When companies struggle with a failing product, the answer usually is to evolve. Not to double down on what has (thankfully for us) worked for several decades but now is starting to fail systemically.
What you're saying here presumes to be the answer to the most important question Mozilla is struggling with: in 10 years, is a browser-focused Mozilla viable? Nobody knows the answer to this, there are strong reasons to think the answer is a strong "No." So stop pretending like you know the answer.
FireFox is not a failing product, it is the only product they have that is not failing and pursuing shiny and new stuff that nobody needs (despite the corpspeak there) is only going to accelerate that towards becoming the truth.
Mozilla is a one-trick pony (well, they were a two trick pony but then they decided to murder Thunderbird and then retracted it or whatever they did, it also confused the hell out of me when they pulled that one). And they now have to accept that, deal with it and focus on being the very best one trick pony they can be.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-suspends-firefox-send-...
How are they supposed to address the malware problem without making significant changes to the system? “Just add abuse reporting” sounds expensive, in terms of moderation. And there’s still the reputational risk of having God-knows-what encrypted content served through a subdomain of firefox.com. While I liked being able to share trusted URLs, something tells me that ain’t coming back.
You're making strong statements here as fact that are not only subjective but which run against evidence.
Mozilla is letting 250 people go, that's not because their things other than Firefox are a resounding success, but mostly because none of those things pay the bills and are failures in the market place.
Firefox is falling behind on Chrome and Edge, it is really annoying that since a couple of weeks I'm more or less forced to use Chrome because FireFox languishes in domains that matter to me personally. That's a pretty strong sign because if there is one thing that I never thought would happen it is that I would switch away from FF. So no, it is not failing - yet. But it may come to that. If people like me are considering to switch that future is closer than you might like.
So maybe my strong statements are subjective but they are actually backed by some evidence, you did not provide any whatsoever other than naysaying.
Firefox has been losing market share steadily for years. The biggest efforts to turn that around have at best slowed it. Your subjective experience backs it up. That's evidence it is a failing product.
Mozilla has shipped successful products other than Firefox. Rust being a strong example, and then there are moderately less successful ones that have varying impacts. I worked on one (Hubs) that had a strong trajectory when I left, both in terms of user and revenue growth.
Potential users are saying, "Here are things I want in Firefox," and a Firefox/Mozilla advocate is telling them that's not what they really want, and Mozilla is going to work on something else.
It's been this way for years, and at the end of the day users realize it's pointless to argue and switch to Chrome.
Executives have a tough decision to make in terms of where and how to place bets. The OP's approach is to just concede that Mozilla will be dead some day and they may as well just slow the decline. If you are the CEO, accepting this and acting in accordance with that would be a dereliction of duty. I am not claiming to know the answer. I worked on a team that tried to place a strong bet to backstop things if Firefox ultimately failed. But I don't think the confidence that it's self-evident that they should just go all-in on Firefox is justified.
I think most Firefox users on Hacker News would dispute this. Judging by the average thread on Firefox, most of us think that Mozilla's efforts have mostly been to make Firefox worse. I don't know that I'd go that far, but the issue seems to be that most of the user facing changes have been the kind of pointless changes for the sake of change, and side projects most people don't use or want in their browser.
A sibling comment mentions breaking the addon API. If the addons I want to use are broken for months at a time, that's going to get me to consider using a different browser, even one with less capabilities. (This doesn't have to be a rational process; ideally you want your users to never think "ugh, why isn't this working, hmm I haven't checked out Chrome in a while". Even if Chrome is worse, some of them are going to switch.)
Then there's Pocket, which (let's admit) exists only because it's a direct source of revenue for Mozilla via advertisements placed in the browser chrome.
Then there's the pointless change to the URL bar, which drew an absurd amount of outrage. That much anger over a small UI change is not justified of course, but that's not the point. Stuff like this breaks the cardinal rule of not pointlessly pissing off your dwindling user base.
There's whatever the hell the mobile team is up to, with some new perpetual beta project every 12 months and putting an enormous amount of effort into a new Firefox for Android with a worse, slower UI that's not significantly faster for actual browsing and currently only has support for a handful of addons (which are the only reason anyone uses FFA).
There's enhanced tracking protection, which in the good ol' days of Firefox would have been an addon. Granted, it seems like it's doing something genuinely useful.
The RSS viewer got removed in version 64.
Then there are the fiascos, like the time Mozilla broke all users' addons, the hotfix sideloading scandal, the Mr Robot thing...
To be clear I do recognize that at least some parts of Mozilla are interested in improving Firefox, but the issue is that most of the improvements there are not obvious to anyone. Personally I've enjoyed the feature to automatically block notification permission requests (the UI for that is great). The addition of WebP support was nice, and ongoing work to support AVIF is also appreciated. The work on WebRender and introducing Rust code into Firefox is appreciated and has made Firefox noticeably faster. There have been some nice improvements to the developer tools too.
The problem is that most of this stuff isn't visible to ordinary users, even to power users. That's a problem for attracting new users, to be sure. But the attempts Mozilla has made to attract new users seem to largely be failing. And so the worst thing they could possibly do is to piss off the dedicated users who remain, but that seems to be what they've mostly accomplished.
I'm very happy with the work they do to make a better rendering and styling engine. However I'd like to add that it wasn't that bad kn the first place as someone like to say: I could have hundreds of tabs open back in 2014 with no problems.
> I don't know that I'd go that far, but the issue seems to be that most of the user facing changes have been the kind of pointless changes for the sake of change,
Yep. Also I'm not against a facelift but don't let ux-ers run the show alone. When everyone cries out: stop and think! And if you cannot hear the cries: fix your feedback system! Like the one that Google has the feedback system at Mozilla makes it clear to me that my voice doesn't matter at all.
> and side projects most people don't use or want in their browser.
I'm fine with side projects as long as they don't come at the expense of the main product.
> A sibling comment mentions breaking the addon API. If the addons I want to use are broken for months at a time, that's going to get me to consider using a different browser, even one with less capabilities. (This doesn't have to be a rational process; ideally you want your users to never think "ugh, why isn't this working, hmm I haven't checked out Chrome in a while". Even if Chrome is worse, some of them are going to switch.)
Exactly.
> Then there's Pocket, which (let's admit) exists only because it's a direct source of revenue for Mozilla via advertisements placed in the browser chrome.
I even don't have the problem with pocket that certain other people have, but couldn't they've been honest about it from the start? Trust was the one thing that differentiates Mozilla from tbe crowd.
> Then there's the pointless change to the URL bar, which drew an absurd amount of outrage. That much anger over a small UI change is not justified of course, but that's not the point. Stuff like this breaks the cardinal rule of not pointlessly pissing off your dwindling user base.
IMO the problem is they want to get us to think it is a community project and at same time ignore the community.
[...]
> Then there are the fiascos, like the time Mozilla broke all users' addons, the hotfix sideloading scandal, the Mr Robot thing...
Yep. It shows how they completely doesn't understand that their main asset is user trust.
They broke the plug-in API years ago and haven't bothered to fix the new one meaning I'm stuck with ugly tabs on the top even when I use Tree Style Tabs. Scrapbook extension hasn't worked for years etc.
Today, the main reason I use it isn't technical superiority but stubbornness, idealism and rhe fact that the alternatives are just as bad. I.e. despite all the progress on speed etc nothing makes up for breaking the single reason why they were the work horse of browsers: the extensions ecosystem combined with cross platform and good baseline performance.
FWIW: Mozilla can get money from me today - if they promise to use it to fix Firefox.
They wont. Quite on the contrary they are quite clear that donation money goes to other projects. I understand this has something to do with Mozilla being a non profit and browsers development not being a thing in their charter, but sooner rather than later I hope they'll realize that providing a good, free browser is maybe the biggest thing they can do to secure an open web ecosystem.
