While my perspective isn't as strategic or metrics-driven as his, I had a lot of time to observe and think as both a community member and Mozilla employee. FxOS also wasn't my baby, so there's that. Note also that I speak for myself here and my own observations and paraphrases--whatever I say that pisses someone off is something I'm saying, not that Mozilla said verbatim.

My primary takeaways were twofold:

(Long, TL;DR at bottom)

1) I agree with you. Desktop and mobile are two separate markets, period. The first mostly serves a workplace audience and the second a personal audience, but most people with a desk job at the very least will use a web browser as part of their day. Desktop may be a minority of the overall, but it's a minority that won't go away anytime soon and so will continue to influence HTML and standards disproportionate to pure market share.

That's important because Mozilla's gambit for preserving the open web was pretty simple (I say was because I think they're just not that focused at this point):

Have enough people using your browser that websites absolutely have to support the emerging standards that browser relies on-- and perhaps in doing so make it less attractive for site providers and browser providers to spend time on proprietary tech that isn't significantly better than those standards, thereby making other browsers move to those standards too.

Doesn't mean these people have to use it everywhere, or that it has to be a majority share (10%+ was what I commonly heard as "enough") or otherwise "win". But it does have to be enough that people will complain if the website doesn't support their browser and that testers are influenced to test the site against it.

(BTW, as a test professional, the fact that Firefox no longer appears in most test matrixes I encounter due to lack of a blip on analytics is very telling, and Firefox has a serious risk growing around site incompatibility or instability in their browser).

That brings me to my second takeaway:

2) The grand majority of people don't use a web browser because of the browser itself; they use it for one of a few reasons:

a) It's default on their system.

You will not win these people over because they're not there for any reason other than it being the easiest or most integrated path. Note that this is pretty much the whole mobile market, and why it was a dire mistake for Mozilla to conflate the two markets, decide mobile was more important due to combined market share, then go tilting at windmills.

It's also, any altruistic reasons aside, why the moonshot was to create an OS so Firefox could be the default mobile experience.

b) Ethics/Community. This was a relatively small but very vocal part of Firefox's userbase. Probably more people were there "against Chrome" than "for Firefox," but whatever. Firefox succeeded in the first place because of "against Internet Explorer" so it's a valid reason to be there. The nice thing about these people is they pull in more people.

Unfortunately, one side effect of Firefox OS as a project was working with proprietary partners who emphasized confidentiality such that you couldn't share with the community in the way Mozilla did before. When Mozilla diverted most of their effort to Firefox OS, it froze out a lot of the community efforts.

I think Mozilla-the-org also became less skilled at working with community, both for that shift and perhaps because they brought in a lot of people from the mobile and other sectors who didn't have that background.

Whatever the case, this base wasn't well-maintained, and I don't think operates as a core in the same way it might once have, at least for Firefox.

c) Customization, and this is really why Firefox (and Mozilla) is where it is today IMO:

The add-on ecosystem is the most compelling reason both to start using but especially continue using a non-default browser, and Mozilla chased theirs away.

Here's the thing:

You have one browser, whose job is to get the hell out of the way of the content and fade into the background, and several installed extensions whose jobs are to solve specific problems you have. 1 browser. Several extensions. 1 invisible, generic browser. Several hand-chosen extensions that make it your own.

Which bit are you sticking around for? Probably the extensions. The browser is a platform, a means, not an end--not just for the web but for its own functionality.

That's why all the complaints are performance and crashes and things that make you notice the browser, not generally native features or UI. It's the whole rationale behind browser-as-OS efforts in the first place.

Syncs and reading lists are nice, but with an ecosystem you can get them after the fact. With no ecosystem, you'd better either really like what you're handed or be trapped into using it a la iOS--and even Apple has figured out they have to be somewhat customizable or people will even switch OSes to get it.

That's where Chrome won.

Specifically, when Mozilla pretty much cargo-culted Google's rapid release program without first creating a version-independent extension store and add-on API, they seriously fucked up.

