In ancient Greek mythology, Kassandra, priestess of Apollo and daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, was granted the gift of prophecy by Apollo, in return for “favours”. When Kassandra then decided to, well, not grant any “favours”, Apollo showcased that as a good son of Zeus, he did not understand consent either, and cursed her by making sure nobody would believe her prophecies. There’s some variations to the story from one author or source to the next, but the general gist remains the same.
Anyway, I’ve been warning everyone about the fall of Mozilla and Firefox for years now, so here’s another chapter in the slow decline and fall of Mozilla: they’re now just flat-out stating they’re an online advertising company.
As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we need to simultaneously work on public policy, standards, products and infrastructure. Today, I want to take a moment to dive into the details of the “product” and “infrastructure” elements. I will share our emerging thoughts on how this will come to life across our existing products (like Firefox), and across the industry (through the work of our recent acquisition, Anonym, which is building an alternative infrastructure for the advertising industry).
↫ Laura Chambers
Pretty much every one of my predictions regarding the slow downfall of Mozilla are coming true, and we’re just waiting around now for the sword of Damocles to drop: Google ending its funding for Mozilla, which currently makes up about 80% of the former browser maker’s revenue. Once this stream of free money dries up, Mozilla’s decline will only accelerate even more, and this is probably why they are trying to get into the online advertising business in the first place. How else are you going to make money from a browser?
In the meantime, the operating system most reliant on Firefox existing as a privacy-respecting browser, desktop Linux, still seems to be taking no serious steps to prepare for this seeming inevitability. There’s no proper Firefox fork, there’s no Chromium variant with the kind of features desktop users expect (tab sharing, accounts, etc., which are not part of Chromium), nothing. There’s going to be a point where shipping a further enshittified Firefox becomes impossible, or at the least highly contentious, for Linux distributions, and I don’t see any viable alternative anywhere on the horizon.
I’m sure things will turn out just fine.
Ugghh. Yeah this is a death spiral alright. At least LibreWolf is a thing?
For myself, I’ve been making an effort lately to switch to Falkon (since I’m a dedicated KDE user). Some websites still require user agent foolery (looking at you CVS Pharmacy), but overall I’m happy with the functionality, and impressed with the performance vs Firefox or Chromium. It reminds me of old school browsers like K-Meleon or Opera 9, just very slick and unpretentious. And it should have decent sandboxing as well, since QtWebengine is based on Blink, and the Flatpak gets frequent updates.
The thing I’m worried about is if companies start doing Internet Explorer era shit again, blocking browsers or OSes at a more basic level instead of just checking user agent. And at least in the US, the sites most prone to that seem to be very important ones – pharmacies, government sites, insurance companies, hospital networks. Places that aren’t primarily about tech, and have a lot of tech debt, so they’re motivated to cheap out and support the narrowest subset of browsers they can get away with.
Don’t forget banks. My bank’s website already barely functions on desktop Firefox on Windows 10/11 on high tier 2024 hardware, and I have to disable my ad-blocker to be able to log into it. If not for the mobile app I’d never interact with my bank at all, apart from going to a branch or calling them like it’s 1992. I would be almost completely cut off from accessing my finances online if I ever decided to move away from a smartphone to a basic phone.
My bank works fine on my main Firefox profile, aside from thinking I’m signing in from a new location every time, but I run a separate Firefox profile for making purchases because my “Redirect attempts to open a new window/tab into navigating the current tab if not invoked from a middle click” about:config setting breaks PayPal’s popup-based checkout flow.
(That’s one feature I’ll dearly miss if I have to choose something that’s not a Firefox or Mozilla Suite fork. Doing the “click the link, then middle-click the current tab, losing the Back button in the process” dance is irritating.)
Indeed @ rainboxsocks – it appears that more and more sites are restricting access. I have been trialing the beta IRIS browser on the hobby platform RISC OS. It is based on webkit but can not access several sites including MS office 365. Also use Netsurf but that is a limited functionality light weight browser.
I have been using Firefox since it became widely available and was using Netscape and Mosaic before that…
But it looks like it might be time or very soon time to part ways with Firefox and Mozilla.
One issue might be portability of bookmarks – I have over 21,000 of them (no doubt numerous bookmarks are dead now – maybe 25% of them or more).
