5 ms·

Bias disclaimer: I've worked on Chrome and Edge, opinions strictly my own >and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pul

Bias disclaimer: I've worked on Chrome and Edge, opinions strictly my own >and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome. Could and should Mozilla have done better? Yes. "Any energy?" is uncalled for, however. There was the entire Quantum rewrite for significant performance boosts (around the time Chrome started getting called out for bad perf). There's containers, anti-tracker tech, and a big privacy push. There is much more they could have done, and my outsider opinion is that Mozilla the organization lost its way and focused too much money and effort on things that don't matter, but it's not like they pulled an IE6 and abandoned Firefox.

agumonkey 4y ago
That's how it felt to me too. Stretched too thin. Yet as a small company compared to MS or Google, I can imagine how hard it is to try to thrive or just survive and maintaining a stable path when you're fighting big pockets. I just wished they could rebalance their allocation and focus on simple daily usability things. Just a bit more. ps: for instance, the screenshot tool is brilliant
- fooker 4y ago
  >Stretched too thin Meanwhile they have had consistently growing revenues and consistently declining number of developers.
  - dblohm7 4y ago
    > Meanwhile they have had consistently growing revenues and consistently declining number of developers. Citation needed? And no, the 2020 layoffs don't count: It's 2023.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Size of the company is actually irrelevant. What's important is the number of developers they put on the project.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    ... which is often directly related to company size, or at least funding. It's not like Mozilla has all these great independent revenue sources. Google and Microsoft can afford to throw significantly more money at their browser without thinking about how to make any money off of it, or off of related things. Mozilla has no such luck.
- sam_goody 4y ago
  Stretched too thin? They fired Brendan Eich, who invented JS, led Netscape past IE, and then headed Mozilla. Who, when fired, started Brave and turned it into a bigger system than FF (including the only relatively new free search engine with its own index), from scratch, in a world already dominated by Chrome, and Safari. I know, I know, Eich donated personal money to some cause that some people on the internet didn't like. But from a business perspective, it was the stupidest thing they could have done, and is the point at which FF went from growth to (fast) loss. (And the cause itself was not justified, especially considering it was a private donation, it was a legal org (not like KK or whatever), and he apologized afterwards. Even if it was a mistake, that should not have been justification for firing him.)
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > started Brave and turned it into a bigger system than FF On what metric is Brave bigger than Firefox?
  - quesera 4y ago
    This is revisionist. Mozilla's mistake was not in firing Brendan Eich (and Brendan Eich was not fired). Mozilla's mistake was in promoting Brendan Eich to CEO. Mozilla employees said ~"we were not totally comfortable with Brendan as a leader in the Technology role, but we recognized his long history with the Org and his Technical excellence, so we kept mostly quiet. But we strongly object to his promotion to CEO and primary representative of Mozilla to the world, because we do not feel that he represents the Org's values and do not believe he will be an effective leader of us." Brendan probably could have returned to his CTO role with little fuss. But he may have had larger aspirations, he may have been sick of working under existing leadership, and he may have been personally disappointed by the Org's vote of no confidence in him. All are 100% reasonable! So he resigned. He was not fired. Yes the board might have "recommended" that he resign, but he would have been crazy (and display poor leadership abilities!) to try to stay in the CEO role after that drama. > and he apologized afterwards Has