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Firefox Was Always Enough

ianbicking.org

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#2
I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla:

a few tips from from no one:

1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards.

2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox needs to be the best browser. It is the thing that makes the company money and makes it recognizable to the lay person. You will never be able to outspend Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but they are always going to have more competing priorities pulling their best engineers away and causing political infighting about what should be crammed into the browser. Mozilla does not have to have any of that.

3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.

That is it. I like some of Mozilla's side projects and I agree with the business philosophy that they should be looking to diversify their revenue stream, but I think they should all be part of two core products: Firefox and Thunderbird. Why Thunderbird? Because I think there is an undeserved niche in the business email service provider space and I think Mozilla can have a universal client on desktop, phone, tablet, and browser that is the trojan horse to up sell that product.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#3
> Mozilla has always made the bulk of its money from selling the preferred placement of a search engine in Firefox

It's amazing how valuable eyeballs are -- that you can fund an entire software project just that way.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#4
I dont think I understood the point about mozilla wanting to influence the web being bad for firefox.

Particlulalry if having lots of users is how you influence things, since then you need to provide a good product (or lock users in via some external ecosystem).

Maybe some recent EU legislation moves can help them in the same way the browser choice thing helped.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#5
> Now it’s focused on technological pessimism in the form of a security and privacy emphasis.

First time I've seen this phrased that way. If all you can think of with regards to tech is security and privacy, you are the EU: "technological pessimism".

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#7

I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla: a few tips from from no one: 1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards. 2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox n…

> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.

I know Mozilla's non-Firefox projects aren't popular here, but if Thunderbird really wanted a niche in the business world Mozilla would need to start an email service to go with it. The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#8

> Mozilla has always made the bulk of its money from selling the preferred placement of a search engine in Firefox It's amazing how valuable eyeballs are -- that you can fund an entire software project just that way.

It’s not the eyeballs that are valuable. It’s the money those eyeballs will spend.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#9
Firefox lacks in the default UX area, just from the top of my head:

Print to PDF is better in Chrome, comes with a preview.

Search marks matches in the scroll bar.

Opening a recently closed tab opens a new tab in Chrome instead of replacing the existing one.

There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.

I like the bookmark tags feature of Firefox though, which Chrome lacks.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#10

I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla: a few tips from from no one: 1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards. 2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox n…

What about a @firefox.com webmail service. I’d pay for it.
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