I already donate money directly to other projects, so I am not interested in that.
I will be signing up for the VPN thing however once it becomes available and if I know the profits goes to Firefox (irony over irony is if I'll need to use a VPN to sign up for the VPN I want :-P)
When you install TST, it shows a message explaining to you how to get rid of the tab bar. It's also in their documentation: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
Since the doc is not super clear on this, the userChrome.css needs to go in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/chrome/userChroms.css (you might have to create the "chrome" directory).
It's not a super-nice process, but as someone who occasionally does tech support, I understand why they don't offer an API anymore that misbehaving addons could use to utterly destroy the browser UI.
It is also clear that this is a hacky workaround that is not guaranteed to continue working.
Mozilla, I'm going to use very small words here so that you understand: users will want to change your UI. You can't fight that without fighting your own users. Then again, that doesn't seem to be stopping them.
You can't both say "well we let you do it, we're so customizable" and "but if you do and anything goes wrong, it's your fault."
I'd rather that userchrome get removed and Firefox own up to the fact that they're not gonna properly support what users want.
A company who puts users first should not be ashamed of supporting their users' desires. You either support your users or you fight your users. Mozilla have somehow decided to publicly fight their users and furtively and abortively support them in secret; I really don't get how they think that reflects well on them. It feels like Moz are more trying to appease their own UX designers than their userbase.
FWIW Mozilla even experimented with vertical tabs, only they made the tab column so high it interfered with the URL bar and also didn't support nesting.
Why is that dereliction of duty?
Actually accepting the facts as they are is the hallmark of a good CEO. Trying to pretend reality and facts don't matter and that FireFox will win this battle is - pardon the word choice - delusional at this point in time.
So if your choices are between fighting a losing battle as good as you can or accelerating the drop then I'd be all for fighting that battle and drawing it out as long as I could. Accelerating it with wild-ass gambles is what got Mozilla where it is today.
I note they just cut 25% of their workforce. That's not a sign of a healthy company, unless they had 25% excess people in the first place, and then it would be a sign of bad management. So I'm going on the assumption that they are letting go of people they could ill afford to miss.
> Others in the thread think they can survive by focusing on Firefox (you disagree obviously.)
I disagree because the writing has been on the wall for a long time. The diminishing market share tells a pretty clear story. What is happening now is that Mozilla will try to jump from one shrinking ice-floe onto another that they hope will be more stable and may even give them room to expand again. They fail to recognize - again, my opinion - that this lack of focus is one of the drivers of the exodus in the first place.
> Some (like me) think they can survive by building new things people will pay for. (you think they are a 'one trick pony.')
That's possible, but survival of Mozilla the software house making a lot of other stuff that generates revenue which is not the browser is none of my concern nor interest. I can see why as a Mozilla employee it would be your concern. But I see no difference between that work and that of any other software company. The browser is where the difference can be made.
> A CEO who disagrees with your opinion isn't ignoring facts
If that CEO has a great plan on making Mozilla survive and manage to stave off further decline of the browser market share then I haven't seen it. So either that plan does not exist or they have already given up but are just not telling you (or me, for that matter).
> and a CEO who doesn't charter a strategy towards something other than catastrophic failure is not a good CEO.
That depends on how avoidable the catastrophe is.
Losing the browser would be a catastrophe, losing the rest would not even register, for everything else that Mozilla does that I'm aware of there are alternatives. But a browser with still some market share that is privacy focused and not beholden to some large advertising agency or hardware provider is a unique thing.
I think the big difference between our points of view is that you are looking from the inside out and I'm looking from the outside in. You have by virtue of your position more information at your disposal, but your interests and mine are not necessarily 100% aligned.
I would prefer for FireFox to be available as long as possible, you - apparently - would like Mozilla Inc as an entity to survive. Those two are not necessarily joined at the hip. Though obviously if Mozilla Inc survives FireFox may have a better chance of survival too.
But it looks to me, reading between the lines here, that Mozilla effectively announces that they feel that the browser as a source of revenue is a dead end and that if they do not move into other markets that the company will go under.
This, a thousand times. I care about Mozilla as the makers of Firefox - the browser for the users.
1. Firefox dies and Mozilla dies
and
2. Firefox dies and Mozilla survives by making a chat app
These are identically bad to me as a user. In both cases, the only project users care about from the company is gone.
And here is the main point: for some reason Mozilla and their accountants seems to think that Firefox is just a source of income and that their main goal as a non profit is something else, while all the time the most important work they have done to improve the world has been to create an alternative and better browser that isn't owned by big media.
That's idealism.
The difference between a non-profit and a corporation is that while a corporation seeks to provide return to the shareholders, a non-profit seeks to provide a good life to people who run it.
Until three years ago or so I think that's what I thought was the idea of Mozilla.
This is a non-profit ran by those that raise funds i.e. the non-profit parasite class. Those kinds of non-profits are famous for throwing charity galas that cost $250,000 to produce and raise $260,000.
It is just so extremely frustrating when I wish someone well and they - in my opinion - take the wrong choices.
Here's a sort of thought experiment, which I really don't know the answer to. How much of Firefox development (by hours, lines of code, commits, pick your metric) is done by Mozilla employees as part of their day jobs? And how much of that development is ~useless for the maintenance and improvement of the core browser? (Stuff like Pocket and the "discovery" feature on the new tab page, all the time spent on the URL bar changes, etc etc.)
It might turn out to be the case that most, or even all of core Firefox development could be done by the community. At the very least I'm willing to put out there that maintaining a web browser does not require half a billion dollars a year. (It's rather hard to imagine that 100 full time devs making $250k a year each couldn't handle basically all of the core development, for example.)
The problem with Mozilla is that it's a business, for all intents and purposes. With an open source project, as long as ongoing development is financially maintainable you don't have to care about marketshare. Mozilla cares about marketshare because it affects how much Google will pay them for search traffic (and how much they get from in-chrome advertizing).
When Oracle proved derelict in its duties managing the development of OpenOffice, the Document Foundation was formed, largely by people who were already spending their time on OpenOffice. They forked OpenOffice into LibreOffice almost overnight. Major longstanding pull requests were quickly merged. New people who previously hadn't wanted to contribute stepped up to support a community project. And the result has been all to the good! The Document Foundation still manages the project, and in 2019 did so with a total income of less than a million Euros.
To me this is proof that large open source software projects can quietly evolve into two camps: one is the employees of a governing corporation, and the other is the community. And the community might be doing most / all of the core work required to keep the project running, and the employees are mostly doing stuff that benefits the company. And suddenly there's a community fork - and it just works, without any hitches. I don't know if this would be successful in the case of Firefox, but I expect (and hope) that people would try if there was ever a hint of Mozilla abandoning it.
(For another example, consider KDE e.V., which manages an enormous open source project on a budget of under 600k Euros a year as of 2018.)
Maintaining a browser is an immense undertaking. With 50 full-time contributors, you may just about be able to provide a functional chrome to Blink (then WebKit) that doesn't suck too badly and keeps up with the performance and web standards requirements that Google in particular keeps pushing forward.
100 people is in no way enough to make both production-quality browser chrome and browser engine on your own, become the cutting edge for performance and privacy improvements, keep up with and participate in standards development, plus whatever auxiliary supporting efforts are necessary when your browser is the main product as opposed to supporting a cashflow-rich ad or app store business.
Sure, you can build a Chromium derivative for early adopters or crypto enthusiasts with a handful of people and a bunch of VC money. But what Mozilla does is more important, and has a much larger scope. They may survive with 100 people for a while, they would be a far cry from being relevant though.
