Firefox

Good to know that the people in Mozilla are actually capable of leaving. What I don't understand is why they don't all leave together and get themselves leaders who actually care about Firefox instead of the dollars. I bet that if there was a big push by Mozilla employees to a new browser on top of Servo (as was originally the plan?), they joined whatever foundation Servo has, and they made a lot of noise about it, many people would be itching to move their donations over from Mozilla to OpenCollective.

Firefox lost users not only because Big Goo threw thousands of engineers at their own browser, but because they actively fucked up nearly everywhere they could. Sure, FF got faster and more stable and and and, but it also introduced a ton of crap nobody asked for. They also had random projects that had absolutely nothing to do with Firefox which just wasted their time and money.

A final Community thing is that over the past five or so years, Mozilla has been turning away from it's powerhouse, the Community. I have no idea why, but I can say that it's a top down decision. At some point, some folk at a high level decided that Mozilla got to where it did on it's own. It did not. The thing I was beating a drum about was that the folk working there were the lucky ones who got a paycheck, but most of their peers were folk who didn't have a badge and a @mozilla.com email address. Leadership was convinced that the people in our Community were just customers, and maybe fans. This pissed off so, so many folk, and rightly so. They had given hours or years of effort and time without compensation, because they believed they were part of a larger effort. They felt betrayed because they were betrayed. I'm sure that someone probably had a reasonable argument about “how could we let all these outsiders have say?" or "I don't like that those folk hate the amazing work we're doing promoting lemony fresh bell bottoms (or whatever trend they were chasing)?" I dunno, boss, maybe the folk using your browser actually might have solid reasons of their own and might really appreciate things that don't show up on LinkedIn top takes?

I'm not kidding when I said that Firefox is a niche browser. Folk have to actively look to use it. They have to search it out, figure out how to download it, ignore all the warnings and “suggestions” that they should keep using whatever the native browser is, avoid all the ads for Chrome as the better replacement browser, ignore all the sites saying “Your browser is out of date” because they couldn't be arsed to test things in Firefox, etc. Firefox users are not normal. They are deeply abnormal, and frankly a lot of them are proud of that.

The problem is that Leadership doesn't know how to deal with that.

Source

Mozilla's DAU count has been dropping for years. There's all sorts of reasons for that. I bet you can come up with a few yourself.

I honestly cannot. I would expect DAUs to be increasing as Chrome becomes increasingly user-hostile and Firefox is the first stop for people looking to jump ship from Chromium-based browsers. Where are the users going?