[someotherperson]

Might be a bit contrarian, but so what?

Mozilla hasn't produced a decent browser for, what, 12 years? They instead take their hundreds of millions of dollars annually to instead spend time building junk like half-baked password managers.

I'd argue that Mozilla's mishandling of Firefox has been killing innovation in this space for years -- it is a giant red flag for anyone wanting to enter the space considering Mozilla's budget and still not being able to produce something of value. The reality is moreso that Mozilla itself doesn't care about building a better browser. It's only when people started to realise this in the last couple of years that we've started to see some new contenders.

Maybe when Mozilla dies, we might start to see open source efforts going to better browsers.

[myaccountonhn]

I actually think Firefox is better than chrome and use it as my main browser. Not sure why you say it’s not decent.

I also think they do a lot of great stuff around Firefox, the email spoofing is good, the sync function is good, their podcasts and studies are good. Not sure what people mean here.

[alexsereno]

This is a strong but valid take, Mozilla has a huge focus on getting revenue streams from somewhere, but flubbing it right and left along the way. The consumer might benefit from a better browser but Mozilla has basically decided that that’s not what will drive growth or revenues… not that I think they’re particularly correct about that

[nabakin]

Idk, I think people underestimate what it takes to support a browser. It's a lot of money and Mozilla doesn't have an ad empire to leverage, operating system sales to subsidize from, or phone/computer sales.

All they have is the revenue they make from Google, a little bit from their attempts at revenue diversification, and a little bit from their partnerships (like Pocket). If the Google revenue disappears, they won't even be able to maintain the current level of quality.

[someotherperson]

This to me is entirely fantasy. We are instead overestimating what it takes to support a browser because of how much money Mozilla gets and still can't produce anything. We're talking amounts in the billions of dollars here, and more than a billion in current cash reserves.

This Google-controlled narrative is pushed out onto a lot of things (i.e search) which people are slowly starting to realise isn't that complex or expensive to build after all (see Brave Search for example). It's not surprising that Mozilla would echo similar sentiments considering the entire company is controlled opposition.

[nabakin]

What other similarly sized or smaller company has successfully built a browser which is not Chromium-based fit for the average consumer? If you're just piggybacking on Google's work, then sure, it's probably not bad, but Mozilla has their own browser engine and is trying to keep feature parity with browsers which have effectively unlimited funding.

[alexsereno]

Well yes it’s clearly expensive to support a browser and that’s why they’re trying to make money, but they’re failing miserably to deliver on those other revenue streams and they aren’t keeping up in the browser space. That’s all, if they were developing some business model that worked that would be different. That’s why breaking off googles monopoly would kill them, they are dependent on it