Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

https://civilityandtruth.com/2020/08/13/mozillas-uncertain-future/

by jonathankoren • 6 years ago

404 394 6 years ago

causality05• 6 years ago

Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior.

That was a fundamental mistake. The who's-got-the-biggest-version-number dick-measuring, the constant deprecation of power features and customizability, everything that was intended to beat Chrome in a contest Google couldn't lose is the reason Firefox can't hold onto a decent market share. The 25% of internet users who wanted what Firefox offered ten years ago still want the same thing now, but Firefox decided it was worth losing that 25% trying to chase the 75%, and they lost.

TimSchumann7• 6 years ago

I find it hard to disagree with this sentiment.

I don't use firefox as my main browser because it's better than Chrome, I use it because it's not google.

bickeringyokel• 6 years ago

I find I am not missing anything in terms of features or stability since the quantum engine except perhaps bookmark management being a bit clunky.

If you truly prefer chrome why not use a chromium browser that is not Google? (Brave for example)

lrem• 6 years ago

Seeing Google from the inside, I have way more trust in it than the general public. But I do use Firefox as my personal browser because I like what they're doing with the tech stack. Having everyone just slap their logo on Chromium sounds like a way towards eventual stagnation.

KingOfCoders8• 6 years ago

" I use it because it's not google. "

Me too.

robbrown451• 6 years ago

That's a tough sell for the vast majority of non-HN users.

cel1ne• 6 years ago

I don't think so, i switched to Firefox about two years ago, after the major upgrades, and I think it's way snappier, faster and more usable than chrome.

MattGaiser4• 6 years ago

The challenge with not competing with Chrome is that websites are now mostly developed with Chrome as the dev-tool.

Even large companies are just optimizing for that one browser:

https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/11/28/please-build-websites-w...

How many users are going to be willing to put up with stuff not working until they switch?

causality05• 6 years ago

Functioning like Chrome in rendering and page features doesn't mean Firefox has to behave like Chrome in the UX. For example, why gut the ability of people to skin and customize their browser as they see fit? Why is Mozilla involved in a running battle against users who want the tabs below the address bar? Why entirely prevent us from sideloading extensions instead of letting us turn the ability on and off?

TimSchumann7• 6 years ago

This is the main thing I’m concerned with. Instead of adhering to an open standard, everything becoming ‘whatever google says goes’.

cotillion• 6 years ago

The Firefox bug report for a websocket message inspector was opened 7 years ago. It took 6 years before it got implemented.

Its no wonder they lost marketshare among developers.

xxs2• 6 years ago

Make better and paid/subscription based(!) dev tools, instead screwing the UI and disabling add-ons. People are buying jetbrains products even though free ones exist.

I do use firefox but all the auto-update features are off on desktop. On mobile I am/will be stuck with 68 forever, I suppose as well.

pjmlp11• 6 years ago

The anti-IE generation is mostly to blame for that, they ended up adopting the behaviours they criticized so much.

nikitaga• 6 years ago

Lack of good built-in RSS reader is puzzling. Could have been their way into offering paid web services as the cross platform browser is so perfectly positioned for this feature.

ulfw• 6 years ago

Who cares about the version number?

Come on. People don‘t pick a browser based on a too high or too low version number.

causality05• 6 years ago

Exactly my point. Mozilla used a rational numbering scheme where the larger the change, the larger the increment, with full integers being reserved for major changes. Then Chrome started changing its integer every few weeks and Firefox upended its own scheme to keep from looking unfashionable.

Brakenshire2• 6 years ago

25% seems like much too high a number for the group you’re talking about. I’d be interested to see some data on level of technical engagement and knowledge, but in my experience a large percentage of users don’t even have a clear idea of what a browser is.

The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because:

i) Chrome is pushed by Google.com, which has a near monopoly on search

ii) Chrome was bundled and installed alongside other software

iii) Chrome is built into Android and Chromebook

iv) Chrome has a huge advertising budget

And all of these factors combine to make Chrome feel like the default portal to the web.

Also for a period of time Chrome was undeniably a better, more stable browser. It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable.

But Firefox Quantum only exists because of Servo, and vital parts of Servo (parallel layout in particular) have not been integrated into Firefox. It’s bizarre to see Mozilla sabotaging its long term chance at technical leadership not only by scrapping Servo but firing the engineers who built it.

I had an untechnical family member say unprompted last week they want to move away from Chrome but couldn’t use Firefox Mobile because it’s too slow. At the same moment Mozilla leadership was sacking its staff working on parallelising the browser engine.

KingOfCoders8• 6 years ago

I left FF several times for being slow, being a memory hog, dropping extensions, not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) and come back from Chrome for ideological reasons. I might not be the core audience or user group, but I have not left because of i.) - iv.).

kinleyd2• 6 years ago

Which is why, for the life of me, I just can't see the logic of firing the Servo team.

microtonal• 6 years ago

I think this hits the nail on its head, but I would add

v. Intentionally breaking other browsers subtly on Google properties.

i, ii, and v are directly from Microsoft’s 90ies/00s playbook and the regulators are sleeping.

ksec• 6 years ago

The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because:

My opinion is that none of those actually matters. The "one" single reason Chrome won market share was the same playbook how Google Search Engine Started.

Speed.

I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better.

You could advertise the heck out of your product, but if it wasn't any good it wouldn't matter. For nearly 10 years Google Chrome was undoubtedly the fastest browser on the planet. It wasn't until Quantum landed on Firefox before you could at least have a few metric of performance wins going to Mozilla, and that is also partly because Chrome has slowed down a lot in recent years.

neverminder2• 6 years ago

I had an untechnical family member say unprompted last week they want to move away from Chrome but couldn’t use Firefox Mobile because it’s too slow. At the same moment Mozilla leadership was sacking its staff working on parallelising the browser engine.

That's because Firefox is slow. I'm saying this as someone who's been using it as the main browser for at least a decade.

My latest personal anecdote. Firefox trackpad scrolling is lagging on my brand new Precision 7750 with vanilla Ubuntu 20.04 installed. Chrome doesn't have the same issue, especially considering Google's unfriendliness towards Linux.

rndgermandude6• 6 years ago

It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable.

No, they did not. Electrolysis was around before WebExtensions. Sure, Electrolysis wasn't backwards compatible and a lot of existing extensions had to rewrite part of their code to be compatible, and abandoned extensions were broken forever - or would have been once mozilla removed compat shims (unless somebody picked up the slack, which people quite often did). This was still a lot better than breaking every extension and forcing a new extremely restricted WebExtensions API that was a clone of the Chrome APIs but came with their own bugs and a lot of "TODO: implement actual API".

Quantum is just a PR term. The impact of Quantum-related changes to extensions was tiny if present at all (if the extension already survived Electrolysis).

The only reason that old non-webext extensions do not work anymore in Firefox at all is that they helpfully removed the actually code that would run the extension (but not really last I checked, it's still around to support mozilla-owned sideloaded/builtin extensions such as pocket).

comm-central (Thunderbird, Seamonkey) even implemented their own implementation of what was removed to get (restartless) old-style extensions working again, falsifying the claim that forcing a WebExtensions-only change was a requirement to get e10s/Quantum going.

Underneath it all, to this day most of Firefox is still javascript + XUL/HTML on the frontend with bridges (XPCOM, etc) to expose the C components.

PS: e10s shipped in v53, "old" extensions were only removed in Quantum, which was v57 (but not really removed, as I noted, just disabled for everybody except mozilla's own stuff).

I ran (and sometimes still run) a personal fork of 60esr (aka >57 ;) where I added back "old" extension support by git-reverting a few hundreds of lines of code that they removed.. That thing was Quantum too, all the Quantum perf/speed improvements were still present, and yet magically still supported all the old extensions I cared about.

stjohnswarts4• 6 years ago

the current mobile firefox browser works great and it's not "too slow". They just simply didn't like their experience and told you it was "too slow" because they're biased again new things. Benchmarks (real ones on real web pages prove it) I agree with you though that Chrome engines are just everywhere and it's going to take some big sea change for that to not be the case.

anonymousab5• 6 years ago

which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable.

That was the big one that cost a lot of users, but it was a jusitifiable big leap for them to take.

But they have also been suffering papercut after papercut power user losses with various regressions and removal of functionality since then.

