Linux 桌面上的 Firefox 面临着大问题
Firefox
![](/data/attachment/album/202308/15/113626l4oa08c0j4jj5z0b.jpg)


毫无疑问，无论是在桌面、笔记本电脑还是移动设备上，**浏览器都是任何操作系统中最重要的应用之一**。如果没有一个功能强大、快速且稳定的浏览器，操作系统的实用性将大幅度降低，以至于我相当确定，**如果一个操作系统没有浏览器，几乎没有人会将其用于常规、正常的使用**。拥有一个起码可用的浏览器是将操作系统从娱乐玩具升级到你可以使用超过 10 分钟的有趣新奇物品的关键。


但问题在于，开发一个功能强大的浏览器实际上非常困难，因为浏览器本身已经成为一个功能丰富的平台。承担起从零开始构建浏览器的巨大任务并不是很多人感兴趣的事情——[除了那些疯狂的人](https://www.ladybird.dev/)——而这一切被恶化的原因是，由于市场的合并和垄断，与剩下来的三个浏览器引擎竞争基本上是无济于事的。Chrome 和其各种衍生产品的[占据统治地位](https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share)，其次是 iOS 上的 Safari，原因仅仅是因为你在 iOS 上不能使用任何其他浏览器（引擎）。然后就是 Firefox，作为一个**远远落后的第三名**而存在——且份额还在下滑。


这就是 Linux 桌面发行版所处的环境。长期以来，**Linux 桌面几乎完全依赖于 Firefox**（和之前的 Mozilla 套件）作为它们的浏览器，一些用户选择在安装后下载 Chrome。尽管 GNOME 和 KDE 名义上都有自己的两个浏览器，[GNOME Web](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web) 和 [Falkon](https://www.falkon.org/)，但其用户数量有限，发布的版本也寥寥无几。例如，没有一个主要的 Linux 发行版会将 GNOME Web 作为其默认浏览器，并且它缺少用户对浏览器期待的许多功能。相比之下，Falkon 只会偶尔更新，往往几年才发布一个新版本。更糟糕的是，Falkon 通过 [QtWebEngine](https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine) 使用的是 Chromium 引擎，而 GNOME Web 使用的是 WebKit（它们独立于浏览器更新，所以浏览器版本并不总是一个可靠的指标！），所以**两者都依赖于世界上最无情的两个公司——谷歌和苹果的善意**。


即使是 Firefox 本身，尽管它显然是 Linux 发行版和 Linux 用户的首选浏览器，也并**不将 Linux 视为一线平台**。**Firefox 首先是一个 Windows 浏览器，然后是 macOS，最后是 Linux。**Linux 世界对 Firefox 的热爱并没有得到 Mozilla 同样的回应，这种情况在许多地方表现出来，**那些在 Windows 端修复和解决的问题在 Linux 端被忽视了好几年甚至更久。**


**这种情况最好、最明显的例子就是硬件视频加速。**这个功能从一开始就是 Windows 版本的默认部分，但是直到 2023 年 7 月初发布的 [Firefox 115](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/07/firefox-115-intel-gpu-video-decoding-on-linux)，才在 Linux 上默认启用。即使是这样，这个功能也只是默认为英特尔显卡用户开启，并没有 AMD 和英伟达用户什么事。这种视频加速功能的缺失（对于 AMD 和英伟达用户来说，仍旧如此），是 **Linux 笔记本电脑在电池寿命上与 Windows 对手差距严重的一个主要因素。**


然后，要走上这条路一直都是漫长、艰巨、且充满颠簸。长久以来，要让硬件视频加速在 Linux 的 Firefox 上工作一直复杂而不稳定，每一个浏览器版本可能都会改变你需要设置的标志。有时候无论你怎么做，它可能都会在连续几个版本中停止工作。论坛消息、博客帖子和网站文章中充满了过时的指令和像 [Hail Mary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail_Mary) 一样的建议，供那些试图让它运行的用户参考。你以往的成功经验会随着每个版本的发布而变化，而跟踪所有这些都是一种**噩梦**。


不仅仅是硬件加速视频解码。手势支持在 Linux 版本上的推出比在 Windows 版本上要晚得多——比如使用滑动来前进和后退，或者在图片上捏合来进行缩放。同样，触摸屏支持也在 Linux 版本的 Firefox 上晚了一段时间才出现。通常，此类功能可能在默认启用之前几年就可以通过 `about:config` 指令启用，但这远非理想情况。


桌面 Linux 的普及率落后于 Windows 和 macOS，**这并不是什么意想不到的情况，或出于恶意的结果。**前几段的重点并不是抱怨 Linux 版 Firefox 的状态，或者建议 Mozilla 将 Windows 和 macOS 版本的宝贵资源转移到 Linux 版本。虽然如果他们这么做的话，我显然不会抱怨这些，但这并没有多大意义。我强调这些问题的真正原因是，如果今天在 Mozilla 现有的财力和资源下，Linux 版的 Firefox 已经被视为第三级平台，那么**如果 Mozilla 的财力和资源急剧减少，将会发生什么？**


Firefox 的状况并不太好。它的市场份额在这些年里急剧下滑，现在在桌面和笔记本电脑上仅占有微薄的 3%，而在移动设备上更是微不足道的 0.5%。Chrome 和稍少的 Safari 已经完全压倒了这个曾经威猛的浏览器，以至于它对于 Linux/BSD 用户和其他平台上的更多极客来说，基本上就是一个附带的产品。我说这个并不是为了贬低那些使用 Firefox 的人——我就是其中之一——而是为了强调 Firefox 当前市场位置的糟糕程度。**这种市场份额的缩小已经对 Firefox 的开发和未来前景构成了伤害**，尤其是如果这种滑坡还在继续的话。


然而，市场份额的下滑远非最大的问题。摆在 Firefox 头顶的达摩克利斯之剑是 **Mozilla 非常奇怪且失衡的收入来源**。大多数人可能都知道，Mozilla 的大部分收入来自与谷歌的搜索合作。大约 80% 的 Mozilla 的收入 [来自谷歌](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates)，后者支付给这个浏览器制造商费用，以将谷歌搜索设为默认搜索引擎。


这份协议还会持续多久？无论 Firefox 陷入多么糟糕的情况，它还会一直续约吗？合作的规模会缩小，还是会完全结束？什么时候，谷歌会觉得每年在本质上是对竞争对手的慈善上投入数亿美元已经不再值得，或者根本不需要？谷歌与苹果的类似搜索交易已经面临 [法律审查](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-search-deal-doj-antitrust-suit-2020-10?op=1&r=US&IR=T)；那么这种审查会对与 Mozilla 的交易产生影响吗？


只需问自己这个问题：如果由于 Firefox 的市场份额进一步下滑，与谷歌的交易泡汤，两者结合起来，或甚至这里未提到的其他因素，导致 **Mozilla 的资金短缺，哪个版本的 Firefox 将首先感受到削减？**Mozilla 会采取什么措施来缓解困境？当 Mozilla 日益绝望时，我们是否会看到与其他公司的肮脏交易？不靠谱的加密货币概念？允许广告以换取收入？更多的推荐的网站和扩展，需要付费？还是 Linux 版本将被全部削减，让社区接管？


**这就是 [Thunderbird](https://www.osnews.com/story/26159/mozilla-to-cease-development-on-thunderbird/) 所经历的。**Thunderbird 花了近十年的时间才完全恢复。这也可能发生在 Linux 的 Firefox 上。


这就是桌面 Linux 的 Firefox 所面临的问题。这个最重要的桌面 Linux 应用程序已经处于**非常困难的境地**，而且似乎不可避免的是，事态只会逐渐变得更糟。然而，我并**没有看到有人在谈论这个问题**，或者考虑 Firefox 最终可能的消亡，这对 Linux 桌面意味着什么，以及如何避免或减轻这种情况。


在理想的世界里，Linux 桌面的主要利益相关者 —— KDE、GNOME，各种主要的发行版 —— 会聚在一起，严肃地考虑一项行动计划。在我看来，最好的可能解决方案是复刻一个主要的浏览器引擎（或选择一个并大幅投入），并修改这个引擎，并专门为 Linux 桌面进行定制。**停止生活在 Windows 和 macOS 浏览器制造商的残羹冷炙中**，完全专注于制作一个完全为 Linux 及其图形堆栈和桌面优化的浏览器引擎。让主要的利益相关者共同在一个 Linux 首选—— 或甚至仅限于 Linux —— 的浏览器引擎上共同努力，而将图形前端留给各种工具箱和桌面环境。