@ Thom – you are probably far more qualified than me to compare but maybe it is time to evaluate if any of these alternative browsers are suitable to change to at this point in time. Criteria would have to include:
1. privacy respecting
2. reasonable speed
3. ability to access 99% of websites
4. availability for multiple platforms
5. active development
6. ability to import bookmarks and other settings from existing browser
7. likelihood to continue to exist (longevity – ie what is the development model, individual, community, not for profit, for profit, etc)
LibreWolf – is this the best option as it is based directly on Firefox ? Does it bring any of the negative aspects across from mainstream Firefox? (with builds for Windows, various Linux distros, MacOS)
Waterfox (improved DNS queries end of 2023)
Pale Moon – Goanna Based forked from Mozilla Gecko – seems to get regular updates (with builds for for Windows, Linus, Mac OS and FreeBSD) – have found in limited use that it is not 100% compatible
Vivaldi – built using Chromium but supposed to have privacy focus, seems to get fairly regular updates (with builds for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and IOS)
Ladybird (alpha release target not until 2026) – supposed to be a new web engine (no small feat)
Falkon (formerly QupZilla) – Chromium browser based – updates not as regular, only for Linux- is this a lightweight browser?
Flow Browser (SDKs for Android, Linux, IOS, macOS and Windows) – doesn’t seem to mention privacy in its features at all though
etc
For me, the bigger question is the threat of getting more lax about the rules for adddons.mozilla.org.
I rely on a bunch of extensions (stuff like automatic cookie deletion, high-granularity javascript blocking, ad blocking, WebScrapbook, User CSS, TiddlyWiki Classic save-to-disk, “Accept: image/webp” blocking, SponsorBlock, Consent-O-Matic, etc.) and, last I heard, it was at least not uncommon for the same extension to have more “telemetry” in its Chrome/Chromium builds than in its Firefox builds because of AMO rules.
It doesn’t help if a browser is the most privacy-preserving thing in the world if the only way to get the functionality I need reverses all that.
I think we’re all just waiting for Ladybird at this point. Given the timelines its alpha release will probably roughly coincide with Mozilla sinking to the level of Brave. Andreas Kling, his contributors, and their sponsors are determined to make something both worthwhile and nigh-incorruptible. His background as both a hobbyist OS developer and a WebKit engineer has attracted tons of confidence and a lot of contributions—hundreds of different people chipped in during September.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aXSBCtELZ4
Since it’s being built whole-cloth rather than incrementally, there are some weird rough edges in terms of responsiveness and stability—but the quality, expertise and dedication on display are nevertheless staggering. We should regard the whole endeavour as nothing short of a messianic deliverance from the Browser Wars.
The codebase is BSD-licensed, but unlike other engines, Ladybird’s lead sponsor, FUTO, is devoted to “almost-open-source” in the most principled way possible: they believe in licenses that require corporations to help fund development. They also have a ton of other sponsors which will work wonders to prevent any one of them from holding too much sway, (or being too important to risk offending) as Google has over Mozilla.
Part of me wonders why Firefox didn’t try a similar approach. Perhaps 30 years of the same codebase, and a sense that the project will never pose a serious threat to the Chromium oligopoly, has just made everyone weary of the project. Or perhaps it’s because a lot of the sponsors for Ladybird have been compensated by extra effort put in to make their pages render correctly—I doubt Mozilla could shake down anyone with the equivalent. “Pay up or we’ll break your website (even more) for a stagnant 3% of the Internet, all of whom have adblock!”
I personally can’t wait for Ladybird to reach a stage of development that is good for everyday usage. When it’s out, I’ll be there, as quickly as I supported pre-Firefox releases of Firefox right from the start. It feels like the breath of fresh air we’ve needed for years, if not over a decade now, in the world of web browsers. It feels like everything about it has been carefully planned in such a way to swiftly avoid *all* of the problems that plague nearly every aspect of every single one of our current web browsers. Mozilla has lost their way probably about a decade ago at this point, and they only keep digging deeper. Ladybird can’t come soon enough–everything about this project just feels so exciting to me, in ways that Firefox hasn’t since the 2.x or 3.x days.
Sadly Thom will ignore everything Ladybird because of his personal politics.
this is the correct thing to do – andreas has an inexcusable stance of “no politics” which treats marginalised people existing as “political” and rejects any attempts at inclusion
any project with such a toxic worldview is complete garbage and should be ignored
I have to agree; saying “no politics” then explicitly banning marginalized people from contributing to the project is hypocritical and hateful, and not something I can get behind. I lost all interest in Ladybird and SerenityOS because of it, despite the work itself being nothing short of amazing.
We need to be careful in repeating false/incomplete narratives. The person was banned because of their aggressive behaviour towards active members of the team, Not because they were a marginalised people.