A ton of add-ons couldn't keep up with release and broke--Firefox's add-on "API" was to either essentially monkeypatch the internals or to create binary extensions, neither of which had any real abstraction from implementation. The need to manually update the compatibility version number and reupload to AMO for every single release froze more out (this was fixed server-side by auto-incing the number but it was just a workaround to a real problem as now extensions might not be really compatible). AMO always had a problem with turnaround on submissions, and this didn't help.

In general Mozilla sent the message of being out of touch with the add-on community, and that it wasn't a clear priority.

Jetpack/Add-Ons SDK was there as a not-really-mature portability measure to mitigate this, but it wasn't powerful enough to support a lot of the best extensions. It also happened in parallel with the rapid release shift, not before it when it was strategically needed. Then Jetpack kind of died off, probably partially because of the shift in efforts towards mobile/FxOS and partially because Jetpack never really became kick-ass enough to make the type of impact that gets more resources.

Meanwhile, right before Firefox stepped into this and never stepped out again, the Chrome Web Store opens in 2010, ready to receive any disenfranchised add-on makers. Talk about right place at the right time. Now Mozilla finally is adopting Chrome's extension API, both because it probably works better with multiprocess but maybe also to get some cross-platform extensions back. I imagine that'll work OK, but maybe too little too late.

AMO isn't what it used to be at all. Meanwhile, Chrome's Web Store is phenomenal. Combined with the (yes, unfair) Google Suite integration in Chrome there's a lot of friction to keep people on Chrome as a platform, and short of Chrome making a huge mistake that shakes people off like Mozilla/Firefox did, there isn't much reason to switch browsers for a cross-platform extension that's already on the one you use.

And when I look at the blog posts re: Firefox improvements, etc., I keep coming back to "it's a platform, not an app" and wonder if they'll ever take that ground back. Maybe if they somehow completely redefine the browser experience or otherwise stay deeply opinionated (Opera is sort of going this route) but otherwise, it'll just be parity and parity doesn't move people.

I'm thoroughly convinced Mozilla won't achieve much impact with Firefox until they understand and execute on building the ecosystem as the vast majority use case and never damage it again. However, that means them also understanding that people came to and left Firefox for any number of reasons other than Firefox itself or its native features, interface, etc., and I don't see that yet institutionally in their execution.

Some bright spots: Rust and WebAssembly are both fantastic. In general, I think Mozilla has been great at addressing the developer segment, both with the browser dev tools themselves and especially with MDN. Maybe what'll eventually preserve Mozilla is getting drummed out of the web browser business and into more of a core tech business. Regaining browser relevance is going to be a heck of an uphill for them.

TL;DR: Mozilla should never have gone full-tilt at mobile and made a grave mistake in assuming desktop was becoming irrelevant to their mission; and by far the biggest fuckup was alienating the add-on community since customization is the most compelling reason why people would use a non-default browser. It's entirely possible they won't come back from that. Their biggest recent impacts have been peripheral to or completely orthogonal to the browser, and might be their brighter future.

The extension ecosystem was always one of the strongest distinguishing facets of Firefox. I think Mozilla panicked when Chrome threatened Firefox's market share, and started trying to compete hard on things like being at the forefront of new technology adoption at the expense of the existing extension ecosystem. And in the process, Mozilla lost control of the messaging and it came to be seen as constantly doing little more than aping Chrome. The Web Extensions stuff is an example of the marketing issue. Mozilla new as far back as 2010 that extensions were the biggest stumbling block to getting multiprocess working. What they should have done was start developing the new extension APIs that far back, and made Firefox use multiprocess mode only if no legacy extensions were installed.

I never worked on the previous Firefox extension API but I find it ridiculously easy to have a cross platform extension that works on Chromium and Firefox. That counts for something.

This point is proven again by Mozilla forcing the new extension API before the extensions are ready.

What do you think about Firefox mobile, the only browser that supports add-ons , could it use it to get some relevance or is that battle lost too ?

That said, Firefox for Android is a great technical accomplishment, and a valuable project. The fact that they are able to differentiate themselves with extensions is very powerful.

