Comment by rvba
3 days ago
Mozilla the one which:
* lost market share of its product from 30 to 2%
* spends money on fun projects and acqusitions that generate no revenue, while taking away what the users wanted (addons, extensions, customizing) since supposedly this is hard to do
* spends money on politics instead of core product
And many more
You should read a business book too. Focusing on core product (firefox) should be top priority, especially if it is the only real product that generates revenue.
Soon music will stop and there will be no money, since it got spent on everything else.
The problem is Mozilla's mission is not to develop a browser! They have a browser, and it is what everyone knows them for, but their mission is only vaguely related to the browser. I don't care much about their mission - there are plenty of other charities that have similar missions if I did. I care about a great browsers and they are not delivering that - which is fine as far as their mission, but I'm miffed because I can't get what I want from anyone.
What do business books say you should do when the primary way you lose your market is illegal and anti-competitive business practices from a megacorp in a political environment anathema to punishing anti-competitive business practices?
Please tell me how Firefox was supposed to compete with Chrome being bundled with nearly any download of any software anywhere, and with a one click installer on the Google homepage. The value of that advertising alone far exceeds what Mozilla could afford.
People who think it's Mozilla's failure to have been utterly crushed by illegal business practices are so strange to me.
What did you expect to happen? Why do you think we have laws against this stuff in the first place? How would you have outspent the behemoth on advertising? How would you have overcome a competitor being included with nearly everything done on a computer?
Google Chrome's abuse of installers was so bad that Microsoft had to change how it sets "default browser" because Google was setting itself as the default entirely without user interaction! Tons of the marketshare that went from Firefox to Chrome did not do so intentionally, did not even know, and did not mean to
It's funny, because Firefox gained dominant market share in a time when Internet was much younger and Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows.
However Firefox offered something that IE did not have - extensions and customization, so those "in the know" popularized it. Especially abilty to block ads spread as word of mouth.
Then the "in the know" people would install Firefox and recommend it (for free!) to their family and friends.
Now we are in time when Google creates various "manifests" that are a fancy way of saying that they want to cut on ad-blocks in Chrome... so it would be Firefox time to shine again. What do they do? Their CEO (previous one) says that they dont want adblocks and could in fact get rid of them! So opposite of what made Firefox popular in the first place!
Then on top of that they developers of firefox have a big internal problem: they dont want to do what users want (ability to make addons, extensions and customize thing). They dont want to do that because it is "hard". They want to do greenfield projects that nobody is interested in. Note that those developers dont write Firefox for free, they earn good salaries. But management lets them do what they want.
The differentiator for Firefox were extensions - but those were killed, because the team did not want to support them
Business book will ask you "what is the unique proposition of Firefox" - it was adblock now and they want to kill even this.
That argument is a lot less convincing now that Brave (by their previous CTO) has seen exponential growth the last few years while Firefox has just cruised. It turns out Firefox just kinda sucks.