30 ms·

Mozilla was never able to leverage its success in the desktop browser market into a successive platform story that evolved into mobile and beyond. They realize

Mozilla was never able to leverage its success in the desktop browser market into a successive platform story that evolved into mobile and beyond. They realized this too late, and then their extreme over-correction was to build a new mobile operating system. However an open-source OS already existed in the market with AOSP so FirefoxOS needed to try to thread a convoluted set of needles to justify its existence. It actually was a confusing set of Android Browser web-apps mixed with an OS for new devices -- a contradictory strategy that they could never resolve. The worst part of the current tech-environment is that companies are dead years before they even know it. The next platform is already tearing apart your current one, while its in its infancy. And the entrenched players in the next space will be incredibly hard to unseat. By the time you recognize the threat, attempt to turn the ship to respond, you are already deep down aware that there is very little chance of a happy ending. This results in convoluted late-stage product strategies that have 3+ directions since management knows no single one of them are viable. This is a deeply uncomfortable truth that keeps me up at night.

Touche 9y ago
Thank you for stating this. What people forget is that the early Android Browser was really, really bad. Chrome helped considerably, but it wasn't released until several years into Android. Also remember that Chrome was not preinstalled when it came out; you had to download it. Firefox had an opportunity to become what Chrome for Android eventually became; the better 3rd party browser. But they made 2 critical mistakes (as an outside observer): 1. They didn't take mobile (and specifically Android) very seriously at first. Fennec felt like a side-project at best. 2. XUL didn't work very well on Android, and it took them a long time to make the switch to native. I believe things could have turned out very differently had they done the right thing from the beginning.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  The built in WebKit engine was perhaps a bit out there, but besides Mozilla there was also Opera who had been doing mobile browsing for quite some time (Opera Mobile originated on Windows PocketPC).
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    You beat me to it. Opera was a good example that they could've cut OEM deals as a mobile browser.
    - jjgod 9y ago
      Yup, but the surge of iOS and Android quickly brought that to an end, there is almost no OEM deals at mobile. (Still exists at TV/Set-top boxes, but those are not nearly as popular.)
- anth1988 9y ago
  They still would have been kiled when google started bundling Chrome. Especially with how aggressive google is in pushing it (i.e. the "chrome or safari" box in gmail that keeps coming back even though I check always safari).
- lucideer 9y ago
  I'm sorry but I couldn't disagree more with this comment. I don't have stats on Firefox or Chrome (or even the native browser) usage to hand, but I really think these are largely irrelevant. 1) Most people experience most of the "web" on their phones via a non-browser. This may be by clicking on a shared link within the FB/Twitter/WhatEver app and seeing it inside an integrated WebView, or it may simply be viewing content normally available via the web through the lens of an app presenting the "same" content "natively". Either way, the point here is that browsers have had less of a role. 2) For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default. They're going to downloads apps for things their phone doesn't already do; for webpages, it already has an app for that. Android Browser is the "Blue e" here. The above may not be the case for the typical HN crowd, but it's quite naïve to think the majority want and act the same as we. I am hopeful that this trend is changing - that slowly dedicated mobile web browsers are becoming a more viable option - but certainly this was not the case when Fennec was launched. The best we could hope for was for Chrome/Safari to gain ground over "apps". Mozilla's offerings never stood any real chance of being super successful in this early climate and tbh FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so.
