The last thing Mozilla needs is to spend more time pretending they're a big tech company and can compete with those guys. They should focus on Firefox (as GP said), not build a communication platform that will then fail versus Signal/WhatsApp/Hangouts/Teams/etc.

Yup. Someone else will likely do a better job building those. Mozilla's (and only Mozilla's) core competency is browser building, and they should stick to it. Anyone can build a communicator, but building a full browser engine is becoming a forgotten skill.

The decline of Firefox started with Chrome's JavaScript engine, who was years ahead of Firefox's performance. The focus on JavaScript-heavy websites was already growing, and Firefox was slow to catch up.

Now they're about the same performance-wise, but the mind share lost was brutal. there was a period that the only advantages Firefox had over Chrome were memory use and extensions, and they had to get rid of the NPAPI extensions for security reasons.

The basic problem for Mozilla is they poured a ton of effort into improving performance and marketed that heavily... and they basically didn't gain back share at all.

Pivoting would kill Firefox, and this is exactly what we should be trying to save if we care about some version of the open web. Indeed, I'm advocating for pivoting away from all of these other things, and towards Firefox as the one and only concern for the organisation.

> DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this.

An appetite, yes. But not a major one. A privacy-focused, ad-free approach would be hugely appealing to the HN crowd. But I’m less convinced about the public at large.

market to multiple verticals.

schools, local/regional/state governments, non-profits - types of orgs that have some long-term interest in privacy.

>schools

The same schools that went all in with Chromebooks?

No. Different ones. I'd probably also look at non K-12 schools.

DDG is tracking free, not ad free. They show you ads based on your searches.

DuckDuckGo is to a large degree a wrapper around Bing. Why do you think Mozilla has a chance here when even Microsoft failed?

And I'm not even talking about on a technical basis, Bing is pretty OK. The marketing required to displace Google would be inconceivably large.

They get most of their money from advertising deals with those major companies (such as by putting google in as the default search engine). Competing against them would likely result in those companies removing the advertising dollars and tanking the business.

> Competing against them would likely result in those companies removing the advertising dollars and tanking the business.

Google paying Apple massive amounts of money to keep Google Search the default search engine on their devices doesn't seem to be affected by the fact that Pixel phones (or Android as a whole) and iPhones are competing. Though I gotta admit that it could be because Google doesn't have the overwhelming winner position in that market, as opposed to the web browser market.

However, I still find Google pulling the funding unlikely, given (afaik) the reason for Google "financially supporting" Mozilla is exactly because Google is afraid of being legally called out as a monopoly in the web browser market. The only point at which I can see Google pulling that funding is if Mozilla ends up on the same level as Chrome in terms of posing a danger to Google's dominance. At which point, Mozilla has already won and doesn't need Google that much to sustain itself, so I wouldn't pose it as a strong concern.

But they only get that because they have a market share for now. After they don't, which will be the case soon enough, then they are toast.

But if they can garner 5% market share via this new approach then they save themselves from destruction long term.

Mozilla getting rid of the Google default search engine deal would be the best thing that ould happen to Firefox. That money is not free, it is (amongs other things) a shackle that keeps Firefox from going too far against Google's interests.