Animations Team
Binding Team
Device Team
DevTools
DOM Team
Ecosystem infra
Input Team
Layout Team
Paint Team
Rendering Core
Speed Metrics Team
Style Team
Web Capabilities (Project Fugu)
Worker Team
For doing the "best job possible", you can probably blow up team size by a lot, there are numerous tasks that would benefit from more attention and I'm sure Mozilla are already making hard trade-offs at their current staffing levels (which obviously include a lot of people outside of Firefox engineering).
On the other hand, 10-20 years ago, there were a lot of alternative browser projects that were moderately active and able to keep up with 90% of the web.
KDE e.V does not fund any development. It's just there to help with legal matters, organizing conferences, sprints etc.
KDE's development is primarily by volunteers and a handful of developers paid by various interested companies.
These companies have historically included TrollTech/Nokia/Digia/Qt Company, Red Hat, Novell (Suse), Canonical, and nowadays mostly Blue Systems,
Right - my question is what would happen if Firefox development moved to basically the same model. A sibling comment to yours claims 50 full timers isn't enough to develop a browser, so maybe it wouldn't work.
Maybe they should start making cars, or washing machines. But you know what will happen? They will not conquer any new market and they will also lose the one they had.
Mozilla constantly ignores the user needs (extensions, customization) and adds new, "cool" stuff that nobody wants (Pocket, accounts, Mr. Robot adds).. Those "cool" things are only interesting for the managers who want to put it into their CV and some developers that enjoy working on greenfield projects that will never be completed.
At the same time, the core product dies: user needs are ignored, money is spend on everything else, not the browser.
If you think Rust is a 'successful product' in regards to business given the Mozilla Corporation's financial situation, then this is extremely worrying.
I would posit that this (one) of the reasons why 250 people had to be let go. Mozilla focusing on 'distractions' rather than anything that makes them money.
The scope of this thread is if Mozilla has the potential to make successful products (or, things, I guess) beyond Firefox. The OP claims its not possible for the organization to do so. In my mind, showing they have created software that has traction (some revenue generating, some not) disproves this. A PM considers a product successful if it is adopted and loved by users. Other people consider it successful if its team is cash flow positive. Others consider it successful if it bolsters the company brand. The definition of successful I was working with is one that shows Mozilla can ship useful software.
The problem with your view is that if you don't have a plan on how a product will generate revenue that you are effectively taking a huge gamble that may not pay off. So you'll be 'successful' by your definition while filing for chapter 11, something that Mozilla is flirting with in the medium term if they pursue this route.
Only companies with very deep pockets can pursue bets like that, and even then it could hurt. Microsoft Xbox' story is a good example of a bet that worked out, there are many examples of such bets not working out, quite a few of them killing the companies that made the bets.
So it's a niche product targetted at a niche user group.
Where firefox the company is failing is to have a financial sound way of delivering that niche product. To keep the product relevant it needs to invest, and it needs some revenue to pay for these investments. This could be through other products, sponsering, subsidies, etc.
As a long time firefox user i care about having an alternative browser. I don't care about the company mozilla, nor any of its other products. But i understand the money to keep firefox relevant needs to come from somewhere.
But posting Rust as a product and claiming FireFox is not successful is simply not on the level.
FireFox has been amazingly resilient given the onslaught aimed at it, the fact that it still has the marketshare it does is a success in its own right. That that marketshare is dwindling should surprise noone, least of all those working at Mozilla.
As for your experience: that is how most products are developed. But Mozilla is not - at present - a company with more than one successful product. Not from my perspective, and likely not from any of the other frequent users of its flagship product.
I should have never said Rust was a product, you're focusing on a word I used you didn't like and have made it a gotcha that let it derail us away from your original claims. I was using it as an example of Mozilla creating something successful other than Firefox. You claimed Mozilla is a one trick pony and is incapable of making anything else successful other than Firefox. This is objectively false. Firefox only generated revenue in the first place due to an ad deal, which is held up by legal concerns. You also completely ignored the other example I gave, the product I worked on and ran the team for, which is also generating revenue for the company. (Revenue which, I might add, is not backed by advertising dollars nor legal blowback.)
Take care.
And for what it's worth, I used Hubs a little, and it was pretty neat - thanks. Unfortunately I was never able to gain traction on using it more regularly, as the nerdiness level of a 3D/VR environment was too high for my social circle.
By that virtue it seems that an awfully large number of "products" that came out of Bell Labs wouldn't be considered successful, unless I misunderstand.
The fact that it led to useful products is the reason it was established in the first place: a very long term plan from a company that could easily afford it.
And since it strengthened the company that decided to commit the resources it definitely can be considered a success.
There are a few more examples of such institutions, some more successful, others less so but overall doing basic research in a time when tech is in a state of flux looks like it is a winning strategy.
But for some reason managers never takes responsibility.
Isn't Rust a language? https://research.mozilla.org/rust/
How is that going to keep the lights on? Doesn't seem like it contributes to the bottom line in any way, so they would have been better off allocating those people to keeping Firefox competitive. Seems like they need a "more wood behind fewer arrows" moment like Google had. Or a "sell everything but consulting" since consulting is the only thing making money moment like IBM had when they sold laptop, storage, printer, etc. divisions.
Rust is not a product. And for Mozilla it was a huge distraction, one they could ill afford.
So my point stands: this is a rearguard action. Eventually they will lose, accelerating that is in nobody's interest.
This is demonstrably false. Rust was designed for use in browser development, and it has successfully been adopted into Firefox. The payback is increased security, stability, and Firefox developer productivity.
None of the other major browsers are written in Rust, there does not seem to be a huge difference in the number of security issues listed for any of those.
I once worked at a company where they wanted to build everything, preferably including their own operating system programming language and database. And all that four a payment processor, something you could probably write in any language available. Guess where that story ended?
If something isn't core to your proposition it is a distraction.
D has the complexity of C++ with major drawbacks, (the stdlib was tightly tied to GC for example).
Just look at D's marketshare and its overall time on the market.
If you argument is that literally any Turing-complete language would somehow do then bravo for missing the point of basically every language besides asm.
And no, your strawman doesn't hold.
D has been on the market for significantly longer than Rust and reached 1.0 full 8 years before Rust had a 1.0 release, so not surprising at all.
But the rate at which Rust is being adopted is much faster than that of D.
Moreover Rust brings something novel to the table and even inspiring other popular languages, like Swift, in the process.
D has nothing that I'd consider novel. So personally I'll trade D for Rust any day. Luckily, we don't have to pick.
You do realize Rust is a big part of the reason Firefox is more competitive past v57 than it ever was, right?
Mozilla should spin Rust out ASAP so they can focus on their core. Rust has enough momentum now that it does not need Mozilla attention to keep it afloat. Or at least, that's the impression I'm getting, if that's not the case then my apologies.
The fact that Mozilla is a browser company seems to be well known everywhere except at Mozilla. I find this odd.
The word 'browser' is mentioned exactly once in that corporate message and it is in a negative way, 'beyond the browser'. Not exactly inspiring hope, that one.
The plan is to have a Rust Foundation.
Of course you can, as it was shown by FF winning against the preinstalled IE a decade ago. Users were happiliy switching away, because FF was just the better browser.
edit: I regret using the word 'product' since it clearly allowed an instant response of goal post shifting around if Rust is a product, or whatever, by everyone else in this thread. My point was not that, it was that Mozilla is not a 'one trick pony', which was the original claim. And as a person who ships products, I consider a product a failure if less people are using it over time, regardless of the potential underlying cause.
Rust is not a product, never was meant to be one either, if you can point to $0.01 of income brought to Mozilla because of someone paying for Rust then I will be happy to concede that it is in fact a product.
Failing to me means that your product can not stand in the marketplace on merit. Underhanded - criminal at that - tactics by a competitor does not change that in principle. See also: Stacker, Netscape (hm, haven't we seen this before: browser company wants to be platform company, does a rewrite), and many other products that ultimately did not make it but had a very good run while they were alive.
