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I don't think he would've done things differently really. He was also part of the same old guard and wasn't exactly aiming for some radical changes inside Mozil

I don't think he would've done things differently really. He was also part of the same old guard and wasn't exactly aiming for some radical changes inside Mozilla. Imo one of the only things that could've made Firefox more relevant would've been to focus on an electron alternative, especially early on in 2013-14 as it would've been an entirely new "product segment", which could've made Firefox the standard engine for a lot of apps. But there's no indication that anyone high up at Firefox wanted to do something like that. It's a non-profit and non profits are rather conservative, for better or for worse.

Moomoomoo309 2y ago
You mean positron? https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron They did try to build that, and gave up.
- kasabali 2y ago
  They had XULRunner long before that, then of course they ditched it to pursue whatever crap they were pursuing that year. What a great vision.
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  Yeah I heard about it, but I don't know why they gave up. There's a lot of stuff that could be done to improve on electron (especially back then), and Mozilla was in a nice position where they controlled their web engine (as opposed to electron), so they could've made a very solid product... anyways that's not happening now... Edit: okay from what I understand in the blog, one of the reasons for abandoning it was that it was hard to keep up with the electron API changes and keep it compatible. That just goes to show that they were completely outplayed early on, otherwise they wouldn't have had to play catch up by merely being an electron shell around Spider monkey... >But Tofino is dead (long live the Browser Futures Group!), and Electron compatibility isn’t essential for a viable Gecko runtime. It’s also hard, since Electron has a large API surface area, is a moving target, requires Node.js integration (itself a moving target), and is designed for Chromium’s process architecture, which is substantially different from Firefox’s.
lolinder 2y ago
He would have at least avoided getting distracted by every single liberal cause that popped up along the way and kept his focus on technology. You can complain about Brave's crypto stuff, but at least it was trying to solve a real problem with internet monetization instead of being whatever Colorways was.
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  Sure but that's just a symptom not a cause. Even without making Mozilla turn into a regular non profit that just happens to have a browser project (as opposed to a browser project non profit), the strategy they had just couldn't work. Every monetization attempt failed (even with stuff centered around "privacy", a niche where Firefox is well known). I've seen numbers that indicated that the Mozilla foundation donations are almost equal to what they profit from their commercial products.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > Every monetization attempt failed (even with stuff centered around "privacy", a niche where Firefox is well known) Again, though: they have yet to try the obvious, which is allowing people to donate to Firefox. I have zero interest in supporting all the random distractions that Mozilla engages in, but if they gave me a donation box for Firefox specifically I'd set up a recurring payment today. They can't in good faith claim to have tried every monetization method when they have never let users earmark funds for Firefox.

Moomoomoo309 2y ago

You mean positron? https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron They did try to build that, and gave up.

kasabali 2y ago
They had XULRunner long before that, then of course they ditched it to pursue whatever crap they were pursuing that year. What a great vision.
mardifoufs 2y ago
Yeah I heard about it, but I don't know why they gave up. There's a lot of stuff that could be done to improve on electron (especially back then), and Mozilla was in a nice position where they controlled their web engine (as opposed to electron), so they could've made a very solid product... anyways that's not happening now... Edit: okay from what I understand in the blog, one of the reasons for abandoning it was that it was hard to keep up with the electron API changes and keep it compatible. That just goes to show that they were completely outplayed early on, otherwise they wouldn't have had to play catch up by merely being an electron shell around Spider monkey... >But Tofino is dead (long live the Browser Futures Group!), and Electron compatibility isn’t essential for a viable Gecko runtime. It’s also hard, since Electron has a large API surface area, is a moving target, requires Node.js integration (itself a moving target), and is designed for Chromium’s process architecture, which is substantially different from Firefox’s.

lolinder 2y ago

He would have at least avoided getting distracted by every single liberal cause that popped up along the way and kept his focus on technology. You can complain about Brave's crypto stuff, but at least it was trying to solve a real problem with internet monetization instead of being whatever Colorways was.

mardifoufs 2y ago
Sure but that's just a symptom not a cause. Even without making Mozilla turn into a regular non profit that just happens to have a browser project (as opposed to a browser project non profit), the strategy they had just couldn't work. Every monetization attempt failed (even with stuff centered around "privacy", a niche where Firefox is well known). I've seen numbers that indicated that the Mozilla foundation donations are almost equal to what they profit from their commercial products.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > Every monetization attempt failed (even with stuff centered around "privacy", a niche where Firefox is well known) Again, though: they have yet to try the obvious, which is allowing people to donate to Firefox. I have zero interest in supporting all the random distractions that Mozilla engages in, but if they gave me a donation box for Firefox specifically I'd set up a recurring payment today. They can't in good faith claim to have tried every monetization method when they have never let users earmark funds for Firefox.