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Comment by selfhoster11 | Hacker News Reader

They should focus on saving Firefox.

- Cut out all (or at the very least, most) initiatives that don't serve the goal of promoting Firefox's market share or sustainability going forward

- Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian

- Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.

- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).

- Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.

- Make whatever partnerships are needed to have a steady stream of income, be that donation or selling out to Google or Bing.

Firefox is in trouble. Firefox is also Mozilla's raison d'être, and they should embrace that. We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.

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Current CEO is a cancer to Mozilla, her main goal seems like to make more money personally before Mozilla goes bankrupt. As long is as she is there - there is no hope

https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

The arrogance is hard to believe.

> In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

And she raised her pay while firing essential engineers: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/313658-mozilla-fires-2...

I'm a firefox user for over 10 years. I think I'm now convinced there is no future, I'll have to start to adapt to another browser now. I'll give Vivaldi a try.

That was the layoff where they got rid of all the rust people?

Its going to sound harsh, but they are loosing market share to browsers that didn't have to invent a new language to write a browser in.

So, getting rid of those people was probably a positive impact for firefox since they were mostly just yak shaving instead of actually improving the end product. The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as long as it performs well, doesn't eat all their ram, or create giant backdoors.

Letting "the lets rewrite our core product in $COOL_TECH_OF_MONTH" people run a product is a sure sign of something that will fail if its not already. Lets invent our own computer language to do it is even worse.

This feels like a gross mischaracterization of the intent and work that went into Servo. You say this as if nothing else was being done on Firefox concurrently even though this is demonstrably false - and in fact, portions of Servo were integrated into Firefox (see: Quantum).

Firefox keeps losing on technical merit because it is fundamentally impossible to keep up with Webkit and Blink, which are all backed by massive corporations and are throwing money at the engineering and project resources to actually move things forward.

Your take was wrong. The move to rust was great and used to improve security and maintainability of the browser. They cut the wrong people. What they should have done was whack everything other than firefox and coders contributing to that code base and employees supporting that effort directly. They have awful leadership currently that are just milking their exec offices for the cash.

> The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran as long as it performs well, doesn't eat all their ram, or create giant backdoors.

In the short term, yes. In the long term however, this strategy could have been crucial. And the long term is precisely where open source software usually has the upper hand.

> The users don't care if you wrote it in C++ or fortran

Web site users don't care if a site's written with NodeJS or assembly; but that would make a huge difference to bugginess, development speed, feature set, etc.

Firefox is getting bogged-down in some areas due to its C++ codebase; especially trying to introduce concurrency (in a way which doesn't break everything, or cause unforeseen security implications, which is often the case in C/C++)

> or create giant backdoors.

Using memory safe languages is a big step towards this goal.

The main problem is that they're not making money with their core product so they need to experiment and innovate to find ways to make money.

I agree they probably didn't need to invent rust: that was an happy accident, the kind of things that happen when you have really smart people around. If they had a money making accident we would be talking about something else, but I guess they would need a different type of culture for that to happen.

This is not how you run a company and it shows. It's impressive Mozilla is still around if you ask me - but I suspect it has to do with Google, M$ needing someone easily controllable to keep the anti monopoly government people away from browsers.

Rust and servo were how they were innovating, and where a lot of the competitive features came from. By firing them, Mozilla made clear that they do not care about these things. The CEO is quite clearly a parasite hell-bent on extracting as much value as she can before bailing for the next victim.

That's soooo wrong. Projects like Servo were exactly the sort of things they should have been working on.

Mozilla didn't really invent Rust, and its looking quite likely that Rust is going to be just as significant of a contribution to the world as Firefox was (long term).

>I'll have to start to adapt to another browser now. I'll give Vivaldi a try.

Seems silly, I see no valid reason to switch browsers. What technical or functional limitations are you running into that didnt exist earlier?

Firefox (android) doesn't always let me scroll back to the top of the page

I wish Vivaldi wasn't horrible. I gave it a real try on all my devices for about 6 months a couple of years ago, but it is just too unreliable and prone to crashes and random issues. I've been way, way happier on Firefox ever since.

If Firefox goes the rest of the way down the tubes, I'll try Edge before I go Vivaldi again.

Edge is a privacy disaster.

Used Netscape Navigator until Firefox was released. Stayed on FF until a couple of years ago. I moved to Waterfox and Vivaldi, I highly enjoy both.

Vivaldi is the best option! I have been using it as my daily driver, and I don't have any moment of regret.

Her logic assumes that another company would actually pay her that much. Given how disastrous her tenure has been to Firefox's user base, I'm skeptical that another company would even want her as CEO, let alone pay her this much.

There's supply and demand here.

Any replacement CEO is going to be thinking, I'm trying to beat Google, Apple and Microsoft on a tiny budget and if I dont succeed people will blame me personally for it all, complain about me online and claim that no one else should employ me. That's a gamble for anyone coming in who has better options and so attacks on the CEO for being a failure only help to create a moat and increase her bargaining power.

The replacement "CEO" should be someone like Linus Torvalds, someone who is not in it for the money but for the satisfaction of crushing his opponents where it matters: mind share among developers followed by market share. Someone who does not try to go with the flow of fake virtue and bloated CxO remuneration. Someone real. Someone who has the testicular fortitude to say ¨NO" to the social justice crowd.

Maybe Brendan Eich can come back? Do a Steve Jobs, take back the project and make it into what it was meant to be, primus inter pares among browsers.

I'm extremely curious what you think her job is and what her job actually is. I don't know either one. But I must be waaaaaay of base if 2m+ is a reasonable salary for the workload and responsibility.

And if we want to get conspiratorial, If she thinks her main job is getting the most money out of the Google deal, then Google would be more than happy to pretend shes doing great in the negotiations and pay 5m extra.

The sooner Mozilla loses its dev culture and talent the more power Google has.

You forgot the part that comes after:

> By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.

Yikes, makes me also consider just switching off it again

Where would we go though? It's bordering on Chromium-derivative or bust at this point.

Safari or Brave

Brave is the most non-google chromium variant, kind of like a Firefox based on chromium, and safari is still a good browser on Mac

Fuck, I'll do it for a mere million dollars. The market has spoken.

I can't do much worse than losing 85% market share.

You'd think that there are even qualified people who would do it for (almost) free, just for the chance of building a resume...

As a professional that gets offers like this ("it will be good for your portfolio") I hate this comment.

If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Almost everyone in business has an MBA so that qualification is pretty easy to get.

The passion they need is a lot harder.

There's a weird type of logic going on where almost everyone who would be willing to do it for almost free is probably not qualified for the job. Would you really stake the future of your foundation on someone who still needs to build their resume?

Do nonprofits really care about the market? Not sure how that works, what would it take to replace her if she doesn't want to be replaced?

The professionals that work in those nonprofits do. If you want a capable manager or SEO, you need to pay a correct market price.

I don't think this has anything to do with arrogance, this is simply the market value speaking. Ginni Rometty did something similar with IBM; while being a terrible CEO ("IBM was the worst-performing large-cap tech stock during Rometty's tenure, dropping 24%" [1]), she got a whopping $20M per year [2] during her first 7 years of being a CEO, and she got $20M golden parachute [3] upon leaving the shell of an IBM.

This is not arrogance. This is simply the pay of a CEO, regardless of their performance.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/31/ibm-was-worst-performing-lar...

[2] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-01-31/ginni-rome...

[3] https://www.silicon.co.uk/workspace/ibm-ginni-rometty-20m-33...

If that's what the market rate is, then let them go work somewhere else.

There are hundreds of thousands of individuals capable of doing these jobs making nowhere near as much - plenty of them would do it better.

Mozilla is not IBM. They may compete against the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Apple, yet they are not those companies either. The scope of their business interests are minuscule in comparison. Heck, their share of the markets that they do compete with those companies in pales in comparison. So yes, there is an element of arrogance in her claim.

> This is not arrogance. This is simply the pay of a CEO

You have a social responsibility to take care of the people working below you, which as a CEO is everyone. If you fire them and give yourself a raise, perhaps it is not arrogance but it definitely is gross negligence. No amount of "this is simply the market value" corporate doublespeak is going to change the fact that doing so takes you further and further from being an actual human being. Perhaps this is okay with you, but I think it should be questioned and mocked.

IBM is more than two orders of magnitude bigger than Mozilla in terms of both spending and headcount. On a log scale, Mozilla's scale is about halfway between IBM and your local McDonald's franchise.

CEOs of smaller companies typically don't command that level of compensation, and when they do, it's generally because the company performed well and their pay was heavily perforamnce-based.

> I don't think this has anything to do with arrogance, this is simply the market value speaking.

What market value? Firefox's market share is down 85%. It's hard to believe there's not someone cheaper and more capable available. This sort of extravagant CEO pay might be excusable if the company is actually booming, but in this case, it really looks like it's just plain greed: loot the company while running it into the ground.

An industry standard of arrogance is still arrogance.

Where is the board in all of this?!

What "CEO"? Does every mom-and-pop shop get a "CEO" with $3M compensation? Does every startup? I don't think Mozilla leadership deserves to be placed among big tech executives with standardized pay.

