
2014 Goals - snird
https://wiki.mozilla.org/2014
======
cjensen
I'd like to comment on goals for engineers in general:

If your goal is X million users or some such end-user metric, you have created
a goal for your salesmen, not your engineers.

An engineer cannot sign up a user, except indirectly through quality work. "X
million users" is only indirectly under the control of the engineer:
intermediates like sales or getting-the-word out are out of the engineer's
control and can be screwed up by others. If the engineer does not get to pick
his own features to work on, then the work he does do is limited by the wisdom
of the person making assignments.

In other word, a goal like this is discouraging for an engineer because he
lacks serious control over whether or not the goal is accomplished. It is an
anti-motivator.

Instead, goals for engineers should be things directly under their control.
Are you assigning specific features to the engineer? Getting a list of them
done with high-quality solutions can be a goal since that is entirely under
the engineer's control. Want to get your low-cost solution adopted? Set a goal
for the engineer to reduce memory space by Z percent or improve performance by
Y percent.

Always make sure goal achievement is controlled as much as possible by the
person receiving the goal.

~~~
mccr8
There are more specific goals for engineering in other places, like the
Platform quarterly goals:

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q1-Goals](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/2014-Q1-Goals)

~~~
Goosey
Out of curiosity, does anyone know what "{{{1}}}" under Layout refers to? I
found it a bit ungoogleable.

~~~
abrowne
I think that's a wiki syntax error. The wiki source[1] for that line is

    
    
        * {{ok|Ship input=number internationalization features }}
    

[1]:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Platform/2014-Q1-Go...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Platform/2014-Q1-Goals&action=edit)

------
wellboy
Mozilla is just the best company. They took a stand when it mattered and where
the billion dollar money makers Google, Apple, Facebook and the like failed
spectacularly.

They are no bs, fight for internet freedom, celebrate transparency, are the
centroid of internet activism and the extension of Aaron Schwartz' ideas.
Mozilla is what makes me want to stay in tech and every company should try to
learn from Mozilla what it means to be a tech company.

~~~
johnbm
They make all their money from Google ads. Millions.

~~~
gcp
This hasn't stopped them from taking stances, though?

Diversifying the income seem to be an important goal right now, even if the
userbase hasn't been very sympathetic so far.

------
rguldener
I really miss focusing on the details of their desktop product here: About a
week ago I tried to switch away from Chrome and back to FF and its been a
rough week. Speed wise FF is actually great, absolutely no complaint here,
same goes for memory. What I didn't expect and what kind of shocked me is how
broken some web pages are on FF. For instance in GMail I can't use Cmd+arrow
keys to jump to the beginning or end of a line and on the new Google maps (the
one that has been around as a preview for more than a year) zooming by
scrolling simply does not work. It's not just Google sites though, I had
stutering scrolling on some more complex sites (where Chrome has no issue) and
some startup pages have oddly shaped buttons and similar layout issues. It
seems like many sites aren't testing on FF anymore.

I really expected FF to be on par with Chrome in terms of rendering quality
but that really turned out not to be the case in many small, yet annoying
corner cases. They got big by incorporating the quirks of IE and then
improving on that, maybe it is time they start thinking about implementing
some of the WebKit rendering quirks and go from there.

I really want to keep on using FF and to love it but if it means I have to
switch browsers for some of the sites I use daily that will be difficult.

Using FF 27 on OS X 10.9.2

~~~
jacobolus
> _For instance in GMail I can 't use Cmd+arrow keys to jump to the beginning
> or end of a line_

This is a bug in gmail, not a bug in Firefox. In standard browser text
widgets, Firefox reads your standard OS X key bindings and treats them
properly.

However, Google is unsatisfied with standard form fields, and so they
reimplemented their own glitchy, poor-performance, half-broken text widget,
which happens to semi-work in Webkit, but not handle shortcuts like cmd-arrows
in Firefox. It’s in no way fair to blame Mozilla for that.

~~~
zeckalpha
I can confirm this went away when the "improved" compose was added.

------
acqq
In one sentence: they don't want to have the only income from having the
search engines (especially Google) in the search boxes and links, so they want
to have their own cloud and services and in-browser ads.

~~~
aw3c2
I was hoping that the word privacy would appear somewhere in the 2014 goals of
a major browser but no. As you said, the opposite.

~~~
gcp
Privacy isn't a 2014 specific goal. It's in the Manifesto itself.

~~~
aw3c2
I thought more privacy & less leakage to third-parties would be nice.
Especially with all the government access to databases. Ie adding more control
of cookies, JS, requests, HTTPS etc while providing an interface that my
grandma could understand.

