Firefox is on the verge of extinction. What can they do about it?

The web without Firefox is a web not worth having.

Metrics:

Chromium vulnerability:

Wired interview w/ Mozilla VP:

Support the Show
* BTC: 1DckZocn7pA7MDzKSu98UbS4TjocfK633x
* ETH: 0x1C0FDD6d450679359876a077A15DFd0537E8C2D8

You can find me on these socials:
* I am an Odysee partner

# Comment Section Rules

1. Be kind to each other.
2. Don't swear, don't use racial slurs (you will be automodded)
3. I reserve the right to permanently ban habitually abusive commenters and I don't apologize. Banned users /won't/ be notified.

If you can't *cope* with having rules, you're welcome to *not* leave a comment.

You can email me at gardiner-at-heavyelement-dot-io

# What are your machines specs?
Office Rig:
* AMD Ryzen 7 1800x
* MSI Pro Series X370 SLI PLUS
* AMD RX VEGA 64
* GSkill Ripjaw V DDR4 8GB x4 (32 GB)
* Fractal Design Define R9 Case
* Manjaro GNOME

Living Room Gaming Rig:
* ASUS X99-E-10G WS
* Intel Core i7-6900K @ 3.2GHz
* NVidia Titan X (Pascal)
* DDR4 Corsair Vengeance RGB 8GB x8 (64GB)

Backup Rig
* System76 Thelio Minor
* AMD Ryzen 5 3400G
* DDR4 16GB RAM
* Zotac Nvidia GTX 970 4GB

Home Server:
* ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3
* AMD FX 6300 at 3.5 GHz
* Nvidia GTX 750 1GB
* DDR3 20 GB RAM

#Firefox #Mozilla #Monopoly

[thighdude]

The idea of Mozilla, disentangling themselves from Google, and being a serious competitor for both Google and Patreon / Jack Conte makes me smile.

[MasterPJ]

I'm using only on desktop and android. I feel it smoother and friendlier than chrome, and I support its philosophy. I think the world NEEDS Firefox to exist and doing good, I hope more people will realize it before it's too late.

[webxorcist]

I only use Firefox, and I am amazed by these low numbers. I can honestly say that most people in my private and work environments all use Firefox and are pretty idealistic about it. These people include technical people.

[gerowen]

I use Firefox for a couple of reasons:

1) They're more friendly toward open standards and are one of the only meaningful browsers left still building their own rendering engine.
2) I can click the "lock" icon in the address bar and get a much more user friendly summary about the type of encryption being used on any specific webpage, such as what size AES keys are being used, what version of TLS is being used, etc.
3) The built-in screenshot tool is super handy for capturing receipts and such in a better way than just printing to PDF and without having to trust a third party addon to "view all content on all webpages".

There are more reasons, but these are some of the biggest ones for me.

[victor]

Mozilla has been riddled with terrible management for many years, and that's the one and only root cause for all of these issues. making stupid changes and not giving a damn about the community feedback puts you right into their current place

[seancondon]

As an avid user of Firefox, I seriously wish it got more attention. The idea of Chromium being the only browser backend honestly scares me. It's not merely a monoculture issue, though. Chromium is the very definition of an antitrust violation.

[EvanOfTheDarkness]

While Firefox is the only large browser that is *not* a Chrome reskin, it is the one that most feels like one. To answer the question in the title, stopping to copying chrome, and adding features instead of removing them would be a good start.

[TravisNewton]

What can Mozilla do? The lead devs can get their heads out of the sand and LISTEN to what the users they are alienating are saying. Nobody asked for the redesign where you can't tell if it's a tab or a button. All the devs do is throw up their hands, grumble something about legacy code, and move on. Nobody asked for the address bar to "grow" and "pop out". Again, all the devs did was throw their hands up, grumble about legacy code, and move on. Before anyone says "BuT yOu CaN cHaNgE tHe CsS!", look, that's fine for an advanced user. Grandma isn't doing that. She just wants her browser to look and function like it always has. When you start putting friction between people, they start going towards the path of least resistance - and that's Google. Chrome's address bar doesn't grow and pop out at you, the tabs are still tabs, the interface is kept clean and intuitive. And that's honestly one of Mozilla's problems. They have MANY other problems.

I still use Firefox. I've been using it religiously since 2004.

[HoobalugalarX]

I used to use Firefox almost exclusively and even advocated it to everyone I knew with a PC, especially when IE was the dominant space in the market. After flash video took over the web however (catch up TV and the like as well), chrome came valiantly into the picture with an in-build solution, even on linux (tbh especially on linux)... no longer a need to explain to grannies and aunties how to install and update flash player every 5 seconds, as it was in-built into chrome, I myself even eventually caved… but no longer, I will be switching back to Firefox from this day forth, thanks Gardiner for helping me rediscover the true path.

[sharkinahat]

I use FF both on desktop and mobile. I'm annoyed that backdrop-filter is still not implemented and that on Android FF has wonky scrolling and no dev tools - but at least it blocks adds in YT videos.

[ingframin]

Mozilla foundation is the main problem of Firefox

[CaptZenPetabyte]

I moved to Brave & it is much better than Firefox. I wont go back.

[fleurcode]

My one criticism of this vid is "Vivaldi is a boring reskin of Chrome" while Edge is even more of a reskin, i'm sorry but you haven't spent a single minute in Vivaldi for that statement, it is so much more complete than Chrome.

[yuryzhuravlev]

Mozilla should start doing products for people not for some strange managers. I believe crowdfunding + public voting for features should improve the situation. They spend so much time and money on not really needed features.

[callme_Sweetpea]

Wow! I had no idea Firefox had it this bad. I have used it for the last... 15 years? Maybe even more. Both on PC and Android. I can't see myself using any other. Dammit :(

[TagetesAlkesta]

1:57 Incorrect. Brave is free and open source and uses the MPL 2.0 license — the same license as Firefox. Of course that doesn’t excuse its Chromium core and crypto-bro garbage, but I feel like you’re being unfair.

[BriefNerdOriginal]

I'm using Firefox on all my devices and am very happy with it. I never feel like I'm missing something. On the opposite, with a couple of add-ons it's so efficient in eliminating ads, that I cannot believe other people still didn't switch to it.

[jan_harald]

mozilla has had great ideas, and WAS awesome
but especially as of late, there's been...quite backwards changes...
and yeah, google's monopoly on the web, is awful, and there's *NOTHING* other than firefox, that's even REMOTELY competing in the web browser market...
I guess technically there's also webkit, but that's not REALLY much of an alternative...

[purgatoriprytania]

Mozilla would need to drop the woke virtue signalling and focus on making a great browser. Baker needs to go.

[NicoCoetzee]

I started on Netscape Navigator way back when. So, for me, the transition to Firefox was natural and kind of a given. I always hated Internet Explorer, especially since it was the only browser that worked on some Enterprise internal Web App. Some enterprises are still stuck on this old legacy technology. I used chrome (and chromium) on and off, but Firefox was in my mind always better - and it could be because I just know it better. I have firefox installed everywhere: Linux, Windows, Android, OSX and iDevices... and yes, I know technically that on iDevices firefox use Safari in the back, but still... It is also set as my default browser everywhere.

Loosing firefox will be a really sad day for me. I love the mozilla technical documentation and I use it as a reference all the time. In terms of browser features, I make extensive use of many of the latest features and without competition I don't know if the likes of Chrome would keep the same high standards if they are an outright monopoly. We can even see right now how Google treats their customers. Even if 50 million users have a problem with some product, it's unlikely Google will pay much attention as that is a really low percentage of their user base. This is the problem when companies become too big.