I can't say enough good things about Mozilla and their values. After becoming disillusioned with Apple over the last five years, Mozilla feels like one of the last remaining forces attempting to stave off a computing world of digital fiefdoms (in addition to Automattic and Canonical).
The nice thing about open-source: Canonical's self-interested advancements of Ubuntu have made the OS quite a bit better.
By "the OS", I am referring, of course, to Debian. :)
I think (perhaps-douchebaggy) self-interest is perfectly fine when it has positive externalities in the world. You're free to avoid the drama of the Ubuntu project itself, while continuing to reap the rewards on the rest of the ecosystem from its existence.
I'm not sure if Ubuntu made Debian much better than it is. Sure, there are some contributions, but they usually go other way around - Debian benefits Ubuntu.
Especially with latest developments of Ubuntu moving away from the rest of the Linux world (Mir, Unity and etc.). I.e. all the Ubuntu specific things aren't benefiting the rest, only Ubuntu.
Decisions like supporting and moving to Mir, Unity, etc... have been technical. You can't say they are douche-bags because of that.
And on Ubuntu moving away from the rest of the Linux world, do you know what's the most popular OS that uses a Linux kernel and that will probably be the most popular OS period? It's Android. And besides the backing of Google, which definitely helped its popularity, given that other big companies tried variations of Linux on phones, you've got to wonder, aren't there technical reasons too for Android's popularity?
And of course there are. Android maintains binary backwards compatibility. And Android simply skipped on all the X.org / GTK+ / Gnome / Qt / KDE cluster fuck. People complain about Android fragmentation, however compared to Linux on desktops, development for Android feels like you're in heaven.
Why? It's great either way. If improvements to Ubuntu help get people into linux, and they choose to stay on Ubuntu rather than move to Debian, how is that not a win?
I'm glad somebody brought up Red Hat. I can't believe Canonical is mentioned in a similar context as Mozilla and Red Hat is forgotten. If we were talking about Google or Amazon, however...
I'm mostly peeved with the whole theme licensing issue that's popped up recently. Mostly the idea that if you don't do things their way, you're doing it wrong (and can be banned from speaking at a WordCamp).
Values listed on a web page are one thing. Actions are another.
I haven't been impressed with their actions over the past few years.
Just look at Firefox. Instead of striving to provide a lean, practical, extensible browser, all they've managed to do is copy Chrome as of late. The UI changes have not been for the better. The release schedule changes were very painful, and the version number inflation is pointless. While its performance and memory usage is marginally better these days, it has still been years without any significant improvement. It's not surprising that users are moving away from it to other browsers.
Then there's Thunderbird. Aside from Firefox, this was one of their only other pieces of useful software. Yet they've dropped their support for it to a minimal level.
What's worse, while neglecting their software that people actually use on a daily basis, they've embarked on pointless efforts like FirefoxOS and Persona. We don't need another mobile OS, especially one that's essentially crippled to only supporting development using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS (which, of course, are already available on Android and iOS, not to mention the other mobile OSes that are already widely available). Persona is clearly not gaining any traction.
The only encouraging thing out of them has been Rust. But even that seems to be rather loosely associated with them, and appears to be regarded as quite experimental.
I know, I know. I'm not paying for their software, so they don't have any obligation to me, etc., etc.. I'm merely not convinced that their actions really correspond to the principles in their manifesto very well.
Notice that over the past several years, in each data set, that Firefox's usage has dropped off, or at best not grown.
People are leaving Firefox because it's not improving, and because it is actually getting worse in many ways for many people. If we're going to get the Chrome experience even when using Firefox, but done in an inferior fashion, we may as well just use Chrome.
I expect we'd see a similar, if not more severe, drop off in Thunderbird's usage numbers. I've personally moved to a different client within the past year, and I know several other people who have, too.
There's nothing compelling about FirefoxOS compared to Android, iOS, or the incumbents. Average people will not switch to it. Without these people, it won't gain traction, and Mozilla will still have limited to no influence in the mobile space.
