The real reason for Firefox' decline

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This article points out a couple of good facts about the situation, however there is a single fact that almost always gets lost in such a discussion:

Firefox and Google Chrome mainly pretend to compete.

If you look at the business relations between the two on the surface, it seems like they compete extremely with each other, right?
Wrong.

The reality that apparently barely anyone knows about is that Firefox is already indirectly part of Google for a long time. So, all the “competition” going on between the two is mainly for the shows.

Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me that Google is eating up Firefox. Google has literally a huge graveyard of what products it killed.

Firefox will just be the +1 in that list…

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Very Good Akito. I’ve been saying this for a couple years many won’t listen Mozilla gets a large amount of it’s funding via Google.

85 percent of Mozilla’s $67 million in revenues in 2006, the most recent year reported, came from Google, it’s true –
Owen Thomas

However, the open secret in the tech sector is that at the end of the day, Google calls the shots. As this blog post will explain, when a pro-user security feature in the browser threatens Google’s business model, it is the feature that is made to compromise–not the search engine. – Cnet

Just a couple of quotes. So FF receives a lot from Google. It’s not as independent as most believe. It’s still a good browser but there are others I prefer to use.

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Great article…every FF user should know that… That list of killed Google functions is incredible, it would be very interesting to see a parallel list of new functions that have overtaken the killed ones…if that has been done for some.

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Indeed, I was thinking about the same thing. Sadly, I know a couple of alternatives for the dead ones and the alternatives are all pretty much part of the Google-Spy-On-Me universe. For this, they removed the independent spy-less or less spy-impacted products. The dead products mostly didn’t spy so well on us, which is probably the main reason they were removed. The products that are pushed and supported most, are the ones spying on us and screwing us over, the most.

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Yes…and that was the reason I asked about a list. It takes a huge amount of effort to block Google and Amazon…and I really have the impression I am fighting a war that I just cannot win. Most people I know when asked about Google just shrug their shoulders and say…who cares, they are not interested in me as an individual. How can you answer that…

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what did it for me is when i saw they are pushing(on their starting page) the same SJW propaganda as all others corporations …

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The thing is in the world we live in, poor small companies that try to compete with the big guns, will eventually fail to the masses. Google has always been a part of Firefox, was not through choice either, it was through trying to make money, as anything open source, still needs money to make the product. As important as Firefox is as a Internet provider, to me it only makes sense to keep up the being different to anything else with security and anonymity of the user, bringing in more choice for the user.

When you look at the likes of Brave, Opera, Microsoft Edge etc, they are all running Google Chrome at their heart, which leads to spying in my mind. Even if you use Brave with their newish engine, you can’t tell me that they’ve gotten rid of Google altogether. Google will always be at the helm of those browsers.
Firefox gives you more choice and yes it is slower as a browser, but faster than it used to be.
Unfortunately people want everything done yesterday, as in using Google search will get the answer quicker, but privacy is at risk and nobody seems to get that not only will Firefox one day be gone, but so will the Internet altogether as we know it now. With all the telemetry, over populated planet, means over populated Internet, it will blow up or burn out altogether.

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I kinda miss the old days when OS/browsers/Softwares didn’t have googles and google-esque fingers in them :frowning:

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Me too, no spying, just browsing the web at your leisure without all this telemetry we have now. As humans we are now products, being sold off everyday as advertisements for other big corps to also sell us off on. It’s all about the money now, where as before it was safe and freer. Though I remember when Firefox had enough of Adobe Flash and went full HTML. In the Windows version of Firefox, it kept getting hacked through Adobe Flash, onto people’s computers. Firefox said enough is enough and introduced HTML. YouTube then moved over fully to it, as did the BBC, Channel 5, ITV, Channel 4 took ages to migrate over and all of their box sets were not sorted out properly, without hearing or being notified about it from the public they would still be the same today. Just goes to show that, that one move to HTML made a difference that benefited everyone. It’s this type of thing that Firefox will be remembered for.

