I saw that title on Twitter about this article and I thought that can be a good idea to start an article (required few time).
Just as intro I am a Mozilla volunteer since 2013, Mozilla Reps since 2015 (twice in the Reps Council), Mozilla TechSpeaker since 2016, I develop browser extensions for Firefox, leading the Mozilla Italia community for the participation side, doing talks and stuff, joined 7 times the Mozilla All Hands and many other things.
I am not pro-Google, I use LineageOS for my phone with no Chrome, no Google Contact/Calendar but my Nextcloud instance also for my files, duckduckgo for my searches and so on.
Why Mozilla lost the war?
For Google there is a project that gather all the products that was killed by Google, this list is something like that but also include the various fails where other competitors instead achieved something that moved Mozilla less important in the tech market.
Just as note as volunteer since 2013 I can consider myself a veteran, also I often saw that volunteers remember better this list compared to the Mozilla employees that often stay inside the company/foundation for few years and not so much time like a volunteer.
- The new Lazy Loading that will be implemented in WordPress but is supported only by the Chrom* ecosystem and is not a standard yet, Firefox 75 got that feature.
- Jitsi is not supported in Firefox because some APIs for WebRTC are missing, so in this situation of a lot of people switching to remote solution (the coronavirus stupid pandemia) the red panda is not offering a very good experience.
- WebReplay is now a Firefox fork because for Mozilla this dev feature is not important anymore maybe for the last changes of layoffs...
- Electron conquered the world but the Mozilla alternative was abandoned. If Gecko was embeddable in the right moment maybe the web won't so Chrom* centric.
- Firefox OS is just a big example of a lot of huge promises and results that wasn't realistic.
- Mozilla Backpack with the Mozilla portal for volunteers badges (yes maybe I am the only one remembering it) was the first step to promote the badge technology in the learning world and now died (migrated to another service).
- Firefox Hello started and later killed but maybe if Mozilla still worked on that the WebRTC technology was more privacy friendly.
- Mozilla WebExtension changed the ecosystem a bit as you can see from the Chrome blog in the extensions category, 2013-2018 with no posts in a very huge time frame. The Addon ecosystem changed in Mozilla (recently also in Thunderbird) but didn't affect anyway the Chrom* APIs also with the Manifest V3 changes.
- Thimble started during the Web Literacy after the dead of Mozilla Webmaker, and now closed.
- Popcorn Maker was a cool project to do interactive video with Web technology but shutdown like the others.
- The Mozilla Learning Network started during the effort of Web Literacy that Mozilla chosen to close also if it is still a hot topic and other realities are now moving on this, the difference is the scale that Mozilla achieved is not reached by anyone now. At least the portal is still alive with all the content...
- WebUSB started as project by Google but because is not a standard now is dead, Mozilla is still behind on adopting new API like WebMidi. This means that there are no way that Mozilla start to look on these proposals and do something to help on becoming standards.
- Debugger.html, that started as a project to run the debugger outside Firefox but is now stopped also if there are nice debugger examples.
- Google is now doing things for web literacy (like this one to tests users' abilities on identify phishing) when was the first goal in Mozilla few years ago (excluding the mozilla club program) with Encrypt campaign, Take back the web campaign (there aren't anymore official links to that), Codemoji (to learn cyphers), WebWeWant campaign. Instead, is doing other things like privacynotincluded that in my personal opinion don't compete with the scale of the others campaigns.
- Warn when downloading executable files over HTTP now is supported in Chrome 82 but not in Firefox. Last comment of an user "Firefox could have been a pioneer, instead it looks like Chrome will get there first."
Check the rest of the post on the blogpost.
Top comments (4)
I love Firefox as a browser but we should be realistic about the fact that Mozilla has orders of magnitude less resources than the three other companies behind the other browsers: Google, Microsoft and Apple.
I don't know most of the projects you listed. I don't know the full story and can't presume to know it but maybe they were stretched too thin trying to tackle all of those things.
Browser adoption was surely limited by Chrome's appearance and likely (even though most end users don't know about it), the difficulties of embedding Firefox or using it as a developer platform.
At the same time though Mozilla is working on or has worked on really cool stuff like Rust, WebAssembly and VR technologies.
and
don't know how the 2019 went, but the fact they let go 70 people in 2020 might mean it didn't go as they expected. Or it might mean they decided to stop focusing on so many things at the time.
I'm still optimistic, I don't think the goal is to have Firefox become the most popular browser, that ship has probably sailed but Mozilla can keep innovating and building a really good product :)
If you check the rest of the blogpost you can find more information but yes Mozilla worked on those technologies but doesn't have the same effect like other companies.
My idea was to show how mozilla kill projects to switch on other things and later competitors or other community doesn the same things better maybe with less volunteers then mozilla has.
So, what can we do?
Expose to Mozilla the various issues that as users and developers we are facing on using that product.
As example in this days a lot of people is reporting problems with Jitsi github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues... and bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?s...
Now that there is high pressure they are evaluating on working on adding this missing APIs, we need to put different goals on the Mozilla ones that for me are not following the real wider needs but just the interests of few months based on the news.