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Mozilla lost in the browser war, but still believes it could save the Internet

The secret story of a very long, sometimes lonely and completely quixotic quest




In 2016, Mitchell Baker, chairman and interim director of Mozilla, set about updating her manifesto. Yes, formally it was a Mozilla manifesto , but it was completely made by Baker. This is something like a bill of rights for the Internet, or even like the Ten Commandments : 10 principles of how the Internet should be, expressing ideas about promoting privacy, openness and communication. It periodically contains such words as “individual” and “public”, and it begins with the assumption that the Internet is created for people and should be treated accordingly.

Baker's first opus was published in 2007, and was an adaptation of the principles that Mozilla has adhered to since its founding in 1998. Over the years, the manifesto has become a fundamental document for Mozilla and the Internet as a whole. Employees from time to time cite it, often mentioning their favorite principles in disputes and explanations. Baker says he only regrets that it’s impossible to reduce these principles to one simple sentence, such as “do no evil” or “think differently”. It turns out that explaining how the Internet should be takes a little more time.

Ten years after the first version of the manifesto, Baker decided that it was time to change it - because the Internet itself had changed. In the early days when Mozilla was the code name for the source code for the browser from Netscape, and its rival was Internet Explorer, the Mozilla team believed that the web was the future and that it should remain open. By 2016, the Internet was captured by phones, the world was controlled by mobile applications, and the Internet was dominated by several companies serving billions of users, subject to the increasing influence of their shareholders and governments, and conducting their business based on an unprecedented collection of user information. Baker could no longer reconcile with her place in this ecosystem.

“I’m not going to spend my life creating an open system suitable for trolls, surveillance organizations and violent groups of people,” she said.

So Baker decided to change the rules to help change Mozilla's vision. She sketched out a few new principles, and shared them with some people. That's how Mozilla works - slowly, together, trying to chat with everyone. Baker received feedback, wrote even more, shared again. So, over and over again, for several months, this process continued. At some point, she decided that she had finished - “I liked him, he had clear headlines,” she said, but the reviews of people shocked her. One reader wrote that he liked him, but his parents would call this text “another California liberal bullshit.” Baker rewrote it again.

Finally, on March 29, 2018, two days before the 20th anniversary of Mozilla, Baker wrote a Mozilla blog post., where she indicated that over the past decade, the world has seen "all the power of the Internet, used to increase disagreement, incitement to violence, the spread of hatred and the intentional manipulation of facts and reality." Baker then added four new principles to the manifest, calling for equality, reasonable debate, and diversity, heading the key to Safe Internet.

Mozilla has spent the last few years in an increasingly fierce and high-profile struggle for the future of the Internet. She is fundamentally redesigning her most important product, Firefox, to bring it to a vision of a company where the web will be more user-friendly and concerned about privacy. She fights in the courts to ensure that the Internet is accessible and honest for as many people as possible. She fights with Google, Facebook and other technical conglomerates - including those that provide most of the profit for her.

Technology companies have become villains, and Mozilla has designated herself a hero motivated by fear that if she does not fix the Internet, does not return the era of confidentiality, openness and communication, then this may not be done by anyone.

David vs Goliaths


Concerns about the state and future of the Internet have been growing in Mozilla for years, but if you can choose “the day Mozilla has changed forever,” it will be March 17, 2018. This day is also known as Cambridge Analytica Day . When information about the practices of gathering information prevailing on Facebook began to be made public, and millions of people began to ask themselves if the tech giants were abusing their trust and if their privacy was being violated, the Mozilla team met to decide how to respond to this situation. Perhaps it is better to explain these privacy concerns with the human language? Offer tips for users on privacy practices? This didn’t seem enough.

Then someone got an idea: Mozilla makes Firefox, a functional browser that already has the technology of "containers" that separate one tab from all the others. Initially, containers were well suited for tasks such as logging into different Gmail accounts in one window. But what if people can also use them to prevent Facebook from following them while visiting sites?

