I wish Mozilla would explore the enterprise productivity space. There’s huge amount of money currently being made on dubious enterprise security products, and with the browser being at the forefront of threats (its literal purpose is to execute lots of untrusted code safely) I feel like an enterprise build with centralised management, in-browser DLP (removes the need for janky TLS interception middleboxes), built-in adblocking (since those also reduce productivity) would sell really well and give them independence from Google and the advertising industry.
I don’t understand Mozilla’s current strategy; their attempt to pander to the advertising industry and produce a Chrome clone has been a massive failure as demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share which is now effectively a rounding error. For people that are satisfied with being part of the advertising economy, why wouldn’t you just use Chrome and the Google ecosystem? If you don’t mind your data being used for advertising purposes, Chrome is an excellent browser and their broader ecosystem gives you functionality Mozilla will never match.
Mozilla’s only way out is to go back to its roots and build a better user-agent, and provide an adversarial alternative to the current advertising-based ecosystems.
> demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share
At this point I think Firefox market share stopped being in Mozilla's hand.
Just as it was during the browser war days, the critical issue went back to site compatibility: Firefox performs poorly on Google properties (Gmail is fine, YouTube, gsuite, admin consoles are pretty bad), and document based services like Notion or Figma. It kinda works, but Chrome based browser perform notably better.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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?"
> 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.
This is a chicken and egg problem; right now there is no compelling reason for the masses to use Firefox so developers are right to not worry about it and tell people to just use Chrome if they’re experiencing any issues.
But if Mozilla makes a killer enterprise browser and a significant chunk of the enterprise jumps on it they will have an incentive to support it.
Firefox performs poorly on Google properties
(Gmail is fine, YouTube, gsuite, admin consoles
are pretty bad)
I switch between FF and Chrome pretty frequently, and I've never felt any issues with YT or Gsuite. Haven't used the rest in multiple browsers so I can't compare.
There are some caveats to mention. One, I use AdBlock, and I'm subscribed to YT Premium so I don't see ads. Two, the documents I edit with GSuite are generally pretty trivial. Three, I've always used decently spec'd (not high end, but decent) computers so perhaps I'm not feeling performance issues that are felt on low end gear.
Still, I agree that's somewhat besides the point. Comapanies can (and do) decide to stop caring about Firefox at any point. There's no guarantee that Gmail will run well on Firefox tomorrow, or two months from now.
At some point people should recognize the web browsers are an opinionated VM. Many many many languages only have one runtime. There's no true reason Mozilla NEEDs its own engine, and probably would be in better shape today if they shifted to a privacy defensive fork of chrome.
It might not be a problem in principle, but it's definitely a problem when said one runtime is controlled by a single entity that is both powerful and fundamentally adversarial towards the users.
A privacy fork can only do so much if Google keeps removing underlying things that make it possible. The more it diverges from upstream, the harder it is to maintain.
I partly agree. Firefox moving to Webkit or Blink isn't as bad as people put it, but under one critical condition: Firefox still keeps the capacity to steer away from Google's roadmap and shoulder a competitive and full implementation of the engine on its own (100% maintain a fork that can deviate from Blink as much as needed, including becomming fully incompatible).
Under that specific scenario, we would get the best of both worlds. There would be less engine variety, but it would save Firefox and offer an out of a Google owned ecosystem.
Now I think that's absolutely not trivial, and if Firefox could pull that out it could probably as well push its own engine way more forward right now.
For instance Apple played that game, ended up basically alone on Webkit, and I'm not sure Safari is more competitive to Chrome than Firefox is. Safari keeps some market share, but the reasons are elsewhere.
I would like to see the browser be the Users Agent. IE: "Cookie Banners?" That's a browser, not website issue. I really care less about the interpreter/VM than I do say, how we built a browser on it (which is why webkit is great, and I had my own webkit GTK browser that did exactly what I wanted, and why so many webkit based apps exist!)
> "Cookie Banners?" That's a browser, not website issue.
It was neither, it was a legal issue. As I understand it, EU law (or its most common interpretation) did not actually allow websites to just defer to a browser preference. Fortunately, the EU is about to fix this:
IMHO rendering engines can be ignored for restricted use cases or if it's fine to work 98% of the time. What we're expecting from a mainstream browser is a way higher bar, so having no control on the engine is a no go. Tomorrow Firefox having to wait for Google to implement a new sandboxing approach, or not able to override deeper DRM or tracking integration would be a pretty bad situation.
As I understand it that's exactly why Apple took webkit and ran with it.
> Cookie Banners?
People really viscerally hate those, do they. That anger should be pointed to the site pushing them IMHO, but aside from that, dismissing the banner is in itself a legal choice (whatever the default was) that isn't only bound to cookies despite the name. Whatever happens on the backend or service can also be bound to that choice.
I look at it the same way we have newsletter checkboxes. They're a PITA but I wouldn't trust an automated system to make the right choice on every single form, and not sign me to some super weird stuff just because it thought the checkbox was a newsletter optout (imagine a site pushing a "bill me every month for the extra feature" clearly explained option, but with an html input id close to "opt_out_of_free_plan" and it's automatically checked by your browser)
im surprised this is earning such downvotes. idk about the "opinionated" vm perspective but I think it needing its own engine oe not is at least something worth considering. firefox has been my go-to alt browser for years as my backup to chrome. it was what I would use to "test again in another browser" but as time has gone by, more and more stuff just doesn't work on firefox :(
It's already problematic to have Chromium dominating/near-monopolizing, and add salt to the wound letting Gecko die this way.
