Your two claims (Mozilla can't do anything other than Firefox, Firefox is not failing) are easy to provide counter-evidence to.
You're making strong statements here as fact that are not only subjective but which run against evidence.
You're making strong statements here as fact that are not only subjective but which run against evidence.
Mozilla is letting 250 people go, that's not because their things other than Firefox are a resounding success, but mostly because none of those things pay the bills and are failures in the market place.
Firefox is falling behind on Chrome and Edge, it is really annoying that since a couple of weeks I'm more or less forced to use Chrome because FireFox languishes in domains that matter to me personally. That's a pretty strong sign because if there is one thing that I never thought would happen it is that I would switch away from FF. So no, it is not failing - yet. But it may come to that. If people like me are considering to switch that future is closer than you might like.
So maybe my strong statements are subjective but they are actually backed by some evidence, you did not provide any whatsoever other than naysaying.
Firefox has been losing market share steadily for years. The biggest efforts to turn that around have at best slowed it. Your subjective experience backs it up. That's evidence it is a failing product.
Mozilla has shipped successful products other than Firefox. Rust being a strong example, and then there are moderately less successful ones that have varying impacts. I worked on one (Hubs) that had a strong trajectory when I left, both in terms of user and revenue growth.
Potential users are saying, "Here are things I want in Firefox," and a Firefox/Mozilla advocate is telling them that's not what they really want, and Mozilla is going to work on something else.
It's been this way for years, and at the end of the day users realize it's pointless to argue and switch to Chrome.
Executives have a tough decision to make in terms of where and how to place bets. The OP's approach is to just concede that Mozilla will be dead some day and they may as well just slow the decline. If you are the CEO, accepting this and acting in accordance with that would be a dereliction of duty. I am not claiming to know the answer. I worked on a team that tried to place a strong bet to backstop things if Firefox ultimately failed. But I don't think the confidence that it's self-evident that they should just go all-in on Firefox is justified.
I think most Firefox users on Hacker News would dispute this. Judging by the average thread on Firefox, most of us think that Mozilla's efforts have mostly been to make Firefox worse. I don't know that I'd go that far, but the issue seems to be that most of the user facing changes have been the kind of pointless changes for the sake of change, and side projects most people don't use or want in their browser.
A sibling comment mentions breaking the addon API. If the addons I want to use are broken for months at a time, that's going to get me to consider using a different browser, even one with less capabilities. (This doesn't have to be a rational process; ideally you want your users to never think "ugh, why isn't this working, hmm I haven't checked out Chrome in a while". Even if Chrome is worse, some of them are going to switch.)
Then there's Pocket, which (let's admit) exists only because it's a direct source of revenue for Mozilla via advertisements placed in the browser chrome.
Then there's the pointless change to the URL bar, which drew an absurd amount of outrage. That much anger over a small UI change is not justified of course, but that's not the point. Stuff like this breaks the cardinal rule of not pointlessly pissing off your dwindling user base.
There's whatever the hell the mobile team is up to, with some new perpetual beta project every 12 months and putting an enormous amount of effort into a new Firefox for Android with a worse, slower UI that's not significantly faster for actual browsing and currently only has support for a handful of addons (which are the only reason anyone uses FFA).
There's enhanced tracking protection, which in the good ol' days of Firefox would have been an addon. Granted, it seems like it's doing something genuinely useful.
The RSS viewer got removed in version 64.
Then there are the fiascos, like the time Mozilla broke all users' addons, the hotfix sideloading scandal, the Mr Robot thing...
To be clear I do recognize that at least some parts of Mozilla are interested in improving Firefox, but the issue is that most of the improvements there are not obvious to anyone. Personally I've enjoyed the feature to automatically block notification permission requests (the UI for that is great). The addition of WebP support was nice, and ongoing work to support AVIF is also appreciated. The work on WebRender and introducing Rust code into Firefox is appreciated and has made Firefox noticeably faster. There have been some nice improvements to the developer tools too.
The problem is that most of this stuff isn't visible to ordinary users, even to power users. That's a problem for attracting new users, to be sure. But the attempts Mozilla has made to attract new users seem to largely be failing. And so the worst thing they could possibly do is to piss off the dedicated users who remain, but that seems to be what they've mostly accomplished.
I'm very happy with the work they do to make a better rendering and styling engine. However I'd like to add that it wasn't that bad kn the first place as someone like to say: I could have hundreds of tabs open back in 2014 with no problems.
