The history of browser hegemony is quite reincarnation.
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Editor’s note: The history of hegemony in the browser has a taste of reincarnation. At first Netscape took the lead, then Microsoft used the operating system’s monopoly position to make IE usurp successfully. However, this kind of support that lacks inherent advantages finally sits instability. Firefox, which has a deep connection with Netscape, has become popular with its smooth performance, rich features, and higher security. It has been around for three minutes at the peak. One. However, as Google launched Chrome with huge R & D and marketing resources, Firefox began to decline. However, the story may not be over. As users increasingly value privacy, Google, which relies on advertising, is constrained, and Firefox, which is constantly increasing in privacy and performance, may come back. As Firefox celebrates its 15th anniversary, Sean Captain reviews and looks forward to this browser. Originally published on Fastcompany, titled: Firefox at 15: its rise, fall, and privacy-first renaissance
According to Statcounter data, it is very likely that you are reading this article with Google ’s Chrome browser. The search giant ’s browser has already occupied 65% of the global market (about 50% in the United States). Today, only about 4% to 5% of web surfers go online via Firefox, the open source browser of the Mozilla Foundation in California. However, when Firefox was launched 15 years ago on November 9, 2004, the web was very different from today, and since then the browser has begun to rise rapidly.
When Firefox first came to the stage, Internet Explorer, which knocked down Netscape Navigator, already occupied more than 90% of the market. Since it is the default browser on Windows, and Windows has a similar market share in the operating system market, the monopoly of IE seems to be permanentof. But Firefox quickly became popular and eventually peaked in 2009, occupying a third of the market share. Although it is unlikely that Firefox will regain its former glory, this browser is undergoing a certain degree of renaissance. This is not only achieved by improving speed and improving functions, but also because it puts control of privacy in the hands of users on.
Fifteen years have passed, and it’s hard to imagine how radical Firefox was when it debuted. Firefox was not created by a large company like Microsoft (or Google today), but was developed by volunteers who provided code for free around the world. In 1998, Mitchell Baker co-founded the Mozilla project, and today he is chairman of the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation. He said: “Developers know about open source. But the prevailing view at the time was that open source was only for geeks. You can develop [tools] for developers, but you cannot use open source to develop consumer products.”
In 2004, the first version of Firefox was launched.
Firefox offers more than technical utopian ideals. It was developed with security in mind, and appeared at a time when IE 6 bundled with Windows XP fell into a security crisis. “The browsers most people used at the time had security risks,” Baker said. The US government even warned consumers about the security risks of IE, which provided an excellent opportunity for the development of Firefox.
In addition to security, Firefox also provides a streamlined, easy-to-understand interface, fast performance, and rich features. Before Microsoft even realized the value of this feature, it made paged browsing mainstream. Firefox also provides powerful support for technologies such as JavaScript (invented by Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich) and standards such as CSS. They allow Web pages to work the same way regardless of browser. It also provides Expand to make customization almost unlimited. The benefits of switching browsers are obvious and easy—in fact, many people do.
In 2009, my colleague Harry McCracken commented on FAt the fifth anniversary of the birth of irefox, “It is possible that there are still some cross-worlds where Firefox has not appeared, where IE still has a monopoly market share, and the Web is a much more boring place.” < br>
Firefox’s bold, non-profit characterises its business origins. In fact, it came from Netscape, the once dominant browser maker, which was the first major IPO in the Internet age (1995). Netscape is the creator of the first major web browser, Mosaic. In 1998, Netscape announced that its browser code would be open sourced in the Mozilla (mixed word composed of Mosaic and Godzilla) project. (The original red dinosaur logo was designed by street artist Shepard Fairey, who was also the designer of Obama ’s famous “Hope” poster.)
In 1999, Internet giant AOL acquired Netscape, which has since been involved in a slow vortex of unavoidable corporate acquisitions. But thanks to the Mozilla project, this technology lives longer than the original company. The project originally created a browser under the name Mozilla. The version that was eventually called Firefox was led by Joe Hewitt, Dave Hyatt, and Blake Ross. It was initially called Phoenix, and then changed to Firebird. Later, it was officially released under the name of Firefox in 2004 due to trademark issues. .
Firefox in its fifth anniversary in 2009.
