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I'd say if they wanted to do a moon-shot-but-actually-achievable non-browser project against a slow, bloated, closed, locked-in, shitty product that everyone uses anyway (so, like IE back when they took that one), they'd target Google's office suite. As a bonus it could give them the revenue they want, through paid business hosting with official support or something like that.

Being an as-good-as-the-competition web browser that's not the default on any major OS (yeah I use it, but the Linux desktop ain't major) and doesn't have something like Google's reach for massive promotion (like they did with Chrome) is gonna kill them as a viable product with broad appeal, at this rate. They need to find a way to make that so much better than the competition that people bother to install it (on others' computers, too, like how they got their start), and I'm not sure how they can do that, or they need to pick another crappy but super-popular web-related product and go for the throat.

[EDIT] for that matter, web chat/conferencing, and social. IMO the browser's a dead-end for them except as a supporting product, but they keep focusing on utterly dull, niche, or already well-served products. IE sucked, but everyone needed a browser. Firefox crushed it by thoroughly and entirely not sucking. Pick something else that sucks and do the same. Not... bookmarking or whatever Pocket does.

Office 365 is pretty great I honestly dont get why people keep using gsuit

Free, and they already have gmail. Android pushes it. Seems super-popular in schools. Ties in with their education offerings, I think, and lots of schools use chrome books.

If you ever managed to drop out of the "free" google apps classification (and I don't think I was the only idiot to mistakenly allow that to happen), google apps are not free.

I pay about $12/month to be able to use these things, which I regret only slightly less than not having the time to establish suitable alternatives.

I got Office 365 as I enrolled into university a couple of years ago in Australia, always thought most universities went with MS offerings.

Unlimited Google Drive, honestly. It’s nice being able to keep an offsite backup (but not the only one, of course) of my NAS in the cloud.

I assume they’ll get rid of it at some point and then I’ll move, but it’s surely handy (OneDrive is completely terrible UX wise and has a 5TB hard limit).

I actually prefer the flat aesthetic of MS services, not sure what UX you're referring to. Yes the storage limit sucks but other than that Outlook and One Drive are not any laggier than Google's products to me and they have all the basic things I need (plus some ads, admittedly). Needless to say MS office is superior to Google docs.

Ended up going to one drive when I saw how much resources google drive was eating up on my mac. Work pays for both anyway.

It's unfortunate that they don't support Linux. Drove me to a competitor, for myself and my whole family.

Each time somebody mentions, that 'libxslt2' is on an XPath 1.0 level (20 years old, we are at v3.1, currently) and how nice an update would be, the common agreement is the same: "lots of work, which nobody pays for."

Just thinking about all the money they burned through, how great would it have been, to bring XML up to current standards, and to support it well in Firefox. I mention this, because it is important, that we have at least one browser in the market, that understands XML native.

Or what would be if "Ubiquity" would have become an integral part of Firefox? Wow, just wow! I hate these people. They totally ignored the desire of many folks for a WYSIWYG XUL IDE back in the day as well... Instead they made Firefoxy parties, sold T-Shirts and coffee-mugs, implemented 'Persona', 'Hello' and what not! Did you just say, they bought 'Pocket'? Holy moly! I thought it was just a strategic relationship.

Especially ironic considering that Firefox's UI chrome markup language (XUL) is (was?)... XML. And javascript. It was like a not-shitty Electron ahead of its time by like 20 years. I'm still bitter about XUL being irrelevant now.

They bought pocket and, in my opinion, overpaid for it significantly (quite a few of us were mad at that at the time).

There was some relationship between the creator of Pocket and one or more Mozilla executives and/or board members that made the whole purchase stink in more ways than one.

First thing i do on a new Firefox profile (for the one machine I have still running Firefox) is disable Pocket.

What has XML to do with anything?

XML is the only serious, modern document format we have and well within the realm of web browsers.

Very informative! I remember using Mozilla alongside Netscape with the entire suite for editing etc. versus Frontpage.

And when Phoenix/Firebird came out how it was very basic but a slimmed down version of Mozilla.

It seemed they lost their way and just became the old Mozilla browser but with lots of features nobody wanted (Pocket??) and a tonne of other things I have no idea why they got involved in. Perhaps they just employed developers who liked writing new things.

This x1000. They get hundreds of millions a year to maintain a few foundational web technologies. Instead of doing that well, they are constantly on quixotic adventures with stuff like the Mr. Robot crossover and still fail to maintain core functionality. They lost the ability to fully remap browser controls in 2016 and haven't restored it since.

How do you have that much money for such a limited scoped mission and still get in over your head? And if so, what hope is there for anyone else?

Same here, been using Netscape, Mozilla, Phoenix and Firefox. Watched the development of Firefox 0.x to 4, e10s, MemShrink, SpiderMonkey, xMonkey, Firefox OS, Rust and Servo.

