7 ms·

What Is the Point of Mozilla?

49 points by LinuxBender 8y ago

camgunz 8y ago
From the article: > Mozilla's ill-judged adoption of the EME standard downgraded Firefox from a long-standing beacon of software freedom to a well-featured browser much like any other. I think we need to level up our understanding of how power structures are changed. Either you have an intense revolution, or you have incremental change marked by constant compromise and iteration. In the absence of revolution, which would entail somehow revamping the copyright regime in every major political region (US, EU, Asia), Mozilla had no choice but to implement this stuff in order to stay in the game. It's infuriatingly easy to stay pure on the sidelines, just like it's infuriatingly easy to be a senator in a safe state casting moral aspersions towards senators in swing states. But senators in swing states get things done; they're on the front lines of change. Mozilla's getting things done, working against both entrenched corrupt political and corporate interests, and armchair technological purists. The way to help the situation isn't to criticize organizations like Mozilla for compromising. It's to change the environment so compromise with corrupt institutions isn't necessary.
- kgwxd 8y ago
  I despise EME and disable it but, I agree, they had no choice. I'm sure that 5% share would be more like 0.001%, all idealistic goofs like me. So "for no gain whatsoever" is not only unprovable, I'm pretty sure it's very wrong. Some choices at at Mozilla have annoyed me greatly but many have made me very happy. I think they've been a net positive influence for user interests.
  - mjw1007 8y ago
    I don't think it would have been so bad for them. If I liked Firefox better than Chrome but Firefox didn't let me watch films in my web browser, I'd run Firefox day to day and open Chrome when I wanted to watch a film. In my experience running a second browser for one particular troublesome site is something not-particularly-technical people often end up doing without worrying about it too much.
    - amaccuish 8y ago
      I did that and it was annoying. I'm glad they've put DRM in, and if you don't want it, you can just ignore the install prompt.
blowski 8y ago
Firefox didn’t take significant market share from Internet Explorer because it was open source, but because it was a better browser. Building good software (that happens to be open source) with mass-market appeal does more to further the open source movement than any amount of shouting from soapboxes.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Totally agree. Firefox used to be a breath of fresh air because it worked so well. Now they seem to be just a copy of Chrome. Heck, sometimes I can't even tell whether I have Chrome or Firefox open because they look so similar. I would much prefer if they went to back to building better browsers.
  - re4ctor 8y ago
    What do you propose Mozilla do now to build a better browser?
    - latexr 8y ago
      I’m not the person you were replying to, but the single feature that keeps me out of Firefox is their lack of AppleScript support. I (and many other automators) use AppleScript daily, multiple times a day, to control aspects of Chrome and Safari. The fact that I can’t do the same with Firefox puts it completely out of consideration.
      - blowski 8y ago
        Aren’t they then still playing catch-up with Chrome et al instead of doing something new and innovative. Firefox’s add-ons were influential in spawning today’s App Stores. They introduced tabbed browsing. A JavaScript console and DOM manipulation tools. Internet Explorer had nothing like it, which is why Firefox so quickly caught on.
        desas 8y ago
twblalock 8y ago
The author says that "Open source has won, so Mozilla's original mission to promote free software is no longer a priority," and that Mozilla should focus on advocacy. But how can Mozilla's advocacy have any effect if there is not a competitive Mozilla browser? The vendors of popular browsers are able to ignore Mozilla and do whatever they want, because there is little threat that people are going to switch to Mozilla's browser en masse.
- thrower123 8y ago
  It's sort of amazing that Netscape/Mozilla has had two real shots at being the best, most dominant browser in the arena, and squandered both opportunities horribly.
jaas 8y ago
"Perhaps Mozilla's biggest blunder was its decision to add support for the closed-source DRM W3C standard Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) in Firefox." It's hard to imagine a perspective from which this is true that isn't very narrowly constrained to anti-DRM activism. If anything, implementing DRM was a significant positive for Firefox market share, unpleasant as the decision was. The article says: "Despite Mozilla's kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway" Yes - and Mozilla would have lost even more users, faster, if they didn't integrate DRM capabilities. The fact that Mozilla continued to lose users after DRM is not evidence that DRM was bad for market share. DRM stemmed the bleeding a bit. I understand why people don't like DRM, and I'm sympathetic, but almost nobody actually wants to use a browser without DRM because they'd be cut off from doing what they want to do (e.g. watch Netflix, YouTube). Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares. Firefox didn't "add" DRM so much as they retained it while throwing the rest of Flash out the window. Firefox is clearly better off now. Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time. They lost a lot of users because they weren't shipping a browser that met modern quality standards. That was probably their single biggest mistake, and that's why their market share is what it is today.
- abdullahkhalids 8y ago