> I don't know that I'd go that far, but the issue seems to be that most of the user facing changes have been the kind of pointless changes for the sake of change,
Yep. Also I'm not against a facelift but don't let ux-ers run the show alone. When everyone cries out: stop and think! And if you cannot hear the cries: fix your feedback system! Like the one that Google has the feedback system at Mozilla makes it clear to me that my voice doesn't matter at all.
> and side projects most people don't use or want in their browser.
I'm fine with side projects as long as they don't come at the expense of the main product.
> A sibling comment mentions breaking the addon API. If the addons I want to use are broken for months at a time, that's going to get me to consider using a different browser, even one with less capabilities. (This doesn't have to be a rational process; ideally you want your users to never think "ugh, why isn't this working, hmm I haven't checked out Chrome in a while". Even if Chrome is worse, some of them are going to switch.)
Exactly.
> Then there's Pocket, which (let's admit) exists only because it's a direct source of revenue for Mozilla via advertisements placed in the browser chrome.
I even don't have the problem with pocket that certain other people have, but couldn't they've been honest about it from the start? Trust was the one thing that differentiates Mozilla from tbe crowd.
> Then there's the pointless change to the URL bar, which drew an absurd amount of outrage. That much anger over a small UI change is not justified of course, but that's not the point. Stuff like this breaks the cardinal rule of not pointlessly pissing off your dwindling user base.
IMO the problem is they want to get us to think it is a community project and at same time ignore the community.
[...]
> Then there are the fiascos, like the time Mozilla broke all users' addons, the hotfix sideloading scandal, the Mr Robot thing...
Yep. It shows how they completely doesn't understand that their main asset is user trust.
They broke the plug-in API years ago and haven't bothered to fix the new one meaning I'm stuck with ugly tabs on the top even when I use Tree Style Tabs. Scrapbook extension hasn't worked for years etc.
Today, the main reason I use it isn't technical superiority but stubbornness, idealism and rhe fact that the alternatives are just as bad. I.e. despite all the progress on speed etc nothing makes up for breaking the single reason why they were the work horse of browsers: the extensions ecosystem combined with cross platform and good baseline performance.
FWIW: Mozilla can get money from me today - if they promise to use it to fix Firefox.
They wont. Quite on the contrary they are quite clear that donation money goes to other projects. I understand this has something to do with Mozilla being a non profit and browsers development not being a thing in their charter, but sooner rather than later I hope they'll realize that providing a good, free browser is maybe the biggest thing they can do to secure an open web ecosystem.
I already donate money directly to other projects, so I am not interested in that.
I will be signing up for the VPN thing however once it becomes available and if I know the profits goes to Firefox (irony over irony is if I'll need to use a VPN to sign up for the VPN I want :-P)
When you install TST, it shows a message explaining to you how to get rid of the tab bar. It's also in their documentation: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
Since the doc is not super clear on this, the userChrome.css needs to go in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/chrome/userChroms.css (you might have to create the "chrome" directory).
It's not a super-nice process, but as someone who occasionally does tech support, I understand why they don't offer an API anymore that misbehaving addons could use to utterly destroy the browser UI.
It is also clear that this is a hacky workaround that is not guaranteed to continue working.
Mozilla, I'm going to use very small words here so that you understand: users will want to change your UI. You can't fight that without fighting your own users. Then again, that doesn't seem to be stopping them.
You can't both say "well we let you do it, we're so customizable" and "but if you do and anything goes wrong, it's your fault."
I'd rather that userchrome get removed and Firefox own up to the fact that they're not gonna properly support what users want.
A company who puts users first should not be ashamed of supporting their users' desires. You either support your users or you fight your users. Mozilla have somehow decided to publicly fight their users and furtively and abortively support them in secret; I really don't get how they think that reflects well on them. It feels like Moz are more trying to appease their own UX designers than their userbase.
FWIW Mozilla even experimented with vertical tabs, only they made the tab column so high it interfered with the URL bar and also didn't support nesting.
Why is that dereliction of duty?
Actually accepting the facts as they are is the hallmark of a good CEO. Trying to pretend reality and facts don't matter and that FireFox will win this battle is - pardon the word choice - delusional at this point in time.
