Have you heard of the company Mozilla? Perhaps many people will shake their heads. However, when it comes to the company's important product, Firefox, I am afraid that no programmer does not know it.
In August of this year, Mozilla launched a new round of layoffs (this is the second round of layoffs so far in 2020). The number of layoffs is 250. Most of the layoffs come from the development tool department, accounting for about four of its total employees. One of them, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker wrote in a blog: The coronavirus pandemic has severely affected our income. I really hope there is another way. In general, the two rounds of layoffs together accounted for almost one-third of the company.
Considering that a large part of the general user base of Firefox is programmers, reducing investment in this field seems to be a particularly short-sighted approach, because it will disappoint your most loyal users. But for those who are not familiar with Mozilla, the layoffs seem to be just another example of competitors failing to succeed in the market. After all, Mozilla's top-brand product, Firefox, has not challenged market dominance for many years. Perhaps this is just a process of gradual death?
But Mozilla is not just a company that only relies on Firefox. It is not just another small technology company defeated by trillion-dollar competitors such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google. On the contrary, Mozilla has a long history of driving the development of web standards. For a historical company, its crisis should concern all of us.
A brief history of Mozilla
In the late 1990s, the Netscape browser changed from the king of the Internet to the mediocre in just a few months. The reason for this is just because Microsoft has bundled Internet Explorer to install, which seems unfair, but most industry observers believe that the browser will be free and ubiquitous in the future, and it is difficult for you to rely on one browser to host the entire Company's business.
However, Netscape unintentionally seemed to have done a genius for the future. It decided to turn the browser into an open source project, and therefore incubated Mozilla. Mozilla independently developed the browser, mail and chat tools, etc. However, in the face of competitors with more funds and greater influence, after all, they still failed to turn things around. But in the next few years, the Mozilla team transformed into a different organization, this is the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, dedicated to promoting open web standards.
Soon after, a group of Mozilla developers created a new browser, Firefox, and spun it into an independent wholly-owned subsidiary, which continues to provide funding for the Mozilla Foundation to this day. If these maintain close ties with America Online (AOL), which acquired Netscape, they would have been wiped out by changes in the Internet trend a few years ago. In fact, even AOL gave up on Netscape in favor of Internet Explorer, and it soon became insignificant.
Mozilla's contribution
Firefox is Mozilla's most famous product. The early Firefox was a pioneer in ad blocking, data privacy, and development tools. As an open source browser product, Firefox has always been cautious about any actions that have a "commercial atmosphere". Mozilla has never even advertised for any company in Firefox. For a long time, apart from Google, Mozilla has almost no economic source, and most of its income comes from search engine cooperation. In the early days, it attracted countless fans with Firebug, but after chrome had chromedevtools, everything changed differently.
If this is all about Mozilla, then this company is another speed bump for Chromium and WebKit to conquer the world. On the contrary, Mozilla has advanced some of today's most important network technologies. Here are their four best initiatives.
1. Rust
When Netscape went bankrupt, few people realized that its most important contribution was to leave a simple scripting language, which was JavaScript.
JavaScript was created during the brief period when Netscape ruled the Internet, but in the two decades after Netscape’s failure, JavaScript became more and more common and more dominant, and Firefox left the most important Innovation may be the efficient type-safe Rust language.
Rust is committed to becoming a programming language that elegantly solves the problems of high concurrency and high security systems. Rust is a language proposed for multi-core systems and absorbs some important features of other dynamic languages, such as no need to manage memory, such as no Null pointers, etc. Wait. Many developers who think C++ is too lenient and error-prone prefer Rust, and those who think the OOP language is too bulky and inefficient also like Rust. Despite its relatively low usage rate, Rust has been ranked as the most popular programming language in a Stack Overflow developer survey every year since 2016.
Unfortunately, for the current Mozilla, contributing to the Rust language is no longer a priority. In the recent round of layoffs, they laid off the developers and service teams focused on Rust, and it is this group of people who are trying to build a new Rust-based browser engine. But RUST will not sink with this huge ship, and the planning of an independent RUST Foundation is already in progress.
2. HTML5
It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when the whole world was caught in a fierce battle between HTML and XHTML. XHTML is a non-backward compatible version of HTML that has been redesigned with a stricter XML syntax. In 2004, the standards body responsible for HTML (W3C) officially stopped all HTML work.
Without the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, this special group composed of Apple, Opera and Mozilla, the story would have ended. The rest is history that WHATWG won, which forced W3C changed course and launched a series of new standards under the umbrella of HTML5, including flash-free video, web workers, web sockets, and so on.
WHATWG was founded because W3C intends to abandon HTML and strive to develop XML technology. In 2007, Mozilla Foundation, Apple, Opera and other companies suggested that W3C follow WHATWG's HTML5, which prompted HTML5 to become our current standard.