显然，这并不容易，需要在时间、资源和人员方面进行重大投资。然而，通过仅专注于 Linux，你不会真正与 Blink 和 WebKit 竞争，因为他们完全不重视桌面 Linux（Chrome 在 Linux 上仍然没有硬件视频加速）。让其他引擎去为各种专有平台争夺——Linux 需要一个独立于谷歌（和苹果）的浏览器引擎，并且**认真将 Linux 作为一个平台对待。**


我真的很担心 Linux 上浏览器的状态，特别是 Firefox 在 Linux 上的未来。我认为桌面 Linux 社区的各种主要参与者，从 GNOME 到 KDE，从 Ubuntu 到 Fedora，**显然对于 Firefox 出问题或死亡完全没有应急计划**，尽管我们都知道当前的浏览器市场状态、Mozilla 的财务状况和两者的未来前景。这种行为实在是太不负责任了。


**Linux 桌面的 Firefox 面临着大问题，但似乎没有人愿意承认它。**


*（题图：MJ/0c6cebcc-3c94-4ac1-86cc-ecfa828d33e7）*




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via: <https://www.osnews.com/story/136653/desktop-linux-has-a-firefox-problem/> 


作者：[Thom Holwerda](https://www.osnews.com/story/author/thom-holwerda/) 选题：[wxy](https://github.com/wxy) 译者：[wxy](https://github.com/wxy) 校对：[wxy](https://github.com/wxy)


本文由 [LCTT](https://github.com/LCTT/TranslateProject) 原创编译，[Linux中国](/article-16092-1.html) 荣誉推出


OK
There’s no denying that the browser is the single-most important application on any operating system, whether that be on desktops and laptops or on mobile devices. Without a capable, fast, and solid browser, the usefulness of an operating system decreases exponentially, to the point where I’m quite sure virtually nobody’s going to use an operating system for regular, normal use if it doesn’t have a browser. Having an at least somewhat useable browser is what elevates an operating system from a hobby toy to something you could use for more than 10 minutes as a fun novelty.

The problem here is that making a capable browser is actually incredibly hard, as the browser has become a hugely capable platform all of its own. Undertaking the mammoth task of building a browser from scratch is not something a lot of people are interested in – [save for the crazy ones](https://www.ladybird.dev/) – made worse by the fact that competing with the three remaining browser engines is basically futile due to market consolidation and monopolisation. Chrome and its various derivatives are [vastly dominant](https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share), followed by Safari on iOS, if only because you can’t use anything else on iOS. And then there’s Firefox, trailing far behind as a distant third – and falling.

This is the environment desktop Linux distributions find themselves in. For the longest time now, desktop Linux has relied virtually exclusively on shipping Firefox – and the Mozilla suite before that – as their browser, with some users opting to download Chrome post-install. While both GNOME and KDE nominally invest in their own two browsers, [GNOME Web](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web) and [Falkon](https://www.falkon.org/), their uptake is limited and releases few and far between. For instance, none of the major Linux distributions ship GNOME Web as their default browser, and it lacks many of the features users come to expect from a browser. Falkon, meanwhile, is updated only sporadically, often going years between releases. Worse yet, Falkon uses Chromium through [QtWebEngine](https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine), and GNOME Web uses WebKit (which are updated separately from the browser, so browser releases are not always a solid metric!), so both are dependent on the goodwill of two of the most ruthless corporations in the world, Google and Apple respectively.

Even Firefox itself, even though it’s clearly the browser of choice of distributions and Linux users alike, does not consider Linux a first-tier platform. Firefox is first and foremost a Windows browser, followed by macOS second, and Linux third. The love the Linux world has for Firefox is not reciprocated by Mozilla in the same way, and this shows in various places where issues fixed and addressed on the Windows side are ignored on the Linux side for years or longer.

The best and most visible example of that is hardware video acceleration. This feature has been a default part of the Windows version since forever, but it wasn’t enabled by default for Linux until [Firefox 115](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/07/firefox-115-intel-gpu-video-decoding-on-linux), released only in early July 2023. Even then, the feature is only enabled by default for users of Intel graphics – AMD and Nvidia users need not apply. This lack of video acceleration was – and for AMD and Nvidia users, still is – a major contributing factor to Linux battery life on laptops taking a serious hit compared to their Windows counterparts.

The road to even getting here has been a long, hard, and bumpy one. For years and years now, getting video acceleration to work on Firefox for Linux was complicated and unreliable, with every release of the browser possibly changing what flags you needed to set, and sometimes it would just stop working for several releases in a row altogether, no matter what you did. There’s a venerable encyclopaedia of forum messages, blog posts, and website articles with outdated instructions and [Hail Mary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail_Mary)-like suggestions for users trying to get it to work. Conventional wisdom would change with every release, and keeping track of it all was a nightmare.

It’s not just hardware accelerated video decoding. Gesture support has taken much longer to arrive on the Linux version than it did on the Windows version – things like using swipes to go back and forward, or pinch to zoom on images. Similarly, touchscreen support took a longer time to arrive on the Linux version of Firefox, too. Often, such features could be enabled with about:config incantations for years before becoming enabled by default, at least, but that’s far from an ideal situation.

With desktop Linux trailing both Windows and macOS in popularity, there’s nothing unexpected or inherently malicious about this, and the point of the previous few paragraphs is not to complain about the state of Firefox for Linux or to suggest Mozilla transfers precious resources from the Windows and macOS versions to the Linux version. While I obviously wouldn’t complain if they did so, it wouldn’t make much sense. The real reason I’m highlighting these issues is that if Firefox for Linux is already treated as a third wheel today, with Mozilla’s current financial means and resources, what would happen if Mozilla saw a drastic reduction in its financial means and resources?

Firefox is not doing well. Its market share has dropped radically over the years, and now sits at a meagre 3% on desktops and laptops, and a negligible 0.5% on mobile. Chrome and to a lesser extent Safari have trampled all over the venerable browser, to a point where it’s effectively an also-ran for Linux/BSD users, and a few more nerds on other platforms. I’m not saying this to disparage those who use Firefox – I’m one of them – but to underline just how dire Firefox’ current market position really is. This shrinking market share must already be harming the development and future prospects of Firefox, especially if the slide continues.

The declining market share is far from the biggest problem, however. The giant sword of Damocles dangling above Firefox’ head are Mozilla’s really odd and lopsided revenue sources. As most of us are probably aware, Mozilla makes most of its money from a search deal with Google. [Roughly 80% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates), who pays the browser maker to set Google Search as the default search engine.

How long will this deal continue? Will it be renewed indefinitely, regardless of how much farther Firefox slides into irrelevance? Will the size of the deal drop, or will it end altogether? When will Google decide that spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year in what is essentially charity for a competitor is no longer worth it, or needed? Google’s similar search deal with Apple is [already facing legal scrutiny](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-search-deal-doj-antitrust-suit-2020-10?op=1&r=US&IR=T); will that scrutiny have consequences for the deal with Mozilla, too?

Just ask yourself this question – if Mozilla’s funding dries up because Firefox’ market share declines further, the Google deal falls through, a combination of the two, or even other factors not mentioned here – *which version of Firefox is going to feel the cuts first*? What will Mozilla do to soften the blow? Are we going to see sleazy deals with other companies as Mozilla grows increasingly desperate? Shady crypto nonsense? “Allowed” ads in exchange for revenue? More suggested websites and extensions, for a price? Or will the Linux version just get cut entirely, left to the community to take over?

Exactly this [happened to Thunderbird](https://www.osnews.com/story/26159/mozilla-to-cease-development-on-thunderbird/). It took Thunderbird almost a decade to fully recover. This could happen to Firefox for Linux, too.

This is desktop Linux’ Firefox problem. The single most important desktop Linux application is already in dire straits, and it seems inevitable that things are only going to get worse from here on out. Yet, I don’t see anyone talking about this problem, or planning for the eventual possible demise of Firefox, what that would mean for the Linux desktop, and how it can be avoided or mitigated.

In an ideal world, the major stakeholders of the Linux desktop – KDE, GNOME, the various major distributions – would get together and seriously consider a plan of action. The best possible solution, in my view, would be to fork one of the major browser engines (or pick one and significantly invest in it), and modify this engine and tailor it specifically for the Linux desktop. Stop living off the scraps and leftovers thrown across the fence from Windows and macOS browser makers, and focus entirely on making a browser engine that is optimised fully for Linux, its graphics stack, and its desktops. Have the major stakeholders work together on a Linux-first – or even Linux-only – browser engine, leaving the graphical front-end to the various toolkits and desktop environments.

