Sometimes the answer to a company which is trying too many things at random is to drastically reduce the dispersion of effort, and focus ruthlessly.
It's very hard to do psychologically, though.
IMO Mozilla would probably be better served, business-wise, as being "the customizable Chrome". It would be a much smaller business (i.e. less IP under development), but it could be profitable and it leverages their USP in a way that Chrome doesn't seem able or willing to follow.
Finding different products to sell simply leads to Firefox going away, IMO. I don't care about Mozilla; I care about what Firefox does that Chrome does not. And at the end of the day, that's mostly Tree Style Tabs, uBlock and a menu bar.
Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 and one of the things he stopped was the heavy bleeding from having too many (confusing) SKUs.
His first new product was the iPod, released in 2001 while development of the iPhone started around 2005.
The release of the iPhone would happen ~11 years after his return.
You mean ipod and itunes, perhaps?
Mozilla's thesis is about unlocking the potential of the Internet and ensuring it remains a public resource. Its purpose for existing is not about tree style tabs or ad blockers. But this makes for a tough process of determining how to foster innovative products since the mission is so broad.
Spot on. In fact, I think that without FireFox Mozilla might as well be dead, even if it survives as a legal entity and employs people. That's it's whole reason for existence as far as I'm concerned.
To the extent Mozilla sees itself as an internet company, it seems it is is so it can subsume other parts of the internet into the browser.
If it genuinely saw itself as an internet company and not a browser company, it would not have:
- killed Thunderbird, its premier non-web non-browser application;
- built a phone where every app was a browser + ad hoc web-y extensions, even where using a web application approach did not make sense;
- the exact same dumb idea as above but for IoT;
- integrated every product idea it makes or acquires (Pocket, Send, now Reality) into its browser as the primarily / solitary entry point
- continually sidelined / demoted even web-but-non-browser technologies like RSS
"Mozilla's users" (and by this you really mean, Firefox's users) see Mozilla as a browser company because everything they do revolves around their browser.
I don't think Mozilla sees themselves as a "company". Their philosophical core is as a foundation promoting core believes. The title of their website is "Internet for people, not profit" and their recruiting pitch is "We're on a mission. Join us".
Amen. And not send each and every keystroke to Google.
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/turn-autosuggestion-off-mozi...
Is there evidence Chrome does that? I've never heard this claim before.
Ok, maybe not every keystroke. For instance, form fields should be safe.
I regard Firefox Container Tabs and Rust as the most useful things that come out of Mozilla.
