Seriously. It seems like Mozilla is completely directionless, working on multiple competing projects which go nowhere either due to lack of resources or not addressing any real community need.

I'd love to see that effort concentrated on solving actual problems in a focused way, or maybe even making Firefox not sucky.

Making Firefox non-sucky? Isn't https://github.com/servo/servo good enough for you? Creating a new programming language and using it to build a modern browser rendering engine? I understand that Mozilla is going lots of different directions with its projects but come on, they can't be accused of not putting the effort to make the web better.

Servo has nothing to do with Firefox.

You're right, I stand corrected.

I was under the impression that Servo would end up being the web browser engine powering newer versions of Firefox (or any other flagship Mozilla browsers to be) and from my more extensive reading after reading your comment, I appear to be mistaken.

The underlying point I was making though (if it still stands) is that the good folks at Mozilla are not exactly sitting on their collective ass, they are in fact trying really hard (and the bleeding edge way) to make the web better.

> The underlying point I was making though (if it still stands) is that the good folks at Mozilla are not exactly sitting on their collective ass, they are in fact trying really hard (and the bleeding edge way) to make the web better.

I never claimed that they're sitting on their collective ass. They're certainly trying to make the web better, but by running in a million directions at once (due to the lack of direction) they end up going nowhere.

And Phoenix had nothing to do with SeaMonkey. Funny how things work out.

That's what happens when you oust Brendan Eich. He seemed to be the one with vision and drive.

I am not the downvoter. Mozilla was running in a hundred directions back before the Eich fiasco. This has nothing to do with gay or anti-gay politics and that really isn't leading the conversation in a productive direction.

It looks like their following the Google model, except without needlessly pulling projects that don't gain enough traction yet serve a niche market.

That's just good business. Google is a company that's run for profit and is ultimately answerable to its shareholders. Google's job isn't to perform a social good, it's to continue making money. If it has areas of its business that are net losers (with no hope of eventually performing) then it has an obligation to do something about this.

For a good example of a business that divested its underperforming businesses to the great benefit of its shareholders, look at General Dynamics beginning around 1994.

> without needlessly pulling projects that don't gain enough traction yet serve a niche market

I thought they did exactly this with Persona. It seems like they barely gave it a shot before pulling the plug, and a trusted, neutral federated login is still not a solved problem.

For an example of a pulled Mozilla project, see Skywriter/Bespin: https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/skywriter/

Which lives on as part of Cloud 9. https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9

This is a project under active development, and was created to address of the need of mobile app developers who expect some form of UI toolkit for building mobile webapps.