Obviously, this won’t be easy, and will take serious investments in time, resources, and people. However, by focusing entirely on Linux alone, you wouldn’t really be competing with Blink and WebKit, who don’t take desktop Linux seriously at all (Chrome still doesn’t have hardware video acceleration on Linux). Let those other engines fight for the various proprietary platforms – Linux needs a browser engine that is independent of Google (and Apple), and takes Linux seriously as a platform.

I’m genuinely worried about the state of browsers on Linux, and the future of Firefox on Linux in particular. I think it’s highly irresponsible of the various prominent players in the desktop Linux community, from GNOME to KDE, from Ubuntu to Fedora, to seemingly have absolutely zero contingency plans for when Firefox enshittifies or dies, despite everything we know about the current state of the browser market, the state of Mozilla’s finances, and the future prospects of both.

Desktop Linux has a Firefox problem, but nobody seems willing to acknowledge it.

The problem isn’t the software. Its the dummies in charge….. they made FirefoxOS and then abandoned it.

Today there are 170million KaiOS devices in use, if they made even $1 per phone that’d be rolling in cash enormous amounts of cash anyway you look at it… it would have been a non search revenue source of cash of in excess of several million a year.

> The problem isn’t the software. Its the dummies in charge…..

You’re right, but only partially.

> Today there are 170million KaiOS devices in use

Absolutely. And they have the licence: they can legally compel this.

Licence author: Mitch Baker, Mozilla CEO.

But also, don’t neglect Rust.

Mozilla invented *the* hottest new programming language. Then, in cutbacks, they killed it and laid off the team.

While Ms Baker took home a 6 digit paycheque.

Absolutely at least Rust is now a foundation…. probably better off that way.

Actually I’d say the problem is on the side of Linux but the SECOND you mention it the “Cult of FOSS” also known as the FOSSies, have a royal screaming REE! fest…its the lack of a stable ABI. Look even Linus Torvalds himself puts out some software that he only supports on Apple and Windows because of this and the reason why is obvious, trying to keep stuff running on Linux is like trying to hit a running dog with a live bee.

Try getting some driver or program from even 6-7 years ago running on an up to date Linux? I hope you have a CS degree, meanwhile last year I found a disc I burned full of software I figured I’d need for the new hotness, the Windows XP RTM so for the hell of it I tried installing them on Windows 11…and they all “just worked”, hell even my old jukebox/MP3 ripper which I thought for sure wouldn’t work…nope, it worked.

If you want companies to support you? Ya gotta meet them half way and making software releases on Linux a life time job just don’t cut it. And as we saw with Thunderbird the FOSSies can’t scream “Give us the code and we’ll do the work” because that is exactly what happened to TBird and it still hasn’t recovered and last I used it Thunderbird felt like a relic of the early 00s, certainly nothing near what pro email software offers in 2023.

So either accept you need what the other 2 has had for years, a stable ABI, or don’t be surprised when what is happening with FF on Linux is the state all software not made exclusively for Linux ends up.

bassbeast,

I HAVE a CS degree, and honestly there’s been lots of drivers that I couldn’t get to work

on windows, so although I agree there’s some truth to linux dependency issues, the new self contained packages are improving this. Meanwhile windows users shouldn’t throw rocks when their own house is made of glass. Seriously, there is SO muchwindows hardwareI’ve had to throw away over the years because windows stopped supporting it. Sometimes it’s even the case that linux will run it and windows won’t. It’s not always rosy for linux support either, but methinks these one-sided linux attackers need to step back and look at the whole situation.Is this supposed to be a criticism for linux? Windows users use thunderbird too. In fact it was my email client when I was a windows user.. MS outlook express was the inferior product for me. When I migrated to linux thunderbird was one of the applications I didn’t have to switch out. You can be critical of it if you like, but there aren’t many alternatives with the same level of features. Gmail has monopolized email, but for users who still prefer a full email application, thunderbird is still a top contender despite the project’s lack of resources.

Be careful not to conflate issues, when we talk about stable ABI in terms of linux we’re usually referring to the kernel’s internal ABI, which isn’t something that impacts userspace stability. The linux userspace ABI has been exceptionally stable and you can run software from decades ago. The linux userspace compatibility issues do not stem from linux stable ABI, but rather the stability of 3rd party userspace dependencies, which generally have no affiliation with the linux kernel. This is somewhat equivalent to the DLL hell issue on windows, and linux has it too. Generally the solution for this is either not to build software using 3rd party resources, or to bundle those resources with the software. This works on both windows and linux, but linux has historically not done this because the repositories were used to keep software dependencies in sync – something that windows simply didn’t have. But linux can support bundled dependencies as well, you can take a look at android, appimage, snap, flatpak for examples of this. There is a lot of debate over whether this is better or worse than the distro repository model and both approaches have some compelling justifications.

So I think there is a lot of merit in having an informed discussion around these topics, but we’ve got to look much deeper than these “linux sucks” rants that do little to advance the discussion.

khtml vibe…

It’s a huge task but there is also https://servo.org/ a quite active rust web engine.

Problem is that WebKit/chromium and firefox are too confortable and good enough right now and people lazy. That’s why we need crazy people or forward thinking people/companies.

CosmicWeb ?

I wouldn’t call servo quite active… it can’t even properly render the most essential pages. There appears to be no succesful effort to get it into a usable state probably because there anybody on a payroll to push it forward.

Even the ladybird browser is doing that very well at this point… probably mainly because it has someone pushing it forward in the right direction.

Checking commits:

https://github.com/servo/servo/commits/master

is visible that Igalia (OSS contributor specialists) is working on it…

and this recent presentation, the situation doesn’t looks so bad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfk8s5OD99A

Servo seemed like an attempt to rebuild all parts of Firefox at first, but the spreadsheets killed it off. Now it’s barely a proving ground for new tech ideas (I don’t even know if it’s still active). We did get a couple of pretty cool projects out of it though, Stylo and WebRender (not sure what else), which are integrated in Firefox now.

Arc (built on Blink, not WebKit – don’t get me started on Safari/WebKit) is showing that people are willing to trade up for value. But Firefox isn’t providing any value more than an 1:1 alternative for Chrome.

Thom, there are literally several dozen things you got wrong in your post.

Video HW acceleration: Firefox has had troubles with it because HW video acceleration has always been in a terribly fucked up state.

NVIDIA was the first to offer the community open source VDPAU but since the community was obsessed with the NIH syndrome, VAAPI followed. Too bad NVIDIA didn’t quite care. Then they eventually gave up on VDPAU, it started to trail the other implementation with no AV1 support, NVIDIA told everyone to start using NVDEC instead, it didn’t see any significant uptake, and then they eventually implemented AV1 decoding support in VDPAU. Now we still have VAAPI which sort of works and fully incompatible VDPAU. Mozilla decided not to support VDPAU in any shape or form.

Gesture support: I cannot comment on that because I’m not aware of any significant number of users who need or use this feature. 1 in 100 maybe? IMO it’s not really worth talking about.

Lastly.

Web engine development is hard and expensive, like really hard. Microsoft gave up on Edge and started using Chrome instead.

You’re talking about Linux as if some organizations with very deep pockets are standing behind it ready to pick up any development and support whatever necessary for Linux to succeed on the desktop.

The issue is, not a single organization in the world cares or is working to make the Linux desktop a competitive OS. None.

Main offers from RedHat, Ubuntu and Suse are RHEL, Ubuntu LTS and SLES all intended for enterprise/server use.

Linux on the desktop has been and remains a complete joke both in terms of money invested and the number of active users (fewer than 20 million). There’s no market for it either, as the vast majority of Linux users expect to get everything for free, they won’t spend a penny supporting anything for Linux.

How do you reconcile all those facts? A hobby OS, with few users and you ask Mozilla to spend more money properly supporting ~5% of its users? Why would they do so?

Your first need to have an actual well-supported OS, which can be used by your grandma, for which people can create proprietary software which can work for decades without recompilation and such. Windows is such an OS. Linux is a bug-ridden hobby OS where the knowledge of CLI and computing are a must to maintain your system. Once we have such an OS, guess what, even Chrome will support it better!

Lastly, Chromium supports HW video acceleration out of the box. I feel like you’ve forgotten it exists.

The truth Linux has an OS problem. It’s never become an actual OS outside of RHEL which is primarily a server OS. RHEL doesn’t use the mainline kernel (which doesn’t give a fuck about stable APIs/ABIs and breaks them regularly), doesn’t include modern software (for stability sake), doesn’t support modern HW.

