Firefox has been losing market share steadily for years. The biggest efforts to turn that around have at best slowed it. Your subjective experience backs it up. That's evidence it is a failing product.
Mozilla has shipped successful products other than Firefox. Rust being a strong example, and then there are moderately less successful ones that have varying impacts. I worked on one (Hubs) that had a strong trajectory when I left, both in terms of user and revenue growth.
Rust is not a product. And for Mozilla it was a huge distraction, one they could ill afford.
So my point stands: this is a rearguard action. Eventually they will lose, accelerating that is in nobody's interest.
This is demonstrably false. Rust was designed for use in browser development, and it has successfully been adopted into Firefox. The payback is increased security, stability, and Firefox developer productivity.
None of the other major browsers are written in Rust, there does not seem to be a huge difference in the number of security issues listed for any of those.
I once worked at a company where they wanted to build everything, preferably including their own operating system programming language and database. And all that four a payment processor, something you could probably write in any language available. Guess where that story ended?
If something isn't core to your proposition it is a distraction.
You do realize Rust is a big part of the reason Firefox is more competitive past v57 than it ever was, right?
Mozilla should spin Rust out ASAP so they can focus on their core. Rust has enough momentum now that it does not need Mozilla attention to keep it afloat. Or at least, that's the impression I'm getting, if that's not the case then my apologies.
The fact that Mozilla is a browser company seems to be well known everywhere except at Mozilla. I find this odd.
The word 'browser' is mentioned exactly once in that corporate message and it is in a negative way, 'beyond the browser'. Not exactly inspiring hope, that one.
Of course you can, as it was shown by FF winning against the preinstalled IE a decade ago. Users were happiliy switching away, because FF was just the better browser.
edit: I regret using the word 'product' since it clearly allowed an instant response of goal post shifting around if Rust is a product, or whatever, by everyone else in this thread. My point was not that, it was that Mozilla is not a 'one trick pony', which was the original claim. And as a person who ships products, I consider a product a failure if less people are using it over time, regardless of the potential underlying cause.
Rust is not a product, never was meant to be one either, if you can point to $0.01 of income brought to Mozilla because of someone paying for Rust then I will be happy to concede that it is in fact a product.
Failing to me means that your product can not stand in the marketplace on merit. Underhanded - criminal at that - tactics by a competitor does not change that in principle. See also: Stacker, Netscape (hm, haven't we seen this before: browser company wants to be platform company, does a rewrite), and many other products that ultimately did not make it but had a very good run while they were alive.
Mozilla is confusing their own importance to staying alive as 'Mozilla the profit seeking company' vs 'FireFox, the last stand'.
And the latter to me is much closer to the stated mission of Mozilla than the former, no matter how much corpspeak they throw at it.
Potential users are saying, "Here are things I want in Firefox," and a Firefox/Mozilla advocate is telling them that's not what they really want, and Mozilla is going to work on something else.
It's been this way for years, and at the end of the day users realize it's pointless to argue and switch to Chrome.
Executives have a tough decision to make in terms of where and how to place bets. The OP's approach is to just concede that Mozilla will be dead some day and they may as well just slow the decline. If you are the CEO, accepting this and acting in accordance with that would be a dereliction of duty. I am not claiming to know the answer. I worked on a team that tried to place a strong bet to backstop things if Firefox ultimately failed. But I don't think the confidence that it's self-evident that they should just go all-in on Firefox is justified.
I think most Firefox users on Hacker News would dispute this. Judging by the average thread on Firefox, most of us think that Mozilla's efforts have mostly been to make Firefox worse. I don't know that I'd go that far, but the issue seems to be that most of the user facing changes have been the kind of pointless changes for the sake of change, and side projects most people don't use or want in their browser.
A sibling comment mentions breaking the addon API. If the addons I want to use are broken for months at a time, that's going to get me to consider using a different browser, even one with less capabilities. (This doesn't have to be a rational process; ideally you want your users to never think "ugh, why isn't this working, hmm I haven't checked out Chrome in a while". Even if Chrome is worse, some of them are going to switch.)
Then there's Pocket, which (let's admit) exists only because it's a direct source of revenue for Mozilla via advertisements placed in the browser chrome.
Then there's the pointless change to the URL bar, which drew an absurd amount of outrage. That much anger over a small UI change is not justified of course, but that's not the point. Stuff like this breaks the cardinal rule of not pointlessly pissing off your dwindling user base.
There's whatever the hell the mobile team is up to, with some new perpetual beta project every 12 months and putting an enormous amount of effort into a new Firefox for Android with a worse, slower UI that's not significantly faster for actual browsing and currently only has support for a handful of addons (which are the only reason anyone uses FFA).