It might be that they need to pay that amount to attract top CEO talent. But then again, I'm not sure if Mozilla should be large enough to need a top CEO. I mean effectively reducing it to just the Firefox team would be fine with me. And then it's maybe 80 people to manage in total. So that's one regular office building and you're done. It doesn't sound like the CEO will be critical for anything in this company.

Unfortunately that is up to the people writing the checks. Their goals and the goals of Firefox enthusiasts are not particularly aligned.

And if top CEO talent results are a 85% market dip, why bother paying that much? A headless chicken can't make it much worse.

> When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

Then go work somewhere else!

If you can make 5 times as much somewhere else, and that's all you care about, quit Mozilla and go work somewhere else. Her attitude and greed are unbelievably infuriating.

from her Wikipedia page

> Baker was trained as a lawyer. She coordinates business and policy issues.

I don't know of any lawyers running a successful tech company.

They usually run for office instead.

...which makes sense. If someone is going to write, interpret, or enforce laws, you want them to have a deep understanding of the law.

I don't know of any lawyers running a successful country either :)

PS: By success I don't just mean economic...

Assuming she would be in line for a competitive role, which I highly doubt with the current track record.

I would have zero problems with her salary if firefox wasn't a sinking ship and was actually increasing market share (or at least holding on to it). I continue to use it, as it's a great product, but I wonder how long before google cuts off the spigot of money.

Atleast 200% of that payrise makes sense due to inflation. Value of the dollar halved during the past ~10 years.

Unless I calculated wrong 19% in the past 10 years. According to the https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm $100 in January 2012 has the buying power of $124.04 last month.

You seem to imply central bankers are honest and CPI is accurate. This is absolutely not the case and you should update your views.

It used to be a 50% haircut every ~10 years, now its closer to a 50% haircut every ~5 years.

That would make sense if all the lower wages got the same raise.

Wages cascade from top to bottom. You think CEOs should only get a raise after min. wage employees do?

That's not how this country will ever work but it's a nice fantasy.

omg, i am considering deleting firefox now. terrible.

Sounds stupid, you don't pay her salary by using firefox.

if you think thars bad, just wait til you hear how google ceo is paid.

As someone who knew someone who worked there she is absolutely nuts and her thinking is beyond radical. She will destroy Mozilla if she doesn't step down. Assuming it's not too late already.

No, she is on the take from Google to keep Firefox as a shield against monopoly claims, while reducing the actual competitive threat.

Pretty sure Apple/Safari and Microsoft/Edge have the monopoly shield taken care of at this point. Firefox on its current trajectory will bleed to death slow enough for nobody to notice. Mozilla stopped innovating in the one product of theirs anybody cares about. I sort of wish Mozilla would die faster so the current executives bleeding it dry would move on, and hopefully someone who actually cares about more than the money could revive it.

While it wouldn't surprise me with how awful Mozilla has been, do you have any proof or is it just a hypothesis?

> to keep Firefox as a shield against monopoly claims

Not with that marketshare! Assuming you're right, it seems she's failing at that too; there is no appearance of worthwhile competition from Firefox, which fighting for a distant #3 spot

Well they fired the previous competent CEO for political reasons. If politics and what you do in your private time is more important than competence, then this is what you get. Well deserved. FireFox getting it what it deserves. If you hire CEOs based on being women or having nice private beliefs, instead of competence you can eat failure all day long as far as I'm concerned.

A big part of the problem IMO is that Mitchell Baker is a lawyer, not a technologist or engineer. She does not understand how software companies are supposed to function.

I used to strongly support the mission of Mozilla. When I first read about the practices of upper management I felt like a fool for ever having donated in the past.

That is not going to happen again and I don't even like Firefox so much anymore because of it.

The donations go to the Foundation (woke activism), not the Corporation (Firefox etc. development) anyway.

previous one - now stellar ceo wasn't great either

A better CEO would not be cheaper, particularly considering that whoever takes the job would be tasked with saving a dying product.

High salary and a golden parachute would be required to attract anyone good enough to succeed.

> High salary and a golden parachute would be required to attract anyone good enough to succeed.

I'm not sure if the best way to get someone to save a dying product is a golden parachute which rewards them for running it straight into the ground. You have to make sure they're not risking everything to keep Firefox going, but ideally they'd have some skin in the game so they don't have an incentive to just loot whatever they can until it dies before sailing away from the burning wreak with even more money.

It's not a reward for failure, it's an insurance policy.

Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.

What kind of executive would accept an offer like that?

A golden parachute is the insurance policy: it says to the candidate, we know this is a nearly impossible task, and it might damage your career if you fail, so we will guarantee you some money if you fail in order to compensate you for taking on that risk.

I would really love to hear even one example of a CEO's career being damaged by failure in any material way.

Meanwhile, people for whom income is literally making the difference between getting food on the table and not get 2 weeks at best, often nothing at all.

I mean, I'm actually sympathetic to the idea that no one should take a job unless it has absolutely zero risk of ruining them financially if they fail at it, but it's pretty clear that this is a benefit only extended to very few people who don't really need it.

> Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.

Keeping in mind that "below market rate" is still "retirement within a few years at the Mozilla CEO's rate.

So even if your career were damaged, and it's easy to not have it damaged, you can retire after like 3 years. That's a fine insurance policy.

> If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.

Of course you'll get a lot of money.

1. You can give yourself a raise. If the Moz CEO had come in and we saw market share increasing do you think anyone would give a shit about increasing their pay? The issue is it's tanking and they laid off a ton of people at the same time they took a huge pay raise.

2. Executives are compensated with stock. Company does well, your stock goes up.

You don't want that kind of executive anyway. You want someone that identifies with the market and is seen as a safe hand to run FF into the long term future. That alone will do a good part of stopping the drain.

> What kind of executive would accept an offer like that?

One that cares about Firefox more than about making insane amounts of money that are so far past what you need to live a comfortable live.

I think Mozilla and Firefox are cherished by a lot of people who would like to see them thrive.

But I think if given a choice, most of those people would prioritize the survival of a viable competitive web browser. The name of the product and the sponsor of the product are less important.

So a related question might be, "What would it take for a Firefox fork to succeed?"

If you think the CEO of Mozilla is a cancer, a fork solves that issue. Obviously, there are a lot more concerns than just the CEO. So, what else would a viable fork need?

In the end, Mozilla could implement any measures that would work for the fork, and probably do so easier. So answer the question for the fork, and you've answered the question for Mozilla.

Well a large part of the problem with a fork is that you don't see a lot of random drive by contributions. As a possible contributor myself a couple times, firefox is a development nightmare because it doesn't have a good autoconfig system that lets one download the code and start being productive quickly.

Then like chrome, i'm betting most people can't actually built it in reasonable time on their laptops since it burns a good 64 core machine with 128G of ram for a hour or two. Screw up said configuration, and your in for another rebuild loop. It can take days just to get a working development environment.

A fork in no way solves this because you can't for the devs who mozilla is paying. Firefox is a huge project requiring devs with lots of experience in the technology who also like to be compensated. You can't fork firefox, you have to change the leadership or nothing else will change.

Really? This isn't GM -- it's a web browser. An important one, but even a paltry $1M should be enough to draw in the right talent.

$1m is senior engineering manager compensation in the valley at several companies just a short drive away from Mozilla’s offices. It’s far below CEO compensation.

Anyone who is capable of succeeding as the CEO of Mozilla would be giving up millions of dollars they could easily make elsewhere in the valley if they took only $1m as their comp.

So? Not the entire world is US-based. Tech salaries in USD are way out of whack compared to elsewhere.

I also bet that for the type of challenges facing Firefox and with my proposed reforms, a motivated senior engineer who knows what they are doing would be just as good or better compared to a standard CEO.

No, it's not binary as you make it out be.

There is a wide spectrum of CEOs skills and compensation. A SVP, VP, or even director level person at Apple (and the like) could be CEO of Mozilla (and would be happy to take a CEO title and steer their own ship).

I'd bet there are couple internal people at Mozilla that could be promoted to CEO and be happy with CEO pay and be successful too.

"Capable of succeeding" meaning what? If you switch to a normal manager and suddenly save the company 2 million a year, and they stop making the current trend of decisions, that sounds like a win-win. CEOs aren't magical rarities.

Sounds perfect. Any up and coming CEO wannabe could take the Mozilla job to prove they've got the chops. Then, after turning things around, they could ride off into the sunset at any of those other corps. Everybody wins.

Someone visionary and humble like Sundar or Satya might work. Preferably an engineer or engineer-minded rather than a lawyer or MBA.

How much money do you think a Sundar or Satya-type person would be willing to accept? Certainly not as little as the current Mozilla CEO is being paid!

One doesn't have to look too far. Bring Jamie back! :)

"- Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money"

That has to be the first on the list, because that is the prerequisite for everything else.

Unfortunately there is no mechanism to achieve this within Mozilla. The people that need to go won't; they've got their trophy titles and they've feathered their nest as they want it. Thus Mozilla and Firefox with it are doomed.

Solving that would take a fork, just like it did with Netscape. It would also require an endowment of capital to fund a core of developers for years just to catch up with blink/webkit/etc. At this point the best plan might be to adopt the latter.

Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.

So at this point what is the value proposition of saving Firefox? That's a rhetorical question; I get it. I just don't know if it's enough to attract the developers and funding to do it. It's conceivable; one could imagine a leader with the passion to inspire people and attract the funding and developers.

Maybe that person exists. If so they won't be doing it under Mozilla.

> Thing is the market is producing this without Mozilla. Brave and others are delivering real alternatives to Chrome, Safari and Edge.

And in the end, it's all WebKit derivatives under the hood. That is the danger. There used to be three major distinct engines (Firefox, IE/Trident, WebKit) plus a boatload of specialized ones (Opera)... and that competition bred improvements and features. These days it's all about walled gardens, which is what the "market" (aka a bunch of ultra rich companies) wants, and Firefox is the last truly independent fighter standing.

Sadly, Firefox has been mismanaged for almost a decade now.

We are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Just as "the open web" is becoming fully viable as an application platform, it is morphing into "Google's VM".

"That is the danger."

As I said, I get it. Getting it doesn't fund stuff, however.

Was an endowment needed for LibreOffice and Maria DB? I don't actually know how it happened with those two, but they both seemed to be more or less grassroots forks when people realised that Oracle won't ever be a good custodian. Perhaps a Firefox fork here could emerge in a similar way.

I don't know about LibreOffice, but my recollection was that MariaDB was initially less a reaction to Oracle actually having been bad for MySQL and more a fear that Oracle would potentially {be bad, close the product, ...}

> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).

If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.

But all those projects have commercial support in some way because other companies rely on them and provide resources. It's unclear to me how Firefox achieves the same. Maybe that's a question a CEO can answer.

If you think you need a CEO then it makes perfect sense to me to pay them a competitive salary. For the same reason you should pay your devs a competitive salary. You can't just say "they should work for less". That's unfair and unrealistic. Either you need one and should pay for a good one, or you don't need one at all.

> Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian.

Or how about they donate Firefox to Apache?

> If Mozilla is just Firefox then why to they need a CEO at all? Why does a web browser need an executive team? It doesn't make any sense to me. Linux doesn't have a CEO. Python doesn't have a CEO. Postgres doesn't have a CEO.

It doesn't matter what the top position is called: CEO, the Grand Warlock of Yendor, or Benevolent Dictator For Life. CEO ≈ whoever is in charge and entrusted with enough authority that they can elevate or kill whatever they are managing, and that was probably the intended meaning.

> Or how about they donate Firefox to Apache?

Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software. If Firefox gets donated to them, it's curtains. Maybe if they went elsewhere it could work.

Or, they could create a Totally-Not-Mozilla Foundation and bring trustworthy old-timers with the right vision on board. Then they could either do a hostile takeover aka LibreOffice, or coax the original Mozilla Foundation into handing over the brand peacefully.

>Or, they could create a Totally-Not-Mozilla Foundation and bring trustworthy old-timers with the right vision on board. Then they could either do a hostile takeover aka LibreOffice, or coax the original Mozilla Foundation into handing over the brand peacefully.

And perhaps restart servo development?

Why not. Electron has gotten kinda soft after all these years. It needs someone to give it some competition.

> Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software.

Interesting. I did not seem to know that. I always thought that Apache was a leader in open source since a lot of the notable tools (i.e. Spark, Airflow, Kafta) are maintained by Apache.

Are there any articles that I can learn more about this?

It's an interesting point. A significant number of Apache (big data) projects do indeed seem to be "in the attic"[1]. But they have high profile projects that are well maintained. AirBnB created Airflow then donated it to Apache. Do they still use it internally and contribute to Apache Airflow? Do other companies contribute?

Spark is central to Databricks, the company started by the original creator of Spark.

So at least for a couple high-profile Apache projects there are for-profit organizations with an interest in furthering development.

I assume Databricks pays devs to contribute to Spark, I actually don't know.

So maybe Apache Firefox with a Mozilla corporate sponsor isn't such a terrible idea. Although again, I have no idea what the commercial motivation would be behind supporting Firefox development.

[1]: https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?category#big-data

> It doesn't matter what the top position is called...

In a conversation about salary I think it is clearly CEO-the-corporate-leadership-position, not a euphemism for BDFL.

> Apache has a reputation as the graveyard of open source software.

Except for httpd, Spark, Airflow, Kafka, Hadoop, etc.

https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?number

You are answering the question "how can Mozilla make more money", but that wasn't what was asked. Mozilla as a whole is profitable already, and revenues have been growing close to 100% year over year. As a company they are in great health.

Except that's not what users care about when picking a browser. Google has too much money, tech, marketing and too big an existing user and device base to make any kind of direct competition feasible. Giving Mozilla a few hundred million dollars extra isn't going to make a difference.

The subtitle of the question was "What would you do if you were in charge of Mozilla? How would you save Firefox?"

My answer is an attempt at addressing these two questions. My goal wasn't to make Mozilla more profitable, but to ensure that it's focused on what should be its core mission, rather than the mire of sideshows that they engage in at the moment.

Also, I don't care how Mozilla the amorphous blob of a corporation is doing. I care about how Mozilla the vehicle for the survival, promotion and development of Firefox is doing, and that one seems to be on the brink of death if nothing is done to change the current course.

As a regular end user why do I care about what Mozilla's mission is? Apple makes shiny devices, Google gives me great free services, and in return I use their (perfectly great) browsers. What is one single reason to use Firefox?

As long as these large companies continue to put effort into their browsers (which Microsoft didn't do with IE), users are simply never going to switch, the same way no one is using desktop Linux or LibreOffice or DuckDuckGo.

>What is one single reason to use Firefox?

I want to use a browser that does not sabotage my ability to make it work how I want in order to protect the main business of its parent corporation.

Not a snazzy headline I know.

And IMO this is where Firefox is getting worse.

Firefox used to be much less user-hostile. Now it draws too much attention to itself, like it's trying to be a lifestyle brand.

Using Firefox feels like walking through a busy shopping mall, and I worry that the folks making Firefox don't know any other way that life can be.

Post-update pages (if they must exist in the first place) should look like:

> You're using the latest version of Firefox! (Need a VPN? Try ours!)

> You're using the latest version of Firefox! (Discover the best of the web with Pocket from Firefox)

…but instead it feels more like:

> YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED SIGNING IN TO POCKET YET! SIGN IN NOW! (btw firefox updated)

> Buy our VPN Buy our VPN Buy our VPN Buy our VPN Buy our VPN (btw firefox updated)

I wish Firefox would focus on being a useful tool (like the rest of the software I use). Compare Firefox's first-run experience with that of GNOME Web: Firefox is obnoxious; GNOME Web just gets out of the way.

I believe in Mozilla's mission circa 2004, but I'm not convinced that Firefox does any more.

I actually don't use the direct Firefox branch anymore, although my wife and daughter have it on their computers so it is often available to me. I tend to use Firefox Developer branch so a lot of these complaints people are seeing I haven't experienced. (haven't experienced in the normal Firefox on other computers either so sort of weird, maybe I set up a don't bother me with changes profile a long time ago and I just forgot)

"What is one single reason to use Firefox?"

Better ad blocking.

Is it better than Chrome + uBlock Origin/Privacy Badger/Ghostery?

Better plugin capabilities in general. Also better privacy.

Ha! Was gonna say exactly this! It's the only reason I use it! Used to like the add-ons then they broke them all in an update two years ago

> What is one single reason to use Firefox?

Security, privacy, and customization are why I use it. It takes a lot of work to do it, but you can lock down firefox very effectively and you have more freedom to decide what your browser is and isn't allowed to do with firefox than anyone else.

In the end, what we're missing in browsers is a browser that works for you instead of exploiting you to make money. Out of the box, firefox doesn't hit that mark today, but at least it can be beaten into submission. No other browser gives users that kind of control.

I actually do use duck duck go. There doesn't seem to be any advantage to using G search anymore, the web has reached a critical mass of trash that just overwhelms unspecific searches.

Yeah, DDG can even give better results at time than google does. Google search has gone from being exceptional to becoming ad filled trash. Every other major search engine (directly or indirectly) gets their results in part from Google, but since most spammers are focused on Google the father from google you get the better results can be.

> What is one single reason to use Firefox?

I have many reasons for using Firefox.

However the one reason that instantly pops into my mind is containers. I can easily have multiple "accounts" without mucking around with multiple browser profiles. This alone is worth it switching from Chrome to Firefox for me.

I use Firefox because I believe its important for there to be more than one browser implementation (rendering engine) in the world. If you believe the same, go and download and use Firefox, even if it inconveniences you to do so. Now, about Skia...

| What is one single reason to use Firefox?

Because f*ck monopolies?

> Google gives me great free services

2005 called, they want their Google-enthusiasm back.

If Google is the new Microsoft, what's Microsoft now?

Uhhh... I use all of those things. And Firefox. It's less demanding on resources, and the containers are game-changing.

Why choose Chrome? I can't think of a single reason to prefer it over FF, but have just provided 2 reasons to prefer the opposite

With enough investment, Firefox could also innovate and introduce features that aren't in Chrome or Safari to actually win users back

It's not user-facing features that move users from one browser to another, it's the number of websites they use that don't break with one or the other.