/. has talked about this just today: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/08/12/1835204/should-there-be-an-official-version-of-linux

Your entire reply is a rambling jumble of nonsense, and a clear sign you haven’t read anything in the article. At all. We know you hate Linux. That’s fine. Why you, then, insist on always barging in with this gibberish is beyond me. Wouldn’t your life be more fun and mellow if you didn’t rage-bait like this?

Been contributing to Linux for over 20 years, using it as a primary OS on all of my computers, got mentioned in the kernel commit log at least a dozen times, initiated the resolution of OOM situation which resulted in systemd-oomd being written and incorporated by default which made Linux usable in low memory situations where it used to crap out hard before and … you call me a Linux hater and my comment a “rambling jumble of nonsense”?

OK, then, if you start with personal insults, then I’ll see myself out. You may as well delete/block my account on OSNews if you really believe I’m a Linux hater. Never expected something like that from you.

I can vouch for every sentence in my comment. Nothing in it was “nonsense” or “trolling”. I feel like someone has taken a huge dump on me. Sorry, I’ll just log out.

Well, for a start, your post is factually incorrect:

VA-API was developed by Intel and not ‘the community’ – see https://lwn.net/Articles/338581/

Later AST. I’m sure there are many Feecebook groups that have like minded people for you.

No more “here we go again” and tiring rebuttals to read.

Nice one Thom. Your article has hit Slashdot as well.

It’s very low of you to insult someone who brings forward very valid points about desktop Linux usability like that. The real-world stats speak for themselves and Linux doesn’t need die-hard fanatics with religious like attitude to succeed.

Artem S. Tashkinov,

That might have been true decades ago, but linux desktop has become much more usable on the desktop today. Canonical, despite controversies, deserve a lot of credit for making the desktop more user friendly. Also steam is making absolutely huge inroads for linux gamers. Linux isn’t as popular as the more dominant platforms, but clearly organizations are working on Linux desktop. I would say that Linux isn’t a one-size-fits-all OS, but that’s ok. It is extremely popular among developers, so much so that even microsoft have put aside their hatred and are supporting linux distros on windows.

You’re hatred of linux makes you ignorant to the fact that some of us are using it productively on the desktop today. Many of us are former windows users too, yet we found linux was a better OS

for us.Yes, I second Thom Holwerda, you are full of linux hate and it’s really tiresome to hear the thoughtless hater arguments over and over again. If linux doesn’t do it for you, that’s fine, stick with windows, macos, whatever…if you’ve got an OS that makes you happy then I’ll happy for you! IMHO it’s fine to criticize linux, especially when those criticisms are insightful! But too your arguments stem from anger issues more than rational considerations, and that just doesn’t create a good discussion.

Name one technology that cannonical has developed that has made Linux better on the desktop I’ll wait.

It certainly isn’t MIR.

upstart. It was replaced with SystemD, but it served as an improvement over sysv and showed the most conservative change wasn’t sufficient and the more radical SystemD was required to handle init.

I’ll also thank them for ubuntu tablet, that was the best linux tablet OS. Which isn’t saying much, and is just abandoned right now, but good effort no real hardware support which wasn’t completely their fault.

But their real contribution was in packaging and defaults. Ubuntu, especially the early versions made usb drives, dvd roms, media codec support easy as cake from first install with no headaches.

Fedora soon adopted many of those, and now its difficult to recommended over Fedora, but they deserve some credit.

A free LTM Desktop OS is also a nice contribution, that few others have done well.

Bill Shooter of Bul,

Upstart and Unity came to mind for me as well, though IMHO ubuntu had a positive impact on linux desktop earlier than these.

cb88,

Well, you’re asking for a specific home grown technology, and while canonical does have some to it’s name, I was thinking more about how Ubuntu contributed to making the linux desktop a well rounded experience in general Admittedly now days we take it more for granted, but originally most linux distros were quite hard to install and configure for non-hackers. Getting X configured and running was confusing and painful. Ubuntu took debian’s massive software collection and made it more accessible and streamlined for new users with live CDs & DVD that could easily be used to run and/or install a full desktop in a strait forward manor.

I suppose maybe we could haven gotten here without ubuntu, but I used to get tons of distros via “Linux Format” magazine and others, and IMHO ubuntu really was really one of the exceptional ones at that time. I believe without them linux adoption would have slowed. These days I actually prefer Mint though.

> There’s no market for it either, as the vast majority of Linux users expect to get everything for free, they won’t spend a penny supporting anything for Linux.

This is simply false. Valve, a company with extremely little patience for fruitless endeavors, has turned consumer Linux into a product that sells like hotcakes. Before that, people who run desktop Linux were already paying real money for games that run well on their OS, either natively or through Proton, which Valve also develops. According to Valve’s official surveys, there are more people running Steam on Linux than on MacOS (I doubt there are many people who bother to use Steam despite having no games on their account).

Not only that, but the Humble Bundle people have consistently reported Linux users as paying *more* on average: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/08/linux-users-pay-more-humble-indie-bundle-3

Sure, it’s just games, which are inexpensive compared to professional software. But there is still a difference between inexpensive and free.

Besides, when was the last time you or anyone you know paid for a web browser? Of course people expect them for free! That has been the status quo since the late 90s.

Linux users are not even asking for something they do not have. It is not 2004 anymore, desktop Linux is not the self inflicted torture it used to be. They are lamenting the gradual loss of something they DO have, which is a functional and dependable web browser. Firefox is not merely being neglected on Linux, it’s gone to hell in general because of Mozilla’s gross incompetence–Linux users are affected disproportionately, but everyone is affected. Chrome and its reskins are a joke, and I lament the inevitable day I have to give in and switch simply to get my most used sites to work correctly.

fr4nk,

Me too. I don’t think it will be a sudden switch, rather the incompatibilities will gradually cause more websites to break over time. Just this month, I was forced to use chrome to register a new credit card since the process failed under firefox. I didn’t investigate further, but obviously the company hadn’t tested it and didn’t care about alternatives. I see this all too often even with my own clients 🙁

The uncomfortable truth for me is that running alternatives is increasingly becoming an empty symbolic gesture: I cheat and run chrome when websites force me to. Ergo, the market is proving that websites don’t have to support alternatives, we’ll just give in to the monopolists anyway. Many will ride FF until it becomes truly defunct, but then what? Can FOSS projects get enough donations or free labor to develop them independently without becoming stale? I don’t know and have never had a good answer here. Sometimes corporate subsidies work, like a free base product with charges for corporate upgrades. But this hasn’t panned out great for browsers when more dominant browsers get bundled for free.

To be completely clear eyed – Steam on macOS is VERY HOBBLED.

It can’t run Windows games at all (no proton support on macOS), and even most macOS games won’t run because they are 32-bit and current versions of macOS can’t run 32-bit apps (which is one of those radically stupid things that Apple regularly does). (As a side note, it’s EASIER to run 32-bit Windows games on M1 hardware, than it is to run 32-bit macOS games… this is stupid, and Apple deserves every ounce of blame for it.)

Anyway, it’s not an apt comparison – Steam isn’t well supported on macOS. Games are – you can run games on macOS, including the Windows version of Steam. But it’s not an adequate comparison to compare the macOS version of Steam to really anything else. It’s just not well supported (I do hope that changes, but I don’t see a lot of incentive for Valve to poor resources in to proton on macOS, even though it should be technically possible for them to get it up and running on the latest versions of Metal and Rosetta 2).

CaptainN-,

Agreed, the lack of 32bit is apple’s fault.

Rosetta 2 is and always was a stop gap measure for macos, just like rosetta 1. Unless apple were prepared to open source and/or license Rosetta’s ARM emulation to 3rd parties, it would make little sense for steam to target it only for it to disappear in a few years.

While developing an emulator like apple’s is technically possible, I think it could be beyond the current scope of wine/proton, as the acronym states “wine is not an emulator”.

I did a search and came up with two projects that might help here…appearently these can run x86 steam games on ARM SBCs like RPI.

https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86

https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64

Alas 32bit applications still wouldn’t work on apple’s latest macs…

Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple turns off Rosetta 2 at some point (probably sooner, rather than later), because they do incredibly stupid things ALL THE TIME. For a lot of reasons, they really shouldn’t EVER turn it off (or at least give a stated long horizon of like 10 years). But I know they will, because they are Apple. And that makes building something on it a risky proposition.

I’m not sure if they could conceivably implement their own performant x86 emulation. From what I understand, Apple’s implementation in Rosetta 2 uses a hidden x86 memory model implemented in the m1 architecture, to radically improve the speed of their emulation vs. what is available to everyone else. I don’t know if they have documented that anywhere, or if they’d even allow anyone else to use that in their own code. I also am not certain they’d keep that around forever. They might remove that along with Rosetta 2 in some revision in the future (or likely remove Rosetta 2 long before they remove that support in hardware). This would be entirely stupid, but it’s Apple.

