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by pwdisswordfish4 2075 days ago
Well Mozilla spends over $50 million year-over-year on non-development costs that have generally proven to be completely ineffective: their marketing budget. So a one-time $100k cost is a fraction of a percent of what they already squander on at least one program they get next to no ROI from; pay the one-time cost for this, and the marketing they get out of being the one that made it happen comes along for free.

And they outwardly profess to be in an uncomfortable position due to Blink's stranglehold over the hearts and minds of developers. Electron plays a major role there. Something like this would go further to support the Mozilla mission than anything they've done themselves (and done to themselves) over the last ~3 years...
1 comments
eitland 2075 days ago
> Well Mozilla spends over $50 million year-over-year on non-development costs that have generally proven to be completely ineffective

Warning: opinions and unresearced statements ahead

Considering the contract they landed earlier this year many of us would be really happy to fail so successfully financially.

That said: Of course on the technical side they've given away much of their previously huge edge on extensibility, gained some performance (or so I hear, I never had issues with the old Firefox) and some security (again: from what I hear). Oh, and spent some major goodwill from the security community on stupid gimmicks.

Here's to hoping they can pull something off (for example by sponsoring this project or something, I don't know) to make themselves relevant again and stay relevant by again capturing the power user / enthusiast niche.

Because right now we are starving for better alternatives, there isn't exactly much to be enthusiastic about at the moment IMO: browsers just get more and more complex and enable more and more crazy applications.

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pwdisswordfish4 2074 days ago
> Considering the contract they landed earlier this year many of us would be really happy to fail so successfully financially.

This is worded as if it's a retort to the previous comment, but... how is it supposed to be?

The claim is that Mozilla's marketing program is overbudgeted and useless, not that Mozilla is "financially [un]successful". Even if you subscribe to the philosophy that multi-million royalties -> success, there's no contradiction. The only way that would be a contradiction is if the marketing team is the one that "landed" that deal. (And that deal isn't even new. Mozilla and Google have had similar deals forever.)

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eitland 2073 days ago
> This is worded as if it's a retort to the previous comment, but... how is it supposed to be?

> The claim is that Mozilla's marketing program is overbudgeted and useless

My point was that maybe they are targeting their marketing at someone else than end users (Google? Regulators?).

And that I think it is frustrating and a bad idea in the long run.

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