8 ms·

Someone needs to write a book on the how and why Mozilla became whatever the hell it is now, and why they would drop the ball so hard on Firefox while jumping f

Someone needs to write a book on the how and why Mozilla became whatever the hell it is now, and why they would drop the ball so hard on Firefox while jumping from one unsustainable idea nobody wants to another. Why is there no adult in the room to say no to the nonsense and direct resources towards the one thing people actually do want?

s_dev 2y ago
Getting rid of Brendan Eich was a bad idea in hindsight. Yes he supported Prop 8 and people didn't like his political views but given the current US climate that seems all very tame in comparison and I'm not sure exactly how that conflicts with running a Web Browser development agency.
- edent 2y ago
  Seán, how do you feel about the sign "No Irish Need Apply"? Would you be happy working for a company where the boss pays campaigners who want to discriminate against you? If not, you can perhaps see why people didn't want Eich's bigotry around their project.
  - s_dev 2y ago
    Can you confirm if that was the case at Mozilla? They actively discriminated against hiring gay people? From what I've heard that's not true at all. I think a closer analogy is no boss or CEO will likely have political views that match my own and I tolerate that and will work for such people.
    - edent 2y ago
      What is "active" discrimination? When the CEO is donating to causes which directly discriminate against you - would you apply to work there?
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  Lots of companies have political silliness going on inside them but are still able to produce good products. For example - the CCP stuff at Bytedance, the Cheobol stuff at Samsung and the various stuff at Google.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Those companies aren't propped up by substantial quantities of volunteer labor. The volunteers rebelled against Eich when he made it clear he would not apologize for trying to take away the human rights of the people volunteering to support the project. It was a complete failure of leadership on his part.
    - BrendanEich 2y ago
      This is a nice story but it's untrue. We had no volunteers who actually worked on Mozilla code and who "rebelled" (Hampton Catlin et al. did not contribute as part of "The volunteers"). The entire late March to early April drama was too fast to measure any change in volunteer contributions to Mozilla code. Volunteers saying they'd stop volunteering wasn't a factor in what went down. Worse, you are making stuff up in claiming that volunteers in substantial numbers "propped up" Mozilla. The Google money was still good enough to pay all essential personnel.
- n4r9 2y ago
  It's always a difficult situation. Employees want leaders that represent their values and are halfway competent at being data-driven. I don't know much about his political views or whether internally there was anything other than the Prop 8 stuff going around. However some of his later comments regarding COVID suggest biases in basic interpretation of data.
  - vasachi 2y ago
    So current employees want a leader that basically only thinks about said leader's salary, I guess? That is a shared value among many, can't argue with that.
    - n4r9 2y ago
      Is this a veiled comment about the interim CEO Laura Chambers? I don't know much about her but some brief googling suggests a worldview quite aligned with the majority of tech workers in the West: * Focus on employee wellness, including mental wellbeing * Support for making the internet free, open and accessible to all * History of working for non-profits and traditionally neglected sectors * Stated opposition to current influence of money and big tech in politics
- st3fan 2y ago
  Under Eich Mozilla mostly abandoned Firefox development to focus on his big bet that failed: Firefox OS. It took Mozilla many years to recover from that technically after it finally killed FirefoxOS. It was a good bet. But it did not work out. No leader is infallible.
  - ewzimm 2y ago