Somebody does not like Linux…

The first thing that is I want to say is that, while 20 million users may not be enough to sustain a viable commercial desktop, one of the great things about Open Source is that 20 million is still a huge number of users and more than enough to drive a viable community. That should be clear to somebody quoting /. as a source as I doubt that site has ever seen half that many users and the peak was long ago. /. is pre-Digg, pre-Fark, pre-Reddit, and now pre-Lemmy. I miss the /, effect. Blast from the past.

You are not wrong that the big money in Linux is in enterprise and the server. Behind that is certainly its absolute domination in the embedded market. Linux is the de-facto standard in the SBC market ( itself not that big ). “Desktop” Linux is probably behind all of those in absolute numbers. That said, you certainly cannot call Linux a “hobby OS” in my view. Linux is not cobbled together by a half-dozen enthusiasts.

First, Desktop Linux is still Linux and requires very little dedicated “operating system” work to be done as it inherits the Linux kernel. While you may not like Desktop Linux and for lots of valid reasons, even Microsoft has trouble competing with the features and performance of Linux because of all the kernel investment. Second, even desktop specific technologies get a lot of corporate backing. Obviously we have companies like Canonical ( Ubuntu ) which hopefully goes without saying. You say ( and are correct ) that Red Hat cares about Linux for RHEL but they are also authoring or sponsoring a bunch of decidedly desktop tech such as HDR ( high dynamic range colour ). One of the biggest drivers on the desktop these days is gaming and, on Linux, you have Valve ( the makers of Steam ) investing hugely in the Linux Desktop for gaming. Finally, like with the Apple ecosystem, there are hardware vendors that contribute to Desktop Linux to support their hardware business ( eg. System 76 ). The point here is that there are a lot of devs building Linux desktop tech as their day-job ( not as a hobby ).

A desktop is defined by its applications and Linux is the standard Open Source desktop. It is hard to find a class of application that is not available on Linux. There are typically numerous high-quality options. Often the best software in any given category is Open Source these days and, if that is the case, it probably runs best on Linux. On the distro I am typing this on, I think I have access to something close to 90,000 packages. That is a pretty deep bench of applications for a “hobby OS”.

There are even a fair number of commercial and proprietary applications available for Linux as well. This article is about web browsers. Both Google and Microsoft seem to think it is worth their time to make their browsers available for Linux. Why? Part of it may be because, while a smaller audience, it is who the Linux Desktop audience is made up of that makes it attractive. Why did Microsoft go to all the trouble of building WSL ( running Linux applications in Windows ) if nobody wanted to do that? It is clearly to keep developers from adopting Linux. Many were and many are. One of the biggest forces in tech is still “the cloud” and the standard “cloud architecture” is containerization ( micro-services, K8S, Docker, Podman ) and containers are native to Linux.

Which is to say that, while you may see it as “a joke”, it is totally viable to use Linux as your primary desktop. I do. I use it personally and professionally. Nothing that I have to do cannot be done and done well on Linux. Ironically, for your point and the point of Thom’s editorial, I can only say that because I use Microsoft Edge instead of Firefox sometimes as some video conferencing ( and other ) applications do not work well ( or at all ) on Firefox. So, thank God for the “non-hobby” desktop stuff Linux Desktop users have access to.

Now, all that said, there is no doubt that Desktop Linux is not displacing Windows or even MacOS anytime soon. It is also true that , relatively speaking, fewer commercial applications target Linux. Why is that? The /. article you link to does not posit that the problem is quality, as you have implied, but rather a lack of standardization. I buy this. There is no “Linux Desktop”. There is no dominant RHEL-like standard that application developers can target. At least, there did not used to be. I see Flatpak as finally addressing that problem. Instead of having to support 30 different “desktop” distributions, you can now just target Flatpak. It is not perfect yet but it is, in many ways, the standard, unified version of desktop Linux that the article you link to is asking for. On the gaming side, we finally have a stable ABI and a single “standardized” environment to target. Thanks to Proton, it is DirectX and Win32. It may not be what Richard Stallman had in mind but, as a practical matter, that is what is happening. So, the “application” side is starting to dial-in.

You do not have to like and certainly do not have to adopt desktop Linux. I am not here saying that it is awesome or better and that you are a fool if you do not use it. You made a lot of good points that I agree with. I certainly agree that, beyond the apps, the Linux desktop is pretty fragmented and even any given distro still introduces more “change” than most desktop users want. However, I cannot agree that desktop Linux is a “hobby OS” or “a joke”. The latter seems more subjective so I care to argue about it less. The level of commercial ( non-hobby ) involvement in making the Linux desktop viable is hard to ignore so completely though.

As you can probable guess, I am typing this on a Linux Desktop which also happens to be an old Macbook Pro. The reason that this particular machine is running a Linux desktop is that Linux provides a much more modern and vastly more capable desktop than Apple makes available to me on this hardware. But I guess I cannot expect that much from Apple as they do not have dramatically higher desktop market share than Linux does ( especially if you consider ChromeOS to be desktop Linux – which I do not ). Based on that, perhaps you consider ChromeOS ( or even MacOS ) to be a “hobby OS” as well.

> The issue is, not a single organization in the world cares or is working to make the Linux desktop a competitive OS.

Except ChromeOS. Which outsells Macs.

In $ terms, and note, each Mac is 3-4x the price of the average Chromebook, meaning ChromeBooks outsell Macs more than 4-5x times over.

Chromebooks have an average support lifespan of about 3 years. Over the last 3 years, ITRO of 100 million Chromebooks have sold.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/749890/worldwide-chromebook-unit-shipments/

Out of the box, they run nothing but ChromeOS, which is a Linux, based on Gentoo.

That is ~100 million Linux users. Counting in people on older machines and premium models with longer support, that’s 120-150 million, conservatively.

For contrast Ubuntu has more users than all other distros put together and it has maybe 40M users.

https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/#:~:text=How%20many%20people%20use%20Ubuntu,of%20all%20Linux%2Dpowered%20websites.

That means ChromeOS is 3-4x Ubuntu, and that means that desktop Linux is over 150M people. That is quite significant.

Are you sure?

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

I’ve made this point a lot of time – Linux is not an operating system the way folks understand that term (most define it as the complete stack – something comparable to Windows or macOS). Distros are more like an operating system on those terms.

Folks also don’t understand what goes in to adding a feature to Linux. It’s not the same as hacking some half-baked solution in to Windows, then never touching it again. There’s a great youtube channel by an engineer that used to work at Microsoft (Dave’s Garage) where he talks about some features he added in the 80s or 90s, that hasn’t been updated since (or has just barely been maintained). This is how commercial software is built, something is rapidly added to the point where it’s “just good enough”, then it sits there, often with all it’s bugs, which later become features that have to be maintained. That is why Windows’ multiple monitor support is still absolute trash in 2023, and why their color management and HDR support is laughably inadequate (macOS to Apple’s credit gets a lot of this right).

In Linux though, a proper spec has to be created, and then multiple distributed teams need to agree to that spec, probably write 9 more, before get the right one, and then it needs to get implemented correctly by all those teams. Watching the effort unfold around HDR has been a perfect example of this effort. All of that without a single (or often, without ANY) actual business model. The result will eventually be that Linux has the absolute best, most complete implementation of color management and HDR support, bar none. This has happened repeatedly with lots of other feature sets. Once Linux gets it, it’s the most solid implementation out there. But it takes TIME (especially for complex features, like color management/HDR, or a web browser).

App vendors like Mozilla with Firefox can’t just wave a magic wand and get the platform support they need for all this to work. Case in point, Firefox HAS (or at least did a few years ago) the best support for Wayland out of all the browsers. They have true 1st tier support for it, not just support through xwayland, like most of everyone else. It’s amazing fast, and amazingly responsive. But it’s buggy – because wayland itself isn’t quite ready yet (or wasn’t last I checked, I really gotta try out a recent version – my weekend project, just decided, it’s been too long).

I do wish Mozilla would more aggressively support the “desktop-ish” platforms that are being delivered to the market by vendors like Valve with Steam OS. There should be a top tier gaming mode Firefox implementation there. I do understand why they don’t – they’ve been burned by that type of effort before. I’d still like to see it.

The web has a Firefox problem. Open Source has a Firefox problem. It is not a Linux problem.

Yes, the web is in a dangerous spot with Blink ( Chrome ) having almost exclusive control of the web and with the only real alternative being the WebKit engine ( older Chrome ).