The dark days
2009 was a high point, marking the start of Firefox’s sharp turn and has not yet recovered. This fall can be summed up in one word: Chrome. In 2008, Google’s browser was born, it brought more gorgeous, and most importantly, provided a faster experience.
Baker said, “The first few versions of Chrome are indeed better. I must admit it.”
Google invests a lot of new technology into the core (called the engine) of the Chrome browser, which makes browsingThe efficiency of the device is greatly improved. Firefox is built on an aging code base that cannot keep up. (I have been a Firefox user since the beginning, but I remember that I quickly gave up the browser after Chrome appeared.)
Google also has the advantage of having a huge development and marketing budget. With the advent of smartphones in the late 2010s, Google found that its largest mobile platform gave Chrome the inherent advantages Internet Explorer had in the 1990s. Apple has similar advantages on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, which makes Safari the second most popular browser in the world (about 16% of the market). Unlike Microsoft 15 years ago, Google and Apple did not stop improving because of complacency after gaining huge market share.
(Before the Chrome browser appeared, Google was very enthusiastic about Firefox, and even promoted the browser on the homepage of its search engine. Even after launching the Chrome browser in 2008, the company still passed a Google’s deal to become Firefox’s default search engine boosts the latter’s revenue because the advertising revenue it receives is split from Mozilla. In 2017, Mozilla made more than $ 500 million in revenue from this type of advertising and has been working with Yahoo for some time After that, Google became its main partner again.)
Firefox crashed because Mozilla launched a series of failed products. In 2004, it also launched an email client called Thunderbird, but this client never stood out in front of the industry-leading Microsoft Outlook. In 2013, Mozilla launched a lightweight mobile operating system called Firefox OS, intended to challenge Android / iOS duopoly. They also developed a handful of phones but failed to attract public interest, and Firefox OS was scrapped in 2017.
Some special Mozilla applications have been spared, such as Bugzilla, an application used to track software errors. However, the foundation’s focus is increasingly tilted towards developing Web browsers, but not so well.
Quantum, introduced in late 2017, offers a faster and more gorgeous experience.
Huge breakthrough
Selena Deckelmann, an engineer who joined Mozilla in 2012, is now the senior director of Firefox browser design. “I think, as an engineering organization, we have become very complacent for a while,” he said. Deckelmann’s first job was to analyze crash reports generated by the browser when problems occurred, so she was able to know the product’s failures early. The downturn in Firefox may indicate the disadvantages of non-profit, volunteer-led projects. Because there is no need to please shareholders, in the absence of business pressure, the organization may neglect to remain competitive.
One of Firefox’s problems is its inability to keep up with the development of modern computer hardware, including its inability to take advantage of the concurrent computing capabilities of multiple CPUs and GPUs. Mozilla has been working on a series of relatively small improvements, but this small change has changed dramatically at the end of 2016. David Bryant, vice president of platform engineering at Mozilla, announced the development of a new browser engine called Quantum. Deckelmann said, “It’s like the next book. Now, our focus is starting to shift more explicitly to performance.”
The first version of Quantum-based Firefox came out in November 2017, and is expected to double the performance of the dull predecessor. This is undoubtedly a huge improvement and has won praise, but at best it can only make Firefox equal to Chrome.
Privacy has become a key feature of Firefox in 2019.
Privacy as a killer 锏
Just like competitors is not enough to win converts from market-leading products. However, Firefox is better than Chrome in protecting user privacy. In the process of transitioning to Quantum, Mozilla introduced a series of technologies to prevent advertisers, social networks and even Internet service providers from tracking and analyzing your personal data. (This, coupled with the tolerable speed, made me re-use Firefox again, and also made many other people take a closer look at it.Looked. )
Chrome is unlikely to want to compete with Firefox over privacy issues. Google ’s huge wealth comes from online advertising, which is based on collecting as much user information as possible on as many devices as possible. Obstructing this process in any way threatens its core business model.
In contrast, Mozilla is a non-profit organization whose foundation is based on the utopian ideals embodied in Baker’s 2007 Mozilla mission statement. It lists 10 principles around the core concepts of free software, universal access to the Internet, and interoperable technologies. Principle 4 states: “Personal security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental principles and must not be considered optional.” (The declaration was updated in 2018, adding values such as human dignity, tolerance, and “civilian discourse.” )
The existence of a manifesto marks the difference between Mozilla and competitors of other major browser manufacturers. The Mozilla Foundation is both a software maker and an activist organization, and these two activities are inseparable.
