[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.]
One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards.
OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome."
Really? That's what's got you bent out of shape?
Sure, Mozilla has made mistakes. Did we apologize? Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?
People want to continue flogging us for these things while giving other companies (who have made their own mistakes, often much more consequential than ours, would never be as open about it, and often learn nothing) a relatively free pass.
I'm certainly not the first person on the planet whose employer has been on the receiving end of vitriol. And if Mozilla doesn't make it through this next phase, I can always find another job. But what concerns me about this is that Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet. To see it wither away because of people angry with what are, in the grand scheme of things, minor mistakes, is a shame.
EDIT: And lest you think I am embellishing about trivial complaints, there was a rant last week on r/Firefox that Mozilla was allegedly conspiring to hide Gecko's source code because we self-host our primary repo and bug tracking instead of using GitHub, despite the fact that the Mozilla project predates GitHub by a decade.
I certainly don't think the corporate doublespeak is reason to switch to Chrome, but I do think the corporate doublespeak in this announcement is just awful.
When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layoff announcement is just inviting a tidal wave of eye rolls.
I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance.
I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.
This lay-off is not because of Covid or racism. It is because of the overwhelmingly awful executive leadership at Mozilla.
Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion. FirefoxOS anyone?
The only benefit Mozilla now provides is a warning to companies that place how liked and popular employees are over how skilled and hard working they are.
Mozilla has collected such a large group of well behaved and well liked underperformers to an absurd level like no other company in history. This is no more obvious than the woefully under-qualified and perennially under-performing leadership.
Someone please explain to me how Mitchell Baker continues to have a job? How is Mozilla still paying this person millions, yes millions, of dollars?
Pocket?! You are going to save Mozilla with a glorified bookmarking app?
The current CEO of Mozilla Corporation and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation (the parent organization of Mozilla Corporation) earned a total compensation of $2,458,350 [1] on a $436 million company revenue on 2018, or half a percent of the company's revenue. I can't find 2019 stats, but on a company that's not doing well, CEO's comp seems high.
I can't think of a good reason why Mitchell Baker should keep her job. I'm fine with competitive executive compensation, but what has she done other than lay off the people doing the work?
I have no idea what normal CEO salaries look like as a percentage of revenue. I'm not even sure if that's the right way to measure it. But it doesn't sound crazy high to me?
And the worse your company is doing, the more important it is to find a good CEO and the harder it will be for you to attract a good one. So you can even make an argument for why CEOs that joined companies that are doing badly might be getting paid more on average.
I wondered how much it was, and did a quick search. Apparently Sundar Pichai (Alphabet) had a total comp equivalent to ~0.13% of the revenue, and Tim Cook (Apple) was at 0.05%. So Mozilla's CEO is at 3 to 10 times more than those two examples, while arguably underperforming them.
Of course startups CEO will have different goals - company at different stages of their growth will have very different goals and tangentially they need different CEOs with different skill sets to achieve those different goals.
I never really understand why people ask for things like this. Presumably Mozilla is paying these salaries because that's what they need to pay to hire good people at that level. Why would those people stay at Mozilla if they suddenly had their salary cut? They are probably already making less than they could make in a comparable position elsewhere.
Because people feel like C-level compensation is way too high, and people feel this is disconnected from actual performance. C-level compensation has risen way, way faster in the last decades than general employee compensation [1].
It doesn't change because upper management is all in the "cult", and there's no incentive to lower salaries. If all programmers (or any other profession) were in charge of their own salaries, I'd suspect something similar happening with people rewarding each other more and more compensation while pointing at other companies to justify it.
I can see how one can argue that C-level compensation is too high (although there are also good arguments against that) but surely you can't expect Mozilla to solve this problem by themselves? If Mozilla cuts C-level salaries while the rest of the industry doesn't then why would any of them keep working for Mozilla?
This is a crap argument. Every company/NGO can use that and it doesn't solve the problem. Mozilla as a self-proclaimed altruistic ideologically-driven org should lead by example.
If the current CEO, whom from the outside is not doing a great job, is not willing to. You find a different CEO. I am not convinced that no one wants to do the job for $500k instead of $2.5m. Whether that person would be good/bad/worse is pure speculation, but it's not like organizations are taking the chance.
"Whether that person would be good/bad/worse is pure speculation"
they'd probably have to have at least a negative $2m impact before it mattered right?
revenue on its own may not even be the best measure, if the revenue comes via methods that conflict with the larger ideology. I don't know if Mozilla has that conflict with itself or not.
Your point is accurate though, and I've held the same views for a while now. This sort of thinking would seem to dictate that the next Mozilla CEO will need to come in at around $2.5m - that's been defined as the floor now. Regardless of how well that person executes, they've got that base. And... you can't really judge them after 3 months. You'd need to give them a year to make a 'real' assessment... and you've just spent that money on someone, regardless of outcome.
If I read the 990 right, 257500. This is 2x the lowest officer salary and 30% higher than the second-highest. By comparison Mitchell is 8x the second-highest officer and 17x the lowest. There may be more comparable salaries at MoCo, but those are not on the 990s.
NGO or non-profit doesn't mean they took a vow of poverty. It means the corporation does not distribute profits to shareholders (and may be exempt of some income taxes). It still can be loaded with money, and many NGOs are.
> Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion. FirefoxOS anyone?
FirefoxOS gets a lot of hate, but I honestly thought it was a pretty good idea. The problem was that it was terribly executed.
It’s a bit unclear to me wether that was your point or not.
Obviously the idea of Firefox OS is great. It's successor KaiOS (fork of Firefox OS) is the third most popular mobile OS with hundreds of millions of users.
I think what OP was saying is that Mozilla is so poorly managed that they took a great idea and made it crash and burn.
Even Microsoft - with countless more resources and motivation - failed to make traction in mobile. Blackberry was swept off the stage in the blink of an eye.
Firefox OS was abandoned pretty quick as I remember, 2 years tops?
> Even Microsoft - with countless more resources and motivation - failed to make traction in mobile.
Microsoft made a new OS where they needed developers to target their platform. Too few did, and the platform failed.
Mozilla tried to bypass this chicken-and-the-egg problem by being able to leverage PWAs which “everyone” is making anyway these days. It wasn’t a too crazy bet that it might have worked.
In a similar vein the Pinephone is trying something similar these days: not asking developers to target it, but instead leverage existing app eco-systems (Linux and web).
I don't expect a runaway mainstream success here, but I do wish them luck.
It might have had some neat technical designs, but it is not a good idea to try and launch an OS into a maturing market, which the smartphone market clearly was by 2013.
It worked in India - it was a success. And it was a shock when Mozilla just gave it up. Giving up on an install base of hundreds of millions just when it was taking off...the US is not the only market you know ?
Sometimes you need to plough your way through the field to get the bountiful harvest - Mozilla did that and then left the harvest to burn.
Firefox made the right call, they were never going to succeed against Android. Looking at statcounter, Kai has not been able to resist it either, dropping from somewhere over 4% to under 1%, while Android sits at over 95%.
FirefoxOS was a good idea: a portable phone system that could run on cheaper hardware than Android could, built with web technologies instead of Java.
Then hardware manufacturers started producing cheap hardware that could run Android with acceptable performance, thus eliminating the price advantage for FirefoxOS, before that OS could take off in third world nations.
Well ChromeOS was successful so you could see Firefox OS as an alternative in the market. They both came out at the same time. There were of course 6 different table/mobile OSes at the time. Maybe it was a difference in execution. Or maybe resources.
So, I don't really know the context of the stuff you're writing about, if you would please indulge me...
> Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion.
I honestly am not aware much of that.
> FirefoxOS anyone?
I can't tell if you're unhappy they started that project or unhappy they stopped it. I'm guessing you're unhappy, so I'm going to go along with the guys that were involved on that project for the rest of your post.
I am curious though, since you seem to know so much about Mozilla driving itself into the ground, do you know the resources that were spent on FirefoxOS?
> The only benefit Mozilla now provides is a warning to companies that place how liked and popular employees are over how skilled and hard working they are.
I know that Andreas Gal was disliked, but how was he unskilled and what did his position have to do with the nature you're speaking of?
> Mozilla has collected such a large group of well behaved and well liked underperformers to an absurd level like no other company in history. This is no more obvious than the woefully under-qualified and perennially under-performing leadership.
How did you asses that Andreas Gal was under qualified and under performing?
> Someone please explain to me how Mitchell Baker continues to have a job?
Mitchell Baker is one of the oldest closely related employees to Netscape, Mozilla etc. She is very much the original culture of company. Her particular focus is the overall business aspect of operating the organisation rather than the technical. The technical work would have been people like Andreas Gal.
> How is Mozilla still paying this person millions, yes millions, of dollars?
That's not her sallary, that comes from compensation. Compensation is based on looking at what other similarly sized companies, usually in the same sector are paying based on similarly skilled people. Companies do not want to lose their CEOs etc. What might suprise you is that she's being paid at the lower end of the scale, and this is because she's a CEO sourced internally.
If Mozilla were to replace her with an external CEO, they would likely end up needing to pay vastly more. The compenstion paid is usually pegged to performance. While the company might have not done well as a whole, there are likely things this person has navgiated the company through that you did not see? But, if you did, please share.
> Pocket?! You are going to save Mozilla with a glorified bookmarking app?
Mozilla is following a common technique to help bring stability to the company when one or more revenue stream starts struggling or drying up -- It is diversifying income. Mozilla appears to be a very R&D sort of company, so they seem to be doing what you see companies like Microsoft Garage or Alphabet do and try to create their own 'start ups' without the company bit to try to innovate new products. Hence where FirefoxOS came from.
Many people originally scoffed at the idea of Apple doing a phone.
Honestly, and I mean this with full sincerity, your response is exactly the point.
You just don’t seem to get the obviousness in front of you, just like almost all of Mozilla while the rest of the world sees how absurd and sad things are.
Mozilla has zero chance of survival at its current size without the browser tech. Instead of working on creative ways to monetize that, back when Firefox still had enough market share for it to matter, precious time was wasted on a wide variety of valueless diversions.
Mozilla without Firefox is dead. Pocket or a VPN service has zero chance of bringing in similar revenue. Zero. It was and is a giant waste of time.
And so here we are. Years wasted on what could have been real honest and creative attempts at monetization from competent leadership. They had 10 years to figure it out. Instead they played with whatever new shiny toy fell in front of them.
> You just don’t seem to get the obviousness in front of you, just like almost all of Mozilla while the rest of the world sees how absurd and sad things are.
I don't know, I feel like I have more context you do right now. But maybe that is just experience from working in organisations like this.
> Mozilla has zero chance of survival at its current size without the browser tech. Instead of working on creative ways to monetize that, back when Firefox still had enough market share for it to matter, precious time was wasted on a wide variety of valueless diversions.
That's not really true though, is it? FirefoxOS derivatives took off significantly and did very well, but, unfortunately, it turned out listening to the public saying to cut it was an awful idea.
> Pocket or a VPN service has zero chance of bringing in similar revenue.
It's not about bringing in similar revenue on a single project, it's about having many different income generators though.
> It was and is a giant waste of time
Did you actually check the development effort involved? They didn't have to spend much on resources to do so, to do these alternate revenue streams, the organisation spent relatively little rather than putting all their money behind a big project and then if it doesn't work out, collapsing -- which is likely to occur trying to pursue large projects like you're suggesting?
Not entirely certain on the reasons why the general public didn't like him, but, I suspect the real reason was because he was leading the FirefoxOS project.
I think they could have learned something from wartime speeches here in terms of reading their audience. People who care about Mozilla as an entity are sophisticated readers.
They could have said pretty much the same thing, but with a nod to the fact that it is hard to believe the corporate version. E.g. "Mozilla has laid off 250 employees today. Why? Well here are our reasons, let's start at the beginning...".
And then I'd be more interested to read.
I would love to know why - short on cash? Google's teet running dry? Or do they believe fewer people = more agility? or maybe the roles really were redundant.
The opening, coming from a super well paid CEO, pissed me off. I need a good browser, maybe with accompaigned products but no save the internet, racism, bl, etc. Most likely won't ever support Mozilla with such language.
I think this is a valid point. Donors don't want to give money to further enrich Mozilla's overpaid leadership, and they don't want to give money to then be split between the cause they're really donating for (generally Firefox) and various tangentially related political causes.
There's no way to donate directly to Firefox development.
The more people use restricted funds designation, the less bloated non-profits with wishy-washy missions there would be and the less money there would be to pilfer by the parasite class that lives in the executive roles of the non-profits.
Write "Restricted funds - see attachment" on a check. On the attachment list check details and a restriction such as "Direct expenses for <blahblahblah> only." If you just do not want it to go to G&A fluff fund the execs use to live a large life, just exclude G&A: "<blah blah blah> purposes only. No G&A"
Regulations for non-profits aren't a joke. If they took your restricted funds, you bet they are going to follow the restrictions.
Non-profits may hate it but at the end it is money. So they take it. If they decline to cash the check, no skin off your back.
Source: lived in a non-profit land as a tech consultant. Heard constant bitching about big donors being smart and always restricting funds above a few hundred dollars. Execs of every non-profit that pretends it cannot deal with restrictions are taking the donor for suckers and are fleecing them.
> Okay, but how does that money get from MoFo to MoCo?
It is their problem, not my. They want money. It is restricted. Money is fungible. If they figure out how to use the money that is restricted then they need to spend less unrestricted money.
General and Administrative. For example, a catered lunch from a fancy restaurant that will have friends of the execs attend as a part of some presentation would be charged into G&A line.
Interesting, thanks. Do Mozilla really accept restricted funds donations toward Firefox development? What are the steps to make such a donation?
Here's a related discussion on exactly this topic, from 11 months ago. I see that it was you who mentioned restricted funds in that thread, too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874641
Donors don't fund Firefox. Search engine revenue does. Every scrap of evidence suggests that donations will absolutely not fund work at the scale of Firefox. If they did our overall open source infrastructure would be in much better shape.
Exactly. I care about Firefox and Thunderbird, not about Mozilla. If another company forks the projects and delivers a better program I'll be as happy as if Mozilla keeps doing it.
Supporting and directing Internet standards, resisting Google, etc, are a byproduct of developing an independent browser.
Did you police yourself? It seems you replaced a word you intended with the word “politics” to be PC.
Mozilla has always been political. It was born so. Why do you think Jamie Zawinski got Shepard Fairey to design its logo?
The Mozilla manifesto is full of political statements.
Do you remember the fight against DRM? Net neutrality? SOPA?
Often, people that speak like you mean “speech favoring equal treatment” instead of “politics”.
They used to care about freedom, now they care about a bunch of vaguely defined stuff aligned with (some of) US left. Being from outside the US, to me this change and the speed of it seems extremely jarring. I mean just look at their messaging in new tabs -- do I really need my browser telling me that "It's okay to like Facebook" or that "Tech (people? companies? projects?) has a responsibity to [...]" ? Thanks, Mozilla, I guess I wouldn't have used it if not for your permission (/s). Does anyone even read these fucking things before they push them out?
There's a difference between politics to improve Internet-related things (like fighting DRM, SOPA, or promoting net neutrality) and other political issues that while important are completely irrelevant to a browser development company.
I'd like to add that Mozilla has relatively limited resources and it's more worthwhile for them to focus on issues that are directly related to what they do (the web) instead of unrelated social issues.
Furthermore Mozilla has the expertise, connections and brand when it comes to the web they can use as leverage to solve web-related social/political issues, but might not have much leverage for unrelated issues so the risk/reward ratio will not be in their favor.
Exactly. Everything in the world is political: Firefox was a political statement from its outset, Mozilla is a political entity, and also - and I've yet to see an argument from anyone against this notion - Mozilla is overwhelmingly a force for good in the world. Lots of people on HN really struggle to accept this, because it goes against their own (libertarian right or anarcho-capitalist) political perspective.
People complaining about "politics" are often complaining about political scope creep.
If I keep that in mind while listening/reading people complaining about "politics" it is often the smallest change to their stated message that would make it clear and internally consistent. So I ask clarifying questions to see if their complaint is poorly articulated rather than picking at their words to defend the thing they're criticizing.
> I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose.
I didn’t think it was well written at all. The sheer number of words is a red flag. There are five focus areas that are all extremely vague. Good writing is clear and concise.
Open Source is not influenced by political factors. Influencing factors are almost entirely economical, with the exception being decisions by lawmakers.
I'd rather they kept politics and so-called fights against racism out of Software, because they were never problematic there to begin with.
The terms master and slave for example are only in bad taste because people make them to be.
To channel RMS: The political concern there is Free Software. Open Source isn't a political movement, it's an approach to software development that has similar ideas on software licensing.
Consider that it might have always been politized, but the previous status quo might have been more convenient/pleasant to you (i.e. made it easier for you to ignore problems which affect others).
I agree that the criticism is disproportionate, especially after all Mozilla has done for the net. I am disappointed what issues take up a priority today. I primarily think of focusing on community as policing speech in repositories and terminology, brave new world style. I don't think the old leadership failed, I think the new one is just very quick with results. Mozilla was beloved because they had a different image. I am in a position where I dislike their advocacy, because it just doesn't resonate with me for improving anything, on the contrary. I don't judge them for trying to monetize some of their services, but I also see it as a result of expanding aimlessly.
And they want to offer me leadership? For what? Seriously considering if Mozilla still has a place on the donation list.
This blog post is pretty bad. Doesn't mean I just drop my support, but I don't see how you cannot be disappointed here or who feels like this is a road to improvement.
"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"
I was a loyal Firefox user and can't even remember why I switched to Chrome. Sometimes shit happens. Kohler can be all ecited about making the next great toilet bowl. Just don't expect me to get excited every morning to go take a poop on that bowl. It's an impossibly high standard!
> I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose
If the purpose of Mozilla is to fight systematic racism, then I'm sorry building a web browser and running a VPN is a terrible way to go about it and the leadership team should be removed.
Bit of hyperbole there. This is a press release that their PR head pumped out in 5 minutes, using whatever techniques they teach PR heads at communications schools. Insert any company that can lay off 250 employees and keep ticking, and you will probably get about the same exact document from a similarly schooled PR head.
I wouldn't expect there to be a corporate template for a mass layoff press release. Having such a thing would be a warning sign for the future of the company to me.
Also, people who don't know anything about a task tend to underestimate its complexity. I can't remeber the name of the effect but it's a variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Mass layoffs are and have been standard procedures in any company, regardless of size. Writing such templates in good times instead of wasting resources elsewhere is just good risk management.
Whether you have a template or not, each mass layoff is going to be under specific circumstances, and is going to carry significant PR and HR consequences. It would be wise to take considerably longer than 5 minutes to consider and craft that message. I would agree that they could hammer out an initial draft for discussion with management in 5 minutes though.
Agreed on hyperbole and I could have used a more realistic example. My point was to bring up faulty logic, which is still equally valid.
As others have mentioned, layoffs should not be templatized, it is an indication that the company doesn't care much about the employees, the heart and soul of the company. I hope to God it was more than 5 minutes to draft a message to put 250 people out of a job in the middle of a Pandemic.
Putting it up to "well this is the standard of the industry" is bullshit, if you want more realistic examples, sexism in the work place is _not_ a hyperbole and is still very normal and very wrong.
It depends on whether the reader feels diversity should be reduced to a PR tool and a mechanism of distraction, which seems disconnected from whether you’re for or against diversity as a goal for the organization. In fact, I’d think both folks for and against it would find this reductive usage onerous at best.
I don't agree. I think the whole press release comes off quite dishonest and manipulative.
I'm not quite sure who the intended audience of the release is. Releasing a statement announcing the layoff of many employees while trying to position the company as "a technical powerhouse of the internet activist movement" just screams insincerity.
Honestly, I think the exact opposite of what you're implying. If you truly value diversity, you don't use it as some sort of cover in the first paragraph of your layoff announcement.
Any corporate entity making claims of supporting diversity without creating efforts to improve actual diversity which requires much earlier interaction long before hiring, is likely not really concerned about diversity but virtue signaling.
This is just my own opinion. There's also the consideration that merit and talent should exceed diversity as a goal. For developers, I find that those that I would hire are roughly 10-15% of those I've interviewed. I've always paid more attention to content and character, and that has shaken itself out to include quite a bit of diversity in the end without being a goal.
Maybe it's a side effect of coming from a generation online before cameras and even gui interfaces were really much of a thing. I never really cared much about someone's sexual or racial identities, only what their ideas and statements were. I almost wish we could return to those things. When I see a pull request on github, I don't go looking into the person, only the code.
> That depends entirely on how the reader feels about diversity.
Or that depends entirely on how the reader is used to seeing buzz words the whole time used in unrelated contexts. You know, not every mundane thing is life bears relation to high ideals.
You're getting downvoted and all the replies are disagreeing with you. Is it because everyone else is misunderstanding your clear, reasonable argument, or is it more likely something to do with the way you're communicating it?
It appears to be the former because no one addressed my point that people have different viewpoints.
In my original post I stated that people would only eyeroll a reference to diversity based on how they view diversity. That's it.
I thought that was harmless and succinct. People have different points of view, and no person can anticipate how another person will react. Then people tried to explain to me that I was wrong, which means: people's views DON'T actually play into how they react, which is demonstrably false. See that? In order to argue me, you have to take the position that you know exactly how everyone will already react.
OK, so what's the point you were trying to make with your initial statement? If you were just making the tautological statement that people act based on their points of view, a fact which if meant literally is both obvious and irrelevant, then what was the point of making that comment?
Rather, your comment strongly appeared to suggest that you were implying one would support Mozilla's statement if they supported diversity, and vice-versa. But if you were trying to imply that, it appears you missed the point of the parent's comment. And if you weren't trying to imply that, and weren't just stating a tautology, then it still isn't clear what point you are trying to make.
>Critical thinking means removing your emotional bias from analysis.
it also means not immediately dismissing different perspectives.
It is self defeating to remove emotional bias when the statement in question is an emotional plea. That's likely the root of all the reservations you're getting in replies.
> Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people. These are individuals of exceptional professional and personal caliber who have made outstanding contributions to who we are today. To each of them, I extend my heartfelt thanks and deepest regrets that we have come to this point.
it is still a weird suggestion. given two truths "we are currently failing" and "we decided to change course" it makes sense to bundle them into "we tried something, we must face it didn't work, there are negative consequences now, we are hopeful a new direction will save us".
sometime corporate doublespeak is just trying to communicate a narrative or a vision for the future, which in terms of long term survival are often more important than clearly stated facts.
Yes, but that's largely because they serve different purposes.
Mozilla's announcement is a press release for external consumption. Carta's post is internal and for employees, and I'm sure there was one of these for Mozilla as well, but we're not privy to it.
Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them.
People in this business always discover this stuff and then they're always like "Why do they hate me?". The answer is "they never wanted to love you. They want to watch you fall". Like DDG with their favicon service (which HN billed as some sort of nefarious tracker).
Vanta bypassed all this by not playing to the Security Puffery crowd. Usually a quick way to do that is to require money because the Security/Privacy Puffery crowd doesn't have any.
I'm a happy Firefox and Chrome user. Honestly, it's been working fine for me.
I use Firefox. I have used it since it was called Phoenix, and I still use it today, extensively, on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
I'm just disappointed about what Mozilla has become over the years. It wasn't supposed to be an "agile" tech company, with slick marketing and UI/UX, making deals to try to get market share.
It was supposed to be a non-profit foundation, making an open-source cross-platform browser engine, pushing for open protocols and standards. It enabled a few niche open-source operating systems to have a viable browser, it put a big dent in IE's market share, I would say it paved the way for Safari on iOS to be viable way back in 2009, and that obviously changed the world.
It still could have done that. It was making 100s of millions of dollars per year from the default search provider deal, for over a decade. It could have saved most of that money, spending it only on 50 to 100 browser engineers. Branching out to MDN and websocket or webrtc libraries would also make sense. But the rest of the crap, the marketing, the rebranding, the Pocket purchase and integration, Firefox OS, the voice recognition and AI stuff (and notice the announcement, they're keeping the AI division, really need that part apparently), stuff that nobody remembers, that's all a waste of money that could be saved by the non-profit foundation to just support the low-level engine keeping the open web viable.
I'd say if they wanted to do a moon-shot-but-actually-achievable non-browser project against a slow, bloated, closed, locked-in, shitty product that everyone uses anyway (so, like IE back when they took that one), they'd target Google's office suite. As a bonus it could give them the revenue they want, through paid business hosting with official support or something like that.
Being an as-good-as-the-competition web browser that's not the default on any major OS (yeah I use it, but the Linux desktop ain't major) and doesn't have something like Google's reach for massive promotion (like they did with Chrome) is gonna kill them as a viable product with broad appeal, at this rate. They need to find a way to make that so much better than the competition that people bother to install it (on others' computers, too, like how they got their start), and I'm not sure how they can do that, or they need to pick another crappy but super-popular web-related product and go for the throat.
[EDIT] for that matter, web chat/conferencing, and social. IMO the browser's a dead-end for them except as a supporting product, but they keep focusing on utterly dull, niche, or already well-served products. IE sucked, but everyone needed a browser. Firefox crushed it by thoroughly and entirely not sucking. Pick something else that sucks and do the same. Not... bookmarking or whatever Pocket does.
Free, and they already have gmail. Android pushes it. Seems super-popular in schools. Ties in with their education offerings, I think, and lots of schools use chrome books.
If you ever managed to drop out of the "free" google apps classification (and I don't think I was the only idiot to mistakenly allow that to happen), google apps are not free.
I pay about $12/month to be able to use these things, which I regret only slightly less than not having the time to establish suitable alternatives.
Unlimited Google Drive, honestly. It’s nice being able to keep an offsite backup (but not the only one, of course) of my NAS in the cloud.
I assume they’ll get rid of it at some point and then I’ll move, but it’s surely handy (OneDrive is completely terrible UX wise and has a 5TB hard limit).
I actually prefer the flat aesthetic of MS services, not sure what UX you're referring to. Yes the storage limit sucks but other than that Outlook and One Drive are not any laggier than Google's products to me and they have all the basic things I need (plus some ads, admittedly). Needless to say MS office is superior to Google docs.
Each time somebody mentions, that 'libxslt2' is on an XPath 1.0 level (20 years old, we are at v3.1, currently) and how nice an update would be, the common agreement is the same: "lots of work, which nobody pays for."
Just thinking about all the money they burned through, how great would it have been, to bring XML up to current standards, and to support it well in Firefox. I mention this, because it is important, that we have at least one browser in the market, that understands XML native.
Or what would be if "Ubiquity" would have become an integral part of Firefox? Wow, just wow! I hate these people. They totally ignored the desire of many folks for a WYSIWYG XUL IDE back in the day as well... Instead they made Firefoxy parties, sold T-Shirts and coffee-mugs, implemented 'Persona', 'Hello' and what not! Did you just say, they bought 'Pocket'? Holy moly! I thought it was just a strategic relationship.
They bought pocket and, in my opinion, overpaid for it significantly (quite a few of us were mad at that at the time).
There was some relationship between the creator of Pocket and one or more Mozilla executives and/or board members that made the whole purchase stink in more ways than one.
First thing i do on a new Firefox profile (for the one machine I have still running Firefox) is disable Pocket.
Especially ironic considering that Firefox's UI chrome markup language (XUL) is (was?)... XML. And javascript. It was like a not-shitty Electron ahead of its time by like 20 years. I'm still bitter about XUL being irrelevant now.
Very informative! I remember using Mozilla alongside Netscape with the entire suite for editing etc. versus Frontpage.
And when Phoenix/Firebird came out how it was very basic but a slimmed down version of Mozilla.
It seemed they lost their way and just became the old Mozilla browser but with lots of features nobody wanted (Pocket??) and a tonne of other things I have no idea why they got involved in. Perhaps they just employed developers who liked writing new things.
This x1000. They get hundreds of millions a year to maintain a few foundational web technologies. Instead of doing that well, they are constantly on quixotic adventures with stuff like the Mr. Robot crossover and still fail to maintain core functionality. They lost the ability to fully remap browser controls in 2016 and haven't restored it since.
How do you have that much money for such a limited scoped mission and still get in over your head? And if so, what hope is there for anyone else?
Same here, been using Netscape, Mozilla, Phoenix and Firefox. Watched the development of Firefox 0.x to 4, e10s, MemShrink, SpiderMonkey, xMonkey, Firefox OS, Rust and Servo.
Witness Firefox ran an Ad on the front page of newspaper with thousands of supporters names on it. It sure made us proud, the battle against IE. ( Which is why I get pissed when people say Safari is the new IE ) I dont know how long ago was that, early 2000? Must have been nearly two decade.
Pushed Firefox installation in a University Campus to thousands of PCs. Pushed through hundreds of installations in a few enterprise. Along with dozen of other things, communities, Mozillazine ( I think it is now in Read Only Mode) .
There are lots of help from others too. I am sure I am not the only one. I dont know and dont think Chrome ever got that much support.
If you are IBM or Intel, you can afford to do silly thing like acquiring McAfee. You can afford to waste money and inefficiency. The whole reason why Startup were able to compete with some of the big players is that they could get $10 out of $1 spend, while Enterprise could barely move even with $10. The inefficiency is real, the only exception to that is possibly Apple.
Mozilla has a large cooperate mentality, enterprise inefficiency, non-profits ideals and startup's moon-shot strategy. I dont know of any possible worst combination than that.
So after nearly three decades of Netscape / Mozilla, I moved on to a different browser. It was just too painful to watch.
Edit: I forgot to add, Google has yet to renew their contract with Mozilla. Given their new low in marketshare ( Judging from Apple, terms are likely paid per Active User basis ), I suspect the negotiation terms is substantially lower than previously. Hence the layoff.
Not sure I understand. You disagree with the way the company/organization is being run so much, so you stopped using their free product? Do you still like the actual browser?
If coca-cola did some re-organization I didn´t like or spent money like a mad person on ridiculous products, I´d still buy coke until the company went broke.
I find that I agree and disagree on a few points. I do wish they'd kept their focus on the technical over the marketing. I don't think they really needed the swaths of MBA types in charge of the organization, and wish they'd stayed closer to their technical roots which is what survived from the earlier Netscape through AOL and into Mozilla. I was also an early fan from Phoenix, though I think the Firebird name (also a fan at that time of Firebird SQL) was a misstep.
I think some of the more encompasing efforts haven't all been bad. Rust as a language has been a great thing to come from Moz. Firefox OS could have been interesting as well.
For that matter I'd have been happy to see broader adoption of Mozilla's identity efforts, and don't so much mind them trying to get VPN as a secondary funding source.
I do wish their structure was more geared towards keeping the technical and developer teams as a focus of the organization over the more commercial aspirations.
I will say I did switch to Chrome around 2010 mostly because I really do prefer it's UI/UX ... FF is getting closer to that, despite some really not liking it and I've considered switching back.
I also find it ironic how popular electron has become, when XULRunner was such a great platform well over a decade before. I do think there's opportunity to create the next npm in concert with deno and firefox for supporting a greater module approach. There's still some unanswered bits there. Similarly, still would like a way to do bundled application packages; similar to jar or silverlight that's just a zip file of assets with a manifest and modules.
If often feels like Mozilla is doing their own thing to try and gain market share instead of working with the broader community.
Yep, if they had stuck the Google money in an index fund and only operated off a small drawdown then they wouldn't need to rely on commercial interests or donations today.
AI has been beset by problems of racial bias, and is currently only open to corporate giants. It makes perfect sense to try an manage core AI capability as an NGO exactly the same as it makes sense to manage an open, free browser.
You can argue that Mozilla specifically shouldn’t do this, and you might be right. But no-one else has their profile. No-one else is doing it.
I think your critique is the only reasonable one I've read so far. Mozilla need to go back to their radical roots, refocus their energy for the new decade, above all find a way to survive which doesn't compromise their integrity.
They should have switched to blink or WebKit years ago. Yes I used Firefox since it came out of AOL but for quite a few years now it has been a liability. Too many web sites simply don't work in Firefox. Nobody making web sites tests in Firefox any more. The Mozilla leadership adopted the head in the sand approach on this point with the obvious outcome. So long and thanks for all the fish!
The secret to make folks test on Firefox is by making developers happy. What makes them happy? A good DevTools experience.
Chrome won me over as a developer with its developer console, and I noticed Firefox Devtools has become a lot better now.
There are still quirks in Chrome's devtools and Firefox really has a shot if it focuses properly. For example working with large JS files are painful and the networks tab can be way more better.
But the rest of the crap, the marketing, the rebranding, the Pocket purchase and integration, Firefox OS, the voice recognition and AI stuff (and notice the announcement, they're keeping the AI division, really need that part apparently), stuff that nobody remembers, that's all a waste of money that could be saved by the non-profit foundation to just support the low-level engine keeping the open web viable.
I have no reason to think that your assessment of what's "crap" is a good one, while the assessment of those who actually work at Mozilla is somehow worse.
> Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them.
Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users; casual users are more numerous and less demanding. Chrome won the war a decade ago when it decided to focus aggressively on casual users, leaving Mozilla to deal with the fractious dregs of the power user market.
Sure, power users can be a pain in the ass, but if everything were up to casual users, we'd all still be on IE 1x, i.e., whatever that wraps the same broken, insecure, non-standard-compliant MSHTML engine in the shiny Windows UI toolkit-du-jour. Power users were the first to pick up Firefox when it was split off from the old Mozilla suite, and power users were the ones who began using and recommending Chrome when it was the upstart browser. If Firefox survives and (hopefully) returns to a reasonable market share, it'll probably be thanks to power users who stuck with it or gave it another chance.
Except Chrome was significantly better in ways that even casual users could see and be sold on: simplicity and speed, which initially turned away a significant number of power users who heavily rely on and prefer a wide variety of addons and settings to customize Firefox.
Power users are certainly valuable for spreading the word but it's only one way, you can also actually advertise and market the thing like Google did. And even though power users can spread the word, you still need a superior product for casuals to actually win them over. How long has HN and other forums been beating the drum for Firefox now? Has it actually made a difference in their declining marketshare (at least for desktop, not sure about mobile)?
I don't think it has, and I don't think it ever will. If Firefox survives and resurges in popularity, it will be for a better, more polished, more optimized, slicker product for casuals. And many power users will hate them for it. Well, that's just my prediction.
This is a very revisionist explanation of how Chrome succeeded: Simply put they paid to be injected into Adobe Reader and Flash Player installs. When Android came around, every manufacturer was required to include Chrome as default.
This is quite mistaken, Chrome would not be the market leader without the best product quality. You can't force a worse browser into market leadership, as Microsoft can tell you. They've been aggressively forcing defaults and preinstalling their browsers at a far deeper level than Google was for years (and they're still doing it), yet they lost so badly they outright abandoned their own formerly dominant browser. Then even among techies and "power users" who know how to change defaults, Chrome gained incredible traction as the fastest and simplest browser.
Companies can push a browser all they want but getting the vast majority of people to actually use the browser that you've put in their face requires your browser to be legitimately better than the one they're used to. Everyone, including many "power users", could see how much further ahead Chrome was, especially in its early years.
I know some people prefer to think that Google has mind control abilities and can somehow trick users into using a product that provides a worse experience, but this is far from the reality. Effective marketing and delivery is only ever a fraction of the story. It's telling that even in the tech industry, full of professionals who know how to use computers, Chrome remains the dominant browser.
That doesn’t match my memory at all. I recall a lot of word of mouth between non tech friends about “this new fast browser Google made”. At the time it really was eye-poppingly fast by comparison to the competition.
There was definitely tech crowd excitement about Chrome back when it was actually fast, but you don't get a 71% market share that way. You get a 71% market share by cutting deals with other vendors to inject your app, which is exactly what was done.
Another fun fact, is that previously to Chrome, Google had been doing the same with the Google Toolbar for IE, which changed everyone's default search to Google as well. Chrome wasn't so much about "protecting the open web" as protecting Google: They were afraid (not inaccurately) that Microsoft was considering figuring out a way to prevent the Google Toolbar from hijacking the search settings in IE.
The nontechnical user flow at the time, was that they might have MSN Search or whatever on Internet Explorer 6, and then they'd hit a website that needed Adobe Flash Player. The Flash Player installer would have the "Also install the Google Toolbar" checkbox preselected, so it would install that browser toolbar and switch your search engine to Google.
The reason Sundar Pichai is the guy that ended up on top at Google is because the Google Toolbar (and then Chrome) was his baby, and that ushered in Google's monopoly much more than literally anything else at Google.
Plus Google‘s browser cared deeply about developer tools. They were a generation better than anyone else at the time and had great support/evangelism. That alone converted my team of 15 in a year.
I don't disagree with your first paragraph - though I also remember, in London, giant billboards and cinema ads for chrome too as well as advertising for it on the google search page.
However, I switched from Firefox to Chrome when the former changed how DPI were calculated, told everyone that the new way is the right way and it's up to websites to deal with it, and everything looked wrong in the meantime. And then I noticed that on Chrome, not only did things look a bit nicer to me (quite apart from the DPI issue), but the same sites I often used rendered just a little bit faster - faster enough to be noticeable.
At the time, at least for me, Chrome was at least equal to Firefox in terms of product quality.
I used the first version and remember it being like a stripped-down version of Firefox at the time. It was the same codebase but with most of the useful UI ripped out.
I'd consider myself generally a power user... I still really preferred chrome's out of the box experience over Firefox really early on.
I think a lot of times more technically driven products resist change a bit too much. Some of the best examples are Gimp and Firefox. Gimp's UI is hideous and despite Gimpshop builds offering a better experience to users, they still resist. Similar for Firefox's overall ui/ux when so many preferred chrome (including myself).
Not all UI change is for the better, but when the vast majority of users prefer a different experience, it's helpful to listen sooner than later.
Just as an FYI: Apparently the Gimpshop website isn't owned by the developer and hasn't been for years. It's apparently riddled with adware and malware and isn't developed anymore.
