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Mozilla has lost the plot. People support Mozilla because they want a strong, independent browser, not so staff can siphon money into side projects that exist m

by kburman 11mo ago

Mozilla has lost the plot. People support Mozilla because they want a strong, independent browser, not so staff can siphon money into side projects that exist mainly to look good on someone’s resume. Things like Transformer Lab have nothing to do with Firefox and nothing to do with the mission Mozilla claims to care about. This isn’t innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy distractions while the browser that actually matters keeps slipping behind. And it’s happening because there’s no real oversight, no accountability, and no one willing to say “no” when someone pitches another off-brand hobby project. Mozilla needs a reality check. Stop burning resources on experiments nobody asked for, remove the people who think this is acceptable, and refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser. Until that happens, they’re just wasting donor money and goodwill while Firefox slowly fades away.

forgotpwd16 11mo ago
>refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser Considering their existence depends on Google's money, it's to their best interest for the browser to lag behind Chrome.
- nativeit 11mo ago
  I keep hearing this, but I haven’t seen any convincing evidence there are no alternatives.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    I think it would have to be alternative search licenses, crowdsourced fundraising or some new product offering. There's little precedent for crowdsourced fundraising on the scale of what Mozilla gets from its search deals. The examples I hear are Wikipedia and Tor. Wikipedia is the largest of its kind, I suspect the largest year-by-year internet crowdsourced project in existence and it gets half of what Mozilla's operations cost. Tor even less. So Mozilla would have to have more than double the largest crowdsourcing effort in history. So there goes crowdsourcing, at least as a primary option. I don't think there's other licensing opportunities that pay out as much as Google, so there's strike two. So then it's a matter of dabbling in side bets, which risk being inconsequential, compromising core mission values (e.g. adtech), or user backlash (VPN, Pocket) and stand accused of losing track of their mission. I personally wouldn't mind doing what Proton does and offering a drive/calendar/email suite but, again they would get accused of losing sight of their mission and I don't know how much they would stand to make from it. Nevertheless I do think continuing to experiment in side bets is worth trying. Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly imo, they do some Ycombinator-style VC funding, which I believe are done out of the returns on their endowment. That might be one of the most intriguing directions over the long term, but again I have seen people on HN and point to that as yet another example of Mozilla supposedly failing to stay focused on their core mission.
glenstein 11mo ago
This is the fictional hallucination that somehow makes it into every comment section about Mozilla. So let's go through the facts one more time: (1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation. (2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some exceptions (we'll get to those). (3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses. (4) The narrative that a failure to keep up/push new features drove market share losses paints a picture that's entirely zoomed in on Mozilla and ignores Google leveraging its search and mobile monopolies to muscle its browser onto the map, which likely would have happened regardless of how good Firefox was. (5) The narrative that the browser was broken and behind is somewhat outdated - it was true in the market share loss era, but then they did the dang thing and launched a major engineering effort, fundamentally rebuilt the major parts of the browser via Project Quantum, a monumental engineering transformation that delivered speed and stability, the thing everyone asked for. It's obviously not perfect, but in terms of performance and stability its certainly good enough to be a daily driver in most cases and not in a state of tragic disrepair. (6) Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all their market share overnight. That said, yes, there are bad things: the dabbling in adtech is bad imo ("privacy preserving ads" seems to be category error), dabbling with AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point in its current iteration, Pocket was understandable as a revenue grower but seems have been a wash and annoyed users and they didn't bother to maintain it, Mozilla nonprofits broader advocacy for privacy seems to be confusing some people, and Firefox OS genuinely did seem to have cost engineering resources at a time that they lost market share. That said, I would love if there was a 10 year old Firefox OS project right now given Google's pushing of developer certification. So, yes, there's stuff I don't love. I don't feel like this iteration of Mozilla has the innovative spirit of, say, Opera back in its heyday, and it's not as polished as Chrome. But the comment section rhetoric has spilled over into fever dream territory and not is even pretending to map onto any coherent historical timeline, factual record, or story of cause and effect, and often contradictory in its declaration of demands.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
Lord-Jobo 11mo ago
I don’t understand how so many gigantic corporations can focus on cutting costs over and over, firing people until every team is anemic. Then there’s Firefox, who very clearly just need a slim team focused on performance and maintaining standards.

