[romanows]

Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links. I really don't like advertising so I really don't like going down that road.

Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?

[aquova]

I constantly see this take and I'm afraid I don't agree with it. Firefox is continuing to lose market share, and I think it's less anything they're doing and due simply to the fact that Google is a household name while Mozilla is not. When the user is already using a Google phone, email, search, maps, drive, and document editor, it follows to also use their browser. Simply being a solid browser isn't enough to motivate people to switch away. So I think they should try out some new interesting ideas in the hope that some of them take off. Now, I don't think this is the feature to do that, but I won't criticize them for trying.

[JeremyNT]

I agree with this take.

It's not like the power users who currently use Firefox and yet dislike this stuff are going to switch away from Firefox, since there's nothing to switch to other than Chrome, which is clearly worse.

Personal anecdote, I didn't like Pocket being added to Firefox, but eventually I did start using it - only because it came from Mozilla. And I currently pay Mozilla money for Relay (along with VPN), which are examples of them expanding outside of their core browser features.

[JumpCrisscross]

> not like the power users who currently use Firefox and yet dislike this stuff are going to switch away from Firefox

Not a Firefox power user, but also not a fan of having to learn through HN that I need to disable some random opt-in to not have my browsing leaked by my browser. Was genuinely on the fence about deleting it and simplifying to Safari.

[threecheese]

IMO this holds Firefox to an impossible standard; it is vanishingly unlikely that Safari doesn’t perform this same type of user research and data collection, for search utilization wrt their relationship with Google and for other features of the browser. Your point about being surprised by this is certainly valid, if this is indeed opt-out/in by default.

[riedel]

I am a happy user of LibreWolf: they do the opt out for me. On android I use mull. I have to say that I am quite happy and really do not understand everyone moving to chromium based browsers.

[JohnFen]

> It's not like the power users who currently use Firefox and yet dislike this stuff are going to switch away from Firefox

Sure they do. I know a lot that have, anyway. I'm one of a tiny percentage of my tech circle who uses it anymore.

[Sammi]

I will switch away from Firefox to Ladybird as soon as Ladybird is half as good as Firefox.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> When the user is already using a Google phone, email, search, maps, drive, and document editor, it follows to also use their browser.

I think it's more that everyone used Google for search (because it at least was legitimately the best by a good margin) and then Google used that position to push Chrome. The other stuff may have helped, but I think search was 90% of it.

[ragnese]

Well, when Chrome first came out, it was definitely way faster than the other browsers for websites that had heavy JavaScript usage a la GMail. I imagine the gap has closed quite a bit, but I would suspect that it's probably still there, since they can coordinate development of both their web apps and the browser to work well together.

More recently, there was that whole thing where YouTube was "accidentally" adding delays to non-Chrome browsers.

[merb]

Actually I still use Firefox. But with stuff like that, it puts me rather off of it. Firefox isn’t better than chrome anymore and Mozilla acting as a Media Company and adding sponsored links and sponsors in their products is just not cool for a so called privacy focused company, pocket was already a strange thing and now that.

[xemdetia]

What I think I am waiting for from Mozilla is instead of this enrich the suggest experience just go full Yahoo like Microsoft did with Microsoft start. Make an organic 'good' home page, and let people who want to not use it switch it out and capture interest that way. Make links people can share so you can convince them to try Mozilla. You have to FIND Mozilla nowadays, and in comparison I look at what Opera has been doing lately in actively helping people find them. I am at least seeing a path for Opera to grow more than Firefox right now.

[Fatnino]

Firefox being solid is what got people to move off ie6 to ff1.5

And tabs. That was a cool idea.

[wakawaka28]

At this point, most of the people still using Firefox desperately want a private browser. It would be nice for Mozilla to come up with innovative new features as they did in their heyday, but everything they have attempted for the last several years has broken beloved features and betrayed the privacy of users.

[saurik]

I just feel like they should be concentrating their time into adding features to Firefox which Google either will not or doesn't care to add to Chrome, not trying to compete with Google's entire business suite: that's a losing uphill battle and the pitch "we're slightly more private" is a hard one that they aren't even doing well... if they want to make a commitment to 0 data storage with no suggestions or analytics, that would be one thing, but they refuse to do that and so can't hold this narrative.

