Angry crowd: “Mozilla should do things to diverse revenue!”
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! 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!”
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.
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
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.
Also angry crowd: "No, not ads or AI, it's stupid."
What was your point anyway?