I haven't said this bc it seemed obvious but since I was snarky yesterday: My assumption is that Mozilla is real into AI (and real not into most other things) right now is bc the potential remedies in the Google monopoly suit are an extremely real exis...
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@kevinriggle I mean, the Moz funding system has been such a weird fragile thing for so long.
It's wild to me how much life can flourish in what is essential a brief lil loophole.
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Alex Russellreplied to Luis Villa last edited by [email protected]
@luis_in_brief @kissane FFOS had the right strategic insight (that a world where mobile is native-dominated means the eventual end of the web), but was saddled with an lack of carrier/opco/hardware dynamics clue. That is, it tried to make the fight a hardware purchase fight, rather than winning incremental JTBD for the web on devices folks already owned.
Engine choice would have been necessary to really contest that, and Mozilla leadership never connected the dots.
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@luis_in_brief @kissane FFOS had the right strategic insight (that a world where mobile is native-dominated means the eventual end of the web), but was saddled with an lack of carrier/opco/hardware dynamics. That is, it tried to make the fight a hardware purchase fight, rather than winning incremental JTBD for the web on devices folks already owned.
Engine choice would have been necessary to really contest that, and Mozilla leadership never connected the dots.
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@tedmielczarek et. al. ported gecko to iOS at least twice, but leadership never made it a press/PR/regulatory/legislative issue, despite the existential nature of the threat.
When FFOS collapsed, folks who appreciated the problem enough to try left, and the rump went into a desktop-centric, Apple-enabling crouch.
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@luis_in_brief @kissane It's a black mark that @owa is doing much, much more for the web on 3/4ths of the world's client computers than Mozilla has this decade.
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@luis_in_brief @kissane @owa Seriously, go look at the Mozilla Policy blog and see how much energy has been expended on, e.g., net neutrality vs. real browser choice.
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@luis_in_brief @kissane @owa Mozilla hasn't even had a proper go at the scourge of IABs which are suppressing earned market share!
The market share doom loop is accelerated when users you "win" don't actually get the benefits of your product. This is a place where the villains (Google, FB, Apple) are easy to describe in those terms. And yet.
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@luis_in_brief @kissane @owa This kind of malign neglect makes sense if your founding principles treat the web as just another application that routes packets across the internet, which is what you *actually* care about.
But if the web were viewed as a singular human asset...well...you might be willing to fight for it.
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@slightlyoff @luis_in_brief @kissane FxOS was saddled commercially by the lack of support for a very short list of apps. Just the lack of a specific messaging app was a death sentence in many markets.
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@slightlyoff @kissane @luis_in_brief I suspect the Internet-not-Web phrasing was to include Thunderbird.
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@dbaron @kissane @luis_in_brief Also my assumption (see also: the rest of the seamonkey suite). The lesson for me is that missions have consequences.
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@fabrice @luis_in_brief @kissane Of course! And that's why the broader web ecosystem was always necessary. Mozilla didn't collaborate on the "Web APIs" it pushed in that era (mirroring the hubris of Chrome Apps, etc.). You open space for a whole OS when the ecosystem is mostly on-side, not the other way around...at least not without a 3 or 4-miracle event...and by the time of FFOS, MADA had closed the window (anti-competitively) and carriers didn't need FFOS in the same way.
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@slightlyoff @kissane @luis_in_brief But do you think you can *predict* the consequences well enough to make it worth sitting through *that many* meetings about defining the mission?
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@fabrice @luis_in_brief @kissane The 3+ miracle moment of Android is hugely underappreciated. A second smartphone entrant happened because a rich software house (Google) already had an OS and US carriers were *terrified* of the AT&T exclusive (and so would market any credible alternative, bend data deal terms, and eat returns). Motorola saw it as existential.
All those pressures were deflated by FFOS's founding, reducing support and raising difficulty level.
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@fabrice @luis_in_brief @kissane Without that sort of crucible, you need a strategy to get the mobile web to users that doesn't require lining up billions in marketing and supply chains. Something like what FF pulled off desktop. Yes, there was Fennec, but Mozilla never pushed hard on the policy issues holding it back, either on Android or iOS. It has been gutting to watch.
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@dbaron @kissane @luis_in_brief Would that be cheaper or more expensive than watching what I care about get eaten by institutional neglect?
Obviously, the people on the bus had as much (more?) influence than the words on the page, but over time those things feed back on each other.