If not, you can perhaps see why people didn't want Eich's bigotry around their project.
I think a closer analogy is no boss or CEO will likely have political views that match my own and I tolerate that and will work for such people.
When the CEO is donating to causes which directly discriminate against you - would you apply to work there?
Worse, you are making stuff up in claiming that volunteers in substantial numbers "propped up" Mozilla. The Google money was still good enough to pay all essential personnel.
* Focus on employee wellness, including mental wellbeing
* Support for making the internet free, open and accessible to all
* History of working for non-profits and traditionally neglected sectors
* Stated opposition to current influence of money and big tech in politics
It was a good bet. But it did not work out. No leader is infallible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231216111510/https://gerda.tec... https://archive.luxferre.top/gerdaos
That's what I understood from their postmortem post:
"Engineering — Have a clear separation between “chrome” and web content rather than try to force the web to do things it isn’t suited to. Create device APIs using REST & WebSockets on the server side of the web stack rather than privileged JavaScript DOM APIs on the client side. Create a community curated directory of web apps on the web rather than an app store of submitted packaged apps."
https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-story-of-firefox-os-cb5bf79...
Without getting into the politics of Eich's firing, It simply looked like people there just didn't care about the browser there anymore.
If they did, the people who were vocal enough to get a CEO fired would obviously have raised a voice against the dropping marketshare (aka their own bottomline), money squandered on various non browser projects (pocket), all these PR nightmares (mr robot, recent layoffs ) etc ...
Needless to say when i say people, i mean at least the vocal ones in power and obviously not everyone.
You mean the guy who then did the Brave browser, which inserted referral codes and installed VPN services without users' consent, and wants you to earn monopoly money for watching ads? Yeah, he surely would've been the savior of Firefox.
Off-topic; it’s great to see a good old-fashioned XHTML web page – with a Strict doctype to boot! I remember hand-crafting websites using XHTML (at first Transitional, then Strict) using Server Side Includes as the only backend technology and being proud at how semantic and human-readable the source code was. The markup on this page is elegant, clear and readable while the rendered XHTML is both accessible and responsive.
Firefox had its rise when Microsoft had basically slowed IE development to a crawl, which allowed them to build a lead of how much better they were than IE that no browser developer would be dumb enough to allow to reoccur. Tabs, Adblock, Firebug, performance for youtube and google maps that wasn't appalling at a time when these apps were themselves new and exciting.
Like you could show a normal person who was using IE6 tabs and adblock, and that's a clear use case to switch browsers. The only feature anywhere near that compelling in the recent or not-so-recent past is sync, which is why every browser manufacturer has their own version of it. And sync still isn't tabs or adblock.
And they had a clear revenue model with Google (and not yet irrelevant competitors) paying for search and not yet starting to squeeze them. I'm sure that revenue model was partly undermined when they moved to yahoo in the US and everyone just went and switched back to Google, which caused Google to question how valuable that really was.
At the same time, Google developed Chrome because it let them push features that were useful for their revenue generating products. And google pushed hard. Some of its early market share was to wooing us with performance and tab isolation, for sure. But a lot of it was bundling with new laptops, flash player, anti-virus programs etc. to automatically set it as the default for non-tech users who may not recognise what a browser is really.
And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop.
One of the big misses from Firefox was being so late to Android. They couldn't have Firefox on iOS, and it took ages for government regulation to meaningfully change that, but they could have been on Android much sooner, and used some of their desktop network effects and sync to build market share, but instead they left it so late and missed the mobile market such that their poor mobile market share turned browser sync into something that harmed their desktop market share, as people wanted a desktop browser to sync their mobile Chrome tabs etc.
Firefox's headcount (and the pace of web platform development) had ballooned over this period, and this was fine when the Google money was still a given, but now that's looked to be decreasing or entirely at risk, Mozilla has needed to make Firefox pay for Firefox (unlike Chrome, which doesn't really need to pay for Chrome as long as it's a channel for Google's revenue generating products). This has put them in pretty direct conflict with their users, as ways to monetise the browser goes against a lot of why their remaining users are their users to begin with.
The tech influencer effect also switched to pushing Chrome at the time, especially outside of Linux/FLOSS communities.