The problem with building a web browser is that if you introduce too many new features then you are breaking with web standards. The most you can do is add some user conveniences like sync, themes and extensions, but those don't go far enough to make enough users consider switching. A browser can, by definition, never have a "killer app".

LibreOffice is the dominant OpenOffice fork and the main alternative to Microsoft Office, unless you count Google Docs. LO seems much healthier when compared to Firefox, if anything.

> the same way no one is using desktop Linux or LibreOffice or DuckDuckGo.

Have you seen how bad Google results are these days?

This is exactly right, and as you’ll see from the long tail of answers, there isn’t one that actually applies to normal people.

It used to be that IE etc was actually quite bad, and Firefox was substantially faster while adding important features like tabs. That’s when the nerds installed Firefox on their parents computers. Then FF languished, Chrome came out and was much faster and used less resources. So the nerds replaced everyone’s browsers with Chrome.

Now everyone is using their default browser from their phones, or apps, or inline system browsers in apps. All the browsers are roughly equivalent now, so the nerds don’t have a lot of reason to go around and change their parents browsers. Plus you don’t have any real advantage to changing the mobile browser from Chrome (Android) or Safari (iOS). Thus the market has shifted away from desktops, FF lost there, hasn’t regained, and has made almost no inroads on mobile.

They need a reason for the nerds en masse to go and change everything, while inertia and incompatible built-in password managers will make this painful.

Once Google have a total monopoly there is nothing stopping them from making adblocking impossible and add even more user tracking/data gathering.

It's a stance.

And tbh I don't see much difference with Firefox when using Chrome (besides all the data that I can see leaving my computer to go to google servers even when I'm not on any website)

The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were.

For me, it started back when "sponsored tiles" were first announced in 2014. On the surface it was obviously advertisements, but many defenders tried to argue that it was a "good thing"

Then there was the proprietary Pocket extension baked into the browser with no easy removal. Again, many defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"

Then the "studies" channel was used to push a Mr Robot ad. It's unclear how it was aligned with the values, but defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing".

They partnered with Cliqz to collect data and make recommendations. Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"

They partnered with Booking.com to push advertisements, going so far as to argue that they didn't receive any monetary compensation and that it was just a "social experiment". Again, defenders tried to argue it was a "good thing"

This is just a sampling of the events in the last 8 years (sponsored tiles was 2014). Every single time, they may have received some sort of benefit, but a number of users who bought into firefox for the security and privacy aspects ... felt betrayed and left. Because if it isn't about the privacy, what is the USP of firefox? "Not google" is only a small part of the user base.

> The real (and often downvoted) answer is that Mozilla compromised on their core values. A "death by a thousand cuts", as it were.

I expect it's downvoted because it's laughable. 99% of browser users don't give a shit about those things. If a poll were to be taken of the HN users who switched to Chrome, I doubt even a quarter would cite that as the reason.

It was indeed a death by a thousand cuts, but the thousand cuts were

* popup advertisements for Chrome on the frontpage of the most visited website on the planet

* Google paying off Adobe, AVG, Avast and others to make their installers include Chrome using disgusting dark patterns

* Android, the collapse of desktop browsing in comparsion to mobile browsing, and people that will just default to using the same browser on their laptop/desktop as on their phone

* Netflix DRM that didn't work on Firefox for a few months

* Youtube, Google Meet and Google Docs refusing to work properly on Firefox

* The word "Google" becoming as synonymous with simply using the internet as the internet explorer icon was in the 2000s

* Chrome was and to some extent still is legitimately snappier than Firefox

Agreed, these are the macro-level events that really drove user adoption. The narrative (especially the Mr. Robot thing!) are totally out of proportion to their actual impact on user adoption and aren't the all-or-nothing tests of credibility or integrity that people are suggesting they are.

— but they are symptomatic. The Mozilla of 2004 wouldn't even think of doing user-hostile stuff like that, because they were trying to make a useful tool rather than a lifestyle brand.

Those things will have disillusioned people who used Firefox because their goals were aligned. I agree that Google being Google will have lost people who used Firefox simply because it was a good tool.

> * Youtube, Google Meet and Google Docs refusing to work properly on Firefox

One vote for Google Meet being the reason. I didn't want me dropping out of meetings and rejoining in a different browser to become a regular thing.

I use Google Meet with Firefox on my M1 Mac every day. The only thing that doesn't work for me is camera backgrounds. Would be nice to be able to share audio when presenting, but I almost never present.

Why not both? Firefox was really heavily damaged by both internal and external factors/attacks.

99% of browser users is not relevant, the question is how big a percentage of FireFox' users (the ones that remain, that is). Because if you lose those that is a much harder thing to recover from than to not win back the other 99% that you don't have anyway. And I suspect that the FF users of old care very much, though, of course I'm only speaking for myself here.

>99% of browser users is not relevant

You should do that math again.

>And I suspect that the FF users of old care very much

But do they? Firefox's rise was largely due to IE6 being pure trash, and the average user of a web browser in 2008 being a lot more knowledgeable than the average user today.

Marketshare, by definition, is the share of the market. The market has expanded dramatically, but desktop browsing itself has plummeted, and a lot of users are just going to default to whatever they're using on their primary device (their phone), which is Google. "Google" is synonomous with using the internet in the same way that the internet explorer logo used to be in the mid 2000s.

I fully agree. If the consistent messaging is meant to be "use this browser, it's private and respects you", but it's then compromised by advertising and data abuse, it seems hypocritical and damages adoption of the browser.

I don't recall very many people defending Mozilla on the Mr Robot or the Booking.com missteps. Even current and ex-Mozillans lambasted them for those.

I recall a few people defending the sponsored titles (or half-hearted defenses about how it's bad but not that bad since you can turn them off) but those defenses seemed to be largely drowned out by the overwhelmingly negative response.

The only of those that I recall having anything close to "many defenders" was the Pocket integration.

I know you're saying this not the question being asked, but what's your source for their revenue growing anywhere near that rate, or indeed at all?

As far as I can see their revenue peaked around FY 2017 at $562 million. In 2018 that number was about $450 million and short of expenses, they were short of expenses again for 2019 but for a $338 million settlement from Yahoo/Verizon.

The most recent reported year, 2020, saw a slight drop in their search income but a sharper cut to expenses (mostly by cutting about $60 million in "software development" expenses), putting them back on track, in a way.

They've had a steady increase in subscription income, but it's still dwarfed by the current search deal (in 2020, just shy of $25 million in subscriptions vs. over $440 million from search).

I think that the point of the GP is not necessarily about money, but to have the structure focus on Firefox. ie that it should be the source and the objective of the funding to have all the attention that it needs.

They could pivot to compete with the Big Tech conglomerates in general.

Provide their own suite of integrated tools, search engines, communication platforms, and so on. But with a privacy-focused and ad-free approach.

DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this.

They could go further, and remain relevant and viable in the way that DDG is, even if they never again are the most popular browser.

The last thing Mozilla needs is to spend more time pretending they're a big tech company and can compete with those guys. They should focus on Firefox (as GP said), not build a communication platform that will then fail versus Signal/WhatsApp/Hangouts/Teams/etc.

Yup. Someone else will likely do a better job building those. Mozilla's (and only Mozilla's) core competency is browser building, and they should stick to it. Anyone can build a communicator, but building a full browser engine is becoming a forgotten skill.

The decline of Firefox started with Chrome's JavaScript engine, who was years ahead of Firefox's performance. The focus on JavaScript-heavy websites was already growing, and Firefox was slow to catch up.

Now they're about the same performance-wise, but the mind share lost was brutal. there was a period that the only advantages Firefox had over Chrome were memory use and extensions, and they had to get rid of the NPAPI extensions for security reasons.

The basic problem for Mozilla is they poured a ton of effort into improving performance and marketed that heavily... and they basically didn't gain back share at all.

Pivoting would kill Firefox, and this is exactly what we should be trying to save if we care about some version of the open web. Indeed, I'm advocating for pivoting away from all of these other things, and towards Firefox as the one and only concern for the organisation.

> DuckDuckGo already proved there is an appetite for something like this.

An appetite, yes. But not a major one. A privacy-focused, ad-free approach would be hugely appealing to the HN crowd. But I’m less convinced about the public at large.

market to multiple verticals.

schools, local/regional/state governments, non-profits - types of orgs that have some long-term interest in privacy.

>schools

The same schools that went all in with Chromebooks?

DDG is tracking free, not ad free. They show you ads based on your searches.

DuckDuckGo is to a large degree a wrapper around Bing. Why do you think Mozilla has a chance here when even Microsoft failed?

And I'm not even talking about on a technical basis, Bing is pretty OK. The marketing required to displace Google would be inconceivably large.

They get most of their money from advertising deals with those major companies (such as by putting google in as the default search engine). Competing against them would likely result in those companies removing the advertising dollars and tanking the business.

> Competing against them would likely result in those companies removing the advertising dollars and tanking the business.