A few days later, Mozilla released the Facebook Container extension for Firefox, as well as detailed instructions on how to hide as much of its data as possible from a large blue application. It was a useful product and a powerful statement. Mozilla not only allowed the Internet to be free, but also actively tried to improve it.

“It gave us the largest audience we have ever had on social media and the press,” said Peter Dolansky, director of privacy and security at Mozilla. “It has changed the way we enter the world and create our products.” Mozilla then made another statement - that it will no longer be advertised on Facebook.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has changed people's attitude to online privacy, that is, has made many people really discuss this issue. “There were too many stories about how people’s data is collected, and for the first time, people realized this,” Dolanski said. He began to believe that some users - not all, not most, but some - might be interested in a product specifically designed to protect their personal information. And so it turned out that Mozilla just had such a product.

Firefox has long had such a not-so-flattering difference from most popular browsers - it wasn’t made by any huge corporation. For years, he fought Internet Explorer, trying to expand the Internet beyond the blue icon that lived on every Windows PC. In early 2000, at some point, when Mozilla first started releasing things like tabs and the search bar, it seemed like Firefox could win a browser war. And then Chrome appeared. Google's browser - created by a group of former Mozilla employees - now occupies more than two-thirds of the market, according to analytics from StatCounter. Firefox is responsible for a share of just under 10%. Among mobile browsers, Chrome and Safari dominate in a similar way; Firefox has less than 1% there.

Yet Mozilla’s influence exceeds Firefox’s market share. Since even its commercial division is wholly owned by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, since it has existed for a long time, and since it publicly promotes the values ​​described in the manifesto, it is able to drag even large competitors to its side.

“Mozilla, DuckDuckGo, Sonic, and other“ small ”tech companies are constantly going beyond their capabilities as they articulate their values, listen to and stand up for them,” said Jenny Gebhart, research director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Even senior executives at competing browser companies said they respect Mozilla’s opinion.

However, in words alone you will not go far. Over time, Mozilla learned to use product updates as declarations of intent - not just to threaten the sky with a fist, but to state that the situation could improve, and then make that improvement.

Better by default


A few years ago, Mozilla studied how its users understand the meaning of “confidential web browsing.” The results did not surprise her: when the user clicked on the mask icon and started the incognito mode, he expected that they would not be tracked at all. In fact, all the same, a lot of data was collected about him. Therefore, Firefox programmers gradually began to disable third-party trackers and scripts that work in the background, which were initially allowed to work in this mode. Improving the confidentiality of the confidential mode was successful - that is, they began to collect less data, and users did not notice the difference.

However, these same trackers helped users access sites and buy products, and blocking them would break the Internet for many users. However, Dolanski and his team could not get rid of the feeling that it was still worth it. For two years, they conducted dozens of experiments with users, worked together with publishers, advertisers and technology companies, tried to figure out exactly how the Internet would break if it could not track you. They made changes, tweaked policies, and tried to find fixes that worked for all stakeholders.

This project, known as Enhanced Tracking Protection, became one of the features of Firefox in 2018. However, initially this setting was hidden somewhere deep, and concerned only part of the tracking ecosystem. Mozilla understood that few users would use this switch, or even find it. “You can't put the burden of privacy protection on everyone,” said Celina Dekelman, Mozilla’s chief Firefox design director. Even the most attentive users rarely understand the real mechanics of maintaining privacy online.

“It is extremely difficult to understand which set of checkmarks you need to put down in order to maintain your privacy,” Dekelman said. The only way to get people to turn on the desired switch is to turn it on themselves. Last July, after months of testing and tweaking, Mozilla included enhanced default tracking protection for a specific subset of users. In September, the company distributed it to all users. Dolanski prepared for the feedback flow, but it did not happen. No one especially noticed the difference.

Mozilla has always done this: make responsible decisions for users without loading them with details. However, at this time, Mozilla decided to say a little louder about the goodness that she tried to spread.

