It was inevitable given it's a top 7 most popular site.
The reality is, the masses, the real world, the average person. Is an asshole.
It doesn't reflect in the real world, because people learn to hide their assholeness at a very early age (Or they learn how to get punched in the face).
On an anonymous forum. You don't have to hide your assholeness.
Frankly it's amazing the site never devolved into 4chan. I attribute that to all the people doing free labor --> mods.
It may not be a, in denial, hiding their heads in the sand situation.
Sometimes a topic gets too popular, it drowns out all the other topics. At that point, aren't they just a glorified version of r/llm?
I'll give you one personal example:
The year Caitlin Clark was drafted to the wnba.
r/wnba went from a subreddit of 9000, to eventually 200k subs.
We were bombarded with CC posts every hour.
- Some of it was trolls staging a race war (this was during US elections).
- Some of it was genuine CC fans, who wanted to talk about CC.
- Some of it was bball nerds, who you know... wanted to talk about a bball player in a bball forum (regardless of who that bball player happens to be).
So what happened was, at any given day, 80% of the front page was CC content.
At that point, we might as well have been r/caitlinclark.
So the mods did something drastic and controversial. They banned all "low effort" CC content.
WTF does "low effort" mean? It pretty much meant 99% of CC posts got removed.
The forum went back to something that resembled a bball forum. That talked about other players. And other teams. Not just Caitlin Clark.
Islands only link up every once in a while, so once you land on an island that's it at least for now. When islands link up you'll see a big '?' appear in the page header that you can click on to explore the linked island. There are two islands right now because the populations are low. There's a mechanism for discovering new islands as the island populations grow.
My hope is that by smooshing people together randomly and making it harder to move, people will have a new way (new old way?) of interacting online that has more of the good aspects of offline socialising. But you're 100% right that without a reason to engage it's going to be very quiet. I'm looking at different ways to tackle this that range from "it's a video game now" to something much more subtle.
I think you're right, but it's important to emphasize many of these attempts to tell the story of market share get major facts catastrophically wrong. The decline in Firefox market share from like 33% to below 10% is mostly because the world pivoted to mobile, and Firefox "dominance" was in a world of desktop browsers. It was defaults and distribution lock-in as the world pivoted to mobile that led to the change in market share. As well as the web as a whole effectively tripling in number of users, and Google leveraging its search monopoly and pushing out Chromebooks effectively at cost.
For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.
No, the decline of Firefox market share happened in the early 2010s, on desktop, when everyone switched to Chrome because it felt way faster. I say "everyone" - this is the subset of "everyone" who were switched on enough to use a non-default browser in the first place. The rest used IE or Safari, dependent on platform.
What happened in the last 6 months or so to affect those numbers? According to them, Chrome increased in percentage quite a but recently and the others all got "compressed" towards 0.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
I can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.
I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition?
You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.
Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
Pretty sure even back then, uBO was on the list of vetted extensions. I remember using it prior to 2023 (since like 2019), on my old OnePlus 6. There may have been a period it wasn’t available, but surely it wasn’t gone for too long.
I use several extensions on Fennec mobile: AdGuard AdBlocker, Google & YouTube cookie consent popup blocking, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Translate this page, Web Archives, uBlacklist
Please enlighten me. How does one make a browser "better" these days?
- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them.
- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
- The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup.
How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas.
Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them.
The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.
First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3].
Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should.
Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before?
And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions.
> [3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.
Yeah as someone who picked up Firefox when it was Phoenix, it was “free Opera with a less-odd-feeling UI”. That was basically the initial (great!) sales pitch.
What got me installing it on any computer belonging to a person I would have to help support was the auto-pop-blocking and that it performed a ton better than IE/Netscape/Mozilla. Opera also performed better and I think it also blocked pop ups out of the box, but it wasn’t free (well, kinda, but the free edition… had ads).
> - They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with extensions, then they destroyed their own extensions. They copied everyone else, not the other way around.
> - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then while destroying their extensions they made vertical tabs harder, while still leaving it as a charitable contribution by the community instead of an internal project, and slow-walked it for a decade. I still have to do weird CSS to make them look right, because they decided to have an opinionated sidebar for no particular reason.
> - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
This, again, is not their fault. It's because of a man who they don't pay, who has had to battle with them on multiple occasions. Their only contribution is not accepting a Chrome standard completely. Imagine wanting to be given credit for not exactly copying your neighbor, after an enormous amount of pressure was brought to bear. It's my belief that Google decided that Firefox wouldn't kill ad blocking in the end, because it would have looked horrible in antitrust court. Now that's over (Obama judges don't believe in antitrust), and you can expect Firefox to kill it soon enough.
> Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Nah. They kept telling me, while ignoring everyone's complaints about their actual experiences, that the most important thing was to reduce startup time for some unknown reason.
Make Firefox fully and exclusively a tool in service of the user.
Eliminate - both in code and by policy - anything that compromises privacy. If a new feature or support of a new technology reduces privacy, make it optional. Give me a switch to turn it off.
Stop opting the user into things. No more experiments. No more changing of preferences or behavior during upgrade.
Give the user more control; more opportunities for easy and powerful automation and integration.
Not only would this win me back as a user, I'd pay for the privilege. I'm paying for Kagi and happy to be doing so. I'd love to pay for an open source browser I could trust and respect.
In my experience Chrome does not just load faster, but it also uses less memory than Firefox because of its more aggressive tab hibernation that is enabled by default.
On my laptop I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because it kept filling up all of my RAM resulting in other applications crashing.
The reality is, the masses, the real world, the average person. Is an asshole.
It doesn't reflect in the real world, because people learn to hide their assholeness at a very early age (Or they learn how to get punched in the face).
On an anonymous forum. You don't have to hide your assholeness.
Frankly it's amazing the site never devolved into 4chan. I attribute that to all the people doing free labor --> mods.
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