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The annual State of Mozilla report
Mitchell Baker has announced
the availability of the annual State of Mozilla report and associated 2010
financial statements. "As the Internet experience is changing,
Mozilla, too, is changing. The products and tools that we use to advance
our mission are expanding and evolving. A browser is necessary but not
sufficient. Equally important is expanding the number of people who
understand our values and identify as Mozillians. Mozilla has both the
challenge and the opportunity to expand our reach dramatically. We have
the ability to bring our values to life in new ways. Embracing these
opportunities means embracing change, embracing hope and embracing
determination."
(Log in to post comments)
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 0:17 UTC (Tue) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link] Equally important is expanding the number of people who understand our values and identify as Mozillians. Sure, and "I'm a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper, we're a Pepper; wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?" WTF is a "Mozillian"? I prefer Brazilians... female, if you please. Hey, it's only a browser!
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 1:49 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
The phrase is indeed surreal, but I think he's trying to associate the value of Mozilla with that of the open internet.
I'm not really sure I believe the premise, myself, though the lack of that codebase would have left us with a less open internet, particularly in the past.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 2:56 UTC (Tue) by samth (subscriber, #1290) [Link]
Mitchell Baker, as you see if you click the link, is a woman.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 16:59 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
Buh, and I doublechecked the name when typing that pronoun. Sigh.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 9:48 UTC (Tue) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
I think Mozilla is trying to get some sort of community identity around their ideas of freedom and openness on the web, without identifying themselves as being part of the existing Free Software movement, or really sounding like a movement at all because some people find politics scary. Essentially they seem to be trying to rally people to support a cause without them noticing that there even is a cause.
It's reminiscent of the whole 'Open Source' idea, and suffers from the same problem - that if you pitch your way as better simply because the results are better, then you easily lose users when someone else makes a better (proprietary) mousetrap. The only sustainable way to get people to support freedom and openness is to convince them why they're important and valuable things.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 13:40 UTC (Tue) by imgx64 (guest, #78590) [Link]
I don't want to insult Stallman on here, but do you know what an average user would think of him when he first reads about him?
Well, let's just I prefer to have a different figure for a movement I'm promoting.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 13, 2011 1:24 UTC (Thu) by lindahl (subscriber, #15266) [Link]
Even if you'd like a different spokesperson for the movement you're promoting, you have to admit that "Open Source" did not end up helping the general public understand anything better. Check out the recent Quora question: "If Mac OS X is based on Unix, why isn't Apple required to open source it?" Once you're done banging your head against your desk, you should realize that things are more confused than they were when we argued a lot about "free" vs "freedom".
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 19:54 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
> I think Mozilla is trying to get some sort of community identity around their ideas of freedom and openness on the web, without identifying themselves as being part of the existing Free Software movement, or really sounding like a movement at all because some people find politics scary. Essentially they seem to be trying to rally people to support a cause without them noticing that there even is a cause.
Hi, I work for Mozilla. The term "Mozillian" is just a (silly ;) name for a member of the project. Mozilla has a lot of awesome contributors and the name kind of stuck. That's pretty much all that is.
Not sure what you mean by "rally for a cause without noticing there is a cause". Mozilla clearly states that they are working for an open web, and that that principle is more important than making money - Mozilla is a nonprofit. So Mozilla is very clear about its cause I think, and that resonates with a lot of people. Just like the FOSS movement resonates with a lot of people (me, for example; I support both of those two causes).
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 21:04 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link]
"principle is more important than making money - Mozilla is a nonprofit."
There is no contradiction amongst principles, making money, and non-profitness.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 21:51 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
I agree, didn't mean to imply otherwise.
Financials Posted Oct 11, 2011 5:00 UTC (Tue) by fyodor (guest, #3481) [Link] You have to click a few pages in to get to the financial report. Mozilla made $123 million last year in revenue and now has almost $150 million in assets. Wow!One potential risk is that most of that revenue comes from Google, who now makes their own competing browser.