Today, Firefox has blocked 1.6 trillion tracking requests - about 200 pieces per user per day. However, instead of saving the city and disappearing into the night in the manner of Batman, Mozilla decided to beat her chest a little. She created a “privacy protection report” for users, which described in detail how many trackers were blocked, how many cookies were thrown out, how many times the user's information was leaked or turned out to be open. She created tools like Firefox Monitor , which monitors the dark web and alerts users to change passwords, and Lockwise password manager .



The general message of Mozilla: you should know how bad everything is and how to improve it. Though not much.

Hit hunt


As Mozilla worked on improving Firefox, the world began to phase out Firefox. Most people use Chrome, while most others use the browser that they have on their phone or laptop. And even if they install Firefox, it will not affect browsers that run inside applications on phones, voice applications or instant messengers. The desktop browser was once the only portal to the Internet: today it is not even the most important of the portals.

Mozilla tried to redistribute efforts to create other products, but did not succeed. The Thunderbird project was supposed to “make e-mail easier", but it was not successful. A big bet was made on FirefoxOS in an attempt to create a mobile OS with a focus on the web, able to compete with iOS and Android, but the fate of this project coincided with the fate of Windows Mobile and WebOS. “We were not able to figure out what needs to be done in a closed mobile system,” said Baker. “The system remained the same as it was before the web: two giants and a closed system.”

The Mozilla product development team took several years to reflect on which innovations can transform the web the way the web transforms PCs. One of Baker's guesses is mixed reality. Whether it’s glasses for augmented reality or Pokémon Go on smartphones, Mozilla is actively investing in a future in which digital and real information are intertwined. Baker is also interested in a way to make a smart home a more closed and privacy-oriented system. “I don’t understand why the automation system of your house should be located on the global highway,” she said.

Mozilla is one of many companies that is changing the idea of ​​where data should be stored and what part of it should generally go to the Internet. However, in these areas, Mozilla, apparently, will again have to fight the giants for market share.

Today, most of Mozilla's profit — about $ 435 million in 2018 — comes from several partnerships with search engines paying Mozilla every time Firefox users press Enter in the browser’s search box. Most come from Google, some come from Chinese Baidu and Russian Yandex, as well as from other countries. This means that Mozilla receives most of the money from the same data-collection, hiding content and showing targeted advertising of the monsters with whom she fights for this money.

“When we started, search engine profitability was an ideal option,” Baker said. At the beginning of the 21st century, Google was the only project growing faster than Firefox. It was the best search engine, and his ideas about openness and universal access coincided with the goals of Mozilla regarding the Internet. And now, as Baker says, "they no longer seem to be 100% matching."

Mozilla's financial position is solid - thanks to years of such partnerships - but she is no longer so comfortable with the new policies of data collection, misinformation and other partners.

Mozilla plans to diversify, working on paid subscriptions for services such as VPN or secure storage, hoping to find new ways to generate revenue from a growing number of users willing to pay for a confidentiality guarantee. However, all these ideas do not work as fast as we would like: recently the company dismissed 70 out of about 1,000 employees, and in an appeal to the staff where the changes were described, Baker admitted that the company “underestimated the time it takes to create and release new products profitable. "

Apparently, Mozilla is increasingly convinced that her best chance of saving the Internet is to go beyond her own products. Outside the browser, ad networks, and technology companies in general. The only way to deal with Google, Facebook and other seemingly irresistible tech giants is to change the structure and technology of the Internet itself.

Outside the browser


Shortly after Alan Davidson joined Mozilla as the new vice president of politics in September 2018, he met with the team to understand what it would be better for Mozilla to work on. They plotted: on one axis, the importance of the problem, on the other, how much Mozilla can do on this. The most interesting was the upper right corner - big problems, big opportunities. There were three topics. The first is privacy and security. The second is content and misinformation. The third is network neutrality and Internet access.