  I don't think the quality factor is the _most_ significant factor in the decline of Firefox's market share - though it might be a significant factor. Firefox simply lost out to Google doing all they can to push Chrome onto people. Its advertised on their pages, its pushed onto organizations using google tools, etc etc. Even if Chrome was marginally worse than Firefox, it would have a similar market share.
  - Merem 8y ago
    Exactly. People seem to forget the effect it has when Google promotes something on their search engine as well as Youtube (where they also forced you to get a Gmail-account eventually after taking over) etc.
user812 8y ago
"...market share has dropped from 14% in 2014 to today's woeful 5%. [...] Meanwhile, Mozilla has flourished financially. The most recent "State of Mozilla" report says that in 2016 various deals with search engines brought in an astonishing $520 million." Just a reminder that Mozilla was able to pull of an unbelievably good deal with Yahoo thanks to Marissa Mayer in November 2014, which made Mozilla winning the lottery in case Yahoo was sold afterwards before 2019. Yahoo was sold to Verizon shortly after the deal which made it possible for Mozilla to pull out of the deal unilaterally, and still getting a yearly payment until 2019 ($375 Million fixed annually, to be exact). Please tell me: Who makes a 4 year fixed deal with a browser maker that is losing 10-15% of its users annually? It does not make any sense for Mayer to do this, except if she was completely on the side of Mozilla. My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management. It is hard to overstate the deal with Yahoo. It makes Mozilla basically immune to drops in market share until 2020. The deal with switching to the Yahoo search engine (starting in 2016) was already too good to be true, as Yahoo gave Mozilla way more money than Google had done before, and Google was already paying well. The result is that for around 3 or more years now Mozilla is living inside a bubble, where basically nothing what they do has financial consequences. Not only that, they are building up enourmous amounts of financial reserves, so I think we will actually never again see Firefox innovating. When the finances finally will reflect the state of Firefox, that is when they have used up their reserves somewhere in 2021 or 2022, Firefox won't play an active role anymore. Most of the 1000+ employees will have to leave during the next 5 years. Mozilla switched back to Google with the aim of getting both the Yahoo money and additional Google money. - vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/the-ghost-of-marissa-mayer-is-still-haunting-yahoo - techcrunch.com/2017/12/06/oath-and-mozilla-are-suing-each-other-after-firefox-switches-back-to-google-search/
- ianbicking 8y ago
  "My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management." What would Mozilla do that it's not doing? I don't see an obvious answer to the marketshare issue (except maybe marketing). It's not that there's nothing that could be done, but what that thing is is unclear. I suppose it's true that in the face of financial insolvency management might go into a "do anything" mindset, but that's just a death spiral, it can lead to action but I don't think it helps guide correct action.
Vinnl 8y ago
> Despite Mozilla's kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway: market share has dropped from 14% in 2014 to today's woeful 5%. In other words, Mozilla betrayed its core mission to preserve the open internet, for no gain whatsoever. I think this is very disingenuous, for three reasons: 1) It pretends like it's a certainty that Mozilla's market share wouldn't have fallen further without the move. 2) It pretends like whatever effect implementing/not implementing EME would have had could be predicted by Mozilla at the time with 100% certainty. 3) The article doesn't at all mention all of Mozilla's efforts to keep EME from being standardised in the first place. Which is a shame: an otherwise interesting article has an aftertaste of also being a misleading propaganda piece, even if I agree with the goal of the propaganda.
- antisthenes 8y ago
  It's disingenuous firstly because we're treating market share as the only measure of success for a browser. Obviously if that's the case, it matters little what niche browsers do anyway - because they lost the battle to Chrome years ago.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    I would say it's an important measure of success though: a lot of what Mozilla can do, it can only do thanks to its market share. This includes influencing the W3C, lobbying politicians with actual experience making a browser, and financially supporting that work. Furthermore, if Mozilla had a market share of 80%, they would have been in a far better position to actually fight EME.
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
The point of all competition ... to the benefit everyone else, surely?
basic1 8y ago
Mozilla lost because they sat on their butts for 10 years under Eich and lost their technical advantage. Firefox got sandbox and multi-process features in 2016 that IE8 had in 2009, they were happy to crash and lose every Pwn2Own before that. Being semi-nonprofit they can't secure any talent so they fake being like Google by blowing money on social activism and rebranding when they're not siphoning it to buy each other's start-ups.
Fej 8y ago
> Open source has won Chrome is proprietary, Edge is proprietary, Safari is proprietary, even Opera is proprietary. You might say Chromium is free, and that's technically true, but Google makes it intentionally difficult to install and it almost certainly has practically no market share compared to Chrome itself. Firefox is the only browser with a meaningful market share that is free software.
rayascott 8y ago
I don’t understand how this link got posted again, when I posted it 11 days ago. What am I missing? URLs look identical to me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953516

