34 ms·

2014 Goals

99 points by snird 13y ago

wellboy 13y ago
Mozilla is just the best company. They took a stand when it mattered and where the billion dollar money makers Google, Apple, Facebook and the like failed spectacularly. They are no bs, fight for internet freedom, celebrate transparency, are the centroid of internet activism and the extension of Aaron Schwartz' ideas. Mozilla is what makes me want to stay in tech and every company should try to learn from Mozilla what it means to be a tech company.
- rimantas 13y ago
  Apple was the first to bring implementation of things that now a big part of what we call HTML5: canvas, CSS transforms and animations, etc. Mozilla deserves credit of taking over from IE6 and moving web forward in the first years of XXI century (when there was no Facebook at all and Apple was hardly a billion dollar money maker), but around 2007 Gecko stalled and Apple and then Google driven WebKit took over. Maybe Mozilla was a tech company but now I see them mostly as politics company.
  - gcp 13y ago
    I must've imagined all the things like emscripten, all the new WebAPI's that make Firefox OS possible, WebRTC, asm.js, etc...but then again I'm not a random internet troll which is posting vague and baseless comments all over HN.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - rimantas 13y ago
      emscripten depends on LLVM, guess who is the biggest backer of that project? Would you mind to expand a bit about "vague and baseless"? Or maybe you could spend some time and learn the history of canvas element, or CSS transforms? http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0080.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0080.h... http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0090.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0090.h... http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2007Mar/0662.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/20... As for "all new WebAPI's" you'd be surprised how many of them were first implemented in WebKit. WebRTC? Chrome—fall 2012. Firefox—summer 2013
      - gcp 13y ago
        As for "all new WebAPI's" you'd be surprised how many of them were first implemented in WebKit. Enlighten us: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI WebRTC? Chrome—fall 2012. Firefox—summer 2013 I don't think so: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/11/progress-update-on-webrtc-for-firefox-on-desktop/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/11/progress-update-on-webrtc-... Note that at this point Firefox had DataChannel, and it would take Chrome months to catch up there. Firefox also introduced the used audio codec. That said it's a bad example, because WebRTC standardization is currently a strong effort between both companies and it'd be great for the web if more standards went this way rather than ending up with having to try to standardize half-assed implementations from one rendering engine. (cough WebSQL cough)
- johnbm 13y ago
  They make all their money from Google ads. Millions.
  - gcp 13y ago
    This hasn't stopped them from taking stances, though? Diversifying the income seem to be an important goal right now, even if the userbase hasn't been very sympathetic so far.
modeless 13y ago
Huh, Rust and Servo aren't mentioned.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  Neither is Persona.
  - nl 13y ago
    Persona is dead: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR
    - yRetsyM 13y ago
      What does AAR stand for? (Was half expecting RIP)
      - IvyMike 13y ago
        Guessing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_action_review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_action_review
- gilgoomesh 13y ago
  There aren't many details on the page. It seems like a very long slogan/mantra/core-values more than an actual plan.
- robin_reala 13y ago
  Servo is long-term, not 2014. It’s a very interesting project, but don’t expect any fruits from their labours any time soon.
  - asb 13y ago
    Sure, but projects like Rust have been very successful in terms of getting external contributors interested. A goal regarding getting more people involved and made aware of Mozilla Research efforts wouldn't seem out of place.
el_duderino 13y ago
I hope they step it up in the browser area again. I know they were top dog, but as we all know, Chrome is now the reigning champ in speed. Firefox has come a long way. I still try it out for a couple weeks every few months, but I continue to come back to Chrome.
- fra 13y ago
  I couldn't imagine switching away from Firefox + Vimperator. It's an incredible combo, and I don't think the speed difference between FF & Chrome is noticeable nowadays.
  - fragmede 13y ago
    > I don't think the speed difference between FF & Chrome is noticeable nowadays. It is, if you turn off ad-blocking. Certain sites will then just hang all of Firefox.
    - mccr8 13y ago
      If you notice such sites, please file a bug about them so they can be investigated and fixed.
    - gcp 13y ago
      Certain sites will then just hang all of Firefox. Which ones?
      - fragmede 13y ago