    While the FirefoxOS brand didn't survive, the technology itself took off as KaiOS and is more popular that iOS in many markets. It just took a Chinese company with some TCL money to manage distribution successfully. https://www.kaiostech.com https://www.kaiostech.com
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      KaiOS is actually dead now; and the market share is now irrelevant - even WhatsApp has shut down their app on the platform, and the App Store is no longer working. Completely cannibalized by cheap Android.
      - ewzimm 2y ago
        Wow, you're right, last update was in 2022. I still see a lot of devices in use though. I guess the OS updates don't matter too much. Didn't know about the app store. I guess most people I've seen using them just use the preinstalled apps anyway. The last time I used one someone asked me to sideload something, and adb worked fine for it. The website was at least updated recently.
        pabs3 2y ago
        There was a fork of KaiOS called GerdaOS, not sure how active it is: https://web.archive.org/web/20231216111510/https://gerda.tech/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231216111510/https://gerda.tec... https://archive.luxferre.top/gerdaos https://archive.luxferre.top/gerdaos
  - saidinesh5 2y ago
- saidinesh5 2y ago
  I think that's a symptom and not the cause of the current situation. Without getting into the politics of Eich's firing, It simply looked like people there just didn't care about the browser there anymore. If they did, the people who were vocal enough to get a CEO fired would obviously have raised a voice against the dropping marketshare (aka their own bottomline), money squandered on various non browser projects (pocket), all these PR nightmares (mr robot, recent layoffs ) etc ... Needless to say when i say people, i mean at least the vocal ones in power and obviously not everyone.
- deng 2y ago
  > Getting rid of Brendan Eich was a bad idea in hindsight. You mean the guy who then did the Brave browser, which inserted referral codes and installed VPN services without users' consent, and wants you to earn monopoly money for watching ads? Yeah, he surely would've been the savior of Firefox.
  - dizhn 2y ago
    These are all true but the browser is open source. When they say "we don't do that" (even if the stuff is in the gui) I don't have to take their word for it. I can check it.
    - deng 2y ago
      And yet the closed-source Safari is less scummy than open-source Brave. "I can check myself" is, for the vast majority of people, a purely theoretical option. Even if you happen to be a C++ wizard, diving into a 65k+ files code base is not done over a weekend.
st3fan 2y ago
Angry crowd: “Mozilla should do things to diverse revenue!” Also angry crowd: “No! No! Not that thing! How dare you explore alternative revenue streams! You are Mozilla, just pick and the execute a successful 100 million dollar idea!”
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  Angry crowd all over my tech bubble: "Mozilla should make a subscription that directly funds the development of Firefox, and not the salary of the CEO that does nothing." Also angry crowd: "No, not ads or AI, it's stupid." What was your point anyway?
- parasti 2y ago
  Nobody in the crowd ever said the first thing.
  - LeoWattenberg 2y ago
    I sure have. Mozillas main and perhaps only real mistake was that they didn't meaningfully attempt to become independent from Google the second Google started building Chrome (with Mozillas help, no less!). A truly independent Mozilla would not have needed to implement DRM, and would be shipping with adblock by default - which incidentally is exactly what made people switch from IE to FF in the first place, popup ads. Now the ship has beached itself and the crew is frantically trying something - anything - to plug the leaks, prevent her from capsizing and trying to get her back afloat. I don't know if they'll manage, or if ladybird is the alternative to the new IE that is Chrome
- meindnoch 2y ago
  Angry crowd: focus on your browser! Mozilla: what? acquire a bookmarking service? Angry crowd: no! develop your browser! Mozilla: ok, got it! I'll make a VPN service! Angry crowd: WORK ON YOUR FUCKING BROWSER Mozilla: AI? Did I hear AI from someone over there?
