What Is the Point of Mozilla?
linuxjournal.com
linuxjournal.com
It's hard to imagine a perspective from which this is true that isn't very narrowly constrained to anti-DRM activism.
If anything, implementing DRM was a significant positive for Firefox market share, unpleasant as the decision was. The article says:
"Despite Mozilla's kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway"
Yes - and Mozilla would have lost even more users, faster, if they didn't integrate DRM capabilities. The fact that Mozilla continued to lose users after DRM is not evidence that DRM was bad for market share. DRM stemmed the bleeding a bit.
I understand why people don't like DRM, and I'm sympathetic, but almost nobody actually wants to use a browser without DRM because they'd be cut off from doing what they want to do (e.g. watch Netflix, YouTube). Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares. Firefox didn't "add" DRM so much as they retained it while throwing the rest of Flash out the window. Firefox is clearly better off now.
Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time. They lost a lot of users because they weren't shipping a browser that met modern quality standards. That was probably their single biggest mistake, and that's why their market share is what it is today.
In any case, it's probably not a healthy perspective for Mozilla or its community to just write this off as Firefox being the victim of a big ad campaign for another browser. Mozilla had real problems and missed opportunities, and that's where their focus rightfully should have been.
I also use the developer tools, and they're also adequate for vanilla-js development.
So based on 2 decades of experience with Mozilla, I'd go with Chrome surpassing it in market share as more to do with promotion than Mozilla not being good enough.
While your comment prompts me to try again and figure out why this is the case exactly, Google's marketing is not the reason for me (and, unfortunately, others too).
If I had to guess, I'd say it usually boils down to a feeling of clunkiness and weird hogging of memory/processing, whether true or just perceived. I've read some threads that indicate this is a problem for Mac users in particular, but I don't know if this is actually true.
Other developers on teams I've been on certainly pushed it hard (mostly for the dev tools, which I admit I went to Chrome for at times), so there was 'grassroots' support there if I've used that word correctly, whether that came from being hoodwinked by The Great Advertiser I don't know.
I can pop open Task Manager at random times and see Firefox in the 2GB range (this on an 8Gb machine running Slack, Chrome and PHPStorm at the same time, so it's a little cramped for RAM at the best) and I'm running 20-30 tabs. Even chopping down to a handful still keeps you well over 2Gb.
It won't seize completely the way it used to prior to multiprocess, but you get this weird situation where you get a spinner just switching tabs.
For many years, I defaulted to Firefox because of an extension I loved (FireFTP) which could never make the leap to WebExtensions. I can recall developing on Firefox then patching things to make IE6 happy. But on my home machine I switched to Vivaldi entirely.
And in the long term, I think that by legitimizing DRM like they have, they will still be at a disadvantage, because they've helped give the green light to this class of technologies, where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage.
The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have. Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser. It would frankly be better if they just used Chrome. Mozilla's vain obsession with their brand and with being popular with people who don't care is frankly toxic to them.
We need to stop using the term marketshare when talking about Firefox, because that implies that there is a market, and there isn't. There might be differing levels of usage between browsers, but comparing usage of Firefox to Chrome or Safari is apples and oranges, because Mozilla's goal is not to open an app store and build a monopolistic for-profit closed platform, as Google and Apple's are. And I think that this pseudo-capitalist mentality is causing them to overcompensate in harmful ways.
Imagine if other staples of OSS started acting this way (some of them already do). Imagine if Ubuntu adopted a Microsoft-style forced updates model. I could honestly see them doing that.
And I bring this up in many of my comments, but I'm so glad that when Firefox first came out, they didn't worship at the feet of Microsoft and try to emulate IE6 the way that they worship at the feet of Google. I'm glad that a decade ago they didn't consider themselves failures because they couldn't win over the AOL users.
> Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares.
Yes, exactly. I think DRM is conceptually incompatible with an open web browsing ecosystem, so of course it should require ugly hacks to pull off. If a company wants to introduce closed and hostile code to their users, they should be on their own. It is not our job to facilitate them doing bad things.
> Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time.
That's highly subjective and I strongly disagree. Chrome's UX is AWFUL. It is constantly doing things behind my back, and I can never rely on it for anything. And thanks to Chrome popularizing forced destructive updates, interfaces have become very unstable, and you cannot rely on a feature in your browser even being there when you wake up in the morning. It could just be silently erased.
Their app store is so terrible and filled with so many misleading low quality or outright hostile extensions it is barely useful. And even if they were better, I couldn't rely on them not dissapearing.
Soon, we won't have address bars and URLs will mostly be used for internal use. Ads will be rendered server-side and stitched into content. Our computers will be completely out of our control and run whatever code Google feels like. And Chrome will be an accomplice.
We are truly entering a dark age of technology.
