Browser engineers are expensive. And we need a lot of those. And before leaving their current well paying job, they need the insurance that a potential people-funded contract won't die off after 2 years.
I actually think that, a few of us would be totally willing to build a new strong, fast and privacy centric browser.
Some absolutely incredible ideas have been discussed about a potential new engine (Servo based) that could be privacy-first / lightweight / fast / bloat-free. This would require rethinking the web in a retro-compatible way, and here again I've heard of some very smart ideas.
… but who's gonna lead that? And where will the money come from?
Firefox 4 was supposed to be our response to Google Chrome. We were feature driven. "Firefox 4 will be released with features A, B and C". And it took us a stupid amount of time to get there. Firefox 4 was supposed to be great. But no devtools, no multiprocess … compared to Chrome it was bad.
So much work and stress went into this release, it took us a loooong time, people were exhausted, and the result was mediocre. Electrolysis was hard. Hardware acceleration challenging. And all these new HTML5 features… gosh.
But we had to get much much better, because the Google's engineer were killing it. The race was hard. And we also needed a Firefox-on-mobile plan. With less engineers, and a much smaller budget.
Important people left after Firefox 4. John Lilly left. And Mozilla hired product managers and such. More marketing etc etc. Things changed. We moved to a new version of Firefox every 6 weeks (that was a good move though).
We basically went from the "savior of the internet" to "google chrome followers".
I've been working at Mozilla since its inception. And eventually left the company 2 years ago.
And I'm so mad.
Mozilla is not the Mozilla that was created almost 20 years ago. It's not the same people there. After the Firefox 4 nightmare, they started hiring product managers from big corp. We started seeing some ex-twitter, ex-microsoft, ex-amazon joining the company. People with more professional ambitions. We didn't know how to react to Google Chrome and the smartphone revolution. We all trusted the upper management, but upper management was slowly becoming non-mozillians.
And an absurd mechanic started: original engineer were busy writing difficult code. upper-management was morphing into some BS silicon valley gang. New young engineers were hired, and they thought the core of Mozilla values lied in these upper-management people. And slowly the original engineers started leaving, leaving behind this BS people with these young engineers.
Marketing became "how to show we're good people". LGBT, women right, etc etc. Who gives a shit about Mozilla standing for these values? It's all marketing. The real only value, the manifesto, burnt a long time ago.
Don't get me wrong, LGBT and such are important, but that's not the job of Mozilla.
The last blow: getting rid of Brendan. Maybe he didn't have the same values employees had about LGBT, but fuck this. People in the silicon valley *love* being offended. And that thing was just too good of a fight for them. Brendan was the last bastion standing.
I'm so so so mad.
Mitchell trusted the wrong people. We were seeing all these ambitious silicon-valley-puppets taking the position of PM, director, etc etc…
Got damn, all we wanted is to make Gecko amazing, light, in a lightweight simple browser. But all these stupid features that were landing on our head…
Hard.