The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were.
For me, it started back when "sponsored tiles" were first announced in 2014. On the surface it was obviously advertisements, but many defenders tried to argue that it was a "good thing"
Then there was the proprietary Pocket extension baked into the browser with no easy removal. Again, many defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
Then the "studies" channel was used to push a Mr Robot ad. It's unclear how it was aligned with the values, but defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing".
They partnered with Cliqz to collect data and make recommendations. Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
They partnered with Booking.com to push advertisements, going so far as to argue that they didn't receive any monetary compensation and that it was just a "social experiment". Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
This is just a sampling of the events in the last 8 years (sponsored tiles was 2014). Every single time, they may have received some sort of benefit, but a number of users who bought into firefox for the security and privacy aspects ... felt betrayed and left. Because if it isn't about the privacy, what is the USP of firefox? "Not google" is only a small part of the user base.
> The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were.
I expect it's downvoted because it's laughable. 99% of browser users don't give a shit about those things. If a poll were to be taken of the HN users who switched to Chrome, I doubt even a quarter would cite that as the reason.
It was indeed a death by a thousand cuts, but the thousand cuts were
* popup advertisements for Chrome on the frontpage of the most visited website on the planet
* Google paying off Adobe, AVG, Avast and others to make their installers include Chrome using disgusting dark patterns
* Android, the collapse of desktop browsing in comparsion to mobile browsing, and people that will just default to using the same browser on their laptop/desktop as on their phone
* Netflix DRM that didn't work on Firefox for a few months
* Youtube, Google Meet and Google Docs refusing to work properly on Firefox
* The word "Google" becoming as synonymous with simply using the internet as the internet explorer icon was in the 2000s
* Chrome was and to some extent still is legitimately snappier than Firefox
Agreed, these are the macro-level events that really drove user adoption. The narrative (especially the Mr. Robot thing!) are totally out of proportion to their actual impact on user adoption and aren't the all-or-nothing tests of credibility or integrity that people are suggesting they are.
— but they are symptomatic. The Mozilla of 2004 wouldn't even think of doing user-hostile stuff like that, because they were trying to make a useful tool rather than a lifestyle brand.
Those things will have disillusioned people who used Firefox because their goals were aligned. I agree that Google being Google will have lost people who used Firefox simply because it was a good tool.
I use Google Meet with Firefox on my M1 Mac every day. The only thing that doesn't work for me is camera backgrounds. Would be nice to be able to share audio when presenting, but I almost never present.
99% of browser users is not relevant, the question is how big a percentage of FireFox' users (the ones that remain, that is). Because if you lose those that is a much harder thing to recover from than to not win back the other 99% that you don't have anyway. And I suspect that the FF users of old care very much, though, of course I'm only speaking for myself here.
>And I suspect that the FF users of old care very much
But do they? Firefox's rise was largely due to IE6 being pure trash, and the average user of a web browser in 2008 being a lot more knowledgeable than the average user today.
Marketshare, by definition, is the share of the market. The market has expanded dramatically, but desktop browsing itself has plummeted, and a lot of users are just going to default to whatever they're using on their primary device (their phone), which is Google. "Google" is synonomous with using the internet in the same way that the internet explorer logo used to be in the mid 2000s.
Even if it is one percent (which I highly doubt) and that one percent is committed enough then that's enough of a core to guarantee the success of the project. It doesn't need a team of 1000 to build a browser, much less to keep an existing one patched and rolling along.
Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns.
A non-Chromium browser needs to maintain a critical mass of users to be sufficiently large to ensure that the world wants to stay compatible with it, and having 1% of marketshare is not sufficient for that, no matter how committed these users are - if firefox drops to 1%, then it becomes irrelevant and the project has failed at its goals as the "web standards" become equivalent to whatever chromium does.
Browsers get influence to keep the web as we want it to be mostly based on the quantity of browser users which websites want to attract and keep; without that all the best code in the world is useless and doesn't even give you a seat at the table, much less a strong say for how the de-facto standard web practices will change.
> Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns.
As a browser maker your "concerns" should really be web/internet standards. If websites and webapp builders aren't complying with standards and are building their stuff to only work in non-standard compliant browsers that's a separate problem that no web browser can solve.
Perhaps that's not how they ought to work, but that's definitely how they work - web standards are effectively determined (e.g. in WHATWG) by a consensus (or in some cases unilateral action) of makers of browsers with nontrivial market share; and that's how this has been happening for quite some time now. If you've got 20% market share, then your opinion (and your implementation choices) matters much more than that of the multiple <1% browsers.
I fully agree. If the consistent messaging is meant to be "use this browser, it's private and respects you", but it's then compromised by advertising and data abuse, it seems hypocritical and damages adoption of the browser.
I don't recall very many people defending Mozilla on the Mr Robot or the Booking.com missteps. Even current and ex-Mozillans lambasted them for those.
I recall a few people defending the sponsored titles (or half-hearted defenses about how it's bad but not that bad since you can turn them off) but those defenses seemed to be largely drowned out by the overwhelmingly negative response.
The only of those that I recall having anything close to "many defenders" was the Pocket integration.
For me, it started back when "sponsored tiles" were first announced in 2014. On the surface it was obviously advertisements, but many defenders tried to argue that it was a "good thing"
Then there was the proprietary Pocket extension baked into the browser with no easy removal. Again, many defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
Then the "studies" channel was used to push a Mr Robot ad. It's unclear how it was aligned with the values, but defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing".
They partnered with Cliqz to collect data and make recommendations. Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
They partnered with Booking.com to push advertisements, going so far as to argue that they didn't receive any monetary compensation and that it was just a "social experiment". Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"
This is just a sampling of the events in the last 8 years (sponsored tiles was 2014). Every single time, they may have received some sort of benefit, but a number of users who bought into firefox for the security and privacy aspects ... felt betrayed and left. Because if it isn't about the privacy, what is the USP of firefox? "Not google" is only a small part of the user base.