So if your choices are between fighting a losing battle as good as you can or accelerating the drop then I'd be all for fighting that battle and drawing it out as long as I could. Accelerating it with wild-ass gambles is what got Mozilla where it is today.
I note they just cut 25% of their workforce. That's not a sign of a healthy company, unless they had 25% excess people in the first place, and then it would be a sign of bad management. So I'm going on the assumption that they are letting go of people they could ill afford to miss.
> Others in the thread think they can survive by focusing on Firefox (you disagree obviously.)
I disagree because the writing has been on the wall for a long time. The diminishing market share tells a pretty clear story. What is happening now is that Mozilla will try to jump from one shrinking ice-floe onto another that they hope will be more stable and may even give them room to expand again. They fail to recognize - again, my opinion - that this lack of focus is one of the drivers of the exodus in the first place.
> Some (like me) think they can survive by building new things people will pay for. (you think they are a 'one trick pony.')
That's possible, but survival of Mozilla the software house making a lot of other stuff that generates revenue which is not the browser is none of my concern nor interest. I can see why as a Mozilla employee it would be your concern. But I see no difference between that work and that of any other software company. The browser is where the difference can be made.
> A CEO who disagrees with your opinion isn't ignoring facts
If that CEO has a great plan on making Mozilla survive and manage to stave off further decline of the browser market share then I haven't seen it. So either that plan does not exist or they have already given up but are just not telling you (or me, for that matter).
> and a CEO who doesn't charter a strategy towards something other than catastrophic failure is not a good CEO.
That depends on how avoidable the catastrophe is.
Losing the browser would be a catastrophe, losing the rest would not even register, for everything else that Mozilla does that I'm aware of there are alternatives. But a browser with still some market share that is privacy focused and not beholden to some large advertising agency or hardware provider is a unique thing.
I think the big difference between our points of view is that you are looking from the inside out and I'm looking from the outside in. You have by virtue of your position more information at your disposal, but your interests and mine are not necessarily 100% aligned.
I would prefer for FireFox to be available as long as possible, you - apparently - would like Mozilla Inc as an entity to survive. Those two are not necessarily joined at the hip. Though obviously if Mozilla Inc survives FireFox may have a better chance of survival too.
But it looks to me, reading between the lines here, that Mozilla effectively announces that they feel that the browser as a source of revenue is a dead end and that if they do not move into other markets that the company will go under.
This, a thousand times. I care about Mozilla as the makers of Firefox - the browser for the users.
1. Firefox dies and Mozilla dies
and
2. Firefox dies and Mozilla survives by making a chat app
These are identically bad to me as a user. In both cases, the only project users care about from the company is gone.
And here is the main point: for some reason Mozilla and their accountants seems to think that Firefox is just a source of income and that their main goal as a non profit is something else, while all the time the most important work they have done to improve the world has been to create an alternative and better browser that isn't owned by big media.
That's idealism.
The difference between a non-profit and a corporation is that while a corporation seeks to provide return to the shareholders, a non-profit seeks to provide a good life to people who run it.
Until three years ago or so I think that's what I thought was the idea of Mozilla.
This is a non-profit ran by those that raise funds i.e. the non-profit parasite class. Those kinds of non-profits are famous for throwing charity galas that cost $250,000 to produce and raise $260,000.
It is just so extremely frustrating when I wish someone well and they - in my opinion - take the wrong choices.
Here's a sort of thought experiment, which I really don't know the answer to. How much of Firefox development (by hours, lines of code, commits, pick your metric) is done by Mozilla employees as part of their day jobs? And how much of that development is ~useless for the maintenance and improvement of the core browser? (Stuff like Pocket and the "discovery" feature on the new tab page, all the time spent on the URL bar changes, etc etc.)
It might turn out to be the case that most, or even all of core Firefox development could be done by the community. At the very least I'm willing to put out there that maintaining a web browser does not require half a billion dollars a year. (It's rather hard to imagine that 100 full time devs making $250k a year each couldn't handle basically all of the core development, for example.)
The problem with Mozilla is that it's a business, for all intents and purposes. With an open source project, as long as ongoing development is financially maintainable you don't have to care about marketshare. Mozilla cares about marketshare because it affects how much Google will pay them for search traffic (and how much they get from in-chrome advertizing).