By this logic they had already long legitimized it through their grudging support for Flash. But don't let that stop you from trying to act like it's magically different.
>where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage
They were always at a disadvantage in the fight against DRM. They never had any real control over it to begin with, and had to constantly be at a disadvantage while it was Flash-based. The fact that they adopted EME changes nothing at all, except that some people on the Internet took it personally because they wanted to.
>the way that they worship at the feet of Google
Suuuure they do. Just like they worshiped at the feet of Yahoo before.
>The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have
Some hard evidence for this shift in their mentality would sure be nice. Simply owning a corporation doesn't mean you're suddenly driven by a profit motive. Nor does the fact that you may earn some revenue from things that some people love to hate.
>Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser.
They have always been a business. A non-profit organization is legally a type of business. And even by non-legal definitions they are still a business. A business does not mean "a profit-driven venture".
Just like their mission has always been to make products for everyone, whether or not they happen to hold strong beliefs about privacy or DRM or even web browsers.
>We are truly entering a dark age of technology.
I've been hearing that since I was just a kid. I'm sorry that Mozilla didn't win your DRM war for you (and me), but that doesn't mean they've given up on all attempts to avert your "dark age" prophecy. But they're just a couple of thousand people. They won't be able to avert every disaster.
There is a surprising amount of parallel here to how IE was surpassed in quality by Mozilla/Firefox after IE 6, and that painful period is still haunting IE/Edge.
Not saying it's exactly the same situation, but history rhymes.
> Mozilla's ill-judged adoption of the EME standard downgraded Firefox from a long-standing beacon of software freedom to a well-featured browser much like any other.
I think we need to level up our understanding of how power structures are changed. Either you have an intense revolution, or you have incremental change marked by constant compromise and iteration. In the absence of revolution, which would entail somehow revamping the copyright regime in every major political region (US, EU, Asia), Mozilla had no choice but to implement this stuff in order to stay in the game.
It's infuriatingly easy to stay pure on the sidelines, just like it's infuriatingly easy to be a senator in a safe state casting moral aspersions towards senators in swing states. But senators in swing states get things done; they're on the front lines of change. Mozilla's getting things done, working against both entrenched corrupt political and corporate interests, and armchair technological purists. The way to help the situation isn't to criticize organizations like Mozilla for compromising. It's to change the environment so compromise with corrupt institutions isn't necessary.
If I liked Firefox better than Chrome but Firefox didn't let me watch films in my web browser, I'd run Firefox day to day and open Chrome when I wanted to watch a film.
In my experience running a second browser for one particular troublesome site is something not-particularly-technical people often end up doing without worrying about it too much.
Firefox’s add-ons were influential in spawning today’s App Stores. They introduced tabbed browsing. A JavaScript console and DOM manipulation tools. Internet Explorer had nothing like it, which is why Firefox so quickly caught on.
I wasn’t proposing that implementing AppleScript will shoot up Firefox’s market share, just that until they do, I (and others that care deeply about automation) won’t even look in its general direction as a serious contender to being the main browser.
[1]: They didn’t; NetCaptor did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcaptor
1. Using what budget exactly?
2. Most of those OEMs are already bundling Chrome in order to get the Play Store.
I mean they wanted to build an entire phone OS, and get OEMs to ship that. Shipping a browser should be more manageable, don't you think ?
>2. Most of those OEMs are already bundling Chrome in order to get the Play Store.
Exactly. Most OEMs bundle chrome + other third party browsers depending on their deals and motivations. The play store contract doesn't prevent them from bundling additional browsers.
It seems they are mainly following Chrome these days.
I think this is very disingenuous, for three reasons:
1) It pretends like it's a certainty that Mozilla's market share wouldn't have fallen further without the move. 2) It pretends like whatever effect implementing/not implementing EME would have had could be predicted by Mozilla at the time with 100% certainty. 3) The article doesn't at all mention all of Mozilla's efforts to keep EME from being standardised in the first place.
Which is a shame: an otherwise interesting article has an aftertaste of also being a misleading propaganda piece, even if I agree with the goal of the propaganda.
Obviously if that's the case, it matters little what niche browsers do anyway - because they lost the battle to Chrome years ago.
Just a reminder that Mozilla was able to pull of an unbelievably good deal with Yahoo thanks to Marissa Mayer in November 2014, which made Mozilla winning the lottery in case Yahoo was sold afterwards before 2019.
Yahoo was sold to Verizon shortly after the deal which made it possible for Mozilla to pull out of the deal unilaterally, and still getting a yearly payment until 2019 ($375 Million fixed annually, to be exact).
Please tell me: Who makes a 4 year fixed deal with a browser maker that is losing 10-15% of its users annually? It does not make any sense for Mayer to do this, except if she was completely on the side of Mozilla.
My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management.