We need a viable Open Source web engine that is not controlled by a corporation. Obviously Blink ( Google ) and WebKit ( Apple ) are not that. To be honest though, Firefox is not really that either anymore as Mozilla is showing signs of being no better steward than the other two. I am really glad that you mentioned Ladybird as it could be a saviour here. They have a long way to go obviously but have actually made outstanding progress. I read this article the first time on Ladybird on Linux.

This editorial confuses me though. The success of Firefox is not really a Linux problem. As the editorial itself states, Firefox itself is not even Linux first. Firefox is a Windows browser that works on Linux. Although Firefox is my browser of choice, by the metric of being Linux specific, Firefox is no better than Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. Both Chrome and Edge are available for Linux and work great. In fact, I have to use Edge all the time ( on Linux ) for situations where Firefox does not work. Losing Firefox would be a tragedy but not because Linux has any worse browser support or options than Windows and MacOS.

I do not think that a Linux specific browser engine makes sense actually. Browser engines should be cross-platform. I am happy that Ladybird has gone this way instead of just being the browser for SerenityOS. We can have Linux specific browsers but they should be based on cross-platform browser engines.

Anyway, I agree that Firefox is in trouble. I also agree that the web is in a bad spot without an Open Source browser engine from “the community” instead of a corporation. Neither of those are really Linux problems though. At least, not in my view.

tanishaj,

I agree with your premise that the loss of firefox is not just a linux problem. Becoming dependent on a monopoly is a problem for everyone. Also I see nothing wrong with browsers being portable. Although I do have an example of how a dominant platform could negatively effect web browsers on other platforms: remember MS active-x, where MS were deliberately shoving windows specific technology into the browser? Had that succeeded, it would have been catastrophic for the open web, turning it into a platform for proprietary OS specific technology. Thankfully that failed.

Yes, thank God MS Active-X failed ( not that it has totally gone away sadly ). Cross-platform protects against the OS monopoly but not against the applications monopoly and, as Thom correctly states, the web browser is the most important application as it has the potential to provide a monopoly over the web. Google is certainly doing its best to use their dominance against us with nonsense like manifest v3 and now the Web Integrity API. Our only protection against this is to avoid monopolies. Sadly, network effects and economics work to create natural monopolies in tech.

I was going to say that Linux, despite its small share, plays an important role in preventing things like Active-X. Microsoft wants to run Edge on Linux and MacOS. If it was just one competitor, perhaps it would be worth trying to force them out. In that sense, Open Source acts a bit like what proponents hope for the Fediverse. It is ok if we all use the same instance as long as there are viable alternatives. It is ok if some of these alternatives have barely any adoption as long as it is enough to keep them going. That way, if the dominant instance starts to flex and act against the community interest, it is possible for us to credibly move to something else. Firefox, even with 5% market share, plays an important role in keeping Chrome honest but only as long as Firefox is good enough to credibly adopt. In many ways, desktop Linux plays the same role. One of the great things about Open Source is that 20 million users is more than enough to keep it viable even if 3% market share would never attract a viable commercial competitor.

tanishaj,

I totally agree, a project doesn’t necessarily have to be dominant to keep competition honest! It just needs to be viable such that users have the opportunity to switch. Linux isn’t going anywhere, thanks in part to how much investment it is getting from corporations using it in servers and appliances. Firefox on the other hand…well, I am more concerned about it. Mozilla don’t have a stable conflict-free business model. They have no reliable revenue once they exclude google. A ~3% market share wouldn’t actually be so bad for mozilla

as long as it were sustainable. This is still a fairly large market, but I’m not sure that mozilla’s user base are adequate for mozilla’s long term survival without wealthy corporate sponsors like those feeding linux.I hope so. They have a good browser for now IMHO. But to date mozilla’s hasn’t succeeded in diversifying their revenue stream from google and that’s troubling. I feel that a risk of failure is still in the cards.

I think the real issue is Open Source has a scaling problem. It’s very common to see one or two people launch a project. It’s very rare to see projects with hundreds of active contributors (the kernel being a single exception.) A browser requires hundreds of active contributors due to the scale of the task, and a community development effort of that scale just hasn’t materialized. Plenty has been written about how “we need” it, but the issue is lack of people willing to devote time to actually do it.

Serious question/thought experiment: if there were hundreds of active volunteer developers on Mozilla in 2002-2004, would MozillaCo even exist? Any attempt to go commercial would just cause the volunteers to move to their own fork, and we’d see something like the LibreOffice/OpenOffice split, where the active fork is the one that gains users.

The problem is that Open Source, like almost everything humanity does, requires leadership and organization. We like to tell ourselves that successful Open Source projects are an emergent property of self-interested engineers or users. This is only partially true.

The reason that I think that Ladybird may succeed is because of Andreas Kling and the community / culture he has built. It looks like it may actually grow and sustain large enough and long enough to get the job done.

As you say, Firefox is mostly a product of Mozilla ( the company ) and there is not a lot of evidence that it will survive without them ( hope I am wrong ). Mozilla started off as a foundation in 1998 and did not become a corporation until 2005. But it has never really been independent of a corporation, first Netscape, then AOL, and of course Mozilla Corp itself.

Have we ever really seen a truly independent web engine? I mean Blink ( Chrome ) used to be WebKit ( old Chrome, current Safari ) but it was KHTML before that ( part of the KDE project ). The truth is though that KHTML never had the required number of devs behind it as a community effort. It was not until Apple got involved that it became a viable alternative to Gecko ( Mozilla ), Trident ( old Microsoft ), or even Presto ( old Opera ). Even though Apple was pretty heavy handed with the KHTML effort when they created WebKit, WebKit is the closest we came to a viable web engine community maybe. At one point, we had quite a few entities collaborating on a single engine: Apple, Google, SONY, Nokia, BlackBerry, and others. No one company dominated that group. That changed when Google forked WebKit to create Blink. Now, even though there are many Blink based browsers, Google is totally in control of Blink and Apple dominates WebKit.

The danger for web engines seems to be getting dominated by a single company regardless of if that happens out of the gate or at some later time. There has to be enough of a “community” to thrive even when a major corporation is participating or, even harder, when that corp forks the project.

Not to open this can of worms but, by my observation, it is not the license but rather the vibrancy of the community that determines which projects will thrive and how easily the can resist being dominated by a corporation. And community appears to be about the leader and the culture they create more than anything. There is no web engine equivalent to “Linux” because there is no “Linus”. Again, I am holding out hope for Ladybird because I think maybe Andreas can be that guy. What is it with Scandinavians?

Thom Holwerda,

Are you talking about the media? Because we actually do talk about this quite a lot even here in the osnews comments. We’re no strangers to this discussion, but what can we really do about it?

If mozilla & firefox fail, some of us will look for forks of course, these will probably be chrome derivatives. What concerns me greatly is the browser DRM that google are developing right now. DRM is a drug for media companies, they’re eager to get on board any DRM train. Advertisers have an incentive. Banks, governments, other service providers, even porn sites could start using google’s DRM too. So browser DRM really could be the nail in the coffin for FOSS browser alternatives.

For their parts google, microsoft, and apple will say “we just provide the DRM API, it’s not our fault service providers are blocking alternative.s”, and from a legal perspective this argument might carry weight.

I don’t think that’s true, I think most of us in the industry do acknowledge it, but we don’t have an answer for it. Marketshare is driven by the ignorant masses; they use what’s bundled without concerning themselves about monopolization in the least.

If love to see a return of Opera (of old). Current Opera is a different beast, no longer really aimed at power users. And it’s heir (Vivaldi) is great but based on Chrome like all the others.

Would I pay £20/£30 for it? Yeah, I think I would. But that’s the catch. Open source, by its nature is a difficult beast to monetize. “Why pay for something I can get for free”?. And something that isn’t free (beer) won’t be included in any distro as a result.

I wonder if there is an engine already floating around that the community could really around though. Khtml was obviously absorbed and rebranded. But I wonder what else is out there.

Adurbe,

Yeah. I’m sure thousands of developers would be willing and able to do the work if only they could answer the question of making a living and getting paid. The irony is that silicon valley has so much money that it shouldn’t be a problem, but the bulk of it is going to the very top while the rest make a pittance. Capitalism has not produced a balanced economy.

Alfman, you always provide a great read and it was overdue to tip my hat.

However, I don’t think that money or funding was a problem. I’d rather ask: what exactly is missing from a practical perspective? What problem are we going to solve? Right now I only assess an Uncomfortable Feeling in the Guts for Google playing an important role. However, the source code is available. If the issue becomes pressing, we will fork and remain the status quo.

