Firefox Test Pilot

You need to realize that behind every sarcastic, disdainful comment about Mozilla or Firefox is years, often nearly decades, of Firefox usage, contribution, and promotion. When people come to trust and rely upon a tool for getting work done for many, many years, and then the organization responsible for that tool starts changing priorities in ways that negatively effect the tool's usability and usefulness, people react negatively.

And when the organization then gets defensive and offended at people's negative reactions, it creates a self-reinforcing cycle of negativity and not-listening-to-the-other-side.

Mozilla makes a great browser, saving the world from Microsoft and IE. Nearly two decades later, Mozilla starts mucking with the UI, chasing the mythical never-used-the-Internet-before-and-will-always-be-that-way user, forcing unwanted, unrequested features upon all users, etc.

Naturally, people respond negatively. "Why are you doing this, Mozilla? Why are you ruining this great browser? Why are you now chasing numbers and mythical unicorn users instead of pursuing excellence and usefulness like you always have before?"

Then Mozilla employees get defensive and respond with, "What? Why don't you like what we're doing? Why aren't you being nice to us? We're doing this for you! Stop being mean!" And then they say to each other--especially on Bugzilla reports--"Ugh, more comments from the peanut gallery."--or in Mozilla-speak, "advocacy"--"Locking this bug to editbugs-privileged only accounts."

So now we have two sides that are offended by each other and not listening to each other. But the two sides are not equal, for without users, what is the point of Mozilla and its products? Plenty of well-made software has fallen into obscurity over the years when people weren't using it. And without Firefox, what are users left with but poor imitations?

Undoubtedly Chrome has had an impact here, but Mozilla is mistaken to imitate Chrome to recapture its users. Some people leave Firefox for Chrome because they prefer Chrome, or because Chrome is faster (and they don't mind its memory usage). But other people leave Firefox for Chrome because--wait for it--Firefox has stopped being Firefox! They figure, well, if Firefox is going to try to be a poor imitation of Chrome, I might as well just use Chrome.

But what we really want is authentic Firefox, the browser that we started using when IE ruled the world and Phoenix rose from the ashes of Netscape to save us from the Evil Empire. Microsoft isn't the threat to the Internet it used to be, but monoculture will always be a threat, and proprietary, walled-garden, app-store-style software is a growing threat to user freedom and empowerment.

We need Firefox to be Firefox, not Chrome, not Mozilla's experiment of the month, not Mozilla's platform for enacting social change.

I guess the problem is that Mozilla is literally not who it used to be, because the people are different, and they have different ideas. Probably money has something to do with that; a few years of hundred-million-dollar+ deals obviously has an impact. People get used to the money, and when it comes down to it, they'll do whatever they think it takes to keep the money flowing, even if it means undoing what made them successful.

But the root problem is the Rug Problem: people react negatively when the rug is yanked out from under them without their consent. Mozilla should recognize this and not react defensively.

Instead, Mozilla should interpret every such comment as evidence of bugs in the Mozilla organization, people, processes, and priorities. When "customers" are unhappy, smart companies don't get offended and tell off their customers, they figure out why customers are unhappy, and they make them happy again.

As for myself, I'm keeping an eye on Pale Moon, which has made a commitment to stability in API and UI, and to usefulness for its users. I wish Mozilla would make the same commitment to its users and extension developers.

(oh wait, no, we had to cancel that one for licensing reasons)