49 points by LinuxBender 8y ago

From the article: > Mozilla's ill-judged adoption of the EME standard downgraded Firefox from a long-standing beacon of software freedom to a well-featured browser much like any other. I think we need to level up our understanding of how power structures are changed. Either you have an intense revolution, or you have incremental change marked by constant compromise and iteration. In the absence of revolution, which would entail somehow revamping the copyright regime in every major political region (US, EU, Asia), Mozilla had no choice but to implement this stuff in order to stay in the game. It's infuriatingly easy to stay pure on the sidelines, just like it's infuriatingly easy to be a senator in a safe state casting moral aspersions towards senators in swing states. But senators in swing states get things done; they're on the front lines of change. Mozilla's getting things done, working against both entrenched corrupt political and corporate interests, and armchair technological purists. The way to help the situation isn't to criticize organizations like Mozilla for compromising. It's to change the environment so compromise with corrupt institutions isn't necessary.

kgwxd 8y ago
I despise EME and disable it but, I agree, they had no choice. I'm sure that 5% share would be more like 0.001%, all idealistic goofs like me. So "for no gain whatsoever" is not only unprovable, I'm pretty sure it's very wrong. Some choices at at Mozilla have annoyed me greatly but many have made me very happy. I think they've been a net positive influence for user interests.
- mjw1007 8y ago
  I don't think it would have been so bad for them. If I liked Firefox better than Chrome but Firefox didn't let me watch films in my web browser, I'd run Firefox day to day and open Chrome when I wanted to watch a film. In my experience running a second browser for one particular troublesome site is something not-particularly-technical people often end up doing without worrying about it too much.
  - amaccuish 8y ago
    I did that and it was annoying. I'm glad they've put DRM in, and if you don't want it, you can just ignore the install prompt.

blowski 8y ago

Firefox didn’t take significant market share from Internet Explorer because it was open source, but because it was a better browser. Building good software (that happens to be open source) with mass-market appeal does more to further the open source movement than any amount of shouting from soapboxes.

maxxxxx 8y ago
Totally agree. Firefox used to be a breath of fresh air because it worked so well. Now they seem to be just a copy of Chrome. Heck, sometimes I can't even tell whether I have Chrome or Firefox open because they look so similar. I would much prefer if they went to back to building better browsers.
- re4ctor 8y ago
  What do you propose Mozilla do now to build a better browser?
  - latexr 8y ago
    I’m not the person you were replying to, but the single feature that keeps me out of Firefox is their lack of AppleScript support. I (and many other automators) use AppleScript daily, multiple times a day, to control aspects of Chrome and Safari. The fact that I can’t do the same with Firefox puts it completely out of consideration.
    - blowski 8y ago
      Aren’t they then still playing catch-up with Chrome et al instead of doing something new and innovative. Firefox’s add-ons were influential in spawning today’s App Stores. They introduced tabbed browsing. A JavaScript console and DOM manipulation tools. Internet Explorer had nothing like it, which is why Firefox so quickly caught on.
      - desas 8y ago

twblalock 8y ago

The author says that "Open source has won, so Mozilla's original mission to promote free software is no longer a priority," and that Mozilla should focus on advocacy. But how can Mozilla's advocacy have any effect if there is not a competitive Mozilla browser? The vendors of popular browsers are able to ignore Mozilla and do whatever they want, because there is little threat that people are going to switch to Mozilla's browser en masse.

thrower123 8y ago
It's sort of amazing that Netscape/Mozilla has had two real shots at being the best, most dominant browser in the arena, and squandered both opportunities horribly.

jaas 8y ago

"Perhaps Mozilla's biggest blunder was its decision to add support for the closed-source DRM W3C standard Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) in Firefox." It's hard to imagine a perspective from which this is true that isn't very narrowly constrained to anti-DRM activism. If anything, implementing DRM was a significant positive for Firefox market share, unpleasant as the decision was. The article says: "Despite Mozilla's kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway" Yes - and Mozilla would have lost even more users, faster, if they didn't integrate DRM capabilities. The fact that Mozilla continued to lose users after DRM is not evidence that DRM was bad for market share. DRM stemmed the bleeding a bit. I understand why people don't like DRM, and I'm sympathetic, but almost nobody actually wants to use a browser without DRM because they'd be cut off from doing what they want to do (e.g. watch Netflix, YouTube). Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares. Firefox didn't "add" DRM so much as they retained it while throwing the rest of Flash out the window. Firefox is clearly better off now. Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time. They lost a lot of users because they weren't shipping a browser that met modern quality standards. That was probably their single biggest mistake, and that's why their market share is what it is today.

