>Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.
Again, the whack-a-mole myth that simply won't die. I have asked people about this over and over and over again over I'm gonna say like the past year and a half and at this point I feel pretty confident that this was kind of a mass-hallucinated myth. If you try to be objective and actually look at the numbers and you look at the time period over which Firefox lost browser share and you look at their budgets in the time period over which they engaged in side bets, the math just doesn't add up. None of the side bets ever occurred at prohibitive development costs, and they did not occur over a time period over which Firefox's browser share crashed. There's no such thing as a missing browser feature which Firefox was unable to implement because they didn't have access to resources due to those resources being siphoned away by sidebeds. And people seem to have forgotten they're supposed to actually like make a real argument about these things before simply claiming it.
There is a kinda-sorta real version of the argument, which is that around 2016 or so, before Firefox released quantum, the quality of the browser was lagging behind alternatives, and they were investing significant resources in Firefox OS. That's the closest to a real thing that this argument can attach to. But no one making this claim even knows that no one making this claim has looked at their budget, how much it costs to run a VPN, or made any cause and effect connection between that and other things. This is a myth that kind of got hallucinated into existence by hn comment sections.
I do think the critique of straying from a commitment to privacy is a real thing, but the narrative that they wasted time and resources on side features while the core browser experience deteriorated, attempts to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between that and market share is not backed up by any facts. And if you look at my comment history, it's practically a year of pleading with people to cite any example whatsoever that would substantiate this argument.
Again, the whack-a-mole myth that simply won't die. I have asked people about this over and over and over again over I'm gonna say like the past year and a half and at this point I feel pretty confident that this was kind of a mass-hallucinated myth. If you try to be objective and actually look at the numbers and you look at the time period over which Firefox lost browser share and you look at their budgets in the time period over which they engaged in side bets, the math just doesn't add up. None of the side bets ever occurred at prohibitive development costs, and they did not occur over a time period over which Firefox's browser share crashed. There's no such thing as a missing browser feature which Firefox was unable to implement because they didn't have access to resources due to those resources being siphoned away by sidebeds. And people seem to have forgotten they're supposed to actually like make a real argument about these things before simply claiming it.
There is a kinda-sorta real version of the argument, which is that around 2016 or so, before Firefox released quantum, the quality of the browser was lagging behind alternatives, and they were investing significant resources in Firefox OS. That's the closest to a real thing that this argument can attach to. But no one making this claim even knows that no one making this claim has looked at their budget, how much it costs to run a VPN, or made any cause and effect connection between that and other things. This is a myth that kind of got hallucinated into existence by hn comment sections.
I do think the critique of straying from a commitment to privacy is a real thing, but the narrative that they wasted time and resources on side features while the core browser experience deteriorated, attempts to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between that and market share is not backed up by any facts. And if you look at my comment history, it's practically a year of pleading with people to cite any example whatsoever that would substantiate this argument.