And the same goes for Persona. It has been around for a few years now, but average people aren't using it, nor does it look like there's any reason they'd want to.
"Openness" may be a noble goal, but I think they had much more influence when they were producing software that people liked to use because it worked well. The move away from this has corresponded to a decrease in their influence, and much greater influence for Google, Apple, Microsoft and even Opera.
> "People are leaving Firefox because it's not
> improving, and because it is actually getting
> worse in many ways for many people"
If we're pointing to market share as a barometer of browser quality, then I guess Internet Explorer is the best browser in the world.
There is no doubt some people are leaving FF for Chrome because of real/perceived issues with the tech itself. A significant number of people are discovering Chrome directly or indirectly because of:
1. Google advertises Chrome to its users on its search portal and its other massively popular web properties.
2. Google's massive presence in the tech press
3. Google's advertising for Chromebook devices
4. Indirectly, though the absolutely massive multinational
ad campaign for Android devices
5. The hundreds of millions of people that use Chrome on
their Android devices
6. Chrome's integration with the rest of Google's ecosystem
7. Google's status as a household world at this point. ("Let's see, I've heard of Google. This software must be okay. I do not know what a 'Mozilla' is and my daughter told me not to install things from companies I've never heard of.")
All extremely significant factors in the browser market share shift, and all avenues that Mozilla cannot rely on.
Chrome was also bundled with Adobe Flash Player installer for Windows, I.e. you download Flash and, if you didn't uncheck the check box, Chrome is set as your default browser.
Thank you - I was just beginning to wonder if the other side was actually right, when you reminded me there are two games - market share and free speech.
You don't have to rule the world before fixing it.
Mozilla may have lost the current battle for influence in the developed world, but with Firefox OS and the accompanying partnerships with carriers, Mozilla is aiming to bring Web-centric mobile devices to the developing world. I can only hope that they haven't already lost this battle, and that the people they hope to reach with Firefox OS value their freedom over hot brands, trendy walled-garden social networks, and having all of the latest features that are exclusive to proprietary systems.
Nothing is wrong with competition. Their response to it, however, clearly isn't working in their favor. Their apparent lack of willingness to move away from this failed path is further hurting them.
If they don't provide quality software, then they won't have users. If they don't have users, then they won't have influence. If they don't have influence, they don't have any real power to assert their "open web" philosophy. The less power that Mozilla has, the more power their competitors will share, including those with a much different philosophy.
If they don't have influence, they don't have any real power to assert their "open web" philosophy
A philosophy does not assert itself by having power, it reveals its value (or lack thereof) to the honest thinker, and has that value regardless of the existence of such thinkers.
That kind of thinking is nice and all in the academic world, but in the real world a philosophy is absolutely useless unless some person or organization has the ability to put those ideas in to practice.
By losing market share, Mozilla is losing influence, which will inhibit their ability to introduce more "openness". Their philosophy will become far less useful, and its value will decrease, if it can't actually be implemented.
Why are you putting open into quotes? Anyway, the Nineteen-Eightyfour approach to what is true or right never did it for me.. utilitarian love for wisdom is not something that can actually exist.
> Mozilla's value and goal is pushing for open web. Not
> creating the best browser.
Then they have very stupid goal. Whatever that "open web is" (seriously, how do you close the web? by hanging lock on http and html?) but the main point is that the web is what browser vendors make of it. Some features of HTML 4 only lived in the spec, because no browser cared enough to implement them. HTML versions are if fact meaningless, because only features supported by browsers matter. Hence if you make a philosophically pure browser which nobody uses you will have zero influence on the web.
Nobody is saying that those influences don't exist. We're merely saying that it's pointless to try to combat them without market share. Products that nobody uses will have essentially no impact, even if they're more "open" than the more popular products.
Mozilla had some influence a few years ago, but they've been making decisions and taking actions that appear to be eroding that influence. If the current trends continue, their influence will continue to diminish. If they're striving for an "open" web, they're going to need influence to have any real impact.