The actual users lost are minimal, but I suspect the overall perception of Mozilla's priorities, among those kinds of users, has suffered much more.

afiori2• 6 years ago

what was 25% ten years ago is closer to 5% now

outadoc2• 6 years ago

the constant deprecation of power features and customizability

They made ONE switch to a superior and standard extension model, and HN loses its minds. Do you really think you're in the majority here? Making it a more secure, faster and just better browser is just the only way forward. Without that Firefox would just be slow as hell, wouldn't play YouTube or Netflix videos, and not have any extensions left because no one wants to create an extension from scratch just for Firefox.

They tried their best and I hope it's been enough, even though the future looks bleak.

KingOfCoders8• 6 years ago

"Firefox would just be slow as hell"

Why is that?

The problem is they get into to web standards game which is driven by Google to create pressure everyone else to spend millions on the newest standards.

I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me (except HTTPs).

Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF)

They broke exetensions several times without any benefit to users, but losing extensions on the way. One of the core features for power users dropped for nothing - well for their own fun rewriting the browser and rendering engine several times, I guess it was fun at least doing "interesting things".

josefx2• 6 years ago

They made ONE switch

How many plugins work with the new Firefox on Android?

standard extension model

One were Google already declared that APIs used for ad blockers are considered deprecated and might be dropped at any time? With one major browser vendor being actively hostile towards a large amount of plugins that "standard" doesn't do much. It certainly doesn't guarantee portability unless Mozilla completely jumps the shark and also kills ad blockers.

forgotpwd163• 6 years ago

The WebExtension API even years later is afaik still less capable than XUL. They also deprecated plugins (NPAPI), a recent version has disabled userChrome.css and userContent.css by default and the pref is noted as legacy and the same is now considered for user.js if not removed. Also you cannot set a locally-hosted newtab page any longer.

luckylion2• 6 years ago

They made ONE switch to a superior and standard extension model, and HN loses its minds.

They did the same for Thunderbird recently. Given their approach to only provide the minimum of features and say "get an extension if you want anything more", that's an issue if you're killing those extensions.

gvjddbnvdrbv4• 6 years ago

As a power user I am aware of more than one breaking change.

They constantly mess up my attempts to automate provisioning.

Add on installation has been messed up.

Lots of my user.js suddenly gets ignored because of breaking changes.

dependenttypes7• 6 years ago

to a superior

Even now it lacks a lot of necessary APIs that the old one had - such as the ability to disable ctrl+q on linux. I would argue that only around now the new model became usable.

Making it a more secure

In expense of usability.

wouldn't play YouTube

It played youtube before and it would still play it without the switch.

Regardless, the old extension model was not the only power user feature which they killed (rss and panorama were two others).

eitland4• 6 years ago

Without that Firefox would just be slow as hell, wouldn't play YouTube or Netflix videos,

OK, this is just plain wrong IMO.

Speed is a major thing for me and I never had issues with it, even with 400+ tabs. I can go as far as understanding that not everyone was as lucky as me but it seems the speed issue is given too much weight.

and not have any extensions left because no one wants to create an extension from scratch just for Firefox.

There seems to be fewer real extensions now than before. Yes: more websites packed as extensions, less working TST, Scrapbook etc.

ekianjo5• 6 years ago

superior and standard extension model,

Superior as in, that can do less things than XUL extensions? I am at loss, has the meaning of 'superior' changed recently?

badsectoracula4• 6 years ago

switch to a superior

It is so superior that to this day, Downthemall - an extension which is literally all about downloading - cannot even let you choose an arbitrary directory to put the files you downloaded.

and standard

That was Google's "standard" that Firefox decided to adopt and even if Firefox decided to implement it, there was no reason to not also keep its own extension system - this way it would be able to have both its own advanced extensions and Google's functionally inferior extensions, essentially making it the most extensible and customizable browser by far.

TedDoesntTalk2• 6 years ago

They made ONE switch to a superior and standard extension model

No, they made TWO. The original model was the XUL-based one. Then there was the Add-on SDK:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Add-ons/Add...

THEN WebExtensions.

So some extensions had to be ported twice, within just a couple of years. This alienated a LOT of add-on developers.

tomc19859• 6 years ago

It's soo more than that. They'd destroyed all the old UI in favor of Chrome-style HTML+JS instead of platform-native XUL

They added all sorts of weird commercial initiatives to someonething that was supposed to be privacy-oriented and nonprofit

They torched an entire ecosystem of extensions so they could be more Chromelike

They put out landing pages and press releases full of weasely PR speak instead of the "mainstream engineering" vocabulary they used to use

Maybe Firefox should get in touch with the Pale Moon guys and use their code as a basis for resurrecting everything that made FIrefox great

baby4• 6 years ago

it's definitely not superior seeing how tree style tab is still somewhat broken (which is the number one reason for anyone to switch to firefox)

kanox• 6 years ago

constant deprecation of power features and customizability

Can you be more specific?

Advanced customization is provided by extensions and they're as well supported as ever.

gvjddbnvdrbv4• 6 years ago

They really are not. Even Mozilla would not make that claim.

fastball4• 6 years ago

I don't use FF because I still find SpiderMonkey (its JS engine) to be slower than V8.

alcoholic_byte11• 6 years ago

Firstly, the question of browser superiority and choice is not just about speed. You wouldn't want to choose an operation procedure A) over B) simply because A is faster as A has a mortality rate 30%higher that B. Secondly, the web is not high-end-gaming so a few ms more or less don't really matter IMHO. Also note that Alphabet might slow their service down deliberately, because you are not using their browser. Lastly, to finish off with a strong argument, I want you to look at https://arewefastyet.com/win10/overview?numDays=60 . It always depends on the benchmark and circumstances, as I havn't checked other OSs on that site.

MaxBarraclough2• 6 years ago

You mean you find the browser to be slower? There's more to a browser than its JavaScript engine. Firefox and Chrome also use entirely different rendering engines.

As for which browser really is faster, it depends on the workload. Someone already linked to https://areWeFastYet.com/

ptx• 6 years ago

Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser

To be fair, part of what distinguished Firefox from the original Mozilla browser was that it was more similar to Internet Explorer, e.g. supporting alt+D to focus the location field and that kind of thing. But I agree that becoming too much like Chrome is a bad idea - if I wanted Chrome, I would use Chrome.

Certhas2• 6 years ago

Pretty much every Firefox discussion on Hacker news you have commenters that say they just can't stand Firefox because it's 10ms slower than Chrome. Google also has been advertising Chrome heavily for the last ten years. And there was a time when Firefox was undeniably significantly behind on performance.

jansan• 6 years ago

On our Javascript heavy app Chrome is still about twice as fast as Firefox. Admittedly it is not your average app, but I cannot confirm claims that Firefox is almost as fast as Chrome.

slim• 6 years ago

firefox lost it's market share because chrome was a better, faster, more complete browser. Mozilla didn't need to develop any strategy other than building and even better browser. So they tactically designed a safer language, then used it to build a better browser. It was working as planned, but they just abandoned it. Now they don't have a better browser and I wonder if they'll ever have one.

alcoholic_byte11• 6 years ago

No. Bigger marketing-budget and better positioning in reaching users. If they use google with a non-Chrome browser they will be prompted to install Chrome because it is better. Some people might have just installed it so Alphabet would stop nagging them. Youtube supported some old deprecated protocol that only Chrome still supported so the users perceived youtube as performing better more reliable on Chrome, and it also gave Alphabet an excuse to say:" This does not happen with Chrome". Slyly withholding the information that Alphabet created this unpleasent user-experience in the first place.

So that smells of deceit, and manipulation to me.

Thus, even if it were true that Chrome is more performant than any other browser, I would not put my trust and security in a company resolved to use these types of actions.

//Edit

Just because I mentioned the Youtube thing twice already. In case you want to have a source: here it is https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

// Edit 2 Well I just found out that Chrome is dropping/has dropped Certificate Pinning. How is that for improvement of the security of you user-base? FF still supports it.

//Edit 3 There was also a paper trending on HN on how QUIC aka HTTP2 threatens a user's privacy. The design-decision was explained with performance in the paper; I can get that talking about a protocol concerned with speeding up the internet, but coming from a company monetizing surveilance and targeted advertisement, is very disquieting.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 6 years ago

"That was a fundamental mistake."

