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Values listed on a web page are one thing. Actions are another. I haven't been impressed with their actions over the past few years. Just look at Firefox. Ins

Values listed on a web page are one thing. Actions are another. I haven't been impressed with their actions over the past few years. Just look at Firefox. Instead of striving to provide a lean, practical, extensible browser, all they've managed to do is copy Chrome as of late. The UI changes have not been for the better. The release schedule changes were very painful, and the version number inflation is pointless. While its performance and memory usage is marginally better these days, it has still been years without any significant improvement. It's not surprising that users are moving away from it to other browsers. Then there's Thunderbird. Aside from Firefox, this was one of their only other pieces of useful software. Yet they've dropped their support for it to a minimal level. What's worse, while neglecting their software that people actually use on a daily basis, they've embarked on pointless efforts like FirefoxOS and Persona. We don't need another mobile OS, especially one that's essentially crippled to only supporting development using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS (which, of course, are already available on Android and iOS, not to mention the other mobile OSes that are already widely available). Persona is clearly not gaining any traction. The only encouraging thing out of them has been Rust. But even that seems to be rather loosely associated with them, and appears to be regarded as quite experimental. I know, I know. I'm not paying for their software, so they don't have any obligation to me, etc., etc.. I'm merely not convinced that their actions really correspond to the principles in their manifesto very well.