>We're merely saying that it's pointless to try to combat them without market share. Products that nobody uses will have essentially no impact, even if they're more "open" than the more popular products.
The history of BSD and Linux should call that assertion into question.
They started relatively unpopular, but their openess earned them a core niche of technically capable innovators and early adopters, who over time improved their quality enough for them to nearly dominate in servers and mobile.
How is my statement "moving the goalpost"? I'm not moving any goalpost; I never claimed at any point that JS microbenchmarks were a good indicator of overall browser performance.
At a time when JS execution was a larger part of browser workloads (and the implementation techniques of JS engines were extremely simple compared to what was known to be possible for dynamic languages) JS microbenchmarks were a better proxy for whole browser peformance, although they weren't great at that point either. Today, all popular browsers have relatively decent JS engines and differences on microbenchmarks just don't reflect total browser performance as much as they did in the past.
Surely JS execution is a larger part than ever of browser workloads, or are you referring to things like CSS3 which move some of the rich-webapp work out of javascript?
Persona is far from pointless. The Web needs a decentralized identity to counter centralized, proprietary systems like Google, Facebook, and Twitter accounts.
With Firefox OS, Mozilla is skating to where the puck is going to be, maybe already is. Mobile devices are the future of interpersonal electronic communication. Something so important to our daily lives and society should not be dominated by fiefdoms like iOS and Android.
Email addresses and site-specific passwords already work just fine as a decentralized identity service. You can run your own email server(s) on your own domain(s), if you feel it necessary. Then again, you can use some other provider. Either way, basically everybody online already has at least one email account, if not several. Anyone who wants an email address, or even another one, can easily get one. Persona is trying to solve a problem that just doesn't exist, so it's no wonder we see so little adoption of it.
With FirefoxOS, Mozilla is skating to where the puck was in 2008. Android and iOS, among many others, just got there far earlier. FirefoxOS's HTML5/JavaScript/CSS approach looks much less appealing when it's also available on every other major platform, in addition to native approaches that these other platforms offer when performance or special functionality is needed.
If only we could harness cynicism to power our cities!
There isn't room for a third platform. Android and iOS can force developers to use Java or Objective-C through sheer numbers, but no other platform has that sway. If you look at the market today, every single player is pushing to make HTML5 a first-class target for application development: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, RIM, Canonical, etc. Apple's original plan for the iPhone was only Web apps.
The Web, in all of its glorious kludgyness, is going to win on mobile the same way it did on the desktop. Firefox OS is just one small part of that overwhelming trend.
About Firefox OS, I was talking about the ubiquity of smartphones and similar mobile devices on a global scale, not just the existence of modern mobile operating systems. I don't think the former has peaked yet, and the Firefox OS team is hoping to make an impact in the developing world in particular. Regarding HTML5+JS versus native, in Firefox OS, HTML5+JS is native as far as applications are concerned, and Mozilla is providing and trying to standardize APIs for all of the "special functionality" that developers can only use through proprietary APIs on the other platforms.
Asm.js? Emscripten? WebRTC? Come on, Mozilla has really been pushing the limits of the web lately, in new and interesting ways that no one else will try.
Asm.js is, at best, a truly atrocious hack. Emscripten is only marginally better. They're both quite inferior when compared to NaCl and PNaCl, for instance.
Trying to further entrench JavaScript is not a step forward, and I don't think it's something that should be encouraged or considered positive. Actively trying to move away from JavaScript toward a more general, and sensibly-designed/implemented in-browser runtime would be beneficial. Even embedding Lua, Python, or some other reasonable language would be helpful. But creating horrid JavaScript subsets is not helpful.
Unless I'm mistaken, WebRTC mostly came out of Google, not Mozilla. So maybe this is not a good example for you to use?
Who cares if you can run Quake or Skype in a browser? Nobody wants that because browsers suck. They're just so, so, so limited compared to native tech. Mozilla should be working on getting us the fuck away from Javascript, HTML and CSS and severely limited browsers.
