The first thing they made was a web-browser, because they had all the pieces and all the people right there, they had a good idea how to do it, and because the biggest threat to openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web at the time was the dominance of Internet Explorer.
These days, Mozilla must be less focussed because there's no single dominant threat to focus on. There's things like video patent codecs, DRM, promoting HTTPS, the ever-increasing complexity of the browser stack, the enticing power of native mobile apps, the lack of an awesome funding model for freely-distributed content, the return of walled-garden content platforms...
They could focus on making Firefox awesome and abandon all the rest of those issues, then we'd have a nice browser but we might have a much less interesting and useful Internet to browse with it. I do not envy Mozilla's leadership in the slightest right now, they're making a bunch of very tough decisions and nobody will know if they did the right thing for maybe five or ten years.
I don't think this is the right way. Having two much on the plate can actually be negative and you might end up doing nothing really well. I don't think that Mozilla should only be working on Firefox, but rather select few more which manage to do properly. We need a focused Mozilla, not a scattered Mozilla which tend to do everything that's a FAD (For eg: IOT)
Perhaps more important is permission to explore and invent and follow through.
However, it turns out they are heavily innovating in the same space as Go with their stunning work on Rust. Additionally, they are building world-class next-gen products with their work on Servo and Daala. Not to mention fantastic tools such as http://rr-project.org/.
I believe your assessment of Mozilla's engineering talent is inaccurate.
TL;DR: I'm a squeeing fanboy for a lot of the people in Mozilla Research.
I'm flattered, but I don't even rank among the top five CSS wizards in this building, much less on the planet :)
- Gradle still doesn't provide half of the functionality of the ndk-build scripts
- Studio still not up to what Eclipse CDT provided
- We NDK users were left dry while they figure out how to provide proper support
For both NDK and SDK, lots of bugs to choose from:
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list
Then going back to the SDK, any professional Android developer can enumerate lots of issues when you need to get information.
Also I am yet to see a release of the support library that isn't followed by complaints in G+.
So what are those Google experts doing?
I like Java a lot, but C++ is the current kind of portability across mobile OS for native applications, as common language across SDKs.
If I would be doing this commercially, I would have gone Xamarin already.
Yeah, it's stunning how impossible it is in 2016 to profile native code on Android with Google tools. Meanwhile, Apple has had arguably the best CPU profiler available anywhere on any platform (Instruments.app) for years and years.
NVIDIA has done an incredible job making this basic functionality work on their Android systems…yet, sadly, their work doesn't extend to all Android platforms.
Are you serious? Patrick Walton, Alon Zakai just to name a couple.
Every year, I weigh whether I should throw some bucks to the Mozilla Foundation. I've been using their browsers, under one name or another, for over 20 years since the day I first discovered the web. It's been the most important piece of software in my life.
I appreciate what they (along with Apache and BSD) have done in providing an open source counterexample for the GPL, and opening the door for open source in corporate software development.
Moreover, I worry about their long-term financial viability. Yahoo is NOT going to be around in its current form forever. I'm not sure whether there's any other "anchor sponsor" on the horizon that would fund Mozilla at the same level as Google or Yahoo without forcing compromises in principles.
However, I still just haven't been able to make myself click the donate button.
The things that I ACTUALLY care about from Mozilla (i.e. Firefox and Thunderbird) are things that fell into their lap from Netscape back in 1998, and which they've incrementally tweaked or re-worked in the two decades since. I don't feel a sense that anyone in a leadership position at Mozilla really cares about those things. I think they see them as "legacy software", providing only a "brand" to be "leveraged" in squeezing a bunch of other junk onto their resumes.
They work on a lot of interesting technical things behind the scenes, but little of it appears to have traction or visibility. The things that ARE promoted by leadership and marketing are "day-late-and-dollar-short" imitations of whatever Google did a few years prior. I don't care if you create a "me too" copy of Android without any phone carriers to sell it. I don't care if you create a "me too" Raspberry Pi, that will be lost in a sea of other coming-soon hobby boards by the time it's actually released.
The Wikipedia article on Mozilla suggests that their annual budget has grown from $2 million initially, to over $300 million today. You know what? They were a better and more RELEVANT organization when they were closer to the $2 million mark. I don't want to donate money so that a band of Google-reject executives can pad their resumes with nonsense and shut down Thunderbird.
I almost kinda HOPE that their funding collapses in the wake of Yahoo's death, so that the leadership bails and they're forced to downsize into something sensible and focused on the flagships. I just hope that the perhaps-inevitable reformation can happen gracefully without being so jarring as to end Mozilla altogether.
First off, Mozilla didn't have FF "fall into their lap" from Netscape. Netscape spun it off and gave birth to Mozilla. They absolutely do not consider Firefox legacy software and you'll need to back that up somehow for me to believe it.
They may very well be a better company at $2M than they are at $300M, but the back half of your comment sounds bitter and angry at what appears to be Mozilla's recent announcement on Thunderbird.
Not that this is a critical point worth arguing about or getting bogged down with pendantics... but I don't see any meaningful distinction in what we're saying.
Mozilla was bootstrapped with Netscape IP. They maintained Navigator/Communicator for awhile, then split its browser and email features into separate slimmed-down applications. My point was that their flagship applications come from inherited IP, and none of their original IP developed since the Netscape split has been remotely as impactful.
> They absolutely do not consider Firefox legacy software and you'll need to back that up somehow for me to believe it.
I struggle to name any meaningful developments in Firefox over the past 7 years that are not direct imitations of something done by Chrome. The situation with Thunderbird during that same window of time, and Mozilla leadership's view of it going forward, has been discussed at length. All major new initiatives and public visibly is directed toward mobile OS or IoT hardware unrelated to their flagship applications.
In my view, that is legacy software. The definitions and wordsmithing of others may vary, but that's the rationale behind my use of the term.
> the back half of your comment sounds bitter and angry at what appears to be Mozilla's recent announcement on Thunderbird
It is challenging to communicate in an online written medium, without being able to use voice inflection and body language to convey cues and emphasis on certain words as you would in person.
So if I capitalize a few words, or use Markdown formatting on a couple of phrases, that doesn't necessarily denote "anger or bitterness". Italics isn't a microaggression.
For what it's worth, I switched my personal domain's email hosting to Google Apps, and haven't used a desktop email client in years. I'm not personally bitter over the decline of focus on Thunderbird.
I'm simply wholly uninspired by everything that Mozilla leadership is trying to inspire me with today. The declining usage of their flagship applications, along with failure to gain traction for new initiatives, indicates that I'm hardly a minority. They need a more focused vision and identity.
I miss being enthusiastic about Firefox. I've used it since it was Phoenix. It was an absolute joy to use until some time in the 2.x series, IIRC. These days? Chrome's snappier, I like its interface better, its extension ecosystem is nearly as good, and it's ~1/10 as likely to make my fan kick on. Safari's so much easier on my battery that it's like the others aren't even trying, so I end up using it most of the time even though it's my least-favorite of the three.
I'd like something that is to Firefox what Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was to the Mozilla Suite.