Forgetting Firefox
medium.com
medium.com
1) I was disappointed that Mozilla continues to be seen as a tech company even by people in the know (author says he was/is a web dev). Mozilla is a political organization with a mission[1] to keep the web open. It was instrumental in the whole net neutrality thing[2], runs a series of worldwide programs that teach kids and adults about the web and web development, and is trying to push for standards wherever it can.
2) I don't have hard growth numbers for Firefox for Android, but it is a very good browser and has consistently been rated highly in the play store, and has between 50-100 million downloads and rising.
3) With some recent plays, Chrome seems to want to become the next IE. While the Blink/Chromium team itself seems to be committed to the open web, it seems like internal pressures may be driving some proprietary features or shipping things too early. (This last sentence is purely my personal opinion and speculation). In addition, the rise of web sites which say Chrome only, is quite scary (looks at WhatsApp Web). Apple only really has a lead on mobile and MS, Apple and Google aren't exactly friends at the corporate level. At this point, Mozilla getting out of the standards space could just lead to three web ecosystems (IE-Win, SafariPhone, Chrome-droid), which would be disastrous.
The author doesn't seem to realize that having a strong, competitive browser allows Mozilla to have the influence he says it needs to have. Even if we decided that email was important too, is there a strong business model in email like there is for search? Further, email itself seems to be fairly standardized and respected. The monopoly of Exchange is in corporate environments, where any other company could come in break the hold with a compelling enough product. Email itself is highly fragmented, since there are millions of mail servers out there, all of which have to talk to each other. So it is hard for any one server to make up its own rules. There are only a handful of popular browsers. Vendors can very easily implement cool features they want which won't work in other browsers. It seems it is in the best interest of Web developers to not let them do it, by saying no to using browser-specific APIs on public websites.
This is also a resource problem, Mozilla the company simply does not have enough engineers to throw at everything.
[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ [2]: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/tom-wheeler-net-neutra...
I'm the author! Thanks for the feedback. Some notes:
1. I do realise Mozilla is not first and foremost a tech company. But I do feel that it accomplishes its mission - driving towards an open web - /through/ technology.
2. I have FF for Android; it's a great browser. I don't use it generally. I'm definitely glad it's available and appreciate having the choice.
3. Agree about Chrome, and I note as such in the article (in fact a Chrome developer has commented on that point in the Medium article).
I definitely think Mozilla having a strong browser is important. I don't want Mozilla to stop working on Firefox, I'd just rather it move into a maintenance mode with focus on a few key features and improvements rather than what appears to be change for the sake of change - and the extra effort going into Thunderbird.
Your points about email fragmentation are perfectly valid - but the same was true of the web until there was some really great client software to help drive innovation around them. That's what I think/hope could happen with a stronger Thunderbird.
I love Firefox and it's still my primary browser. I can't see myself changing to anything despite the exhortations of my peers and colleagues. I love everything about Mozilla so please keep up the great work!
What about Fx for Android prevents you from switching? It would be great to have that data.
I'm on an N4 which is starting to show its age; it's old and crusty and I'm trying to keep it as stock as possible.