Mozilla went wrong in many areas — pretty much all of them. A herd of toddlers could’ve done better because their decisions would’ve been basically random, which would’ve bested the Mozilla aggressive mediocrity.

One of the common Mozilla strategies to nuke a feature the devs didn’t like was to hide the feature well, claim no one ever used it (because they couldn’t find it), then get rid of it as “no one used it.”

The quote below reminded me of this Mozilla strategy.

On the flip side, Wroblewski found that making it harder to find common features reduced user engagement. When the (former) Polar app simplified their navigation design from a segmented control menu to a toggle menu to make the design seem “cleaner,” user engagement dropped because the primary functions were no longer continually exposed to users.

I hate Mozilla, but it’s also an interesting study in how hard an organization with so much goodwill and potential can fail, and how you know it’s over when the organization and developers derive joy from defying and disappointing the users of the product.

Mozilla is going to die anyway, but if I had a billion dollars I’d spend a large portion of my fortune fucking them all up.