There's enhanced tracking protection, which in the good ol' days of Firefox would have been an addon. Granted, it seems like it's doing something genuinely useful.
The RSS viewer got removed in version 64.
Then there are the fiascos, like the time Mozilla broke all users' addons, the hotfix sideloading scandal, the Mr Robot thing...
To be clear I do recognize that at least some parts of Mozilla are interested in improving Firefox, but the issue is that most of the improvements there are not obvious to anyone. Personally I've enjoyed the feature to automatically block notification permission requests (the UI for that is great). The addition of WebP support was nice, and ongoing work to support AVIF is also appreciated. The work on WebRender and introducing Rust code into Firefox is appreciated and has made Firefox noticeably faster. There have been some nice improvements to the developer tools too.
The problem is that most of this stuff isn't visible to ordinary users, even to power users. That's a problem for attracting new users, to be sure. But the attempts Mozilla has made to attract new users seem to largely be failing. And so the worst thing they could possibly do is to piss off the dedicated users who remain, but that seems to be what they've mostly accomplished.
They broke the plug-in API years ago and haven't bothered to fix the new one meaning I'm stuck with ugly tabs on the top even when I use Tree Style Tabs. Scrapbook extension hasn't worked for years etc.
Today, the main reason I use it isn't technical superiority but stubbornness, idealism and rhe fact that the alternatives are just as bad. I.e. despite all the progress on speed etc nothing makes up for breaking the single reason why they were the work horse of browsers: the extensions ecosystem combined with cross platform and good baseline performance.
FWIW: Mozilla can get money from me today - if they promise to use it to fix Firefox.
They wont. Quite on the contrary they are quite clear that donation money goes to other projects. I understand this has something to do with Mozilla being a non profit and browsers development not being a thing in their charter, but sooner rather than later I hope they'll realize that providing a good, free browser is maybe the biggest thing they can do to secure an open web ecosystem.
I already donate money directly to other projects, so I am not interested in that.
I will be signing up for the VPN thing however once it becomes available and if I know the profits goes to Firefox (irony over irony is if I'll need to use a VPN to sign up for the VPN I want :-P)
Why is that dereliction of duty?
Actually accepting the facts as they are is the hallmark of a good CEO. Trying to pretend reality and facts don't matter and that FireFox will win this battle is - pardon the word choice - delusional at this point in time.
So if your choices are between fighting a losing battle as good as you can or accelerating the drop then I'd be all for fighting that battle and drawing it out as long as I could. Accelerating it with wild-ass gambles is what got Mozilla where it is today.
Isn't Rust a language? https://research.mozilla.org/rust/
How is that going to keep the lights on? Doesn't seem like it contributes to the bottom line in any way, so they would have been better off allocating those people to keeping Firefox competitive. Seems like they need a "more wood behind fewer arrows" moment like Google had. Or a "sell everything but consulting" since consulting is the only thing making money moment like IBM had when they sold laptop, storage, printer, etc. divisions.
If you think Rust is a 'successful product' in regards to business given the Mozilla Corporation's financial situation, then this is extremely worrying.
I would posit that this (one) of the reasons why 250 people had to be let go. Mozilla focusing on 'distractions' rather than anything that makes them money.
The scope of this thread is if Mozilla has the potential to make successful products (or, things, I guess) beyond Firefox. The OP claims its not possible for the organization to do so. In my mind, showing they have created software that has traction (some revenue generating, some not) disproves this. A PM considers a product successful if it is adopted and loved by users. Other people consider it successful if its team is cash flow positive. Others consider it successful if it bolsters the company brand. The definition of successful I was working with is one that shows Mozilla can ship useful software.
The problem with your view is that if you don't have a plan on how a product will generate revenue that you are effectively taking a huge gamble that may not pay off. So you'll be 'successful' by your definition while filing for chapter 11, something that Mozilla is flirting with in the medium term if they pursue this route.
Only companies with very deep pockets can pursue bets like that, and even then it could hurt. Microsoft Xbox' story is a good example of a bet that worked out, there are many examples of such bets not working out, quite a few of them killing the companies that made the bets.
Maybe others are still doing that, but the situation's a lot murkier now. Firefox's UI is more confusing than it used to be (every time you open an application and it does something it doesn't normally, that's confusing to non-nerds—looking at you, update-announcement tabs and "hey come look at Pocket!" messages), other browsers have gotten better, and FF requires extensions to deliver an obviously-better browsing experience than other browsers (it may provide more privacy than Chrome or Edge out-of-the-box, sure, but my mom can't tell that, unlike automatic pop-up blocking, which was obviously a improvement over IE when FF was getting started). It's also not so lightweight that it draws comments from normies when you launch it, because it comes up so fast (this was an actual thing back when it first came out, vs. IE)