Davidson is particularly close to the topic of network neutrality. He worked on this issue for more than ten years, first at Google, and then director of the digital economy under Barack Obama. By 2018, Mozilla and many other companies and organizations were suing the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in an attempt to repeal the “Restoration of Internet Freedom Act,” which essentially eliminated network neutrality in 2017. Mozilla quickly became the lead plaintiff in the process - which then turned into the Mozilla v. FCC process - and had been preparing for months in court in Washington, DC

On February 1, 2019, Davidson and his team gathered in a large hall decorated with wooden panels, and proved their point of view to the three judges. Usually such things go quickly, but in this case everything went a little differently. “Usually you write all sorts of briefs, hundreds of pages, spend thousands of man-hours, and then you get an hour of time to speak,” Davidson said. - And this time we discussed the issue for almost five hours. I’ve never seen anything like it before. ”

Leaving the courtroom squeezed like a lemon and stepping into the snowy streets of Washington, Davidson was not sure how he was feeling. “I don’t want to say that I was optimistic,” he said, although it seemed to him that the two judges were sympathetic to the arguments of Mozilla. He could only wait. And wait.

Usually the court publishes its decision on Tuesdays and Fridays, but does not give clear schedules for certain cases. Therefore, twice a week, someone from the Mozilla team went to court to check if a decision appeared. Meanwhile, the rest of the team was preparing for all the outcomes. Nine month. While one morning on October 1, Tuesday, at the moment when Davidson was still driving to the office, "my phone suddenly just started to burst."

From Mozilla’s point of view, the decision was mixed. The court did not set aside the FCC ruling, but allowed individual states to adopt their rules on network neutrality, which, according to Davidson, will happen soon. “A year ago,” said Davidson, “we thought we would have a more serious opportunity in Washington,” in order to help pass a federal privacy law. “However, things did not go as we hoped.” Instead, he focused on government programs in Kenya, India, and elsewhere.

Mozilla has only a few employees in Washington, but they are constantly increasing their activity. In January, Mozilla filed a lawsuit from an independent expert on behalf of many small technology companies in a case in which Oracle accused Google of infringing Oracle’s copyright on Android. The Supreme Court hearing is scheduled for March, and will set critical precedents for ownership and management of the code. In the report, Jason Schulz, a New York law professor and Mozilla consultant, wrote that “competition and innovation are at the core of the healthy Internet and the software development field that feeds it.” He said the court should side with Google.

At the same time, Mozilla is trying to help remake some of the underlying technologies of the Internet. She is working to implement a new protocol, DNS over HTTPS, or DoH, which makes it difficult for providers to track user activity. This attempt earned Mozilla the title of “Internet villain” from a group of Internet service providers from Britain, although they later canceled this nomination. Mozilla was one of the first to join the battle to encrypt the entire web via HTTPS, and today is in the forefront of DoH supporters.

This work, like many other company initiatives that prioritize privacy, is gaining popularity in the industry. Google is running several Chrome related projects, and announced its intention to eliminate third-party cookies designed to track users - although it has not gone as far as Firefox, which blocked them completely. Microsoft’s new Edge browser and Apple’s Safari browser provide powerful default anti-tracking capabilities. Following Mozilla, Google began to block annoying pop-ups. Browser developers everywhere make the web a little safer.

All of this is good news for Mozilla, but with a big “but”: every new Edge or Safari user who thinks about their privacy ceases to be a Firefox user. Baker, like many other Firefox employees, insists that this is normal. Mozilla's work, its mission, its manifest has always been more than browsers. In addition, by the time these browsers fix, completely new Internet segments will appear - voice assistants, AI interfaces, mixed reality platforms - and they will also need their champion of openness and humanity. “We have our manifesto,” said Baker. “After all, we will never be able to fully fulfill it and end it, right?” And even if they could, then in a week something new would appear. ”

The manifest will change again. The internet will change again. Mozilla is simply trying to guarantee that it will still exist in order to continue its struggle.

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