Although Mozilla is not the leader of this farce, they played an important role in launching this sport, which helped us define the network technology for the next decade.
3. Asm.js
Mozilla Firfox is the first browser optimized for asm.js. Technically speaking, asm.js is only a subset of JavaScript. It can avoid some difficult-to-optimize mechanisms and modes of the JavaScript engine (mainly garbage collection and type judgment), and achieve the goal of optimizing the operation of the JavaScript engine. In actual use, it is unlikely that asm.js can be written by hand. It is very troublesome and error-prone to write, but Mozilla's developers proved that they can compile other languages into this performance-enhanced language, which is called Emscripten. Put the real-time 3D game built on the C++ Unreal engine in a web browser.
Asm.js is the most important springboard for innovation in modern Internet history: WebAssembly. WebAssembly bytecode is a kind of machine code that smooths out different CPU architectures. WebAssembly bytecode cannot run directly on any CPU architecture, but because it is very close to machine code, it can be translated into a machine of the corresponding architecture very quickly code.
WebAssembly is a collaborative project between Mozilla and other browser manufacturers, but without asm.js examples, it would not have been born so quickly. Even today, for some old browsers that do not support WebAssembly, asm.js is still a backward compatible supplement to WebAssembly.
4. MDN (Mozilla Developer Network)
MDN is a huge resource of high-quality developer documentation. You can think of it as a Wikipedia for modern web development, or a better version of W3Schools.
If you have searched for answers on the Internet, you may have encountered such a gem as MDN. Perhaps you have used its detailed CSS property reference, or its well-organized HTML DOM reference, or perhaps you have conducted in-depth research on a particular emerging API, such as IndexedDB or WebRTC.
Now Mozilla has completely killed the MDN team. Although they promise to keep the popular website running, and may get more community support with other partners. However, without an active organization injecting capital and talents, whether MDN can maintain its high standards is an open question. After all, Mozilla already has a lot of abandoned early online education projects, such as Webmaker, Mozilla Backpack, and X-Ray Goggles (a very simple way to introduce HTML, more effective than 90% of video tutorials). If MDN disappears, it will be a huge loss for everyone.
Why Mozilla died
Although Mozilla is not completely finished, it has clearly reached a turning point in history. In the dismissal letter sent by Mozilla to employees, the blame was attributed to the new crown virus, which made everyone suspicious. After all, Mozilla created the Mozilla Foundation to help Mozilla weather short-term shocks, not to consider issues from a long-term perspective. It was originally designed to isolate Mozilla's software development work from capricious CEOs and Silicon Valley investors hoping to double their investment. Although the new crown virus will eventually pass, it is not easy to rebuild a development team and regain the trust of developers.
In September 2019, Mozilla announced the financial status of the Mozilla Foundation and the company. The total revenue in 2018 was US$450 million, of which US$430 million came from royalties, mainly embedding search engine advertisements in the browser. Subscription and advertising revenue was US$5.377 million (2018), accounting for less than 2% . In terms of expenditure, the largest expenditure is software development, which is as high as 280 million U.S. dollars, followed by brand and marketing expenses, which is as high as 5.28 million U.S. dollars.
The fact that Mozilla did not say but is often reported in the technology media is that Mozilla's revenue model is extremely fragile: the advertising revenue of browser development competitors .
More than 90% of Mozilla's funding comes from an agreement with Google: Google will be the default search engine for Firefox. In return, Mozilla receives more than $400 million in subsidies each year. Although the market penetration rate of Firefox browser has plummeted, but this agreement may continue until 2023.
Over the years, Google’s update speed has slowed down. Maybe they continue to fund Firefox just because they don’t want this struggling browser to die completely, and their own methods have attracted antitrust concerns, which is the same as Microsoft’s investment in Apple. The reasons are roughly the same, but no matter what Google’s intentions are, Mozilla's almost complete dependence on a donation from a tech giant seems to be a serious strategic error.
For many years, Mozilla has been trying to develop commercial products, such as Firefox OS, an expensive VPN network and an advanced bookmark service. Most of these plans have failed. Now, Mozilla has set its sights on a disappointing new goal: to achieve core browser growth through a differentiated user experience. You can understand this in many ways, but at least one explanation is that they hope to succeed by modifying the browser’s user interface and repacking the current product with new marketing methods. If this is the case, then Mozilla's heartbreaking decline story is also the beginning of its end.
If you want to make a meager contribution to Mozilla, it is best not to use donations. Due to the way the company is established, none of the money will be used for Firefox or development tools. If you have the skills and time, the best support is to join the Mozilla community and contribute to their code base.
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