I'm a bit disappointed. Mozilla makes a couple of great things (Firefox, Rust, MDN, ...). But in contrast to their products, I have a quite bad impression of their Foundation and/or Corporation. I don't know if it is warranted or not, but I have the impression that they mostly exist to burn through the millions they get from Google for setting them as default search engine. Most of the time I hear about them, it is self-referential. Either some dispute at the management level, or they are doing some outreach / marketing / branding stuff.
Now this might just be my prejudice (and please don't downvote me for admitting it :-) !) but when it comes to a "brand identity", prejudices and impressions are important.
This new branding doesn't help at all with my perception of Mozilla. If anything, it emphasizes the perception that Mozilla is a bloated entity disconnected from the products I care about. That they put a nerdy "://" in there to appeal technical means to me that they are even aware of this.
What I would have done is to go back to the early 2000s unapologetically retro dinosaur. This was from a time when Mozilla was the underdog, when it was the Free alternative, when it was getting better and better, and when Firefox was invented.
Alternatively, ditch "Mozilla" and "Foundation", and rebrand as just "Firefox". Everybody loves Firefox.
The millions they are getting from Google are probably spent mostly on salaries, since developers are expensive and it takes big teams to build products like Firefox and do marketing for it. Saying that they "burn through millions" is mean spirited, since that's the cost of doing business in this industry. Plus they've earned those millions, so it's theirs to burn.
They also can't stand still, so they invest in experiments and R&D, much like how companies are doing. Most of those experiments are failures naturally, so they tried Firefox OS and failed, they tried Persona and failed, but that's what experimenting is, HN readers should understand that and without burning some money on that, you'll never build those projects that make a difference.
Reading your message again, I don't understand what's your problem with Mozilla. And why is Mozilla under so much pressure on HN, whereas companies such as Apple and Google are getting a free pass on how they spend their money and on moral issues? Is it because they are a non-profit? That's the only explanation that's reasonable for what is in my eyes a huge double standard.
> Alternatively, ditch "Mozilla" and "Foundation", and rebrand as just "Firefox". Everybody loves Firefox.
Except that Firefox per se isn't why I love supporting them. I'm supporting Mozilla because of their values and I use Firefox as my main browser because I trust Mozilla to protect my interests more than I trust others, not because Firefox is technically the best, because saying that at this point wouldn't be true.
They also can't stand still, so they invest in experiments and R&D, much like how companies are doing. Most of those experiments are failures naturally, so they tried Firefox OS and failed, they tried Persona and failed, but that's what experimenting is and without burning some money on that, you'll never build those projects that make a difference.
There is a reason those failed (lack of focus or any long-term plans are one).
Reading your message again, I don't understand what's your problem with Mozilla. And why is Mozilla under so much pressure on HN, whereas companies such as Apple and Google are getting a free pass? Is it because they are a non-profit
Have we been reading the same HN?
I think people are critical of Mozilla because they are one of the few groups trying to build an open web and their constant back and forth and closing down projects has had some real effects on progress.
Also, the firing of Eich for political views will always be controversial.
Isn't closing down projects (that don't seem to be succeeding and are taking resources) exactly evidence of focus?
Eich wasn't fired. He quit because he felt Mozilla was put under too much pressure because of him. Ironic you should remark that given the point of the post you're replying to: he quit exactly because of the reason you are using as justification.
I wonder what will happen when it leaks out the new CEO voted for Trump/Hillary.
There are lots of people who believe that Persona, if properly integrated with browsers could have taken off. You can find old HN threads where people were begging them to do x y an z and it instead remained a neat but underutilized project.
FirefoxOS? Either commit to it or don't, but the way it was rolled out and abandoned after a few years didn't feel especially strategic.
Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.
Compared to what other companies are doing, Persona's source-code is open source [1] and you or others are free to continue that project if you think it makes a difference. As it happens Mozilla isn't under any obligation to you or anybody else to continue a project that is draining resources and given its open-source nature, if nobody picks it up, then I doubt its viability.
Firefox OS from an "open web" perspective, was primarily a vehicle to push for the standardization of web APIs needed for mobile devices. It has succeeded in doing that and many Firefox OS improvements are now incorporated into Firefox for Android. But given the complete dominance of Android on the low end, it would have been extremely foolish to continue it, as that would have been literally burning through cash. Consider that even Microsoft has failed spectacularly, given all their resources and experience in building operating systems.
> Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.
Wait, people are allowed to speak their own mind? Oh, the horror.