I have the same opinion. Yet multiple times I have been "corrected" on HN by former/current Mozilla employees that this strategy of trying to match every new feature in Chrome was the only option. Seems like there are some fundamental disagreements between Firefox developers and Firefox users. Whenever I read the Firefox developer discussions I always feel the tone is that "we know best". Other users do not have a voice. Sure you can donate to the Foundation, but as stated in the OP Firefox developers are employed and paid by the Corporation. I sincerely doubt they are interested in any constructive feedback from other users, even if they are supporters.

Krasnol• 6 years ago

As one of those conservatives who always whined about major changes:

Nah, that's not the moment of doom. The moment of doom came when google chose to spread their browser bundled with freeware and people all around ended up just having it as their major browser. Many not even knowing how that happened because they never remove the check marks on the installers. I'm still pissed that people where I installed Firefox now use Chrome as their main browser without having even realised when that changed....I wish there would be a way to block just google/Chrome installers.

Most of the people don't know/care about where Chrome comes from or that it's good to un-google or whatever. It's just a minority caring about this. This minority is not relevant to the overwhelming dominance of google.

slightwinder3• 6 years ago

Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser

Not really. firefox rose tu domination as bland copy of the Internet Explorer, the dominating Browser that time. They also added parts of their own like tabs and addons, but that were just gadgets for those who knew about them.

The 25% of internet users who wanted what Firefox offered ten years ago still want the same thing now,

What 25%? Addons are hardly used by anyone, except Adblockers. Even the most well known addons are only used by around 1-2% of the users. Adblockers are more popular, but even they seem to stuck by just 20 or 30% of firefox-users.

alcoholic_byte11• 6 years ago

Google entered the game later. So according to your logic one should always drop dead the moment s.o. else enters the game.

Besides, without having read all responses to your post, FF is different, or do you think Alphabet would condone a browser that has container tabs and disables a lot of advertisement/tracking out of the box.

Also offering what I had 10years ago, means not being able to to implement new features as quickly, it stagnates development;and on top of that, it will mean less innovation, so you could turn around, crying foul, and say that not enough has been done to be innovative. In my opinion, it is a void argument, a friend to all is a friend to none so to speak.

And let's not forget, Google/Alphabet had Chrome support an old protocol that was deprecated to make youtube work best only on their browser. A move in itself qualifying as sabotage of a competing product. It is only possible because Alphabet controls a lot of the infrastructure, people use(more on that a few paragraphs down).

Mozilla needs money so they make a deal with Google keeping it as the default search-engine, which means giving revenue to their competitors since Alphabet also produces the Chrome-Browers.

IMHO, Mozilla is not at fault here. The everything is free mentality and the economic playing field is. Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple are the Robber Barons of the 21st century. Just like Rockefeller et all were a hundred some years ago.

We now see first hand what happens if they are not reeled in and not split up. There is an eerie similarity to what happened with the old barons. Thankfully that process gained some tracking in some countries and I do hope it will continue.

Yes I am aware there is Chromium, Iron, Brave, Opera, but I am cautious and wouldn't want to touch them with a 10 foot pole, because the rendering-engine is provided by Alphabet which thrives on information gathered against the users will. All nice products, but my argument here is the same as the one against foreign chips in domestic security products. There is always this hint of doubt. One only has to look at the development-frameworks e.g. Facebook offered for free turning every app based on them into a data gathering tool.

So I can only agree with posters below: FF is superior and more innovative and secure than Chrome and most people wanna be hip, not have to think and that is where the bigger advertisement-budget comes in.

If one screams loud enough, people apparently do believe it is healthy to eat a certain brown excrement while being part of that a huge surveillance botnet that is Google.

//Edit: Here is the source of my claim regarding Youtube https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

//Edit2: And regarding security and innovation in that area. Google was very innovative. It dropped Certificate Pinning for their Chrome-Browser. The only thing that alerts one do MITM-Attacks if an attacker gains access to a key for signing a certificate. IMHO one more reason to stick with FF or move over. These days people think what Chrome provides is everything there is. I for myself vote with my wallet. Adblocker(because Alphabet also runs an ad-provider, also for other sides), I do not use Google as search-engine and if I must hooktube instead of youtube :)

xg152• 6 years ago

I don't know if that was really Mozilla's fault or that Google was always in a position where they could force Mozilla's hand.

When Firefox was at its absolute maximum market-share, Google was already the "start page of the internet" thanks to its search page. They used this and other marketing/bundling strategies (which were possible thanks to Google's resources) to aggressively grow Chrome's market share at an unprecedented rate. Compare Firefox' incredibly heroic battle against IE which, after a decade of advocacy, archived an unbelievably-seeming 30% global market share - with the rise of Chrome, which went from 0% to 50% in a few years and completely obliterated IE. [1]

Sorry, but that was never an even playing field.

It's amazing what they did manage to archive in their position - but with Google dominating both the browser and the way web sites are discovered, they have far more leverage to influence web standards than Mozilla has. I think Mozilla's choice was one of "copy Chrome and keep at least some amount of influence on the web" or "do your own thing and become incompatible with the web that actually exists".

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

ukyrgf• 6 years ago

I don't remember Google throwing any marketing at being the start page of the internet. That was a Reddit campaign trying to get users to switch from Digg.

squarefoot• 6 years ago

I think Firefox lost users to Chrome mainly because Google advertises their product constantly.

What you point out about trying to imitate Chrome is right though; when they dumbed down the very complete and functional settings window into an almost empty HTML page that forced to resort to about:config to do anything non trivial, or when they literally copied the terrible Chrome main window structure, I literally wanted to puke. I'm not sure however this is the reason why normal users distanced from the product. Firefox back then was the alternative to Internet Explorer and its load of security and privacy problems, so it started in a context where a good number of users actually wanted to switch to a different browser, despite some lock-ins such as Active-X and the like, I believe even Opera had some well deserved success at a moment for that reason, but none of them could compete anymore when the new kid in the block was a strongly and pervasively advertised product like Chrome. Firefox today is faster and more user privacy friendly than Chrome; to me if most people don't use it is simply because they don't know. Small personal example: of the many people I installed it, the number of those that went back to Chrome is a single digit percentage, which should suggest they didn't choose Chrome initially, but rather they didn't know about the alternatives.

Now it's the time for all Firefox users to tell others that they chose Firefox, and why, then for Mozilla to invest some damn money in advertising!

antisthenes• 6 years ago

I can't speak for the other 25%, but this is certainly true for me.

I stopped using the official Firefox when they decided to throw away the entire plug-in ecosystem and moved to Quantum or whatever. After they did, it's been a long, but very stable slide down in power user functionality and what made it Firefox.

giancarlostoro• 6 years ago

It's really a shame, and I've mentioned this before. If Mozilla sells a 'Developer' version of Firefox that is technically fully open source, but the idea is that it will directly support Firefox development, I will pay, you can add tiers, a VPN (since they're going to offer this anyway) and other goodies (maybe I can finally have a cool @firefox / mozmail.com / foxmail.com email or whatever) and I would probably subscribe to pay for higher tiers if it brings me other benefits, the email bit I mention because they do already provide an email client, it's a shame they never produced their own email service to subsidize their efforts elsewhere.

Mind you they already have Firefox Developer edition, they can keep it free and add a Firefox Professional Developer Edition that guarantees funds go to better funding Firefox development and I will be one of the first to pay for it, if it's got a monthly subscription or yearly. No "discount" tactics either, please, it makes no sense for someone trying to maintain a lot of non-profit open source projects.

craftinator2• 6 years ago

Sometimes, a group makes no poor decisions, or no none that actually matter, but their goals are overcome by events, and they fail. It's not about what Mozilla did, it's about what Google did; Firefox is simply not going to win against Chrome in terms of marketshare. Of course they can still win in terms of making their browser more awesome for the people who actually use it!

takeda• 6 years ago

Agree the same thing started with Opera, previously they were known from inventing many features (some of them actually Chrome copied when it first appeared). Once Chrome started gaining traction they started be the ones that were copying Chrome. Ultimately dropping the Presto engine and becoming just another skin for Chrome. I didn't use Opera and later Firefox to get Chrome experience.

john45342432• 6 years ago

The future of Rust language from Mozilla is also uncertain.

blablabla123• 6 years ago

Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior.

Yes, that's also were Mozilla lost me. Also since last year's questionable privacy problems, I really see no point in continuing to use Firefox. Just going for maximum performance/best integration which is Safari.

