Mozilla CEO quits, org pivots, but what about Firefox?
Mozilla CEO quits, org pivots, but what about Firefox?
Could it have more to do with browser's ever-increasing irrelevance?
Why? Well, it was Chrome. Yes, I know many of you spit at the very name. Get over it.
OK, boomer (yes, "surprise! surprise!", this harticle – for "hate driven article" – was written by a boomer, and one that writes for several online publications, too).
This article is not only a (staggering) failure from the aforementioned boomer to grasp what really is at play here, but it also shows a significant, shocking lack of quality assurance in the way "theregister" determines what gets published. This piece isn't an opinion as much as a flaming bag of shit, meant to stink everyone's shoes, and motivated only by the author's ineptitude-fuelled frustration in what seems a textbook example of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
Lemme first address my primary point, in relation to what I quoted at the top, I'll get to illustrating the various failures of the author after that.
No, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, we will not "get over it".
The first inaccuracy is in depicting Mozilla Firefox as "a browser". It isn't merely just another browser. Firefox is the last widespread multiplatform browser that isn't using the Blink engine (yes I know GNOME Web and Konqueror use WebKit, which is Blink's ancestor, BTW[^1] , but they are hardly widespread. And safari isn't multiplatform).
Why does that matter? Because the engine is essentially all that a browser is, once you strip away the cosmetics. So the actual contest here isn't between a dozen of browsers, but between two engines, and Firefox's (Gecko) is, indeed, in a dire position. But if we let it go further, it will, as Steven puts it, fall into irrelevance (the inaccuracy here is that the harticle depicts Firefox as already irrelevant).
And if we ever come to the point where only one engine prevails, where services necessary for administrations, citizenship, and life in general, can drop support for anything else than Blink, it is the end of the open web, and of open source web browsers in general[^2].
You will then have to input intimate personal information into a proprietary software, by law.
If you don't see this as a problem, you are part of the problem.
And this is why we can't "get over it".
The internet is much more than just the web. But 100% (rounded from 99.999+%) of users are unaware of that.
The web is much more than browsing. But 100% (rounded) of users are unaware of that.
We are getting our technology reduced to the lowest common denominator, and this denominator is set by people who fail to open PDFs.
Now, as to the other blunders I mentioned above, here are a bunch:
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"Mozilla's revenue dropped from $527,585,000 to $510,389,000".
This is a 3% drop. Significant? Yes. But hardly a game ender.
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"So, where is all that money coming from? Google".
I know it, you know it, we all have known that for a decade by now, and yes, it is a problem, yes, we need public FOSS funding, but that is neither news, nor relevant. Firefox, as the last major browser not directly controlled by Google, can find funding elsewhere. If I'm correct, and the stakes are so high, when Google pulls out, the public will step in (🤞), in the form of institutions, such as the EU.
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"[...] she wants to draw attention to our increasingly malicious online world [...] I don't know what that has to do with the Mozilla Foundation".
That's on you, buddy. Understanding the matter at hand should be a prerequisite for publishing on theregister. But I digress. The maliciousness has a lot more to do with software than with users. And the root of said software aren't in "the algorithms", but really in actual, user facing software, that runs in our physical machines, where our microphones, cameras, GPS, and various other sensors are plugged...
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"Somehow, all this will be meant to help Mozilla in "restoring public trust in institutions, governments, and the fabric of the internet." That sounds good, but what does that have to do with Firefox?".
Again, it's on you. Seriously, WTF. I get that you, the author, are American, and that decades of misinformation about "socialism", and "public ownership" will do that to a motherfucker, but Firefox does need funding aside from verdammt Google. You even highlighted that point yourself... How do you suppose they would get public funding if the government, or the public, doesn't trust Mozilla? Because replacing Google by another corporation only moves the problem, it hardly solves anything. While I'm at it, quick history lesson here: the "fabric of the internet" has been publicly funded. All of it. The internet was designed by DARPA funded researchers. Public money. Developed by universities. Public money. The web was invented at the CERN, by a researcher. Paid with public money. As a tech writer, how do you not know that?
[^1]: WebKit is only partially different from Blink, since Blink is a fork of WebKit. So, as far as "interoperability through competing implementations" goes, WebKit is of rather limited relevance, unfortunately.
