A Quarter Century of Mozilla
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
It is possible that if Brendan Eich stayed, some other people (developers passionate for gay rights etc) would leave. But the disastrous plunge in market share that was brought about by the current vanilla leadership is, IMHO, a magnitude worse than what that controversy would be able to bring.
For an analogy: Tim Cook is a great manager for Apple, but I don't believe he would be a great founder of something similarly big on the contemporary smartphone market.
Mitchell Baker is certainly passionate about things, they're just not the things which push Mozilla forward in competing with the Google-Microsoft-Apple trifecta. She is compassionate about her own remuneration, having increased it manifold [1] over what Eich took while overseeing a decline in market share by 85%. She is compassionate about "social justice", using both Mozilla-the-organisation as well as funds from the Mozilla foundation to push "racial justice" [2], "diversity and inclusion" [3], "environmental and climate justice" [4], "alphabet justice" [5] and more - just do a search for "Mozilla foundation social justice" for more examples.
Baker is not as interested in developing a browser, that is comparatively boring and does not give you any virtue brownie points so it was not that hard a decision to fire 250 people [6] to become a 'more nimble organisation' which coincidentally left more money for those other purposes she wants to pursue. Who needs developers after all when you have an internet full of volunteers?
In short, Baker needs to be fired if Mozilla is to have a chance at rising again like the Fenix or Firebird it once tried to name their browser after but which names got shot down due to trademark conflicts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-racia...
[3] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/diversity/2021/what-we-build/
[4] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/intersections-of-digi...
[5] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-supports-lgbt-eq...
[6] https://www.techspot.com/news/86331-mozilla-laying-off-aroun...
I think the primary factor was simply that Google switched from promoting Firefox to promoting Chrome after its release in late 2008, so once any inertia in the public mind wore off, they couldn't keep up. The decline in IE continued, but it started going to a different place.
The other dominant thing in that time frame was the rise of mobile. Mozilla didn't control a mobile platform, so they were second place out of the gate on Android in a way they never were on Windows where both Chrome and Firefox had to be downloaded manually. They also didn't have a well-developed account ecosystem, so as syncing between desktop and mobile browsers became a thing, that was another nail.
The trend line seems pretty unchanged since then.
But not good enough. Firefox today has not much benefit over chrome&clones. They once had them, but sold them all over the years for whatever nonsical reasons they brought up. And they also lost trust from multiple little stupid actions, driving even more people away.
At the end, I would say they simply lost because of poor management.
> So why are users switching to Chrome and clones?
I still use Firefox as my main browser since the beginning, but for some years now I also use Chromium and sometimes even chrome as a second browser, for cases where compatibility is necessary. And I guess there are many people like that, except that have no real reason to continue using Firefox, or never start in the first place.
> Is this because when you visit Google and MS properties from FF, they promote their browsers heavily
Where is this promotion everyone is talking about?
> To keep the future of open web open, Firefox must continue to exist.
Disputable.
For many years every time I got a new machine I would make the effort to switch my link hover cursor to the old Netscape/Mozilla one [1][2] just because I liked it. There is a 22 year old Bugzilla issue for this that I had bookmarked [3]. I don't know how to do this now and it would probably look weird on my HDPI display, but it was something I liked to do when I was younger and more motivated to mess with my setup. These days I just accept whatever is given to my by Apple or Ubuntu.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/1YNFW6r.png
[2] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/098bef52b444fde064...
But I think that the greatest thing that they created is Rust.
On a related note, I am anxiously awaiting the Thunderbird redesign. I need to replace Spark (v3 was about the worst update possible from an interface/workflow perspective, so I'm still on v2) and I'm hoping Thunderbird will be the client I settle on.
Just kidding but none of the major browsers feel like proper open source projects. Mozilla hasn't had a community-driven vibe in a long time, and its Temporary Extension nonsense make it feel less open in a different sense besides the code. Brave is a grift. Safari is nice but closed-source. Chrome is my favorite but is too tied to Google. Edge started off good but Microsoft has added junk to it.
[0] https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...
I wasn't thinking of a toy HTML rendering engine to play around with but a browser - an Electron project could pretty quickly exceed what it can do.
Rendering engines are cool though - and it's nice one of has been invited to TC39: hover over linusg on https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/contributors
I'm pretty interested in Servo and hope its reboot after exiting Mozilla goes well. https://servo.org/blog/2023/01/16/servo-2023/
I mean, ok. It's a browser that has sensible privacy defaults.
> Mozilla has introduced new products, such as Firefox Relay and Mozilla VPN, to keep people’s identity protected and activity private as they use the internet.
The free version is provided by Cloudflare, and the paid version is provided by Mullvad. I assume the clients are custom, though. But these have always felt like rebrandings or partnerships to me.
> Mozilla is contributing to healthy public discourse, with Pocket enabling discovery of amazing content and the mozilla.social Mastodon instance supporting decentralized, community-driven social media.
I'm sure there are faithful lovers of Pocket out there somewhere. But for me, it's the first thing I remove after I install Firefox. The way Mozilla talks about Pocket, there must be some PM at Mozilla who simply cannot let get of this pet project of theirs. You'd think it was a huge differentiator/killer app, the way they talk about it, but it's really just a widget that rudely reappears after major version updates, even if you've dismissed it before.
Never used the mastadon instance, but I'll bet it's very nice.
> As AI emerges as a core building block for the future of computing, we’ll turn our attention in that direction and ask: How can we make products and technologies like machine learning work in the public interest? We’ve already started this work via Mozilla.ai, a new Mozilla organization focusing on a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem. And via the Responsible AI Challenge, where we’re convening (and funding) bright people and ambitious projects building trustworthy AI.
YESS! More of this. This is your chance. There's a new Internet Explorer on the horizon, an new Netscape - a new paradigm shift. Don't let that new paradigm be closed and run for profit! Give the power to the users, give us open choices! Don't just treat this as a lazy branding moment. Provide something truly open and beneficial to users, and they will come to you. You did it once already in 1998, do it again!
> I'm sure there are faithful lovers of Pocket out there somewhere.
I use Pocket as a glorified bookmark manager. I'm not even really sure what discovery options it has except for the email they send me, which I filter out of my inbox before I ever see it.
Edit: Actually, not even that. I use it as a "Read Later" service.
At some point I got an email saying I had to migrate my Pocket account to my Firefox account or I'd lose the former. Never could get it to work or figure out how to contact someone about it. I moved to Instapaper.
It will probably get sacked eventually, just like Moznet was. The problem is, this isn't core to their business
This project can’t survive without funding from a vital corporation and you all know it.
Safari largely ignores PWAs and Chrome's new features of the week, but still seems to work OK.
My main use case for Chrome (vs. Safari, Firefox, etc.) is Google services.
Kind of like my favorite use case for Google search - searching Google properties.
There are examples of sites that have already dropped Firefox. To support it is almost a philanthropic effort, the “greater good of free software” or whatever.
Then why does it connect at start at e100.net ?
Why does it use google for "malware protection" ?
Because you have not blocked it at the router. Defence in depth saves you from having to trust any single party. Use "trustworthy" software, add blocking at the host level, at the DNS forwarder/resolver level and at the routing level and you're more likely to catch those ugly bottom feeders which tend to slip from the nets.