Absolutely, but the truth of your words is also the tragedy. Having engaged and demanding users might have positive externalities when these users demand things that improve the products in the market as a whole, and thereby improve the experience for casual users as well. But companies don't want to improve their products, or improve society, or improve experiences for users; what they want is to collect rent. An established company becomes more cost-efficient by embracing casual users and ignoring power users. An upstart company might want to leverage power users to compete against a well-funded opponent, but that debt eventually comes due as we see now with Mozilla.
At enterprise prices (i.e. thousands of dollars per user per year) it makes sense to accept the cost of dealing with power users. But not for a product that you give away for free.
I say this as someone who has been using Firefox for years, and you'll need to pry it from my cold, dead hands. I'm impressed that Mozilla has survived for as long as it has, I was sure they'd be financially kaput by 2016; at this point I think Google only keeps their search deal up as an attempt to avoid antitrust action. I don't know what the future holds for Firfox, but I hope it remains competitive. We need alternative competing implementations for the health of the web.
"Sure, power users can be a pain in the ass, but if everything were up to casual users, we'd all still be on IE 1x, i.e."
How true. To paraphrase Henry Ford, if HTML5 developers asked instead what casual users wanted, we would now have a faster Flash.
It's history repeating itself over and over: developers and power users introduce or ask for something innovative, then casual users notice it, embrace it but also ask for it to be simpler to use ("50 knobs are too many, we want it to be usable with 3!"), therefore many functions are automated, other removed and interfaces are dumbed down to make the product palatable to the lowest denominator; however now the product has lost most of its "cool factor", not to mention some advanced functions, and doesn't attract power users anymore, many of them ending up migrating elsewhere. Rinse, repeat.
That is not going to happen to Firefox, since the war for conquering casual users has already been fought and won by Google thanks to their pervasive advertising telling everyone the lie that Chrome is better and safer. Mozilla should instead focus on giving power users the best possible product wrt security and privacy, two aspects where it would win hands down against Google, while at the same time try not to lose those among casual users who happen to be concerned about privacy and security and to whom Chrome would not be an option.
As for Mozilla's need to become profitable, why don't they attempt to use their widely known brand to sell personalized Pi-Hole-like boxes, hardware firewalls, VPN bricks that connect together from here to there, etc. Imagine two boxes with network plus audio ports: you connect mic, headphones, optional camera, a network cable, your laptop and the two boxes will establish an authentic E2E encrypted voice + video + data communication from anywhere to anywhere, no other operations required. Mozilla could surely provide the necessary services to get around NATted or filtered connections, and the shiny boxes with their logo would ease the association between the brand and the concept of private communications, security, privacy etc. helping as a consequence the adoption of Firefox as well. I think if they really want to focus on privacy and security they shouldn't ignore the hardware field where their brand can still make a difference.
Your flawed assumption-by-framing is that all of Firefox's power users are "techie" / "computer-savvy" / "hacker" power users, which is definitely not true for other products, and likely isn't true for Firefox either.
Parent indicates that the same power users that hat first adopted Firefox, before it had any market share or was known to regular people around the world, will be the ones who save it. Those are, in industry parlance, "early adopters".
Those early adopters would have been adopting Phoenix 0.2^ which was released in September 2002, that was later released as Firefox 1.0^ two years later — at a time when the only power users could have been those same "early adopters".
Those early adopters would have been as I describe: technical users with the capability to install and operate an unfamiliar browser for the sake of curiosity. (I was still using MSIE in 2002, so it's not like it was universal among technical users either, yet.)
Those early adopters do not represent the total set of power users today.
It is also the reason why GNU/Linux desktop will never go beyond 2%.
Android and ChromeOS pack a Linux kernel on their bottom layers, but nothing of it gets exposed to userspace neither for users nor for devs.
Android NDK explicitly doesn't have anything Linux related as part of the official stable APIs contract, and on ChromeOS Linux support is exposed via a container, WSL2 style.
> casual users are more numerous and less demanding.
That makes zero sense.
Why Mozilla seems to be axing the Servo division? The only part that actually catered to casual users? Also by introducing a VPN and Pocket Premium is for casual users how?
I'm pretty sure kibwen implies this restructuring is to cater to casual users. By axing their division focused on perfs, i.e. one of few divisions that actually impacts casual users.
I disagree with "never, ever" - everyone's fighting to get _developers_ to use their tools, which is why both Chrome and Firefox have a great F12 inspector built in, Microsoft is open-sourcing a ton of stuff and building VS code and developing a native Linux subsystem etc.
Basically, there's money in being an ecosystem like Apple's or Google's app store - you can take a 30% cut just for being the platform if you play it right - but Microsoft noticed with Windows phone and UWP that you can't just set up a store and rake in the cast unless you can attract developers to build things on your platform.
Then there's anchor products, a term from supermarkets for things like coke/pepsi (depending on the country you're in) - the idea being, if you don't stock these then your customers will shop somewhere else. If Facebook/Uber/Whatsapp/$COMPANY decides to develop their app for mobile OS 1 and 2 but not 3, then that's a strong disincentive for some people to buy OS 3, even if it's privacy-respecting and open-source and diverse and whatever. (The desktop counterpart to this is MS Office. For most companies, the choice is between Win and Mac, and will remain so unless Office ever becomes natively supported on Linux.)
Even the government has realised this, with their "clean app stores" plan - I read this part as "we won't outright ban US citizens from buying Huawei phones, but we'll make sure they only have access to a segregated app store and we'll lean on major companies not to develop a separate version for this store.
So if you ever want to launch a new platform, service or similar with a business plan that third parties will develop software for it, you'd better keep these third parties happy with decent developer tools.
The two biggest features that made firefox what it is were extensions and tabbed browsing, both aimed at power users. Take those away and it never would have been used by power users and no one else ever would have heard of it.
When have they marketed to power users? Can you point to a campaign? Everything I’ve seen from them has been trying to convince everyday people that privacy is necessary or some fun Mr Robot thing.
Interestingly, I don't quite subscribe to that view. I think there are businesses (like Retool or Quickbase) that are very good at catering to power users.
But I know what you mean. In the Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths text (which I don't necessarily fully subscribe to except for the naming conventions - which are useful), these people are the Mops. They aren't people who are actually concerned about security (Vanta is a successful product for those people) or privacy. They are the Mops of the Sec/Priv group.
They can't give you anything and you can't give them anything. So there's little point engaging with them. If you're interested, I have a friend working on something he calls overlay networks, to allow the Geeks to communicate with other Geeks while allowing Mops to provide the cultural mass.
I've met other people who were part of Firefox's big grassroots campaign that forever changed the web and won all of us the new standards-compliant web that Chrome has thrived in and a lot of them have remained Geeks. And I suppose almost all of them were Power Users. So I don't quite disagree with you, I just think the group is refinable and you definitely want the Geek Power User on your team - they become the fabled first adopter.
For being the go to example of “HN user craps on launch of highly successful product”, the reply to Drew’s reply is pretty respectful and backdowns down on several points.
It's not even about technical vs casual people it's about Moore's Law. Memory became so cheap that it makes sense to store everything in an internet cloud.
Casual people are more likely to pay to solve their problems, and believe your product is “magic” (saw this first hand from user feedback and interactions at a popular startup). Some technical people will, many will not. Know your audience, go where the money is, not the complaints of non users.
Nerd and power-user evangelists are the only reason FF ever had any market share to begin with. We installed it on everyone's computer we had access to. We did this because even non-nerds could tell it was better than the OS' default browser, out of the box.
Non-nerds can no longer tell it's better, so I stopped doing that. No longer worth the effort, might even end up adding to my friends-and-family tech support burden rather than reducing it. I still use it myself anywhere Safari's not available, but yeah, it's a power-user-only product now.
Chrome only did better with regular users because 1) it was OS-bundled, and 2) they could shove "try Chrome!" banners at the top of every Google property. I don't think the product itself is significantly more focused on normal users. Google's just got a way, way better platform for promotion. They can snap their fingers and get a million installs of something in a day, if they really want to. But fact is FF doesn't have that. What they did have was power users doing all their marketing for them. Not so much, these days.
At the time Chrome took off, Firefox had gotten bloated and slow, and Chrome was lightning by comparison. (I'm sure part of it was simply due to having enough features out of the box, thus requiring less add-ons / extensions.)
Firefox of course got much better eventually, but by then the damage was done, and Chrome's ability to sync with the rest of Google products (and Android devices) made the browser extremely sticky.
People say this, but I always find Chrome just oddly unappealing to use. It just doesn't "feel" right. Which is the opposite of what I hear lots of people say, but it's always felt that way to me nonetheless.
FF was really crashy/hangy around when Chrome came out—the main appeal of Chrome was that it'd do the same thing but confine the damage to one tab. Also IIRC its dev tools were on par with or better than Firebug (remember that?) early on, and performed way better. FF has gotten a lot better since then so the difference is much less stark. It was worth a little UI weirdness at the time to not have your whole session die when one tab misbehaved.
Didn't need shady, just... any javascript, really. No other browser was any better so I don't think anyone thought much of it until Chrome came out with the amazing new feature of per-tab crashing.
You can measure it. For our large Javascript-heavy application Chrome is twice as fast as Firefox. V8 is an amazing piece of technology and the Chrome team should be proud of this.
Chrome UI was (and is) total shit compared to Opera (Presto Opera, not the new Blink one). The tab bar was literally unusable for like 10 years if you had more than ~20 tabs open.
Last time I used Windows without an SSD, Chrome kept stalling on IO every couple minutes (for some profile or temp files bs), fixed by symlinking to a ramdisk.
Chrome still can't properly VSYNC, can't keep a stable framerate and has unnecessary frames of input lag.
When (if) they make ad blocking impossible, they will lose every single tech savvy user they have.
> Chrome only did better with regular users because 1) it was OS-bundled,
What OS bundles Chrome? Do you mean ChromeOS?
> and 2) they could shove "try Chrome!" banners at the top of every Google property.
That happened way later.
Maybe you have forgotten since it was so long ago, but the original wave of power users migrating to Chrome and bringing their non-power user friends along was exactly like the wave of folks who moved to Firefox. Chrome came out in 2008, had process-per-tab isolation and custom Chrome (i.e. window decorations, that's where the name comes from) that used less vertical space.
[EDIT] and Chrome was better enough that it got power users switching (this is before "Google has become very obviously evil" was common geek opinion yet, which helped), but I'm not sure it would have gotten them installing it on normal folks' computers with quite the fervor we did Firefox, back in the day. The banner ads are what got them on normal people's computers.
It was power-users. That process isolation thing was a big part of its selling point. IIRC they put out a comic strip touting how technically awesome it was
> [Privacy/Security focused people] don't actually use [Firefox].
Is this what you mean? If so, I strongly disagree. I'd wager such 'power users' are the majority of Firefox users at this point. Casual users have all gone to Chrome, as well as many [but certainly not all] power users. I am still using Firefox and plan to continue doing so for as long as I can.
I'm concerned that Mozilla's mismanagement will make "for as long as I can" rather short. The only reason for this to concern me is because I use it. Writing off concerned commenters as non-users is a huge mistake.
I think it is possible to market privacy and security to casual users, but it's far more difficult to market anything to the privacy and security crowd. Apple has succeeded in their privacy marketing, I'd argue, because they already have a huge number of casual users.
Yeah I don't think being "privacy centric" has won over apple. It is their hardware/software integration and the mass market appeal they've built on top of their ad campaigns. I use apple stuff everyday and it is as stable as linux for me and much preferred to windows because of the constant invasion of privacy that is Windows 10.
> a) it's very hard to figure out if something is private/secure
> b) the company can change the deal at any point
Yes! Don’t forget the time Firefox, bastion of privacy, forgot to update a critical cert that allowed addons to work, and then said, “don’t worry guys, the whole time we had the power to force our updates without your consent, under the guise of an analytics feature, and we used that to fix this!”
> DDG with their favicon service (which HN billed as some sort of nefarious tracker)
That was a pretty blatant exposure risk for something trivial, and the employee who responded on it was shockingly inept. At some point the amount of stupidity becomes so incredible that Hanlon's Razor breaks down.
There are definitely people like you are describing, but it's unfair to lump everyone who critisizes Mozilla, DDG, or any other privacy-focused company in with that crowd.
I will happily critisize Mozilla, DDG, etc when they come up short, but I will also happily celebrate their successes and continue to use and recommend their products as long as they don't stray too far. I want them to aim for perfection, but I completely recognize they will fall short.
There is a huge difference between critisism and condemnation.
Criticism of errors in privacy/security does not mean they "want you to fall". Forcing proper change often requires public pressure.
Advocating against security is you advocating against yourself for no purpose other than sticking it to others. That's incredibly poor reasoning, and you're generalizing all groups as if they're all outrage for bad reasons.
I also hate the privacy argument. Anyone can write super-private software, it just needs to do nothing.
Anyone can do better than Google when it comes to privacy, especially if you define "privacy" as "don't do what Google is doing". It is almost a tautology: we first define Google as the opposite of privacy and then market yourself as private by not being Google. In order to drive the point, you add some kind of blocking feature and, yay, private!
In order to be relevant, you need to do more than that. Firefox used to be a great browser not because it was private, but because it was a great browser. It had great support for the latest web technologies, tabbed browsing before IE, it was fast, etc... And because of that it managed to make a dent in IE market share. But now, what does it have that Chrome doesn't besides not being from Google? Firefox even lost most of its identity by discontinuing XUL (for good reasons, I know) and updating its UI to look more like Chrome. I use both browsers on a day-to-day basis and Chrome tends to work better on average, though Firefox seems to be slowly catching up. I don't know what the situation is with Servo but it might be what Firefox needs.
Another example would be DuckDuckGo. Again, it caught the "privacy" virus. Please, no, "private" just means you are a proxy for inferior Bing results in this case. The worst part is that DDG has more to offer than "privacy", like instant answers and bangs. Why not market these instead?
The best way to privately search the web is to not use a general purpose search engine in the first place if you can at all help it.
Instead of using DDG's !wiki or googling "wiki [topic]" you can configure a search keyword to send you to Wikipedia's search results page, cutting out the middleman. I have this done for a dozen or so sites I use frequently and this has cut my general purpose search engine usage down significantly.
This is the sort of privacy enhancing feature that Firefox should streamline and advertise. I wonder if they don't make it known to users because it might influence how much money Google is willing to give them for being the default general purpose search engine..
The best solution I know for Wikipedia is to just host your own copy of it. Never need to send any queries out to the web. It's only around 100G with images. I use a simple url filter to change all wikipedia links to point at my local copy. Works like a charm. And fast. https://www.kiwix.org/en/
The UI for this feature barely even exists in Firefox -- you have to make a bookmark, and then edit it to replace the query with %s and add a keyword. There is also the half baked "one-click search engines" thing, but the button to "find more" just redirects to the extension store.
The Chrome UI is somewhat better and it also automatically creates these when you use a search somewhere, with a keyword equivalent to the site's domain.
I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product.
The tragedy of Mozilla is a very human one, with special embellishments added by the prevailing culture in the US, its home...
"the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal"
It is more like people are willing to dismiss bad behavior when there is a clear profit motive, since it seems obvious that when someone is in it for the money they will ignore other considerations. Take the profit motive out of the picture and people start to imagine other motives or attribute bad behavior to negative character traits, even when the behavior is generally better than the for-profit counterparts'.
Well, people expect a company to not try to ride the high horse down the low road. I don't personally think Mozilla has really done anything bad, I get it, they are a real company, with real employees who work for a living. Sometimes the realities of running a company clash with their PR of being some sort of public good. FWIW, I like Mozilla, and a lot of their values, and the products they put out, but their marketing does leave them open to ridicule in ways that a company who always answers "money" to the "why did you do this?" question is not.
> is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal.
It might be the other way around in this case.
Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot.
Throughout the years when choices had to be made Mozilla didn't always side with the open web or the users, and whenever they were asked about it, the answer was always the same:
"Not our hill to die on. We need the clout we would lose, otherwise we won't be big enough to have any say when the next thing comes around."
and then the next thing came around, and the next...
The problem is that Mozilla seems to have revenue as an important goal. I imagine that's why people clamour for them to focus on the browser instead of pointlessly playing corporation with borrowed feathers.
When IE6 came into the market it was the best on its class, the only problem was Microsoft declaring victory and dismantling the team to create Avalon (WPF), which is also the background why CSS Grid came from WPF.
... and the installer would download very quickly on your mom's dial-up, unlike the full Mozilla Suite which was huge, and it was much lighter-weight, better-performing, and had better default features for people who didn't need all of Mozilla Suite, so you could install it on there so she'd stop getting 500 pop-unders and then ending up with a virus and ten "browser bars" you had to fix.
> We need the clout we would lose, otherwise we won't be big enough to have any say when the next thing comes around.
As John J. Chapman said in 1900:
> I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.
> Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot.
"MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – December 15th, 2004 – [..]The ad, coordinated by Spread Firefox, features the names of the thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation’s fundraising campaign to support last month’s highly successful launch of the open source Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser.
Spread Firefox is the volunteer-run Mozilla advocacy site, with over 50,000 registered members, where community marketing activities are organized to raise awareness and to promote the adoption of Firefox."
How do I pay for Firefox directly? Donating to the foundation seems noble, but like other commentators have mentioned it all gets absorbed into the foundation or is part of a 'bonus product' bundle that (in my mind) overvalues a service I don't want (VPN, Pocket, whatever.)
I don't think Mozilla/Firefox is failing because no one will pay for it, but, because it won't take money for Firefox directly.
1000% this. i was literally writing the same comment. just have an easy way for me to selectively donate $15/month to Rust, Servo, Firefox, Thunderbird, whatever. instead you get some generic bucket with no possibility to really vote with your money.
e.g. i would have never paid for the A/R stuff they distracted their Servo engineers with (plus the Magic Leap entanglement). i would have also withheld funding for the non-removable Pocket integration fiasco. and the jack-in-the-box Mr. Robot promotion - once my tools start to become Mozilla's agents rather then user's agents, they cease to be my tools.
i should add that people who choose to use firefox rather than the default are those who are most likely to pay. not listening to them is absolute nonsense.
1. Mozilla's revenue from the Google search deal depends on users searching for things using Firefox. More searches through the Firefox search bar, more revenue for MoCo.
2. Marketshare == developer mindshare. Declining marketshare has created a positive feedback loop where devs (or their managers) become less concerned about supporting Firefox. This induces more web compat issues, which causes more people to switch away, cycle repeats.
Firefox used to have two major advantages, at least for me as a user rather than a developer: customisability and the respect for privacy. The former went under a bus with Quantum and has never recovered. The latter is still there, but the single biggest hole in it is the use of Google for search, so that's probably the first thing that many privacy-sensitive users are going to change.
I do still use Firefox as my primary browser, despite having reconsidered several times in recent years. However, as a dev I have all the others readily to hand, and I do find myself forced to use others because pages simply don't work in Firefox with noticeable frequency now. From the opposite angle, I also can't remember the last time a client specified Firefox compatibility for a new project. It's usually Chrome, iOS Safari if mobile is relevant, and maybe Edge in corporate settings now.
Unfortunately the vicious cycle of market share and compatibility has been established, and while I think we'll all end up worse off for it, I'm not sure there's much anyone can do about it at this point, at least not as long as most of the actual functionality in Firefox is (unsurprisingly) so similar to other browsers.
> I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you".
I know a couple of guys who posted their stuff here. They don't care about the complainers because the complainers don't have and don't offer to have skin in the game. They did the sensible thing, which is to be polite and respond noncommittally thanking them for the feedback or to ignore them.
Because you don't get information that will improve the product from them, they aren't potential customers, and they usually don't know what they're talking about anyway.
I don't think it's necessary or appropriate to assign an insulting stereotype label to that subset of customers, especially not on HN. People who behave in this manner can be readily found on HN in many discussions (for example, virtually all about telemetry), and while I don't understand them I don't condone insulting them either.
Irrelevant. I object to the intent to be insulting, not to the specific insult chosen. Insultingly calling them “paperclip giraffes^” with the same derogatory intent would have earned the same comment.
I get it that the US federal government has been antagonizing the world on overdrive for the past ~4 years, but as an "insider" I really don't understand how you arrived at any of these conclusions. The very notion of "collective psyche" is entirely nonsensical in the US as there is almost nothing that is very broadly agreed-upon.
Now of course I'm particularly opinionated about Mozilla, since I donate regularly to the foundation, subscribe to their VPN, contribute to the Rust ecosystem, and use Firefox not only on desktop but mobile as well. So, perhaps I live in what might be called a bubble, but the idea that anybody would knock Mozilla because they are not profit-driven just doesn't make sense to me, and is actually the complete opposite of what I got from reading the comments in this thread, which, by the way, probably has decent international representation anyway.
> And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product.
I'm not sure how many there are that would pay for it, but I'm sure it's not zero.
I believe a browser is like an IDE, and I'm quite happy to pay for mine, as are plenty of other people apparently, JetBrains & Co are making good money. They are focused on their users though, which Firefox isn't.
I'm pretty sure that Firefox could get plenty of paying users at $100/yr even just by focusing on good developer experience. They don't though, and Chromium does.
That's a good point. A business plan along the lines of, for $8/month you get the pro edition which has all the latest features and updates, which the free tier would get 6 months later or so.
I use FF (dev edition) as my primary dev browser, and it's made a lot of progress on DX. Chromium has a smoother experience overall, but FF is not too shabby nowadays.
Sometimes it feels like there are people out there who want Mozilla to fail and gleefully seek ways to make that happen (even by doing something as simple as amplifying misinformation), even though it is not really in their interests to do so.
I've never seen any indication that anyone wants Mozilla to fail.
But after seeing several years of repeated strategic blunders and bad management, and Firefox slip from being the most popular web browser by a comfortable margin to a single digit percentage market share, which is still sliding down, I think the available evidence shows that they have failed quite badly, and for the most part through problems of their own making. Now, I'd like to use Firefox again, but they have regain strong technical focus first. They are all over the place doing irrelevant stuff. I'm surprised they even have that many staff to lay off in the first place given their financial situation. There must be a large percentage of non-jobs amongst that thousand, because they certainly weren't all dedicated to making a good web browser.
> I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal.
Mozilla can always give up firefox and let it has it own non-profit organization that take the revenue from the google deal. That way Mozilla can continue to focus on their advocacy product which they get paid so much for.
For me, the feeling of getting kicked in the shins by a diva designer every-other update has risen dramatically in the past few years, as has the prominence of (at least the feeling of) 'closed wontfix dontagree' issues for common and longstanding gripes on the bug tracker and GitHub. The unfortunate nature of a bad feeling is that it will outweigh a positive feeling from another change of equal consequence.
I would not be surprised if it was the same for other users. It results in implicitly giving less benefit of the doubt when another potential controversy comes up.
Other application developers are held to a lower standard because they have already come out the other side - people already simply assume the worst about them. The paradoxical anger comes from the fact that they don't want to do the same with Mozilla, but feel more and more that they'll have to.
The 'closed wontfix dontagree' attitude, or letting important requests sit there open for over a decade -- some with tens of thousands of comments -- is what killed Firefox more than anything.
In the enterprise world, Firefox lacked a few, small, but critical features:
1) MSI Installers
2) Group Policy Administrative Templates
3) Proxy configuration from Windows
4) Enterprise PKI integration
Some of these are supported now, but for about a decade there was at least one person in Mozilla with a philosophical opposition to doing anything that is seen as helping an enterprise Windows network deployment.
I'm pretty certain that Firefox still doesn't work properly in a large corporate environment. At any rate, I've given up trying, as have millions of other administrators. We installed Chrome, which "just worked", and moved on.
The result of this is that enterprise web applications were written for Chrome, not IE or Firefox. Chrome became mandated and automatically pushed to every machine. It has become the new IE6, for better or worse.
There is now, and has been for some time, an advocate of Firefox in the enterprise and last I checked that is almost entirely what he worked on. His name is Mike Kaply.
Why was that important? I was under the impression that exe and msi installer had no real difference between them. Obviously I am incorrect but I am wondering why.
True, there's a spectrum. There's the "download wizard" stub installers, then "interactive only" installers, then the ones with unattended command-line flags, and then there's native support for the operating package management format.
In Windows there are further nuances, such as installing per-user, per-machine, or both. Similarly, MSI support often implies support for transforms (MST files) and patches (MSP files) also, which is important on large networks. Back in the days of constrained bandwidths, MSPs were great for rolling out updates without killing the WAN, but few vendors would provide them.
Firefox tended to prefer the interactive install wizard installers and hence deploying it at scale was an enormous pain in the arse.
For example, the Enterprise CA thing actually interacted with the packaging. You had to crack open the Firefox files, download some obscure NSS command-line tool that they regularly moved around on their website to spite admins, and inject your corporate certificates into the Firefox-specific Root CA file. After this, everything had to be put back together in some way for deployment, typically by repackaging the files into an MSI.
Similarly, instead of ADM Templates that allow settings to be pushed out via Group Policy, you had to do hideous things to JavaScript files. These also changed regularly and had all sorts of limitations.
There was just no way anyone in their right mind would do this every few weeks to keep up with the Firefox release schedule. IT admins have other things to do, not just babysitting Firefox, the one special and unique flower that refuses to play nice with Windows.
The only other obstinately anti-admin products I can think of that were this bad were the Java Runtime and the Adobe suite of products. Even Adobe provided an ADM template at least, even though they published it as a PDF.
On several important Windows servers on a customer's LAN that are accessed via Remote Desktop, Firefox is able to tell it wants to auto-update... and it fails to do so, since an unprivileged passer-by cannot (and should not) update important software, and no actual administrator bothers with browser updates after initial setup and certification.
> I would not be surprised if it was the same for other users.
Yep, you can count me in this group as well. The Firefox team goes out of it's way to make so many changes that just seem useless or annoying; it's baffling to me. It really feels like a team with too many devs and designers sitting around needing to create work. I very much doubt that's actually the case, but that just means it's a widespread management issue.
That said, it doesn't make me want to stop using Firefox because the only other option is Chrome which has bigger issues.
> It really feels like a team with too many devs and designers sitting around needing to create work.
This is how a lack of a vision manifests - if there was a vision, there would be meaningful work for everyone, instead of people inventing unwanted features to keep themselves busy.
And of course, vision needs user & customer research, it's not a thing a 'leader' could hallucinate with no external inputs.
The last update of Firefox mobile really made wonder how it passed QA.
The navigation bar on the bottom is an interesting expiriment but still I quickly moved it back up.
The new tab layout is worse. Each tab need much more space so you can display about half the number of tabs on the same space.
The top sites when you opened a new tab also disappeared. It seems you can put bookmark or something to replace them but the top site feature was really good. I'm likely to want to visit sites I visit the most and that used to be a touch away
> The last update of Firefox mobile really made wonder how it passed QA
They had it as a separate app, as it was (seemingly) a rewrite that uses GeckoView. So having less features and unstable features was somewhat expected for users that went out of their way to install it.
Naturally, a lot of the old features weren't supported, and some were likely feeling like unmaintainable legacy code in the old version (Fennec) to begin with. So a rewrite may have made sense, for where the products were at and where they wanted to go. At least, in my opinion.
But for whatever reason, they decided that they had reached an acceptable level of feature and usability parity as to replace the old version with the new one (Fenix) in the play store. Somewhat forcibly moving all of the current users onto the new browser, silently for auto-updaters and update-all-ers. The downgrade path for those who want or need the old version is... well, I didn't see any documentation when I googled, so presumably it's "install the old APK and hope things work".
It's a cynical and somewhat egotistical approach to software development, disappointing to see from Mozilla and yet another entry on the list.
At this point, I would not be surprised if they find the idea of the extension whitelist - rather than a more open platform as is the desktop and was Fennec - far too appealing to move away from in the future.
That's somewhat doom-and-glooming, but many months ago I had thought they wouldn't end up trying to shove Fennec users onto Fenix in this way, and yet... here we are.
Also they basically removed the tablet mode - here I am with a 10 inch tablet and no tab bar, no back button on address bar & no keyboard shortcuts, perfect! :P
More things the dropped in lates "stable" Firefox for Android:
- save as PDF
- print support (!!)
- downloade manager
- full URL display
- about:config (!!!)
- extensions (other than 9 extensions they carefully cherry-picked)
I'd grant you that Mozilla is being held to a higher standard, to high perhaps. That's not really my complaint about Mozilla. The thing is, I freaking love Firefox. Developer can't speak highly enough about MDN, and with good reason. Yet, the thing we see as users and donors to Mozilla is Pocket, FirefoxOS, an idiotic VPN and other pointless project. Thunderbird can apparently just roll over and die for all the Mozilla Corp. cares.
What annoys me with Mozilla, again as much as I love Firefox and the spirit of Mozilla, is that the corporate leadership seems to ignore the project that works. New focus my ass, Mozilla needs to refocus on Firefox. Maybe you do, but it certainly doesn't seem like it from the outside.
Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close, yet corporate Mozilla seems to have forgotten about it, it's never a highlight in Mozilla Corp. communications, but it should be.
> Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close
In what sense? Feature set, user experience, security, stability, performance, developer experience?
Genuinely curious. I switched from Chrome last year and have yet to find a single aspect in which I’d say Firefox would lead, with the exception of privacy.
Crash safety. If Chrome crashes, you get one single, short lived pop up to restore your tabs. If you miss it or can't click it for some reason, though luck.
Firefox, on the other hand, will simply always reopen your tabs and prompt you, in case the crash was its fault. In fact, losing ~50 open tabs in Chrome was what made me switch.
The tabs are still there even if you miss the prompt. Either press Ctrl-Shift-T, or select the three dots => History and the tabs are there, under the "Recently closed" section. The caveat is that you have to restore the tabs before you've browsed enough pages that the tabs are pushed out of the recently closed tabs. Also, I simulate Chrome crashing by sending SIGSEGV signal to it, but I'm pretty sure this applies even if Chrome crashes for real.
For a lot of crashes (mostly due to X bugs - I have an "interesting" setup) I couldn't find those tabs in recently closed. I'll try to simulate it and maybe open a bug report; if it's only in my case this might be less of a general issue than I thought.
As a user it feels like all of the major browsers have been good enough for quite a while now. Is there anything other than bug fixes and performance improvements happening in that space these days?
Well we are seeing major browsers limit control in recent updates, so that's the new major browser race it seems. Safari and Chrome are locking down what you can do with extensions, which limits what you can do to protect your privacy online.
web standards are always evolving and updating. A lot of users don't appreciate that it's happening but it is. Firefox and Chrome do a pretty good job of keeping up. Chrome also adds a lot of proprietary additions to push the envelope as well as differentiate Chrome as well.
> A lot of users don't appreciate that it's happening but it is.
That kind of backs up what I was saying, doesn't it? The browsers are good enough for most of the users most of the time and the new features matter to fewer and fewer people.
I was doing automated image capture of some data sites and diffing them to see if they changed. Chrome would jitter. Firefox drew the same bits every time.
> Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close...
Source? Based on which criteria? If you have even the slightest belief in the wisdom of the crowds, you'll realize that there must be something really appealing in Chrome which has resulted in its 68% market share. Compare that to Firefox's 7%.[0]
There's no secret sauce to chrome. It's single super power which made it the standard for non-tech users is googles ability to slap a bar on every single one of their sites telling users to use chrome. Google told them, so that's what they did. End of story.
I don't think that's the whole story. Chrome was more user friendly from the beginning. It took FF years to drop the rigid, Windows XP style UI and become more user friendly. At the same time, FF doesn't offer the same level of syncing your data across all your devices like Chrome does. And when it comes to system resources, say what you want about Chrome's tab memory management, but FF on macOS is not a pleasant experience either (extensive CPU usage and heating problems).
I have tried to switch back to FF (and even to Edge), but every time I realize Chrome - despite all its problems - is a much smoother experience. YMMV.
In the early day every driver CD and a large portion of online installers had chrome bundled and pushed. Pretty sure almost every preinstalled system also had chrome. If I don't miss remember, even game installers occasionally pushed chrome. It was very noticeable and I remember quite well the annoyance of having to go to advanced setting and unselect chrome several times during reinstalls of windows 7.
They did have a different memory profile (might still have one in macos, I wouldn't know since I don't use mac), and the UI is each to ones own, but I few programs outside of AOL installers has been as pushy as chrome during the beginning.
It's not withering away because of minor mistakes; it's withering away because of major mistakes. Those mistakes are largely in corporate governance -- this is the reason so many are furious about the $2.5MM salary for a CEO at the helm of a market-share death spiral. Every single product line except Firefox is an also-ran from a revenue standpoint. How does Baker respond? Fire the Servo team, and tell an interviewer there will be a focus on (among other niche services) a "VR chat hub." Oh, and any salary reduction for executives is 'a burden.' (https://twitter.com/lizardlucas42/status/1293232090985705478)
All this from an organization with the audacity to solicit donations from end-users.
So no, I would not say Mozilla has learned anything or worked to prevent it happening again. What has changed since the January layoffs except for the scale of the layoffs? In no world is running a company such that you have to boot a quarter of your workforce 'minor mistakes.'
The silver lining is that Mozilla's race to receivership won't make much of a difference. They haven't done much for web standards beyond co-signing Google's railroading of the standards bodies, and they couldn't even stand up for video or DRM standards either. Every download of Firefox ships Google Analytics, installer stubs for Cisco and Google video blobs, and a configuration that shunts your DNS lookups to yet a third private corporation. With friends like Mozilla, who needs enemies?
In short, the organization is utterly rudderless (and has been for nearly a decade), incapable of supporting itself without search engine subsidies, and not achieving any of the ideological goals it espouses. What we're witnessing now is what happens when you can no longer coast on branding. What's down this road, after some deck-chair rearranging, will be cessation of operation of the for-profit arm and a new direction for the non-profit arm, which might survive that. Time will tell.
Best comment of the thread. Well done. I strongly agree.
Aside: That linked salary reduction comment is also pretty damned tone deaf. oof. I imagine having to find a new job because of major systemic mismanagement is also a burden!
The argument for DRM is that it ships in a sandbox built by Mozilla.
But hey, I'm sure that if Mozilla didn't ship DRM, video codecs, etc, the browser would have been more popular.
Firefox is actually useful.
DNS lookups are safer with a provider vetted by Mozilla. They were able to negotiate a contract you wouldn't have been able to get. Ensuring you more privacy.
But sure bash Mozilla for trying to be pragmatic, privacy and features is not a trivial thing to balance.
> The argument for DRM is that it ships in a sandbox built by Mozilla.
Actually, I was long since wondering how exactly that sandbox works, so if you have some more information about that, I'd appreciate it.
Henri Sivonen's general explanation of EME and CDMs[1] tells the following:
> A CDM could be bundled with the browser, downloaded separately, bundled with the operating system, embedded in hardware as firmware running in a second domain of computing (such as ARM TrustZone) or wired into hardware. EME leaves this aspect implementation-dependent. [...]
EME does not specify the output abstraction for CDMs. It leaves open several options. The CDM could:
- Merely perform decryption and hand back the encoded media (e.g. H.264) to the browser.
[...]
- Perform decryption and decoding and then work together with the GPU so that not even the operating system gets the opportunity to read the pixels back from the GPU.
Meanwhile, Mozilla's implementation of EME seems to be substantially more restrictive[2]:
> Firefox does not load [the CDM] directly. Instead, we wrap it into an open-source sandbox. In our implementation, the CDM will have no access to the user’s hard drive or the network. Instead, the sandbox will provide the CDM only with communication mechanism with Firefox for receiving encrypted data and for displaying the results.
[...]
in Firefox the sandbox prohibits the CDM from fingerprinting the user’s device. Instead, the CDM asks the sandbox to supply a per-device unique identifier.
However, if the sandbox works as explained, the DRM seems to be trivially defeatable: I can simply fork Firefox and modify the sandbox, so it lies to the CDM about the fingerprinting and/or captures the decrypted media stream and writes it to a file - so then, how did Mozilla get Hollywood to agree on this?
On the other hand, if the CDM has some means to verify that Firefox has not been tampered with, then it can escape the sandbox - so then, what is the point of the sandbox?
To a large degree Mozilla is given equal treatment to other companies who is struggling financially. People are emotionally (and some economically) invested in Mozilla, and the announcement are clearly not calming those investors.
A common pattern I see when companies are struggling is that the refocus back on the core product. They cut side projects, they move away from what ever broad vision plan that got them into the current mess and refocus narrowly back to a handful profit earning core products.
The reaction to Mozillas announcement would likely look very different if instead of talking about go beyond the browser into a different world they would had done the opposite and refocused efforts exclusively to the handful of products that bring the core of users to Mozilla. Such announcement would clam people and make them hopeful that firefox would gain a strong competitive edge in a time where chrome only get older, slower, more privacy invasive and heavier practitioner of dark patterns. Some would naturally complain that their pet side project would be discontinued, and there would likely be people lamenting the loss of the advocacy work, but users would understand that sometimes a company need to go back to the core product in hard times.
1) Make a good browser. Get market share. Use it to push the envelope for what can be done on the web.
2) Respect user privacy.
3) Don't spam me with push notifications, in-browser advertising, or any other marketing communications unless it helps goals 1 or 2.
4) Don't spend most of your money on projects that aren't your browser.
Mozilla keeps getting into partnerships that send data to third parties, advocating for things that have nothing to do with browsers or the internet, investing money into every new trend[0][1], and not focusing on their core selling point: a browser that's fast, safe, privacy-focused, extensible, standards-compliant, and stops Google from acquiring a total monopoly over browsers so they can remove adblockers.
This press release hints that they're going to continue tilting at windmills: their new direction is "diverse, representative, focused on people outside of our walls, solving problems, building new products, engaging with users and doing the magic of mixing tech with our values." They're "a technical powerhouse of the internet activist movement", and rather than donors who support their browser, there are "hundreds of thousands of people who donate to and participate in Mozilla Foundation’s advocacy work". I read this as "we're going to spend time and money on things that are not Firefox".
I haven't donated to them for years, because I'm sick of seeing their money go to projects that don't integrate with Firefox and won't ever reach a significant number of consumers while they bleed market share, or to American-centric policy advocacy that also doesn't relate to the internet. I don't think this is an unrealistic expectation, because there's no way in hell I'd donate to Google or any of their competitors in the first place. Hopefully their lay-offs are an opportunity to focus their efforts on providing a browser across all platforms and adding features to that browser.
