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It's what happens when you fire you engineer CEO for his personal opinions (that I disagree with) and replace him with a "company culture" that has nothing to do with engineering, but has the "right" opinions.
You can’t lead effectively if the people you are trying to lead justifiably view you as hostile to them.
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I would have made that same mistake if I was making decisions for Mozilla at the time. It's such an elegant, logical and tempting ideal to turn the browser into the OS. Too bad it didn't work out.
Well, now we have PWAs. I'd be more than a bit bitter if I was a mozilla dev tasked with making those work on android/ios instead of on firefoxOs.
It seems like everyone has reached much the same conclusion: there may be many factors, but the real killer and root cause is that Chromium is well suited to being embedded, and Gecko is not. So hey, any companies out there interested in bringing back a little diversity in browser engines? Or just making a tiny dent in Google's dominance for the greater good? Consider funding work to make Gecko better suited to embed…
>Consider funding work to make Gecko better suited to embedding Mozilla seems to choose what to do with donations though. I don't think there's any way to target funding for Gecko, Rust, etc.
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Guess which one is better in 2022, Firefox or Brave? (except maybe containers) Firefox was born in 2002 (under Eich management) as Phoenix, it's kinda obvious that 16 years later (57 is from 2018, Eich left in 2014) it needed a technological upgrade. In ~2009-2010 Firefox was used by 33% of the web users. Today it's at ~6%. I blame management, the alternative is believing Firefox just had bad luck or that developers…
> I blame management, the alternative is believing Firefox just had bad luck or that developers at Firefox suck (which they do not) There are other factors at play than managerial incompetence: - the entire iOS part of "all web users" uses WebKit because Apple doesn't allow other engines. For Android, most devices ship either Chrome or a WebKit wrapper (the default Android WebView), and many users don't bother switch…
I agree there's no single point of failure, but IMO what made Firefox (and Mozilla before it) different was that it was different.
they played catch-up against Chrome with the result that they did not gain new users and lost many of the older ones
I still use Firefox on desktop, but on mobile first they removed the extensions from their mobile browser, then announced they would only support WebExtensions API, removing a ton of features from existing extensions, then they started purging "controversial" extensions (as in controversial in the eyes of Google) from their addons web site, that basically made Firefox a worse Chrome.
The nails in the coffin for me have been laying off the entire devtools, MDN and servo development teams and the ads in the search bar.
All of this started happening soon after Eich left.
I'm not saying Eich alone could save Firefox, he's also a person I dislike on a human level and he's probably more troubles than he's worth for a company, but my opinion is that Firefox "new" mindset post Eich disappointed its true fans that were mainly developers and you don't recover from that.
EDIT: I understand the need to make money, but are Pocket Premium or reselling VPNs the right way for a browser vendor?
It's what happens when you fire you engineer CEO for his personal opinions (that I disagree with) and replace him with a "company culture" that has nothing to do with engineering, but has the "right" opinions.
I mean, they had an internal employee revolt, since his “personal opinions”, opinions backed by cash, were that those employees should have their human rights limited. You can’t lead effectively if the people you are trying to lead justifiably view you as hostile to them.
I repeat it: I don't like Eich, I don't like his opinions, but he never laid off entire dev teams, he used his personal money to support his personal world view, it has nothing to do with what people at Mozilla could or couldn't do.
> You can’t lead effectively if the people you are trying to lead justifiably view you as hostile to them.
Is it better if your righteous new CEO fires you?
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> Now my question would be why not WebKit, as that is also easy to embed. There are browsers that use WebKit, just not that many. Wasn’t part of the WebKit/Blink split that Google cared about supporting non-Apple platforms and Apple didn’t want to anymore, (and the reverse on a number of Apple-priority features), and both sides purged their post-split engine codebases of the stuff they weren’t supporting, making post…
This is incorrect. Conflict was over multiprocess architecture, where Google added it as a WebKit port and Apple did a proper redesign and produced WebKit2. WebKit is still extremely portable and non-Apple platforms are first class.
I would flip that and say Mozilla would be better off if they just adopted Chromium and made sure they provided builds without the controversial stuff.
They gave up on having a competitive rendering engine implementation when they abandoned Servo so why bother ?
Who is using FF for the rendering engine ? If anything it just breaks compatibility because few test for it anyway. They even fired the devtools team so developing for FF is worse than Chrome.
If they created a Chromium distro that was cleaned up for privacy it would probably be a better product than what they have right now.
Mozilla’s priorities are questionable, I’m not sure anyone outside the company knows. I’ve long resisted using a Chromium browser but Firefox has languished for far too long. I’ve been using Arc for maybe half a year now and I don’t plan on going back. Without a team working on Servo, Mozilla is lost IMO.
Recently Mozilla decided it does not want donations :) Great for woke bs, not so great for actually funding and developing browser.
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That non embeddability is probably also a major reason why there isn't a significant node competitor based on spidermonkey. I get wanting to focus on Firefox as a whole, and that making components more independent can add quite a bit of work. But at the same time, if it was easier to use gecko in other browsers, and spidermonkey as JS environment outside the browser, I wonder if that would increase usage of and inter…
We embedded spidermonkey as the JavaScript engine for the prime video application on games consoles and smart TVs when I was at Amazon (5 years ago+ not sure if they still use it). I've not embedded any other JS engines, but it wasn't too bad to embed.
CEF was also relatively straightforward to use. Both times we were embedding them in C++ applications.
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Recently Mozilla decided it does not want donations :) Great for woke bs, not so great for actually funding and developing browser.
Where was this headline?