Firefox already does this and continues to be supported. Not sure what you’re talking about. I’m only pointing out there’s no way the company Mozilla can survive off just their browser, because no company currently has a monetized browser product. They immediately lose here. I’m happy with the privacy I get from Firefox and I wished more people enjoyed it, but I understand they’re up against anticompetitive companies on the regular, so I can’t expect them to keep acting as if Firefox is all Mozilla is hanging their hat on.
> Firefox already does this and continues to be supported. Not sure what you’re talking about.
And I enjoy it everyday. Happy to clarify. I am talking about your claims
> Frankly Mozilla already lost that and people demanding Mozilla stay firefox focused are telling the company to death spiral.
> Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share. And even if they did the company has no real way to monetize.
This is hyperbole. Firefox could push for the privacy angle, or the no-ads angle, or have the best developer tools, or a lot of other potential paths, and it could resonate with a lot of people, and win market share.
Firefox already has a way to monetize the default search engine, and they were doing fine with that before the started following all kinds of non-core initiatives and behaving like a big respected corporation.
If Mozilla focused on their core product this revenue could be enough to be profitable. This is not due to market share, or some defeatist prediction, but to mismanagement IMO as an outsider.
I think focus on the core product is exactly what they need. That is how they started.
P.S. Unrelated, but the whole topic reminds me of Unity $4.4B acquisition of ironSource (an Ad company), instead of focusing on providing a better Game engine (their core product).
Firefox started out in the position it is in today, back when Internet Explorer had Chrome's current market share. They carved out a market share because they sucked less than IE.
But now we're back to square one, with a big corporate entity running dominant browser, and a host of lazy developers that only develop for that one browser.
We really need Firefox to step up to the challenge again to keep chrome honest. Sadly Mozilla flounders at every step, and somehow manage to make their browser even more user-hostile than Chrome.
The situation differs. IE lost because it stagnated, as Microsoft didn't care about the Web.
Google cares about the Web, and they not only keep developing Chrome, they also keep developing Web standards, meaning that any competitor has a lot of keeping up to do just to stay in one place.
Not just that but Firefox has become stagnant when it comes to a lot of interesting Web standards. WebUSB, WebSerial etc... are the ones where people are really pushing the web and Mozilla refuses to implement them.
For some of them, they do.
But they could have implemented some of them behind a feature flag/cli flag or so? They did this for things that were bigger security headaches.
That way they'd collect all the real world issues and iterate on their solutions for their privacy concerns.
Right now, it is just one more reason why Chrome taking over their market share.
It is not like the use cases for connecting devices and use them via. the Web Platform will suddenly disappear if they don't support it.
Their reasons to push against WebUSB are, imo, valid. There are legitimate concerns and a high level of complexity to allow such low level USB access in the web browser.
Their reasons to push against WebSerial are not as valid and that would still cover most use cases without the downsides and complexity of the full WebUSB.
Another difference. Because Google is on the Ads business, they won't incentivize anti-ad/privacy behaviour. Firefox has that edge, at the very minimum.
