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The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance (www.zdnet.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Article seems pretty flawed. Relevance is a vague metric, and the author relies pretty heavily on data related to government site visitation, which seems subject to bias toward certain types of users.

Market share is likely still incredibly low, but Firefox's relevance should be spiking right now due to Google's shenanigans with Chromium. The fact that like 90% of revenue for its for-profit wing is from Google is still troubling.

Any alternative views out there?

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[–] 61 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I mean, you can argue that Google actually has a monopoly on web browsers right now. iirc Firefox takes a ton of money from Google, so if the choices are “Google’s proprietary browser” or “a non-Chromium browser backed by Google” (EDIT: unless you’re on Apple hardware and use Safari), then Google comes out on top either way.

Wish we could get another good browser engine that isn’t Chromium, WebKit, or Quantum.

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  • [–] 67 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Ehh

    There's a clear difference between accepting money from an entity and letting it control things and make decisions. Pushing for a full and clear separation from any potential conflict of interest (while noble) is how projects die.

    I'd love for Firefox to be fully funded through small anonymous public donations in an ideal world. As it is, I don't see an issue from taking Google's money to do something that most users would want anyways.

    If the default search wasn't google, I'm certain even more users would bail on Firefox. Anyone who does want an alternative search engine is capable of clicking on it during installation.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Firefox might be able to survive on donations, if Mozilla’s CEO stopped giving herself raises

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago*

    They don't even want our money. They just let you donate to Mozilla foundation, which does other projects.

    Firefox is developed by Mozilla corporation which is funded by the google deal.

    I donate to several FOSS projects including monthly to KDE but I won't donate to Mozilla until I can actually make sure my money goes to firefox. And ideally not their overpaid CEO either, no.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    a full and clear separation from any potential conflict of interest (while noble) is how projects die.

    There are worse things than death, like being successful by screwing people over and/or making the biosphere unlivable.

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  • [+] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Apple and Google deserve about the same amount of trust. I don't know that Safari is any better than Chrome other than keeping a large portion of users in a secondary browser. I guess it all depends on whether uBlock Origin is able to be loaded on it along with other useful extensions. I'm a Firefox fan though.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    I wouldn’t nominate either one for sainthood, no argument there. I walked away from Google because they are an ad company that makes devices and software - that has become increasingly more apparent in the last several years, I’m sure it was always true but less obvious in the early days.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I'm still sad about the day the real Opera with the presto rendering engine died. And while Vivaldi is getting many of the features and functionality, it's still a chromium rebuild. I guess it just takes too much money to build your own rendering engine anymore.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I guess it just takes too much money to build your own rendering engine anymore.

    Even Microsoft couldn't do it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Heck even Google couldn't do it, they used Apple's WebKit. And even Apple couldn't do it, they used KDE's KHTML. Speaking of KHTML: Konqueror is still around, though they've already decided to get rid of KHTML completely and move to one of the forks, development pretty much stalled since 2016.

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