"These are obviously experimental tools and there’s no guarantee they will ever make it into a release version of Firefox. Indeed, the idea behind Test Pilot is to allow the Firefox team to test new concepts."
The efforts on making Firefox faster and more responsive have been going on for a few years (e10s/electrolysis being one of them) and are appearing in the releases as fast as the team can develop, test and deliver them. I personally believe Mozilla has a highly capable core team on this, and to insinuate otherwise, to me, seems like accepting commercial interests of other browser makers as higher than FLOSS interests. I don't disagree on quality of the product being a huge aspect in value judgments, but it cannot and should not be the only one.
It doesn't matter if they are experimental or not. It doesn't matter if they will make it into the release or not. There is one very certain thing: these experiments divert resources and people.
"Fast and more responsive" is just one aspect. Because "we're getting faster" and "these are just experiments" lead to a situation when "Browse against the machine" [1] uses FF for work and Chrome for play, and pretends it's ok.
More people won't necessarily help solve any problems though. (Insert obligatory Mythical Man Month mumble mumble, hand-waving, etc. here.) Perhaps additional resources could help.
In general I agree that Mozilla has lost its way with its current head count; successfully funding a company with advertising revenue tends to do that.
This is how they are adding features to the browser. This is a smart way of doing it. Make it experimental, gauge the feedback, and integrate it if the feedback makes it seem useful.
As an example, they tried vertical tabs, and it appears it didn't work as well as they needed it to be so it has been left out. On the flip side, the empty tab page was also an experiment, and that worked well and made it to the default browser.
These experiments are work on the browser. But instead of adding them as features, introducing them as experiments and then adding the polished, stable, feedback adjusted version as a true feature that can be marketed effectively.
Vertical tabs used to work so well on Firefox that I held on for just that, even when everybody had already left for Chrome. Then they killed it. Now you're saying they dropped it because they couldn't get it to work again. Kind of sad.
>I personally believe Mozilla has a highly capable core team on this, and to insinuate otherwise, to me, seems like accepting commercial interests of other browser makers as higher than FLOSS interests.
There's only one interest in the browser wars: prevail or perish. If Firefox cannot secure a large enough market share, it will be insignificant, lose funding, and die off.
"These are obviously experimental tools and there’s no guarantee they will ever make it into a release version of Firefox. Indeed, the idea behind Test Pilot is to allow the Firefox team to test new concepts."
The efforts on making Firefox faster and more responsive have been going on for a few years (e10s/electrolysis being one of them) and are appearing in the releases as fast as the team can develop, test and deliver them. I personally believe Mozilla has a highly capable core team on this, and to insinuate otherwise, to me, seems like accepting commercial interests of other browser makers as higher than FLOSS interests. I don't disagree on quality of the product being a huge aspect in value judgments, but it cannot and should not be the only one.