        To see the effect on a small scale, load up a single JS timer[1] and watch the seconds increment by 1 each second. If I disable both RequestPolicy and Ad Block Plus, loading up http://cracked.com http://cracked.com, http://failblog.cheezburger.com/ http://failblog.cheezburger.com/, and http://www.wikia.com/Wikia http://www.wikia.com/Wikia, and then just blindly clicking around one of those sites, it will cause the counter to jump/skip over seconds. Chrome does no such skipping (on the same machine). RequestPolicy and ABP seem to help, but not eliminate the problem. Okay, so that test is totally artificial, but surf the internet for a couple days without restarting Firefox (27.0.1) on Ubuntu (13.10) and Firefox still grinds to a half, taking more than half a second to change tabs or register other UI input. Rather than debug Firefox, I can just use Chrome. [1] http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=tryjs_setinterval3 http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=tryjs_setinte...
cjensen 13y ago
I'd like to comment on goals for engineers in general: If your goal is X million users or some such end-user metric, you have created a goal for your salesmen, not your engineers. An engineer cannot sign up a user, except indirectly through quality work. "X million users" is only indirectly under the control of the engineer: intermediates like sales or getting-the-word out are out of the engineer's control and can be screwed up by others. If the engineer does not get to pick his own features to work on, then the work he does do is limited by the wisdom of the person making assignments. In other word, a goal like this is discouraging for an engineer because he lacks serious control over whether or not the goal is accomplished. It is an anti-motivator. Instead, goals for engineers should be things directly under their control. Are you assigning specific features to the engineer? Getting a list of them done with high-quality solutions can be a goal since that is entirely under the engineer's control. Want to get your low-cost solution adopted? Set a goal for the engineer to reduce memory space by Z percent or improve performance by Y percent. Always make sure goal achievement is controlled as much as possible by the person receiving the goal.
- mccr8 13y ago
  There are more specific goals for engineering in other places, like the Platform quarterly goals: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q1-Goals https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q1-Goals
  - cjensen 13y ago
    Good. I wasn't sure who these goals were for, which is why I aimed my comments at a general target instead of Mozilla specifically.
  - Goosey 13y ago
    Out of curiosity, does anyone know what "{{{1}}}" under Layout refers to? I found it a bit ungoogleable.
    - abrowne 13y ago
      I think that's a wiki syntax error. The wiki source[1] for that line is * {{ok|Ship input=number internationalization features }} [1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Platform/2014-Q1-Goals&action=edit https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Platform/2014-Q1-Go...
Mz 13y ago
Wikipedia fails to say anything about monetization and googling is not readily enlightening. Does anyone have a link to a quick run down of how they monetize this? Thanks.
- Greenisus 13y ago
  The Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit, so they may not care too much about monetization.
  - Mz 13y ago
    Even non-profits have to pay the bills somehow (I have done lots of volunteer work and read up on such things). Plus, there is a taxable Mozilla Corporation. So, somewhere, there is money being made, somehow.
    - pwnna 13y ago
      Mozilla Corporation is not for profit, which basically means that they're there to get money and pay taxes (non-profits don't pay taxes). All they need to do is pay the bills (and employees). Mozilla Foundation completely owns Mozilla Corporation and there is no shares available.
      - zobzu 13y ago
        i think you meant to type "Mozilla Corporation is FOR profit" Mozilla Foundation is NOT for profit. :-) And Mozilla Foundation owns the corporation. Also, AFAIK, the foundation can only use money from donations 'n all. The corp is used to pay employees, but can't pay the foundation much.
    - showerst 13y ago
      They get a huge payment from google and other search engines for being in the search engine list in firefox, which constitutes most of their revenue. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2012/faq/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2012/fa...
workhere-io 13y ago
Wondering why Persona isn't on that list. It could use some marketing efforts.
- mbrubeck 13y ago
  Persona is moving into maintenance mode until/unless it can come up with a better strategy for driving adoption. Some related info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR Both the team and some of the underlying technology are now at work on Firefox Accounts, which is a simpler (non-federated) system that will power the new Firefox Sync service, the Firefox Marketplace (for installable web apps on Firefox OS and other platforms), and other Mozilla services.
  - workhere-io 13y ago
    I get the sense from your comment and link that there's a real risk that Persona will be abandoned in a few years?
    - wmf 13y ago
      It seems like they expected Persona to get substantial adoption before it was even finalized and then declared it a failure when that didn't happen.
      - callahad 13y ago
