Mozilla Firefox Is Dying

[leonixyz]

We are undoubtedly witnessing a rapid decline of Mozilla and its products: the question we should be asking ourselves is: how long before the total collapse? And furthermore: are those Linux users (like me) who are still relying on Firefox for doing their development job ready to abandon it?

Let me list at least three facts to support my thesis:

1) Over the past year, there have been various controversies announcing a radical change in the core values of the Mozilla Foundation

2) After its rewrite (Project Fenix), the Firefox Mobile browser has never regained the completeness it had before, despite the passage of years

3) One of the web extensions developed by Mozilla (and marked as “official”) was recently removed from the store because it violated Mozilla's own add-on policies: this suggests serious internal disputes.

I wonder what is your opinion

[1] https://www.osnews.com/story/141100/mozilla-foundation-lays-off-30-of-its-employees-ends-advocacy-for-open-web-privacy-and-more/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/111usm9/years_after_fenix_release_of_android_browser/

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/blocked-addon/%7B6003eac6-4b07-4aaf-960b-92fa006cd444%7D/3.0.1/

[theandrewbailey]

(I say this as someone who used Firefox for 20 years and wants to see Firefox succeed.)

Firefox has been dying since the moment Chrome released. Mozilla's recent rebrand as a bunch of activists[0] and the likely halt of Google money (to be default search) means bad things for Firefox, I think. Let me know how that works out for them. I don't think it will matter much in the end, since Firefox has felt like someone's side project to build a Chrome also-ran for a long time.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-o... (Firefox was mentioned exactly once in Mozilla's official rebrand announcement, which shows how irrelevant Firefox is to them.)

[neuralkoi]

> how long before the total collapse?

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

I've still to see a site where Firefox is not supported. uBlock origin still works well with Firefox.

When I start having issues with those, I'll start looking for a replacement. Hopefully Ladybird Browser will be out by then.

[net01]

> Hopefully Ladybird Browser will be out by then.

Right now LB is incredibly slow and will be slow for a long time. Most of the cost of browser engines isn't implementing the code but optimizing it; thousands of PhD hours are poured into optimizing 1 JS function.

I've been using LB every day for about 2 months now.

Related to the article, I think FF is not dead; they have servo that is developing fast and will be incredibly fast and responsive. FF isn't going anywhere. They just accumulated a lot of technical debt and will be leaner once servo is out.

[sergiotapia]

you do not need the thousand phd hours (?) to have a usable browser. Ladybird on X very frequently shows stuff working just fine and getting better every week. Lets have some faith.

[net01]

i would argue that _you do_ every millisecond you save is multiplied by the millions ( or billions) of users that use your product. The web browser is the most important tool in the 21st century; nothing comes close.

But it is true that we will inspire ourselves with techniques and methods used and implemented to optimize each subset of the engine build and build on the shoulders of giants.

[decafninja]

I don’t know a single person outside of online tech communities like HN that still uses Firefox. Virtually none of my non-tech friends know what Firefox even is.

[jjaksic]

You should tell them.

[TheCapeGreek]

Being a tech & privacy evangelist to non-technical friends & family becomes exhausting after a time. Sometimes, you just want to be a person with other people, not a tech person.

[runjake]

Firefox's death is a leadership issue.

It's still a solid browser and could be resuscitated, but you'd have to immediately remove the Mozilla leadership and change it's culture.

My hope is that Firefox viably carries on as an OSS project away from the control of an organization whose CEO gets paid $6.9 million annually while engineering continually gets cut.

Firefox can't survive with Mozilla at the helm.

[jjaksic]

Firefox has been my browser since its first beta 20-something years ago, and I don't see anything replacing it. It has by far the best addons and tab management. Chrome, after all these years, doesn't even offer vertical tabs, and its extensions API keeps getting more restrictive.

[incomingpain]

>We are undoubtedly witnessing a rapid decline of Mozilla and its products: the question we should be asking ourselves is: how long before the total collapse?

Why ask this? Tomorrow they could announce huge new funding from Bezos or google announcing cutting off funding. Regardless, it doesnt uninstall software from your machine.

>And furthermore: are those Linux users (like me) who are still relying on Firefox for doing their development job ready to abandon it?

I technically use firefox everyday; but it could be force uninstalled from my computers and id mostly not notice. I cant imagine being so dependent on it.

>I wonder what is your opinion

Hardly needs to be proven that Mozilla has been declining a very long time.

Microsoft never invested in Internet Explorer because of the antitrust charges in the early 2000s.

