> We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown.

We did guess it. Google were already past their “don’t be evil” days in 2013. They were possibly better than other companies of similar scale, but the decline was already clearly beginning. People had long warned that Google could not be trusted to keep Android open in the long term, that eventually their benevolence would fade. A good chunk of the enthusiasm around Firefox OS was in breaking the duopoly and the idea of a platform that would be much harder to lock down.

I installed FirefoxOS on a phone years ago, it wasn't even bad really.

> And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS.

Today, we have Mobian, postmarketOS, PureOS and many more GNU/Linux OSes for smartphones.

What would be Mozilla's revenue model for instant messaging?

> instant messaging

Doesn't Mozilla have their own Matrix server?

You don't really seem to be trying to fairly describe the problem.

With Pocket, Mozilla forced it on everyone, then two years later they bought the service, then many years later they eventually killed it for everyone. They didn't even try the approach of making it an opt-in extension that users could install if they desired. The unoffensive strategy was obvious all along, and they just didn't choose that route. The concerns of Mozilla partnering with and promoting a proprietary service were easily anticipated, and the solution (buying Pocket) was clearly an option since they did that step eventually.

Yes, Mozilla may be in a hard place trying to diversify and find success with their other ventures. But they're clearly making plenty of unforced errors along the way.

> It's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.

You have any evidence for this - that is, that the same subsets of users are being hard on Mozilla and soft on Google? Because that's pretty easy to quantify if you have evidence, which I notice you haven't presented.

Right now all you have is a gut feeling disguised as an factual claim about reality - which is worse than worthless because it's biased by your feelings, as opposed to being a wild guess.

I believe that this is just the typical pattern of groupies being more toxic than band-members or crew. If you go to /r/rust, every announcement of a donation to the Rust Software Foundation is met with derision for the donor. In fact, if you go there today, you'll see it's got some extraordinary drama going on - primarily from non-programmers. If you look at the latest Arduino developments, it's the same story with non-users enacting some purity ritual and users being more sedate.

The reality of the thing is that community-oriented projects have the problem that the groupie-layer of the community are a group that are so marginally attached to the organization that the death of the organization won't affect them but are sufficiently attached to the organization that they can affect the org.

A population like that will naturally tend towards extraction of all surplus from the organization - if the org dies as a result, it doesn't matter, but if they don't do this they're "leaving money on the table" so to speak. With the rise of social media, the groupie layer of people can be extraordinarily large since forums with centralized sign-on allow for a variety of subjects to be posted and consequently being in the fandom is cheap - you don't have to seek news, it'll be there for you to have an opinion on. Hacker News, Reddit, etc. lead to a grouping point for people to have opinions on things they care so little about they would never seek it without it being thrust upon them by The Feed.

So I agree with you. It's challenging. I don't think it's because the community is special, though. I think it's just the structure of communities today because of the dynamics of social media.

I must have seen other sides of the community, since all I seen has been a consistent criticism that Mozilla neglects the two main products Firefox and Thunderbird, while focusing community money and focus on new products that does nothing to improve Firefox and Thunderbird. When new products get released it is indeed met with extreme scorn, and when they eventually fail, they will anew get criticized for wasting money.

There is a market share costs that pocket had on Firefox. Lost developer time, money and community trust mean that product pushed Firefox just that bit further into marginalization. Basically every product Mozilla releases is the same story when they fail to make their core product better.

It is not damned if you do, damned if you don't. Google could abandon Chrome, gmail or any other product like that and they would still be Google (and be profitable). Mozilla would not exist without Firefox, and the trust the community has with Mozilla is directly tied with Firefox.

> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt

Literally nobody skeptical of Mozilla is giving MS and Google the benefit of the doubt. Mozilla gets skepticism from people exactly because they don't want Mozilla to become like those companies.

Pocket in particular was a breech of trust. It brought ads and surveillance to firefox, when many users had turned to firefox in the first place to avoid those same things. Of course that was going to draw criticism.