        In hindsight we did indeed spend too much time experimenting and tweaking, and not enough time saying "it's good enough" and driving it to completion. But it's open source :) we're still working on getting it there. The next release will dramatically scale back the API complexity, lock in the APIs and data formats, and pave the way for native browser extensions, self-hosted polyfills, etc.
    - callahad 13y ago
      The only change is that Mozilla isn't funding new feature development in Persona this year since Firefox OS has slightly more time-sensitive / urgent needs. Persona is still actively supported by Mozilla, and is a critical part of our own infrastructure. Persona ain't going away so long as we're still relying on it.
ajExpo 13y ago
Its sad to see Mozilla go. I really liked them as a software community, but I think I will soon have to be looking for a different browser. Or maybe someone at Mozilla will make a stand, and tell out that Mozilla accounts/device sale figures is just wrong, and that it does not make the web more open, but ties them to another "ecosystem"
- gcp 13y ago
  Your post makes no sense to me. Why do you think web applications built on standardized HTML are "another ecosystem"? Mozilla has been pushing this path since...forever.
- zobzu 13y ago
  i'm not quite sure to comprehend your point. Mozilla isn't going anywhere. Firefox Desktop isn't going anywhere.
  - drdaeman 13y ago
    > Firefox Desktop isn't going anywhere. Actually, it's not unlikely it's going to the butt^W cloud. /s
acqq 13y ago
In one sentence: they don't want to have the only income from having the search engines (especially Google) in the search boxes and links, so they want to have their own cloud and services and in-browser ads.
- aw3c2 13y ago
  I was hoping that the word privacy would appear somewhere in the 2014 goals of a major browser but no. As you said, the opposite.
  - gcp 13y ago
    Privacy isn't a 2014 specific goal. It's in the Manifesto itself.
    - aw3c2 13y ago
      I thought more privacy & less leakage to third-parties would be nice. Especially with all the government access to databases. Ie adding more control of cookies, JS, requests, HTTPS etc while providing an interface that my grandma could understand.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Silhouette 13y ago
So, let's not try to build the perfect plan. Let's build a good enough plan, and move fast and change things as we go. Please don't. Moving fast and breaking things is the #1 thing that's been turning me off Firefox ever since the move to six-weekly updates and dropping more than token support for older versions. Notably absent from the list is the one thing I, and I suspect many others reading this, actually care about: making Firefox a better browser, i.e., fixing bugs, improving performance, and adding support for useful new features. Do that, and any concerns about how much/little it's being used will take care of themselves. I really don't care about yet another UI rearrangement (I'd rather you didn't), I really don't care about integrating the kitchen sink into the browser (I'd rather you didn't), and I'm still waiting to discover anyone who does care about these things and doesn't work for Mozilla.
- mbrubeck 13y ago
  Hi, I'm a Firefox developer. The Firefox engineering teams have our own more specific goals at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Goals https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Goals Sadly the maintenance of this wiki page has fallen behind, so goals for current and previous quarters aren't posted yet. :( Anyway, I can tell you they are largely focused on performance (startup speed, smoother scrolling, and responsiveness), developer tools (the new memory profiler; CSS source maps) and some experiments that may lead to new features in the future (like built-in translation of web pages between different languages). I'll ask around to see who has the official list and can update the wiki page. There are also engineering goals for the teams that build the Gecko platform (shared by Firefox, Seamonkey, Thunderbird, and Firefox OS), which are at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q1-Goals https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q1-Goals
- rimantas 13y ago
  > making Firefox a better browser I said it many times before and I will repeat this again there: this goal was dropped as soon as Blake Ross left the project. And I am starting to suspect that even if Mozilla wanted to make Firefox a better browser they no longer know how.
- eitland 13y ago
  > Notably absent from the list is the one thing I, and I suspect many others reading this, actually care about: making Firefox a better browser, i.e., fixing bugs, improving performance, and adding support for useful new features. Do that, and any concerns about how much/little it's being used will take care of themselves. Stop the FUD already will you? (Check my comment history, I'm mostly nice) Mozilla has been iterating tirelessly on speed and lower memory consumption etc etc. I can't remember when the last major ui redesign was. So for everyone who hasn't tried FF in a while: give it a try!
rguldener 13y ago