>4) Don't spend most of your money on projects that aren't your browser.
Web browsing is much more than a browser now, it's outside of browser tracking, like Facebook and Google pinging your ip address. It's hiding your email from spammers and email traders. Sharing links outside of browser and being able to read them offline. Controlling browser habits with voice.
Mozilla offers paid service that do such things. It all works towards your second goal - respecting your privacy.
I don't hold Mozilla to higher standards. I just expect Mozilla to make a decent browser. Firefox is not a decent browser anymore compared to its competition. Its performance and security is lagging severely behind Chrome, and it doesn't really respect privacy any more than Chrome does in its default configuration. Pretty much the only two advantages it has right now are containers, and the fact that it's not Chrome. The former matters a lot less now that the newest version of Cookie AutoDelete can remove cache and indexedDB per-domain.
The one thing that could save it, Servo, doesn't seem to be a priority. Instead, Mozilla seems to be focusing on offering cloud services that nobody wants or cares about, which also don't really respect privacy any more than other cloud services. The only significant revenue stream Mozilla has is through Firefox, which keeps steadily losing users and market share.
And even that is almost entirely dependent on people using Google search with the browser. Given that Google is Mozilla's primary competitor who has intentionally broken their apps on Firefox and is pushing them down in search results, and that Firefox is marketing itself to privacy-conscious people who wouldn't use Google anyway, it doesn't seem wise or sustainable at all.
Unless things seriously change, I have no faith that they'll be able to turn this situation around. We may just have to live with a Blink/WebKit web monoculture until we get some serious anti-trust legislation.
Can confirm. I made the switch to Chrome in its early days when Firefox couldn't touch its performance, but switched back to Firefox around a year or so ago since Chrome could no longer touch Firefox's performance. It really has come a long way since the days most people seem to be remembering.
> Its performance and security is lagging severely behind Chrome, and it doesn't really respect privacy any more than Chrome does in its default configuration.
The first two points haven’t been true for years and the second is debatable - Firefox’s tracking protection certainly seems to be more effective.
The problem for Mozilla is that this doesn’t matter enough: Firefox feels faster than Chrome, but both are fine in normal use and your web browsing experience will be most affected by the site you’re using needing a ton of JavaScript rather than the browser. Similarly, their developer tools have a bunch of nice features but the developer experience is pretty decent in every browser so it’s not a distinguishing factor the way it used to be.
Browsers have been commodified and that’s the core of Mozilla’s business while Google has a ton of ad revenue to support Chrome no matter what happens.
If you're on the Firefox team (or know anyone who is) please encourage them to make Firefox customisable again.
It gets worse with every updated. More options are stripped back in favour of "simplicity".
Firefox made a name for itself by giving users control to make it their own browser; saying it has become a "clone of Chrome" is clichéd now, but that doesn't change the fact that it's true.
Firefox needs to stop chasing the Chrome user base and build back a user base of its own.
I believe it's based on Chrome/Chromium to some degree (pretty sure it uses Blink) so I understand if it isn't something you're interested in given the topic of this thread, but the Vivaldi browser is insanely customizable.
You get flogged for things for-profit companies don't because Mozilla claims the moral high ground and then leaves something to be desired in its actions and results. The rather dodgy non-profit/for-profit hybrid while effective from a business standpoint, doesn't help your cause: while originally presented as the for-profit serving the non-profit, the reality appears to be the other way around.
IIRC, the stated purpose of the formation of the foundation and corporation was to primarily fund the development of the/a browser product. Over the last 10 years, the corporation has taken in several billion dollars which should have been enough to fund a sizeable fraction of annual cash needs in perpetuity (i.e. don't spend it as you get it, invest it as various endowments/trusts do so that you have an annual revenue stream to fund the project on an ongoing basis) anticipating that the large cash payments from search engines weren't going to last forever.
Unfortunately, rather than doing that, it appears most of the money has been spent on various misadventures and expanding staff to consume the funds taken in which now apparently has to be scaled back. So now we get to read this blog post which reads like any number of VC-backed startups needing to pivot to find a business model. Mozilla has one, if it would just stop spending money going off on all these tangents and focus on what I suspect the vast majority of us want from it: the best possible browser. If we get to a point where browsers are no longer relevant, then frankly neither is Mozilla. It's shown minimal aptitude for things other than browsers, and supporting tech, which it unfortunately doesn't seem terribly interested in focusing on.
When the parent command asked/goaded for elaboration I was worried you wouldn't notice or respond, but you did and clarified in depth, saying precisely what a lot of us are thinking. Thank you for doing so.
I think the issue is multifold, but basically from what I've seen (including having multiple friends at Mozilla and visited their HQ multiple times), Mozilla is run exactly like any other Silicon Valley company.
Sure, there is no shareholders so there is this freedom, but people working there were basically hired after working in other tech companies, and they just work as they did in other tech companies. The fact that Mozilla Corporation is owned by a non-profit seems to be completely lost. Basically people are paid to improve metrics, whether it's the number of users, the ARPU, the "engagement" on whatever features they decided was important...
Add to that the fact that Firefox lagged technically behind Chrome for many years (it only recently cought up with Quantum) and UX wise also Firefox was stuck on the "IE6 but with tabs" look and feel and waited many years before accepting that the UX introduced by Chrome when it was released was superior.
As a result, now that casual users are on Chrome and the Firefox user base is mostly made of users who choose Firefox not because of its technical merits but because it's Open Source, supported by a non-profit, etc. There is a disconnect between that user base and the Mozilla Corporation who just thinks like any other SV company.
So you think Mozilla would be better if it wasn't run like a tech company? How should it be run instead? Why should they not be using metrics to measure the impact of what they do? It's not obvious to me that running it less like a tech company and more like a non-profit (whatever that means) would work better.
Well, that would explain why they are seemingly ignoring the Firefox power user and fan community, that got them where they are in the first place by free marketing and advocacy.
Looks like we dont fit their badly selected metric. :P
Surely the option to have tabs organized vertically on the side of the windows instead of stuck crowded to uselessness on top can be considered as a technical merit.
I don't mind any of Mozilla's mistakes. Like you say: Mozilla is exemplary when it comes to getting things right when they screw up.
What I mind is that I can't take Mozilla seriously at all.
They keep trying new projects. I laugh every time because I know it will be gone in six to twelve months.
Right now Mozilla is offering VPN service. Theoretically, I am the ideal customer. I care about privacy and security and make good money and have been a devoted Firefox user for nearly 20 years -- ever since Phoenix 0.2! And I trust Mozilla 100x more than the competition.
But I've never even glanced at that service. Why? So I can have the rug pulled out from me in six months? lol.
For me to take any non-Firefox project from Mozilla seriously, I'd need to hear some kind of commitment from Mozilla to supporting it for the long haul.
> So I can have the rug pulled out from me in six months?
This reasoning is silly and bizarre. What, exactly, is the massive risk you're taking when you use a VPN that could go away at some point? Not only is a VPN a commodity that many other service providers can easily fill if the worst was to happen, Mozilla's VPN is just a rebrand of Mullvad which would be a cinch to switch to.
So much for trusting Mozilla and caring about privacy and security. Evidently, the potential risk of losing a cheap & convenient VPN app is a far bigger issue! /s
You are factually correct, of course - of all their random, scattered efforts, the "cost" of finding another VPN provided and switching to it is not large.
I still disagree greatly with your conclusions.
What, exactly, is the massive risk you're
taking when you use a VPN that could go away at some point?
I didn't say it was "massive." I
In reality, the cost to me would be "only" a few hours of research to find a suitable alternative if/when Mozilla folds their VPN service.
Still, like most people, I rely on a lot of software and a lot of services in my life. I work many hours per week. I don't like to spend my limited free time fixing crap and making lateral jumps to alternative things and services if I can help it, unless there's some sizable advantage. If I had to spend an hour or three on everything in my life every six months, it would add up to a lot and I choose to spend the finite hours of my life differently.
So much for trusting Mozilla and caring about privacy and security.
This doesn't follow. Mozilla has a history of introducing and subsequently shuttering many services, so therefore I don't care about "privacy and security?"
For whatever it's worth: I care deeply about Mozilla (and privacy and security) and I do support them financially via donations.
As someone else mentioned, apparently this goes to the Foundation which funds other social causes instead of the Corporation that develops Firefox. Donations won't actually help Firefox much at all. To support the Corporation directly, you'd need to pay for one of their paid products like Pocket or their new VPN.
> This doesn't follow. Mozilla has a history of introducing and subsequently shuttering many services, so therefore I don't care about "privacy and security?"
It follows like this: here's a great privacy & security product you claim is "ideal" for you, made by a company you "trust 100x more than the competition". But it's somehow not worth it to you as someone who cares about privacy & security?
The speculative risk of a couple of hours every year (but in practice, more like 20 mins to switch to Mullvad, which even if you didn't know about before, you know now) is more valuable than what appears to be - by your own words - one of the best privacy & security products to come along in a generation?
Empty praise. Deep concerns for privacy & security that are conveniently not reflected in product choices. Honestly, it's a mystery why Mozilla devs even try to cater to this crowd. They talk up a storm about caring about privacy & security yet when a great product comes around, there's always another reason not to use it. Always another reason why it doesn't measure up. With friends like these, who needs enemies.
You're making a number of factually incorrect assumptions with a sprinkling of reading comprehension errors here.
you'd need to pay for one of their paid products
like Pocket
I do. Was using it already when Firefox acquired it.
It follows like this: here's a great privacy &
security product you claim is "ideal" for you
Re-read. I didn't say that.
appears to be - by your own words - one of the
best privacy & security products to come along
in a generation?
Those were most certainly not my words.
more like 20 mins to switch to Mullvad, which
even if you didn't know about before, you know now
Wait, is this a revolutionary product, or a mere rebrand of a good existing service that happens to support a worthwhile brand? Make up your mind.
Deep concerns for privacy & security that are conveniently
not reflected in product choices.
I'm no special talent, but you are spectacularly and offensively off-base.
I do support them with product choices, and also with thousands of hours of my time as a web developer over the years, always fighting to support Firefox in the projects I worked on, even when the product owners could not have cared less or were openly hostile to the idea of spending any time whatsoever supporting something that wasn't IE6 or Chrome.
I will not ship web-facing code that doesn't support Firefox.
With friends like these, who needs enemies.
I'm no special talent, but god damn. I'm not a friend of Firefox - I'm a warrior fighting for them in the trenches every day.
Hope someday I have "enemies" who spend a few thousand hours in the trenches for me over two decades and also throw money my way. Wouldn't mind an army of those.
If it makes you feel any better, I'll probably support their VPN product too eventually if it actually survives their terminal ADHD.
I didn't say it was revolutionary, and it doesn't need to be revolutionary to be a product ideal for you, from a company you find more trustworthy than any other - those appear to be your adjectives, it only follows that this means it's a great privacy & security product for which those are fairly critical qualities. Insult my reading comprehension if I'm wrong, but I might even say those qualities make it the "best" for you.
Good for you that you're really enthusiastic about Firefox usage, that's not my point. My point is that it's quite empty and valueless to dismiss a product like the VPN because you're afraid it might go away despite its apparent quality.
You did say you've never even glanced at the VPN for that reason, and given that Mozilla is apparently refocusing its efforts on paid products like those, an army of users who won't even glance at their products regardless of quality is increasingly useless. Especially if Mozilla experiments with potentially great products, which involves killing bad ones, quite frustrating to see a "will it be there in 6 months" attitude kill any apparent interest.
Edit: not sure it'd help, but an analogy might be: imagine I told you I care deeply about chicken dishes, chicken is my favorite, I choose what to eat based on whether they have chicken, I'm a chicken warrior! You make a high quality chicken dish, and then I say "it looks great, if I ate it I'll probably enjoy it, but I can't even try it. What if you drop it on the floor while serving it to me? What if the dog eats it while I'm digging in?". Would you think my complaint is sincere? I don't know, I've evidently spent too much time pointlessly arguing about this.
Personally I’m excited to switch to the Mozilla branded VPN. I expect it will be a good try at a VPN service, and it will hopefully be a way for them to make a bit of extra money. If it fails, it fails and I’ll pick another.
There are companies launching on HN and employing people on HN all the time. Those companies may or may not survive the long haul. I don’t see how I can sensibly demand more of a promise from the software and services that I buy, vs. what we (collectively) promise to our own users or customers.
Those standards and the faith in their adhering to them are _all Mozilla has_. I use Firefox on all my devices, even mobile, but it's hard to argue that on a pure tech perspective, Chrome is the superior browser.
The reason I use Firefox is I still trust Mozilla more than Google, but the more Mozilla erodes that, the less they have to offer - the browser is not improving technically at the same rate Mozilla is diminishing reputationally.
> One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards.
Standards for Mozilla do not come alone from being an NGO, but from the promises Mozilla makes and the history. Breaking promises and forgetting it's origin seems to be the main source of hate against mozilla, besides of course the fails themself.
> Did we apologize?
Nope.
> Did we learn anything?
Nope.
> Did we work to prevent it happening again?
Nope.
But some were even repeated.
> Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet.
Is this still a thing? I get the impression that mozilla today has just become a small unimportant voice, mostly just following the choral. Even Microsoft seems to be now stronger in that regard.
I've went through some of the comments on a german IT news site regarding this and it's been nothing but dissapointing.
People openly post that they'll switch to Chrome or Chrome-derivatives, as if that fixes things, because Mozilla allegedly is throwing away money by not 100% focusing on the browser.
Mozilla is the last company other than Apple maintaining an independent browser engine. Microsoft has given up as well.
If Mozilla and by Proxy the Firefox Project dies, the internet will become a darker place. The only hope would be that Microsoft ruins the Chrome browser via EEE (and in thise case, one of the instances where I hope they do) before Mozilla has to shutter.
People give Google an excuse for the billionth time they are caught exporting your medical history from chrome but if Mozilla makes a mistake, they're chastized for it.
When Brendan Eich was made CEO, Mozilla employees did everything possible to make sure that he wouldn’t stay; all due to a single political donation from six years beforehand.
While I don’t agree with his position, the whole fiasco tarnished Mozilla and the people in it, at least in my mind.
Far from being held to an impossible standard, I feel like it suffered from a form of monoculture.
Firstly, it was _not_ a single political donation.
I'm Jewish. If it came out that the new CEO of my company made white supremacist statements half a decade ago, without any indication they had changed their position since, you better believe I would refuse to continue working for that company until and unless they were no longer CEO.
This isn't a disagreement about the marginal tax rates to apply to millionaires, or a political difference about some minutiae of government regulation. Prop. 8 was directly opposed to the basic human rights of a segment of the population. Why would I, as a gay person, work for someone who seeks to deny me the basic right of an equal-under-the-law domestic partnership? Why would I, as a person with gay friends, overlook something like that, just because the CEO gives vague promises of being "supportive and welcoming" without actually disavowing any of their discriminatory viewpoints?
Human rights are not a political position, and opposing them is not simply a friendly disagreement. No one is obligated to tolerate your attempts to deny people basic human rights in the name of inclusiveness.
This seems like a "my way or the highway" or "black and white" argument, coached in language suggesting that you don't need to make inroads for peace, for the sole reason that your side is inherently right and theirs is inherently wrong. This idea of firing or ostracizing people without attempting to reform them first is a shoot first, ask questions later, knee-jerk sort of morality.
If you end someone's means of making a living or ostracize them from society, purely for moralistic reasons, just because you can, this is moral exclusion, a form of oppression. It's when your opinion of them is so poor that you no longer find the need to act ethically towards them. It's the same principle that enabled the oppression of the the Jews.
Holding this opinion is possible if you refuse to come to terms with the humanity of the person you disagree with. Our only real "obligation" in society is to follow the law. If you only live based on this obligation, you can easily become quite cruel and in some ways immoral. But instead of simply living by obligation, we can do better: we can seek to create more peace than strife. That means making inroads with your enemy, not ostracizing them just because you can.
Nobody ended Eich's means of making a living, ostracized him from society, or denied his humanity. He remained Mozilla's CTO after his donation became widely known in 2012. There wasn't any significant protest until he was promoted to CEO in 2014. He wasn't fired and still reprimands people who say he was. He's been another browser company's CEO since 2015.
Eich probably could've defused the situation if he just apologized. Instead he wouldn't even say he wouldn't do it again.[1]
People didn't refuse to follow Eich just because they could. They didn't even refuse to follow him just because he hurt people. They refused to follow him because he still thought what he did was right 6 years later.
Jews were oppressed because of who they were. Eich faced a choice because of what he did.
Yes, but what was that thing he did? Voting: acting in accordance with the law. By pressuring him to resign, he was basically told that his actions within the law were immoral, unacceptable, and harmful.
Eich had a choice to save himself: renounce his views. Of course the Jews were not given a choice during the Holocaust. But as a different example, they were given a choice to renounce their faith during the Spanish Inquisition.
Clearly it's ridiculous for me to compare being burned alive to being corporately run out on a rail. Yet the choices offered, from a moral standpoint, were similar. Choose to renounce who you are and what you've done and you can stay a good member of society; stand your moral ground and be persecuted. In either case, the crime was not violating the Law of the State, but the moral law of a certain majority of society.
How do we judge if we are being treated justly? Is the law always just? Are actions outside the scope of law always just? In truth, this is often subject to the time and place. Even today, we sometimes treat people unjustly within the scope of the law. That's why I suggest ethics that do not hang it's treatment of people on the power to act from personal morality alone.
I think rather than say "repent or be shunned", other tactics could lead to changing the subject's mind or actions. Or even accepting that exiling the person does not change much materially about the world. They'll still be the same person in exile, doing the same things, so what was the benefit personally or to society of removing them from the group?
If the "harm done" was merely to the emotional peace of the part of the group that has to come to terms with the morality of people acting within the law, this seems like a reason to keep the person. Because again, even if working outside Mozilla, Eich may vote the same, so the "harm" from a legal standpoint against gay marriage is unmoved either way. The only effect of the backlash was purely to the emotional peace of either (and to the overall quality of life of Eich). Keeping them could at least allow a rapport to form and possibly change views, on either side, without causing further harm. But this is just one case, so this may not work in other examples.
Your comparisons are patently ridiculous. Jews were persecuted for personal beliefs that hurt no one and affected none but themselves; this is very much not the case for Brendan Eich, whose views and actions were explicitly intended to take away rights from others.
Moreover, the Spanish Inquisition acted on the power of royal decrees, so they very much enforced laws of the state, which means your example falls flat even on its most basic premise.
You seem to either misunderstand or misrepresent the point of the protests against Brendan Eich. Mozilla employees weren't trying to abridge his rights to free speech or to vote according to his beliefs, they simply didn't want to follow a person actively working towards making their lives measurably worse for no good reason. Of course getting him to resign doesn't make him change his voting; that was never the point! Brendan Eich isn't a child, and people's main objective isn't to discipline him and make him understand what he did wrong- it's to limit his damage! Why allow someone to infect an organization you care about and depend on with their toxic beliefs? Again, a CEO's biases don't amount to a hurtful code comment; they are steering the entire company culture!
So, I definitely got that part of the Inquisition wrong. The persecution and technically-not-forced-but-basically-forced conversions (conversos) happened about a century (1391) before the actual "Spanish Inquisition" kicked off (1483). The latter, with the papal bull by Sixtus IV granting the Castilian Crown permission, enacted a state-sponsored Inquisition. Before this it wasn't (to my knowledge) a part of state law, but more of an explosion of moralistic/religious mob frenzy. So the "real Spanish Inquisition" seems to have happened long after Jews were forced to convert. In any case, it was a poor argument on my part.
I agree with you that the leadership does set the culture and tone for the company. But I also believe that forcing leaders to transmute their personal lives into the moral symbol of an amorphous corporate entity is somewhat inhumane. Do we have to only have leaders who lead pious, uncontroversial personal lives? Isn't there a balance to strike between this person's personal and work life?
Famously, Steve Jobs was an asshole. Jeff Bezos is another asshole. There's undoubtedly been other asshole leaders of companies. As leaders, they set their company's cultures. But where is the moral outrage asking them to step down from causing harm to their employees? You read about them in many books and blogs - terrified employees, managers making bad decisions out of fear, difficult work/life balance. And yet, if you look at the actual moral outrage from the tech world, this is business as usual. But it's harmful! On the scales of moral justice, it would seem terrorizing your workforce can be okay, depending on the form it takes.
This is another stupid, poor comparison on my part, but I'm trying (in vain probably) to get at this: what is considered "beyond the pale" of harm probably is not based on some kind of measurable outcome, but rather what gets people more angry - specifically the anger rooted in moral exclusion. In addition I'm saying that it's possible that keeping people around, regardless of their questionable personal ethics, might not be a cultural catastrophe.
I've worked with many people over the years, some of them in positions of leadership with controversial views. But the company culture encouraged open and honest communication, and its strength helped people have the occasional difficult conversation in an open way without it becoming a toxic working environment. That's certainly not always possible. But it was proof enough to me that by sticking by these people, we could eventually explain and help open up the thoughts of someone who would go on to lead others.
Another argument could be made that even following someone who's making one's life worse may have, in the grand scheme, a greater-good impact. One example might be Mozilla fighting for Internet... whatever it fights for, and another might be the power of the supply chain to provide cheaper goods (Amazon, Wal-Mart) or an alternative platform for creative work (Apple). So there may be reasons (excuses?) for following a leader who is making your life hell. You'd have to ask those employees why they do it. I do it because one coal mine is as good as the next. I suppose if you want to keep the most coal miners doing the most work you need a mine boss that inspires them, so a mine boss that nobody likes and doesn't inspire great work is probably worth chucking. But if the workers can put the boss out of their mind and still get their work done, who really cares about the mine boss? At what point can/should we stop focusing on individual morality and instead focus on practicality? Maybe that's a dangerous direction in itself.
In addition to everything pseudalopex said below, which I agree with 100%, I'll just add that, yes, some things absolutely are and should be black-and-white, my-way-or-the-highway. Particularly, issues of human- and civil-rights.
The opposition to Eich was not because of some unpopular opinion he held at some vague point in the past. He wanted to ban same-sex marriage in 2008, and all indications are he still wanted that in 2014. Eich had ample chance to easily diffuse the situation by clarifying his beliefs; instead, he provided vague platitudes about inclusiveness and leaving his personal opinions at the door.
I'm sure there's plenty of companies that wouldn't mind having an anti-gay-marriage CEO. Hell, most people could stomach working with someone with those views; remember Eich was chief technologist and a Mozilla board member from the start, and CTO from 2005, which Mozilla's LGBTQ employees obviously tolerated. But I'm sorry, I have very little trust that a company can maintain a certain set of values, when I know for a fact its Chief Executive Officer holds diametrically opposite views. Management shapes every aspect of a company, so the personal opinions of the person holding the highest position in that chain matter.
There is nothing unethical about acting this way. This is not denying Brendan Eich his humanity (unlike what his views do to others). Being CEO of Mozilla is not a basic human right that he is being denied.
If a society is to be tolerant, there has to be a separation between when
someone is politically active; and when someone decides to take matters into their own hands (e.g., firing someone because they’re trans).
Maybe you’re right that a CEO is different, but the ordeal left me with an uneasy feeling.
If I’m on the wrong side of the popular-opinion in the future, what’s to stop me from being ostracized and pushed out?
Because if it can happen up high, you better believe that it can happen to the rank and file.
Yea, there’s a tension and it’s almost contradictory to allow this but I think it’s important.
The other consequence of this is that anonymity (voting, for example) seems to be just as relevant today.
You've got it backwards- the rank and file are held to much different standards than upper management. As a Sw. Engineer, or even a team lead, my opinions are indeed my own, as long as they don't negatively impact my work; as a CEO, his opinions shape the direction of the company; this isn't something you can just leave at the door, no matter how much you claim otherwise.
Again, this isn't just about an unpopular opinion or a difference of perspective. We're talking about literally denying human beings their civil rights. Where do you draw the line with this? Do I need to accept a person who works towards racial segregation? Is a Nazi acceptable, as long as they don't try to commit genocide on company time?
If you're ever on the wrong side of granting people basic human and civil rights, I hope you'll have the good sense to reconsider and change your position. I'm not sure why you believe anyone owes you acceptance of your views regardless of what they are.
It’s always the rank-and-file who get fired if (somehow) their viewpoints are made public and it’s embarrassing. whereas anyone in power get a free pass because they built up a network of influence.
When it was taboo to be gay, why did Alan Turing get screwed, while nobles like Vita Sackville West did not?
More recently, Christian Cooper did not and does not want Amy Cooper (the infamous Central Park Karen) fired for what she did, because who wants a racist as their employee? Don’t you wonder why Christian Cooper didn’t want that, even though by all rights he should have felt differently?
As for where I draw the line: If it’s legal and it doesn’t affect business/work, then it’s something to tolerate.
If the person becomes disruptive, or can’t separate their personal views from working well with their colleagues then it’s time to part ways.
But then again, I trust people to fight the good fight so that things work out for the best and conclusively.
Finally, I definitely don’t appreciate you making assumptions about my views just because I find what happened worrisome. Your insinuations are a very short step from an irrational witch hunt and exactly why I find what happened worrisome.
Like, not lying to users about data collection, not opting users into third-party products, not censoring add-ons for political reasons?
Gimme a break. The foundation is given a big break as it is, being tax-free. Then there is this huge greedy corporation bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars while resting its brand on the perceptions most users (outside of HN) have about Mozilla and Firefox being a non-profit thing in general.
Mozilla seems to continue a self-destructive path. Chrome/Edge already got the casual users, now Mozilla risks loosing its main userbase just so that they can take a taste of being popular again.
While I find the corporate speech slightly annoying this is not even close to being my main issue with Mozilla. I am more concerned with the complete disregard for privacy that Mozilla has (even if we ignore telemetry and the normandy backdoor that you need to fiddle in about:config to disable and you make sure to check for new about:config options in every update [some of them are even hidden by default!], there have been privacy issues reported on bugzilla for years that have gone ignored), along with limiting the options that the user has (no option to ignore hsts, userChrome.css being killed, webextensions being limited, etc), making rushed decisions (such as the move to webextensions before the api was mature enough for the extensions to move over), the lack of openness (despite being promised years earlier the pocket server code is still closed), the general disregard about their main project (some bugzilla issues in firefox are old enough to vote), wasting money on designers (the ui is fine and it has been fine for quite a while, it is as if they want to find ways to mess it up just so that they can justify their wages), and the lack of care given to less popular platforms (such as linux).
> Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?
> One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are a always held to impossibly high standards.
Yes, that is the name of the game. Isn't it? You are not a obscure project in GitHub. If you don't think so please move on. When you are a top Hollywood star you play the game of the stars. The same applies for sports or other high competitive activities. Chrome is here, show you deserve the place you are.
>OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome."
Really? That's what's got you bent out of shape?
One thing I've learned in my time as an engineer is that ultimately, the course and attitude of a company comes from the top. Thus, what upper management chooses to say is a great indicator of the health and direction of a company, especially to a non-employee or someone without other knowledge of the company. I can understand why people would react strongly to this latest missive from Mozilla - apparently, everything we like about Mozilla and Firefox is going to be dismantled to aid in the fight against systematic racism (and starting immediately with the mass layoff of the Servo team). Yes, this is enough to make me consider switching.
1. That's how Mozilla positioned itself. "We are so non-profit, non-evil and so better than others, because we think about ecosystem, rights and all the good stuff". You went after this high bar - you should comply with it.
2. Sounds logical: no one wants to get stuck with abandonware (or semi-abandonware). Browsers are the #1 by importance piece of software. Competitors in this field just HAVE TO keep up with the current state of things and global expectations/demand. If you don't - goodbye, then.
4. No, Mozilla never apologized for its mistakes properly. It doesn't even admit most of them. And it clearly didn't learn anything as it still is deaf to peoples opinions/expectations/feedback. Just as an example: take a look at your issue tracker and the managerial approach at what should gain the focus of developers. Issues live there unsolved for more than a _decade_. Mozillians don't care what people want, they work on things THEY are interested in. Or maybe in what their nutjob of a manager tells them to work on.
5. I was a firefox user since it's quite early days and it's Mozilla's actions that made me switch to Chromium. With Google Chrome (being the base for Chromium) I at least know what evilcorp Google is. And they do. They don't claim to be the defenders of the weak.
I think being employee is putting you in a different perspective.
It's hard to escape news cycle, and when you apply what you see inside vs how it's presented publicly, you get angry. Understandably, as you twisted facts and cherry-picked details, just to support the narrative.
This is true about employees at many big companies. For - ask why people work at Google/Facebook, given all the horrible stuff you read about them? Reasons will be often similar - news cycle vs reality is very distorted and careful balances of tricky topics don't make catchy headlines.
Are those companies flawless? Hell no. Are they evil empires spending all their time figuring out how to steal candy from a baby? Also no.
Yeah, the loudest voice goes to the complainers. Most people are NOT sitting around demanding apologies from a non-profit that makes browsers... that's not normal.
We're not all blind to the trap certain Mozilla users (and certain Floss users in general) set up for authors who try to be sincere Floss players but naturally need to make real world compromises.
Just wanted to let you know I appreciate what you and Mozilla are doing, regardless of these certain purity-zeolots. May Mozilla live long!
I'm not sure that asking Mozilla not to couple commercial initiatives (like Pocket) with their browser platform product is setting a high standard. Surely you can see how taking that kind of stance actively erodes the company's reputation as a privacy-focused nonprofit.
> Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet
This is the primary reason why I choose Firefox over Chrome. Because Mozilla is the the world's Jon Snow against the world's white walkers (Google and co).
Mozilla needs to do whatever it needs to stay alive. We need more non-profit voices in the table not less
Whats got me bent out of shape is that your bosses fired the entire threat management team. That's why I'm spending hours switching to UnGoogled Chromium today.
I switched from Chrome back to Firefox last year after a decade away and I am loving it. I dunno much about the internal politics at Mozilla (which seems to be a lot based on the little I do know) but I can say that Firefox is light years ahead of Chrome in terms of UX.
For some reason reading that press release made we want to give money to Mozilla, and made me think about how important it is that there be more than one (all the chrome cousins are practically one) browser.
I do so hope Mozilla survives for many more years.
What you advertise your product as will always stick with people.
History Lesson. Back in the early 00's we all used IE and Proxomitron to block undesirable web elements. Firefox, Safari, and Netscape all existed, but IE6 was constantly forcing companies to break them.
Then, Firefox came out with Tabbed browsing and plugins, something that took IE years to catch up on. You could use adblock with firefox as early as I believe version 2 or 3 and that was very effective at blocking web advertising and undesriable elements as well as making the web more convenient to work with.
Then late 00's Google decided it wanted to be an advertising company, and its interest in Firefox changed and firefox was was pulled down the path of becoming an company selling advertising.
Today, they do things like quietly implimenting DNS in HTTPS, which we all know is aimed at ads and ad targeting. All while putting up cutsie pages with animated animals in them about their product with undertones about sticking it to the man.
The reason people flog you and your organization on the internet is they have very, very long memories and know what bullshit looks like.
Try forking firefox into a ruthlessly ad-removing, DRM abusing, secure, privacy protecting, enterprise quality version of what it is today with vastly simplified configuration options and sell it for $25 a year. Then you'll get some attention, otherwise, you're being paid to not compete.
Most people on HN (nee the world) don't think critically when they see a clickbait title / submission. I've worked for many companies that have been flogged by the users of public forums, without those users having the slightest idea what they are talking about. But being angry sure does feel right. (I am guilty of the same...)
I don't think you should read comments on the internet if vitriol gets to you. Users routinely threaten to switch to the competitor's product over trivial issues or conspiracy theories, but I've learned to ignore it because those users aren't going to be able to use any product for long if they're that sensitive.
Don't take the complaints literally. It's all very simple.
Chrome is the technically better product, despite privacy issues (sorry). Many techies want to switch to Chrome. But it's against their self-described ideology. So they find some fault with Mozilla - there always will be - and that's the excuse they need, regardless of what Chrome does. Mozilla should focus about making a better product and ignoring minor complaints.
That said, Mozilla is mismanaged. Always was. I remember back before Firefox when Mozilla was the example of a mismanaged open source effect. It didn't change that much. It's just that IE stagnated and Opera was barely known (despite being by far better), so a trimmed Firefox could surge. Once actual competition got going, it was obvious FF would be a small minority. Linux prospered by getting community contributions from interested companies. Mozilla never managed to get to that stage.
The 'Fuck mozilla' moment for me happened when Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for his personal and political opnions donations. Since then I have bothered very less about Mozilla.
I don't hold Mozilla to higher standards. I regard Mozilla as being deeply sick, even by the standards of a non-profit. The Mozilla Corporation has three plagues.
First, the plague of Debian and the logjam breakers. Mozilla, like Debian, has many technical users with loud opinions and struggles to reach consensus. Debian suffers from this problem because it comes to consensus oh so very slowly - multiple competing packaging formats exist and hurt the community for decades. But, Mozilla has the worst result - "logjam breaker" executives come in, and, rather than pushing the technical leadership to make a reasonable technical decision based on the weighed factors, they break the logjam by encouraging the technical leaders to blindly imitate the competition. This problem is intractable - giving in to the Debianers means being mired in debate forever and making no or extremely slow progress; giving in to the suits means failing to innovate, becoming a clone of your competition, and eventually being forgotten. A true solution requires real technical leadership, something that's sorely lacking at Mozilla, or a different user base, which is not a possibility at Mozilla.
Second, the plague of Wikimedia. Non-technical leadership comes to dominate decisions about how to spending incoming donations from successful technical projects. Such leadership is often interested in hoping from the board of one non-profit to another. Much like Googlers are always interested in content for their next promotion form, such non profit executives are interested in bragging about the great projects they kicked off the ground. The results is a slew of failed and cancelled projects while the core project languishes.
Finally, the plague of social justice run amok. Most companies right now are on social justice kick and for the last few years. That's good; racism is bad, and tech could be a bit more welcoming. However, most companies understand where the lines are drawn. For example, Google executives don't release statements after employees die trashing the employee because of an underlying difference in personality and/or political views. Google also doesn't fire executives because of their political views or previous donations, when held privately, particularly when those political views are relatively common. Such actions have a chilling effect on recruitment and leads to technical talent that might otherwise have been interested in Mozilla (like myself) to permanently write it off.
I don't hold Mozilla to higher standards and I'm not mad about double speak. I'm mad that Mozilla is nasty, that is breaks well established liberal norms regarding political freedom, that it's executives waste my donations on resume lines for their next gig, and that it's technical leadership seems incapable of making balanced decisions other than imitation Google. But most of all, I'm mad that nobody at Mozilla can even see the problem (yourself included). Mozilla is deeply sick and needs to diagnose its own problems correctly, in order to begin remediating them. Until then, I'll regard it as a dying corporation and I'll look forward to the day when Mozilla finally dies and we can get started on the project of building a free web again by forking Chromium.
>Google also doesn't fire executives because of their political views or previous donations, when held privately, particularly when those political views are relatively common.
Obviously you're referring to Brendan Eich. But you're wrong: Eich was not fired, and he was not forced to resign. In fact just the opposite: the board tried to get him to stay. This should not be news to you: it was in the FAQ on CEO resignation, from April 2014 when it happened:
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.
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.
I think people are so used to corporate "oh he was resigned" doublespeak that they can no longer take any such assertion seriously, regardless of facts.
>I am a life long atheist however American SJWism has me on the brink of converting.
I've heard that argumentation tactic many times, from people who had nothing better than: "I don't believe in something that we both agree is false, but I'm mad at you, so I'm going to punish you by changing my belief system and believing in it."
That's absolutely childish, and I don't believe you're going to punish me by renouncing your atheism and becoming a Christian just to spite me (that wouldn't be very Christian, would it?), and I really don't care what false things you profess to believe in in order to punish me. Come up with a better argument, or admit defeat, since you've already humiliated yourself by admitting that you'll sell out your beliefs out of spite.
Also, you made it perfectly clear that you're homophobic by writing a sentence that begins with "I have absolutely nothing against homosexuals, but ..." You can stop right there. You already gave away the game.
Edit: it appears I cannot make an edit. I do think the correction is immaterial to the larger point. Eich was not able to function as CEO given his donation. The wide publicity of this event, the other event I mentioned in my post, and even the FAQ you shared and the blog post that is OP are symptoms of an organization that is more interested in being seen positively from outside than in treating its people well. Given the wide publicity of these events, Mozilla struggles to extract experienced and high quality talent from the industry.
>Update 2: A Mozilla spokesperson says "the three board members ended their terms last week for a variety of reasons," adding "two had been planning to leave for some time, one since January and one explicitly at the end of the CEO search, regardless of the person selected."
Do you have any evidence that the official Mozilla FAQ about the matter is lying, and that they actually fired him, or did not ask him to stay? Has Eich himself ever made the claim that he was fired, or forced out, or denied the board tried to get him to stay? Or are you just spreading conspiracy theories that contradict the known facts?
I don't want to invalidate what you've said, so please don't interpret my comment that way. I would encourage you to think a bit more about a few things:
> For example, Google executives don't release statements after employees die trashing the employee because of an underlying difference in personality and/or political views.
While I agree that it was probably a mistake for Mitchell to have made that post, I think that it also says something about Mozilla's culture that a lot of people outside of Mozilla do not quite grasp.
Mozilla throughout its history has been mostly "open by default." IMHO there was an attempt to change that in MoCo during the latter couple years of Chris Beard's tenure as CEO, but traditionally (and Mitchell, as a co-founder of Mozilla, very much comes from the traditional side) Mozilla has been very open.
As a consequence of this openness, sometimes things come out that, from the outside, look like airing of dirty laundry, because in just about any other organization, they would be. But notwithstanding a few NDA exceptions and the Community Participation Guidelines, Mozilla employees can identify themselves as such and blog about whatever they want without having to filter it through PR.