------
workhere-io
Wondering why Persona isn't on that list. It could use some marketing efforts.

~~~
mbrubeck
Persona is moving into maintenance mode until/unless it can come up with a
better strategy for driving adoption. Some related info:

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR)

Both the team and some of the underlying technology are now at work on Firefox
Accounts, which is a simpler (non-federated) system that will power the new
Firefox Sync service, the Firefox Marketplace (for installable web apps on
Firefox OS and other platforms), and other Mozilla services.

~~~
workhere-io
I get the sense from your comment and link that there's a real risk that
Persona will be abandoned in a few years?

~~~
wmf
It seems like they expected Persona to get substantial adoption before it was
even finalized and then declared it a failure when that didn't happen.

~~~
callahad
In hindsight we did indeed spend too much time experimenting and tweaking, and
not enough time saying "it's good enough" and driving it to completion.

But it's open source :) we're still working on getting it there. The next
release will dramatically scale back the API complexity, lock in the APIs and
data formats, and pave the way for native browser extensions, self-hosted
polyfills, etc.

------
el_duderino
I hope they step it up in the browser area again. I know they were top dog,
but as we all know, Chrome is now the reigning champ in speed. Firefox has
come a long way. I still try it out for a couple weeks every few months, but I
continue to come back to Chrome.

~~~
fra
I couldn't imagine switching away from Firefox + Vimperator. It's an
incredible combo, and I don't think the speed difference between FF & Chrome
is noticeable nowadays.

~~~
fragmede
> I don't think the speed difference between FF & Chrome is noticeable
> nowadays.

It is, if you turn off ad-blocking. Certain sites will then just hang all of
Firefox.

~~~
gcp
_Certain sites will then just hang all of Firefox._

Which ones?

~~~
fragmede
To see the effect on a small scale, load up a single JS timer[1] and watch the
seconds increment by 1 each second.

If I disable both RequestPolicy and Ad Block Plus, loading up
[http://cracked.com](http://cracked.com),
[http://failblog.cheezburger.com/](http://failblog.cheezburger.com/), and
[http://www.wikia.com/Wikia](http://www.wikia.com/Wikia), and then just
blindly clicking around one of those sites, it will cause the counter to
jump/skip over seconds.

Chrome does no such skipping (on the same machine). RequestPolicy and ABP seem
to help, but not eliminate the problem.

Okay, so that test is totally artificial, but surf the internet for a couple
days without restarting Firefox (27.0.1) on Ubuntu (13.10) and Firefox still
grinds to a half, taking more than half a second to change tabs or register
other UI input.

Rather than debug Firefox, I can just use Chrome.

[1]
[http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=tryjs_setinte...](http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=tryjs_setinterval3)

~~~
gcp
_but surf the internet for a couple days without restarting Firefox (27.0.1)
on Ubuntu (13.10) and Firefox still grinds to a half, taking more than half a
second to change tabs or register other UI input._

 _Shrug_ , I do this all the time as I never restart the browser. And your
timer test is WORKSFORME too :-/

------
modeless
Huh, Rust and Servo aren't mentioned.

~~~
robin_reala
Servo is long-term, not 2014. It’s a very interesting project, but don’t
expect any fruits from their labours any time soon.

~~~
asb
Sure, but projects like Rust have been very successful in terms of getting
external contributors interested. A goal regarding getting more people
involved and made aware of Mozilla Research efforts wouldn't seem out of
place.

------
misuba
I hate to see a monetization/sustainability plan based on ads. AdBlock will
kill Tiles, and if it doesn't, that'll kill adoption amongst occasional users.

A better idea IMO: get on the user-is-the-customer-not-the-product train and
build the open web at the same time, by blessing a distributed social
networking technology and selling installs of that technology, Automattic-
style.

------
shirro
Sell a well built MozBook with 4GB+ and a full HD screen and some nice extras
like a backlit keyboard for double the price of a typical Chromebook and I am
in. Perhaps. I probably would not have to queue for it.

Mozilla are facing some real problems I am afraid and they aren't technical
ones. They aren't the default browser on any significant platform so for
people to switch they need to have something wrong with their existing
browser. That is decreasingly the case with IE which has improved considerably
and then they have to be the best alternative browser available which for many
people is questionable.

Going the platform route is interesting but they are competing with Android
with a massive installed space at the low end.

The elephant in the room is the Chromebook which I am writing this, and most
everything else, on and the trouble with the damn thing is it is good enough.
Not stunningly, mind blowingly amazing. But good enough and selling by the
millions. And chrooting it and installing Firefox is not a typical scenario.

------
kev6168
Mozilla should spend 1/3 of their Total Resources on making an Overwhelmingly
Dominant Browser for Android and iOS. It's life or death.

Talk to me in 4 years.