Andreas Reichel,

You are too kind sir 🙂

That’s a fair point, money isn’t necessarily the end all be all for FOSS. But as a developer myself I’ve dedicated most of my working life to paid contracts and I don’t know how to change this. I concede that my experience may not be representative, but personally I would struggle to support myself and my family working on FOSS without income. In all my years I haven’t come across even a single business taking an interest in sponsoring FOSS projects. I’ve probably been looking and working at the wrong places for this, but as someone who is not independently wealthy, I guess I need more guidance as to how one should make a living working on FOSS.

Honestly, working on a browser would be intriguing technical challenge, which is something I do enjoy. But doing it for free feels irresponsible to my family given cost of living expenses that don’t disappear when I donate my time. From where I’m sitting with my connections independent FOSS development doesn’t cover my cost of living. Maybe I could use better connections though? I really don’t know, but if I could find a way to support myself independently doing pure FOSS work I would seriously consider it.

I’m with you. As a paid professional myself (who values work life balance too!) It’s very hard to find an “in” to open source projects sometimes. If more organisations paid to work on opensource work then it would be great. But more often than not, the proprietary bit the company builds on top is the focus as that’s what makes them the money!

Seconded. I couldn’t support myself on FOSS. No way. It seems at least in my generation many were essentially working two full time jobs, one that paid money and another one for fun that was FOSS. Then eventually a company stepped up and paid for the FOSS work. Or A company had a need in a FOSS app, and paid their devs to add it. My contributions have been rather small I must admit, my few contributions to various seldom used utilities and games took so much longer to submit and get reviewed than it took to write them it was very discouraging.

Honestly I think Ladybird, that Thom linked to, is about the best bet that we have.

Agreed. But it actually would need FireFox to vanish and Google doing something stupid for LadyBird to grow and to mature. Big trees need to fall for small sprouts to grow.

You think so? I am not arguing with the wisdom of your big trees / sprouts analogy in general. I think that is true of commercial efforts as it is just not viable to fund a commercial effort without market share. Certainly, it makes sense that it may also be hard to create a viable Open Source community around a project where other, larger, and good enough options exist.

I think though that the only pre-requisite for success in Open Source is community. If you can create one, you can succeed. The number of users relative to your “competition” is really not relevant.

The Ladybird community is interesting. Mostly, it is an offshoot of the SerenityOS project and involves the same people. The motivation for creating a web browser was simply that SerenityOS needed one and they have a preference for building all the core stuff from scratch themselves in a mono repo. For a good while, there was only the SerenityOS web browser and it only ran on SerenityOS. Andreas created Ladybird as a cross-platform browser that leverages the libraries in SerenityOS that were being used for the browser. My guess is that a good chunk of the reason for going cross-platform is that it dev on such a massive project was just faster if he could do it on Linux and not have to rebuild the OS every commit. Of course, it also raises awareness and interest in the project. There are now Ladybird contributors that were not part of SerenityOS. There has even been some commercial sponsorship lately and at least one person has been hired to work on Ladybird. Andreas himself is full time on SerenityOS / Ladybird / Jakt through Patreon and other sponsorships. The profile of Ladybird must be helping with that. SerenityOS / Ladybird do such a good job of building community. In addition to Discord and GitHub, there are regular YouTube videos, “office hours” live stream sessions, and participation in conferences. The Ladybird project especially seems to understand the importance of showing off real-world results and prioritizing dev by what is required to make real sites work. Contrast that to something like Servo ( which could not really render anything the last I looked ) or projects like ReactOS ( which does not care if users see results it seems ). Ladybird is still a very young project. Yet, I can read OSnews in it already. In fact, I first saw this editorial and read it the first time inside Ladybird ( I build it sometimes and test a few sites to see how they do — including OSnews ).

The Ladybird community is building a web browser for themselves with the the goal of being able to “surf the real web”. They are doing this as they do not see any of the existing browsers as meeting their needs. As long as they stay engaged with that mission, I do not think it matters what market share they have or how successful the other browsers are. To be clear though, I am not trying to predict what market share Ladybird will eventually have ( probably low ). Rather, I am wondering if they have the momentum and community-strength to create a viable alternative to Firefox and Chrome. While it is too soon to tell, I am thinking that they can.

Greetings Thom.

From my perspective, you look at it way too negative.

Yes, the current browser market has room for only 1 or 2 implementations of a rendering engine and more competition was always a good thing. However, both implementation are OPEN and there are a few alternative projects which only don’t pick up because there is no real need or demand since the existing solutions are just good enough.

As a programmer I find it easier to solve a problem when there is a real demand and maybe even a sponsor. Motivation is much harder when there is no immediate improvement to achieve. What problem exactly would you want to solve right now? (Seriously, nobody cares about HW acceleration, Gestures and all of that. JavaScript performance maybe, for continuously abusing browsers as OS Container for JS applications.)

So lets say, I give you 100 Mill USD for developing a browser for the Linux/Unix market and you can burn that money whatever way you want — what exactly would you do and which problems would you want to solve?

Andreas Reichel,

Ah, you are just posturing 🙂 Still, it’s an interesting question.

Many years ago I had ideas for how the web should work, and if I had the resources to work on it I might have given it a shot. I’ve never liked the HTTP postback model used by web pages. It still bugs me to this day. So much of our work as web devs goes into working around the web browser’s postback model: collecting posted fields and regenerating an HTML pages over and over again. This is inefficient on multiple levels: network traffic, latency, server cpu overhead, client cpu overhead, etc. My vision for the web was more data oriented. Database sources could be distributed and the interface would automatically update based on realtime updates to the database without relying on all these inefficient HTTP postbacks. .net “viewstate” kind of gives developers a way to hide the postback model, but it does so in an extremely inefficient manor build on top of HTTP/HTML and doesn’t support data streaming. What I wanted was a stronger framework to make this all transparent and work out of the box.

I wouldn’t t mind talking about this in more detail if anyone is interested 🙂 I for one am not confident that a small independent developer would be able to promote it effectively though even if it worked.

“.net viewstate” as in Webforms? Old school.

Since you mention .NET, what do you think of SignalR? How does that compare to your vision?

I just would hire full time devs to work on Firefox for Linux. I guess it would be better than creating new browser from scratch if there is FF already.

Would not be surprised if, some distant day, Thunderbird turned out to be Mozilla’s “marquee” program and Firefox became the charity case.

Speaking for my family, Thunderbird ( on macOS and on FreeBSD) has been the most reliable way to deal with the email “firehose” and with managing calendars.

Firefox’s (and Mozilla’s) biggest problem is that folks don’t use their product, even on Windows, the primary platform target. If I were them, I’d focus on questions about why more people don’t prefer Firefox – and especially devs (for me, it’s one very specific problem – their JS stack traces are harder to deal with than Chrome’s – that’s it.)

For non-developer users, I think the main problem is mostly that users now have their Browser data stored in Google’s cloud, and the 1 time mechanism for copying browser stuff from Chrome to Firefox is laughably insufficient for users either trying the browser out, or willing to try both for a while. Mozilla can put all the innovative UX in to Firefox they want (though they haven’t in a while), but it won’t matter if switching is going to cause users to lose all their browser settings.

Loss aversion is a real thing in browser land. Users don’t even close their tabs (seriously, its insane). Arc is a browser who’s entire selling point is that it’ll safely close your tabs for you. I’ll never understand this, as someone who just closes my tabs, but this is a real thing for end users. If Mozilla can figure out how to to satisfy a concern over loss aversion (the way Arc has) they might be able to claw back some market share.

On the subject of platform support – I get where Mozilla is coming from, with their prioritization of the commercial platforms (Windows in particular). It’s also worth noting that on the Linux Desktop side, it’s actually quite difficult to support that, and there are a lot of things in flux all the time. Linux Desktops don’t even have things like a stable HW accelerated interface (wayland isn’t there yet – even after all these years, though it seems close! Other things like HDR aren’t supported at all, though that’s not too important for web browsers just yet – color profiles ARE important, and no support for that either). Firefox BTW, DOES have 1st class support for Wayland, which is more than its competitors, but since Wayland itself isn’t complete, it’s not complete in Firefox, so you have to enable it in the advanced configs. But it’s REALLY fast when it’s enabled. Other browsers (at least last time I checked, which admittedly, was a while ago) use xwayland, which is mostly the thing that’s slow that folks complain about when when talk about wayland.

