"Firefox is dead to me“, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote last month in The Register. He cited complaints about everything from layoffs at Mozilla to Firefox’s discontinuation of Pocket and Fakespot, its small market share and some user complaints that the browser can become slower. 
An answer (also published in The Register) argues that Mozilla simply has “a level of management that doesn’t seem to understand what works for its product or which parts of it matter most to users…”
“Steven's main point is correct. Firefox is a bit of a mess – but, seriously, it's not that bad. You're still better off with it – or one of its forks, because it's FOSS – than with almost any of the alternatives.”
Unfortunately, much of IT operates on emotions, tradition, and team loyalty, when it should be using facts, evidence, and numbers.
Don't bother saying Firefox is getting slower. It's not. It's faster than it's been in years. Phoronix, the Greek/Latvian benchmark site, rated 21 publications from late 2023 to today, and Firefox is steadily getting faster and faster…
Since Firefox 1.0 was released in 2004, Firefox has never had to compete. It's like a mosquito in a Google artery... Mozilla's leadership is directionless and unstable because it's never had to do or be anything else.
He's never needed to know how to make a profit, because he's never needed to make a profit. No wonder he has no real direction or vision. He's never needed them. E
Like we said, don't blame the app. You're still better off with Firefox or a fork like Waterfox. Chrome is watching you. even when you are in incognito mode…
One of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinski has said repeatedly: “Listen to me now, what if browser development was in the hands of some kind of non-profit organization?”
“In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should do two things and two things only:
— To build THE browser as a reference point and
— To be an attack dog on standards committees.
— There is no 3.
Perhaps this is the only viable solution. Mozilla, despite its many failures, has invented many amazing technologies, from Rust to Servo and a top operating system for budget phones.
It shouldn't try to exploit these things. Maybe it should encourage semi-independent spin-offs, like Thunderbird, and KaiOS or Rust.
But Zawinski has the only clear vision and solution we've seen so far. Maybe he's right, and Mozilla should be a non-profit organization, working solely to fund a single, independent, vendor-neutral, standards-compliant browser engine.
In 2025 with so much monitoring, do you think he won't be able to cope?
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