As you can see, this also raises a tension between "Mozilla should be more mindful about what its executives are saying online," vs "Mozilla is too corporate and should not be silencing its employees." There are people on both sides of that who will be upset, and again, no matter which side they're on, seem to always conclude, "Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome!"
A more expansive NDA would obviously mitigate that, but Mozilla doesn't do things quite like Google or any of its other competitors.
> Google also doesn't fire executives because of their political views or previous donations, when held privately, particularly when those political views are relatively common.
There was a lot of poor reporting during the Brendan Eich affair. Personally I think that the stuff written by the WSJ was a hitpiece that contained multiple falsehoods, but those falsehoods stuck around and built up this narrative that still lives today. Having been there when it happened, the least inaccurate account of what happened was written by CNet's Stephen Shankland [1], IMHO. I suggest you read it.
Finally, the Brendan Eich thing happened over six years ago. Is this really something for which Mozilla should be repeatedly be attacked, ad infinitum? Personally I think that it is increasingly off-topic, yet any time Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere, I can pretty much guarantee that `Ctrl-F` `Brendan Eich` will turn something up. People just don't seem to be able to move on from that. I don't think that Mozilla's cause and the vast majority of the people who work there deserve to be punished because of that.
And since you mentioned Google, keep in mind that they are not saints without their own controversies. eg Andy Rubin.
Please don't worry about offending me / invalidating what I say - it's an internet forum, I don't take it that seriously. Please take my response in the same frame of mind.
Your defenses... aren't.
It's not airing the letter to the general public that was problematic. It's thinking that those are appropriate things to say out loud that's a problem. One of my coworkers passed from cancer a few years back. Frankly, a lot of people thought he was a real jerk before he passed. Nobody said bad things about him to people who knew him after he passed. Not internally, not publicly, not part of the carpool, not anonymously on blind, not even as a little joke after having a few drinks at the bar. Speaking ill of the dead is nasty. And it's mean. People who liked the deceased will overhear you and they'll go home later and cry and think about what people would say about them if they died and then cry more. Mitchell (? I don't remember who tbh) kicked a puppy and put it on YouTube and you're here with "Yes, Mozilla has a long history of putting the things it does on YouTube." It's not the publicity that's the problem - it's kicking the puppy in the first place!
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from the CNET article. It wasn't really about gay marriage, it's because the board was indecisive and make a decision and then doubted themselves? So, it was just incompetent management? If you aren't sure about promoting somebody, don't promote them. Promoting somebody and then having them resign because you weren't sure is terrible. Mature corporations with competent leadership recognize that personnel decisions matter - that peoples' feeling are impacted when titles are granted and taken away - and make these decisions deliberately and carefully.
The Eich affair was the cause, but it's not the underlying problem. Mozilla lacks competent technical leadership. Managers with ten years experience in the product area who can make broad-lens decisions. You can see this everywhere. I participate in the web ecosystem in my day job. I'm always struck by the lack of professionalism in the emails from Mozilla employees on github issues. Most Mozilla employees mail like employees 1-2 years out of college. At my company, that fades - managers speak to employees who get too heated in emails and give them pointers with regard to staying on topic and staying technical. But you can also see them in product - Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature - one of the most important strides for privacy on the web in decades - was produced by somebody with a 10 year lens - somebody who saw the security blog post in 2012 about being able to track Twitter users based on their image caches and who had dealt with a decade of the gigantic mess of incompatibility that is cookies for just as long. For their tracking prevention solution, Mozilla copied what some existing plugins did. And it all goes back to Eich. Because managers with 10 years of experience are closer to 40 than 20. They're substantially more likely to have seen political fashions swing - they've seen somebody (perhaps the Dixie Chicks) have their career ruined for reasons that seem incomprehensible a decade later. And they've accumulated at least one "unpopular" political view. And they've come to realize that some organizations are simply too interested in political fashion to be an appropriate home for them.
The point is - what happened to Brendan Eich doesn't prevent me from using Firefox. I don't use Firefox because it sucks. And it sucks because Mozilla can't hire good people with decades of experience. And Mozilla can't hire good people with decades of experience because of what happened to Brendan Eich (and the attitudes that led to it).
"I don't use Firefox because it sucks. And it sucks because Mozilla can't hire good people with decades of experience."
Why do you think it sucks? It's been absolutely epic the last couple years in my opinion. They're making some awesome technical choices. They've repeatedly gotten themselves into trouble on the social level, but frankly I don't see how you could say they're not doing well technically. I'm pretty sure Firefox is outperforming Chrome on multiple aspects, and they're positioning themselves to become the best browser period.
I don't really care for its "smart" features like the anti-tracking or other services they offer, so unfortunately I won't be paying them any money any time soon, but to me it's incredible that there's a company out there paying people to rewrite their rendering engine in rust, while also having to pay/support people to actually make that same language suitable enough to become a critical part of an app with such a large user base.
Well, it's slower for one and web features lag for two. But the one that is really the most important to me is security and privacy features. Browsers have effectively made two majors improvements recently - Safari made third party tracking impossible by gradually fully segmenting everything - HTTP caches, LocalStorage, cookies, etc. - and Chrome made JIT exploitation and then Spectre attacks in JavaScript impossible by using process boundary separations and applying sandboxes to purpose built processes. On both fronts, Firefox is behind. Chrome devs are also engaged in active anti-fingerprinting efforts from minor efforts (like reducing the fingerprint-ability in Safari's new APIs, reducing the amount of available by default information in the user agent, or defining SameSite cookies).
I also see privacy issues sit in the Firefox bugtracker. I read about fuzz tests from project zero and elsewhere and realize Firefox is under-fuzzed, both DOM and JS. I finally stopped using Firefox because, as somebody who writes native code for a living and reads about bytecode VMs for fun in my spare time, I could no longer convince myself that it was satisfactorily secure.
What awesome technical choices do you think Mozilla has made recently? I'd love to hear an example. Throwing away the plug-in model to catch up for performance was an necessary technical choice (perhaps), but it was largely solving a self-made problem and catching up with the competition rather than bona fide innovation, so it falls short of "awesome" to me.
> Safari made third party tracking impossible by gradually fully segmenting everything - HTTP caches, LocalStorage, cookies, etc. -
I haven't been following exact features between browsers too closely recently, but Firefox's Tracking Protection has been around for a while and improving for years; and of course, Firefox is where AdBlock/uBlock originated. What does Safari provide that Firefox does not? How does it affect web compat?
> and Chrome made JIT exploitation and then Spectre attacks in JavaScript impossible by using process boundary separations and applying sandboxes to purpose built processes.
This feature has been a long time coming in Firefox, and it's still not all the way there.
But Firefox did just release an opt-in process isolation feature for Firefox, which applies stricter cross-origin controls for a variety of content, and in exchange gives web developers access to SharedArrayBuffer, the feature that needed to be disabled to mitigate Spectre attacks.
So site isolation is progressing, and the first iteration of it has been released.
> What awesome technical choices do you think Mozilla has made recently?
The development of Rust. Servo, which acted as an experimental testbed for a parallel browser engine and has led to its CSS parser, WebRender, and a number of other components being used by Firefox. Asm.js as an alternative to NaCl, which led to the joint development of WASM.
I appreciate that site isolation is in progress in Firefox, but it came out in Chrome two years ago (three now?). You're telling me that the soon to be released IE7 will include a pop-up blocker, so I should switch back to IE from Firefox.
> I haven't been following exact features between browsers too closely recently, but Firefox's Tracking Protection has been around for a while and improving for years; and of course, Firefox is where AdBlock/uBlock originated. What does Safari provide that Firefox does not? How does it affect web compat?
Firefox, like uBlock and AdBlock is list based - it forbids known bad actors. Safari is changing web standards to make tracking impossible, regardless of whether or not you are a known actor, and doing it gradually and carefully enough enough where breakage is minor enough that users don't complain. And Safari has less market share than Firefox. Look at e.g. https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/ for the principles and the other posts on the blog for details about the implementation. It's an industry wide change that a non-advertising funded browser company needed to push, and it just needed a real leader to push it. And that person turned out to be John Wilander (https://twitter.com/johnwilander). For whatever reason (I've given my thoughts above), I think Mozilla struggles to attract these sort of talented experienced mid-career people.
Rust is pretty cool, but Servo is pretty immature, and it seems like Mozilla just fired all those people. I dunno. I don't see a bright future there.
> Rust is pretty cool, but Servo is pretty immature, and it seems like Mozilla just fired all those people. I dunno. I don't see a bright future there.
Well, yeah, that's the problem.
Until now, I felt like despite its issues, Mozilla was mostly on the right track. There have been a few mistakes here and there, but it was fundamentally doing good work.
However, cutting Servo, and it looks like maybe Cranelift as well (not sure about that, but Dan Gohmen aka sunfishcode, who seemed to be one of the lead contributors, has been laid off) is a huge blow.
While Servo as a whole browser is pretty immature, a number of components of it were adopted by Firefox, such as its CSS parser, Webrender, its GPU accelerated parallel rendering engine, and more.
You had asked about what Mozilla had done recently, and I listed a few things. But it looks like they are cutting a lot of that. They mentioned focusing on wasmtime and the Bytecode alliance, but I don't see how cutting one of their lead contributors helps out with that.
And they seem to be slowly cutting the head count on Rust; it's less apparent because there are enough people not at Mozilla contributing, and some of the core contributors have been moved onto other projects which use Rust at Mozilla so while they're not contributing directly they are still somewhat involved; and some folks have left of their own accord.
But now it looks like some of those other teams are being cut, like Servo and at least some of the wasmtime team, so I really hope that more companies can put some more investment directly in Rust, as well as the WASM ecosystem.
Their choice to move over to webrender I think is their most major awesome technical choice. It's not "just" building a GPU renderer, they actually made the decision to step into a language that was still being developed, because they anticipated trouble in the long term if they opted to just tack it on to the existing C++ codebase.
I don't know about web features lagging, I feel that's also just chrome pushing web features before they're fully ratified, but maybe there's some where firefox really lags. It was a bit painful for my project that they've held back on the shared buffers thing, but I think that's going to be turned on soon again.
Besides webrender, they've been really working at performance the last couple years, there's performance improvements in nearly every release.
If they're not fuzzing their interpreters that is worrying. If they really are doing bad, surely someone's gonna come and do it for them right? Or do you think Firefox is so small right now hackers aren't even bothering?
I don't think anybody will bother. Firefox fighting IE was successful because it allied three groups: people who cared about open source, people who cared about modern web standards, and people who cared about user-first free software and privacy. Security research like fuzzers and people who like to customize their software are really in the first group. Firefox vs Chromium only captures the third group. If what you think is cool is privacy and free speech, you don't know how to fuzz software; if what you think is cool is fuzzing, you'll fuzz Chromium because that's what everybody uses.
I think the future is a rebase on Chromium. With so many companies (Brave, Google, Microsoft) each shipping their own integrations in Chromium, integrations will naturally become plug-in based (or at least, have a fairly stable API), allowing each vendor to opt in or out of each customization. Then, projects like Tor will move the TorBrowser to Chromium with their own implementations that are tracker free and one of them will eventually take the place of Firefox as the rallying point for the free software ideologues.
Which is a shame because I have a lot of sympathy for the free software ideologues. I'd like to win the browser fight for user-first free software ideology, not just corporate directed free software. But I no longer see Mozilla or Firefox as a banner under which that can be done. At the same time, I'm not sure how next free banner gets started.
I had to look up on wikipedia the details of the Brendan Eich resignation. It sounds like he donated money to California Proposition 8, and politician supporting it, which wanted to pass a state amendment banning same-sex marriage. So he supported denying a human right to a group of people. As a prominent CEO he was called out for it and he made a choice to resign. Is that about right?
It is notable that in your summary you refer to this as political fashion swings, and "unpopular" political views, and an overreaction. Would you characterize the civil right movement in the same fashion?
You also seem to correlate competent technical leadership with someone who sympathizes with Eich's views. That in my experience doesn't follow at all. If anything competent leadership means you have worked with many people of all different backgrounds and have excelled at leading and empowering them. Mozilla likely has many LGBTQ employees, and if your personal prejudices stifle their contributions, then you are not competent by definition of leadership.
> It is notable that in your summary you refer to this as political fashion swings, and "unpopular" political views, and an overreaction. Would you characterize the civil right movement in the same fashion?
Just to answer your question explicitly: yes. If somebody had a political opinion that was popular with 40% of the population and had not brought it into the workplace, I would not support firing the person for holding that opinion, even if the opinion were, for example, that schools should be segregated by race. While I personally don't support segregation by race, I don't find firing people for political views kept outside of work to be in the long term interest of liberal societies. I find the notion of segregated but equal schools unworkable (because those with power will always ensure their schools are better) but not inherently evil. And, in some situations (e.g. gender), I do not oppose "separate but equal" schooling. While I personally attended a public school, I have several friends who attended single-sex private schools, and they turned out OK.
With all this in mind, your language around "denying a human right" makes it clear that you aren't giving Eich's views a fair hearing. California had domestic partnerships for same sex couples that ensured comparable protections around spousal visitation, etc. While I also disagree with the notion of "separate but equal" for partnerships and support granting gay couples the right to marriage, international organizations (like the United Nations) do not generally consider "separate but equal" to be human rights violations. To be a human rights violation, the separation must be coupled with a disparity in treatment (as in segregated schooling in the United States), which Eich is explicitly opposed to.
I agree that having a political opinion is not a basis for firing anyone, and likely illegal. However as a manager, and a CEO of a company, your biases and prejudices regarding the rights of some of your employees are more likely to affect your performance and hurt the company.
But we are talking about Mozilla specifically, which states in their manifesto: "We are committed to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience." If we put aside any value judgement on that statement, I can see how a CEO publicly supporting exclusion can raise concerns about their performance with respect to the company's mission.
Even so, Eich wasn't fired, he resigned and moved on.
Far more interesting to me is that 6 years later, you and others on this forums go to such effort to justify why any problem with the company is a consequence of that resignation. Eich doesn't need your support. I'm curious as to what drives the justifications and the splitting hairs as to what is the approved meaning of human rights as defined by international organizations. The language about denying human rights should have been the least controversial part of what I wrote.
> Far more interesting to me is that 6 years later, you and others on this forums go to such effort to justify why any problem with the company is a consequence of that resignation. Eich doesn't need your support. I'm curious as to what drives the justifications and the splitting hairs as to what is the approved meaning of human rights as defined by international organizations.
I think you may be observing something about yourself and attributing to others. Mozilla's problems aren't a consequence of Eich's resignation. Mozilla has several problems - I described three of them that are particularly prominent to me - 1) Debian / power users 2) wikimedia executives 3) and social justice amok. Eich resignation was one of two symptoms I gave as examples of the third problem. I could also have given this blog post as an example, as it bizarrely tries to describe a layoff in the context of fighting racism (were the laid off employees racist?).
I find it interesting that you ignored all the other problems I mentioned and the other symptoms of the same problem and focused in on attacking Eich to such an extent.
The US Supreme Court rejected separate but equal in the context of race and government provided public school for children. In 2020, it's still legal to provide separate but equal accommodations for gender - and most establishment (public or private) do so with bathrooms. And, government and private organizations provide separate but equal, and in many cases unequal, shelters for their homeless populations by gender. Filing out a different government form isn't a human rights violation - it happens all the time - people with disabilities or those above a certain age fill out a different or additional forms. On the other hand, systematically having dilapidated and unsafe buildings for schoolchildren of one race but not the other is a human rights violations. Do you see the difference?
California civil unions weren't just a different form. They didn't confer the same rights as marriages.
The history of civil rights didn't end with Brown v. Board of Education. The Civil Rights Act and Loving v. Virginia also repudiated separate but equal. Voluntary single sex education and certain environments where women might feel vulnerable are specific exceptions. The California Supreme Court gave separate but equal for same sex unions a fair hearing in 2008 and found it was discriminatory and unconstitutional. The US Supreme Court agreed in 2015.
Eich didn't apologize or even say he wouldn't do it again. He actually pointedly refused to explain his views except to say he supported civil unions.
Brendan Eich donated to a proposal opposed to same sex marriage during a year that Barack Obama was opposed to same sex marriage. Do you believe that Barack Obama's opposition to same sex marriage should have made him unsuitable for any executive employment (i.e. in the private sector as a CEO, or in the public sector as a Mayor, Governor, or POTUS)?
At companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, you can work on a browser regardless of your political views. At Mozilla, you need to think a certain way first. A smaller pool of technical talent to choose from leads to worse technical leadership. Recall that Eich only became the CEO (over the opposition of a portion of the board) after months where Mozilla was searching and couldn't find anybody better. It's not that the people who have particular political views are particularly talented, it's just that some of them are talented, just like the people who disagree with them. If you can include talented people of all stripes, you can do better than if you restrict yourself to talented people from a single ideological group.
Eich was Mozilla's CTO when the donation became widely known. Nothing came of it for 2 years until he was promoted to CEO. You can discriminate against LGBT people outside of work and still work on a browser at Mozilla. You just can't be in charge of everything.
Unless by "everything" you mean the government of the United State of America (the country where Mozilla has its headquarters), in which case, it's OK again (Obama opposed same sex marriage at the time when Eich made his donation). You can dress it up like Eich's views were some big sin that demands banishment from society, but of America's 45 presidents, 44 of them agreed with Eich, and the one who disagreed initially agreed with Eich before disagreeing with him. So, I'm pretty sure you can be in charge of everything with those views.
This is really not a productive line of discussion, please stop. If you have any friends who are same-sex couples, ask them who they would vote for if they were sent back in time to all those previous elections. That's a real way to move the conversation forward that doesn't involve speculating about why certain famous and/or powerful people acted the way they did, many of whom are now dead and can't be given the chance to explain themselves anyway.
> Do you believe that Barack Obama's opposition to same sex marriage should have made him unsuitable for any executive employment (i.e. in the private sector as a CEO, or in the public sector as a Mayor, Governor, or POTUS)?
> So he supported denying a human right to a group of people
Marriage is certainly part of UDHR ("according to national laws governing the exercise of this right" which allows said human right to not apply to certain groups of people. UDHR also considers it a human right for someone to be kidnapped and forcefully re-educated so I do not understand why anyone takes it seriously) but that does not make it a human right. Marriage is nothing more than the government acknowledging that two people love each other, I personally fail to see why this should be a human right (or why the government is meddling in it at all).
If you fail to see it personally I take it you haven't had many of these rights denied. To be fair I haven't either, but Marriage is not "just" an empty acknowledgment:
its the right of inheriting when your spouse dies
its the right to be covered by your spouse's insurance
its the right to share joint custody of children
its the right of spousal privilege in court
its that you can file taxes jointly
its the rights to benefits as a spouse of a veteran
and dozens more of trivial and important legal rights most couples take for granted. These are trivially denied in many social interactions and used to make others feel like second class citizens, and deny them their pursuit of happiness. This was all debated and settled by the Supreme Court in 2015.
If the government would stop meddling in all the other legal affairs then I would see the reason for your confusion why they are meddling in marriage.
Whether or not I personally fail to see why marriage specifically should be a human right is not relevant to whether if I had any of these "rights" denied.
> its the right of inheriting when your spouse dies
You can designate your own heir.
> its the right to be covered by your spouse's insurance
> its the right to share joint custody of children
> its the right of spousal privilege in court
> its that you can file taxes jointly
> its the rights to benefits as a spouse of a veteran
> and dozens more of trivial and important legal rights most couples take for granted
And I am arguing that these are not things that should come with marriage - people who decide to not get married and people who are not legally allowed to get married (such as people in polyamorous relationships) should have the ability to enjoy the same rights as married people. Regardless though, not all of these are part of the universal definition of marriage (nor are a necessary part of it), the UDHR says that marriage as an abstract concept is a human right (and only for certain people at certain times as the law allows) - it does not designate any specific privilege between married people as a human right.
> If the government would stop meddling in all the other legal affairs ...
There is a difference between the government attempting to catch someone who violated the rights of someone else and the government recognizing (or not) the love between people.
For multiple issues, including the certificate expiration fiasco from last year, the butchering of bookmarks and history in Firefox, to Firefox on Android, and more and more mistakes that I think about.
They didn't apologize.
They didn't learn anything.
And yea, they sometimes even did it again.
> Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards.
> OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome."
If you think that Mozilla not using "corporate doublespeak" is an impossible standard, I am left speechless.
> Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs
To call advertisements "user-enhancing" is an affront and betrays values like privacy that Mozilla claims to espouse. There's no reason to believe, after missteps like embedding cliqz tracking or using update channels to push booking.com ads, Mozilla actually appreciates those values. At that point, it's no better on a privacy front than Chrome.
> If you think that is a reason to abandon Mozilla
I have made no statement about abandoning or not abandoning Mozilla for corporate doublespeak. You're the second Mozilla employee that is putting words in my mouth in this thread. I think that is suggestive of what Mozilla has become.
Actually I think all the political BS is more than enough for me to give Mozilla the cold shoulder. I mean some of the stuff they fight for like mozilla's stop hate for profit (Cooporating with ADL to bully companies into censorship), yearly donations to riseup are actively seeking to undermine my ability to speak freely and demonstrate peacefully.
I will never donate a penny anymore. I won't even test end products in FF!
This is what you get when you use a supposedly race neutral tech NGO as a guise to do race politics! I am not giving an inch to an organisation that seeks to stiffle public debate in any way what so ever "hate" or not.
These days, being against demographic replacement, against globalism and corporatism is considered hate-speech. Racial, political and religious critique is selectively considered hate speech regardless of the format and tone.
I agree that there is a need for browser alternatives, mostly so one company doesn't have all power over the future and shape of the web. Secondly because I would PREFER a political neutral organization to do my critical software, and Google has shown time and time again to have party affiliations. The US software landscape is so dystopian that it makes the chinese vendors look good and fair! If a US vendor isn't in cahoots with intelligence agencies, then its corporate and elite sponsored NGOs with even more sinister end goals;
Like the ADL who spent almost a century to get a child rapist and murderer exonerated post-humorously, because he didn't manage to walk free from his crime by blaming his black employee (For once a major community effort didn't turn out with a poor BLACK man hanging from a tree, but a rich kid). ADL who wants us all to talk about US slavery, but not about who owned the slave ships, and who managed the supply chain.
English is neither a programming language nor a formal logic. When we see an "if" statement that would otherwise seem irrelevant, it is common to interpret it as an insinuation.
@hu3's misunderstanding is entirely understandable.
You're implying OP intends to abandon Mozilla based on their criticism towards corporate doublespeak.
If not then your comment makes even less sense.
Let me phrase it clearly to anyone reading this: It is perfectly fine to criticize corporate double speak and people should not be confronted for that.
I like Mozilla as a product forge, but i really don't see why you should have that massively overpaid Management, Marketing yes, Developers for sure...but management, more and more Mozilla smells like yahoo. But still great Product and the only Browser i use!
> One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards.
People talk as if Mozilla and others could exist in their magic bubble outside of a world where all comes down to money.
Being a non-profit means they still have to pay rent, loans etc. so there has to be enough money to do that. While many use Mozilla products without donating it is strange for me that the same people wonder about Mozilla not having enough money to keep all their employees and infrastructure.
Focusing on other actions that promise an increase in revenue is necessary if people just take without giving back.
Mozilla management has me puzzled. They have a position that is incredibly strong, lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to Chrome or Edge.
"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.
A common refrain, but is anything but obvious. Focusing on the browser could be a losing strategy. I'd argue it probably is. The trajectory is terrible: the tech is being commoditized (WebKit, Chromium) and the market share picture is bleak. The opportunity cost is huge: maintaining a web engine, one which basically just tries to keep up with the others put out by Google et al, takes armies of people that could perhaps otherwise be leveraged elsewhere towards creating something disruptive which could carry Mozilla forward into the future. The entire revenue model is held up by, of all companies, Google. And that model is backed up by market share which is going down continuously, is under attack on all sides, and is morally compromised by being powered by by ads. The biggest counterincentive to Google pulling the plug isn't one of ending a transaction of mutual value exchange, but potential legal impact by regulators. Not exactly the most robust business model.
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.
Yes, it is a losing strategy because this is a rearguard action. There are only losing strategies, nothing will turn Mozilla around to be some kind of powerhouse besides what it already is. And that's fine. It doesn't need to be the next singing, dancing platform with bells and whistles. It's a tool. It should do one thing and do that one thing well.
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.
I loved Firefox Send and really hope they can find a way to address the malware problem [1]. It was the only large file sharing service I fully trusted both because of the encrypted zero-knowledge aspect of the system and the organization behind it; I used it several times a month personally and told others about it. To me it was a "win" under the Mozilla/FF brand.
I think they have rather different use cases. FFsend is asynchronous because I don't have to be online for my friend to download the file. But it's also less trustworthy than a system based on PAKE. And if you're sending a file to a Windows or Mac user with average technical ability, Wormhole is basically not an option at present.
Wow, that’s a bummer. I used Send semi-regularly over the past year, and recommended it to colleagues. By coincidence, I haven’t needed it since early summer.
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.
Yah, I really liked it. Have you found any other similar services that have a web ui (other commenters have shared similar CLI-based tools)? I loved using it to share stuff with my less technically-savvy friends and family.
Since this is so useful, and has operational costs because they have to run a server, could they solve two problems in one go by just charging money for it? Like $10/year or something tiny. Bet the malware issue would go way down.
Yeah, I agree. I offered on Twitter to pay a "small amount yearly" but my tweet was just a single random data point on Twitter. Hopefully some folks reading this who work at Mozilla or know someone who does, will pass on that a non-trivial people spoke up to say they got real value out of Send.
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.
IMO, this thread is a great example of why Mozilla and Firefox are becoming irrelevant.
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.
I never claimed there aren't unmet needs for Firefox users, or that their needs are invalid. My claim is that there's a good chance the strategy of trying to compete in the browser market is a failing strategy. That is backed up by the evidence. Mozilla has put a ton of resources into improving Firefox, and yet people are still, on-net, leaving.
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.
> Mozilla has put a ton of resources into improving Firefox
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 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'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.
> Mozilla has put a ton of resources into improving Firefox, and yet people are still, on-net, leaving.
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)
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.
And the new tree style tabs is quite unstable compared to the old 'bad' plug in which results in it sometimes being very handy that the other tabs are still visible. I'd love for them to be gone too, they take up vertical space which is at a premium but then Mozilla should first give extension developers a chance to get the kinks ironed out. Such unforced errors are really annoying.
They also keep threatening to remove userChrome.css (or at least adding more leopards), and I think the day that happens may be the day I throw my hands up and stop using Firefox. Although I don't know what I'll use instead. I guess I'll have to contribute a pile of patches to `surf` or something.
Yeah instead Addons have to direct the user to manually modify CSS, thus perfectly protecting the sanctity of the browser UI for all time.
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.
Mozilla understands that very well. Otherwise userChrome.css wouldn't exist. They just made it so that it's abundantly clear that if you screw up your userChrome.css, it's your fault, not Mozilla's.
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.
A better solution would probably be to add a proper API to move the tabs around and then some possibility to customize them.
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.
> If you are the CEO, accepting this and acting in accordance with that would be a dereliction of duty.
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.
The "facts" you are claiming are just your opinion. The opinion specifically being that there is literally no way for Mozilla to survive. Others in the thread think they can survive by focusing on Firefox (you disagree obviously.) Some (like me) think they can survive by building new things people will pay for. (you think they are a 'one trick pony.') A CEO who disagrees with your opinion isn't ignoring facts, and a CEO who doesn't charter a strategy towards something other than catastrophic failure is not a good CEO.
> The opinion specifically being that there is literally no way for Mozilla to survive.
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.
> 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.
This, a thousand times. I care about Mozilla as the makers of Firefox - the browser for the users.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
That would require the organization to be ran by engineers.
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.
> Losing the browser would be a catastrophe, losing the rest would not even register
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.)
I was part of the BlackBerry browser team in the days of BlackBerry losing the mobile market. We maxed out somewhere between 50 and 100 people working on the mobile browser, and that doesn't include business/marketing because it was just a part of the overall smartphone product.
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.
That's actually useful information. There are 750FTE at Mozilla. How many of those do you think would it take to do the best job possible on the browser. That would give one way of calculating a budget.
Hard to say, and I suck really bad at estimates. If I low-ball it at maybe 200-300, that's likely off by a factor or three. A possibly old but close enough page on chromium.org lists the following teams:
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
and that looks like it's only focused on Blink, not including the actual chrome (desktop/mobile apps) or V8 which would both be substantial efforts as well. Who knows how much technology is pulled from other teams at Google, like video encoding for WebRTC, server performance collaboration for the SPDY/QUIC effort, low-level storage for IndexedDB, devrel with buggy websites or certificate authorities, security audits and whatnot?
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).
Interesting that 'factor of three' puts it within the range of the number of employees Mozilla currently has. That means that the browser is already in danger if they do other stuff besides. Hm. That's more urgent than I thought it would be.
To clarify, I wrote "factor OR three", by which I meant to emphasize my complete lack of certainty regarding the "best possible" performance you asked about. I'll only commit to my earlier statement about the definite irrelevance below 100 people.
There are a lot of dead or mostly dead browser projects out there which makes me think community alone is probably not enough (as a comparison, for a C/C++ programming IDE there are enough moderating active projects out there that I'd say community is enough to make an IDE).
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.
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.
Did you just write that Mozilla, a company whose core product is making a browser, should just stop making their core product since it is losing market share?
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.
I think a point of confusion here is that there are different definitions of "failure" in this discussion. Others in this thread are defining failure as "Firefox no longer exists as a viable open-source browser", whereas you seem to be defining failure as "Mozilla no longer exists as a commercial organization". Diversification of Mozilla's focus is all well and good, so long as it continues to serve what I and evidently others see as its raison d'etre, which is to support Firefox. It may be insensitive of me to say so in this difficult time for Mozillians, and I certainly hope everyone caught up in this restructuring ends up all right, but I see no reason why Mozilla should outlive Firefox in the event that, as you suggest, it is doomed to failure.
> Mozilla has shipped successful products other than Firefox. Rust being a strong example.
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.
I mean, I started a team of a growing, revenue generating product at Mozilla but I still don't define if something is a successful product based upon if it generates revenue or not.
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.
It is successful if it generates more revenues than went into it and if it strengthens the company that decided to put the time, effort and funds in it in the first place.
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.
The browser is a succesful product in the sense that it has found product market fit: there is a group of users that value the key benefits of firefox (not large company controlled, opensource, focussed on security and privacy). It may not be a large group of users, and it may not be a growing group of users, but it has a group of appreciative users that would rather use firefox over other browsers.
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.
That money - and then some - is found through donations to the foundation (which to the user may mean 'support FireFox' and to the Mozilla foundation means 'play money') and the renting out of the 'search box'. It is the rest of the projects that get their funding from FireFox, not the other way around.
It's hard to keep up with all the goal post shifting (the definition of "product", "successful", and so on) - in any case, it's common for companies to start with the problem of delivering user value first, and then figuring out revenue later. One doesn't need a clear plan for revenue when starting out. The project I worked on at Mozilla itself is evidence of this: we had ideas for how to generate revenue for it when we started out, but the one we ended up doing was not on the list since we discovered the opportunity in the process of developing the product.
I'm not shifting the goal posts, you are but I'm going to bow out at this point. If you want to have a constructive dialog with someone who has been a Mozilla user since day #1 and continues to be so - it's the browser I write this on - today and will likely be one long after Mozilla the company may no longer exist then you're welcome to that.
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.
Firefox is a successful product. One that is failing. I never claimed it can't be turned around, I was pushing back on the idea that it's self evident that is the solution to Mozilla's problems. (When in fact, that's what Mozilla has been mostly focused on this whole time from a budgetary perspective, and yet here we are.)
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.)
No one will probably see this so deep in the comment tree, but I appreciate your level-headedness throughout this exchange, and I agree with your point that a winning high level strategy for Mozilla is not self-evidently obvious.
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.
> It is successful if it generates more revenues than went into it and if it strengthens the company that decided to put the time, effort and funds in it in the first place.
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.
Bell Labs was not created to be a stand alone company. It was created with the express purpose of being a laboratory, hence the name. Its main product was patents, and some copyrightable code.
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.
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.
The original purpose of Rust and Servo was to build a better browser. Rust was designed with browser development in mind, and is used increasingly in Firefox. That was an investment that has paid off in spades. (Edited to add: But I agree it's not a "product" in the "provides revenue" sense)
"Mozilla is a one trick pony" implies they can't ship useful software. The definition of "product" isn't the point. If those products (or languages, or whatever) can't generate revenue that also wasn't the point of this thread. If one believes that Mozilla cannot create new things that the world finds extremely valuable, then things like Rust provide counter evidence of that claim.
No, it is evidence of Google taking steady marketshare away from FF through underhanded tactics such as a basically unlimited advertising budget. You simply can not fight such a war and win, you can only lose gracefully.
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.
> And for Mozilla it was a huge distraction, one they could ill afford.
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.
You don't design a language for 'browser development'. You design a language because you feel there is a need for a language and none of the existing languages meet your needs. If Mozilla had adopted D instead of developing Rust the world would have kept on turning and they'd be further along compared to where they are today.
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.
> If Mozilla had adopted D instead of developing Rust the world would have kept on turning and they'd be further along compared to where they are today.
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.
D's market share is still much larger than Rust's, though clearly Rust is winning that battle in the longer term. Not that 'D' isn't without its flaws but those could have been fixed for a small fraction of the effort that went into making Rust.
Yes, but that still does not make Rust a product for Mozilla.
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.
> You simply can not fight such a war and win, you can only lose gracefully.
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.
That was a time when Mozilla was focused on Firefox and Thunderbird, two programs that were at that time best in class. The times have - as the article headline suggests - changed since then.
I guess we have different definitions of "products" and "failing."
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.
Yes, it commonly helps if you use the same definitions to have a productive discussion.
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.
> 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
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.
But Mozilla is not a 'programming languages' company in the mold of Microsoft or former Borland. Programming languages are worth $0 to the market place at the moment. So if Rust gave some unique advantages, great. Use those. And maintain focus. Because if they don't do that then we may end up with Rust and no FireFox and to me that would be net loss.
> But Mozilla is not a 'programming languages' company in the mold of Microsoft or former Borland.
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 $$ "on the market place", ever. All it needs to do is enable Mozilla developers to make Firefox more competitive, easier and faster than other solutions. It is doing that, see "Firefox Quantum", WebRender, Servo etc.
And BTW, the Rust staff paid by Mozilla is relatively tiny, (dozen people?). The fact that this is a major focus is pathetic.
Borland is 'mostly dead', it ceased being an independent entity in 2015 and that's because it is very hard to sell tools in a world that considers software tools to be a commodity.
Microsoft is only a language powerhouse because they own a whole platform. Mozilla does not qualify as a platform company, as much as they may want that.
> but their languages are mostly there to attract devs to Windows/Azure and are making $0 directly.
Exactly. The kind of benefit that Rust will never bring to Mozilla. Entirely different audiences.
> You missed my point, Rust does not need to directly make $$ "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.
> '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'.
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.
(I've been staying out of all of these threads, but to be clear, the number of people employed to work on Rust by Mozilla is more like 3 or 4, not 12. It's been shrinking for quite a while.)
That is one dysfunctional organization if it needs to invent a new language only to have a browser that is usable but still behind its competition in functionality and speed.
FF (Phoenix, Firebird) gained market share because a bunch of geeks & power users installed it on any computer they could get ahold of, because it was an obvious safety, performance, and usability win over default browsers, and especially IE.
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)
I recently switched back from ffx to chrome as well. there are so many nice features in ffx, but none of them matter if the core product begins lagging.
I agree that the browser side is not doing very well in terms of market share, but I don't see any evidence that Mozilla has been or is able to make a successful product that isn't firefox. Sure, they made quite a few different things but they have not show any ability to really get them any traction. They wouldn't really be in this situation if they did.
What other not failing products are there? Are people standing in long lines to get their shiny new Firefox OS phones? Did Pocket flourish under Mozilla?
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.
I think one challenge is a lot of Mozilla's users see Mozilla as a browser company, whereas Mozilla sees itself as an Internet company. The users may be right. Your Apple analogy is a tough one - if Apple had just stayed focused on PCs, and not the higher level mission of the company around comput-ing-, they would have not invented new kinds of computers. Focus makes sense, once you've locked in on something. The trick of what to focus on is hard though, and the scope of things to consider as possible to focus on is informed by the mission of the company and its fundamental thesis for existing. When the iPod came out it was often chastised as being off-mission for Apple, and many Mac enthusiasts yelled that it would detract away from having them fix whatever the problem of the day was bothering them about their Mac. This kind of complaint is obviously very familiar in the Mozilla case - things other than Firefox are often considered 'distractions' much like the iPod (which led to the iPhone) was by similar people who were heavily invested in the company's existing product line. Time will tell if Mozilla survives if it turns out they should, unlike Apple, listen to them and accept they can't do more than one thing.
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.
> I think one challenge is a lot of Mozilla's users see Mozilla as a browser company, whereas Mozilla sees itself as an Internet company.
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.
Agree. I use Firefox for all the usual reasons. I've considered donating to Mozilla in the past, but have always decided not to -- because my impression is that most of that money would be spent on experiments and signaling, not work on the core product that I care about.
> a lot of Mozilla's users see Mozilla as a browser company, whereas Mozilla sees itself as an Internet company.
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".
Your counterpoint is a little confusing to me.
Apple reversed their sinking fortunes when they released the iPhone. That seems to make the exact opposite of your point.
> Your counterpoint is a little confusing to me. Apple reversed their sinking fortunes when they released the iPhone. That seems to make the exact opposite of your point.
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.
While it wasn't as big a smash commercially as the iPod, the Bondi Blue bubble iMac was Jobs' first big new product after his return, several years before the iPod.
Apple's fortunes were by no means sinking when they released the iPhone. You could make that argument for the iPod, perhaps. I've always seen OS X and the iMac G3 as the turnaround point, both of which play into GP's idea of simplification and focus.
The G3 definitely, it was marketed, and marketed heavily, to the average person in the days of a beige box and computers being complex boring office tools.