Chrome was released back when Google was still viewed favorably. People were high on gmail, google docs, and they still had "don't be evil." It took pretty much no time at all to start seeing Chrome everywhere Firefox used to be.
So yeah, I agree with you - no doubt some of it is Mozilla's doing, but I think more or less it was out of their control and I think "we" (the tech crowd) are just as much at fault for Chrome's dominance and the downfall of Firefox. It only took 5 years from release for Chrome to surpass Firefox, and the tech crowd were very much the early adopters and drivers of that.
In the modern era, Google is the opposite problem. They DDoS the community by developing standards fast enough that nobody can keep up with them. Actually, it seems impossible to compete with them on their turf. We need an alternative that somehow avoids that competition.
Unfortunately Google is quite good, they managed to embrace-extend the whole internet. Not sure what the options are. Somewhere a filter needs to be applied to reject more proposals.
Was 2011 "so late"? It was already there when Android 4 came out, still before Android gained a really significant market share (15%, same as Blackberry and half as much as Symbian at the time). Two years before that there were versions for Maemo too (which was much easier to port to), and Android versions used the same codebase at the time.
Figures I found for global share are Android 48%, iOS 20%, Symbian 16%, Blackberry 10% (https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/2011-handset-and-sma...) which matches my memory of that time much better.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...
For context, the first stable release of Firefox for Android was made just a few months after Nokia N8 release.
Also angry crowd: “No! No! Not that thing! How dare you explore alternative revenue streams! You are Mozilla, just pick and the execute a successful 100 million dollar idea!”
Also angry crowd: "No, not ads or AI, it's stupid."
What was your point anyway?
Now the ship has beached itself and the crew is frantically trying something - anything - to plug the leaks, prevent her from capsizing and trying to get her back afloat. I don't know if they'll manage, or if ladybird is the alternative to the new IE that is Chrome
Mozilla: what? acquire a bookmarking service?
Angry crowd: no! develop your browser!
Mozilla: ok, got it! I'll make a VPN service!
Angry crowd: WORK ON YOUR FUCKING BROWSER
Mozilla: AI? Did I hear AI from someone over there?
E.g. VPN, search, bookmarking service - great. Charge for them, have the money go into browser dev, focus on privacy and be done with it.
I feel like once you state these questions out loud it becomes clear that none of this cause and effect necessary to make the argument work is being critically thought through at all.
There was a time when this complaint about core browser experience had some legitimacy and that was in the 2010s up through 2016. They rebuilt their whole engine into Quantum in 2017, which was a major leap forward. And ever since then the differences have been real, but subtle. Meanwhile Google has leveraged its dominant position in search, and it's major investments into Android and Chromebooks to push people to its browser. They've also used their revenue to invest in an embrace extend extinguish strategy in the browser space.
The vast majority of the vibes about Mozilla transgressions are more like a self-perpetuating oral tradition than a thoughtful narrative grounded in causality.
People say "all the stuff going on with Mozilla" like there's a list of real things that really happened when it's upwards of 90% smoke and vibes. And this is coming from someone who thinks the recent subtraction of language about not selling your data actually was a bad move and rather damning.
But it's a real thing in a long line of nothingburgers, and it's amazing once the comment gets to the part where it's supposed to make a specific charge and instead it's just "all the things going on".
>I don't believe it's astroturfing, simply just mind bogglingly awful arguments. Claiming the decline in market share is tied to inadequate browser features with no two conversations ever agreeing on what those features are. No coherent theory of cause and effect between features and market share while ignoring structural advantages that are much more important drivers, which Google leverages. Claims that CEO pay is the problem when it's 1% of annual revenue. Idiosyncratic interpretations of their published statements that make unfalsifiable assumptions about intentions. And a basic inability to grasp and compare the relative scale of different types of transgressions (e.g. Google is increasingly driving the web into deeper dependence on Chromium, but Mozilla once did a Mr. Robot promo!)
These aren't good arguments. These aren't coming from a place of coherent thinking about the actual drivers of market share, and there's no coherent theory of cause and effect that ties other side bets to the trajectory. It's all incredibly low effort vibes because people seem to have lost grasp of how to make real arguments.