Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month
5 days ago by sanitation to c/technology
There was a blog post not too long ago, where an Ex-Mozilla engineer shared his thoughts on exactly this topic. The tldr was something like
"Don't try to be like the other browsers, chasing daily active users. Get back in touch with your userbase and understand why they choose Firefox every day instead of just mindlessly picking one of the larger browsers like the majority of users. Then build a browser for these users, instead of pushing them away by doing what the other browsers (which they actively try to avoid) do."
I share this sentiment, but it won't make the money people happy, so I don't think it'll happen.
EDIT: Found the post: https://blog.unitedheroes.net/5751
I dispute this as well:
“Don’t try to be like the other browsers, chasing daily active users. Get back in touch with your userbase and understand why they choose Firefox every day instead of just mindlessly picking one of the larger browsers like the majority of users. Then build a browser for these users, instead of pushing them away by doing what the other browsers (which they actively try to avoid) do.”
This is a nice sentiment.
But these aren’t the Internet Explorer days.
A browser engine with less than 1% market share isn’t going to be supported by web developers, and then everything about its development becomes an uphill battle. Major sites won’t work, and they can’t afford to fixe them all on an ad hoc basis. And again, it’s not like the IE days where the “default” browser is so unbelievably dysfunctional, the OS was more open, and the user base was a bit more technical.
I’d argue one of Firefox’s most important functions (alongside Safari) is to stop Chrome from becoming the de facto web standard, instead of the HTML spec.
And it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that “these users” the quote describes is an exceedingly small base. It’s reasonable for Firefox to want to expand that, instead of catering to an ever shrinking pie.
I do partially agree: Mozilla needs to touch some grass. They need to get sane. But there is no “option to pick” presented to most of the world. And if Mozilla caters to the same oldschool Internet users like they always have, Firefox will die.
I don’t have a good solution. I’m just arguing that sentiment is applicable to an era we are no longer in.
but it won’t make the money people happy
Aka pay the Firefox devs.
I understand Mozilla wastes a lot of income, but still. This isn’t a hobbyist piece of software, it’s an expensive, labor intense project that needs constant professional attention.
The income part isn’t trivial, unless they find some alternative source of funding (like the Ladybird project apparently has).
Firefox is a well known browser. People just don't use it because Chrome offers something else. Firefox has always been a "Chrome lite", following in their footsteps instead of standing on it's own terms.
They abandoned their privacy direction, only coming back when it's beneficial for them to market it. While Chrome sucks for adding features that aren't standard, Firefox needs to just be quick with it too. It took Firefox forever to add tab groups, something people were asking for all the time.
They are absolutely out of touch with their user base and have no direction. Opera GX targeted the gaming niche and now they have similar market share to Firefox, which is insane. It's a shit browser, but at least they went for something. Firefox just idles and adds whatever is popular way too late. Nobody wanted AI shit added, why was any development time wasted on it? The engineer is right.
You basically see it with some sites now, where you're just told "use chrome if you have any issues", and then it reflects badly on firefox, because a casual user might just think it's the fault of the browser that it's poorly made and doesn't work properly.
For the websites, it's not worth writing around browser-specific quirks, when the vast majority use a chrome-based browser.
Linux has always had that problem. "Linux doesn't support any games!" or "Linux can't run Photoshop". That's the way it is always phrased and seen (and was much worse before Proton came along). Not "The devs didn't bother supporting Linux" or "Adobe sucks".
"The income part isn’t trivial, unless they find some alternative source of funding"
Addressed within the article by the insider:
For what it's worth, I'm not concerned for Mozilla isn't it running out of money. So long as Google or another large search engine exists, it can get cash. There are also a few other financial stability angles it can do which (frankly) would be better.
Google can easily afford to fund Mozilla, and it can't afford to stop. They still need to act like they aren't a monopoly.
…Do they?
I feel like we are very close to a cyberpunk future where Alphabet doesn’t have to pretend.
And I feel that’s quite dismissive. Mozilla doesn’t have enough development resources as-is, hence the whole original article. And abandoning Servo. And a bunch of other things. If money was a non-concern, they wouldn’t be here.
I am longtime Firefox user and i diagree. Firefox will never be big or profitable and should double down on its fanbase. Being divergent from the norm is a feature not a bug. It is the reason people are still using it. Being non-profit and open source is the strength that will always keep it alive because its funders are its fans.
If a website stops working on Firefox I won't use the website. If i really have to use the website I will switch to Vivaldi temporarily. If i have to use it regularly I'll complain about it to the website support. Every time I use it.