Right now, Firefox's strategy seems to be focused on trying to follow in Google's footsteps and do everything they can to implement something almost as good as Chrome just without some--but not all!--of the extra things we hate about Google. The result of this strategy is there are simply way too few answers to the question "why should I use Firefox instead of Chrome?" that aren't "because someone has to lest we lose the war, and it may as well be you (as I guess you drew the short straw today)" :(.

I want to be clear: these unique selling propositions can be really small. If you are using Linux on a computer with a touch screen, Firefox implemented good multi-touch with kinetic scrolling support for X11... it puts Chromium to shame, and so if you are using such a computer you are likely to use Firefox even if it is less performant or doesn't work with a few websites you like. The goal isn't to only target the majority by chasing analytics: it is to win a thousand 0.01% minorities that add up to 10%.

The only other UI thing--and I'm using Firefox right now, and have been using Firefox as my primary browser for months now--that I can think of are container tabs. This one is interesting because, frankly, it doesn't buy me that much over Chrome's support for multiple profiles, and yet I do slightly prefer the feature, and clearly a bunch of other people do if you look around: implementing this feature won Firefox a bunch of users who now consider this part of their workflow and can overlook other faults.

Firefox used to be really good at this: they owned the space of web developers due to Firebug--which was also a critical market as it meant websites tended to work in Firefox--but Chrome saw that and took it from them. If I were in charge of Firefox, my hail marys wouldn't be allocated to end user acquisition: it would be focused on what I can offer developers to get them back to using Firefox as their primary browser. But like, it isn't even clear to me Firefox right now cares about developers anymore :/.

I mean... not only did they lay off the entire MDN writing team back in 2020--which to me was putting Firefox at the forefront of developers' minds (in the same way you mention users knowing about Google)--but, as far as I understand, they also laid off a lot of the dev tools team. Their website showing the features of Firefox for developers sounds strong, but I feel like Chrome also now has all of this stuff. I am excited to see that Firefox claims to have better support for CSS Grid debugging, I guess?

I also say that, because another place Firefox used to have a unique selling proposition is that it was "the hacker's browser": you could easily alter any part of the interface due to its crazy XUL layer, and I knew a ton of developers and users alike who would sell you on Firefox due to the crazy Firefox-specific extensions you could install. But as Chrome added extension support, Firefox not only wanted to be compatible with Chrome's extensions... they dropped (almost) everything that was unique about Firefox.

As it stands, they at least do retain some functionality that isn't just the same as what Chrome offers: support for synchronous fetch hooks (which I might be describing poorly) that is used by the more advanced ad blockers. This is a great USP because, of course, Google isn't going to support those... but Firefox stops there. I contend that it wouldn't be a big lift for them to add some extra Firefox-specific extension API surface and get, for example, the Tridactyl user community back to 100% on Firefox.

And there is frankly a ton of uncharted territory on being able to make powerful web extensions. I used to be in charge of the iPhone native code extension community, and I seriously feel more crippled trying to easily modify a web page than I ever did with a native Objective-C app, and that's insane: I myself constantly run into roadblocks due to being unable to dig into the private data of JavaScript objects or closures, and I see other developers complain about being locked out of styling web components.

Firefox should lean into "it is easier to hack the web with Firefox" as we know Google is going in the opposite direction. Despite the insane complexities of jailbreaking your iPhone, we had around a consistent ~10% marketshare; and no: that wasn't piracy! Not only did the US Copyright Office investigate and say we weren't the problem, we had a thriving ecosystem of paid native app extensions! (Though, frankly, if Firefox managed to hold ~10% marketshare entirely on the back of piracy, I'd be OK with that!)

Otherwise, as it stands, Firefox seems to be removing unique selling propositions as they focus on narrowly re-implementing exactly the set of things offered by Chrome. They have decided that the only market worth targeting is the mass market, and so they are making the same analytics-driven decisions Google makes with respect to safety, streamlining, and prioritization that forsake developers and power users as part of a losing battle with Google for 90% of the web when they used to own the other 10%.

