541–550 of 1001 posts
I just wish they shift their focus again to technical solutions, instead of political/social issues. I don't know why software company has need to act like NGO/activist group (doesn't matter if I agree with their stances or not).
It's self-defense. It does no good to focus on the tech if the people writing the code are being murdered or deported.
Source?
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They may have made mistakes over EME but would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?
> would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS Yeah, in a heartbeat. I actually never used Netflix and probably never will. I won't be be party to destroying what is good and not-like-TV about the web, for the sake of stuff that is like TV, and usually is less interesting to me than even silence.
Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't h…
Like an addict, Mozilla became dependent upon the revenue they earned from their Google and Yahoo search deals. Search compliance requirements then prevented them from innovating in the areas you mentioned (and others). Mozilla had an opportunity to reduce the search dependency and transition to a subscription business around 2014-2015 when the paid consumer VPN market started to scale, but based on the internal ince…
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A common refrain, but is anything but obvious. Focusing on the browser could be a losing strategy. I'd argue it probably is. The trajectory is terrible: the tech is being commoditized (WebKit, Chromium) and the market share picture is bleak. The opportunity cost is huge: maintaining a web engine, one which basically just tries to keep up with the others put out by Google et al, takes armies of people that could perha…
> What you're saying here presumes to be the answer to the most important question Mozilla is struggling with: in 10 years, is a browser-focused Mozilla viable? No, I think it presumes that given the Mozilla Foundation's mission, if a browser-focussed Mozilla Corporation is no longer viable, the parent Foundation has utterly failed, and neither it nor the Corporation that supports it has a reason to exist. Now, one c…
That seems like the exact same argument people said with IE6.
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There is a large gap between "focus on the browser" and "make Firefox slightly better." People forget that Firefox gave the world tabbed browsing. Sure, it was around before, but Firefox was the drive and impetus that moved it from a niche idea to the default option across every browser . That was over a decade ago. Firefox has the opportunity to execute a vision of modern web-browsing again. And, frankly, we really…
I seem to remember that Opera was the first stand-alone browser that brought the world tabbed browsing. People switched to Opera for that and its fast performance. Other browsers including Mozilla copied the feature to catch up. Opera was the source of browser interface innovation and I wish we could replicate that process. They also invented popup blocking, speed dial (the default blank tab UI now on every browser),…
We lost "lightweight and snappy" way back in FF 2.0, and every browser blocks pop-ups now. Today's equivalent would be making ad blocking built-in and on by default, which it isn't. The advertising and constant "we updated!" tabs opening up (yeah, great, I don't give a shit, stop telling me) are at least as annoying as Opera's adbar was, IMO. Hopefully we get a spin-off browser eventually that gets back to FF's roots, and then eventually eats it, like FF did Mozilla Browser.
[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…
When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layoff announcement is just inviting a tidal wave of eye rolls.
Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't h…
So what are your suggestions? Let Mozilla die and enjoy Google monopoly in the web? No, thanks. I prefer a non-profit organization which " failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure ". By the way, consider donating to Mozilla if you want them to (be able to) listen to you.
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Counterpoint: Apple when Jobs came back. Sometimes the answer to a company which is trying too many things at random is to drastically reduce the dispersion of effort, and focus ruthlessly. It's very hard to do psychologically, though. IMO Mozilla would probably be better served, business-wise, as being "the customizable Chrome". It would be a much smaller business (i.e. less IP under development), but it could be pr…
I think one challenge is a lot of Mozilla's users see Mozilla as a browser company, whereas Mozilla sees itself as an Internet company. The users may be right. Your Apple analogy is a tough one - if Apple had just stayed focused on PCs, and not the higher level mission of the company around comput-ing-, they would have not invented new kinds of computers. Focus makes sense, once you've locked in on something. The tri…
To the extent Mozilla sees itself as an internet company, it seems it is is so it can subsume other parts of the internet into the browser.
If it genuinely saw itself as an internet company and not a browser company, it would not have:
- killed Thunderbird, its premier non-web non-browser application;
- built a phone where every app was a browser + ad hoc web-y extensions, even where using a web application approach did not make sense;
- the exact same dumb idea as above but for IoT;
- integrated every product idea it makes or acquires (Pocket, Send, now Reality) into its browser as the primarily / solitary entry point
- continually sidelined / demoted even web-but-non-browser technologies like RSS
"Mozilla's users" (and by this you really mean, Firefox's users) see Mozilla as a browser company because everything they do revolves around their browser.
Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't h…
So what are your suggestions? Let Mozilla die and enjoy Google monopoly in the web? No, thanks. I prefer a non-profit organization which " failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure ". By the way, consider donating to Mozilla if you want them to (be able to) listen to you.
As a consumer of the web and a developer on the web, Mozilla is one of the few "big" players in the web ecosystem that I see who are really fighting for keeping the web open.
We were just having this discussion with a friend the other day, on the topic of the anti-trust hearings. What if the web didn't evolve to be open like it was today, but instead had followed the evolution of the mobile space, dominated and fully controlled by only two players? What if it was impossible to run a website from a server in your bedroom but instead had to submit your website to some corporation and wait a couple of days before some semi-human reviewer approved it (or not)? The transformative power of the web on global society would never have been as big as it has been if it had evolved in that model.
For that reason alone, I applaud Mozilla and I decided to start donating today. I would hate for the web to be under the tyranny of some corporation because that would be such a loss for humanity. And we need people and organizations that put up the fight against the Googles of this world.