Google paying Apple massive amounts of money to keep Google Search the default search engine on their devices doesn't seem to be affected by the fact that Pixel phones (or Android as a whole) and iPhones are competing. Though I gotta admit that it could be because Google doesn't have the overwhelming winner position in that market, as opposed to the web browser market.

However, I still find Google pulling the funding unlikely, given (afaik) the reason for Google "financially supporting" Mozilla is exactly because Google is afraid of being legally called out as a monopoly in the web browser market. The only point at which I can see Google pulling that funding is if Mozilla ends up on the same level as Chrome in terms of posing a danger to Google's dominance. At which point, Mozilla has already won and doesn't need Google that much to sustain itself, so I wouldn't pose it as a strong concern.

But they only get that because they have a market share for now. After they don't, which will be the case soon enough, then they are toast.

But if they can garner 5% market share via this new approach then they save themselves from destruction long term.

Mozilla getting rid of the Google default search engine deal would be the best thing that ould happen to Firefox. That money is not free, it is (amongs other things) a shackle that keeps Firefox from going too far against Google's interests.

I know many people who used to use Firefox and moved on to Brave. Brave has a mission that is easier to get behind and till it’s unclear what Firefox is trying to be.

Brave's mission is to make money by any means necessary. Any other fluff is bs.

What is Brave's mission in your opinion?

Brave is led by Brendan Eich, you know who.

I don't think that's true: Brave is actively building independent revenue-generating services so they have a footprint on the web instead of just being a company that makes a window to the web.

And they are growing. The big thing there is just positioning, and being aggressive in the right places.

That's the fundamental problem with Mozilla: MS, Google and Apple can leverage web footprint and physical platforms to market their products and generate revenue for browser development. Plus Apple's happy to take money from Google. Brave's building some kind of revenue-generating platform that stands on its own.

I don't know if Mozilla has a vision in that kind of way.

Hell, Firefox OS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

This rant is pertinent: http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...

>> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives. The diversity of truly independent browser engines is far too important to give up without a fight.

There are a lot of people oh HN who agree with that but then use a different browser for whatever reason. I feel like these people are being very hypocritical and should use what they want to succeed. Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.

That's not to say Mozilla doesn't need to get their shit together, but if market share drops too low they will not be able to get money to do the things they need to do.

> Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.

I use Firefox despite long standing bugs. Somehow a browser that aggressively throttles background tabs is still able to leak memory to background tabs. For the longest time Firefox messed with my wireless headset, they finally added proper support for web audio APIs and things are better now.

CPU usage is still all over the place. Some inactive tab will cause FF to spin CPU usage up to 100%.

Firefox still leaks resources, I can shut down all tabs and still have the media playback process using up tons of CPU and RAM.

WebGL performance is worse than Chrome.

TBF it has been getting steadily better over the last year, I have noticed a marked improvement. I'd say a year or so ago it was noticeably bad on a regular basis, now it is an occasional annoyance. But it should never have gotten that bad.

More to the point of the question, Google spent a LONG time pushing Chrome, hard. They paid lots of # to bundle it with app updates years ago. Visiting Google properties causes banner ads "Download Chrome!" to appear. A few years back YouTube videos would occasionally just stop working in Firefox.

And now days with Node development, well, Node developer tools are built into Chrome. React developer tools run in Chrome.

A while back I spent a few weeks figuring out how to configure Firefox to work exactly how I want a browser to work, then months happily using it. Then a big update was released and everything broke. I never bothered to get it working again. And despite claims of performance improvements that came with the release, it still chugged slower than Chrome. I would love to use a browser that I can actually configure how I want without things breaking every week, even if it's slower in general. But if I can't configure reliably and it's slower -- what's the point?

From this perspective, the RPM from one of RedHat's derivatives would be the ideal answer - a long term support release.

As far as I know, such lengthy support terms do not exist for any Windows releases.

Firefox on RedHat 8 will stay as it is until 2029.

Actually there is a fairly secret long term version of windows 10 that also does without all the bullshit. No store, no constant massive feature updates, etc. Windows 10 LTSB / LTSC. They try to make it seem like its only for embedded machines but its basically just stripped down windows 10 with a lot more similarities (feature wise) to what windows 7 was.

This claim is totally fiction.

RedHat has no magic Mozilla sauce, they simply ship Firefox ESR and upgrade it every year. You'll have the same breakage in the end, just yearly instead of monthly.

They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.

When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set.

Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.

For an average person, I think this argument is fine. But we're on HN where we can discuss something with a bit more nuance. There's two major things that I see that FF offers that Chrome doesn't, including chromium alternatives. 1) More privacy. Chrome tracks you substantially more than alternative browsers. In addition to that, is simply the chrome ecosystem, see next point. 2) Chrome's dominance defines the web. A decentralized service doesn't become centralized once one player takes 100% of the users. It happens long before because a big player can throw their weight around and force others to do what they want. Chrome already acts this way. We talk about this extensively several times a year here, so I'll let others state this argument better. But the short is that Google can define protocols, more tracking analytics, etc.

It really comes down to two things.

- Do you want to encourage more privacy across the web?

- Do you want the web to be more decentralized?

If you want more privacy and less centralization, you should use FF. I don't think it is just about the services that they offer. I think we can go deeper and talk about the future of the web in general and how our choices affect that.

Firefox promises all these things, but I think that by and large the problem is that it just doesn't deliver on them for the average person. And average person is how we get the market share and safety in numbers.

Legislation is the answer for privacy. The tech ship has long sailed to the point that invasive stalking is 'too cheap to meter'.

Take a look at tree-style tabs. I started using them in FF and have looked several times at chromium-based add-ins and absolutely nothing comes close.

Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST.

Multi Account Containers is also good.

I'm glad this exists (although it appears there are extensions in other browsers that do the same thing) but I never have more than 10 tabs open, so it's not something that would make me switch.

I've been using Firefox straight for 10+ years and tried all major vertical tabs extensions and now I recommend Sidebery to everyone.

> Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST.

What makes it weak?

What are you talking about exactly? Is this an extension for FF?

> They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.

I'm not going to tell anybody else what their reasons are or should be, but for me voting against the browser monoculture was a reason to switch.

Most people won't care enough, of course, but to me it's not that different than voting for a candidate in an election who might not be the absolute best fit for my personal interests but who seems better for an overall political culture, or some other similar compromise.

On Desktop, I can agree. But uBlock Origin on Android is only possible on Firefox afaik (and one of the major ways Google uses Android for Ad revenue leverage)

Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient.

It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.

Not claiming, that your experience isn't true, but: Firefox hasn't crashed for me in years! And I am a real tab hoarder. 400 tabs and more are not so uncommon for me. Then again I don't allow arbitrary websites to run all sorts of shit scripts. It might or might not be your hardware, or it might be the websites you visit.

Not the OP, but I consider it a soft crash every time I update Firefox in my OS, and it won't allow me to spawn new tabs until I restart Firefox. Annoying behavior they've included a couple years back.

Don't forget to disable all prefetching, landing pages visiting previous sites, studies and pings on each start and shutdown to improve privacy.

Another tab hoarder and for me the only times Firefox has crashed is when I have upgraded Firefox but not yet restarted it.

Yeah, I think there are measures I could take to help the situation but it's a little low on my priority queue at the moment. The crashes are rare and not really a big issue for me.

Hmm, interesting, because I don't force myself to use Firefox. I use it because it's just plain better than Chrome, in that I can configure it just the way I want.

I'm curious what OS you're running. For me, on macOS Firefox performs the best out of all browsers I've tried, but on Linux it feels a bit sluggish.

Damning by faint praise shows how bad it is right now for FF. Back in the golden age of Firefox (arguably, before the versions started incrementing like Chrome), it was a pure pleasure to use, even if certain things like ActiveX refused to work. Now, if we "force ourselves" to use it, it's "maybe OK".

I can't remember Firefox crashing in recent years and that includes times I approached 2000 open tabs. Though after using the same profile for over 5 years now it has trouble remembering the color scheme for whatever reason.

"Soft" crashes where websites simply don't load or function properly in FF, but do in Chrome, are far more common.

I never had Firefox crashes until Ubuntu 21.10 which I think made Firefox a snap, now I get crashes when it tries to load fonts. And I get that colour scheme thing now too.

My data point, FF has worked fine for me on MacOS and Windows for years.

I use Firefox. Not exclusively, but most of the time, on principle.

I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. For power users, Vivaldi is a far better choice despite the Chromium browser engine. And for both of these groups, Firefox UX worsens and improves seemingly at random.

Quite frankly, I'm conflicted whether I should recommend Firefox at all. If I say "look, here's Firefox! It's more private than Chrome, and almost as fast and error-free!", and then Mozilla goes on to ruin that perception 6 months later (as they are wont to do), then it's my reputation and credibility at stake. Not only is that an unnecessary ego hit, but also makes me look like a liar (or at best, like an ivory tower dweller divorced from reality).

> I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better.

I can't imagine why you would say this. Could you point out some concrete examples of better UX?

The hamburger menu, for one. It's extremely unintuitive. Not the fact that it uses a hamburger icon, but that even simple things like accessing the full list of my bookmarks involve multiple clicks. If you know the keyboard shortcuts then it's not a problem, but I want common UI items to be accessible from the UI.

