Mozilla was never able to leverage its success in the desktop browser market into a successive platform story that evolved into mobile and beyond. They realized this too late, and then their extreme over-correction was to build a new mobile operating system. However an open-source OS already existed in the market with AOSP so FirefoxOS needed to try to thread a convoluted set of needles to justify its existence. It actually was a confusing set of Android Browser web-apps mixed with an OS for new devices -- a contradictory strategy that they could never resolve.
The worst part of the current tech-environment is that companies are dead years before they even know it. The next platform is already tearing apart your current one, while its in its infancy. And the entrenched players in the next space will be incredibly hard to unseat.
By the time you recognize the threat, attempt to turn the ship to respond, you are already deep down aware that there is very little chance of a happy ending. This results in convoluted late-stage product strategies that have 3+ directions since management knows no single one of them are viable.
This is a deeply uncomfortable truth that keeps me up at night.
Thank you for stating this. What people forget is that the early Android Browser was really, really bad. Chrome helped considerably, but it wasn't released until several years into Android. Also remember that Chrome was not preinstalled when it came out; you had to download it.
Firefox had an opportunity to become what Chrome for Android eventually became; the better 3rd party browser. But they made 2 critical mistakes (as an outside observer):
1. They didn't take mobile (and specifically Android) very seriously at first. Fennec felt like a side-project at best.
2. XUL didn't work very well on Android, and it took them a long time to make the switch to native.
I believe things could have turned out very differently had they done the right thing from the beginning.
I'm sorry but I couldn't disagree more with this comment. I don't have stats on Firefox or Chrome (or even the native browser) usage to hand, but I really think these are largely irrelevant.
1) Most people experience most of the "web" on their phones via a non-browser. This may be by clicking on a shared link within the FB/Twitter/WhatEver app and seeing it inside an integrated WebView, or it may simply be viewing content normally available via the web through the lens of an app presenting the "same" content "natively". Either way, the point here is that browsers have had less of a role.
2) For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default. They're going to downloads apps for things their phone doesn't already do; for webpages, it already has an app for that. Android Browser is the "Blue e" here.
The above may not be the case for the typical HN crowd, but it's quite naïve to think the majority want and act the same as we.
I am hopeful that this trend is changing - that slowly dedicated mobile web browsers are becoming a more viable option - but certainly this was not the case when Fennec was launched. The best we could hope for was for Chrome/Safari to gain ground over "apps". Mozilla's offerings never stood any real chance of being super successful in this early climate and tbh FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so.
I'm one of those people, but this is exactly what I was trying to get at in my comment. The HN crowd often seems to see the world through a strange lens, as if the majority of users use technology like they do. It's far from reality.
Yes, as well as many other extensions. I'm using Self-Destructing Cookies, Desktop by Default, Smarter Scrolling and Android Text Reflow in addition to uBlock, thus tweaking my mobile browsing experience to something much better than the stock browser.
Yes, you can. It's the reason I use it on my phone. Chrome Mobile is faster, but I cannot tolerate ads on the big screen and on my phone they are 100x more unnerving.
> FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so.
They should have pursued commercial strategies like becoming the default browser for Samsung and others. That would have got them around the "default" problem. Sell the "differentiation", build a kick-ass browser for Android; that would have given them a chance. They didn't even try it.
It's resource-intensive and not generally straightforward to cut deals with Samsung. They have many hardware/software combos to support. They have their defaults to promote. And they often have money being thrown at them by other large players.
Of course. But all that effort pales in comparison to trying to persuade manufacturers and carriers to opt for an unproven OS with barely a reference implementation, as well as actually developing such OS.
>2) For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default. They're going to downloads apps for things their phone doesn't already do; for webpages, it already has an app for that. Android Browser is the "Blue e" here.
And yet Firefox, for a period of time, had trumped IE on Windows. And of course, Chrome trumps IE on Windows today.
Besides, the "age of the OS" doesn't matter -- the age of the users does, and younger users tend to be even more savvy and favorable of third party browsers.
Microsoft dropped the ball so badly in the IE6 days that the difference between IE and Firefox was enormous, in terms of performance, stability, and features.