he? Not really. At least not contemporaneously with the events at Mozilla, and likely not since then. To be clear -- I don't think he should feel the need to apologize for personally-held beliefs. But I don't think it's possible to be a leader of people in any Org while simultaneously holding beliefs that are so offensive to the same people. ... We do agree that Brendan's resignation was a net loss for Mozilla. But he might have not been able to succeed in the Mozilla Org anyway. Even as CEO, he'd have the board to contend with. As CTO, he had the CEO and the board to contend with. If there are effective people in that group, they are not making themselves known.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  > Yet as a small company compared to MS or Google It's not about the overall company its about browser team. I'd love to see a comparison of the actual sizes of the teams creating browsers, isn't Safari only a handful of (admittedly extremely talented) people?
tracker1 4y ago
I just feel that Mozilla has spent way too much on PR, marketing and ventures that make no sense in their space. They got big by being a leader in the browser tech stack, and making tools developers and tech guys wanted to use. That led to the influence over other areas, but advising friends and family to use it. Mozilla org has completely lost sight of their base. A good 70-80% of their budget should be on their core product development and adjacent products only. The fact that only recently have they discovered, hey, we had this pretty good email client that we let all but die off. They should separate their core rendering and script engine teams to focus on better embed-ability and security structures. Another team(s) focused on the integration for Firefox as a browser. Another for Thunderbird. The fact that they killed off their Rust efforts, XULRunner and so many other things that could be really useful today is just painful. Yeah, XUL didn't run great on 1998 hardware, but what are so many apps targeting today, Electron. And now there's a resurgence towards lighter options (Tauri and others) because it kind of makes sense to (re)use a browser rendering engine for general UI development. It's extremely flexible, has a flushed out (if somewhat complex) styling and theming system, multiple language support, complete font rendering, svg rendering, and accessibility support and runs on/under everything under the sun. Maybe hire on some of the types that have tried and failed to remake email and browsers that have some creative vision on how users actually use these applications, and let them work with the engineering teams to make quality software again. Spend less time on branding, and more time on the core tech. They still have enough brand reach and clout that people will try the new stuff and if it's good, then organic growth can and would work (again). Hell, if they want to branch out... make a REALLY great email and communications platform that is open-source with a hosted model. How big of a pain is it to self-host many of these things today? If they want to acquire someone, bring in Caddy, Fastmail and/or Zimbra for adjacent tech development. I only harp on the email and Thunderbird side because two decades ago, they were in a better spot than anyone to offer a competing product to Outlook+Exchange and they just didn't even try. And now even Outlook kind of sucks because the cloud integration is what it is at scale. Leaving a gaping hole where that entire market used to live. A great open-source core product, with a good extensibility model and some commercially licensed integration points could have been insanely popular.
- orra 4y ago
rvba 4y ago
People wanted add-ons and customization, not the things you mentioned. Firefox was "the" customizable browser with great ad-block.
- tommica 4y ago
  And it is still customizable
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    But to a far, far lesser degree. The importance of this to me is that I used to be able to customize away the terrible aspects of the FF UI. Now, I can't really do that anymore. Not that it matters, because FF performance has become so terrible for me that it was no longer really usable anyway.

