Despite some well-publicized departures, I'm still bullish on Mozilla. As javascript becomes more capable, Mozilla's open-web mission becomes more attainable. Public awareness of widespread government surveillance increases the demand for trustworthy communication tools. Concretely, FirefoxOS is quietly reaching maturity, and Servo has a great deal of promise.
I think that Mozilla's strange position, being a non-profit that is at various times either in competition or in cooperation with the world's largest tech companies, makes employee departures all that more press-worthy that the typical corporate churn. I wouldn't read too much into it.
> Mozilla's open-web mission becomes more attainable
That's their mission (allegedly), but things like Pocket integrations, or the Telefonica chat thing (Hello?) really make me think it's not where the manpower is going.
Most of the effort behind Hello was independent of Hello. Hello is based on WebRTC, which is something Firefox needed to support anyway. Hello is just a neat way to use it, and I doubt that it required a lot of effort. ICBW, though.
I can't figure out what you mean here. WebRTC's implementation is totally open source. The only thing aside from accounts in Hello is the STUN/TURN servers, and I think OSS projects exist for running those.
In other words, everything is reusable and is being used by tons of new startups and projects doing video conferencing.
The whole thing will even use free codecs if both sides support it.
You are very optimistic, unless Mozilla gets really innovative, I don't see how Mozilla will survive in the long run, or at least be relevant enough to put pressure on competitors. I don't think your two reasons are good enough, most users don't care or know about the surveillance issues, and while servo maybe prove to be a technically superior browser, that's not enough.
Technically superior = faster/less bloat, and that could mean a lot.
People moved to firefox because IE was slow and sucky. They moved to Chrome because Firefox was bloated. Now some are even moving back to Firefox because Chrome guzzles RAM. Servo would be an ideal next step; a large architectural change like that is perfect for gaining lots of traction.
Firefox beat IE on features like tab browsing and popup blocking, not really on speed. Servo should be better than gecko, but there's so much more to a browser than the runtime that it's hard to do a fair comparison yet.
I think that Mozilla's strange position, being a non-profit that is at various times either in competition or in cooperation with the world's largest tech companies, makes employee departures all that more press-worthy that the typical corporate churn. I wouldn't read too much into it.