I’d love to see Mozilla and Firefox coordinate with vendors who are actively trying to expand the desktop Linux market share. It’s a travesty that they haven’t worked with Valve to produce something that works seemlessly in Steam OS. At the end of the day, Firefox is an old crusty code base, that seems hard and time consuming to work on (I’ve watched many bugs languish in their bloated bug tracker for years), and they haven’t prioritized making the core easier to work on, the way that Google has with Blink. That’s a real shame. There are parts in there that would make an excellent dev target. Like I’d love to see a React Native like target that uses their WebRender without JS – expose a DOM like API through to Rust, and then maybe implement a higher level React or Svelte like API on top of a scripting language like Rhai. There just doesn’t seem to be an appetite for creating new ways to use their tech at Mozilla, even though they’ve got quite the winner with Rust. They are in this hunkered down maintenance mode posture on Firefox. That’s what happens when your company is run by spreadsheets I guess. 80% of revenue comes from this thing (Firefox on Windows), so we have to spend our effort on just this thing, rather than creating new product categories (there seem to be so many opportunities). Maybe they’ll figure it out.

CaptainN-,

The cause is extremely simple: the vast majority of owners never change the bundled browsers. Unless there are serious problems, what’s bundled is what they’ll use. Unfortunately for mozilla, they don’t have the benefit of a successful hardware platform to bundle their browser with. To be fair, they did think of this already and built FF OS, but like everyone else, they failed to compete against android and IOS.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-os-is-dead-mozilla-kills-off-open-source-iot-project-with-50-layoffs/

Users switching browsers is not only rare but also some other browsers don’t play nice and steal the defaults back, like microsoft edge has been doing. So microsoft has a viable path for market inroads, whereas mozilla have to go against the grain.

I do think your ideas have merit, but I don’t think it would matter anyway. The firefox browser is completely off user’s radar, the vast majority of users are not even making a conscious decision not to use it. That’s the reality mozilla are up against. If mozilla were willing to spend money, they could grow their market share like google did by paying software developers to bundle chrome (tons of software devs did this back in the day, they’d get paid while google got marketshare). Another idea, which I’m not advocating for since it goes against the FOSS grain, is the Opera browser model. Mozilla could theoretically pay for ads like Opera does. They have a business model and use it to pay streamers/youtubers to advertise the Opera browser. I don’t know how well that’s working out?

I agree that being the default on OEM products is an advantage, but on Windows that is still Edge, yet they haven’t managed to gain much market share. Folks are downloading Chrome – but that probably has to do with how aggressive Google pushes that in Google search results (like they used to do for Firefox). So it’s not so much that users don’t have an interest, it’s a question of exposure, which I think is pretty close to your point. I’m not sure what Firefox could do on that front. I do like that they are the default on most Linux distros. We just need more people deciding to use Linux, which has the same problem (plus a few more)!

CaptainN-,

I would say have gained a lot of market share in just a few year…

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-edge-now-has-more-than-10-of-the-desktop-browser-market-share/

I wish we had more data to work with publicly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the upticks in edge correspond with users buying new hardware. It certainly seems plausible.

I concede it’s only speculation, but if mozilla’s browser were being bundled instead of edge, I think it’s likely that FF would be at 10-15% today and would have a positive projection over time.

OEMs bundling deals are quite common and the browser is no different. Google do bundling deals with some manufactures so that they were the default browser out of the box. I’ve seen it personally where chrome is preinstalled on windows. Also they obviously have android and chromebooks.

Then there’s crap like this…

https://www.engadget.com/2018-09-12-windows-10-to-discourage-chrome-firefox-installs.html

https://www.engadget.com/2018-03-16-windows-10-preview-forces-mail-links-to-open-in-edge.html

I think the EU may have cracked down on it and I don’t know if this is currently happening, but it’s not been a fair fight when this is what mozilla has had to face.

Yeah, I agree it would help. Linux uptake is not really something mozilla’s controls though.

Maybe more websites could recommend linux/firefox and use scare tactics for windows & edge users, haha. The thought of microsoft getting a taste of their own medicine is funny, but it’s unlikely to actually happen.

Thom is 100% right in his observation that we are on the brink of losing Firefox support on Linux. If Chrome/Chromium are going the same way is hard to tell, due to technological platform choices for their services, I suspect Google has quite many engineers preferring using Linux on their desktops too; this is only a guess from my own personal perspective, but if I am right, they are probably more willing to allocate resources for a marginal platform for their own browser. Hence if we lose Firefox there will probably be something chrome flavoured for fulfilling our browser needs.

There are two killer features of Chrome, same bookmarks on all devices and it is installed by default in Android and on most corporate Windows desktops I know of. Internet explorer used to be bad enough for IT departments to rather install something else and Google seems to be a dependable provider…

Regarding the assertion that graphics acceleration is a needed tool for day to day work, I humbly beg to differ. First and foremost I have neither managed to get it to work on Windows, nor on Linux and regardless of that, I am still in good health ,-)

I am using my browser as much as anyone else, the only circumstance where I have been forced to try this acceleration, has been to optimize MS Teams, first on linux when the pandemic hit and I was forced to move my lessons to this platform. Since Teams worked (but with problems) without acceleration and crashed the browser with acceleration enabled. Disabling acceleration was an easy choice on Linux. More or less the same result regardless if I used a computer with a discrete Nvidia GPU, AMD:s integrated GPU, or Intel’s integrated graphics.

After two years I was forced, by my employer to switch to Windows, and I soon found out that Teams and graphics support in the browser worked as bad in Windows as on linux; tried both Edge and Chrome there. The real killer seems to be if one of the students is running an animated background picture, then the my browser goes belly up if my acceleration is enabled. Same thing on Windows regardless of that platform being “better supported” in many ways; I have tested on various hardware platforms, same result regardless.

Teams is a moving target, this may well work flawlessly, right now. But that is not the point, the point is that this part of the basic set of capabilities that we may expect from a browser does not seem to work well anywhere, or there are certainly problems with it that makes this technology less useful. If my choice is between a browser that works and a browser that potentially would use less energy, but saving amperes while behaving erroneously, I would rather go for more power consumption and a more predictable behaviour.

There may be other web applications where the video acceleration feature of modern browsers is needed, unfortunately I have only seen one such app, and even if this feature was supposed to be required, it turned out not to work. Hence I believe that the video acceleration is quite an unusual requirement and regardless of platform choices, it is not mature enough to be trusted.

Almost like Chat GPT, which can be plenty of fun, but rather not something to depend on in your day to day life.

Thanks for a nice site,

B-man

there are, right now, as i write this, at least 10 forks of chromium and firefox for linux

palemoon, waterfox, librefox, icewolf, brave, de-googled chromium, opera, vivaldi, otter browser,

‘linux’ is several thousand people all working on different projects, statements like ‘linux has a firefox problem’ are bizarre and confusing since there’s over 100 distros of linux and at least half of them dont come with firefox except the corporate ones which don’t care at all about enshittification of the web

hazbot,

While it’s understandable why the existence of many forks may give the impression that the market is good for redundancy How many of them are genuinely doing the heavy lifting versus applying basic patches on the back of someone else’s work to scratch an itch? It’s pretty easy to create a fork and give it a name. For example osnews could realistically create a fork and call it the “osnews deluxe browser”, but it doesn’t mean they could maintain it in the absence of mozilla’s upstream developers.

At least if mozilla fails, developers will still be able to fork Chromium, so at least there’s that. But even so google’s dominant control over the market means google shapes the internet and forks are mostly along for the ride without much say themselves – especially if google’s DRM initiative catches on.

I have been using Firefox since version 0.9, but in the last year I have gradually switched to Chromium. I am a frequent user of the Raspberry Pi 4, and the Pi’s moderate hardware exposes Firefox’s problems very well. Mozilla on the Pi is a near-unusable resource hog, while Chromium performs adequately on this hardware.

The Brave browser is a good option. It is available for arm64, can sync across multiple devices, and has hardware acceleration that is good enough for YouTube and similar platforms. Brave still has some problems with DRM media on the Pi, but you can always use vanilla Chromium as a “player” exclusively for DRM content (you don’t need to sync). And despite recent claims, hardware acceleration for arm64 Linux in Firefox 116 only works barely.

The aggressive political agenda and stupid design decisions (including the latest unremovable “extensions” icon) are another issue, but I can live with the latter since Brave has a much less customizable UI anyway.

As for the Firefox itself I think we need an independent alternative to Chrome (including the reendering engine) so perhaps the next big reset “2003-style” is needed. Today’s Mozilla is a far worse resource hog than Netscape was back then.

Some time ago I`ve set up VM with Windows 11 and 4gb ram. Edge was slow as turtle, and Firefox just fly