Thank you for keeping the Persona dream alive. It turns out that being open source wasn't sufficient for Persona to be able to be continued by a third party: we accidentally baked in some intractable centralization, and the code was too much of a mess. Moreover, I'm not sure that Persona's proposed architecture makes sense outside of a browser vendor.
"Let's get something straight first. I'm not a fan of excuses. Persona failed to achieve its goals, and I'd rather we own up to what it was good at, and what it failed at, learn from it, and keep fighting for better authentication on the internet because that's what matters."
1. In hindsight, I firmly believe that Persona's emphasis on browser integration was a red herring, and directly resulted in an architecture that was intractably centralized.
2. We committed massively to Firefox OS relative to our size and revenue.
With respect to your first point, is this a catch-22 that might ever be solved? The place that is best capable of providing the right UX for something like SSO/identity management/authentication does seem to be the browser, yet even if it isn't a red herring (as you seem to think) it certainly doesn't seem at this point to be a path that can lead to success (just off the top of my head: Persona, Microsoft's first "Passport" attempt in the Windows 9x era, Microsoft's CardSpace in the Vista era) because it's obviously not enough for a browser to support it if websites don't support it...
It's possible that the FIDO Alliance, with enough support from large enterprises, will be able to compel browsers into implementing something native. Otherwise, it feels like anything in this space will need to bootstrap itself by, first and foremost, working on the Web without special consideration by browsers.
I recall well all the meetings and arguments from the early days. The commitment to Firefox OS (née B2G) was late. It came after two years from B2G launch in late July 2011, until after Ben Adida left in July 2013. Mike Hanson took over for Ben on the identity team side; Fernando Jiménez Moreno from Telefónica (https://github.com/ferjm) did the B2G-side work.
Maybe that was right on time. I don't think so: Facebook Connect was even more entrenched, and Android installed base was climbing out of the Gingerbread 2.3 swamp. The commitment may have been massively massive once started, from your point of view. However, it was almost two years late precisely because we had to argue endlessly, from executive level down, against Ben's preferred non-Firefox/non-OS browserid adoption strategy: the JS shim library.
3. Can you give us more insight into how the Eich ordeal is looked at in retrospect at Mozilla? Would it happen again in a Peter Thiel kind of situation?
Respectfully, I'd rather not wade into that on HN. It's in the past, and there's a great deal of nuance that would be hard to convey here. I'm confident that Mozilla is in a good place today.
the way it was rolled out and abandoned after a few years didn't feel especially strategic
This doesn't "feel" like a very well substantiated argument either. It received little traction, users didn't like the performance of the devices at the price points needed to penetrate the market, key apps (hi WhatsApp!) had announced they would not port , and Google responded in force with Android One. It took enormous amounts of resources from Firefox development. Looks to me like they committed as far as they could without bringing the entire company under.
Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.
Mozilla Foundation people (i.e. not his employees) actually. But anyway, I hope this argument works for the president too.
> This doesn't "feel" like a very well substantiated argument either. It received little traction, users didn't like the performance of the devices at the price points needed to penetrate the market
I had a toy firefox phone to play with that had potato level processing power. I was actually surprised by how smooth everything was, way better than android on way less hardware. Firefox seems to be the only browser optimized for portables.
Andreas Gal and I were among those calling for Persona to be integrated into Firefox ASAP, for scaling leverage against Metcalfe's Law. We had frustrating, protracted arguments about it with Ben Adida. I found resistance to the idea to be based on ill-concealed fear and loathing of dealing with the Firefox codebase, and (possibly as a consequence, not cause) explicit preference for doing a JS "shim" library and promoting it to web developers in competition with FBConnect.
That worked about as well as you would expect.
Eventually, Mark Mayo got Firefox Accounts going, but it was non-federated. In truth so was Persona: Mozilla ran the only IdP of note. Also, prior to Accounts, the protocol seemed to fork in anti-federated ways, but to me that was just teething pain, to be overcome by further evolution.
The fatal problems were threefold:
1. Facebook had huge scale and even in 2011 (browserid days) it had already won.
2. The Persona team was averse to integrating into Firefox, for whatever client population "interop readiness" pressure that might have put on servers (Metcalfe's Law is a barrier to new protocol adoption).
3. Users don't grok federated identity. Relying party? (That's the first party, the site to which you're browsing with clear intent and understanding of its identity -- assuming you haven't been phished.) Identity provider? (What's this sketchy popup I get every week or so asking me to re-login to some third party?) The whole federated Rp/Idp/browser three-body problem is confusing and looks like some kind of hack, not just phishing but popup malware.