It is worth being loyal to me for Firefox, because I am loyal to them. I won't switch to chromium based browsers out of principle.
not pay the ceo 6 millions a year would be a start
Avoid forcing AI to its users? I switched to WaterFox just to avoid it.
While problematic, yeah, I’d dispute that as Firefox’s market share problem.
Users like you and me, who are even aware of projects like Waterfox, are a minuscule, vanishing minority. We aren’t switching to Chrome anyway. But we aren’t representative of the web’s user base.
And if most Chrome users were sick of the Gemini spam… they’d have already switched to Firefox, where it’s toggleable and an order of magnitude less in-your-face. But they aren’t.
Same with Manifest V3. They neutered UBlock on Chrome long ago, yet that’s clearly not dissuading most Chrome users.
In short, if in-your-face-AI was a dealbreaker for most, Chrome wouldn’t be gaining market share.
I think it's a network problem. Most people use Chrome, therefore most people's friends and co-workers use Chrome, so there's a strong incentive to go with the pack. Google is obviously exploiting this to get their ecosystem claws in deeper, but I think the main thing is that Google effectively dethroned Microsoft as the default, and Mozilla has just kind of "been around" the whole time as the weird alt browser that the IT guy uses, even being propped up by Google in exchange for Firefox users' search data.
What should Mozilla do? IDK. I don't think "more AI" is the right answer, but I also don't know what I would do in their position. It's a tight spot.
I don’t think “more AI” is the right answer, but I also don’t know what I would do in their position.
Yeah.
I think “nontoxic” machine learning features are nice. You know, oldschool stuff. Firefox’s auto translation, as an example, is really cool, (AFAIK) completely local, and way better than Chrome’s equivalent.
But they poisoned that well with the yet-another-stupid-chatbot thing.
I dunno what Mozilla was thinking. It was so shitty. And now there will be a negative reaction to anything even ML-adjacent, even if it isn’t enshittified.
Yeah it is. My friends think I'm 90 years old because I use "that old 90s browser, what a weirdo!"
I actually doubt the majority of people nowadays know what a browser is and how it differs from the OS or other applications
Do a fresh install of Firefox sometime and keep track of all the places Mozilla shoves AI into your face. The notifications, the sidebar, and coming soon: even the window type. Begging to use AI to group your tabs. Begging to summarize the article you just found that was actually written by a person.
You'd figure Chrome would be the worst offender here, but they own the Google search engine, and that's mostly enough for them. A fresh Firefox install comes across as maximalist as Microsoft Edge these days.
🥺
At least Firefox lets you turn that shit off
As long as it can be turned off, it’s not a dealbreaker for me. I prefer living in the upstream where, AFAIK, firefox gets all the vulnerabilities patched first
I think their best option at present is to push the privacy, interoperability and independence side of their product and target European governments on the basis of digital sovereignty. Yes, it's based in the US, but the product itself is open source and independent of the big tech giants, and that can be leveraged to get more support in Europe as the only viable alternative to Google's Chrome ecosystem and Apple's Safari ecosystem.
It's difficult for Mozilla, not because of what Firefox is, but because it is financially dependent on Google which makes it harder to be aggressive about calling out just how bad Google and Chrome are for users. Mozilla would ideally be lobbying the EU anti-trust apparatus to stop Google aggressively pushing Chrome, in much the same way Netscape did with Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
Mozilla is stuck, because it's main threat is also it's main lifeline. So it really needs to try and diversify itself away from it's financial dependence on Google. That has been near impossible but European governments may be the way forward. It won't replace Google, but Trump has created an opportunity in Europe that Mozilla has to aggressively follow.
Google was already doing that for years. Most of Firefox users use it because it's leaner than Chrome and supports adblockers. None of these advantages will suddenly disappear, but Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself, and more users will migrate away from it to Firefox.
So Firefox strategy should be to simply not screw up by adding unnecessary stuff like AI.
Chrome will inevitably become worse all by itself
But when?
Again, this isn’t Microsoft, whom you can rely on for prompt footgunning. Chrome is still very fast, reasonably lean, and developed with more resources than Mozilla.
Hence Firefox could die before Alphabet starts to really tighten the screws. That’s what I’m most afraid of, as the next step for Alphabet would be “depreciating” Chromium, closing the source, and killing all the forks.
I don’t want a world where the only viable browser is a Chrome binary.
If I was Mozilla CEO I know exactly what I would do. I would double down on the users.
Immediately put out a press release that Mozilla will not for as long as I'm in charge make one single dime selling user data. Put in our very corporate charter that we are required to collect as little data as possible to make our products work. Also make a public promise that any AI features which aren't 100% local will require a very big opt-in and we will try to avoid shipping any such things at all.