  - MrAlex94 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
a_imho 2y ago
At this point I find it very hard to chalk it up to mere incompetence.
Macha 2y ago
I do wonder how much of it was really in their control. Firefox had its rise when Microsoft had basically slowed IE development to a crawl, which allowed them to build a lead of how much better they were than IE that no browser developer would be dumb enough to allow to reoccur. Tabs, Adblock, Firebug, performance for youtube and google maps that wasn't appalling at a time when these apps were themselves new and exciting. Like you could show a normal person who was using IE6 tabs and adblock, and that's a clear use case to switch browsers. The only feature anywhere near that compelling in the recent or not-so-recent past is sync, which is why every browser manufacturer has their own version of it. And sync still isn't tabs or adblock. And they had a clear revenue model with Google (and not yet irrelevant competitors) paying for search and not yet starting to squeeze them. I'm sure that revenue model was partly undermined when they moved to yahoo in the US and everyone just went and switched back to Google, which caused Google to question how valuable that really was. At the same time, Google developed Chrome because it let them push features that were useful for their revenue generating products. And google pushed hard. Some of its early market share was to wooing us with performance and tab isolation, for sure. But a lot of it was bundling with new laptops, flash player, anti-virus programs etc. to automatically set it as the default for non-tech users who may not recognise what a browser is really. And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop. One of the big misses from Firefox was being so late to Android. They couldn't have Firefox on iOS, and it took ages for government regulation to meaningfully change that, but they could have been on Android much sooner, and used some of their desktop network effects and sync to build market share, but instead they left it so late and missed the mobile market such that their poor mobile market share turned browser sync into something that harmed their desktop market share, as people wanted a desktop browser to sync their mobile Chrome tabs etc. Firefox's headcount (and the pace of web platform development) had ballooned over this period, and this was fine when the Google money was still a given, but now that's looked to be decreasing or entirely at risk, Mozilla has needed to make Firefox pay for Firefox (unlike Chrome, which doesn't really need to pay for Chrome as long as it's a channel for Google's revenue generating products). This has put them in pretty direct conflict with their users, as ways to monetise the browser goes against a lot of why their remaining users are their users to begin with.
pixxel 2y ago
[dead]
AyyEye 2y ago
Not so much a 'why' but it does have a good history of the user-hostile moves Mozilla has made. https://digdeeper.club/articles/mozilla.xhtml https://digdeeper.club/articles/mozilla.xhtml
- maleldil 2y ago
  Not every "user-hostile" change listed was a net negative for users. For example, the page strongly opposes XUL deprecation, but that was a necessary change for e10s, which benefitted users in both performance and security.
  - pseudalopex 2y ago
    No. XUL deprecation was after e10s.
- Anthony-G 2y ago
  Thanks for that. Off-topic; it’s great to see a good old-fashioned XHTML web page – with a Strict doctype to boot! I remember hand-crafting websites using XHTML (at first Transitional, then Strict) using Server Side Includes as the only backend technology and being proud at how semantic and human-readable the source code was. The markup on this page is elegant, clear and readable while the rendered XHTML is both accessible and responsive.
renewiltord 2y ago
It’s a bit obvious. Happens to everyone with an achievable goal. They set out to create an open source web browser and web standards and now every browser is OSS and the web is on standards. Now they have no reason to exist and so the org is trying to sustain itself while finding another purpose.
fazeirony 2y ago
not just drop the ball, but willfully kick it to the other goal

