The Fall of Mozilla, continued.

Neil put it pretty clearly:

Like it or not – probably not, in Mozilla’s case – there is a rather large proportion of the population that does not like having social policy dripped on their technology. And a nontrivial percentage of techies are either social conservatives themselves, or have an actual problem with seeing social conservatives get defecated upon by the current in-crowd.  This probably wouldn’t have mattered, when it came to Mozilla: except that people who ragequit Firefox on principle were typically shocked to discover that it had become a raddled piece of bloatware while they weren’t looking.  Certainly I was.  And I wasn’t and am not shy about saying so.

Moral of the story?  If you want to suddenly go dump on a portion of your market just to impress the cool kids, make sure that your product is really so awesome that it can survive the backlash.  Because the cool kids aren’t big enough to keep you alive.  In fact, they probably don’t like you anyway.

26 thoughts on “The Fall of Mozilla, continued.”

  1. Heh. I’m stuck keeping an old version of Mozilla on my work machine because one corporate web-app was written to it .. and apparently *only* it .. newer versions don’t work, Chrome breaks badly, etc. etc.
    .
    Still, this is an old pattern repeating.

    1. Though kind of unusual. You generally see way more old IE dependencies (even with IE8 support ending at the end of the year, and IE6 support long since gone officially) and (especially in mobile) WebKit dependencies than FireFox dependencies.

      1. I have run into a few Chrome dependencies. That’s Mozilla’s real problem the market is moving to world without Firefox and there isn’t anything they can do about it.

        1. Every market, over time, tends to balance out to 1 leader, 1 second-tier “tries harder”, and a bunchaton of also-rans and niche plays.
          .
          Look at cars, look at computers, look at kitchen appliances – don’t just look at the front badges, look at who owns what..
          .
          Netscape’s one-time CEO described their company as “a rabbit rapidly fleeing a pickup truck full of armed rednecks”, meaning Microsoft .. the focus was on innovation and product superiority.
          .
          The rabbit died.
          .
          Mew

          1. acat:
            .
            Heck yeah the rabbit died – the truck is faster.
            .
            I had told Neil a few years back that yes, while IE was/is slow, FF was/is click-open-and-brew-a-pot-of-coffee slow. Safari on Windows is faster than both – and uncluttered.
            .
            The truck (and Apple cart) are faster than the Fox, too, especially since Mozilla cut one of it’s legs off.

  2. This all went down while I was doing a “How long can I live with just IE?” experiment after I finally moved from XP to Win7. (The answer was, a couple years.) When I finally needed to install another browser, I found that the FF Nazis had made my choice either.

    2. I’ve still got IE, I guess that makes me the browser user equivalent of Japanese Soldiers coming out of the Jungle 30 years after WWII.

  3. We use Chrome at work, and I use it at home. I have to use FF for one application on my Macbook, but I never search for anything.

  4. Chrome is the Eye of Sauron, but it’s better than Mozilla. There is a pre-rage branch of the Moz codebase, called Pale Moon, that also has much of the useless bells and whistles left out.

    And there’s always IE. You WILL submit.

  5. Mozilla has forgotten that their product has to work better than the competition. Every thing else is irrelevant.

  6. The lesson is that no matter how good your application – your tool is – there is always another tool available just like it. The meta-lesson is do not base your business decisions on a social media storm. Twitter, Facebook – those are all easily manipulated to seem like the world is against you. When it passes there is actually nothing. The best response, I can think of, when it breaks, is to have an auto responder say “Thank you for your comment; we will take it under consideration as we do we do all comments.”

    And then actually evaluate the storm from there – you know – is it actually a broad- based reaction which should be addressed; or is it a spike based upon an easily offended ‘being’ targeting you because you arrived on the ‘radar’ of that easily offended ‘being’?*

    *In this case ‘being’ represents any person or group with a chip on the shoulder that Paul Bunyan would think a Redwood. These ‘beings’ have no other thing to do than look for offenses from somewhere; seriously – what would the easily offended do otherwise – get actual jobs and only bore their family and friends with the fine-points of their grievances? How much can any bar-stool take of that?
    No – the entire country must know of this!
    And so we do.
    And so we look into our pint-glasses and think “I really do not want another, but – maybe he/she will go away in the next half hour, so…”One more and I’ll tab out.” God, could you please shut-up and go bother him… “Uh-huh; really…I don’t know about that…”
    Bad answer – now I am getting told ‘about that’…
    “Will you leave me alone? I’m just trying to watch the baseball game already!”
    Wait – why am I getting lectured? Just go away already! “Thank you, (my favorite bartender), I don’t know anything about that, you know me, I have a couple of beers, watch the game, and go home.”
    (comments)
    “No, I do not know why the loonies try to talk to me! I’m nice, clean, polite, and I tip well! I don’t even swear here! I’m one of the best here!”
    (further comments)
    “I know you’re giving me grief, but still – it wasn’t me!”