People forget about that period between Jobs coming back and the iPhone since their rise afterwards was so incredible. Their laptops and the imac were such a better alternative to the pc at that time and the fan base they developed helped create the conditions for success of the iPhone (which as a bit of a weird product when it arrived).
Making a browser is Mozilla’s purpose. If Mozilla can’t do that, it doesn’t have a reason to exist and will fail. If the Feed the Children charity decides that feeding children is too hard and decides to water plants instead, I expect it will fail too.
The Mozilla Manifesto says nothing about web browsers. If you think they should throw it out and focus on making web browsers (and abandon their mission as an organization) you'll have to take it up with them I guess.
Well, 99% of "the Internet" is the web, so a free web browser is the vital part in that. And not some tool about "remixing HTML" or open badges or something [1]
With mobile native apps, there's no way that 99% of the internet is the web. Video accounts for 60% of total web traffic, and a good chunk of that is not through a web browser, I'd imagine.
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.
The thing is, their only option for making a relevant browser is investing in it maximally because users will ruthlessly pick the best browser. If they cut back on the browser, they may as well just put it out to pasture, because that is where it will go in time. So either mozilla focuses on the browser first and foremost, or they get out of the browser business.
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.
I disagree on a couple of points. The idea that it takes armies of people to develop a web browser or that the Firefox's technology would be less relevant because of the existence of alternatives like WebKit.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
- 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.)
Mozilla is a non-profit which, in my view, is valuable only as a chromium alternative. Why must it be big/etc? Being a megacorp shouldn’t be Mozilla’s goal.
I and nearly everyone else even know who they are certainly don't care what Mozilla think about this. We know it as the custodian of Firefox and nothing more.
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.
> the tech is being commoditized (WebKit, Chromium)
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.
That's a mug's game. The best you can do is exactly what Webkit does, because that's what you're trying to imitate. You won't do it 100% perfectly (all software has bugs), so in any direct comparison you come out looking worse.
I won't strongly argue with your opinion. Basically because business is complicated and I don't believe I would know what is the losing strategy for Mozilla. But I don't really know how Mozilla could be interesting to me outside of Firefox.
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.]
After several years at Mozilla I eventually realized that the leader, not to name them, cares about fame, power and money, even more than "evil big corporations". That it makes a browser that is good for the web is a side effect.
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.
Not the parent poster, but I'll provide https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo... (page 52) as accompanying evidence specifically for the $2.5M claim. Mitchell Baker's compensation totalled $2.48M in 2018, with the second-highest-paid executive, Mark Surman, making only $322k.
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.
Thanks for capturing my feelings around this so well. I absolutely love Firefox, but I can’t help but feel Mozilla’s ambitions are hurting them rather than helping them.
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”.
Regarding the donations, I think the way they are structured with donations going to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and development of Firefox being done by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation means that donations cant be used to support Firefox development. Its unfortunate, because I would happily donate to fund Firefox, but I'm not terribly interested in funding Mozilla's non-profit activities (at least not more than other charities I could donate to).
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.
Yep, Mozilla and/or the Firefox team is abysmal at communicating about these things. They regularly make HN front page with the release notes, but ... nothing happens, no call to action, no communication.
This is a bit of a silly argument, because money is fungible and dollars are dollars. Donating money to the Foundation means less of the Corporation's dollars have to go to supporting the Foundation, and so more of the Corporation's dollars go to Firefox.
Either that, or they decide that they now have enough cash to pursue folly #12 and end up with less budget for FF.
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.
That's not how entities managed by humans function. If you give the Mozilla foundation $1, they now have $1 + their previous money. The people running the org have no incentive to lower their other revenue sources. They want to manage as large of an org as possible and you do that by not leaving money on the table.
Mozilla's mission is to make the internet a better place for everybody. Having an open web browser is a part of that, but nowhere near sufficient to accomplish the goal. The "vanity ambitions" you are talking about are the things that actually make a long-term difference in people's lives. Having a great competitive browser with a silo'd, broken up Internet is not a desirable end-state.
Losing that great competitive browser because of pursuing even higher goals and ending up with an even more silo'd, broken up internet is an even less desirable end state and one that is much more likely to materialize by acting like this.
At the moment, it looks a lot like they're losing a competitive browser despite putting a lot of effort into the technology - either because Google competes unfairly, or because it just has more resources to compete with fairly. So it seems reasonable to look for other approaches to support the open internet.
Every major lauded technical achievement has been followed by a series of community and PR missteps. I'd wager those have mostly affected the power users more than the average user, but I suspect continually driving the power users away in this manner will hurt them more than it helps them.
I don't see how losing Firefox would end up with an "even more silo'd, broken up Internet". Firefox can't fight that by itself so just having Firefox by itself isn't going to make much of a difference to what Big Tech is going to do with the Internet.
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.
This is a relatively narrow view of the Internet, though. You're talking about a web-standards silo kind of thing, which I agree is bad, but is not the sum total of the problems affecting the Internet. See https://internethealthreport.org/2019/ for some more context on what I'm trying to convey. I don't agree with everything in that report, but hopefully it demonstrates that there are threats to the Internet that Firefox can't fix just by being a great browser.
> Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest.
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.
There is a large gap between "focus on the browser" and "make Firefox slightly better."
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.
I seem to remember that Opera was the first stand-alone browser that brought the world tabbed browsing. People switched to Opera for that and its fast performance. Other browsers including Mozilla copied the feature to catch up.
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.
You're right. Phoneix/Firebird were basically a clone of the obviously-best-to-copy Opera features but without the ad bar, with a more native-feeling UI, and maybe (IIRC?) even lighter and faster to launch. Built-in popup blocking, very lightweight and snappy, tabs, free, no ad bar. Those were the selling points, and aside from the last two and slightly odd-feeling UI widgets, Opera had them already.
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.
Modern FF makes Mozilla Suite look svelte and respectful. It's heavy and loud. I use it when I'm not on macOS or iOS and need a full-fat (and then some) browser, but I'd have a hard time recommending it to anyone.
> 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.
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.
> I seem to remember that Opera was the first stand-alone browser that brought the world tabbed browsing.
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.
> 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.
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)...
As soon as their revenue isn't dependent on Firefox, why would they continue to develop it?
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.
The only 10X browser improvement that can be made these days is if it cuts RAM use by 1/2 compared to the others, (and isn't tied to crypto). I would pay for this!
Mozilla management is getting paid top dollar, they are trying to act as they deserve it by starting and killing projects they clearly don't understand.
I would love to see a small dedicated team concentrated on the browser and led by manager who are not playing SV hotshots.
So would I. The last time I used Firefox, they couldn't keep the entire browser from crashing because a single tab broke. They've got a long way to go to get Firefox up to its competition.
Firefox is the product of Mozilla mission. But mission is larger than just a browser. I'd love to see it extend to trusted email services and search engines, for example, but this requires a lot of engineering.
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.
If they cannot succeed in making Firefox better, the problem is bigger than I thought. So basically, they’ll try to gain income from other sources, because they have given up on increasing the Firefox market share, and anticipate losing the revenue that comes with it?
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.
I think that point is not as big as you think it is. Remember how big Firefox was back in the day? This was despite Microsoft pushing IE and bundling it with Windows.
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!
What Google did - and does - should land them in some seriously hot anti-trust water. But they'll get away with it, just as Microsoft got away with it. "This is not the monopoly you are looking for...".
I still don't get the concept of antitrust suits with browsers. Unless the system literally prevents you from installing a competing browser, you can always just go and download the competing browser and use it. Theres nothing stopping you from doing that, where's the monopoly power here?
Microsoft bundling Windows with IE, and Google using their search dominance to promote Chrome. That’s anti-competitive behavior right there, abusing your monopoly in one area to extend it to another.
> Unless the system literally prevents you from installing a competing browser, you can always just go and download the competing browser and use 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.
The idea is that to use soft power you got from x to push product y is not great for the users as y should compete on its own in a meritocracy.
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.
Firefox was big because the alternative was dysfunctional.
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.
> 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.
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!
"Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed"
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.
I don't think they've given up on it - they're still making pretty big technical changes. But they would be daft to bet that they will somehow manage to win back significant market share from Chrome, given the resources Google can put into it.
But if they’re not betting on winning market share from Chrome, then what are they doing that’s worth betting on?
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.
To take one example, Mozilla's 'privacy not included' guides. They rate hardware and software products for privacy protections. This is a topic that people care about in the abstract but couldn't easily make concrete decisions on. You may disagree with how they do it, but it's definitely relevant.
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.
> 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
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.
Perhaps the disconnect is that Mozilla's goals are not just the bits you care about. If all you're saying is that they should double down on Firefox and ignore everything else because that's what you want, that's not a very interesting argument.
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.
> If all you're saying is that they should double down on Firefox and ignore everything else because that's what you want, that's not a very interesting argument.
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.
Precisely. All they would have to do is to allow you to earmark your funds 'Just for FireFox' and to pinky swear they would not commingle that with their general pot for pet projects.
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.
> Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest.
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.
> But they did that, and now Firefox market share is almost negligible because it wasn't the default browser on mobile OS's.
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.
I use KaiOS on my phone. It's pretty good. A nice cross between 'dumb' and 'smart'. I like it a lot. No forced upload of my contact lists and no forced membership of some eco system.
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.
For me extremely relevant. And that probably explains a lot of my perspective. I'm one of those 'free software all the way' types and FireFox is a very important component in that toolchain.
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.
> 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.
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.
Wikipedia says it was announced in 2011, I'd say that was pretty early.
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.
We had an issue where my mom's company had email set up through like, godaddy or some shit. And to have calendar invites work (including people sending google calendar invites, or my mom sending them invites), it was some extra charge that her boss wasn't willing to pay. I explored a bunch of possibilities, then on a whim threw Thunderbird on her machine, set up IMAP/SMTP, and tried sending her a calendar invite. It Just Worked, showed up in her Thunderbird calendar. Then she did the same for me, boom, functional calendar invite.
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.
> 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.
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.
So you feel that it is better to do many things and fail at all of them than it would be to do one thing and succeed at that because that one thing has no meaning in the world that would result?
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.
> So you feel that it is better to do many things and fail at all of them than it would be to do one thing and succeed at that because that one thing has no meaning in the world that would result?
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.
Ok. I'm not an idealist. I like my browser, would like to keep it, even if that means that some of Mozilla's loftier goals will not be reached. Because once the browser battle is over those goals will be even further from reach.
So I think we want the same thing in the longer term, just disagree about what the order of execution is.
>Mozilla. From combatting a lethal virus and battling systemic racism
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?
I'm pretty ignorant about how they monetize Firefox, but isn't it pretty hard? The attempts I (think I) know of are selling the search box, putting some ads on the home/start page, and that mr. robot ad thing. I'm skeptical FF alone could fund Mozilla's mission to build an open, free web, and doubly skeptical when you consider its adversaries (Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft, heavy hitters for sure).
Selling the search box brings in on the order of hundreds of millions a year. This alone puts them in a singularly unique category of 'well funded' open source software. Granted, their 3-year billion dollar deal may have been the high water mark (edit: it wasn't, revenues have increased since then), but a lot of valuable work can be funded with even $100 or $50 million a year. Sure, they need to constantly be on the lookout for alternate revenue streams should their primary dry up but a lot of the things they've been trying have been contrary to their users interests and marginal at best. (i.e. if they become the thing that many of their users flocked to Firefox to get away from, what is the point of its existence?)
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.
Firefox is super fast in almost all the ways that matter. It consistently does great in benchmarks and plenty of users (myself included) use it as their daily driver for some pretty intense use cases (I... admit to hoarding tabs... sigh).
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.
Web is all mobile now. To get new users, Firefox needs mobile users.
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.
Firefox is awesome on mobile today, it supports add-ons which other browsers don't and that alone is a huge advantage. Any mobile browser market share problems faceiing Mozilla don't seem technical to me.
The features described are not present in any browser today. People will install any app with "the cool new thing". Never underestimate the power of mass psychology / herd behavior.
They've grown too big to do the thing we all want them to (focus on a high-quality open source browser), because they don't need nearly as many people as they have to do that, but also can't cut 75+% (I suspect more like 90%) of their staff because it would be tantamount to suicide for the current organization and rebirth as a new one. They won't do that voluntarily.
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.
Let's turn that around: How much would it cost to run a lean-and-mean Mozilla that just focuses on FireFox? How much does it cost to run an unfocused Mozilla that tries very hard to compete with all those huge platforms out there?
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)
OK, let's play this game: You are now fully in control of Mozilla - projects, finances, it's all on you. How would you turn Firefox into a browser with significant market share in an increasingly mobile world where two competitors control default applications and most users newer change any defaults?
I would put the user first, make privacy the #1 priority, make it plain to the EU that FireFox is the only browser that can make that guarantee and long term stand by it and apply for subsidy as well as promotion by the EU and/or anti-trust action against Google, Microsoft and Apple for not giving the users of their devices the option to install/run FireFox right out of the gate.
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.
So the monetary part of your plan is to get subsidies from the EU, to the tune of maybe $100 million per year, if we optimistically assume that you can keep going with several times less revenue.
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.
How much money would it take to run a FireFox Inc. laser focused on just the browser?
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.
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?
First step in increasing market share is to stop losing market share. Jacquesm’s strategy owns the market for privacy-prioritizing customers, creating a market share floor. It may be small but it’s a solid, committed base. Then you build on it.
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.
I don't see how making additions optional for a free browser would increase costs, telemetry does not increase visibility, but it is a serious privacy concern and the mobile market is owned by Google and Apple, two companies that are not going to be won over unless there is some serious firepower available, something FireFox does not currently have.
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?
It's Firefox. The second F is not capitalized. And please don't get rid of my privacy-first mobile browser (small market share notwithstanding) to focus on your privacy-first desktop browser.
> 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.
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.
I agree with a lot of things except on the mobile part.
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.
Fair point. I shot from the hip there because I was asked to and it was all that I could come up with just before dinner. But you are totally right that the synergy between desktop and phone is an important one to keep in mind.
I like this question. Not as a way to argue, but as actual productive discussion.
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.
Even if you got 100% of those projects committed to integrating Mozilla technology, you'd have a infinitesimal fraction of the browser market. Furthermore, those users are already probably fairly anti-Google, so it would be preaching to the converted.
Can I play? You get pushback from most of those projects because Chrome is the 'just works' option for the mobile web - no-one tests their websites with Firefox mobile. Some of them are persuaded on principle (like Replicant), some want money, some refuse outright. We'll say you agree a $500k /yr deal for Firefox as the default in Lineage.
You still have a tiny fraction of the mobile browser market, because all those platforms together are a drop in the Android & iOS ocean.
I would pay $100 or $5/month or something for Firefox. I don't really understand why they don't have a pay-if-you-want model. I donate to nonprofit news organizations I read even though I can get their news for free, and I pay for a couple Android apps I want to support even though the "premium" versions don't have any meaningful extra features.
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?
This is a bit of a silly argument, because money is fungible and dollars are dollars. Donating money to the Foundation means less of the Corporation's dollars have to go to supporting the Foundation (Edited to add: which they do via dividend payments), and so more of the Corporation's dollars go to Firefox.
I don't disagree with your concept in theory, but I also don't think there is any evidence to suggest that MoCo's trademark royalty payments (as IIRC that's how they are structured according the financial docs) are adjusted based on MoFo's needs.
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.
I do donate to the foundation, but as others have said, that's a separate organization. I guess I could "donate" to Firefox by getting a VPN subscription, but I don't want a VPN and I think that would send the wrong message. I would like to monetarily indicate that I value Firefox specifically.
Maybe you should contribute to one of the many "fix bugs for money" websites where you can specifically donate money to get bugs in open source products fixed. It's even better because it doesn't have to be a Mozilla employee who does the actual fix.
That's very very cool, but I too would specifically like to pay Mozilla for Firefox. I have been a dedicated user since Phoenix 0.2 and it is near to my heart, my soul, and my profession.
This was discussed recently in another post and the answer I got was basically "until Google and Apple force us we have no obligation to change anything"
I suppose even then they won't be obligated to do anything at all... I guess there's no way for them to really notice how many people don't even go to the trouble of making their websites load... that's what I observe tech newbies do rather than switch browser from whatever I installed.
Web standards are hideously complicated to implement, and browsers are hideously difficult to charge for. That doesn't make for a viable business.
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.
Rust can be stand alone, Thunderbird is already stand alone and the way Mozilla handled that pretty much killed Thunderbird in the marketplace.
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.
As long as most of Firefox's users interact with Google web properties, Mozilla are screwed. Google properties work better in Chrome, and will even directly advertise Chrome.
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.
Mozilla has a lot of obvious extra products they could start that generate real profit. They could start selling a paid mozilla account subscription that gives you a vpn/mail/IM
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.
> lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to Chrome or Edge.
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.
I think they've already tried, their attempt was called "Firefox OS" which ran web apps exclusively. I don't think they have the skill or clout to pull it off. And I don't say that as an insult, not even Google could really pull it off, although they're still trying. Native app performance is too far superior, even now.
"So basically, they’ll try to gain income from other sources, because they have given up on increasing the Firefox market share, and anticipate losing the revenue that comes with it?"
Are you gonna give them the money to replace that income? Is anyone at all?
If they keep focusing on the browser at the rate things are going they'll be dead as a company. They need to think ahead and work on a strategy that keeps them afloat.
Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior.
In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't hills worth dying on. And now, because Mozilla didn't choose a hill to die on, they are going to die on no hill at all.
When they aren't the browser that is standing up for interoperability and the freedom and privacy of their users, they have no way to differentiate themselves. Firefox is just another browser, and it's one that is architecturally dated and under-resourced compared to its rivals.
I had assumed that when Mozilla had nothing left to lose as Firefox marketshare crashed, they would go back to being the scrappy underdog who advocates for the right thing. The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen.
> They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME
I agree about the EME point, but for h.264 they did stand up and lost. I can remember h.264 not working in Firefox for a long time while it did work on Chrome. It probably cost them a lot of users, but at some point you have to stop and realize that you are harming yourself more than advancing the cause.
You might argue they lost the battle but won the war. A technological split between traditional media companies and web companies has developed: the former are continuing to pursue MPEG-LA endorsed codecs that enable their industry to keep a stranglehold on the market (i.e. H.264, HEVC, VVC), while the latter have moved to alternatives: a lot of hardware comes with VP9 decoding support already, and there's an enormous push (with nearly 100% buy-in) to make AV1 the web's next default video codec.
This means that the web is moving towards media streaming on mostly royalty-free codecs, which was exactly the goal Mozilla originally had.
> You might argue they lost the battle but won the war.
The tide of the war is turning, little thanks to them IMO. VP9 was a Google initiative and they were already interested in royalty free codecs because of YouTube. Chrome didn't have to lose the H264 battle to get to work on VP9 and other royalty free technologies. Mozilla didn't do anyone any favors by losing the battle of H264 on its own. It has only made them weaker for future battles.
As a point of interest, Google had announced that Chrome would not be supporting H.264 around that same period, but then backtracked and never removed it.
Edit: IIRC, it may have been the built-in support/licence for H.264 on Windows and Macs that kept the support in Chrome, so those running Chrome on other OSes might not have been so lucky.
So what are your suggestions? Let Mozilla die and enjoy Google monopoly in the web? No, thanks. I prefer a non-profit organization which "failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure".
By the way, consider donating to Mozilla if you want them to (be able to) listen to you.
100% agree with that. Maybe Mozilla's greatest skill really is in PR and that it is a rotten organization inside (which so many comments on HN seem to imply), but I don't buy that. When you try to do good, you always put yourself in a vulnerable position. As soon as you make a single mistake, people love to point the finger and criticize for being a hypocrite and not living up to your standards. When an evil company does something good, we applaud them. When a good company makes a mistake, we bash them.
As a consumer of the web and a developer on the web, Mozilla is one of the few "big" players in the web ecosystem that I see who are really fighting for keeping the web open.
We were just having this discussion with a friend the other day, on the topic of the anti-trust hearings. What if the web didn't evolve to be open like it was today, but instead had followed the evolution of the mobile space, dominated and fully controlled by only two players? What if it was impossible to run a website from a server in your bedroom but instead had to submit your website to some corporation and wait a couple of days before some semi-human reviewer approved it (or not)? The transformative power of the web on global society would never have been as big as it has been if it had evolved in that model.
For that reason alone, I applaud Mozilla and I decided to start donating today. I would hate for the web to be under the tyranny of some corporation because that would be such a loss for humanity. And we need people and organizations that put up the fight against the Googles of this world.
Nah Mozilla's PR is mainly due to historical stuff, not to new marketing (post FxOS era more or less)
The org inside is.. like many old orgs, half rotten, half fine. There's a lot of good engineering and even good leaders, thought the ones that are genuine tend to be pushed aside over time for ... more evil reasons, friendship, money, wrong color, you name it. You like you said when you try to do good you put yourself in a vulnerable position and its valid externally just as well as internally as I'm sure you're aware (all companies have this problem to some extent and Mozilla is in my opinion on the "worse side" of the slider atm)
Note also that Mozilla Corp is not Mozilla Foundation. Pretty much none of your donations go to the web browser itself.
Their VPN is a bit pointless at the moment though. They're basically reselling Mullvad. You can get the same servers & more connectivity options (e.g. bypassing their client) for the same price by just going direct.
The point is their client can be agnostic to the backing service. If Mullvad is ever found to have problems (privacy, security, etc), Mozilla can switch to a better service without affecting end users at all.
We have heard this argument many times from Mozilla advocates on HN. I don't buy it. To me, this sounds like an argument for the status quo. It may be a rational descriotion of the reasoning what Mozilla is continuing to pursue, but essentially it argues, "No one can do better. Therefore, don't change anything". Well, if the comments in this thread (and many others) are any indication, there are some users who want change. Mozilla is not "good enough" for these users. Things could be better.
No one knows what would happen if things changed. Sometimes we have to take risks, experiment. The portrayal of Mozilla as being like a little boy with his (Firefox) finger in the dike saving us all from being flooded over by the (Google) sea is an oft-told fairy tale.
It is arguable that Mozilla is already "dead" and has been for quite some time.
Google already has a "monopoly in the web", and they in fact control Mozilla by being its essential source of revenue.
The "non-profit" bit is also getting old. Is it supposed to mean something by implied comparison to other non-profit organisations? Mozilla is a corporation, it has employees doing the same work as Google as it tries to maintain faeature parity, including gathering data on users through telemetry. It is dependent on Google, it relies on the sale of web advertising in order to be able to pay those employees. Web advertising is the very thing that Firefox users want to be protected against.
How is that preventing Google from enjoying a "monopoly in the web"? Google could pull the plug on Mozilla at any time. As others point out, it probably prefers to prop Mozilla up instead.
My suggestion is to release a different sort of browser, smaller. In fact, release multiple browsers, each with a different focus. These specialised browsers could use pieces of Firefox code but would be small enough any user could compile in a short time on an underpoweered computer. Of course they could also be more secure what with reduced complexity and attack surface.
There are so many annoyances with the web that could easily be solved by going in a different direction, away from advertising and the idea of a web browser as an "all-in-one" program.
I believe there are markets for this, although no one knows the size of them, because users are coerced to use the same handful of overgrown, corporate-sponsored web browsers, forever increasing in complexity, insecure and in need of a patch.
At this point in web history, trying to achieve 100% feature parity with a corporate-sponsored web browser funded by advertising is a waste of time, IMO. What is worth the time are features that those corporations will never pursue. These are the most interesting things Mozilla has been doing with Firefox.
I am typing this using a text-only browser that I can edit and re-compile in minutes. Much faster than Firefox; no ads, tracking or telemetry. I certainly do not need a major web browser to read HN or the sites posted to it. Using the same program to read HN as I use for, e.g., internet banking, is silly, IMO. I actually have better ability to read sites posted to HN than some readers who consistently get thwarted by crazy web designs, phoney paywalls, etc. There should be many browsers in between linemode and "modern" browser. There should be a spectrum of choice of user-agents, each with different feature sets, not always the same ones.
> Google already has a "monopoly in the web", and they in fact control Mozilla by being its essential source of revenue.
This is exactly why we need to use the "non-profit" part of the deal. Donations is the future. Please donate and your voice in the future of Mozilla will be heard (and not the voice of Google).
> My suggestion is to release a different sort of browser, smaller. In fact, release multiple browsers, each with a different focus. These specialised browsers could use pieces of Firefox code but would be small enough any user could compile
This is ridiculous. Firefox is not just for programmers who routinely compile things. It is for everyone. I am not compiling anything. You suggestion will make Chrome 99.9% monopoly.
"Please donate and your voice in the future of Mozilla will be heard (and not the voice of Google)."
Are you saying that user donations are going to match or exceed the revenue Mozilla gets from their deal with Google?
If yes, then, to use your phrase, "This is ridiculous." It is not realistic.
Chrome cannot and will never be "99.9% monopoly" as that would make things too easy for the antitrust lawyers.
Sounds like you want your web browser software exclusively controlled by a small group of people at Mozilla. Well, they are not volunteers; they want to get paid and Google/web advertising is their meal ticket. They are not going to work for "donations". You think you are fighting Chrome, but by supporting the status quo, you are just feeding it. The Chromium project was initiated at Google by hiring developers from Mozilla. Mozilla relies on Google turning a profit. That is what allows Mozilla developers to get paid.
Projects that survive on donations, like the BSD projects, are usually supported by voluteers who have jobs or do consulting outside of the project. Mozilla developers are not volunteers. Mozilla is a corporation with millions in revenue.
Assuming it could be done, making web browser source code easier for more people to work with and compile does not exclude anyone. It has the opposite effect. It includes more people in the creation of user-agents. Firefox currently takes hours to compile. This is why you are not compiling anything, even if you wanted to. As such, the project is hardly "for everyone". Only a small number of people can actually make use of it.
> Meaning, soon to you, a chromium firefox based browser no different as to Edge, Brave or whatever else is out there.
Doubtful. I think of lot of the reason Google helps fund Mozilla is so there's a better answer to the question "Does Google have a monopoly in web browsers?" It's better for both Google (because they can point at competition) and Mozilla (because Google will still want to hand them money) if Mozilla has their own engine.
They invested $150 million in non-voting stock, which wasn't a lot of money for Apple, even in those days. However, Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser for Macs in return for Microsoft to continue to developer Office for the Mac.
At the end of the 5-year agreement, Apple released Safari and the rest is history, as they say.
The good or service you get in a purchase is not always the whole reason for the purchase. For the same reason you might buy somethingat a fund-raiser for more than you would at other times, Google may be supplying get good terms on their deal with Mozilla.
Firefox hurting Google has nothing to do with the reasoning I supplied previously. In fact, Firefox not hurting Google is all the more reason to make sure they get funded and survive if it lets Google avoid or deflect government scrutiny.
I think given the licensing model of Chromium, every major browser being Chromium-based† is still not really a Google monopoly on browsers, or even on browser engines.
† In practice, it's already true, given that Firefox is niche even on desktop.
It's less about whether they actually have a monopoly, and whether there's shielding from government scrutiny. Their current market share (greater than 60%) affords them quite a large influence on the direction of web standards (which seem to be lagging implementation in browsers).
Google is already under constant investigation from various governments at this point. Money spent keeping a competitor alive when it's low market share means it doesn't have the same power as Google is probably money well spent.
Influence or not, all a vendor needs to do if they want to compete with chrome is fork it. There can't be an honest way to construe that as a monopoly.
Imagine the market was for PNG decoders, and all the major players were using libpng (just like real life). There is no way to conclude that there is a monopoly on that.
> Influence or not, all a vendor needs to do if they want to compete with chrome is fork it.
Sure, but are they going to do a hard left and ignore Google commits, or if Google implements some new CSS features, are they going to pull those in because it's easy and the work is done then they haven't diverged as much, even if they might not have implemented them exactly that way if the incentives weren't aligned quite the same way?
> There can't be an honest way to construe that as a monopoly.
It doesn't really matter whether it is a monopoly, it matters whether governments see it as unfair. Antitrust laws didn't spring forth from the founders, they were passed by legislature, and then used shortly after to curtail what society perceived to be abuse of power. It also was not done in one go, the Sherman Act was passed in 1890, and then it was updated through both the Clayton Act and Federal Trade Commission Act in 1914.There's nothing to say that laws couldn't be passed to change how antitrust applies slightly (especially in Europe, where they seem to have for appetite for this recently than the US). That might sound a little preposterous, but we're talking about one of the largest companies in the world, which is traditionally when laws like this have been passed in the past.
While I doubt if an antitrust case was brought against Google it would be because of Chrome, reducing any example people can point to when justifying making a case is probably worthwhile when operating at Google's scale.
> Imagine the market was for PNG decoders, and all the major players were using libpng (just like real life).
PNG is a standard, that standard is not changing to any appreciable degree, and if there was a major push to extend PNG and many readers couldn't read PNG's correctly because they used proprietary extensions, we would definitely be having discussions about whether there's enough viable alternatives on the market, do they have enough market share.
Keep in mind, this is just a revised instance of Microsoft's strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish where they've learned to be more circumspect and more careful about the "extinguish" step to avoid too much unwanted attention, so it's more nuanced.
Same, at least these days. I have an old chromebook running linux that's at least halfway through it's last leg. I recently tried Firefox on it because an update managed to bork Chrome a bit. I found many of the performance issues I'd been increasingly suffering from cleared up. Amusingly, I was using Chrome in the first place because the exact same situation happened a few years ago, but with the browsers switched.
Worth noting that starting out with a new profile (and empty history database) will speed up any browser, which could help account for both of your experiences.
> They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME.
But they did stand up to industry pressure, to a larger degree than most are willing to give them credit for.
On H.264, they refused to implement it, arguing that while the licensing requirements were acceptable at the moment, there was no guarantee that the patent pools would get greedy later on (boy did that turn out prescient with H.265). And they got Google to agree to rip out H.264 support from Chrome... except Google appears to have no intention of doing so, and it took Mozilla a year to realize that they had lost the battle.
On EME, Netflix faced the problem that it couldn't implement its contractual obligations to encrypt films without Silverlight, which was clearly on its last gasp. I believe it was Google and Microsoft who brought the original specification, based on their existing implementations. Mozilla objected vociferously and continuously, trying to get more parts of the system specified (such as communication between the browser and the CDM), and generally trying to make the CDMs as narrow as possible and as open as possible. They ultimately lost on most, if not all, of those issues, but it's not for a lack of trying!
I largely agree, but however far Mozilla is from the peaks it could theoretically be on, I still wouldn't criticize it like this without qualifying my complaint by adding the fact that it still has much lower to to sink before it's as bad as Chrome.
I don't use Firefox anymore and I don't love Mozilla, but I appreciate the efforts they do make in favor of privacy and interoperability and especially the fact that still make the best fairly drop-in alternative to the engine with 80% domination of the browser market. I still would recommend Firefox to any nontechnical person who uses Chrome or Edge now (it's at least as fast, uses maybe 40% less RAM, and just happens to be less evil). (And I personally still use a browser that benefits from their work, Palemoon, which is also flawed (corrupted to a much smaller degree than FF by a much less evil search engine than Google — DuckDuckGo — but I'd use any browser —even the old Edge, if someone maintained a version for my OS— that's not based on Chromium, if it slowed down the growth of Google's evil empire/monopoly)).
Have you ever contacted an elected representative with your concerns that Google is a monopoly and that laws should be either enforced against them or re-written to abate that, in addition to changing your own behavior?
Do they have to be better in anything? I'm totally ok if they are just a little worse than Chrome but relatively independant. I don't see the browser space that endangered right now. As a casual user I din't see a problem if there even was a feature freeze for some time. I get that things are moving in some direction always but all this innovation about dumb websites is maybe overengineering
"The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen. "
Maybe you have not noticed that money actually matters? Mozilla maintains a global infrastructure for serving Firefox updates and new installs; they have to pay developers to keep up with bugs, vulnerabilities, and new web standards; they have to pay lawyers to deal with the various legal issues that come up when a project has millions of users across multiple jurisdictions; etc. Donations have never been sufficient for Mozilla to do the core development work on Firefox, which is why they signed those search deals.
I don't agree with this point of view. I think that world is slowly evolving towards an age where this point of view is outdated.
There are things for which it makes sense to try and find a different model then traditional profit driven. A web browser is one of those things. It should be a neutral window into a neutral network.
Why doesn't Mozilla try to master donation marketing the way Wikipedia does? I am sure Firefox would have an active and regular donors would the large community of enthusiasts knew that otherwise it would be heading either towards EOL or towards making it commercial
Wikipedia does not require anything like the technical staff that Mozilla requires, and even Wikipedia has struggled to get by with only donations. Wikipedia does not run on end-user devices and does not have to deal with all the things that entails. A critical vulnerability in Wikipedia is a problem for Wikipedia; a critical vulnerability in Firefox is a problem for everyone who uses Firefox, and it needs to be fixed by someone who is not going to suddenly be swamped at their day job. Wikipedia can ignore new web standards that are not useful for Wikipedia itself; Firefox has to support most web standards to remain useful as a web browser.
The best case for a community-driven Firefox would be for big companies to provide support, either in the form of money or in the form of labor. That is more or less the model that has propelled the Linux kernel. Unlike the Linux kernel, there are few if any companies out there who can point to Firefox as a strategically important project that they are prepared to pay someone to work on, especially given the existence of good, actively-developed alternatives (including Chromium for those who require open source).
Having to pay lawyers for legal issues shouldn't be a reason to lay off 250 employees. It certainly can cost a lot, if they are getting service from top-legal firms, working on billable hours. But they can choose to stick retain lawyers for important matters such as IP-rights, etc., get help from the community for other legal matters and work. For example debian has the debian-legal mailing list, where a lot of lawyers hang out and are ready to help. I certainly would like to contribute if any questions regarding my area of expertise popped up.
Big law firms also do a lot of pro-bono work. Since Mozilla is a foundation they might also try to exercise these channels.
If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it.
Covid-19 crisis shouldn't affect Mozilla, everyone is still using browsers while working at home.
There are also other ways to raise money for a corporation, for example Mozilla can go public to raise money to sustain their workforce and finance important infrastructure updates such as Servo engine.
"If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it."
Debian receives hardware to test and develop on, infrastructure, and other non-monetary support from various corporations that view Debian as a project with strategic value to their businesses. Debian also benefits from only having to package software and forward bugs to the appropriate upstream maintainers -- including Mozilla. I mentioned the lawyers at Mozilla only as an example of something they actually do need money to pay for, and I strongly suspect that Mozilla's legal team has more work to do than Debian's but do not have any first-hand knowledge. Technical work is probably a larger expense for Mozilla than legal, just by the nature of developing and maintaining a web browser that has to support the modern web (which is more application runtime than document delivery).
"Mozilla can go public"
At which point they will be beholden to their shareholders and will have to be even more revenue-focused, which is what I was replying to in the first place.
Like an addict, Mozilla became dependent upon the revenue they earned from their Google and Yahoo search deals. Search compliance requirements then prevented them from innovating in the areas you mentioned (and others). Mozilla had an opportunity to reduce the search dependency and transition to a subscription business around 2014-2015 when the paid consumer VPN market started to scale, but based on the internal incentives present at the time, they found the search money too lucrative to resist.
While this seems largely factual, it's certainly not a generous interpretation.
I view Mozilla as a privacy leader in a very small market dominated by giants. Microsoft gets users for free thanks to Windows, Apple does the same twice as well thanks to iOS, Mac and the browser not being complete cancer. Chrome has Google and YouTube to drive its users, not to mention first mover advantage in the industry. What does Mozilla have to drive Firefox users? Nothing, it's not a tech giant.
The shear fact alone that they exist and can swing with the big boys is an unbelievable accomplishment in my book, certainly worthy of praise and a more nuanced interpretation of events. Privacy is their only angle as it's all that's left to them to compete. They're getting better and better and marketing this fact but that's also because the general population is getting more educated to the value of their data thanks to Snowdon and The Zuck.
To assert with confidence that they should have started charging users a subscription fee 6 years ago is ludicrous, you can't know that would have worked out. It still may not.
Additionally the VPN boom we've seen - and Mozilla is only now capitalizing on - is largely a symbiotic evolution which coincides with the rise of the streaming giants. e.g. The only reason my parents know what a VPN is, is because they want access to Netflix's US catalog which is far superior and geofenced.
They didn't originally yet knew it was happening, happily taking money from foreign users until the studios and content copyright holders started demanding a geofence as they secure different distribution networks in other countries..
The whole entertainment industry is a giant mess and was never prepared for instant, across the world access to content. Tom Scott just did a brilliant video about how copyright laws have lagged far behind the tech that distributes it, it's worth a watch if this stuff interests you.
This is where these guys lose me. There is no way you get Netflix or Hulu or Disney in Firefox without EME or something similar. Ultimately the question is do you want to be a mainstream browser or not? Obviously Mozilla does and most people want it to be and don't care about it. If you don't like copy protection then don't buy stuff with it or torrent instead. This is such a tired argument to be having in 2020 and boring complaint about Mozilla.
FireFox and Chrome can't even stream Netflix or Amazon at 1080p. It's like they capitulated and still lost. I watch Netflix in their own app on Windows because even though Edge will technically stream 1080p, it seems to be rate limit capped with noticeable quality reduction :|
> would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS
Yeah, in a heartbeat. I actually never used Netflix and probably never will. I won't be be party to destroying what is good and not-like-TV about the web, for the sake of stuff that is like TV, and usually is less interesting to me than even silence.
How does unfreedom hurt freedom? In that any given person cannot be in several places of the freedom spectrum at the same time. If they're a serf, a mere set of eyeballs and a wallet, they cannot be a grown literate human being in an information age also. If a person prefers to be illiterate and have stories read to them, they cannot be an author, or an investigative journalist. If another person prefers to be their master, rather than their peer or at least an unrelated stranger, they likewise aren't free, since all leashes cut both ways.
Computers are powerful enough these days to have multiple browsers installed and running simultaneously. One could have used Firefox for general browsing and just used Chrome for Netflix.
