Firefox Hello was probably an atempt to fuel WebRTC or provide some capabilities to Firefox OS. But it was included in the main distribution - Firefox - spending resources for what ?
* Messing up the marketing behind critical projects (Persona) and then shutting them down when their usage is too low for their taste.
* Axing Thunderbird, one of the last usable non-web-based email clients. I don't like nor use TB, but maintaining a decent email client cant be that hard for Mozilla, and it is important for the web.
* Putting a ton of money into Firefox OS, an atrociously bad and slow OS that had the worst mobile UX I've ever experienced. Then putting even more money into the Flame so that they can have a bad OS on dedicatedly-bad hardware.
* Constantly messing up feature development on Firefox with Hello, Pocket and more, all pointing to Mozilla clearly not understanding the Firefox userbase.
* In the mean time, Firefox is still far slower than chrome. Scrolling especially. Gmail and irccloud are unusable for me on Firefox. My own project hits Firefox's performance issues (compare seeking on this player in Chrome/Firefox: https://hsreplay.net/replay/vZEz7JoNnfgVo34HJUHhEF - Firefox is a solid 10x slower).
So to recap: Axing critical projects in a market they understand, so that they can spend the money on futile projects in a market they don't understand. Introducing controversial new features in Firefox while the browser is still far slower than Chrome, losing what's left of their market share. And this is just the big stuff, I could go on for another 10 paragraphs.
Mozilla is heading into a mountain. They need to seriously rethink their structure and priorities if they want to avoid a crash.
Edit/PS: Most of these issues are structural. Pocket's functionality is useful in a web browser. A truly-free mobile OS/smartphone is also something we need. And foss communications are extremely important to the web, which is currently locked in to hangouts/messenger. But Mozilla is messing all these up at every corner; underestimating costs, underestimating effort, misunderstanding (being disconnected from) their userbase, not marketing anything properly and giving up too easily.
I don't want to be overly cynical, but how is supporting a native email client helping the web? Email isn't "web" unless you access it through a web browser. So it seems totally in keeping with Mozilla's current web-only strategy to ditch their native email client and encourage everybody to use webmail. After all they want people to ditch all native apps (except the web browser) and use the web as their operating system. Supporting a native email client don't fit in with that strategy.
Without free and open email, it makes every internet based company's job that much harder (potentially impossible).
Any long-time firefox user with a shred of sense could have predicted (and did predict) the massive fallout that came from Pocket. Yet, Mozilla didn't.
Everybody assumed Mozilla took money from Pocket. Yet, Mozilla didn't.
The Pocket situation is hilarious. People see a 3rd party service being shoved down the throats of the user, they immediately assume Firefox is "selling out". Mozilla got all the negatives of a bad deal, and none of the money. It takes a certain skill to mess up this bad.
"Although the company emphasizes that Pocket and Telefonica didn’t pay for placement in the Firefox browser, Mozilla Corp. chief legal and business officer Denelle Dixon-Thayer told WIRED that Mozilla has revenue sharing arrangements with both companies."
http://www.wired.com/2015/12/mozilla-is-flailing-when-the-we...
They already have Sync that moves extensions, bookmarks and settings around between browsers.
The reading mode in Pocket is far from perfect. I use to maintain a FF extension that did something similar and it wasn't much more that a CSS file.
I mean the project has it's momentum but in terms of industry it means nothing so i wonder if they will cut money someday like they are doing with these features.
And in terms of industry: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html
Firefox OS in its pre-shutdown iteration did not serve these people perfectly yet, but it was well on its way to be a solid choice for them. A choice that held their values first, not just the values of western consumers trimmed to fit.
And now there are no 'open' choices for an open mobile internet device (below 50USD) The cheap knockoff Android phones that dominate that market are preloaded with untrustworthy applications, and ship with unverifiable firmware. The latter is almost never updateable to anything recent or patched for security. This makes for a very exploitative, dangerous web, and it grows more so as it grows more integral to peoples livelihood.
I applaud Mozilla for starting it, but I think the decision to shutter the whole initiative was incredibly damaging. At the very least because now it, falsely, appears to be a cautionary tale to anyone else that may wish to attempt this initiative.
Firefox OS (or more generally, a free phone&OS) is something I do believe is needed but Mozilla had the completely wrong approach towards it. They severely underestimated how much effort is involved. I heard from several mozillians the attitude was "we'll just do everything in HTML5 and gecko will do just fine". (Sounds familiar? It was Jobs' vision for iOS. See how that turned out.)
They didn't understand how much work is involved into making not just a platform, but also an OS (with all the builtin apps, making them not suck is a prerequisite) and the hardware itself. My Flame's only redeeming quality was that the battery died after a week, which kept me from finding out more issues with it.
I don't know that FxOs was ever a solid choice. It was barely ever even a choice. I wish Mozilla would've just funded or partnered with one of several existing players in that space, such as Jolla.
Sadly, their ideological mission conflicted with the realities of their target market (and in this case, price-point).
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Firefox_OS/...
They did. They partnered with Meego (The Intel and Nokia lead platform.). Remember Meego?
This does need to be close to a 'from the ground up' initiative. And that has nothing to do with latest developer trends.
For the rest you unfortunately have a point.
Minus a couple adjectives, what you're describing is the way that companies grow and learn. If one of Mozilla's projects ends up being the Next Big Thing, then all this experimentation will look really smart in retrospect. Until then, it feels unfocused. That's normal.
Every member of the Steering Committee should issue a public apology and resign for gross incompetence.
Instead of judging people on their technical merits I propose we totally start to judge them on how well their ideology lines up with ours. That's the best way to promote diversity and ensure technical capability. Clearly it has worked well for Mozilla
Looks like they have somehow realized that though as the approach with "experiments" is a different one.