@Adurbe:
Denis was banned because he submitted a PR to change a gendered “he” referring to non-human code to either “they” or “it”, as would be appropriate for ungendered, non-human subject matter. He was told that the PR was political in nature and went against their “non-controversy” rule, and contributor gmta even said “the grammar fix is good” referring to the requested change from the “he” pronoun, but still banned him and closed the PR without changing it. Since then, any potential contributor who is openly LGBTQ+ has been banned from contributing to the project, and often their proposed PRs are marked as “spam” before being closed. Also of note is that the dude who submitted the PR isn’t publicly LGBTQ+, but is apparently an ally, and therefore a target of hatred and intolerance from the developers of the project.
I blame languages. Gendered pronouns don’t really belong in code or even on most websites, but here we are using them anyways. I really wish there were inoffensively neutral pronouns that refer to people generically without having to declare genders, haha. Even Ze/Xe don’t fit the bill since these are not the absence of a gender declaration. “It” is the closest word we have, it imparts no gender declaration at all, but the problem is that it refers to objects rather than people. I find it really unfortunate that English provides no one-size-fits all generic words since that would obviously be the solution.
As somebody that has used Firefox as my primary browser since the Phoenix / Firebird days, I have also been increasingly disappointed in Mozilla as a company over the past couple of years. I agree, it pretty much has to get worse. You can attribute this to corporate greed and not be wrong. Remember though that Firefox now has many employees. It has become dependent on a certain level of revenue to feed itself but that includes its many dependents. They will simply have to find new sources of revenue and it is hard to imagine them doing that without betraying the altruism central to their core mission.
Firefox is and continues to be Open Source. Even now, there is no reason to be beholden to Mozilla as there are many alternatives both based of Firefox code and not. Lately, I have been using Zen quite a lot: https://zen-browser.app/.
Would Zen or Floorp or one of the others step up to do more of the core development if something happened to Firefox? I am not sure. I would hope so. If not though, there are other WebKit, Chromium, and non-Chromium Blink options. It seems unlikely that Linux would be left without a modern browser if Mozilla the Open Source company disappeared.
For me, the issue is relying on for profit companies to build our web browsers. I very much hope that we get a non-corporate alternative. In my view, Thom is simply pointing out here is that Mozilla may turn out to be no better than Google in the end. So, there is nothing to predict and be right about. Mozilla operates as a corporation. The worst has already happened.
I am very much hoping that Ladybird will be a truly independent browser. We will see. Regardless of the project structure, once you have people depending on payroll, independence gets a lot harder.
https://ladybird.org/
Maybe it will be somebody else. Servo is alive again and coming along.
What I do not understand at all though is why Thom always presents this as a “Linux” issue.
The problem with Mozilla becoming a poor steward of Firefox is a threat to the Open Web. That is a huge deal for everyone. How does it matter what operating system I am using? I use both Windows and macOS sometimes. The web is not less important to me when I do. Or are we trying to say that Firefox is the only option for Linux users? Because that is not true either.
My Linux machines are work machines too and I am not always a free software purist while I work. I use Microsoft Edge on Linux quite a lot ( Teams, Outlook, Zoom, and a few other apps mostly ). I could use Chrome. Instead of Zen, I could use Brave, Vivaldi, Thorium, Floorp, Falkon, GNOME Web, or many others. My browser options on Linux seem very similar to on Windows.
The problem is that we allowed all our browser engines to become financially dependent on Google. Let’s not do that again.
>”In the meantime, the operating system most reliant on Firefox existing as a privacy-respecting browser, desktop Linux, still seems to be taking no serious steps to prepare for this seeming inevitability. There’s no proper Firefox fork, there’s no Chromium variant with the kind of features desktop users expect (tab sharing, accounts, etc., which are not part of Chromium), nothing.”
Yes, Thom, because no browser besides Firefox could possibly work on a desktop distro.
Oh wait no – they all work just fine and there’s an overwhelming amount of choice, too much really. Imagine that. Everyone wants to get their product into the hands of the desktop GNU/Linux users for some strange reason. Call me crazy, but maybe that’s because in some large markets like India, desktop distro usage is trending above 10% market share and software makers can no longer ignore it like they did in the late noughties and in the early aughts.
The problem is, that for the vast majority of those alternatives the design decisions for underlying browser engine are going to be made either at mozilla or over at google. Both primarily ad companies, so there’s “conflict of interest” in big cow sized letters written all over it.
However, this is not a threat exclusive to linux, but to the entire internet ecosystem. Personally, I am actually least worried about the consequences for linux – when things get too bad, a proper firefox fork *will* rise to the challenge and distro’s *will* move en masse, as they amply demonstrated back when openoffice ceased to be relevant.
Mote,
I agree, many of the alternatives don’t have significant resources and will be bound by the project they forked. The big question is how far will mozilla’s ad business model go in terms of impacting browser capabilities. NaGERST mentioned manifest v3, designed to curtail independent adblocking engines. Google are pursuing this so forcefully due to their conflict of interest; users interests are incompatible with their business goals. Mozilla’s ad business may ultimately lead to the same conflicts for firefox.