Opera had ads, firefox basically became a major player by default with nobody contesting them.

Mid to late 2000s, financial crisis era, they became activists for the open web and net neutrality; but after the financial crisis they jumped over to "social justice" which destroyed them.

[nik736]

I am still using Firefox Dev Edition as my daily browser and honestly don't care about the 3 things you mentioned. It's a solid browser, works flawlessly and stable for me. I dig the dev tools and it's "fast enough". The only thing where I think they are on the wrong track is about PWAs, I don't understand their stance at all.

[firefax]

As one might guess from my username, I run Firefox. I love it -- I have it customized just the way I like it.

I think if they focused on memory issues rather than wizbang new features, paired with getting android and iOS versions up to snuff, they could catch up, paired with a marketing campaign.

What is our goal here anyway? Does everyone need to use firefox? A year of "Firefox on the desktop?"

Some tools are niche -- used by craftmen. What are sysadmins and engineers but, at heart, craftsmen?

Anyways, in closing I think it's a good browser.

[mmphosis]

LibreWolf, and Firefox Nightly are the only browsers that I use.

I have hope for servo and Ladybird.

I refuse to go anywhere near Chromium and all it's derivatives.

The batteries are long dead on the devices that ran Safari.

[gitprolinux]

Competition eventually always improves the user experience for everyone. I support innovative, competition, though FF, please support others also. Reciprocate the love.

[Bender]

Firefox is still working great for me and I am both a Linux and Windows user. The addons I use are still working great. uBlock, NoScript, Canonical, CSS Exfil, ClearURLS, FoxReplace, Temporary Containers, Zoom Page WE. FoxReplaces helps remove IDPol and most compelled speech from the web. Canonical sometimes helps me see if I am submitting dupes. uBlock and NoScript keep readable sites readable and keep me away from most of the trash sites that depend on ecma-slop just to read some HTML. Temporary containers break most tracking. I could not realistically ask for more.

[aborsy]

It’s been my default browser, also at universities I have been to (many use Linux desktop in common PCs). No issues.

Those items you mentioned are not really issues so to speak. You could say things like that about anything.

[rstuart4133]

Maybe browsers are nearing "peak maintainable complexity" for a single computer program. An early indication of this was the Linux distro's giving up on maintaining them. That was the universe informing mankind it had created a lump of so code so complex, it exceeded the ability of a single man to pick it up and run with it from a standing start. Now it seems it's getting beyond the ability of a moderately well funded organisation like Mozilla to maintain a competitor to Chrome.

Why is that important? Clearly maintaining Chrome isn't beyond the kind of software engineering expertise Google can bring to the task. Creating a ecosystem around a browser with so many features everyone uses it, but so complex only a few organisations do the same thing has rewarded Google handsomely. It's one of the ways they control the internet.

That control has also created a huge risk - people wielding antitrust laws want to break it. But if Google doesn't develop it what are we left with - Firefox? Or maybe its a whole pile in incompatible browsers, controlled Microsoft and Perplexity. Ah how we all pine for the IE6 days when Microsoft tried to use it to mold the internet in the direction it wanted it to go (which was nowhere much at all). Not.

Or we perhaps we abandon the entire platform. I suspect they hit the "release with the lowest bug count" a long time ago. With that ability to add features slows, they become less reliable, and eventually they collapse under their own weight. Does that deliver us a X to Wayland monument in Web Standards? Perhaps its starts with "HTML Small", a tiny version of HTML + CSS without the legacy that's small, simple and fast to render on a watch. Maybe the Chinese already have such a thing in WeChat.

[BoredPositron]

Netscape 2.0

[espeed]

There needs to be a browser that archives your browser history and pipes a stream of it in real time so that open-source personal AI engines can ingest it and index it. The future of the Web will be built on this. Google may not do it. Firefox could.

[ibmark]

"announcing a radical change in the core values"

Please identify the "radical change" referred to in "various controversies"

pretty vague confirmation or explaination for a decline in any going concern most of which are nowhere as valuable and free to millions of users as is firefox ... so whats meaining of this

ibmark0

[nobody9]

Nearly all of this is false news. Virtually all browser-focused companies have had layoffs, but none of them have crippled Firefox. Indeed Firefox has the Zen project to thank for leading the way to a safer post-Chrome-is-for-sale world on PCs. Hopefully a similar project will arise for phones and for an even safer Deno framework.

[deafpolygon]

It’s been dead for several years now: it has nothing to offer besides the Gecko engine, and that they’re not doing great at.

Truth hurts, right?