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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

The Mozilla CEO is to blame for the chaos they caused around Firefox, and them losing market share to Chrome for the past 14 years.

Mozilla is so dysfunctional that the CEO is rewarded a massive bonus for running the company to the ground and laying off their employees.

They are not interested in competing against Chrome; instead they are chronically dependent on Google's money and on life support, making over 80% of their revenue despite the Mozilla CEO saying that they would not fully depend on Google's money. in the future. [0]

I hope Brave makes Firefox (and Mozilla) even more irrelevant.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

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> I hope Brave makes Firefox (and Mozilla) even more irrelevant.

I get that you hate Mozilla, but from the perspective of an end user of browsers, this is a deeply irrational position. Less competition in the browser space is uniformly bad for end users, as we've seen very clearly in the past.

My dislike for Mozilla the non profit is rather intense but I still agree with you: nothing good comes out of playing into Googles hand here and shortening and simplifying the path they have to try to go to corner the browser market and become really problematic.

I still hope we can manage to break up Google before that happens so anything that delays Googles cornering of the browser market is a win in my eyes.

Note that competition in the browser space is different from competition in the engine space. Even then, Chromium remains open source, we already see things like Brave committing to not shipping the adblock-killing extension changes that Google is pushing.

As to Mozilla, their combination of incompetence, user-hostility, and complete dependence on Google renders them controlled opposition at best. They are not a serious player in the browser space, continuing to treat them like one is directing limited resources and mind share into a failing enterprise.

This ignores the fact that Google is the/a dominant player in at least mail, search, ads, and mobile. That both funds Google's browser and they can nag users to switch.

It's more surprising that Mozilla survives at all (and likely at Google's mercy with default placement payment) since the only other browsers who can hope to compete have massive subsidies from a larger business.

Mitchell Baker's salary is outrageous.

Wow, think of what just a little of that 5 million could buy in terms of bug fixes!

Mozilla Foundation Total revenue: 600 million

Salaries and benefits - management & general: 81 million

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

How would a nonprofit expect to compete against Google? It's not exactly evenly matched is it?

Firefox on desktop has been more than good enough anyway.

Firefox competed against fairly successfully against Microsoft for a decade.

They still spin off massive amounts of cash -- they just piss it away on their foundation, and not improving the product.

> Firefox competed against fairly successfully against Microsoft for a decade.

My recollection was that Microsoft had stopped innovating on IE6 almost entirely during that decade, right? Or at least for the few years that enabled Firefox to get a foothold.

> They still spin off massive amounts of cash -- they just piss it away on their foundation, and not improving the product.

Hard agree on this. So many side quests when the main quest is not done.

No they didn't. Microsoft was just asleep at the wheel. The difference between an incumbent who doesn't care (MS) and an upstart that cares (Google) is easily visible by how rapidly IE market share crashed after Firefox arrived -- and then later, how FF crashed as Chrome grew.

> I hope Brave makes Firefox (and Mozilla) even more irrelevant.

Let's not go this far. Mozilla getting its shit together will only benefit us.

Firefox usage is abysmal on Desktop (from the Cloudflare usage stats which doesn't depend on JavaScript being enabled) and practically inexistent on mobile. My tech friends gave up, and normal users just use the defaults: Edge (which is good enough for them), Safari or whatever browser default browser comes with their smartphone. Mozilla needs to figure out how to attract new users, and focus.

A lot of us are running with modified UA strings to combat fingerprinting.

Specifically because of Cloudflare in my case.

Having stopped Firefox users from browsing the net with infinite verification loops, Cloudflare finds their unbiased estimation of internet browser usage shows Firefox is in decline.

4% share according to our Google Analytics (higher education). Of course, FF users might be more likely to run an adblocker that blocks GA, but either way it's a pretty dire figure.

It seems we're all relying on Apple/Safari to provide that Chromium alternative.

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