Furthermore, it’s not necessarily enough for alternative browsers to exist if they aren’t well supported by websites. Some websites already don’t work with FF. I don’t blame mozilla for these incompatibilities, but regardless compatibility becomes a major stumbling block for alternatives when publishers only support the dominant browser(s). It’s like we didn’t learn the lesson from IE, or maybe some of us did but collectively we are failing to prevent it from happening again.
I feel that the article is missing a few points here. Mozilla was always deeply connected with “digital advertising”, that is on where the majority of the revenue comes from, always had. One could hence argue Mozilla wants to become more active in this role, compared to historically being rather passive by simply proxying the “digital advertising” part to Google. The same is true for Chrome, very active when it comes to “digital advertising”. So this alone can’t be the reason for predicting a downfall of a web browser and claiming you got it right. As this is how it already is or has been from the beginning. The real reason of the downfall for Mozilla is people just didn’t care, they chose Chrome instead. A web browser that always was the most active, not to say exclusive, on when it comes to “digital advertising”.
“more active in digital advertising” yeah they are going to accept manifest v3. The death of mozilla is imminent and it hurts for me.
If that would be true then Chrome would already die, due to supporting Manifest V3. In reality nothing happened, Chrome didn’t lose a single user over supporting it. So all in all accepting or not accepting Manifest V3 doesn’t play a role in Mozilla demise.
Geck,
I don’t think NaGERST’s point was that manifest v3 would kill Mozilla, but rather that the decline of Mozilla pushes us in that direction.
In some ways google’s takeover of adblocking via manifest v3 parallels microsoft’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” maneuver. Their adblocking engine, although much worse for users, stands to become the standard as competitors become irrelevant.
So why aren’t we criticizing Chrome and Google over it then and what good would it do if we would? And why would Mozilla demise due to supporting Manifest V3 and/or starting to be more (pro) active in regards to “digital advertising”? Is “digital advertising” going anywhere anytime soon, does Google really do the best job at it? Did even us, the ones with some sort of opinion, became stupid ignorant fools? Or what?
Geck,
Some of us do criticize the chrome monopoly all the time, just as we criticized the IE monopoly. But it doesn’t mean that people listen or change. It sucks, but things may have to get worse before they get better. 🙁
I think you have it backwards. Should mozilla end up enforcing Manifest v3 limitations like google does, it will not be the cause of their decline. Rather it’s their decline against the market share of bigger tech giants that has mozilla scrambling for a sustainable business model.
Who said digital advertising is going anywhere? While it’s crystal clear that users hate ads, especially as they’ve become increasingly interruptive, they are one of the few long term proven sources of revenue. Mozilla know ads are disliked, but it could be a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them”.
Many users will see this as a betrayal of user interests and boycott Mozilla over it. Yet in doing this, these same users may end up helping google even if they didn’t intend to. And google have promoted advertising far more than mozilla have.
Not for being a monopoly, for introducing Manifest V3 and being all about “digital advertising”. How on earth we came from Google introducing that as a new reality to criticize Firefox and similar browsers for being into “digital advertising”. It’s just mind blowing. And why would many users see it as a betrayal if it has been like that from the start. Is the problem here that some people are too young to even know on how Mozilla and Google are making money? And in the end why would one assume that Mozilla in more active role would be a worse thing then Mozilla in passive role, on where they are just a proxy for Google. In regards to being a “digital advertiser”. I mean nobody will pay for a browser with their own money, company hence needs to raise a couple of tens of millions annually. Why is it a good thing only when such “digital advertising” business goes through Google? Is this some sort of Stockholm syndrome at play here? And how on earth would you create and maintain a new web browser without paying tens of developers for developing and maintaining it. Millions have to come from somewhere or just forget it.
Geck,
It makes sense that people who are against this stuff are upset at mozilla. But the trouble with holding mozilla accountable for it is that it may kill mozilla and further empower the google monopoly, which is kind of unproductive.
