When you choose to sell your user base to google, you are part of the problem
So... pick one, but you can't both be angry at Mozilla because they use Google's money and be angry at Mozilla because they're trying to find a way to work without Google's money.
More seriously, if Mozilla really can't afford to do browser R&D, I really have to wonder why they keep dumping money into political & non-browser related causes.
Look, no offense, but to do "harm" by killing Servo, people would have had to have been using Servo, or there would need to be a clear path to people using Servo, which there wasn't, really. The parts of Servo which were technically viable in any reasonable timespan were already mainlined into Firefox.
>embedding Pocket
You genuinely think this is "more harm" than Google? Seriously? Not to mention that Pocket is a non-Google source of profit for Mozilla.
>and let's not forget how they siphoned the money they made with their Google contract, they chose to fund their other questionable endeavors instead
"questionable endeavors" like, um, Rust and Servo? You're ignoring the successes while only alluding to failures. I like both Rust and Servo, but say what you will about Firefox OS, at least it presented new market opportunities. Rust and Servo did not.
>When you choose to sell your user base to google, you are part of the problem
Please suggest a viable business model for Mozilla, then.
They didn’t even make Firefox, someone else did and they took it over, they had no foresight. They ignored people’s complaints about memory issues for years. They didnt keep one tab from crashing the whole thing for years, followed chrome to fix. Frankly Mozilla really is a dinosaur and seems to lack any real practical innovation.
HN has a serious revisionist history problem w/r/t Mozilla.
The memory problems, and the lack of multiprocessing, were both hamstrung by the Firefox extension model, which allowed nearly unlimited customization of the browser, at the expense of nearly unlimited ability to muck up the internals of the browser. It led to any poorly coded extension being able to cause all sorts of memory leaks, sluggishness, bugs and crashes.
And yet techie types were screaming bloody murder when they started talking about "innovation" via transitioning away from the XUL foundations. They didn't care about performance or security so long as their XUL extensions kept working, they said. I remember those threads well.
edit: oh look, there's one in this very thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349686
Certainly they could have made more progress and faster, had they not had a huge existing community to transition, unlike Chrome who had a completely fresh start and far more resources.
Also, on all your other issues, see https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...
this is bullshit. people working on Netcape's dime, myself included, under the Mozilla project umbrella, and with approval from the Mozilla leadership, myself included, created the browser that would come to be Firefox.