My main issue with the people running Mozilla is that they have wasted vast sums of money on executive salaries and their half baked notions of new initiatives the company should take up (and later abandon) that don't involve building web browsers, email clients, or supporting development tools.
"...the anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless..."
... wasn't completely unreasonable.
Firefox seems to needlessly introduce features I barely need. Check their new release, 140.0
They introduced a toggle in the address bar to show the window title. Who tf is asking for this?
This browser just needs to be as simple as it can, without all this feature bloat.
Bookmarks are for long term storage. In some sense it is more like Stared History, something may be we need to return in the far future for reference. If browser have a function where it would record everything I read, bookmark would be stared piece of information where I think it is important.
Tabs Opened are reading list or To-do list. 30 Tabs on Toothbrush because I haven't decided which one to buy. Another 30 Tab on "each" different items which I planned to buy. 50 Tabs on HN because I haven't had time to read it yet. Sometimes I opened them when I visit HN front page and read it later. I must admit about 200 tabs wouldn't be needed if I am at 200K+ salary I just buy the top range without thinking. But I am frugal. Shopping on Amazon Prime, another 50 tabs.
SideBar Tabs doesn't work for me. Mostly because the Desktop web isn't designed for squashed layout. I would imagine it would work much better if I am on a 21:9 ultra wide monitor. But I haven't had the luxury to test it out.
> His tab bar is composed of only barely recognizable icons
I assume he is on Chrome? Because Firefox doesn't squeeze out the Tabs to Fav icons only.
... Are you still on an old 4:3 screen? Standard 1080p is wide enough, if a bit short. I tend to do half-width and full-height on a 4k screen, with a tab sidebar.
It's just annoying that firefox took away the original tree style tab's ability to hide the main tab bar...
Is his desk clean?
Is he strong enough to lift a feather duster and whip the vacuum cleaner around?
Having a mountain of tabs open is the equivalent of not putting your tools away, keeping your desk tidy or keeping your house clean.
People that get stuff done tend to be those that keep things tidy. Millions of tabs open might give the impression of 'genius at work', but do the deliverables get delivered?
This might not be a popular opinion, however, after having to tidy up my dad's estate (he never put tools away and his computer had billions of tabs open), I have formed my own conclusions on this.
The comparison doesn't really hold. This is not like an untidy workbench. Modern browsers don't incur a significant penalty for having hundreds or even thousands of tabs. There are workflows that benefit from Never Closing, and I'm glad to see browsers now don't turn into a nipple bar to expose me.
Indeed after years and dozens of times where someone looks over my shoulder to see many tabs and abandons our topic to engage in Shame Time, I am fully innoculated to their barbs and feel it says more about the person pointing than myself. I manage to engage in a world with noise. Some people can't. The worst of them reach for grand overarching conclusions, as you have done here.
I also sometimes leave the evening dishes for the morning cleaning session.
I have recently learned a lot about highly effective people and tidiness is a common trait, even with browser tabs.
For most of my life I have been working with far too many tabs open, however, I do have this habit of bookmarking all tabs monthly, to then go to about twenty tabs across (the forever tabs) to then 'close all tabs to the right'.
You would be amazed at how few of those 'vital' tabs get reopened.
Each of them is a promise to one's future self to do something or read something, and rarely does one's future self do that.
I just don't see open tabs as burdensome, any more than my Steam backlog. If I get to them I do, if I don't, I don't. I also don't defrag my SSD and when I reboot my RAM starts fresh.
Tidiness and entropy are always at tension, and it's often best to let the balance be.
Not my experience at all.
The consistent failure of bookmark managers is notable, doesn't matter if they are pure web-based or implemented as browser extensions the story is always that they're a "roach motel", somebody put in 30,000 bookmarks and realizes a few years later they didn't look back at them once.
A counter-example is my Fraxinus bookmark manager/personal webcrawler/image sorter that I've been running for about 15 months and probably accumulated about 1 million images (was 700k last I looked) I look at images from it every day. The backlog of image galleries in the primary classification queue is about 1000 and I dunno, I could probably put "bigtags" [1] on another 1500 galleries but I don't feel like I have to, it's not like I don't have enough content already.
I wish I had some consistent and simple way to export both bookmarks and history into all my devices so I could feed them into my AI, make them portable, etc.