Besides that, the UI is just sluggish a lot of the time. It feels that Chrome(ium) has a far better latency response.

I want Firefox to succeed. But that doesn't mean I will use an inferior browser, especially when I feel the decision makers at Mozilla are out of sync.

> Firefox is very usable

Are you intentionally underselling it or is this what I can expect of Firefox? Because it's not a super awe-inspiring endorsement.

I don't understand what you need. Go and try Firefox. As a person that uses Firefox as a daily driver, both at work and at home usage, I can't recall when I had to switch to Chrome. In 2010, maybe. I don't know what other "awe-inspiring endorsement" you need.

Firefox did not save my marriage nor did it make me a million dollars, no.

Do you use Firefox because it’s a better browser or because of philosophical reasons? If it’s the former, then I want to know that somebody thinks it’s the best way to browse the web. If it’s the latter, then tell me it’s worse but the politics of supporting Google are distasteful to you.

Don’t tell me it’s “very usable” because I’m going to interpret it as the latter which may or may not be correct.

I agree with your topline goal, but I am surprised by the way you think about it. Most of what you recommend has no obvious connection to firefox-the-program.

Like...

> - Donate the major money drains that aren't Firefox to the Apache Foundation or another worthy custodian

> - Fire all inessential staff that don't want to work on Firefox.

> - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).

> - Make sure that all donations from now on are redirected to things that support Firefox development and nothing else, period.

All of these are good suggestions if the problem is that Firefox is running out of money or has too few resources. But that's not my impression at all!

Google's strategy with Chrome demonstrates how valuable it is to develop other compelling services that use cutting-edge standards supported by your browser. Google does it in a way where they freeze out other compatible browsers, but Mozilla does not have to. I would say that the number one thing that Mozilla can do to support the web is to make web standards meaningful again - and the best way to do that is to develop things aside from web browsers to demonstrate the value of those standards.

> We as a community, cannot afford to let Firefox languish until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives.

I don't think Mozilla having non-Firefox projects harms Firefox. I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center, with many other ongoing projects.

My impression is that Mozilla is too focused on basically everything that isn't Firefox - to me, it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it. They are lacking for attention, and not money, which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox. Anyone else can do funny extensions or VPN or what have you got, but browser-making is Mozilla's core competency that no one in the FOSS ecosystem has mastered to the extent they did.

It seems evident to me that if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family, putting it back in a safe 10-15% range of market share where it can't be picked off or ignored by Google. And I know that power users are leaving en masse - I stuck with them through thick and thin for nearly 15 years, and I'm finally getting ready to leave if the situation doesn't improve.

> I think there is every reason to believe that a healthy Mozilla has Firefox at the center

Neither Mozilla not Firefox are healthy, in my assessment. And this is exactly because they are getting sidetracked instead of centering on Firefox.

> it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it

In my experience many things come to be in horrifying shape because of focus as well, so I don't agree with your logic.

> which is why they should jettison everything that isn't Firefox or doesn't serve Firefox.

I mean, 4 / 6 of the products on their product pages have Firefox in the name[1]? Really begs the question on what you mean by "doesn't serve firefox." I guess you mean you don't like the VPN or Pocket?

> if they made Firefox into a power user browser again, somehow, then power users would flock to it again and bring in some of their peers and family

I think maybe the reason we have different views on this is that we might view the user base differently. I'm not sure how you mean "power users" - it's a fuzzy term - but I suggest we start at the number of people in the worldwide IT industry[2]. Probably not all super users, but likely more technically savvy. It seems there are about 55,000,000 of us, but that's in an internet user population of 4.66 billion[3]. That puts the power user population at about 1.4% of the people represented in the market share statistics. So if global relevance is your goal, I'm not sure that the power users are gonna do it. Even if Firefox dominated the market they would need to bring a lot of friends and family along to get the people needed to push Firefox up ~6%.

The web is just way, way bigger than it used to be and is serving way more people. I totally agree that Firefox is failing to find a convincing foothold in the modern web, but I'm unconvinced that appealing to power users would benefit the browser or the web more than any other group. I also think that, if Firefox caters to a particular demographic with unusually deep expertise, that they risk moving the browser in a direction that's less appealing to users who lack that deep expertise.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/products/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126677/it-employment-wo...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-populatio...

> My impression is that Mozilla is too focused on basically everything that isn't Firefox - to me, it's axiomatic that Firefox wouldn't be in such a horrifying shape if they were focused on it.

I really don’t think that most of us would have any meaningful knowledge on this without having first hand experience, so I don’t think these opinions are of any use.

If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye. Google will set the standard, taking input from any other tech player big enough to have a seat at the table.

Its bad enough ISO certification boards and official positions of the W3C can be bought or corrupted. Let there be only one engine, controlled by Google? And even the pretense of a open and fair playing field goes away.

Open source and open protocols were not resistant enough to for profit corporations.

Now our standards are dwindling, open source projects and standards boards re completely co-opted, and the conversation on mailing lists and forums sounds like the never ending squabbling and finger wagging from your Fortune 500 HR department.

Foss and open standards have been captured by capital. And it shows in the culture.

Hell, it shows in the conversations around places like this.

Exactly. This is why Mozilla, as the only credible custodian of the only credible Chromium/Blink/WebKit competitor, needs to wake up and die trying to stop that future, if needed. If they lose that war, there is no reason for them to exist over Brave or Vivaldi, for example.

> If all that is left is chromium, then you can kiss what is left of web standards good bye.

Well, we've already done that. Google a) dominates the standards bodies and b) releases "standard" features that are only standard because Chrome says so

Yeah we would get "IE6" from google not like first 2-4 years but soonish.

Difference is Chrome source is available to fork if Google cross the line.

This.

However, I think they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine. They have wasted so much money on the wrong things, IMO.

If Firefox dies, the open web dies. It's that simple. For the open web to remain open, there needs to be at least one more truly independent source of authority regarding how a rendering engine should work. Everyone else has thrown in the towel and abdicated that authority to Google by embedding Blink.

Google is either actively malicious to the open web, or doesn't care about it other than as something they can strip-mine as a revenue source. They sufficiently diversified into mobile and Android that the death of the open web would be but a blip to them.

IMO, Firefox should consciously be that alternate source of authority. How they accomplish that organisationally is irrelevant, what is relevant that their browser as a whole is competitive and focused enough that it stops haemorrhaging market share, and can start to slowly rebuild it as people look for a way out of Google's ecosystem.

That is a reason why the world should want it to exist, but it isn't a reason why anyone individual would consider it better than Chrome.

Firefox used to at least directly target segments of the population with its more comprehensive developer platform, but they have slowly been tearing that out for many years and now Chrome is converging to the same place.

At best I would say "the reason for Firefox to exist is because we need it to exist" argues we would have to prop it up using some kind of government intervention--to deal with the "it is at least slightly worse for every given user"--but the problem is we need people to actually use it, not for it to merely continue to be developed, and "require some random percentage of people to draw lots and be forced to use Firefox" is probably a dystopia for other reasons.

Why does everyone always forget about Safari in these discussions? Safari has a respectable marketshare on mobile / tablets. Not as good on desktop but it’s not a lost cause.

It's not a relevant browser. The last time I have seen Safari installed on a Windows machine was likely 2013-14, if not earlier. It doesn't have an Android version (which makes it less relevant on smartphones). It doesn't support Linux, which lots of the power user/tech trailblazer crowd is using. It's not open source, unlike Firefox or Chromium. It lags in features (which to be fair, isn't bad when they impact privacy).

I don't think there's a good case to be made for Safari outside of Apple devices.

"Apple" and "open" don't belong in the same sentence.

Probably because you can only use Safari on Apple products.

I've never seen Safari on an Android or Windows device. I would imagine this is on the list of things that is technically possible, but not a real world use case.

So that's why.

>they need to answer the question, why should Firefox exist? If there is no compelling reason, well, there you go. If there is, double down on that make that reason shine.

Unfortunately, that reason (browser engine diversity)is compelling to people who understand the situation, but not general consumers - and it's impossible to make general consumers care, unless maybe Firefox went for an edgy "rebel against the man" vibe.

I feel like I understand the situation but I'm doubtful that browser engine diversity is compelling. It seems like duplicate effort. As long as Chromium accepts pull requests, what's the problem with browser monoculture?

(In case it's not clear, I'm asking in earnest. I'm not trolling.)

- - - -

edit: Okay, pull requests alone are not enough, but the objections y'all are raising seem like they could all be answered by forking, no? If Google upsets their users then a different browser has a chance to gain users:

- Ad-blocking

- Better extension API

- Maintaining backwards compatibility

- No Manifest V3

- Better vision of the web than Google

In other words, effort expended on duplicate functionality for it's own sake is wasted. Why not let Google do the heavy lifting and then improve on their work, rather than trying to compete head-to-head on the whole enchilada (of a complete browser engine)?

A browser monoculture allows one entity to dictate how the web works. Even if you can open a pull request against Chromium, that doesn't mean it will get accepted without the approval of Google.

Right now, backwards compatibility is protected by competing browsers. If one breaks backwards compatibility too often, it risks becoming known for having sites not work on it.

