Mozilla has been a sinking ship for decades now.
There’s a reason Chrome was able to steal the alt browser market from Mozilla at a time when even laymen understood that IE was awful - Mozilla stopped innovating the second they were winning. They had tabs! What more could you want?
Chrome came along at a time when browser performance wasn’t a focus, when JavaScript meant websites were slow, and said “fuck that, let’s make it fast”. Say what you will about Chrome or JS, Google was on to something and the modern web today is 95% thanks to Chrome pushing things forward.
Everyone jumped to Chrome and Mozilla fucked around for literally years before they got the memo that actually browser performance matters. They were once the best browser tools on the market until once again Chrome pushed the envelope, and once again developers switched while Mozilla sat back and did nothing.
Mozilla meandered back and forth, releasing shitty products nobody wanted (like pocket and send) instead of focusing on the most important thing: the browser.
Yet they’re somehow still here, hobbling along, doing fuck knows what instead of making a better browser and innovating to beat Chrome.
Didn’t expect to see Lemmy defending privacy raping mega corp Google today…
Hey can we save the word rape for actually important shit instead of privacy concerns, thanks.
Wooooords have meeeeeanings, pleeeeeease don’t misuse them for emphasis.
You can disapprove of their privacy practices while acknowledging its innovations. There’s a reason Chrome got a stranglehold on the market.
Although Google making Chrome almost certainly had a part in it. For a while, you couldn’t use Google without a “try our new Chrome browser!” pop up in the corner, and there aren’t many who don’t use Google.
Firefox doesn’t have the same advertising reach, and neither do they have the reputation of Google, as a big company to help them in the eyes of laymen. Basically everyone’s heard of Google, but less so Mozilla. You’d may as well ask them to install Konqueror, or Netscape for all the good that it would do.
Stopped innovating? Just because the user interface didn’t change much? They’ve contributed a ton to web api’s and the open web in general. They also contributed massively to rust, and private / secure browsing standards. It has absolutely not been left to languish. Now I prefer some other UI’s but you won’t catch me claiming Mozilla ceased innovation.
They’ve also contributed in general to JavaScript. So yeah, Google definitely pushed the envelope there, but Mozilla didn’t just watch it all happen. Also, factor in that they were key contributors to web assembly.
Yes they contributed a lot to web standards, bit they didn’t contribute to actual user experience which is why people install a web browser in the first place.
Mozilla consistently gets complacent.
That seems paradoxical to me. Maybe you mean user interface, but those standards are a massive part of experience. How media loads, caches, and renders. How cross site resources work. How DNS works. Etc. And just think of all their massive contributions to CSS and animations. I mean they play a pretty big part in user experience.
Not to mention MDN, for which many of us can be thankful alone.
I think performance was part of Chrome’s success, but there was also all the memes in 2010 about installing chrome to replace IE, and the ads that Google ran on their search page. I don’t think Pocket came out until Firefox was already deep into the decline. I do think Chrome held onto those users because of their ram efficiency at the time, and nice features like built-in translate. Now, users can’t switch because the web depends on Chrome, just like back in the IE days.
I think performance was part of Chrome’s success
I don’t think I fully believe that, normies don’t care about how fast a page loads and the proof of that is that they were using IE for so long.
Now, users can’t switch because the web depends on Chrome, just like back in the IE days.
What? I’ve been using FF since 2006, or something like that, how is the web dependent on chrome?
It’s one factor among several. Another large factor is that Chrome was easier to deploy and manage in a corporate environment for many years. Really until Edge came out a whole lot of people had it foisted on them via their IT department at work, I’m sure many still do but Edge has definitely changed things and made that less common since it gets included with the OS. Combined with Google constantly pushing it everywhere these workers were guaranteed to encounter the option to download it at home even if they didn’t explicitly seek it out, and since they already used it at work it wasn’t a scary download it was familiar and made by that great company Google that everyone is so impressed by. They click the download and that’s that, they don’t even know Firefox is an option.
