zlacker

It's far, far too late for this. The W3C is already irrelevant, not that it ever mattered much.

The internet is made by big companies. Not standards bodies. The WHATWG has the actual living standards, and Google, Apple, Cloudflare and Amazon make the actual software. Nobody cares about the W3C. And Mozilla is long past dead.

>>solard+(OP)
> And Mozilla is long past dead.

Mozilla is far from healthy but calling it dead is overstating things.

>>matkon+p1
It's only alive in the same sense that a zombie is... constantly moaning and groaning while begging for brains, shambling aimlessly along waiting to be put out of its misery

>>matkon+p1
Less than 5% of global usage [1], and no presence whatsoever on mobile. Pretty much dead.

[1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage And CF stats doesn't depend on JavaScript.

>>matkon+p1
Mozilla is dead as a doornail. Google succeeded where Microsoft did not, they essentially control the entire web now.

>>slig+T4
4% of global browser usage can be described in many ways (defeated, miserable, collapse compared to the past etc) but it definitely is not dead and is one of few developed browsers.

>>solard+(OP)
> The internet is made by big companies. Not standards bodies.

Yes. However said companies may want to avoid too much scrutiny from governments.

As long as they can pretend the web is an open standard, they are good. If Google were to leave the w3c, it would expose them to antitrust laws and so on.

>>ascend+U5
> Google succeeded where Microsoft did not

Microsoft wasn't trying to control the web; they were trying to hobble it so that everyone kept on developing for win32. In retrospect, not a great strategy, but many companies try to kick the can down the road, and it often works, so I can't fault them too much.

>>matkon+e6
If we're arguing about whether 4% global usage constitutes dead, then yes, it's truly dead and Mozilla is completely irrelevant. Even Microsoft is more important these days (again).

>>nordsi+Y7
Eh-- I think that 2-3 years of breathing room they bought-- and killing Netscape's "the browser is the operating system" dreams-- was probably worthwhile from their point of view.

>>ascend+U5
Yep, Firefox should have allowed styling their scrollbars. Nobody wants those ugly ass scrollbars in their apps.

>>matkon+e6
For many years what is now macOS hovered around 3% usage.

The phoenix can rise.

The frozen chicken can not.

Still breathing makes a huge difference.

>>solard+d8
The difference between 0% and 5% is that at 0%, if you want an alternative, you have to write it yourself, but at 5%, the alternative exists. Mozilla is not dead.

If you don’t like what Google is doing, don’t pretend that Firefox does not exist. Do something instead. File bug reports, send patches, donate to those who are working on Firefox and countering Google.

>>jamiek+8b
Maybe if they replaced top Mozilla leadership. Apple had to reinvent itself back into relevance. Mozilla refuses to, and just keeps stagnating in a cesspool of rot and nostalgia. They're less a browser maker these days and more an ineffective think tank. I think Google keeps them around just as a "useful fool" so they can look less like a monopoly...

Probably better for a different org with different leadership to start over. I wouldn't count on Mozilla to miraculously reinvent itself.

>>nequo+Eb
Frankly I trust Mozilla's governance even less than Google's. They took an amazing product (Phoenix) and mismanaged it into irrelevance.

If there were a good browser run by a different nonprofit org, I would support that.

>>solard+(OP)
> The W3C is already irrelevant, not that it ever mattered much.

This sounds myopic, or what do you mean? W3C is not only about HTML and CSS innovation, but is responsible for and/or involved in a diverse set of relevant standards — many of which "big companies" don't show as much interest in contributing to.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium#St...

>>matkon+p1
Mozilla is on life support. Not quite dead. Perhaps in a coma.

>>slig+T4
I'm writing this on firefox for android. It has 100M+ downloads on the play store.

>>solard+Rd
Even if you don't trust Mozilla, they cannot do what Google is already doing. Mozilla doesn't have nearly enough market power to force something like WEI down our throats.

>>ascend+U5
San Francisco salaries and the removal of Brendan Eich is what happened to Mozilla not Google and Microsoft.

>>solard+(OP)
> And Mozilla is long past dead.

I have been using Netscape/Mozilla, in terms of heritage, ideology, and codebase, for almost a third of a century now.

I was there 30 years ago using NCSA Mosaic when it was first released for the VMS Vax system. The only break of any kind I had was with Opera as a secondary browser in the few short years between Netscape 4 and Phoenix (original Firefox). And I was still using Netscape 6, just not exclusively.

They can tear Mozilla (or any one of its forked variants) out of my cold, dead hands.

>>Eduard+re
How many of those are actually relevant?

The DOM is largely abstracted over by JS frameworks and component libraries.

XML, XPath, XHTML, SOAP, etc gave way to haphazard JSON that's easier to use.

