Least surprising advice o' the year: Stop Using Chrome, Mozilla Engineer Says

Least surprising advice o' the year: Stop Using Chrome, Mozilla Engineer Says

"As Chrome was beginning to take off, Firefox developed a reputation for being buggy and bloated. Mozilla alienated enterprise IT, then tried to make up. It failed to find a way to work around or challenge Apple's iOS rules, resulting in the absence of Firefox from iOS devices and diminished relevance as the mobile revolution took hold. Following pressure from the advertising industry, it backed away from its plan to block ad-tracking cookies by default, thereby undermining its claim to put users first. It supported the addition of digital-rights management technology to Firefox, alienating the open source community and eliminating a reason to choose Firefox over Chrome.

Perhaps most damaging of all, Mozilla stepped into a political minefield by elevating CTO Brendan Eich as CEO in March 2014. The decision set Mozilla's community against itself. Eich in 2008 had made a financial donation in support of California's Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, a position anathema to influential members of the Mozilla community. Following 10 days of controversy and online debate, Eich resigned, leaving Mozilla and its supporters divided about Eich's treatment and depriving the company of a singular technical talent -- Eich invented JavaScript. Almost all Mozilla staff supported keeping Brendan Eich as CEO."