Ten years later, we’re only seeing pieces of that in Firefox - and when Mozilla laid off many of its employees in 2020, that included the Servo team. With Servo, Mozilla started a project to build a new engine from scratch. Browsers today are incredibly complex pieces of software. Yet with all of the resources being poured into Chromium, it’s hard to see how Firefox and its Gecko engine will remain competitive in the long run. Even today, for most users, privacy is a nice to have but not a reason to switch browsers, especially when there are plenty of extensions that can essentially do the same (though Firefox’s Multi-Account Containers are a game changer and should be available in every browser, as far as I’m concerned). Its focus on privacy resonates more today than it ever did - but for now, that hasn’t changed the browser’s fortune. Today, with Firefox Relay and the Mozilla VPN, it seems the organization has refocused a bit. There were efforts to build a Firefox OS for affordable smartphones (which still lives as a fork under the KaiOS banner), VR browsers, arguments over whether there should be sponsored tiles on Firefox’s new tab page, a WebRTC video chat service and much more. It’s no secret that over the years, Mozilla got distracted. Today’s Mozilla, after many lean years, seems to be on a path to a better financial future, but its dependence on Google makes for an uneasy alliance as Mozilla tries to champion online privacy in a world dominated by the giant advertising company it utterly depends on.įirefox, too, is now a perfectly competent browser - but so is every other browser. It’s much easier to lead when your product has 30% market share and growing (like Firefox had around 2010) and your biggest competitor is declining quickly, but it’s hard to make your voice heard when you are under 4%. But also a nostalgia for the open web, which Mozilla was able to champion when Firefox still had a dominant market share. That’s a nostalgia for a time when Firefox was truly revolutionary after it broke out of the Mozilla Application Suite back in 2002 and quickly threatened the hegemony of the utterly dismal Internet Explorer. Mozilla launched version 100 of its Firefox browser today, but more so than a day for celebration, it feels like a day for nostalgia.
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