Mozilla is confusing their own importance to staying alive as 'Mozilla the profit seeking company' vs 'FireFox, the last stand'.
And the latter to me is much closer to the stated mission of Mozilla than the former, no matter how much corpspeak they throw at it.
That's not the only way to measure it. Rust paid for itself by making Firefox more competitive. Also, I like how the focus is on one of the most useful things Mozilla does outside of Firefox and not the gazillion things that had much, much less use than Rust.
What? Microsoft is nothing like Borland. Sure they make some money from Visual Studio Enterprise or whatever, but their languages are mostly there to attract devs to Windows/Azure and are making $0 directly.
You missed my point, Rust does not need to directly make $$ "on the market place", ever. All it needs to do is enable Mozilla developers to make Firefox more competitive, easier and faster than other solutions. It is doing that, see "Firefox Quantum", WebRender, Servo etc.
And BTW, the Rust staff paid by Mozilla is relatively tiny, (dozen people?). The fact that this is a major focus is pathetic.
EDIT: Not a dozen, more like 3-4 people.
Borland is 'mostly dead', it ceased being an independent entity in 2015 and that's because it is very hard to sell tools in a world that considers software tools to be a commodity.
Microsoft is only a language powerhouse because they own a whole platform. Mozilla does not qualify as a platform company, as much as they may want that.
> but their languages are mostly there to attract devs to Windows/Azure and are making $0 directly.
Exactly. The kind of benefit that Rust will never bring to Mozilla. Entirely different audiences.
> You missed my point, Rust does not need to directly make $$ "on the market place", ever. All it needs to do is enable Mozilla developers to make Firefox more competitive, easier and faster than other solutions. It is doing that, see "Firefox Quantum", WebRender, Servo etc.
I'll give that a 'maybe'. I don't see much difference in speed of development, if any I see a much slower pace of development @ Mozilla, bugs are open for a very long time and are typically closed not because they got fixed but because they've been 'inactive for too long'.
> And BTW, the Rust staff paid by Mozilla is relatively tiny, (dozen people?). The fact that this is a major focus is pathetic.
12 people is not 'tiny', thats two full teams. Of the 750 people left - if my math is correct - that is a small fraction but compared to the size of the team dedicated to FireFox it is reasonably large.
This has little to do with Rust and has been a thing for a long time and honestly it's a thing for every major piece of software, you just don't see the bug trackers usually.
Just look at how many issues VS Code or IntelliJ has logged in for example.
The fact is, Firefox only got usable at v57 for many, including me, which was thanks to Rust.
> 12 people is not 'tiny', thats two full teams.
And how many marketing, outreach and happiness heroes, ambassadors etc. does Mozilla employ? My bet would be 5x the size of the Rust team at least.
Maybe others are still doing that, but the situation's a lot murkier now. Firefox's UI is more confusing than it used to be (every time you open an application and it does something it doesn't normally, that's confusing to non-nerds—looking at you, update-announcement tabs and "hey come look at Pocket!" messages), other browsers have gotten better, and FF requires extensions to deliver an obviously-better browsing experience than other browsers (it may provide more privacy than Chrome or Edge out-of-the-box, sure, but my mom can't tell that, unlike automatic pop-up blocking, which was obviously a improvement over IE when FF was getting started). It's also not so lightweight that it draws comments from normies when you launch it, because it comes up so fast (this was an actual thing back when it first came out, vs. IE)
Do you have example of this?
Sometimes the answer to a company which is trying too many things at random is to drastically reduce the dispersion of effort, and focus ruthlessly.
It's very hard to do psychologically, though.
IMO Mozilla would probably be better served, business-wise, as being "the customizable Chrome". It would be a much smaller business (i.e. less IP under development), but it could be profitable and it leverages their USP in a way that Chrome doesn't seem able or willing to follow.
Finding different products to sell simply leads to Firefox going away, IMO. I don't care about Mozilla; I care about what Firefox does that Chrome does not. And at the end of the day, that's mostly Tree Style Tabs, uBlock and a menu bar.
Mozilla's thesis is about unlocking the potential of the Internet and ensuring it remains a public resource. Its purpose for existing is not about tree style tabs or ad blockers. But this makes for a tough process of determining how to foster innovative products since the mission is so broad.
Spot on. In fact, I think that without FireFox Mozilla might as well be dead, even if it survives as a legal entity and employs people. That's it's whole reason for existence as far as I'm concerned.
To the extent Mozilla sees itself as an internet company, it seems it is is so it can subsume other parts of the internet into the browser.
If it genuinely saw itself as an internet company and not a browser company, it would not have:
- killed Thunderbird, its premier non-web non-browser application;
- built a phone where every app was a browser + ad hoc web-y extensions, even where using a web application approach did not make sense;
- the exact same dumb idea as above but for IoT;
- integrated every product idea it makes or acquires (Pocket, Send, now Reality) into its browser as the primarily / solitary entry point
- continually sidelined / demoted even web-but-non-browser technologies like RSS
"Mozilla's users" (and by this you really mean, Firefox's users) see Mozilla as a browser company because everything they do revolves around their browser.
I don't think Mozilla sees themselves as a "company". Their philosophical core is as a foundation promoting core believes. The title of their website is "Internet for people, not profit" and their recruiting pitch is "We're on a mission. Join us".
I regard Firefox Container Tabs and Rust as the most useful things that come out of Mozilla.
Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 and one of the things he stopped was the heavy bleeding from having too many (confusing) SKUs.
His first new product was the iPod, released in 2001 while development of the iPhone started around 2005.
The release of the iPhone would happen ~11 years after his return.
You mean ipod and itunes, perhaps?
Amen. And not send each and every keystroke to Google.
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/turn-autosuggestion-off-mozi...
Is there evidence Chrome does that? I've never heard this claim before.
Ok, maybe not every keystroke. For instance, form fields should be safe.
That's why they've tried in the past (and hopefully continue to do so) to provide resources like you're pointing at to "the public" to build and create their own special place on the Internet. Something outside the gated ecosystems of those big internet companies (Facebook, Twitter, etc).
Have they gotten it perfectly right every time? No, but that's okay, and it's good that they're even trying because not that many people (or companies) are.
And the thing with mozilla is that the browser is their core asset. All this other stuff they do? It is fluff, of marginal importance. If they’re not doing the browser, they’re just another small software vendor, irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
WebKit had its beginnings by being borrowed from Konqueror, an open-source and little used web browse for Linux. That really underscores both how it's possible to develop a quality web browser with fewer resources and that having independent technology is useful. Safari wouldn't have been able to leap frog some other browsers if they weren't able to use WebKit to do it. And I think most readers of this site know that it is important that web technology doesn't become a monoculture.
Whether or not Mozilla can secure independent funding without Google, whether they are "viable" or "relevant". I think those questions are a distraction. The real question is, what is Mozilla's mission? Because if they aren't fulfilling the mission, those other factors are irrelevant. And it's clearly possible for them to do something useful in the browser realm even with 0 resources if they had to fall back on community contributions and be a project like Konqueror.
No, I think it presumes that given the Mozilla Foundation's mission, if a browser-focussed Mozilla Corporation is no longer viable, the parent Foundation has utterly failed, and neither it nor the Corporation that supports it has a reason to exist.
Now, one can argue both sides of that, but I think there's a very good argument they the center of the open consumer internet is the browser, and that soloing functionality off of that (even if the particular thing you are promoting happens to be an open solution) ends up just reinforcing the trend toward balkanization of the internet into domains of disconnected functionality mostly ruled by proprietary apps and services.
That seems like the exact same argument people said with IE6.
Firefox bugs that I have personally encountered as a user or developer I want fixed:
- localStorage implementation easily breaks during power failure https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1341070
- SVG rotation glitches
- Fails to correctly render the "Exo 2" font inside an SVG (Granted, for this one, it just made me switch fonts for my application.)
