Twitter could be the next Mozilla | Hacker News Reader

Twitter could be the next Mozilla

medium.com

8 pointspavlov9 comments

I wrote this Medium post yesterday after the news broke that Salesforce has walked away from Twitter acquisition talks.

Today I learned that David Levine already had very much the same idea as the one I presented in my post a couple of weeks ago: https://medium.com/we-progress-by-sharing-ideas/bill-gates-s...

Yes, let's make this happen! I don't tweet but I use twitter every single day and it's obvious that it has become fundamental to the net. It's worth fighting for, worth donating money to.

More on this:

* https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/29/save-t...

* #buytwitter: http://internetofownership.net/2016/10/04/a-guide-to-buytwit...

The way I look at it is this - if Twitter vanished off the internet tomorrow, I might not really care. I'd see fewer articles using (foul|racist|sexist|whatever) tweets as their data set.

But Mozilla? I'd miss them. I use both Firefox and Thunderbird for various things all the time. Mozilla puts out products that I want to use. Twitter just puts out a lot of noise and angry people.

The big difference is the Mozilla was driven into the ground by better competition, hence validating the market for a better browser.

Twitter has been so far mostly ignored by tech giants, letting it do its own thing. Nobody else is fighting for that particular market niche.

> Mozilla was driven into the ground by better competition

I thought it was Microsoft's anti-competitive strategy? (bundling IE, changing the API's to break netscape, etc.)

> > Mozilla was driven into the ground by better competition

> I thought it was Microsoft's anti-competitive strategy? (bundling IE, changing the API's to break netscape, etc.)

I thought it was Mozilla's utter lack of regard for the their userbase.

That came later, after they decided that they preferred politics to market share. (sometime around 2008-09, judging from the TIFF support bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160261#c39)

TIFF. It might have been handy in certain instances, but IMHO, it was never been a big deal except in the page-layout world. And even then, having an eps was better.

I missed that cluster of madness for firefox, I guess. Had I known that Mozilla would turn out this way, I would never have donated money. My name is on their full-page NYT ad and poster.

I wonder if they'd give me a refund?

Microsoft might have been part of it, but check out http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html.

They waited 3 years before a new release. In internet terms, it's like 21 years between any new features.

During that time, IE was (IMO) the best browser objectively, in almost every sense of the word. They didn't change the APIs per se to break Netscape, they started giving features that Netscape didn't offer because users wanted them.

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