I relate to a lot of this post. There was a time when it was totally obvious to me that XUL was going to take over the computing world. And whenever someone came up with a new technological paradigm, promising it would solve All The Problems, I either believed them or strenuously objected, feeling threatened by the idea that everything I knew was going to be invalidated.
Now that I'm old and jaded, it all seems silly. There are no silver bullets, everything is at best an approximation of a great idea that would solve at most a small fraction of all the real problems out there, etc.
I'm still pretty invested in Mozilla (ok, I work here now), but more for the good of human advancement and discourse, and an actually useful portable runtime that is kept free from being captured by entities that would inevitably use it as a weapon for lock-in and monopolization.
Things aren't looking all that great on the latter front right now, and indirectly though it might be, Firefox's market share is one of the most potent defenses against that. Even if Mozilla has a trail of missteps and lost opportunities. (To be honest, I actually think Mozilla has done far better than is commonly portrayed on this site. It's amazing how many people could obviously done vastly better than the idiotic monkeys running Mozilla into the ground for their own small-minded amusement.)
Now that I'm old and jaded, it all seems silly. There are no silver bullets, everything is at best an approximation of a great idea that would solve at most a small fraction of all the real problems out there, etc.
I'm still pretty invested in Mozilla (ok, I work here now), but more for the good of human advancement and discourse, and an actually useful portable runtime that is kept free from being captured by entities that would inevitably use it as a weapon for lock-in and monopolization.
Things aren't looking all that great on the latter front right now, and indirectly though it might be, Firefox's market share is one of the most potent defenses against that. Even if Mozilla has a trail of missteps and lost opportunities. (To be honest, I actually think Mozilla has done far better than is commonly portrayed on this site. It's amazing how many people could obviously done vastly better than the idiotic monkeys running Mozilla into the ground for their own small-minded amusement.)