I really miss focusing on the details of their desktop product here: About a week ago I tried to switch away from Chrome and back to FF and its been a rough week. Speed wise FF is actually great, absolutely no complaint here, same goes for memory. What I didn't expect and what kind of shocked me is how broken some web pages are on FF. For instance in GMail I can't use Cmd+arrow keys to jump to the beginning or end of a line and on the new Google maps (the one that has been around as a preview for more than a year) zooming by scrolling simply does not work. It's not just Google sites though, I had stutering scrolling on some more complex sites (where Chrome has no issue) and some startup pages have oddly shaped buttons and similar layout issues. It seems like many sites aren't testing on FF anymore. I really expected FF to be on par with Chrome in terms of rendering quality but that really turned out not to be the case in many small, yet annoying corner cases. They got big by incorporating the quirks of IE and then improving on that, maybe it is time they start thinking about implementing some of the WebKit rendering quirks and go from there. I really want to keep on using FF and to love it but if it means I have to switch browsers for some of the sites I use daily that will be difficult. Using FF 27 on OS X 10.9.2
- eitland 13y ago
  tbh I think some of this has less to do with FF and more to do with OSX. (used one for almost three years.) As far as I'm aware of there is no universal standard that every developer follows on OS X. Some choose CMD + arrow keys, others the classical shell version (ctrl a/ctrl e). Even Apples own apps are (was?) not consistent in this matter.
  - jacobolus 13y ago
    This is mostly incorrect. Cf. http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html Nearly all OS X apps use Cocoa and standard Cocoa text widgets. Ones which don’t, such as Firefox, usually try to read the standard Cocoa keybindings and respect them. Firefox actually does a relatively good job with this now (within the past 2 years or so; before that, they didn’t). Both cmd+arrows and ctrl+a/e should work in almost every text box on OS X. [Unfortunately, applications like browsers override cmd+arrows to switch tabs or navigate through history or something, depending on context... which is IMO a really stupid and obnoxious choice. Browsers typically use cmd+arrows for back/forward except in a text box, where the text bindings take over. I hate it, because it leads to accidentally going back when the user intends the text box movement command.] The problem in the GP’s particular case lies with gmail’s custom form field though, which is not a regular text widget, not with Firefox.
shirro 13y ago
Sell a well built MozBook with 4GB+ and a full HD screen and some nice extras like a backlit keyboard for double the price of a typical Chromebook and I am in. Perhaps. I probably would not have to queue for it. Mozilla are facing some real problems I am afraid and they aren't technical ones. They aren't the default browser on any significant platform so for people to switch they need to have something wrong with their existing browser. That is decreasingly the case with IE which has improved considerably and then they have to be the best alternative browser available which for many people is questionable. Going the platform route is interesting but they are competing with Android with a massive installed space at the low end. The elephant in the room is the Chromebook which I am writing this, and most everything else, on and the trouble with the damn thing is it is good enough. Not stunningly, mind blowingly amazing. But good enough and selling by the millions. And chrooting it and installing Firefox is not a typical scenario.
Eleutheria 13y ago
> Objective: Become a force in the cloud while delighting our users by adding services to our products. > Measurable goal in 2014: End the year with 20M people using a Firefox account. That's what I want to see from Mozilla. I want to have a johndoe@firefox.com account and use it as my login account to the firefox cloud, to all the services mozilla will provide. They need engagement, I was an early user of phoenix more than ten years ago. I dumped firefox for safari and never touched a single mozilla property again. No need to. Now they have to seduce me again, they need to bring me day after day to their properties. They need email, chat, cloud storage, documents, notes, blogs, everything I can do, everything I want to store, send, exchange, communicate, enjoy, play with. Everything. Then they can insert ads and compete with google. Billions over billions. Then they can offer premium accounts with premium features. Billions over billions. That's sustainability. That's a plan.
- Eleutheria 13y ago
  "Firefox is the cloud" Now that's a motto. I want my johndoe@firefox.com account.
parallelist 13y ago
Firefox has too many bugs and when you file them they don‘t get fixed very quickly at all. That’s why it isn’t my primary browser. Maybe something about that should be in this document.
misuba 13y ago
I hate to see a monetization/sustainability plan based on ads. AdBlock will kill Tiles, and if it doesn't, that'll kill adoption amongst occasional users. A better idea IMO: get on the user-is-the-customer-not-the-product train and build the open web at the same time, by blessing a distributed social networking technology and selling installs of that technology, Automattic-style.
kev6168 13y ago
Mozilla should spend 1/3 of their Total Resources on making an Overwhelmingly Dominant Browser for Android and iOS. It's life or death. Talk to me in 4 years.
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  They can't make one for iOS.

