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Comment by jaytaylor | Hacker News Reader

Hey Mozilla, please quit it with this nonsense and focus on Firefox. Sincerely.

If not just Firefox, other related products. They seem to have the same issue as Google with starting and dropping strange products. I was actually considering using their password manager on iOS when they announced it would be discontinued.

Mozilla's "Fluent" internationalization software is some of the best out there. It is a real shame that they are not doing more with it and integrating it with other tools in this space.

Lockwise has been absorbed into Firefox now. So if you don't mind installing Firefox on iOS, you can install Firefox to get the password manager, which integrates with iOS's password autofill, even to a better extent than the old Lockwise app. The old Lockwise app tended to not respond from iOS' autofill "trigger". Firefox doesn't have this problem.

This is a bit of a "well-actually." Yes, all the functionality of Lockwise is still there, but the situation is complicated enough that not everyone is going to get it. For every person you correct on HN regarding this, there are hundreds of other people who don't visit HN, never bringing it up in a context where someone can teach them how to use Firefox as a password manager on iOS.

It's great if you know about it. But it still shake's people's confidence about the future of any new product announcements from Mozilla.

That's also true and I agree. It's confusing. It also took me a while to realize that Firefox for iOS has gained the built-in password manager and that I could replace Lockwise (which, due to it often not responding to the iOS password autofill trigger, was really annoying).

I would have prefered if Mozilla simply fixed Lockwise.

MDN is a breath of fresh air after the W3sScools abomination.

Thunderbird is still very relevant (not everyone wants to use web based), but they've let go of it.

I'm personally also quite happy they took a detour to promote and use (to some extend) Rust. IMHO a pity they've stopped the Servo project.

Rust seems to have more uptake than FF lately.

"Just focus on Firefox" will lead to stagnation and eventual death.

The essential problem here is that a web browser is nothing without content, and much of the most popular content on the web is found through Google, a company who grows closer every day to locking down a vertical monopoly. Firefox would have to be ten times as good as Chrome to even be on equal footing, and while it does have some marginal advantages, nothing is enough of a deal breaker that I would stop visiting YouTube just to avoid using Chrome [1]. Firefox really was that much better than IE6, but Firefox isn't competing with abandonware this time around.

Mozilla needs to stimulate the creation and viewing of content outside of Google-owned walled gardens. Pocket Recommendations were an obvious attempt at this; just make sure all the recommended articles actually open correctly in Firefox. This was probably also the biggest reason why they bent over so far backwards to accommodate NetFlix, who would have been happy to make sure Firefox worked correctly just to avoid being vertically integrated to death by Chrome and Google Play Movies/TV.

The relationship between Steam and Linux comes to mind. Funny how Linux became a viable gaming platform right after Microsoft announced the Windows Store.

[1]: This will, of course, change once uBlock Origin stops working.

> The essential problem here is that a web browser is nothing without content

While this makes business sense, what kind of world are we creating where nothing is worth investing in if we can't monetize the fuck out of it? Where KPI and user engagement is king?

Thanks, I hate that. Mozilla is dying because they've forgotten their core product. We're here for the browser, not the content that makes us the product.

> what kind of world are we creating where nothing is worth investing in if we can't monetize the fuck out of it?

Where did that come from?!

I never said anything about monetization. I said "content," and there's plenty of non-commercial and indie content that is only tested in Chrome. You can probably root-cause analyze it to monetization (indie website creators only test in Chrome because they only use Chrome, and they only use Chrome because they also happen to frequent YouTube which works best in Chrome, or maybe because their PC came with Chrome by default), but blaming Mozilla for the fact that most people don't exclusively use non-commercial websites seems a bit silly.

> We're here for the browser, not the content that makes us the product.

I really don't understand what you mean here. What do you even do with Firefox, if not open web pages in it?

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