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Unpopular opinion: Firefox is allowing itself to be phased out, and contributing to a less free internet, with their business moves. It was hugely upsetting whe
by franklyt 5y ago
Unpopular opinion: Firefox is allowing itself to be phased out, and contributing to a less free internet, with their business moves. It was hugely upsetting when they axed their dev team mid-pandemic.
- sgt 5y agoThey said they did the axing due to the long term viability of Firefox. So it would be ironic if this axing had such bad PR that it had a worse effect than having too many heads.
- the_duke 5y agoMozilla really can't do that much to prevent it. Firefox only got popular because it was so much better than IE at the time. Now Chrome and Safari are the preinstalled on most devices or are pushed on you if they are not. They are also good enough or better that users don't have enough incentive to switch, especially with ad blockers working just fine on the competition (for now...). And Google won't allow Chrome to fall behind in a meaningful way. There is not much market opportunity to compete against the monopolistic distribution channels that Apple and Google can leverage.
- franklyt 5y agoThis would be a decent point if nobody had any interest in chromium alternatives and Firefox was a new upstart brand, neither of which are true. Usually, when a CEO heads an explicitly sinking ship, the CEO will be removed and someone will be brought in to turn around the company. No idea why that hasn’t happened.
- throwaway3699 5y agoThey already replaced their last CEO due to outrage. Another replacement would signal disaster.
- dralley 5y ago> This would be a decent point if nobody had any interest in chromium alternatives and Firefox was a new upstart brand, neither of which are true. What? The dominance of the mobile space by one of their competitors, who pre-installs their own browser, and who advertised said browser for free on the most visited website on the planet (google.com) for years, is absolutely relevant regardless of how old Mozilla is. And the world isn't like HN, most people don't care that much about their browsers, and don't even know what "chromium" is.
- franklyt 5y agoFirefox has, since incipience, faced that challenge. Anyhow, the point I’m making is that I don’t agree that it is impossible to compete with trenched competition. Firefox has some prior momentum themselves, they’re not quite an upstart.
- kbrosnan 5y agoThe last 10 years worth of CEOs for Mozilla Corp. 2008-2010 John Lilly 2010-2013 Gary Kovacs 2014 Brendan Eich 2014-2019 Chris Beard 2020-now Mitchel Baker [edit formatting]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- goonogle 5y agoMozilla isn't the same company as when I was a teen. I've attempted to use their platform on numerous devices over the last 3 years and ran into issues. I've moved on. No amount of HN praise can override my real world experience.