by kburman 11mo ago

forgotpwd16 11mo ago

>refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser Considering their existence depends on Google's money, it's to their best interest for the browser to lag behind Chrome.

nativeit 11mo ago
I keep hearing this, but I haven’t seen any convincing evidence there are no alternatives.
- glenstein 11mo ago
  I think it would have to be alternative search licenses, crowdsourced fundraising or some new product offering. There's little precedent for crowdsourced fundraising on the scale of what Mozilla gets from its search deals. The examples I hear are Wikipedia and Tor. Wikipedia is the largest of its kind, I suspect the largest year-by-year internet crowdsourced project in existence and it gets half of what Mozilla's operations cost. Tor even less. So Mozilla would have to have more than double the largest crowdsourcing effort in history. So there goes crowdsourcing, at least as a primary option. I don't think there's other licensing opportunities that pay out as much as Google, so there's strike two. So then it's a matter of dabbling in side bets, which risk being inconsequential, compromising core mission values (e.g. adtech), or user backlash (VPN, Pocket) and stand accused of losing track of their mission. I personally wouldn't mind doing what Proton does and offering a drive/calendar/email suite but, again they would get accused of losing sight of their mission and I don't know how much they would stand to make from it. Nevertheless I do think continuing to experiment in side bets is worth trying. Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly imo, they do some Ycombinator-style VC funding, which I believe are done out of the returns on their endowment. That might be one of the most intriguing directions over the long term, but again I have seen people on HN and point to that as yet another example of Mozilla supposedly failing to stay focused on their core mission.

glenstein 11mo ago

This is the fictional hallucination that somehow makes it into every comment section about Mozilla. So let's go through the facts one more time: (1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation. (2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some exceptions (we'll get to those). (3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses. (4) The narrative that a failure to keep up/push new features drove market share losses paints a picture that's entirely zoomed in on Mozilla and ignores Google leveraging its search and mobile monopolies to muscle its browser onto the map, which likely would have happened regardless of how good Firefox was. (5) The narrative that the browser was broken and behind is somewhat outdated - it was true in the market share loss era, but then they did the dang thing and launched a major engineering effort, fundamentally rebuilt the major parts of the browser via Project Quantum, a monumental engineering transformation that delivered speed and stability, the thing everyone asked for. It's obviously not perfect, but in terms of performance and stability its certainly good enough to be a daily driver in most cases and not in a state of tragic disrepair. (6) Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all their market share overnight. That said, yes, there are bad things: the dabbling in adtech is bad imo ("privacy preserving ads" seems to be category error), dabbling with AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point in its current iteration, Pocket was understandable as a revenue grower but seems have been a wash and annoyed users and they didn't bother to maintain it, Mozilla nonprofits broader advocacy for privacy seems to be confusing some people, and Firefox OS genuinely did seem to have cost engineering resources at a time that they lost market share. That said, I would love if there was a 10 year old Firefox OS project right now given Google's pushing of developer certification. So, yes, there's stuff I don't love. I don't feel like this iteration of Mozilla has the innovative spirit of, say, Opera back in its heyday, and it's not as polished as Chrome. But the comment section rhetoric has spilled over into fever dream territory and not is even pretending to map onto any coherent historical timeline, factual record, or story of cause and effect, and often contradictory in its declaration of demands.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

Lord-Jobo 11mo ago

I don’t understand how so many gigantic corporations can focus on cutting costs over and over, firing people until every team is anemic. Then there’s Firefox, who very clearly just need a slim team focused on performance and maintaining standards.