Mozilla Firefox Is Dying

(I say this as someone who used Firefox for 20 years and wants to see Firefox succeed.)

Firefox has been dying since the moment Chrome released. Mozilla's recent rebrand as a bunch of activists[0] and the likely halt of Google money (to be default search) means bad things for Firefox, I think. Let me know how that works out for them. I don't think it will matter much in the end, since Firefox has felt like someone's side project to build a Chrome also-ran for a long time.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-o... (Firefox was mentioned exactly once in Mozilla's official rebrand announcement, which shows how irrelevant Firefox is to them.)

Firefox's death is a leadership issue.

It's still a solid browser and could be resuscitated, but you'd have to immediately remove the Mozilla leadership and change it's culture.

My hope is that Firefox viably carries on as an OSS project away from the control of an organization whose CEO gets paid $6.9 million annually while engineering continually gets cut.

Firefox can't survive with Mozilla at the helm.

I don’t know a single person outside of online tech communities like HN that still uses Firefox. Virtually none of my non-tech friends know what Firefox even is.

Firefox has been my browser since its first beta 20-something years ago, and I don't see anything replacing it. It has by far the best addons and tab management. Chrome, after all these years, doesn't even offer vertical tabs, and its extensions API keeps getting more restrictive.

I am still using Firefox Dev Edition as my daily browser and honestly don't care about the 3 things you mentioned. It's a solid browser, works flawlessly and stable for me. I dig the dev tools and it's "fast enough". The only thing where I think they are on the wrong track is about PWAs, I don't understand their stance at all.

> how long before the total collapse?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

I've still to see a site where Firefox is not supported. uBlock origin still works well with Firefox.

When I start having issues with those, I'll start looking for a replacement. Hopefully Ladybird Browser will be out by then.

Competition eventually always improves the user experience for everyone. I support innovative, competition, though FF, please support others also. Reciprocate the love.

Firefox is still working great for me and I am both a Linux and Windows user. The addons I use are still working great. uBlock, NoScript, Canonical, CSS Exfil, ClearURLS, FoxReplace, Temporary Containers, Zoom Page WE. FoxReplaces helps remove IDPol and most compelled speech from the web. Canonical sometimes helps me see if I am submitting dupes. uBlock and NoScript keep readable sites readable and keep me away from most of the trash sites that depend on ecma-slop just to read some HTML. Temporary containers break most tracking. I could not realistically ask for more.

Nearly all of this is false news. Virtually all browser-focused companies have had layoffs, but none of them have crippled Firefox. Indeed Firefox has the Zen project to thank for leading the way to a safer post-Chrome-is-for-sale world on PCs. Hopefully a similar project will arise for phones and for an even safer Deno framework.

>We are undoubtedly witnessing a rapid decline of Mozilla and its products: the question we should be asking ourselves is: how long before the total collapse?

Why ask this? Tomorrow they could announce huge new funding from Bezos or google announcing cutting off funding. Regardless, it doesnt uninstall software from your machine.

>And furthermore: are those Linux users (like me) who are still relying on Firefox for doing their development job ready to abandon it?

I technically use firefox everyday; but it could be force uninstalled from my computers and id mostly not notice. I cant imagine being so dependent on it.

>I wonder what is your opinion

Hardly needs to be proven that Mozilla has been declining a very long time.

Microsoft never invested in Internet Explorer because of the antitrust charges in the early 2000s.

Opera had ads, firefox basically became a major player by default with nobody contesting them.

Mid to late 2000s, financial crisis era, they became activists for the open web and net neutrality; but after the financial crisis they jumped over to "social justice" which destroyed them.

Netscape 2.0

It’s been dead for several years now: it has nothing to offer besides the Gecko engine, and that they’re not doing great at.

Truth hurts, right?

There needs to be a browser that archives your browser history and pipes a stream of it in real time so that open-source personal AI engines can ingest it and index it. The future of the Web will be built on this. Google may not do it. Firefox could.