Comment by arjie

Comment by arjie 2 days ago

21 replies

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Mozilla has the classic problem of a non-profit that achieved its aims. I was around back in the day and my friends and I were avid evangelists of Firefox - a few cogs in the wheel of the marketing installing Firefox on school machines and getting all the elderly people to use it and so on. There were user groups and student ambassador programs and so on. It was an incredible marketing effort combined with an effort to bring standards and compliance to them into the mainstream. And it worked because they added features at a rate that IE simply did not match.

The extension ecosystem, tabs, plugins, and notably whatever effort they did behind the scenes to ensure that companies that did streaming video etc. would work with their browser all played out really well.

I think the ultimate problem is that Mozilla's mission of a standards-compliant web with open-source browsers everywhere ultimately did get achieved. The era of "Works with IE6" badges has ended and the top browsers run on open-source engines. Despite our enthusiasm at the time for it, I think the truth is that Firefox was probably just a vehicle for this, much bigger, achievement.

Now that it's been achieved, Mozilla is in the fortunate place where Firefox only needs to exist as a backstop against Chrome sliding into high-proprietary world while providing the utility to Google that they get to say they're not a monopoly on web technologies.

Mozilla's search for a new mission isn't some sign of someone losing their way. It's just what happens to the Hero of Legend after he defeats the Big Bad. There's a post-denouement period. Sam Gamgee gets to go become Mayor of the Shire, which is all very convenient, but a non-profit like Mozilla would much rather find a similar enough mission that they can apply their vast resources to. That involves the same mechanics as product development, and they're facing the same primary thing: repeated failure.

That's just life.

edelbitter 2 days ago

This new "please accept cookies and scripts to prove you are running Google Chrome without Adblockers" Internet does not exactly look like mission accomplished to me. And that is before we even get to the part of the Internet that goes straight to "please run this Android app so we can ask Google who truly owns your device".

If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.

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RicoElectrico 2 days ago

American non-profits seem to be run like corporations, with all disadvantages of it. Bloated, losing focus, growing for the sake of growth (where growth means headcount and income, not necessarily charter goals)

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  • bawolff a day ago

    I think its even worse than that. Corporations at least have a bottom line to chase. At the end of the day there is the hard reality of you are either making money or you arent. There is an objective measure of success. American non profits are like the bad parts without the checks and balances of actually having to make money.

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    • bloppe a day ago

      I mean, non-profits also have to make money to stay alive, they're just not allowed to pay dividends to investors.

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Amezarak 2 days ago

Mozilla did lose their way. It happened because they abandoned their core users: you. People who loved Firefox so much they practically forced it on everyone around them.

Google released Chrome with a massive advertising campaign, reaching even to television. They put ads for Chrome on the world's biggest web properties. It was packaged in installers. Not to say it wasn't a good browser - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox. This marketing campaign bought them a ton of marketshare.

Mozilla's response, instead of sticking by Mozilla evangelists, nearly all of whom were power users, was to decide that the browser was too complicated for its users. It needed to be more like Chrome. It needed to be the browser for the proverbial grandma. So they axed features (like Panorama), configurability, and extensibility, alienating everyone who really cared. Only they didn't have the marketing heft of Google, so they didn't get Grandma, either.

Ever since then they've been panicking and grasping at straws and shoving in shovelware like Pocket in obviously vain attempts to regain what they had. And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.

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  • jlokier a day ago

    > - but it wasn't obviously better than Firefox.

    Ah, but Chrome was obviously better than Firefox.

    When Chrome was released, the advertising I recall focused on one killer feature that Firefox didn't get for many years after that: Speed.

    Chrome's JIT JavaScript was so much faster than everyone else's interpreted JavaScript that you could run a materially different kind of software in the browser. It was like the difference between a slow interpreted language and a fast compiled one. Chrome's rendering was also fast.

    There was even a cartoon explaining how the new JavaScript engine worked.

    Chrome felt like the next generation of browser.

    I say this as someone who remained a fan and user of Firefox throughout. I stuck with Firefox through its relatively slow years.

    Firefox caught up, but it took years. It got its own JIT JavaScript, but there were a few years after that where Firefox's rendering was relatively slow by the new standards. However, Firefox has excellent performance all round by now.

    I was disappointed when Chrome came out that JIT JavaScript could even be a marketable feature and wasn't already the default in the best open source browsers, because it seemed like such an obvious thing to do for many years prior, and not particularly difficult. I guess market forces resulted in nobody deciding to do it in Firefox, or any other open source browser, until competition made it a necessity. I was quite surprised, because Firefox seemed like the product of passionate technology nerds, and performance JITs are very fun and satisfying things to make, with visible results.

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    • Ferret7446 6 hours ago

      > When Chrome was released, the advertising I recall focused on one killer feature that Firefox didn't get for many years after that: Speed.

      And sandboxing. Browser sandboxing was rare due to the memory required, and Chrome released right around when it started being practical to run tabs in separate processes.

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    • Amezarak 20 hours ago

      Firefox performance seemed like it really varied for some people. I never noticed any difference.

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  • antisol a day ago

    This, 1000%.

    I've been saying for over a decade that Mozilla decided to abandon their core demographic - power users, instead going after people who "really like chrome, but think that it’s just too fast and doesn’t use enough memory".

    I always questioned how big that demographic was. Looking at a chart of Firefox's market share would seem to indicate that I might have been on to something.

    But Mozilla just keep doubling down on trash. They're not actually interested in hearing what people want. People like me tried to tell them before we abandoned Firefox. But they weren't interested in listening. It's been this way for 10 years or more now.

    I've long been of the opinion that the best thing for Mozilla would be for it to die, so that some other FOSS group (maybe the FSF, or debian, someone like that) could take its place with a firefox fork. And maybe even start actually improving the software again.

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    • eviks a day ago

      > that some other FOSS group...could take its place with a firefox fork

      What stops them from contributing improvements now?

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      • M95D a day ago

        The state of mess the code is in?

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      • antisol a day ago

        Multiple factors, e.g the perceived lack of an immediate need, and also Mozilla's control of the firefox codebase.

        For instance, one improvement that a more user-respecting group might contribute is ripping out all the AI slop. But as pointed out in the article, Mozilla like the AI slop and wouldn't accept those changes.

        If Mozilla was to disappear, orgs like those I mentioned would likely see a more urgent need to take over in order to break the chrom(ium) monoculture.

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  • creata 2 days ago

    > And they never will, until they make people like you and me LOVE Firefox again.

    What are the sorts of features you think they should consider adding?

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    • akimbostrawman a day ago

      Just copy librewolf/mullvad Browser and become actually a private browser. Create self hosted alternative to Google services like Brave has.

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    • bbor 2 days ago

      Random thought, but Kagi is acting like I wish Mozilla would. Their main product is a search engine, but they’ve been trying out a slew of other initiatives, all of which seem well thought out and integrate LLMs in an exclusively thoughtful, opt-in way. Surely many of them will end up being failures, but I can’t help but be impressed.

      Maybe it’s because I’m a power user and they tend to cater to power users, idk — that’s definitely what the comment above yours is hinting at.

      But at this point, I think we can all agree that whatever Mozilla is doing now isn’t working… so maybe power users are worth a shot again?

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      • dralley a day ago

        If Mozilla tried to do something like Kagi, they would likely be castigated by half of HN for "yet another side project adventure"

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