Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

> I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me

How about layouts being broken because (funnily enough) web developers are desperate to use features such as grids and flexbox that make their jobs less painfully awful?

Presuming you're a developer - surely you can sympathise with the desire to get people to upgrade their browsers so that webdev's lives are made more pleasant?

>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.

Rust is dead!

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.

Perhaps FF developer edition was meant to test the waters for this approach? Do web people actually use that? I never got to the point of making it part of my process, but I'm not doing enough web to really have a process.

In any case, a dev browser can only be relevant if it's representative of end user browsers. The history of browser wars has shown that a superior dev experience can be a decisive factor in winning users, but it can never be more than a supporting role.

These days a far more plausible dev level monetization angle would be Mozilla's unique position as the origin of Rust. Spin out a Rust subsidiary that sells service and perhaps also some premium tooling/SaaS in the open market while doing work on Rust/Servo/FF for a nominal fee that allows both sides to keep the lights on.

But that (just like paid browser dev tools) would be B2B and apparently Mozilla Corp completely fails to see itself as a B2B actor outside of consumer eyeballs deals like the Google deal and the increasingly outbrainy start tab fillers.

But failure to go that way is hardly surprising. Where would the business skillset come from when the entire organizion outside the tech teams has more in common with the great money furnaces of Wikimedia than with anything else?

The only way I can see for that kind of transition to go well would be some form of merger/acquisition with someone already existing in those fields (consultancy and/or tooling). "you take the engineers, we'll be buying services". But the successful ones would be very reluctant to suddenly load themselves with the entirety of Rust. It would probably take someone owner-managed who brought a decent amount of idealism into the equation. Total number of candidates might amount to zero.