Maybe it's just me, but I think the name "Firefox" is fun and endearing, while "Mozilla" is ugly and ponderous. I say this as someone that has been on the Web since Mosaic and almost entirely used Netscape-heritage browsers since then. Let the Mozilla name go, and embrace Firefox.
When I hear "mozilla" I remember the event I went to where apparently some board members decided to come after all and the employees / contractors were panicking to make sure everything was perfectly presentable. The food catering, the cleanliness...
to me, the word mozilla reminds me of the ueeless board members.
Mozilla is clearly trying to expand into new areas. Some of the fun ones from their open job postings include a social recommendation component (likely the reason for this rename), Search and a bunch of AI stuff.
> Mozilla Social’s vision is to develop an integrated platform that empowers users through seamless communication, content discovery, curation, and sharing capabilities, enabling them to stay up-to-date, explore new perspectives, and engage within a safe and enriching experience. Define and own the technical execution of our long term ML strategy with a particular focus on developing industry leading recommender system techniques.
> Mozilla’s Innovation Studio is a fast-paced organization of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial minded individuals. We build new products and experiment quickly to improve and extend the way people access and engage on the Web. We are looking for a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help us develop and grow new machine learning driven products and tools.
> The Firefox team is a community of engineers who care deeply about delivering the fastest, friendliest, most usable browser possible. We are responsible for making the things you see in the browser work securely, quickly, and well! We are looking for a Principal Engineer to help us develop and grow new machine learning driven products and tools. You will play a key role in enabling safe and healthy machine learning and AI driven experiences in Firefox.
> Firefox is used by hundreds of millions worldwide and the Director of Product for Search and AI is a critical role in the product management team. The role will lead a team of PMs and be responsible for the product strategy, vision, and execution of our Search and AI investments. You’ll combine product excellence with strong leadership skills and help build a smart browser that helps our users be productive online.
I wish they'd stick to a browser, and keep the other stuff separate. I have no idea why every product has to grow until it's overbloated and the core functionality starts lacking behind.
"I can't trust Mozilla, they get too much of their income from Google"
(Mozilla tries to branch out so that they're less dependent on Google) "I wish Mozilla would just stick to Firefox"
(Mozilla tries to find a non-Google revenue source for Firefox) "How dare they try to monetize Firefox, the one and only product I want them to produce."
Hacker News has detected a management team that led their product from 20% of the global market to watching-the-race status. If that doesn't elicit general criticism what will? I think they're being outcompeted by Opera.
The issue here is that things like socialising, search and what have you to diversify revenue would have been really interesting back in Firefox 2.0 when they had a thriving extension ecosystem. There were things like ChatZilla where there were full fledged apps being built in browser to provide social options.
Mozilla killed that off when they removed the old XUL layers. They went with Google's strategy of everything being a HTML/Javascript web app. Cool I suppose but they've obsoleted themselves and there isn't an obvious way back into the game for them. They aren't competent at anything, thy're stewarding a 3rd rate product and they're wasting a lot of money. They'll struggle to do anything right under current conditions.
The old extension ecosystem is one of the reasons their performance was suffering and their market share was declining. It had declined significantly long before the decision was made to end support for XUL. Ending that support is one of the reasons Firefox's performance is competitive with Chrome again.
Your take also ignores the very real anti-competitive factors Firefox is up against. Google relentlessly promoting Chrome across their web presence and paying third parties to trick end users into installing it and setting it as their default for instance: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
It's a fair point, but what is the pitch meant to be now? "We're reskinned Chrome"? If I wanted reskinned Chrome I'd use Brave. Which in fact I do want and do use.
Firefox isn't owed a market. Google have proved themselves, so far, to be better stewards of the world's browser engine than the people at Mozilla. It might have a new era in the sun one day, but right now there really isn't much of a niche for Firefox. And the fact that Chrome overran Firefox does sit with the Mozilla, whatever the argument is about competitive practices. Chrome was (likely: still is) just technically better.
> And the fact that Chrome overran Firefox does sit with the Mozilla, whatever the argument is about competitive practices.
I mean, Mozilla couldn't afford to pay Adobe, Avast, etc $3 per user to install an unwanted browser for years even if they'd cross the moral and ethical line to do so. So a chunk of that was outside of their control.
Firefox uses an entirely different engine underneath. So, from a 'health of the web' perspective, it helps prevent the mono-culture. It also supports extensions on Android, which is quite nice, and syncs my stuff between them. It can't support them on iOS since everything is just Safari Lite underneath.
