Is Mozilla relevant anymore?
Most people don't care and the ones who do know Mozilla enough to know they failed miserably to live up to their standards. They dug a hole they can't get out of now.
Most people don't care and the ones who do know Mozilla enough to know they failed miserably to live up to their standards. They dug a hole they can't get out of now.
Firefox is actually pretty good again. They dropped the ball for a while and let Chrome eat their lunch, but I switched back a couple years ago when the whole fiasco that forced users with Google accounts to automatically log in with their browsers occurred. Google eventually added an option after the backlash, but I trust Mozilla's incentive structure more than Google's when it comes to my browser
What you're saying is that Mozilla threw out the very things that made them relevant?
Rust is now managed by the Rust foundation. Having the language shepherded by a dedicated foundation is healthier than keeping it all in house.
It's definitely fair to argue that laying off some of the core Rust developers harms their relevance, but it's definitely more nuanced than "they just threw out..."
Despite the Mozilla leadership and the at times questionable investments, Firefox could never be more relevant.
We need a non-Chrome browser just as we need multiple operating systems with different design paradigms. It gives us flexibility, increased surface area for experimentation, and acts as an anchor for web standards (at least as long as non-Chrome browser share remains).
If running instructions should be free, so should reading information. Even if Chromium is itself open source, Firefox (and mostly Safari) keep Chrome from turning into a thin client that bakes in Google's self interested designs for the web.
I think Mozilla corporation should be acquired or merge with Canonical, Framework, or some other open-minded computing company. The leadership should build a strong "complete package" offering: laptop, phone, operating system, browser. That makes more sense to me than continued investments into weird side projects with little chance of developing traction.
And by weird side projects, I don't mean their efforts in VR or discontinued efforts in TTS. I think building open platforms in these domains makes a lot of sense. I just don't know if Mozilla should be the folks to do it. Their core mission - web - should be their singular focus.
The absolute best thing Mozilla could do, though, is spend money on marketing and partnerships to improve Firefox adoption and stem the losses. After they get growth back, the next thing to do is to develop stable, sensible revenue streams. The browser has become a commodity, which is why I think premium hardware sales could do the trick. Especially if it's "ethical" open hardware.
nrp (Framework founder's HN username), you should go have a chat with Mozilla folks sometime. Now isn't the time to consider an acquisition, but after you achieve growth and scale - please buy them out. Tout them as part of your offering, and use them as an additional funnel to drive Framework hardware sales.
> market that they value privacy and then their actions show otherwise
Which actions?
On the android platform Mozilla removed all extension sideloading capabilities.
Even their store extensions are now almost entirely off-limits for the user unless they create a Firefox account and link it to their device through some extension list ID.
The former just feels like an evil powergrab, the latter feels like a privacy reducing growth hack.
I really want Firefox to be great and do use it on all platforms, but many recent decisions regarding their products are not great.
In addition to that it seems that their toxic culture does appear to leave its mark on the brand.
https://digiday.com/marketing/after-mozilla-stopped-spending...
Sadly, they mention here their Manifesto which states:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/MarketingGuide
> Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
However, if you look at what settings are enabled by default and with the recent announcement of them tracking installs and downloads, they are no better than Chromium.
If such a competitor were to use Chromium/Blink, how do they differentiate from the other browsers? How do they avoid changes that Google push into Chromium/Blink that they don't want? Where do they get the resources to develop standards they want to support like MathML or several of the CSS drafts?
If such a competitor were to create their own web stack, where do they get the resources and time to build the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to a level that is competitive?