It is hard to overstate the deal with Yahoo. It makes Mozilla basically immune to drops in market share until 2020. The deal with switching to the Yahoo search engine (starting in 2016) was already too good to be true, as Yahoo gave Mozilla way more money than Google had done before, and Google was already paying well.
The result is that for around 3 or more years now Mozilla is living inside a bubble, where basically nothing what they do has financial consequences.
Not only that, they are building up enourmous amounts of financial reserves, so I think we will actually never again see Firefox innovating.
When the finances finally will reflect the state of Firefox, that is when they have used up their reserves somewhere in 2021 or 2022, Firefox won't play an active role anymore. Most of the 1000+ employees will have to leave during the next 5 years.
Mozilla switched back to Google with the aim of getting both the Yahoo money and additional Google money.
- vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/the-ghost-of-marissa-mayer-is-still-haunting-yahoo
- techcrunch.com/2017/12/06/oath-and-mozilla-are-suing-each-other-after-firefox-switches-back-to-google-search/
What would Mozilla do that it's not doing? I don't see an obvious answer to the marketshare issue (except maybe marketing). It's not that there's nothing that could be done, but what that thing is is unclear.
I suppose it's true that in the face of financial insolvency management might go into a "do anything" mindset, but that's just a death spiral, it can lead to action but I don't think it helps guide correct action.
But Google, in contrast to Mozilla, has to work hard to innovate and their income is always a reflection of how good they are and they have a management with a long-term vision.
Due to the fixed contract Mozilla will not feel the consequences of their actions for a very long time.
You see this kind of laziness everywhere when money doesn't matter anymore. It is more or less human nature.
To answer your question: It is not about marketshare. Mozilla has always said it is about values and open source, and so on. They could do something great even with 1% marketshare.
Mozilla is basically doing nothing that makes power users say "Wow, I really want to use this browser and will recommend it to my friends and family". Instead for some reason those users are increasingly frustrated with Firefox on multiple levels.
I think there is a slight possibility that the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 will be when you see some subtle changes to how Firefox works. Maybe they get their humility back.
I only try to give an account of general user sentiment. Of course it's very difficult to get an accurate measure of this sentiment, but I see lots of negative comments online, and lots of valid arguments.
Only Mozilla can come up with ways to spend that money.
I think I made it quite clear that it is first and foremost about innovation, and money is only a tool. But usually what you can do in such situation is hiring top people from the industry as leaders.
There are a number of things Mozilla is doing that are appealing to me as a power user.
1. Rust and Firefox Quantum. Mozilla has invested a herculean amount of effort into making Firefox's internals cutting edge, and we've only just started seeing it pay off. The updated CSS rendering component alone made Firefox one of the snappiest browsers, and it's going to get even faster as additional components are rewritten.
2. Firefox is going to start blocking a lot more trackers by default in the coming months; some of this is in beta, more is in nightly. Power users can already do this with extensions, but it's easier for me to recommend a browser that does it by default.
3. Mozilla is reviewing add-ons. There were a lot of complaints about this initially, but I feel safer installing things from Firefox Add-ons than I do from the Chrome Web Store. The review process isn't perfect, but it feels like it's much harder for a Firefox addon to scoop my entire browsing history and get away with it. Allowing me to disable automatic updates for individual extensions is also good; it's a second layer of protection against situations like that Sylish fiasco where an extension suddenly, silently becomes malicious.
4. Add-on APIs. The add-on situation was dire when Mozilla killed XUL extensions and switched to a Chrome-compatible format. But now they're extending it and adding all sorts of functionality for add-ons that Chrome doesn't have, again.
It's not a coincidence that tracking protection will only come with the first build in 2019. They probably had to rewrite their contract with google.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_and_Yahoo_Holdings_Oath_Cou... ends at 2018-01-05.
[edit: seems to be still going. The latest thing I can find is Mozilla on the losing end of a discovery dispute in August: http://lawzilla.com/blog/yahoo-holdings-inc-v-mozilla-corpor... ]
- Is Yahoo obliged to pay anything at all? If Yahoo is succesfull, Mozilla will not get anything.
- Is Yahoo obliged to pay the full $375 million per year or only the difference between the new Google contract and the old Yahoo contract? In the latter case Yahoo would only have to pay Mozilla $375 million minus the Google money if they won.
Unfortunately I don't know more.
But how can Mozilla's advocacy have any effect if there is not a competitive Mozilla browser? The vendors of popular browsers are able to ignore Mozilla and do whatever they want, because there is little threat that people are going to switch to Mozilla's browser en masse.
Chrome is proprietary, Edge is proprietary, Safari is proprietary, even Opera is proprietary.
You might say Chromium is free, and that's technically true, but Google makes it intentionally difficult to install and it almost certainly has practically no market share compared to Chrome itself.
Firefox is the only browser with a meaningful market share that is free software.