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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn't Firefox OS actually bring various new APIs to Firefox browser itself?
That's what I understood from their postmortem post:
"Engineering — Have a clear separation between “chrome” and web content rather than try to force the web to do things it isn’t suited to. Create device APIs using REST & WebSockets on the server side of the web stack rather than privileged JavaScript DOM APIs on the client side. Create a community curated directory of web apps on the web rather than an app store of submitted packaged apps."
I was SVP Engineering as well as CTO from 2013 January till 2014 April. Your use of "mostly abandoned" is a false statement, knowingly told. You don't say it if you don't have evidence, but the evidence in terms of headcount and budget does not support what you say. I had four VPs under me, and only one was working on Firefox OS. Firefox was fully funded.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> One of the big misses from Firefox was being so late to Android.
Was 2011 "so late"? It was already there when Android 4 came out, still before Android gained a really significant market share (15%, same as Blackberry and half as much as Symbian at the time). Two years before that there were versions for Maemo too (which was much easier to port to), and Android versions used the same codebase at the time.
> 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.
The tech influencer effect also switched to pushing Chrome at the time, especially outside of Linux/FLOSS communities.
Chrome was released back when Google was still viewed favorably. People were high on gmail, google docs, and they still had "don't be evil." It took pretty much no time at all to start seeing Chrome everywhere Firefox used to be.
So yeah, I agree with you - no doubt some of it is Mozilla's doing, but I think more or less it was out of their control and I think "we" (the tech crowd) are just as much at fault for Chrome's dominance and the downfall of Firefox. It only took 5 years from release for Chrome to surpass Firefox, and the tech crowd were very much the early adopters and drivers of that.
Yeah, Firefox made a lot of sense when the problem was Microsoft’s incompetence and inability to make any real progress or support standards.
In the modern era, Google is the opposite problem. They DDoS the community by developing standards fast enough that nobody can keep up with them. Actually, it seems impossible to compete with them on their turf. We need an alternative that somehow avoids that competition.
Unfortunately Google is quite good, they managed to embrace-extend the whole internet. Not sure what the options are. Somewhere a filter needs to be applied to reject more proposals.
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!”
Fundamentally I think having people pay for a browser is a hard sell. I do think complementary services being sold to fund the browser are a good idea though.
E.g. VPN, search, bookmarking service - great. Charge for them, have the money go into browser dev, focus on privacy and be done with it.
I also don't think they necessarily were subtracting from resources necessary to maintain the browser experience (which would be the key to that whole entire argument), which probably was a significant motivator for doing them. Easy enough to spin up with little to lose.
I know this sounds like it's making a point, but... Do we have any intuition for the resources dedicated to the side projects versus the ones dedicated to the core development and whether they subtracted from development? Was one project equivalent to 10% less resources on core browser development equivalent to 5% loss of market share? One percent? Ten percent?
I feel like once you state these questions out loud it becomes clear that none of this cause and effect necessary to make the argument work is being critically thought through at all.
There was a time when this complaint about core browser experience had some legitimacy and that was in the 2010s up through 2016. They rebuilt their whole engine into Quantum in 2017, which was a major leap forward. And ever since then the differences have been real, but subtle. Meanwhile Google has leveraged its dominant position in search, and it's major investments into Android and Chromebooks to push people to its browser. They've also used their revenue to invest in an embrace extend extinguish strategy in the browser space.
The vast majority of the vibes about Mozilla transgressions are more like a self-perpetuating oral tradition than a thoughtful narrative grounded in causality.
I don't know if you know this, but browsers don't generate revenue (with the exception of Google paying you hush money to pretend they aren't a browser monopoly)
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
Asking people what did "Mozilla do wrong?" is kind of like asking "How do I get to Shell Beach" in the movie Dark City, with similar results.
People say "all the stuff going on with Mozilla" like there's a list of real things that really happened when it's upwards of 90% smoke and vibes. And this is coming from someone who thinks the recent subtraction of language about not selling your data actually was a bad move and rather damning.
But it's a real thing in a long line of nothingburgers, and it's amazing once the comment gets to the part where it's supposed to make a specific charge and instead it's just "all the things going on".
I mean, it’s not like you can’t look up all the various grants, fellowships, groups, businesses, programs, etc Mozilla funds. Or fault us for noticing all the random endeavours they pursue then kill because they would seemingly rather do anything than make sure Firefox offers an attractive alternative to other browsers. Firefox had ~30% market share 15 years ago and Mozilla leveraged that into Pocket/firefox send/firefox os/hubs/lockwise/hello/thimble/notes/persona/etc. All defunct except the ones they mashed into the browser itself, when the initial selling point in the IE days was that it was “lightweight”.
So this is the type of comment I was thinking of. I'm just paste a segment from a previous comment that highlights the problems with this form of criticism, which I take to be more demonstration of an information literacy problem than a narrative that's pertinent to happenings with Firefox.
>I don't believe it's astroturfing, simply just mind bogglingly awful arguments. Claiming the decline in market share is tied to inadequate browser features with no two conversations ever agreeing on what those features are. No coherent theory of cause and effect between features and market share while ignoring structural advantages that are much more important drivers, which Google leverages. Claims that CEO pay is the problem when it's 1% of annual revenue. Idiosyncratic interpretations of their published statements that make unfalsifiable assumptions about intentions. And a basic inability to grasp and compare the relative scale of different types of transgressions (e.g. Google is increasingly driving the web into deeper dependence on Chromium, but Mozilla once did a Mr. Robot promo!)
These aren't good arguments. These aren't coming from a place of coherent thinking about the actual drivers of market share, and there's no coherent theory of cause and effect that ties other side bets to the trajectory. It's all incredibly low effort vibes because people seem to have lost grasp of how to make real arguments.
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."