Judging from market share, does anyone who's not a power user even run Firefox these days? I know I stopped religiously installing it on non-nerd relatives' computers and stopped evangelizing it to my friends years ago, when it stopped being a clear usability and safety win. They're certainly not installing it themselves.
[EDIT] basically I have no reason to bother a friend or relative to install Firefox if they're gonna open it and go "well, that's... fine". Non-nerds could immediately tell Phoenix/Firebird/early-FF were better than IE. For real. These days, to convince my uncle to install FF instead of Edge, what's the sell? What about FF makes it seem to them like I didn't just make them do this for no reason? Unless you also install some extensions, the only difference is that they advertise different add-on services at you. If FF doesn't make bold choices that improve the default browsing experience, I have no reason whatsoever to recommend them to non-nerds, or to install FF when I set up a computer for someone, or whatever.
This is what I do currently. I use Chrome or Brave to access Google sites only, and use Firefox for all other activity. I never sign in to any Google account from Firefox. For me it doesn't feel inconvenient at all to just click the Brave icon when I want to check Gmail and I like segregating my Google activity as much as possible.
"new focus", "new mindset", "organizing ourselves differently", "new structure", "thinka bout a different world". These are all euphemisms for death.
Why don't corporations simply be straightforward and say "We are facing imminent death and we need your financial assistance if you don't want a Google-monopolized world"?
This "changing world" fluff is a huge turnoff for people actually wanting to help Mozilla's mission.
Mozilla is probably one of the most customizable, with defaults that are relatively pro-privacy and therefore privacy focused player in the browser market.
Fly by nights like brave have come in and then realized its hard to do in a sustainable way.
Chrome is certainly not privacy focused. Ie and edge arent either.
There is a reason tor browser is basically firefox code under the hood.
> And now, because Mozilla didn't choose a hill to die on, they are going to die on no hill at all.
The part you get wrong is that they were always going to die, hill or no hill. It has been a slow grind downward as Firefox has practically vanished as a product among mainstream Internet users. It's merely slowly going to the same grave as Opera and IE. Chrome won, on both the desktop and mobile. The only major holdout is the Apple ecosystem with Safari, because Apple can do what it likes.
What else is Mozilla other than Firefox? Not much in terms of revenue sources.
I've been using Firefox daily for 15 or so years, and I've watched as everyone I know stopped using it one after another. Chrome is a good browser for most purposes, the average user - which is what Firefox requires for Mozilla to stay alive financially - doesn't care about the things you apparently think they do.
Mozilla certainly has its faults, but how is generating revenue an indication of how far they have fallen? Why don't you contribute to the project for free? Most of us aren't going to do that so it's a little unreasonable to fault them for having to generate revenue to keep the lights on.
“We need to focus...” followed by 5 different areas to focus on.
That’s not focusing.
“[We] need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests.”
What? Mozilla needs to build great products that solve people’s problems better than Google or whomever else does. That’s what Firefox did when it came out. It was objectively better than IE in ways that people could immediately grasp.
“Representing interests?” WTF are you even taking about? If you mean privacy and ownership of my personal data than say that.
“To start, that means products that mitigate harms or address the kinds of the problems that people face today. Over the longer run, our goal is to build new experiences that people love and want, that have better values and better characteristics inside those products.”
Mitigate harms? Again, WTF are we even talking about? Better values? Maybe this is the open source roots showing? But the majority of your business is based on selling default search engine rights to one of the most invasive harvesters of personal info, so let’s not pull that “values” thread too much here Mozilla.
Make awesome products and solve people problems better than your competitors. If you competition is doing scummy stuff, then tell people why your approach is better. Apple is doing an awesome job messaging the importance of privacy.
That's the last call for anybody who thinks "it's good that Mozilla exists, and its mission is important, but I'm still using Chrome and derivatives". Mozilla can't exist solely because people think it has a good mission: it needs products that can pay the bills, or at least a large population of active users.
What kills me is when people say they use Chrome cause they don't trust Mozilla cause they embedded Pocket, but like Chrome is literally shoved with a million Google bits, even Chromium (the open source variant of Google Chrome which is the proprietary variant almost everyone installs) has Google crapware at a much larger scale. Mozilla's Firefox still feels like the lesser of the two evils.
Edit: Added clarification about Chromium in case someone doesn't know the difference between Chromium (open source) vs Google Chrome (proprietary).
Here is the worst possible case scenario that is really happening with Chrome:
If I want to use a Google Property with Chrome (just tested with Google Search Console) I MUST be "signed into" Chrome with the same Google Account as I want use to access the service.
I am not "signed into" Chrome with a google account and I log into that service using the login process IN the web page I become automatically "signed into" Chrome.
Chrome just peeks throught the veil and I am now logged into my browser. Talk about overstepping boundaries.
So, I don't want to have my browser sessions associated to my google account so I "Sign Out" of the browser. BOOM! Logged out of the service as well.
This is a very sad day for the state of a free and open internet.
It's a great browser, even faster than Chromium. I especially appreciate that they offer 32 bit versions for download which run on my old Linux machines just by unpacking the ZIP to some directory.
Well i think Mozilla made very clear in the past that they did all they can to avoid Pocket to be evasive, and they made it to respect your privacy, in case you choose to use it. Of course you can always turn it off on your Firefox and never come across it again.
Why do you think it has to offer suggestions? Reading List didn't. The equivalents in other browsers don't. Suggestions could be a separate opt in feature.
Pocket's Article View is optional. Firefox has Reader View built in. Special handling for top sites could be built in. Special handling for any site could use a protocol designed for privacy like malware protection does.
>you can always turn it off on your Firefox and never come across it again //
Are you aware that they reenabled it for users who had removed it (and of course made it a non-removable plugin in the first place), not sure if you were being sarcastic?
I still don't understand what Mozilla got out of forcing Pocket on people.
Somehow I feel like they could have avoided a lot of the backlash by renaming Pocket to Firefox Pocket (and thus being part of the Firefox Lockwise, Firefox Send, Firefox Sync etc suite). Instead of being / feeling like it’s own separate entity, it would have felt like an integral part of Firefox and thus enjoying the same privacy commitments.
Even though I have Pocket disabled I don’t see much of a problem with it being in the browser. Isn’t it the same concept as Safari’s Reading List?
It's just a plugin. They could have put it in the store, put a message in the update info "try pocket, we'd like to ram it down your throat but someone here with sense suggested we could give you control over your browser". Ta-da.
No need to put it into people's toolbars, pretend it's integral then put it back in people's toolbars when they remove it.
It's just disdain for users and the exact sort of heavy handed tactics I use FOSS to avoid.
Same thing with changing start pages, just leave it alone - suggest new defaults on update and allow people to subscribe to adverts if they want them.
yeah that would be a good a idea i think the logical reason i can find for them to not do it was that Pocket was an independent business where probably Mozilla does not even own completely. Also by keeping them independent makes it easier to sell in the future.
Sadly I had hopes for ChromeOS but I'm more saddened nothing like ChromeOS has popped up.
If Mozilla teamed up with someone like Ubuntu to produce a viable alternative I'd buy into it fairly quickly honestly.
In the meantime I'm considering an iPad Pro as a "Laptop" alternative and as a way to offload apps from my phone so my phone is just that, a phone with nothing but maybe the work apps on it and texting stuff. I don't want social media in my pocket anymore.
Edit: On another note, maybe if we see more ARM laptops it may be worthwhile for a new Netbook / ARM focused distro to crop up. One thing that kills me about Chromebooks is paying a thousand dollars for decent specs but I could pay the same amount and real a laptop with a real OS on it. The main selling factor with ChromeOS for me though has always been their security model.
> If Mozilla teamed up with someone like Ubuntu to produce a viable alternative I'd buy into it fairly quickly honestly.
The thing about that it is that it has really very little to do with Mozilla. ChromeOS is only that because a) ChromeOS and Chrome are both made by Google (there is no "teaming up"), and b) Google's incentive is for everything to be using their services in their browser.
But putting everything in the browser is not generally desirable in its own right. An interesting competitor would have a browser, but it would just be another application. And there have been several attempts at making security-first operating systems, from various Linux distros to OpenBSD, but none of them have Google's resources. And that isn't really a problem Mozilla can solve at this point either.
I would be fine if not everything is in the browser honestly. However the number of packages should be a slim amount to mimic how minimalist Chromebooks can be closely.
Putting everything in the browser doesn't buy you anything unless your goal is to put everything into your web services. Meanwhile it incurs a lot of costs because browsers are designed for client-server, which in Google's case was the point, but in a user-focused device it's a liability. You saddle yourself with javascript instead of better languages, you end up having to reimplement things like local storage and data transfer between applications, a lot of interesting applications will need access to lower level networking than browsers normally provide (e.g. ICMP, UDP, multicast) or some other access to hardware (e.g. access to USB devices).
Why build a second operating system inside the browser instead of just using the original operating system?
I'd be surprised if "people who know what telemetry is" and "people who choose to use ChromeOS" have much overlap.
I don't mean that as a dig on ChromeOS - personally I think its evolved into a pretty decent product for certain use cases. You can even use Firefox if you're so inclined.
So Firefox should aim to only be marginally better than Chrome, degrading itself along the way?
Firefox: 'I know we used to do cool stuff but Google rips it's users a new one on the regular so we need to be more shitty too, what're they going to do leave and use Chrome, lolz' /probably
Thing is, Google doesn't try to sell itself otherwise. Mozilla talks a good game about privacy and users-first, but then it goes and does things like Pocket, Mr. Robot, etc. that make it clear it is all just marketing.
Edit: Uh, my memory was faulty on this one. See below.
Mozilla replaced a feature that was end to end encrypted with one that sent private data to a third party for data mining.
They denied getting paid for the integration. That was technically true. They eventually admitted they got paid for referrals.
They bought the company in 2017 and promised to release the source code. They still haven't.
The Pocket website says "as a member of the Firefox family, privacy is paramount."[1] The first part is misleading and the second part is simply false.
The whole Pocket affair reeked of “Valley connections” and corruption, and resulted in a net loss of privacy for Firefox users compared to what was there before. I use Firefox and will likely never stop using it, but that and FFOS, I felt, were signs that MoCo was being run like “just another company” rather than something that should have a strong moral and ethical compass.
the alternative is cutting the bills down somewhat. They made about 500 million in revenue in 2018, that's a healthy pile of cash.
They've got a pretty huge engineering team and still development on their products is painfully slow. Just take the password manager they've been offering, it can't even import or export passwords and it misses half of the features any of the free competitors have.
Adding even more stuff on top of it doesn't really give me a lot of confidence.
Money is fungible and dollars are dollars. Donating money to the Foundation means less of the Corporation's dollars have to go to supporting the Foundation (which they do via dividend payments), and so more of the Corporation's dollars go to Firefox.
I don't disagree with your concept in theory, but I also don't think there is any evidence to suggest that MoCo's trademark royalty payments (as IIRC that's how they are structured according the financial docs) to MoFo are adjusted based on MoFo's donations.
I hate to say it, but this is one of the reasons I stopped donating. Mozilla was getting a bit like EFF-lite and I've had enough of the EFF's non-mission nonsense as well.
That doesn't work with their current structure. Foundation can receive donations, Corporation (itself a subsidiary of the foundation) can sell products (like Mozilla VPN).
I wonder why the current structure is set up like that. I mean I don't think it's by accident – if it were set up like that by accident, surely, it could have been set up so people could direct donations directly at Firefox, if the CEO wanted that.
The structure is set up that because it reflects the goals of Mozilla. Firefox the browser is not the end goal, it's a means to making the internet a better place. And that's what the Foundation is about. The corporation also pays dividends to the Foundation in order to help fund their efforts, because it's the Foundation's work that matters more (in the long term) than Firefox.
It was established precisely so that the Corporation could pursue commercial operations that the Foundation legally couldn't before that, like business partnerships.
Also Mozilla Foundation didn't qualify as a public charity since it received less than 1/3rd of its revenue via donations, though I don't know if it can be considered as one now (15 years after the split).
Do this! I procrastinated on switching from Chrome to Firefox for several months because I wasn't sure how much time and effort it would take. I set up a monthly donation to Mozilla during this time because it was easy and supported browser diversity.
When I did finally switch, it turned out to be pretty easy and fast to transfer my bookmarks and passwords to Firefox, and there are some features like the built-in containers and add-ons like Tree Style Tab [0] that I find pretty valuable.
I wonder if it would work for companies/services to offer perks to their users in exchange for donation to Mozilla? It's a weak example but if, for a $50 donation, you could get an icon on your HN profile -- and that shows up with your comments -- that you're a financial supporter of Mozilla that might drive donations. Granted, HN is a pretty small community but if, say, Facebook offered a perk level for supporting Mozilla it might get the network effect going perhaps.
I would happily pay for a “premium” Firefox experience, even if that premium was only cosmetic. I have received so much value from Firefox over the years that it would be an honour to support them directly.
Yes I know I can donate. But I want to pay, and that’s different somehow.
And the best product is a product that is useful to users.
To me, Mozilla felt like an ideology and not so much like a browser. That repelled me from Mozilla. I was annoyed by their attitude and puns toward Chrome, especially the prefix war and the comparison between IE6 and Chrome. That was way too much for me, even though they had a point. Ironically one of their evangelists, that made a lot of noise against Chrome, later moved on to Microsoft.
Microsoft has settled the prefix war in the way that they adopted Chromium.
Coming from Netscape, which I loved, and going through almost every iteration of the Internet and browsers, Mozilla feels like Assembler or C to me. Yes, Assembler was cool when you had your C64, and yes, you can do everything with C, but that is not the point. People need to get a job done, and yes, automated Garbage Collection is ok most of the time - I mean you Java, C#, Python, etc.
Maybe the comparison is not the best, but Mozilla's priority seems right this time: new product(s).
> Mozilla can't exist solely because people think it has a good mission: it needs products that can pay the bills, or at least a large population of active users.
Absolutely. It has to stand on its own feet. Yet the only reason Mozilla is being kept alive is due to Google paying them to be the default search engine as part of a deal which is where the majority of their revenue is from. [0]
Funny how their mission in "supporting internet privacy" also somehow means we must have deals with companies with the likes of Google who don't believe in Mozilla's own mission in order to survive.
Well, you have to pick your battles, right? Maybe in some future when Mozilla has their own privacy-oriented open-source search engine, as well as an independent solid source of income, it would cease to sign contracts with Google. We aren't there yet, and may never be.
> Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath (which was the subject of litigation the parties resolved in 2019.)
This is actually sad - because i have limited use for either of those products. I likely want the VPN, but the value of having it on my phone is minimal to me.
So while i think i will get the VPN, Pocket on the otherhand... is just meh to me. Products where i give some cloud company a ton of data, even if a good company, is just not an interesting problem for an honest company to solve.
VPN is meaningful. Privacy in general is meaningful. Basic necessities like identity and communication are meaningful.
Pocket is a really nice feature and a good UX, but just not interesting to me for the company goals. If it makes them money i'm happy, but it's just mildly more interesting to me than Mozilla Tiktok might be.
I really hope they embrace the essentials to the web, and make a profit doing so. VPN seems like the right direction (though i'm dying for it on desktop). Pocket, less so... to me.
Is it actually true that Mozilla’s core business (develop Firefox, funded by search bar traffic) loses money? Or is the crises that this core business doesn’t generate enough surplus to fund the overhead of other activities that Mozilla engages in?
I subscribe to Pocket Premium to support Firefox development because I think it's critical for it to continue existing, but I use Chrome as my daily driver because it's almost 2x faster on my Mac.
I give FF a try every few months and will happily switch if they ever manage to get it to having comparable performance to Chrome or Safari on my architecture.
I spent the last month switching to FF because Chrome is getting dog slow and I wanted to support it, despite multiple issues since switching I stuck along.
Seeing this "diversification" strategy I just installed Edge and am giving it a try, FF wasn't a great experience but I was willing to stick with it to support Chrome alternatives - but it's obvious it needs a lot of work - and removing focus is a signal people should be moving off not coming back to it.
Well, I want to use products from companies that I support. Mozilla is simply pushing too much politics that I strongly disagree with so I cannot support them.
Brave is more private and respecting of the user, without the politics. It's all whats good with Mozilla leaving out the bad part.
We could have had that in Mozilla today, but because virtue signaling they had to fire Brendan. This was probably the nail that lead to the coffin for Mozilla.
Yes, do you have something to say or do you just like to quote me?
I dislike companies that push a political agenda when the product or service itself has little to do with it. Privacy politics is fine, since that is a core part of Mozilla and Firefox and is very neutral since everyone can enjoy privacy. It is also part of the browsing experience.
But pushing stuff like "white privilege" is just pushing away users like me. I use Brave, which is a company founded by Brendan and they don't push anti gay marriage politics on me even if that is what they may support.
I just don't want that in my browser, it makes it a shitty experience. I don't understand what's hard to understand about that. I am also a web developer, so pissing me off will just result in me not testing the website in Firefox unless my users specifically requests it.
> I just don't want that in my browser, it makes it a shitty experience.
How? If you don't care about politics, why would the politics of the organization running the browser affect your experience? Aren't you therefore virtue signalling (in this case for maximal free speech) by not using Firefox for political reasons? You haven't mentioned any product features/decisions made as a result of Mozilla's "virtue signalling" that affected the day-to-day experience of using Firefox.
My reason for using Firefox and never trying Brave is the same: I strongly disagree with Brendan Eich's politics. If using Brave means Brendan Eich profits from it then I'll never use it.
Mozilla, with revenue of $27M last year, is mainly responsible for Firefox and a few related applications [0].
Apache meanwhile, has revenue of less than $1M, and has over 350 projects with huge adoption like Cassandra and Kafka and Lucene and Maven and that eponymous HTTP server [1].
In 2017 Mozilla paid their CEO $2.3M and their treasurer (who only worked 6 months) $1.2M [2].
Mozilla is a foundation which owns a for-profit corporation. That corporation had revenues of $450M in 2018 [3]. I double checked this shocking amount.
Most of that revenue comes from their search partner, which was switched back to Google recently [4].
How is all of this possible given the relative contributions of these software non-profits?
Apache projects are generally developed by a combination of interested volunteers and corporate-funded teams, not by employees of the Apache foundation.
The Apache Foundation is organized as a legal entity to host projects, but is intentionally decentralized. Because they have chosen to organize themselves this way, many large companies have chosen to work with them to host collaborative open source projects they care about. It fills a very different niche than Mozilla.
Looking at the revenue of the Apache Foundation is about as misleading as looking at the revenue for the Mozilla Foundation. In both cases, development is generally funded through corporations, though in the Apache case the corporations are independent while in the Mozilla case the Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation.
> Mozilla, with revenue of $27M last year, is mainly responsible for Firefox and a few related applications
The 'Mozilla' that is responsible (in the sense of funding) Firefox development is the Mozilla Corporation, not the Mozilla Foundation. I don't think the 2019 annual report is out yet, but the 2018 one gives "In CY 2018, Mozilla Corporation generated $435.702 million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue": https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/
Can’t say I’m surprised there wasn’t much movement on that project in a coordinated fashion it had all the makings of a project without adequate staffing to complete its vision.
Can you elaborate on this? Because I remember the day Firefox became fast with an incredible amount of fondness, and that moment owed in large part to Servo.
Firefox is faster than it was, but it's still the slowest browser. I've gotten literally 2x benchmark scores from Safari on the same hardware, and the subjective difference is large. Servo propelled FF from "unusable" to "worth the tradeoff" but they didn't have the resources to make it fast.
My experience in daily use of Firefox post-Servo is that all page loads have essentially been instantaneous. This is of course subjective based in part on hardware, so I'm not disputing your assessment.
As far as I'm aware, Servo is at the bleeding edge of performance under the hood. Its hybrid glyph rendering system for example is state-of-the-art.
I'm no browser architect--I don't know how the rendering engines compare, and of course it depends on the site and the extensions used. I did just time some popular websites, and confirmed my impressions. For example, nytimes.com gives
That was in private windows with no extensions. I tried it on my Windows machine with no extensions too, and it was 1.44 to 1.51, basically margin of error. I know MacOS Firefox has really lagged on performance improvements in the past. It could be a Mac-only issue.
I wonder if anybody else is interested in having it developed. Maybe if a couple of star developers currently being laid off, or redirected to other stuff, started to put more effort into it, and the community started supporting them with donations, that could speed things up?
Firefox is widely popular, and its popularity is also wide among the techs-savvy, well-paid people. Pledging to pay $10/mo for Firefox development would make a difference if, say 20k, or 50k people subscribed. I suspect there is a chance to achieve such numbers with a well-run campaign.
How can I donate some money that is specifically for Firefox development?
I do not really care for or like the other products that Mozilla is developing, like VPNs etc but rather, I would like for my money to be used towards browser development.
Exactly. Somebody should organize a fund for that, add an easy subscription solution, like Patreon, make it widely known, and sort out all the legal and tax issues.
(Unfortunately, I don't see myself doing that. At least not yet.)
This was the only important team in the whole Mozilla organization. I'm looking for a browser to beat Chrome on my mobile on performance, and Servo was the best competitor.
At the same time this is not a big surprise to me: Mozilla was already becoming a PM driven organization instead of an engineer driven one. At least they gave us Rust, that will live on and be extremely successful.
If that's the case I might as well stop using Firefox. I enjoyed it because of its performance and to a small degree to stave off Google. I'm also a big fan of developing new technology to innovate, like with Rust.
But Firefox makes my web development work harder. It opens Gmail slower. And with this news, I have no reason to support Firefox. I don't want to stand behind a company that's de-prioritizing the only product I use.
Mozilla needs to stop prattling on about being a "world-class, modern, multi-product internet organisation" and being "diverse" and "inclusive" and "battling systemic racism" and get back to developing its core products which people actually want to use.
Stop with the fluff and the airy blog posts and societal ambitions and get back to doing actual engineering which gets people back using your products. You may have a "new focus on community" but it means nothing if there's no product to have that community built around.
You might claim to be a "technical powerhouse of the internet activist movement" (whatever that is !? ) but soon you're going to be nothing at all because Firefox is, as much as it pains me to say it, still merely following and not leading while Mozilla leadership goes back and forth and seems more interested in writing blog posts about global issues than the technology that actually makes it a viable business.
Focus on Firefox. Build a product that's truly competitive once more. Build a product. Not endless blog posts about trust and "authenticity" and "leadership" and whatever else appears on the RSS feed today; get some actual leadership together and start looking at what you're actually doing, which of late has been not a lot at all.
I feel like this should go down as one of the worst layoff announcements in history. The whole post seems to be an attempt to smooth over the layoffs with glorious language about the battle against systemic racism, internet freedom, etc. If I worked there, or was laid off, this would just make me more cynical.
Mozilla PR is famous for their absolutely meaningless and elusive corporate communication. I'm not sure how they ended up that way but it's a reoccurring theme.
Mozilla (or the CEO) wants to be a large profit driven corporations. Right now Mozilla makes its money by saying it's a privacy focused non-profit. These announcements are about saying they are the former without making it too obvious to those who like them for being the latter.
Interviewed there last year, wasn't a fit. It turns out I dodged multiple bullets.
I hope they turn things around though. Firefox is a great product and we need it. And I hope the people who were let go land safely on their feet elsewhere.
The Safari/WebKit team is much more reasonable, with probably an average of one to two hundred people working on it at any given time (this is a bit complicated to measure, since many people move around between the browser and related teams like Mail or CFNetwork–and not to mention the various non-developer roles that only work part-time on Safari–but it should be accurate to an order of magnitude).
I'm sure there are lots of other engineering teams at Apple focused on security, build systems, developer tools, infrastructure, etc that the Safari/Webkit team relies on.
Then there are all the non-engineering functions like HR, marketing, etc.
I'm including all of that in that number, the actual organization's full-time engineer count for it is probably half that. Also, I am excluding people working on things used by Safari but general purpose and part of the OS, such as system libraries and platform security features (many of which Chrome and Firefox use themselves).
It fell victim to the same problem as Wikimedia, a kind of Dutch Disease: The web browser was too good, they earned so much money in donations from it that it attracted freeloading middle managers and do-gooders who don't give a flying f about the browser, but started empire-building with vague new "missions".
This has wayyy too much corporate doublespeak in it. I try not to be negative on companies with a good mission, but this fluff-filled announcement tells my spidey senses that they're about to do something that people won't like.
> Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges.
There's a lot of talk of values that doesn't have an obvious associated action. This is typically a two stage way of announcing something. Next comes the actual action, which is in keeping with the "new values".
"
New focus on economics. Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges.
"
A kind reading would be that they'll try to move to a consultancy or subscription based model, like Red Hat. An unkind reading is that they will make portions of their products and code proprietary and charge licensing fees.
"... everything was free ..." is an ambiguous statement in this context. Do they mean free/libre or do they mean free/gratis? This, to me reads like corporate double speak. It leaves enough ambiguity so that people can have a kind interpretation while letting them claim they were being honest about their intentions should they choose to go a proprietary route.
I find this sad, Mozilla is really an advocate for the open web and web standards. Since web browsers are free, they can't make much. They might be able to sell something like Thunderbird; if they improve it and make it more into a service, like Hey! for example. They could also try the sponsorship model that a lot of open source projects are doing. They already have sponsors, but maybe sponsors for their open source frameworks might be better than asking for donations at a company level.
If downsizing the organization and bringing some revenue in from a VPN service helps them be less financially beholden to Google, I think that's a net positive.
I don't know that they would need to sell Thunderbird as a whole bundled product/service like Hey; they could launch a paid email service (in the "it's not Gmail" market occupied by Proton, FastMail, Posteo, etc.) and use that money for work on Thunderbird.
Not so different from having a VPN service and using it to bring in money for Firefox.
At the end of the day, money is money, at least to a point. Unless the search deal funding is drying up in the background, this will be nickels and dimes on top of that.
I was at Mozilla for a few years. I'm quite sure there was ideological tension with some around accepting Google's money, but I think the bigger issue was not having a diversification of funding and feeling like that one pillar could bring things down. In theory the changes in the mid-2010s to multiple international search providers should have helped with that, but the American pillar was Yahoo. I don't think that did Mozilla a lot of good after the Verizon buyout.
(All said, seems every time I comment something Mozilla, ex-upper management makes it clear in thread that the view from the ranks or my five-years-gone memory is incomplete, so take with as much salt as you need.)
Thing is, Mozilla's been talking service focus and funding diversification for awhile now. I'm not sure what they expect to change to make it more successful this time. Cutting payroll is an extension, not a solution.
> Furthermore, Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed. The Google deal has historically accounted for around 90% of all of Mozilla's revenue, and without it experts see a dim future for Mozilla past 2021.
If that's the case, I doubt they have another option.
For anyone worried about what will happen to Mozilla if Google decides they don't want to pay for being the default search engine in Firefox anymore. Their current arrangement is a lot of eggs in one basket.
Was about the net positive, if you trow out all the developers and just hold the highly paid management, firefox will loose even more % and not even google will care if the default search engine google is.
Mozilla made over $500M revenue in 2017 and $451M in 2018. Apparently the decline has continued, but it should still be enough to develop a browser. I would guess that Firefox is profitable but all of Mozilla's other things are dragging them down.
classic story of envy driving you to be worse than that what you envy - was shocked to get to know some Mozilla folks and find out that they _fly everyone to week-long "offsites" at resorts_. Because something something gotta be competitive...
the American system of employment is demonstrably broken; Mozilla in SF is bound by hundreds of contradictory and expensive rules for employment, originally designed to make safety and stability for workers, that are now spaghetti-code and are routinely worked around using international channels
probably not directly, no.. but the expense of employees and the pressures within management, I would expect, are a factor on why 250 responsible adults had jobs last week, but next week, they will not, in High-cost of Living SFBay Area
But they haven't said where the jobs are being eliminated and not all are coming out of the Bay ARea. The article mentions they are closing a center in Taipei. They also have a pretty distributed workforce with only part of it being in the Bay Area.
The US has a generally simple set of employment rules compared to the rest of the world. Most of which you outsource to some third party company and pay them a fixed fee per employee. The cost of employment comes from capitalistic competition for talent. Also, the fact that so many minimum wage workers exist in the US (at a minimum wage below most developed nations) is direct contradiction to your point. Employees are cheap in the US, engineers are expensive everywhere.
They get a fortune from Google and still don't let me customize the controls except by a new API that doesn't take effect in a tab until the document has loaded. They just need to manage what they have better.
That's sad, many of them would have joined Mozilla not just for money but genuinely believing they are working for social good and they did.
I understood how bad Mozilla, for lack of a better term 'sucked' at making money when I saw how the small team of KaiOS picked up the remains of Firefox OS and not only turned it to be a viable business but did so in the ruthless, hyper-competitive market of Smartphone OS ecosystem where even Microsoft had failed.
IMO Mozilla should have gone full throttle on Thunderbird Enterprise with support structure, Something for Microsoft Teams equivalent and finally embracing DDG with open hands.
> I understood how bad Mozilla, for lack of a better term 'sucked' at making money when I saw how the small team of KaiOS picked up the remains of Firefox OS and not only turned it to be a viable business but did so in the ruthless, hyper-competitive market of Smartphone OS ecosystem where even Microsoft had failed.
KaiOS is in the ultra-low-end smartphone/feature-phone market that Microsoft/Google/Apple don't care about at all.
What's remarkable is that something ill-conceived like "web technology on ultra-low-end devices" actually gained enough traction to get devices on the market.
Like Firefox OS before it, actual KaiOS devices were not well-received, because of poor performance and lack of apps. It's just that nobody really notices because all the buzz is around "real" smartphones.
>Like Firefox OS before it, actual KaiOS devices were not well-received, because of poor performance and lack of apps.
As of Q1 2018, 23 million KaiOS devices were shipped. It stood second in terms of market share in India due to JioPhone(even ahead of iOS). It seems future Jio Phones would be Android, especially considering Google is now invested in Jio(It's an investor in KaiOS as well). Mozilla had recently signed a deal to develop the gecko engine for KaiOS further.
KaiOS team saw where Firefox OS would fit well and they brought it to fruition; Something I feel Mozilla could have pulled off too.
> As of Q1 2018, 23 million KaiOS devices were shipped.
Like I said, remarkable.
> KaiOS team saw where Firefox OS would fit well and they brought it to fruition; Something I feel Mozilla could have pulled off too.
You mean they could've pulled off getting investor money to develop a bad product into an even worse product and unload it on markets in the developing world, where people are presumably used to bad products?
I don't think that's in their "mission statement".
I could have seen Mozilla build an enhanced email service like Hey! Actually, they could still probably do it, it would align with their focus on privacy and experience with email reader.
True, email requires more players to stay federated and would have reflected well with Mozilla's supposed ethos. But, I seriously doubt whether Mozilla would have pulled off what Hey did in terms of marketing.
Mozilla's marketing for the hypothetical email service would have been like ProtonMail without the advantage of 'Switzerland/CERN' brand. Also, ProtonMail has now gone all guns on Apple following Hey, which I don't think Mozilla would do.
While Mozilla would likely not go head on against Apple, Mozilla still have some aura especially in the Silicon Valley. Who knows, they might have cut a deal with Apple...
It would be nice if they took over the video call market from Zoom. They definitely have the web expertise to do it, and they could make a lot of money since absolutely no one I know actually wants to use zoom over a competitor.
The "new focus" isn't that new, it's been the same since Baker became CEO, and it's a focus on making Mitchell Baker really, really rich.
Mozilla's privacy branding is in direct conflict with Baker's vision of some kind of corporate entity that can pay her a lot of money. Apple can do this because they are filthy rich themselves, Mozilla's puny market share means that increasing their revenue will require them to use the most valuable coin in the Internet realm, which is user data.
I think a LibreOffice-style hard fork will be necessary at some point with a nonprofit carrying Firefox forward. Another thread mentioned Mozilla Firefox becoming a skin on Chromium ... Microsoft basically has validated this approach, and I can see Baker eliminating most of the rest of their engineering core to do the same.
> I think a LibreOffice-style hard fork will be necessary at some point with a nonprofit carrying Firefox forward.
It doesn't have to be a hard fork.
A new community could do a soft-fork of the Firefox codebase, like Ubuntu does with Debian. (Or even like Seamonkey!)
There have been several attempts at this, but they never consolidated into a clearly-presented single alternative (like LibreOffice, Ubuntu, or Glimpse image editor).
If there is enough interest in maintaining a viable browser that isn't controlled by a large corporation, would funding for the new project emerge from the likes of Red Hat?
The issue is that there are few nonprofits that can carry Firefox as much as it need. The document foundation has around 0.2% of the revenue that Mozilla has, so that was a lot more manageable than a hard fork of Firefox would be.
A potential new non-profit would need backing from some very large companies, donations from privite people would likely get no where near enough.
>"Sadly, even with Mozilla Foundation getting 40M in donations they need the Corporation to pay the bills (including Mitchell Baker's 2.5M/y salary)"
I remember a headline in 2006 that Mitchel Baker's salary at Mozilla was $500k which I thought was a lot for non-profit but her salary has increased 5X since then? Based on what exactly? I understand the need to pay competitive wages but $2.5 million when the organization is in such a state that you are laying off a significant chunk of your workforce? Is she giving up any salary?
This forum would be in uproar if the firm was offering their software devs $30k a year, but offering competitive pay for executives and managers is a sin incapable of restitution for some inconsistent reason.
Exorbitant executive pay is a sin incapable of restitution wherever it occurs, much more today than at any point in the past. The leaders of nonprofits especially should be ashamed to accept such pay. Developer compensation generally is not exorbitant to nearly the same degree, so this comparison feels unfair.
Explain to me why an executive who might have three or four opportunities choose the lowest paying one while a dev should be entitled to competitive pay?
They can do whatever they want. One should be ashamed to be overcompensated in the context of a non-profit, because they're leaching from an organization designed to do good. A competitive dev salary is probably nowhere near being overcompensated, but a multi-million dollar exec salary almost certainly is.
I have a feeling you hold this view because personally taking a million dollar salary would not reduce your quality of life. This is not true for all people.
And then Jesus spoke untu his disciples, "Hey, sorry guys, but this do-gooder miracle business just isn't cutting it anymore. All the other carpenters are making bank, and my quality of life is reduced."
> offering competitive pay for executives and managers
"competitive" is key here, it means they have to compete.
I know people on the work floor like to make jokes about executives golfing and yachting, but there is some truth to it that these executives are building and maintaining their network and that leads to contracts and revenue that keeps the company in business. That's what their worth is. That's the competition they have to be successful in.
Mozilla gets about 400M in free Google idiot money. If burning through that for a 2.5M salary but still having to fire 25% of your workforce means you are being competitive at the C-level, then most random people can do that for half the money; a quick 1.25M saved.
It's not about a C-level exec getting a large compensation. It's about them failing abjectly and not being worth a fraction of that money by normal management standards.
"Focusing Firefox On Users In order to refocus the Firefox organization on core browser growth through differentiated user experiences, we are reducing investment in some areas such as developer tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development, and transitioning adjacent security/privacy products to our New Products and Operations team."
So what is the impact on things like Servo/Rust, and the core browser?
I guess they are setting up for a post-Google-pays-to-keep-us-going world, but not sure that Pocket or Hubs or VPN are going to set the world on fire.
I feel for everyone who will lose their job here. That's never a pleasant thing, particularly so in current circumstances.
Notwithstanding that though - and with no disrespect to anyone being laid off - I'm actually really encouraged by this. The key quote from the announcement is this one:
"Furthermore, Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed."
Mozilla's reliance on Google is a major detraction from delivering privacy-focused products.
I've said before, and I'll say again: I'd gladly pay a fee for Firefox if it meant (a) it was funding the product so that (b) there was no need for them to peddle in surveillance.
I really wish Mozilla all the best. Commit to provacy, show me where to pay and I'll gladly sign up.
--
I'm aware they accept donations and have already donated. But that's different from paid-for products.
I would also happily pay for Firefox. I'm not sure if it would be better or worse for the browser though, in terms of market share. If they don't charge for it, hopefully they can cover costs with other paid services, like their VPN service.
Honestly, it would be great if Mozilla could provide privacy focused cloud services like storage, email, etc. I'd gladly pay for it, knowing they are not interested in collecting my information.
How long do you think Mozilla can resist the temptation to monetize your data? Personally I prefer they don't try to run these services because the concentration of data is too much of a temptation for anyone. You already have email and storage options. Mozilla just needs to offer a way to pay for Firefox directly.
They need to get back to their roots of fighting for the user, open access, open standards, and privacy
The last few years, imo, they have been chasing market share by trying to play follow the leader with Google which have turned off a few major power users which was their core base
This is with out getting into some of the political based initiatives we have seen over the last few years as well
Coming from the finance world, there's a very good reason that doesn't happen. In situations where a company is spiraling, everyone is incentivized to leave for new work. The people who are most competent at work are also most capable of getting new jobs, so what used to happen before it was standard was as a company died, the best people left, and the company died faster.
If you axe the CEO's pay by 50% one year, what reason does he have to stay on and fix things? Why shouldn't he just go to some successful series A startup, get a bunch of equity, and retire in 10 years? He definitely could, if he wanted to.
While I fully understand the logic of what you're saying, this is what makes us peons despise the upper execs, as they've turned it into a game of "Heads I win, tails you lose".
I mean, if you're a great CEO, you're lavished with Midas-level wealth. If you're an absolute shitty CEO, you're also lavished with let's say Midas-junior-level wealth in the form of retention bonuses and/or golden parachutes to fix the mess you created (as you, no doubt, axe a large number of your underlings).
While I definitely think Mozilla is great for the internet, their main product is terrible from a business perspective. Trying to monitize a piece of free software that you are selling on this privacy benifits is a loosing battle. The reason free software is free is _because_ it can sell more valuable ads by using your data. Products that you pay directly for don't need to worry about selling ads so they don't have to do tracking and such.
A paid browser at this point is realistically impossible to sell at any sort of scale because chrome is free. IMO Firefox Mozilla needs to make a new product that is paid. Someone on HN suggested email and/or other services that compete with Google's user product suite? At that point you are selling server space so its easier to get people to pay for it.
