> The excellent devtools were a good., non-ideological reason for developers to use Firefox as part of their daily work, & thus test in it & care about it. Moz had long given up on any other developer relations activities.
Pale Moon, Waterfox, SeaMonkey and IceWeasel to Firefox: "Your First Time?"
Economically, Mozilla never had stood a chance against the major browser competition given that it was also being 'kept alive' by its main competitor for decades. The open-source alternatives also had no chance of competing and are eternally relying on donations.
The moment Google entered with their own browser and Microsoft, Opera, Qt and Electron crowd all jumped into the Chromium boat, Mozilla only had 'Firefox' as the only reason why they are still relevant and that's it. Not even Mozilla cares about the greatness Rust brings. It's just another open source tool which everyone is saying: "tank u, gimme dat 4 free". Here's another way to make money: Mozilla could also easily have been the Rust equivalent of "Erlang Solutions Ltd.".
We all know that no-one would go for their non-competitive VPNs or premium bookmark service. The reality is, Mozilla has to stand on its own and pivot to something else other than Firefox to generate revenue if it wants to stay true to its mission statement which is essentially privacy. Not sure how they have the balls to support "privacy" (on their frontpage) [0][1] and then tell us that they have a contract with Google to fund them [2] as the default search engine choice at the same time.
Pale Moon, Waterfox, SeaMonkey and IceWeasel to Firefox: "Your First Time?"
Economically, Mozilla never had stood a chance against the major browser competition given that it was also being 'kept alive' by its main competitor for decades. The open-source alternatives also had no chance of competing and are eternally relying on donations.
The moment Google entered with their own browser and Microsoft, Opera, Qt and Electron crowd all jumped into the Chromium boat, Mozilla only had 'Firefox' as the only reason why they are still relevant and that's it. Not even Mozilla cares about the greatness Rust brings. It's just another open source tool which everyone is saying: "tank u, gimme dat 4 free". Here's another way to make money: Mozilla could also easily have been the Rust equivalent of "Erlang Solutions Ltd.".
We all know that no-one would go for their non-competitive VPNs or premium bookmark service. The reality is, Mozilla has to stand on its own and pivot to something else other than Firefox to generate revenue if it wants to stay true to its mission statement which is essentially privacy. Not sure how they have the balls to support "privacy" (on their frontpage) [0][1] and then tell us that they have a contract with Google to fund them [2] as the default search engine choice at the same time.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/firefox
[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/