In a monoculture, Google could take aggressive moves to prevent ad-blocking. In a monoculture, Google could push more ad focused features like FloC. Google could integrate more ways to allow browser fingerprint (not saying they would, but there would be no recourse).

With competition Google knows that people could balk at any point so they must balance their interests with their users' interests. In a monoculture, they wouldn't have to.

Because Google is still in control. Saying that Chromium "accepts pull requests" is misleading. That's true, but the overall direction and large architectural decisions are made by Google.

For example, see Manifest V3 (and the deprecation/removal of old versions). Almost everybody that hears about it disagrees - users, extension developers, etc. However, despite it's popularity being as low as could be, Google is still putting it in.

Today, if I see an article about FLOC (or whatever they're calling it now) and don't like it I can go and download Firefox. In a Chromium-only world I'm SOL.

The problem with browser monoculture is that it will erode the authority of the spec over time. Having multiple independent implementations of the same spec means that developers won't be able to merely code to one browser and treat it's quirks as gospel.

A good example of what happens if you only have one implementation is Flash Player. People programmed to the implementation and not the (non-existant) spec. So any reimplementation of Flash Player is largely an exercise in chasing after implementation bugs in the Player that badly-developed movies rely upon. Even Adobe's official internal documentation on SWF and AVM2 is woefully incomplete, because the actual "spec" is the proprietary source code of the player and whatever tribal knowledge had been accrued from decades of maintaining it.

The sole implementation in this case (Chromium) being Free Software does alleviate this a little, but the spec is still more of a suggestion than a reality.

As long as Chromium accepts pull requests, what's the problem with browser monoculture?

For example, Chromium won't be accepting pull requests to un-break the extension API (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...).

I know it's in bad taste to complain about downvotes on HN, but why is this downvoted?

It's a legitimate question, in a realm that many people including in HN's general demographic don't consider.

If someone wants to learn something, why not help them instead of downvoting into oblivion because they don't know or disagree with something you know/believe?

Edit to respond to edit:

The biggest reason I think is that there's no way a fork would survive - the only way that it could would be if Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/$SOMEBODY_WITH_MONEY threw their weight behind it, which is unlikely, because any change which harms users will either help or be neutral to any of these companies.

> As long as Chromium accepts pull requests, what's the problem with browser monoculture?

you've ansewered yourself: as long as chromium accepts pull requests. the day firefox dies, chromium stops accepting pull requests.

> Okay, pull requests alone are not enough, but the objections y'all are raising seem like they could all be answered by forking, no? If Google upsets their users then a different browser has a chance to gain users:

Forking is an uphill battle starting at 0% market share, which is less than Firefox has now.

They should do a Apple styl “Think Different” campaign.

I think that's a bit too far - for example, Thunderbird is a great web client. I do think they should have found a way to hold onto the Servo team and make that engine more useable and better than the base chromium engine. If they had been able to keep the Rust foundation on board, it would have also made sense.

However, I do agree that their leadership has made terrible decisions and they've absolutely focused on the wrong products.

Thunderbird was on my mind when I was writing this. I think it ultimately comes down to whether they can afford any missteps or side concerns at all - and if the answer is "no", then Thunderbird must be cut loose no matter its value. It can always be mothballed until the times get better, or it can even be given "on loan" for some fixed duration to another trusted FOSS foundation and re-adopted when the time is up.

As good as Thunderbird is, I wouldn't want it to be anywhere near the top of Mozilla's priorities list right now.

I think Thunderbird gets to piggyback on some Mozilla infrastructure - hosting, CI/CD, receiving donations into a dedicated Thunderbird pool - but has been mostly cut out as you describe for some time. https://blog.thunderbird.net/2012/07/the-community-is-standi...

Thunderbird has always been their opportunity to demonstrate their stack is a general ecosystem, but it's headaches show that their stack isn't a good ecosystem for anything that isn't Firefox.

They shouldn't be trying to build thunderbird for its own sake, they should be demonstrating their equivalent for electron and feel pressured to make it no worse for users than the current Thunderbird, but attractive/stable enough for outside developers to choose over electron/etc.

For the record, I disagree with the assessment that they should be building an Electron email client. Most users are already using a paid/monetised Electron email client, a soon to become Electron client (like is supposedly planned for Microsoft Outlook), or a webmail interface.

Electron clients cannot compete on deep technically obscure feature sets, simply because they didn't have 20 years to accumulate them. They cannot compete on latency. Thunderbird should remain native.

> Thunderbird should remain native.

Er, you do realise that Thunderbird isn't exactly native, either, what with it being based on XUL (or whatever's still left of that these days) and Gecko?

I think you are using dichotomies inappropriately to invoke the standard biases that have trapped the Mozilla community.

Something that competes with electron is not electron. Non-native includes RLBox which is now going to secure Firefox according to Mozilla. Mozilla is on record regretting thunderbird's poor Integration with the Firefox stack as a trial for thunderbird devs and a tax slowing Firefox engineering.

This holding pattern has gone on and on because no one wants to establish the correct API layer to maintain as an inherent tax for Firefox engineering that enables all F/OSS to reuse the NS* stack correctly with good documentation.

In the long term this means chromium has an ecosystem and Mozilla's stable ecosystem consists of just one browser. However flawed chromium is, it has no competition for most developers and competition with WebKit for a handful.

The obvious thing to do was continue to invest in Servo. If they could have produced a parallel layout engine, which could provide app like animations without fiddling on desktop and Android, and then make that easy to embed, they could have made real inroads into blink/webkit.

You're absolutely right. The fact that so many other browsers are based on chromium, is a blatant condemnation of how the Servo engine has not met an important demand. If Servo was properly useable outside of Firefox, we would have seen more open-source browsers use it.

Yeah but Mozilla has been subverted, since the current CEO got on they are a lightning rod for Google against browser monopoly legal attention, while trying everything possible to neuter them from being a real threat.

Thus she cut the thing most likely to provide a real threat to chrome.

Another interesting idea: what if they courted alternate browser projects and/or environments like electron to use the Firefox engine the way those currently tend to use Chromium?

I don’t know if Firefox is currently harder to integrate than Chromium, or if they would just need to gain some sort of edge (no pun intended). But they could for example:

- Provide first-class documentation for integrating

- Provide some kind of stripped-down version that’s optimized for Electron-type scenarios; perhaps they could make it more resource-light for this usecase than Chromium is

Gaining marketshare this way could garner better support from websites and/or libraries, and might also prompt corporate support from invested companies

Some of the reasons for why it's not used as a base were discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29900496

Welp, there you go

> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).

They fired the CEO that knew what he was doing. Personally, I think Mozilla is getting what they asked for.

>Personally, I think Mozilla is getting what they asked for.

A continuously increasing revenue seems to be what they're getting currently.

What makes you think Brendan Eich would have been a good CEO? He was CTO of Mozilla during the period that Chrome was eating Firefox's lunch. He was probably more responsible for Firefox product decisions at that time than CEO Mitchell Baker.

"throwaway" is fitting, given the quality of this comment. I was CTO from 2005 (when we incorporated Mozilla Corporation for taxpaying reasons; before that I had a Chief Architect title; I was also on the Mozilla Foundation board) through 2014. Firefox market share grew until 2011. Whatever the causes of Firefox peaking then, if you blame me for the fall during my last three years there, you can credit me for the rise from 2004-2011. Use a consistent yardstick.

Point of clarification: Mitchell Baker was not CEO at that time (and never had been). She was chair of the board. The previous full CEO was Gary Kovacs, succeeded by acting CEO Jay Sullivan, then Eich for 9 days.

Mitchell was CEO before John Lilly.

Agree with this.

I feel they should start trying to out “out innovate” the other browser developers. Stop playing politics, which Google will always win, and just start making new “cool shit” that developers want to use! Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.

Also, they should be attacking things like electron, and “hybrid” mobile app development. Build a toolkit based on Gecko for cross platform development that addresses the problems with electron.

> Hire the best innovative thinkers in the industry and set them free to invent browser apis for developers to use.

I think they should be doing the opposite: Adding features the users want to use and keeping the web as simple as they can get away with. Google is already busy giving web developers whatever APIs they want, that is not a fight Firefox can win.

I would instead argue that Firefox's Gecko engine is beyond saving and that any money invested in it now would be better donated to other community projects because there isn't enough resource to catch up. Sticking with Gecko will eventually lead to the dismise of Firefox the organization.

Microsoft, with their resource and their ability to bundle Microsoft Edge in with Windows, couldn't get any appreciable amount of marketshare. Firefox, with less resource than Microsoft, won't fare any better.

Rebuilding Firefox with Chronium would salvage whatever the mindshare/marketshare left. Then Firefox could still wield some influence with their marketshare and the threat of forking Chronium.

I'm 100% onboard with Chromium being the universal de facto standard for the web as long as it's open.

Really, all I want from a browser is Chromium, full features without disabled APIs, with a few extras like Sync, P2P stuff, and codecs, fully open.

Right now, I think anyone with name recognition and marketing ability could probably develop a winning browser for 50k or so. Just... take chromium, add sync, and an ad blocker for high bandwidth video ads. Done. You have made the world's best browser, the rest is business stuff.

