I'd like to thank Gerv for agreeing to an interview with LQ. He wanted to make it clear that while he is a long-time Mozillian, his views are not official positions of the Mozilla Corporation.
LinuxQuestions.org) First, let me say thank you for agreeing to an interview. Tell us a little about yourself and how you first got involved with Mozilla.
Gervase Markham) My name is Gervase Markham. I’m a Christian, a Liverpool fan and a lover of good cheese, and I live in Sheffield in the UK with my wife and our three young boys.
I’ve been with Mozilla, as a volunteer or employee, since 2000. I got involved when I read a Slashdot comment (!) from an existing Mozilla contributor called Matthew Thomas. It said that if Mozilla failed, then Microsoft would get control of the web. I thought that the web was too awesome, even then, to be controlled by a single company, so I decided to help Mozilla out. Sixteen years later, I’m still here. I’ve done many things in my time, but I currently work mainly on Public Policy, which I tend to summarise as "persuading governments not to make unhelpful laws about the Internet". My current focus is copyright reform in the EU; you can read our
policy positions on the Mozilla Policy blog.
LQ) A throwback question that I asked in a 2002 interview of Asa from Mozilla: What do you consider Mozilla's place in the current browser market? If you couldn't use a gecko based browser, which one would you use?
Gerv) Exactly what Firefox should be (which is perhaps another way of asking what its place in the current market is) is something which has been debated recently. You can read my views on that question
on my blog. Some metaphors I think work are “butler” and “exoskeleton”. I do think that what people expect from a browser, and what a browser can usefully do for them, has changed a great deal since 2002.
In terms of differentiating ourselves from other options, I think Mozilla’s non-profit status makes it easy - we should be unambiguously on the side of the user, and not on the side of someone else’s bottom line. And we need to both do that, and get better at explaining it.
As a Linux user, if I couldn’t use a Gecko-based browser, then I wouldn’t have much choice of rendering engine! And that is one reason why Mozilla’s continued success is so important. I’m really glad the Microsoft is writing a new, standards-compliant engine, but they haven’t said anything about Linux support. So I’d probably use Chromium (not Chrome) with some changes to make sure my privacy was preserved. At least, until Servo is ready :-)
LQ) I was disappointed when Mozilla declined to participate on Bad Voltage (and subsequently declined to even offer a statement of any kind) after a Mozilla-related segment. I was even more disappointed when Mozilla initially declined requests to be interviewed by LQ, something they have been happy to do before. Based on feedback I've heard, Mozilla now often declines interviews. This seems to point to a culture shift within Mozilla toward being less open and transparent with external organizations, even Open Source related ones. Do you think this is a fair assessment? While some amount of cultural change is inevitable in an organization that has grown as much as Mozilla has, do you think this change will have a negative impact on the long term growth and perception of Mozilla?
NOTE: The person previously interviewed by LQ was on leave and agreed to another interview after I sent these questions to Gerv. More on that soon.
Gerv) I personally declined a Bad Voltage request for an interview because it became clear that one member of the BV team was very keen to discuss gay marriage - a topic which I have no interest in discussing in a broadcast interview (or any interview). I would not be surprised if the other refusal(s) BV got were for similar reasons. I was rather disappointed that this possibility was not mentioned at all in the follow-up BV segment where the team speculated on why Mozilla might have refused.
However, I do agree there is probably some truth in the idea that Mozilla is now more cautious about talking to the media than we have been in the past. As you note, some degree of cultural change comes with organizational growth; it also comes when you have a higher profile. But the events surrounding Brendan Eich’s appointment as CEO last year probably also have something to do with it; that was a very painful period for everyone in the organization, and I don’t think that many people would say that the press attention was helpful as we tried to work through it. More generally, Mozilla regularly struggles with the tension between being open, and kicking off an unnecessary press storm which has to be dealt with. If I were planning our office, I’d put the PR team next to the bar...
We do need to make sure Mozilla both speaks and acts in a way which demonstrates that it’s clearly a part of the open source community, with everything that entails. I’m not sure we’ve got this right at the moment, and want to look at ways we could do better.
LQ) Do you think it's accurate to say there is a bit of internal struggle happening within Mozilla about the future direction of the organization and the best path to take to achieve the Mozilla mission?
Gerv) In an organization of 1000+ full-time people and 10,000+ part-time people, it would be very unusual if there were not differences of opinion as to our future direction! Mozilla has made a number of strategic realignments recently, trying to respond to what is a fast-changing market. Unanimity on every aspect of these changes would be… surprising. Robust debate about such things is important; if there’s one thing we could improve on, I’d say we need to make sure our discussions engage the entire community outside the walls of the Mozilla Corporation as well as inside.
LQ) There seems to be a perception in the community that Mozilla has become less responsive to feedback (to be fair, this isn't a new issue. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=374002 for an example from 2007, which got comments for almost 5 years). Any comment on this?
Gerv) I’m not sure how one would measure “responsiveness to feedback”. One trouble we do have, and have always had, is that browsers excite a lot of passion in people, because they use them every day, and a small group can be very vocal in demanding what they want even if it’s not the right thing when you consider the big picture.
MNG support would be one controversial example I could cite - 8 years on, people still bring that up. So ever since I joined Mozilla 15 years ago we’ve been dinged as being unresponsive to feedback, and it’s hard to tell how much of that is code for “they didn’t do what I wanted them to do”.
LQ) While browser statistics are notoriously difficult to track and hotly debated, all sources seem to point toward a downward trend for Firefox on the desktop. At LQ, Firefox isn't doing too badly. In 2010 Firefox had a roughly 57% market share and so far this year it's at 37%. LQ is a highly technical site, however, and the broader numbers don’t look quite so good. Over a similar period, for example, Wikipedia has Firefox dropping from over 30% to just over 15%. At the current rate NetMarketShare is tracking, Firefox will be in the single digits some time this year. What do you think is causing this decline and what does that mean for Mozilla?
Gerv) Firefox having 100% market share has always been a non-goal for us; the world we want to see is one where there are multiple standards-compliant browsers to choose from. So in that sense, the current situation is a success. Firefox market share is not an end in itself; it’s a means to an end of advancing our mission.
However, we also need sufficient market share to have impact on things like web standards; the stewards of other browsers sometimes support the right thing, and sometimes don’t, and we have to be creative in building alliances, but in the end our market share is directly related to our chances of getting our way. And for that reason, any reduction is bad news, because if we reach a point where we no longer have sufficient market share, that threatens our ability to advance our mission. We recently launched a new marketing campaign, taking into account the fact that many people now use multiple browsers, based around the message “When it’s personal, use Firefox”. Marketing isn’t all we need, of course, but telling people about what you are doing helps. Not enough people yet realise that Mozilla is a non-profit with a mission.
LQ) While Mozilla revenue numbers take a while to be released, the general consensus seems to be that moving from the deal with Google, to the deal with Yahoo and other local providers will result in less revenue. While the move may have some non-monetary advantages such as independence, flexibility and a better alignment with the Mozilla mission do you anticipate the revenue impact will be severe enough to impact the long term goals of Mozilla?
Gerv) There does seem to be a persistent thing going around that the Yahoo! deal (and associated deals to make other engines the default in other markets) were bad for Mozilla financially. I’m not authorized to say anything that hasn’t already been said publicly, but I will point to the positive statements that were issued by Mozilla in the aftermath of the deals being signed, some of which made very clear that we are in a stronger position now financially. Yes, that word is “stronger”, not “strong”.
The search market needs more competition, and I’m glad we are a part of making that happen. Whatever engine you use, this is going to be good for you.
LQ) With both revenue and market share declining, does Mozilla still have the clout it needs to direct the evolution of the web in a direction that is open and transparent?
Gerv) And it’s at this point that I have to dispute the premise of your question - see above :-) But I would say that if Firefox had had a higher market share at the relevant time, then the discussions about EME (the W3C standard for DRM in the browser) might have gone in a different direction. In the end, standing alone, we decided that implementation was better than accelerated irrelevance.
So in two ways, the EME situation underscores how important for our mission we think it is for Firefox to have substantial market share. If we’d had more of it, the discussion might have been different; and to avoid losing it, we had to do something painful. The more people use Firefox, the more likely it is that we can direct the web to be a force for good. We could certainly use more clout, and your vote counts.
LQ) Firefox was initially created because some people within the Mozilla Project felt that Netscape was too bloated, partially due to feature creep. Has Firefox succumb to Zawinski's law and become the thing it aimed to replace?
Gerv) Well, we haven’t yet succumbed to Zawinski’s law, unless you count being able to render “gmail.com” as being able to read mail. In fact, depending on how you look at it and how you assemble the history, Firefox is one of the only examples of the law working in reverse - Mozilla’s flagship browsing product used to be able to read mail (when we shipped the Mozilla Suite) and can no longer do so.
I think that people expect different things from a browser in 2015 than they do in 2005, and the web has significantly more capabilities - real-time audio/video communication, for example. The question is not about whether you add features or not, but about whether you are adding the right features. Of course, there’s room for debate on this too. But a browser has to render the web that exists, and today, that means a lot. Facebook’s current HTML UI, for example, was unimaginable ten years ago, and takes a pretty seriously capable piece of code to render it.
LQ) I noticed something interesting about feedback from my initial post. Many people commented that they have recently stopped using Firefox for technical reasons. Memory leaks and random crashes were the two most cited technical reasons, but there were others. Do you think the quality of the Firefox codebase has decreased? I don't seem to get the random crashes, but do notice the memory leaks. Do either of these happen to you personally?
Gerv) I don’t see many memory leaks or random crashes - I run our Aurora (alpha) version and my about
:crashes log says I’ve had an average of 2 per month in the last 3 months. There is, however, a 100% CPU spin I hit quite often and need to track down. I do know we’ve been working really hard over the past couple of years on
reducing memory usage, there are memory-usage tests on our continuous integration platform and any regression gets jumped on, and we have some of the best
crash-reporting infrastructure of any open source project anywhere. Constant vigilance.
If Firefox is slow or crashy for you, suspect an extension first. Unlike other browsers, our extension model lets addons do
anything; and as you can imagine, that has major upsides in available power, but a big downside in that a bad addon can cause instability. Try “Restart with Addons Disabled” on the Help menu and browse around for a while.
LQ) On the topic of my post, do you have any general comments or reaction based on it or the ensuing discussions?
Gerv) Your post surprised me, in that it seems like an odd reason to stop using Firefox. If you really think “the web would be a worse place without Mozilla”, you need to vote with your feet, rather than expecting someone else to support us so you don’t have to.
LQ) There seems to be a perception among some that Firefox has been chasing Chrome recently, especially from a UI perspective. Do you think this is fair/accurate?
Gerv) I noted to someone the other day that for some people, if we add a feature Chrome has we are “chasing Chrome”, and if we add one they don’t have, it’s “bloat”... I think that parity with Chrome on performance (for example) is table stakes for competitiveness in the browser market at the moment, and of course if there are new web platform capabilities, we both add those too. So I suspect people offering this criticism are mostly thinking of the UI. In terms of that, I don’t really know, but it wouldn’t be totally surprising to me if two different sets of UX researchers came to similar conclusions about a topic. And of course, when Firefox started, being like IE so it was easy to switch was (if I remember correctly) an explicit UX goal. Similarity is not necessarily due to lack of creative ideas.
Personally, UI changes don’t bother me too much. I’m fairly adaptable. I had no problem when Ubuntu shipped Unity, either :-)
LQ) The adoption of Firefox OS has been slow and the initial release contained similar vendor lock-in as Android and iOS (I understand this is going to be addressed in a future release, which is great news). What do you think are the chances of Firefox OS achieving success and how does Mozilla define success in the context of Firefox OS. How important do you consider Firefox OS to the future of Mozilla?
Gerv) Success for Firefox OS, from my perspective, would be analogous to success in the browser market - enough market share to provide an open alternative, and to drive the market in a positive direction. This could be measured in raw user numbers, but doesn’t have to be - Asa (who you interviewed a while back) is fond of saying that IE 7 was the best browser Mozilla ever produced, because the rise of Firefox caused Microsoft to have to get back in the game again after they shut down browser development post-IE 6.
I wrote a blog post a while back called “
Success Is Not Inevitable”. The mobile phone OS market is amazingly tough. There is a real possibility we won’t succeed; but if we don’t, then the citizens of the world will have fewer options available, none of which would be anything like as aligned with Mozilla’s mission and the values of web openness and freedom as Firefox OS. We’ve made a really good start - 18 mobile carriers in 31 countries, if my figures are current - but we have a long way to go.
LQ) Where do you see Rust going in the next 1-3 years?
Gerv) Rust occupies a unique place in the language pantheon - it’s memory-safe, type-safe, parallelism-safe (is that a word?), integrates well with existing C, C++ or other compiled code (to allow for incremental replacement in an existing application) and it’s fast - as fast as C or C++ if the implementation did all the checks it should, and which Rust does. I’m no language expert, but I’m fairly sure nothing else ticks all those boxes. It’s just what we need for Servo, our next-generation rendering engine, but I’m pretty sure it’ll have a load of other applications too. Watch for it on the Internet of Things.
I’ve been saying for a year now that I’d love to see an SSL stack written in Rust. Servo needs one anyway, and given all the problems SSL stacks have been having recently, it would be a much-needed addition to the options. Of course, writing crypto code is not for the enthusiastic amateur; there are probably not many people in the world who could pull this off. If you are one of them, think about it.
LQ) A question from an LQ member: What is done to keep Firefox up to date from a technical point of view (IMHO, it can not compete with Chrome and other Webkit/Blink-Browsers anymore in terms of speed), how far is progress with the new Servo engine and will the extended capabilities for plugins be kept when a change happens. The Pentadactyl plugin I use is, AFAIK, not possible on Chrome and similar browsers due to a lack of capabilities for plugins, so that Chrome users have to use rather featureless copies of Pentadactyl, like Vrome or Vimium.
Gerv) Well, I think our speed is
pretty competitive :-) Servo is coming along nicely, and we are in the middle of integrating the first bit of Rust code into Firefox itself, as a test. Once that’s in, more bits of Firefox will move over to Rust implementations.
As to what will happen with addons for a browser based on Servo, that’s much less about Servo itself and more about the browser built around the engine. That doesn’t really exist yet - at the moment, Servo only has fairly simple UIs built around it for testing purposes. But however Servo ends up being used by people, I think Mozilla is unlikely to forget that powerful addons, while being a right pain in the backside in some ways (see above), are also a big reason why people use our products.
LQ) Anything else you would like to add or think people should know about Mozilla?
Gerv) I hope that every LinuxQuestions reader already knows that Mozilla is a non-profit-making organization, with a
mission to preserve and promote the good of the web. But I would add that the browser you choose is not just a statement about which order you like your UI buttons in, but a vote for how you want to see the future of the web.
So if you think Mozilla’s vision of an open web, available for all to innovate on a level playing field without toll booths or speed bumps, is a good one, then use Firefox, and encourage all your friends and family to do so as well. And more: test your websites with Firefox, use and give feedback on our developer tools, write your browser addons for Firefox, make sure your distro ships Firefox by default. Every little helps, and you can make a difference.