That's a funny idea. Suppose there were a Firefox Pro option?
It's the sort of thing a lot of people here might pay for regardless of what's in it just because they believe Firefox is essential to the open web.
But what could it be?
What if all it was to start was bundling their existing VPN service, Scroll, and Pocket Premium for a single price, and even if technically you can use them in Chrome or as iOS apps, it's marketed as a better browser. And then the door is open to add new things, maybe pinboard-style bookmark archiving would make sense?
Is it a hit? Hard to say. But it feels like a better bet as a feature set that ALSO supports the open web than marketing each of those services individually.
The reduced spending on dev tools makes me sad. Their efforts in the past, for example their unparalleled support for CSS grid, have set the standard for web developer tools. I hope they find a way to continue to innovate in this space.
Yeah, I very much agree. For a diverse Web development needs to be good on as many browsers as possible.
Maybe this could be one of the separate parts some of the devs could split out as a donation/patreon project or something. You pay for them giving you better dev environment in Firefox.
The CEO mentions that COVID devastated their revenue but doesn’t elaborate. Did COVID somehow impact their market share? Are fewer people buying and as such they get less rev share? Something else?
Yeah that's interesting. I thought nearly all of Mozilla's revenue came from Google to default to their search engine. I wonder if COVID is just an excuse to do this now.
The browser space is extremely competitive because it has been driven for decades by corporations seeking to dominate the field, and that naturally leads to Byzantine complexity and high barrier for any competition.
Mozilla really needs to find ways to generate profits and in turn, channel the lion's share of those profits into their browser. But this is a hard proposition when giant corporations give away their browsers for free and even bundle it hard with their operating systems. The unfairness of Mozilla's browser endeavour is stark when you stop to think about it.
Maybe we the collective really do deserve our corporate overlords because we can't be bothered to pay for something when a free version also exists. This not only applies to Firefox but is a big reason why nearly all the top OSS are struggling to reach parity with their commercial counterparts.
How many of us will pay Office/Adobe licenses but if LibreOffice or Gimp ask for payment, we won't? The reason is vendor lock-in and feature-wise inferiority of the open source counterparts, but if no one uses them, then like the proverbial chicken-and-egg, they will never be able to compete, and will only slowly fade away.
I was watching Troy Hunt's weekly update[0] where he reveals he's open-sourcing Have I Been Pwned (HIBP). He also talks about the failed M&A process:
We get all the way with an organisation who we thought was a very good fit.
[...] which due to confidentiality reasons I have to describe as "a change in
business operating model" happened that killed the whole [deal], in February.
Mozilla would have been a perfect fit for HIBP. Could it be that the failed M&A partner was in fact Mozilla, who are now revealing their "change in business operating model" (ie: focus on commercial products)?
This comment from 5 months ago has the same idea [1].
First paragraph: Get to the point (layoffs are happening) immediately, and state the concrete reasons why they are necessary.
Second paragraph: Thank the people being laid off, call out some of their good work, and talk about the things you are doing to help them find a new job.
Third paragraph: Mention the steps you are taking to avoid having to have layoffs again. Be as specific as possible. When mentioning "focus", that means focusing on one, possibly two, very specific things.
Last paragraph: Motivation for the future. Renewed commitment to making Firefox better.
The "make Firefox a secondary goal" faction has won again.
"Mozilla exists so the internet can help the world collectively meet the range of challenges a moment like this presents. Firefox is a part of this. 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. Over the last while, it has been clear that Mozilla is not structured properly to create these new things — and to build the better internet we all deserve."
Pay Mozilla for email hosting and matrix homeserver hosting!?! YES, PLEASE! Oh, and in my monthly fees, i can simply add $1 or $2 per month to donate directly to the browser team s well? YES, PLEASE, where do i sign up!?!?!?!?!
While I'm serious about the above, forgive my capitalization and excessive punctuation...but this is honestly a great idea. For Mozilla - which is a company that i trust - to offer a paid service for 3 of the most essential internet services - web browsing, email, and chat (via matrix) - would be a great product offering. They could even offer other additional stuff like the VPN service i heard about...which generates so much value for users, and by making it a paid service, makes it sustainable. I'll add the caveat that none of these would be amazing money-makers, and stuff like managing email is hard, but it is a start, and at least brings in revenue. Maybe not so revolutionary (as a set of offerings), but sometimes foundational things provide the platform for future awesomeness.
Would it be acceptable for the third-party provider (whether Mozilla or not) that you're paying email and matrix hosting services to run automated content scanners on the email and chat server to detect known malware and child pornography content signatures?
A lot of people take for granted that "I pay you money" implies "I have the right to use your service without you having any right to inspect my usage of your service", and it'd be useful to know your views on that.
I guess this is an unexpected question. But definitely support automatic content scans but paired with proper, legal due process. I think malware is an easier thing to get automated but other stuff might be more difficult.
Are you claiming that Mullvad are doing the same for the Firefox-brand VPN? If not why are you making a distinction between email,matrix and vpn services?
I claim nothing, and I know nothing, about whether this provider you’ve named (or any other) do or not. My question is driven by curiosity about the views of an HN commenter.
I chose those services based on the list in the parent’s post only; I could have filled in any service where the provider hosts your data on storage for you (eg. Usenet, RSS feedreader, web forum, file sharing).
I don’t consider VPNs to be a service that host the data you interact with on their own storage, so they aren’t of interest to my question.
Just looked at transfer.sh, and it seems like a much WORSE alternative. The best thing about Firefox Send was the simple end-to-end encryption where I could upload the file, then just send someone the (secure) 1-time only download URL. Looks like transfer.sh doesn't support any encryption on its own, you have to do all your encryption/decryption on your own.
The cost of building and maintaining a competitive browser is huge and it's hard for Mozilla/Firefox to compete with Google/Chrome. Firefox saw its monthly active users go down by ~14% in the last 8 months [1]. I think Mozilla should consider stopping Firefox development and fork Chromium to focus on accessibility and privacy (both in and out of the browser). It's far from ideal--there'll only be one popular browser engine--but it's a trade off that could help Mozilla put more money and time towards its true mission: "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all". The cost of building/maintaining Firefox is holding them back from putting more money and effort toward that mission (and I think that's why they're reducing their workforce [2]).
[2] "Today we announced a significant restructuring of Mozilla Corporation. This will strengthen our ability to build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech. Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people."
Mozilla should consider stopping Firefox development and fork Chromium to focus on accessibility and privacy (both in and out of the browser).
Mozilla will die before getting the intellectual maturity to do this.
The cost of building/maintaining Firefox is holding them back from putting more money and effort toward that mission (and I think that's why they're reducing their workforce [2]).
Well said!
Anyone remember when companies were straightforward about layoffs and firings? You know, text like "Sales are slow, so we need to lay some people off", not "We’ll meet people where they are" (whatever that phrase-du-jour even means).
If that letter is a guide to leadership at mozilla, there's not much hope for the future of the organization. It might be a good idea to ask the remaining technical people what they would like to build, and let them go from there.
It's time to excite people with products. They got the browser to be nearly as good as the alternatives (I try every new release of FF, only to switch back to Safari when I see the terrible effect FF has on power consumption).
How about a better alternative for remote meetings? Start with the basics: respond to reduced bandwidth by focussing on audio, not video. I want to hear what someone is saying, not to see the titles on their bookshelves. In my experience, zoom is pretty bad at this, and so (to a lesser extent) is microsoft/teams. Watching TV news, I've learned that webex and skype are also poor. Given the poor alternatives, and the high demand, I am surprised Mozilla has not already produced a kick-ass product, and I was disappointed not to read of this (or any other technical idea) in this management-speak firing letter.
'The coronavirus pandemic “significantly impacted our revenue,”' -
Most of their revenue comes from search engines paying to be the default. Are there any details on why the pandemic would have a significant impact on that?
While I get the intent, as noted on the thread about their version 2 script blocker: what better way to hobble what tiny share you have by not allowing site owners to know FF users exist?
For all it's flaws, and with the exception of a brief 18 month stint, I've been a dedicated Firefox user since 2004. I sincerely hope that this project finds its new groove and continues to provide a viable alternative to Chromium. The world truly needs it.
Thought it would be another political activism post, turns out to be a dressed-up corporate layoff announcement:
> Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce — approximately 250 people of exceptional professional and personal caliber who have made outstanding contributions to who we are today.
Mozilla should have a Mozilla club. Today, you can go to https://donate.mozilla.org/ and you can donate monthly, but you get nothing for it except the warm glow of helping Mozilla.
Instead, Mozilla should have a private Discord for dues-paying club members, where participants have direct access to Mozilla decision makers, who should show up on a regular basis and do AMAs.
Furthermore, the Mozilla club should nominate a user ombuds who can sit in on Mozilla's board meetings.
Throughout this thread, I see folks criticizing Mozilla for not writing code / fixing bugs they care about, without providing a constructive way for Mozilla to fund their favorite initiatives. I think a Mozilla club could cut some of these tricky knots.
Donating to Mozilla goes to the foundation, not the company. This funds various initiatives that you may find useful or not but does not go directly to the browser. As far as I know there is no actual way to pay/donate and have that money allocated to the browser only.
On the other hand, I disagree with your proposal. When I pay for software, content or a service I pay because I want the service/content, not because I want to join some kind of social club or receiving useless merch cluttering my wardrobe.
I wonder what this means (and fear) for important projects like https://commonvoice.mozilla.org, that do not seem to have been concerned with a business case at all. Best case I can currently see is that some other organisation will take it on, though I'm not sure which.
And I'm also curious how the pandemic has impacted them. As I understood it, still by far their major revenue sources were the search engine deals - has their value changed due to the pandemic?
> I've been told that a large part of Mozilla's security team has also been laid off, which seems like a big issue especially after Mozilla launched a VPN offering last month.
This makes me feel worried. I have come to rely on Firefox as the antidote to Google's data collection machine and it would be unfortunate if Firefox also goes the same way with this new focus.
Soo... don't do the blockchain stuff. They have a built-in ad-blocker and I see very few ads. You install a blank page chrome extension and you don't see their new tab ads either. Practically, a chrome downstream-mod that strips as much telemetry and google spying as possible is a simpler way to get rid of the parts of chrome one doesn't like.
occassionally I am reminded exactly how vapid the discourse are open source has gotten - 20 years ago, there used to be discussions, now it's just 'google is SELLING EVERYONES DATA' instead of 'telemetry makes me uncomfortable'
when someone suggests X, instead of 'honestly, I think what I'm looking for is something free as in beer - no charge, no revenue' 'ugh X is no alternative, they do also make money in a way I don't like!'
the thing is, 20 years ago I was 10 and just trolling around slashdot, there shouldn't be _weaker_ arguments at 30
I just wish they shift their focus again to technical solutions, instead of political/social issues. I don't know why software company has need to act like NGO/activist group (doesn't matter if I agree with their stances or not).
They were doing fine until Chrome ate up all the market share.
Google shouldn't have been allowed to do that. It's very anti-competitive for them to have a browser that defaults to Google search and disables plugins that support adblocking.
Google is destroying Mozilla. Their monopoly is making the web worse.
Chrome was better than Firefox; it was massively better than anything else. And it had the omnibar. I now find Firefox the fastest, but it seems that it varies from person-to-person/machine-to-machine and Chrome is entrenched.
That's just like... your opinion man. I never found Chrome to be vastly superior to Firefox. Sometimes it seemed faster, and other times it was a total hog. It's been back and forth like that ever since it came out.
Here's an anecdote for you. I worked at a computer store when Chrome was released. People would come in all the time, and they had no idea they had installed Chrome on their computer. They had no idea that it had taken over as the default browser. They didn't know they weren't using IE. Chrome had a super basic installer that asked one question, and it was linked right from Google's home page. I interacted with average computer users hundreds of times every month.
That's how I believe it became the dominant browser. Average people don't care that one browser is slightly faster than the other or has an omnibar.
Do you really, honestly thing that is why it came to dominance? There's billions of computer users out there, and the majority of them are not techie nerds. They don't know or care what browser they are using. They just want to click the internet icon. You think all those people were sitting around, opening up task manager, and comparing the results with all of their tabs open? They are all used to the internet being slow. They don't know what part is being slow.
If what you are saying was true, then Firefox should have dominated over IE. Did they take over a large share of the market? Yes, after fighting and fighting for years on end. Chrome just came out, and after putting it on their home page, suddenly their marketshare skyrocketed. I believe that if Google had to put it on a different URL, it would not have gotten the adoption it has now.
Yes it was. I don't really see the difference anymore, on any practical level. However, Chrome has been removing useful features and not fixing usability bugs while just being more and more invasive, privacy-wise.
I jumped from Firefox to Chrome with no hesitation when I saw Chrome blazing through multiple tabs without any slowdown. At the time Firefox was crawling on like a snail. Now, years later, I jumped from Chromium to Firefox because I could no longer use the browser to preserve control over certain web pages I needed to use.
> Chrome was light years ahead of Firefox in both cpu and memory use for years
No it wasn't.
Firefox has always been significantly better at memory usage than Chrome. Here is a benchmark from 2012 [0] and Firefox's memory usage only went down after that [1]. On the other hand Chrome is infamous for its extravagant RAM usage ([2] and million other web search results). Only in the last few years Google have started to pay attention to Chrome's memory use.
[0] Chrome was light years ahead of Firefox in both cpu and memory use for years
That has not been my experience. Quite the contrary, Chrome never worked as good as Firefox in any of the OSX or linux laptops I owned. The only thing about Firefox is occasionally websites being broken due to Chrome-only support.
> Google had the advantage of plastering Chrome all over google.com when people performed searches. That's how it got installed everywhere.
That, and aggressive bundleware campaign in early-mid 2010s.
Google paid above market rates for authors of popular Windows freeware like CCleaner, Adobe Flash etc. [0]. They even tried to bribe VLC at some point [1].
I'm always baffled to see commenters in HN were aware of Google Search banners but not this bundleware business. I guess it's due to people here having disproportionately high use of macOS and Linux compared to rest of the world.
You're changing tenses from "was" to "is". Yes, firefox is good today. But, back in the day when people had to think hard about which browser to use, it wasn't as good.
ALSO, it's mostly that people switched from IE to chrome, as opposed to switching from firefox to chrome.
Firefox was a mess for a long time. It's not the speed that mattered but the stability. Chrome isolated everything into separated threads and processes. One tab couldn't kill the whole browser. Firefox didn't and initially even the UI was in the same thread as the webpage javascript. Doing the switch required having all extensions rewritten so they lost market share in the process (but had no choice by then).
> They were doing fine until Chrome ate up all the market share.
Like, 10+ years ago...?
> Google is destroying Mozilla. Their monopoly is making the web worse.
What in the heck are you talking about. Google doesn't directly make money from Chrome - it's free!
In fact, Mozilla's bills are being paid in large by Google paying for them to use google.com as the default browser.
Mozilla has always struggled to make money. This is not some new phenomenon with the company, and certainly is not because of Google making a good browser.
> Google shouldn't have been allowed to do that. It's very anti-competitive for them to have a browser that defaults to Google search and disables plugins that support adblocking.
I mean... what? They shouldn't have been allowed to do that... because why? Because a browser defaults to a specific search engine?
C'mon now. Google built a great browser that users loved, and they flocked to it. It was faster than all the competitors at the time - including firefox - and had much better word-of-mouth traction. Firefox always had a "techie expert" connotation back in the day, and it bit them in the butt when it came to the average joe deciding which browser to use.
End of story.
There's no sinister anti-competition plot here. For heaven's sake, Google pays loads of Mozilla's bills, and collaborates with them on loooooads of projects!
> What in the heck are you talking about. Google doesn't directly make money from Chrome - it's free!
I appreciate the breath of fresh air Chrome brought in when it entered the market but: every percentage point Chrome takes in the market is a dollar Google doesn't have to pay for search traffic acquisition. Google absolutely profits from the chrome userbase. In the same manner, Android is valuable as a means of avoiding paying Apple for defaults on iOS.
Chrome has always represented a threat to Mozilla's business model, even though it was seemingly more and more profitable with less and less market share (shades of "The Producers"). It'll be interesting to see how 2021 shakes out; Yahoo! outbidding Google for default search engine momentarily put to rest the idea that Mozilla was an antimonopoly figleaf funded by Google. However, the minute Mozilla legally could, they flipped back to Google, and, frankly, that undercuts their bargaining position with Google. And with Yahoo.
> It was faster than all the competitors at the time - including firefox - and had much better word-of-mouth traction. Firefox always had a "techie expert" connotation back in the day, and it bit them in the butt when it came to the average joe deciding which browser to use.
Given how strongly Mozilla's fate is tied to market share, it seems like they should be leaning harder on advertising. I'm told Mozilla has a huge marketing department but IDK what they do TBH.
That’t kinda stupid to be honest. Just charge me $50 for Firefox... you know what make it $100 per year and I will pay, just to avoid Chrome.
I don’t know how many of us are out there, but a large number of people don’t mind paying for the tools they rely on. I have co-worker who pay $100+ to get the email client they want.
How such a payment scheme would work with an open source project I don’t know, but find a way for me to direct payments to Firefox.
> Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce — approximately 250 people of exceptional professional and personal caliber who have made outstanding contributions to who we are today. To each of them, I extend my heartfelt thanks and deepest regrets that we have come to this point. This is a humbling recognition of the realities we face, and what is needed to overcome them.
What a load of bull! How many people did she save from firing by taking a pay cut? I agree that it would have been an insignificant number of the 250 people fired, but it would have made a difference in the life of the employees not fired and it would have given meaning to her words.
Words are extremely cheap (including the ones I'm writing right now). Statements only become principles when they imply a personal cost, otherwise they are just ideas.
You do get that the total compensation for 250 FTE's is probably in the neighborhood of $25 million/yr. She gets paid about $1m/yr which includes performance incentives. So if she just gave up her whole salary she would only have to fire 96% of the people let go today.
C suite members raking in high salaries is the tiniest most insignificant issue when it comes to a large orgs finances. In most large orgs if C sites were paid $0 the average employee wouldn't even notice the difference.
> 250 FTE's is probably in the neighborhood of $25 million/yr
Mozilla is very engineering-heavy. While I don't know other people's salaries, I do know that the fully loaded cost of a developer almost anywhere is much higher than $100k/yr.
You do get that the CEO has the most power in directing where the company goes and the CEO is directly reponsible, at least in part, for the current situation Mozilla is in. As a result I think the CEO should have been the first to suffer the consequences of the reality they were (partly) responsible for creating, before the first employee would have been impacted.
The way I see it, the employees that had almost no control over Mozilla's direction over the last years are suffering the consequences.
Right but this makes no sense except as some weird punishment thing. Like it seems it would be the same to you if they still fired all 250 employees but also cut the CEOs salary as a slap on the wrist.
Like this stance is crazy if you apply it to anyone but the CEO. Can you imagine if you got punished for writing bad code or not making a project deadline by having your salary cut?
Regardless of whether you think she's doing a good job as the CEO, she's still doing her job and deserves to be paid. Your just asking for CEOs to be company whipping boys.
> You do get that the total compensation for 250 FTE's is probably in the neighborhood of $25 million/yr.
In 2018 she received almost $2.5 million comp from Mozilla. Assuming that her comp has not decreased since then, that would be 25 FTEs (according to your numbers) that she could have chosen not to fire at no other cost than her compensation. Do with that what you will.
Yes, I specifically addressed that point in my post:
> I agree that it would have been an insignificant number of the 250 people fired, but it would have made a difference in the life of the employees not fired and it would have given meaning to her words.
Like it definitely wouldn't have been worth it. Playing some weird self-sacrifice game to save a few highly skilled employees that will absolutely be able to find work elsewhere is silly.
Yes the whole situation sucks, layoffs are never fun. I'm sure this decision was genuinely hard for her to make and she doesn't need to self-flagellate to prove to anyone that she cared.
The layoffs themselves show that Mitchell Baker is a leader. Layoffs are by far the hardest thing for a CEO to do. Assessing the reality of their market position, examining their future opportunities and revenue streams, and positioning the company to still be around in 10 years sometimes means deciding that the people you have currently aren’t the people you need to ultimately be successful and stay in business.
You should never give a CEO a pay cut for doing their job and making the hard decisions to help keep the company in the black.
> Layoffs are by far the hardest thing for a CEO to do.
Seeing up close and personal several CEOs that laid off people, I saw very little evidence of that. Some even happily talked about vacations and buying yachts, when not in employee company.
It's a popular claim that 1 in 5 CEOs is a psychopath. I don't know if that's true, but I'm inclined to think it wouldn't be such a popular claim if it weren't somewhere close to the truth. CEOs who don't seem to give a damn about the wellbeing of their employees aren't particularly rare.
Something to consider here too is that Chris Beard was CEO of Mozilla for over 5 years ending late 2019. Mitchell Baker only took over within the last year.
While I was getting ready to reply and say that most of my comments in this thread talking about the CEO were meant as general comments not referring to a specific Mozilla CEO, I went and read the Wikipedia Page for Mitchell Baker, so while you are correct that she took over from Chris Beard as CEO, there is also this bit of history to consider:
> When the Mozilla Corporation was launched as a taxable subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation on August 3, 2005, Baker was named the CEO of the new entity. In addition, she joined the Mozilla Corporation's Board of Directors, though she also kept her seat on the Mozilla Foundation's board, as well as her role as Chairperson.
In 2014, she wrote this piece[0] (while she was not CEO, but Chair), justifying putting ads in Firefox.
Layoffs can be as much about spending less money as refocusing the company. The company might layoff people who are very good at X but have no experience with Y because the company is not doing X anymore and is focusing on Y. From the announcement, "our pre-COVID plan for 2020 included [...] investing in innovation and creating new products", which suggests they hired people who were very experienced at X (a new product) but have decided to kill development on X. It would be nice if the post actually said what X was, since this whole post is totally generic. Retraining people to work on Y rather than laying them off would be nice, but maybe that would take too long and those people don't want to be retrained to work on Y, and will be much happier working on X somewhere else.
I read in this thread that they removed servo people, given that this was one of the best investments of mozilla in the past few years I would argue that refocusing is an issue itself.
> We love the traits of it — the decentralization, its permissionless innovation, the open source underpinnings of it, and the standards part — we love it all. But to enable these changes, we must shift our collective mindset from a place of defending, protecting, sometimes even huddling up and trying to keep a piece of what we love to one that is proactive, curious, and engaged with people out in the world. [...] and seeing how the traits of the past can show up in new ways in the future.
If my US corporate-speak decoder works halfway decently this paragraph reads really scary. When exactly have decentralization, permissionless innovation, open source and web standards become things to remember fondly while you move on? This honesty reads like an admission of defeat.
These posts always make me wish that hackernews has a way to block posts from certain users.
These kind of posts always bring out the hateful comments and if I look at their posting history a lot of times they seem to post mostly hateful comments. Call it a filter bubble if you want but I would rather not waste my time trying to convince them they are wrong and would rather be able to block them.
I feel the same. A friend wrote an extension that allows you to do this and my life has been much better. It just kills threads made by users I don't like.
- I can support Mozilla today if I know the money goes to fix and improve Firefox
- For almost everything else I'll prefer to send the money directly
I sent a reply back to the last fundraising email I got and they still cannot promise that the money will go towards Firefox.
To me however Firefox seems to be their biggest chance of achieving their mission:
"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."
For this reason I find it deeply ironic that donation money somehow cannot be used to develop Firefox when that should be the core purposes.
I worked at Mozilla from 2013-2017, then moved into clean tech. I currently manage software engineers for a technically-not-cleantech company that is extremely effective at selling life-changing products, especially solar energy, in the global South. While I don't have open slots on my team, I'm happy to chat about software job hunts in general, and the amazing opportunities available right now to fight climate change in particular. There are dozens of legit companies that can use your skills—you just have to find them. If you need a #mozillalifeboat, feel free to get in touch. "sampenrose" on Google's email service.
> Just last night I was thinking about how it was possible that, given the relative trends, Mozilla’s greater legacy might turn out to be Rust, not Firefox.
This means a 1/3 reduction from where they were last year. And now with remote work being the norm, I could see a company like Mozilla preferring that to save further costs.
Their Google deal has not be renewed yet and that has accounted for a lot of their revenue in the past (the article mentions a 90% figure).
I just hope Mozilla Co & Mozilla Foundation survive.
Always struck me that this nonprofit has some of the most beaucoup waterfront real estate down at EMB/Harrison. And that it shared the building with one of its partners, Google.
750 employees with $350 million or more in revenue. It seems like they're just restructuring and using covid as cover. Maybe I'm wrong, but it kind of looks like that on the surface.
This is obviously very sad for the folk being laid off from Mozilla, and they have my sympathies and best wishes for finding alternate employment.
Separate to that, and I realise I'm shouting at the sky since this is just one comment among over 1200 others... CAN WE PLEASE STOP GIVING THE WEB TO GOOGLE.
Apple's iOS browser engine policy is basically the only thing that stands between Google and complete dominance of the web. That's right, an anti-choice, walled-garden decision to force WebKit on all iOS users, is the only defence against Chrome supplanting the ideal of The Web, with itself.
Firefox and Safari are basically the only browsers left that don't use Chromium, and they are making the sensible decision to hold back Google's frenetic sprint to expose our entire computers to JavaScript. I'm confident that Apple can hold the line if it wants to, but I have to assume that Firefox will be dead within 5 years, which means the entire dream of an open web, rests solely on Apple's whims. This is not healthy in any way.
To all of you who say things like "Safari is the new IE", or bemoan the lack of particular Chrome APIs in WebKit, or who solely target Chrome and don't care if your sites break in Firefox/WebKit.... you, all of you, individually and collectively, are killing the web. Stop sleepwalking all of us into a future where Chrome is the only "OS" that matters on any platform.
I came here to ask a question, hopefully one other people would like answered also:
If the funding for the FireFox web browser combined with all Mozilla projects/products, or is there some separation?
I would like to donate just to support development of the FireFox browser. Is that possible?
FireFox containers is a very important feature to me and supporting FireFox and containers is something I would like to support at a higher level than the few random Mozilla donations I have made in the past.
I personally think that Mozilla have been making poor decisions, but I can't believe that people would say they they are quitting Firefox because of it.
Mozilla might be going through a rough patch, and they now need our support more than ever. Hopefully Firefox will be around a lot longer than the people currently running the show.
I will not stop using Firefox, and will continue to try and help people move away from Chrome.
The new vision sounds like the old, current vision for the most part. I might be missing subtle changes in items 1 through 4. But item 5 is interesting:
> New focus on economics. Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges
I think combining this with the momentum behind things like the Federal Reserve's new inter-bank payments system (linked on HN yesterday) could finally make micropayments or something analogous mainstream. I would really enjoy shifting some of the advertising-funded model back to direct revenue from customers. I would like to be considered a "customer" again in more walks of life, generally. Not just a "subject." I think the customer-vendor dynamic is much more healthy when I am indeed the customer.
If there's anything hopeful to take from this announcement, I think this is it.
Maybe it's a cultural problem but many of their products are aimed at consumers when they have the opportunity to tune them for enterprise (lockwise?). They could make more money with better and paid consultation projects. Many open source projects they own can be sassified (voice project?).
A shame, the internet could use a product like Firefox.
`an open and accessible internet is essential to the fight.`
can't agree more. Unfortunately just having that is not enough to get people to use your product. VLC maintainers seems to have understood this. To paraphrase JB Kempf "if you want people to use your open source product, build a great product that is also open source."
Not sure where Firefox went wrong. And for sure the inclusion of default browsers in various OSes did not help (or even the automatic install of Edge whether you want to use it or not) but it seems like there are deeper problems with this product.
I really hope they can get act together and start gaining marketshare again.
I am curious how COVID impacted a company like Mozilla? Their main revenue comes from search partnerships, there were more people at home searching things during lockdown. In the internal message Mitchell Baker said:
“We started with immediate cost-saving measures such as pausing our hiring, reducing our wellness stipend and cancelling our All-Hands. But COVID-19 has accelerated the need and magnified the depth for these changes. Our pre-COVID plan is no longer workable. We have talked about the need for change — including the likelihood of layoffs — since the spring. Today these changes become real.”
I was told about 10 years ago that management at Mozilla was a shitshow. They have had layoffs, project cancellations, and internal strife for a long time. Sounds like more of the same.
The new FF version for android is a toy. All advanced features have been removed. Virtually no addons are available. No more about:config. The home screen is a joke ("collections" instead of my previously opened tab? What's that about?). Opening a new tab does not place the focus in the address bar, and the "new tab" button and the address bar are on opposite ends of the screen, resulting in very awkward finger movements. I got so angry in the first hour of using it that I uninstalled it. It's the worst browsing experience I've had since before IE4.
It's so bad that maybe it's deliberate in an attempt to sell the missing features as addons or a pro version or something? At least I hope that's what it is, otherwise I don't understand the move at all.
I feel for everyone who will lose their job here. That's never a pleasant thing, particularly so in current circumstances.
Notwithstanding that though - and with no disrespect to anyone being laid off - I'm actually really encouraged by this. The key quote from the announcement is this one:
"Furthermore, Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed."
Mozilla's reliance on Google is a major detraction from delivering privacy-focused products.
I've said before, and I'll say again: I'd gladly pay a fee for Firefox if it meant (a) it was funding the product so that (b) there was no need for them to peddle in surveillance.
I really wish Mozilla all the best. Commit to privacy, show me where to pay and I'll gladly sign up.
--
I'm aware they accept donations and have already donated. But that's different from paid-for products.
EDIT: cross-posted comment above from duplicate thread [0]. Don't think that's against guidelines - apologies if so.
> The key quote from the announcement is this one:
> "Furthermore, Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed."
That sentence doesn't seem to be anywhere in the announcement, nor in the linked PDF. Where are you getting this?
On one hand, it's of course kind of a bummer that these folks are losing their jobs--never an easy thing to see.
On the other, I'm excited about the products that may end up coming out of this. I'm already paying for the Mozilla VPN + Browser Extension (I think that totals something like $8/mo), plus another few dollars for additional storage on my personal Google account at the moment. I would be immensely enthusiastic about putting that (and more) money towards a privacy-respecting Mozilla-hosted email/calendar/file storage system instead.
That obviously not an insignificant engineering challenge, but there's a bunch of open-source work in that area already that could probably be used as a template. I only hope that whatever products they put out, they spend some time making sure they're not damaging the enormous amount of goodwill they've built up in the community about privacy and Internet ethics.
I find this sad news. I highly recommend mozilla to others due to its focus on user privacy and open nature of organization. I know it is not an option for a complete browser with its own js engine, rendering tool kit and kind of whole app eco-system is not possible to survive on donations and small income channels.
But, I would have highly recommended mozilla do it in a way to release a community and enterprises services. where Enterprise will lead the future path of browser with its own industrial/enterprise offering to customer sets like governments, Developers and big companies, parallel maintaining the community version of browser as its now, may be two feature cycle behind with some less but fully open features.
If I had an option to buy a paid version of mozilla service which gave me better functionality for application support and development I would have gladly paid for it.
I wish, It is the path they chose.
I like the new focus on how they will make money. While it's nice to be a mission-driven org they always straddled that line of being aspirational and being "for profit." It makes the value proposition tough to define. Putting an emphasis on revenue will better define the business without needing to sell their souls.
It really stinks that 250 people lost their jobs, I don't want to downplay that. But I think overall this is a good move for Mozilla. For them to be product-oriented will allow them to uphold their own privacy advocacy ideals. Most notably, they may eventually be able to remove Google as Firefox's default search engine.
Well after all these years they were soley sitting on Google's contract money and are yet to create a very competitive and revenue-generating product that users will pay for. Firefox VPN is essentially Mullvad with Firefox branding so there is no comparison with either of them.
Most of all of the products Mozilla has is either free (mostly) or not competitive enough to the point of redundancy. For the typical end-user (who really doesn't see open-source as an advantage) Pocket can be replaced with Chrome Bookmarks and ultimately, Firefox can be replaced with Chrome.
Add to that that for the freedom-concerned user Pocket has to be replaced (Wallabag is good), as do most of their other "privacy respecting" services. There's no advantage with them over any of the propriatary alternatives other than a fallen-out-of-favor-dwindling-financially foundation-corporation hybrid healf heartedly developing an important browser saying they won't sell your data.
Possibly. But Google gets the bad PR and stays in the dominant position anyway, while Firefox more or less disappears. I don't say Google necessarily wants to be evil towards Firefox, but in their position it is enough to not care.
Also, even if the contract is renewed, the number could be smaller.
Google isn't afraid of bad PR of larger caliber. No normal user cares whether Mozilla is getting money from Google and people who care find it questionable that Google is the default search engine instead of something like DuckDuckGo (that would fit the Firefox brand so much better).
Whenever the day comes it'll be a small notice on the normie-tech websites ("An era has come to an end") and a short discussion in freedom-concerned tech circles.
Who doesn't deep down already consider Mozilla dead at this point? I'm just hoping for a good rebirth.
I’ve always thought of Mozilla as a “force for good and change”, never as a money machine. This has maintained some balance for allowing Google to go largely unchecked. If Mozilla moves in a direction more focused on profit and more products, there’s no balance and the overdue regulating has to kick in fast.
I you think projects like Mozilla and Firefox are important donations can really go a long way. If enough people even donated ~$5/mo to projects like this, which is less than lots of people spend for Spotify or buying coffee, it would make open source privacy respecting projects a lot more viable.
> I you think projects like Mozilla and Firefox are important donations can really go a long way.
I know this kind of goes against my other comment stating that I'm super worried about losing the only viable free and open browser out there (my only browser), but: what's keeping me from donating is the bad aftertaste of the money being used for frivilous things. I don't want to fund their bookmarking service. I don't want to fund their VPN rebranding effort. I don't want to fund their authentication services. I don't want to fund their voice recognition services. They're probably great, but it's the browser that's absolutely essential and irreplaceable at this time!
You can't give them money and then put conditions on top of it. It's their business decision as to what they want to do with their monetary donations.
Otherwise, this would be like your employer saying, "I will pay you salary, buuut only if you promise not to spend it on alcohol". It clearly doesn't work like that, you just have to make a high level judgement if you agree with their values and if yes, go ahead with that donation.
Which is exactly what gspr is saying is the reason they don’t donate. If an org shows that they have no focus, then people won’t want to donate exactly because you can’t say what the money goes to.
All the hand wringing here is kind of pointless without pointing out that it appears that Google has not renewed its contract, which accounts for almost 90% of Mozilla’s revenue.
It’s obvious and necessary for Mozilla to consequently focus on revenue earners and put infra dev on the back burner.
Also, why you (Mozilla) are at it (Firefox): Please make Firefox the premium development tool for webdevs. Headless should work as with Chrome. I am forced to use Chrome when running Puppeteer.
Why create a separate "Firefox Developer Edition"? It's just a distraction.
What exactly does this mean? Will I be forced to find a new browser in the near future? Not that I was completely content with what happens for many years now, of course, it's just that I don't know anything better (or even not worse).
This is one of the most pathetic layoff releases I have ever seen. Its extremely, soul crushing, heart wrenchingly depressing to see Mozilla succumb to the the get woke go broke mentality.
They should be focused on making good tech period nothing else.
> Investing in New Products
We are organizing a new product organization outside of Firefox that will both ship new products faster and develop new revenue streams. Our initial investments will be Pocket, Hubs, VPN, Web Assembly and security and privacy products.
This is very much welcome, and I look forward to more products with paid tiers. Mozilla Corporation must have ways to get revenues from end users through different means, and combining that with Mozilla’s vision is a good thing. If there’s one thing missing for me in this list, it’s an email service that combines the best of other paid email providers.
“Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.”
“I bring up Gerv's open-mindedness because I know that many people didn't find him so, but, frankly, I think those folks were mistaken. It is well documented publicly that Gerv held what most would consider particularly “conservative values”. And, I'll continue with more frankness: I found a few of Gerv's views offensive and morally wrong. But Gerv was also someone who could respectfully communicate his views. I never felt the need to avoid speaking with him or otherwise distance myself. Even if a particular position offended me, it was nevertheless clear to me that Gerv had come to his conclusions by starting from his (a priori) care and concern for all of humanity. Also, I could simply say to Gerv: I really disagree with that so much, and if it became clear our views were just too far apart to productively discuss the matter further, he'd happily and collaboratively find another subject for us to discuss. Gerv was a reasonable man. He could set aside fundamental disagreements and find common ground to talk with, collaborate with, and befriend those who disagreed with him. That level of kindness and openness is rarely seen in our current times.”
Here is an article another person who knew Gervase Markham who refutes Mitchell Bakers account https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/ . Worth a read.
Here is Brokedamouth on the two class system now at Mozilla https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061500 Comment replicated here (it is worth looking at the whole discussion):
“I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500/night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment that made it clear as day was during a trip to Hawaii for the company all hands. The plane was a 737 so you had to walk past first class. These all hands are a huge deal for families - many were struggling down the aisle, carrying booster seats, etc. And they were passing two of the C-levels sitting in giant first-class seats sipping tropical cocktails. The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last. Mozilla has always reversed that rule and the result was a pretty toxic culture, all around.”
The people saying this is full of corporate doublespeak look to be very true, especially when you have a memory and can look up what has gone on before.
I had the pleasure of meeting Gerv once at a UK Linux conference in the mid 2000s. He was a really nice person, and an asset as a public face of Mozilla. I can't help but feel that his critics are genuine "illiberals" who can't tolerate any point of view but their own. And unfortunately, it's those people who are part of its current management problems.
I did disagree with him about the Mozilla position upon trademarks, which was unusually aggressive for an open source project at the time, and for the most part still is. As a Debian developer at the time, that may have influenced my views somewhat.
> "Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges," Baker said.
> We must learn and expand different ways to support ourselves and build a business that isn't what we see today.
Perhaps I am wrong, but to me this reads as Mozilla plans to give up on not being evil and to do whatever it takes to make money. Sounds like Mozilla products will soon become toxic including Firefox if not forked. Also, looks like their hand is being forced by google.
