This is just another symptom of what I think is a prolonged stagnation at Mozilla. I suspect they've lost touch with the needs of their users a lot of the time.
Firefox hasn't been in a good place lately. Most of the changes since Firefox 4 haven't been to the users' benefit. It's like these changes have been more about imitating Chrome, regardless of whether or not this is good for Firefox's users. Yet Chrome is still superior where it really matters, such as performance and resource usage. If Firefox users are just going to get a Chrome-like experience these days, but not as good as that offered by actual Chrome, then they might as well just move to Chrome. And I think that's exactly what we've seen, and why Firefox' usage numbers are dropping.
We see the same with Firefox Mobile. It really isn't superior to the alternative browsers in any way. In many ways it's significantly inferior. There's really nothing to pull users to it.
Thunderbird was perhaps their second most useful product, after Firefox. Yet they've basically given up on it now. I know I've migrated to another email client, and many others have chosen to do the same, too, now that Thunderbird doesn't really improve over time. Even then, the changes we've seen lately have been more harmful than good. The UI is less usable now than it was in earlier release, for instance.
Firefox OS is another example. It really doesn't offer anything tangible over Android, iOS, or the many other mobile OSes that already exist and already widely available on many devices. In fact, it offers a very limited development environment compared to the alternatives, which surely doesn't help its case. The only reasons I've heard to use it are ideological, about Mozilla somehow being "more open" or something of that sort. That's just not enough to gain real traction, I'm afraid.
And Persona is yet another example. It just doesn't meet the needs of its potential users.
Rust is perhaps the only interesting thing I've seen coming out of Mozilla lately. But it has taken a long time to get to where it is, and I'm not sure if it still has the momentum to have the impact that it might have had were a stable version available a year or two ago. Go, and even C++11, can now provide a lot of its benefits today, if not much earlier.
I think there's been a lot of wheel-spinning at Mozilla lately, in terms of their offerings. Their successful products are being ignored or actively made worse, while their new offerings don't actually benefit a wide audience, or offer an insufficient amount of benefit.
I'm not going to pretend to know how to fix these problems, but focusing on product that users actually want, and giving these users the functionality they want, may be a good start.
> Go, and even C++11, can now provide a lot of its benefits today, if not much earlier.
The main benefits of Rust are (a) bare metal performance with zero overhead with (b) memory safety, for security and developer happiness. Go lacks (a), with its mandatory runtime, garbage collection, and ecosystem based around a non-optimizing compiler, and C++ lacks (b), with its memory safety problems that are real, pervasive, and cannot be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility. What you said is only true if by "a lot of Rust's benefits" you mean "basically none of its benefits".
It sounds like you are unhappy with some of the user interface decisions in Firefox and are trying to use this story as a way to spin this out into some sort of narrative of Mozilla's decline and stagnation.
I can use Go and C++ today without fear that code I write now won't be able to compile next month, due to significant language and/or library changes. The same cannot be said for Rust.
Since I can get perhaps 90% of the benefits of Rust today using other languages that I can actually use seriously, I might as well just use them. Had Rust been more stable in 2012, maybe it'd be a different situation today.
And you can read my original comment again, if the big picture isn't clear to you. I hope it's obvious then that this is far more than just a few bad UI decisions involving Firefox. That is an issue, of course, don't get me wrong, but it clearly goes much beyond that.
Almost all of Mozilla's major projects, from Firefox, to Thunderbird, to Firefox for Mobile, to Persona, to Firefox OS, and even Rust are suffering from some pretty serious detachment from the needs of their users. This is resulting in a decrease in adoption, like in the cases of Firefox and Thunderbird, limited adoption in the case of Firefox for Mobile, or basically no adoption in the cases of Firefox OS, Persona and Rust.
> Since I can get perhaps 90% of the benefits of Rust
> today using other languages
Incorrect, unless you're one of the rare few using Ada or Cyclone. Bare-metal memory safety is fundamentally impossible in both Go and C++.
> Had Rust been more stable in 2012, maybe it'd be a
> different situation today.
Incorrect. I was there! And trust me when I say that 2012 Rust was very far off the mark. Rust is a language that was designed to be released in 2014, not 2012 or 2006 or 2038.