2014 Goals

99 points by snird 13y ago

Mozilla is just the best company. They took a stand when it mattered and where the billion dollar money makers Google, Apple, Facebook and the like failed spectacularly. They are no bs, fight for internet freedom, celebrate transparency, are the centroid of internet activism and the extension of Aaron Schwartz' ideas. Mozilla is what makes me want to stay in tech and every company should try to learn from Mozilla what it means to be a tech company.

rimantas 13y ago
Apple was the first to bring implementation of things that now a big part of what we call HTML5: canvas, CSS transforms and animations, etc. Mozilla deserves credit of taking over from IE6 and moving web forward in the first years of XXI century (when there was no Facebook at all and Apple was hardly a billion dollar money maker), but around 2007 Gecko stalled and Apple and then Google driven WebKit took over. Maybe Mozilla was a tech company but now I see them mostly as politics company.
- gcp 13y ago
  I must've imagined all the things like emscripten, all the new WebAPI's that make Firefox OS possible, WebRTC, asm.js, etc...but then again I'm not a random internet troll which is posting vague and baseless comments all over HN.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - rimantas 13y ago
    emscripten depends on LLVM, guess who is the biggest backer of that project? Would you mind to expand a bit about "vague and baseless"? Or maybe you could spend some time and learn the history of canvas element, or CSS transforms? http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0080.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0080.h... http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0090.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0090.h... http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2007Mar/0662.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/20... As for "all new WebAPI's" you'd be surprised how many of them were first implemented in WebKit. WebRTC? Chrome—fall 2012. Firefox—summer 2013
    - gcp 13y ago
      As for "all new WebAPI's" you'd be surprised how many of them were first implemented in WebKit. Enlighten us: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI WebRTC? Chrome—fall 2012. Firefox—summer 2013 I don't think so: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/11/progress-update-on-webrtc-for-firefox-on-desktop/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/11/progress-update-on-webrtc-... Note that at this point Firefox had DataChannel, and it would take Chrome months to catch up there. Firefox also introduced the used audio codec. That said it's a bad example, because WebRTC standardization is currently a strong effort between both companies and it'd be great for the web if more standards went this way rather than ending up with having to try to standardize half-assed implementations from one rendering engine. (cough WebSQL cough)
johnbm 13y ago
They make all their money from Google ads. Millions.
- gcp 13y ago
  This hasn't stopped them from taking stances, though? Diversifying the income seem to be an important goal right now, even if the userbase hasn't been very sympathetic so far.

modeless 13y ago

Huh, Rust and Servo aren't mentioned.

StavrosK 13y ago
Neither is Persona.
- nl 13y ago
  Persona is dead: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR
  - yRetsyM 13y ago
    What does AAR stand for? (Was half expecting RIP)
    - IvyMike 13y ago
      Guessing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_action_review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_action_review
gilgoomesh 13y ago
There aren't many details on the page. It seems like a very long slogan/mantra/core-values more than an actual plan.
robin_reala 13y ago
Servo is long-term, not 2014. It’s a very interesting project, but don’t expect any fruits from their labours any time soon.
- asb 13y ago
  Sure, but projects like Rust have been very successful in terms of getting external contributors interested. A goal regarding getting more people involved and made aware of Mozilla Research efforts wouldn't seem out of place.

el_duderino 13y ago

I hope they step it up in the browser area again. I know they were top dog, but as we all know, Chrome is now the reigning champ in speed. Firefox has come a long way. I still try it out for a couple weeks every few months, but I continue to come back to Chrome.

fra 13y ago
I couldn't imagine switching away from Firefox + Vimperator. It's an incredible combo, and I don't think the speed difference between FF & Chrome is noticeable nowadays.
- fragmede 13y ago
  > I don't think the speed difference between FF & Chrome is noticeable nowadays. It is, if you turn off ad-blocking. Certain sites will then just hang all of Firefox.
  - mccr8 13y ago
    If you notice such sites, please file a bug about them so they can be investigated and fixed.
  - gcp 13y ago
    Certain sites will then just hang all of Firefox. Which ones?
    - fragmede 13y ago
      To see the effect on a small scale, load up a single JS timer[1] and watch the seconds increment by 1 each second. If I disable both RequestPolicy and Ad Block Plus, loading up http://cracked.com http://cracked.com, http://failblog.cheezburger.com/ http://failblog.cheezburger.com/, and http://www.wikia.com/Wikia http://www.wikia.com/Wikia, and then just blindly clicking around one of those sites, it will cause the counter to jump/skip over seconds. Chrome does no such skipping (on the same machine). RequestPolicy and ABP seem to help, but not eliminate the problem. Okay, so that test is totally artificial, but surf the internet for a couple days without restarting Firefox (27.0.1) on Ubuntu (13.10) and Firefox still grinds to a half, taking more than half a second to change tabs or register other UI input. Rather than debug Firefox, I can just use Chrome. [1] http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=tryjs_setinterval3 http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=tryjs_setinte...

