Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

When Mozilla announced Firefox OS, some management factions pushed to cut Firefox to a skeleton crew and go "all in" on Firefox OS. Even though Firefox still had 30% market share and Chrome only 20%, they were ready to give up the desktop. Thankfully that didn't happen because others knew Firefox "kept the lights on." Imagine a Mozilla without Firefox OS, where the hundreds of engineer-years and hundreds of millions of dollars poured into Firefox OS had instead been invested in Servo and e10s/multiprocess Firefox..

And Brave makes me sad. No disrespect to Brendan and his team! Kudos to them for building an opinionated product that excites people. But many of Brave's praised features are things Mozilla considered but dropped due to fear of publisher retaliation or lack of focus. Things like:

  * Tracking protection in non-private browsing mode
  * Blocking third-party cookies from unvisited domains
  * HTTPS Everywhere integration
  * Partitioned user sessions
  * Promoting alternatives to toxic web advertising
  * Some sort of micropayment system
  * One-click Tor or secure VPN browsing

[Disclaimer: I am a Mozilla employee, but these are my own opinions.]

It is easy to blame Fireofx OS now for the waste, but 4 years ago it was not that easy to see that it would be a total disaster. It was just things that Mozilla was betting on did not come through.

The real problem for me is why Firefox OS was not stopped 2 years ago when trends became clear. That is inexcusable given the amount of efforts Mozilla continued to spend on it.

And the original Slashdot article was about the IoT one.

Actually, 4 years ago and then again 3 years ago I said it was a total disaster. I have mountains of email reports from an audit of the project.

4 years ago boot-to-gecko was still at the rather early stage and it was not possible to see how it would end. Given the need to diversify for Mozilla it was reasonable to proceed to get at least one shipping device. Even 3 years ago with the first phone release one could argue that continuing with the project was not totally unreasonable. But 2 years ago the market message was crystal clear.

Chris totally nailed it. The world doesn't turn out to need another version of Android made out of HTML, CSS, and JS, and could have spent many of those resources making the browser engine the world does need for a gazillion-core CPU+GPU future (Servo). Many good intentions and naively believing a word that operators or OEMs say are only some of the reasons why.

And Brave makes me sad, too, for lots of reasons.

Disclaimer: Former Mozilla employee, but love the people still.

> And Brave makes me sad, too, for lots of reasons

I'm interested. Here, email, DM on Twitter, whatever you prefer.

Update: I took Chris to be saying Brave makes him sad about Mozilla fearing backlash and lacking focus. Maybe I misread, but the way we propose to pay publishers with Brave could one day become a web standard. No fear. And focus matters, obviously at a startup but definitely at a bigger outfit facing giant sized competition.

Yeah, I meant sad for Mozilla. The excitement and praise for Brave could have been Firefox's if Mozilla hadn't become so timid. Maybe I'm just jealous.. :)

>* Tracking protection in non-private browsing mode

Mentioned in the Slashdot comment and would be a simple thing to add. Agree with some of the others though.

Yeah, tracking protection already works in non-private browsing mode. All that's needed is a one-line code change (and the will) to unhide the UI.

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