There are people who claim that Mozilla does not have the guts to openly challenge Google in the same way the company attacked Microsoft in the mid-2000s. Mozilla’s official competitive strategy can be described as almost being mushy in a time when the company needs to be more aggressive than ever to make its case. But the company gets more confident and its chairman has just told us that, while Google is the lesser of two evils, Firefox will have to evolve to sustain its role as the Robin Hood of the open web.
Mozilla’s direction for Firefox has been quite confusing lately. Firefox 4 was a catch-up play that ended up to be, more or less, damage control in a market environment that is problematic for Firefox: It is caught in the middle of a cut-throat competition for market shares between Microsoft and Google.
The role of a future Firefox has not been clear as its consumer and business roles were questioned, as its capability to handle web applications are still blurry and some of Mozilla’s employees engaged in self-destructive measures in which Mozilla products are openly criticized by its own staff. Thankfully, a recent blog post by Mozilla’s chairman, Mitchell Baker provided a bit more clarity on the Firefox of the future: Firefox will be more than a browser down the road (this is, by the way, the most significant update on her vision for Firefox since her strategy that included a mobile browser for 2010.)
The blog post itself is little more than the fluff you would expect from vision statements. Baker argues that Firefox needs to expand:
“For one thing, even if I use Firefox, I use it today to create information about myself that lives in multiple data silos (or “websites” or “apps” or “services”). These are often inter-operable, subject to different rules, and usually difficult or impossible to combine. Access to information I’ve created about myself is fragmented. The set of values that we have built into Firefox is not yet present in this information / data layer.
Secondly, the browser is no longer the only way people access the Internet. People also use more focused “apps” to do discrete tasks, and often feel a strong sense of attachment to the apps and the app model. This is an exciting addition. Mozilla should embrace some aspects of the current app model in addition to the browser model. I think of apps as a new “form-factor” for the web. Focused, with a sense of discovery and ownership. Today apps are also platform specific, sometimes device specific, and don’t provide many of the attributes we associate with the web.
Thirdly, mobile devices mean the entire hardware and software stacks are changing. As a result, the computers many of us use are more closed than they have been in our lifetimes. At the same time, the range of new possibilities and experiences is exploding. Mobile computing needs a strong infusion of Mozilla values. This means Firefox and other software on the new platforms, it means apps and it means bringing the Firefox experience to data and services as well.”
What I mainly took from these guidelines is that Mozilla will be trying to apply its open approach to mobile web browsers and applications, including tools that would allow users to control their data and identity in one place. However, the more important information provided is the fact that Baker believes that the “browser is necessary, but it is no longer sufficient. There are a number of reasons the Firefox experience needs to expand to fulfill the Mozilla mission.”
So, we could expect Firefox to grow beyond being simply a browser, even if the above mentioned ideas remain blurry and the remainder of her post raises more questions than it gives answers: “Mozilla has a unique ability to put user sovereignty first in all of these areas,” Baker wrote. “We’re organized as a non-profit precisely so that this is the only thing that matters. Our stakeholders care about the values we build into the Internet, not the economic value we create for ourselves. We’ve done this with Firefox. We had a vision of how the world could be, and we created a product to make that vision real. Now the vision seems obvious. It’s been widely adopted and has become a competitive aspect of the mainstream.“
All right, it’s a feel-good vision statement and it’s not designed to give detailed answers. However, reading the entire post including the comments to the article provides some color for Baker’s statements. Quite obviously, Mozilla cannot be happy about the current market and as much as Baker stresses that the economic value does not matter, Mozilla’s market share will impact its future role in the browser market and beyond. In one reply, Baker writes: “We’ll see how controlled environments are a competitive advantage. People said that was true of nearly everything before open source came along !”
In a reply to another reader who asks Baker to move from the browser to the next big challenge, she adds: “[…] the browser piece isn’t dead. Open source is *not enough.* An open source browser –or two– built to promote the business goals of one or two giant commercial enterprises is better than the Microsoft monopoly before, but it’s not the same as building product *solely* to support the values of the Mozilla Manifesto. So keeping Firefox vibrant remains really important to building an open web platform. Chrome is open source, but Google and Mozilla are not the same.”
Is this a first, very careful challenge to Google – and the notion that Google’s goals may not be quite so evil as Microsoft’s goals, but damaging to the idea of an open Internet nevertheless? Clearly, there is quite a bit that be read into Baker’s words. However, in combination with the vision that Firefox has to be more than just a browser, it is obvious that Mozilla is now morphing into Mozilla 2.0 to defend (and liberate) a new Internet from the threat of corporate interests. Baker is quite evidently questioning the future of “controlled” environments such as Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Store and similar trends.
Firefox’ current disadvantage is that it does not offer a platform model and is threatened to evolve from a tool that provides access to the content of the Internet into a simple app, at least on smartphone and tablet form factors. Compared to Apple, Google and Microsoft, Mozilla lacks the operating system layer that will enable its rivals to turn the browser into much more than the browser and into a critical enabler for platform features: Microsoft will leverage IE in Windows 8 to run Windows HTML5 apps, Google is tuning Chrome to become the underlying software to run its web services especially well and Apple is expected to make Safari much more useful as far as its iCloud is concerned.
Conceivably, Firefox could get lost somewhere in the middle of this platform battlefield.
As HTML5 evolves more toward becoming an application platform for future operating systems, and Apple, Google and Microsoft develop their browsers to fit platform usage models, Firefox’ value as an alternative browser could erode. If Chrome is faster and includes specific features in Google’s cloud services, why would you use Firefox? If IE10 and its Windows-optimized hardware acceleration engine has advantages in HTML5 Windows 8 apps, is there a compelling reason to use Firefox?
Mozilla has not reacted very well to the evolving platform challenge so far. A storm has been brewing with Chrome that is gaining market share at a rapid pace, a newly launched Chrome OS operating system, Google’s efforts to deploy backend technologies to support Chrome (such as SPDY), a Windows 8 OS that is scheduled for a 2012 release and Apple that will be increasingly under pressure to aggressively grow and secure an online services eco-system that is tailored toward apps and its Safari browser.
While there is value in an open alternative, Mozilla’s battle is more difficult to win in the future than it was in the past. Mozilla will need a very powerful platform with unique and compelling value to keep its vision alive in the coming years. It has every opportunity to do so, but needs to be much more aggressive and bold to let its users know what they can expect from Mozilla 2.0.
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