cjensen 13y ago

I'd like to comment on goals for engineers in general: If your goal is X million users or some such end-user metric, you have created a goal for your salesmen, not your engineers. An engineer cannot sign up a user, except indirectly through quality work. "X million users" is only indirectly under the control of the engineer: intermediates like sales or getting-the-word out are out of the engineer's control and can be screwed up by others. If the engineer does not get to pick his own features to work on, then the work he does do is limited by the wisdom of the person making assignments. In other word, a goal like this is discouraging for an engineer because he lacks serious control over whether or not the goal is accomplished. It is an anti-motivator. Instead, goals for engineers should be things directly under their control. Are you assigning specific features to the engineer? Getting a list of them done with high-quality solutions can be a goal since that is entirely under the engineer's control. Want to get your low-cost solution adopted? Set a goal for the engineer to reduce memory space by Z percent or improve performance by Y percent. Always make sure goal achievement is controlled as much as possible by the person receiving the goal.

mccr8 13y ago
There are more specific goals for engineering in other places, like the Platform quarterly goals: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q1-Goals https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q1-Goals
- cjensen 13y ago
  Good. I wasn't sure who these goals were for, which is why I aimed my comments at a general target instead of Mozilla specifically.
- Goosey 13y ago
  Out of curiosity, does anyone know what "{{{1}}}" under Layout refers to? I found it a bit ungoogleable.
  - abrowne 13y ago
    I think that's a wiki syntax error. The wiki source[1] for that line is * {{ok|Ship input=number internationalization features }} [1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Platform/2014-Q1-Goals&action=edit https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Platform/2014-Q1-Go...

Mz 13y ago

Wikipedia fails to say anything about monetization and googling is not readily enlightening. Does anyone have a link to a quick run down of how they monetize this? Thanks.

Greenisus 13y ago
The Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit, so they may not care too much about monetization.
- Mz 13y ago
  Even non-profits have to pay the bills somehow (I have done lots of volunteer work and read up on such things). Plus, there is a taxable Mozilla Corporation. So, somewhere, there is money being made, somehow.
  - pwnna 13y ago
    Mozilla Corporation is not for profit, which basically means that they're there to get money and pay taxes (non-profits don't pay taxes). All they need to do is pay the bills (and employees). Mozilla Foundation completely owns Mozilla Corporation and there is no shares available.
    - zobzu 13y ago
      i think you meant to type "Mozilla Corporation is FOR profit" Mozilla Foundation is NOT for profit. :-) And Mozilla Foundation owns the corporation. Also, AFAIK, the foundation can only use money from donations 'n all. The corp is used to pay employees, but can't pay the foundation much.
  - showerst 13y ago
    They get a huge payment from google and other search engines for being in the search engine list in firefox, which constitutes most of their revenue. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2012/faq/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2012/fa...

workhere-io 13y ago

Wondering why Persona isn't on that list. It could use some marketing efforts.

mbrubeck 13y ago
Persona is moving into maintenance mode until/unless it can come up with a better strategy for driving adoption. Some related info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR Both the team and some of the underlying technology are now at work on Firefox Accounts, which is a simpler (non-federated) system that will power the new Firefox Sync service, the Firefox Marketplace (for installable web apps on Firefox OS and other platforms), and other Mozilla services.
- workhere-io 13y ago
  I get the sense from your comment and link that there's a real risk that Persona will be abandoned in a few years?
  - wmf 13y ago
    It seems like they expected Persona to get substantial adoption before it was even finalized and then declared it a failure when that didn't happen.
    - callahad 13y ago
      In hindsight we did indeed spend too much time experimenting and tweaking, and not enough time saying "it's good enough" and driving it to completion. But it's open source :) we're still working on getting it there. The next release will dramatically scale back the API complexity, lock in the APIs and data formats, and pave the way for native browser extensions, self-hosted polyfills, etc.
  - callahad 13y ago
    The only change is that Mozilla isn't funding new feature development in Persona this year since Firefox OS has slightly more time-sensitive / urgent needs. Persona is still actively supported by Mozilla, and is a critical part of our own infrastructure. Persona ain't going away so long as we're still relying on it.