Focus on speed. Chrome started getting market share in the first place because they advertised it could render a web page in under 100ms. So that's what I would shoot for. Screw everything else, the main rendering parts of the browser should be fast, threaded, and stable.
Part of that would be to include some script selection processes in the browser itself. This would partially be like an ad block but more like a priority system. Right now you go to a news website and there's a good chance you're pulling tens of megabytes of JavaScript that tracks everything and actually runs a fucking auction in your browser where advertisers are bidding on the right to show you an ad. This does not help the user. So I would focus on developing a system that identifies what JavaScript code renders the bulk of the web page and what is for things like ads, the add code goes dead last. That way the content of the page loads very quickly.
Then I would basically license ublock origin and include that functionality in the browser itself. I would throw Dev time at optimizing the hell out of that. And that would be one of the questions asked at first run, do you want to block advertisements? If user says yes then ublock is enabled. That alone will probably get a shit ton of users, because it will do the same thing as Chrome did years ago, just make the experience of web surfing better.
I would stop reinventing the UI every two years.
Understand that people are speaking from frustration. Users are tired. We are sick of having things we don't want shoved down our throats and told that we want them. This is not just Firefox, this is most software.
Sure, but I'm talking about making an exception for just this one. But fine, it can be opt-in. I can't imagine why, though; I have it on literally every device and it rocks.
Completely my opinion: I think the problem is Mozilla is beholden to the requirement that it MUST grow and make more and more money. It is a business after all.
If Mozilla just focused on maintaining a good product that browses the internet well and just stays there. It doesent have to do cutting edge, it doesn’t have to be ultra quirky. It doesent have to focus on increasing market share. It just needs to focus on being a good product.
People are going to come and go. Opinions change and people do get tired of being taken advantage of. The Honda Civic didnt get so popular because it was the most performant car, the most spacious car, the most efficient car, etc It got popular because while it wasent the MOST of those qualities it was quite good with those qualities.
Firefox’s best bet at this point is maintaining good qualities and being as accessible and compatible as possible.
It’s a rigged game though. Mozilla’s struggling to even implement feature parity with the income they have, and being “good” isn’t going to place redirects to install Chrome over half of people’s phones and web browsing.
…Personally, I think Mozilla should dump Firefox.
And put everything they have into Ladybird, or maybe Apple’s WebKit.
Mozilla are playing a rigged game, and the only way to survive is get out of Google’s grasp. Practically, that means joining some other entity who already has dev money and a good project.
Mozilla might as well just close up shop. If they were to abandon Firefox, what exactly are they bring to the table for anyone else?
The brand, development power, and bits from the Firefox codebase they could re-use.
More importantly, Firefox’s devs get to work on something that already has leverage in an ecosystem, eg WebKit for Apple or Ladybird for Linux.
They need to build their own privacy-oriented services, and offer different tiers. Also important is that if they do launch a product, make sure they plan on keeping it alive or people won't trust it and migrate to it (like how Google kills products). Make it a safe-haven for those who cares about privacy. And I'm not talking about using third-parties and rebranding them as their own..
Yeah.
I think they tried with a few services, like the VPN, but could never afford to go whole-hog with a stack like Proton.
…In fact, it’d be interesting if Mozilla merged with Proton, DuckDuckGo or something.
Ddg, proton, mulvad and Mozilla would actually be a solid force that could make something great. But 1St party support for products is against the ethos of firefox and open source.
They could continue Firefox as normal and then from a working group to make a new browser designed specifically for a new internet or a new group of sites on the current internet walled off from big tech by having their own dns. That would be interesting. An internet that actually follows w3c guidelines and adhears to open principles. It must provide a good experience it can't be all HTML and CSS blogs like all other alternatives. It should try to do the current web better instead of 1999.
Do not forget the VPN was rebadged from mullvad (I think) so it was not even their own stuff
There used to be significant differences in performance that drove browser choices. The top dog browser always had a way of getting fat and slow and then something else would come along. This is how Chrome got its start. But today’s much more powerful hardware hides a lot of poor performance, and most web bottlenecks are in the content (ads and shitty site design) where the browser can only make a small difference.
User couldn’t care less about privacy and adblocking performance, apparently.
Mozilla is actively driving away users who care.
