This is the fictional hallucination that somehow makes it into every comment section about Mozilla. So let's go through the facts one more time:
(1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation.
(2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some exceptions (we'll get to those).
(3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.
(4) The narrative that a failure to keep up/push new features drove market share losses paints a picture that's entirely zoomed in on Mozilla and ignores Google leveraging its search and mobile monopolies to muscle its browser onto the map, which likely would have happened regardless of how good Firefox was.
(5) The narrative that the browser was broken and behind is somewhat outdated - it was true in the market share loss era, but then they did the dang thing and launched a major engineering effort, fundamentally rebuilt the major parts of the browser via Project Quantum, a monumental engineering transformation that delivered speed and stability, the thing everyone asked for. It's obviously not perfect, but in terms of performance and stability its certainly good enough to be a daily driver in most cases and not in a state of tragic disrepair.
(6) Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all their market share overnight.
That said, yes, there are bad things: the dabbling in adtech is bad imo ("privacy preserving ads" seems to be category error), dabbling with AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point in its current iteration, Pocket was understandable as a revenue grower but seems have been a wash and annoyed users and they didn't bother to maintain it, Mozilla nonprofits broader advocacy for privacy seems to be confusing some people, and Firefox OS genuinely did seem to have cost engineering resources at a time that they lost market share. That said, I would love if there was a 10 year old Firefox OS project right now given Google's pushing of developer certification.
So, yes, there's stuff I don't love. I don't feel like this iteration of Mozilla has the innovative spirit of, say, Opera back in its heyday, and it's not as polished as Chrome. But the comment section rhetoric has spilled over into fever dream territory and not is even pretending to map onto any coherent historical timeline, factual record, or story of cause and effect, and often contradictory in its declaration of demands.
> The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.
I don't necessarily disagree, but there were more than a few things that were before 2020:
Apple wouldn't let Firefox onto the iPhone. Pretty big writing on the wall, there. Turns out it's really hard for a sub-billion-dollar company to succeed with a mobile OS, though, which is why we only really have two left. (Even Microsoft couldn't swing it)
> Mozilla caves to Widevine DRM: 2014
Shipping the only major browser that can't play movies, cool cool cool.
> Directory Tiles: 2014
Nearly everything on the web visited with Firefox is funded by advertising. The new tab page is one of the least obtrusive surfaces in the browser that still gets seen. Seemed worth a shot to try building an ad stack in that space which tried not to surveil.
> Pocket acquisition: 2015
Discovery on the web is hard. Maybe that's a job for a browser? Maybe folks will pay for it? Maybe it can pay folks on the web?
> Firefox Focus: 2015
Privacy seems like a good idea. Maybe folks would like a browser that focuses on that?
> Cliqz experiment: 2017
That's Brave Search, these days. Lots of folks seem to like it?
> "Looking Glass" Mr. Robot sponsorship: 2017
I don't know the whole story there. IMO, looked to me like some earnest folks tried to do something fun but rolled a 1 on the d20 for a critical fail. Footguns abound.
Not saying all the above were handled with perfection, but I was there for all of them and there were good folks doing things that made sense at the time. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess?
I agree that I don't think there was anything wrong with Firefox Focus, and the hostile reaction to the Mr. Robot thing I find completely inexplicable. It didn't involve telemetry, sinister industry collaboration, compromise performance, or implicate Mozilla as a bad industry actor in any meaningful way. It all hinges on buying into a very idiosyncratic attempt at moral equivalence to egregious breaches of trust that never really made sense to me.
Of the list, I would grant that Firefox OS has a credible case for siphoning non-trivial resources away from the browser at a time that coincided with their period of market share loss.
The others I don't love, because again I could compare this to what I consider the peak of Opera before it went to Chromium, I considered it to push truly mind-blowing user beneficial innovation (Opera Unite was truly mind blowing to me, and I fully buy the hype about its revolutionary potential, though I suspect in our present environment, perhaps an unsustainable security nightmare).
