Their investment into AI yielded some cool things like on-device language translation that I use a lot in Firefox.
Rust is something that grew out of their investments into programming languages/tooling/etc.
Their investment into documentation and technical writing brought us MDN, which is a great resource for web development.
Mozilla's development of password managers, that they eventually walked back on rolling out as an independent product, yielded a better password manager built into Firefox, as well as Firefox Verify.
It's also important to make a distinction between the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit, and Mozilla the corporation. The non-profit is responsible for many of the non-browser investments.
I have to say that I'm really loving Mozilla/Mozilla Research these days. Their heart is in the right place, and their research projects like Asm.js, Persona, Rust, and Firefox OS are very cool. They are what Google was in 2005.
I love contributing to Mozilla. I contributed to a bunch of projects in the past years, including Chromium (a very friendly bunch BTW), but Mozilla makes me feel like I'm a real part of this, not just some guy sending a patch.
- Literally everything they do is in the open, volunteers can participate a lot if they want to, even start new projects. (~50% of their employees remote, I guess that helps a lot here.)
- They're mentoring people new to a project really well - I love this even though I prefer to just dive into the code myself.
- They call you a "Mozillian", send you foundation/company/product updates, invite you to Mozilla Summit (I was there this year, and it was amazing) etc.
- Mozilla is not profit oriented, they just care about their mission: Moving the web forward and keeping it open. Makes me feel like part of a good cause, as opposed to unpaid labour.
All in all, they really got this figured out. I can recommend them to anyone who wants to contribute to something big/important.
What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO.
Mozilla's intentions and fears seem to be very reasonable, driving what they do from AV1 to fighting DRM, though they have hit dead ends with Firefox OS (now Kai OS) and other side projects, the organization is still doing work that is in the best interest of the common person, unlike what the tech giants have been doing.
Mozilla is constantly working for the open web. Not only do they design products, but they invest in work groups and conference for that.
Hell they even produced and gave away the best documentation on the front end currently existing (MDN).
They finance other open sources projects, try to innovate all the time (they fail often, but trying new things always leads to that), pay dev to do so.
Mozilla is hardly unique there. Webkit and Chromium are also open source and Google is pro-Web as well.
The only real advantage Mozilla had was the technical advantage of having one of the few popular and mature browser engines available of which only their programmers knew well enough to work on. Since Webkit though, that advantage has disappeared.
You could say their image as a non-profit out to do good is a advantage. Maybe that is something they should work on.
Mozilla Research is awesome. They punch way way way above their weight.
Google is chock full of programming language people, but Mozilla's work on Rust and Javascript (ES6, asm.js, sweet.js) is producing far better languages than Google has done with Go and Dart in my humble opinion.
I love the resiliency of Mozilla. It seems like most news about it and Firefox are are doom and gloom, especially when we're comparing Firefox to Chrome.
So what does Mozilla do? Make their great documentation even better, and enrich the development community.
These choices by the Mozilla foundation might be unrelated. However, if things go south, I hope the community remembers who is consistently advocating for it.
Exactly. Mozilla has been working on a lot of stuff that really matters in a long game and for the internet in general. A lot of the OS foundation level features coming to the browser aren't coming from Chrome/Google, but from Mozilla/Firefox and Samsung/Tizen. Check out all the WebAPIs. How many of them are being pioneered by Google? How many by Mozilla?
My personal opinion is that both are doing a lot to innovate and a lot for the web, but that they are complementing each other. Google is pushing forward the front-end and how the browser works with current content. Firefox is working to get browsers to the point where they can do many of the same things that operating systems can do today. A lot of that work is not as straight forward as reimplementing what operating systems do, since they often require entirely new trust paradigms because sensitive things are being exposed to the open Internet. It's not a trivial task.
Lastly, Rust and Servo matter a lot. You will only be able to get so far with WebKit/WebKit2/Blink/Gecko/Trident, etc. before you start hitting the limit of the architecture of each is capable of. Rust and Servo are being architected from the ground up with the future of computing architecture in mind. This means that they will be behind now, but will jump ahead once Servo is production ready.
Not the person you're responding to, but my thoughts - Mozilla could be serving a role similar to academia in that doing work that's not profit based allows one to explore more widely. Those results can be shared with the community. Rust is an example and I imagine there are others.
I went to the Mozilla Festival in London this year and was amazed at just how much does Mozilla does. They're very far from just a browser manufacturer.
I don't share their views, but I'm thrilled that their project exists and very happy with Mozilla donating to help improve their email client security, since it's a major player in the pro-privacy ecosystem. If I had to agree with the philosophical beliefs of everyone I gave money to, I'd starve.
I feel that Mozilla is best seen as a sort of research group. Many of the technologies they pioneered or pushed are part of web standards and we're all better off for it.
For example FirefoxOS could be considered a failure but I think many things they researched and developed are now part of web standards, especially those concerning offline webapps.
This is great! I'm glad to have a way to directly support MDN for the work that they do. MDN is by far the most valuable part of the work Mozilla puts out.
Their investment into AI yielded some cool things like on-device language translation that I use a lot in Firefox.
Rust is something that grew out of their investments into programming languages/tooling/etc.
Their investment into documentation and technical writing brought us MDN, which is a great resource for web development.
Mozilla's development of password managers, that they eventually walked back on rolling out as an independent product, yielded a better password manager built into Firefox, as well as Firefox Verify.
It's also important to make a distinction between the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit, and Mozilla the corporation. The non-profit is responsible for many of the non-browser investments.
reply