undefined | Better HN

0 pointsdralley8mo ago0 comments

The kneejerk Mozilla hate on HN gets so fucking tedious.

Google's marketing budget for Chrome is greater than Mozilla's entire budget. They sponsor a Formula 1 team FFS. They spent a decade paying off Adobe, Java, AVG, Avast and all the other shitty free AV softwares to auto-install Chrome. They targeted Firefox users with Chrome ads on the homepages of Google and YouTube. That's literally billions of dollars worth of marketing alone that they don't even have to pay for.

Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents combined (Africa, South America, Australia) with a couple trillion USD to spare. Each controls an operating system (or two) with more than a billion users each on which their browsers are pre-installed.

No shit they struggle to compete on brand and marketshare. They're basically forced by the economics of the market to do search deals with Google, and whenever they try to develop independent sources of revenue people shit on them for that too. People shit on them for making deals with Google and make insinuations about them being "controlled opposition" because of that dependency, but also shit on them for pursuing any other independent sources of revenue, like the branded VPN service or the innocuous cross-promotion of that Disney movie with the Red Panda.

People shat on them for trying to compete with Android via FirefoxOS because the bet didn't work out, even though it was probably the only way they could have avoided this outcome and gained real independence, had it worked out.

"Just focus on Firefox", they say - unless that means laying off people that work on Rust, or AV1, or Opus, or WebAssembly, or Let's Encrypt, or experimental browser engines that wouldn't have been production-ready for a decade. According to HN, Mozilla should focus but also keep churning out and spinning off research projects, but only successful research projects, not ones that fail. Anything Mozilla does is always retroactively terrible if it fails but if it works out great they never get credit for it anyway.

0 comments

leidenfrost8mo ago

The idea behind the parent comment is not that they can't compete, but they are specifically made not to.

Sort of a puppet browser made only for proving the court that the giants are not technically a monopoly, while ranking a bare minimum number of users for them to count.

While that's not entirely unreasonable, I don't think that's the doom of Mozilla. Puppet or not, their tangled codebase makes it a pita to contribute anything if you're not being paid a salary for it.

Despite having a high expectation for the "free browser", deep down we know that it's the same "Free in theory" software, not unlike Java or Vscode. Software that's made by a company and once they stop pouring money on corporate development and support the project will become a zombie in no time.

dralleyOP8mo ago

It is completely unreasonable and (willfully) ignores the long, long list of places where Mozilla has fought against the other vendors including (especially) Google on privacy grounds.

It's the sort of thing people say mostly for their own self-satisfaction, without actually thinking about it or trying to figure out the answer. Like: "both parties are the same" or "what have the Romans ever done for us"

II2II8mo ago

Mozilla can do a lot more to fight on privacy grounds. I realize it isn't going to happen since even enabling a lot of the existing privacy features by default is going to break many websites (which, in the minds of most people, would reflect a broken web browser), so they are stuck talking about it while end users have to jump through a bunch of hoops if they want to get the browser as it is advertised.

const_cast8mo ago

Yes, I agree completely. You cannot even compare Chrome and Firefox because the sheer privacy violations of Chrome make it not a worthy competitor. The difference is, nobody cares.

Google develops Chrome and Chrome relies entirely on Google's money. Google is the default search engine. They are much, much, MUCH more tightly coupled to Google than Firefox could ever be.

But nobody says anything. And yet, Firefox makes Google the default search engine, and everyone has a think piece on it. Firefox is dead, they say, they're just Google's puppet. Then what is Chrome?

1 more reply

aeve8908mo ago

>Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents

Please get real. Comparing real output money measure in an annual basis with market capitalization is ridiculous. It's like someone comparing your annual salary with their net worth.

jksflkjl3jk38mo ago

They don't need alternative revenue streams. Just take the millions they receive from Google and spend it on tech. Cut out all the warm and fuzzy political marketing bullshit and all the management that have promoted it.

zelphirkalt8mo ago

It is not so clear cut now, is it? The often silly wannabe social justice stuff does cost money, and their management does get record high payments, even though they don't do a particularly good job, and even though important engineering projects were cut. Mozilla's behavior is not a culture of engineering, that fosters trust in the browser product.

thesuitonym8mo ago

This is such a nonsense argument. Nobody is upset that that more people use Chrome than Firefox. That has never been the case. In fact, historically, Firefox users tend to like being on the outside.

The "kneejerk Mozilla hate" isn't about marketshare, it's about ineffective leadership bringing features nobody wants while ignoring problems users currently have.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse