So the other day I was testing a new browser called waterfox. What stuck me as odd was how a small company seemed to have made Firefox so much more usable everyone. I normally use librewolf for privacy and security reasons but waterfox actually temped me to switch. (I ended up not switching for privacy and security reasons)
After I used waterfox for a bit I started thinking more and more about Mozilla the company. What are they even doing these days? It seems like they have stopped with the innovation. They could of setup a competitor to google with a custom nextcloud but they haven't made any competitive products other than a VPN.
I also saw a Nord VPN commercial and it was full of lies are usual (seriously, malware protection?). However a lot of there arguments could apply to Firefox. Why doesn't Mozilla do any sort of advertising? Admittedly Firefox isn't great in the UI department for the average user so it may be worthless
Honestly, much of the problem is us, not them. At some point they did Firefox Send, but people misused it for sending malware and stuff, resulting in Mozilla having to shelve the project for legal reasons, for example. (Now, if it was me, I'd just have said "just base Send's operations on Sealand or someplace without DMCA", but that's a call they did not make). They now created a VPN but the problem is, AFAIK, it's not their own product it's just Mullvad with extra steps, so people just use that instead. And when they do stuff for web freedom / digital sovereignty awareness, such as campaigns against DRM or a study on the car IoT market, people (aka: we) complain that they are "doing useless stuff". Just about the newest good thing they've done is Relay, and I'm pretty sure there's hefty complaining about that.
And then there's the idiots who moan than "peOpLe wHO wANt prIVacY uSE BraVE", so there's that too.
With our attitude like that, there's no way for them to win.
Somebody else necroed this thread. So I apologizing for responding to your comments so late. But here we are
I think the Mozilla foundation has alienated a lot of people by making it impossible to directly support the web browser. People who want to support the web browser, have no mechanism to do so through Mozilla. They can support the foundation and its initiatives.... So removing that small degree of direct support, that people can get behind for the thing they love, makes the rest of the organizations actions all net negatives. The zero some game with the donations, each one of these things is removing potential attention from the browser. Now I know that's not entirely true, but we're talking about people's perspectives. If they only care about the browser there's no way to support it, and the Zilla foundation is using its massive wealth on a bunch of things not related to the browser, or making the browser better, etc etc people are fairly saying hey they've lost their focus. They're doing lots of things that aren't related to the thing I care about.
If we recreated the Mozilla foundation today, without the browser. Spin it off in a totally separate organization not related to Mozilla. I don't think a lot of people would care what they do, one way or the other. They wouldn't get hate. They probably get a fair few donations for their social causes. But it wouldn't have conflated digital freedom of the browser with a specific agenda, and a specific implementation