[Barrin92]

Firefox became competitive again on a technical level after the overhaul with 57 long after Eich was gone, and under Eich the browser was already in a steady state of decline for a long time both technologically and in terms of usershare.

Trying to ride old stereotypes about engineers and management that has nothing to do with facts is pretty cringeworthy.

[daoismyname]

Guess which one is better in 2022, Firefox or Brave? (except maybe containers)

Firefox was born in 2002 (under Eich management) as Phoenix, it's kinda obvious that 16 years later (57 is from 2018, Eich left in 2014) it needed a technological upgrade.

In ~2009-2010 Firefox was used by 33% of the web users.

Today it's at ~6%.

I blame management, the alternative is believing Firefox just had bad luck or that developers at Firefox suck (which they do not)

[mschuster91]

> I blame management, the alternative is believing Firefox just had bad luck or that developers at Firefox suck (which they do not)

There are other factors at play than managerial incompetence:

- the entire iOS part of "all web users" uses WebKit because Apple doesn't allow other engines. For Android, most devices ship either Chrome or a WebKit wrapper (the default Android WebView), and many users don't bother switching browsers from the default. As ever more Web usage moves towards mobile, the disadvantage towards Firefox only accelerates - which is part of the reason why Mozilla tried to build a competitor.

- Many users also don't bother very much to switch their desktop browser. Apple users, especially on mobile, tend to stay with Safari as not even Chrome can keep up with the battery life optimizations Apple did, much less Firefox (not to mention Apple probably doesn't even grant non-Apple apps access to entitlements, but that's just guesswork).

- Netflix and other DRM content. A lot of people went to Chrome back in ye olde days when getting Netflix to run in HD resolutions (or at all) was a nightmare on everything sans Chrome (and Internet Explorer), and thanks to inertia (see above) they stayed on Chrome. And I'm not even wishing to fault Mozilla's management for resisting DRM for as long as they did, but in the end customers voted with their download buttons for convenience.

- The desktop users that do switch their desktop browser switch mostly to Chrome because Google blasts out tons of ads to switch to Chrome, not to mention website developers suggesting their users to move to Chrome or outright announcing that bugs involving browsers other than Chrome won't get addressed.

The last thing is undoubtedly the biggest issue - it is impossible to counteract the advertising and other financial firepower of Google. In ye olde times, regulatory agencies should have stepped in long ago to ban the cross-promotion that Google did (similar to the MS judgements), but they didn't and now we're living in a browser duopoly that is rapidly devolving into WebKit monopoly.

[daoismyname]

> There are other factors at play than managerial incompetence:

I agree there's no single point of failure, but IMO what made Firefox (and Mozilla before it) different was that it was different.

they played catch-up against Chrome with the result that they did not gain new users and lost many of the older ones

I still use Firefox on desktop, but on mobile first they removed the extensions from their mobile browser, then announced they would only support WebExtensions API, removing a ton of features from existing extensions, then they started purging "controversial" extensions (as in controversial in the eyes of Google) from their addons web site, that basically made Firefox a worse Chrome.

The nails in the coffin for me have been laying off the entire devtools, MDN and servo development teams and the ads in the search bar.

All of this started happening soon after Eich left.

I'm not saying Eich alone could save Firefox, he's also a person I dislike on a human level and he's probably more troubles than he's worth for a company, but my opinion is that Firefox "new" mindset post Eich disappointed its true fans that were mainly developers and you don't recover from that.

EDIT: I understand the need to make money, but are Pocket Premium or reselling VPNs the right way for a browser vendor?

[bwat48]

I prefer firefox to brave