s_dev 2y ago

Getting rid of Brendan Eich was a bad idea in hindsight. Yes he supported Prop 8 and people didn't like his political views but given the current US climate that seems all very tame in comparison and I'm not sure exactly how that conflicts with running a Web Browser development agency.

edent 2y ago
Seán, how do you feel about the sign "No Irish Need Apply"? Would you be happy working for a company where the boss pays campaigners who want to discriminate against you? If not, you can perhaps see why people didn't want Eich's bigotry around their project.
- s_dev 2y ago
  Can you confirm if that was the case at Mozilla? They actively discriminated against hiring gay people? From what I've heard that's not true at all. I think a closer analogy is no boss or CEO will likely have political views that match my own and I tolerate that and will work for such people.
  - edent 2y ago
    What is "active" discrimination? When the CEO is donating to causes which directly discriminate against you - would you apply to work there?
spacebanana7 2y ago
Lots of companies have political silliness going on inside them but are still able to produce good products. For example - the CCP stuff at Bytedance, the Cheobol stuff at Samsung and the various stuff at Google.
- kibwen 2y ago
  Those companies aren't propped up by substantial quantities of volunteer labor. The volunteers rebelled against Eich when he made it clear he would not apologize for trying to take away the human rights of the people volunteering to support the project. It was a complete failure of leadership on his part.
  - BrendanEich 2y ago
    This is a nice story but it's untrue. We had no volunteers who actually worked on Mozilla code and who "rebelled" (Hampton Catlin et al. did not contribute as part of "The volunteers"). The entire late March to early April drama was too fast to measure any change in volunteer contributions to Mozilla code. Volunteers saying they'd stop volunteering wasn't a factor in what went down. Worse, you are making stuff up in claiming that volunteers in substantial numbers "propped up" Mozilla. The Google money was still good enough to pay all essential personnel.
n4r9 2y ago
It's always a difficult situation. Employees want leaders that represent their values and are halfway competent at being data-driven. I don't know much about his political views or whether internally there was anything other than the Prop 8 stuff going around. However some of his later comments regarding COVID suggest biases in basic interpretation of data.
- vasachi 2y ago
  So current employees want a leader that basically only thinks about said leader's salary, I guess? That is a shared value among many, can't argue with that.
  - n4r9 2y ago
    Is this a veiled comment about the interim CEO Laura Chambers? I don't know much about her but some brief googling suggests a worldview quite aligned with the majority of tech workers in the West: * Focus on employee wellness, including mental wellbeing * Support for making the internet free, open and accessible to all * History of working for non-profits and traditionally neglected sectors * Stated opposition to current influence of money and big tech in politics
st3fan 2y ago
Under Eich Mozilla mostly abandoned Firefox development to focus on his big bet that failed: Firefox OS. It took Mozilla many years to recover from that technically after it finally killed FirefoxOS. It was a good bet. But it did not work out. No leader is infallible.
- ewzimm 2y ago
  While the FirefoxOS brand didn't survive, the technology itself took off as KaiOS and is more popular that iOS in many markets. It just took a Chinese company with some TCL money to manage distribution successfully. https://www.kaiostech.com https://www.kaiostech.com
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    KaiOS is actually dead now; and the market share is now irrelevant - even WhatsApp has shut down their app on the platform, and the App Store is no longer working. Completely cannibalized by cheap Android.
    - ewzimm 2y ago
      Wow, you're right, last update was in 2022. I still see a lot of devices in use though. I guess the OS updates don't matter too much. Didn't know about the app store. I guess most people I've seen using them just use the preinstalled apps anyway. The last time I used one someone asked me to sideload something, and adb worked fine for it. The website was at least updated recently.
      - pabs3 2y ago
        There was a fork of KaiOS called GerdaOS, not sure how active it is: https://web.archive.org/web/20231216111510/https://gerda.tech/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231216111510/https://gerda.tec... https://archive.luxferre.top/gerdaos https://archive.luxferre.top/gerdaos
- saidinesh5 2y ago
saidinesh5 2y ago
I think that's a symptom and not the cause of the current situation. Without getting into the politics of Eich's firing, It simply looked like people there just didn't care about the browser there anymore. If they did, the people who were vocal enough to get a CEO fired would obviously have raised a voice against the dropping marketshare (aka their own bottomline), money squandered on various non browser projects (pocket), all these PR nightmares (mr robot, recent layoffs ) etc ... Needless to say when i say people, i mean at least the vocal ones in power and obviously not everyone.
deng 2y ago
> Getting rid of Brendan Eich was a bad idea in hindsight. You mean the guy who then did the Brave browser, which inserted referral codes and installed VPN services without users' consent, and wants you to earn monopoly money for watching ads? Yeah, he surely would've been the savior of Firefox.
- dizhn 2y ago
  These are all true but the browser is open source. When they say "we don't do that" (even if the stuff is in the gui) I don't have to take their word for it. I can check it.
  - deng 2y ago
    And yet the closed-source Safari is less scummy than open-source Brave. "I can check myself" is, for the vast majority of people, a purely theoretical option. Even if you happen to be a C++ wizard, diving into a 65k+ files code base is not done over a weekend.

st3fan 2y ago

Angry crowd: “Mozilla should do things to diverse revenue!” Also angry crowd: “No! No! Not that thing! How dare you explore alternative revenue streams! You are Mozilla, just pick and the execute a successful 100 million dollar idea!”

