alt Hacker NewsIt's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future
Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.
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The string of departures and how people communicated around them let me think it’s something a lot less nefarious: Mozilla looked like an extremely political company at the time.
Servo was extremely good at communication with their very frequent news letter and Rust had a lot of wind in its sails, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ruffled the wrong feathers. Mozilla is very much still managed by what remains of its old guards - by that I mean what hasn’t been poached - especially at the top.
That would be pure incompetence from the top management but not malice.
I still strongly believe Servo can be a real counterpoint to Chrome/Chromium's hegemony in the long haul. Not sure why Mozilla ditched it nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it.
I think Mozilla makes a lot of sense if you consider the following long term strategic goal: Become independent of Google money. None Google income has grown to 150M$ in 2023, up from 80M$ the year before. Mozilla has used dramatically more of the Google money to build up assets than it spends on advocacy or other projects that irl some people so. In 2023 they had 1B$ in investments. Net assets have been going up by 100M+ per year.
They are not yet in striking distance to truly become independent, but they are making significant steps in that direction. The share of Google money in their revenue went from 90% in 2020 to 75% in 2023.
I don't think following the money actually shows what you think it does.
As a postscript:
Damned if they do, damned if they don't. There were plenty of people at the time arguing that Firefox maintaining one independent browser engine was idiotic and they should just switch to Chromium like everyone else. People like to lambast Mozilla over relatively minor advocacy spending stuff and cry that it should just focus on Firefox, but insist it should have obviously continued with Servo. Even though Servo probably wouldn't have made a substantial difference to Firefox post Quantum for a very long time.
What do you mean? Doesn't most of Mozilla's revenue come from Firefox?
Every day I login into Hacker News. Every day, I see Mozilla FUD.
It's wrong to name names without prood but after a point you start doubting your understanding of the world and at this point I'm beginning to suspect Mitchell Baker is a plant
The end of Pocket is just another sad example.
As an April fools joke, Mozilla should announce that they are discontinuing Firefox in order to focus on their core business, which is a beautiful abstraction: the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.