Lunduke and JWZ seem to both have a bone to pick with Mozilla for various reasons, and some of their criticism is apt and fair, and some of it feels extremely personal. These articles tend to pop up from both of them every time that we reach a year end or donation campaign from Mozilla.

While sometimes I agree with them (and in particular I agree that Mozilla has gotten way too comfortable with advertising and with partnering with extremely questionable and/or harmful people and technologies), an issue with the criticism I keep coming back to is that Mozilla is in a position where it often gets blamed simultaneously for relying too much on Google for revenue and also for every single revenue stream it comes up with that isn't Google being somehow a distraction from Firefox.

I'm not actually a fan of Mozilla's current CEO or many of Mozilla's recent decisions, I do think on some levels Mozilla is floundering around. And you're never going to get an argument from me that CEOs shouldn't be paid less across the board. But it is worth adding some context to Lunduke's criticism in particular that the last few years have also seen some of the strongest financial developments for Mozilla in a while and I'm not completely sure what critics like Lunduke want if they're going to simultaneously call Mozilla out for being in the pocket of Google and call Mozilla out for looking to diversify revenue and push development towards what is by far one of the most popular buzzwords for financial investment and product investment/monetization in the entire tech industry at the moment. If Lunduke wants independence from Google, then short of antitrust this is how you get it: you build things that are actually monetizable. By that metric, even people who are critical of the CEO like me need to be willing to admit that she seems to on some points be doing an actually fairly decent job. Under her, Mozilla has finally started taking meaningful steps to diversify funding away from Google's influence.

I don't want to act like the frustration isn't legitimate. I do feel frustration when I watch Mozilla rewrite their Android tech stack for the Nth time. That effort could be better spent elsewhere.

But I'm also very firmly of the belief that you could replace Mozilla's CEO with anybody and the markestshare decline would look the same. This is not a problem of leadership. This is a problem of antritrust and Mozilla flat-out is not big enough to out-compete an anticompetitive market. I'm all for Mozilla getting better, but sometimes I see criticism here that if they just straightened their act up and made a fantastically better browser it would change everything. It wouldn't.

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As a thought experiment:

In June of 2024, Mozilla Firefox will be the only mainstream browser with fully effective uBO support. Manifest V3 will be out so it will be gone from Chrome. Safari already has terrible adblocking extension support. Brave is not deprecating those APIs, but Brave also (as far as I know) doesn't have an extension store and relies on Chrome's so if those extensions get dropped from development on Chrome they will also not be available for Brave.

Come June, do we think that Firefox having indisputably the best adblocking of any other browser will move the needle on its market share?

I don't. I don't think consumers will care. I can't count the number of times that I have told people about features in Firefox that are objectively better than Chrome's implementations (multi-account containers, profiles, android extension support, fully offline translations, the TOR uplift project, actually encrypted cross-device sync, etc, etc...) and they didn't even know those features exist. Yes, some of that is that Mozilla is genuinely terrible at marketing. But a much bigger part of that is that the browser market doesn't really work that way anymore; default positioning and anticompetitive behavior are more effective steering tools than any browser feature set.

I agree that it comes down to antitrust. But the only thing I can think of that Mozilla can do about that is to

A) continue to diversify their revenue from Google (because Firefox itself is not monetizable) and to

B) start campaigning for intervention (which they are doing right now in this article).

Because even if Mozilla was able to build an indisputably better browser than Chrome, it wouldn't matter. You've said it yourself, alternatives were much better than IE6 and it still didn't matter. Does anyone think it's even physically possible for a company of Mozilla's size to outpace Chrome even more than Chrome and Firefox outpaced IE6? Plenty of other companies (including Microsoft) have been in Mozilla's position and have tried to do what Mozilla is doing, and their conclusion was that they couldn't compete with Chrome; they couldn't develop a separate browser engine from Chromium and keep pace. Microsoft decided that what Mozilla is doing right now was too difficult to attempt.