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Comment by djhaskin987 | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla has really gone off the rails. They have deprioritized html 5 compliance and keep chasing spectres like VR and mobile. I really wish they'd just stick to making sure there's a solid, viable alternative to chrome, instead of getting distracted like this.

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I noticed a few months back that the Servo engine (upon which I was building a play/experimental browser) development had shifted significantly in the direction of Mixed Reality (it shifted more than a few months back, but I was not paying that close of attention). At that point I gave up on my browser project.

Some execs at Mozilla think MR is the wave of the future. I think it's mostly a party trick with a very niche market and will always only be a niche market, and wasting top talent on MR seriously detracts from a project that is a hundred-fold more important. But maybe that's just me.

> MR seriously detracts from a project that is a hundred-fold more important

I have mixed feeling about this. I’m inclined to agree with you however if it did take off it could mean the difference between Firefox dying and becoming the market leader.

I don't know if mobile counts as a spectre in 2019. Unless you mean in the sense that gaining significant market share on mobile is a tall order in a way that it isn't on desktop?

Do you have a source on that they've de-prioritised HTML 5 compliance?

I don't think mobile is a mistake, as long as Chrome mobile doesn't have as blocking there's at least one very good reason to use Firefox, also the reader viewer is a life saver.

VR seems like a huge waste of resources though. Yes I think it will take off in the next 10 years, but are people really going to be using VR to browse the web? And can you really make good VR apps in JavaScript? I doubt it.

People still don't use WebGL/WASM for traditional 3D games which are less demanding.

> VR seems like a huge waste of resources though. Yes I think it will take off in the next 10 years, but are people really going to be using VR to browse the web?

You could've asked something similar 12 years ago: sure, smartphones will probably take off, but are people really going to be using those small devices to browse the web?

Mozilla missed that boat; they can't afford to miss this one if it's going to take off. Weighing that against investing resources now, at a time when they're financially healthy, makes it a pretty sane direction in my view.

I don't think the comparison is meaningful. Twelve years ago, it was obvious to most people that the web on smartphones would be important. Mozilla understood that but they were presumptuous: instead of trying to create the best Android web browser, they tried to make an OS that could rival Android. FirefoxOS/Boot2Gecko failed, and their mobile build suffered from all this.

I don't think that VR sets have the exponential growth that smartphones had on their first years. So this new target of Mozilla may never expand outside a niche market. And I'm afraid their flagship browser could suffer from the side-effects of this focus.

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