Not focusing on Firefox is what brought it to its state today, so what should Mozilla do? Focus even less on Firefox and instead on ads, AI and begging. Insane.
EDIT: As an aside, it looks like Mozilla's VC fund invested in the funding round[0] of one of the former board members[1] of mozilla.ai which is kinda weird.
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/credo-ai-series-b--...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-mozilla-ai-i...
Suffice to say that we all deserve better.
"focussing on Firefox" isolates you from the vast majority of people who don't use it, and provides €0 of revenue per year to work on Firefox at all.
I'm assuming you're saying that, since FF has a low browser share today, Mozilla focusing their effort to improve it would be wasteful, because that would be putting more resources behind a product that isn't popular.
If so, I wonder how that's different from any other company that wants to grow their market share. They probably face many of the same choices, e.g.: keep your core users satisfied, or try to bring in a new market. It's pretty intuitive to me that putting ads in Firefox would alienate their current core users, but how would putting ads in FF bring in new users? Wouldn't the result just be fewer people using Firefox?
If what they care about is the mission, then that seems like a bad idea. If what they care about is revenue, then I wonder how the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the Mozilla Corporation, squares that tradeoff with the mission they exist to serve.
Focusing on anything other than Firefox (but ads and AI? really?) not only cheapens the brand, but also devalues and risks their Google deal.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42054867 ("Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division (techcrunch.com)")
I don’t know how you can be this out of touch with your users.
source: one of the authors of those emails
From the 990s, it seems Mitchell took out $32,683,642 over the eight years from 2016 to 2023. With 2024 included, she could well top $38M -- not too shabby!
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43112590. 2024 will be the last big comp year for Mitchell.
Then the people who wants to work on/support Firefox can solely work on Firefox, and other people who wants to pursue whatever tech-of-the-day is (eg. crypto, VPN, AI) can push whatever agenda they want in their own org.
Instead of the current state where the other-agendas people are riding on Firefox's brand name recognition while starving Firefox into oblivion.
They won’t do this because then they can’t redirect any of the donations and funding that people give to Firefox to <insert non-browser project here>.
Guess it is just a matter of time until Firefox is behind a walls too?
- We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS
- We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment
- We don't have anyone actively working on an Android or iOS port
- now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain
I wish them luck, but yikes what a very, very deep hole they are trying to dig themselves out of just to reach alpha that thumbs its nose at Windows and the entire mobile market
The hubris of writing a web browser in C++ after looking at Chromium and thinking, "pffft, those morons clearly don't know how to avoid UAF bugs"
Mozilla has constantly ignored the market and their users. Time for other orgs to take it up and time for Mozilla to not renew.
ie, instead of Thunderbird (which I know isn't developed by Mozilla anymore), create a hosted email platform with a PWA that can run and store data locally.
These types of products would have a virtuous relationship with Firefox.
If you want to use the web as your primary application runtime, you're currently stuck with closed-source apps, or pretty bad open source apps that are difficult to integrate.
Sandstorm did (and still is as a community project) try to integrate some existing apps into a cohesive-ish platform with nice security guarantees, but it wasn't really made accessible to every day users.
Something similar to Google Workspace, but open source and hosted by a foundation could be a nice default starting point and/or a principled platform to use, for a lot of users.
Um excuse me? Mozilla has been asleep at the wheel for years, letting Firefox languish while Mozilla plays squirrel with a dozen other things nobody knows or cares about. In fact, I guarantee you that outside of nerd culture, nobody has any idea what Mozilla is. But maybe they have heard of Firefox.
You should be shouting *Firefox Firefox Firefox!* from the rooftops with a massive new ad campaign aimed at growing marketshare rapidly. Then find creative ways to respectfully monetize your enthusiastic fanbase.
This seems like Software Business 101 to me, which is why I am continually mystified you seem unable to grasp these basics.
To Mozilla? No. Donations are not the same as paying for a specific product or service. I do not want to support their other adventures.
> What services do you want that shouldn't be available to non-paying users.
Librewolf, but by Mozilla.
To be fair, that was largely because Netscape was awful.
