4 ms·

"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 Mo

"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.

user812 8y ago
Google is a good example what can happen with lots of money productively. But Google, in contrast to Mozilla, has to work hard to innovate and their income is always a reflection of how good they are and they have a management with a long-term vision. Due to the fixed contract Mozilla will not feel the consequences of their actions for a very long time. You see this kind of laziness everywhere when money doesn't matter anymore. It is more or less human nature. To answer your question: It is not about marketshare. Mozilla has always said it is about values and open source, and so on. They could do something great even with 1% marketshare. Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels. I think there is a slight possibility that the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 will be when you see some subtle changes to how Firefox works. Maybe they get their humility back.
- pythonaut_16 8y ago
  You still didn't really answer what you think Mozilla should be doing with that money. (Besides vaguely hinting that they don't target power users anymore which suggests you're bitter about the switch to web extensions)
  - user812 8y ago
    Actually I am not bitter. I don't really use extensions with Firefox. I only try to give an account of general user sentiment. Of course it's very difficult to get an accurate measure of this sentiment, but I see lots of negative comments online, and lots of valid arguments. Only Mozilla can come up with ways to spend that money. I think I made it quite clear that it is first and foremost about innovation, and money is only a tool. But usually what you can do in such situation is hiring top people from the industry as leaders.
- jamesgeck0 8y ago
  > Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels. There are a number of things Mozilla is doing that are appealing to me as a power user. 1. Rust and Firefox Quantum. Mozilla has invested a herculean amount of effort into making Firefox's internals cutting edge, and we've only just started seeing it pay off. The updated CSS rendering component alone made Firefox one of the snappiest browsers, and it's going to get even faster as additional components are rewritten. 2. Firefox is going to start blocking a lot more trackers by default in the coming months; some of this is in beta, more is in nightly. Power users can already do this with extensions, but it's easier for me to recommend a browser that does it by default. 3. Mozilla is reviewing add-ons. There were a lot of complaints about this initially, but I feel safer installing things from Firefox Add-ons than I do from the Chrome Web Store. The review process isn't perfect, but it feels like it's much harder for a Firefox addon to scoop my entire browsing history and get away with it. Allowing me to disable automatic updates for individual extensions is also good; it's a second layer of protection against situations like that Sylish fiasco where an extension suddenly, silently becomes malicious. 4. Add-on APIs. The add-on situation was dire when Mozilla killed XUL extensions and switched to a Chrome-compatible format. But now they're extending it and adding all sorts of functionality for add-ons that Chrome doesn't have, again.
  - user812 8y ago
    I think those are good points, and #2 is important. It's not a coincidence that tracking protection will only come with the first build in 2019. They probably had to rewrite their contract with google.
dandellion 8y ago
Maybe they would avoid removing features that some users rely on, like bookmark descriptions. And would focus more on what users need instead of what developers think is cool to implement.

user812 8y ago

Google is a good example what can happen with lots of money productively. But Google, in contrast to Mozilla, has to work hard to innovate and their income is always a reflection of how good they are and they have a management with a long-term vision. Due to the fixed contract Mozilla will not feel the consequences of their actions for a very long time. You see this kind of laziness everywhere when money doesn't matter anymore. It is more or less human nature. To answer your question: It is not about marketshare. Mozilla has always said it is about values and open source, and so on. They could do something great even with 1% marketshare. Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels. I think there is a slight possibility that the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 will be when you see some subtle changes to how Firefox works. Maybe they get their humility back.

pythonaut_16 8y ago
You still didn't really answer what you think Mozilla should be doing with that money. (Besides vaguely hinting that they don't target power users anymore which suggests you're bitter about the switch to web extensions)
- user812 8y ago
  Actually I am not bitter. I don't really use extensions with Firefox. I only try to give an account of general user sentiment. Of course it's very difficult to get an accurate measure of this sentiment, but I see lots of negative comments online, and lots of valid arguments. Only Mozilla can come up with ways to spend that money. I think I made it quite clear that it is first and foremost about innovation, and money is only a tool. But usually what you can do in such situation is hiring top people from the industry as leaders.
jamesgeck0 8y ago
> Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels. There are a number of things Mozilla is doing that are appealing to me as a power user. 1. Rust and Firefox Quantum. Mozilla has invested a herculean amount of effort into making Firefox's internals cutting edge, and we've only just started seeing it pay off. The updated CSS rendering component alone made Firefox one of the snappiest browsers, and it's going to get even faster as additional components are rewritten. 2. Firefox is going to start blocking a lot more trackers by default in the coming months; some of this is in beta, more is in nightly. Power users can already do this with extensions, but it's easier for me to recommend a browser that does it by default. 3. Mozilla is reviewing add-ons. There were a lot of complaints about this initially, but I feel safer installing things from Firefox Add-ons than I do from the Chrome Web Store. The review process isn't perfect, but it feels like it's much harder for a Firefox addon to scoop my entire browsing history and get away with it. Allowing me to disable automatic updates for individual extensions is also good; it's a second layer of protection against situations like that Sylish fiasco where an extension suddenly, silently becomes malicious. 4. Add-on APIs. The add-on situation was dire when Mozilla killed XUL extensions and switched to a Chrome-compatible format. But now they're extending it and adding all sorts of functionality for add-ons that Chrome doesn't have, again.
- user812 8y ago
  I think those are good points, and #2 is important. It's not a coincidence that tracking protection will only come with the first build in 2019. They probably had to rewrite their contract with google.

dandellion 8y ago

Maybe they would avoid removing features that some users rely on, like bookmark descriptions. And would focus more on what users need instead of what developers think is cool to implement.