[eropple]

You seem to be under the impression that the difficulty of putting out a working product is something the consumer cares about. They don't.

Results are what matters, and for all too long Mozilla's results have been poor compared to Google's.

[DEinspanjer]

There are a lot of things that "the consumer" doesn't care about. Some of those are things that Mozilla feels are very important and we spend time trying to show people why.

Mozilla doesn't make a browser to maximize their profits by taking as much from "the consumer" as they can get away with. If we try to compete with the other vendors on those terms, I agree we will fail.

I hope that there continue to be enough people whose goals align with Mozilla, and that together we can work on improving not only Firefox but the web. As we do that, then we will be able to help more of those uncaring consumers.

[eropple]

This sits among the more passive-aggressive posts I've seen in a while.

Mozilla makes a browser. It is evaluated in comparison with other browsers. It does not matter who makes those other browsers or why--and it's not like the primary contenders are "maximizing their profits" off of it anyway! The WebKit guys aren't "maximizing their profits" by writing WebKit. Google isn't "maximizing their profits" by using WebKit in Chrome. There may be some knock-on benefits for Google, but it's certainly not directly making them cartloads of money. But what they have done is written a very, very fine browser.

I was a Mozilla user well before Firefox--heck, when Mozilla Suite was EOLed I was a SeaMonkey user for a while. And then I left. Why? Because Mozilla's browser stopped being worth my time. The competition blew past XULRunner (lol) and Gecko (ouch) and Mozilla simply has not caught up. Maybe the memory issues have been fixed in recent years; I wouldn't know because the reason I won't go back now is performance and compatibility. Lofty goals that we poor benighted consumers don't "get" are nice to have, but bringing them up because your browser can't hack what WebKit can doesn't excuse it from not being able to do so.

It is notable and both sad and funny that the only time you get the "people don't understand what we're doing!" spiel is when you don't have people singing hosannahs to your greatness. If you want them, compete successfully. Don't come around whining that people switched away because the things that matter to them were inadequately addressed by your development team. Because that's solely and singularly on you guys. I want you guys to do well. I truly, honestly do. Right now? You don't compete, so I avoid Firefox. Sorry.

[DEinspanjer]

I was trying not to be aggressive and still make some points that were important to me. Reviewing the post, I'll concede it has a passive-aggressive tone. I apologize.

[ootachi]

You admit to not having used Firefox in recent years, so how do you know that Firefox "doesn't compete"?

[eropple]

Because I have to target it. It's installed; it is not my first or second browser of choice except to make sure CSS3 and JS don't hork.