

My Frustration with Mozilla - linuxexchange
http://jeremy.linuxquestions.org/2015/06/12/my-frustration-with-mozilla/

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rilita
The thing that we now call Firefox has gone through many revisions, going back
nearly to the beginning of the internet. A lot of that code has been shared by
many browsers.

The code is composed of 4 parts imo:

1\. The rendering / layout engine

2\. The scripting engine

3\. The UI

4\. Other junk/addons

#1 and #2 are both tremendous and do amazing things. Passing the latest ACID
tests is wonderful. #3 and #4 are unfortunately what many people think of when
they think of Firefox.

Really, #3 and #4 are irrelevant in the long run. Mozilla itself is irrelevant
in the long run imo. The only thing that is important is the existence of good
rendering and scripting engines that are open source.

So long as those things exist, all the rest can be changed. Other
organizations could take the place of Mozilla and it wouldn't really matter
overall, because the code that matters will continue to live on so long as
hackers exist to continue putting it to newer better uses.

Look at Chrome. What is Chrome really? To me it's just Webkit with a
minimalistic UI wrapped around it. ( and later a new scripting engine also ).
Does Chrome matter? No, not really. Webkit matters.

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bobajeff
The fundamental truth about Firefox's success is that it was in the right
place at the right time. Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross started a side project to
help get rid of the stink that was Netscape 6. The Internet Explorer team was
to be disbanded for about 4 years. Opera was still charging money for their
browser. Brendan Eich and Mitchell Baker were about to start the Mozilla
foundation.

The events collimated in what became the launch and initial growth of Firefox.

~~~
Drdrdrq
That's a bit dismissive. Firefox was / is a browser that provides an
alternative to IE / Chrome / NameYourFavoriteProprietaryBrowser. It is
worrying that Mozilla seem to be forgetting why they are strong... But in my
view thay still represent the better side. I would love if they didn't include
Hello and similar, but I hope thay come around and make the right thing.

~~~
bobajeff
It may sound that way because I summed up alot of history in a few sentences.
In truth there was more going on (AOL and Google had some hand in it too) but
the bullets points still tell the cusp of what happened without the delusions
that have been projected on top by it's fans or journalists.

That's not to say there is no value in the manifesto, in openness, in
innovation or whatever. It's just not likely what gave it all of it's
downloads.

