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Comment by CarelessExpert | Hacker News Reader

> The MBA types have completed their takeover of a once venerable engineering organization.

And yet, in the last 5 years we've seen some of the greatest leaps in Firefox in the form of adopting technologies in Servo. And that's ignoring the growth of Rust adoption and so forth.

But you're right. Obviously the problem is the technologists aren't in control.

It's definitely not monopoly abuse on dominant platforms, the fact that browsers don't make money (even Microsoft couldn't do it), the lack of diversification in their revenue models...

If they just got the tech right it'd solve everything!

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Agreed.

The deeper reason why bundled IE was such an existential threat to Netscape, then to Mozilla, and, more generally, a Web that wasn't under the thumb of any one corporation, was that the surest way to squash your competitors is to take away their ability to make money.

With IE, the strategy was to make money on the OS and developer tools. You needed to buy a Microsoft IDE, which would run on a Microsoft operating system, in order to make those cool ActiveX controls that everyone was leaning on back when JavaScript couldn't quite hack it. Also Frontpage.

With Chrome, it's ads and Google One.

Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox has no way to make money on the browser. There's passing a hat, but that was never going to make for a sustainable business. Not if the only people who really care enough to toss some money in, developers, are going to continue to stick with Chrome. Which they clearly are. So they need to pivot to survive. Even if they lose some goodwill with techies. Most employees won't accept simple gratitude as a form of payment.

IE was largely a defensive move to prevent Windows from becoming irrelevant as a developer platform. It served its purpose and then was left to languish.

Chrome was largely a defensive move to prevent Google's ads from being disintermediated. It continues to serve its purpose.

> There's passing a hat

Frustratingly, Mozilla has made it all but impossible to contribute financially to the development of Firefox itself. You can donate to the Mozilla Organization but there's no guarantee any of that money will be spent on Firefox development.

I would absolutely pay for Firefox if they'd let me.

Seconding this for anyone reading!

> But you're right. Obviously the problem is the technologists aren't in control.

Like, say, Brendan Eich? Is this a case of get woke, go broke?

> Is this a case of get woke, go broke?

Yes.

> It's definitely not monopoly abuse on dominant platforms

How is the Google monopoly forcing them to make developer experience worse?

> the fact that browsers don't make money (even Microsoft couldn't do it)

Microsoft didn't even try. Microsoft wanted control, not monetization of the Browser itself. I'm pretty sure that Browsers can make money, especially from developers. JetBrains makes money building developer products, and people pay them, because their products are that much better than e.g. vscode.

Turn Firefox into a great developer browser that saves developers time and annoyance, and they'll happily give you money. Turn developers away, and they'll use a Browser that saves them time and annoyance. And at some point they'll stop testing in Firefox, just like they don't test in IE6.

It requires money to support developers. They aren't free nor do they grow on trees. If you don't have enough revenue you won't be able to pay for your development team.

Monopolies tend to suck the revenue streams from a market. While Google may not be directly responsible their market dominance does make it harder for other competitors to make money.

> How is the Google monopoly forcing them to make developer experience worse?

My statement was a broader one about Mozilla's overall struggles in the market, not about this specific decision.

> Turn Firefox into a great developer browser that saves developers time and annoyance, and they'll happily give you money.

Just to state the obvious: Developers are not any browser's primary target user base. Not by a longshot.

I agree that appealing to developers is important. Microsoft had to learn that the hard way through the early aughts.

But appealing to developers and power users isn't going to fill the gaping financial hole left behind after the Google deal got cancelled. Developers are notoriously cheap. If they have the option of Firefox with paid dev features, or a free Chrome, I'm pretty confident I know which one they'll choose.

> And at some point they'll stop testing in Firefox, just like they don't test in IE6.

And they'll do so because their users aren't using the browser and so it's not worth their time. For Firefox to remain relevant it needs marketshare. Heck, I'll bet the reason Google felt comfortable cancelling the search partnership is because Firefox' marketshare fell so far that the benefits were no longer worth the cost.

Hence my comments about monopoly abuse and so forth.

> If they have the option of Firefox with paid dev features, or a free Chrome, I'm pretty confident I know which one they'll choose.

I don't think that's obvious at all. JetBrains is making plenty of money ($230M in 2018 according to Wikipedia), even though there are free IDEs (one of them sponsored by Microsoft no less). Theirs are just that much better.

You're right that hobby developers are cheap, but the professional market is quite different, and even more so when you sell to enterprises. $100/yr is nothing compared to developer salaries and for all web developers, designers etc, the Browser is the major tool.

> For Firefox to remain relevant it needs marketshare.

My impression is that developers are pretty much the remaining users of Firefox. And they're kicking them out.

> JetBrains is making plenty of money ($230M in 2018 according to Wikipedia),

JetBrains isn't up against a monopolist who's willing to offer the same features for free to any comers.

Also, worth noting, the now-cancelled Google deal was worth $375M to their bottom line. So even if they could hit JetBrains' numbers (which I highly doubt), it still wouldn't fill the hole left behind.

If anything, what this says to me is that Mozilla shedding staff makes sense. If JetBrains can be profitable producing a complex IDE with half the spend (Mozilla 2018 spend was $451M), it makes me wonder just how efficient Mozilla is with their staffing.

> Developers are notoriously cheap. If they have the option of Firefox with paid dev features, or a free Chrome, I'm pretty confident I know which one they'll choose.

Exactly. Especially since Firefox is one of the only non-Chromium based browsers left. If you pivot towards only courting developers and make it a paid product, you now have a product that no longer at all represents the browsers (and rendering engines) that users are using. Why test on Gecko when (now that it's paywalled) no one is actually using Gecko?

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