True, they could possibly spin out other high quality secure products and I hope that is what they do and that I am wrong. It all depends on the current leadership and how desperate they get I suppose and I am not familiar enough with that to say.
> Sounds like Mozilla products will soon become toxic including Firefox if not forked.
This is extremely worrisome. Has it not been demonstrated quite clearly that developing and maintaining a modern and secure web browser is a gargantuan task, almost on par with an OS itself? Isn't Mozilla really the only organization that currently stands a chance at keeping a truly free and open such browser in the game?
It's definitely not a requirement for companies to go into minute detail when making these sorts of announcements, but Mozilla is a non-profit and I think it would be good IMHO if they were to shed some light at least on the skillet of those being let go relative to the new direction being taken.
If Mozilla is charting a path forward as a "technical powerhouse" and focusing on Pocket, Hubs, VPN, etc. (as per the linked memo), I would hate to imagine even a single SWE being laid off for reasons not performance-related.
It worries me that nobody in power at Mozilla seems to have the first clue how to make money from Free Software and so they have made "commercialism" a corporate fetish.
Making money and looking commercial are not the same thing, team. For the some organizations they can be diametrically opposed. Mozilla, for example.
Mozilla need a CEO who knows how to make money for the company rather than just receive it in their paycheck. Ideally one who eats up less than the revenue from the first 50,000 VPN subscriptions.
Good intentions or ethicality aside, I don't find Firefox as a browser convincing. It is just not as good as Chrome in handling navigating web pages.
I'd say focus on making Firefox better experience wise should always been their priority, but the neglection of it has been lasting too long. Now Chrome becomes the even bigger monster than IE uses to be, Firefox will have a much harder time to justify its own existence in a financially substainable way
Mozilla's ace up the sleeve, which I'm sure has been a temptation to them many times - and seems more and more inevitable the more they brand themselves as the privacy browser - is to make ublock origin a default and baked-in feature out of the box.
I see this as an if, not when situation. Google may pull funding immediately if they do so but the surge in users would be extreme, possibly forcing big G to reconsider or lose an ever increasing market share to Bing and DDG.
Maybe DuckDuckGo could pay Mozilla to be Firefox's default search engine and get many more eyeballs on DDG… but if uBlock Origin blocks adverts on DDG, why would DDG pay Mozilla?
The core Gecko engineering group in Taipei was all laid off already back in 2018. I'm not sure what was left but apparently it wasn't considered very essential.
I was surprised and saddened when Mozilla gave up their mobile Firefox OS. They should have been "The Web Company". Google and Apple have competing interests with their proprietary native apps. They would much prefer the entire web shift to apps. Mozilla could have been the open mobile app platform. Maybe one of the purposes of Chrome OS is to ensure someone like Mozilla doesn't do it.
- 5 years of C/C++ programming experience.
- 3 years of experience in Linux native application development.
- Having experience in QT development is preferred.
I am already paying a very high price (mostly in time) to keep the data thieves from stealing my precious data. I would pay a pretty high monthly fee to someone who I could trust to take care of it for me. That's why I pay the Apple tax. How about a free browser for those who want to DIY privacy and a premium for those who don't want to spend their time?
I wonder why they didn't ever try to make it as a cloud provider, it would fit their mission well to provide cloud services, it would just be for the server side instead of the client side. Guess it's about a decade too late to pivot there, but firms like Cloudflare shows that it's possible to compete with the big actors with enough focus.
Can they just focus on the browser? Firefox has been falling behind for years now, especially on mobile. And it's not all because of Google's questionable advertising. Chrome is simply better in many ways.
Mozilla is failing it's core mission chasing so many vanity projects. It's a non-profit, not a startup. Flush management and start over
If you actually use Firefox it's really hard to support the belief that there's some quality or speed gap like there was in the mid-2010s. They're neck and neck on quality and features but it also highlights the degree to which Google uses their other businesses to promote Chrome: everywhere you go you'll be hit with suggestions to switch to Chrome, not to mention various QA “lapses” like lowering performance on YouTube or accidentally breaking logins on GCP only in Firefox.
"New focus on economics": It was bad enough seeing terrible clickbait in the "Recommended by Pocket" section displayed on every new tab. Now I have to go into settings to opt-out of Sponsored Stories so I don't have to see ads for Honey.
All to fund the so-called "internet activist movement"?
I'm totally with you on "Recommended by Pocket" thing, it's very sad. But I think you are confusing Mozilla with something it's not.
Mozilla is not a software company today that tries to be an internet activist. Mozilla is an activist company that also happens to develop software to prove their point. So no, it's not just about the web browser.
I wish Mozilla would distribute their free software the way some museums charge entry. A “suggested donation” of $X. And when I go to download the browser prompt me to either pay the suggested donation or manually change it to $0. I’d gladly pay $10 for Firefox every major update and I’m sure I’m not alone. It’s just not something I really think about very often. The passive asks just aren’t that effective.
> And when I go to download the browser prompt me to either pay the suggested donation or manually change it to $0.
FYI elementary OS does that and they have public analytics where you can see how many people skip it: https://plausible.io/elementary.io
Their "payment skipped" goal has 57.9k conversions, while "payment complete" has 1k conversions. This is <2 months of data, since they've started using Plausible pretty recently.
In theory it's a nice idea, but it's hard enough to persuade my friends and acquaintances to try Firefox (again, since many of them left between versions 4 through 56). If they visited the website and were asked to make a donation, they'd think Firefox has become commercial software and will leave immediately. This will hurt their market share even more, if anything.
Ubuntu tried that one, and it wasn't very effective.
Unfortunately web browsers cost money to make and maintain and people at large have shown they won't buy one the old fashioned way. Finding something that works is a hard problem.
The free open source software approach has its own limitations. Developers and companies need to make money to be viable. Software is a class of product; it takes work and resources and simply can’t be all free.
This is going to be a problem going forward. I feel bad seeing developers sometimes begging for donations. Why should software be free?
Are there any lists of people looking for work during this round of layoffs? It sounds like a lot of good projects got cut and there's some companies growing that are finding it hard to locate talent. The pandemic is making people weary of switching jobs and at my company it's been very difficult.
While we are focusing in technology, once need to look into their Finance team and how they push leadership on terms of income/cash flow. Recently one ex-Google guy joined as COO not after a very successful gig in Cloud, hope he helps leadership this time.
What's the relation between Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation? Corporation is for profit and Foundation is non profit so they don't share revenues? But why they don't merge and become one for profit company, they would much stronger.
It feels like my hopes for ever seeing the Library window get fixed are being dashed against the rocks. How can they ever hope to change the world when they can't even rewrite a history/bookmarks GUI? I'm genuinely concerned for Firefox.
Dear Mozilla, I would gladly sign-up for monthly patronage payments that go towards the development of Firefox features that the community chooses. Firstly, "installable" PWA support on Linux and Android. No one cares about your VPN or Pocket.
I've used & loved Mozilla forever but at some point I am starting to wonder: when you fire 1/3 of your workforce & have obvious mismanagement problems, how can you still guarantee the security of such a complex piece of software?
I wish the EU would get behind Firefox development. It would certainly be in their courtyard, given how much energy they've spent battling monopolies and toward creating a market in which there is competition.
Can someone tell me how COVID situation explicitly affected Mozilla's revenue to such an extant? If anything, Internet companies were the least affected or in-fact has been benefited from COVID situation.
A door closes a window opens. Does not look good, but neither does the current status quo. Might just be the blessing in disguise that kicks off some actual competition in the browser space.
Would defiantly move from proton to Mozilla’s VPN the minute they make it available in Europe. Would love to cancel my iCloud storage too, if Mozilla offered an hosted NextCloud or something similar.
Mozilla's VPN is powered by Mullvad. Mullvad is available globally right now, costs €5/month (vs Mozilla VPN's $5), and allows a range of payment methods all the way down to "cash in an envelope".
Mozilla are great, I have nothing against them, but I really struggle to see the point of their VPN service.
I’d like to support Mozilla going forward. I’m not sure if this is a major revenue stream for them possibly or not, but if I can help, why not. I’m aware of mullvad btw and I need to run out my proton subscription in any case.
Add features to your smaller products (Lockwise, Notes, Monitor, Pocket, etc.) and put them behind a paywall, while keeping the core features free to use.
I'd pay triple the price of Pocket's premium / Mozilla's VPN ($15/month) for a Mozilla/Firefox app pack.
Rust has gained so much traction at this point with other major companies (Cloudflare, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc), because of the unique value it offers, that I assume it would have to be picked up if it got dropped by Mozilla.
mrustc doesn't support all of Rust, its only purpose is to bootstrap the normal Rust compiler; and it only works on x86 and x86_64 Linux and isn't very much optimized (eg. needs about 10GB of RAM for the final linking).
And it's lagging behind by a year or two (which is about 15 intermediate releases of the Rust compiler you need to compile to get the current one); because it only has a single developer and keeping up is a huge amount of work.
Web browsers should be considered public utility, funded by tax payers money and developed by independent organization. Core web browser should have minimal set of features, just enough to safely browse internet and do every day tasks, like online banking. Open source "core" web browser could be extended by companies and provided as commercial software with various additional features (VPNs, news aggregators, etc.) that might be useful to some users who have means to pay for them.
The mentions of “racism”, “advocacy”, etc on this post make me want to puke. All while firing people from servo, rav1e, etc. Make a bloody good browser and stop meddling with politics, dunces!
Glad they spent time replacing the facist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, white supremacist verbiage "master" instead of ensuring their white and Asian employees had jobs.
tldr (if I remember correctly): the higher ups is still paid a shit-ton of money despite firing their employees and begging for donations. Along with abandonware being created all the time (some of them were good ideas even).
It used to be centered around XUL, and there was even a sort of proto-electron in the form of xulrunner and the related Prism project, but they were all dropped years ago and XUL itself has been deprecated and is being steadily replaced.
There might've been a window somewhere in there where turning XUL/Gecko into a Qt style application toolkit could've been an option, but I think we're well past that point now.
Yup; Google / Chrome, Apple / Safari + webkit, and Microsoft / Edge get away with it because their browser is not their product, it's an extra. For Google its original intent was to make the internet faster so that people would see more ads.
Firefox needs a company behind it whose income is not tied to the browser. I don't believe you can monetize a browser, not without doing some dodgy shit like forcing search engines on people, injecting ads, premium features, etc.
I know Firefox tried to launch a number of products over the years to try and make money, but at this point it doesn't seem to be working. I think their only hope financially is to be bought up by a FAANG, but they either have their own browsers or no interest in having one.
> Since not enough people are donating, they have to figure out how to make money otherwise.
I'd love to donate but only for the browser, not for that other stuff. And that seems to be the main problem here: They make tons of money, but there not investing it where they make the money with.
I wonder what percentage of their bottom line comes from goodwill donations from individuals, versus the millions they get each year from Google and various other search companies they have contracts with - in some recent past years Google has been funding like 90%+ of their budget haven't they?
There's Mozilla Foundation and there's Mozilla Corporation (the corporation is a subsidiary of the foundation). For Mozilla Corporation:
> In CY 2018, Mozilla Corporation generated $435.702 million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue compared to $542 million in CY 2017.
Having been disillusioned with what means to try to make money with desktop FOSS software, I would bet that goodwill donations aren't that representative.
Foundations often have trusts. Many of the donations go into the trust and most of your operating expenses (perhaps not including fund raising) come out of the interest payments, not the principle.
I was so disappointed when I discovered Mozilla was spending it as fast as it comes in. There will never be a windfall like the Google donation again.
They could still work out a way to renew the Mozilla-Google contract, if they are extremely desperate.
I would be against it and prefer them to focus on their own products and strike alternative funding deals with multiple companies like what letsencrypt does and NOT solely rely on one source like Google.
Anyone else concerned by a browser manufacturer claiming to build products by mixing tech with their "values"? This seems like the exact opposite of what I want with utility software.
I think they are able. Apple still arguably does. But there's no obvious incentive for them. Developing your own browser engine is a big ongoing investment, constantly adding new features and promptly plugging security vulnerabilities. We've long expected browsers to be free, so it doesn't generate any direct income. If they want to collect data with it, they can wrap Blink in their own app.
Mozilla keeps it up because of the principle that there should be more than one decent rendering engine. For-profit companies can't take that stance.
Apple can't really compete with Chrome. They have walled off one little walled garden (iOS) that Chrome isn't allowed to enter, but everywhere that Chrome is allowed, it is crushing Safari.
Same reason Google forked webkit to make blink. Over time the involved parties' priorities diverge and when that gap is wide enough, it makes sense to fork.
Also note it's not just Edge we're talking about. Microsoft is one of the main Electron stewards, and products like VSCode are built on that platform.
As I said, I'd like that to happen, but I don't see MS being bothered by diverging priorities enough to fork after _throwing away_ a whole engine to avoid duplicating work. At least not in the medium term.
I don't have any insider knowledge. It makes sense to me that a trillion-dollar platform company will at some point want to control their browser destiny, and not rely on their competitor's roadmap.
You may very well be right. I have no special knowledge of internal workings at MS. Having said that, I can guarantee that there are factions within MS that were against getting rid of Edge and factions that are all about MS building their own browser. It's very possible these factions may win out at some point in the future. They certainly have the talent and resources to work on Chromium/Edge independently.
They're already knee-deep in some ideology bullshit (instead of working on actual browser that people want to use) and now they cover laying off 250 people with corporate garbage talks.
I really hope that Firefox has a future, but that kind of events make me thing otherwise.
Also, Rust now has open source autonomy/community. Mozilla could go away tomorrow and it would survive. There are some pretty big names invested and interested in it.
Corporate cancer[0] strikes again. Mozilla took on a lot of social justice projects over the years. They hung around their ankles like a boat anchor. Good on them for jettisoning that excess baggage and refocusing on their primary business.
Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation.
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.
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.
The (substantial) one they were forced to pay Brendan for firing him. You see, CA law protects employees from being fired for political activities done outside work -- this was a law put on the books a long time ago, originally to defend unionization campaigns and communists from being fired, but it means I can donate to the Pro-Life-Anti-Gay-Anti-Black party all day long, attend their conventions, give speeches, etc, and it's illegal for you to fire me for that.
Funny how so few people know about this law.
That's why they had to come to a settlement to pay him so that he would agree to leave and not pursue his rights under the law.
They didn't fire Eich, as I said in my posting that you replied to. Did you not read that? So what proof do you have that they paid him a financial settlement for firing him, when clearly they didn't fire him? Or are you just making up false accusations now that contradict the known facts?
Exactly how much did they pay him, and why, since they certainly didn't fire him, and just how do you know that? Where is your evidence, or your retraction and apology for lying and spreading misinformation?
It's great that a user-centered protest against a CEO who literally donated to ban gay marriage is considered "virtue signalling". And that's not even considering that Eich was a CEO for all of 11 days before he quit.
I think that’s when their values changes from being a technically excellent product to being a friendly company that values harmony over function.
So it did stick to their values, but their values seem superficial rather than functional.
As a user, I would rather have a better browser than a company full of people who think that being against gay marriage 10 years ago means they are dangerous to coworkers or whatnot.
I think it’s great for companies to choose their own values and make their own way. And I can prefer companies that focus on other things.
I don’t necessarily think firing Eich causes Mozilla to suck, but I think Brave is a much better browser and they have far fewer employees with less funding.
I don’t donate to Mozilla and one of the reasons is because their mission is so vague.
Brave is just (yet another) wrapper for Chromium. The scope of the project is nothing like the scope of Firefox, let alone Mozilla.
As for being a better browser, built in adblocking is great (especially on mobile). But the whole Brave rewards thing is kind of weird and never made sense to me.
It’s a very different browser, but I used it as an example because I think it’s much better than Firefox and Chrome.
Mozilla could have made Brave, they didn’t. Brave is simpler, but better, I think, and even more so shows off how Mozilla’s values aren’t in making awesome software, but in something else.
I largely ignore the weird Brave blockchain thing and just use it as a nice, simple browser.
Are you suggesting that Mozilla should have made a chromium skin instead of an actual browser? So far as I can see the only thing meaningful brave offers over chromium is adblocking on mobile which is indeed huge but also available on mobile Firefox. Meanwhile Mozilla has given us rust, servo, and and an addon ecosystem that is still more powerful and flexible than chrome even post giving old school addons the ax.
I don’t think Mozilla should have Brave per se, but it shows some of the work they could have done.
If they had to literally skin chrome to do then I guess they could. But they should be capable of so much more.
Specially Brave is faster to launch and uses less resources than Firefox and had privacy and ad blocking features turned on by default. I particularly like the little bug that shows you how much bloat it’s blocked.
Adblocking out of the box would be hard given that most of mozillas ad money comes from search partners which are at root ad companies. They still advertise adblockers like ublock origin among their recommended addons and enabling adblocking is 30 seconds work and with sync it will be automatically added to firefox as soon as you sign into sync.
Ultimately this money is what has enabled Mozilla to exist at all. Brave is living on borrowed money from presumed future revenue from its cryptocurrency scheme which may or may not come to fruition.
Brave was a good browser. Now it's... what, a Chromium extension? I liked pre-rewrite Brave much more than post-rewrite. The tab contexts (or whatever they were called, it's been so long that I've forgotten) were great - pre-rewrite Brave had ten separate containers for cookies and so on, so if you kept Facebook in context 8, you'd only be logged into Facebook in context 8, and you could do all your other browsing in the nine other contexts.
This was also good for multiple accounts; most social media doesn't support clients anymore, or doesn't have good clients, and in order to keep separate topics separate, you need multiple accounts. So now I keep three different browsers open, because there's just no good way to do this otherwise.
I still mostly use Brave, but IMO it's much less differentiated from other browsers than pre-rewrite.
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.
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.
I think it’s disingenuous to split hairs like this. Eich didn’t exhibit any plans t resign until the episode and pressure that resulted in his resignation. I think that’s the same thing and I would also use this term any time a CEO “resigns to spend more time with her family” instead of being fired.
How is quoting the official Mozilla FAQ "splitting hairs"? It doesn't claim he's leaving to spend more time with his family, it literally asks if he was fired, and answers no, then asks if he was asked to resign, and answers no. How more explicit can you get? Do you have reason to believe the FAQ is lying?
So you're calling Eich willfully ignorant to claim he was not fired or forced out, when he actually was? Has he said that himself, or are you putting words into his mouth?
If you're a CEO of a company why would you resign? Just for fun? The idea of a resignation does not come randomly and the closest reason why Eich decided to resign appears to be extremely petty.
If you're a CEO of a company why would you be against gay marriage? Just for fun? The idea of a destroying someone else's marriage does not come randomly and the closest reason why Eich decided to destroy other people's marriages appears to be extremely petty.
If he was forced to resign, then that makes him a liar, because he explicitly stated that he was not forced to resign. And if he's a liar, then he certainly shouldn't be the CEO of Mozilla.
Sorry, but no. You can't 'force' someone to do something 'voluntarily'.
The obvious reality is that Eich realized he fucked up and could no longer effectively lead Mozilla, given that they are as much about their self reinforced myth of being the internet good guys as they are about tech.
And so he stepped down.
The kind of scene that you are envisioning occurs in Maffia movies but not IRL. Eich was under a lot of pressure, but most of that as a direct consequence of the inherent conflict between Mozilla's stated external position and Eich's personal actions. When you are CEO of such a large company you know that you can't combine the two unless you mean it.
Props to Eich for doing what was right instead of further harming Mozilla.
That's outside pressure. Not inside pressure. Mozilla board + employees actually wanted Eich to stay.
Anyway you seem to be quite stuck on your interpretation, all of the people involved have a single consistent story and instead you want to believe your own. You are of course welcome to your opinion.
It's flabbergasting what intellectually dishonest mental gymnastics and strained misinterpretations and denials of proven facts that homophobes will resort to in order to bravely stand up for each other and proudly justify their bigotry.
Cancel culture is honestly not a very good weapon, silencing people doesn’t produce any dialogue but makes people afraid of saying anything, creates a sensation of paranoia and fear. And lots of innocent folks fell into that trap and had their lives destroyed for no good reason. Canceling has been overused and what could once be used as an ace in the sleeve it became a nail bomb. I don’t think we could get anywhere fruitful by allowing these, it may in fact take us backwards a few steps. Dialogue and debate is the only way
>He donated to leave the existing law in place that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.
This is wrong in every way that actually matters.
The California State Supreme Court struck down the law which banned gay marriage, and gay couples were allowed go be married. Many many gay couples were married during this period.
Eich donated to Proposition 8, a ballot initiative which provided an amendment to the California State Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman within the state consitution, in effect overruling the judgement of the California Supreme Court.
It was not an effort to "leave the law in place", it was an effort to remove from gay couples a right which they had already been granted by the court system, and to freeze this into the constitution itself.
So imagine being a gay Mozilla employee and knowing that your boss not only wants to prevent you from gaining civil rights, but wants to remove civil rights which you were already granted.
> Hell, even Obama ran on keeping that the law.
DOMA is completely unrelated. This is about the California Constitution, not any state or federal law.
I agree with you that the internet version of torches and pitchforks is probably more counterproductive than righteous, but I think in Eich's case the backlash and ultimate result were probably fair. In his own words, he could not be an effective leader under the circumstances. That was exactly right. In 2014, LGBTQ rights were still very much an active fight, and placing someone who was publicly fighting against those civil rights into a position to be the public face of the organization and the leader to everyone working for and with it was untenable. Public protests in that very specific scenario were warranted, and their success should be held as an example of when and how the influence of public opinion was wielded appropriately and effectively.
Brendan Eich was in no way destroyed, and it certainly wasn't over speech. The anger against Eich was because of _actions_, specific and concrete, the entire purpose of which was to deny people like you basic civil rights.
"deserving, if there is any" Ah yes, clearly no more imaginable deserving case in all the world than legally protected political donations COUGH METOO COUGH
It wasn't the opinion, it was the actions that were taken. As CEO you're in the spotlight. A CEO also (together with the board) sets direction. That's quite different from any other position within the company. Meaning, for most positions I do not understand why people are getting fired. For a CEO to act in a way that is highly frowned upon, plus goes against what the company is trying to convey, that's just plain weird. IMO keeping such a person on would be strange.
The evidence is that he was pushed out of the CEO position, and received a monetary settlement lol.
A person would have to be extremely stupid to think that if someone got pushed out of a CEO position, that it is somehow impossible that the company/ceo would be incentivized to not talk about.
There is quite obviously a financial incentive here. I am not sure how someone could deny the existence of this financial incentive.
This is standard stuff. It is completely reasonable that either of them would not want the bad publicity from that, and that there are financial incentives to not admit that he was pushed out of the CEO position.
Executives get pushed out of positions, without companies or the executives admitting to it, or lying and saying that they left voluntarily.
Again: where is your evidence that he was "pushed out" and that he "received a monetary settlement lol"?
I specifically asked you for evidence, which you failed to provide. "Laughing out loud" is not proof, it just highlights that you don't have any.
So I'll ask you again for proof: provide a link to a reputable source that proves that he was pushed out, that he received a monetary settlement, and that Eich and the FAQ are lying.
Otherwise the only thing you've proven is that homophobes will bend over backwards, twist facts, and lie to rationalize and cover up for each other's bigotry. If you can't prove it, then apologize for spreading misinformation.
You're accusing Eich and the board of lying, but now I've asked you to prove that YOU are not lying, and you've failed.
If someone is really going to deny the existence of an extremely obvious financial incentive for a company to lie about idea that it pushed out the CEO, then I am not sure what could be possibly told to convince that person of anything.
Someone would have to be completely and entirely lost, to not be able to see the clear and obvious motivations for a large corporation to lie about the idea that it pushed their freaking CEO out of the position.
I will state again. I am referencing the obvious financial incentive here. Only someone who is completely lost would not recognize that as an obvious motivation.
It is not misinformation to point out the completely apparent financial motivation for them doing this.
That is the evidence that I am referencing.
I absolutely consider it to be evidence if there is a huge and obvious financial motivation.
That's not a fair point about virtue signalling. I get the motivation there, the term rubs you the wrong way (me too) because it's frequently used by the wrong people, and you're trying to either help the guy write or write off his arguments. But there's no guilt by association. There's nothing inherent about 'virtue signalling' that makes it bigoted, and if corporations found a way to make money by pretending to be bigoted, the scale would tilt in the other direction.
Free speech and anti-corporate attitudes are traditionally liberal values. Nowadays, you see arguments from bigots that oppose corporate power over free speech. We shouldn't be forced to withdraw our positions on free speech or corporate power just because they're associated with bigotry now. The idea of expecting others to do so is apalling to me, even if I'm not on board with the virtue signalling stuff specifically.
I was going to say "virtue signalling to West coast liberals", but I decided to shorten things up a bit.
Mozilla doesn't have any more business interest devoting resources to LGBT causes than Chick-Fil-A has a business interest in funding anti-LGBT causes.
The difference is Chick-Fil-A makes money hand over fist and can afford to take its eye off the prize a little. Mozilla doesn't have that same luxury.
One can argue that Chick-Fil-A has made homophobia part of their business interests. Unlike Mr. Eich, who donated to homophobic political causes with his own money, the outrage at Chick-Fil-A stems from them using their corporate foundation to make such donations.
So Eich's case is, despite superficial resemblance, markedly different. Mozilla built a brand around openness and the idea of "putting people first" and making them feel "empowered, safe and independent." (Those quotes are from at least one version of their mission statement.) Eich's backing of the anti-gay-marriage initiative was a PR problem for them in a way that it might not have been for many other companies. Also, he violated the first rule of holes (i.e., when you're in one, stop digging); it's possible they might have been able to do effective damage control without booting him if his initial response hadn't been, in so many words, "it's my money and I can do what I want with it."
And, sure: it is, and he can. The CEO of a nonprofit Catholic hospital chain could also use their money to donate to Planned Parenthood. But, if they did, we can be reasonably sure the hospital's boards of directors would have words with them about it.
What prize and business interest are you referring to? The Mozilla Corporation is a company that must answer to its shareholders, and its only shareholder is the Mozilla Foundation. The Foundation, in turn, has interests determined by its board, and "an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience" is one of those interests (added formally to their manifesto in 2018, but likely the guiding idea behind the Eich matter).
You could certainly disagree with the interests of the Mozilla Foundation's board, and could choose to support another organization, like Brave Software, that has different ones, but are you suggesting that a board should not be able to determine the interests, within legal limits, for a non-profit, or that the sole shareholder of a corporation should not be able to control its interests and mission?
I'm not sure I understand why establishing social values shouldn't be a vital component of any organization, particularly a non-profit organization dedicated to equality and openness, that employs a large number of people and relationships with the public and any number of third-parties? I'm actually not sure it's operationally possible to ignore them as a large public organization. Further, how much time and resources do you think it really takes to identify and define a code of values? Seems like it wouldn't necessarily require the full-time focus of even one member of staff and the very occasional meeting.
Chicken sandwiches and web browsers are not a moral purpose for being. It is difficult to imagine both the priorities you have identified and the idea that you find love and hate to be equivalent purposes like rooting for different sports teams.
One party has predictably made a mess of everything it touches including a pandemic response that will eventually kill over 200,000 Americans while suing end Obamacare which will if successful result in 20M Americans losing health care.
The last time they were in power they started multiple wars that has cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.
Are we now stuck with this vacuous corporate virtue signalling forever, or just until the globalist/leftist/whatever-ists finally achieve the absolute tyranny they seem to be seeking?
It's wild to live in a world where a guiding philosophy of maybe we as a society should make best efforts to treat people with maximum kindness is mistaken for "absolute tyranny".
Yes they could have gone with a much clearer message: "People still aren't using Firefox much, so we've had to lay off part of our workforce. However we have lots of great technology almost ready so expect that to change soon" sort of thing.
Instead: In these COVID times, COVID COVID unprecedented COVID systemic racism. COVID. Btw we fired 250 people. Uncertain times, COVID.
Why does Mozilla even develop their own browser? There is inherently nothing wrong with everyone using Chromium as a foundation. Mozilla could use Chromium as renderer while still doing all the privacy preserving stuff they do. There is absolutely no correlation between the rendering engine and privacy. And they few interlinks (fingerprinting, etc.) can very likely be addressed through patches that are rebased over Chromium.
Firefox with its own renderer is dead anyway on iOS already, where everyone is forced into Webkit. It seems like a loosing battle to spend so much money on something that doesn't give the average user ANY benefit whatsoever. Yes, Chrome will be a monopoly, but Microsoft already bought into that monopoly. What's the point of fighting a loosing battle? Focus on integrating Chromium and make it into a rock solid privacy-first browser.
They'll be all fired before they realized that you're spelling the truth.
Until them you're condemned to be downvoted in order to lessen the harm on their childish sensitivities.
Cognitive biases are indeed powerful.
Mozilla was dead to me the moment they decided to financially support the encrypted communication services of antifa (riseup.net). Even though that donation was a drip compared to what the CEO pulls out of the organisation.
I straight up deleted it! And I make sure that any organisation I get into won't bother optimizing or even testing for FF since it has such a small user base these days that its not worth bothering with it, testing on the default android browsers and safari has higher priorities these days.
If the end users complain, we tell them to use ANY other browser now and they are happy with it.
This is what you get when you pose as an NGO that stands for values such as free-speech and openness while you do nothing but stiffle it behind the curtains. (Helping professional political agitators, that are renown for attacking peaceful protests etc is the opposite of supporting free-speech, so is getting your own CEO booted for having an opinion, controversial or not!)
Their priorities are out of wack. Firefox is their golden goose. It's the thing that gives them clout and revenue. Their job is to increase adoption because increased adoption means more clout and more revenue. You do that by constantly reinvesting in the platform and making it your core singular focus, especially performance and tooling (because developers are a big driver for browser adoption). Where is the Firefox version CEF? Where is a competitive option to v8/node.js? Why is MS Edge (and every other independent browser) based on CEF and not Firefox? Why has Firefox performance lagged behind Chrome for years now?
Since they ousted Eich (and maybe even before that), they've been focusing on everything except Firefox, and as a result they've steadily lost market-share. They screwed up.
Case in point:
>New focus on product. Mozilla must be a world-class, modern, multi-product internet organization.
What do you mean 'multi-product internet organization'? You have Firefox, and ... what else? Nothing. Firefox is the only thing that keeps them relevant and provides employment for their people. But let's instead focus on everything else?
Counterpoint: Firefox is the thing they're best known for, but it's been inexorably losing market share for years to a direct competitor with vastly more financial muscle and access to very prominent advertising space. At the same time, they're dependent on that competitor for most of their revenue.
It's hard to imagine they could give Firefox a significant technical edge over Chrome, no matter how much they focus on it. Even if Google plays entirely fair - not optimising things like GMail & Google Maps for Chrome at all - it has the resources to keep up with anything Mozilla can do.
Throwing all the eggs in one basket and praying is not a strategy. It makes sense for them to diversify. Inevitably there will be some failures (Firefox Phone seems like a bad idea with hindsight, but hindsight is always 20/20), but some things are having a bit of quiet success, like Firefox Send or their 'Privacy not Included' guides. How they create revenue, I have no idea, though their new VPN is one idea.
>but it's been inexorably losing market share for years to a direct competitor with vastly more financial muscle
If you remember, they gained market-share by competing and beating another direct competitor with vastly more finical muscle.
>It's hard to imagine they could give Firefox a significant technical edge over Chrome, no matter how much they focus on it.
Have they tried? Why isn't Firefox front-and-center in this blog post. Why wasn't Firefox listed in their five areas of focus?
But if their attitude is that they will never be able to compete with Chrome, maybe they should just adopt CEF and move on to building all those new products they alluded to.
>Throwing all the eggs in one basket and praying is not a strategy.
They have one egg, one basket. Firefox is the only thing that makes them relevant. Without Firefox they have nothing. That they have delusions of grandeur is their problem. To me, not having Firefox be the core focus of Mozilla is considerably more risky than trying to figure out new products.
> they gained market-share by competing and beating another direct competitor
Microsoft wasn't really interested in the web, and let IE stagnate for years. Google makes an enormous amount of money through the web, and consequently puts a lot of resources into developing Chrome.
>Microsoft wasn't really interested in the web, and let IE stagnate for years.
Sounds like Mozilla and Firefox.
But let's step back. If your contention is that Firefox cannot raise its adoption and/or cannot compete with Chrome - then Mozilla is in big trouble. In that case, they should free up their dev resources by dumping Firefox and either getting out of the browser game, or adopting CEF like everybody else and build their services (like 'Pocket' and 'VPN') on top of that.
Sorry I thought it would be obvious to anyone reading the article. My hope was that by setting expectations to where they should be, the terribleness of this corporate statement would be more apparent.
The only sacrifice Mitchell Baker admits to is firing people. Somehow the ones that stay are supposed to do more.
There is no statement that firefox should be the best browser out there to encourage more users to switch.
No rallying call against the ad industry which is internet users biggest enemy
All I got out of it is that they want to develop new services as a software substitutes and charge people for it, probably as a subscription.
That seems a little extreme. You'd prefer Google/Chromium to be a complete monopoly because you don't like the political views of the company that develops Firefox?
I don't agree with all of Mozilla's politics either, and yes it's Free/Libre software and anyone could fork it, but there is no group more well-positioned to make Firefox a success than the people who built it. It's the Internet, you've got to take the good with the bad; in Mozilla's case the good far outweighs the nuisance of their often-partisan fundraising.
I think we completely agree. It's just that I have no faith in that the people in charge are in any shape or form involved in the actual development process of FF. And therefore I want the former to cease existing so that the latter can thrive.
Their activism has been way worse than fundraising. [0] Is treading a line where I even doubt FF is in the medium/long term even legal to use for people that don't align with their extreme views.
I used to work next door to Mozilla's SF HQ during the same time they ousted Brandon Eich for wrongthink. That whole fiasco was borne of the political biases of the rank-and-file employees, many of whom I've encountered throughout my career. I don't think it's a safe assumption that "the leadership team is compromised" and all would be well by cutting the head off the snake or whatever analogy.
Really Firefox is developed primarily by paid employees and the organization has fostered extreme political viewpoints from top to bottom. I could do without their partisan political drum-beating but much of their activism is honestly rooted in principles that keep the Internet open and fair, even if as an organization they act hypocritically (ie. by censoring browser add-ons developed by conservatives). My problem with the partisan stuff isn't even that I disagree with it, more that it alienates people (like you) who would likely otherwise agree with the stated mission of the organization but can't support the types of irrelevant virtue signaling they engage in.
I think you should look back at Mozilla's mission before making a statement like that.
As Kvark wrote above [1]:
> Mozilla is not a software company today that tries to be an internet activist. Mozilla is an activist company that also happens to develop software to prove their point. So no, it's not just about the web browser.
People have incentives. Google employees likely are there to have the experience on their resume and monetize later. Mozilla people work for a non profit, hence they are probably motivated by social activism rather than money or fame.
Sadly considering their behaviour regarding ads, the default search engine, telemetry, sending the sites that you visit to google, pocket, etc it seems that they no longer care about making the internet a better place and that their focus it profit.
That's not a dichotomy though. There's money, there's "making the best browser possible", there's "changing the world through activism" and there are plenty more goals. I understand those that criticize the activism would prefer them focusing on building the best browser.
I can't say if it's in a good or bad way, I guess it would depend on the individual case. I just know it's extremely hard to be true to your stated purpose when incentives push you in other directions.
Please don't reframe my words. Nowhere did I state that "mozilla's politics are just corporate speak". I don't know enough about Mozilla's politics, to make that statement.
What I did was to point out what reading that page felt to me, and to point out that Principle 5 has been recently broken by Mozilla. If you have something to say to that, please do, but don't put words in my mouth.
> I don't know enough about Mozilla's politics, to make that statement.
And yet you feel qualified to tell us whether we should or shouldn't be political. When pointed out to that we are a fundamentally political organization you shift the goalposts to webextension support (another tick on the HN mozilla bingo card).
250 people lost their job today. Most of whom worked for Mozilla for political reasons, because they believe in the manifesto. But by all means please tell us why our motivations for working here are wrong.
> But by all means please tell us why our motivations for working here are wrong.
I guess among the work offers you had when you made your employment choice, Mozilla's was the best. Would you still work at Mozilla if you were getting paid half of your current salary? How about 10%?
And who is this "us" you keep referring to? Have you been elected representative for a group of Mozillians?
Yes you have. You have made the implication that I'm asking you to act according to my wishes/opinions. I can hold an opinion without asking you to act according to my wishes/opinions. I hope you can see the difference. I don't know how to express it so it comes across more clearly.
Quite clearly we are discussing your opinion and I've never claimed you're demanding we act according to your wishes. You are the one putting words in people's mouths.
> Honestly I wish we had more activists pursuing something else than money.
This is very hard to do without money. Money gives you freedom. If you lack money, other parties can use money, and whatever money can buy, as leverage against you – to stop whatever you are pursuing.
While I really hate to suggest this, the best way to make money might be to sell space on newly opened tabs (with an option to turn off ads for something reasonable like USD$24.95 per year).
Mozilla tries this every few years and gets (rightfully) huge blowback. Mozilla makes enough money (through partnerships), the problem is they just spend too much.
The sheer number of phone calls I would get from pissed-off friends and family for whom I installed Firefox would make me want to put a brick through Mozilla's window.
Thanks for the downvotes, I know you don't like the facts, but here they are:
> Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath (which was the subject of litigation the parties resolved in 2019.) [0] [1] [2]
To do that now would be financial suicide. They have several new services, if they manage to get revenue from them they could survive cutting Google. But not before.
The Debian Foundation also doesn't have to compete against Google on a product that costs millions of dollars to build and maintain, and that Google throws billions at in marketing.
Being beholden to your main competitor is a losing strategy. It's made them a lot of money in the short term to lose it all in the longer term. It's easy to comment on this in retrospect, but I personally think they should have considered this more seriously before making a deal with the devil.
Maybe settling for less cash, and working with partners you don't directly compete with, like DuckDuckGo and the like, would be a better long-term strategy even if it means less cashflow and a smaller company in the short term.
Please note that this thread has multiple pages of comments. To reach them, click the More link at the bottom, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336&p=3