Firefox at 20
Back in June 2002, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was experiencing space for the first time, the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Microsoft was reaching its final arguments, and Adam Price, using what was then called Mozilla on a Mac, had an issue with persistent tooltips.
That relic is no more, as a fix to Bug 148624 was pushed in early September, with the fix appearing in build 119. I tried to replicate the tooltip on my not-yet-updated 118.0.1 Firefox browser on Mac but could not experience this rite of passage for myself. The patch itself is quite small, adding a check for whether a document has focus to the tooltip-showing code.
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Zhu [born in 1999, just three years before this bug was submitted] was motivated and knew how to program but had “zero experience in projects as complicated as the Firefox browser” and had “never contributed to open source projects before.” But it was the summer before their PhD program started. “So, why not?”
My favorite old Firefox bug is that it needs AppleScript support.
If you’re curious about how you’d even go about finding and fixing a bug in the Firefox codebase, Mike Conley has been livestreaming his dev work at Mozilla weekly for years. A lot of the stuff he records involves picking a bug from the backlog, and then meticulously hunting it down and murdering it.
Bas Schouten (via Hacker News):
We’ve been motivated by the improvements we’re seeing in our telemetry data, and we’re convinced that our efforts this year are having a positive effect on Firefox users. We have many more optimizations in the pipeline and will share more details about those and our overall progress in future posts.
Bryce Wray (via Hacker News):
Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 — and then began its long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome. The latter shot from 1.37% use in January, 2009, to its own peak of 66.34% in September, 2020, since falling back to a “measly” 62.85% in the very latest data.
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With such a continuing free-fall, Firefox is inevitably nearing the point where USWDS will remove it, like Internet Explorer before it, from the list of supported browsers.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols (via Hacker News):
And the top web browser is, according to the DAP’s 5.27-billion visits over the past 90 days, just as you’d expect: Google Chrome with 47.9%. Firefox, with only 2.2% of the market, is sliding into irrelevance.
PG&E (via Hacker News):
The following browsers are below our threshold for support.
Šime (via Hacker News):
To be honest, until recently I wasn’t even sure myself why I use Firefox. Of course it’s a pretty good browser, but that doesn’t explain why I’ve stubbornly stayed loyal to Firefox for more than a decade. After giving it a bit more thought, I came up with the following reasons.
Frederic Lardinois (Hacker News):
Exactly 20 years ago, Mozilla started shipping version 1.0 of its Firefox browser. At the time, you could download it or buy a CD-ROM with a guidebook from Mozilla (or maybe get it on one of those free CDs that would come with many magazines at the time). Born out of the ashes of Netscape, Firefox would go on to gain well over 30% of global market share. But that was followed by a period of stagnation, and after the arrival of the faster and lighter Google Chrome, Firefox slowly but surely lost market share. It didn’t help that Mozilla, at the time, seemingly prioritized everything but its browser, all while its mobile browser initiatives never quite took off.
Despite everything, Firefox is still going strong, and it is a better browser today than it ever was. Now, Mozilla, which recently said that it wants to refocus on the browser, needs to figure out how to get it back on a growth path.
“There was a time where the browser space was absolutely the front line of an open, safe, equitable internet,” our source said. “Mostly that was about, frankly, preventing Microsoft from taking over the internet.”
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In other words, for the past decade, upstart browser makers like Mozilla, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Arc, and others have essentially been fighting for that 10 percent – the table scraps left by the tech giants.
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“The problems are about the information that travels on the internet,” our source said. “It’s not about the protocols that run the internet anymore. … It’s not about the plumbing. It’s about what’s flowing through the plumbing.”
Previously:
- The State of Mozilla
- Netscape at 30
- Platform Tilt
- Firefox 115’s Two-Tier Extensions System
- Firefox Translations Extension
- Improving Firefox Responsiveness on macOS
- Firefox Total Cookie Protection
- Firefox Now Uses Native Contextual Menus
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I've been using Firefox primarily for the Meta sites as a (probably naive) way to isolate them. I'd been using Brave as my Chrome-alike for a few years but recently switched to Edge for no particular reason.
This quote from Šime is interesting to me:
"Apple claims that they can’t, but they have disclosed user data to law enforcement in the past, so I don’t trust them. Mozilla says that they can’t, and I trust them."
Apple holds the keys with iCloud standard data protection (where Safari information is stored) so of course they can, and should given a legal reason to do so. One only need turn on Advanced Data Protection and that point is moot.
If Mozilla held the encryption key they'd also be able to provide data to law enforcement as they should. There is no reason to not trust one over the other "just because".
I guess that poster forgot the fact that Apple refused to comply with the FBI in a famous terrorism case because they couldn't decrypt the person's phone.
The first version of Mozilla's open sourced browser, released at the end of Netscape Navigator / Communicator, was a steaming pile of garbage - its XML (was it XUL?) based UI was janky, and the application ignored almost every convention of the Mac user experience.
And nothing has changed.
Firefox is still a janky browser, because it is still made by ideologues who seem to genuinely believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the browser is the central computing experience.
No one WANTS to live in a browser-centric world. The browser is the lowest common denominator, it always has been, it always will be. Its sole purpose is to provide a consistent mediocrity everywhere - app and document slop, for when a trough is the only crockery available.
No one WANTS webapps, either (the exception being, people who make web apps).
If Mozilla want Firefox to be used, how about, oh, using the system native dictionary rather than their own? How about doing standard system-native settings? How about having the Private Browsing UI actually show that you're in private browsing mode when you have the app set with privacy settings that mean you're always in private browsing?
I know it may sound heretical, but making the product good enough to buy, might make people think it's good enough to use. It's not like they can make the product *less* popular.
Waterfox is one of my favorite web browsers to use on the desktop and Mull is fabulous on mobile. Both are Firefox rebrands. I don't use Chrome at all. Don't understand the love for regular old Chrome. Vivaldi is more my thing as far as Chromium.
I miss old Presto Opera though. That was a fun browser.
@Nathan_RETRO Yes, Presto Opera was the best! And that's in spite of the fact that it often didn't render webpages quite right. All of its perks far outweighed the downsides!
I can thank it for getting me into mouse gestures, which I still use to this day.
And so far, no other web browser has ever had their fabulous "instantaneous back and forward" feature. On top of just making web browsing feel incredibly fast, it was such a life saver because it didn't just navigate back to the page you were on, it basically instantaneous transported you to the exact state the last page was in. Brilliant! That meant that anything you entered on a form or otherwise changed on the page was still there. No more accidentally navigating away from a form that took you twenty minutes to fill out only to discover that when you go back everything is blank again.
@Someone: there would be more native apps if Apple stopped breaking backwards compatibility. But spending one's life working around Apple's latest breakage is a waste of time. Mozilla doesn't have the time to do that either, hence the non-native UI. IIRC, Ladybird also made that decision.
