Mozilla Needs to Fall Apart to Make Space for Others

I've been slogging through social networks with regards to the current situation with Mozilla and their ramping up of the commercialization of their flagship product, Firefox, as well as the services around it. I started this off with a small thread that's my cynical take that Mozilla is burning the remainder of its goodwill and transitioning into a quasi-Internet/AI/ad services company that feeds on the current need for "a secure option". This is similar to DuckDuckGo's attempt to make a slimmed down Web browser with their services built around it, more akin to Apple's Safari than Google's Chrome; as the former has less of a public reputation for being a vehicle for ad delivery acceleration.

Before diving into this, I suggest that you catch up on the situation by reading thoughts from Mark Mayo. They worked on the products around Firefox for quite some time and visited the topic of Firefox's eventual death before.

There's parts of this that I find a bit thin because it also marks any other non-commercial attempts as potentially doomed for failure:

Mozilla Corporation, as it slowly learns to be a real company, not a movement, is a less and less obvious counter bet to the culture and behaviours of the market winners. Which feels like a betrayal of sorts to us old farts who grew up with both the early web itself, and Mozilla’s rescue of it from the clutches of evil. Back then both had a tangible rebel alliance “fuck you I’ll do what I want to” vibe. They don't now. The reality is it’s just an inevitable progression of an org and a web so well funded to pursue an ancient and incredibly broad mission for so long. Mozilla behaviour and interests sort of mirrors the web broadly, I guess I'd conclude.

This implies that the organization's initial goals were more cosmetic than baked into the ethos of the company/organization. Perhaps, since it's a non-for-profit/corporation hybrid, like the OpenAI/Microsoft tango, this was the end goal of the off-shoot of the Netscape Navigator; to play to another side, only to eventually wither. This feels like an out — a concession to the "market forces".

Folks have floated the idea of a web browser being developed in part with funding or support of a government, to make it into a public good. This is a easy path (to market, execution would be bonkers, especially under this U.S. administration) to pair with groups like ACLU and the EFF to expand user privacy and choice by making a "public" implementation. After all, the Web is built using public research and funding. Shoot, Google uses municipal water to run its data farms; it should ship a Google-free version of Chrome to those residents! In the United States, such a proposal would have to come from a federal mandate, perhaps from NIST or the like; but Google and Apple would fight against this out of a potential fear of requiring the engine be available as an option as opposed to theirs as the default on devices. This is said as well by Mark:

There’s zero incentive for Google to take a patch from Mozilla or Microsoft or an IC that advances the web for users but hurts their bottom line. You need momentum and heft in market to change that kind of behaviour by driving their user bases to demand it from them. Right now, and for quite some time I’d wager, Google alone decides what is de facto on the web by what they ship in Chrome, regardless of what plays out in open source code repos.

This also points out the fallacies of commercial open source — you can paint it any color you like, so long as it's black (or red, green, yellow and blue). If the State won't get involved (and it won't, domestic trade wars are of no concern until it threatens state operations), then we will need to accept that the IETF and W3C will be yet another place to ask Google for permission on what to add to the Web. We collectively failed users when we asked everyone to cargo cult to Google's Chrome without deeper considerations around what would it mean and focused on "ease of use". The EU has more pushback strength to provide an wedge but it has its own work to do.

There's been mentions of whatever comes next needing to be hosted outside of the United States — that's definitely an option. I'm not concerned with the overlap of geopolitics in technology: if it's a notion of civic control, entities like the UN and the weaker EU coalition have shown that it will bend to the United States if they have no alternative.

What Happens Now? I can tell you right now: unless someone manages to build a low-cost commercial option for public institutions like libraries, universities, or public schools; nothing will seriously change. But by pushing it in places where users tend to have the least amount of sovereignty, we can demonstrate both its viability and durability. "It" here can be a Web browser. It could also be a constrained operating system designed for browsing the Web and running whatever necessary applications that these systems would need. Since the Electron-ification of applications is cemented in our development culture, there's less of a worry about compilation targets and more of a concern about what version of Chromium can one ship with their application to a host machine. Projects like Tauri show how one can build a shell over a system provided Web browser to deliver an experience: Spotify on desktop is a more resilient and long-lasting example.

I say "Good luck" to anyone pursuing this. Money is part of the problem. You need legitimate political power to wedge out these Rockefeller-level behemoths in the space. You'll also have to fight people concerned about job security because "dethroning" Chrome means that their work at Google will be at risk. This is a collective effort that should have started in 2010.

But here we are. Fuck the executives at Mozilla for allowing this to happen and wasting good money on vanity projects.