Take the Cambridge Analytica scandal as an example, the data of tens of millions of Facebook users was exposed to this political consulting company. In protest, Mozilla pulled ads from Facebook and launched a petition asking the company to modify its user privacy settings. Not only that, Mozilla also used code as a weapon to fight back and developed a Firefox plug-in called Facebook Container. This plug-in will limit the social network’s ability to collect user data from the browser, such as those opened in other tabs or windows. website.
Mozilla has been stepping up its efforts to track various user behaviors, such as third-party (or cross-site) cookies, that is, files placed in a browser by a site to view all other sites visited by a person . As an optional feature of the experimental pre-release version of the browser, the so-called enhanced tracking protection feature was launched in August 2018. Later it became an optional feature of the mainstream version. In September of this year, Mozilla started blocking by default. In addition to third-party cookies, browsers now also block other trackers, such as the code for online advertising and the social media “share” buttons everywhere on the web.
As expected, Google ’s response has been less positive. In August, it jumped out of opposition to blocking third-party cookies, arguing that it would encourage marketers to design more subtle ways to track users. One method is the so-called fingerprint recognition, which collects specific settings (such as installed plug-ins) on your computer and web browser and forms unique identifiers. The latest version of Firefox 70 is already availableIncluded fingerprint shielding function.
However, Mozilla is not alone in protecting privacy. Apple’s shielding of the tracker is at least as active as Safari will block it, and it also uses this as a reason to sell iPhones, iPads and its computers.
Promotional offensive
Mozilla on the one hand is strengthening privacy protection, and on the other hand, it is also raising the voice of privacy publicity. “For a long time, we thought it was best to be as quiet as possible,” Baker said. “Do everything well behind the scenes, don’t bother or have to say it.” But over the past 18 months, Increasing awareness and concerns about security risks are beginning to change.
In addition to turning on tracking protection by default, the latest version of Firefox also introduces a “Privacy Protection” dashboard, which will detail all blocked trackers in the past week by type. Users can also click the button at the top of the browser to see all trackers blocked on each site.
The privacy protection dashboard tracks the types of traces that have been blocked for a period of time and explains how each trace works.
Mozilla doesn’t just dump statistics to users. The dashboard is minimalistic in design, and color-coded bar charts provide an overview of the different types of trackers that are blocked. It also provides an interpreter to clearly describe the functions of different types of trackers.
Deckelmann says simplifying complex information for users is a major challenge. She said: “This is a common engineering problem. How can you turn all of these things into a story that everyone can understand? That’s what I want to focus on now: focus on that story To help everyone really understand the state of the web. “
Mozilla can not only help you understand how your browser works in the background, but also help users adjust these settings. The advanced tracking protection option was enabled about a year ago, and Mozilla is now turned on by default. If this feature causes the website to behave abnormally, users can still disable it. And users can turn on stricter switches to prevent more tracking technology, but this may affect the operation of the web page.
Baker says, “What we Firefox is trying to do is make everyone haveMore ability to change your online life. You should have some autonomy in your experience. These should not all be determined by large organizations. “
But if only 4% or 5% of web users use these privacy tools, how useful are these tools? Deckelmann said: “We are working hard to increase our visibility and help everyone back to Firefox. But we have another job to actively influence policies and make the web develop in a direction that is beneficial to users.”
As an active organization, Mozilla continues to grow and actively promotes reforms such as net neutrality regulations and Facebook privacy reforms. It also strives to establish new technical standards, such as standards that make it harder for Internet service providers to see which websites a browser visits.
On the product side, Firefox serves as a test bed, proving the effectiveness of technologies such as privacy initiatives for the rest of the web. “We hope that each of these technologies we develop can be used by all browsers,” Deckelmann said.
The vision of Mozilla and Firefox is to expand people’s access to information and exchange with each other, rather than make the company rich. The browser’s popularity in the beginning of 2004 was not only helpful for Mozilla. It also challenges existing players to make improvements and inspires new competitors to join, helping the entire Internet. Fifteen years later, Firefox standing to the right of Chrome and Safari may seem small. But it’s still pushing for new technologies that promote openness and security, helping everyone online.
Translator: boxi.