Opinion Dominance does not equal importance, nor is dominance the same as relevance. The snag at Mozilla is a management layer that doesn't appear to understand what works for its product nor which parts of it matter most to users.
It is very rare for an article on The Register to cause friends of mine to contact me and anxiously ask if they should change their choice of tech, but SJVN's recent column, "Firefox is dead to me," did it.
Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up READ MORE
I am not here to shoot the messenger. Steven's core point is correct. Firefox is in a bit of a mess – but, seriously, not such a bad mess. You're still better off with it – or one of its forks, because this is FOSS – than pretty much any of the alternatives.
Like many things, unfortunately, much of computing is run on feelings, tradition, and group loyalties, when it should use facts, evidence, and hard numbers. Don't bother saying Firefox is getting slower. It's not. It's faster than it has been in years. Phoronix, the go-to site for benchmarks on FOSS stuff, just benchmarked 21 versions, and from late 2023 to now, Firefox has steadily got faster and faster.
GNOME Shell is built in JavaScript. As we detailed when GNOME turned 25, that JavaScript is executed by GJS, which uses the Mozilla JS runtime. Regular readers will have spotted that The Reg FOSS desk is not a big fan of GNOME, but when we looked at version 48, we commented that it felt like it was the fastest version in years.
Don't blame the app, and don't even blame the programmers. That is, the ones who still have jobs, after years of engineer layoffs. Don't even blame the whole organization – blame the management. Steven himself has pointed this out before, early in 2024. So have I. In 2023, I said that Mozilla was asleep at the wheel.
Mozilla has missed so many boats that it's not even funny to catalog them, but sadly, I must.
Last year, the Stack Overflow survey said:
Rust continues to be the most-admired programming language with an 83% score this year.
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