When Oracle proved derelict in its duties managing the development of OpenOffice, the Document Foundation was formed, largely by people who were already spending their time on OpenOffice. They forked OpenOffice into LibreOffice almost overnight. Major longstanding pull requests were quickly merged. New people who previously hadn't wanted to contribute stepped up to support a community project. And the result has been all to the good! The Document Foundation still manages the project, and in 2019 did so with a total income of less than a million Euros.
To me this is proof that large open source software projects can quietly evolve into two camps: one is the employees of a governing corporation, and the other is the community. And the community might be doing most / all of the core work required to keep the project running, and the employees are mostly doing stuff that benefits the company. And suddenly there's a community fork - and it just works, without any hitches. I don't know if this would be successful in the case of Firefox, but I expect (and hope) that people would try if there was ever a hint of Mozilla abandoning it.
(For another example, consider KDE e.V., which manages an enormous open source project on a budget of under 600k Euros a year as of 2018.)
Maintaining a browser is an immense undertaking. With 50 full-time contributors, you may just about be able to provide a functional chrome to Blink (then WebKit) that doesn't suck too badly and keeps up with the performance and web standards requirements that Google in particular keeps pushing forward.
100 people is in no way enough to make both production-quality browser chrome and browser engine on your own, become the cutting edge for performance and privacy improvements, keep up with and participate in standards development, plus whatever auxiliary supporting efforts are necessary when your browser is the main product as opposed to supporting a cashflow-rich ad or app store business.
Sure, you can build a Chromium derivative for early adopters or crypto enthusiasts with a handful of people and a bunch of VC money. But what Mozilla does is more important, and has a much larger scope. They may survive with 100 people for a while, they would be a far cry from being relevant though.
Animations Team
Binding Team
Device Team
DevTools
DOM Team
Ecosystem infra
Input Team
Layout Team
Paint Team
Rendering Core
Speed Metrics Team
Style Team
Web Capabilities (Project Fugu)
Worker Team
For doing the "best job possible", you can probably blow up team size by a lot, there are numerous tasks that would benefit from more attention and I'm sure Mozilla are already making hard trade-offs at their current staffing levels (which obviously include a lot of people outside of Firefox engineering).
On the other hand, 10-20 years ago, there were a lot of alternative browser projects that were moderately active and able to keep up with 90% of the web.
KDE e.V does not fund any development. It's just there to help with legal matters, organizing conferences, sprints etc.
KDE's development is primarily by volunteers and a handful of developers paid by various interested companies.
These companies have historically included TrollTech/Nokia/Digia/Qt Company, Red Hat, Novell (Suse), Canonical, and nowadays mostly Blue Systems,
Right - my question is what would happen if Firefox development moved to basically the same model. A sibling comment to yours claims 50 full timers isn't enough to develop a browser, so maybe it wouldn't work.
Maybe they should start making cars, or washing machines. But you know what will happen? They will not conquer any new market and they will also lose the one they had.
Mozilla constantly ignores the user needs (extensions, customization) and adds new, "cool" stuff that nobody wants (Pocket, accounts, Mr. Robot adds).. Those "cool" things are only interesting for the managers who want to put it into their CV and some developers that enjoy working on greenfield projects that will never be completed.
At the same time, the core product dies: user needs are ignored, money is spend on everything else, not the browser.
If you think Rust is a 'successful product' in regards to business given the Mozilla Corporation's financial situation, then this is extremely worrying.
I would posit that this (one) of the reasons why 250 people had to be let go. Mozilla focusing on 'distractions' rather than anything that makes them money.
The scope of this thread is if Mozilla has the potential to make successful products (or, things, I guess) beyond Firefox. The OP claims its not possible for the organization to do so. In my mind, showing they have created software that has traction (some revenue generating, some not) disproves this. A PM considers a product successful if it is adopted and loved by users. Other people consider it successful if its team is cash flow positive. Others consider it successful if it bolsters the company brand. The definition of successful I was working with is one that shows Mozilla can ship useful software.
The problem with your view is that if you don't have a plan on how a product will generate revenue that you are effectively taking a huge gamble that may not pay off. So you'll be 'successful' by your definition while filing for chapter 11, something that Mozilla is flirting with in the medium term if they pursue this route.
Only companies with very deep pockets can pursue bets like that, and even then it could hurt. Microsoft Xbox' story is a good example of a bet that worked out, there are many examples of such bets not working out, quite a few of them killing the companies that made the bets.
So it's a niche product targetted at a niche user group.
