Trying, yes. But the method they have chosen is to abandon what made Firefox popular in the first place and imitate Chrome. So why not just use Chrome?

IOW, they're killing the goose that laid the golden egg by trying to transform it into a duck. But if I wanted a duck, I'd already have a duck.

I guess they're blaming Chrome for their lost market share rather than blaming themselves for mismanaging their product. So instead of fixing their mismanagement, they're just trying to copy Chrome.

They used to be leaders (without Mozilla, Chrome probably wouldn't exist as it does today), but now the leader has become the follower. And who needs another follower?

Another perspective is that the Web has "grown up" since 1998. Back then the percentage of Web users who were "power users" (remember, empowering users was the mission back then; "Take back the web!") was much higher--but the raw number was still enough to be fruitful. Since then, half the planet is on the Internet, and the percentage of them that are power users is much lower. The raw number is surely much higher still, but that's not enough for Mozilla--they've got to appeal to the masses to get the percentages. All the loyal users who've been with Mozilla for nearly two decades? They can switch to...uh...Pale Moon, I guess. Mozilla just wants the noobs, because that supposedly brings in the most money.

I hate to say it, but Mozilla needs to die so it can be reborn--again. Every so often, the tree of browser needs to be cleansed with the blood of layoffs--something like that. Then their successors can focus on making a good browser instead of chasing more millions.

> "I hate to say it, but Mozilla needs to die so it can be reborn--again. Every so often, the tree of browser needs to be cleansed with the blood of layoffs--something like that. Then their successors can focus on making a good browser instead of chasing more millions."

And you're thinking that because in all of human history, a success story happened exactly once.

Not much of a sample dude and if I were to bet, I'd say that if Mozilla dies, then Firefox will be completely dead as well, because the market dynamics have completely changed since 1998. The elephant in the room being that developing a browser takes a lot of resources and can no longer be done by a bunch of students on their free time.

> "Mozilla just wants the noobs, because that supposedly brings in the most money."

That's a really condescending and damaging attitude. Most of us are in this industry to serve the needs of the "noobs", in order for them to be better at their own jobs. It's how society works you know.

> Not much of a sample dude and if I were to bet, I'd say that if Mozilla dies, then Firefox will be completely dead as well, because the market dynamics have completely changed since 1998. The elephant in the room being that developing a browser takes a lot of resources and can no longer be done by a bunch of students on their free time.

You're likely right, of course. I should have clarified that I don't think that Firefox necessarily will be reborn if Mozilla fails, only that I hope it would be. But I'm afraid that we will find out before long...

> by a bunch of students on their free time.

I'm not an expert on the history of Mozilla, but my understanding is that it was never developed that way. It started with the Navigator code drop from Netscape, and the Mozilla organization was quickly formed around it with existing developers. It took a few years before they had "Firefox" out the door, but I don't think they did that for free in their spare time. Please correct me if I'm wrong. :)

But you're right that developing a browser that can compete with existing ones (in security, at least) is probably impractical without a decent number of full-time staff.

And that brings to mind an idea: a community-funded security team paid to keep up with security fixes, while the rest of the browser is maintained by community volunteers. Sure, it wouldn't get developed as quickly--but I, for one, would be happy to have less UI churn...

> That's a really condescending and damaging attitude. Most of us are in this industry to serve the needs of the "noobs", in order for them to be better at their own jobs. It's how society works you know.

I understand how you could interpret that as condescending, but that's not how I intended it. From my perspective, it's the "non-noobs" that are being condescended to by Mozilla as they continually shoo them away, effectively telling them, "This browser you've been using for 18 years--it is not the browser you're looking for..."

Witness the bug report in question here, in which a Mozilla developer says that Linux users can be expected to build Firefox themselves--he assumes that all Linux users are "Linux developers." What does he care if thousands of people suddenly have their browser fail to function? Mozilla can't be bothered to maintain the existing ALSA backend code.

Is that not their job, to maintain the codebase? What are they getting paid for? Why are they being paid to remove features? Why are they being paid to do things that their users don't want? Please don't lecture me about "maintainability" and human resources--I understand the burdens of legacy code, spaghetti code, etc. The answer is not to toss it into the bitbucket, pulling the rug out from under users. The answer is to refactor the code to improve maintainability, and replace the old code when the new code reaches parity. This is like, they've hit the CADT-panic button, and anytime they see old code, they go, "Eww, gross! Deprecated!"

It's like the ship is sinking, so they're starting to toss things overboard--including pieces of the hull. That will make the ship lighter, while at the same time letting more water in. Eventually it ceases to be a useful or salvageable as a ship, and the passengers jump ship, and then the crew has no passengers or ship. It's like the ship of Theseus: an interesting thought experiment, but it turns out that replacing the hull during a voyage causes ship loss. If they want to build S.S. Mozillium, they should park the S.S. Firefox in drydock first. At least that way the passengers wouldn't have to swim.

Firefox started from a Navigator code dump, but KDevelop was developed in the open by volunteers, along with KHTML, which is how WebKit was then born. Back then it was completely possible to compete with IExplorer as an open-source project, because the expectations weren't that high.

I don't know what the situation for Linux is, even though I'm a Linux (Ubuntu) user at home. But traditionally Linux distributions have been building their own packages. I can understand such concerns though, I care very much about Linux.

That's a good point about KHTML. A long time ago, Konqueror was actually usable as a web browser on most sites. And of course, WebKit has diverged so far...

Maybe what we need is to split up the browser: develop the rendering engine, JS engine, UI, etc, separately, with well-defined APIs. Then the things that require dedicated expertise could be developed by full-time employees, and the results of their work could be integrated into different end-user products, different browsers with different target audiences, developed by different groups, with much less effort and expertise required.

Of course, this is what Gecko and XULRunner used to be. Now Mozilla's direction is just demonstrating how badly needed their former course of action still is.

libgecko, anyone? (or even libservo--but will they handle it the same way they've handled Gecko, and make it practically Firefox-only?)

> Desperately trying to get back to two-digit marketshare?

> Trying to compete, as the last major open browser, against all the corporate browsers?

Firefox was successful because it was a great browser that power users picked up and evangelized to their friends.

Chrome became successful because it was a great browser that Google has pushed hard to users on all their properties, which serve billions of people a day.

Internet Explorer is successful because it's a reasonably good browser that is installed by default on millions upon millions of computers, and because it supports all kind of enterprisey things that enterprises care about.

Safari is successful because it is a reasonably good browser that is installed by default on a platform used by millions of people, and is the only browser actually available on a platform used by millions and millions of people.

Nobody as big as Google or Microsoft is going to push Firefox. Nobody. And if they did, we'd probably consider it a corporate browser anyway. So what is Firefox's strategy to get ahead? To all appearances, cut out the features that made it popular among its core users and strong advocates, and imitate Chrome, because Chrome is popular. But Chrome is not popular because of its features or UI, it is popular because it's a Google product.

I cannot see how Mozilla's strategy is going to succeed, and I've only seen it drive people away - and that includes me, because eventually I will have to move off an outdated version of Firefox. Maybe they have some kind of master marketing plan when they get the product where they want it. I don't know. I don't see how even Servo is going to bring users back. Supporting a free and open web is great, and a goal I support 100%, but at the end of the day I need a web browser that works for me. You can't retain anything more than a very small user base by selling yourself on ideology if that's the only thing that differentiates you.