[ragnese]

> the pitch "we're slightly more private" is a hard one that they aren't even doing well... if they want to make a commitment to 0 data storage with no suggestions or analytics, that would be one thing, but they refuse to do that and so can't hold this narrative.

Or... they can, because they are still more private and respectful than Chrome and Edge, at least.

[saurik]

And yet, every time this comes up people come out to bash Firefox for not going far enough on privacy. The top comments on this HN post are all in that category, as the people who care about privacy actually care about privacy and Firefox's half-assed attempts to walk the line are falling flat for that audience. Meanwhile, as can be seen in these very comments, people seem to have found alternatives: any of the now many forks of Chromium that entirely remove these anti-privacy features they don't want without incurring any other functionality tradeoffs. Firefox could take these users back, but they don't want to: their strategy of throwing away the minority markets so they can be Google-lite in the hope of guilting enough of the majority market into using Firefox is reliant on analytics and they seemingly can't help themselves with the attempts to upsell people on data harvesting services.

[philistine]

If I didn’t know any better, I’d presume Firefox is waiting for Google to get in real bad trouble with the FTC so it has to sign a deal to promote other browsers or something. I would not hold my breath.

[romanows]

This is a great comment.

Firefox used to _stand_ for things that internet savvy folks cared about, and at least some of that would trickle down to make even the non-savvy user's browsing experience better.

[hulitu]

> and I think it's less anything they're doing and due simply to the fact that Google is a household name while Mozilla is not.

Of course, changing the UI, using Google safebrowsing as default and other anti-user practices have nothing to do with it. /s

[pquki4]

> Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment

They can do that for as long as Google is willing to pay. Without additional revenue stream, the day Google decides to cut cost and stop sponsoring Mozilla, that's the day Firefox will run into big trouble. Any additional revenue stream is going to help.

I am no CEO but that seems very clear to me.

[zamadatix]

It's not a sponsorship, it's a sale.It's also made such deals with Yandex, Baidu, and Yahoo before. The sale is for eyeballs on your search (ad) service. Firefox is getting in a precarious situation with it though as the number of users on Firefox has been decreasing (in absolute terms) despite the number of web users increasing.

[xnyan]

It's also a part of their anti-trust defense strategy. Firefox staying alive as a marginal but existent alternative to chromium based browsers is currently good for google.

[lxgr]

If you ever figure out a bulletproof solution to "just taking the money and building a good product/company without any technical debt and organizational cruft", please do share your results – this would be somewhat valuable for humanity!

[causality0]

I dunno, the CEO getting a 400% pay rise in the same time period the browser lost 85% of its market share might be a good place to start.

[BadHumans]

You want them to be Google's vassal state and wait for death instead of trying to become self-sustainable? Defeatist mentality if I've ever seen one.

[mardifoufs]

That's what they are and have been for like 8 years. It's fine. It would be more productive to put it to good use on the browser. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have tried but... they did for almost a decade and they aren't remotely close to being able to sustain themselves without google. It's not defeatist to say that making up for the 600m$/year might be a bit of an unreachable goal at this point.

Chasing ghosts isn't more sustainable than the money from google. Yes it's a business relationship. but I'm not sure how they aren't completely "vassalized", to use your term, at this point already. It's not a potential problem, if google stops paying they would shutdown in a matter of months.

It's not a bad thing, Firefox as we know it wouldn't exist by now otherwise

[Kuinox]

I want them to not replicate google. I use Firefox to fight ads, not to get ads in my searchbar.

[deprecative]

Ironic that ads are what Google uses to pay Mozilla so you(we) can use Firefox.

[immibis]

You assume that Firefox can't exist without Mozilla. Thunderbird got a lot better after divorcing from Mozilla.

[dralley]

A) Firefox is vastly bigger and more complicated than Thunderbird

B) Email protocols aren't a moving target to the degree that the web is

C) Thunderbird has the benefit of being able to freeload off the base platform development that Firefox continues to do, although of course it's a lot of work even to adapt to those changes.