So clearly there are ways to do it better, and I accept them as falling outside the 2020 to 2025 window. But their invocation on behalf of a tragic narrative of Mozilla misjudgment strikes me more as containing a pound of irresponsible rhetorical excess for every ounce of truth. Though I'm heartened that it seems the tide has turned against this narrative on HN.
Same! I remember when Firefox 2 and 3 were major marketing and media events, and the subject of great excitement from users almost akin to the release of a new iPhone.
I think it's unfortunate we got away from that cadence though I'm sure it was for good reasons I don't fully appreciate.
You're trying to reframe this as a factual error about budgets and timelines, but you're missing the core argument.
> (1) They spend more on browser development now...
Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency, not a defense of strategy. If the budget is higher but market share and momentum are still falling, it supports the point that leadership is failing.
> (2) The majority of things... don't actually cost that much...
This misses the real cost. The budget line item for a "lab" is trivial. The opportunity cost in leadership attention, engineering mindshare, and strategic focus is not. You can't fight a monopoly while splitting your attention.
> (3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015...
This is a red herring. The issue isn't the initial loss to Chrome's rise; it's the ongoing failure to regain ground. That failure correlates directly with a pattern of distractions (which you yourself list).
> (4) The narrative... ignores Google leveraging its... monopolies...
The fact of Google's monopoly is precisely why focus is so critical. It's the strongest argument against dabbling in side-projects, not an excuse for it. When your opponent is a giant, you have to be 100% focused on the mission.
> (5) ...they did the dang thing and launched... Project Quantum...
You bring up Project Quantum, which is the perfect example proving the original point. Quantum was a (now ancient, by 2017) all-hands-on-deck success. It was a focused effort. Why is today's leadership repeating the Firefox OS playbook (distraction) instead of the Quantum playbook (focus)?
> (6) ...no one can explain what missing browser feature...
This is a straw man. No one is asking for "one magic feature." The request is for leadership to stop distracting the organization with things that aren't the browser.
You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting projects that formed the basis of the criticism ("adtech is bad," "AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point," "Firefox OS... cost engineering resources").
I'm only going to pick out a handful of these, because otherwise the conversation would be long, but the through line in all of these is that they're not accountable to baseline factual accuracy (and yes, that matters), and they're attempting to rehabilitate malformed criticisms without taking responsibility for the criticisms in the form they've been expressed, and even the attempts at rehabilitation are flawed.
>Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency, not a defense of strategy.
I know you wanted to keep this conversation outside the realm of facts, but that's hard to do when active internet users in 2009 were around 1.77 billion and are now at 5.5 billion, spending in the industry as a whole has exploded, browser complexity has grown to the point that they are effectively mini operating systems, the complexity of the ecosystem of web apis and standards and complexity of security has expanded by orders of magnitude.
Moreover, treating the change in market share like a failure is nonsense in a world where distribution is dominated by OS bundling and defaults. Firefox could double its dev budget and still lose share if Microsoft, Apple, and Google keep leaning on their platform power.
So there are so many levels on which to reject the premise of "spending more to achieve less", which I think it goes to show that measuring these criticisms against the factual record is actually extremely important.
And again, I would reiterate that you're not taking responsibility for voluminous criticisms that are more real than you seem to recognize, which quite literally do suggest that the side bets siphoned away real resources n from software development. You yourself are making a form of that argument, but characterizing it as "distraction", which conveniently can't be measured in development funds or lines of code, but hinges on subjectively judged abstractions (aka vibes) like mind share and "focus".
>This is a red herring. The issue isn't the initial loss to Chrome's rise; it's the ongoing failure to regain ground.
Unless you think that the dynamics driving Chrome's initial rise in market share stopped being leveraged, the significance of its platform dominance in explaining its market share is every bit true now as it was then, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. If anything it's only intensified. And again, this is not taking responsibility for the actual criticisms in the forms they have been expressed, which tend to make no such distinction, mention market share collapse explicitly, and omit the rise of Chrome from the story entirely.