JSON-LD is a tiny niche and mostly unknown.

SVG is used only trivially as a PNG replacement or for vector graphics interchange, while Canvas is more common whenever performance matters.

Aria is mostly an afterthought, put in at the last minute with alt tags and roles on random elements.

Maybe MathML is still used on Wikipedia?

Can't comment on the other ones I've never heard of, but the web ones all seem either dead or niche.

I think this illustrates what I meant by irrelevance. It's not that they make bad standards or have bad ideas, it's just that companies have always preferred their own implementations of these ideas rather than some standard. Over the last two decades, the W3C has been at times a strong suggestion, at times a weak consideration, but never an actual standard. It was always the big tech companies making the actual standards. We were lucky when a W3C spec actually reflected real world implementations.

And this isn't just my opinion... the WHATWG was created specifically to bypass the W3C on purpose.

>>nordsi+Y7
Of course large companies are always a bit schizophrenic with different departments moving in different directions, but I think fundamentally 1995-2000's Microsoft was trying to improve the web, and get people to use it. Just as Google does now they tried to blur the line between desktop and web, just that where Google is trying to move all desktop functionality to the web interface, Microsoft was trying to make all web functionality accessible in a desktop interface.

Explorer and Internet Explorer were deeply married, with the ability to set web pages as desktop background, the Explorer of Windows 98 having a "sidebar" that was an HTML page, the ubiquitous help format being compressed HTML pages with index and search, ActiveX giving webpages desktop-application-like powers, JScript being a powerful javascript-compatible automation language for Windows. Windows was full of web technologies in the dot-com era, many bringing web and desktop closer together. This stopped an reversed course in the early 2000s. You could now say that's classic embrace-extend-extinguish, but the collapse of the dot-com bubble explains explains the sudden lack of investment and increasing distance between desktop and web just as well.

>>Eduard+re
WHATWG (meaning, the browser vendors) are the de facto actual decision-makers of web standards. They tolerate the W3C existing because it's less hassle than causing a big fuss by getting rid of it, but make no mistake: the W3C is a powerless figurehead organization.

>>ConorS+Ve
So does Opera...

>>ConorS+Ve
Pretty sure download statistics don’t reflect usage. And are we even sure those are unique downloads?

At any rate, 100M downloads across the lifetime of the app isn’t much to write home about when considering the billions (plural) that use Google products. Furthermore, there’s an entire class of people that think Chrome IS the internet. It’s wildly more common than the average HN would think.

>>solard+d8
> If we're arguing about whether 4% global usage constitutes dead, then yes, it's truly dead

I am posting from maintained Mozilla Firefox.

That would be impossible if FF would be dead.

>>matkon+e6
There's no plan, no growth, they don't have a mobile OS, and users will use whatever browser (aka, "the internet") comes with their device. On Windows, Edge is being heavily "promoted". Most of the technical people I know gave up, unfortunately.

>>gunapo+ye
>85% funded by Google Search revenue share. Wheelchaired around unconscious.

>>solard+d8
>If we're arguing about whether 4% global usage constitutes dead, then yes, it's truly dead and Mozilla is completely irrelevant. Even Microsoft is more important these days (again).

According to these folks[0], Firefox has a 3.29% market share globally. They also claim there are 4.66 billion browser users globally.

If those numbers are correct, Firefox has a bit more than 150,000,000 users worldwide.

If my software had 150,000,000 users, I'd consider that wildly successful.

Other folks have different ideas/takes on that, I suppose. But it's food for thought nonetheless.

[0] https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share#worldwide-browser...

Edit: Fixed prose.

>>redavn+Xf
They get paid half a billion a year from Google, so thanks to Google things are like this. There's no incentive whatsoever to beat who pays them.

>>slig+Tr
Corporate + institutional mass installs on Windows and Linux — e.g. university computer labs — are still mostly Firefox. It's easier to lock down something that's not part of the OS; and it's easier to create a local-network roaming-user-profile experience that's seamless between the machines that must run Windows (regular labs) and the machines that must run Linux (CompSci labs.)

>>slig+4A
There's an active incentive NOT to disrupt that relationship.

>>redavn+Xf
Firefox's market share was in freefall long before Brendan Eich left.

>>slig+T4
Linux market share on the desktop was 3.08% on June (source:0). I don't see it dying anytime soon because of that. Firefox isn't pushed by Google, hence the much smaller adoption; it's not about quality but rather which one is being advertised the most.

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

>>Eduard+re
Browsers don't really tack W3C standards, they track WHATWG standards. W3C has been an effectively dead organization for the last 15 years.

>>rekabi+dh
i wonder about a fork of chromium by a team of browser developers, including brave, vivaldi and even mozilla. maybe it could be called mozillium