abdullahkhalids 8y ago
I don't think the quality factor is the _most_ significant factor in the decline of Firefox's market share - though it might be a significant factor. Firefox simply lost out to Google doing all they can to push Chrome onto people. Its advertised on their pages, its pushed onto organizations using google tools, etc etc. Even if Chrome was marginally worse than Firefox, it would have a similar market share.
- Merem 8y ago
  Exactly. People seem to forget the effect it has when Google promotes something on their search engine as well as Youtube (where they also forced you to get a Gmail-account eventually after taking over) etc.

user812 8y ago

"...market share has dropped from 14% in 2014 to today's woeful 5%. [...] Meanwhile, Mozilla has flourished financially. The most recent "State of Mozilla" report says that in 2016 various deals with search engines brought in an astonishing $520 million." Just a reminder that Mozilla was able to pull of an unbelievably good deal with Yahoo thanks to Marissa Mayer in November 2014, which made Mozilla winning the lottery in case Yahoo was sold afterwards before 2019. Yahoo was sold to Verizon shortly after the deal which made it possible for Mozilla to pull out of the deal unilaterally, and still getting a yearly payment until 2019 ($375 Million fixed annually, to be exact). Please tell me: Who makes a 4 year fixed deal with a browser maker that is losing 10-15% of its users annually? It does not make any sense for Mayer to do this, except if she was completely on the side of Mozilla. My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management. It is hard to overstate the deal with Yahoo. It makes Mozilla basically immune to drops in market share until 2020. The deal with switching to the Yahoo search engine (starting in 2016) was already too good to be true, as Yahoo gave Mozilla way more money than Google had done before, and Google was already paying well. The result is that for around 3 or more years now Mozilla is living inside a bubble, where basically nothing what they do has financial consequences. Not only that, they are building up enourmous amounts of financial reserves, so I think we will actually never again see Firefox innovating. When the finances finally will reflect the state of Firefox, that is when they have used up their reserves somewhere in 2021 or 2022, Firefox won't play an active role anymore. Most of the 1000+ employees will have to leave during the next 5 years. Mozilla switched back to Google with the aim of getting both the Yahoo money and additional Google money. - vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/the-ghost-of-marissa-mayer-is-still-haunting-yahoo - techcrunch.com/2017/12/06/oath-and-mozilla-are-suing-each-other-after-firefox-switches-back-to-google-search/

ianbicking 8y ago
"My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management." What would Mozilla do that it's not doing? I don't see an obvious answer to the marketshare issue (except maybe marketing). It's not that there's nothing that could be done, but what that thing is is unclear. I suppose it's true that in the face of financial insolvency management might go into a "do anything" mindset, but that's just a death spiral, it can lead to action but I don't think it helps guide correct action.

Vinnl 8y ago

> Despite Mozilla's kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway: market share has dropped from 14% in 2014 to today's woeful 5%. In other words, Mozilla betrayed its core mission to preserve the open internet, for no gain whatsoever. I think this is very disingenuous, for three reasons: 1) It pretends like it's a certainty that Mozilla's market share wouldn't have fallen further without the move. 2) It pretends like whatever effect implementing/not implementing EME would have had could be predicted by Mozilla at the time with 100% certainty. 3) The article doesn't at all mention all of Mozilla's efforts to keep EME from being standardised in the first place. Which is a shame: an otherwise interesting article has an aftertaste of also being a misleading propaganda piece, even if I agree with the goal of the propaganda.

antisthenes 8y ago
It's disingenuous firstly because we're treating market share as the only measure of success for a browser. Obviously if that's the case, it matters little what niche browsers do anyway - because they lost the battle to Chrome years ago.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  I would say it's an important measure of success though: a lot of what Mozilla can do, it can only do thanks to its market share. This includes influencing the W3C, lobbying politicians with actual experience making a browser, and financially supporting that work. Furthermore, if Mozilla had a market share of 80%, they would have been in a far better position to actually fight EME.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

The point of all competition ... to the benefit everyone else, surely?

basic1 8y ago

Mozilla lost because they sat on their butts for 10 years under Eich and lost their technical advantage. Firefox got sandbox and multi-process features in 2016 that IE8 had in 2009, they were happy to crash and lose every Pwn2Own before that. Being semi-nonprofit they can't secure any talent so they fake being like Google by blowing money on social activism and rebranding when they're not siphoning it to buy each other's start-ups.

Fej 8y ago

> Open source has won Chrome is proprietary, Edge is proprietary, Safari is proprietary, even Opera is proprietary. You might say Chromium is free, and that's technically true, but Google makes it intentionally difficult to install and it almost certainly has practically no market share compared to Chrome itself. Firefox is the only browser with a meaningful market share that is free software.

rayascott 8y ago

I don’t understand how this link got posted again, when I posted it 11 days ago. What am I missing? URLs look identical to me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953516