I agree with most of what you say, except Firefox is not a third rate browser.
Despite everything , Firefox is still an amazing product.
I just hope the Mozilla leadership gets thrown out before they finally kill Firefox through incompetence and neglect.
I wish they had kept lockwise, and built an enterprise grade, client side encrypted password manager with it that they sold to businesses. Not only would that provide a revenue stream, it would also provide an incentive for businesses to encourage employees to use Firefox, since it has better integration with the password manager.
It would be nice if those critical of Mozilla offered solutions.
I agree with alot of the points raised, but I also empathize with the tough position Mozilla is in. I know squat about product management and would love to hear some knowledgeable input.
I've never made the exact criticisms above but I've got the solution. Taking the money from Google is fine. Stop spending it all. The CEO doesn't need an inflated salary, Mozilla is not a tech giant. Mozilla doesn't need pristine expensive offices in HCOL areas. Mozilla could pay a core group of engineers good salaries, work on Firefox and adjacent tech like servo. If they had done that and banked/invested the rest of the cash they'd have a big runway for the future.
How many is core? I don't know. Not 750 though. To change course now would mean layoffs which nobody likes. But I argue they never should have hired that many folks, and to continue with that headcount is throwing good money after bad.
If the purpose of the Mozilla organisation was to fund Firefox into the future then they have catastrophically failed at their job. If their purpose was to spread the money they had around to a bunch of people as quickly as possible before it runs out, whilst putting on a good face, then they've succeeded 100%
> If the purpose of the Mozilla organisation was to fund Firefox into the future then they have catastrophically failed at their job. If their purpose was to spread the money they had around to a bunch of people as quickly as possible before it runs out, whilst putting on a good face, then they've succeeded 100%
The mission statement of the Mozilla Foundation is not about Firefox:
> Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
Sure, maybe in my alternative universe Mozilla didn't invent rust. Or they did but it spun out faster. Or... see doesn't really matter, we don't know. And it doesn't mean they couldn't still change course and become a slimmer, Firefox focused organisation with savings in the bank.
> "I can't trust Mozilla, they get too much of their income from Google"
God forbid they’d just make us pay for it…
Give me a $10/month Firefox subscription and I’d pay it in a heartbeat. But I don’t want it to be a $10/month ‘other bizarre Mozilla projects’ subscription. Right now it’s hard to trust that any money I give them would go to a better browser.
You know you can donate to it, right? And Mozilla gets 2% of their revenue from donation. People just don't pay for software when free alternative is available. Also if other mozilla products are profitable, then that money will go to firefox as mozilla is non profit company.
Edit: Leared that you could only donate to mozilla foundation which is not the same.
Actually you can't. You can donate to the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation. But Firefox is owned by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation (which itself is wholly owned by the foundation). The Foundation does "other stuff" in addition to directing the Corporation to develop firefox (what exactly? it's not clear to me). It's managed like a single entity, but the org is broken up like this for some #bigcorp reason (taxes, control how profits are allocated, or some such). Not to drag on it, do business however you want, but my point is that you can't directly donate to firefox development because you have no say on how the Foundation allocates its funds.
It's a bit complicated so I drew up a little diagram:
1. Mozilla Foundation (not for profit) <- Donations accepted here
├── 2. Mozilla Corporation (for profit, wholly owned by the foundation so all profit goes to the foundation) X- No donations
│ └── 3. Firefox X- No donations
└── 4. Other social causes (??? it's not clear)
At least, that's how I understand it. Honestly I'm super curious about what the benefits of this kind of org structure are, and what objectives they optimize for. This org structure is clearly not an accident...
Maybe it's something around them charging Google to be the default search engine. If that kind of activity would endanger the non-profit status I could see them creating a wholly owned "for-profit" subsidiary to protect the tax status of the rest of the organization.
I’m sure this was brought up before, but I followed your link and here is what I saw:
> How will my donation be used?
At Mozilla, our mission is to keep the Internet healthy, open, and accessible for all. To learn how your donation is put to use, click here.
It links to foundation’s website, which has the following things listed as “Our areas of focus”: Rally Citizens, Connect Leaders and Shape the Agenda. Firefox is mentioned 0 times on that page.
