[rafterydj]

I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc.

That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.

[giancarlostoro]

I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!

I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one day someone like (and if they read this, and anyone who reads this will think I'm crazy) CloudFlare just buys Firefox itself from Mozilla so it can finally be funded correctly. CloudFlare has an interesting talent pool and I'm sure there's people who work with Rust / have worked with Rust who can help fund something like Firefox. Then I would like to see them create a true open foundation whose entire bottom line goes towards Firefox, not to anything else.

Free the fox from corporate shennanigans. By my own corporate shennanigans. And CF could be swapped out with any company bold enough to free the fox.

[glenstein]

>I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser,

Unfortunately the side bets are disproportionately visible relative to the vast majority of what they actually do, which is ship millions of lines of code in browser improvements every quarter, keeping pace with Google despite a fraction of Google's resources.

I certainly think a better strategic partner than Google would be ideal. Yahoo had a strategically promising moment that slipped through its fingers that I think will always be a what-if. Cloudflare is interesting because they're very much a create-a-blue-ocean kind of company, and the problem with browsers has always been that the browser space simply isn't a revenue driver, it's something you subsidize from other businesses.

Firefox is, remarkably, the most successful self funded browser engine in the history of the world, but many great companies have come and gone in this space (e.g. Opera) and still fell behind. They invest more in the browser now than they ever have, they have shipped more production Rust code than anybody. But that's not louder than the noise in the modern internet.

I think you're right that someone like Cloudflare would be an interesting partner and I can't think of a better one off the top of my head. And if AI is eclipsing search, that threatens search licensing they're currently relying on. I don't know what AI in the browser is, what new norms, what new expectations, what core concepts are going to matter the most. But something is going to change and you have to get out ahead of that now, to be relevant tomorrow.

[Vinnl]

At the same time, Firefox last year gained tab groups, vertical tabs, a user-friendly profile switcher. Split view and tab notes are under development. It sometimes feels like it's moving faster than ever, and that's disregarding all AI features.

(Disclosure: I work at Mozilla, but not on Firefox.)

[dralley]

> I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!

And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.

I mean, even literally this one sentence is self-contradictory. Thunderbird is not their browser. You complain that they "invest more effort into everything other than their browser" and then complain that they don't invest enough in Thunderbird.

No win situation for them in terms of public opinion.

* They can't get diversify their revenue to be less dependent on Google without doing things that people view as "distractions"

* They don't get credit when the "distractions" are for the public good, like LetsEncrypt, Rust, Opus / AV1, etc.

* They get punished for de-prioritizing "distractions" like Thunderbird and Servo and Rust because those distractions are popular.

* For years they were simultaneously being dragged for dropping the XUL extension ecosystem, and also dragged for low performance and lack of multiprocessing and a bunch of other things which were being kneecapped hard by the XUL extension ecosystem.

It's not like I love their management or anything, certainly they've made mistakes, but the narcissism of small differences hits them with full force relative to every other competitor in the space.

[shafyy]

Sure, it's not like CloudFare centralizes enough of the internet infrastructure, let's also give them one of the few (more or less) independent browsers.