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That is not representative of either the time frame or the resources available to Mozilla. Mozilla has had Hundreds of millions of annual income through their s

• koolba 9y ago
  You can't say Mozilla and squander in the same sentence without referencing their phone OS.
  • incompatible 9y ago
    Google has had quite a few failed projects too, although admittedly their phone OS has been more successful.
  • HeavyStorm 9y ago
    True story.
  • Retric 9y ago
    Around 2012 when they started Android still sucked, so IMO it was a reasonable choice. They also killed it off fairly quickly so no big deal.
    • Sylos 9y ago
      It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share, that they now have the leading mobile OS under their control. You can invest a lot of money trying to remedy that, before it's actually a waste of money. And a lot of technologies and standards that were developed as part of Firefox OS still are very much around today. In terms of standards, they did a lot of work for camera and microphone integration, which they now needed again anyways with Google having pushed WebRTC to a web standard. In terms of technology, the biggest thing is probably Asynchronous Panning and Zooming (APZ). Basically offloading scrolling, zooming and window resizing on the desktop to a separate thread. If you remember how horribly laggy scrolling on Android Firefox was prior to Firefox 46, APZ is what fixed that. And it's one of the main-reasons why desktop Firefox with multiprocess immediately felt so much better. (Released in Firefox 48, but extensions needed to be updated to be compatible with multiprocess, so most people here probably didn't experience multiprocess and APZ on the desktop until around Firefox 51.)
      • jrnichols 9y ago
        "It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share," I remember one reason Chrome gobbled up a lot of marketshare - it was the browser to install because it had Flash built in. Google definitely leveraged that, and then slowly roped people into the Googlesphere from there once they had the browser as your new default.
        • zdkl 9y ago
          Yeah further proof for google that being sneaky Gets Shit Done. We collectively need to factor this into our product choices and stop encouraging the sneakiest of them all.
          • vanviegen 9y ago
            I understand that it's quite trendy to shit on Google's parade these days. But how exactly is bundling Flash player sneaky? Or are you alluding to some sort of bait and switch that was executed to suck people into the Google sphere? If so, please explain! Chrome was never marketed as a privacy-minded browser, was it?
            • thanksgiving 9y ago
              I didn't see it as shitting on Google because there are newer, "hungrier" companies that I think will do sneakier things and cross lines Google wouldn't cross. I think it was valid as a general talking point. We do need to be careful about who we support. For example, there is apparently a $40B rural Internet access bill that Dems are pushing. I love greater access to the internet but I'm more than a little skeptical.
            • deleted 9y ago
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            • cpeterso 9y ago
              Chrome bundles the Flash Pepper plugin, but Adobe's Flash NPAPI plugin installer also bundled Chrome as an opt-out "make Chrome my default browser" setting. So a Firefox user downloading the Flash NPAPI plugin (for their Firefox) would, by default, end up downloading the Flash NPAPI plugin, Chrome, and Chrome's Flash Pepper plugin. If the user really wanted Chrome, they would have downloaded it instead of downloading Flash NPAPI plugin that works in Firefox and not in Chrome.
    • gsam 9y ago
      Now more than ever, I would actually prefer to be running a Mozilla OS phone. The reasons why it was important are even more relevant today with vendor lock-in and the continued flow of out-of-support devices.
  • bad_user 9y ago
    Much of that effort has also gone into Firefox for Android. Which I might say, it has been the only Android browser supporting extensions and quite a nice browser overall ;-) Does Microsoft make a browser for Android? Does Apple?
    • stuaxo 9y ago
      Indeed, I'm pretty sure the phone efforts helped with memory usage and performance.
• dralley 9y ago
  While Mozilla has had quite a few projects that didn't really pan out, I'm not sure you're giving them enough credit. They developed (well... became the first and most significant major backer of) an entirely new programming language, purely for the purposes of building a better browser. And then devoted tons of resources for years into developing Servo, a massive and complex project that is only being realized now. I'd rather they think big and be ambitious like this, than be yet another stagnating tech company kept alive by former glory. Also, it's unfair to argue that they have neglected the browser. Firefox is a massive legacy codebase that couldn't be cleaned up without breaking A LOT OF THINGS, and at every step in the process they faced people begging them not to break their things, despite the alternative being the continued rot of Firefox's internals. But they did try, for years, to move forward without breaking everything - it just came at the cost of glacially slow and cautious progress.
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • hueving 9y ago
    Did you forget about the Firefox OS for mobile phones?
    • sametmax 9y ago
      Like you can't make mistakes in business, come on ! Who in this bloody comment thread did something as spectacular as mozilla ? As useful ? As hard ? And without grave mistakes ? Seriously get a reality check.
      • trapperkeeper74 9y ago
        It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt
• nine_k 9y ago
  You probably forgot to consider how much money / effort have Google wasted on projects that did not pan out. Their flagship products, like Hangouts, still have long-standing issues. Nobody is perfect, and making a good and desirable product is hard.
  • eastWestMath 9y ago
    Doesn't google have more than one failed social network?
    • ce4 9y ago
      Buzz, Wave, Orkut, Talk, Hangouts, Google Plus, Allo, Duo, forced YouTube comments merge to G+
      • mal808 9y ago
        Wave was amazing!
