Mozilla's recent history should be (and probably will be at some point) a case study in PR. They had enormous reserves of goodwill, trust, and positive perception, and managed to squander all of that in a relatively short period of time.
that company went from being beloved by nearly all to universally hated in under 18 months
it has been astounding to watch so much destroyed so quickly
The first "user-enhancing" [1] in-browser ads ("sponsored tiles") were introduced in 2014. Pocket imposition was 2015 [2]. Mr Robot was 2017 [3]. Cliqz was 2017 [4]. booking.com was 2018 [5].
[1] https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126
[3] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-back...
[4] https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...
[5] https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/31/mozilla-ad-on-firefoxs-ne...
e.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
That said, it's not healthy that Mozilla have relied on search revenue from Google.
Personally I've used FF for 10 years+, on Linux nowadays
From personal experience, my perception of Mozilla has been negatively affected by how they've handled the rewrite of Firefox for Android. It was released too early, and it's still missing the ability to search through browsing history. And there are still so many bugs and performance issues almost a year after its release. I opened issues for many of them and they have been left ignored to this day.
- Scrolling up on Google search's results page and some other pages is not registered half the time, and sometimes triggers pull-to-refresh instead
- Scrolling up inside an input box while the page is at the top of the screen causes unintentional pull-to-refresh
- Bitwarden autofill is not registered unless you kill and restart the app after logging in
- You can't save images that require cookies to be passed to the request, such as under DDoS protected pages
- Links will sometimes redirect to about:blank unless you go back and click them again
- Most recently visited page is not restored when closing and reopening the app, even though it's saved to the history (closed as wontfix)
- Uses large amounts of memory, causing Android share actions to be silently killed due to OOM unless you quickly kill the app right after sending them
- Closing a tab and clicking "Undo" in the popup sends the tab all the way to the top of the list, instead of its original position (inconvenient if you have a large number of tabs open)
- Frequently loses open tabs in memory, even within ten seconds of navigating to another tab
I'm pretty much only using mobile Firefox out of principle and for uBlock Origin at this point. And sometimes I still have to use something like Brave to get around performance issues.
And then Mozilla announces that they've spent their development resources on projects like Rally and DoH that I personally have no interest in using.
It's certainly frustrating. It makes you wonder what their management is thinking.
I hope I'm not alone in thinking these are objectively bad experiences to have on mobile, which will only increase the marketshare of Blink-based Android browsers. It's been my experience that, when one of their mobile team's engineers says that they have to wait for the corresponding GeckoView issue to be fixed before it can be upstreamed into FfA, you might as well give up hope of seeing it fixed for at least another few months, if ever. And I can't understand why they close and ignore some issues that still have a very real impact on the browsing experience to this day.
It's sad, because Firefox is the only opportunity on mobile to take advantage of uBlock Origin and other WebExtensions (though full support is still not implemented yet), and Brave's adblocking is at times inferior, like for Twitter's web version.
Apologies for the rant, but I feel that it had to be said.
And yes, I can't understand how Firefox was updated with so many features missing and it is still not there. It's quite sad, really.
I should also mention that Chrome on Android has none of the issues I described earlier. Wouldn't it make sense that even someone like me that desperately wants a reason to stand with Mozilla ends up giving into temptation and uses Brave half the time?
I hope that Mozilla can learn from its mistakes and stay competitive, given that the alternative is an Android browser monoculture. They're one of the few organizations with the resources to implement the increasingly encroaching burden of new web specifications, and I don't think a community-supported fork of Firefox or FfA will survive without some kind of miracle (see Waterfox and its need to eventually implement Web Components or fall out of relevance). The partial WebExtension support on mobile alone is one thing that gives me hope FfA will continue to see support for the near future.
Blizzard specifically lost people passionate about their work, getting taken over by business types, realizing too late that it wasn't Blizzard the company that made great products, but great people making great products. As a consequence of passionate people leaving, their audience doesn't feel like they are being understood at all, or even listened to. The devs that were regularly talking to the players and spoke spoke their language have departed, some of them now working on their own game (Palia), where they continue to work as they used to.
Mozilla just appears to be spreading itself very thin, straying far from their mission of creating a good browser.
I didn't hear about this. Care to explain?