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I really must disagree with that, though. While a lot of things seem to have worsened, there are a lot of other things that got better by a million times. My favourite proof of how shitty and unsafe it was “back then” is this:

This man made the truth about the food industry in the 19th century public.
An extremely terse summary of what happened:
The food industry was literally poisoning the general public with highly toxic chemicals in their food products, just to save a couple of pennies when selling their products. This guy made this public and proved, that the chemicals in question are indeed highly toxic to the human body.

Companies, as bad as they are today, would never do this in our time, ever. If they would even go into that direction, heads would roll.
Now, we just get ingredients that might possible worsen our health a bit when we consume that particular product incorporating such ingredients over decades or way too much. It’s still not perfect, but way better than it was 120 years ago and still better than 60 years ago or even 40 years ago, when we stay on the topic of industrial food, which is necessary for a growing and already big society.

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The Google graveyard is impressive.

On the list, there are several products I really liked and used and whose replacements and alternatives never got nearly as good as the original - even years after their disappearance.

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Second article regarding this very topic:

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I know myself and 1,000’s of others dumped firefox about a year ago when they sent out an email that basically said: “Dear user, we understand many of our users have been on the internet over 20 yrs but we also know that you’re stupid. We now feel we need to protect you from the internet and start censoring your browsing experience. The staff at firefox are intellectually superior to you and realize you cannot think for yourself after a 1/4 of a century online. Just know the High Priests at firefox have your best interests at heart and that is why from here on out you’ll only see articles we approve of.” P.S. If we do not enact these policies Google will pull the plug on us.

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Hey Ute, good question. To say “they are not really interested in me as an individual”, is somehow correct. The same way, the individual is nothing worth to those, who want to make money out of them. Did you read Permanent Record from E. Snowden? I can hardly strongly recommend it, btw.

The Problem shows up really bright and clear when it comes to the cambridge analytica incidents. The individual suffers later from decisions made in the democratic process when they truly based on fake facts and impulse-triggering ads. As the documentary shows, when masses being “controlled” this way, some individuals could not - I dunno… live? - their rights, to fall their decision on facts and true problems (e.g. the false focus on immigrants, which wouldn’t have been a problem at all - from a macroeconomic perspective.) To use such Tools, like CA did (and the tools MOSTLY use metadata), they needed the permission of the authorities, because this tools was classified as weapons. And they did successfully manipulate people with them. So probably I would answer, that it’s not about their individual right alone, it affects us all.

So offtopic: but imagine the analyzes google or even Facebook are able to run. In Googles Case we are talking about the ability to combine all the metadata from Streetview, Youtube, CDN Calls, Stores, Geo-Services, more than hundret billions worldwide searchqueries a day, and all the billion websites, that includes Google Services. I mean, that’s power! They are able to completely surveil the online life of single indivduals, of groups, they have all information every Secret Service, every Government and Company in the world would get wet pants, if they could access it. And Google gives paid (or forced) access to “some” of the data, named to advertisers, governments, agencys and anyone who is willing to pay for it, or for “having a real exciting online experience, while browsing our sites”. They access the tools of google already, as the washington posts wrotes.

So what do this mean for me, as I know it’s not (only) about my cleartext messages, I write my mum everyday? Because everyone is using such evil services, I’m forced to find alternative services, like e.g. selfhosted ICAL Calendars, or LineageOS for my Handy, or reconstruct your selfhosted Webpages and trow off all evil Software. And try to bring my (in my case) little community to services which serves the user, and not Services who praise freedom in forefront and act with hidden agendas behind your back. “We have to be nomads of the internet in future” (I read this anywhere, I can’t remember, its not my phrase! ;)) Straying from one App to another! I would add - Don’t feel comfortable with a service and don’t trust free services. :stuck_out_tongue: Thanks for reading.

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I’m pretty sure you meant to express “strongly”. :wink:

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oh could be! ^^ is it something vulgar? Something “woody”? Haha! Thanks man!

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No, it just means you barely recommend it. However, I think you actually recommend others to read this book, instead of recommending against it.

I personally have a hard copy, too.

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