emilsedgh 13y ago
Mozilla's value and goal is pushing for open web. Not creating the best browser. Creating a kickass browser was the way the reached their goal. We do need another mobile OS because current ones do not respect our freedom. Even if they are technically sufficient, user friendly and usable. So I dont care if Mozilla is copying Chrome or not. I just wish they stay in the same path AND be strong and influencial as they currently are.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  Like I said earlier, it's pretty clear that the path they're following now is diminishing their influence. This page lists a variety of measures of browser usage share: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers Notice that over the past several years, in each data set, that Firefox's usage has dropped off, or at best not grown. People are leaving Firefox because it's not improving, and because it is actually getting worse in many ways for many people. If we're going to get the Chrome experience even when using Firefox, but done in an inferior fashion, we may as well just use Chrome. I expect we'd see a similar, if not more severe, drop off in Thunderbird's usage numbers. I've personally moved to a different client within the past year, and I know several other people who have, too. There's nothing compelling about FirefoxOS compared to Android, iOS, or the incumbents. Average people will not switch to it. Without these people, it won't gain traction, and Mozilla will still have limited to no influence in the mobile space. And the same goes for Persona. It has been around for a few years now, but average people aren't using it, nor does it look like there's any reason they'd want to. "Openness" may be a noble goal, but I think they had much more influence when they were producing software that people liked to use because it worked well. The move away from this has corresponded to a decrease in their influence, and much greater influence for Google, Apple, Microsoft and even Opera.
  - emilsedgh 13y ago
    Ok, so Mozilla suddenly got a very heavyweight competetion from Chrome, fell behind and now is trying to catchup. What is so wrong about that?
    - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
      Nothing is wrong with competition. Their response to it, however, clearly isn't working in their favor. Their apparent lack of willingness to move away from this failed path is further hurting them. If they don't provide quality software, then they won't have users. If they don't have users, then they won't have influence. If they don't have influence, they don't have any real power to assert their "open web" philosophy. The less power that Mozilla has, the more power their competitors will share, including those with a much different philosophy.
      - PavlovsCat 13y ago
        If they don't have influence, they don't have any real power to assert their "open web" philosophy A philosophy does not assert itself by having power, it reveals its value (or lack thereof) to the honest thinker, and has that value regardless of the existence of such thinkers.
        PommeDeTerre 13y ago
        That kind of thinking is nice and all in the academic world, but in the real world a philosophy is absolutely useless unless some person or organization has the ability to put those ideas in to practice. By losing market share, Mozilla is losing influence, which will inhibit their ability to introduce more "openness". Their philosophy will become far less useful, and its value will decrease, if it can't actually be implemented.
        PavlovsCat 13y ago
        Why are you putting open into quotes? Anyway, the Nineteen-Eightyfour approach to what is true or right never did it for me.. utilitarian love for wisdom is not something that can actually exist.
- rimantas 13y ago
  > Mozilla's value and goal is pushing for open web. Not > creating the best browser. Then they have very stupid goal. Whatever that "open web is" (seriously, how do you close the web? by hanging lock on http and html?) but the main point is that the web is what browser vendors make of it. Some features of HTML 4 only lived in the spec, because no browser cared enough to implement them. HTML versions are if fact meaningless, because only features supported by browsers matter. Hence if you make a philosophically pure browser which nobody uses you will have zero influence on the web.
  - abdullahkhalids 13y ago
    You seriously have not been reading YC if you don't know how the web is being closed by a whole host of companies and governments alike.
    - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
      Nobody is saying that those influences don't exist. We're merely saying that it's pointless to try to combat them without market share. Products that nobody uses will have essentially no impact, even if they're more "open" than the more popular products. Mozilla had some influence a few years ago, but they've been making decisions and taking actions that appear to be eroding that influence. If the current trends continue, their influence will continue to diminish. If they're striving for an "open" web, they're going to need influence to have any real impact.
      - SkyMarshal 13y ago
        >We're merely saying that it's pointless to try to combat them without market share. Products that nobody uses will have essentially no impact, even if they're more "open" than the more popular products. The history of BSD and Linux should call that assertion into question. They started relatively unpopular, but their openess earned them a core niche of technically capable innovators and early adopters, who over time improved their quality enough for them to nearly dominate in servers and mobile.
dbaupp 13y ago
> While its performance and memory usage is marginally better these days, it has still been years without any significant improvement It's basically tracked/caught up to Chrome on 3 major benchmark suites over the past year. http://arewefastyet.com/ http://arewefastyet.com/
- cwzwarich 13y ago
  Javascript microbenchmarks don't really matter for browser performance on realistic workloads at this point.
  - aclevernickname 13y ago
    Pay attention, class. this is an example of the "Moving The Goalpost" fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalpost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalpost
    - cwzwarich 13y ago
      How is my statement "moving the goalpost"? I'm not moving any goalpost; I never claimed at any point that JS microbenchmarks were a good indicator of overall browser performance. At a time when JS execution was a larger part of browser workloads (and the implementation techniques of JS engines were extremely simple compared to what was known to be possible for dynamic languages) JS microbenchmarks were a better proxy for whole browser peformance, although they weren't great at that point either. Today, all popular browsers have relatively decent JS engines and differences on microbenchmarks just don't reflect total browser performance as much as they did in the past.
      - dbaupp 13y ago
        Surely JS execution is a larger part than ever of browser workloads, or are you referring to things like CSS3 which move some of the rich-webapp work out of javascript?
- Raphael 13y ago
IanChiles 13y ago
Asm.js? Emscripten? WebRTC? Come on, Mozilla has really been pushing the limits of the web lately, in new and interesting ways that no one else will try.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  Those aren't exactly encouraging projects. Asm.js is, at best, a truly atrocious hack. Emscripten is only marginally better. They're both quite inferior when compared to NaCl and PNaCl, for instance. Trying to further entrench JavaScript is not a step forward, and I don't think it's something that should be encouraged or considered positive. Actively trying to move away from JavaScript toward a more general, and sensibly-designed/implemented in-browser runtime would be beneficial. Even embedding Lua, Python, or some other reasonable language would be helpful. But creating horrid JavaScript subsets is not helpful. Unless I'm mistaken, WebRTC mostly came out of Google, not Mozilla. So maybe this is not a good example for you to use?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - pekk 13y ago
    Well if WebRTC came out of Google, then by God it must not be the Open Web.
- WayneDB 13y ago
  These are hackey kludges that nobody uses though. Who cares if you can run Quake or Skype in a browser? Nobody wants that because browsers suck. They're just so, so, so limited compared to native tech. Mozilla should be working on getting us the fuck away from Javascript, HTML and CSS and severely limited browsers.
  - monsterix 13y ago
    This was the case even when browsers were text-only (lynx and thus forward), no?
  - 13y ago
Aqueous 13y ago
They've done a lot of innovations with respect to JavaScript optimizations, asm.js, and Emscripten. Even V8 running hand-written JavaScript can't approach the near-native speeds of Emscripten-emitted asm.js. A year or two ago I would have agreed with you but Mozilla has stepped up its game. Now if they could just fix their browser's UI.
mwcampbell 13y ago
Persona is far from pointless. The Web needs a decentralized identity to counter centralized, proprietary systems like Google, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. With Firefox OS, Mozilla is skating to where the puck is going to be, maybe already is. Mobile devices are the future of interpersonal electronic communication. Something so important to our daily lives and society should not be dominated by fiefdoms like iOS and Android.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  Email addresses and site-specific passwords already work just fine as a decentralized identity service. You can run your own email server(s) on your own domain(s), if you feel it necessary. Then again, you can use some other provider. Either way, basically everybody online already has at least one email account, if not several. Anyone who wants an email address, or even another one, can easily get one. Persona is trying to solve a problem that just doesn't exist, so it's no wonder we see so little adoption of it. With FirefoxOS, Mozilla is skating to where the puck was in 2008. Android and iOS, among many others, just got there far earlier. FirefoxOS's HTML5/JavaScript/CSS approach looks much less appealing when it's also available on every other major platform, in addition to native approaches that these other platforms offer when performance or special functionality is needed.
  - mwcampbell 13y ago
    About Persona versus site-specific passwords, here's a relevant blog post from one of the Persona developers: http://dancallahan.info/journal/password-managers-not-enough/ http://dancallahan.info/journal/password-managers-not-enough... About Firefox OS, I was talking about the ubiquity of smartphones and similar mobile devices on a global scale, not just the existence of modern mobile operating systems. I don't think the former has peaked yet, and the Firefox OS team is hoping to make an impact in the developing world in particular. Regarding HTML5+JS versus native, in Firefox OS, HTML5+JS is native as far as applications are concerned, and Mozilla is providing and trying to standardize APIs for all of the "special functionality" that developers can only use through proprietary APIs on the other platforms.
  - 13y ago