Google and MS are never going to do anything other than sell out their users for profit. Firefox users are more fiercely critical of the introduction of anti-features and enshittification because they don't really have anywhere else to turn to. Every other browser is just openly collecting your personal data, pushing ads in your face and shoving AI down your throat. The best alternatives we have to Firefox as a browser that respects its users at all are forks of Firefox. If firefox fails because it becomes a chrome clone that's also bad for privacy people will stop using Firefox and if Firefox dies off there are real questions about how many of the forks will continue to be actively maintained.

The browser ecosystem needs an alternative to chrome. Users want a browser that doesn't push ads, collect data, and allows customization. People complain about Firefox because the stakes are high.

In all of these cases, 95% of the comments are by <1% of the users and are probably less relevant goals to Mozilla than us power users would like them to be. Someone is always going to be angry, that doesn't really decide whether you're damned if you do/don't though. I honestly wonder if "internet privacy" is even something the average user is truly interested in either.

I wouldn't be surprised if 'lame' things like "videos look a lot more vivid in Chrome" (due to the years of lag getting HDR support in Mac/Windows) lost Firefox more users than they gained for maintaining support for MV3 uBO. I.e. fewer than 10% of FF installs have uBO installed, even after Chrome dropped it, but the volume of comments about MV3 would have led you to believe this is all browser makers need to consider to be successful.

It couldn't be that Mozilla keeps making bad decisions? No, it must be the community that's unreasonable.

Here is a hint: People who are OK with Google behavior don't use Firefox.

> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.

I've been thinking about this for a while, ever since The Framework DHH incident.

Basically, framework sent DHH a free laptop and funded his ruby conference and "arch distro." DHH meanwhile has some white supremacist musings on his blog. The Framework community flips out, talks about betrayal. There's people in the forums talking about how they were about to buy a fleet of machines but now will have to go back to Dell or whoever.

I was in the thread trying to understand - ok, we're doing ethical math here, right? We liked Framework because ostensibly buying from them reduced our e waste in the long run, and maybe is long run cheaper since we can do our own repairs on easily available parts. Meanwhile, Framework turns around and gives maybe 10k to someone who is prominently pulling a shitload of people into Linux world with Omarchy, who happens to have some disgusting opinions on his blog. I feel like switching to the main companies like Dell or HP or whoever, comes with way darker ethical implications. I mean one of these companies are the ones that provision the IDF, some of them have donated to Trump's ballroom wayyy more than the Ruby conf donation, they all have horrifying supply chains, and not to mention, don't come with any of the environmental benefits of a Framework machine.

So, why is Framework examined under a more critical lense?

My takeaway was twofold: first, people seem ok to dip their toes in activist progressivism to a degree, but are basically primed to throw their hands up and say, "I knew it, default capitalism really is insurmountable, oh well, back to the devil I know, no point in trying ANYTHING!" Second, people seem deeply focused on aesthetics rather than practical outcomes. Framework's far larger contributions to Linux space are instantly nullified by one relatively small donation to a guy who himself has massive contributions to FOSS but also a couple of really gross blog posts. It's not ok to cut away the gross bits: the entire thing is polluted.

I tried to point out the dangerous game being played since I can guarantee I can find a more ethically pure environmental anarchist than any supposed progressive on the forum - after all, the more environmental decision isn't to buy a Framework, it's to rescue a Thinkpad from a landfill, and by the way, anybody here still driving to work instead of taking the bus? And so on. People were, politely, shutting me down. "It's not the same, all framework has to do is apologize for the DHH thing and it'll all be ok." Sure, until it gets out that the CEO was at Trump's inauguration, or that the local Taiwanese office works with super shady parts suppliers, or... Seems to me the best thing to do is try to make a rough ethical calculation based on practicalities rather than purity testing, but nah.

So, if you're going to do something good in this society, you need to not just be much more ethical than the heteronormative capitalist participants, you need to be unimpeachable.