Mozilla's Incredible Speech-To-Text Engine Is At Risk Following Layoffs

[Michael_S]

I don't even understand how Chrome's marketing was even legal. I'm thinking it really wasn't, considering that Microsoft and others have been penalized for similar behavior. It was during the peak of Google-Is-The-Internet's-Darling era, where Google could do no wrong. Every single Google web-product would pop up with gigantic scary warning messages making it seem like you had to download Chrome to continue using G-Mail, Google Maps, YouTube, etc... YouTube had a gigantic DOWNLOAD CHROME button plastered to the home page forever. At one point it seemed like every single piece of freeware, shareware, FOSS and even some commercial software for Windows came bundled with a Chrome installer. It was utter insanity. I can't tell you how many people who have told me they have no idea how Chrome ended up on their

Chrome's dominance has very little to do with it being a "better performing" browser, and everything to do with Google's aggressive and and anti-competitive marketing tactics. How is a small non-profit going to compete with that? They can't. I'm not going to say Mozilla hasn't made some poor business decisions, but they were put in a very bad situation, very quickly. Over nearly a decade they achieved 30% of the browser market share largely by goodwill and word-of-mouth. Then Chrome basically sledge-hammered half of FireFox's market share away in like 4 years, while simultaneously replacing nearly all IE's marketshare as well.

You're correct - I had gotten so accustomed to Google's aggressive marketing for Chrome that I just forgot how invasive and consistent it was.

I would add that the United States' anti-monopoly laws have been all but completely ignored by the federal government for at least 20 years. Microsoft started to catch some heat in the 1990s, which is why they propped up Apple with a small investment at one point. And Google has been the biggest contributor to the Mozilla foundation, so I think they are worried or at least at one point were worried that anti-monopoly lawsuits would come for their browser share.

But in the past 20 years all the wireless carriers consolidated down to two, the finance industry has seen major consolidations (and ignoring anything else Barack Obama did, his 2008 campaign had as one slogan 'No more too big to fail!' but no anti-monopoly actions were ever taken under his administration), Facebook became the king of American social media, Google became the king of search and mobile operating systems, and Amazon became the king of cloud services. And the reaction from Washington, DC is silence.

[onicsis]

Mozilla continue dumbing down UI of Firefox for Android
Firefox is doomed.

[Charlie68]

I'm sorry but you seem oblivious to the reality of things.
YES, it's majoritarily Chrome's (not Chromium) fault, because that's the piece of crappy software Google pushed to be automatically installed like traditional spywares by being embedded in free (costless) software's installers (and of course setting itself as default browser too).

Considering the vast proportion of users that don't know how to avoid/remove that (or simply don't care), it was easy for Google to eat martket share that way.
If someone could have been done at the time to force Google to stop that, Chrome would have never rised as fast as it did. It would have probably earned 50% anyways because regular Google marketing was powerful enough, but two or three years later... Years that could have been enough for Mozilla to set up a defensive strategy.

I guess you are referring to those installers in windows, blame these programs trying to install useless software, this has always been a windows problem apart from chrome. Among other things, some also installed Firefox ....
On the quality of Chrome is your personal opinion, the fact is that today Chromium-based browsers work better than Firefox.

[Charlie68]

There is more to it, but I think the important thing is that when Firefox beat IE and when Chrome beat Firefox, the newcomer was much faster and more stable than the incumbent.

I don't even think that's true any more, at arewefastyet.com one of the benchmarks Firefox routines every day is the page load times of the 20 most popular websites on the internet, and Firefox beats Chrome in a lot of them. But Firefox is old news, users don't care, and Mozilla doesn't have the money to put into marketing Firefox at a level that would compete with Google's marketing for Chrome.

Likewise, for people that don't care about software freedom I imagine the new version of Edge is just as good as Chrome. But again, it's too late and users won't care. (Edit: Not that I want people to move to Edge, I think Microsoft is only currently less evil than Google by virtue of being less competent at data harvesting. But my point is that Firefox can't beat Chrome for the same reason Edge can't, the advantages just aren't big enough to get the users' attention.)

Software freedom has nothing to do with this, we are still talking about two open source browsers.
Chrome is not open source but Chromium from which it derives is, I use Chromium and not Chrome.
Freedom doesn't mean not paying for bad choices, I'm sure Mozilla will be able to get Firefox back in a good position, what I contest is blaming others for their own faults.
We know that Mozilla can't compete with big companies like Google, however not being dependent on big companies can also be an advantage.

[zxy_thf]

You're correct - I had gotten so accustomed to Google's aggressive marketing for Chrome that I just forgot how invasive and consistent it was.

I would add that the United States' anti-monopoly laws have been all but completely ignored by the federal government for at least 20 years. Microsoft started to catch some heat in the 1990s, which is why they propped up Apple with a small investment at one point. And Google has been the biggest contributor to the Mozilla foundation, so I think they are worried or at least at one point were worried that anti-monopoly lawsuits would come for their browser share.

(Maybe off-topic) Realized this might be one reason that Apple doesn't care about the market share at all.
10% market share means it would be really hard to bring Apple to the court with an antitrust lawsuit (What Apple did on iOS for Safari is fundamentally no difference from MS did on Windows 98 for IE).
Meanwhile Apple can still enjoy tremendous net profit from the high end market.

[Vistaus]

do you use google android or something completely different? i mean, is your hardware called "google pixel" ?

I'm not using a Google Pixel, but it's a stock version of Android.

[Vistaus]

Get a Pixel or an Android One device. Don't judge Android by the crap third parties pre-install.

I'm using an Android One device, so there's no third-party crap (and even if there was, I could easily remove it 'cause I'm rooted). But performance isn't my main gripe: it's the confusing OS with inconsistent app behavior that's my main gripe.

[onicsis]

Mozilla sits on a mountain of money but still but many of their products are useless crap

[Michael_S]

Software freedom has nothing to do with this, we are still talking about two open source browsers.
Chrome is not open source but Chromium from which it derives is, I use Chromium and not Chrome.

Chromium is open source, but Google won't accept any patches to it that make changes they dislike. So Google is effectively gaining control over the evolution of web standards by controlling the core project that the great majority of browsers uses. Anyone can fork Chromium, but unless they can somehow attract millions of users their fork will end up being an insignificant niche product.

[L_A_G]

So they weren't satisfied with just decimating the developer tools teams? I'm probably not the only one imagining that classic image of someone sitting on a tree branch as they're sawing off said branch from between themselves and the trunk of the tree.


For those who don't see why decimating the developer tools teams is such a big deal, I'll explain it with a few rhetorical questions and answers;

What's the most basic thing a browser needs to do (apart from actually running)? - To be able to display websites and do so correctly

What ensures that this is always the case? - Developer tools

So what's happening to those? - Almost everyone who works on them are right now being sacked