The fact that this awesome accomplishment hasn't made much impact in share probably proves that "customization" isn't going to significantly outweigh "default" in that market, though my guess is it would still be a leading factor for the very small number of people who aren't using the default browser.

I don't mean to say that Mozilla should avoid mobile efforts entirely. Fennec is necessary, and I think Firefox OS would have been a fantastic reference implementation if Mozilla hadn't chased partnerships and commercial releases in combination with it.

The problem wasn't that Mozilla put time or resources into these things, it was that Mozilla bet on these things to the detriment of their core competencies and, frankly, mission.

The reality is that computers are still computers. Mobile is the new TV.

I run EUC in a large diversified enterprise. We have about 0.05% pure mobile users, mostly iPad based. That is growing quickly, but probably won't exceed 3% in the next 5 years based on the current pipeline. There are exceptions, iirc Comcast has 50k iPads. Other field service orgs are similar.

Server based computing is a thing though. There's alot of BYOD and thin clients in our future. Thin clients are approaching $100 and going lower. VDI/Citrix has a positive ROI for me.

I think the future looks more like Issac Asimov's multivac.

I wish people on HN would use less unexplained acronyms.

Thanks for this. It summarizes succinctly my uneasy observations of large numbers of mobile users.

For desktop power users, however, the mobile is somewhat an extension of their desktop.

My MacBook is my work life. My phone is super important to me, but given some devil's choice, I'd go back to a StarTac before giving up the laptop!

My wife is the opposite. For her, in both professional and personal contexts, the computer is more like a screwdriver -- just another tool. The phone is where the computing happens, and you'd have to pry it out of her cold dead fingers.

Right now it's a split of app and desktop. If you have the leverage on the OEMs, teradici clients are cheapest, but they are at the edge of not having sufficient lifespan for us. There are newer Intel devices that are getting close that we're using on a trial basis.

I can't get into specific dollars, but all-in the cost for VDI delivery is about 10% more, and we end up in the black with a longer client device cycle (which basically skips a rollout cycle) and dropping field service contracts -- FedEx is cheaper than a tech.

We're big enough that the component makers are willing to discount parts like CPUs for us though. Our pricing is generally 18 months cheaper than the market.

It scares me, to be honest. I wonder where this tendency in people will lead in the very long run, particularly when you consider the ideas suggested by companies like Neuralink. It brings Black Mirror to mind.

Will people permanently have an inexhaustible feed of vapid garbage playing in their mind while they ignore most of everything going on in reality, in their actual real life?

However, this is unrelated to the original point. Just a side thought.

Is that not already how it is? Each time I've been the new kid at school or new guy at the office, it seems there's nothing for people to talk about if you don't know all the TV shows or all the memes or all the movies or music or the celeb gossip or latest sports happenings or news or video game releases or this weeks anime developments or whatever it is each person chooses to fill their thought process with other than the world immediately around them.

It seems it's probably comforting to be consumed by external things over which you have no power, instead of being sober about closer things - some of which you could influence given significant effort, some of which you are powerless to influence with any amount of effort.

The most popular TV shows are of things with similar content or at least content quality.

What made you think that the internet or mobile would be any different? :)

I don't ask that everyone read books, god forbid, but it would be nice if people weren't using their phones to put themselves into hibernate nearly all of the time. The phrasing of your question implies that the train is an isolated circumstance, but in my experience I see people out on dates with both people on their phones ignoring each other, and even whole groups of friends out together, all on their phones.

I just wish people would engage more.

I was interested to find that in India, things are named in a way that brings out little points like this. For example, Indians call the little snacks you can buy on trains (like roasted, spiced peanuts) 'timepass.' A way to put the mind on hibernate and pass the time until the next desirable experience, presumably.

Maybe that's just what people want most of the time? The world can't always be the way we'd like it to be, and we're just passing time in a way that takes minimal effort. To get to the next desirable experience.

For most, the phone is where they go when a situation becomes uncomfortable or unfavourable. It's easier to do that than meet and correct the situation (if it's correctable at all). Or learn to see beauty in the mundane.

We need to build a culture of reasoned, purposeful existence, rather than one that is constantly buckling to the whims and fancies of our immediate demands.