Where firefox the company is failing is to have a financial sound way of delivering that niche product. To keep the product relevant it needs to invest, and it needs some revenue to pay for these investments. This could be through other products, sponsering, subsidies, etc.
As a long time firefox user i care about having an alternative browser. I don't care about the company mozilla, nor any of its other products. But i understand the money to keep firefox relevant needs to come from somewhere.
But posting Rust as a product and claiming FireFox is not successful is simply not on the level.
FireFox has been amazingly resilient given the onslaught aimed at it, the fact that it still has the marketshare it does is a success in its own right. That that marketshare is dwindling should surprise noone, least of all those working at Mozilla.
As for your experience: that is how most products are developed. But Mozilla is not - at present - a company with more than one successful product. Not from my perspective, and likely not from any of the other frequent users of its flagship product.
I should have never said Rust was a product, you're focusing on a word I used you didn't like and have made it a gotcha that let it derail us away from your original claims. I was using it as an example of Mozilla creating something successful other than Firefox. You claimed Mozilla is a one trick pony and is incapable of making anything else successful other than Firefox. This is objectively false. Firefox only generated revenue in the first place due to an ad deal, which is held up by legal concerns. You also completely ignored the other example I gave, the product I worked on and ran the team for, which is also generating revenue for the company. (Revenue which, I might add, is not backed by advertising dollars nor legal blowback.)
Take care.
And for what it's worth, I used Hubs a little, and it was pretty neat - thanks. Unfortunately I was never able to gain traction on using it more regularly, as the nerdiness level of a 3D/VR environment was too high for my social circle.
By that virtue it seems that an awfully large number of "products" that came out of Bell Labs wouldn't be considered successful, unless I misunderstand.
The fact that it led to useful products is the reason it was established in the first place: a very long term plan from a company that could easily afford it.
And since it strengthened the company that decided to commit the resources it definitely can be considered a success.
There are a few more examples of such institutions, some more successful, others less so but overall doing basic research in a time when tech is in a state of flux looks like it is a winning strategy.
But for some reason managers never takes responsibility.
Isn't Rust a language? https://research.mozilla.org/rust/
How is that going to keep the lights on? Doesn't seem like it contributes to the bottom line in any way, so they would have been better off allocating those people to keeping Firefox competitive. Seems like they need a "more wood behind fewer arrows" moment like Google had. Or a "sell everything but consulting" since consulting is the only thing making money moment like IBM had when they sold laptop, storage, printer, etc. divisions.
Rust is not a product. And for Mozilla it was a huge distraction, one they could ill afford.
So my point stands: this is a rearguard action. Eventually they will lose, accelerating that is in nobody's interest.
This is demonstrably false. Rust was designed for use in browser development, and it has successfully been adopted into Firefox. The payback is increased security, stability, and Firefox developer productivity.
None of the other major browsers are written in Rust, there does not seem to be a huge difference in the number of security issues listed for any of those.
I once worked at a company where they wanted to build everything, preferably including their own operating system programming language and database. And all that four a payment processor, something you could probably write in any language available. Guess where that story ended?
If something isn't core to your proposition it is a distraction.
D has the complexity of C++ with major drawbacks, (the stdlib was tightly tied to GC for example).
Just look at D's marketshare and its overall time on the market.
If you argument is that literally any Turing-complete language would somehow do then bravo for missing the point of basically every language besides asm.
And no, your strawman doesn't hold.
D has been on the market for significantly longer than Rust and reached 1.0 full 8 years before Rust had a 1.0 release, so not surprising at all.
But the rate at which Rust is being adopted is much faster than that of D.
Moreover Rust brings something novel to the table and even inspiring other popular languages, like Swift, in the process.
D has nothing that I'd consider novel. So personally I'll trade D for Rust any day. Luckily, we don't have to pick.
You do realize Rust is a big part of the reason Firefox is more competitive past v57 than it ever was, right?
Mozilla should spin Rust out ASAP so they can focus on their core. Rust has enough momentum now that it does not need Mozilla attention to keep it afloat. Or at least, that's the impression I'm getting, if that's not the case then my apologies.
The fact that Mozilla is a browser company seems to be well known everywhere except at Mozilla. I find this odd.
The word 'browser' is mentioned exactly once in that corporate message and it is in a negative way, 'beyond the browser'. Not exactly inspiring hope, that one.
The plan is to have a Rust Foundation.