For sure alternative implementations will come, Kosmonaut looks promising. Actually KHTML/Konqueror which Webkit is based on also came out of nowhere, when the Web standards where already considered sufficiently complex for nobody to do a new implementation. So I think this is fertile ground for new efforts...

gigatexal• 6 years ago

Revenue is secured. They have another deal with Google worth ~500M a year for the next few years.

But for growing it and for the future of the browser that’s TBD imo

TimSchumann7• 6 years ago

Why would google fund a direct competitor unless they thought it was to their advantage?

I don’t see how this helps Firefox Users.

gibolt• 6 years ago

It is to their advantage. They get all the search ad revenue

MattGaiser4• 6 years ago

Google’s business is search engine and advertising, not browser market share.

Also helps with an anti-trust case.

coliveira• 6 years ago

Google wants to control search. If they don't pay, some other company will pay for the search traffic.

DarthGhandi• 6 years ago

I really don't understand how that is not enough to fund Firefox and Servo for well over a decade.

WesolyKubeczek• 6 years ago

The CEO needs those sweet bonuses that come from short-term revenue spikes.

But hey, she's not some homophobic bigot, so everything is good, and everyone should feel perfectly safe at the workplace as they are being downsized!

mvn92• 6 years ago

Let me iterate on my comment from the Manifesto submission [1]

Their number one point is:

The Internet is an integral part of modern life—a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.

Mozilla can use the internet and spend their billions on young third-world talents and offer them a job that educates them in web- and browser development. They only have to be in the bay area if they want copying Google to be their number one priority.

There could be thousands of engineers working on Firefox and servo with the benefit that

1) they would develop content that would be guaranteed to work on Firefox and secure Mozilla's position. They would have a path to a growing user base that would lead to an even bigger Google income.

2) there would be a career path without the need for immigration for third world talent, which would end colonial economy dependencies and make the world a better place.

With such an engineering force, they could enter plenty of markets and won't depend on the Google money in the future.

The good thing is, Firefox and Servo is open source. If Mozilla doesn't want to do it, some other player can.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165284

freshsqueeze4• 6 years ago

Definitely secured for the executives and directors. They have very little incentive to make things work and continue to hire their friends and pay themselves lavish salaries.

leokennis• 6 years ago

I have to say this is one of the instances where I’m glad Apple’s hunger for profit and privacy engineering intersect. On Mac at least with Safari there is a privacy oriented browser left.

Maybe Apple could revive Safari on Windows?

TimSchumann7• 6 years ago

I’m slightly annoyed to agree with you here, but I do. I also hope Epic takes Apple to the mats and gets some concessions from the justice department with regards to all the stuff going down with ‘platforms’ and ‘app stores’.

mhh__• 6 years ago

I also like apples stance on privacy.

Given that they are probably the only company that could pull it off, I'd really like to see apple become more open(i.e. Stallman-ism constrained by reality) philosophically - they love to tell their users right and wrong, but if they made a fairly open ARM MacBook that I could run anything other than MacOS (If it's not windows I want things like eBPF to play with) I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

petepete• 6 years ago

What about Chromium isn't privacy focussed? It was my understanding that all of Google's grubby code isn't present.

fastball4• 6 years ago

Or Brave.

It's Chromium with ad-blocking / anti-fingerprinting built in, so even more privacy preserving by default.

sp3327• 6 years ago

Chromium still depends on Google for certain features. https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#feature-overvi...

moksly• 6 years ago

This is completely anecdotal, and maybe I’m the only one, but native browsers have become so good that I’ve gone from decades of using Netscape/Firefox/opera/chrome/whatever to mainly using Edge and Safari. I don’t really need to share a profile between my browsers as I use windows at work and Mac/iOS for personal use.

We’ve gotten to a point in time where the browser is simply really good, and I think that simply makes it hard to make a living if your primary product is a browser.

Even Microsoft abandoned having their own because they no longer needed it to be completely their own to sell their products.

pjmlp11• 6 years ago

They abandoned it because Edge team got tired to play catch-up, while still fixing IE 11 bugs.

Slowly but steady we will start seeing ads for Chrome developers instead of Web developer, ChromeOS has won.

wyclif2• 6 years ago

Just the other day I saw a job opening for a "Chrome developer." First time I've seen that, and I thought to myself, "wow, we've really turned a corner..."

brador• 6 years ago

I still don’t understand how they spend 500M a year with so little to show for it.

What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world? Nothing.

I still can’t copy urls From multiple selected tabs without an extension.

What we need is a group to step up, create a new browser, capture the 500M/year payday and put the money to work.

esperent• 6 years ago

What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world?

Rust, Wasm (although a joint project, inspired by asm.js which was purely Mozilla) come to mind.

Also, I consider keeping the focus on privacy in an age when huge behemoths of companies are determined to steal every aspect of our lives for profit to be truly important work, much more important than any tech innovation.

hu33• 6 years ago

Mozilla employs (or employed) 2 "Rust devs". If that.

steve could chime in to be more precise. But I'd say Rust is a merit of the people involved much more than Mozilla.

If anything Mozilla just fired servo folks who contributed to Rust so it's not like they even pretend to support it.

I hope Rust gets a foundation and I hope that Mozilla transfers the "Rust" trademark to them.

quotemstr• 6 years ago

Mozilla did give us Rust and rr [1], both of which were genuine advances.

[1] https://rr-project.org/

ygjb• 6 years ago

Creating a "new browser" is monumental task, and it's not enough to make something that works. Browsers are extremely high risk pieces of software with an attack surface comparable to an operating system.

Building something competitive means being able to make reasonable assertions of security, and that takes tons of resources.

freshsqueeze4• 6 years ago

This is true. Mozilla knows well how to market to the tech crowd with the "we're the saviors of the internet, privacy, everyone else is evil" marketing. For the billions burned, you'd expect a lot more. The internet browsing experience feels the same as it did 10 years ago.

pornel2• 6 years ago

Quantum has proven CSS can be parallelized, and Rust is an enabler for complex multi-core code.

WebRender (and ongoing work on Servo/Pathfinder) shows that browser graphics can work on the GPU. Not just a couple limited CSS properties on carefully selected layers (like in WebKit/Blink), but all of it.

These are major architectural innovations.

I wonder what's the budget for Blink.

sp3327• 6 years ago

They did show Chrome how to block autoplaying audio in a way that does't annoy the crap out of users.

The screenshot feature is great and I use it constantly.

The containers implementation is pretty slick, and it enabled the first-party Facebook Container add-on which makes it harder for FB to track users across the web.

Edit: And readability mode, which was added a long time ago but I'm including it because Chrome still doesn't have one.

anonymousab5• 6 years ago

What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world?

They got a lot of great improvements and under-the-hood innovations out of Servo, and had more in the pipeline, and MDN served as a bedrock, reliable, gold standard documentation for modern web development.

Coincidentally, the two things they just completely scuttled.

mrweasel• 6 years ago

The mentioning of DoD contractors made we wonder: would the EU help fund the development of Firefox, in order to secure competition in the browser market?

Mozilla would need to restructure and move Firefox to the foundation, but MDN, Firefox and possibly Rust could be funded by donations, corporate sponsors and perhaps the EU, assuming the money could be directed correctly. It would require a management skilled in seeking out these funding options and a brutal focus on openess, but the latter IS something Mozilla knows how to do.

toyg3• 6 years ago

This would likely require the bulk of Mozilla to be based in Europe. It could be achieved for sure, but it would take years to transfer the relevant knowledge. I don't expect MoFo and MoCo leadership to be willing to entertain such possibilities, considering how "valley" their outlook seems to be.

mvn92• 6 years ago

but it would take years to transfer the relevant knowledge.

A) The people with the knowledge just have been fired and are free to move and to be hired

B) Thanks to corona, remote work is a fully accepted option

Something new can be running next week or even tomorrow.

sfvisser• 6 years ago

It makes so much sense for the EU to start investing in an open web and open source software. A relatively cheap option to move towards a society with better data protection and online civil liberties.

I’ve never took the time to really dig into the details of what the EU is exactly doing right now, but it seems regulation is higher on the list than investment and innovation.

Vinnl2• 6 years ago

They've actually funded quite a few projects through their Next-Generation Internet initiative [1] [2]. Relatively small grants, but many, and available without too much red tape, which I think is a huge boon in getting projects off the ground - if just a few of those are a success, so is NGI.

