I saw a talk in 2009ish by John Lilly, the CEO at the time. Someone asked him a snarky question about Chrome, and I loved his reply. He said this was the world Mozilla was fighting for; where people had their choice of standards-compliant browsers. Mozilla did something amazing... it took a problem the average person didn't care about or understand (an open, accessible web) and paired it with phenomenal usability. That's their zone of genius.

I really wish Mozilla would do the same thing for privacy, data and user identity. Right now, Firefox is the only competitive browser not owned by a gigantic corporation. I really wish they'd spearhead a safe way to bring identity to the browser level, with a focus on keeping people safe and private.

They sorta tried with Persona, but it never went anywhere. Password managers are almost impossible to use for the average person, and Mozilla is in a unique position where they aren't a b̵i̵l̵l̵i̵o̵n̵ trillion dollar company (or having to raise VC money to build it). They could charge for a (headless?) email server that focuses on privacy, and pair it with an open standard for authenticating in the browser based on (any) email. We could get one-click logins across the web.

People still trust Mozilla (despite them doing their best to squander their reputation with releases like this). They could genuinely fix one of the largest problems on the open web, because they're one of the few companies without a prohibitive conflict of interest in the space.

Or do something else! I don't really care. But the world definitely doesn't need another Mastodon instance with the Mozilla logo, any more than it needed a cheap phone with the Mozilla logo or an IoT platform with the Mozilla logo.