[1] tags engineered to work with automated classification, namely it is possible for tags to be positive/indeterminate/negative
How do you feel about the fact that the author (of the web page) gets to decide whether a link opens in a new tab?
Point is that I ignore tabs unless I'm alternating between 2 tabs or a need a placeholder for a few minutes. If arbitrary web sites could add to my the list of bookmarks kept by my browser, I'd ignore that list, too.
You've discovered the source of many-o-wars throughout human history.
Thankfully Firefox tabs likely won't bring that 'round.
Thunderbird filter function understand what I want when searching old emails. If you search on an email and selects the one you are interested, and then remove the search, it will automatic scroll the navigation to that date and keep the selected email on view.
Depending of the computer and phone, it might be the same thing in Firefox or Chrome.
Even on Android, despite that chrome updates in the last years made it more sluggish and buggy to have lots of tabs than it used to be like 5 years ago.
I can't understand how Google/chrome team might be so incompetent, but often reopening the browser app in android, some times are overwritten or shifted in position. Very annoying.
This perfectly encapsulates the Mozilla position. Every possible move makes people complain.
Actually a lot of people. For example on a Mac you can't see the window title except the first word or two in the tab.
It's actually not that unusual for the browser to run in a system without window controls.
(I know macs are hard to use, but work requires one, so can't be helped.)
The title already addresses individuals with serious personal dysfunction.
Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up
Maybe the EU can buy it and maintain the browser as a critical piece of infrastructure, the same way roads etc are.
Roads are also a model of corruption and inefficiency, fully captured by private actors (in Europe, Vinci etc). And I think there's no way around it past some size, but that might not be the direction we wish for Firefox.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/construction-company...
That's true, but I'm still going to blame the EU. The nag screens were absolutely a predictable response, and if the regulators didn't spend half an hour thinking about unscrupulous data marketers would react to the regulations, then they are bad at their jobs. And even after that, they've had years to fix the regulations and haven't done so.
Thank you but I don’t think the EU is a good steward. Look how much it spent in funding startups across Europe, and what little we have for it. Look at the decision-making in the EU stack.
Sweden or the Netherlands should buy it. The EU, no.
Microsoft has advertised OneDrive and other products with scare prompts in those toast notifications.
This despite me never having used the Xbox or windows gaming apps and actually having uninstalled them only for an update to decide it should reinstalled
(This was the state as of a couple years ago, I don't know if there's been further developments since)
I used to cheer for Google and its approach to customers, employees, and the world we live in. That ship has sailed long time ago, now its another greedy global mega corporation with thin veneer of 'we are good guys' (apple is similar but in a different way).
Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc, on iOS all use Webkit because of the platform rules. The EU forced them to open up in Europe, but you're not really using Firefox on your iPhone.
Just pointing it out as it's not the same as using Firefox on the desktop or Android.
Both Firefox and Chrome are great browsers, end stop.
But most articles on HN about Chrome start with glowing praise.
And most articles on HN about Firefox start with "What's wrong with FF" and condescention.
I'm past the point of thinking that this is actually reflective about the browsers and their organizations.
Chrome is actively ending ad block support in its plugins. Its CEO is actively engaging in the political process. Firefox has always had a messy relationship with advertising, in which it generally tries to walk the line between reality and ideology. There are pros and cons to both products, depending on what you care about. The fact that articles on each browser so consistently fall into the same pattern does not seem reflective of the actual products themselves.
I think the difference is down to marketing.
Chrome is for all intents and purposes, open source. Yes, there is 0.000001% that's not. It's hard to argue that tiny portion is the difference.
> Chrome is actively ending ad block support in its plugins.
Chrome has not ended ad blocking - I'm using ublock lite and ads are blocked.
> As I reported back in 2023, the Servo browser engine is doing well. Early this year, its own figures show strong continued upticks in interest since Igalia took over development. You guessed it – Mozilla also gave Servo the boot in 2020.
You don't need to develop a new programming language to develop a decent browser engine. Maybe it would be nice, and maybe it could be better, but do you really have the resources to go off on such a tangent? Clearly the answer was no.
> 2020 is the same year Cathay Capital invested $50 million into KaiOStech, saying it would help bring the next billion people online. As The Register reported in 2018, KaiOS is Boot2Gecko, Mozilla's FirefoxOS rebranded. Mozilla killed its own version in 2015.