ajExpo 13y ago

Its sad to see Mozilla go. I really liked them as a software community, but I think I will soon have to be looking for a different browser. Or maybe someone at Mozilla will make a stand, and tell out that Mozilla accounts/device sale figures is just wrong, and that it does not make the web more open, but ties them to another "ecosystem"

gcp 13y ago
Your post makes no sense to me. Why do you think web applications built on standardized HTML are "another ecosystem"? Mozilla has been pushing this path since...forever.
zobzu 13y ago
i'm not quite sure to comprehend your point. Mozilla isn't going anywhere. Firefox Desktop isn't going anywhere.
- drdaeman 13y ago
  > Firefox Desktop isn't going anywhere. Actually, it's not unlikely it's going to the butt^W cloud. /s

acqq 13y ago

In one sentence: they don't want to have the only income from having the search engines (especially Google) in the search boxes and links, so they want to have their own cloud and services and in-browser ads.

aw3c2 13y ago
I was hoping that the word privacy would appear somewhere in the 2014 goals of a major browser but no. As you said, the opposite.
- gcp 13y ago
  Privacy isn't a 2014 specific goal. It's in the Manifesto itself.
  - aw3c2 13y ago
    I thought more privacy & less leakage to third-parties would be nice. Especially with all the government access to databases. Ie adding more control of cookies, JS, requests, HTTPS etc while providing an interface that my grandma could understand.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

Silhouette 13y ago

So, let's not try to build the perfect plan. Let's build a good enough plan, and move fast and change things as we go. Please don't. Moving fast and breaking things is the #1 thing that's been turning me off Firefox ever since the move to six-weekly updates and dropping more than token support for older versions. Notably absent from the list is the one thing I, and I suspect many others reading this, actually care about: making Firefox a better browser, i.e., fixing bugs, improving performance, and adding support for useful new features. Do that, and any concerns about how much/little it's being used will take care of themselves. I really don't care about yet another UI rearrangement (I'd rather you didn't), I really don't care about integrating the kitchen sink into the browser (I'd rather you didn't), and I'm still waiting to discover anyone who does care about these things and doesn't work for Mozilla.

mbrubeck 13y ago
Hi, I'm a Firefox developer. The Firefox engineering teams have our own more specific goals at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Goals https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Goals Sadly the maintenance of this wiki page has fallen behind, so goals for current and previous quarters aren't posted yet. :( Anyway, I can tell you they are largely focused on performance (startup speed, smoother scrolling, and responsiveness), developer tools (the new memory profiler; CSS source maps) and some experiments that may lead to new features in the future (like built-in translation of web pages between different languages). I'll ask around to see who has the official list and can update the wiki page. There are also engineering goals for the teams that build the Gecko platform (shared by Firefox, Seamonkey, Thunderbird, and Firefox OS), which are at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q1-Goals https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q1-Goals
rimantas 13y ago
> making Firefox a better browser I said it many times before and I will repeat this again there: this goal was dropped as soon as Blake Ross left the project. And I am starting to suspect that even if Mozilla wanted to make Firefox a better browser they no longer know how.
eitland 13y ago
> Notably absent from the list is the one thing I, and I suspect many others reading this, actually care about: making Firefox a better browser, i.e., fixing bugs, improving performance, and adding support for useful new features. Do that, and any concerns about how much/little it's being used will take care of themselves. Stop the FUD already will you? (Check my comment history, I'm mostly nice) Mozilla has been iterating tirelessly on speed and lower memory consumption etc etc. I can't remember when the last major ui redesign was. So for everyone who hasn't tried FF in a while: give it a try!