agumonkey 4y ago

That's how it felt to me too. Stretched too thin. Yet as a small company compared to MS or Google, I can imagine how hard it is to try to thrive or just survive and maintaining a stable path when you're fighting big pockets. I just wished they could rebalance their allocation and focus on simple daily usability things. Just a bit more. ps: for instance, the screenshot tool is brilliant

fooker 4y ago
>Stretched too thin Meanwhile they have had consistently growing revenues and consistently declining number of developers.
- dblohm7 4y ago
  > Meanwhile they have had consistently growing revenues and consistently declining number of developers. Citation needed? And no, the 2020 layoffs don't count: It's 2023.
threeseed 4y ago
Size of the company is actually irrelevant. What's important is the number of developers they put on the project.
- kelnos 4y ago
  ... which is often directly related to company size, or at least funding. It's not like Mozilla has all these great independent revenue sources. Google and Microsoft can afford to throw significantly more money at their browser without thinking about how to make any money off of it, or off of related things. Mozilla has no such luck.
sam_goody 4y ago
Stretched too thin? They fired Brendan Eich, who invented JS, led Netscape past IE, and then headed Mozilla. Who, when fired, started Brave and turned it into a bigger system than FF (including the only relatively new free search engine with its own index), from scratch, in a world already dominated by Chrome, and Safari. I know, I know, Eich donated personal money to some cause that some people on the internet didn't like. But from a business perspective, it was the stupidest thing they could have done, and is the point at which FF went from growth to (fast) loss. (And the cause itself was not justified, especially considering it was a private donation, it was a legal org (not like KK or whatever), and he apologized afterwards. Even if it was a mistake, that should not have been justification for firing him.)
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > started Brave and turned it into a bigger system than FF On what metric is Brave bigger than Firefox?
- quesera 4y ago
  This is revisionist. Mozilla's mistake was not in firing Brendan Eich (and Brendan Eich was not fired). Mozilla's mistake was in promoting Brendan Eich to CEO. Mozilla employees said ~"we were not totally comfortable with Brendan as a leader in the Technology role, but we recognized his long history with the Org and his Technical excellence, so we kept mostly quiet. But we strongly object to his promotion to CEO and primary representative of Mozilla to the world, because we do not feel that he represents the Org's values and do not believe he will be an effective leader of us." Brendan probably could have returned to his CTO role with little fuss. But he may have had larger aspirations, he may have been sick of working under existing leadership, and he may have been personally disappointed by the Org's vote of no confidence in him. All are 100% reasonable! So he resigned. He was not fired. Yes the board might have "recommended" that he resign, but he would have been crazy (and display poor leadership abilities!) to try to stay in the CEO role after that drama. > and he apologized afterwards Has he? Not really. At least not contemporaneously with the events at Mozilla, and likely not since then. To be clear -- I don't think he should feel the need to apologize for personally-held beliefs. But I don't think it's possible to be a leader of people in any Org while simultaneously holding beliefs that are so offensive to the same people. ... We do agree that Brendan's resignation was a net loss for Mozilla. But he might have not been able to succeed in the Mozilla Org anyway. Even as CEO, he'd have the board to contend with. As CTO, he had the CEO and the board to contend with. If there are effective people in that group, they are not making themselves known.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
> Yet as a small company compared to MS or Google It's not about the overall company its about browser team. I'd love to see a comparison of the actual sizes of the teams creating browsers, isn't Safari only a handful of (admittedly extremely talented) people?

tracker1 4y ago

I just feel that Mozilla has spent way too much on PR, marketing and ventures that make no sense in their space. They got big by being a leader in the browser tech stack, and making tools developers and tech guys wanted to use. That led to the influence over other areas, but advising friends and family to use it. Mozilla org has completely lost sight of their base. A good 70-80% of their budget should be on their core product development and adjacent products only. The fact that only recently have they discovered, hey, we had this pretty good email client that we let all but die off. They should separate their core rendering and script engine teams to focus on better embed-ability and security structures. Another team(s) focused on the integration for Firefox as a browser. Another for Thunderbird. The fact that they killed off their Rust efforts, XULRunner and so many other things that could be really useful today is just painful. Yeah, XUL didn't run great on 1998 hardware, but what are so many apps targeting today, Electron. And now there's a resurgence towards lighter options (Tauri and others) because it kind of makes sense to (re)use a browser rendering engine for general UI development. It's extremely flexible, has a flushed out (if somewhat complex) styling and theming system, multiple language support, complete font rendering, svg rendering, and accessibility support and runs on/under everything under the sun. Maybe hire on some of the types that have tried and failed to remake email and browsers that have some creative vision on how users actually use these applications, and let them work with the engineering teams to make quality software again. Spend less time on branding, and more time on the core tech. They still have enough brand reach and clout that people will try the new stuff and if it's good, then organic growth can and would work (again). Hell, if they want to branch out... make a REALLY great email and communications platform that is open-source with a hosted model. How big of a pain is it to self-host many of these things today? If they want to acquire someone, bring in Caddy, Fastmail and/or Zimbra for adjacent tech development. I only harp on the email and Thunderbird side because two decades ago, they were in a better spot than anyone to offer a competing product to Outlook+Exchange and they just didn't even try. And now even Outlook kind of sucks because the cloud integration is what it is at scale. Leaving a gaping hole where that entire market used to live. A great open-source core product, with a good extensibility model and some commercially licensed integration points could have been insanely popular.

orra 4y ago

rvba 4y ago

People wanted add-ons and customization, not the things you mentioned. Firefox was "the" customizable browser with great ad-block.

tommica 4y ago
And it is still customizable
- JohnFen 4y ago
  But to a far, far lesser degree. The importance of this to me is that I used to be able to customize away the terrible aspects of the FF UI. Now, I can't really do that anymore. Not that it matters, because FF performance has become so terrible for me that it was no longer really usable anyway.