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Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?:
Mozilla has released Firefox 89, proclaiming it a "fresh new Firefox," though it comes amid a relentless decline in market share.
Firefox matters more than most web browsers, because it uses its own browser engine, called Quantum, and its own JavaScript engine, called SpiderMonkey. By contrast, most other browsers, including Chrome and Chromium, Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi use the Google-sponsored Blink engine, while Apple's Safari uses WebKit (from which Blink was forked). The existence of multiple independent implementations is important for web standards, helping to prevent a single vendor from pushing through changes without consensus, and ensuring that the standards are coherent.
A glance at a statistics site like W3Counter is telling. In April 2008, Microsoft enjoyed a 63 per cent market share with Internet Explorer, and with Firefox performing strongly behind it at 29.3 per cent. By April 2010, IE was down to 48.6 per cent, Firefox up to 32.7 per cent, and Google's newer Chrome was starting to make an impact, at 8.3 per cent.
In April 2012, the three were almost on a par, though Chrome (26.8 per cent) had overtaken Firefox (25 per cent). Today, Chrome is at 65.3 per cent, Safari second at 16.7 per cent, IE and Edge has 5.7 per cent, and Firefox has just 4.1 per cent share. Despite numerous updates, Mozilla's browser has declined from 6.1 per cent share a year ago. Statcounter tells a similar story, reporting a 3.59 per cent share for Firefox, down from 4.21 per cent a year ago.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:33AM (2 children)
Which is a great aspiration, but when you get to the point where not only is every implementation just an implementation of the same standards but the core of the dominant implication is open-source, where's the incentive for anybody to develop their own, if they can't distinguish it by making non-standard "improvements" to the core functionality?
The main argument against Chrome seems to be that people don't want to deal with Google - which I won't argue with - but there are a number of non-Google browsers built around the open-source Chromium code, offering different privacy features and skins, developed and maintained at the fraction of the effort of producing your own engine. The fact that Microsoft - with all their resources - decided to drop development of their own browser engine and build on Chromium instead - is pretty strong evidence that DIY browser engines are not viable today.
That also partly explains why Firefox has been resorting to UI design changes rather than making fundamental changes to their engine: the only other path that would make business sense would be to switch to Chromium.
I'm not even sure what the big advantages are of having multiple competing engines: "security by diversity" would need more than 2 significantly different implementations in widespread use and wouldn't help the many vulnerabilities that crop up in shared libraries, external services, are implicit in the standards or where the standards lead to common coding mistakes. The "one vendor pushing changes" isn't simply cured by having alternatives available when that vendor has a dominant position in the wider computing market (as Google does now, as Microsoft did when the original browser wars happened). The MSs and Googles of this world are perfectly capable of forcing their opinion on standards bodies.
We're far better off than we were back when it was (proprietary, closed source) MS IE vs. (not entirely open) Netscape & Opera. The standards are far better developed, Google have a substantial commercial competitor in Safari (Macs may not be significant, but iPhones are) and there's an open-source implementation in Chromium that can be forked if Google get too big for their boots. Unfortunately, TwitGoogleZonBook have got so big that they could (already have, to an extent) force proprietary standards on the internet without even needing their own browser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @01:11AM
A whole browser is not a one-man or small team project - it requires lots of time and that generally means big money or obsolete on delivery. You don't need to build whole browsers though, but rendering engines, webshit compilers, UX, etc + some glue to hold it together. Each of those projects can be built and maintained and forked by individuals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @03:36PM
The problem is that Mozilla management ate Google handouts and shitted all over firefox. Instead of realizing that Google plans to monopolize www just like Microsoft did to standards with IE, they actively removed whatever made them different. It has gone to the point of no return now. What could have been a winner is now a has been.
Firefox had mindshare of all the geeks all over the world. They needed to double down on their identity, they fucked it up.