Let me list at least three facts to support my thesis:
1) Over the past year, there have been various controversies announcing a radical change in the core values of the Mozilla Foundation
2) After its rewrite (Project Fenix), the Firefox Mobile browser has never regained the completeness it had before, despite the passage of years
3) One of the web extensions developed by Mozilla (and marked as “official”) was recently removed from the store because it violated Mozilla's own add-on policies: this suggests serious internal disputes.
I wonder what is your opinion
[1] https://www.osnews.com/story/141100/mozilla-foundation-lays-off-30-of-its-employees-ends-advocacy-for-open-web-privacy-and-more/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/111usm9/years_after_fenix_release_of_android_browser/
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/blocked-addon/%7B6003eac6-4b07-4aaf-960b-92fa006cd444%7D/3.0.1/
I think if they focused on memory issues rather than wizbang new features, paired with getting android and iOS versions up to snuff, they could catch up, paired with a marketing campaign.
What is our goal here anyway? Does everyone need to use firefox? A year of "Firefox on the desktop?"
Some tools are niche -- used by craftmen. What are sysadmins and engineers but, at heart, craftsmen?
Anyways, in closing I think it's a good browser.
Firefox has been dying since the moment Chrome released. Mozilla's recent rebrand as a bunch of activists[0] and the likely halt of Google money (to be default search) means bad things for Firefox, I think. Let me know how that works out for them. I don't think it will matter much in the end, since Firefox has felt like someone's side project to build a Chrome also-ran for a long time.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-o... (Firefox was mentioned exactly once in Mozilla's official rebrand announcement, which shows how irrelevant Firefox is to them.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
I've still to see a site where Firefox is not supported. uBlock origin still works well with Firefox.
When I start having issues with those, I'll start looking for a replacement. Hopefully Ladybird Browser will be out by then.
Right now LB is incredibly slow and will be slow for a long time. Most of the cost of browser engines isn't implementing the code but optimizing it; thousands of PhD hours are poured into optimizing 1 JS function.
I've been using LB every day for about 2 months now.
Related to the article, I think FF is not dead; they have servo that is developing fast and will be incredibly fast and responsive. FF isn't going anywhere. They just accumulated a lot of technical debt and will be leaner once servo is out.
But it is true that we will inspire ourselves with techniques and methods used and implemented to optimize each subset of the engine build and build on the shoulders of giants.
I have hope for servo and Ladybird.
I refuse to go anywhere near Chromium and all it's derivatives.
The batteries are long dead on the devices that ran Safari.
Why is that important? Clearly maintaining Chrome isn't beyond the kind of software engineering expertise Google can bring to the task. Creating a ecosystem around a browser with so many features everyone uses it, but so complex only a few organisations do the same thing has rewarded Google handsomely. It's one of the ways they control the internet.
That control has also created a huge risk - people wielding antitrust laws want to break it. But if Google doesn't develop it what are we left with - Firefox? Or maybe its a whole pile in incompatible browsers, controlled Microsoft and Perplexity. Ah how we all pine for the IE6 days when Microsoft tried to use it to mold the internet in the direction it wanted it to go (which was nowhere much at all). Not.
Or we perhaps we abandon the entire platform. I suspect they hit the "release with the lowest bug count" a long time ago. With that ability to add features slows, they become less reliable, and eventually they collapse under their own weight. Does that deliver us a X to Wayland monument in Web Standards? Perhaps its starts with "HTML Small", a tiny version of HTML + CSS without the legacy that's small, simple and fast to render on a watch. Maybe the Chinese already have such a thing in WeChat.
Those items you mentioned are not really issues so to speak. You could say things like that about anything.
It's still a solid browser and could be resuscitated, but you'd have to immediately remove the Mozilla leadership and change it's culture.
My hope is that Firefox viably carries on as an OSS project away from the control of an organization whose CEO gets paid $6.9 million annually while engineering continually gets cut.
Firefox can't survive with Mozilla at the helm.
Why ask this? Tomorrow they could announce huge new funding from Bezos or google announcing cutting off funding. Regardless, it doesnt uninstall software from your machine.
>And furthermore: are those Linux users (like me) who are still relying on Firefox for doing their development job ready to abandon it?
I technically use firefox everyday; but it could be force uninstalled from my computers and id mostly not notice. I cant imagine being so dependent on it.
>I wonder what is your opinion
Hardly needs to be proven that Mozilla has been declining a very long time.
Microsoft never invested in Internet Explorer because of the antitrust charges in the early 2000s.
Opera had ads, firefox basically became a major player by default with nobody contesting them.
Mid to late 2000s, financial crisis era, they became activists for the open web and net neutrality; but after the financial crisis they jumped over to "social justice" which destroyed them.
Truth hurts, right?
Please identify the "radical change" referred to in "various controversies"
pretty vague confirmation or explaination for a decline in any going concern most of which are nowhere as valuable and free to millions of users as is firefox ... so whats meaining of this
ibmark0