by glenstein | 2025-11-15 02:28:37+00:00
I'm only going to pick out a handful of these, because otherwise the conversation would be long, but the through line in all of these is that they're not accountable to baseline factual accuracy (and yes, that matters), and they're attempting to rehabilitate malformed criticisms without taking responsibility for the criticisms in the form they've been expressed, and even the attempts at rehabilitation are flawed.

>Spending more to achieve less is an indictment of efficiency, not a defense of strategy.

I know you wanted to keep this conversation outside the realm of facts, but that's hard to do when active internet users in 2009 were around 1.77 billion and are now at 5.5 billion, spending in the industry as a whole has exploded, browser complexity has grown to the point that they are effectively mini operating systems, the complexity of the ecosystem of web apis and standards and complexity of security has expanded by orders of magnitude.

Moreover, treating the change in market share like a failure is nonsense in a world where distribution is dominated by OS bundling and defaults. Firefox could double its dev budget and still lose share if Microsoft, Apple, and Google keep leaning on their platform power.

So there are so many levels on which to reject the premise of "spending more to achieve less", which I think it goes to show that measuring these criticisms against the factual record is actually extremely important.

And again, I would reiterate that you're not taking responsibility for voluminous criticisms that are more real than you seem to recognize, which quite literally do suggest that the side bets siphoned away real resources n from software development. You yourself are making a form of that argument, but characterizing it as "distraction", which conveniently can't be measured in development funds or lines of code, but hinges on subjectively judged abstractions (aka vibes) like mind share and "focus".

>This is a red herring. The issue isn't the initial loss to Chrome's rise; it's the ongoing failure to regain ground.

Unless you think that the dynamics driving Chrome's initial rise in market share stopped being leveraged, the significance of its platform dominance in explaining its market share is every bit true now as it was then, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. If anything it's only intensified. And again, this is not taking responsibility for the actual criticisms in the forms they have been expressed, which tend to make no such distinction, mention market share collapse explicitly, and omit the rise of Chrome from the story entirely.

>This is a straw man.

I promise you it's not, and if I wanted to be uncharitable I could have emphasized some truly off the charts claims people have made with every ounce of confidence and self-assurance that they spoke on behalf of the Mozilla user base, e.g. conspiratorial suggestions that the nonprofit/corporate subsidiary organization is intended to trick people, that they're manipulating their nonprofit reporting figures, completely sincere but inaccurate attempts to claim that the VPN and Pocket were substantial money sinks, conspiratorial insinuations of quid pro quo cooperation with Google's monopoly, or most amazingly, a categorical claim that Quantum was abandoned rather than finished.

Some of the criticisms, quite forcefully made here on HN, have been that Mozilla ignores feature requests, either generally, or specific ones, like tab customizations, or, in this thread, WebUSB. Everyone dies on a slightly different hill. But they all tie the issue of market share to the issue of "focus" on the browser however quantified. And if you don't think it's a matter of feature development, the logic is equally flawed if you substitute a new preferred term like "core browser". Just like there's no magic feature that restores the market share overnight, there's no such thing as a sufficient threshold of focus on the core browser that achieves that restoration of market share.

>You call the original post a "hallucination," but then you immediately list the exact pattern of failed, distracting projects that formed the basis of the criticism

I think that misreads the balance of emphasis in my comment. I would say my comment was a dispute of the vast majority of ventured criticisms, combined with an acknowledgment of proportionately a small few. There are needles of legitimate criticism buried a haystack of spurious nonsense. I would also suggest it's a bit of a misread in a more important sense, in that I'm attempting to demonstrate a degree of case-by-case reasonableness that contrasts with the one-dimensional nature of criticisms. Both in this thread and in my general experience and defenses of Firefox are even handed and willing to acknowledge criticisms, and that spirit of even-handedness is not reciprocated in criticisms that ever recognize their rhetorical excess. In fact I would argue in this conversation it's being abused in an attempt to leverage it into a confession of a contradiction.

That's not everything, but I think it serves as a representative encapsulation. If you want, pick out whichever point you believe is your strongest unanswered objection, and I'll hear you out, though we might be far enough into this comment tree that HN won't give me the option to reply.