That's a weird take. Mozilla has a wide variety of developers, working on all sorts of things. One of those things is experiments to figure out what the browser "foundation" should actually include.
I like that they're experimenting to figure out what good usability looks like and what the next generation of "browser" should deliver. Some things should just be there when you want them...not an app you install separately or a website you go to for the functionality. I don't know if all of these new things fit that category (voice stuff probably yes, notes probably yes, large file sharing maybe?), but I know I want Mozilla to keep trying new things.
Also, if Mozillians aren't building user-facing things with the "foundation", they don't actually know what the foundation should look like for developers. You have to be a developer using the platform daily in order to understand what it does right and wrong. I don't know how they could do that without actually building things that sit atop the platform.
I just found it damaging to their vision and brand. Take Hello and Persona as example. User focused? Yes. Failure? Absolutely. They need to be developers focused. Less and less developers are testing their apps with Firefox as the primary platform.
That's becuase of their declining marketshare (which is mostly due to strategic disadvantages in distribution channels and marketing budget) not their brand or split focus.
Budget has always been their disadvantages, yet in the pre-Chrome days, they were core product focused and won many developers support. Their vision was once inspiring and admirable. This was how they won over IE. However, ever since Chrome was introduced, most of their innovations are either catch up or gimmicky features - not to mention the political turmoil/non sense. I really wish they can focus on their core product again.
They got kind of lucky too. Their main competition abandoned development of their browser for about 4 years. Now, there are four browsers in active development each regularly communicating with web developers.
Given their pick it's obvious web developers would rather focus on the browsers with the most share of users.
There was a complaint in this thread that it isn't peer-to-peer, which is...kinda weird. Requiring that your recipient have the device they want to receive it on running at this very moment is kinda a non-starter for a file sharing tool, IMHO. Doing that without it being a Mozilla-hosted app isn't really a thing I'd care about. P2P is neat, but it's not a very good user experience, especially for non-technical users.
I like that they're experimenting to figure out what good usability looks like and what the next generation of "browser" should deliver. Some things should just be there when you want them...not an app you install separately or a website you go to for the functionality. I don't know if all of these new things fit that category (voice stuff probably yes, notes probably yes, large file sharing maybe?), but I know I want Mozilla to keep trying new things.
Also, if Mozillians aren't building user-facing things with the "foundation", they don't actually know what the foundation should look like for developers. You have to be a developer using the platform daily in order to understand what it does right and wrong. I don't know how they could do that without actually building things that sit atop the platform.