Android's browser was never in a position quite that bad.
Yet Firefox had pretty good success competing with ie on Windows. I think they should have been able to replicate that success competing with the android browser.
That's because IE on Windows was shit, much worse so than the Android browsers, and everyone who used Windows had that exact same shit browser. On Android, you'll have some people with a bare bones AOSP browser, some with something their vendor came up with, some with Chrome, some with another third-party browser (Opera Mini, anyone?), so they may not all be using shit.
> For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default.
I disagree, which is why I cited Chrome for Android as an example. It was not the default for a while (a couple of years at least?) but was still fairly popular. I remember doing webdev at the time and getting bug reports for Chrome. I also have received bug reports for Chrome for iOS.
I agree that it's hard to beat a good default, but the original Android Browser was so bad that it opened the door for competition.
When I was working on Opera, the reasons you stated above were also considered as the reason of the quick shrinkage of Opera’s market share at mobile, which eventually brought Opera to its downfall.
Firefox is at a similar position here because on mobile nobody cares about a browser with slightly more functionalities than the builtin one.
The built in WebKit engine was perhaps a bit out there, but besides Mozilla there was also Opera who had been doing mobile browsing for quite some time (Opera Mobile originated on Windows PocketPC).
Yup, but the surge of iOS and Android quickly brought that to an end, there is almost no OEM deals at mobile. (Still exists at TV/Set-top boxes, but those are not nearly as popular.)
I have this same deep-seated fear around the online advertising business and the content it has supported for over two decades. We've gone from print to online ad dollars over the years and we've watched many print pubs fold.
Meanwhile, the online ad dollars never paid for the remaining staff/product left behind to maintain web sites, so slowly those online entities have been shrinking to skeleton crews, too, or deploying beyond panicky revenue models that no user wants to endure, making matters even worse.
So, for 20 years now, it's been a constant zigzagging journey for publishers. Page impressions, lead generation, rich media (e.g video), 'viewable' ads...
And in 2 years it will be "the next big thing", all the while more and more pubs shutter their doors and content continues to be narrowly focused, delivered by social.
Hell, not just the publishers fading out... I'm seriously worried about how this content evolution is affecting our personal biases and cognitive abilities.
I have a feeling that behavior played a (small?) role when the EU decided to fine Google for abusing their market position to pressure themselves into the shopping comparison market - they saw what happened the last time Google did that.
Chrome team wasn't actually that big when they launched; IIRC they got their Founder's Award soon after I started at Google and all the team member names fit on 2 PowerPoint (well, actually Google Presentation) slides. This was almost 2 years after they had launched for internal dogfooding, so the initial team was likely quite a bit smaller.
I would chalk it up to the massive amount of experience among the early team members. Chrome was started by ex-Firefox people. The initial tech lead for Chrome, Ben Goodger, was the former tech lead for Firefox. Chrome Extensions were developed by the guy who invented GreaseMonkey. V8 was designed & led by Lars Bak, a veteran of Beta, Self, StrongTalk, and eventually tech lead of Java HotSpot. Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser.
Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do.
Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch:
It really was about 20 people, and they all have extensive resumes working on products like Firefox, HotSpot, GMail, Google Gears, or other Google products.
> Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser.
> Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do.
I think this is a false dichotomy; the huge resources are what allowed them to hire all of those experts.
Actually, at $100k/yr per team member even Mozilla could afford such a team several times over. At least one if several of them of talent level nostrademons described were made ridiculous-good offers. :)
It appears it was management and/or politics that stopped other companies from doing what Google did.
Mozilla had around $7-8 million in profit last I looked. Currently over $9 million. They could still afford them at $250k each. Such a project would've even been worth most or all of a year's profit. Fortunately, they're doing Quantum to improve things. :)
Revenue is the important number to look at - Wikipedia has it at $329.5M as of 2014. Profit is after salaries - when all the early Firefox people left, they were replaced by other programmers, who probably cost a bit less but not a whole lot. I think tsunamifury's estimate of $500K-1M minimum isn't out of line, but even then, a team of 20 people making $1M fully-loaded costs $20M, which isn't exorbitant. Mozilla's revenue was estimated at $57M in 2006.