Chromium is so prevalent as an engine, that most developers don't test their code on Firefox and just tell everyone to use Chrome/Chromium when they run into issues.
This has the unintentional side-effect of strong-arming the W3C into compliance with the engine and not the other way around. Why do we bother with the W3C then? if they are powerless and Chromium can do as they please?
>> This has the unintentional side-effect of strong-arming the W3C into compliance with the engine and not the other way around.
I don't want any engine to have that much dominance, but I especially don't want that dominating engine owned by an ad company who's main goal is to spy on people.
- Rapid Release or Extended Support Release channels
- MSI deployment wrapper
- ADM and AMDX group policy templates
- MacOS plist file policy templates
- Linux target JSON file “policies.json” policy templates
- “Open in IE” extension for ActiveX
Does not have the built-in DLP you're requesting (at as far as I could find) and Firefox already has pretty aggressive adblocking that sets off lots of sites for me.
100% agree. I would happily run a dedicated enterprise browser that blocks downloads, has DLP, has watermarking (etc) if it meant I could use my own PC. Not Browser Isolation or VDI - An actual enterprise browser.
My job is pretty much 100% in browser though, so I realise this isn’t viable for everyone.
Palo Alto Networks is one of several companies pushing custom versions of Chrome as enterprise security browsers doing exactly what you're talking about: holistic DLP/anomaly detection, URL filtering and content inspection in-browser. Presumably because it's closer to the malicious behavior, and network MITM is harder to accomplish with newer TLS and with decentralized workforces.
If Firefox had a more customizable, enterprise-feature-focused browser maybe we'd be seeing it used instead of Chrome? I don't know.
The main driver of market share loss was the rise of mobile and Chrome being the bundled default on over a billion devices. I don't think Mozilla's run has been perfect, but I am flabbergasted at so many confidently wrong retellings of the history of market share change that treat it exclusively as a story of Mozilla's strategic missteps and make no space for the fact that a trillion dollar company with the #1 or #2 most visited site in the world for the past 20 years muscled a new browser into the picture, leveraging their monopoly in search and mobile, plus laptops produced and sold practically at cost. Firefox could have made every perfect decision you could have dreamed of and still suffered a market share collapse.
In fact, I think there's a pretty clear-cut example of a natural experiment demonstrating what it looks like to execute in the browser space to nearly perfection and still lose. In my personal opinion, Opera at its peak with the Presto engine, represented the most impressive combination for it's time of elite level performance and stability, genuinely good innovation that benefited the user, and commitment to the core browser above all else. My favorite was whenever they rolled out Opera Unite (to this day a truly mind blowing idea), I think Opera 11 or 12.
And, at a time when it truly mattered, was light on resources and bandwidth and even shipped a portable executable that could be run from any Windows PC from a USB stick. Not only that, but it was consistently ahead of the competition with embedded and device adapted versions. Is business partnerships were creative and cutting edge too. They were early to mobile, struck deals with oems, and even got on the Nintendo Wii. They offered paid and subscription options. IIRC they sold "speed dial" placement for ads and got into the search licensing game. So in everything from performance to speed to stability to innovation that actually benefited users, to intelligent business partnerships and experimenting to find revenue, Opera executed at perhaps the best level anyone could, the perfect moneyball browser. And I was never originally an Opera fanboy, I preferred Firefox 1 and 2 at the start, but pivoted to Opera because, as a college kid with no money, it delivered an impressively modern experience on lightweight hardware.
Despite executing at the highest level both in software and business decision making, it didn't matter, because distribution power trumps product quality. Sustaining a fully independent rendering engine became financially unsustainable, and with the maturity of Android, carriers favored bundled stock browsers.
With no options left Opera then made what I consider a difficult and very unfortunate decision, but perhaps having no other choice, sold to a new ownership team, pivoted to Chromium, and lost much of its team to Vivaldi which is also based on Chromium. But at no point in the story was their loss of financial visibility or market share due the loss of vision that people think explains Firefox's loss of market share. If the world actually worked that way we'd all be using Opera 25 right now.
Edit: If someone more knowledgeable could chime in, I would be fascinated to know if choosing a browser on Android could be a potential monopoly remedy. There's already precedent for that on Windows, iOS and on Android in EU for search.
I don’t understand Mozilla’s current strategy; their attempt to pander to the advertising industry and produce a Chrome clone has been a massive failure as demonstrated by their ever-shrinking browser market share which is now effectively a rounding error. For people that are satisfied with being part of the advertising economy, why wouldn’t you just use Chrome and the Google ecosystem? If you don’t mind your data being used for advertising purposes, Chrome is an excellent browser and their broader ecosystem gives you functionality Mozilla will never match.
Mozilla’s only way out is to go back to its roots and build a better user-agent, and provide an adversarial alternative to the current advertising-based ecosystems.