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It’s time to give Firefox another chance

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Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the key misconceptions about Mozilla is that Firefox is their "core business." It is not. Mozilla is not a company; their "core business" is not defined by their most successful software product. It's defined by their mission statement: "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all." They've used their $100-160 million (it has grown over time) budget for a lot of things in the…

> Mozilla is not a company Mozilla Corp. is taxable and had revenues of $329.5 million in 2014 per Wikipedia. Most of that money came from Google in exchange for making Google the default search engine in Firefox. Open internet and goodwill aside, Firefox is very much their core business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

That said, the Corporation is wholly owned by the foundation, and are both run according to the Mozilla Manifesto. (moco employee here)

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#732
post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you confusing the not for profit mozilla foundation and the for profit mozilla corporation here ? The foundation had engaged in tax evasion over the money raised through the corporation and ended up settling with the IRS by paying a $1.5 millions fine[1], they had provisioned $15 millions for this fine, suddenly they got a few unexpected millions to spend on whatever. I agree that comparing mozilla to google make…

Is there a difference? Is there a reason we say Google and not ABC? The seperation is purely legal and financial, no?

To your last question, yes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15409217

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#733
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am however one of those. While I understand the technical reasons for the switch I don't think it has been handled well. Extensions I rely on daily are going to cease functioning because the WebExtensions API isn't mature enough for the developers to migrate. Are they going to wait? Probably not... most affected will probably abandon their projects because FF rushed the transition and their user base is about to dr…

They had to sort of rush it, because they wanted to rush out multiprocess, to stop the bleeding of users (which has very much worked [1]). And then they needed to follow up with the switch to WebExtensions relatively quickly, so that extension authors wouldn't start porting their extensions to multiprocess and then after that effort have to rewrite their extensions to be WebExtensions-compatible. They wanted extensio…

Developers can't port to APIs that don't exist. Mozilla holding to the November deadline as implementation has slipped hasn't helped them in any way.

Mozilla kept pushing developers to make their XUL extensions multiprocess-compatible even after WebExtensions was announced. At one point, they were going to keep the multiprocess compatibility shims until the WebExtensions deadline, but then they decided to start removing them sooner.[1] SDK extensions were mostly multiprocess-compatible already.

Developers are currently maintaining multiple branches of their extensions because 52 ESR is missing APIs and 57+ won't support hybrid extensions. Aligning the WebExtensions transition with the ESR cycle would have made things a lot easier for them.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firef...

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