2014 Goals

If your goal is X million users or some such end-user metric, you have created a goal for your salesmen, not your engineers.

An engineer cannot sign up a user, except indirectly through quality work. "X million users" is only indirectly under the control of the engineer: intermediates like sales or getting-the-word out are out of the engineer's control and can be screwed up by others. If the engineer does not get to pick his own features to work on, then the work he does do is limited by the wisdom of the person making assignments.

In other word, a goal like this is discouraging for an engineer because he lacks serious control over whether or not the goal is accomplished. It is an anti-motivator.

Instead, goals for engineers should be things directly under their control. Are you assigning specific features to the engineer? Getting a list of them done with high-quality solutions can be a goal since that is entirely under the engineer's control. Want to get your low-cost solution adopted? Set a goal for the engineer to reduce memory space by Z percent or improve performance by Y percent.

Always make sure goal achievement is controlled as much as possible by the person receiving the goal.

They are no bs, fight for internet freedom, celebrate transparency, are the centroid of internet activism and the extension of Aaron Schwartz' ideas. Mozilla is what makes me want to stay in tech and every company should try to learn from Mozilla what it means to be a tech company.

I really expected FF to be on par with Chrome in terms of rendering quality but that really turned out not to be the case in many small, yet annoying corner cases. They got big by incorporating the quirks of IE and then improving on that, maybe it is time they start thinking about implementing some of the WebKit rendering quirks and go from there.

I really want to keep on using FF and to love it but if it means I have to switch browsers for some of the sites I use daily that will be difficult.

Using FF 27 on OS X 10.9.2

A better idea IMO: get on the user-is-the-customer-not-the-product train and build the open web at the same time, by blessing a distributed social networking technology and selling installs of that technology, Automattic-style.

Mozilla are facing some real problems I am afraid and they aren't technical ones. They aren't the default browser on any significant platform so for people to switch they need to have something wrong with their existing browser. That is decreasingly the case with IE which has improved considerably and then they have to be the best alternative browser available which for many people is questionable.

Going the platform route is interesting but they are competing with Android with a massive installed space at the low end.

The elephant in the room is the Chromebook which I am writing this, and most everything else, on and the trouble with the damn thing is it is good enough. Not stunningly, mind blowingly amazing. But good enough and selling by the millions. And chrooting it and installing Firefox is not a typical scenario.

Talk to me in 4 years.

Please don't. Moving fast and breaking things is the #1 thing that's been turning me off Firefox ever since the move to six-weekly updates and dropping more than token support for older versions.

Notably absent from the list is the one thing I, and I suspect many others reading this, actually care about: making Firefox a better browser, i.e., fixing bugs, improving performance, and adding support for useful new features. Do that, and any concerns about how much/little it's being used will take care of themselves.

I really don't care about yet another UI rearrangement (I'd rather you didn't), I really don't care about integrating the kitchen sink into the browser (I'd rather you didn't), and I'm still waiting to discover anyone who does care about these things and doesn't work for Mozilla.

Thanks.

> Measurable goal in 2014: End the year with 20M people using a Firefox account.

That's what I want to see from Mozilla. I want to have a johndoe@firefox.com account and use it as my login account to the firefox cloud, to all the services mozilla will provide.

They need engagement, I was an early user of phoenix more than ten years ago. I dumped firefox for safari and never touched a single mozilla property again. No need to.

Now they have to seduce me again, they need to bring me day after day to their properties. They need email, chat, cloud storage, documents, notes, blogs, everything I can do, everything I want to store, send, exchange, communicate, enjoy, play with.

Everything.

Then they can insert ads and compete with google. Billions over billions.

Then they can offer premium accounts with premium features. Billions over billions.

That's sustainability.

That's a plan.

Or maybe someone at Mozilla will make a stand, and tell out that Mozilla accounts/device sale figures is just wrong, and that it does not make the web more open, but ties them to another "ecosystem"