- Increase CEO pay
- Repeat as needed
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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it should be "We need to focus on the browser" -> lays off employees and pushes feature requests to the open-sorce volunteer community to fill as they see fit.
Firefox should only exist to be a standards-compliant browser (not part of the Google ecosystem). It should not be using Google WebExtensions or a Google manifest. Anything beyond the bare minimum of compliance with the W3C's published standard should be a community made addon or plugin.
Ideally, it should also not collaborate with companies like Meta to manufacture consent about in-browser tracking for ads, i.e.
https://www.w3.org/community/patcg/
(You can't say "PATCG" without saying "patsy"...)
Absolutely right. It shouldn't collaborate with any for-profit entity, or non-profit entity captured by for-profit entities. Everything should be about maintaining the base engine at compatibility to open standards, and pushing everything else to either the community or volunteers in the non-profit.
Addons are important though, and they fucked with developers quite a bit in the past. Making the developers start over again is probably going to piss them further.
Oh, I agree. We're past the point of no return now. Our only hope lies in Ladybird. I'm holding out hope for that engine, though only slightly.
This weirdly took me back to a chance conversation I had in the late 90s with the development manager for Internet Explorer. I asked him a technical question about a new feature I thought IE might be getting. He had no idea what I was talking about, and said (almost verbatim), "Now that Netscape is essentially dead, we really have no motivation to innovate in the browser space." This was about at the end of the transition period when the money people took over MS from the geeks, and I remember thinking yeahhh, this is the end. The feature I was asking about was "back channel requests" - later known as AJAX. I believe it was first implemented natively by Firefox and then Microsoft (who could have done it like 5 years sooner) scrambled to play catch-up - which by then was their standard pattern.
Oh man, I had almost forgotten about when you had to write different ways to read the XHR response depending on which browser you were trying to support.
Right! The thing I asked him about was if XMLHttpRequest would be natively supported instead of having to use an ActiveX object. His reaction was oh, hmm, that sounds kinda cool but nah. At that time dynamic HTML still wasn't all that old, web pages were still mostly content that just sat there. And now we could eliminate page refreshes and server-side state maintenance, and have little apps run in the browser and interact with APIs. I was super psyched about this changing the whole face of the web, and that MS would lead the way. But sadly by then it had become all about getting people to re-buy Windows every few years.
Pretty accurate except for "we must focus on the browser", I've never seen/heard them doing that.
I still remember when they cancelled vertical tabs after successful testing.
From their announcement about ending Pocket and FakeSpot:
we’re looking ahead to focusing on new Firefox features that people need most.
Far be it from me to say they act upon these statements, but I do see them made.
Edit: yay more AI
This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way.
They did? I still have it enabled and it works. If I get an update that removes this, mozilla can go shit themselves
Many years ago they had an offical extension called "Tab Center", it had been in "labs" for some time. When it finished testing (it worked well), Mozilla decided to drop it instead of deploying it in Firefox. It wasn't even in low priority.
It took them many years and they finally implemented vertical tabs in 2024.
I remember using an extension for that in like 2008 or something.
And I remember them disabling the features that extension required to function.
That was the move to Firefox 3.0, wasn't it? Back when major Firefox releases were actually major and not just minor changes to a few tertiary features.
I'm pretty sure that upgrade killed more addons than every update since then combined. It took years for some of them to return.
When was that? I only ask because Firefox has vertical tabs now.
Sorry for AI but I couldn't find it by just googling:
Yes, Firefox did have an in-house developed "Tab Center" — it was an experimental feature created by Mozilla as part of their Test Pilot programme around 2016–2017.
🧪 Mozilla's Original "Tab Center" Name: Tab Center
Status: Experimental Test Pilot feature (now discontinued)
Timeframe: Circa 2016–2017
Purpose: To explore the usability of vertical tabs on the left side of the browser, instead of the traditional horizontal layout.
🔍 Key Features Displayed open tabs vertically in a sidebar.
Showed a more spacious, scrollable list of tabs.
Included favicons and tab titles — easier to manage lots of tabs.
Supported mouse gestures like tab pinning and closing.
Looked and felt very similar to Edge’s modern vertical tabs.
Ah TIL! I think it was finally added as of version 136, fairly recently.
Capitalism and enshittification
Yep, it's not that Firefox is bad. It's that the people currently in charge of it are trying to be greedy assholes and operate like the greedy assholes that run other companies.
Get rid of those people or otherwise stop them from their greedy assholery and The Firefox hate would stop.
Get rid of those people or otherwise stop them from their greedy assholery and The Firefox hate would stop.
What if we tried paying them even more, instead, first...just to be sure we tried everything?
I want to believe it's possible for a viable browser to be built purely out of altruism. Such an endeavor would require, ironically, a steady stream of income to ensure that the developers are well compensated and are not burdened by, you know, hunger and lack of shelter.
Firefox has had a good run but it's clear that they are chasing cash at the cost of alienating their most dedicated users. The sad thing is that I suspect they've done the math and predict they will gain more users than lose them.
The harsh reality is that browsers are expensive to build. They are the literal portals to our digital lives and it's becoming harder to isolate and anonymize our online lives.
Hell, I'd love to see a Linux distro take this on. Can you imagine if a heavyweight like CentOS or Linux Mint took on the project to build a browser from the ground up?
Linux Mint lists 11 people in their GitHub org. There's likely additional outside contributors, but that's the core team. In the Cinnamon repo, only 5 people have changed more than 1000 lines of code in the last two years.
I expect CentOS to have even less contributors, as they largely just repackage what Fedora does.
Mozilla has around 750 employees, most of which are fulltime devs.
Like, man, I don't want to kill your optimism, but we're talking an order of magnitude difference at least.
Or in short, capienshit.
I mean "Just focus on the browser" does not generates enough money to focus on the browser. I don't want to excuse mozilla management, but they need to try some things to generate money.
Not wrong given that browsers aren't easy to maintain, but they couls start by not paying their CEO millions.
Sure, but most of the projects they are criticized for (like adding the ad measurements API and AI summaries) were never going to make them money.
That sort of argument would be more persuasive if it weren't for the existence all the other Free Software projects that get by just fine on grants and donations.
Yeah, but then they wouldn't have the high headcount and power that they have.
And that sort of argument would be more persuasive if (a) I didn't think Mozilla was squandering the headcount they have, and (b) if I thought Mozilla actually had more power than other comparable orgs, like the Wikimedia Foundation.
Firefox is one of the most complex pieces of software on the planet at around 30 million lines of code (comparable to Chrome, WebKit and the Linux kernel). Personally, I think, it's a miracle they can maintain that with less than 700 devs. That's more than 40k lines of code per dev, most of which they won't have written themselves.
At $DAYJOB, we'll write 40k lines of code maybe in two years, with a team of 5+ devs. And having to maintain 10k lines of code is what I consider rather challenging, i.e. I'll likely start falling behind sooner or later, because the world around me moves faster than I can.
Yeah they’re kinda trapped into playing the capitalism game/as are we all. Find me a non-profit, non-chromium, non-fork of Firefox and I’ll eat my hat…
…and I’d love to eat my hat. Won’t someone make me eat my hat??
Mozilla generates its revenue by waiting for its yearly Google donation...
Just focus on the browsing.