j-r conlinJun 12

So, uh, yeah...

I am leaving mozilla

It was the best place I ever worked, along with some of the smartest, kindest people who I will miss dearly, but there comes a time when you have to leave.

Leaving Mozilla

> On burn-out and bull-headedness

Show threadNumber6 Jun 12

@jrconlin

Mozilla was at about 15% of the desktop market when they jettisoned the extensions that gave their browser super powers the other big browsers didn't have. They did this over the objections of tens of thousands of their users.

Two years later and their desktop usage had dropped to about 5%.

In marketing, you never turn yourself into a commodity, but that is exactly what they did.

It's the total tone-deafness of their "leadership" that is disturbing.

Show threadFabrice Desré
@number6 @jrconlin Do you seriously think that the switch from xul/xpcom extensions to web extensions is the reason of the market slip? (ignoring that the xpcom/xul model was a security nightmare).
Jun 15 at 6:11pmWeb
Show threadj-r conlinJun 15

@fabrice @number6

Because Mozilla has traditionally been very transparent about what it does, it can make people believe that they have insight into all the decisions and outcomes.

I do not fault folk for thinking that way (it's human nature, see information bias), but I do encourage folk to remember that we only see a small percentage of anything, and it's important to remember that we all have strong opinions.

Show threadPhilSalkieJun 16
@fabrice @number6 @jrconlin
Well, a couple years of "This browser is now broken for my workflow and nobody is fixing it" and there's no going back. I dropped FF for that reason, switched to PaleMoon.
Show threadNumber6 Jun 16

@PhilSalkie @fabrice @jrconlin

I believe that Palemoon was hacked (in its archive). It reminded me of the dangers of a single person trying to support a enterprise-sized project.

I switched to chromium for a couple of years. But then they did the snap thing and I couldn't get native host projects to work.

Now I mostly use Firefox, but switch to chromium or chrome for some features. On Android, FF has problems with websites, so I started using Vivaldi.

Show threadPhilSalkieJun 16
@number6 @fabrice @jrconlin
(Eventually I moved to Waterfox and Vivaldi, once the third party devels caught up to that absurd breaking change of tossing out all the add-ons.)
Show threadNumber6 Jun 16

@fabrice @jrconlin

What does a browser do? It renders a web page and interprets some javascript. Two browser makes, A & B, should have nearly the identical results.

So why choose "B" over "A", especially if "A" is already accepted by your bank, your work, and all major businesses?

You use "B" because of its special features. When those features go away, you find something else to use because there's no point.

So yes, when FF made itself an "also ran", it started to bleed users.

Show threadUSB Type-Steve Jun 16
@fabrice @number6 @jrconlin I certainly think it did not help. I remember when Firefox went to Quantum and overnight I lost a major portion of extensions I relied upon since the 2000s (and they did not get ported over-they worked far too deep into Firefox's internals to be permitted to do so). It might not have been the number one cause of the user base decline, but it CERTAINLY did not help Mozilla at all. They should have handled the entire situation far better (and maybe listened to the users a bit more than they did).
Show threadFabrice DesréJun 16

@USBTypeSteve @number6 @jrconlin Yes, that's small potatoes compared to the effect of Chrome marketing on Google's web sites and others, bundling deals etc.

So how should Mozilla have handled the deprecation of xul/xpcom add-ons?