Many bizarre graphics, but none visualizing market share.

The state of Firefox is terrible. The state of Mozilla? I couldn't get it from this terrible website. Which tells a lot about the state of Firefox.

IMO Mozilla has turned into a wrong way since the shitshow with Brendan Eich.

Is it just me or has Mozilla been taken over by grifters?

In the hopes of someone at Mozilla reading this, I don't like you or anything of what you do, you're simply just more tolerable than google but you are not fun, not great, not good, your browser is ok but as a company you are just annoying and i wish you'd shut up more.

So it's my fault when Firefox lost share to Chrome, and a mysterious coincidence, or at best nothing to my credit, that Brave grew from 0 to ~60M from 2015 when I cofounded it -- makes sense!

Your obsession with me, evident in the need to well-ackshually almost every HN post that might be considered positive about my work, is frankly creepy. I've already been erased from Mozilla's site, a la Stalin-era pre-photoshop photo touchups. No worries -- let it go, the past is in the past.

He said about his work. And it would be objectively false either way. I'd say your hero worship affected your comprehension.

> the people who hold these views, do they begrudingly use firefox

I do, despite the useless manager parasites who are intent to bleed Firefox dry to fatten themselves up.

If I didn't use Firefox then I'd have no motivation to care that Firefox is grossly mismanaged. It would be not my problem.

At this point there’s really no other browser. There’s Chromium, and there’s Firefox. With manifest V3 being removed from Chromium, the non-Firefox alternatives might as well all be identical.

I will seriously consider Firefox again when the deplorable Chrome maintainers will kill ad blocking.

Yes, I gave up on Firefox many years ago and use Chromium now. This is because of the identity politics and feminist "code of conduct" speech code being pushed by the organization. I know Google is no better, but I still did it to make a statement to Mozilla. Enough people doing that might get them to stop this nonsense.

you have an extra 60 vertical pixels - I'm not sure it matters.

I agree Mozilla should be involved politics to do with software freedom, but it should not be involved in politics to do with our government, etc.

> I have never had mobile FF crash on me

A few months ago they released a version of Nightly that would crash for most users on startup every time. It was up on the Play store for several days.

That would normally be a buyer-beware situation as with any dev build, but Mozilla had purposely locked several important features - such as about:config configuration and loading any extension - behind the Nightly version, forcing users into that kind of experience.

Most of the problems I have are that when opening a new tab, FF does not show the content. I need to copy paste the url to another tab, and then it works.

Were I a donor to Mozilla, that would tell me they already have more money then they can use toward furthering their goal and in future years I would look to donate directly to organizations helping the impoverished, oppressed.

There is no expertise at managing humanitarian efforts at Mozilla. There is no overlap with their primary purpose and external charitable contributions outside of those supporting open web standards. It’s a waste of everyone’s resources.

It's not just the 'rainbow' initiatives, but the vague way those initiatives are described. Take this for example: "These projects range from creating virtual support networks for LGBTQI+ individuals"

What did they actually do here? Host a mastadon instance for gay people? How many of those people wouldn't have a chatroom with like-minded people if not for Mozilla's efforts? There are countless such spaces on the net already, for instance on traditional social media, on other fediverse instances, on discord or reddit, etc... so how much money did Mozilla spend creating yet another chatroom for LGBTQI+ people and how much real world impact did their effort actually have?

(Aside, saying 'individuals' instead of 'people' exemplifies the sort of swarmy weasel language used by cops, corporate PR, and other snakes putting on airs. Why do they do this, don't they know this kind of language betrays them for what they are? I guess they use this language to impress each other and don't really care that normal people perceive it as inauthentic.)

Reading this post makes me desirous of an email provider political compass chart.

Riseup and Tor have a long history. They run a directory authority and other services used by the Tor project and community. And people with very different politics can and do use their security guides.

> They stopped being an organization dedicated to furthering the cause of free software, and instead dedicated themselves to promoting radical left wing political causes.

