There's no need to save Firefox. When Firefox came out, it was a breath of fresh air. Because of Mozilla, every browser is now really, really great. Even Microsoft's browser is standards compliant and open source! Yeah, I get the arguments that Webkit is too pervasive and Chrome is too tied to Google and all of that... but in my opinion, Mozilla wanted a world where every single consumer had the choice between numerous high-quality browsers, and that's the world we currently live in! Firefox is losing this current battle, but Mozilla won the war.
The problem now isn't the browser, but rather the websites. Too much tracking, too much fights over who owns your online persona, and not enough usability (I'm so sick of passwords).
Mozilla always had a unique skill... they were a non-profit that was great at taking complicated technical issues that plagued the internet, and packaging them in a way that was usable. They took hard problems and made it so nobody had to think about them.
I'd love to see Mozilla do the same for identity. I'd love to see them be the company that killed password, and made it so identity is simple, easy and safe.
First off, Google can't do it. Nor can the other big players. Why? Because identity and tracking so to tied to their core business model, they have to back off imposing it. Otherwise they'll be accused of making it so "you need a Google account to use the web". (Or in Apple's case, they've had to go so far the opposite way that nobody really uses it.)
There's a lot of money in this! Identity is very closely tied to payments (it's crazy how it's 2022 and in the browser I still am typing in my credit card number).
To me, identity online is tied to an email address. You can have an email address with your real name, a few throwaways, etc. Identity doesn't have to mean YOU specifically. I'd love to see Mozilla work with GMail/etc... but also spin up their own email servers. Since most people now access email from a client (Apple Mail, Superhuman, etc), having a headless email server would help both privacy and also put them in a great place to help own identity.
Lastly, Mozilla always was fighting two wars at the same time. They both wanted institutional changes for the Internet (aka standard compliant browsers) and also were building a really nice implementation of it (aka Firefox). I feel like this is how they should approach identity. Getting everyone to follow the same standards (i.e. I can still use my GMail account for anything listed above), while also building their own stellar implementation of it and giving their competition a reason to compete (their own mail server, including these identity features in Firefox, etc).
> a world where every single consumer had the choice between numerous high-quality browsers, and that's the world we currently live in!
I strongly disagree. There are numerous browsers than can render websites well enough but not a single one that puts the needs of user first before everything else.
There's no need to save Firefox. When Firefox came out, it was a breath of fresh air. Because of Mozilla, every browser is now really, really great. Even Microsoft's browser is standards compliant and open source! Yeah, I get the arguments that Webkit is too pervasive and Chrome is too tied to Google and all of that... but in my opinion, Mozilla wanted a world where every single consumer had the choice between numerous high-quality browsers, and that's the world we currently live in! Firefox is losing this current battle, but Mozilla won the war.
The problem now isn't the browser, but rather the websites. Too much tracking, too much fights over who owns your online persona, and not enough usability (I'm so sick of passwords).
Mozilla always had a unique skill... they were a non-profit that was great at taking complicated technical issues that plagued the internet, and packaging them in a way that was usable. They took hard problems and made it so nobody had to think about them.
I'd love to see Mozilla do the same for identity. I'd love to see them be the company that killed password, and made it so identity is simple, easy and safe.
First off, Google can't do it. Nor can the other big players. Why? Because identity and tracking so to tied to their core business model, they have to back off imposing it. Otherwise they'll be accused of making it so "you need a Google account to use the web". (Or in Apple's case, they've had to go so far the opposite way that nobody really uses it.)
There's a lot of money in this! Identity is very closely tied to payments (it's crazy how it's 2022 and in the browser I still am typing in my credit card number).
To me, identity online is tied to an email address. You can have an email address with your real name, a few throwaways, etc. Identity doesn't have to mean YOU specifically. I'd love to see Mozilla work with GMail/etc... but also spin up their own email servers. Since most people now access email from a client (Apple Mail, Superhuman, etc), having a headless email server would help both privacy and also put them in a great place to help own identity.
Lastly, Mozilla always was fighting two wars at the same time. They both wanted institutional changes for the Internet (aka standard compliant browsers) and also were building a really nice implementation of it (aka Firefox). I feel like this is how they should approach identity. Getting everyone to follow the same standards (i.e. I can still use my GMail account for anything listed above), while also building their own stellar implementation of it and giving their competition a reason to compete (their own mail server, including these identity features in Firefox, etc).