(Disclosure: I'm the recipient of one of those grants.)

[1] https://www.ngi.eu/ [2] https://mastodon.xyz/@NGIZero

rjzzleep• 6 years ago

EU research grants have an incredibly high documentation burden and Europe in general still has a problem considering software development as research. It's usually everything that leads up to the development and then the development itself is mostly an afterthought.

ahartmetz• 6 years ago

The fine European-academic tradition of considering actual development as grunt work that is an unworthy thing to do for the great minds. You can see where it got the European software industry as compared to the US. It is endlessly frustrating.

"Software Engineering" in Europe is the other kind of bad, learning methodology without knowing what it is applied to, and learning some "enterprise grade" rubbish.

It is as if no one who has anything to say in academia here knows how good software is actually created. And that is probably the case.

</rant>

fulafel• 6 years ago

Depends on the funding program nature, and grant structure (eg is there a research consortium). Not necessarily that high.

ThePhysicist• 6 years ago

I'm all stoked for publicly funded open-source software, but somehow The EU and most governments seem to be pretty bad at doing this. I recall numerous initiatives that aimed to create open-source ecosystems with massive amounts of public money (billions of euros for some projects) in the past, each and every one one of them ended up as a big disaster.

The latest attempt at publicly funded software is Gaia-X, the EU's (actually mostly France and Germany's) plan to build a European data infrastructure. I really don't want to be negative but I have a really strong feeling that it will fail as well (of course not before all the money has disappeared).

It would actually be cool to see what a organization like Mozilla could do with a sizeable public grant, they can't possibly spend that money worse than it's being spent now.

randompwd2• 6 years ago

Why would the EU give even one cent where the C level execs and board members collect cushy pay-cheques and fire the "hard" skilled people?

Who appoints the board of Mozilla? What will it take for them to be replaced? Can they even be replaced? It's apparent they're protecting a CEO who in any other organisation would have been canned years ago.

jhoechtl3• 6 years ago

Yeah for some time I had high hopes for FiWare but it turned out it was just subsidies for the tendering companies without ANY real incentive for a sustainable business model past the funding period.

tannhaeuser4• 6 years ago

I think part of this deal must involve radically simplifying the web and reflect on the EU's sponsorship of W3C via ERCIM. We've seen web tech becoming more complicated all the time, with self-acclaimed "standardization bodies" (WHATWG) acting as fig leaf for Google's take-over of the web. Now with Firefox on the brink to drop out, like all other "browser vendors" (Opera, MS) except Google before, and failing to create a new browser engine in about 10 years of development (!) with highly competent developers, it must be clear to everyone there's something very wrong with trusting the web as the universal digital medium for accessing nearly every piece of information. It's also becoming extremely hard to find pages that used to be ubiquitous only 2 years ago, so we're heading into an information crisis (on top of information warfare). W3C may have acted in good faith, but in the end contributed to irresponsible CSS complexity (which, in turn, is the result of having no standing/statue and no representation but rather a "pay-as-you-go" sponsorship model). WHATWG have consistently denied including HTML/CSS profiles for simplified subsets (as eg suggested by MS). Time to stop playing this naive web march of progress game only benefitting very few US companies, at the expense of everybody else.

goto112• 6 years ago

How would you "radically simplify" the web without causing breakage?

foolmeonce• 6 years ago

I don't think it's fair to make Google particularly responsible for WHATWG and the over complicated web. The other vendors were on board and used the sentiment against XHTML from those who directly did write-once HTML, right before the web out grew their manual skill level and became capable of offering tooling. The results have naturally been a hodge-podge since WHATWG was about using the sentiments of everyone against a standard, and the results are everything in every direction except the track the W3C standard was on.

kdavis2• 6 years ago

I was responsible for securing the funding for such tasks from the EU for Mozilla. This can work, e.g. [https://browser.mt/]. However, the latest layoffs have basically gutted this plan.

walterbell3• 6 years ago

Is there any chance of the EU funding a Firefox fork that is optimized for integration with other EU initiatives, e.g. data sovereignty and individual data ownership, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/11/1006555/eu-data-...? If a fork is too big a bridge to cross, how about extending the roadmap of an existing-but-neglected Web Standard, contributing reference implementation code to Firefox?

Mozilla wasn't built in a day, and neither will successors. Step one is to get funding for one person with a forward-looking vision and experience with the non-public history that got Firefox to this point. There is a narrow window to preserve a subset of the brain trust for core features (Servo?) before developers get scattered to the winds of other companies.

Finally, if Firefox will eventually lose to Chrome, perhaps we need to step back and look at core protocols (like the Gopher reboot) and new security models (e.g. running each browser tab in a hardware-isolated virtual machine). Extensibility was a core offering of Firefox. There may be new optima on the trade-off chart of security vs. power, when running on newer hardware.

jeswin• 6 years ago

Mozilla must put the advocacy bits aside and focus on the core product. Perhaps the problem with a non-technical CEO is that the advocacy and new shiny stuff is given as much importance as the invisible (and insanely complex) work that makes a browser fast and safe.

A total failure of strategy here - if the leadership couldn't find other revenue sources and partnerships in 5 years they have to fire themselves. Instead they axe the future of Firefox.

bmcn2020• 6 years ago

I'm not sure. I think advocacy is a core part of its USP -- Mozilla is privacy-friendly, and that's an important point, especially as all internet users, even average consumers, are being constantly hit over the head by how data-hungry these huge corporations are.

It's an uphill battle, sure, and there are a lot of things to overcome, but I'm not so sure I'd blame the leadership on this entirely.

I'd blame the market...for now.

zajio1am3• 6 years ago

Mozilla has so many privacy issues so that calling it privacy-friendly is misleading:

https://brmlab.cz/project/spyzilla

soniman• 6 years ago

You have to wonder what the firing of Eich was really about. Hard to believe Eich would've done the same thing.

fzzzy2• 6 years ago

Eich wasn't fired.

boomboomsubban• 6 years ago

- if the leadership couldn't find other revenue sources and partnerships in 5 years they have to fire themselves.

Like the CEO who left at the start of 2020?

cxr• 6 years ago

Five years ago it was clear that possibly the best thing that could happened to the future of Firefox, Mozilla, and the Web would have been for Mozilla Corporation to have gone belly up. But we're past the point where that might do any good with respect to salvaging Firefox or Mozilla's name.

Mozilla Corporation's role today is to siphon away any attention or enthusiasm that might otherwise be directed towards the ideals that Mozilla was originally created to facilitate. The Mozilla Corporation was supposed to have been set up to further the ideals of the then already extant movement that had been operating on a shoestring budget. The imprimatur should have been to direct its paid staff towards doing the boring work that unpaid (but highly effective) volunteers weren't interested in—not to wrench control away and consolidate power within a (now-proven ineffectual) company making ill-conceived commercial plays while trying to fit in with the culture of the Valley and squandering billions.

In the early 2010s, I attended a conference—one sponsored by Mozilla—and brought in on their dime, having been a fairly involved contributor for a few years, but not someone on the corporate payroll. Another guest and I mentioned how poor a job the travel agency had done, essentially fleecing Mozilla and doing much worse than if we'd arranged for travel and accommodation ourselves and then forwarded the bill. "Mozilla has a lot of money" was the response. After the better part of a decade, Mozilla's revenue has only grown, and so has their propensity to squander money.

The best option we have now is for folks to wake the heck up, to realize that the Mozilla that exists is not the one portrayed in either its messaging or fixed in the minds of casual slacktivists, to start a grassroots effort (a la early Firefox) to work on an independent browser—where, unfortunately, the best bet at this point is probably in leveraging WebKit against Chrome and Blink, given what an untameable mess the modern Web has become (not helped by the FirefoxOS efforts; nor the mess that Gecko codebase has become)—and most importantly never allow that effort to be subverted in the way that the Corporation managed to cannibalize and take over Mozilla.

But that's not going to happen, because Mozilla continues to position itself as the organization where folks with a casual interest in the health of the Web are supposed to direct their good vibes, while thoroughly proving itself to be unworthy and incompetent at upholding the principles it's supposed to be fighting for, and while time and time again, the public have proven themselves to have short attention spans on the order of months—so, by the end of the year Firefox and Mozilla will be back to being perceived as your old chum that's fighting the good fight, instead of being steered by a bunch of clueless, well-salaried Bay Area devs LARPing as some motley crew with your best interests at heart, all while the term "non-profit" gets bandied about in public discussions, much to their delight.

randompwd2• 6 years ago

100% this. Mozilla needs to move out from SV. Their boards,executives & managements are way too cosy with other execs.

