Comment by throwaway66666 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway66666 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If anyone's to blame it's mozilla's criminal laziness. There I said it. We were stuck with firefox 3 for 3 years (early 2008-2011), on a time where chrome was getting a +1 version every month or 2 months.

I remember Mozilla "evangelist" employees hard at work, tweeting "version doesn't matter, it's the changelog that matters, chrome team could have changed two background colors and did +1 to the version counter".

Great battle move. Then, Firefox 4 got released and everyone hated the new interface. Even ex-mozilla cofounder JWZ complained that it feels beta even though it's a fully mature product out for a decade now and that's unacceptable. Also, No mp4 support. Oh yeah. They added it in Firefox 20 finally (then no webm support. They finally added it in January 2019. Good job)

In the meantime, Mozilla engineering kept fooling around with projects that went nowhere. Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that? THE JAVASCRIPT PHONE! FLASH TO JS CONVERTER, where is that now? That JS only Video Codec ORBX.js? that Eich said "I saw the future today" 10 years ago, and it's still not out yet. PDF JS (in it's first release made opening large PDF files on Firefox impossible) etc etc. Many good things came of from it too, like asmjs (ancestor of wasm), but in general there seemed a direction of everywhere, neither arriving here nor there.

Mozilla then switched the default search engine of Firefox to Yahoo! At a time when Yahoo was in the spotlight for rapidly dying and looking for a pity-acquisition!! It also came bundled with great bugs that kept resetting the default search engine back to yahoo - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1206101

To give praise where praise is worth, Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation (2009-2018) and Firefox today is finally very stable and relatively fast compared to Edge and Safari.

I know I am sounding trollish and bitter, but the truth is that I am just sad at how Firefox fell. What happened? Did people get lazy as their savings grew? Where key individuals poached away by Google and Apple? Did they burn out? Something surely must have happened...

Addressing your entire post would require further research on my part so I hope you'll excuse that I only address what I can recall off the top of my head.

> Fennec Fox for mobile, what happened to that?

That's just the code name for Firefox for Android. Ime it's fairly pleasant to use since flick scrolling was improved, and browser plugins on mobile are the selling feature.

> FLASH TO JS CONVERTER

Definitely sad to see Shumway die, but I think in retrospect it will be clear it was a forward thinking decision. WASM will obviate a lot of the effort for what has clearly become a historical feature.

> Mozilla did realize their mistakes got back from their 9 year vacation (2009-2018)

The origin of modern Firefox could be dated back to the origin of Servo in 2012 since it layed all the groundwork. I think this is the clear turning point in Mozilla's refocus, maybe push it back to 2015 when Firefox OS was dropped.

Thanks for commenting. My comment was meant to to be slightly exagerated but since your response is grounded, I 'll rephrase mine too :)

The evangelist tweets (I won't dig them because it's not cool) are 100% real, but keep in mind they were meant to be humorous and not official stance.

Firefox 3 got released in 2008, but firefox 3.5 (arguably the best browser at the time) was released a year later. Mozilla released many firefox updates in the meantime I believe they did so even after firefox 4 was released (no forced update from 3.5 to 4).

Firefox 4 was delayed to my understanding due to the whole html5 hype and trying to support as many of the new standards as possible (this info is from twitter so it might be wrong).

Lots of projects in limbo, not much different than google pushing NaCl, Dart, webkit prefixes. It looks bad only when paired with the general low activity. There were some chat logs leaked of mozilla people talking about adding webkit prefix support to firefox. Some where getting very angry over this. Today firefox supports the webkit prefixes :p must have been a multi-year argument.

Lack of mp4 support was due to MPEG LA owning the rights to h264. Mozilla didn't wanna pay the patent owners, in the end cisco created openh264 and mozilla used that, in 2014 nonetheless. Webm was not added because it wasn't a web standard. In my opinion both h264 and webm events got dealt in poor judgement but whatever.

The Yahoo change was due to an expensive multi-year contract between Mozilla and Yahoo. Money before users. I remember people defending it by saying that yahoo search is powered by Bing, not by yahoo themselves.

In general mozilla used to be this awesomely perceived company... no not company, foundation! They organized things like place giant firefox stickers in your city and gain online fame, and sending a cake to the IE team with every major release they did. Spearheaded the whole open web movement. It was Richard Stallman with Charisma 10! And then.. kinda suddenly stopped and became more like the Apache Foundation. Cool and all but slow and old.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com