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I agree with points 1 and 2. I also think it's a reasonable idea for Mozilla to focus on Thunderbird the email client since there aren't a lot of great alternat

I agree with points 1 and 2. I also think it's a reasonable idea for Mozilla to focus on Thunderbird the email client since there aren't a lot of great alternatives. However, when it comes to a hosted email service, there are plenty of good options already out there (e.g. Fastmail and Protonmail). The same goes for VPNs. I would much prefer Mozilla spend that money making Firefox better, or putting that money in some sort of mutual fund, the proceeds of which would fund browser development if Google ever stopped paying Mozilla. The reason is, VPN services are not hard to build. Email services are not hard to build. Browsers are hard to build, and if Firefox development ever stalled it would probably go away forever.

bityard 6y ago
> VPN services are not hard to build Maybe not hard to build, but they are decidedly non-trivial to maintain. Their whole purpose is to get around the business/political decisions of one organization or another, and those organizations are making it increasingly difficult to be got around. A "real" VPN company has to deal with service providers on both ends of the tunnel trying to detect and block them, compliance with complicated legal situations in every country (and state) they have a presence in, law enforcement demanding access to logs and traffic, fraudsters trying to create accounts with stolen payment methods, attackers trying to make their way into the system for a variety of nefarious reasons, and semi-regular zero-day vulnerabilities being discovered and patched throughout the whole service stack. To name just a few of the most obvious hurdles. No, I would not want to be responsible for running a VPN service in this day and age. Email hosting is not much better, for most of the same reasons as above, except that spam filtering is also a whole full-time profession unto itself as well. But yes, I agree with your point on Mozilla's lack of focus. And management competency, I would argue.

bityard 6y ago

> VPN services are not hard to build Maybe not hard to build, but they are decidedly non-trivial to maintain. Their whole purpose is to get around the business/political decisions of one organization or another, and those organizations are making it increasingly difficult to be got around. A "real" VPN company has to deal with service providers on both ends of the tunnel trying to detect and block them, compliance with complicated legal situations in every country (and state) they have a presence in, law enforcement demanding access to logs and traffic, fraudsters trying to create accounts with stolen payment methods, attackers trying to make their way into the system for a variety of nefarious reasons, and semi-regular zero-day vulnerabilities being discovered and patched throughout the whole service stack. To name just a few of the most obvious hurdles. No, I would not want to be responsible for running a VPN service in this day and age. Email hosting is not much better, for most of the same reasons as above, except that spam filtering is also a whole full-time profession unto itself as well. But yes, I agree with your point on Mozilla's lack of focus. And management competency, I would argue.