[naremu]

I think many people here probably use Firefox to some degree and are concerned at the sustainability of the entity that makes it, especially since it seems to follow a for-profit trend of higher executive pay even though it's non-profit and not on the most stable, defensible grounds compared to competing software.

[MBCook]

That’s the bit that really burns for me. I don’t know if they can make enough money for Firefox to survive.

But over the years they’ve spent money on an email client basically no one uses, trying to make a social network, trying to make a phone operating system, and who knows what else. Just huge amounts of money going to what often looks like a complete fools errand. I understand Thunderbird but a phone OS?

Money that could’ve gone to either make Firefox better or to advertise/promote it.

If FF was doing great in the market and they had millions of spare dollars, pursuing other things that match their goals would make sense. But that really doesn’t seem like where they are.

Instead it feels a lot more like if private equity bought an open source project.

[grodriguez100]

> But over the years they’ve spent money on an email client basically no one uses, trying to make a social network, trying to make a phone operating system, and who knows what else. Just huge amounts of money going to what often looks like a complete fools errand. I understand Thunderbird but a phone OS?

Keep in mind that both Firefox and Thunderbird started life as an evolution of the original “Mozilla Suite” which itself was an evolution of Netscape Communicator, which included a browser and an email client. So originally both were part of the core mission of Mozilla.

Thunderbird failed to gain much traction though and it was later spun off — it is now developed by a separate company (a Mozilla subsidiary).

> but a phone OS?

Yes, this does not make much sense to me either.

[MBCook]

Honestly I don’t expect that Thunderbird ever cost too much when they were still developing it, but even at the time I’m not sure it would’ve been worth it.

The other stuff is just me-too insanity from what I can tell. And now of course they’re talking about AI.