  - toyg 9y ago
    > FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so. They should have pursued commercial strategies like becoming the default browser for Samsung and others. That would have got them around the "default" problem. Sell the "differentiation", build a kick-ass browser for Android; that would have given them a chance. They didn't even try it.
    - smcnally 9y ago
      It's resource-intensive and not generally straightforward to cut deals with Samsung. They have many hardware/software combos to support. They have their defaults to promote. And they often have money being thrown at them by other large players.
      - 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
astrobe_ 9y ago
It seems to me that browsers are a counter-example: there was IE and Firefox and all of a sudden, Chrome wrecked both of them. I believe they succeeded thanks to their huge resources, their popularity and their good insight, but which of these factors was the main one?
- fabrice_d 9y ago
  50% a good product, 50% spending billions in ads, bundling deals and nagging people to install chrome when visiting Google properties.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    I swear I had to make sure to download the Flash installer without the Chrome bundle for a number of years...
    - H4CK3RM4N 9y ago
      I just use chrome as my primary Flash program now, as it seems to bundle it's own version regardless of what I have installed.
  - sgift 9y ago
    I have a feeling that behavior played a (small?) role when the EU decided to fine Google for abusing their market position to pressure themselves into the shopping comparison market - they saw what happened the last time Google did that.
- r00fus 9y ago
  I think huge resources wins more often than not. Even more so in our corruption-enabled environment today. Rule of law or better ideas? Meet billions of dollars. We all know who wins ... justice delayed long enough is justice denied.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    Chrome team wasn't actually that big when they launched; IIRC they got their Founder's Award soon after I started at Google and all the team member names fit on 2 PowerPoint (well, actually Google Presentation) slides. This was almost 2 years after they had launched for internal dogfooding, so the initial team was likely quite a bit smaller. I would chalk it up to the massive amount of experience among the early team members. Chrome was started by ex-Firefox people. The initial tech lead for Chrome, Ben Goodger, was the former tech lead for Firefox. Chrome Extensions were developed by the guy who invented GreaseMonkey. V8 was designed & led by Lars Bak, a veteran of Beta, Self, StrongTalk, and eventually tech lead of Java HotSpot. Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser. Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do. Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch: https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.html https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.h... https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html It really was about 20 people, and they all have extensive resumes working on products like Firefox, HotSpot, GMail, Google Gears, or other Google products.
erickhill 9y ago
I have this same deep-seated fear around the online advertising business and the content it has supported for over two decades. We've gone from print to online ad dollars over the years and we've watched many print pubs fold. Meanwhile, the online ad dollars never paid for the remaining staff/product left behind to maintain web sites, so slowly those online entities have been shrinking to skeleton crews, too, or deploying beyond panicky revenue models that no user wants to endure, making matters even worse. So, for 20 years now, it's been a constant zigzagging journey for publishers. Page impressions, lead generation, rich media (e.g video), 'viewable' ads... And in 2 years it will be "the next big thing", all the while more and more pubs shutter their doors and content continues to be narrowly focused, delivered by social. Hell, not just the publishers fading out... I'm seriously worried about how this content evolution is affecting our personal biases and cognitive abilities.