[^2]: Only chromium and brave are available as open source software, chromium is maintained by Google as a courtesy, they can pull the plug any time, it will probably only affect their revenue positively. Brave is 3 times less popular than Firefox.120-
Today, only a relative handful of Firefox users are left. According to the US federal government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP), which gives us the running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits, only 2.2 percent of visitors use Firefox.
Look, I know far fewer people use Firefox than Chrome, but basing it on who uses U.S. government websites in the last 90 days doesn't even make sense if Firefox users were only in the U.S.
I'm in the U.S. and use Firefox and I haven't been to a U.S. government website in the last 90 days as far as I know.
And, I don't know if the author knows this or not, but there's around 200 other countries out there.
114A lot of people in this thread seem to downplay the article with "yeah, that might be your opinion..." but two facts that are facts and not opinions are:
- The market share Firefox hold is insignificant.
- Mozilla's business is a near 100% dependency on one "customer", Google.
This means that if Google decides to stop bank rolling Mozilla it's game over. Firstly because other revenue streams are currently near insignificant when you look at the total expenses.
Secondly because since Firefox hold no significant market share, no one else would be interested in investing in Mozilla and the future of Firefox. After all, whatever Mozilla will throw up on the wall as the "grand masterplan for world dominance" would just end up in the question "Why didn't you do this before?".
I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years. I started using it because I saw what happens when one company controls the browser market. That web browser did so much damage and we only really got rid of it some year ago.
Chrome is a perfect example that the history repeats itself and that people are fucking stupid. People are actually acting surprised and complain about Google putting effort into making adblocking impossible in Chrome.
So all in all, if Mozilla doesn't find other revenue streams, Firefox is dead... It just doesn't know it yet.
Now, everyone yapping about that Linux was an insignificant player and still made it to the top just sound like enthusiasts who really doesn't know history and the harsh reality of doing business.
Linux was just a little more than hobby project (business wise) that essentially only Red Hat and Suse made real money from in the 90's.
Arguably you could say that the turning point was when the CEO of IBM, Lou Gerstner, shocked the world by saying that IBM was going to pump in 1 billion dollars in Linux during 2001. Now, that doesn't look like much today when just Red Hat has a yearly revenue of 3-4 billion, but that's how insignificant Linux was at that time.
After that milestone Linux went for the jugular on Windows Server. For ordinary people it would still take almost 10 years before they would hold something Linux in their hands.
The rocket engine that accelerated Linux and pieces that it was ready for end users was Google and Android in 2007. Linux's growth the last 20 years wasn't mainly driven by enthusiasts, it was business pumping in money in future opportunities.
What future opportunities can Mozilla sell to investors with the market share Firefox has today?
78Nice try Manifest v3 pushers
37I found the stats re Firefox usage a little surprising/hard to believe so I double-checked them. Indeed, most rankings show Firefox use hovering at around 2.5%. The open web is sort of already dead, I think. It's honestly not that uncommon now that I come across websites that don't work in Firefox and there are zero hints or info that you need to use Chrome. It's like the world has already forgotten that the web isn't just an app you access through Chrome.
Google's been working on this more or less since they launched Chrome, so it's not surprising, but wow, that fucking sucks.
17I blocked this website on my news feed because of this article. It's opinion piece written by an asshat.
14This is the best summary I could come up with:
And when I see Mozilla Corp's CEO Mitchell Baker stepping down, I wonder if it's really because she'll be more useful devoting all her time to the foundation than overseeing Firefox's decline into a web browser afterthought.
Almost ten years after Chrome appeared, in 2017, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard admitted, "Firefox did not keep up with the market and what people really want.
Baker told Fortune she decided to step down as CEO because she wants to draw attention to our increasingly malicious online world "and how humans are engaging with each other and technology."
In Baker's subsequent blog post, she announced that Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found.
In Fortune, Chambers was more forthcoming: She'll "focus on building out new products that address growing privacy concerns while actively looking for a full-time CEO."
It's hard to buy that all's well with Mozilla, given Baker's poor results at shepherding Firefox forward and the lack of a real replacement CEO.
The original article contains 777 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
2I'm all for an EU founded browser and other countries can use it too if they contribute. Same with a YouTube alternative. Yeah politics do whatever politics do, but a perfect solution doesn't exist once Firefox is gone. And I'd rather see competition than a monopoly.
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