Despite my above rant, I still use Firefox as my primary browser. The web works absolutely fine on it. I think I’ve encountered one site that required chrome to work correctly in the last year and that’s a huge improvement over where we were back in the early 2000’s with IE.
No, there’s other reasons why people don’t switch, compatibility is not the issue.
I have to switch to chromium often, unfortunately. Various websites are untested with Firefox, and many apps such as Teams are not compatible with FF. Probably better than the early 2000’s but still really bad.
The problem is that browsers aren’t profitable. Mozilla need a revenue source other than donations, and that’s why they’re trying to make another product that’ll stick. They need to make money somehow. If Google stops paying them because of the antitrust lawsuit, Mozilla will probably disappear in a few months.
Browsers are profitable, Mozilla only exists because of the money the browser brings in.
Yes, it’s true that the money is currently coming from Google but only because Google is willing to pay more than other search providers. If Google stopped paying, someone else would pay instead.
To put it another way, Google isn’t forking out millions to Mozilla out of the goodness of its heart
EDIT: to everyone down voting this, please explain to me why Google also pays Apple an obscene amount of money to be the default search engine on iOS if there’s no competition in this space?
if Google stopped paying, someone else would pay instead.
Have we all forgotten that time period when Yahoo! was the default search provider in Firefox?
No.
Google pays to keep its monopoly on search.
Chrome, Android, etc. all are just tools to funnel views on their ads.
If Mozilla would fold, Google would have a monopoly on browsers, which could cause problems for them. So they finance fake competition.
No other company could pay even close to that amount of money.
Chrome came along at a time when browser performance wasn’t a focus, when JavaScript meant websites were slow, and said “fuck that, let’s make it fast”. Say what you will about Chrome or JS, Google was on to something and the modern web today is 95% thanks to Chrome pushing things forward.
That’s where the web started getting worse.
Yeah.
Everything gets made for IE and people scream like its the end of life on the planet, and still ridicule it to this day.
Everything gets made for Chrome and people cant stop slobbing knob over how glorious and great it is, and how good its been for everything, and blah blah blah.
Chrome is worse than IE ever was.
There’s a reason Chrome was able to steal the alt browser market from Mozilla at a time when even laymen understood that IE was awful - Mozilla stopped innovating the second they were winning. They had tabs! What more could you want?
That’s part of the story, but even more important is that they shoved it down everyone’s throat.
Mozilla was doomed from the start.
Netscape Inc. wanted to sell browsers eventually, which makes sense. It’s product which requires a massive amount of engineering effort. But, when Microsoft started tying IE to Windows and giving it away free, there was no way that Netscape could actually make any sales. The bigger reason their business was crushed was that Microsoft was also giving away their web server (IIS) away for free, while Netscape was charging for theirs.
Some kids today are too young to know that Microsoft was sued by the US government over this and lost the case (along with what was very likely Microsoft falsifying evidence). But, then Bush Jr. took office and the government basically took a case they had won and effectively threw out the win.
When it was clear that Netscape was going to fail as a business they open-sourced the browser either as an act of charity or spite. The problem is that it’s still a massive and expensive project to build a web browser. That’s especially true in a world where standards keep evolving and the browser has to keep having new features added.
Since making a browser was so expensive, they needed financial support, and eventually that came from Google. At first Google just wanted Firefox to exist as a hedge so that Microsoft wouldn’t dominate the browser market. But, once Google came out with Chrome it was both a way to keep directing traffic to Google search, and a way to pretend they don’t have a monopoly on browsers.
But, if 90% of the funding of your project comes from Google, there are some obvious lines you can’t cross. So, Mozilla has to keep doing this dance where they make a browser that competes with Chrome, but one that doesn’t cross certain lines that would make Google mad and result in them shutting off the funding.
Google would shut off the funding to Firefox in a heartbeat if they took ad blocking and privacy too seriously. But, Google doesn’t care too much if Mozilla messes around with AI or ads.