Firefox has been absolutely decimated by Chrome.

When MS(Seattle) was the monopolyin web browser, Mozilla (SV) being in SV worked great. Time to move Mozilla out & to be honest, it's probably time for Mozilla HQ to leave USA.

Chrome didn't do anything Mozilla could have done if they had put the vast majority of their funding into the browser instead of pet projects.

Dear Mozilla execs, stop thinking of yourselves as thought leaders. The browser is the fundamental way to access the internet. This is where 99% of your focus should be. Keep iterating and making it better and easier to consume, protect and develop with Firefox.

The last 10 years of firefox have been embarrasing tbh.

l1k• 6 years ago

This outcome was anticipated much earlier in a 2006 interview with Mike Pinkerton (ex-Mozilla, now Tech lead for Chrome on Mac & iOS):

"And then, kind of, they lucked into Firefox. I mean, seriously, they got really lucky that Firefox — that Ben was able to execute so successfully, because I have no idea what would have happened to the Foundation without Firefox. It probably would have just blown up and you know, dried up and blown away. [...] And so they kind of transitioned from that to, “Well, okay, now we’re a corporation and we’ve got our big ticket item, and we’ve got to make sure as many people buy it as possible. And you know, and how do we continue to — how do we continue to ensure that revenue coming in?” You know, so they transitioned more from “Wow, we’ve got this great thing, let’s share it with the world!” To, “Well, we’ve got this great thing, we’d better keep making money off of it.” And I think a lot of those decisions have sort of tainted where the project was going. Bringing in — you know, they’ve got all this money, so now they bring in all of these marketing and manager people who haven’t been part of the community, who don’t understand why Firefox is successful, because they didn’t see what it was. They didn’t grow up through that failure to see why it’s a success and now they’re making the decisions to continue the success."

http://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php?id=7277

walterbell3• 6 years ago

unfortunately, the best bet at this point is probably in leveraging WebKit against Chrome and Blink, given what an untameable mess the modern Web has become

Is there a maintained OSS browser based on Webkit? Do you think it's viable for a new Webkit-based OSS browser to become sustainable by user donations, assuming initial sponsorship by other non-profits or EU?

Macha2• 6 years ago

Konqueror[1] can toggle between KHTML and Webkit at runtime.

GNOME Web (formerly Epiphany)[2] is Webkit based.

Surf[3] (By the suckless st/dwm people) is WebKit based.

That said, Surf would be unlikely to move to chromium from my perception of the views of the suckless group, and their opinions of how software would work are really opposed to mainstream appeal, Konqueror undoubtedly will eventually replace QtWebkit with QtWebEngine for at least the Webkit support (if not dropping KHTML entirely - KHTML's own readme suggests not using it), so that leaves Gnome Web as the one open source browser aimed at a wider audience using Webkit.

[1] https://kde.org/applications/internet/org.kde.konqueror

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Web

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_(web_browser)

chromedev3• 6 years ago

qutebrowser

ghevshoo• 6 years ago

Yesterday I started donating $10/month to the Mozilla Foundation. TIL it’s not the Mozilla Foundation that develops Firefox.

I stopped using Chrome when they added the “feature” that logging into gmail was the same as logging into the browser.

If there was a little notification to the top right in the Firefox with a link to “pay”, even if it was optional, there is some proportion of users who would. And I would bet that your average Firefox user is an order of magnitude more likely to do this than your average chrome user.

So I wonder why they don’t do this? I’ve had similar frustrations for other products I get for free that I wanted to pay for.

sp3327• 6 years ago

I had the same question. And what's even stranger is that the Mozilla.com (not.org) website has no way to send them money, and doesn't even mention the paid products like the VPN. At least Pocket gets a mention which I think you can pay for.

alcoholic_byte11• 6 years ago

Those who seek shall find. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ Got the link from the Thunderbird-site where https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/ redirects to https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US

So yeah the link is out there but you really have to look for it. Which is actually s.th. quite nice. Imagine they would go about nagging people. You might say one of 2 things: a) So in their face, others are probably donating what do they need me for b) So in my face, that is indescent, I do not donate. Whatever the choice happy donating; I already did.;)

freshsqueeze4• 6 years ago

Your $10/month donation will go straight into paying their CEO $3 million dollars per year and her inner circle.

Dunedan• 6 years ago

Does somebody know what the remaining ~750 people are working on? How many of them work on Firefox, Pocket, Lockwise, VPN, HR, marketing, ...? Is there somewhere an overview about that?

Many here disapprove with the recent layoffs and especially the areas affected by them, but I'd like to better understand how many people still work on Firefox (desktop browser, mobile browsers, dev tools, servo, ...), compared to topics like Pocket and VPN and supporting roles like HR or marketing, to get a better picture of how how I feel about Mozilla's future.

mandreyel2• 6 years ago

A possible alternative source of income for Mozilla I think would be, and one I haven’t seen mentioned before, providing consulting services in their areas of expertise.

For example, demand for Rust engineers seems to be steadily increasing[1] and I can’t think of a better company with a larger concentration of Rust expertise than Mozilla. Perhaps the same could work for other areas (ex frontend), but I’m biased toward Rust. Due to lack of experience in this regard I’m not sure if this could actually work, but I could imagine allocating part of their engineering time budget to consultation, whose income would fund their core products.

[1] Besides all the articles popping up about starting to employ Rust by well known companies, my anecdote as a full-time Rust SDE is that I’m getting more and more requests on LinkedIn, and not just for the usual crypto roles.

momokoko• 6 years ago

There are so many ways for Mozilla to leverage their core competencies. Unfortunately failed management with no means to remove them means none of that will happen.

Executive leadership at Mozilla is a disgrace that has now caused a tangible negative result on the future of the internet. The fact that Mitchell Baker still leads this organization is insane. An absolutely inept failure somehow still leads Mozilla. It’s absolutely crazy

fzzzy2• 6 years ago

You do realize that Mitchell has only been ceo of mozilla corp since January, right? And that almost all of the C suite has turned over in the last few years?

mandreyel2• 6 years ago

I completely agree. It’s depressing to see the whole thing steadily come apart at the seams due to their own leadership (or lack thereof, one could argue).

Actually I realize what I wrote above is less true now as they have fired a good number of their incredibly skilled engineers, many of them of course Rust developers. So I suppose my post should be rephrased along the lines of “what Mozilla should or could have done”.

[edit]: Rephrased to be less dramatic.

john45342432• 6 years ago

For example, demand for Rust engineers seems to be steadily increasing

The future of Rust is uncertain as Mozilla.

rwmj2• 6 years ago

Revenue well north of $200 million every year since 2011. How hard would it have been to do the obvious thing and build up an endowment?!

sp3327• 6 years ago

They have a pretty significant cash pile which they mentioned last year. The quarantine kinda threw a wrench in things, but they are still paying the people they let go through the end of the year. So it's not like they're imminently about to run out of cash.

jefftk11• 6 years ago

I don't think that would have made sense: Mozilla stays relevant by producing a browser that lots of people want to use. This requires substantial investment in developer salaries, or else other browsers get better and you don't.

If they had taken your approach, I think they wouldn't have been able to get out Quantum, and then Firefox would be much smaller now, and be even less able to influence the direction of the web.

rwmj2• 6 years ago

But they only spent a fraction of the cash on developing Firefox features like Quantum that people want, and essentially wasted the rest of crazy projects (FirefoxOS), buying things that their users hate (Pocket), and outlandish C-level salaries. They could have paid the core developers and had the endowment.

If they wanted to do the non-core stuff, that's something that the foundation that managed the endowment might have done with x% of its capital, simply by investing in companies that align with Mozilla's mission.

LockAndLol2• 6 years ago

I'm starting to sincerely hope there'll be a fork of Firefox or at least a separation from Mozilla, and for Quantum/Servo to be separated and made an easily embeddable. The inability to donate directly to projects has imo has had a direct result of requiring Google money.

Firefox and Quantum don't need 100M to survive. That's that just absurd. Even if you had 250 people working on it for 100k each, you still wouldn't get to anything as crazy as 100M. 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary.

