this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
39 points (85.5% liked)

Hacker News

1770 readers
1 users here now

This community serves to share top posts on Hacker News with the wider fediverse.

Rules0. Keep it legal

  1. Keep it civil and SFW
  2. Keep it safe for members of marginalised groups

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
39
Mozilla's midlife crisis: from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor (www.theregister.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
5 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] mvirts 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmmmmmm idk, Firefox is way better than it was a few years ago. I'm not super knowledgeable about this, but my impression is that Mozilla has kind of always been on the fringe of tech companies. Just because they funded the creators of rust doesn't make them a major player. Netscape was a completely different thing, even if the codebase got Mozilla started.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Mozilla was pretty central to the web in the early 2000s, with the release of Firefox 1.0 which was the browser that displaced IE6 in the minds of developers and the browser with an NYT ad paid for by donations. It was the first truly mainstream browser with good HTML4/CSS support, tabs, add-ons, and themes and the first browser overall that had developer tools (with the Firebug add-on). Mozilla also pioneered the idea that you could refinance browser development by selling the top spot in your search box (and unfortunately, they never had another such profitable idea; also, they kinda sold all of us to Google).

They've lost a lot of influence on web standards and web development since, and with that they lost cachet with users. A big part of that was that Google stopped promoting Firefox when they released Chrome in 2008.