~~~
zeckalpha
They can't make one for iOS.

------
Silhouette
_So, let 's not try to build the perfect plan. Let's build a good enough plan,
and move fast and change things as we go._

Please don't. Moving fast and breaking things is the #1 thing that's been
turning me off Firefox ever since the move to six-weekly updates and dropping
more than token support for older versions.

Notably absent from the list is the one thing I, and I suspect many others
reading this, actually care about: making Firefox a better browser, i.e.,
fixing bugs, improving performance, and adding support for useful new
features. Do that, and any concerns about how much/little it's being used will
take care of themselves.

I really don't care about yet another UI rearrangement (I'd rather you
didn't), I really don't care about integrating the kitchen sink into the
browser (I'd rather you didn't), and I'm still waiting to discover anyone who
does care about these things and doesn't work for Mozilla.

~~~
eitland
> Notably absent from the list is the one thing I, and I suspect many others
> reading this, actually care about: making Firefox a better browser, i.e.,
> fixing bugs, improving performance, and adding support for useful new
> features. Do that, and any concerns about how much/little it's being used
> will take care of themselves.

Stop the FUD already will you? (Check my comment history, I'm mostly nice)

Mozilla has been iterating tirelessly on speed and lower memory consumption
etc etc.

I can't remember when the last major ui redesign was.

So for everyone who hasn't tried FF in a while: give it a try!

~~~
Silhouette
_Mozilla has been iterating tirelessly on speed and lower memory consumption
etc etc._

And all credit to them for that. Firefox still has a significant lag when
loading on this computer, where neither Chrome nor IE do.

 _I can 't remember when the last major ui redesign was._

I can only assume you don't use the developer tools, then.

------
Mz
Wikipedia fails to say anything about monetization and googling is not readily
enlightening. Does anyone have a link to a quick run down of how they monetize
this?

Thanks.

~~~
Greenisus
The Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit, so they may not care too much about
monetization.

~~~
Mz
Even non-profits have to pay the bills somehow (I have done lots of volunteer
work and read up on such things). Plus, there is a taxable Mozilla
Corporation. So, somewhere, there is money being made, somehow.

~~~
pwnna
Mozilla Corporation is not for profit, which basically means that they're
there to get money and pay taxes (non-profits don't pay taxes). All they need
to do is pay the bills (and employees).

Mozilla Foundation completely owns Mozilla Corporation and there is no shares
available.

~~~
zobzu
i think you meant to type "Mozilla Corporation is FOR profit"

Mozilla Foundation is NOT for profit. :-) And Mozilla Foundation owns the
corporation.

Also, AFAIK, the foundation can only use money from donations 'n all. The corp
is used to pay employees, but can't pay the foundation much.

------
parallelist
Firefox has too many bugs and when you file them they don‘t get fixed very
quickly at all. That’s why it isn’t my primary browser. Maybe something about
that should be in this document.

------
Eleutheria
> Objective: Become a force in the cloud while delighting our users by adding
> services to our products.

> Measurable goal in 2014: End the year with 20M people using a Firefox
> account.

That's what I want to see from Mozilla. I want to have a johndoe@firefox.com
account and use it as my login account to the firefox cloud, to all the
services mozilla will provide.

They need engagement, I was an early user of phoenix more than ten years ago.
I dumped firefox for safari and never touched a single mozilla property again.
No need to.

Now they have to seduce me again, they need to bring me day after day to their
properties. They need email, chat, cloud storage, documents, notes, blogs,
everything I can do, everything I want to store, send, exchange, communicate,
enjoy, play with.

Everything.

Then they can insert ads and compete with google. Billions over billions.

Then they can offer premium accounts with premium features. Billions over
billions.

That's sustainability.

That's a plan.

~~~
Eleutheria
"Firefox is the cloud"

Now that's a motto.

I want my johndoe@firefox.com account.

------
ajExpo
Its sad to see Mozilla go. I really liked them as a software community, but I
think I will soon have to be looking for a different browser.

Or maybe someone at Mozilla will make a stand, and tell out that Mozilla
accounts/device sale figures is just wrong, and that it does not make the web
more open, but ties them to another "ecosystem"

~~~
zobzu
i'm not quite sure to comprehend your point. Mozilla isn't going anywhere.
Firefox Desktop isn't going anywhere.

~~~
drdaeman
> Firefox Desktop isn't going anywhere.

Actually, it's not unlikely it's going to the butt^W cloud.

/s