There's no need to branch out and make all kinds of other side projects that have to fit under the Mozilla umbrella. Splitting focus like that just makes it become a juggling game of who needs the money more, shifting focus between projects and making it difficult for donators to comprehend where the money is going to.

When I donate to KDE, it's doesn't come as a surprise that I can't request my donation to be earmarked for something. The project is for a desktop environment after all. It's in the name and it's the flagship product. But when your flagship product is a browser and you don't provide people the possibility to donate to that product... well, what's the point in donating?

Even the argument of "I know better what to do with your money than you do" sounds incredibly pretentious. We hear that all the time from politicians and we clearly see where that money goes to: their pockets, their friends pockets, some other project we never heard of and THEN it goes to the project we thought it would go to. If I wanted to give my money to an institution I didn't believe in, I'd pay more taxes.

jefftk11• 6 years ago

100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary.

The kind of people you're trying to hire have the option to earn 3-4x as much working for a FAANG. Being excited about working on something you believe in can get you a long way, but that's still a lot to ask.

(See discussion above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157803)

infogulch• 6 years ago

Also, when estimating total employee cost from salary, a good rule of thumb is to double it to cover indirect compensation and overhead such as healthcare, retirement matching, employer's share of income tax, office overhead, IT infrastructure, etc.

LockAndLol2• 6 years ago

If money were everything, nobody would be working on opensource.

I'd jump at that opportunity. Earning a third or a even a quarter of what I earn now would pay for every single one of my living expenses and even allow a comfortable life. There's no way that salary would be OK for a corporation, but for doing something I truly believe in? It's friggin' great.

djhworld• 6 years ago

Does anyone know if the new stuff touted over the last few years (servo, webrender etc) is going to make it into the mainline Firefox release?

I moved back to Firefox back when they released Quantum and was really excited about the plans to make it even better - the blog posts from Lin Clark around parallel layout engines, web render etc. made me really excited about the trajectory of FF [1]

I know this stuff is complicated and they're working to get it right, but I heard in the recent round of layoffs most of the Servo team has been decimated. WebRender is only in the mainline releases for Windows and experimental everywhere else [2]

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/entering-the-quantum-era-h... [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where

tarkin22• 6 years ago

Some of it already has made it into ff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24164058

The_rationalist2• 6 years ago

How is it legal that the financial report of 2019 is unavailable? It's at least a big red flag, I doubt they did such a practice the other years.

sciurus2• 6 years ago

I think about a year of lag is normal, e.g.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/11/21/state-of-mozilla-20...

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/11/27/state-of-mozilla-20...

The_rationalist2• 6 years ago

You're right.

jacknews• 6 years ago

The google contract seems totally at odds with mozilla's privacy focus.

And there seem to have been too many off-target projects recently.

IMHO, they should keep a focus on privacy, and the core browser, adding VPN and perhaps CDN services, all bundled as a subscription. Maybe also ad-free search; perhaps duckduckgo should buy mozilla, or vice-versa? I think a lot of people would be willing to pay for a 'safe, private portal' to the internet.

I think advocacy alone is almost worthless when it comes to defining standards and ensuring they're open. You have to have code (and users) in the game.

xg152• 6 years ago

In ten years it’s possible that the Mozilla Corporation may be just a memory, with the Mozilla Foundation surviving as a modestly-funded advocacy organization.

Maybe I'm pessimistic here, but what exactly could a "modestly-funded advocacy organization" with nothing left but their brand archive against Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc?

Without Firefox, I don't see what kind of leverage they would have to continue their mission. Firefox also was what gave their brand relevance to the public.

The only thing I could see is them becoming a political lobbying organisation or "think tank", trying to advance their mission by pushing for more internet regulation. But even then, they will be pitted against vastly more powerful lobbies.

kalekold• 6 years ago

Rust is dead!

jillesvangurp• 6 years ago

I'm less worried about the product than the organization.

IMHO, Mozilla as a company has never really had a credible business model beyond Google (mainly) choosing to compensate them for directing some search traffic to them (and general ass coverage when it comes to allegations of monopolist behavior). The layoffs are a consequence of their strategy for finding alternate revenue streams being simply too weak to produce tangible results. Certainly not anywhere near levels that would allow them to justify having the ambitions of a big VC founded silicon valley based company with offices in e.g. the middle of the real estate bubble called Mountain View (as well as several other premium locations world wide).

What they do technically with their browser product is fine however and worth protecting. I just don't see that costing in the order of hundreds of millions/year. A couple of million goes a long way to keep a world wide collective of developers going. Many OSS projects manage with far less. It doesn't require maintaining offices in the downtown areas of SFO (in addition to Mountain View), London, Paris, Portland, Berlin, Taipei, etc.

I use Firefox exclusively; like many other users. The wider community of Firefox developers and users has plenty of ways to keep the project going long term in one way or another.

Same with Rust. Rust will be fine without Mozilla. It's widely used and loved by engineers useful to quite a lot of companies. IMHO the rust community is actually much less dependent on central management by anyone (including Mozilla) than the Firefox browser. Most long lived OSS projects need independence like that and thrive because of their independence.

Luckily, Mozilla has a very decent licensing policy (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/license-policy/) that crucially does not include any copyright transfer. That means their role is strictly as a facilitator of development; not as an owner of the copyright to the code. That means that in principle there is room for other companies to get involved or for independent developers to get involved.

Which is why I'm not worried about the project surviving the drama of their mother organization imploding or not. I hope it leads to some sensible changes in the Mozilla Foundation.

staktrace• 6 years ago

FWIW, as a Mozilla employee, I think this is one of the best summaries I've read of the state of Mozilla.

webmaven• 6 years ago

Any recommendations for second best summary?

spenrose• 6 years ago

Agreed (Mozilla employee 2013-2017). If I were going to add something, it's how important Mozilla was c. 2004-2010 when "the Internet" was dominated by OECD knowledge workers using Windows. When iPhone brought "the Internet" to everyone (mainly via its clone Android) c. 2010-2015, browsers moved from the center of the action to plumbing. Like a retired sports star, Mozilla has never been able to cope emotionally with the idea that the world has moved on. Worse, because on some level they know it, the cognitive dissonance gets sharper every year.

ekianjo5• 6 years ago

How are the expenses of Mozilla increasing at such a pace without having a sustainable business model? Seems like poor management.

mothsonasloth• 6 years ago

On the graph at 2014 on the x-axis, is this the "real" reason why Brendan Eich had to resign as CEO of Mozilla Corp?

chromedev3• 6 years ago

No, it was due to him donating to Prop 8

quicklime4• 6 years ago

But as the number of Firefox users decreases (due to the growing market dominance of the Chrome browser), and those users click on fewer online ads (for example, because they’re spending less during the COVID-19 pandemic), the willingness of Google and other customers to pay the Mozilla Corporation for those users decreases accordingly.
Thus when COVID-19 hit and the Mozilla Corporation hit a brick wall in terms of search engine revenue...

Did the pandemic really have an impact on search engine revenue? From what I can tell, users are spending more time online, viewing (and maybe even clicking) more ads and searching for more things online. Google's stock is back to its pre-pandemic peak level, so they seem to be doing fine.

Did Google play hard-ball with Mozilla during their contract negotiations, and manage to lower the cost of their default search engine deal? If so, I feel like that should've generated a bigger outrage than some Chrome UX/Security people tweaking the URL bar. Especially with all the antitrust stuff going on.

slightwinder3• 6 years ago

Companies are spending less money for ads, some even went bankrupt. People also have less money to spend, or are just careful not wasting it in uncertain times.

Though, yes, in most countries it normalizes, but the dent in income is visable.

quicklime4• 6 years ago

And yet, Google’s revenue only decreased by 2%, and Facebook’s increased by 11%. I can see Google making an argument not to increase the amount of money they pay to Mozilla this time, but not to decrease it.

jhoechtl3• 6 years ago

Inventing an entirely knew programming language with new concepts that is aiming at smart people and basing critical components of the web browser on it.

It is this kind of decision which freaks out the ordinary HN reader but is otherwise an alarm bell to any sane business responsible.

That was the nail into the coffin.

burtonator• 6 years ago

If Mozilla wants to have a future it needs to:

- Realize it lost the browser wars, abandon FF and base it on chromium. It might upset the average FF geek on HN but you're not paying for FF development - Google is. As FF user base keeps dropping Google is not going to be interested in funding their development. No one cares about FF enough to actually fund it. Google just is because they want to push you ads.