Seconded. I'd absolutely sponsor Firefox specifically if there were a guarantee that my money were going entirely to Firefox, especially if doing so opened up access to official "low noise" builds that had all monetization, A/B testing, etc disabled.
Which would be the nail in the coffin for any relevance Firefox has. If you worry about their lack of sway in standards bodies as a browser with 3-4% marketshare, they will be completely and utterly irrelevant with <1% marketshare, which is what being a paid browser would result in.
Mozilla has gotten billions of dollars from Google - if they had stayed small and put a significant portion of that income into an endowment fund, they'd be in a much better position for the long term.
and people would complain that they are not funding the development of Firefox. Please realize that maintaining a competitive web runtime can't be done with a "small" team.
I have a deep love-hate relationship with Mozilla. I want Firefox marketshare to grow, but it seems like many of the ventures that Mozilla has (like with Pocket) would just alienate the generally more technical audience that is still on Firefox. They've seemingly killed a lot of their R&D with the winding down of Servo, which is not a good sign given that they are struggling to keep up with Google technology-wise. The mess with MDN didn't send a great message either, though I don't know where that ended up.
Some of Mozilla's ventures seem cool. Like Mozilla VPN seems like a win/win; it supports Mullvad, you get a reasonable service, no complaints from me. But the thing that sucks is, Mozilla clearly needs to expand and build a large business to properly support Firefox, but their avenues for doing so in an ethically reasonable way that connects with the general mission seem pretty limited. Like it would be better if they could operate leaner and more directly focused on just building a good browser, but a lot of their options for monetizing Firefox itself are absolutely terrible. Ever since the whole debacle with using Firefox Studies to advertise, I don't even use upstream Firefox anymore. I do use Thunderbird and even donate sometimes, but I'm terrified that despite being donation-driven Thunderbird will somehow start to be enshittified too as part of their strategy to try to grow at any cost.
All of this signals, to me, a more general issue: it seems that maintaining a feasible mainstream web browser has become generally unsustainable.
Mozilla apparently had laid off the entire team that handled MDN[1]. They seem to have tried to make MDN itself a business unit, too, now with premium subscriptions and an integrated AI chat I guess. Though, I didn't really follow what happened after that, so I'm not sure what really happened and what effects it has had in the longer term.
I mean sure, do other stuff, just keep stuff separate. It started with pocket integration, now the sync account will be linked to other products, and soon you'll need an AI chat account to be able to save passwords in firefox.
Apache can do it... want a web server? Apache webserver. Want java? Get tomcat. Data streaming? Kafka. All apache, but separate.
Look at microsoft.. you need their email account just to be able to install the OS (in many cases). Look at google... get banned on youtube, lose gmail, google analytics, etc.
The problem with Mozilla is that they dont care about their core product, which lost its unique proposition for customers (add-ons and customization) and is losing market share.
If any other product lost so much market share, the CEO would be removed.
Also those "fun" projects are career boosters for people involved, not something that makes firefox better. It even makes it worse, since fewer resources go for firefox.
Are you genuinely wondering why people want their main access to the whole web to be either non commercial, or shielded from commercial interests ?
The whole input behind linux was to have the central piece of computing managed by the community for the community. I'd wish something similar for the central piece of the internet.
Their investment into AI yielded some cool things like on-device language translation that I use a lot in Firefox.
Rust is something that grew out of their investments into programming languages/tooling/etc.
Their investment into documentation and technical writing brought us MDN, which is a great resource for web development.
Mozilla's development of password managers, that they eventually walked back on rolling out as an independent product, yielded a better password manager built into Firefox, as well as Firefox Verify.
It's also important to make a distinction between the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit, and Mozilla the corporation. The non-profit is responsible for many of the non-browser investments.
This pattern in the tech industry is getting really annoying.
Imagine going to your favorite pizzeria and they keep trying to push you to buy some newspapers, clothing or car servicing, because the pizzeria executives want to fill up their resume.
And I think you see that most in foundations (Wikipedia, Linux, etc.) because they have no profit motive, so the ranks get filled by hundreds of unproductive activists or parasites while the tech staff is still a tiny core and doing the actual work.
> The renaming is intended to create a more consistent brand experience across all Mozilla surfaces, driving higher awareness of the portfolio of Mozilla products.[0]
This links to a page which... primarily consists of "Firefox" branded products. VPN is the _only_ Mozilla one. What are they driving awareness of?
I have a Firefox account to sync my browser settings. Renaming it to Mozilla account feels like trying to convince me to use other stuff that Mozilla has.