emilsedgh 13y ago

Mozilla's value and goal is pushing for open web. Not creating the best browser. Creating a kickass browser was the way the reached their goal. We do need another mobile OS because current ones do not respect our freedom. Even if they are technically sufficient, user friendly and usable. So I dont care if Mozilla is copying Chrome or not. I just wish they stay in the same path AND be strong and influencial as they currently are.

PommeDeTerre 13y ago
Like I said earlier, it's pretty clear that the path they're following now is diminishing their influence. This page lists a variety of measures of browser usage share: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers Notice that over the past several years, in each data set, that Firefox's usage has dropped off, or at best not grown. People are leaving Firefox because it's not improving, and because it is actually getting worse in many ways for many people. If we're going to get the Chrome experience even when using Firefox, but done in an inferior fashion, we may as well just use Chrome. I expect we'd see a similar, if not more severe, drop off in Thunderbird's usage numbers. I've personally moved to a different client within the past year, and I know several other people who have, too. There's nothing compelling about FirefoxOS compared to Android, iOS, or the incumbents. Average people will not switch to it. Without these people, it won't gain traction, and Mozilla will still have limited to no influence in the mobile space. And the same goes for Persona. It has been around for a few years now, but average people aren't using it, nor does it look like there's any reason they'd want to. "Openness" may be a noble goal, but I think they had much more influence when they were producing software that people liked to use because it worked well. The move away from this has corresponded to a decrease in their influence, and much greater influence for Google, Apple, Microsoft and even Opera.
- emilsedgh 13y ago
  Ok, so Mozilla suddenly got a very heavyweight competetion from Chrome, fell behind and now is trying to catchup. What is so wrong about that?
  - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
    Nothing is wrong with competition. Their response to it, however, clearly isn't working in their favor. Their apparent lack of willingness to move away from this failed path is further hurting them. If they don't provide quality software, then they won't have users. If they don't have users, then they won't have influence. If they don't have influence, they don't have any real power to assert their "open web" philosophy. The less power that Mozilla has, the more power their competitors will share, including those with a much different philosophy.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      If they don't have influence, they don't have any real power to assert their "open web" philosophy A philosophy does not assert itself by having power, it reveals its value (or lack thereof) to the honest thinker, and has that value regardless of the existence of such thinkers.
      - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
        That kind of thinking is nice and all in the academic world, but in the real world a philosophy is absolutely useless unless some person or organization has the ability to put those ideas in to practice. By losing market share, Mozilla is losing influence, which will inhibit their ability to introduce more "openness". Their philosophy will become far less useful, and its value will decrease, if it can't actually be implemented.
        PavlovsCat 13y ago
        Why are you putting open into quotes? Anyway, the Nineteen-Eightyfour approach to what is true or right never did it for me.. utilitarian love for wisdom is not something that can actually exist.
rimantas 13y ago
> Mozilla's value and goal is pushing for open web. Not > creating the best browser. Then they have very stupid goal. Whatever that "open web is" (seriously, how do you close the web? by hanging lock on http and html?) but the main point is that the web is what browser vendors make of it. Some features of HTML 4 only lived in the spec, because no browser cared enough to implement them. HTML versions are if fact meaningless, because only features supported by browsers matter. Hence if you make a philosophically pure browser which nobody uses you will have zero influence on the web.
- abdullahkhalids 13y ago
  You seriously have not been reading YC if you don't know how the web is being closed by a whole host of companies and governments alike.
  - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
    Nobody is saying that those influences don't exist. We're merely saying that it's pointless to try to combat them without market share. Products that nobody uses will have essentially no impact, even if they're more "open" than the more popular products. Mozilla had some influence a few years ago, but they've been making decisions and taking actions that appear to be eroding that influence. If the current trends continue, their influence will continue to diminish. If they're striving for an "open" web, they're going to need influence to have any real impact.
    - SkyMarshal 13y ago
      >We're merely saying that it's pointless to try to combat them without market share. Products that nobody uses will have essentially no impact, even if they're more "open" than the more popular products. The history of BSD and Linux should call that assertion into question. They started relatively unpopular, but their openess earned them a core niche of technically capable innovators and early adopters, who over time improved their quality enough for them to nearly dominate in servers and mobile.