The initial centralized or under-federated situation to me was not fatal, but could have become so if problems 1-3 didn't doom the whole effort.
Firefox OS indeed suffered from slow and half-hearted commitment from July 2011 on. Not even half-hearted: at first, it was a pirate ship. The CEO told another exec that in previous jobs, someone would have been fired for launching it via a post to mozilla.dev.platform (even though drafts of that post had been discussed and vetted by all execs who were paying attention).
Don't get me wrong, even with aggressive resourcing from mid-2011, Firefox OS might not have made it. But half-hearted, slow-rolled "investment" was worse than either "do" or "do not". No half measures, as Mike in "Breaking Bad" taught.
None of my employees called for me to be fired. You're confusing six Mozilla Foundation employees with people who worked for me in the (arm's length, for profit subsidiary) Mozilla Corporation. See http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/mozilla-employees-to... (which, typical of coverage at the time, fails to note those employees worked for an entirely separate org from the one I was CEO of).
Eich stepped down. There was so much pressure on him from the community that he had no choice. Mozilla isn't beholden to shareholders or profit there goal is more social in nature and they've built their entire marketing and strategy around being the open and democratised internet, Eich had no choice.
Companies like Google shut down projects every day, one of the differences is that Mozilla works in the open and isn't so secretive.
But, I do know former employees and the company overall is a mess, with some teams better than others. People say the same thing about Apple though.
Well what kind of things do you expect to hear about the corp/foundation itself? If you exclude info about their projects, then it seems almost tautological you're going to hear self referential stuff!
I've heard Mozilla's "politics" are very much different to what I prefer, but whatever. It doesn't leak into the end products. As long as they keep producing a browser that prevents Google Browser from taking over, they're a force of good. And Rust is amazing and probably life-changing for me, so that's two massive positive things they do.
As far as the logo, that "retro" dinosaur looked a bit outdated. I fully support them "burning" millions on branding if it means more people use Firefox. I use FF for "freedom" but that's a tough sell. Even technically inclined people I know use Chrome and don't wanna change because of freedom.
My only request would be for them to throw more weight behind Rust. The community and tech is amazing. But getting buy-in from clients to use Rust might benefit from knowing there's a "company" behind it. Maybe.
> My only request would be for them to throw more weight behind Rust. The community and tech is amazing. But getting buy-in from clients to use Rust might benefit from knowing there's a "company" behind it. Maybe.
I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure we employ most of the core Rust and Servo teams. We also pay for all the infrastructure costs for both projects (web hosting, crates.io, CI). Additionally we've also spent a lot of time engineering the Rust ecosystem to meet the needs of large projects like Firefox and Servo to ensure that it meets real-world needs.
One thing people need to keep in mind when saying "Mozilla should put more resources into X" is that we're not a very large company in the space we work in. We have something like 1,200 full-time equivalent employees and we ship software that competes with products from companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft. We constantly have an outflow of employees who get offers for more money from larger companies, or who leave to join startups. We're well-funded, but we're not a public company not will we have an IPO, so it's hard to compete with stock options for the promise of big money. That doesn't matter to everyone, but it's hard to fault people for wanting it.
We don't always get everything right, but I think right now we're doing about the best we possibly can to fulfill our mission with the resources available.
I really like this redesign it's clever and interesting; it looks more modern to my eye and makes me realise that Moz://a are all about the web. It presents several ways in which the logo can be shortened and I had to go to the Mozilla site to look up what the old logo was. I'll remember this new one instantly.
The way of thinking in your comment is really common... let's look backwards, never modernise or improve things. Never make a considerably better Macbook Pro (in terms of design anyway), BBC website (thousands of users says every redesign is terrible and they want this back: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4832892.stm) or logo identity (I still rate the 2012 olympics logo - https://www.fastcodesign.com/1670429/the-surprisingly-smart-...). Let's keep everything the same or look backwards to see how we should move forward.
I know lots of people doing interesting things at Mozilla and I have no idea why they get such a bad rap; the worst thing they have done is shutting down Persona IMO.
I know lots of people doing interesting things at Mozilla and I have no idea why they get such a bad rap
The other movers in this space are for-profit corporations. Nobody's expecting anything of them. The resulting dread leads to unrealistic and even conflicting expectations for Mozilla.
Yeah, that's something that I absolutely hate about journalism, or well, rather our culture in general.