We need to get over our disdain for "atrocious hacks" like asm.js and Emscripten, and instead see them as a strategy to advance the open Web platform, without requiring the cooperation of other players who have competing interests. The end goal is to connect more people without giving control to for-profit companies like Google and Apple.
Why would we want to "advance" sideways? What have happened to "the best tool for the job"? Where does this moronic "web for everything" attitude comes from?
As for the last sentence: I wonder in what state would Mozilla foundation be if not for Google's money.
It's fine for us hackers to use the right tool for the job, but the business of end-user platforms tends to be dominated by a few players, with strong network effects. Microsoft wants people to use Windows for everything, and has succeeded at that on PCs for a long time. Apple wants people to use iOS for almost everything and Mac for the rest, and with iOS at least, they've been quite successful. Google wants people to be highly dependent on Google services; Android and Chrome are means to this end, and Android in particular is firmly under Google's control despite technically being open-source.
proponents of software freedom and people's freedom in the online world want people to use free software as much as possible, especially at the platform level. Note that this desire, unlike the ones listed in the previous paragraph, is altruistic, not self-interested. So far, work on free-software platforms for end-users has focused on GNU/Linux desktop environments. Unfortunately, efforts in this area were always fragmented, and are becoming more so.
But we already have another platform that has serious market-share among end-users and mind-share among developers, and is not owned or controlled by any single player. That's the Web platform. This is why Mozilla is pushing the Web platform to rival the proprietary platforms that are currently dominant. It's a means to accomplish lofty goals that are undeniably worthwhile on a global scale. We need to keep the end goals in mind and recognize that the best way to reach these goals in the near future and given the constraints of an imperfect world might be something as displeasing to us hackers as the Web platform.
As for Google's money, why is that a problem? If Mozilla can maintain a mutually beneficial agreement with Google, such that Mozilla is able to reach its goals while Google also gets what it wants without harming users, then it's all good.
> I wonder in what state would Mozilla foundation be if not for Google's money.
Google isn't paying hundreds millions of dollars to be Mozilla's default search engine because Larry and Sergey are nice guys. Google gets a fantastic return on their investment. I'm sure Bing or Yahoo (which is still Bing) would gladly pay Mozilla for that privilege. The web might be a better place if Google's near-monopoly dominance was knocked down a few notches.
They've done a lot of innovations with respect to JavaScript optimizations, asm.js, and Emscripten. Even V8 running hand-written JavaScript can't approach the near-native speeds of Emscripten-emitted asm.js. A year or two ago I would have agreed with you but Mozilla has stepped up its game. Now if they could just fix their browser's UI.
They say 'internet' rather than 'web' but Mozilla's recent direction seems very heavily web-only oriented to me (FirefoxOS, Persona and basically concluding Thunderbird). Are they actively working on anything serious which is not web-based?
(Not to put them down. I love Mozilla and what they have done for all of us. Just curious as to their direction)
Do you have any suggestions for internet problems or projects that could use more attention? The question of "web versus internet" seems pedantic at first, but it is a thought-provoking. Privacy tools like Tor come to mind.
Your answer explains well why so many people in this thread do not understand the Mozilla mission very well.
Mozilla sees the Internet not as a bunch of bits and bytes and protocols but instead as an integral part of people's lives. As a way to enrich people's lives, to enable innovation, to give people opportunities, to let people communicate.
Sure Mozilla contributes heavily on the technical side in many forms. But, the real value, and this is outlined very well in the mission statement, is about empowering people.
And the single biggest channel for that is the open web. Hence the large focus on web technology.
TCP/IP in itself does not provide any value. It is just a transport. Web technology does all the interesting things, this is why I dare to call it the universal language that the internet speaks.
>> And the single biggest channel for that is the open web.
>No, streamed or buffered audio and video are the biggest channel for that.
