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- Hacker News
- > That doesn't mean we can't become big. We did this before. When we listened to our Community, gave them what they wanted, let them work with us to build something amazing, they told their friends
Exactly this. Mozilla/Firefox lost their way when they stopped listening to the community.
Which is not to say you shouldn't try to build new cool things that the community hasn't thought of yet - but you should listen to them when they tell you it is terrible garbage that they do not want and there is no way to opt out.
by musicale - I think Mozilla started getting nuts the day they ventured with Firefox OS. To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.by lawgimenez
- It was a brilliant idea and some day someone will repeat it to make a fuckton of money.by eklavya
- Firefox OS was a brilliant idea. Imagine cross platform and open apps based on HTML/JavaScript that feel native and polished. 2026 would have been amazing if Mozilla executed it right.by drewfax
- Firefox OS was amazing and, sadly, would STILL be amazing today.
Boot-to-Gecko is brilliant because honestly most apps today... are Web pages packaged in an "app". Most PWA with desktop shortcuts (and ideally offline responsive mode) show that. Very few "apps" genuinely need to be apps.
Consequently being "just" a phone with basic connectivity and delegating the rest to the browser made perfect sense.
I didn't work because it didn't make sense or wasn't technically feasible. It didn't work because anybody who made a mobile OS wanted THEIR own walled gardens. The fact that today we are stuck with Android an iOS shows how needed it was and still is.
by utopiah - I think Firefox OS was great, and too early for its time, combined with the mistake of "let's run on extremely terrible hardware" (rather than designing for the flagships of the time, which wouldn't be flagships by the time it shipped).by JoshTriplett
- > To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.
I do not think that this was that confusing. People [1] looked around at the beginning of the 2010's and saw
1) Mobile usage was growing exponentially and desktop was... not [2].
2) Every mobile OS shipped their own browser by default, or even went so far as to prevent other browsers from being used at all (iOS) [3].
3) Because Android and iOS both had non-trivial marketshare, neither could be called a "monopoly" so there was no way to use anti-trust law to get Firefox on devices as was done with Windows (not that this would have been a compelling strategy even if it were possible).
People took that set of facts and concluded Mozilla needed its own mobile OS in order to stay relevant.
What they underestimated was the amount of investment needed to make such an OS and get it on devices and the amount of time it would have to exist in a state of not being very good before it could compete with the established players (who were not standing still... people forget how bad Android was in the beginning). But if you look at the actual world we ended up in, with no mobile OS from Mozilla and a total Firefox marketshare that is less than desktop Safari's, it is hard to say that initial conclusion was incorrect.
[1] Full disclosure: I was a Mozilla employee at the time, though not involved in any of these decisions.
[2] I would say "desktop was shrinking", but to everyone's surprise it actually remained fairly steady in absolute numbers, although it did become a smaller slice of a much larger pie. In 2010 everyone expected it to shrink, though.
[3] Mozilla did ship a re-skin around mobile Safari to try to get some brand presence, but was still at the mercy of what web standards Safari chose to implement, and you could hardly call it a first-class experience. Eventually iOS loosened their rules, but no one could have predicted that back then.
by derf_ - I really wish Mozilla would focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. I don’t want extensions (attack vector), vpns, fancy bookmarking services that are deprecated later on etc. I want to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.by deanc
- Firefox is little more than a uBlock Origin runtime for me, so extensions are pretty critical for me.by Telaneo
- How do you expect Mozilla to make enough money from just Firefox to survive if Google ever decides to stop paying them for being the default search engine?by MatejKafka
- > I don’t want extensions (attack vector)
How do you block ads and invasive trackers? DNS only?
by driverdan - > focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. [...] to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.
"Nothing more," you say.
The chief focus should be Privacy... Privacy and Performance... Our two chief focuses should be Privacy and Performance... and Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... Our three chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, and Safety on the Web... Our four chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, Safety on the Web, and ruthless Efficiency in Preserving Battery Life... Our five... no... Amongst our chief focuses... Amongst our non-trivial chief focuses that users think are easy... are such elements as Privacy, Safety on the Web, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... I'll come in again.
Software Engineering Apologies to...
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Inquisition_(Monty...
- 100%. Browsers are considered a commodity but I'd happily pay for a browser that:
1. Could do all the stuff chrome does as well as chrome. (Eg, canvas rendering speed etc). So I can actually use web apps.
2. Just doesn't ever have anti privacy code, pro ad code, etc in it.
I use brave and a self managed lan which is just an ad hoc half assed attempt to reach the above goals. Because there is no other option.
by strix_varius - Extensions were why Firefox was so popular among those considered 'abnormal.' Chrome just copied the idea. VPNs, Pocket, and sync services are all great features; it's their implementation and execution that is so poor.
