{"id":45798,"date":"2024-11-15T16:01:40","date_gmt":"2024-11-15T21:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=45798"},"modified":"2025-03-04T15:26:40","modified_gmt":"2025-03-04T20:26:40","slug":"firefox-at-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/15\/firefox-at-20\/","title":{"rendered":"Firefox at 20"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Purdy<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Back in June 2002, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was experiencing space<\/a> for the first time, the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Microsoft was reaching its final arguments<\/a>, and Adam Price, using what was then called Mozilla on a Mac, had an issue with persistent tooltips<\/a>.<\/p>

That relic is no more, as a fix to Bug 148624 was pushed in early September<\/a>, 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<\/a>, adding a check for whether a document has focus to the tooltip-showing code.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

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?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

My favorite old Firefox bug is that it needs AppleScript<\/a> support<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

dannyobrien<\/a>:<\/p>\n

If you’re curious about how you’d even go about finding and fixing a bug in the Firefox codebase, Mike Conley<\/a> 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Bas Schouten<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Bryce Wray<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Steven Vaughan-Nichols<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

PG&E<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

The following browsers are below our threshold for support.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Šime<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Frederic Lardinois<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Exactly 20 years ago, Mozilla started shipping<\/a> version 1.0 of its Firefox browser<\/a>. 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<\/a> but its browser, all while its mobile browser initiatives never quite took off.<\/p>

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<\/a>, needs to figure out how to get it back on a growth path.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Thomas Claburn<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

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.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n