Mozilla's midlife crisis: from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor
Mozilla's midlife crisis: from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor
Can the sleeping fox ever wake up?
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Mozilla the corporation, and the foundation, seem to be doing everything in their power to distance them selves from the browser.
They want to be anything but a browser company. It's such a weird identity crisis.
Every time they're in the news it's for something other than developing their browser. Donating to them doesn't fund the browser. They're explicit about that. It's just pants on head crazy.
21Don't think they're intentionally trying to distance themselves from the browser, though. I think they're trying to find other ways to make money.
Ideally they would do this without dropping the Firefox ball but that doesn't seem to be the case. Of the funding that has gone to strange, now dead non-Firefox projects, I wish some of that could have gone to making Firefox better. Not just a faster browser, but other things like power-efficiency and continuing Rust migration.
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Hmmmmmm idk, Firefox is way better than it was a few years ago. I'm not super knowledgeable about this, but my impression is that Mozilla has kind of always been on the fringe of tech companies. Just because they funded the creators of rust doesn't make them a major player. Netscape was a completely different thing, even if the codebase got Mozilla started.
13Mozilla was pretty central to the web in the early 2000s, with the release of Firefox 1.0 which was the browser that displaced IE6 in the minds of developers and the browser with an NYT ad paid for by donations. It was the first truly mainstream browser with good HTML4/CSS support, tabs, add-ons, and themes and the first browser overall that had developer tools (with the Firebug add-on). Mozilla also pioneered the idea that you could refinance browser development by selling the top spot in your search box (and unfortunately, they never had another such profitable idea; also, they kinda sold all of us to Google).
They've lost a lot of influence on web standards and web development since, and with that they lost cachet with users. A big part of that was that Google stopped promoting Firefox when they released Chrome in 2008.
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I don't understand all the disappointment in this thread with Firefox. I still use it daily and vastly prefer it over Chrome/Edge. I've rarely ever had compatibility or performance issues. And most of all, on Android, I can use uBlock Origin addon with mobile Firefox. Yeah they're not pioneering the web, but who cares? It does exactly what I need it to do without a bunch of bloat while also not being run by an evil corporation.
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