[alberth]

Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?

Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property.

Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to SharePoint).

Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform.

Brave (based on Chromium), and LibreWolf (based on Firefox) has even carved out those user who value privacy.

What’s Firefox target user?

Long ago, Firefox was the better IE, and it had great plugins for web developers. But that was before Chrome existed and Google capturing the mass market. And the developers needed to follow its users.

So what target user is left for a Firefox?

Note: not trolling. I loved Firefox. I just don’t genuine understand who it’s for anymore.

[sdf4j]

I value my privacy and use Firefox. Honestly, I have trust issues with volatile “security focused” forks. I feel the risk of them been tampered are greater than the marginal gains.

[threeseed]

Firefox like Chrome still allows long-lived i.e. 400 days first party cookies.

This is being abused by advertisers to track you across the web.

If they do care about privacy it would be good for them to copy Safari and make this 7 days.

[cpeterso]

Does a 7 day expiration matter if the tracker can just set new cookies with new 7 day expiration dates as it tracks you?

Also, Firefox partitions cookies by site (aka Total Cookie Protection), so first-party facebook.com cookies, cross-site facebook.com cookies on example.com, and cross-site facebook.com cookies on example.net all get separate cookie jars.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/02/23/total-cookie-pr...

[threeseed]

Total Cookie Protection is a completely useless feature.

Advertising industry has been moving to first party cookies ever since Apple implemented ITP.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> If they do care about privacy it would be good for them to copy Safari and make this 7 days.

If I get logged out of every website on a weekly basis I'm going to be annoyed.

> This is being abused by advertisers to track you across the web.

How do they use first party cookies to track you?

[davidfischer]

There's a few ways first party cookies can track you. Probably the biggest single way is Google Analytics which by default uses only first party cookies. Even without cookies at all, GA could track you across the web although first party cookies do make this a little easier and "better". However, first party cookies can help trackers in other ways like for CNAME cloaking[1] which basically makes a first-party cookie function similarly to a third-party one.

Disclosure: I work for a small privacy focused ad company.

[1] https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-trac...

[threeseed]

> If I get logged out of every website on a weekly basis I'm going to be annoyed.

Then those websites should move to Passkeys.

> How do they use first party cookies to track you?

Because Meta and Google allows websites to submit advertising data to them server side using a self-hosted JS file which sets the first party cookies on your behalf.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Because Meta and Google allows websites to submit advertising data to them server side using a self-hosted JS

How does ex. 7d expiration help with that?

[majorchord]

> How do they use first party cookies to track you?

domain fronting

[SXX]

Firefox target users are whoever need Manifest v2 extensions to work on Chrome after Google will completely remove it. So basically everyone who want working ad-blocker.

[hintymad]

> due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property

I'm not sure if that's true. I switched to Chrome because Chrome felt snappier than its competitors. Its multi-process model made Chrome more robust. It's developer tool had better usability than Firefox's. And Chrome's extensions, at least initially, offered better experience and wider selections. Oh, Google's integration of Chrome with Google's identity system was a nicer experience too.

[nolist_policy]

It was a conscious choice for me as well.

After the Bundeswehr Taurus leak[1] there was a lot of speculation of how the meeting was tapped. One possibility is that they mitm't the guy joining from Singapore with a Certificate from a Chinese CA.

Now Google saw auch a possibility and introduced Certificate Transparenty a few years ago which burns the whole CA if it signs sich a mitm Certificate.

However, Firefox does not check for CT timestamps to this date.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Taurus_leak

[attendant3446]

I still think that desktop Firefox is better than any other browser. Their mobile browser is just average though.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

All devs should be using Firefox. If not, you are failing in your moral duty.

[dtx1]

> So what target user is left for a Firefox?

Google, so they can pretend they don't have a monopoly so the antitrust lawsuits are kept at bay. And Mozillas CEO[0] so they can extract millions while fucking us all.

[0] https://itdm.com/wp-content/uploads/Mozilla.png

[alberth]

That is such a weird graph, because it doesn’t show Mozilla revenue.

On that same timescale, Mozilla revenue went from:

  2009:   ~80M
  2019: ~$800M

That’s a 10x increase in revenue, for an organization already at scale.