>This is a straw man.
I promise you it's not, and if I wanted to be uncharitable I could have emphasized some truly off the charts claims people have made with every ounce of confidence and self-assurance that they spoke on behalf of the Mozilla user base, e.g. conspiratorial suggestions that the nonprofit/corporate subsidiary organization is intended to trick people, that they're manipulating their nonprofit reporting figures, completely sincere but inaccurate attempts to claim that the VPN and Pocket were substantial money sinks, conspiratorial insinuations of quid pro quo cooperation with Google's monopoly, or most amazingly, a categorical claim that Quantum was abandoned rather than finished.
Some of the criticisms, quite forcefully made here on HN, have been that Mozilla ignores feature requests, either generally, or specific ones, like tab customizations, or, in this thread, WebUSB. Everyone dies on a slightly different hill. But they all tie the issue of market share to the issue of "focus" on the browser however quantified. And if you don't think it's a matter of feature development, the logic is equally flawed if you substitute a new preferred term like "core browser". Just like there's no magic feature that restores the market share overnight, there's no such thing as a sufficient threshold of focus on the core browser that achieves that restoration of market share.
>You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting projects that formed the basis of the criticism
I think that misreads the balance of emphasis in my comment. I would say my comment was a dispute of the vast majority of ventured criticisms, combined with an acknowledgment of proportionately a small few. There are needles of legitimate criticism buried a haystack of spurious nonsense. I would also suggest it's a bit of a misread in a more important sense, in that I'm attempting to demonstrate a degree of case-by-case reasonableness that contrasts with the one-dimensional nature of criticisms. Both in this thread and in my general experience and defenses of Firefox are even handed and willing to acknowledge criticisms, and that spirit of even-handedness is not reciprocated in criticisms that ever recognize their rhetorical excess. In fact I would argue in this conversation it's being abused in an attempt to leverage it into a confession of a contradiction.
That's not everything, but I think it serves as a representative encapsulation. If you want, pick out whichever point you believe is your strongest unanswered objection, and I'll hear you out, though we might be far enough into this comment tree that HN won't give me the option to reply.
(1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation.
(2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some exceptions (we'll get to those).
(3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses.
(4) The narrative that a failure to keep up/push new features drove market share losses paints a picture that's entirely zoomed in on Mozilla and ignores Google leveraging its search and mobile monopolies to muscle its browser onto the map, which likely would have happened regardless of how good Firefox was.
(5) The narrative that the browser was broken and behind is somewhat outdated - it was true in the market share loss era, but then they did the dang thing and launched a major engineering effort, fundamentally rebuilt the major parts of the browser via Project Quantum, a monumental engineering transformation that delivered speed and stability, the thing everyone asked for. It's obviously not perfect, but in terms of performance and stability its certainly good enough to be a daily driver in most cases and not in a state of tragic disrepair.
(6) Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all their market share overnight.
That said, yes, there are bad things: the dabbling in adtech is bad imo ("privacy preserving ads" seems to be category error), dabbling with AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point in its current iteration, Pocket was understandable as a revenue grower but seems have been a wash and annoyed users and they didn't bother to maintain it, Mozilla nonprofits broader advocacy for privacy seems to be confusing some people, and Firefox OS genuinely did seem to have cost engineering resources at a time that they lost market share. That said, I would love if there was a 10 year old Firefox OS project right now given Google's pushing of developer certification.
So, yes, there's stuff I don't love. I don't feel like this iteration of Mozilla has the innovative spirit of, say, Opera back in its heyday, and it's not as polished as Chrome. But the comment section rhetoric has spilled over into fever dream territory and not is even pretending to map onto any coherent historical timeline, factual record, or story of cause and effect, and often contradictory in its declaration of demands.