rguldener 13y ago

I really miss focusing on the details of their desktop product here: About a week ago I tried to switch away from Chrome and back to FF and its been a rough week. Speed wise FF is actually great, absolutely no complaint here, same goes for memory. What I didn't expect and what kind of shocked me is how broken some web pages are on FF. For instance in GMail I can't use Cmd+arrow keys to jump to the beginning or end of a line and on the new Google maps (the one that has been around as a preview for more than a year) zooming by scrolling simply does not work. It's not just Google sites though, I had stutering scrolling on some more complex sites (where Chrome has no issue) and some startup pages have oddly shaped buttons and similar layout issues. It seems like many sites aren't testing on FF anymore. I really expected FF to be on par with Chrome in terms of rendering quality but that really turned out not to be the case in many small, yet annoying corner cases. They got big by incorporating the quirks of IE and then improving on that, maybe it is time they start thinking about implementing some of the WebKit rendering quirks and go from there. I really want to keep on using FF and to love it but if it means I have to switch browsers for some of the sites I use daily that will be difficult. Using FF 27 on OS X 10.9.2

eitland 13y ago
tbh I think some of this has less to do with FF and more to do with OSX. (used one for almost three years.) As far as I'm aware of there is no universal standard that every developer follows on OS X. Some choose CMD + arrow keys, others the classical shell version (ctrl a/ctrl e). Even Apples own apps are (was?) not consistent in this matter.
- jacobolus 13y ago
  This is mostly incorrect. Cf. http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html Nearly all OS X apps use Cocoa and standard Cocoa text widgets. Ones which don’t, such as Firefox, usually try to read the standard Cocoa keybindings and respect them. Firefox actually does a relatively good job with this now (within the past 2 years or so; before that, they didn’t). Both cmd+arrows and ctrl+a/e should work in almost every text box on OS X. [Unfortunately, applications like browsers override cmd+arrows to switch tabs or navigate through history or something, depending on context... which is IMO a really stupid and obnoxious choice. Browsers typically use cmd+arrows for back/forward except in a text box, where the text bindings take over. I hate it, because it leads to accidentally going back when the user intends the text box movement command.] The problem in the GP’s particular case lies with gmail’s custom form field though, which is not a regular text widget, not with Firefox.

shirro 13y ago

Sell a well built MozBook with 4GB+ and a full HD screen and some nice extras like a backlit keyboard for double the price of a typical Chromebook and I am in. Perhaps. I probably would not have to queue for it. Mozilla are facing some real problems I am afraid and they aren't technical ones. They aren't the default browser on any significant platform so for people to switch they need to have something wrong with their existing browser. That is decreasingly the case with IE which has improved considerably and then they have to be the best alternative browser available which for many people is questionable. Going the platform route is interesting but they are competing with Android with a massive installed space at the low end. The elephant in the room is the Chromebook which I am writing this, and most everything else, on and the trouble with the damn thing is it is good enough. Not stunningly, mind blowingly amazing. But good enough and selling by the millions. And chrooting it and installing Firefox is not a typical scenario.

Eleutheria 13y ago

> Objective: Become a force in the cloud while delighting our users by adding services to our products. > Measurable goal in 2014: End the year with 20M people using a Firefox account. That's what I want to see from Mozilla. I want to have a johndoe@firefox.com account and use it as my login account to the firefox cloud, to all the services mozilla will provide. They need engagement, I was an early user of phoenix more than ten years ago. I dumped firefox for safari and never touched a single mozilla property again. No need to. Now they have to seduce me again, they need to bring me day after day to their properties. They need email, chat, cloud storage, documents, notes, blogs, everything I can do, everything I want to store, send, exchange, communicate, enjoy, play with. Everything. Then they can insert ads and compete with google. Billions over billions. Then they can offer premium accounts with premium features. Billions over billions. That's sustainability. That's a plan.

Eleutheria 13y ago
"Firefox is the cloud" Now that's a motto. I want my johndoe@firefox.com account.

parallelist 13y ago

Firefox has too many bugs and when you file them they don‘t get fixed very quickly at all. That’s why it isn’t my primary browser. Maybe something about that should be in this document.

misuba 13y ago

I hate to see a monetization/sustainability plan based on ads. AdBlock will kill Tiles, and if it doesn't, that'll kill adoption amongst occasional users. A better idea IMO: get on the user-is-the-customer-not-the-product train and build the open web at the same time, by blessing a distributed social networking technology and selling installs of that technology, Automattic-style.

kev6168 13y ago

Mozilla should spend 1/3 of their Total Resources on making an Overwhelmingly Dominant Browser for Android and iOS. It's life or death. Talk to me in 4 years.

zeckalpha 13y ago
They can't make one for iOS.