Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

Back then Firefox was a brand with decent recognition.

That's a great question, honestly, and I like your framing of trust.

I do not trust Mozilla to keep a product alive. I was frustrated by Firefox OS and more recently Pocket, but everything they've tried or acquired aside from the browser itself (and Thunderbird I guess?) has failed and been shut down. That has burned a lot of people along the way.

For this reason I can't see myself becoming a user of any future Mozilla projects.

Merge Mozilla (including Firefox Relay, Mozilla VPN, etc ) with FastMail or Proton, price it reasonably and I’d be on board. If it worked well I’d recommend it to anyone I could.

I understand email isn’t easy but it difficult to imagine why Mozilla didn’t seize the opportunity.

> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt

Literally nobody skeptical of Mozilla is giving MS and Google the benefit of the doubt. Mozilla gets skepticism from people exactly because they don't want Mozilla to become like those companies.

Pocket in particular was a breech of trust. It brought ads and surveillance to firefox, when many users had turned to firefox in the first place to avoid those same things. Of course that was going to draw criticism.

Google and MS are never going to do anything other than sell out their users for profit. Firefox users are more fiercely critical of the introduction of anti-features and enshittification because they don't really have anywhere else to turn to. Every other browser is just openly collecting your personal data, pushing ads in your face and shoving AI down your throat. The best alternatives we have to Firefox as a browser that respects its users at all are forks of Firefox. If firefox fails because it becomes a chrome clone that's also bad for privacy people will stop using Firefox and if Firefox dies off there are real questions about how many of the forks will continue to be actively maintained.

The browser ecosystem needs an alternative to chrome. Users want a browser that doesn't push ads, collect data, and allows customization. People complain about Firefox because the stakes are high.

I believe that this is just the typical pattern of groupies being more toxic than band-members or crew. If you go to /r/rust, every announcement of a donation to the Rust Software Foundation is met with derision for the donor. In fact, if you go there today, you'll see it's got some extraordinary drama going on - primarily from non-programmers. If you look at the latest Arduino developments, it's the same story with non-users enacting some purity ritual and users being more sedate.

The reality of the thing is that community-oriented projects have the problem that the groupie-layer of the community are a group that are so marginally attached to the organization that the death of the organization won't affect them but are sufficiently attached to the organization that they can affect the org.

A population like that will naturally tend towards extraction of all surplus from the organization - if the org dies as a result, it doesn't matter, but if they don't do this they're "leaving money on the table" so to speak. With the rise of social media, the groupie layer of people can be extraordinarily large since forums with centralized sign-on allow for a variety of subjects to be posted and consequently being in the fandom is cheap - you don't have to seek news, it'll be there for you to have an opinion on. Hacker News, Reddit, etc. lead to a grouping point for people to have opinions on things they care so little about they would never seek it without it being thrust upon them by The Feed.

So I agree with you. It's challenging. I don't think it's because the community is special, though. I think it's just the structure of communities today because of the dynamics of social media.