Because the leadership is hellbent on copying Chrome but worse and investing in utterly pointless endeavors instead of making a good browser. It's a shame. Giving money to the Mozilla Foundation is the same as throwing it to a black hole.
I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches.
Is this a hypothesis that we can specify and test? Is this how we would approach this problem?
It sounds more like a cynical write-off, not a actual strategy
>I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches
Cool, but that strategy clearly isn't working.
I'm suggesting, instead of writing off Firefox, we (you specifically, and me and whomever else wants to) start engaging with Mozilla to help figure this stuff out
Nothing is perfect, but at least it's got some of the hardest parts right: Organizational momentum and distribution. Technical stuff is easy to change compared to that.
The challenge now is finding competent people who can actually put the effort in, with no compensation, to make it work and that might take convincing the Mozilla folks to do something differently.
Having done this kind of thing a few times, that sounds way easier than trying to totally start over from scratch though.
There is nothing to test, it's why I stopped using Firefox. Check the Mozilla foundation page for all the crap they fund instead of the browser. Look how much the UI looks like Chrome, even little things like clicking the searchbar expanding it outside its bounds.
> I'm suggesting, instead of writing off Firefox, we (you specifically, and me and whomever else wants to) start engaging with Mozilla to help figure this stuff out
They don't listen to feedback. When Apple (the company known for telling people they were holding their phones wrong) introduced the safari tab-redesign that merged tabs with the searchbar, it was nearly universally disliked and they backtracked on the change. Apple of all companies backtracked on a bad design. Mozilla? They just keep on going.
When Nintendo was struggling due to the failure of the Wii U, Satoru Iwata took on a massive pay cut to avoid firing people. Mozilla? Fired the Servo team and raised executive compensation.
> In 2020 Mozilla announced it would cut 25% of its worldwide staff of nearly 1,000 to reduce costs. Firefox has fallen from 30% market share to 4% in 10 years. Despite this, executive pay increased 400%, with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s top executive, receiving $2.4m in 2018.
[1]: https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-bylaws.pd...
[2]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/leadership/
Notwithstanding that, they still put out firefox. And Firefox is a far superior browser to any of the alternatives if you care about user-centric control and privacy. So to anyone who cares even a little about being able about these things, supporting Firefox is the way to go.
If a mythical even-better browser shows up, great. But here and now, it's Firefox, or completely surrender the web to commercial interests.
Firefox was created by pre-Baker Mozilla which was an organisation focused mostly on - to coopt the terminology used by those who coopted Mozilla later - "software justice". When Eich was ousted (for voicing an opinion he shared with people like Barack Obama [1]) and Baker took his place she set a course towards different goals: Mozilla was going to focus more on social justice because it was not enough to only build software. She clearly did not realise - or did not care - that it was through creating viable open alternatives to proprietary browsers and related software that Mozilla was in fact doing the best it could towards achieving the aim of a more just world.
Baker needs to be ousted, she can go lead some NGO somewhere if she wants to fly social justice flags. Let Mozilla be led by those who understand that software freedom is an integral part of freedom of information access and an open internet which are essential to counteract the tendency towards authoritarianism which has plagued society since the dawn of time.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/33750...
Yes, I'm familiar with the history (fun: I even have an original signed CD of the initial Netscape open source release, handed out at the release party in San Francisco which I attended).
Mozilla of today could perhaps be more focused on the browser.
Nevertheless, they continue to support it, maintain it and release it. If you want a browser today in 2023 that puts out user control and privacy first, this is it, Firefox.
Baker's organisation continues to release the browser which pulls in several hundreds of millions from Google. This money is for the largest part not used to improve the browser or the software ecosystem surrounding it - Firefox sync is withering on the vine, Thunderbird has been spun off, Seamonkey has been spun off a long time ago, Servo has been terminated (the project is continued by volunteers), the Rust team has been let go, etc. The money is used for political activism and to fund Baker (who again raised her own remuneration, from $2.5 million to $3 million) [1] and her organisation.
That Firefox still is being released is more despite of Baker's managerial decisions than thanks to them. Mozilla is kept alive by Google because the presence of Firefox on the market is an insurance against claims of a monopoly. That insurance is getting less effective now that Firefox has dropped to a low single digit market share so it remains to be seen whether Google will continue to shore up Mozilla for much longer.
> If you want a browser today in 2023 that puts out user control and privacy first, this is it, Firefox.
Yes, that is still true because of the work done by Mozilla developers and volunteers. Now imagine how much further the browser and related projects could have been had Mozilla been led by someone who would use the proceeds of the Google deal to further software and ecosystem development instead of what largely amounts to political virtue signalling, "color of change" and other PACs and similar activities.
Baker is not the right person to lead this organisation, she is a political activist [2] better suited for an NGO or PAC.
[1] https://techrights.org/o/2022/02/17/mozilla-salaries/
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
Step 1 is get rid of the for-profit corporation that pays its CEO 2.4 million dollars a year to lose market share. That's 24 well-paid developers, or double that from lower-income countries.
The foundation had a revenue of $441 million in 2020. We know that in 2014 ~90% of their revenue come from its search-engine deal with Google. That means that without Google they'd have ~44 million to work with these days (or more).
That's a lot of devs, before even considering non-search-engine sources of revenue. Personally I don't mind ideas like the VPN. I do mind the stupid grants the foundation does unrelated to a web-browser or acquisitions like pocket.
That's a stretch even if we don't count the additional overhead.
How many years of Google money would it take to support ~500 staff purely for making Firefox in perpetuity? That's maybe ~$50 million/year?
This[1] says endowments target ~7.5% annualized returns. So a very conservative 5% return could pay for ~500 staff with ~$1 billion in Google bucks.
[1] https://www.nacubo.org/Press-Releases/2023/Higher-Education-...
Try > 5.6 million. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...
Any suggestion that Firefox do support Tab Groups will be met with ridicule. It just doesn't.