Per recent discussion, I am now curious. If you have significantly reduced your Firefox usage in the last 5 years… why is that? (And what browser did you switch that usage to?)
(Please just relate your personal experiences, no screeds about relative browser superiority, thank you.)
@glyph I tried switching to Safari and made it about two months before I got angry and came back to Firefox, simply because the Firefox feature set is too damn good: tab containers for sandboxing certain domains, tab sending (push and pull) between multiple devices, and proper ad block extensions and privacy features.
Every time they make me angry with their ai nonsense I just remember that no other browser gets even one of those right, let alone all three.
@amethyst it *also* halved in usage from 2015-2020, so the people still using it in 2020 were almost certainly aware of some of its benefits and yet attrition continued, which is what I'm curious about.
I guess a better question for you might be: what made you want to *try* switching to Safari in the first place?
@glyph Most recently was because Apple Pay stopped working in Firefox on macOS (after working fine for a couple years), along with being tempted by some nifty-looking Safari extensions that—because iOS jail—would actually work on both the desktop and the phone browser, while my Firefox extensions only work on the desktop.
In the background, I've had growing concerns about Mozilla Foundation being stupid, doing/saying shitty things around crypto/ai/etc, along with repeated rollout of features I absolutely do not want in my browser, that were enabled by default, or the concern that Mozilla itself might be turning into enablers of various sorts and me losing trust in the foundation to follow its mission. Their most recent CEO announcement is adding an awful lot to that feeling.
@glyph Interesting. Their self-reported data shows a slow decline in absolute usage [1] while ITU data [2] shows a big increase in total usage, consistent with the reports of rapidly dropping share.
1. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
2. https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-internet-use/
@mario_angst_sci @glyph Even though it's been over ten years now since my last day at Mozilla, I still get irritated whenever salaries are brought up like this.
As just a developer (not an executive), after Mozilla I literally doubled my salary overnight by accepting a job with an ordinary for-profit company. And while you didn't mean it this way, what it feels like when a lot of people complain about Mozilla people getting paid is "you should have been happy to be significantly underpaid during some of your prime earning years, because you were working on an Important Societal Mission and that's more important than money".
And I extend that to discussions of executive pay. Demanding that people be underpaid relative to peers "for the misson" will always bother me.
Or more bluntly: if someone thinks working on important things has to involve being paid less (or even completely unpaid, as is too often the case with open source), I invite them to be the one who does it.
@glyph @mario_angst_sci I generally avoid getting into arguments about specific executives or policies or whatever. I just think that people who work on societal good should actually be rewarded for doing so, and as far as I'm aware Mozilla exec salaries are still on the low end compared to other household-name tech companies.
And I understand it's a difficult problem: other companies can make huge stock grants to avoid needing to actually pay out hard cash, and Mozilla does not have that option. But I also know what I was making when I worked there, and what my peers at not-even-Big-Tech companies were making, and it really does get to me.
@ubernostrum @glyph Thanks for sharing this perspective. I both understand where you are coming from and I generally agree with your points. Also as someone who works in research, where some of these points apply sometimes.
If I explore my own, somewhat visceral reaction to executive pay at a company like Mozilla, another personal inconsistency is that I am much less consequential in ditching other products or even non-profits (e.g. I know some people at the WWF and pay is not exactly bad, as it should not be, as you say) for what I perceive as exaggerated salaries. I am probably not alone in this.
It's interesting. I think it is in part something like a spurned lover thing, tech like a browser that is so present in our lives, in a tech landscape populated by unsavory options left and right, is then held to a much higher standard and maybe also judged unfairly.
It might also be a bias in reacting to an absolute number, when it would make more sense to see it in relative terms, as you point out. Although we also should take care to not get numb to absolute numbers and compare them across contexts, if we ever want to make progress to a more just economic system.
And maybe, with the recent Mozilla AI nonsense, it's just an easy way retroactively adjust my image of Mozilla. That's sad in its own way, actually.
@glyph I used to run Firefox as my day-to-day browser, but I decided to give Safari a try when upgrading my laptop a while back and was pleasantly surprised by it.
The fact that anyone who cares about mobile (which is everybody) is forced by Apple's iOS policies into testing on Safari means I see fewer sites break than before, and while the privacy controls aren't as fine-grained or powerful as Firefox they still offer what I think is a reasonable baseline. Performance is also decent, and the battery-life impact is hard to beat.
I still keep Firefox installed, and I still use it for some things (especially browser-based games), but I'd say my usage of it has dropped probably 80% or more.
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