Brendan Eich might not be the perfect CEO. But still I think he would have done better than Mitchell Baker did. He's interested in technology in a way in which she isn't.
The business model for FirefoxOS didn't make sense, just like the business model for WebOS didn't make sense. Android was cheaper than free to put on phones because Google was willing to share search revenue with carriers. They would not have done that on a FirefoxOS phone before it reached scale, nor would Microsoft, which was pushing its own phones.
I don't buy it. Apple owners pay premium prices for a perception of increased safety and convenience. I feel that way about what WebOS was. There is always market space available for a device people want.
HP played musical CEOs - 3 in less than a year - and one decided they shouldn't be in the phone or PC business. People loved the phones which were objectively years ahead of Android or iOS. It was not a product failure, but one of management.
People loved the phones, but they didn't buy them. The carriers didn't want to sell them because they don't get paid on the backend. As I said, the business model doesn't work.
FirefoxOS was simply dumped too early. You need TIME to advance in an established market and they simply didn't give it time. They wanted results within a year or two, but growth occurs organically in an occupied market.
In India, an entire telecommunications company was forced to use a fork - KaiOS for Reliance Jio phones because FirefoxOS was abandoned.
FirefoxOS was a terrific idea, but the baby needed time to grow up to teenage level, but was murdered soon after birth
A leader should unite an organisation. You can't lead an inclusive organisation and then cause divisiveness.
And don't forget, these things are not just cosmetic. Not being able to get married could lead to some serious consequences when having kids (e.g. a lesbian couple) and one partner dying.
Personally I would not have pushed to fire him, no, and I'm very pro-LGBTQ+. It was only a small donation compared to how much he makes and the legislation was easily defeated. But I don't work at Mozilla.
> And don't forget, these things are not just cosmetic. Not being able to get married could lead to some serious consequences when having kids (e.g. a lesbian couple) and one partner dying.
That is not true. California had domestic partnerships with identical rights and responsibilities as marriage starting in 1999. Eich opposed applying a term that, in his view, carried religious import. That's all.
I don't think he would've done things differently really. He was also part of the same old guard and wasn't exactly aiming for some radical changes inside Mozilla. Imo one of the only things that could've made Firefox more relevant would've been to focus on an electron alternative, especially early on in 2013-14 as it would've been an entirely new "product segment", which could've made Firefox the standard engine for a lot of apps. But there's no indication that anyone high up at Firefox wanted to do something like that. It's a non-profit and non profits are rather conservative, for better or for worse.
He would have at least avoided getting distracted by every single liberal cause that popped up along the way and kept his focus on technology. You can complain about Brave's crypto stuff, but at least it was trying to solve a real problem with internet monetization instead of being whatever Colorways was.
Sure but that's just a symptom not a cause. Even without making Mozilla turn into a regular non profit that just happens to have a browser project (as opposed to a browser project non profit), the strategy they had just couldn't work.
Every monetization attempt failed (even with stuff centered around "privacy", a niche where Firefox is well known). I've seen numbers that indicated that the Mozilla foundation donations are almost equal to what they profit from their commercial products.
> Every monetization attempt failed (even with stuff centered around "privacy", a niche where Firefox is well known)
Again, though: they have yet to try the obvious, which is allowing people to donate to Firefox.
I have zero interest in supporting all the random distractions that Mozilla engages in, but if they gave me a donation box for Firefox specifically I'd set up a recurring payment today.
They can't in good faith claim to have tried every monetization method when they have never let users earmark funds for Firefox.
Yeah I heard about it, but I don't know why they gave up. There's a lot of stuff that could be done to improve on electron (especially back then), and Mozilla was in a nice position where they controlled their web engine (as opposed to electron), so they could've made a very solid product... anyways that's not happening now...
Edit: okay from what I understand in the blog, one of the reasons for abandoning it was that it was hard to keep up with the electron API changes and keep it compatible. That just goes to show that they were completely outplayed early on, otherwise they wouldn't have had to play catch up by merely being an electron shell around Spider monkey...
>But Tofino is dead (long live the Browser Futures Group!), and Electron compatibility isn’t essential for a viable Gecko runtime. It’s also hard, since Electron has a large API surface area, is a moving target, requires Node.js integration (itself a moving target), and is designed for Chromium’s process architecture, which is substantially different from Firefox’s.
Yes. The purpose of Mozilla Org, from the perspective of the people paying for it (Google), was to kill Firefox. Mitchell Baker got rewarded because she did her job.
Yes. Brave's crypto scam is a problem, and they've done some very controversial things in that regard. Like taking "money" on behalf of sites that didn't even participate.