If for example Google does something bad, then that's no news worth reporting about. It's just business as usual. And people will even defend Google, saying that they are a company, they are supposed to do everything to maximize profits, even if what they do is just barely scraping along the borders of legality.
If instead Mozilla does something vaguely questionable, then most journalists will just leap at the opportunity to report about the innocent-thought Mozilla turning evil.
Looking at the video I must admit I was pretty meh'ed, but looking at it in use at http://www.mozilla.org (especially on mobile) I have to admit it works well.
Before seeing the new logo I thought they were building an AI to automate adding pointless, sarcastic comments to hacker news. Now I realise I was wrong...
I think that a fair amount of people share your views. Some time ago I articulated [1] that I find that Mozilla has to appeal to three very different groups of people, and its efforts to appeal to one are met with disdain from the others.
To quote a portion of my post, these audiences are, in increasing order of vocalness:
[a] the impressionable; the next-wave of web user who has recently gotten online
[b] the alternative-seeker; the average web user who is uneasy with Google
[c] the idealist; the open web, open-source advocate
Is this even a demographic? I really dislike Google. But I still use search (DDG just doesn't quite cut it for me). And Chrome for a few sites. And YouTube. And Android and Play Music, which gets my kids ad-free YouTube.
FF needs to be appealing by itself, not in contrast to Google, to succeed. Features like adblock on Android - that's powerful stuff.
>web user that just got online
Is this much of a demographic in developed countries?
I like Google's products, the problem with Google is that keeping all of your eggs in a single basket is very unwise, especially given their potential for evil.
They can now control and mine your searches, the videos you view, the email you send and receive, your contacts list, your location, literally keeping track of where you've been, the mobile apps you use, your purchased eBooks, your music subscription, your browsing history, your chats, your cloud data, etc. The only thing they failed at is social networking.
I see many people placing so much trust in Google, but that's very foolish. Even if they behaved well until now, power inevitably corrupts and even if they kept your data safe, let's say for the sake of this argument, you don't know where that data will be tomorrow. Plus there are people that lost access to everything due to one of their automated processes that bans accounts based on weird heuristics, e.g. people getting banned from their email account because they've bought and sold a Pixel. How fucked up is that?
I must also say that even though I can forgive Mozilla for every one of their failures because they were in good faith, I cannot forgive Google for killing Google Reader in order to promote Google+.
So I would say that non-Google is definitely a feature. I use Firefox because I trust Mozilla more than Google, Apple or Microsoft, with the browser being the window to all my communications and secret desires. Of course, I still use other Google products, including Chrome and Android, though not full time, my work email is GSuite (personal is FastMail), etc.
This is definitely a demographic. The browsers are both good enough products for many common user cases that something like this can dominate the consideration.
It's interesting that you mention this here, as it seems to me that the Firefox and Mozilla brands do in fact try to appeal to different groups of people. I believe the Firefox brand caters for [a] while the Mozilla brand seems like a better fit for [c]. [b] seems to be somewhere in the middle...?
Shallow criticism like this is terribly irresponsible. Not only does the Mozilla Foundation function as a kind of foundation for the Internet in critical ways including their documentation being even more popular than W3C materials, but they have plenty of great offerings including L20n which may be one of the most powerful and usable localization frameworks available. Your comment might make sense as long as you never need to look up any documentation of Internet standards or translate content into other languages.
> Most of the time I hear about them, it is self-referential. Either some dispute at the management level, or they are doing some outreach / marketing / branding stuff.
Note that marketing is how they get the install base that Google pays for default searches for.
In the timeline where they fund a dozen 'protect the internet' campaigns, where they issue grants to a dozen open source projects, where they print up banners, stickers, websites, etc.
If you like, marketing is how they _keep_ their install base.
Now this might just be my prejudice (and please don't downvote me for admitting it :-) !) but when it comes to a "brand identity", prejudices and impressions are important.
This new branding doesn't help at all with my perception of Mozilla. If anything, it emphasizes the perception that Mozilla is a bloated entity disconnected from the products I care about. That they put a nerdy "://" in there to appeal technical means to me that they are even aware of this.
What I would have done is to go back to the early 2000s unapologetically retro dinosaur. This was from a time when Mozilla was the underdog, when it was the Free alternative, when it was getting better and better, and when Firefox was invented.
Alternatively, ditch "Mozilla" and "Foundation", and rebrand as just "Firefox". Everybody loves Firefox.