- Spidermonkey, as a JavaScript engine, is slow and the documentation (Perhaps it could be replaced with GraalJavaScript? An engine that lacks basic escape analysis is bad in my book.)
- Various bugs I am assisting them in resolving.
Mozilla while it has a For-Profit Corporation, is still at its core a Non-Profit, they need to keep true to that mission
This is the fundamental problem with Mozilla.
I think they should just have their own app store for extensions, handle payments and take a good cut.
If Mozilla exists without Firefox it has totally and utterly failed in its one purpose.
That's certainly not Mozilla's position on the matter.
Beyond that my limited (and I do mean limited because I seriously don't care what they do as long as the browser remains FLOSS and high quality) understanding some political activists (with unrelated and potential laudable political agendas) have taken over financial control of Firefox development and are using it to fund their unrelated politics.
An aside from the discussion at hand: is it possible to repackage Gecko so that it uses the same API calls that WebKit uses, basically translating from WebKit calls to Gecko calls? The problem with WebKit and Chromium is that all new browsers are going that direction and Gecko is being left behind. This isn't good for the web as a whole. A version of the Gecko API that could be a drop-in replacement for WebKit would be very helpful here, it seems to me.
This is how Vivaldi (and I guess every other Chromium-based browser) pitches itself compared to Chrome.
Someday they had a name which could be worth something, but I lost my trust in Mozilla ages ago. I don't believe their management, to me they have as much integrity as Facebook (ok, maybe a little more... I'm not sure). I am using Thunderbird and don't know a good alternative, so it would be a pity if it dies, but I'll get over it pretty quickly. Moreover, I don't really need any new features for Thunderbird, nothing but security updates.
Even more than that, I am not really that picky about the engine. Sure, I was always pretty enthusiastic about the technology in Mozilla (I mean — Rust! — do I even need to say more?). And I do like Gecko. But, you know, if they believe they will deliver better if they switch to WebKit, I'm kinda ok with it. If it won't break any plugins, chances are I won't even notice. I may cheer for Servo and stuff, but it's not why I use Firefox. The browser as a product is a bigger part of the UX for me than mere rendering engine. Also, Firefox is still a little less of a spyware than the competition. Fuck up that experience for me, and you lose a very loyal old-time user. Keep up with the competition while not fucking it up, and there's still enough momentum for me not to switch. I guess there's a lot of people like me in that regard.
Finally, Mozilla is not a startup with a core of energetic talented people, who can make miracles happen. It is a quite old non-profit organisation, entrenched with politics. Their biggest (only?) asset I know of is people, who know browser stuff. Well, maybe the brand, known for browser stuff. Do they have anything else at all?
So, yeah, anything is a bet, but I don't think I would bet on anything outside of Firefox. Not now, anyway. When everything is good financially and we have money to spare, well, looking for alternatives may be good. But when you are struggling for money and are about to lose everything you were keeping afloat for the last 20 years... As I said, Mozilla is not known for brilliant top-management, that has a crystal-clear vision and makes ingenious decisions that save the company when the business is struggling. The best thing I would expect them to be able to do is cutting costs, finding new sponsors and new ways to "slightly sell" Firefox without angering too many users. And even that they don't do very well.
The most radical thing I would reasonably expect them to pull of would be to switch all forces to mobile version of Firefox and win it, while loosing desktop version. But I doubt it.
[Also, in some parallel reality they could take advantage of political situation and sell Firefox OS to Huawei (or maybe get a sponsorship). But in this reality, Firefox OS is dead, Mozilla is too rigid to make wild moves like that, and Huawei is waaay more capable of building their own OS than Mozilla.]
The people that brought balance got gradually left go or left out of disgust, allowing that leader to grow their compensation unchecked (2.5M a year now).
I had a lot of respect for them when I joined, and was just feeling empty and disappointed when I left.
One all hands speech that is stuck with me was the one about "how Mozilla needed to participate to something with the United Nations and that's really important" when their wanted to join the UN board. This quickly got covered up and they also did not get to join the UN board.
Basically, follow the money, as usual. I'll be on the lookout for a post from Eich on the subject, I guess.
That page does note that Baker was "paid only by related for-profit" - but at best that introduces a conflict of interest.
As I've never been at Mozilla, I can't confirm any of the other details. And I'll say that any large-scale technology company needs to strike a balance between product focus and the degree to which it controls the conversation around its space, and Mozilla's investment in things like Rust will have a lasting positive impact on the software engineering discipline. But it's also clear that the environment was toxic enough to make at least one person (the parent poster) feel this way, and that itself is a yellow flag.
Don’t get me wrong; their “distractions” have given the world a lot of nice things (Rust comes to mind). But first and foremost, Mozilla’s mission should be to ensure a great, competitive browser, and they’re losing the competition badly. And imho they are prioritizing their resources badly as well.
The one reason that I don’t donate to Mozilla is simply because I feel that my money will be used for vanity ambitions, rather than to the core product. I wish there was a way to donate to Mozilla and say “only use this money for Firefox, because that’s the mission I support, and I don’t really care about the other 90% of the things you’re doing”.
I wonder if crowdfunding around specific development goals would be productive - certain promising features like Webrender have been in development for a very long time, and I'd be willing to contribute money to see them finished and shipped.
Mozilla has not been very effective with how they have spent the received money in the past, a very large fraction of that money went to dead end projects or net negatives.
Both, actually.
But anyway, you're entitled to your opinion.
Why do you say this? Because this is exactly what I expect Mozilla/Firefox to do.
IE, Chrome and Opera all use the Chromium engine. Safari is locked into the Apple ecosystem. And as such, it’s imperative Firefox fights this battle, with all the resources and community support they can get. Otherwise we do end up with a Chromium-only silo very quickly.
"Don't be evil".
This is short term thinking. A slightly better Firefox tomorrow is nice I guess, buy I care way more about being able to use Firefox in 2030, or 2040. Making a browser is not looking like a business model that is going to make you last forever - not when Google is your competition. Their business model already depends on them being financed by other tech companies which are the epitomes of the ad tech industry. Their market share is shrinking, and the moment Google (and their other sponsors, but mostly Google) think they can get away with it they will cut Mozilla's funding.
I very much encourage their branching out if it leads to them being more independent and sustainable as a company. Moreover, I think [1] the idea of Firefox providing basic internet services is a really good idea.
People forget that Firefox gave the world tabbed browsing. Sure, it was around before, but Firefox was the drive and impetus that moved it from a niche idea to the default option across every browser. That was over a decade ago.
Firefox has the opportunity to execute a vision of modern web-browsing again. And, frankly, we really need it. Tabs use to be the solution; now I measure problem difficulty in terms of tabs I have open ("That was a 10-tab problem"), and find myself closing 15-20 at a time.
Arguably, Pocket is trying to do that, but as a secondary service. It needs to be integrated, and seamless. I want stacks of tabs, tagged tab groups, an Inbox-like interface for my web history, including reminders (rip Inbox Reminders), predictive new-tab screens, cross-device tab sharing. I want to collect and link sites I've seen, and quickly be able to find them again. I want internet history that's a set, not a random list.
Firefox could bring us the next wave of web browsing again. Instead, they're building an app that claims to make web browsing better---by going to a second location.
Opera was the source of browser interface innovation and I wish we could replicate that process. They also invented popup blocking, speed dial (the default blank tab UI now on every browser), actual page zoom (before it was just font size increasing/decreasing), and a bunch of things that failed a like mouse gestures and built-in torrent/feedreader.
One big thing Opera didn't invent was the use of the address bar for more than URLs, so you could search and autocomplete on it. I think some combination of Chrome+Firefox iterated on that concept.