> Almost all of Mozilla's major projects, from
> Firefox, to Thunderbird, to Firefox for Mobile, to
> Persona, to Firefox OS, and even Rust are suffering
> from some pretty serious detachment from the needs
> of their users.
Citation needed. By any estimate, Firefox still has a fifth of all web traffic, with 500 million users. Firefox for Android has between 50 and 100 million downloads and is the highest-rated browser on the Android app store. Firefox OS continues to find new carriers and launch in new territories, which is more than can be said for Tizen or Meego or Symbian or Ubuntu Touch. And even though Rust hasn't even launched yet we're seeing month-over-month growth in traffic on every outlet.
Go does not give you bare-metal control without GC and C++ does not give you safety. They do not give you "90%" of what you want, if you're in a domain that needs those features. If you need to write libraries to be used by Ruby, for example, Go does not give you 90% of that, it gives you 0%. If you need to write secure, memory-safe software, C++11 does not give you 90% of what you want, and anybody in the security field will tell you that.
It has taken time to stabilize Rust because it is doing something that no language in industry has done. Rust is not designed to be a Go that's 10% better or a C++ that's 10% better. It's designed to let you do things you can't do in those languages. Like writing libraries callable by C that are guaranteed not to segfault. Or writing games that can't afford GC.
I would have agreed with you a year ago on Firefox. I was almost ready to give up on it the performance was so bad. But recent fixes have had a huge improvement for me. Firefox is at least as stable and fast for me as Chrome--on Mac 10.8.
That said, I never understood the problem that Persona was trying to solve.
The problem Persona solves is: how can I log in to various sites securely without having to generate site-specific and inconsistent widely-varying sign-ins and security AND without having all my activities tracked by Google or Facebook or others etc.
In short: how can we get "sign-in-with-Google" but with anything and not just these big players and protect privacy fully?
because one project doesnt work out... lets conclude all other projects sucks!
such a cool argument.
im typing this from "firefox mobile" - its called firefox or fennec however. it has a high rating on the play store.a 4.5 stars. it works very well too, much better than chrome has for a long time.
Agreed. Sweeping generalizations about Mozilla and subjective discussions of Firefox's UX have nothing to do with a public dialogue about evaluating Persona's current state.
Firefox hasn't been in a good place lately. Most of the changes since Firefox 4 haven't been to the users' benefit. It's like these changes have been more about imitating Chrome, regardless of whether or not this is good for Firefox's users. Yet Chrome is still superior where it really matters, such as performance and resource usage. If Firefox users are just going to get a Chrome-like experience these days, but not as good as that offered by actual Chrome, then they might as well just move to Chrome. And I think that's exactly what we've seen, and why Firefox' usage numbers are dropping.
We see the same with Firefox Mobile. It really isn't superior to the alternative browsers in any way. In many ways it's significantly inferior. There's really nothing to pull users to it.
Thunderbird was perhaps their second most useful product, after Firefox. Yet they've basically given up on it now. I know I've migrated to another email client, and many others have chosen to do the same, too, now that Thunderbird doesn't really improve over time. Even then, the changes we've seen lately have been more harmful than good. The UI is less usable now than it was in earlier release, for instance.
Firefox OS is another example. It really doesn't offer anything tangible over Android, iOS, or the many other mobile OSes that already exist and already widely available on many devices. In fact, it offers a very limited development environment compared to the alternatives, which surely doesn't help its case. The only reasons I've heard to use it are ideological, about Mozilla somehow being "more open" or something of that sort. That's just not enough to gain real traction, I'm afraid.
And Persona is yet another example. It just doesn't meet the needs of its potential users.
Rust is perhaps the only interesting thing I've seen coming out of Mozilla lately. But it has taken a long time to get to where it is, and I'm not sure if it still has the momentum to have the impact that it might have had were a stable version available a year or two ago. Go, and even C++11, can now provide a lot of its benefits today, if not much earlier.
I think there's been a lot of wheel-spinning at Mozilla lately, in terms of their offerings. Their successful products are being ignored or actively made worse, while their new offerings don't actually benefit a wide audience, or offer an insufficient amount of benefit.
I'm not going to pretend to know how to fix these problems, but focusing on product that users actually want, and giving these users the functionality they want, may be a good start.