[kaolinite]

The problem I feel with Mozilla is that they mistook why they were successful. They attributed the success of Firefox to the openness of the browser and the company and have doubled-down on that. In reality though, that wasn't why it was successful at all.

Firefox was great because it was a great browser at a time when other browsers weren't so good.

The fact that it was open-source was a huge plus for people in tech but it wasn't the main (or even a significant) reason for its success. As a result, as soon as Chrome comes out which many people consider to be better (or at least a better experience) people abandoned it.

[batiudrami]

I don't think Mozilla is naive enough to think that your average user cares about open source. But it is one of their core philosophies and not something that they will abandon.

[Mahn]

They've been marketing Firefox with a strong focus on openess for sometime now. Someone at Mozilla clearly decided that openness was their main USP at some point.

[IgorPartola]

Then why spend the time and money producing videos about being open and choice. I am a person that is knowledgable about OSS, free software, etc. and even I don't care to watch them. Instead, maybe they should worry about user experience a bit more. For example, can they make the browser look a bit slicker by default? Less buttons, no separate search bar? It's just so 2006. Honestly, most users care far more about a nicer back button than your license. And if they want to stay relevant they have to appeal to the average person, not just the OSS activists.

[Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd]

The separate search bar is for privacy reasons. Mozilla doesn't want to send all key presses in the url bar to a search engine, yet search suggestions are useful enough to show them when users actually want to search.

[IgorPartola]

So does it actually accomplish any privacy protection? There are two cases:

You blindly type in your search query into the Awesomebar and it works correctly. For users that do this, it works just like Chrome, no privacy protection.

You use the provided search bar for searches, and Awesomebar for URL's. Your searches are in no way protected. This does protect the URL's you type in, such that example.com is not sent to Google/Bing/Yahoo/DDG/etc. as you type out "example". Did Mozilla actually show that this is worth protecting, and that most people don't just type in "example", hit Enter, go to Google, then click on the first link? This is what I see 99.9% of users doing already.

Note that the autocomplete can pick up the difference between a URL and a search by the presence of a pattern that doesn't follow a URL. Chrome does this. Type in "example.com" vs "?example.com". The "?" is specifically there to indicate that you want search. Perhaps privacy conscious FF users could learn this shortcut, and everyone else can get the convenience they expect?

I am not trying to downplay the importance of privacy in browser implementations, just questioning the privacy implications of this feature.

[barrkel]

If Firefox is to ape Chrome so much, it should just give up.

(Not a fan of Chrome.)

[wtallis]

If Firefox were nothing more than Chrome with the ability to run extensions like NoScript, it would still be the browser to choose.

[sjwright]

You're over-thinking things -- only a tiny proportion of people pick browsers on technical or philosophical merit. Chrome is popular because they have the support of Google's marketing heft. It really is that simple.

[itg]

Every non-technical friend I have installed Chrome because "Google told them it was faster" from the link Google has on their site when you use a different browser or it is bundled with so much software.

[sjwright]

That's exactly the marketing heft I'm referring to.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

That, or they had a technical friend who laughed at them for using IE and told them to use Chrome.

[dragonwriter]

> The problem I feel with Mozilla is that they mistook why they were successful. They attributed the success of Firefox to the openness of the browser and the company and have doubled-down on that.

I think you've mistaken the purpose of Mozilla: the purpose of Mozilla is not to have a successful company independent of openness, it is to promote "openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Web".

Mozilla isn't a for-profit company (well, the Foundation isn't, and the Corporation is wholly owned by, and exists to further the purposes of, the Foundation.)

[wmf]

If Mozilla didn't care about openness and just focused on making the best browser, what could they have done differently? They could have had H.264 earlier, but that's pretty minor. They haven't been hurting for money.