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by Hasu
867 days ago
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> Why was this even necessary? Firefox has always been an undervalued asset at Mozilla. They sat on it and seem to have barely invested enough effort to make it decent enough to compete with Chrome. It's necessary because Firefox doesn't make money. >Apple is doing it for iOS, Google is doing it for Android. I still don't understand why Mozilla couldn't see itself sharing this cake with Firefox when it had 30%+ market share. Mozilla's browser development is funded almost entirely by Google. If Mozilla had stepped up to become a real competitor, Google would have shut off the money, and Firefox would have just died. Google sells ads. Apple sells hardware. Mozilla doesn't sell anything. If they want to be independent and compete, they need independent income. |
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That's been the trope for many years. I believed it in the past. I'm skeptical it's still the case. Mozilla made enough money over the years to risk leveraging some of Firefox's potential and buy its own independence. I'm also optimistic that Mozilla has always been uniquely qualified, with enough resources, know-how, and branding power to set up some of the ideas that I suggested, relatively quickly.
For instance, if even tomorrow they came out with a specialized Business Firefox offshoot, augmented to simplify the development of business web apps (e.g. it natively understands TypeScript and a few selected frameworks; it easily integrates with cloud providers and APIs; it simplifies dealing with the local file system and databases; basically a special browser tuned to understand modern front-end development), companies would pay attention. For devs, no need to start playing around with complicated tooling. The environment is the browser. I know I'd at least give it a try with no second thought. The trade-off to building apps quickly would be the need to install that Business Firefox. I think it's a decent trade-off.