Mozilla's resources are directed at Firefox much more than anything else. Grants and donations were 1% of 2022 expenses. Your claim would be far from true still even if all grants and donations went to communist rebels.

They're saying that Chrome would have to kill adblockers to be as bad as Firefox for them.

I think that advocating for a free and open internet is political. Open source software is a radical political movement

Oh, that's a close example I didn't think about at all. Maybe! Though I'm not sure what makes this subsidiary an inherently better structure?

How much do comparable companies spend on management, administration, and marketing?

I mean the approval process for packages in Cargo is controlled by vendor.

Some stuff I would like to see:

First and foremost, allow me to donate to Firefox. Not to the foundation, to Firefox. Second, and related, increase Firefox' budget. Remember how extensions were essentially dead on Android since 2020 until recently? Or how they fired a chunk of the Rust team due to budget cuts? That should not have happened.

Third, put Firefox front and center. The article linked here has exactly one mention of Firefox, and that's in the standard footer at the very bottom. The fact that "State of Mozilla" doesn't talk about Firefox as point one (or at all) worries me.

Fourth, go to the offensive. Stop chasing whatever Chrome is doing and, more important, stop implementing their every dumb idea. I am glad they said no to Manifest V3 but, at the same time, I can't remember when was the last time they stood their ground before that (and even then, they are following Chrome's lead too).

I'm fine with exploring other sources of revenue, but I worry that those sources are benefiting Mozilla more than they are benefiting Firefox. The fact that Firefox' usage has plummeted and yet the CEO has not lost their job over it is, to me, a worrisome indicator of where Mozilla's priorities are.

They do have a fixed release window, don't they? So the amount of versions per year is not really meaningful.

Laying off the Servo team is one example I remember, that didn't look like Mozilla cares about Firefox. Personally I keep on using Firefox and can't really complain about the browser itself, even though it's noticeable that incompatibilities increased over the years as the market share decreased.

I also agree, that it's the correct approach for Mozilla to search for different revenue streams. They just haven't been succesful with that for years, which together with the fact, that market share is declining drastically, paints a bleak future for Mozilla.

A lot of people care about Mozilla's declared goal of an "open internet" (for which a browser monoculture is the greatest risk). That's why you hear so many complains.

The internet enables new ways to attack democracy, need to fix those bugs.

Should you publish the manifesto of a terrorist? Should you allow people to create millions of accounts? Who should you amplify with your algorithm?

That was the turning point for Mozilla, after that it started to become involved in activism, including social justice and identity politics.

The Mozilla board appointed Eich CEO. He resigned after proving unable to manage predictable grass roots opposition. And he refused Mozilla's offer to remain in another role.

Chris Beard didn't make 4x what Eich did. Mitchell Baker didn't replace Eich and doesn't have an MBA. What would make either of them a trophy CEO?

Do people forget Mitchell Baker has been a Mozilla employee for decades?

> a legal agreement allowing 1 party to publish substantial falsehoods without recourse

Wouldn't that include most employee termination agreements, where the (newly ex-) employee has to keep their mouth shut regardless of what their employer does or did?

"And a legal agreement allowing 1 party to publish substantial falsehoods"

Gag contracts I have seen, gag the person leaving and getting the money, not the company. Companies have the challenge that thousands of employees can't say something, it's hard to enforce and easy to trip over and get burned.

From the techie perspective, Mozilla didn't have "best years" I think. As a Mosaic/Netscape/FF user, I liked Mozilla for two things, adhering to standards compared to IE and being open source (the second being the reason I still use it today, not because of technology (I don't like tab management with 50+ tabs open e.G, never liked the environment implementation)). I don't consider Firefox a technological marvel, but IE looked very bad. Firefox for me never innovated enough or seemed to have the user in mind. From my perspective the USP was always "We're the open source one" which wasn't enough when Chrome arrived.

Not an Opera user, but from the sidelines it always looked like Opera was innovating more.