Mozilla is still today doing incredible work. The work on Quantum was extremely forward-thinking in a way that most corporations cannot support; it brought us Rust, which is a fantastic contribution to the ecosystem.
Furthermore, Mozilla has always had troubles with judgement and mismanagement, this is not new. The problems that have been surfacing are old problems, they're just getting more severe.
Their whole mission is to have better judgement and management, advocating for the user instead of a corporation (or foundation). So it sounds like you're in agreement with the GP that Mozilla's decay is not news.
Are there? I see no evidence to support that assertion and a lot of evidence against it.
Market share matters. The last vote at the W3C about DRM video being the most recent example.
I mean, I probably qualify as reasonably savvy, and I have used exactly 4 browsers in the last 10 years: Firefox, Chrome, IE/Edge, and Safari.
I probably don't count as savvy, but my browser experience over the last 10 years has been a somewhat broader list. Having started with Firefox at V2, I switched (around '06) to my primary browser being Opera, with SeaMonkey as a secondary - especially when I want IRC; Firefox, K-Meleon, and Links are all in the background ready to go. I also used QtWeb for a brief period.
When Opera switched to being a Chrome clone, I jumped ship. SeaMonkey didn't provide the ease-of-use I wanted for an everyday browser, so I went back to Firefox. I'm now more often on Pale Moon.
Which Mozilla enthusiastically and Fully supported Google, MS, and Netflix in support of DRM.
Their fake unwillingness from 2014 was about as transparent as netflix's where by netflix claims it is "all the MPAA/Studios" why at the same time closing down all Open Access API's, and Locking down all their own wholey owned content behind DRM
This is not the first time user privacy has been invaded on Firefox or by Mozilla and it will not be the last
The fact that these Data Reporting features, and allowing FF to run "studies" on you is a OPT-OUT setting not a OPT-IN setting is all the proof I need that the Mozilla of old is long dead.. A Privacy respecting company would make such things OPT-IN, not OPT-OUT..
That is with out even getting into the whole Orwellian Ministry of Truth they are creating, or about 100 other things
The engineers at mozilla are NOT the problem.
Doesn't the fact that that's even allowed to happen point to a larger problem?
I don't know, Rust and Servo seem to show that there's still the hacker spirit that was there at the beginning, it's just they accumulated a lot of 'business types' if you will over the years and they need to put that engineering face back at the top, instead of being too focused at running a multi-million dollar enterprise.
I hope you're not pretending that Servo is somehow the fastest way to browse the web...
Firefox 57+ is absolutely not the fastest way to browse the web. I'm sorry, I tried.
it hogs my memory if there's no other software running
Maybe your system is different, but for me, FF 57+ uses much more CPU than Chrome, and unlike RAM, that's a statistic that actually affects something in a meaningful way (increased power consumption).
If you're worried about Chrome using RAM when nothing else is, you might be fetishizing the concept of free RAM.
I've stuck with FF because I'm a web developer-- sadly, the money led me there from other more interesting lines of dev work-- and I don't want to see a single browser dominate the web the way IE used to.
elsewise, I'd say, try creating a new FF profile, unfortunately afaik older profiles can still jank up the browser a bit
I see Mozilla as suffering from a crisis of identity, internally; it's acting as though it is staffed by believers in the manifesto but is now steered by those enamoured with The Bay Area and its ways.
Rust, Firefox 57, and even FirefoxOS are/were noble efforts to succeed in delivering on the manifesto. Pocket and this latest advert update smack of an executive that is thirsty to exploit the Mozilla brand for profit.
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy applies to do-good missions just as easily as it does to the worst of avaricious corporations or bloated gov't depts.
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization." [0]
E.g. the company owner remains a company owner only as long as they are willing to go sufficient far to keep the company profitable; those who don't go bankrupt and lose their position.
The bureaucrat is not special in that respect - they are "just" the natural foot soldier of those who want to maintain an organisation for the sake of the organisation.
As such the backbone of any long-lasting organisation will be made up of those who are good at both maintaining their position in an organisation, and in protecting the organisation against inside and outside "threats".
Unfortunately such threats can include those who want to focus resources on the original goal of the organisation, at the risk of diminishing the role of the organisation.
Since Pournelle mentions the Soviets: to me this is one of the most dangerous parts of Leninist party theory: it involves rules meant to strengthen a party organisation against the threat of outside force, but it also made the Bolshevik party ideally suited for party bureaucrats and power mongers, whose prime goal quickly became the perpetuation of the party and the privileges of power.
A lesson should be to make any organization as weak as it can possibly be while retaining its ability to function. Unfortunately to function that needs an even playing field, or "as weak as it can possibly be" in the face of competing with multinational corporations quickly means something much bigger than we might hope.
this works for company, bureaucracies and everything else in life and is part of the entropy an organization accrues with time.
giving bureaucrats a weaker initial position will only extend the time before takeover.
If you can't be financially self-sustaining, then no level of desire to do good in the world will result in the long term ability to continue doing good.
It is like the phrase, Justice without power is inefficient and power without justice is tyranny. You need both profit and philosophy to do good.
After that they got into all kinds of "social signaling" shenanigans, and the rest is history.
There's a lot of power in branding, apparently. People keep saying things like, "Mozilla is a good company at heart", and I'm at a loss. Mozilla 2017 is nothing like the Mozilla that existed when the Foundation was established, or when the Mozilla Manifesto was adopted. Tons of key people left in a few different waves: first when Google pulled them off the project to go build Chrome, and then lots more who trickled out over the years during and after the Kovacs/FirefoxOS era. What remains is (a derivative of) the codebase + the name "Mozilla" + and, like, Mitchell. But that's it. Keep calling it the same thing, though, and somehow folks act like we're talking about the same thing.
Mozilla imploded—or rather, got Netscapified—years ago. To believe that Mozilla or Firefox is your old friend who's still helping you fight the good fight is incredibly naive and can only come from someone who hasn't actually been paying attention and is easily fooled by (trivially contradicted) surface-level details (like a name). I mean, it's not even like some philosophically tricky ship-of-Theseus problem. Mozilla is dead, people, and this isn't news.