Regardless of Mozilla being an "opensource friendly" company, this is perverted.
The brand is Mozilla for FF and always has been. How on earth is finally fixing your branding "perverted"? At worst it has taken decades to get their act in gear!
You can fiddle with other Mozilla branded stuff or not ... no biggie - its still your choice.
No perverts were harmed producing the preceding paragraph.
The Firefox brand is stronger than the Mozilla brand, so it feels like an exec move to try and leverage something to boost something else.
On the copy of Firefox I'm typing this in, the only obvious mention of Mozilla is in the About dialog, where it says somewhere in the blurb in the middle that "Firefox is designed by Mozilla". The main app menu (macOS) says Firefox. The icon when you switch apps says Firefox. The app you start when you Cmd-Space is Firefox. The install directory is /Applications/Firefox.app.
There's another "More from Mozilla" in the Preferences, but the icon, which kinda has to be a Mozilla icon, looks out of place with the other icons.
When I used Windows 10 (and all the way back to... 3.1, I think? I'm only middle-aged), I logged into that OS with a username and password. No way was I going to use a Microsoft account, and now it's moot since I just use Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), since I like what both the Mint and Debian teams are doing so far.
Same for my work computer (local government entity/utility).
Perverted does seem like overly strong language to describe something I just prefer not be the case but which many others (presumably) could care less about.
> Regardless of Mozilla being an "opensource friendly" company, this is perverted.
Mozilla's messaging over the past few years has always been perverted, all talk and no action.
They "care about your privacy", yet their tracking protection was for a long time whitelisting known malicious domains from trackers. Their telemetry implementation in the browser to this day does not comply with the GDPR as it's opt-out rather than opt-in.
The browser, despite being free, open-source and supposedly on your side (a purported user-agent), uses many user-hostile tactics typical of malicious closed-source software such as frequent nagging, bad/annoying defaults, etc.
> Mozilla's messaging over the past few years has always been perverted
This is just a corporate PR (or enterprise bullshit). Nothing to do with reality.
No one should ever trust corpirate PR in the same way other human beings are trusted. Because a company is not a human being. Although both __can__ speak similar language (of words and sentences). The difference is that the corporation is (almost) never held responsible for any words it outputs. It literally can say anything and get dry out of water later even for a complete bullshit.
Yeah the one bad default I excuse for them is Google as search. Since it pays for the whole thing obviously. And it's easy to change and it never nags you to put it back.
This is the first step in Mozilla conceding defeat with regards to Firefox and preparing for its demise.
They know there's nothing they can do to save Firefox (since they are the problem that led to the decline of FF in the first place), so they are preparing for its demise (or takeover by competitor/FOSS community) by trying to disassociate other Mozilla services from the Firefox brand, in hopes that users stick around with those services post-Firefox.
The upside of this is that password managers don't need to adjust and you don't need to look up your password when logging in the next time as the existing stored password will still be selected automatically. I always hate having to go through such things when sites decide that logging in through www.example.com isn't good enough and it needs to be login.example.com (and a year later, accounts.example.com)
I recently created a Mozilla account to sync some bookmarks off my old phone.
The service is frustratingly amateur. They spam you with a series of emails even when you unsubscribe and the syncing items, which are just URLs, is extremely slow and unpredictable.
I don't recommend signing up, and this post reminds me I should figure out how to delete the account.
You shouldn't need an external account to use a web browser. As for extra features, like password and bookmark sync between own devices, maybe it should be standardized? Let's say I could switch between Mozilla, Google, Apple or Microsoft accounts, depending on context, e.g. work, or personal.
I’m pretty fond of their Relay product. I use something called Hide My Email on my iPhone and it, an Apple product, generates an email address that forwards to my main address and a reply-to address that will relay my mail to the sender without revealing my main address. It is great for signing up for stuff on the web. Relay is just like that, but works on my non-Apple computer (it’s a browser extension). It also has an add-on which generates one mobile number that works the same way and you can give it out to services that need a phone number.
I did file a support ticket once and the support person clearly didn’t understand or read my request and instead sent back some pre-formulated response to another query. That was kind of annoying. But other than that I’m quite happy to pay the few bucks a year for the service.
I know the Corporation need to find some crazy new passion project to spend whatever is left of the Google money after they've been handsomely paid, but I wish FF got more love, or got sold to a company who gave a shit about it.
