Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

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Their priorities are out of wack. Firefox is their golden goose. It's the thing that gives them clout and revenue. Their job is to increase adoption because increased adoption means more clout and more revenue. You do that by constantly reinvesting in the platform and making it your core singular focus, especially performance and tooling (because developers are a big driver for browser adoption). Where is the Firefox version CEF? Where is a competitive option to v8/node.js? Why is MS Edge (and every other independent browser) based on CEF and not Firefox? Why has Firefox performance lagged behind Chrome for years now?

Since they ousted Eich (and maybe even before that), they've been focusing on everything except Firefox, and as a result they've steadily lost market-share. They screwed up.

Case in point:

>New focus on product. Mozilla must be a world-class, modern, multi-product internet organization.

What do you mean 'multi-product internet organization'? You have Firefox, and ... what else? Nothing. Firefox is the only thing that keeps them relevant and provides employment for their people. But let's instead focus on everything else?

Counterpoint: Firefox is the thing they're best known for, but it's been inexorably losing market share for years to a direct competitor with vastly more financial muscle and access to very prominent advertising space. At the same time, they're dependent on that competitor for most of their revenue.

It's hard to imagine they could give Firefox a significant technical edge over Chrome, no matter how much they focus on it. Even if Google plays entirely fair - not optimising things like GMail & Google Maps for Chrome at all - it has the resources to keep up with anything Mozilla can do.

Throwing all the eggs in one basket and praying is not a strategy. It makes sense for them to diversify. Inevitably there will be some failures (Firefox Phone seems like a bad idea with hindsight, but hindsight is always 20/20), but some things are having a bit of quiet success, like Firefox Send or their 'Privacy not Included' guides. How they create revenue, I have no idea, though their new VPN is one idea.

>but it's been inexorably losing market share for years to a direct competitor with vastly more financial muscle

If you remember, they gained market-share by competing and beating another direct competitor with vastly more finical muscle.

>It's hard to imagine they could give Firefox a significant technical edge over Chrome, no matter how much they focus on it.

Have they tried? Why isn't Firefox front-and-center in this blog post. Why wasn't Firefox listed in their five areas of focus?

But if their attitude is that they will never be able to compete with Chrome, maybe they should just adopt CEF and move on to building all those new products they alluded to.

>Throwing all the eggs in one basket and praying is not a strategy.

They have one egg, one basket. Firefox is the only thing that makes them relevant. Without Firefox they have nothing. That they have delusions of grandeur is their problem. To me, not having Firefox be the core focus of Mozilla is considerably more risky than trying to figure out new products.

> they gained market-share by competing and beating another direct competitor

Microsoft wasn't really interested in the web, and let IE stagnate for years. Google makes an enormous amount of money through the web, and consequently puts a lot of resources into developing Chrome.

>Microsoft wasn't really interested in the web, and let IE stagnate for years.

Sounds like Mozilla and Firefox.

But let's step back. If your contention is that Firefox cannot raise its adoption and/or cannot compete with Chrome - then Mozilla is in big trouble. In that case, they should free up their dev resources by dumping Firefox and either getting out of the browser game, or adopting CEF like everybody else and build their services (like 'Pocket' and 'VPN') on top of that.

You speak like they have any other baskets.

Firefox Quantum was a pretty significant investment in Firefox. It made literally zero impact on their market share decline.

It broke things I cared about, so I use it less.

Maybe they mean to remember Thunderbird exists?

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