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by PunchyHamster 202 days ago
> The main point of course is that those sites are at fault (sometimea intentionally when it comes to Google), but that doesn't change Mozilla's position. Stop using Google services is just not a great choice, and many of us use them rely heavily on them for work.

That's not exactly what happened. Yes, google did some shady stuff but in parallel Firefox was also slow for everything.

Only when FF Quantum launched the performance caught up, and the same launch gave power user a push to go elsewhere, coz all their plugins either stopped working or worked worse.

And it was too little too late too. IIRC the FF market share was already hovering around 10%. There were some people going back to it after Quantum release but that didn't last and were not at the level where companies like one I work for don't even test on FF because market share is so small clients don't require it

> Mozilla could make technical miracles and or bring some incredible feature from the left field, but that's a tall order for any company that size, so I'd expect most of their future effort to still end up with lower market share, whether or not they had good ideas.

Mozilla could, years ago, not focus on everything else but making a browser (Anyone remember Firefox OS ? nobody ? thought so). Firefox was on the top of the web and the management squandered it all.

3 comments

It’s not about ff being slow. That was never a reason to switch (unless it was misconfigured and couldn’t use your video card or something, but that happened just as often with chrome back then).

Google actively breaks firefox compatibility at random. It seems intentional from the outside, but it could be incompetence.

For instance, copy paste didn’t work in google docs under firefox the last time I checked.

> copy paste didn’t work in google docs under firefox the last time I checked

Still doesn't. Because instead of using the standard clipboard API, google docs uses a special extension which of course is pre-installed on chrome, and AFAIK not even possible to install on Firefox.

The UI says that it’ll work under FF anyway, but I guess they don’t test the fallback.
The Web is in a weird place where, most websites are so inefficient that they require the literal cutting edge of browser rendering and JavaScript execution performance to even run acceptably.

It's natural for a browser engineer to look at a website and go "wow, this is trash. Go ask the makers of this website to, I don't know, stop re-rendering the page 100 times a second."

Whereas the Chrome team's approach for years has been "okay, this website is trash. How do we make this trash run well for the users?"

I was thinking about incidents like this one (around 2023, way after Quantum)

https://www.zdnet.com/article/youtube-is-slowing-video-loads...

> Firefox was on the top of the web and the management squandered it all

I have not followed Mozill's internal shenanigans close enough to properly understand, and really wonder what's the biggest hurdle for some other company or org to come in and scoop/fork Firefox. I'm assuming it's sheer money.

Mozilla obviously dropped the ball. And then nothing is there to catch it.

The hurdle is that, if you're going to fork a browser, you can just fork Chromium. Might as well start off ahead rather than behind.

That's why most new browsers are Chromium-based.

Yet that still is a win for Google. A win that gives them control of the Internet.

Is that something we, the techies, want?