[Amezarak]

Mozilla did lose their way. It happened because they abandoned their core users: you. People who loved Firefox so much they practically forced it on everyone around them.

Google released Chrome with a massive advertising campaign, reaching even to television. They put ads for Chrome on the world's biggest web properties. It was packaged in installers. Not to say it wasn't a good browser - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox. This marketing campaign bought them a ton of marketshare.

Mozilla's response, instead of sticking by Mozilla evangelists, nearly all of whom were power users, was to decide that the browser was too complicated for its users. It needed to be more like Chrome. It needed to be the browser for the proverbial grandma. So they axed features (like Panorama), configurability, and extensibility, alienating everyone who really cared. Only they didn't have the marketing heft of Google, so they didn't get Grandma, either.

Ever since then they've been panicking and grasping at straws and shoving in shovelware like Pocket in obviously vain attempts to regain what they had. And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.

[antisol]

This, 1000%.

I've been saying for over a decade that Mozilla decided to abandon their core demographic - power users, instead going after people who "really like chrome, but think that it’s just too fast and doesn’t use enough memory".

I always questioned how big that demographic was. Looking at a chart of Firefox's market share would seem to indicate that I might have been on to something.

But Mozilla just keep doubling down on trash. They're not actually interested in hearing what people want. People like me tried to tell them before we abandoned Firefox. But they weren't interested in listening. It's been this way for 10 years or more now.

I've long been of the opinion that the best thing for Mozilla would be for it to die, so that some other FOSS group (maybe the FSF, or debian, someone like that) could take its place with a firefox fork. And maybe even start actually improving the software again.

[eviks]

> that some other FOSS group...could take its place with a firefox fork

What stops them from contributing improvements now?

[antisol]

Multiple factors, e.g the perceived lack of an immediate need, and also Mozilla's control of the firefox codebase.

For instance, one improvement that a more user-respecting group might contribute is ripping out all the AI slop. But as pointed out in the article, Mozilla like the AI slop and wouldn't accept those changes.

If Mozilla was to disappear, orgs like those I mentioned would likely see a more urgent need to take over in order to break the chrom(ium) monoculture.

[M95D]

The state of mess the code is in?

[edelbitter]

To be fair, Mozilla-affiliated developers have accomplished some serious cleanup in recent years. New & redesigned features are fake tabs with special permissions instead of that unholy intertwining of web standards and local UI in C++. Storage is almost-proper sqlite3. Dynamic linking against system libraries old&new just works(tm). Even the vendored Rust packages more or less build fine, now even across multiple compiler versions. Plus, AMDs new-ish CPUs with ginormous L3 brought recompile (and thus, bisect) times to almost reasonable levels, so that is not as pressing of an issue any more. I would guesstimate only 25 years left at the current speed till Firefox can be considered maintainable again.

[M95D]

And only 24 years left until Ladybird is usable as a replacement. /s

[eviks]

So will the mess suddenly disappear?

[jlokier]

> - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox.

Ah, but Chrome was obviously better than Firefox.

When Chrome was released, the advertising I recall focused on one killer feature that Firefox didn't get for many years after that: Speed.

Chrome's JIT JavaScript was so much faster than everyone else's interpreted JavaScript that you could run a materially different kind of software in the browser. It was like the difference between a slow interpreted language and a fast compiled one. Chrome's rendering was also fast.

There was even a cartoon explaining how the new JavaScript engine worked.

Chrome felt like the next generation of browser.

I say this as someone who remained a fan and user of Firefox throughout. I stuck with Firefox through its relatively slow years.

Firefox caught up, but it took years. It got its own JIT JavaScript, but there were a few years after that where Firefox's rendering was relatively slow by the new standards. However, Firefox has excellent performance all round by now.

I was disappointed when Chrome came out that JIT JavaScript could even be a marketable feature and wasn't already the default in the best open source browsers, because it seemed like such an obvious thing to do for many years prior, and not particularly difficult. I guess market forces resulted in nobody deciding to do it in Firefox, or any other open source browser, until competition made it a necessity. I was quite surprised, because Firefox seemed like the product of passionate technology nerds, and performance JITs are very fun and satisfying things to make, with visible results.

[Ferret7446]

> When Chrome was released, the advertising I recall focused on one killer feature that Firefox didn't get for many years after that: Speed.

And sandboxing. Browser sandboxing was rare due to the memory required, and Chrome released right around when it started being practical to run tabs in separate processes.

[Amezarak]

Firefox performance seemed like it really varied for some people. I never noticed any difference.

[creata]

> And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.

What are the sorts of features you think they should consider adding?

[bbor]

Random thought, but Kagi is acting like I wish Mozilla would. Their main product is a search engine, but they’ve been trying out a slew of other initiatives, all of which seem well thought out and integrate LLMs in an exclusively thoughtful, opt-in way. Surely many of them will end up being failures, but I can’t help but be impressed.

Maybe it’s because I’m a power user and they tend to cater to power users, idk — that’s definitely what the comment above yours is hinting at.

But at this point, I think we can all agree that whatever Mozilla is doing now isn’t working… so maybe power users are worth a shot again?

[dralley]

If Mozilla tried to do something like Kagi, they would likely be castigated by half of HN for "yet another side project adventure"

[bbor]

Search is quite the undertaking, so I'm not really hoping that Mozilla takes that on in particular. I'm just pointing out the odd reality that I tend to trust Kagi (a for-profit) to fight the general good fight in a way I agree with more than I trust Mozilla (a non-profit).

[akimbostrawman]

No because that would actually be a feature worth adding and actually make it a privacy browser instead of a funnel for data to Google.

[akimbostrawman]

Just copy librewolf/mullvad Browser and become actually a private browser. Create self hosted alternative to Google services like Brave has.