Firefox marketshare revisited

Why building a better browser doesn’t translate to a better marketshare


Active Firefox Installs



Obtaining the data









What about Mobile?












What about Mozilla?





Chrome won








Desktop market share




Adding users?





What does this mean for the Web?





Hold the GOP accountable







Get ready for machines to make mistakes









AI silicon vs AI software

There is a lot of activity in the neural network hardware space. Intel just bought Nervana for $400m and Movidius for an undisclosed amount. Both make dedicated silicon to run and train neural networks. Most other chipset vendors I have talked to are similarly interested in adding direct support for neural networks to future chips. I think there is some risk in this approach. Here is why.

Most of the time executing a neural network is spent in massive matrix operations such as convolution and matrix multiplication. The state of the art is to use GPUs to do these operations because GPUs have a lot of ALUs and are well optimized for massively data parallel tasks. If you spent time optimizing neural networks for GPUs (we do!), you probably know that a well optimized engine achieves about 40-90% efficiency (ALU utilization). Dedicated neural network silicon aims to raise that to 100%, which is great, but in the end a 2x speedup only.

The problematic part is that chipset changes have a long lead time (2-3 years), and you have to commit today to the architectures of tomorrow. And thats where things get tricky. A paper published earlier this year showed that neural networks can be binarized, which reduces the precision of weights to 1 bit (-1, 1). Slow and energy inefficient floating point math turns into very efficient binary math (XNOR), which speeds up the network on existing commodity silicon by 400% with a very small loss in precision. Commodity GPUs support this because they are relatively general purpose computers. Dedicated neural network silicon is much more likely designed for a specific compute mode.

In the last 12 months or so alone we have seen dramatic advances in our understanding how to train and evaluate neural networks. Binarization is just one of them, and its fair to expect that over the next 2-3 years similarly impactful advances will be published. Committing to hardware designs based on today’s understanding of neural networks is ill advised in my opinion. My recommendation to chipset vendors is to beef up their GPUs and DSPs, and support a wide range of fixed point and floating point resolutions in a fairly generic manner. Its more likely that that will cover what we’ll want from silicon over the next 2-3 years.

Brendan is back to save the Web

Brendan is back, and he has a plan to save the Web. Its a big and bold plan, and it may just work. I am pretty excited about this. If you have 5 minutes to read along I’ll explain why I think you should be as well.

The Web is broken

Lets face it, the Web today is a mess. Everywhere we go online we are constantly inundated with annoying ads. Often pages are more ads than content, and the more ads the industry throws at us, the more we ignore them, the more obnoxious ads get, trying to catch our attention. As Brendan explains in his blog post, the browser used to be on the user’s side—we call browsers the user agent for a reason. Part of the early success of Firefox was that it blocked popup ads. But somewhere over the last 10 years of modern Web browsers, browsers lost their way and stopped being the user’s agent alone. Why?

Browsers aren’t free

Making a modern Web browser is not free. It takes hundreds of engineers to make a competitive modern browser engine. Someone has to pay for that, and that someone needs to have a reason to pay for it. Google doesn’t make Chrome for the good of mankind. Google makes Chrome so you can consume more Web and along with it, more Google ads. Each time you click on one, Google makes more money. Chrome is a billion dollar business for Google. And the same is true for pretty much every other browser. Every major browser out there is funded through advertisement. No browser maker can escape this dilemma. Maybe now you understand why no major browser ships with a builtin enabled by default ad-blocker, even though ad-blockers are by far the most popular add-ons.

Our privacy is at stake

It’s not just the unregulated flood of advertisement that needs a solution. Every ad you see is often selected based on sensitive private information advertisement networks have extracted from your browsing behavior through tracking. Remember how the FBI used to track what books Americans read at the library, and it was a big scandal? Today the Googles and Facebooks of the world know almost every site you visit, everything you buy online, and they use this data to target you with advertisement. I am often puzzled why people are so afraid of the NSA spying on us but show so little concern about all the deeply personal data Google and Facebook are amassing about everyone.

Blocking alone doesn’t scale

I wish the solution was as easy as just blocking all ads. There is a lot of great Web content out there: news, entertainment, educational content. It’s not free to make all this content, but we have gotten used to consuming it “for free”. Banning all ads without an alternative mechanism would break the economic backbone of the Web. This dilemma has existed for many years, and the big browser vendors seem to have given up on it. It’s hard to blame them. How do you disrupt the status quo without sawing off the (ad revenue) branch you are sitting on?

It takes an newcomer to fix this mess

I think its unlikely that the incumbent browser vendors will make any bold moves to solve this mess. There is too much money at stake. I am excited to see a startup take a swipe at this problem, because they have little to lose (seed money aside). Brave is getting the user agent back into the game. Browsers have intentionally remained silent onlookers to the ad industry invading users’ privacy. With Brave, Brendan makes the user agent step up and fight for the user as it was always intended to do.

Brave basically consists of two parts: part one blocks third party ad content and tracking signals. Instead of these Brave inserts alternative ad content. Sites can sign up to get a fair share of any ads that Brave displays for them. The big change in comparison to the status quo is that the Brave user agent is in control and can regulate what you see. It’s like a speed limit for advertisement on the Web, with the goal to restore balance and give sites a fair way to monetize while giving the user control through the user agent.

Making money with a better Web

The ironic part of Brave is that its for-profit. Brave can make money by reducing obnoxious ads and protecting your privacy at the same time. If Brave succeeds, it’s going to drain money away from the crappy privacy-invasive obnoxious advertisement world we have today, and publishers and sites will start transacting in the new Brave world that is regulated by the user agent. Brave will take a cut of these transactions. And I think this is key. It aligns the incentives right. The current funding structure of major browsers encourages them to keep things as they are. Brave’s incentive is to bring down the whole diseased temple and usher in a better Web. Exciting.

Quick update: I had a chance to look over the Brave GitHub repo. It looks like the Brave Desktop browser is based on Chromium, not Gecko. Yes, you read that right. Brave is using Google’s rendering engine, not Mozilla’s. Much to write about this one, but it will definitely help Brave “hide” better in the large volume of Chrome users, making it harder for sites to identify and block Brave users. Brave for iOS seems to be a fork of Firefox for iOS, but it manages to block ads (Mozilla says they can’t).

Oracle sinks its claws into Android



Why did Google create its own Java clone?




Apache vs GPL











A rough year ahead






The winner


The losers