I highly dislike the thought of browser developers being in bed with advertisers, but I do understand how economic realities lead to this outcome. Everyone wants to put food on the table. Mozilla should have been more efficient with their money and part of the fault lies there, but even so money often causes these conflicts of interest. We have to recognize that projects need to make money to survive, I don’t have a better solution. 🙁
No, Mozilla really shouldn’t take the blame here, the blame is on Google and Chrome. Internet in this day and age is whatever they make it to be. The rest don’t have any meaningful influence over it. On top of that the blame is on regular folk, there was no notable reason to ditch Firefox for Chrome in the first place, still isn’t, yet majority has done it in a blink of an eye. Disgusting behaviour if you ask me but what gives. And now Mozilla should take the heat for that too? As for the money debate, this one is rather funny too. If i remember correctly there was a project announced, that got some sparse money support, like that is ever going to be enough to develop and maintain a modern web browser, on where competition spends tens if not hundreds of millions on it annually and provides is for free as in beer. It was dismissed due to main developer political views and for being strongly opinionated. Google and Chrome again not taking any heat like that, due to Google occasionally releasing a PR campaign, we are not bigots, believe us. All in all give me a break, demanding some new web browser for free, demanding political correctness only on one side of the spectre, cancelling people that historically made progress. Most of them are indeed as some would perceive them as bigots, as normies in the end don’t even care. So first thing to do is to bring some political incorrectness back to Mozilla, until then forget it. They still have the money so that shouldn’t be a problem, they should be more active at it, though.
Geck,
Of course you’re going to say that, but for better or worse your views aren’t representative. Don’t take this personally, our views and choices are marginal and don’t have a big impact.
I do sympathize with the difficulty of generating independent revenue without advertising, but I would not go as far as to say mozilla hold no responsibility for driving users away in different ways. To me FF is the least bad option to protect us from browser monoculture, but to be honest I do wish mozilla would do better by power users. We are the ones who traditionally showed the most interest in FF. I don’t like when they override my settings. I find their extension walled garden to be offensive to FOSS. Of all browser companies, they should be the ones promoting freedoms and advanced use cases, yet they’re locking users down like apple and treating us like basic users. It is what it is.
Manifest V3 and “digital advertising” are the doings of Google and Chrome. Mozilla is irrelevant here and pinning it to them is ignorant, shows lack of any sense of awareness or understanding. On top of that people now act on how Mozilla should not engage in “digital advertising” more pro actively. Like Google are some sort of saints and nobody can do it better in term of ethics and such. They are entitled and not blamed for it the rest are under constant scrutiny and advised against it. As for views and choices, of individuals, not having a big impact. For sure they do, individuals chose Chrome and ditched Firefox. The impact and consequences of that are in my opinion rather huge.
Geck,
There’s no telling what a desperate mozilla will or won’t do. And no, it’s not ignorant to consider how their motives may change going forward since they’ve decided to get into the advertising business themselves. You may still promote mozilla & firefox, which is fine, but you are not justified in calling people’s concerns about it ignorant.
That depends on if we represent a significant market share, For better or worse, firefox users are largely ignorable. I say this as a FF user myself, the majority of website owners don’t care about us and they can afford not to, unfortunately. 🙁
OK, so we agree people are mostly ignorant, when it comes to web browser choice, it’s just when it comes to Mozilla, here we are having an informed discussion, especially when blaming Mozilla for manifest V3 and “digital advertising” and i guess for people choices ditching Firefox for no apparent reason. Should we add world peace too? Anyway, go for it Mozilla, ditch this ignorant fools, they are not helping in any meaningful way. Start to earn your own money and put more politically incorrect people at the top. People that are after bigger market share and not some agenda driven folk, agendas that have nothing to do with web browsers and that are fine with ignorance and Firefox having 1% market share. Even GNU/Linux on desktop can beat that. Jeez.
Geck,
“Ignorant” is your word. I would use apathetic or indifferent.
No, I haven’t blamed Mozilla for manifest v3, that’s on google, The downfall of FF marketshare makes mozilla’s position less relevant every year, so suggesting that mozilla are to blame for manifest v3 or digital advertising is ridiculous. It is not ignorant to consider that mozilla, who are openly getting into advertising, might succumb to pressure to promote ads and defeat adblocking. You are free to believe mozilla won’t succumb to this, but it’s not ignorant or irrational to point out the possibility.
People still have to make a choice, on lets say Windows, so i don’t buy the indifferent part. In the end it’s a deliberate choice that requires some effort, like downloading and installing a web browser. On top of that everybody knows Google is all about “digital advertising”.
Geck,
I don’t agree. Average people genuinely don’t care about browsers or monopolies. If they did care the world would be quite a different place.
Well, it’s not that the “effort” is difficult so much as they can’t be bothered because they don’t care. Just so we’re clear, it’s not that I don’t care, but it goes back to the point that you and I aren’t representative. Those of us who do care will have already made the switch. Collectively we just don’t have much influence on broader trends.
If average person wouldn’t care and their choices wouldn’t be all that important then Firefox would never have been a thing in terms of high market share in the past and Chrome would never have monopolize the web browser space. We would instead still be using something like IE 6. And on top of that it’s safe to assume most if not all of this same people know perfectly well Google is all about “digital advertising” and Chrome being an important tool for that.
