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.
That's a great question, honestly, and I like your framing of trust.
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.
That makes much more sense. I wonder what the non-HN public thinks - most of those products, like Firefox OS, were essentially unknown outside HN-like populations. Pocket was better known.
But yes, that is part of trust and I'd like to see them address it.
Firefox is still heavily used by Linux OSes as the default browser. But I think that's mostly momentum at this point. If more people knew about Mozilla's organizational challenges, then I think Firefox would get ditched.
Do they like the browser, or do they like the fact that it's not owned by Google?
When I use Firefox, either it's because I don't have a choice (my distro doesn't ship Chromium in a way I like, i.e. not Flatpak) or because I make an effort to "support" Firefox. But once in a while, I need to use Chrom(ium) because the website doesn't work on Firefox. Not that it is necessarily Firefox' fault, but the fact remains that if Chrome was an independent non-profit, I would most likely use Chrome and not Firefox.
I think a tangential interesting question is: how many monthly active users does Firefox have, that choose to use Firefox? Not people who "click the internet icon", etc.
Like you, I suspect the brand recognition and loyalty is much, much lower than many people in this thread believe it to be. Not talking about among the highly-technical HN audience; just at large.
That's a fair question. It's of course my opinion, not hard fact, but here goes:
- 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 have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox
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?
> They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox.
Says who? I have never seen figures that show this. It also doesn't excuse the gigantic amounts of money wasted on irrelevant things, or executive salaries.
> And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...
That's pretty charitable. LE was a wider industry initiative, and while Rust was incubated in Mozilla AFAIK, they also let it slip through their fingers.
> Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.
How on earth are you defending her behavior? It was utterly shameless and indefensible. Do you work for Mozilla?
> Mozilla needed and needs to find other products
No, it doesn't. It needs to bank its giant wad of cash and learn to live off the interest plus whatever it can get in donations. Mozilla does not need to be a for-profit company, it needs to be a non-profit making a browser. That was always supposed to be the mission, from day one.
> Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome
They did when IE was shoved down people's throats, and Firefox was the better browser. They did when Chrome came around and started taking over. Most people even now get pushed to Edge or Safari, yet still end up using Chrome. People switching browsers is a thing.
Any other belief or possibility is "utterly shameless and indefensible", and therefore of suspect motivation. Doubt is difficult, but certainty is ridiculous (said someone).
A privacy play would be more successful from Mozilla if I were paying them for it. The incentives would be aligned. I cannot pay google for privacy, because they are incentivized against that.
Paying a company for something doesn't mean that the company isn't going to also sell every scrap of your data they can get their hands on. If the company is unethical you are always going to be the product. Mozilla is either going to be an ethical company or it isn't and how much money you give them won't make any difference. Mozilla has not always been an ethical company, but I don't think it's too late for them to turn that around, even if it will take time for trust to be rebuilt. I still want them to be the hero we need them to be.
Trust is relative and it is subjective meaning that I trust Mozilla more than I trust google but I also trust them in general, enough at least that they support most of my internet browsing. Unless you mean something else ?