Video may take up enormous amounts of bandwidth, but the information density is very low. And it's unclear whether the time spent watching video is anywhere close to the time spent reading text, looking at pictures or navigating the links of the Web. And buffered video is delivered over HTTP...
Anyway, this pedantry is tiring, st3fan has a valid point. TCP/IP is necessary, but not sufficient. It is the combination of Web technologies (TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, etc) that is driving so much of the innovation of the past 15 years. Could the Raspberry Pi have been the success it is today without the visibility afforded by the Web? I doubt it.
All of the popular full, un-sandboxed operating systems for end-users are proprietary. No, desktop GNU/Linux doesn't count. The only non-proprietary platform that has sewrious user market-share and developer mind-share is the Web platform. Therefore, as much as it may disgust us from a technical/aesthetic point of view, advancing the open Web platform is the best way to achieve certain highly desirable social/political goals.
And by "all of the popular full, un-sandboxed operating systems for end-users" you mean the one that isn't sandboxed, Windows? because, technically even just the popular part could mean only Windows, but the addition of un-sandboxed further cements that because OS X sandboxes things a bunch now.
There is one issue people haven't glossed over. Mozilla derives over 85% of their revenue from Google (by making google the default search engine). So a lot of their development involves getting funding from google. The problem with this is that you cannot fight for open standards (against google, it looks like of late) when you derive most of your funding from your adversary. You need an independent revenue stream, like Red Hat. Firefox can probably offer non-tracking services to corporations that have doubts over google's data policies.
PS : I am a fan of Firefox, but it has been crashing way too often of late. Only the fact of me being a power web user (I have more than 70 tabs open on average) has kept me a continued Firefox user.
Google is not what I would call an adversary. Mozilla, Google, Microsoft and others are willing to go in the same direction, they don't share the same priorities and it's all about negociations and stuff.
When Mozilla and Google renewed their partnership, I heard that Bing was ready to pay Mozilla a bigger check than Google was, yet they choose to stick with Google because they thought it was a better option for the user. If it's true, I think we can trust them about the way they earn money and use it.
On the other hand, as far as I understand, Firefox OS is built with partners from the industry, which probably means that development costs are shared, and not only supported by Google's money.
Last but not least, we probably have a lot of different experiences with firefox, but my setup does not crash every so often...
Maybe you have an extension that is causing your crashes ... I suspect something that is not used by very many people.
As a side not I am proud to work for Mozilla. The first thing we ask before doing anything is "Will this make the internet a better place?" ... too many companies do not live their missions or, at least, don't live up to them.
It seems that any problem with Firefox results in this user-blaming. How often is one obligated to reset one's profile? If extensions make the browser slow and unstable, do you expect users never to install any? Mozilla seems to have a real problem hearing criticism about its browser. But when you push it back on the user, the truth is that a lot of people aren't going to accept that blame. They're just going to ditch your browser for something which doesn't create this sort of problem with completely normal, average usage.
There is no user blaming here. In normal circumstances Firefox is very stable so if it is crashing the fix is extremely likely to be one of the things I mentioned.
You should never have to reset your profile but if your PC (or Firefox) crashes it can cause profile issues and a reset then helps to regain stability.
The most common causes of crashes are extensions and addons. Because Firefox allows extension developers very deep integration with Firefox they can occasionally cause instabilities. Of course we want users to use extensions but occasionally one gets through that causes problems.
Most extensions do not make the browser slow and unstable, just badly written ones.
Nobody at Mozilla has problems with accurate criticisms about Firefox as it shows us where to focus in order to make the browser better.
Yep, that's the current default on FxOS builds. Beyond that, I'm totally ignorant of the business deals that are in place around Firefox and FirefoxOS.
> The Internet is an integral part of modern life—a key
> component in education, communication, collaboration,
> business, entertainment and society as a whole.
This is true. Alas, too many forget, that "internet" is not the same as "web" and think that everything internet is should be made of HTML, CSS and ECMAScript, instead of thinking of internet as the net of interconnected devices.