We lost "lightweight and snappy" way back in FF 2.0, and every browser blocks pop-ups now. Today's equivalent would be making ad blocking built-in and on by default, which it isn't. The advertising and constant "we updated!" tabs opening up (yeah, great, I don't give a shit, stop telling me) are at least as annoying as Opera's adbar was, IMO. Hopefully we get a spin-off browser eventually that gets back to FF's roots, and then eventually eats it, like FF did Mozilla Browser.
Well "we updated" mobile firefox to 79, and broke almost all add-ons, forgot the bookmarks, most visited sites, effective homepage and made it crash every hour or so. I can't recall more broken version of Firefox since the times it used to be Mozilla Suite.
This was actually the last straw for me. I had 30 tabs open, and Firefox decided to take an update. Any time I opened a new tab, it demanded I restart my browser, closing everything, and refused to function. That level of interruption was so unacceptable I switched (back) to Chrome.
Nope. There were other browser before that. And Opera did not have Tabs back then. They had MDI with a button-bar for document-access. Mozilla was the first one delivering a real tabbed interface, and was later copied by opera and others.
At the end there was a bunch of features coming from several browsers (but mostly mozilla and opera), which improved each other in tight competition; so it's a bit complicated to say what originated from whom.
Pretty sure it was one of the notable innovations in the original Chrome beta release.
Chrome, of course. It integrated google straight in the URL. To this day, I still don't use URL as a search bar, and press ctrl+K (instead of ctrl+L)...
If they found a different cash cow with their wild bets, why would they cross-subsidize Firefox with it?
Not focusing on Firefox makes Firefox less likely to thrive, no matter which way you look at it.
It's quite hard to turn that kind of ship around, though, psychologically, when you've been fighting rearguard for so long, and mentally are in a place of prestige while the halo of lights imperceptibly fades. Mozilla's shadow is its own worst enemy.
That's javascript mostly. Hard to optimize it away.
I would love to see a small dedicated team concentrated on the browser and led by manager who are not playing SV hotshots.
When is the last time a bug fix rose to the top of Hacker News?
When is the last time a cool new library or project rose to the top of Hacker News?
Virtually nobody would consider a fixed browser a success and unsurprisingly, nobody wants to do that kind of unrewarded work.
10 months ago?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21324273
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874139
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20857892
Another fix:
If I understand this right, Mozilla tried to focus on FF only, and that didn't pay back. User base is still declining (in relative numbers), revenue stream gets narrower. So Mozilla is trying to transform itself from a browser vendor to a true user agent, assisting the user and protecting them more comprehensively on the web. This transformation is still ongoing.
They can make Firefox better, and have been doing that a lot. The problem is - it doesn't make the users to come. Google, Apple, Microsoft - all own platforms that people use, and they heavily push the users towards their own browsers.
Users nowadays have been conditioned that it’s perfectly normal to download Chrome after installing Windows / buying a new computer. If Google can do this, why not Mozilla?
I think you are having a very selective memory. Since day one, Google put Chrome ads everywhere including on the Google home page when you are visiting from Firefox and there is no way to permanently disable them.
If you are aware of a similiar marketing outreach that Mozilla could do I'm sure they would love to hear about it!
Not if the company providing the competing browser goes out of business and stops offering it.
That's really what antitrust regulation is for: to prevent one dominant company from killing all their competitors. Once that happens, the dominant company has no more pressure to succeed and their product stagnates, harming everyone.
Browsers are actually a great example of this; despite the government prosecution, Microsoft succeeded in killing off Netscape and then had the entire browser market to themselves. The result was IE6 and "made for Internet Explorer", a horrible mess that took years to clean up.
But it’s not really how the world works though as bigger companies use this soft power for everything, which is why I have stocks in FANG and it just keeps going up and up.
It’s a bit like Atlassian, no one is happy with Jira by itself but they do have the whole package.
https://slate.com/technology/2009/05/google-s-first-ever-tv-...
The “try Chrome” ads for other browsers didn’t start for a while later after that IIRC.
Mozilla cannot really competitively compete with Chrome on features, not for long. Anything new they put out that can pull in a meaningful usershare increase will be replicated by Google. And all the niche features they want to push (privacy et al) aren't going to cause major market swings.
Firefox circa 2004 was dominating because IE was a steaming pile of garbage and Apple had no market share at the time. If you wanted a usable browser it was your only option and even then they were still a minority to the installed by default broken trash.
So what? History has shown that users happily switch to a different browser if it is better. The Mozilla Corporation should know this, as they were the ones making people switch from IE to FF a decade ago. And they were competing against a preinstalled browser!
Aka the browser will no longer bring them any money to sustain themselves. It's sad but we're basically seeing a chromium near-monopoly coming.
From my perspective, the Chrome monoculture is one of the largest threats of the Internet right now, and I don’t see how Mozilla could be relevant without challenging that.
But I guess this goes back to Mozilla the corporation, rather than Mozilla the non-profit org. They want to maintain some form of independence, at the cost of making bit bets.
I get the feeling from this thread that some people think the only conceivable purpose of Mozilla is to maintain an independent browser, and if they can't do that they may as well shut down. Mozilla sees itself in a larger role of supporting a healthy internet, and kind of has to think about what else that might mean besides an independent browser.
This is exactly how I feel about Mozilla indeed. Their only relevance to me is their browser, I don’t care much about the rest. If a “privacy not included guide” is the best example of other value they add, this strongly confirms it from my point of view.
Even if you believe Firefox is the only goal, though... Mozilla needs money to develop it. Despite all the technical effort that's gone into it in recent years, Firefox is still losing marketshare. Maybe there's some killer feature that will turn it around. But so far tracking protection doesn't seem to have done it, and there's not that many other features that Google can't copy. So if you still want Firefox to be useful in 10 years, there's a real chance it will be need to be subsidised by something like Mozilla VPN.
I started this discussion with the point that I’m not donating to Mozilla, because I don’t want my donations to go to their other projects. Mozilla is of course free to do with their resources what they want, it’s just that they should not be expecting my support in that case.
I personally prefer to fund established projects and developers with donations, I just don’t consider Mozilla very good at starting new projects. I want to fund and support Firefox and that’s it, and there’s currently no way to do so. And with that, comes my criticism of how they are using their resources that I can fund.
But it is set up exactly in the contrary manner, without much in terms of any guarantees about what the budgetary division will be leaving FireFox as the collector but not the recipient of the bulk of those funds. Imagine where FireFox would be if not for all those non-starter projects and products that drain resources make it to launch and then get axed quietly 3 months later.
But they did that, and now Firefox market share is almost negligible because it wasn't the default browser on mobile OS's.
For example, I'm sceptical about the potential reach of XR, but if it grows big, it is vital that Firefox plays a bigger role there, instead of everybody being reliant on apps and Chrome once again.
Firefox has never been a default browser on any OS, mobile or otherwise, and I don't see how that could ever change short of Firefox developing their own OS. Which is in fact something they tried a while back for mobile, and it didn't go so well.
A fork of it (KaiOS) is currently more popular than iOS in India.
I'd argue that their PWA-focused OS was just a few years ahead of its time.
The only gripe I have is that pre-installed software can not be easily uninstalled but I understand they need to eat there too so I'll give them a pass. Rearranging the icons took care of that particular irritation.
Sadly though, I don't know how relevant it is due to Linux's desktop marketshare.
Of course, being more or less forced into Gmail and Google docs (or office 365) means that that too is now a losing battle but I hope to fight this rearguard as long as I need to be commercially active. Frankly, I can't wait to shut down my email account and call it a day but it's still some years away.
Exactly, and they only did that when it was too late, and it was proven that mobile was going to be big. It'd have required betting on mobile before it was a sure thing, instead of just focusing on the browser they had.
I don't think Mozilla had any chance in this market. Microsoft couldn't do it, Blackberry couldn't do it, Palm couldn't do it, Nokia... probably could have done it if they hadn't been sabotaged by Steven Elop, but still. After the iPhone came out, everyone else failed except Google, who I'd posit just got lucky with a couple of well-timed carrier deals in key parts of the world.
