I have my beefs with Mozilla, but to say they aren't focusing on code is crazy. The stuff they're doing (especially with the native JS compilation) is very difficult stuff that honestly has a chance to change all browsers for good.

I have good friends on their *Monkey teams and can say without a doubt that there's a lot of impressive code going in there. Stuff that someone absolutely needs to be doing-- and it's all available for free.

I agree I'm also annoyed with FF memory consumption and some stability issues I've had lately, but I can't disagree more firmly on the quality of the code they have. Without much research, you can find code at Mozilla that's better than what major for-profit companies are producing out of their R&D-- and it works across a dozen platforms.

I think he was using words loosely - I have the same problem. Namely, this isn't nerds working on something awesome anymore. It's marketing. Old Firefox wouldn't have done something stupid like break a world record: it didn't need to. It was all about finding a browser that you liked and using it.

Then the fucking browser wars started, and all of us fucked away hours on it, and Firefox/Google took notice and started playing the game, which was a shit move.

So the coding is still good, no doubt, but Firefox has become a movement rather than a piece of software.

Is there anything wrong with marketing? Sure on one hand you could say they "sold out". But underneath all the open source and hackers they are a company... a for profit company at that. They are pushing a product that is superior to the current standard and are forcing inovation that might have taken significantly longer had they not become a serious threat. So if a few tactics like setting world records helps spread the word and make the internet better, I'm all for it.

I would love to see Firefox become the industry standard. It will force other browsers to start playing by the rules, mainly living up to standards and working harder to make a better product. Competition is what creates better products. When you have a monopoly or are the only major player in an industry you aren't as innovative. You don't need to be. Look at the cell phone market pre iPhone... now everything is touch screen and has internet...

It's wrong when you do it in a weaselly way.

The thing that most pissed me off was their "Firefox vs. Safari" comparison chart, where Firefox got points in things like "encourages developing standards" and a ton of things that AREN'T web browsing. Their marketing has NOTHING to do with how good the browser is, EVERYTHING to do with pure glam. Same with setting a world record. That did nothing to prove anything, nothing to counter the criticism that Firefox was getting for things.

And, not to get all fanboyish, but Firefox is an inferior product. Opera is slimmer and faster, and yet can do far more out-of-the-box. On the Mac, as alluded to before, Safari is a godsend. Firefox looks wrong, it's too cluttered, it doesn't support two-finger scrolling well or three-finger navigation at all. And the team almost certainly knows this. Yet they've ignored constantly the fact that they're making an inferior product and continue to market their product as the best there is. Which, at least on OS X, it's not.

I think the thing that I like most about Steve Jobs is when, in a marketing interview, he said, "Apple TV might not work. Other people have tried and failed. There's every chance this will fail too. In which case we'll improve again." Apple is famous for marketing, but it's famous for marketing in a more honest way: they don't lie about their product. Firefox and its developers do. That's what's wrong with their marketing.

I'm glad you're not running Firefox. Google's money enables more programmers to work on it, marketing allows it to grow market share which puts pressure on IE and less directly to make the web more standard. The loss of your idea of some sort of purity is a nothing price to pay for turning Firefox into a force for the advancement of the web.