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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

civilityandtruth.com

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#111

Post by robbrown451 »

TimSchumann wrote: post #3
causality0 wrote: post #2

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 m…

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.

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

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#112

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv »

kanox wrote: post #41
causality0 wrote: post #2

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 m…

> 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.

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

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#113

Post by ahartmetz »

rjzzleep wrote: post #66
mrweasel wrote: post #46

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 se…

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.

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.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#114

Post by djhworld »

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

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#115

Post by zajio1am »

bmcn2020 wrote: post #51
jeswin wrote: post #48

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. Instea…

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…

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

https://brmlab.cz/project/spyzilla

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#116

Post by dependenttypes »

outadoc wrote: post #40
causality0 wrote: post #2

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 m…

> 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…

> 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).

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#117

Post by dependenttypes »

luckylion wrote: post #97
outadoc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

They are adding openpgp support to thunderbird because enigmail will be dead soon. So much for extensibility.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#118

Post by bishalb »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #98
KingOfCoders wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.).

One of the reasons I'm still on Fox is tree-style tabs (with "Tree Style Tab" extension) and being able to hide top tabs (using userChrome.css).

The best things about tabs in Firefoxia the scrollable tab bar. I am not sure why chrome doesn't add this.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#120

Post by l1k »

cxr wrote: post #49

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 id…

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

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