Geck,
In the past IE lagged on innovation and moreover microsoft lost antitrust cases, which opened up the market. For better or worse google chrome is actually a decent browser for most. And it remains to be seen if any antitrust cases will help mozilla today such as the browser selection screen that had been mandated by europe for windows.
People don’t react as much when changes are slow & incremental. I honestly think things have to get worse before mainstream users will reject the browser monoculture. Google are able to crank up the ads, but they’re smart enough to know that they can’t allow firefox users to have a better experience, which is why we’ve been seeing them testing more effective adblock-blockers this past year or so. This is a sign of more things to come. Once they have things tuned as they want, the firefox adblock blockers may be left on permanently, then the firefox adblocking advantage over chrome will be nullified. Unless regulators get involved, there’s not much mozilla or users can do about this.
You are missing the point entirely. That is most people made an informed decision that took effort and chose Chrome, a lot of them by ditching Firefox, regardless of Chrome enforcing manifest V3, V4 or whatever and being all about “digital advertising”. So nobody will move to Firefox if Mozilla will be against manifest V3 and would become against “digital advertising”. It’s ignorant if you believe that, for people to ditch Chrome over Firefox because of that.
What Mozilla can do is to file a lawsuit, demanding Google to separate Chrome in a separate company and for Google to provide access to their advertising API for Chrome and competition to compete on equal terms, that is monetizing their user privacy on equal terms. On top of that Windows, iOS and Android should have a browser selection screen. But i know, why? Why would you do that if you already are on Google pay list and your salary is not all that bad. Who cares if your product died, in terms of market share. So maybe some other party will need to do that instead.
Geck,
Relatively few people actually do that though. Most users are on mobile and keep using the default bundled browser.. On windows google paid OEMS to pre-install chrome and software developers to install chrome. Most average users don’t go changing their browser on purpose. Even microsoft, now that the terms of their antitrust lawsuit expired, have been using control over the OS to overwrite user preferences – again users may be switched without having made the choice. This happened to me once or twice on my work laptop – my firefox preferences got replaced.
I know it sucks for mozilla, but bundling has always been one of the most successful marketshare strategies and that’s the way it is.
Sounds like you misspoke here? Trends don’t look good for mozilla, but even if there are more people who would switch because of ads, we can’t ignore the impacts google’s anti-adblocking enforcement could have if made permanent. In an environment where adblockers are actively being denied access, that has the effect of nullifying any potential adblocking advantage FF would have. Many of us have been witnessing these experiments in the past year, where firefox users specifically were disabled/interrupted. This is not hypothetical, it could reshape adblocking forever.
Maybe they should, although it could drag out for several years. We might see a repeat of netscape 🙁
Also, the judge in the google search antitrust lawsuit may have just put an end to mozilla’s primary source of revenue.
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/09/nx-s1-5146006/justice-department-sanctions-google-search-engine-lawsuit
I guess if you weren’t aware of this you may not have understood my points about mozilla becoming far more dependent on it’s ad business. But understanding that the google money is about to stop changes everything for mozilla.
A few hundred million people are in my opinion not a few people. And your theory can be easily dismissed, just look at Firefox market share at its peak. That doesn’t back your claim at all, on how people are not really important here and their decisions aren’t really decisions. As for Google achieving what you hope they won’t achieve, it doesn’t change much, people in general won’t switch to Firefox because of that. Lets not forget majority of people was perfectly OK by giving away one of their basic human rights, privacy. No way would hence majority of people do much if Google takes ad blockers away. As for the ruling and in my opinion Google will always have to pay Mozilla money, unless Mozilla decides otherwise. There is no way Google can stop that, rest assured, and no judge will change that. Now, at some point Mozilla will have to decide otherwise, mostly due to pressure, such as for example now people blaming Mozilla for Manifest V3 and “digital advertising”. Now this generation can be rather stupid in such regards, that is i can see Mozilla getting targeted by woke movement and getting cancelled. Due to stuff like manifest V3 and “digital advertising”. Anyway, it’s becoming rather clear that nobody is really happy with Mozilla and the role they are playing any more. And this will only get worse if they wont change their ways.
My reply is waiting to be moderated, don’t know why and if it will not go through a short reply for now and lets leave it at that. No, both of your claims are wrong. First of all people will never switch back to Firefox, due to manifest V3 and “digital advertising”. So Google can kill ad blockers and that won’t change much. Lets not forget people are OK with giving they privacy away, their basic human right, so more ads won’t in any way force them to reconsider their decision to use Chrome. And secondly a few hundred million people making such decision by themself, that is not a few people. Google didn’t make that decision for them, as you seem to claim. Just look at Firefox at its peak, Mozilla didn’t make that decision, people did. Mozilla now getting cancelled, due to manifest V3 and “digital advertising”, that is just so something that current ignorant generation would do. And it’s not like Mozilla isn’t helping them, they for example couldn’t care less about market share. No product on today’s market can afford such strategy, so lets hope some sane people take over there soon and get that house in order. As for some judge killing Mozilla, rest assure that will never happen.