Financials Posted Oct 11, 2011 9:09 UTC (Tue) by tcourbon (subscriber, #60669) [Link]
As the main business of Google is advertising on internet and not to make a competing browser I think that as for now the revenue of Mozilla are not under a serious threat. It can sure become problematic in the future to depend so heavily on Google.
Google Chrome Posted Oct 12, 2011 11:00 UTC (Wed) by jpnp (subscriber, #63341) [Link]
I agree that Google will be content to continue paying Mozilla for directing eyeballs to their websites. How much that is depends very much on Firefox's market share, and Google are competing very hard with Chrome to reduce that.
In addition to their technical investment in WebKit etc., Google have a *much* larger marketing effort for Chrome. Mozilla will need to depend on word of mouth among people who approve of their mission (the trouble they've had with switching to their new release cycle isn't helping here).
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 10:55 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
My hope for Mozilla is that they would spend more resources on Thunderbird. It's gone from good no-nonsense to an insane GUI, memory hungry background processes that never die, while there are still no features to speak of. It's as much an important cog in the ecosystem of an open Internet as Firefox.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 12, 2011 10:57 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
Me too. I don't know of another good mail client I can recommend to people who don't care about computers, but recent versions have gone severely downhill. Stability is gradually declining, the GUI is getting worse (the search interface now only shows about 4 messages per page, with unclear formatting). Mail clients are important, and can and should be so much better than webmail.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 11:57 UTC (Tue) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]
Mozilla is seriously in danger of being eclipsed. WebKit is everywhere, from phones and other devices to 3rd party applications. Mozilla/Gecko is in exactly one place: Firefox.
They seriously bungled the 'rapid release' rollout. Chrome appears designed to be released in that fashion: due to being installed in unprivileged areas (home directory), it simply silently updates itself in the background.
Every time I use Firefox these days it bitches at me that it's out of date. And then I have to sit and watch it download the new version, relaunch (losing all my tabs), checks my add-ones (a bunch are incompatible, great) and then finally come back up. A week later, same thing again.
With all that cash on hand you would think they could afford a UX study or two...
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 12:28 UTC (Tue) by csigler (subscriber, #1224) [Link]
> relaunch (losing all my tabs),
Edit -> Preferences -> General -> When Firefox starts:
> checks my add-ons (a bunch are incompatible, great)
Try the Add-on Compatibility Reporter at this URL:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-com...
It should enable many out-of-date add-ons to run. HTH.
Clemmitt
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 12:35 UTC (Tue) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]
It doesn't matter if it tries to open the tabs again, at best it still has to reload everything (not necessarily fast) and at worst it loses some state. This does not eliminate the annoyance, only mitigates it somewhat.
What good does a compatibility checker do me, the user? That's a developer tool. I already know it's broken.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 13:14 UTC (Tue) by csigler (subscriber, #1224) [Link]
> It doesn't matter if it tries to open the tabs again, at
> best it still has to reload everything (not necessarily fast) > and at worst it loses some state. This does not eliminate > the annoyance, only mitigates it somewhat.
Then I apologize for offering you help. You complained about a problem and I gave you a workable solution. Is it slow? Yes. Do you lose your tabs every time you update? No.
> What good does a compatibility checker do me, the user?
You didn't even bother to try it, did you? Why complain if you're not willing to help yourself. The answer to your question is: With Add-on Compatibility Reporter out-of-date add-ons will function even if the version number doesn't match. I've used it with flashblock and adblock plus on aurora and nightly for some time now with no problems.
So please, if you're going to complain about Mozilla and then refuse help when offered, use Chrome instead and save us all the trouble. Thanks.
Clemmitt
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 14:09 UTC (Tue) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]
>So please, if you're going to complain about Mozilla and then refuse help when offered, use Chrome instead and save us all the trouble. Thanks.
If the "help" is a couple of bad workarounds for things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place, it's perfectly ok to complain.
