[blibble]

simple: not being feckless over a 20 year period

this is not some small charity, they were generating $500 MILLION a year from the search deals

they should have shoved the the billions of dollars into an endowment

from that they could have funded a medium sized team focusing on the browser in perpetuity

but no, they blew it on obvious boondoggles (like Firefox OS)

[shiroiushi]

Exactly. Look at Wikipedia for a counter-example, showing how to do things right. Sure, Wikipedia is frequently asking for donations, but in reality they have a large endowment and can go without new funding for ages, though they'd have to cut back on the unimportant stuff.

Mozilla could have done the same thing if they had a little foresight and didn't just assume the piles of cash would keep flowing in forever.

[tredre3]

> but in reality they have a large endowment and can go without new funding for ages, though they'd have to cut back on the unimportant stuff.

And that is why I'm very annoyed by the fact that every year the donation begging is more in my face. Bigger, louder, harder to block.

Since they don't need the money that bad, why not keep it to a small banner and respect the users FFS.

[Discordian93]

Firefox OS was pretty cool and had it succeeded(Which it might well have if they'd stuck with Witch's plan of targeting the third world), Mozilla would be in a much stronger position to influence web standards and generate revenue nowadays.

[Gud]

Firefox OS is something that should have been developed by an organisation that wasn't beholden to it's main competitor for finances(and still is).

Mozilla should have done everything in its power to gain it's independence(and still should).

I have been a Firefox user since day 1. I rememember, it was Phoenix, then Firebird, and for the last few years, Firefox.

I still use Firefox, which makes me so sad to see how incompetent(or potentially just greedy) the Mozilla leadership is.

Great product, poor stewards.

[robocat]

You've created a beautiful alternative timeline. One that posits that the Firefox team had the technical chops to compete. Money isn't a panacea: Microsoft clearly threw a lot at the Edge redevelopment and that team apparently failed. Also the Chromium team are 10x superstars in my eyes.

The glimmers of technical hope within Gecko like Servo and Rust were chopped.

> but no, they blew it on obvious boondoggles (like Firefox OS)

I agree they wasted money on a heap of useless things (as we see plenty of failed companies do - like Borland).

But I thought Firefox OS was one of the most promising ideas. I'd still like to see a vendor try and produce a phone that supported browser-tech for Apps - the idea is clearly valuable for Apps delivered using WebViews on iPhone and Android.

Personally I think the rot is throughout the org - and blaming one section is pointless - it weren't just management or tech. Watching previously successful corporations die has a similar feel to me.