SO LONG, MOZILLA

Its been a minute or two since I've gone off on a proper rant, and while I'm not going to suggest this is a true return to form, I will be somewhat verbose, somewhat rambling, and somewhat negative, all of which are well-established hallmarks of my thought processes. There's no surprise here.

My history with Firefox goes back all the way to when it was still called Phoenix. It was interesting, but mostly sucked, because few sites actually worked with it. Eventually this morphed into Mozilla, and with the 1.0 release of the browser, it showed that it actually had some chops, and was ready for the big time. It still had quite a way to go before I would recommend that anyone actually use it, but the writing was on the wall -- just a matter of time.

Eventually this begat the Mozilla 2.0 releases, which were increasingly stable.... which shortly thereafter begat.... Firefox. It was a risky move to rebrand and relaunch, but it garnered plenty of attention, and it was now a first-class browser with excellent support and flexibility. Unlike Mozilla, which proved to be substantially broken across a wide range or corporate sites (banking, intranet sites, etc) Firefox came out of the gate widely supported, and aiming to pass the acid 2 test (which I think it launched with, but my memory is fuzzy). A few years later it finally aced the acid 3 test.

At this point, things were quite pleasant. I had no trouble suggesting people migrate to Firefox, and was confident that it would serve their needs for the forseeable future, whether they be tech-heads or normies. And all of this piddled along for quite a while, until two very, very unfortunate occurrences happened within a short span of time: Mozilla introduced the Firefox v3.x releases, and Google took a steaming shit all over the web by introducing their own browser, Chrome.

Somewhere between the 2.x and 3.x versions of Firefox, Mozilla had gone down a wrong path or two, and royally screwed up their golden goose. Just when Firefox had managed to capture an impressive ~31% of the worldwide browser market, they stumbled into a patch of releases so utterly foul that it practically halted their progress overnight. The 3.x releases were slow, buggy, and most importantly, for the purposes of explaining just how bad this was, crash-prone. Even a vanilla copy was crashing on my computer(s) multiple times a day, and these were not pretty crashes, either.

At the same (relative) time, Google threw out their WIP Browser for public preview, and it was incomplete, buggy, but appeared to be very fast. Truth be told, much of it was clever behind the scenes optimizations to make things feel faster than they were, but it was enough -- people like software that feels quick and responsive, and Firefox at 3.x was anything but. People immediately switched over to Chrome, and never looked back. This lit a fire under Mozilla's arse, and they eventually put out the 4.x versions, which were a quantum leap over what previous versions offered, and put it beyond parity with Chrome. Not only that, but their renewed performance push also begat frequently updated metric sites such as arewefastyet.com, which provided a bevy of data about where improvements were needed, where they were headed, and where they had come from.

In short, Firefox was back with a vengeance, but the damage had been done. Everyone had already switched to Chrome, and wasn't keen to switch back. Indeed, out of my cohort, I was the only one who remained with Firefox, despite the 4.x releases being absolutely phenomenal compared to all other browsers on the market. 

And the days droned on, and Mozilla continued to flounder. They attempted to sway people back with ill-conceived marketing campaigns, pointless rebranding, and social media blitzes. But no one cared. I didn't care either, because making a big fuss about your branding was pointless when no one cared about what your brand was producing. Similarly, brands are for fuckwits. We need solid products, not brands to prop up failure and mediocrity.

And speaking of mediocrity, along the many, many, painful decisions that brought us to this moment, Mozilla continued to pile on the poor decisions with a plethora of foot-gun moments. Who could forget the countless UI tweaks that no one asked for, or the integration of Pocket, which no one asked for, or the new 'home page' with ads, which no one asked for, or the full-page ad for a certain Disney flop that absolutely no one on the planet wanted or asked for, or... or... or... you get the idea. Oh, before I forget, there was also a Firefox mobile OS, that....... actually, a few people were interested in. I guess. It was still a dumb idea (given the time) that was destined to accrue zero traction.

Finally, we arrive at the point where, as there was no longer any veneer left on the Mozilla "brand", and probably a grim acceptance that they were forever consigned to the ~2% browser market share, they finally dropped all pretense of making the web a better place, and embraced the advertising business. Their recent acquisition of Anonym, and inclusion of on-by-default telemetry and advertising data, is, to put it bluntly, a bridge too far.

It has been a while since I've told an entire organization to go fuck itself, because quite frankly it's a little puerile, and almost certainly pointless, but damn it does feel nice once in a while, does it not?

So get bent, you fucking ass clowns.