    *****The Left can even screw-up a neighborhood bar.******

  8. So what’s a poor boy to do who wants to dump Firefox but who considers Google to be our WannaBe-Overlord?

    Seriously, Chrome sounds good, but I cannot bring myself to fall into Google’s clutches any more than necessary.

    What’s the next-best browser choice?

    1. I use IE at work (mandated) and Safari or Opera at home/mobile.
      .
      No issues from either my Dell, MacMini, MacBook, iPad(s), or iPhone(s).

      1. Thanks. I’ll check into both of those.

        (For years, the CW has been to stay away from IE due to its being the primary target of virus writers. In your opinion, are we past that point? I can see the benefits of using the browser already designed right into my OS, if that particular danger has lessened.)

        1. Even though it is based on Chrome, I have to recommend you look into SRWare Iron.

          “SRWare Iron: The browser of the future – based on the free Sourcecode “Chromium” – without any problems at privacy and security

          Google’s Web browser Chrome thrilled with an extremely fast site rendering, a sleek design and innovative features. But it also gets critic from data protection specialists , for reasons such as creating a unique user ID or the submission of entries to Google to generate suggestions. SRWare Iron is a real alternative. The browser is based on the Chromium-source and offers the same features as Chrome – but without the critical points that the privacy concern.

          We could therefore create a browser with which you can now use the innovative features without worrying about your privacy.”

        2. IE is so problematic that Microsoft have written an entirely new browser for Windows 10. Google “Microsoft Edge” for info. Microsoft will still support IE for people who need IE-specific features; those features are also a major source of security problems.

  9. I won’t use Chrome. Google is big brother. I can’t find a satisfactory search engine substitute [and I search endlessly – it HAS to work optimally]. But I have PRE-left them. As soon as I find an adequate replacement I am gone forever. I have notified FF that I have PRE-left them. They have forever lost my loyalty and I will be gone when I find my replacement. Wouldn’t it be the cherry on top if Brendan Eich turned out to be in the management of the replacement browser? I would set off fireworks literally.

  10. Pale Moon is really the best non-FF browser out there, IMO. It’s got the separated sections like Camino, and it’s on all the major OSs. Plus, it has bookmark sync across computers and the devs remove most/all of FF’s experiments/bloat.

    Not paid, honest – just love it.

    1. OS X isn’t supported by the PaleMoon download page. I’d love to try it, but I’m not running it in a VM, or running an alpha version.

    2. Agreed. I’ve been using Pale Moon for several months now. It was very easy to migrate all my bookmarks, passwords, etc, and it is gentler on clock cycles than FF. In fact, that’s why I quit using FF, as I got to the point where it hit 50% cpu usage just after logging in to Amazon.

      Added bonus: Pale Moon has a 64-bit version and is optimized for modern CPUs.

      johnv2, I don’t know how tech-savvy you are, but Pale Moon does have a Linux version available, so I expect there should be a path where you can get it to run under OS X.

      One feature I find particularly attractive is that I can set Flash to inactive by default, but have the option to temporarily allow a specific page to load content.

      I only intended to test Pale Moon, but it grew on me to the point where I was using it exclusively.

      The whole “political” flim-flam is, to me, a second order issue, but Moe’s main point stands: FF is no longer a first-order browser.

  11. Pale Moon does support OS X, just not officially. However, the unofficial build works awesomely as far back as Snow Leopard and up to Yosemite (I’m on Snow Leopard and Mavericks on another computer). Check out this forum post for the latest build here.

  12. There are enough good browsers available.

    http://vivaldi.com – if you look for a real true power user browser.

    or http://seamonkey-project.org

    The failure of Mozilla was to go to bed with Google and to sell it’s soul – which ultimately was leading to betray their core user base with re-modeling their browser into a Google Chrome UI clone – with all the other fancy additions aka Pocket or Chat.

    They have willingly betrayed power users and geeks to be more attractive to Simple users.

    Same mentality like the Opera guys.

    Nothing more to be said to that topic.

    But do yourself a favor, do avoid Google Chrome, use Vivaldi… based on Chromium – but with tons of features and customizations.

    Because Google is to blame for the trend that browser developers betray their users to be like Google’s Chrome – just to get a bit of their market share.

    And for this reason neither Mozilla, Opera or Google Chrome should be supported at all!

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