It’s totally expected that a CEO of a company generating ~$1B revenue, would be making $2.5M. Heck, there’s FANNG individual contributors who earn that much.

I’ve clearly never understood the gripe in Mozilla CEO pay. Because how are you going to attract top talent to run an organization that big if you paid any less?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

[dtx1]

That would almost be a good argument but the reality is that they cannibalized their core product to increase their revenue but have done so to the point where it no longer remains viable in the market. Alas, the locusts have had their feast and we are all worse of for it.

[alberth]

So in hindsight, if you were CEO of Mozilla - what would you have done differently that you believe would have maintained Firefox market share?

——

I think diehard Firefox fans don’t understand that, no matter how great you make Firefox - it will always lose share to better distribution.

Google had the best distribution because it was the vast majority of consumers homepage. And on the homepage, it was nagging users to install chrome.

Distribution > Better Product

[JimDabell]

> So in hindsight, if you were CEO of Mozilla - what would you have done differently that you believe would have maintained Firefox market share?

Integrated ad blocker, enabled by default. It’s the one thing Firefox can do that Chrome never will.

Most people aren’t tech-savvy enough to install an ad blocker. Most people really do see all the ads on the Internet. Blocking ads by default would make the browsing experience far more pleasant, and so browsing with Firefox would be far more pleasant than browsing with Chrome for most people.

And obviously, continue to invest in improving the core web experience instead of getting distracted by side quests and firing everybody working on Servo, etc.

[alberth]

> Integrated ad blocker, enabled by default. It’s the one thing Firefox can do that Chrome never will.

How would that work exactly ... given that Google pays Mozilla $800M to be the default search engine just so that they can serve ads to Firefox users.

If Firefox enable a default ad-blocker, Google doesn't then generate ad revenue and they would stop paying Mozilla. Mozilla entire org revenue stream would disappear.

[sltkr]

If I were CEO of Mozilla I would have also killed the core product by implementing Facebook's user tracking shit and making Google the default search engine just so I can rake in something like $10 million personally.

Then I'd retire and start an open-source project to develop a good open-source browser that puts user's interests first.

The problem is the CEO of Mozilla doesn't do the second part.

[M95D]

OH MY GOD! Are you serious with this question?!? Or are you just mocking us?

Bring back editing the UI, custom toolbars, custom side panels, plugins for custom side panels, features Opera 12 had, such as Opera's Notepad, UI checkboxes for commonly used settings to be placed in custom toolbars (I would love a checkbox for JS enable/disable and a checkbox for Images enable/disable), directly editable UI colors without the need to search for a theme, smaller UI without margins/padding (90's style), HTML source code live patching with REGEX the way AdMuncher did it, save page link as .url files, a self-hosted sync server that can run on a OpenWrt router with 64MB RAM (no, I'm not talking about a nodejs crap that needs 8GB ram just for itself!), self hosted download manager as linux console app on a different computer (like Aria2, but with better integration), etc. etc.

This list is just what I could think of in 10 min. I'm sure that $$$ budget could build so much more. How about a new browser from scratch?

Edit:

Here's more: embedable engine allowing others to build browsers based on it, framebuffer support like "links -g" allowing it to run in linux console without X/wayland, ability to act as a remote rendering service to allow a very low power device to use it as a remote web rendering server to offload web page JS/CSS workloads (like Opera Mini worked, but with the intermediary server hosted by the user), integration with OS and/or DHCP server to request a new IPv6 IP for each page visited

[alberth]

Everything you described is extremely technical.

Are you suggesting what you described above, 95% of global users care about? ... and that's why Firefox market share has gone down, because the general person wants a REGEX with live code patching?

Because right now, Firefox has 5% market share (based on the GP linked to graphic).

I'd wager that, 5% market share is roughly proportional to the global market of developers. And the 95% of the world who do not use Firefox today, are the same 95% who don't care about anything you described above.

[dehrmann]

I'm a Firefox use, and while I agree Mozilla neglected it, I think leadership saw the writing on the wall that they're at best the #4 player after Chrome, Safari, and Edge, and they decided to branch out in search of new lines of business. It turns out there isn't a story there (and probably never was--this was a desperation move), and now they're left with Firefox in an even worse state.