Chrome was already on a hockey-stick growth curve before the distribution deals started. I remember being in the TGIF where their Founder's Award was announced and one of the questions was "Isn't it a bit premature to give them this award?" (it was 8 months after launch, the Mac version wasn't out yet, and they had about 5% market share) and Larry pointed to the growth chart and said "They've already won, the rest of the world just doesn't know it yet."
I'd actually switched over to Chrome before joining Google, and told all my family to switch, and it was apparent at launch that it was just a better browser. Once you're at the point where your users tell their friends to switch to your product, there's basically nothing your competition can do to stop you other than massively improve their own product, because you're getting large and exponentially-growing amounts of free advertising.
You can start by letting them do their jobs. From TFA:
"The process involved coming up with an idea, presenting it and getting approval to run with it. You would then repeat this approval process at various stages during development. It was, however, very hard to get approval for enough resources (both time and people) to finesse an idea long enough to make it obviously a good or bad idea. That aside, I found it very demoralising to not have the opportunity to write code that people could use."
The early Chrome people indicated a similar frustration with upper management once Firefox got popular.
If you want a clear demonstration of the management clusterfuck that is Mozilla, see http://arewereorganizedyet.com/ The average time between reorgs in Mozilla is something like three to four weeks.
It's really not clear to me what definition of "reorg" is being used here, given those dates. The only one that might plausibly fit is "any change in the management structure, anywhere in the organization" to give you that frequency. As in, to get this frequency you have to count "a manager has too many reports, so another one was hired to take part of the load" as a "reorg".
That's fair, though it does seem like a fair number of people at Mozilla don't actually know what their reporting chain is nowadays yet alone who needs to approve any expense.
I'm not sure why people wouldn't know their reporting chain. It's in the company "phonebook": search for yourself, then follow the "Manager" links...
Expense approval is less clear, because it's not obvious which things your immediate manager can approve and which need to be kicked higher up the chain. But in my experience asking your manager works pretty well. It's possibly I've been lucky with managers.
All I can say is that this is not universal. My colleagues in Research and I have been able to pursue longer-term research directions at Mozilla that are now successful and which, frankly, most other companies would have shut down long ago for not having enough short-term value.
Yes, it's from the part of TFA article about developing IoT devices. Also in TFA is the author describing their time working on Firefox Mobile and later Firefox OS in glowing terms.
The Chrome team wasn't that big (though not that small either, in the grand scheme of things), but the marketing spend on Chrome was massive. Way more than Mozilla could ever have afforded for Firefox.
And for a number of years now, Chrome has had both a huge team _and_ huge marketing spend.
Firefox succeeded because the only other option at the time was IE6 and Firefox was far superior to IE6, especially among developers. It was Firefox that first gave us developer tools. Do you remember web development in the days before developer tools?
The web also nurtured the GNU/Linux server. Apache on Linux slaughtered IIS on Windows and itself got killed by Nginx on Linux in turn. The web giveth, the web taketh away...
The majority of web stacks, regardless of language, run on Linux.
ISP providers choose GNU/Linux because one cannot argue against free (gratis) that works good enough.
All the programming languages I care and use for web applications have zero dependencies on OS specific APIs, some of which I can even run bare metal or on an unikernel, with zero code changes.
The cloud concept, Web APIs and serverless executions, the OS of server running my web application is irrelevant, thanks to rich runtimes.
As for Apache and IIS, they are pretty much alive outside HN bubble.
The web, specifically Electron, is why I can run a bunch of modern applications on my Linux desktop and I don't have to switch to another OS to use eg. Discord.
The worst part of the current tech-environment is that companies are dead years before they even know it. The next platform is already tearing apart your current one, while its in its infancy. And the entrenched players in the next space will be incredibly hard to unseat.
By the time you recognize the threat, attempt to turn the ship to respond, you are already deep down aware that there is very little chance of a happy ending. This results in convoluted late-stage product strategies that have 3+ directions since management knows no single one of them are viable.
This is a deeply uncomfortable truth that keeps me up at night.