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
Angry crowd all over my tech bubble: "Mozilla should make a subscription that directly funds the development of Firefox, and not the salary of the CEO that does nothing." Also angry crowd: "No, not ads or AI, it's stupid." What was your point anyway?
parasti 2y ago
Nobody in the crowd ever said the first thing.
- LeoWattenberg 2y ago
  I sure have. Mozillas main and perhaps only real mistake was that they didn't meaningfully attempt to become independent from Google the second Google started building Chrome (with Mozillas help, no less!). A truly independent Mozilla would not have needed to implement DRM, and would be shipping with adblock by default - which incidentally is exactly what made people switch from IE to FF in the first place, popup ads. Now the ship has beached itself and the crew is frantically trying something - anything - to plug the leaks, prevent her from capsizing and trying to get her back afloat. I don't know if they'll manage, or if ladybird is the alternative to the new IE that is Chrome
meindnoch 2y ago
Angry crowd: focus on your browser! Mozilla: what? acquire a bookmarking service? Angry crowd: no! develop your browser! Mozilla: ok, got it! I'll make a VPN service! Angry crowd: WORK ON YOUR FUCKING BROWSER Mozilla: AI? Did I hear AI from someone over there?
- MrAlex94 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

a_imho 2y ago

At this point I find it very hard to chalk it up to mere incompetence.

Macha 2y ago

I do wonder how much of it was really in their control. Firefox had its rise when Microsoft had basically slowed IE development to a crawl, which allowed them to build a lead of how much better they were than IE that no browser developer would be dumb enough to allow to reoccur. Tabs, Adblock, Firebug, performance for youtube and google maps that wasn't appalling at a time when these apps were themselves new and exciting. Like you could show a normal person who was using IE6 tabs and adblock, and that's a clear use case to switch browsers. The only feature anywhere near that compelling in the recent or not-so-recent past is sync, which is why every browser manufacturer has their own version of it. And sync still isn't tabs or adblock. And they had a clear revenue model with Google (and not yet irrelevant competitors) paying for search and not yet starting to squeeze them. I'm sure that revenue model was partly undermined when they moved to yahoo in the US and everyone just went and switched back to Google, which caused Google to question how valuable that really was. At the same time, Google developed Chrome because it let them push features that were useful for their revenue generating products. And google pushed hard. Some of its early market share was to wooing us with performance and tab isolation, for sure. But a lot of it was bundling with new laptops, flash player, anti-virus programs etc. to automatically set it as the default for non-tech users who may not recognise what a browser is really. And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop. One of the big misses from Firefox was being so late to Android. They couldn't have Firefox on iOS, and it took ages for government regulation to meaningfully change that, but they could have been on Android much sooner, and used some of their desktop network effects and sync to build market share, but instead they left it so late and missed the mobile market such that their poor mobile market share turned browser sync into something that harmed their desktop market share, as people wanted a desktop browser to sync their mobile Chrome tabs etc. Firefox's headcount (and the pace of web platform development) had ballooned over this period, and this was fine when the Google money was still a given, but now that's looked to be decreasing or entirely at risk, Mozilla has needed to make Firefox pay for Firefox (unlike Chrome, which doesn't really need to pay for Chrome as long as it's a channel for Google's revenue generating products). This has put them in pretty direct conflict with their users, as ways to monetise the browser goes against a lot of why their remaining users are their users to begin with.

pixxel 2y ago

[dead]

AyyEye 2y ago

Not so much a 'why' but it does have a good history of the user-hostile moves Mozilla has made. https://digdeeper.club/articles/mozilla.xhtml https://digdeeper.club/articles/mozilla.xhtml

maleldil 2y ago
Not every "user-hostile" change listed was a net negative for users. For example, the page strongly opposes XUL deprecation, but that was a necessary change for e10s, which benefitted users in both performance and security.
- pseudalopex 2y ago
  No. XUL deprecation was after e10s.
Anthony-G 2y ago
Thanks for that. Off-topic; it’s great to see a good old-fashioned XHTML web page – with a Strict doctype to boot! I remember hand-crafting websites using XHTML (at first Transitional, then Strict) using Server Side Includes as the only backend technology and being proud at how semantic and human-readable the source code was. The markup on this page is elegant, clear and readable while the rendered XHTML is both accessible and responsive.

renewiltord 2y ago

It’s a bit obvious. Happens to everyone with an achievable goal. They set out to create an open source web browser and web standards and now every browser is OSS and the web is on standards. Now they have no reason to exist and so the org is trying to sustain itself while finding another purpose.

fazeirony 2y ago

not just drop the ball, but willfully kick it to the other goal