Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

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Not just that. Mozilla is completely losing focus. They used to stand for "keeping the web open" and they've been doing a shit job of it lately.

* 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 agree with many of your points. I just want to note that Firefox OS aligned 100% with keeping the web open. There is a vast group of users that only have a mobile device and can only get online through their phone. Their entire 'web' experience is through this medium.

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.

I agree; see the PS I just edited in.

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.

>I wish Mozilla would've just funded or partnered with one of several existing players in that space, such as Jolla.

They did. They partnered with Meego (The Intel and Nokia lead platform.). Remember Meego?

It was the wrong approach because gobs of Javascript gives a horrible UX on low-end, first-iPhone-equivalent hardware, but it was approach they wanted because they're so invested in the notion that FirefoxOS would natively implement Web Platform APIs; conversely those platform APIs would become standard Web-(browser) APIs in the future [1].

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/...

The answer to this problem was much easier: a solid Android browser in every Android marketplace, with an easily-extendable architecture. There was no need to go full-OS. Of course, it would have been less fashionable from a development perspective.

Just a solid browser would not help when Android is not designed for that market. And when devices are effectively crippled by lack of support/updates, and questionable bloatware.

This does need to be close to a 'from the ground up' initiative. And that has nothing to do with latest developer trends.

>* 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.

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.

Email is an integral piece of the open internet, and also a critical bit of infrastructure for the web, providing crucial communication and authentication for millions of websites.

Without free and open email, it makes every internet based company's job that much harder (potentially impossible).

Mozilla said they were going to add a Pocket-like feature but realized that Pocket was better than anything they had the resources top do themselves. So I don't think that's messing up feature development our eating time on features people don't want.

Pocket isn't just about the development costs.

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.

Mozilla did take money from Pocket, just not up front.

"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...

Yea, I remember this fiasco when it happened on Reddit.

As both a Firefox and Pocket user this confuses me. What in particular does Pocket do that would have been hard to do?

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.

At least the performance issue will improve with FF48 and Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis coming August 2nd :) https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar

For the rest you unfortunately have a point.

I wonder how Servo compares to Gecko on this so far too.

> Axing [...] projects in a market they understand, so that they can spend the money on [...] projects in a market they don't understand.

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.

yep plus i wonder if they will pull the plug on Rust (which is an ambitious project).

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.

There's no way for Mozilla to "pull the plug" on a community project with its own leadership and governance like Rust.

And in terms of industry: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html

Rust is one of the best things to be coming out of Mozilla right now. I really hope they don't pull a Persona on it.

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