Calling it "FirefoxOS" was a mistake, but the idea wasn't all too bad. The rendering in HTML/CSS was a good idea, Java after all have Java Swing/JavaFX and that worked well, but I wouldn't have forced all of the apps to also be JS. I think it will be the future equivalent of an OS where all apps must be Adobe Flash. The rendering should have all been done in HTML/CSS, with the backend being any language of choice running in a tiny container.
I think Mozilla need to make things that do one thing well, and they also need to get better at developing MVPs that test the waters before pouring in years and millions into it.
Thank You!
Just one additional suggestion: Stop throwing plug-in developers under the bus!
p.s. I'm writing this in seamonkey... and still pine for NPAPI 8-(
I hope this is some kind of sarcastic take I am not getting. What a weird thing to stand for.
It exemplifies why beneficial change is so hard sometimes. The loudest voice in the room can go "here are the problems", we can all nod along in agreement, and then "and here's what we should do" … and it's just out there. I've seen this happen numerous times — borderline continuously — in politics.
Even ealier in the article, they (rightly, IMO) skewer Mozilla for laying off the Rust and Servo teams, but then TFA utterly undercuts its own thesis with,
> It shouldn't be trying to capitalize on [projects such as Rust or Servo].
What? What's the point of Rust, or Servo, then, if not to develop a better Firefox?
> Did you know there's already a special developer's edition? No web designer is building on Firefox first any more. We're lucky if they even test on it. All the functionality attached to Firefox's "Browser tools" sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer's edition.
Though, it would be more plain, if they wrote "could" instead of "should".
Dev tools are part of all browsers. Even Safari, which tries to keep things very simple, ships dev tools on the stable version. I really don't see the point in removing them.
They are very good to have available to everyone.
The thinking is that users are a danger to themselves and will be tricked by threat actors to add some CA cert to the trust store, paste commands into the js console, or download and sideload malicious extensions no matter what controls are in place so therefore these possibilities must be removed.
I talked about this leak and they kept gaslighting me like it didn't exist, Firefox at one point was taking 24 gbs of ram on my pc. (It did)
Another issue, Firefox Nighly, I 100% understand that it's an early bird preview and all that, but they would literally brick your browser whenever they wanted you to force to update it... what? I complain and they say "then don't use nighly", like brother, I understand that, I completely understand to use stable for stability, but there is no reason to FORCEFULLY brick a user's browser whenever you release an update, just have a popup and if they WANT TO they restart at the moment if not at the next restart period... and if you REALLY need for some critical issue you can have a flag with the update that forces a bricking but is only used in extremely important scenarios.
The amount of mismanagement at Mozilla is incredible really, I was a die hard Firefox user, I remember opening my youtube channel trying to right click on a background and not being able to copy the url/view image with chrome back in the day, that was when I realized that Google would force "its" web standards so I decided to go all in on Firefox, yet now I'm back on a chromium browser because Mozilla has completely destroyed the browser I loved, even worse now with all the weird privacy invasive stuff they've added in.
I truly hope ladybird browser is successful.
It's still a great browser, though. A bigger problem is that the web is now a mono-culture of Chrome/Chromium. Many sites don't work 100% on Firefox.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google - Mozilla should not monetize Firefox - Mozilla should only focus on Firefox - Mozilla should develop cool research projects - Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business - Mozilla should have a salary cap and expect executives to treat it like a passion project
Some of these goals are opposite ends of the same slider, so it's not possible to maximize both. Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. For example, my understanding is that while salaries are quite decent, they tend to be below what Apple and Google will offer for similar roles.
Maybe it's seen as waffling whenever they shift these sliders, and maybe that's a fair criticism. But nobody else seems to be able to put together a clear and realistic alternative plan. Most of them pick and choose contradictory goals, other plans like Zawinski's are at least clear, but too radical for those who still want revenue to pay developers or to be able to watch Netflix in their browser.
Like, what is there even to say but constantly complain about that.
