The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy

I was surprised (and frustrated) that OpenAI’s and Perplexity’s browsers are both Chromium-based. I would have thought that they would have gone with a Firefox (or WebKit) fork given:

1. That Google is a competitor to them in the AI space.

2. That Google has such a strong stranglehold over the web, and Chromium/Chrome is a big part of that. I mean, why ultimately help your competitor here?

Some thoughts regarding Mozilla's leadership.

Certain aspects of human nature, as they apply to the corporate world, can be acknowledged and understood, even if they're not excuses when they lead to the downfall of a prominent organization. When you give someone a big title, a dump truck full of cash, and a mandate to innovate, human nature dictates that most people will internalize the idea that "because I was given all this, I must be competent", even if they very obviously are not. Typically the outcome is a "bold plan forward" which is notable for lacking any actual clear solution to the company's main problems. In one example I know of, the CEO decided to pivot from an unrelated field towards launching a cryptocurrency, and cooked up a cartoonishly-dangerous marketing scheme to support the idea. One person ended up dying as a result, and the company then purged every mention of crypto from its website. (And yes, the company collapsed soon afterwards.)

While it's easy to blame the CEO with their oversized salary, the blame for such disasters doesn't just lie with them. After all, arguably the most important roles of the board are to hire a good CEO, ensure the CEO is actually performing as they should, and fire them if they're not. When politics, cronyism, or again, simple incompetence, lead the board to also fail at its job, you end up with the long, slow decline into obscurity we've seen so often in the tech world.

But Mozilla had a good run.

Non profit organisations trying to remain relevant (or just survive) behave this way because they arent much different from companies operating in a market for profit.

Their leadership is often not that much different, with similar people working in similar jobs educated in the same institutions and walking in the same social circles, producing the same solutions to the existential problem of organisational survival.

Maybe it's time for some decently funded other organisation (not a teracorp) to take over Firefox specifically, then let Mozilla go its own way into the sunset. No idea how that could be arranged, though.

Sometimes, I'm wondering if Mozilla did not get too much money.

With an order of magnitude less money, I think they would have been more focused on improving Firefox rather than trying to diversify with projects like Firefox OS, VPN services or AI.

Even today, given their ~$1.5B in the bank, at the cost of a really painful downsizing, the interests alone could probably pay for a Firefox development focused on standard adherence, performance, quality and privacy.

Mozilla is not a company trying to reinvent itself to survive. If it becomes irrelevant because the Browser becomes irrelevant in the future, that's fine in my book, the organization would have fulfill its mission.

But it is sad to see it become irrelevant because of mismanagement and lack of focus.

I wonder where the widely-cited 3% marketshare number comes from.

Does it include dilution from mobile? China/Russia-mandated browsers?

Even with that (Chrome probably is below 50% if you count that way), 3% is lower than I’ve seen.

I know things vary site by site, but still. 3% is not coming from the planet I live on, even before you start filtering out bot traffic and click fraud (both are typically detected as Chrome).

I haven’t done this, but if you want to be fair, you should also add a weight based on likelihood to pay or be an influencer in a western market. That probably cranks the percentage up even further.

Sometimes these posts feel like the old man yelling at the clouds kind of disconnected from reality. They don't seem to even be realising that what they are asking for is contradictory. "Only spend money on the browser/javascript engine", "become independent of google", "give me the best search results when I type into the address bar", but "don't give me AI recommendation".

On top of that, the whole premise that AI is just being a nothing burger. Pull your head out of your arse.

Is there an AI bubble? I tend to agree, likely yes. And yes it is very much overhyped etc. Does that mean that AI is useless and will disappear? No way! Just observe how Joe Doe's are interacting with the web. AI engines have taken over from where people used to use search. It's ironic how they say they just want search results when typing in their address bar, at a time when everyone is complaining that search has become increasingly useless (and yes we can blame AI tools at least partly, doesn't change the fact). Moreover, there are definitely use cases where an AI gives a much better answer than search (just try searching for how to do something a little niche with e.g. ffmpeg, you can either read 10s of block/stackoverflow posts try to understand the manual or ask an AI and typically immediately get a decent answer).

I tend to agree with Mozilla org here, AI does pose an existential thread to the web as we know it and if we don't get non-profit organisations to develop "open" (and I acknowledge the discussion what that entails is important) tools we will end up with a web that is much less free than it is today.

I basically have two problems with Firefox that prevent me from using it my main browser. One is this 7 year old kerning bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596

The other one is Firefox Sync not storing shortcut bar favicons. Every install, I have to click on every web site one by one to bring back their favicons. It's a 17 year old ticket:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378

Firefox adding crazy features that it may or may not cancel in a few years while ignoring these minor issues frustrates me, and keeps me away from it.