Geck,
It’s not the barrier you think it is as a huge majority will stick with chrome despite manifest v3. Some of us have been crying wolf over it, but normal people are going to do what they always do regardless of what you have to say about it. You may find this upsetting, but it still won’t change the reality on the ground.
Go right ahead and draw your line in the sand at Manifest v3, I understand how you feel and don’t have a problem with it, but you have a tendency of overvaluing your own opinion when discussing others. As I’ve been pointing out you aren’t very representative. And I know that I’m not either.
Times have changed. Mozilla benefited from Microsoft’s notoriously mismanaged IE and antitrust judgements before chrome even existed. Today the landscape is very different for mozilla. Desktop users in 2000s were more tech savvy than the mobile users who significantly outnumber them and are also less savvy.. Chrome is far better managed than IE was. And we still don’t know what support, if any, mozilla will get from antitrust courts. I personally don’t know how FF can get an edge and I haven’t seen anyone else offer a foolproof plan either. We know they need money though, and mozilla’s shift to the ad business, while understandably unpopular, reflects this reality.
You can always refute my claims if you believe they are not accurate and are only my opinions and not facts. Claim one people will not shift to Firefox if Chrome kills ad blockers and it’s not due to people being inherently different in 2024. It’s simply their choice to use Chrome and majority would rather watch ads then to switch to Firefox. Claim two Mozilla revenue was tied to “digital advertising” from the get go. Claim 3 Mozilla can always go to courts, claim Chrome is competing on unequal terms, demanding to be separated in its own company and to compete with other web browser for their share of ad business money. Please start with your reply in terms of i agree or disagree with this claim and then state your reasons for it. As sometimes you write a wall of text and in it nothing indicates what you are doing. Are you refuting, agreeing or what.
Geck,
You continue to ignore the counter-points though. Many decades ago users had to install browsers like anything else, but these days the vast majority of users don’t replace the provided browser., instead they just take it for granted that one comes with their device. Also, we mustn’t ignore where technology is headed. It’s not even secret that google successfully managed to block adblocking FF users in their experiments over the past year, They’re also experimenting with other approaches of defeating adblockers by interlacing ads inside of content.
https://thrivesearch.com/youtube-embeds-ads-directly-into-videos-bypassing-ad-blockers/
When they do decide to start seriously crunching down on adblocking, you have to be naive to think FF users will get away unscathed.
Getting their money from google to pay for search defaults is very different from running their own ad company. The later puts adblockering in direct conflict with the business side of their operations.
I’ve already agreed twice that the courts could intervene, but it’s not a sure thing and mozilla might have trouble outlasting a prolonged court battle that goes on for multiple appeals. It’s a gamble.
Not for nothing Geck but I’ve been doing that all along. Bah, you just keep ignoring the counterpoints.
Probably because there is no noticeable difference in adblocking using uBlock Lite, Adguard etc. for Chrome.
uBlock Lite is not sufficient to effectively block YouTube ads.
niebuszewo,
Obviously sophisticated rules cannot effectively be implemented with manifest v3. Boxing in their enemy (adblockers), gives them the technological edge in defeating them. Google can and will take advantage of manifest v3 weakness. It’s all by design.
That is not correct, I have been using it for months, it blocks YT ads, I have no other blocker or DNS blocking. Did you try it using Chrome? maybe it’s less effective in Firefox
gunfleet,
For what it’s worth, I have noticed that google’s anti-adblocking is being deployed regionally and not across the board. I don’t think we can rely on this long term though.
I still hope that the investigations into Googles monopoly will stick a healing foot up Mozillas ass.
They will be forced to develope a user-oriented browser once a judge rules, that Google can’t buy its way into Firefox.
smashIt,
Ironically the antitrust judgement against google’s search monopoly probably ended up hurting mozilla significantly more than google. Consider that google was paying to set the defaults for a relatively small market niche. But on the other side it made up the vast majority of mozilla’s revenue.
“Consider that google was paying to set the defaults for a relatively small market niche. But on the other side it made up the vast majority of mozilla’s revenue.”
That’s why I believe it will force Mozillas hand.
They cannot continue to piss away money for their non tech related activism when their revenue drops buy 95% from one day to the next.