Why do you think the engine is beyond saving? I use Firefox everyday and have absolutely zero complaints...

Mozilla itself didn't think the Gecko engine itself has a long term future either. After all, Mozilla funded the development of the new Servo engine for eight whole years, and it slowly replaced pieces of Gecko with Servo.

After Mozilla laid off all Servo developers in 2020, the future doesn't look bright for Gecko or Firefox.

This set of policies would spell the end of Mozilla, and the end of Firefox unless the community (or another org) picked it up. Mozilla is mostly funded by search engine companies, the largest being Google, and any direct attempt to compete with Chrome would probably end a significant chunk of that funding.

Like it or not, unless Mozilla does what Google sees as acceptable, Firefox can't continue. The only way to turn Firefox around and continue development would be to find an alternative benefactor.

Mozilla is mostly funded by search engine companies, the largest being Google

Not only that, but this creates perverse incentives for Mozilla. Google funds Mozilla to avoid charges of monopoly, and that disincentives Mozilla to compete with Google and make Firefox a competitive browser to Chromium.

Mozilla is currently funded by Google but why are you assuming that a non-profit oriented Mozilla could not find other funding sources? All their past attemts seem to be about monetizing the browser but just like Google has been throwing cash at them there will be others whose motives are more alligned with Mozilla doing the same. As far as I am aware there is no way to donate to the development of Firefox and even if there was I and many others would not do so while Mozilla while the Google funding steers Mozilla's interests.

Would Mozilla be able to get as much without Google as they get from Google? Probably not, but if they do follow the suggestions of the OP then hopefully they would not need as much.

I'll add one more to this:

Use all/most of the money from the Google deal to build a fund. Even doing this for a couple years will build a huge backup plan for Firefox and they can look at not relying on the deal for survival. Instead work off the interest earned on the fund.

> [...] (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share).

This might be a perverse incentive depending on if your goal is to make Firefox a good browser or just a popular one.

True, but at this point it doesn't feel to me that the community has that much to lose. If we're truly sub-5% like Statcounter says, then as long as we minimally muzzle this particular paperclip maximiser (say, the browser engine must remain Gecko or an in-house project and cannot be Blink, user privacy must be no worse than currently, selling data or "partnering with" third parties is disallowed) and let it run for a couple of years, at least we'll get a viable browser out of it.

> If we're truly sub-5% like Statcounter says

You know, that's the real question we should make before going on this entire exercise. Are the usage statistics any reliable?

Firefox is the one browser that blocks the things those sites use to measure market share. Why would we expect their results to be real?

I think they are closer to the truth than not.

Despite my constant advocacy for Firefox for over a decade, a family member whom I respect greatly told me directly and in no uncertain terms that they do not wish to use Firefox and wish to switch to Chrome instead because of numerous issues they have observed. And the worst part is that as much as I wanted it to, Firefox wasn't up to it. I cannot help but think that this is a microcosm of what's happening more broadly.

> until the only browsers in the world are Chromium derivatives

Do you mean WebKit derivatives? Or are you predicting that Apple would switch to Chromium? (No way)

Imagine going back to 1997 and trying to convince tech people that one day KHTML on ARM would be the most popular web browsing platform.

It would have been easier to convince someone in ‘99 that Trident on Itanium would be dominant.

Cutting organizational expenses might be good for unrelated reasons, but I don't see how that increases the market share of Firefox, and I can think of a few ways it could decrease their market share.

My goal, if I were CEO, would be to reduce organizational expenses (and increase other forms of revenue) to the point where the 100s of millions of dollars from Google ($562 million in 2017) was not required for covering the cost of firefox development and spend all those millions on advertising firefox until Google stopped giving it. I can't see where having such a large part of your finances coming from your biggest direct competitor could ever be a good thing, but at least spending it on increasing firefox's market share directly through advertising would have a certain irony associated with it. At least of the Alanis Morisette variety.

What he said was: get rid of the people who are not interested in making the Firefox browser better. Get rid of the distractions. Focus on the browser.

I guess the idea would be to only cut organizational expenses that aren't serving the purpose of increasing firefox market share.

If the goal is to plow all available resources into Firefox, then cutting down on expenses that don't directly or indirectly support the existence of Firefox seems key.

> - Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion

Why stop there? Why not get developers who are "in it for the passion"?

The CEO and upper management do loads to steer the ship. If all they care about is enriching themselves, they will likely struggle to find developers who are in it for the passion.

Look at Google. It is a late-stage, post-IPO business that’s now, frankly, ran by the CFO with a CEO who cares only about the board and an ever-increasing stock number.

The people who have passion left for the most part. Replaced by those who only seek to enrich themselves and climb the perf ladder.

Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.

I guess my post was meant to capture the idea: "Do you find it suspicious that you are recommending CEO/Management be in it for the passion (and low pay!) but seemingly not expecting software engineers to make the same sacrifices?"

> Would those who have passion stuck around if Google was ran by people who still had passion? I’d imagine a much greater number of them would still be there.

Why not just lower compensation for software engineers? Then all the dispassionate perf-chasing engineers will leave for greener pastures and you'll only be left with people who are passionate about the products Google builds, no?

> not expecting software engineers to make the same sacrifices?

Are you talking about the same sacrifices? I haven't seen anyone here asking the CEO to not be paid at all, only those questioning the absurd amount. I don't think going from 1 000 000 to 100 000 (which would be a lot lower than what it was before, just to show the extreme) is even remotely the same "sacrifice" as going from 100 000 to 10 000 per year.

But to answer you original question, yes, Mozilla should also be looking for developers that believe in the mission instead of just trying to maximize their wealth. That should probably include moving the company somewhere cheaper.

A CEO can single-handedly sink the ship (witness Nokia's death). Developers don't have the power to do that.

> Why not get developers who are "in it for the passion"?

Aren't they? Do Mozilla developers work there just to get rich, or because they care about open source?

can we just eat the execs?

on a more serious note, what if mozilla fires ALL execs? will it just crumble under its own weight or will that "industry linked remuneration" be replaced with more money for actual developers who get things done and are not in for the quick buck like address bar ads?

I'm hoping for the latter. Or if not, the that if the Firefox collapsed, it would re-emerge in some fashion as a grassroots community project with non-Mozilla governance.

You know… you don't have to wait for the company to collapse.

Perhaps we have to.

Look at what happened to youtube-dl - even before the DMCA takedown, nobody was doing anything about the leadership being AWOL despite the huge PR backlog. Then, when it was taken down, various forks popped up, including yt-dlp which became a natural potential successor. They injected lots of potential, because the main authority was absent and they seized initiative.

Even after youtube-dl came back, they eventually went under a new management. The entire space of YouTube/video downloaders is better off for the DMCA incident, even if taken by itself it was a harmful event.

Mozilla falling might just reenergise Firefox, though I'd obviously much rather they undergo a priority shift instead, so we can keep continuity.

> Get a CEO/upper management that are in it for the passion, not the money, and cut their salaries (bonuses tied directly to increase in Firefox market share)

And people wonder why non-profits and NGOs don’t attract the best talent. This entitled mindset is the why.

That people who want to do good work should earn less. Perfect! Let them pay for their vacation with goodwill and air.

This is especially rich coming from the HN crowd. Everybody wants a revolutionary but in the neighbour’s house.

There is a vast ocean between strugling to pay for your vacation and making millions every year.

And there is no "the HN crowd" - don't fall into the trap of assinging to collective consciousness for groups and then complaining that it does not behave rationally.

They must definitely fire some of their developers too

https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/i8nuyb/firefox_de...

Yikes, I see quite a lot of grandstanding in that thread, and the linked Github issue.

What do you think of Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) or Rust? Do you think they were a mistake?

Rust is the most interesting thing to come from Mozilla in years.

It was from an earlier era where they innovated instead of just campaigned against powerful web features and tried to be a FOSS version of Apple.

Not necessarily. I do think that UX redesigns, and social and political advocacy were definitely mistakes, though.

Assuming the board are unable or unwilling to salvage FF for the sake of Mozilla, would it be worth considering starting a new non-profit browser based on FF? A new organization without all that baggage? WaterWolf or something?

FF user since it was called the Phoenix Project.

Donating money isn't going to help them. It might help them look good to some techies that follow that information, but otherwise most wont care.

Mozilla needs to focus on other products to use in tandem w FF. Email service that is private, VPN (i think they have a partnership), Thunderbird, zoom like platform. They need office/business solutions most likely. Devtools, dev services, etc.

I'm not saying forget FF, but they can't just focus on 1 product or they are doomed.

I know their phone project fizzled, but I wonder if there's a market for a Chromebook competitor. Position it as a privacy-respecting product for schools. Introduce kids to the idea that Chrome != The Internet.

https://www.kaiostech.com/ is the lineal descendant of FirefoxOS. It got to scale on the same plan: attack the low end of the Android market where the fatter, more recent versions do not fit.

I wish they would gift Thunderbird a few new features, such as Mozilla Account Support. :(

Thanks, Bain and Company.

They should also consider more "Oxidation" of Firefox components, if only because it lowers the bar for mere mortals to make open source contributions.

I would happily support this.

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