You can trust your doctor much more about your knee and much less about their billing. Trust isn't binary and isn't per person/organization/object, but varies by person and (activity?).
And anything will be trusted more or less by different people. Is there evidence of who trusts Mozilla with what, and how much? The the fact that you don't trust them or that some on HN don't trust them isn't evidence.
Also, each of us is both commentator and agent. When we say 'I trust X' or 'I don't trust X', we both communicate our thoughts and change others' thoughts.
I do not trust Mozilla to keep a product alive. I was frustrated by Firefox OS and more recently Pocket, but everything they've tried or acquired aside from the browser itself (and Thunderbird I guess?) has failed and been shut down. That has burned a lot of people along the way.
For this reason I can't see myself becoming a user of any future Mozilla projects.
But yes, that is part of trust and I'd like to see them address it.
- They have for years been trying to add stuff to Firefox that nobody wants, and were privacy violations. The "marketing studies" come to mind.
- They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox, and failing at literally all of it. You can't help but notice the stellar incompetence of Mozilla leadership.
- They have for a long time been raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Google, pissing it away on useless stuff, but mostly on enriching the management layer. How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero? This is a thoroughly corrupt organization.
They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox. And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...
> How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero?
Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.
With Firefox market share plummeting, and little prospect for competing with Google on a free commodity product, Mozilla needed and needs to find other products and not just watch the ship go down.
What's your solution? Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome, despite Google's enormous marketing advantage?