Firefox is quickly becoming a bad copy of Chrome, cargo-culting all of the original's issues and adding a few more problems on its own, so every user is entitled to complain, even though the developers have made clear more than once that they don't care at all because only they know best.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 17:07 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
To be fair:
The compatability reporter, apparently, is misleadingly named for this goal.
And the tab solution isn't really a solution for the implied problem, even if it was misleadingly stated.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 17:55 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
as someone who normally has a couple hundred tabs open, I find that the 'start with the same tabs I had before' option works pretty well.
in fact, my biggest annoyance is that it _doesn't_ reload all tabs immediately at startup, it displays the last page that was cached and then when I go to a tab it reloads it (so I frequently do the 'reload all tabs' after a restart)
given that it's about 6 weeks between releases, and it doesn't force you to restart immediately (just gives you a bar telling you that you need to restart), it doesn't seem that hard to wait for a time when you don't have stuff being composed in a tab to restart.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 13, 2011 3:58 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]
A couple of hundred tabs.
How much RAM do you have? 2TB?
48-core Opteron?
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 13, 2011 4:39 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
on my laptop 2G RAM core 2 duo, on my desktop 4G RAM dual opteron 240
it depends what the tabs are. In my case they tend to be reference materials, not active apps.
recent releases of firefox improve the memory usage significantly. I've gone from firefox using 2-3G of memory to it using <1G of memory
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 16, 2011 3:42 UTC (Sun) by mlinksva (subscriber, #38268) [Link] in fact, my biggest annoyance is that it _doesn't_ reload all tabs immediately at startup, it displays the last page that was cached and then when I go to a tab it reloads it (so I frequently do the 'reload all tabs' after a restart)I like this behavior and used to use an extension called BarTab to force it. It can be toggled via a preference, and there's a UI for it as of Firefox 8, see http://blog.zpao.com/post/9052215461/max-concurrent-tabs-is-dead-long-live
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 14:30 UTC (Tue) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]
> WebKit is everywhere, from phones and other devices to 3rd party
> applications. Mozilla/Gecko is in exactly one place: Firefox.
Well, there is Fennec, but it's hard to compete in a market where every handheld OS vendor already has an embedded and well-integrated browser. It might seem like deja vu, but this fight won't be as easy as beating Internet Explorer 6 was.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 16:51 UTC (Tue) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]
On IOS I'd replace crappy Safari with Fennec anytime. But alas, it's just made for Android devices. This is very probably due to Apple's restrictions keeping out real browsers.
The other, less popular, mobile operating systems are left out in the cold as well... Picking your fights and conserving developer resources, I guess.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 17:29 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
If Fennec will compete by making itself available as a gigantic download in various app stores, it has already lost.
As they acknowldege in the blog post, Moz have put themselves in a very tough spot in the mobile market. Did the video talk about any plans to address this?
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 19:58 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
> As they acknowldege in the blog post, Moz have put themselves in a very tough spot in the mobile market. Did the video talk about any plans to address this?
I don't think Mozilla put themselves in that place - the market got to that place, through Apple's huge success with iOS and Google with Android. Other browser vendors are in the same bad situation, namely Microsoft and Opera.
As for what Mozilla is doing, there are several things. One of them is Boot2Gecko, which has been covered here on LWN before. It's a project to build a FOSS mobile OS that focuses on HTML web apps.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 11, 2011 19:56 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
> On IOS I'd replace crappy Safari with Fennec anytime. But alas, it's just made for Android devices. This is very probably due to Apple's restrictions keeping out real browsers.
Yes, that is correct. Firefox devs would love to release Firefox for iOS, but Apple will not allow that.
The annual State of Mozilla report Posted Oct 17, 2011 6:12 UTC (Mon) by Burgundavia (guest, #25172) [Link]
I use Fennec for exactly one reason: Mozilla Sync. I wonder if I am the only one.
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