Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now? Mozilla is surviving on the mercy of Google money, it's not a viable strategy.

Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?

> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?

It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both.

I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.

The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.

I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.

> it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit.

Leaders are accountable for their decisions, their statements, their strategies, and their care for the organisation(s) that they lead.

> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now?

I worked at Mozilla for a bit over six years and really enjoyed my time there. There were lots of brilliant people attracted by the mission and the work was technically interesting. I left in part because I came to the conclusion that the answer to these questions was no. Google's distribution advantages with Chrome and getting boxed out of mobile by the bundled Android/iOS browsers was simply too much to overcome by making a better product. People can gripe about Mozilla's management or product decisions all they want but the fundamental problem is the structure of the web browser market.

It has merit. I left for similar reasons after a similar tour. I largely agree with their reasons. No further notes.

if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?

I really don’t think it would.

One thing “Do what you did before when you were successful!” is missing is that Firefox was sleek, fast, extendable, new, and cool.

It was cool partly because of its “sleek, fast, extendable”, but also because of its “new”, and it can’t get “new” back.

Perhaps launching a completely new piece of software, like the Netscape -> Firefox change (although that was organic, not planned) - but only if it’s actually something new and cool that comes out of it. A rebadge won’t work.

I don’t think there’s a playbook that works here. I’m struggling to think of many major pieces of tech (or non-tech!) that ever got its cool back. Netscape -> Firefox? Apple and/or the Mac? IE4? Lego? Elvis? “New Nixon”?...

Alongside all of the successes there are orders of magnitude more failures, and I don’t think they’re all on merit.

> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?

A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)

>if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?

Yes.

I used Firefox and made sure everybody in my circle family and social used it. I had donated 5$ to Mozilla when I was making 360$ per month. I believed in mozilla, I was naive. Soon after I learned the money didn't go to Firefox. They soon after launched a political campaign in my country. I realized this and every other fancy they had, was where my money was going. Stopped using it and stopped caring a long while back. Can't wait for Servo/Ladybird to replace it.

It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.

The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as:

* Wanting niche features that don't benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.

* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).

* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)

* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.

These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.

Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1172/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18