In all this, did you forget about the TOR Project, and the torbrowser that is derived from Firefox [ESR edition?]?
The reality is that firefox has been slowly dying since, well the introduction of Safari as modification of an open source code base, that was not firefox. They looked at using firefox/mozilla as a base, but went against it as the code wasn’t as easy to work with as khtml. That kind of indicated a high barrier of entry for less dedicated contributions from outside of core mozilla. From there you have the introduction of chrome from google its previous and still largest contributor.
I wish this was hyperbole, but it’s the complete honest truth. Unless Servo picks up pace rapidly, there might not be any option for a fully working, private web browser on desktop FOSS Linux distributions (and *BSD) any more and this is a very bad thing for everyone, irrespective of which operating system, computer or browser they currently use.
The only reasonable alternative to Firefox (on desktop Linux) Chromium has unnecessary limitations imposed upon it which don’t apply to Chrome OS, including deliberately broken VAAPI support for WebRTC (unnecessarily laggy video calls) as well as broken VAAPI for Widevine-protected content (unnecessarily laggy commercial video playback) and unresolved frame drop issues with Wayland compositors where multiple monitors of different refresh rates are involved. Last I checked, Chrome OS (like macOS) will only render a given tab/window on one screen at a time anyway, so there’s zero monetary incentive for anybody to ever fix this. Heck, until Chrome 130 releases, VAAPI for general playback scenarios won’t work with AMD graphics properly on Wayland, with NVIDIA having no support at all, leaving Intel iGPUs as the only viable option (but not the newest laptop ones if you want a working integrated webcam!)
For those saying “why not just keep using Firefox anyway?” all of the above is already worse for Firefox on Linux. Sure, VAAPI with AMD kinda works at the moment, except that it drops frames irrespective of monitor topology on anything 4K@60 or above on YouTube, as well as dropping plenty of frames on 1080p on live streaming sites like Twitch. There’s also no hardware accelerated encoding support and no hardware accelerated WebRTC support to speak of at all!
This could not have come at a worse time. The EU is constantly re-tabling the proposals for directives to require technology companies to implement client-side spyware (“Chat Control”) which would kill interpersonal privacy dead if these proposals ever succeeded. As said scanning relies upon proprietary software using irreversible hashes of fragments of “illicit materials” while being a mandatory feature (all for legal reasons) it could only ever be safely provided as an operating system service. The common enough use of FOSS Linux distributions guarantees that users have ways to provably avoid said spyware being installed on their computers in the first place, while also serving as the perfect argument for why such directives would not help the police catch criminals.
Also, even if you trust your government and the EU completely, without FOSS Linux distributions, you only have Google, Apple or Microsoft as options. With Google, almost everything is web based and server-side scanned, Apple is slowly but surely entering the advertising market by stealth and Microsoft… well… they steal passwords without explicitly telling you (New Outlook) decrypt any data they take from you without explicit consent (by brute force if they have to) and blur the boundary between what is processed on your computer and what is sent to their servers.
Very very bad indeed.
@artificialhumanrelations: I share many of your fears for the future of independent web browsers, and the free web generally.
Browsers and/or web engines on the horizon are Ladybird and Servo. Ladybird is still pre-alpha, and I have not been able to test how far it has come. Servo is still a simple demonstator: I tried it on the bbc.com site, and sometimes it displayed it, other times not. It also didn’t select new content when clicking with mouse pointer. Sometimes it froze and became “unresponsive”. Not functional.
So we are stuck with Firefox and its spin-offs: Librewolf, Mullvad and Zen being a few of the “privacy respecting” examples. If Firefox becomes the pawn in political games, and the spin-offs can’t be maintained as the Web “evolves”, an uncertain future will follow.
I’m a bit disapointed with Mozilla, but to survive as an organization they do need money.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind paying a subscription for Firefox, 20 to 30€/year. I think it’s well worth it if they will keep the fight against Big Tech dominance on the web standards and specially against tracking/privacy invasion.
But I think they should reduce the products they have and get back to basics, Firefox, Thunderbird and not much more.
Edit: just tried the Donation link in mozilla.org, gives Server Error (500)… cute.
Please be aware that your donation to Mozilla will *not* be used to directly support Firefox developers.
Quote from the FAQ on Mozilla’s website: “How will my donation be used? (…) The Mozilla Foundation programs are supported by grassroots donations and grants. Our grassroots donations, from supporters like you, are our most flexible source of funding. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns.”
In short – you will be funding their political agenda.
They need a revenue model. It sucks, but there it is.
Anyway, check out my Firefox theme! It makes Firefox feel modern, and not like it’s from 2005.
https://github.com/CaptainN/FireBend