Witness Firefox ran an Ad on the front page of newspaper with thousands of supporters names on it. It sure made us proud, the battle against IE. ( Which is why I get pissed when people say Safari is the new IE ) I dont know how long ago was that, early 2000? Must have been nearly two decade.

Pushed Firefox installation in a University Campus to thousands of PCs. Pushed through hundreds of installations in a few enterprise. Along with dozen of other things, communities, Mozillazine ( I think it is now in Read Only Mode) .

There are lots of help from others too. I am sure I am not the only one. I dont know and dont think Chrome ever got that much support.

If you are IBM or Intel, you can afford to do silly thing like acquiring McAfee. You can afford to waste money and inefficiency. The whole reason why Startup were able to compete with some of the big players is that they could get $10 out of $1 spend, while Enterprise could barely move even with $10. The inefficiency is real, the only exception to that is possibly Apple.

Mozilla has a large cooperate mentality, enterprise inefficiency, non-profits ideals and startup's moon-shot strategy. I dont know of any possible worst combination than that.

So after nearly three decades of Netscape / Mozilla, I moved on to a different browser. It was just too painful to watch.

Edit: I forgot to add, Google has yet to renew their contract with Mozilla. Given their new low in marketshare ( Judging from Apple, terms are likely paid per Active User basis ), I suspect the negotiation terms is substantially lower than previously. Hence the layoff.

Not sure I understand. You disagree with the way the company/organization is being run so much, so you stopped using their free product? Do you still like the actual browser?

>so you stopped using their free product?

If it wasn't clear, a user is directly supporting Mozilla by using their product.

But do you like the product?

If coca-cola did some re-organization I didn´t like or spent money like a mad person on ridiculous products, I´d still buy coke until the company went broke.

I find that I agree and disagree on a few points. I do wish they'd kept their focus on the technical over the marketing. I don't think they really needed the swaths of MBA types in charge of the organization, and wish they'd stayed closer to their technical roots which is what survived from the earlier Netscape through AOL and into Mozilla. I was also an early fan from Phoenix, though I think the Firebird name (also a fan at that time of Firebird SQL) was a misstep.

I think some of the more encompasing efforts haven't all been bad. Rust as a language has been a great thing to come from Moz. Firefox OS could have been interesting as well.

For that matter I'd have been happy to see broader adoption of Mozilla's identity efforts, and don't so much mind them trying to get VPN as a secondary funding source.

I do wish their structure was more geared towards keeping the technical and developer teams as a focus of the organization over the more commercial aspirations.

I will say I did switch to Chrome around 2010 mostly because I really do prefer it's UI/UX ... FF is getting closer to that, despite some really not liking it and I've considered switching back.

I also find it ironic how popular electron has become, when XULRunner was such a great platform well over a decade before. I do think there's opportunity to create the next npm in concert with deno and firefox for supporting a greater module approach. There's still some unanswered bits there. Similarly, still would like a way to do bundled application packages; similar to jar or silverlight that's just a zip file of assets with a manifest and modules.

If often feels like Mozilla is doing their own thing to try and gain market share instead of working with the broader community.

Yep, if they had stuck the Google money in an index fund and only operated off a small drawdown then they wouldn't need to rely on commercial interests or donations today.

Thanks for putting this all in perspective. Sounds like bad management to me, really unfortunate. Keeping the AI unit is nonsensical.

AI has been beset by problems of racial bias, and is currently only open to corporate giants. It makes perfect sense to try an manage core AI capability as an NGO exactly the same as it makes sense to manage an open, free browser.

You can argue that Mozilla specifically shouldn’t do this, and you might be right. But no-one else has their profile. No-one else is doing it.

I think your critique is the only reasonable one I've read so far. Mozilla need to go back to their radical roots, refocus their energy for the new decade, above all find a way to survive which doesn't compromise their integrity.

They should have switched to blink or WebKit years ago. Yes I used Firefox since it came out of AOL but for quite a few years now it has been a liability. Too many web sites simply don't work in Firefox. Nobody making web sites tests in Firefox any more. The Mozilla leadership adopted the head in the sand approach on this point with the obvious outcome. So long and thanks for all the fish!

The secret to make folks test on Firefox is by making developers happy. What makes them happy? A good DevTools experience.

Chrome won me over as a developer with its developer console, and I noticed Firefox Devtools has become a lot better now.

There are still quirks in Chrome's devtools and Firefox really has a shot if it focuses properly. For example working with large JS files are painful and the networks tab can be way more better.

But the rest of the crap, the marketing, the rebranding, the Pocket purchase and integration, Firefox OS, the voice recognition and AI stuff (and notice the announcement, they're keeping the AI division, really need that part apparently), stuff that nobody remembers, that's all a waste of money that could be saved by the non-profit foundation to just support the low-level engine keeping the open web viable.

I have no reason to think that your assessment of what's "crap" is a good one, while the assessment of those who actually work at Mozilla is somehow worse.