> I just wish people would engage more.

Some people loose themselves in their phone, others loose themselves into a book.

They're both the same.

If you do, then you must agree that you could replace every moment in your life that had been spent reading a book with you perusing your phone, and you would be the same person today.

Do you believe that to be true?

I just wish people didn't ignore the world all the time in favor of carrying their computer (phone) around with them and staring into it all day long.

What amuses me is when I see someone reading an actual physical book. It is so rare, and it is almost every time someone trying to be hip.

Reading a book is an almost entirely introverted activity. How is the motivation to be hip going to be enough to sustain one's attention across the length of an entire book?

15 Million Merits isn't about the future.

And that's precisely why mobile is eating the world. Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms drive a lot of traffic.

Another time she had tried to open a link to a Word Doc and didn't realize it downloaded it. I showed her where it was in the downloads folder and she proceeded to upload it to Google Drive to open it instead of using Word.

Very few functions kids do these days require a specialist app, just a particular browser.

Her sister was complaining about having to log into Netflix and I suggested she install the App. Her response was "I don't like Apps, I prefer websites."

for netflix, the website has more features, so yeah.

And those fume hallucinations inspired the 'convergence' bandwagon which lead Canonical/Ubuntu, the Gnome project and Microsoft astray for years before they finally started rolling back those dumb decisions.

The markets for smartphones and tablets are now at absolute saturation point and, to a first approximation, no-one is abandoning their laptops/desktops en-masse in favour of working off of a 6 inch screen.

On light days about an hour.

I'm usually on a laptop/desktop for 8-10 hours a day.

Even on a phone/tablet, communication often includes web hyperlinks. The obsession with mobile is a reflection of business model. If you are in the advertising / surveillance capitalism business, mobile ("sensor phone") devices provide non-desktop signals that can be monetized.

Unfortunately, desktop software was hurt by piracy, with a few large ISVs making the most money. Today, Apple makes money on desktop hardware rather than desktop software. Microoft has tilted Windows 10 towards hosted services and data collection, but ISVs cannot abandon the large incumbent Win32 device market.

As laptop/desktop security improves, operating sytems could be reducing desktop software piracy and improving the profitability of ISVs. Instead, "app stores" are following two leaders who don't care about ISVs: Apple (hardware revenue, 30% ISV tax = tiny ISVs) and Google (data revenue, "free" apps).

We have the security technology and social network/marketing experience to design laptop/desktop software ecosystems that protect data/IP and support new ISVs. If Mozilla/Firefox wants to help, they can make it easier for web/extension developers and content creators to get paid.

Uh, App Store? http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/01/13/revenue-from-apple...

From that article, the top 10 mobile "apps" by revenue can be mapped to the modern equivalent of TV, radio and telecom services. None of these are creative software apps like those from large ISVs on desktops/laptops. Instead we have many mobile ISVs who are not very profitable.

Read what you wrote (in the context of the current discussion). Desktop software is alive and well. I don't like the size of the Apple Tax any more than you do, but to suggest this market doesn't exist is laughable.

  - pre-app-store (side loaded / direct download) desktop revenue on Windows and Mac
  - "app store" desktop revenue on Windows and Mac

Where the 30% tax exists in a distribution model, there are few successful ISVs that use only that distribution model. Where sideloading remains on Mac/Windows desktop, there are successful ISVs even with software piracy. On iOS, there is no alternative to the software distribution tax. Developers have been given an artificial choice between software piracy and 30% tax.

Both mobile and desktop ISV software revenue could be improved by app stores that enforced software licensing and provided optional marketing services that added up to 30%. Over time, the relative uptake of those optional services would lead to developer-oriented capabilities in app stores, i.e. serving the needs of the people paying the 30% tax.

I don't know anyone who does banking on their phone -- it's all desktop. Granted, I haven't taken a formal survey or anything.

Bills become much easier to pay via the phone, as you can scan the information from the invoice with your camera (for those companies that refuse to make electronic invoices available). Many invoices now use QR codes as well, so you only have to scan one thing to get all the information needed.