- They need another revenue model. Probably focusing on B2C products. They should start acquiring more companies to buy growth.

They've really squandered a huge opportunity.

mwcampbell3• 6 years ago

It's easy to criticize from the outside. The question we should ask ourselves is what we should have done, and can still do, to help Mozilla's mission. I just set up a monthly donation, as I should have done a long time ago.

eafer• 6 years ago

That won't help: donations to Mozilla don't go to the development of Firefox.

mwcampbell3• 6 years ago

They could though. If enough of us start donating, maybe the leadership will make the necessary organizational changes to make donations go toward Firefox development. It definitely won't happen if we don't do our part.

whoisthemachine2• 6 years ago

It's really interesting that Mozilla doesn't funnel donations to software development interests. There are successful open source projects that do so, such as Linux Mint [0]. Maybe what's really broken is the idea that a browser needs a backing corporation to fund it?

Personally, I can see no better way to keep an open internet than through the development of meaningful software that serves that purpose.

[0] "Donations are usually quite high after a release and Linux Mint 20 is no exception." https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3953

dralley4• 6 years ago

The problem is that Mozilla Corporation needs to exist for various legal reasons, and that it's impossible for Mozilla Foundation to channel funds to Mozilla Corporation for other legal reasons.

Whereas Linux Mint literally just operates a Patreon / Paypal / Bitcoin account and distributes the funds between a couple of people.

detaro• 6 years ago

that it's impossible for Mozilla Foundation to channel funds to Mozilla Corporation for other legal reasons

Do you know details about that? I can imagine that there'd be tax complications, but would have expected a foundation could buy things/services from an entity it owns.

whoisthemachine2• 6 years ago

I wasn't suggesting the Mozilla Foundation channel funds to the Mozilla corporation. I was suggesting that the Mozilla Foundation own Firefox and use donations to the foundation to fund Firefox development.

rch• 6 years ago

Why is it uncertain? They'll get acquired or wind things down. They've had a good run.

networkimprov• 6 years ago

The unstated thesis of the article seems to be that Mozilla lacks a killer app.

So what are possible killer apps, given their history building user-facing internet infrastructure?

(I love FF and never touch Chrome except for testing, but <10% market share is not killer.)

no_wizard• 6 years ago

I always felt that Mozilla should have seen nodejs as their future, and in kind tried to build a gecko powered version (and therefore could have a real successor to XulRunner - electron before its time) I think this may have been a seriously missed opportunity to unset v8. However quantum may have been a little late to the party.

I’m not as vehement against their other moves, though. Pocket could and maybe can be a real business, if they focused on delivering a top tier experience. I thought it could have been a better feedly and/or pinboard alternative, I just haven’t seen enough compelling features there as of of yet. After all, Mozilla Needs alternative revenue streams beyond their search deals.

I also think they could have been an internet identity broker, bringing a unified web identity via their Firefox account service. Alas that may have been too big to crack.

May need to reinvestigate Pocket, but aside from that and just using Firefox as my main browser, I feel like they lost a lot of steam and some goodwill with the developer community.

t0mmyb0y• 6 years ago

When you tie your horse to google you will go out of business.

pbronez• 6 years ago

I doubt that Mozilla management or employees are interested in the Mozilla Corporation becoming a DoD contractor, and it’s unclear to me how much government or foundation funding Mozilla could attract as an R&D lab focused purely on civilian applications in the Internet and web space.

I think there might actually be some interesting opportunities here. Consider:

- Digital Propaganda and Misinformation are increasingly seen as key national defense issues

- COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation and exacerbated the digital divide

- FAANG is under increased anti-trust scrutiny

- USG has strong mandates for web accessibility that current web tech makes very difficult to fulfill

- Privacy implications of AI/ML is getting more attention

Mozilla is well positioned to contribute to positive solutions in all of these areas.

cassepipe• 6 years ago

I am really surprised they did not go for the VPN offer way sooner. It's a massive market in which all that matters in how much you trust your VPN provider. And the only insurance you've got is your VPN provider telling you they don't collect data which is hard to believe considering how much money user data is worth. The only thing Mozilla has plenty is people trusting that they are fighting for greater privacy as they've always have. It seems so obvious that I would like to know if there's a reason they did not go for that sooner. Consider also that integrating a user-friendly Mozilla VPN manager in the browser could bump Firefox downloads. So why?

jasonv• 6 years ago

This thread, paired with the Google/deprecation thread, feel ironically aligned.

Mozilla seems to be deprecating parts of their organization, and Google deprecates products constantly... except for Chrome. Chrome has had a fairly reliable and well maintained product path.

I used to use Firefox constantly, but between Safari being excellent on my Mac, and Chrome being preferable for work related things -- and their decent profile synchronization, I find myself a little mystified every time I go back to Firefox for a spell. Just little things, but they definitely feel like the 3rd wheel now.

twblalock• 6 years ago

I like the comparison to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Like those organizations, Mozilla was being kept alive by corporate money (primarily Google's) and never developed the ability to be a sustainable business on its own.

brianzelip• 6 years ago

Hey author of the posted blog, as a Baltimore resident (and librarian!), I love the shout out to the Howard County library's "choose civility" campaign![0] Nice site.

[0] https://civilityandtruth.com/about/#about-the-name

dzink• 6 years ago

Mozilla can take government grants or even subscription money to become a Cloudflare for consumers. Enable uses to content rate any content including youtube videos and protect each other at massive scale. As a parent I would pay for a safer browser experience for my kids. The Disney of browsers if you will. Provide a leader board of sorts for top contributors who have given time to rate content, money to the foundation, code contributions, etc. They don’t have to sink down the advertising hole either. This is just the tip of the iceberg of ideas I saw in 5 minutes. A corporation paired down to focus on consumer problems or government contracts related to internet security can be nimble and beat the FAANG model precisely because they don’t have to bend to the will of advertisers.

GNOMES• 6 years ago

I have been forcing myself to use Firefox the last two months. Ignoring some performance issues on Google branded sites, I have yet to experience any incompatibilities.

The reason I am going back to Chrome is bookmark usability and Chromecast support.

Posts on the r/Firefox subreddit and official Firefox support pages mention that Chromecast uses proprietary API's, and can/will not be reverse engineered or implemented. I never noticed how often I use the ones at home or work until the ability to cast wasn't available.

As per bookmarks, I love not having my bookmarks visible in my main while browsing, and having them on the new tab page in Chrome is wonderful. I tried to pin my bookmarks to my Firefox top sites, but felt clunky using a hotkey or the menus to view all bookmarks.

TLightful• 6 years ago

Very happy Firefox user here.

Google can take a jump. Chrome was relevant (in terms of quality 10 years ago). Irrelevant now.

moritzwarhier• 6 years ago

I have to chime in... Mozilla seems to pull back on its investment in web standards and browser engine development for revenue reasons. Instead focusing on Pocket, VPN services and similar stuff, all the while keeping up a dubious privacy-advocating public image. Pocket, Mozilla VPN etc might look like they promise more short-term revenue. My view is that Mozilla wants to complete its metamorphosis into a near-irrelevant Opera clone. Gecko/Servo, Firefox and MDN are the valuable parts of Mozilla (to me). Introducing paid premium membership to MDN would have been acceptable. Now I fear that I have to revert my Chromium->Firefox switch. Also, people might not be as gullible as Mozilla thinks regarding their pro-privacy stance. They recently did a billboard and train ad campaign in my area (germany) about tracking and how they claim to prevent it. I doubt that won over significant numbers of users.

Sure, they struggled to survive going down the developer-centric "poweruser" road. I don't dispute that.

What they're missing is revenue-generating consumer products on a large enough scale. Still, I fear that on the basis of their current portfolio and corporate image they won't be able to become competitive in that area. Introducing paid products focused on more niche markets (e.g. developers) would have seemed more sustainable to me.

MaxBarraclough2• 6 years ago

Sure, they struggled to survive going down the developer-centric "poweruser" road. I don't dispute that.

Did they really go down that road? The general perception is that they've just been copying Chrome for years.

imagetic• 6 years ago

Q: What do most regular people consume on the internet?

A: Video.

Q: What does Firefox suck the most at?

A: Video.

Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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