[Night_Thastus]

I'm not sure that FF going down in usage can be put on the CEO at this point. There's way too many forces against them, it is not a "fair" fight against the only other option.

Google is way larger and has deals set in place to ensure that basically everyone ends up with it as the default. Let that go on for a generation or two and people forget all about FF. They cannot compete against that.

As for CEO pay, that's typical. Asking or expecting for it to not go up exponentially is pointless, that's just how it works now.

[tux3]

Without trying to pin everything on the CEO, I don't think it's also fair to treat Firefox as helpless and doomed.

For another data point we can look at Thunderbird, another Mozilla project. Thunderbird had started stagnating. It was borderline abandoned for a while, until Mozilla made it official.

The community tried to catch the discarded codebase and keep it alive, Thunderbird got a new home. Remember we're talking about a desktop email client in the age where a couple major companies entirely own email, as a concept. Email _is_ Gmail and Outlook, it's not even close to a fair fight for a small third party email client to compete against that.

Nevertheless, Thunderbird is growing again.

https://fosdem.org/2024/events/attachments/fosdem-2024-2728-...

[nozzlegear]

Am I crazy, or is there no label for the Y-axis on those graphs? Do we know how much Thunderbird has actually grown?

[leipert]

Probably screenshots from here: https://stats.thunderbird.net/

[bigstrat2003]

> As for CEO pay, that's typical. Asking or expecting for it to not go up exponentially is pointless, that's just how it works now.

The point is that it doesn't have to be typical, nor should it be. There's no universal law of reality which says that CEO pay must forever go up exponentially. It is bad behavior when other companies do it, it was bad behavior when Mozilla did it, and it deserves the criticism it is getting.

[amanzi]

Even us die-hard Firefox users are forced to use other browsers just to get full PWA support. If Mozilla makes it difficult for fans of their browser to stick with Firefox, it's not surprising that non-Firefox users won't bother sticking with it or even trying it in the first place.

[zelphirkalt]

It is not really Mozilla doing anything to make it difficult to get the same experience, but rather uninformed or ignorant web developers building Chromium/Chrome-only experiences. For examples just check out the uninformed tech stack of Slack, MS Teams, and similar that so many companies use. None of those tools work properly in FF, since their devs do not create a cross browser experience adhering to standards. While I am not particularly a fan of Discord, I want to mention, that already years ago they had a working voice and video chat working in the browser in FF. No idiotic gaslighting attempt of "having to change the browser".

A notification on a website stating that one must use another browser is a sign of utter incompetence or ignorance.

[int_19h]

Lack of installable PWA support is squarely on Firefox. At this point, I think they're the only remotely major browser that doesn't have it.

And yes, there is an extension for that. Which is unofficial, requires you to do hacky things (such as installing a whole separate Firefox runtime), and still doesn't fully support things like notifications.

[archerx]

Come on, even Safari supports PWA on iOS. At this point it feels like there was active sabotage going on at Mozilla.

[maxloh]

Firefox's UI/UX is not as good as Chrome's. Some features are either not implemented, or not as good as their counterparts in Chrome.

Some examples that come to mind are multiple profiles, history manager, and bookmark manager.

See some previous discussions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36876696

[palata]

And Chrome doesn't have containers.

I think that it's not a UI/UX thing, honestly they are almost exactly the same thing (tabs, URL bar, webpage). The difference is that people use what they are given, and when you are Google it's easier to be seen by everybody.

[maxloh]

Firefox's multiple profiles' UX is not user-friendly at all. You need to either type "about:profiles" in the address bar or start the desired profile from the command line.

The history/bookmark manager UI is 2000-ish and does not align with current mobile-like design trends.

---

Multi-account containers are a cool idea, but they are somewhat power-user-oriented. Ordinary users often don't grasp the concept of cookies, let alone understand the extension's description.

> Under the hood, it separates website storage into tab-specific Containers. Cookies downloaded by one Container are not available to other Containers.

[bigstrat2003]

> The history/bookmark manager UI is 2000-ish and does not align with current mobile-like design trends.

That's a good thing, not a bad thing. Current UI trends are terrible.

[maxloh]

Not a good thing if Mozilla wanted to increase their market share.

Middle-aged users are already using Firefox if they value the open web, but young users will be driven away by the 2000-ish UI. Mozilla cannot attract new users if they can't keep up with the design trend.

The best solution I can think of is making fancy UI the default but also making it possible for power users to switch back to the old UI.

[palata]

Genuinely interested: do you have any numbers backing those claims about UI, or is it your intuition?

My intuition is that the vast majority of people use the first browser they are exposed to, even if it is IE6. People are exposed to Google Chrome first, it's not a question of UI/UX.

Otherwise, why would the vast majority of people use Google Chrome instead of one of the gazillion Chromium-based clones? The UX is the same, right?

[palata]

> Multi-account containers are a cool idea, but they are somewhat power-user-oriented.

I would bet that the immense majority of users don't use Chrome profiles either.

[maxloh]

That's why Google is putting the profile button on the address bar: to promote the feature. The UI for adding new users is simple and straightforward too.

[palata]

I still bet that the immense majority of users don't use Chrome profiles.

[zelphirkalt]

Eh? Do you have that backwards?

Firefox has all those things.

[maxloh]

Both of them have those features, but the key problem is about UI/UX. Clearly, Mozilla doesn't devote as many resources to improving UI/UX as Google does.

Multiple profiles' UX is not user-friendly at all. You need to either type "about:profiles" in the address bar or start the desired profile from the command line.

The history/bookmark manager UI is 2000-ish and does not align with current mobile-like design trends.

[manicennui]

Then what exactly is the CEO responsible for? Is there a single thing Mozilla does that is relevant anymore?

[mburns]

Baker was not CEO during that graph (well, she became interim in December 2019). She was chairperson of the board.

Mozilla’s CEO for its decline (setting aside Eich’s brief stint) was Gary Kovacs and Chris Beard.