However, all three groups (UX, PM, Eng) need to work symbiotically. Everybody needs to be sharing information and acting as partners in the work they're doing.
It’s their job to understand and copy chrome. Fixed that for you.
Chrome has more or less had the same interface while Firefox rewrites it completely every few years, dropping features along the way each time.
Ex-Mozilla PM here, I completely understand what you mean by this and I generally agree. I'll go a step further and say that as a PM I often didn't have a choice, either, decisions were being made above me and I often found out from the engineers that they'd been told to do something different than what I'd just expended significant effort on documentation to support doing. A primary reason why I left is that I felt like my wings were clipped as PM, and that I was unable to effectively build symbiosis with engineering. I'm more technical than most PMs at Mozilla were and had a better relationship (I think) with engineering than most of the PMs did, but it was a fundamentally untenable situation to be in, where I ended up just being a middle-man, which is not what a PM is supposed to be, and it doesn't create good products or user experiences.
Somewhat ironically, I think that Mozilla needs a stronger Product organization to succeed, but that wasn't happening. If PMs are doing their job right, they are there to advocate for the users/customers and ensure that the direction of the product aligns with how people are using it. At Mozilla, it felt to me like there was a very heavy top-down approach and with some exceptions, most product features or projects were focused on enabling alternative revenue pathways without regard to how this alienates existing users. Very little of what I was asked to work on had any chance of moving the needle on market share, which was and is the fundamental issue for Mozilla existentially.
I feel this hard. On the occasions that I tried to reach out to product management about things that, for important technical reasons, weren't going to work, I was more or less blocked by director-level management and told that I was being mean to my colleagues for wanting to provide that kind of feedback.
Also not American and yeah, if California would stay in California, that would be great.
Then you wouldn't have most of the IT industry and especially FOSS.
I just wanted to log in and point out that Free Software got started at MIT.
FOSS might've been born in the US but it's not a US only phenomenon these days, let alone Californian.
It just looks like the browser is made by crazy people.
I neither care about woke messaging, nor notice them doing very much of it because I'm not the kind of guy who thinks an interracial couple in a tv commercial is commie globalist mind control. My problem is that:
1) their messages on standards are incoherent and not backed by taking firm stands. The only reason I'm confident that they won't break uBlock (i.e. will hold the line on a portion of manifest v3) any time soon is because they would drop from 4% market share to 0.5% market share in a month. This is not a good reason to be confident, because they lost a similar proportion of market share to get to where they're at now, and they didn't seem bothered.
2) Other than uBlock, they've taken away or left to languish things like javascript enable/disable whitelist/blacklists etc. and fine cookie control, and murdered their extension ecosystem that was filled with privacy protecting extensions, and 4/5ths of the ones that are there now look scary and I wouldn't install them. Too bad they lost the community that would have vetted those extensions in moments in favor of the technical solutions of nerfed webextension APIs formulated by a company whose entire business model is exfiltrating data from unsuspecting users. So much for user privacy.
3) Firefox started putting things into the browser that couldn't be turned off, removing configuration options, and pushing a "wrecker" or "overly-vocal minority" narrative at their users who objected to that. So much for user control.
Also, and I have no inside knowledge, it always seems like the people that write the website copy for whatever their latest PR effort is weren't even at the company for their last PR effort, and don't know anyone who was. I'm getting the impression that firefox is a place you go to burnish your resume/portfolio before getting a real job, which is the reason for the constant stupid tiny UI changes. Do people stay there for more than a year or two?
A lot of it is at Mozilla.org, the non profit parent of Mozilla.com
what benefit does having a CEO to mozilla do when insiders and outsiders like me see no tangible benefit? its not like apple which has to pay their CEO top dollar to show they are so good. can the mozilla org not hire X number of developers who would be doing the actual work instead of a single CEO whose job, according to me at least seems to be doing everything in their power to ruin the good name of mozilla? its as if they are paid to take all the bad decisions. strange