[autoexec]

> You want them to be Google's vassal state and wait for death instead of trying to become self-sustainable?

There's no shortage of privacy respecting open source software that somehow doesn't have to choose between depending on Google and selling out their users. Firefox knows that most people won't opt out. They're choosing to take Google's money and screw over their users at the same time.

[sp332]

If they just turn into another Google then what was the point?

[ddalex]

> addressing ... organizational issues

Obviously not. It's very difficult to make people understand something when their jobs depend on them not understanding it.

[not2b]

Antitrust actions in the US and EU may force Google to cut off those payments (to Mozilla and Apple), and if that happens, Firefox needs to survive somehow.

[kjkjadksj]

Somehow open source browsers still get made without a $600 million “rich uncle.” Mozilla is pretty bloated. This can buy like 1200 good engineers. People make browsers with a couple people sometimes.

[zamadatix]

Most open source browsers are a reskin of actual open source browser development. E.g. Brave and Vivaldi are skins on top of the actual Chromium project, librewolf and others on Firefox's components, and Orion and others on Safari's components. Only a rare few browsers e.g. Dillo or Ladybird are actually independent and it shows in that those browsers are nearly unusably slow, compatibility limited, and insecure (that's not a diss on them, they are still awesome projects for their own reasons).

[camkego]

It’s possible to repackage Chromium with a couple people. It’s not possible to build a browser from the ground up with a couple people.

[kjkjadksj]

Using existing code is fine, that's how most software is built anyhow. Only masochists build from complete scratch.

EDIT: I've been getting a lot of down votes for this stance, surprisingly. Why not share your position if you don't agree? There must be a bunch of hardcore people on here who are writing directly on the metal in machine code. Short of that, you are in fact using someone else's code in all your projects.

[JohnFen]

This seems to conflate two entirely different ways of "using existing code". Using tools written by others is technically "using existing code", but that's an entirely different thing than incorporating existing code into your projects.

I think that when most devs hear "using existing code", they're thinking of the latter, not the former.

[kjkjadksj]

How is calling a library and using a function someone else wrote not the same thing as using a function someone else wrote in any other way? Cite your sources by all means but still the difference is a semantical one.

[Vinnl]

It's the classic "building on Chrome cedes control of what the web can do to Google". But I think most people aren't interested in rehashing that discussion here - a search for "independent browser engine" should turn up plenty of arguments if you're interested in other positions.

[marginalia_nu]

Why not? Ladybird seems like it is coming along very well.

[zamadatix]

Ladybird is frickin awesome but give it 10 more years and it still won't be an equivalent to 2024 Safari/Firefox/Chrome without a lot more funding than it's already getting (~100-200k/year in sponsorships).

[mead5432]

Sorry - was looking at an older version of the page and didn’t realize there were already a bunch of the same comment. My bad.

———

Will they though? Maybe some toy ones but the distribution of other browsers are largely built on chromium with a few on Firefox and one or two on WebKit.

Beyond that, there’s Arc that’s made a splash with the HN crowd but IIRC, it’s VC funded so a whole different set of concerns.

There will be other browsers but almost the entire browser market is essentially funded by Google.

[sunaookami]

Sadly Firefox already shows sponsored spammy & clickbaity "articles" on the default new tab page which always makes me cringe whenever I see it on other pcs.

[immibis]

Capitalist organizations, even nonprofits, incentive moving money to the top. Mozilla has the same kind of cancer that Wikimedia has documented. Firefox is open-source, but Mozilla is not.

[jasonlotito]

> Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links.

Browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox, suggestions from sponsors. Each of those can be individually turned off and on.

Why do you think Firefox Suggest using browsing history, bookmarks, clipboard, open tabs, shortcuts, search engines, suggestions from firefox isn't building the best browser "for the user"? Or were you just ignorant of what Firefox Suggest did and didn't bother to take a moment to look it up in Firefox?

[int_19h]

They don't need my data to show me suggestions from my own browsing history, bookmarks etc. They only need it for "suggestions from sponsors", which is ad spam.