All Mozilla (and Firefox) needs is to be run by developers, not the fucking MBAs.
by drewfax - If I couldn't use the ublock origin extension with Firefox, I'd leave for another browser. I consider it essential for privacy reasons as well as for adblocking, and I can't imagine it hurts battery life compared to all the ads and other crap it blocks.
Firefox's VPN service also has its privacy-related uses (yes, I'm aware of the limitations), but I think it mostly serves as a possible source of non-google revenue for Mozilla.
by hoppyhoppy2 - I wouldn't want a browser without extensions. Ad blocking in particular.
To me, ad blocking belongs in extensions. The job of a web browser is to show web pages as intended according to the standards. It includes all the ads, tracking, etc... the page has put in. If you want to block stuff or deviate from the standards in any way, that's what extensions are for.
And extension like ad blocking are an arms race, websites will deploy countermeasures to make them less effective and to which extensions can respond. Again I dont want the core browser to participate in an arms race. Keeping it free of vulnerabilities is already hard enough not to fight against standard behavior.
by GuB-42 - I like that take. There is a tendency in the software world to dream about becoming the BigTech we all hate.
I believe that the people who want Firefox want it because it's different, just like the people who want Linux want it because it is different. And similarly in Linux, many people keep explaining how Linux should look more like Windows if it wants the year of the Linux Desktop.
But I wouldn't be on Linux if I wanted Windows. I am not on Linux because I want everybody to be on Linux, on the contrary. Same applies for Firefox.
by palata - There is also the fact that even if FF was changed into being exactly like Chrome it would not get much of its market share as Google still has more ways to push it onto people. So to compete FF needs to actually provide real advantages and with the much smaller budget the only way it can do that is by competing with features that Google can't or doesn't want to compete in.by account42
- If Mozilla believed in the values it espoused, Librewolf wouldn’t exist. It would just be called Firefox.
One of the first betrayals was putting ads in their new tab page, the forced AI comes as a Mozilla tradition now of user respect as marketing only.
At the same time it simply may not be a viable business. Firefox was popular originally because Chrome didn’t exist and Internet Explorer especially 6 back was awful.
The browser is now an OS on top of an OS, it requires massive resources to maintain. So Mozilla has a cursed mission now and related or unrelated in any case they’re full of it and have lost my respect. Open source and user respect still means something to me even if it doesn’t to Mozilla.
by user3939382 - Does it have to be a viable business though? It's essential infrastructure.by account42
- > I'm not kidding when I said that Firefox is a niche browser. Folk have to actively look to use it.
There was once a time where IE was only ever used to download Firefox... Mozilla squandered that.
by nubinetwork - Firefox was indeed blowing past all the other browsers and set to become the standard.
That's when Google realized they had to do something. The market could not be allowed to be dominated by a pro-freedom, pro-privacy product.
by mike_hock - To some degree, yeah they did, by leaving space for a lean and mean competitor like Google Chrome to come around and eat their lunch. And when it was introduced, Google Chrome truly was the lean and mean browser, less bloated than both Firefox and IE.
But I'm not sure how much they could've done. Maybe they could've invested a ton of engineering resources into a project similar to Firefox Quantum earlier, so that Firefox didn't leave as much room for a leaner browser? But half the reason people complain about Firefox today is that they broke XUL extensions, which was an absolutely necessary step in making Firefox a competitive, fast browser. I can only imagine the backlash they would've seen if they did that before Chrome ate their lunch.
And I'm not sure how much it would've really helped, since 1) Chrome would've still been a less bloated browser simply through having been around for a shorter time and having fewer features, and 2) Google would've still had immense marketing opportunities by plastering Chrome ads all over Google Search etc.
by mort96 - Some things Mozilla could have done correctly:
Yet the best they could do was pay their CEO for nothing.- Kept Rust and sold best-in-class tooling like IDEs to enterprises. - Polished Firefox OS and distributed apps in their store for a 1% commission. - Kept Servo and made the most secure and fast browser that no one else had made. - Partnered with OEMs to offer Firefox as the default browser.by drewfax - De-prioritizing Servo is something I will never understand. Aside from making Firefox attractive again, desktop software has migrated almost entirely to web-based stacks. They could have owned the foundation layer of almost every hardware device if they managed to make Servo faster and slimmer than the options we currently have. What a blunder.by ricardobeat
- Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy absolutely applies here:
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch technicians, and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers' union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that, in every case, the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules and control promotions within the organization."
by magpi3 - damn! then what's happens at the EU where the "goals of the organization" are themselves to increase and champion bureaucracy?by SilverSlash
- I hate this. It basically takes as axiomatic that anyone in an administrative position in an organisation has zero interest in the goals of the organisation -and that those at the coal-face have no interest in the organisation and that there is little or no overlap in interest. Its reductionist, divisive and stupid.by Angostura
- There are also:
* People who understand that the existence of the organization is necessary for the goals of the organization
by Eisenstein - > in any bureaucratic organization
So are there any exceptions?
by ekianjo