Touche 9y ago

Thank you for stating this. What people forget is that the early Android Browser was really, really bad. Chrome helped considerably, but it wasn't released until several years into Android. Also remember that Chrome was not preinstalled when it came out; you had to download it. Firefox had an opportunity to become what Chrome for Android eventually became; the better 3rd party browser. But they made 2 critical mistakes (as an outside observer): 1. They didn't take mobile (and specifically Android) very seriously at first. Fennec felt like a side-project at best. 2. XUL didn't work very well on Android, and it took them a long time to make the switch to native. I believe things could have turned out very differently had they done the right thing from the beginning.

digi_owl 9y ago
The built in WebKit engine was perhaps a bit out there, but besides Mozilla there was also Opera who had been doing mobile browsing for quite some time (Opera Mobile originated on Windows PocketPC).
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  You beat me to it. Opera was a good example that they could've cut OEM deals as a mobile browser.
  - jjgod 9y ago
    Yup, but the surge of iOS and Android quickly brought that to an end, there is almost no OEM deals at mobile. (Still exists at TV/Set-top boxes, but those are not nearly as popular.)
anth1988 9y ago
They still would have been kiled when google started bundling Chrome. Especially with how aggressive google is in pushing it (i.e. the "chrome or safari" box in gmail that keeps coming back even though I check always safari).
lucideer 9y ago
I'm sorry but I couldn't disagree more with this comment. I don't have stats on Firefox or Chrome (or even the native browser) usage to hand, but I really think these are largely irrelevant. 1) Most people experience most of the "web" on their phones via a non-browser. This may be by clicking on a shared link within the FB/Twitter/WhatEver app and seeing it inside an integrated WebView, or it may simply be viewing content normally available via the web through the lens of an app presenting the "same" content "natively". Either way, the point here is that browsers have had less of a role. 2) For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default. They're going to downloads apps for things their phone doesn't already do; for webpages, it already has an app for that. Android Browser is the "Blue e" here. The above may not be the case for the typical HN crowd, but it's quite naïve to think the majority want and act the same as we. I am hopeful that this trend is changing - that slowly dedicated mobile web browsers are becoming a more viable option - but certainly this was not the case when Fennec was launched. The best we could hope for was for Chrome/Safari to gain ground over "apps". Mozilla's offerings never stood any real chance of being super successful in this early climate and tbh FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so.
- toyg 9y ago
  > FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so. They should have pursued commercial strategies like becoming the default browser for Samsung and others. That would have got them around the "default" problem. Sell the "differentiation", build a kick-ass browser for Android; that would have given them a chance. They didn't even try it.
  - smcnally 9y ago
    It's resource-intensive and not generally straightforward to cut deals with Samsung. They have many hardware/software combos to support. They have their defaults to promote. And they often have money being thrown at them by other large players.
    - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

astrobe_ 9y ago

It seems to me that browsers are a counter-example: there was IE and Firefox and all of a sudden, Chrome wrecked both of them. I believe they succeeded thanks to their huge resources, their popularity and their good insight, but which of these factors was the main one?

fabrice_d 9y ago
50% a good product, 50% spending billions in ads, bundling deals and nagging people to install chrome when visiting Google properties.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I swear I had to make sure to download the Flash installer without the Chrome bundle for a number of years...
  - H4CK3RM4N 9y ago
    I just use chrome as my primary Flash program now, as it seems to bundle it's own version regardless of what I have installed.
- sgift 9y ago
  I have a feeling that behavior played a (small?) role when the EU decided to fine Google for abusing their market position to pressure themselves into the shopping comparison market - they saw what happened the last time Google did that.
r00fus 9y ago
I think huge resources wins more often than not. Even more so in our corruption-enabled environment today. Rule of law or better ideas? Meet billions of dollars. We all know who wins ... justice delayed long enough is justice denied.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Chrome team wasn't actually that big when they launched; IIRC they got their Founder's Award soon after I started at Google and all the team member names fit on 2 PowerPoint (well, actually Google Presentation) slides. This was almost 2 years after they had launched for internal dogfooding, so the initial team was likely quite a bit smaller. I would chalk it up to the massive amount of experience among the early team members. Chrome was started by ex-Firefox people. The initial tech lead for Chrome, Ben Goodger, was the former tech lead for Firefox. Chrome Extensions were developed by the guy who invented GreaseMonkey. V8 was designed & led by Lars Bak, a veteran of Beta, Self, StrongTalk, and eventually tech lead of Java HotSpot. Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser. Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do. Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch: https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.html https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.h... https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html It really was about 20 people, and they all have extensive resumes working on products like Firefox, HotSpot, GMail, Google Gears, or other Google products.

erickhill 9y ago

I have this same deep-seated fear around the online advertising business and the content it has supported for over two decades. We've gone from print to online ad dollars over the years and we've watched many print pubs fold. Meanwhile, the online ad dollars never paid for the remaining staff/product left behind to maintain web sites, so slowly those online entities have been shrinking to skeleton crews, too, or deploying beyond panicky revenue models that no user wants to endure, making matters even worse. So, for 20 years now, it's been a constant zigzagging journey for publishers. Page impressions, lead generation, rich media (e.g video), 'viewable' ads... And in 2 years it will be "the next big thing", all the while more and more pubs shutter their doors and content continues to be narrowly focused, delivered by social. Hell, not just the publishers fading out... I'm seriously worried about how this content evolution is affecting our personal biases and cognitive abilities.