The only thing Mozilla needed to do was have more foresight than all of the other guys with far more resources... sure, I guess. I don't think the target you're giving them is reasonable.
> Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest.
There is also this:
> As of today, the Thunderbird project will be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, MZLA Technologies Corporation. [1] (January 28th 2020)
I think that proper email and calendar is what people need too. It's a big market and something you would more obviously pay for than a browser. Protonmail doesn't have a good calendar; Google doesn't have good privacy.
[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
All absolutely free of charge.
I think that's a good thing, that's what Mozilla is good at doing, subverting arbitrary cost added bullshit.
That's about to change though, beta is already out for payed users.
What's the point of survival in the kind of world this would result in? To paraphrase, this kind of life is not a life worth living. The internet activism part is core to Mozilla's mission, without that there's no point to having Firefox at all. Chrome is a perfectly functional browser.
I can hear your rebuttal now: oh Firefox offers better privacy. Sure, in the browser Firefox offers better privacy. But the Internet as a whole is sick, so having a good browser without activism to fix the Internet is just papering over the real problems.
All those other things that Mozilla has done to date have not moved the needle for me even a little bit. But the browser is something that touches me every day, for multiple hours of the day.
Maybe this is just my personal perspective but all this activism has not brought Mozilla much other than a bunch of controversy and in the end a browser that is not quite top notch, when it very well could have been.
I feel it is better to do many things in the hopes that one or more of them succeed, than it is to succeed at a meaningless task. The former takes courage, the latter can be interpreted as cowardice.
> All those other things that Mozilla has done to date have not moved the needle for me even a little bit.
I don't pretend to speak for you, but I choose to believe something different: that Mozilla's other work may not have moved the needle in a way you care to notice, but that without their advocacy and legal work the Internet would be a worse shape today than it currently is. I think that if you were to choose to care about that (and you're well within your rights to not care), you would notice a difference.
> Maybe this is just my personal perspective but all this activism has not brought Mozilla much other than a bunch of controversy and in the end a browser that is not quite top notch, when it very well could have been.
In the end I mostly agree with this. But I still think trying to make the world a better place and failing is better than not trying at all.
So I think we want the same thing in the longer term, just disagree about what the order of execution is.
Perhaps what they mean is "nobody is paying for the browser (except Google, our arch-nemesis) we need to build things people will pay for"
Why is everyone so freaking obsessed with saving the world and fixing all its ills? When did it become not good enough to just make something people enjoy using?
Could you imagine how stupid and obnoxious it would be if every time you bought a tool from a hardware store, the packaging went on some long winded self congratulatory rant about how it's saving the world and battling the woes of humanity?
The problem was/is, they take the money their primary product brings in and invest it into some arguably bad, or at least irrelevant, ideas rather than just reinvesting most of it into Firefox and services consistent with what Firefox represents to users. Part of the reason Firefox lost so much market share was that for several years it had been seriously neglected (presumably so that Mozilla could focus on those arguably bad ideas) while the competition continued to improve. (hint: the #1 metric is performance) They seem more interested in playing the role of a nonprofit quasi-startup and social issues advocate than maintainer of the most viable and valuable open source browser.
I just find it hard to believe that it's possible to be significantly faster than Chrome, to the degree that it would be a notable differentiation--especially when the apps Firefox is loading are largely (again) controlled by their adversaries--Google, Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft. For an extreme (albeit non-performance issue) case, look at Widevine. What was Mozilla realistically supposed to do there?
> They seem more interested in playing the role of a nonprofit quasi-startup and social issues advocate than maintainer of the most viable and valuable open source browser.
I think this is where I disagree with most of the people who say Mozilla should stick to Firefox. I don't think you can make Firefox sufficiently "better" than Chrome engineering-wise--certainly not to the degree where people would notice, and I absolutely don't think you could do it with the owners of the most popular web properties having an incentive to work against you, most of whom have a competing web browser.
To differentiate, one idea is that Firefox create optional browser extensions to support local mesh networking over wifi or bluetooth and a container or VM for hosting servers as a safer and more portable alternative to native appstores. This would represent a step back from the FirefoxOS notion, but a step forward from the browser, and could drive interesting proximity applications as well as gaming, which could lead to new users and properly challenge the status quo.
Rationale: Mobile device vendors are too heavily wed to the cellular carriers and related regulatory inertia to do anything here. In particular, carriers are also major distribution channels for a lot of mobile devices, creating a resistance to anything but carrier-enabled mobile-data as a frontline topology.
If we're lucky the thing we want will be spun off of them before they wind down. Like, you know, how Firefox (Phoenix/Firebird) was born in the first place.
It's the latter company that I would not be willing to pay for, the former would have my cash, and more than they would likely expect from one single user. That's because I think that ceding the territory to Chrome/Edge is exactly what we do not need. (oh, and there is of course Safari, but Apple has other problems)
Ad blocking and tracker blocking would be a central item built into the browser from the get-go. I'd get rid of any and all telemetry unless explicitly opted-in to by the user.
I'd make sure that updates are going to be limited to security issues only and that any other feature changes or additions would always be optional rather than forced.
I'd ax each and every product that is not in line with that mission. Rust would be welcome to stay since it is now part of the future of the browser, but I'd spin it out as a separate entity with its own income stream based on a trademark of the name and set up a foundation around that.
The Rustaceans would be encouraged to create their own governance structure and Mozilla would be just another user of that product.
Oh, and I'd rename the company to FireFox Brower Inc.
As for mobile, I'm sure that there is room for firefox on mobile but first you'd have to convince Apple and Google that they are on the wrong path, a distraction that likely would not lead to a win in appreciable time.
Google, irritated by your ad-blocking-by-default, sues you. Maybe directly about the damage to their business model, maybe over the state aid you're getting from the EU. Whether or not they ultimately prevail, they can definitely tie you up for years spending lots of money on lawyers.
Meanwhile, Google's websites aren't working so well in your browser. Your support for CSS 9 and Javascript 11 was in an optional upgrade, and a load of users haven't upgraded. Even those who have are noticing problems. You suspect Google is deliberately degrading the experience, but the only chance of proving that or stopping it is another big court case. Meanwhile, users who use GMail or Youtube (i.e. most users) are slipping away.
Neither Apple nor Google are convinced they are on the wrong path on mobile.
Google is welcome to sue, they can do that anyway. But since the user is free to install any browser Google would be in very hot water with the EU anti-trust commission if they decided to mess with that right by targeting FireFox with default ad-block. I highly doubt they would do that, and if FF were 'my' company (which is the theory here) then I'd be happy to take that gamble. It would also provide some very much needed free advertising that FireFox are 'the good guys' and Google is 'the bad guys'.
FWIW I've been sued by large companies in the past and successfully gained the upper hand every time. The trick is to know how to enter that battle. One possible way would be to move the FF headquarters and legal seat to Brussels, Belgium.
Good luck with that lawsuit.
Google's websites are still supposed to be standards compliant. Users have the option to stay on their older browsers but will - of course - at some point notice that. But Google - wary of that anti-trust law - will do what they can to ensure that their stuff still works. Which they do today as well.
Apple and Google own mobile. To believe that they can be unseated there on the kind of budget that FireFox Inc, can dispose of is not going to get you a good outcome.
OT, but this sounds very interesting! Have you by chance blogged about these experiences, or posted them on HN? I'd love to read more!
https://jacquesmattheij.com/when-crisis-hits/
https://jacquesmattheij.com/my-brush-with-a-patent-troll/
The most interesting one isn't mentioned in either of those, in a nutshell, one arm of Logitech sued us for Trademark infringement because our 'mascot' Chico looked too much like their camera. At the same time another arm of Logitech was making all kinds of ouvertures.