Of course you can, as it was shown by FF winning against the preinstalled IE a decade ago. Users were happiliy switching away, because FF was just the better browser.
edit: I regret using the word 'product' since it clearly allowed an instant response of goal post shifting around if Rust is a product, or whatever, by everyone else in this thread. My point was not that, it was that Mozilla is not a 'one trick pony', which was the original claim. And as a person who ships products, I consider a product a failure if less people are using it over time, regardless of the potential underlying cause.
Rust is not a product, never was meant to be one either, if you can point to $0.01 of income brought to Mozilla because of someone paying for Rust then I will be happy to concede that it is in fact a product.
Failing to me means that your product can not stand in the marketplace on merit. Underhanded - criminal at that - tactics by a competitor does not change that in principle. See also: Stacker, Netscape (hm, haven't we seen this before: browser company wants to be platform company, does a rewrite), and many other products that ultimately did not make it but had a very good run while they were alive.
Mozilla is confusing their own importance to staying alive as 'Mozilla the profit seeking company' vs 'FireFox, the last stand'.
And the latter to me is much closer to the stated mission of Mozilla than the former, no matter how much corpspeak they throw at it.
That's not the only way to measure it. Rust paid for itself by making Firefox more competitive. Also, I like how the focus is on one of the most useful things Mozilla does outside of Firefox and not the gazillion things that had much, much less use than Rust.
What? Microsoft is nothing like Borland. Sure they make some money from Visual Studio Enterprise or whatever, but their languages are mostly there to attract devs to Windows/Azure and are making $0 directly.
You missed my point, Rust does not need to directly make $$ "on the market place", ever. All it needs to do is enable Mozilla developers to make Firefox more competitive, easier and faster than other solutions. It is doing that, see "Firefox Quantum", WebRender, Servo etc.
And BTW, the Rust staff paid by Mozilla is relatively tiny, (dozen people?). The fact that this is a major focus is pathetic.
EDIT: Not a dozen, more like 3-4 people.
Borland is 'mostly dead', it ceased being an independent entity in 2015 and that's because it is very hard to sell tools in a world that considers software tools to be a commodity.
Microsoft is only a language powerhouse because they own a whole platform. Mozilla does not qualify as a platform company, as much as they may want that.
> but their languages are mostly there to attract devs to Windows/Azure and are making $0 directly.
Exactly. The kind of benefit that Rust will never bring to Mozilla. Entirely different audiences.
> You missed my point, Rust does not need to directly make $$ "on the market place", ever. All it needs to do is enable Mozilla developers to make Firefox more competitive, easier and faster than other solutions. It is doing that, see "Firefox Quantum", WebRender, Servo etc.
I'll give that a 'maybe'. I don't see much difference in speed of development, if any I see a much slower pace of development @ Mozilla, bugs are open for a very long time and are typically closed not because they got fixed but because they've been 'inactive for too long'.
> And BTW, the Rust staff paid by Mozilla is relatively tiny, (dozen people?). The fact that this is a major focus is pathetic.
12 people is not 'tiny', thats two full teams. Of the 750 people left - if my math is correct - that is a small fraction but compared to the size of the team dedicated to FireFox it is reasonably large.
This has little to do with Rust and has been a thing for a long time and honestly it's a thing for every major piece of software, you just don't see the bug trackers usually.
Just look at how many issues VS Code or IntelliJ has logged in for example.
The fact is, Firefox only got usable at v57 for many, including me, which was thanks to Rust.
> 12 people is not 'tiny', thats two full teams.
And how many marketing, outreach and happiness heroes, ambassadors etc. does Mozilla employ? My bet would be 5x the size of the Rust team at least.
Maybe others are still doing that, but the situation's a lot murkier now. Firefox's UI is more confusing than it used to be (every time you open an application and it does something it doesn't normally, that's confusing to non-nerds—looking at you, update-announcement tabs and "hey come look at Pocket!" messages), other browsers have gotten better, and FF requires extensions to deliver an obviously-better browsing experience than other browsers (it may provide more privacy than Chrome or Edge out-of-the-box, sure, but my mom can't tell that, unlike automatic pop-up blocking, which was obviously a improvement over IE when FF was getting started). It's also not so lightweight that it draws comments from normies when you launch it, because it comes up so fast (this was an actual thing back when it first came out, vs. IE)
Do you have example of this?