        • btschaegg 9y ago
          Yeah, totally. I'm still puzzled as to why they killed it - at one point they told us "We only want to show it to a couple of invited people" and the next moment the message was that it didn't get enough traction. Go figure. Edit: Although, thinking about it, it's really ironic how the Google project inspired by Firefly got canceled way too early.
      • CydeWeys 9y ago
        Duo is certainly not "failed"; it's actually doing very well internationally. It has the best video quality at the least bandwidth. If I launched an app that got over a hundred million downloads and had many millions of monthly users I certainly wouldn't call that a failure!
        • late2part 9y ago
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• sametmax 9y ago
  You said that like anything they do is easy. But there is nothing technically, politically or economically easy in the life of mozilla. Add on top of that that they try as best as they can to have a moral stand, and i'm actually amazed they survived at all, yet alone made this come back.
• rowyourboat 9y ago
  > They squandered a lot of money, while neglecting their core business (their web browser). They are not a business, they are a non-profit organization. And their aim is not to simply build a better browser, but to preserve the open web, and put control in the hands of the users. Granted, phoneOS was a failure, but given their mission, they had to try.
  • mal808 9y ago
    I really appreciate that they tried phoneOS, It was very disappointed that it didn't work out.
  • bigbugbag 9y ago
    They are a non-profit organization owning a for profit corporation making tens to hundred millions dollars a year selling users data to search engine. Notably this non-profit organization had provisioned $15 millions anticipating that the IRS might get into how a non-profit was actually for profit, it eventually happened and the foundation ended up getting a $1.5 million fine for their google income before setting up the for profit corporation scheme[1]. [1]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/18/google_still_mozilla_sugar_daddy/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/18/google_still_mozill... The non-profit organization foundation
  • minusf 9y ago
    non-profits and research organisations can also have a "core business", it's just a different word normally for the main thing they were created for.
• ordu 9y ago
  > It’s surprising how they’ve wasted that amount of money to finally in 2017 build a browser that can compete again. This is 9 years after google chrome was released! I belive, that some tasks cannot be accelerated by additional money. There are tasks that needs time. Money may allow to deal with subtasks in parallel by many developer teams, but in complex system it leads to a lot of conflicts between parts of system, and only time can allow to settle them. Browser is such a complex system. Old browser with massive amount of legacy is more so. Moreover if you develop the hole new language for upgrading, it becomes surprizing that mozilla have done it in less than 10 years.
• _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  Exactly (saying this as a FF user since Mosaic times and writing in FF). There was money, millions of it, and it attracted many people who captured the browser, sidelined it, spent the money on their ideological pet projects (OS, ...) and then moved on, leaving the browser behind. After decades of FF I will soon abandon it when it no longer runs vertical tree tabs.
  • robin_reala 9y ago
    You know that Tree Style Tabs 2.0 supports Firefox 57+ right? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
    • Karunamon 9y ago
      I saw that - wish I could get rid of the obnoxious header though, just a frame on the left would be ideal.
      • robin_reala 9y ago
        There’s no API to do that yet from a WebExtension, but they’re working on it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 . In the meantime it’s possible to edit your userChrome.css manually to select the tab bar and hide it.
• JohnBooty 9y ago
  I don't know exactly how things went down inside Mozilla, but I think their refusal to ditch their old extensions API was the biggest thing holding Firefox back. This wasn't due to poor engineering chops; I believe they simply didn't take the decision to inconvenience millions of users - many of whom were using FF perhaps solely because of the vast extension ecosystem. I can't hate them for some of the projects they tried. FirefoxOS was actually something the world really fucking needed. We need an open mobile OS.
• ohthehugemanate 9y ago
  One of the key misconceptions about Mozilla is that Firefox is their "core business." It is not. Mozilla is not a company; their "core business" is not defined by their most successful software product. It's defined by their mission statement: "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all." They've used their $100-160 million (it has grown over time) budget for a lot of things in the last several years. Off the top of my head: * Legal battles * Advocacy for open standards like HTML5 * Web literacy projects like webmaker and MDN * LetsEncrypt * Bugzilla * Thunderbird * NSS * Spidermonkey * Rust * PDF.js * Firefox OS * Development and support for open VR web standards * Supporting other, non-Mozilla open source projects like Tor and NTP Remember that the goal isn't the success of any particular software product. It's pushing the debate and forcing other vendors to adopt and stick with OSS and open standards. In short: yes, Firefox has lagged behind chrome in the last few years in terms of speed. But remember when IOS didn't support HTML5, or any competing apps? Remember when no one was serving the global south with mobile web capable devices? Remember when HTTPS adoption was at 3% and going nowhere? Remember when CSS meant days of per-browser testing and tweaks? You're welcome.
  • hacking_again 9y ago
    > Mozilla is not a company Mozilla Corp. is taxable and had revenues of $329.5 million in 2014 per Wikipedia. Most of that money came from Google in exchange for making Google the default search engine in Firefox. Open internet and goodwill aside, Firefox is very much their core business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
    • steveklabnik 9y ago
      That said, the Corporation is wholly owned by the foundation, and are both run according to the Mozilla Manifesto. (moco employee here)