Everything about this whole post is so symptomatic of everything that is currently wrong with Mozilla.
Fundamentally the leadership has become grossly out of touch with reality. Building a browser is basically making a product which is blue collar work and thus yucky. Yeah you have a huge pay package (thanks people we just laid off!), but when you're at the Country Club it's just so gauche to admit that you actually make something. Everyone else is fund raising, and being activists and other much more glamorous things. You're getting your hands dirty like a commoner!
And so you embark on a series of nebulous advocacy campaigns with no definable success criteria. You pile millions of dollars into things like "The Knight-Mozilla Fellowship" where you "place creative technologists in newsrooms to work on open-source tools and support reporting that strengthens the web and changes people’s lives". You pour money into making things like "Mozilla Webmaker" ( https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/05/22/introducing-mozilla... ). Sure you've got some nerds in the basement doing whatever it is they do, something like "Servo" or whatever, but who cares? You're working on a way to cut them loose anyway, and now when you're at your next $5000/plate fundraiser you can talk about all the amazing advocacy you're doing with the rest of your friends.
Of course the problem is that Google has basically spent it's time pouring money into Chrome and unfairly leveraging it's search monopoly to advertise Chrome and intentionally breaking it's sites for other browsers (attention people looking to argue this point: Stop. Google has no more credibility in this area, and anyone who is still in denial is a useful idiot at this point), and so now when Google brings forward a proposal to add DRM to the Web Specifications all of your advocacy amounts to stale fart in the face of a 70%+ browser share. Whoops! But then again, those are "real-world" results, and you're not interested in that.
What would it even mean to "unfuck the internet"? What sort of metric, goals, and approaches would Mozilla use here? The problem that Mozilla still still does not get is that they have exactly one piece of leverage: Firefox market share. Every penny then spend on useless advocacy run by tech adjacent "hangers on" and not on making Firefox the best available browser is a penny wasted. They've even managed to turn away people who want to support them by making sure there is no clear way to donate to actually worthwhile browser development without having those donations filtered through the foundation where are bunch of useless apparatchiks will get first dibs on that cash, leaving probably nothing to reach through to the people making things.
Until the useless upper management is cleared out and replaced with people who understand that Mozilla has exactly jack shit if they don't have Firefox, it will continue to wind down until we are left with Google as the monopoly owner of the most important platform for information interchange the world has ever known. Yeah that seems like a grim future, but it's the one we're headed for, and Mozilla needs to take a long hard look in the mirror about it's own role in making that future come to pass.
Fundamentally the leadership has become grossly out of touch with reality. Building a browser is basically making a product which is blue collar work and thus yucky. Yeah you have a huge pay package (thanks people we just laid off!), but when you're at the Country Club it's just so gauche to admit that you actually make something. Everyone else is fund raising, and being activists and other much more glamorous things. You're getting your hands dirty like a commoner!
And so you embark on a series of nebulous advocacy campaigns with no definable success criteria. You pile millions of dollars into things like "The Knight-Mozilla Fellowship" where you "place creative technologists in newsrooms to work on open-source tools and support reporting that strengthens the web and changes people’s lives". You pour money into making things like "Mozilla Webmaker" ( https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/05/22/introducing-mozilla... ). Sure you've got some nerds in the basement doing whatever it is they do, something like "Servo" or whatever, but who cares? You're working on a way to cut them loose anyway, and now when you're at your next $5000/plate fundraiser you can talk about all the amazing advocacy you're doing with the rest of your friends.
Of course the problem is that Google has basically spent it's time pouring money into Chrome and unfairly leveraging it's search monopoly to advertise Chrome and intentionally breaking it's sites for other browsers (attention people looking to argue this point: Stop. Google has no more credibility in this area, and anyone who is still in denial is a useful idiot at this point), and so now when Google brings forward a proposal to add DRM to the Web Specifications all of your advocacy amounts to stale fart in the face of a 70%+ browser share. Whoops! But then again, those are "real-world" results, and you're not interested in that.
What would it even mean to "unfuck the internet"? What sort of metric, goals, and approaches would Mozilla use here? The problem that Mozilla still still does not get is that they have exactly one piece of leverage: Firefox market share. Every penny then spend on useless advocacy run by tech adjacent "hangers on" and not on making Firefox the best available browser is a penny wasted. They've even managed to turn away people who want to support them by making sure there is no clear way to donate to actually worthwhile browser development without having those donations filtered through the foundation where are bunch of useless apparatchiks will get first dibs on that cash, leaving probably nothing to reach through to the people making things.
Until the useless upper management is cleared out and replaced with people who understand that Mozilla has exactly jack shit if they don't have Firefox, it will continue to wind down until we are left with Google as the monopoly owner of the most important platform for information interchange the world has ever known. Yeah that seems like a grim future, but it's the one we're headed for, and Mozilla needs to take a long hard look in the mirror about it's own role in making that future come to pass.