no, the criticism of their side projects is NOT that they would provide diversification, it's that they're usually politically motivated feel-good marketing distractions with no chance of ever producing additional revenue except maybe by bringing users to Firefox by convincing them that Mozilla better-aligns with their worldview or whatever

except oops all corporate politics are the same so the politically motivated feel-good crap from Mozilla is exactly the same as the politically motivated feel-good crap from every other corporation and so it's all just a waste of time and money and effort that COULD as you put it "provide diversification" instead, if Mozilla was competently run

I'm going to name some side projects, would you like to explain how the are merely "feel-good marketing"?

- Rust

- LetsEncrypt (collaboration)

- Opus (collaboration)

- AV1 (collaboration)

- Mozilla Common Voice database

- FirefoxOS

- MozillaVPN

- Lockwise

- Relay

- Bugzilla

- Servo

- Pocket

- MDN

- The VR projects - even if you think they're dumb they're hardly political feel-good stuff.

- The new privacy monitoring services

- The Scroll partnership (defunct because Twitter bought them and destroyed it)

> that they're usually politically motivated feel-good marketing distractions

most of them where not

especially if you look at resource distributions

Like tab containers, browser sync, firefox SSO, VR, FirefoxOs, Pocket, the send file thing, relay, VPN, privacy preserving Translation, TTS, reader mode, pdf.js.

Non of them are "politically motivated feel-good marketing distractions" but bets to diversification (which also mostly failed for one reason or another) (and yes Pocket contains political motivated nonsens in it's recommendation system, but by itself isn't a politically motivated features, but a feature I would want to see more of deeper integrated into FF, just REALLY without the recommendation system and a somehow more natural part-of-FF felling UI/UX).

I mean sure that color theme nonsense was politically motivated feel-good nonsense. But using that as point to get hung up on is exactly what the OP comment meant, people tend to be very selective about remembering things so that they fit their narrative.

That’s a great list of nice things that are easy to take for granted. While reading it, I couldn’t help but think of the “What have the Romans ever done for us” scene from Monty Python¹.

I didn’t know about Text to Speech (TTS) but personally wouldn’t have much use for it. The other things I didn’t recognise is VR. I’m guessing this refers to Firefox Reality on the Oculus Go VR Headset² (which seems to be no longer available).

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

² https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-reality...

> Firefox Reality on the Oculus Go VR Headset

yes, through not limited to the Oculus

and it kinda folded Hubs (https://hubs.mozilla.com/) into it

and and I think there was a bit of additional research level stuff never ending up in user hands

but both are somewhat dead, idk. if Firefox Reality still works with any VR headset at all (it might still work with non standalone headset usage) and Hubs is shutting down end of March, a community version still exist (Hubs ~= somewhat like VRChat from the idea but not as VR specific and just less interesting in general)

same for most other things they are either dead or fizzled out (and some are stables, but don't bring users, like pdf.js)

One thing I forget to mention is FF does a lot of work to reduce fingerprint-ability of existing interfaces (while trying to avoid breaking websites by changing/breaking existing interfaces, like some other more privacy focused browsers do). A bunch of this is done in context for the tor-browser but also benefit normal FF. Sadly you using FF ads more information to the fingerprint then any of the protections due to better fingerprint protection (something which is true for any form of privacy protection not used en mass by every one).