@prometeo:
> I made a few points and you answer me with a very long list of what Mozilla (your company, btw) does.

Mostly, because you narrowed “what Mozilla does” to four things

> Since you love examples, I’ll give you mine:

Yes, I believe we all see many of our geeky friends trying Chrome these days, and I believe it to be a combination of multiple factors. Chrome is new, kind of “honey moon” phase – they didn’t “screw” anything yet, they didn’t “made things worse with a major update” etc. so its just an easy start. It’s definitely very snappy (not to confuse with performance, those are two different things), and that’s one area where I feel Mozilla has some work to do. Ultimately, Chrome has this “no userbase” advantage which is always helping move faster.

I believe that Mozilla is aware (and that means that your blog post does help to recognize the mood of the community) of the appealing “freshness” of Chrome to geeks, and that’s a good sign for me.

> I simply cannot see anything good in this, but I hope to be proven wrong.

Yea, I hear you. So let me try to summarize my POV.
1) Firefox is being very actively developed and Chrome is, to use Shaver’s words “the competition we wanted”. I believe we should not be afraid of saying that there is a browser on the market that has some features pushed further and this way calling us to catch up. That’s the competition that is good for the users imo and that’s the competition we provided to this market. We “just” have to be better in some areas, and I believe Firefox devs are aware of it.
2) The very most important area which is currently used as a differentiation beteween Fx and Chrome are performance and snappiness.
Performance wise, I believe that it is cyclical. Depending on the moment of a release cycle of each browser, the ones closer to release are slower, but with each release all browsers are getting faster. Fx3.6 is faster than 3.5 which was faster than 3.0 etc. Same with Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE. Now, as far as I understand (and I admit I understand very little from the field), we mostly measure performance by JavaScript performance, or, to put it differently, we measure ability to performance tens of thousands of operations in a loop. That’s how all perf benchmarks work. The current performance race in this field is down to the concept of JIT – technology that allows for JavaScript compilation. Chrome and Safari use the “old” approach to JIT, the one that is better understood and simpler to implement. Mozilla, on the other hand is trying to implement an algorithm that is potentially much more powerful, but much harder to implement properly. I can go into details, but I’ll be just repeating what Taras explained to me once, so it may be better to ask him for a blog post on this. Basically its all down to the fact, that if we do our JIT right, we’ll be able to be much faster, but for now, we’re struggling to fine-tune when to “trigger” compilation, while Chrome’s approach is much more limited, but works “out of the box”, so they’re faster now. In one year, things should look different and I believe we will see the end of “performance” battle – we’ll all be too fast to notice the difference – and will have to find other differentiators between browsers.
Snappiness on the other hand is an important lesson for Mozilla and basing on the feedback from 3.6, we’re learning our lesson well. I expect that with the next releases the difference will once again get smaller and soon it’ll be hard to notice.
3) Ultimately, you put an equal sign between Firefox and Mozilla, which I believe is wrong and that caused me to write my response. I believe Mozilla, more than ever, is much more than Firefox, no matter how much I love the browser, and we should recognize that you cannot measure the health of the whole project by only one project. Firefox is super important for our notion of success, our ability to make impact, our flexibility to operate, but we do much more, and Firefox is part of something much bigger which I believe brings value to the browser, that cannot be measured in miliseconds on Sunspider nor it can grant you a point on ACID3.

One last thing. I really mean it. It is *my* *personal* *opinions* what I write here. As much as I am a member of a project, and I am employed to do part of what I do for Mozilla, it doesn’t make my words any more official. It may shift my perspective, it may make me biased, but it doesn’t mean I’m representing a voice of anyone except of myself.

@snookums:
I can do very little to express myself differently to match your expectations. I believe that your latter statement is wrong, and Mozilla is extremely active on many fronts, but that doesn’t mean I’m right and you’re wrong. Maybe my perspective is biased by how many projects are going on around me, maybe you’re perspective is biased by your sources of information.

Once again, Google is looking at an open source project and learns from them how to build a web browser. No, wait! Google, Microsoft and Apple are doing it. Now, how awesome it is? Think of all those things that Firefox brought to the browser landscape since its 1.0 version and notice how many of those innovations are now in IE8, Safari and Chrome.

We’re saying the same thing, the only difference is that I feel that we were a reference in the browser market, while you think that we still are.

About Personas, as I answered to Pascal on the “other side”, you’re absolutely right: I’m not an average Firefox user! Anyway, I’m ready to change my opinion about Personas in the coming months and acknowledge that I was wrong.

Can you name an example of a project that generated tons of thousands of dependencies and was irresponsibly killed by Mozilla?

Well, I don’t fully understand what you mean with “dependencies” but, to name one, Ubiquity doesn’t look very lively. I remember discussion about localizing Ubiquity about a year ago, and then very little news (yes, I read Jono’s post in January).

Some, like Italy, Poland, Germany, may have enough internal marketing to consider Mozilla global marketing effort focused on promoting Firefox useless for them or even “too much”.

Unfortunately that’s not the case of Italy: very good on support and localization, completely laking on marketing, marketshare somewhere above 20% (I don’t have exact numbers), PR strategy not very clear. But that’s another topic