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I have a deep love-hate relationship with Mozilla. I want Firefox marketshare to grow, but it seems like many of the ventures that Mozilla has (like with Pocket
by jchw 3y ago
I have a deep love-hate relationship with Mozilla. I want Firefox marketshare to grow, but it seems like many of the ventures that Mozilla has (like with Pocket) would just alienate the generally more technical audience that is still on Firefox. They've seemingly killed a lot of their R&D with the winding down of Servo, which is not a good sign given that they are struggling to keep up with Google technology-wise. The mess with MDN didn't send a great message either, though I don't know where that ended up.
Some of Mozilla's ventures seem cool. Like Mozilla VPN seems like a win/win; it supports Mullvad, you get a reasonable service, no complaints from me. But the thing that sucks is, Mozilla clearly needs to expand and build a large business to properly support Firefox, but their avenues for doing so in an ethically reasonable way that connects with the general mission seem pretty limited. Like it would be better if they could operate leaner and more directly focused on just building a good browser, but a lot of their options for monetizing Firefox itself are absolutely terrible. Ever since the whole debacle with using Firefox Studies to advertise, I don't even use upstream Firefox anymore. I do use Thunderbird and even donate sometimes, but I'm terrified that despite being donation-driven Thunderbird will somehow start to be enshittified too as part of their strategy to try to grow at any cost.
All of this signals, to me, a more general issue: it seems that maintaining a feasible mainstream web browser has become generally unsustainable.
- abnercoimbre 3y ago> The mess with MDN didn't send a great message either, though I don't know where that ended up. Where can I read about this? If it’s hard to link to a blog post, maybe expand on it for the curious!
- jchw 3y agoMozilla apparently had laid off the entire team that handled MDN[1]. They seem to have tried to make MDN itself a business unit, too, now with premium subscriptions and an integrated AI chat I guess. Though, I didn't really follow what happened after that, so I'm not sure what really happened and what effects it has had in the longer term. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/i8dwht/mozilla_have_laid_off_the_entire_mdn_writers_team/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/i8dwht/mozilla_have...