Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I think the sentiment is that WE need to do something too, and I don't see how you really diagree with the OP in terms that what is happening is bad, so what are you going to do about it, if FF is not the answer?

Not an attack, really interested in ideas other than just give up.




I'm more invested in the web being a viable platform for feature-rich applications, in competition with walled-garden app stores, than I am in defeating browser engine hegemony. I'm interested in defeating browser engine hegemony, but I have no specific love for Firefox to stump for Mozilla being the David to this Goliath.

With Microsoft, Facebook, and Samsung shipping Chromium-based browsers and being in direct competition with Google across industries, I don't think there is much danger of Google taking over the web. If things get really bad, I can easily see all of the chromium-based browsers forming a consortium together and hard-forking. But I only see them staying in the game if the web grows and continues to be a viable alternative to native applications. So what I do is I make sure that my apps are usable across as many of them as possible, and not just Google Chrome.

I'm sorry for the vent of frustration that is coming up next. But I'm sick of hearing 5% of the market being one of the loudest voices in threads like this. WebRTC is killing the CPU, WebAudio keeps clipping, I can't run graphics ops in a worker thread, so the UI becomes unresponsive during scene transitions. I can't do anything about these things. I've tried. I've gone to great lengths to maintain as much fall-back compat with Firefox as I could. I finally just gave up because it was taking such a large percentage of my time that it couldn't justify it for being able to reach only 5% of the market. A portion of the market that, quite frankly, tends to not be very interested in spending money. Making Firefox better is not my job. My job is to make web apps.

Have you ever talked to any Mozilla employees? The stories they tell of the corporate culture make my blood boil for them. I mean, hell, after the latest purge, one of the projects they kept on (Hubs) has no developers working on the API support in their browser (WebXR, they fired all of the VR developers working on Firefox).

Maybe if we gave up on Firefox, those developers at Mozilla could be put to better use on browser projects that aren't managed poorly. People said Google was stupid for starting a new browser engine. They didn't start from scratch, but eventually they got there. There are other browser engine projects out there. Mozilla even chucked one of the more promising ones out of their umbrella. So yes, let's stop sending good money after bad and give up on Firefox.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: