[Original post (Nov. 7):]

A couple of days ago, twitter and IRC (and most of the interwebs) started getting hype around this fx10 thing. I was a little late to the party, but I finally got a link from someone and checked it out. At first, I was like “Nice, a browser for developers! Maybe this is what the web dev community needs.” But something wasn’t right. This was a post on the Mozilla blog, and both the post and the video were strangely devoid of any technical information. The video felt like a movie trailer, and gave absolutely no details. The post was the same, saying general ideas, but no “here’s what it does, and here’s the programs you can use with it”.

I would expect something like that from a different company, say Apple. That’s how their business model works, they throw out this cool hype videos with Jonny Ive locked in the same white room and because its cool and flat and minimalist and filled with buzzwords, everyone flocks to the nearest store to watch the first person in line drop his new phone on live TV. That’s their whole marketing scheme. Sure technical specs are widely available, but they do a lot with hype and media. But that’s for a company with different goals and values than Mozilla.

After reading that post, I figured the source would be available somewhere, probably in the hg repos, since it looked like a variant of normal Firefox. So I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find anything. Other people said the same thing. This worried me even more. What happened to being “painfully open”? The one thing that set Mozilla apart is their openness. If you want to contribute to any part of their products and services, you can. They’ve built many things on that model, and that is how everyone knows who they are.

Here’s the thing: Firefox is falling behind. Not in everything (most notably ES6 implementation, where they are still way ahead of everyone else), but in every stat I’ve seen, the market share is dropping. The old “better than IE” mantra is dead, now that IE11 is as good of a browser as Firefox, Chrome, and Opera (my opinion, from a web dev point of view. Jury’s still out on Safari). Chrome now has the market share, and doesn’t look like it’s giving that up anytime soon.

I’m also still trying to figure out what they plan to change with this browser. Web developers by and large use Chrome, because it’s miles ahead of any other browser with its developer tools. Things like viewing paint and layout timelines, an awesome mobile emulator with built in spoofing for UA string, device-pixel ratio, and network throttling are must haves for any web dev. So my assumption is that this browser will attempt to match Chrome with respect to web development. Which makes it all the more baffling why it was built in secret. Why wouldn’t you give the community a chance to improve on the product before it’s launched? People are creative and have good ideas, especially the types of people who work on Mozilla stuff.At the very least, they would give the Chrome team a bit of worry if they saw solid competition to their browser. And competition drives innovation

There is so much irony here that it’s almost funny. First, this web browser is targeted for ‘web developers’, yet web developers couldn’t contribute to the product tailored for them because it was a secret project made by an organization who published the “Open Standard”. Second, another hashtag that I saw tied together with #fx10 is #chooseindependent. Okay, if this was about the normal Firefox, that would be a good hashtag, but this #fx10 browser is no more independent than any other browser from Google or Apple or Opera. The reason Firefox is independent is because its a community-driven project. The company helps out, but a lot of the work is done by volunteers. This new browser wasn’t made independently at all. I use Firefox because I contributed to it, and I helped make it better, and I know a lot of people feel the same way. No one will feel that way about this browser, because no one could contribute to it.

Mozilla missed an opportunity, and it makes me sad. I hope they at least open up the project after it launches, so that the community can be involved in making it better. I am a big fan of Mozilla and what they stand for,as well as what they’ve done for the internet. I hope this is an isolated event, just a bad decision that they will learn from.