Firefox’s death is a good thing

The red panda has continued to die for a very long time. We announce the death of Firefox at regular intervals and yet the browser is still there. And Firefox can’t die, because open source brings immortality to any project. If Mozilla no longer maintains it, then there will be other developers who will take it over.

Do like Silicon Valley …

From the start, Mozilla’s strategy has been messed up. He tried to do like commercial enterprises when her project was part of the common good. The first brick was to speed up the release of new versions to “be like Chrome”. Then he started to offer paid services. Thinking that he would succeed in standing out with the plethora of free offers in the same field.

The Covid-19 was just an excuse to apply the bankruptcy stamp on a company that has betrayed its users for many years. By focusing on marketing, the pretty bling-bling things, and trying to do like GAFAMs, Mozilla shows a Silicon Valley mentality that is coming to the end of its life. We remember Firefox OS, launched with great fanfare in 2013. Orange had even launched a Firefox OS phone called Orange Klif.

Projects turned into miscarriages

Mozilla and Orange had carried out massive propaganda to flood this phone all over Africa. People had bought and after 2 years the project was abandoned. The result has been that thousands of phones have become a brick to create Mozilla’s coffin and many open source projects that want to do like Silicon Valley.

It seems that Mozilla has to lay off 250 people because of Covid-19, what is interesting is that Mozilla has always favored teleworking with employees all over the world. One cannot deny a thing. Despite catastrophic decisions, Firefox has never given up on its Mojo of privacy and security. The same cannot be said for Opera, which abandoned its engine to choose Chrome.

Firefox was Mozilla’s only asset

So, Mozilla wants to make money with its paid services. Pocket Premium, Mozilla Hubs and the VPN. Pocket Premium is a service that allows you to save pages to read them later. There is a free version, but otherwise it costs around $ 4.50 per month. I chuckle out loud, because Wallabag does the same thing, for free and you can host it on your own server. Mozilla Hubs is kind of a gimmick, a “virtual lounge” where you can watch videos and play with friends. It’s such a ridiculous and mediocre joke.

And there is the VPN. Opera started the dance by integrating a VPN into its browser and Mozilla simply followed suit. Mozilla’s VPN is very limited, only a few servers available and only users in some countries be able to use it. With the fierceness of VPN competition from big companies, Mozilla VPN is as likely to break into the industry as Greta Thunberg would face Mike Tyson in the ring.

When you see great VPN providers like NordVPN, VPN.ac, Private Internet Access, Hidemyass, but also VyprVPN, have struggled in the industry, Mozilla’s VPN is already doomed. Firefox is in the minority with 4.25% of the browser market share.

Mozilla must die and Firefox must reborn

But this is a part that has never gone down too much. Firefox is still used by die-hard librists who refuse to give up the last bastion of their digital life in favor of Chrome. Mozilla should have listened to its users, quickly transformed its structure to no longer systematically earn money with services that the world does not care about and proposed a real Open Source project that has its own course of action and that does not follow the sirens of Marketing and technological stupidity.

You have a lot of Open Source projects which survive on little funds and which bring a necessary brick to be the small bastion which will resist again and always to GAFAMS and their cyclopean tentacles. Mozilla has chosen its camp for years, that of copying, without success, the GAFAMS and that of constantly disappointing its most loyal users.

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