All that to say, I think a personal blog is a better place to grind axes than the start page of a hugely important software tool.

Later on Mozilla did buy pocket, so it was no longer third party.

Anyways, a lot of people got super mad with the way they went about it.

I understand that people have complaints and want to hang onto others' past mistakes, but I fail to see how either of those (Pocket&Robot) can be classified as either toxic politics or axe grinding.

They're both monetization tactics that many people disliked. Which somehow resulted in people finding Mozilla untouchable, because apparently nobody else has problematic monetization attempts?

The entire Android app was overhauled a while back, dropping functionally and decreasing stability, and has since been pretty much ignored even though it is still missing features and is still painfully clunky and prone to crash. The developer tools on the desktop app were ahead of Chrome but have stagnated, and they're slow to adopt new standards, but they somehow find time to add things no one asked for like Colorways and a VPN.

I want Firefox to get its traction back, but it's hard to cheer for Mozilla or blame Google when I see them twiddling their thumbs like this.

I don't think this will happen. I think they will just fade away. They are completely dysfunctional now.

Some say it is due to the whole woke movement, and it may be, but really, I see it as due to politics.

By that I mean, politics is nothing but divisive, and if you introduce it into a company, as a corporate culture, you're going to regret it.

IMO, work is where you leave religion, and politics(the other religion) at home.

And Mozilla is paying the price for letting it in.

yes, and forcing out there reasonable CEO for a purity test, long ago.. HELO BRAVE

Eich is not unproblematic, of course (in addition to the anti-gay marriage issue, there is/was also issues of 'covid-scepticism'[1]). And the cryptocurrency stuff in Brave is uninteresting to me (fortunately it's opt-IN though and not opt-out).

And I still think, on the desktop at least, Firefox still has advantages over Brave (and even more so over other Chromium-based offerings).

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230104010454/https://www.nytim...

And yet it's the only mainstream browser for android that support, natively, ad-blocking. Using chrome on mobile is a joke.

All of that didn't just happen because of advertising. It happened become Chrome offered very compelling benefits over its competitors.

For many users, Chrome was faster, lighter, more secure, and offered a better all-around user experience than its competitors did. Even now, that's still largely the case.

Advertising alone can't make that happen.

From a sysadmin perspective, Firefox having its own cert store instead of relying on system store was an extra hurdle for corp IT people.

Then there is the fact that Chrome goes out of its way to integrate with Google's other properties which they market to corporations to replace Office.

So I'm saying, I believe FF would have done better if they tried harder to integrate with corporate environments without compromising on their capability and independence. Name recognition is a big thing.

Google for years installed Chrome using installers of other applications, like malware. I am talking of 10 years ago, that was common practice for google, on windows. So a lot of users found themselves using Chrome without even knowing they were using chrome.

I'm in this camp. I had used Firefox for 20 years, literally since it was just a zip file called Pheonix/Firebird.

I switched to a Chromium-based browser kicking and screaming, but it came down mostly to speed for me, and some website incompatibility (which I can't blame wholly on Firefox).

I'd obviously tried Chrome since day 1, and was impressed and checked back in from time to time, until I decided it was time to finally switch over. I still support Mozilla and Firefox and don't want to see less competition in browser engine space. As long as Google continues to fund it (mostly out of anti-competitive concerns I'd imagine) I don't see them going anywhere.

Things like releasing features for firefox users first, because devs like firefox and it had better devtools, would have kept the firefox userbase afloat.

Instead the mozilla devtools have been allowed to fall behind, web apps are no longer developed firefox-first, and mozilla lost it's opportunity.

The irony here is that the billion dollar corporation (Google is who OP is referring to) actually funds Firefox's development. We looked into this in one of our recent podcast episodes called "How Does Mozilla Make Money?": https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/bdecab32/how-does-m...

While I wouldn't describe Mozilla leadership as that... I don't think you'll find many people who think Mozilla leadership have made good strategic decisions in the last 5 years.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

(Some of many examples of people pushing that false claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14994164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24145537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566200 )

He confirmed the fact that he resigned in his own words on his very own blog. In fact, the Mozilla board begged him to stay. The idea that he was pushed out or fired is just yet another false GamerGate conspiracy theory.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/faq-on-ceo-resignation/

>1. Brendan was not fired and was not asked by the Board to resign. Brendan voluntarily submitted his resignation. The Board acted in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another C-level position. Brendan declined that offer. The Board respects his decision.

>Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?

>A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:

>“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”

>Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.

https://brendaneich.com/2014/04/the-next-mission/

>Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?

>A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.

You missed the pre-installed browser and applications bundled with your computer becoming good enough that ~nobody is going to www.firefox.com to download a browser on a fresh install. This isn't 2004, you no longer need to spend three hours downloading software to make a fresh install of Windows usable.

That, and a weak mobile app.

The explosion of mobile.

Mobile is eating the web. Mobile (Android - it's all Safari on iOs) Firefox is a bad experience.

Allow me to second this!I have a not-so-small bookrmark collection (~600). When I discovered FF tags, I was ecstatic: assigning multiple tags to a single bookmark makes navigating the pile really good.

But, as soon as I discovered that neither iOS nor Android version of Firefox supports tags, I felt betrayed. Add to it the inability to export full FF profile (such peculiarities as about:config overrides, extension lists etc) and you end up with a very disgruntled user. So I ended up with trusting desktop Safari. Turns out it has _similar_ feature called bookmark description.

I still resent Chromium-based products, because UX is wrong to me. But FF is certainly mismanaged if not sabotaged and the upper level management will bury it. Or the time will make FF almost irrelevant.

Google don't make web standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_standards

This is what actually happens: 1. Google (Who is a member of both W3C and OWF) announces a plan/ships a feature. 2. With 80% of the browser market, people use it or get excited by it. 3. The W3C/OWF ratifies the feature as a standard.

This is literally how 90% of web standards happen today.

Take the recent example for instance, Web Standards Body W3C rejects Google’s ad targeting proposal[0]

Browser market share calculation is always dodgy[1].

[0] https://tittlepress.com/tech/2238586/

[1] https://www.sitepoint.com/how-browser-market-share-is-calcul...