>and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.
Could and should Mozilla have done better? Yes. "Any energy?" is uncalled for, however.
There was the entire Quantum rewrite for significant performance boosts (around the time Chrome started getting called out for bad perf). There's containers, anti-tracker tech, and a big privacy push.
There is much more they could have done, and my outsider opinion is that Mozilla the organization lost its way and focused too much money and effort on things that don't matter, but it's not like they pulled an IE6 and abandoned Firefox.
Mozilla org has completely lost sight of their base. A good 70-80% of their budget should be on their core product development and adjacent products only. The fact that only recently have they discovered, hey, we had this pretty good email client that we let all but die off.
They should separate their core rendering and script engine teams to focus on better embed-ability and security structures. Another team(s) focused on the integration for Firefox as a browser. Another for Thunderbird. The fact that they killed off their Rust efforts, XULRunner and so many other things that could be really useful today is just painful.
Yeah, XUL didn't run great on 1998 hardware, but what are so many apps targeting today, Electron. And now there's a resurgence towards lighter options (Tauri and others) because it kind of makes sense to (re)use a browser rendering engine for general UI development. It's extremely flexible, has a flushed out (if somewhat complex) styling and theming system, multiple language support, complete font rendering, svg rendering, and accessibility support and runs on/under everything under the sun.
Maybe hire on some of the types that have tried and failed to remake email and browsers that have some creative vision on how users actually use these applications, and let them work with the engineering teams to make quality software again. Spend less time on branding, and more time on the core tech. They still have enough brand reach and clout that people will try the new stuff and if it's good, then organic growth can and would work (again).
Hell, if they want to branch out... make a REALLY great email and communications platform that is open-source with a hosted model. How big of a pain is it to self-host many of these things today? If they want to acquire someone, bring in Caddy, Fastmail and/or Zimbra for adjacent tech development.
I only harp on the email and Thunderbird side because two decades ago, they were in a better spot than anyone to offer a competing product to Outlook+Exchange and they just didn't even try. And now even Outlook kind of sucks because the cloud integration is what it is at scale. Leaving a gaping hole where that entire market used to live. A great open-source core product, with a good extensibility model and some commercially licensed integration points could have been insanely popular.
... You think Mozilla don't focus enough on Firefox, so you think they should spend more money on Thunderbird, which is an app in an almost-nonexistent market (desktop email)?
Some folks are just never happy with Mozilla.
Firefox has massively improved in recent years. WebExtensions being async prevented horrific freezes that used to happen. Rewriting components in Rust, and using web assembly for native libs, are both good for security. And WebRender was revolutionary.
Two decades ago, Thunderbird was in the single best position to provide an alternative to Outlook. Now, not so much. If they'd had the foresight to do that two+ decades ago, they could be in a similar position to Google Docs or O365 today in terms of revenue generation.
They're a bit behind at this point on what people even like in a browser. They should focus on the core technology. I think dropping Servo and the Rust efforts was probably a misstep and burning cash on marketing and buying out unrelated companies altogether doesn't help.
edit: Also, Thunderbird doesn't HAVE to be just a desktop email client. If blackberry had developed email clients for iOS and Android early on, they would still be relevant today.
I just wished they could rebalance their allocation and focus on simple daily usability things. Just a bit more.
ps: for instance, the screenshot tool is brilliant
They fired Brendan Eich, who invented JS, led Netscape past IE, and then headed Mozilla. Who, when fired, started Brave and turned it into a bigger system than FF (including the only relatively new free search engine with its own index), from scratch, in a world already dominated by Chrome, and Safari.
I know, I know, Eich donated personal money to some cause that some people on the internet didn't like. But from a business perspective, it was the stupidest thing they could have done, and is the point at which FF went from growth to (fast) loss.
(And the cause itself was not justified, especially considering it was a private donation, it was a legal org (not like KK or whatever), and he apologized afterwards. Even if it was a mistake, that should not have been justification for firing him.)
Mozilla's mistake was not in firing Brendan Eich (and Brendan Eich was not fired).
Mozilla's mistake was in promoting Brendan Eich to CEO.
Mozilla employees said ~"we were not totally comfortable with Brendan as a leader in the Technology role, but we recognized his long history with the Org and his Technical excellence, so we kept mostly quiet. But we strongly object to his promotion to CEO and primary representative of Mozilla to the world, because we do not feel that he represents the Org's values and do not believe he will be an effective leader of us."
Brendan probably could have returned to his CTO role with little fuss. But he may have had larger aspirations, he may have been sick of working under existing leadership, and he may have been personally disappointed by the Org's vote of no confidence in him. All are 100% reasonable! So he resigned. He was not fired. Yes the board might have "recommended" that he resign, but he would have been crazy (and display poor leadership abilities!) to try to stay in the CEO role after that drama.
> and he apologized afterwards
Has he? Not really. At least not contemporaneously with the events at Mozilla, and likely not since then. To be clear -- I don't think he should feel the need to apologize for personally-held beliefs. But I don't think it's possible to be a leader of people in any Org while simultaneously holding beliefs that are so offensive to the same people.
...
We do agree that Brendan's resignation was a net loss for Mozilla. But he might have not been able to succeed in the Mozilla Org anyway. Even as CEO, he'd have the board to contend with. As CTO, he had the CEO and the board to contend with. If there are effective people in that group, they are not making themselves known.
On what metric is Brave bigger than Firefox?
Not from scratch. Brave is modified Chromium.
Meanwhile they have had consistently growing revenues and consistently declining number of developers.
Citation needed? And no, the 2020 layoffs don't count: It's 2023.
What's important is the number of developers they put on the project.
It's not about the overall company its about browser team. I'd love to see a comparison of the actual sizes of the teams creating browsers, isn't Safari only a handful of (admittedly extremely talented) people?
Firefox was "the" customizable browser with great ad-block.
Not that it matters, because FF performance has become so terrible for me that it was no longer really usable anyway.