I find it sad that most comments here just focus on the OPTIONAL AI possibilities, which doesn't even register as an issue for the masses. The problem is an inherently weak-toothed antitrust law framework in the US. The moment the courts did decide against splitting chrome from Alphabet, the options for Mozilla became very, very limited. They can't out-feature Alphabet, they do not have near-unlimited reach to advertise their browser. All they currently can do is play catch-up.
main reason I will keep using it as my main browser
That's the main reason I'll stay with them. V3 is such a blatant move to make sure users lose power over their own computer, taking away the right to choose what our devices display or not.
Suspect one of the reasons Google continues to fund Mozilla is specifically to take some heat off anti-trust arguments
I find it sad that most comments here just focus on the OPTIONAL AI possibilities.
And Google Chrome has absolutely no leg to stand on, there.
I hate the enshittification too.
But the cold hard truth is that is seems to at least somewhat help with the funding of the engine's development all the forks also rely on...
We all need to find another way to make funding browsers work. I don't know if that means getting some of the nicher browsers get closer to a workable state (ladybird comes to mind, although I've never studied it, I don't know if their architecture is any good) so that people switch over and they're easier to maintain as the code is newer and hopefully learned from past mistakes enough to be easier to keep working, or keep firefox forks and figure out how to stop spreading our efforts.
At some point we also need to get web devs to stop ignoring the look of pages outside of just chrome, it'll bite them back just like IE back in the day.
if they cherry picked Zen's implementation of split tab, I'd consider going back
It seems a good part of Mozilla's problems keeping users are actually being caused by Google. Besides the constant incompatibilities introduced by Google there's this:
This is Firefox's CPU utilization when just looking at Google's search page in a private window since Google turned on AI by default. My laptop literally gets too hot to be used on my lap. The exact same search on Chrome takes less than 2% CPU. (Yes, I know about Duckduckgo.)
Recently disabling native AI features in Firefox significantly reduced CPU use, but a couple of days ago it shot up again only when on Google's search page.
I noticed this as well. Just opening google caused my GPU usage to constantly sit at ~70 % usage even without searching anything. Is google crowd sourcing compute on peoples computeres or WTF is going on? i completely stopped using google on all my devices and I dont have this problem anymore.
Use Duckduckgo. You can even disable the AI
I start with DDG, but it's far from a complete Google replacement.
Google is far from a google replacement these days.
Or Qwant or Ecosia
I know right, every time I use any google service Firefox goes ballistic.
For years Google downgraded people's experience on search, maps, and youtube on mobile if they didn't use Chrome for Android. As a Firefox mobile user, it was very frustrating. I don't use many Google services anymore, but they, seemingly intentionally, were making other browsers feel worse. I wouldn't be surprised if they were doing it in different ways on desktop.
Thats weird. I tried it both private and not on googles home page and I get pretty much nothing for cpu use.
Wonder why its so different for you.
Fedora Linux if it makes any difference.
I'll make sure to give your opinion all the consideration it deserves.
So long as FF ships Google as default search engine, they'll be captive to Google's fuckery. That does make it a FF problem.
If FF switched to one of those alternatives, possibly with an explanation about Google violating the Mozilla Foundation's stated objectives, that would push the burden on the users that consciously switched back.
I switched for IE to firefox on 2007 and never switch back.
There are some things here and there(mostly due things being implemented by default for chromium), but it has always been the best browser overall for me.
Same here. People are over dramatic. Yes it has ai, but you can opt out and disable all of it, unlike other browsers.
I didn't even remember it had AI. I think I think I disabled it as soon as it popped out and they never bothered me about it again.
Only semi-related to the roadmap and release notes mentioned, but;
I hate the new what's new page that opens after updates. What I want is the release notes, not some huge bannered colorful vast marketing ad space. Until three versions ago it was fairly simple to at least scroll down to open the link. Now it is hard to spot in the violent, pushy, irritating ad space. And it pushes mostly the same stuff every time. Very annoying.
Chrome and Edge are even worse, of course, not even linking technical/complete release notes. But doesn't change the worsening on Firefox.
The browser is loosing millions of users that have not opted out of the user estimate ping, including by using forks that have it off by default*
EDIT: it's not even that, it's "statcounter", that's tracking being blocked lmaooo
Man who has lost nine fingers: "I've reversed course and I will not lose another nine fingers".
Where are they going? Because I’ll be damned if I’m going to chrome or edge. Or using some half baked small project.
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If I was Mozilla’s CEO, I dunno what I’d do.
It doesn’t matter what Firefox implements; Google can spam instant “switch to Chrome” links in front of most of the world’s eyeballs. User couldn’t care less about privacy and adblocking performance, apparently. This isn’t Microsoft, and Mozilla is literally funded by Google as a token effort, so they can’t outdevelop Chrome nor attack it.
What are they supposed to do?
save