> Mozilla was hijacked by political activists who wanted to change the internet and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on non-browser things.

Mozilla, like most nonprofits, has always been run by activists who wanted to change the space the org was focussed on, and it started out spending lots of resources on non-browser things, too.

No, Mozilla was founded by developers and tech people to create a browser from the Netscape sources.

Mozilla says so itself

"The Mozilla project was created in 1998 with the release of the Netscape browser suite source code. It was intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the internet and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market. "

> > Mozilla, like most nonprofits, has always been run by activists

> No, Mozilla was founded by developers and tech people

“Developers and tech people” can also be activists, so that's not a contradiction, but...

> Mozilla says so itself

Except it doesn't in the material you quote, it says (emphasis added):

> It was intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the internet

It doesn't say it was founded by tech people, it says it was founded with the (activist!) intent to harness the power of tech people.

> It doesn't say it was founded by tech people, it says it was founded with the (activist!) intent to harness the power of tech people.

It explicitly says (emphasis added) "levels of innovation in the browser market."

Yes, that's the goal they wanted to harness the power of “thousands of programmers on the internet” for. The quote doesn't say anything about who the founders were beyond their activist goals.

I need to check that one, it will take some time and I might be wrong. I'm out of my water in the details of who made what decision to setup Mozilla.

Seriously though, what else do they even do? Thunderbird? Where does all the millions from Google actually go?

In organizing "events" and "conferences" that have nothing to do with their core-business.

And they have the nerve to beg for money in a very obtrusive way.

Good riddance.

All in all $4890 millions from 2005 to 2020 (majority from Google).

MDN is great resource.

Weird. This is not at all my experience. I haven't been using Firefox for 30 years, since it hasn't existed that long, but I've been using it since it was first working.

Weird. I was using Mosaic on DECs at the beginning of the 90s (when WWW came to university around 1993), then Netscape (commercial "fork" of Mosaic) on SGIs (at my first startup) and then Firefox on Linux.

[Edit] I still remember Coherence also [1], yes I'm that old ;-)

[1] "Cameron made a joke every 30 secs - noone laughed in the audience though I found them all funny." https://svese.dev/i-want-to-meet-cameron-purdy/

Ironically an "online casino" has hacked the CTO coaches website.

Thanks, oh yes the irony, can you email me?

Agreed and same here. Now they're spending their money on lobbying the government for rules in their favor, rather than on improving the product.

I loved the idea of a mobile browser that supported extensions! But they just haven't invested enough to keep it performant. I still use Firefox on mobile now and then, but largely had to switch to the DuckDuckGo mobile browser.

> I'm using FF since nearly 30 years and I can see the end which saddens me a lot.

Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004, see https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/11/mozilla-foundation-re...

Mosaic was released 1993 [1]. Mosaic was from NCSA and commercialized as Mosaic Netscape [2] by Mosaic managers and developers. Mozilla was the open sourcing of the Netscape code to provide a basis for Netscape browser to compete with Microsoft. Firefox was a branch off from Mozilla and after several name changes (Phoenix, Firebird) [3] became Firefox.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Early_years [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History