dbaupp 13y ago

> While its performance and memory usage is marginally better these days, it has still been years without any significant improvement It's basically tracked/caught up to Chrome on 3 major benchmark suites over the past year. http://arewefastyet.com/ http://arewefastyet.com/

cwzwarich 13y ago
Javascript microbenchmarks don't really matter for browser performance on realistic workloads at this point.
- aclevernickname 13y ago
  Pay attention, class. this is an example of the "Moving The Goalpost" fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalpost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalpost
  - cwzwarich 13y ago
    How is my statement "moving the goalpost"? I'm not moving any goalpost; I never claimed at any point that JS microbenchmarks were a good indicator of overall browser performance. At a time when JS execution was a larger part of browser workloads (and the implementation techniques of JS engines were extremely simple compared to what was known to be possible for dynamic languages) JS microbenchmarks were a better proxy for whole browser peformance, although they weren't great at that point either. Today, all popular browsers have relatively decent JS engines and differences on microbenchmarks just don't reflect total browser performance as much as they did in the past.
    - dbaupp 13y ago
      Surely JS execution is a larger part than ever of browser workloads, or are you referring to things like CSS3 which move some of the rich-webapp work out of javascript?
Raphael 13y ago

IanChiles 13y ago

Asm.js? Emscripten? WebRTC? Come on, Mozilla has really been pushing the limits of the web lately, in new and interesting ways that no one else will try.

PommeDeTerre 13y ago
Those aren't exactly encouraging projects. Asm.js is, at best, a truly atrocious hack. Emscripten is only marginally better. They're both quite inferior when compared to NaCl and PNaCl, for instance. Trying to further entrench JavaScript is not a step forward, and I don't think it's something that should be encouraged or considered positive. Actively trying to move away from JavaScript toward a more general, and sensibly-designed/implemented in-browser runtime would be beneficial. Even embedding Lua, Python, or some other reasonable language would be helpful. But creating horrid JavaScript subsets is not helpful. Unless I'm mistaken, WebRTC mostly came out of Google, not Mozilla. So maybe this is not a good example for you to use?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- pekk 13y ago
  Well if WebRTC came out of Google, then by God it must not be the Open Web.
WayneDB 13y ago
These are hackey kludges that nobody uses though. Who cares if you can run Quake or Skype in a browser? Nobody wants that because browsers suck. They're just so, so, so limited compared to native tech. Mozilla should be working on getting us the fuck away from Javascript, HTML and CSS and severely limited browsers.
- monsterix 13y ago
  This was the case even when browsers were text-only (lynx and thus forward), no?
- 13y ago

Aqueous 13y ago

They've done a lot of innovations with respect to JavaScript optimizations, asm.js, and Emscripten. Even V8 running hand-written JavaScript can't approach the near-native speeds of Emscripten-emitted asm.js. A year or two ago I would have agreed with you but Mozilla has stepped up its game. Now if they could just fix their browser's UI.

mwcampbell 13y ago

Persona is far from pointless. The Web needs a decentralized identity to counter centralized, proprietary systems like Google, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. With Firefox OS, Mozilla is skating to where the puck is going to be, maybe already is. Mobile devices are the future of interpersonal electronic communication. Something so important to our daily lives and society should not be dominated by fiefdoms like iOS and Android.

PommeDeTerre 13y ago
Email addresses and site-specific passwords already work just fine as a decentralized identity service. You can run your own email server(s) on your own domain(s), if you feel it necessary. Then again, you can use some other provider. Either way, basically everybody online already has at least one email account, if not several. Anyone who wants an email address, or even another one, can easily get one. Persona is trying to solve a problem that just doesn't exist, so it's no wonder we see so little adoption of it. With FirefoxOS, Mozilla is skating to where the puck was in 2008. Android and iOS, among many others, just got there far earlier. FirefoxOS's HTML5/JavaScript/CSS approach looks much less appealing when it's also available on every other major platform, in addition to native approaches that these other platforms offer when performance or special functionality is needed.
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  About Persona versus site-specific passwords, here's a relevant blog post from one of the Persona developers: http://dancallahan.info/journal/password-managers-not-enough/ http://dancallahan.info/journal/password-managers-not-enough... About Firefox OS, I was talking about the ubiquity of smartphones and similar mobile devices on a global scale, not just the existence of modern mobile operating systems. I don't think the former has peaked yet, and the Firefox OS team is hoping to make an impact in the developing world in particular. Regarding HTML5+JS versus native, in Firefox OS, HTML5+JS is native as far as applications are concerned, and Mozilla is providing and trying to standardize APIs for all of the "special functionality" that developers can only use through proprietary APIs on the other platforms.
- 13y ago