I played the one against the other and ended up with a super good relationship with Logitech upper management (board, two of the directors and founders). I guess they liked the fact that we didn't roll over just like that because they were a 500 pound gorilla. In the end the relationship worked out in our favor, Logitech did invest in a company called Spotlife and when that went belly up they sent us the traffic for nearly a decade.
Finally, I had a run-in with KPN, at the time the largest telco in nl (probably still are) and forced them to pay 300K, a lot of money at the time.
There were some other lawsuits but with smaller parties. We won all of them, mostly because if there was a chance of losing a suit we would simply find another way to solve them, preferably by standing next to much larger people who would take care of the problem long before we had to get worried.
> feature changes or additions would always be optional
> Ignore mobile
So... You are increasing costs ("everything optional"), reducing visibility ("no default telemetry") and ignoring the largest and fastest growing market (mobile). How is your FireFox Browser Inc. making money?
You also didn't respond to my question at all - how is any of this supposed to increase market share?
Corporate and government data security is a related area that a strong privacy-preserving product and team with world class privacy/crypto/security expertise could expand into, especially in places like the EU and India that need a neutral and trustworthy alternative to Chrome-based and Safari-based products. Maybe even the US given the new “Clean Path” initiative.
There are opportunities but you have to stop the bleeding first. I think Jacquesm’s Apple-like strategy of focusing on the most important, already-market-proven product and saying No to most everything else is the best shot at that.
Disabling telemetry is one of the first things that nearly all advanced users do when using Firefox, or when using other products known to include telemetry that can be disabled.
So now any telemetry data that are collected are distorted, given that some of the wisest and most valuable users just aren't included at all because they've disabled telemetry.
Analysis done on the distorted data comes to distorted conclusions.
Product decisions made based on such distorted conclusions end up distorting the usability of the software.
Firefox has collected telemetry for quite a while now, yet I've yet to see that translate into any identifiable improvement.
Worse, a lot of very common Firefox user requests like "make it faster" and "make it use less memory" seem to get minimal attention.
I think Firefox would be a better product, and thus a more widely used product, if the telemetry were to be completely ditched, and the common user complaints that are voiced again and again in all sorts of discussion venues were listened to instead.
Assuming your mobile browser works though.
This is all wishful thinking on your part.
If you don't see how getting the second largest block of internet users strongly behind the one free browser might help to increase market share then that's puzzling but for me the GDPR + FireFox make good sense from an EU perspective. Consolidation + buildout is stop-the-bleeding 101.
That's a lot of users and a government that has made serious moves to show that they too care about user privacy.
Anyway, I did in fact answer your question, and quite exhaustively. But you did not answer mine: how much would it cost to run a lean-and-mean FireFox Inc?
This is a great reply, but I strongly disagree with this bit above - with the pace the web is (finally) moving at, I think it's really important that browsers are "ever-green". Without automatic updates, it won't be long before websites don't look right, or just don't work, in Firefox. And that could lead to the kind of chaos that IE caused, and that would lead to a lot of hate for Firefox.
I think I agree with everything else you said though, and in particular the focus on privacy seems like a great point, especially within the EU.
First as a user of Firefox and Firefox Focus on Android who frequently sends urls/tabs between his devices and synchronizes a lot of things, second because you can't ignore what is now 50% of the Web usage and needs privacy as much as on desktop, if not more.
I could see myself donating some money for such an organization but not in the current state where I would feel I'm paying for the constant brand redesigns or weird activism.
What if they could co-operate with Librem 1,2,3,4,5... from Purism, and PinePhone, and FairPhone, etc
— there're they might find people who would be happy for Firefox on mobile? And Rust and high performance could be nice with a phone like PinePhone
Maybe people would be ok to pay some $ per year for FF on mobile, if they believe/know it won't track everything they read.
I would work with the LineageOS, Replicant, Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, microG, Fairphone, Pinephone, etc. folks to integrate the Gecko engine as much as possible into their offerings. Or at least offer flavors that do so, or prompts to select a browser engine on first boot. If necessary and economical I would pay LOS to ship Firefox by default.
You still have a tiny fraction of the mobile browser market, because all those platforms together are a drop in the Android & iOS ocean.
Regarding the tiny drop comment: you have to start somewhere. Why not with the users who have the most tolerance and technical skills?
I'm sure they wouldn't get enough revenue to replace Google's support, but maybe it would make a dent? Why not try it?
If you want your funds to go toward MoCo (and thus Firefox development), your best bet is to subscribe to Mozilla VPN or Pocket Premium.
Has that been mentioned in a meeting somewhere?
Not explicitly, but I do recall meetings where the announcement was along the lines of "we are choosing to make a dividend payment to fund the Foundation work..." which implies some amount of adjustment based on needs.
We need Mozilla.
The VPN is their best way to monetize.
> The not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation supports open-source apps, web literacy curriculum, gender equality in tech and more.
Yet we are increasingly seeing developers who won't follow those standards. What are we as developers going to do about that?
Unless they become a volunteer based effort -- which is unlikely, given the hideous complexity of implementing web standards -- they don't have a way to fund things.
This is why I've repeatedly spoken against the unapproachable complexity of web standards. They effectively turn the web into a corporate walled garden for megacorporations, because they're too complicated to implement affordably.
Each represents a huge value to the community.
New and untried consumer products? Well, maybe. You never know which could be a big hit.
Still it's not obvious how to make money on any of these :(
I also think that Thunderbird's position can no longer qualify for the adjective 'huge' when coupled with community value, it is well below 1% of the market.
After using it for years I gave up because the bugs were no longer fixed timely, the performance simply terrible and the upgrades were just as likely to cause you trouble as they were to fix something.
Rust has the future, I'm pretty convinced about that. It will take a very long time to materialize, but let's be honest here: without FireFox Rust would have never even seen the light of day, it only exists because a large amount of money earmarked for FireFox was diverted into developing Rust which led to further diminished marketshare for FireFox. The breaking change around plug-ins was another big negative in the near past.
I'm pretty sure this was their direct reason for buying Pocket. It gives something for Firefox users to interact with that isn't actively and passively trying to get them to switch off.
They have already started this with products like Mozilla Send and Lockwise.
No one is willing to pay for a browser but they are willing to pay for these extra services that plug in to the browser.
Every day I wake up to work on my own business and promise myself to do the opposite of this.
By lots, do you mean that we'd need to pull off our boots to count them?
Everything is done on the web now. Job applications, apartment leasing, government services, government obligations, commerce. Giving up the web alltogether is the modern-day equivalent of living as a mountain hermit. It either requires a truly colossal amount of privilege, or it will inflict a lot of pain on you.
They should find/build/maintain a good alternative for that.
Are you gonna give them the money to replace that income? Is anyone at all?
"But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests"
Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There are bugs open for the browser that cost them marketshare every day (WebMIDI for instance) driving people to Chrome.
Spreading their focus thinly, causing their main product to be somewhat neglected and behind when it comes to comparing it with other browsers. And that's before we get into the re-write and forced upgrade and breakage of lots of important plug-ins.
It's not so much the changing world that is the problem here, but a ship that has become rudderless and that does not treat the browser landscape like the war it really is.
The world needs Mozilla, healthy and under good management. I'm not sure if that is a luxury we will have for much longer if they are going down hill this fast. On the plus side, it's open source and will - hopefully - continue to work for many years as long as there are people willing to keep it alive.
So as far as I'm concerned this post highlights the problem in the post itself, this is not what's needed.
Laser focus on the browser at the expense of all the fluff. Forget about 'internet activism' and 'building new products'.
Get the most secure and most user friendly, privacy first, standards compatible and feature rich browser out there and you'll survive for another decade at least. Get distracted by new and shiny stuff and I'd be surprised if it lasts another five years.