Mozilla Foundation never was the Firefox Development Foundation, as much as some of us want it to be. Wikimedia never was the Wikipedia Development and Operations Foundation. If you dislike that, donate to entities with narrower goals (I personally prefer directing money towards OSM and KDE for example)
Sure, I can become the chairman of Turtle saving international and change our charter to prioritize feeding hotdogs to hungry Somalis, but I am still doing an ideological disservice to the grassroots initiative that built the foundation and created the position for me to be sitting on, no?
Also, this seems to me extremely fragile when situations are reversed, say that an outright awful organization like an international petrol company gets a new mission statement. Should all they did before and after that be forgiven because their stated goals say otherwise?
I personally see this as little less than a ground truth, but perhaps there is some way that stated goals stand above all regardless.
EDIT: I do see how you make a very good point when you're looking mostly from the present towards the future, though.
At least for Wikimedia... running Wikipedia itself isn't expensive, they're not running it as a resume-driven-development project in some hyperscaler that brings associated costs, they run bare metal servers to this day (and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup).
Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.
Bad news.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/404231/we-re-finall...
but then why do they constantly run banners implying that Wikipedia will shut down if I don't donate right now?
In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
You said that the Wikimedia Foundation's core mission is to basically do good things. Their core goal is not to keep Wikipedia running (as most people believe).
Wikimedia runs very prominent banner ads all the time on Wikipedia, saying that they need money to keep Wikipedia running, and that they're a small team that depends on community funding to keep Wikipedia running, and they can't do it without you, and please please please donate by this date. I think it is very reasonable for your average Wikipedia user to believe the following, thanks to how Wikimedia advertises:
* Wikimedia is the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia. They're basically the same thing, since Wikimedia's goal is running Wikipedia.
* Wikipedia is run by a small team
* Wikipedia is heavily reliant on donations from normal people
* Wikipedia needs money all the time. I know this because they're constantly running big highlighted banner ads urgently asking for money before $DATE
If what you said is true, and Wikimedia's core mission is not in fact, to preserve Wikipedia, then they're engaging in deceptive advertising. They're giving the impression that they need money right now to keep Wikipedia's funding source secure, but in reality, their goal is much broader than just Wikipedia. I think it's reasonable to assume that Wikipedia's funding could be much more secure if the Wikimedia Foundation solely focused on running Wikipedia. In other words, if they stopped spending on $NOT_WIKIPEDIA_REL_COST they would be fine.
What does this have to do with capitalism or $ENTITY using pictures of starving African children?
> In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
I want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your words. Are you saying that it's okay for Wikimedia to engage in knowingly deceptive advertising because otherwise poor countries won't be able to get their economy running?
Are we agreeing that they're knowingly being deceptive, and that they wouldn't need to be deceptive if they just focused on Wikipedia? And we're disagreeing on whether that deception is moral or immoral?
To show that, thanks to capitalism, deception has become the norm in advertising (of all kind, frankly), and either you go along and play the game, or you go six feet under. It's immoral, sure, but I'd much more prefer to see the system itself fixed than to only nab random offenders.
> I want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your words. Are you saying that it's okay for Wikimedia to engage in knowingly deceptive advertising because otherwise poor countries won't be able to get their economy running?
No. The part with the poor countries refers to that I don't want to see any kind of fundraiser stuff that should be a government's job, and on top of that I disdain many of the charity campaigns relating to Africa because the "aid" we gave utterly crushed the local agricultural and textile industry, sending off many countries into a disastrous dependency loop - if you want to read more on that, look up "mitumba".
No they aren't. People just want a good product that's free from bloat and doesn't change the UI every week, interrupting you when you open it to advertise some sponsored affiliate websites on the home page (Otto and Adidas in my case) or new features I never asked for and will never use like Pocket or the VPN.
The org and leadership should also focus their funds on the technical development of the product itself, instead on social and political activism and virtue signaling since I don't want lectures form my products.
Basically, Mozilla just needs to "PUT THE FRIES IN THE BAG" and everyone would be happy, and even throw in a few bucks every now and then as a gesture of appreciation and good will.
But Mozilla lost users by doing the exact opposite of that, being drunk on the Google funded gravy train and knowledge that they're untouchable, being only thing preventing Chrome being considered a monopoly by regulators.
So good riddance from me, you reap what you sow, RIP BOZO, I can't support a bad product run by incompetent people just on idealism alone, it actually needs to be technically superior first and foremost.
What's this business strategy called?
I call it "not shooting yourself in the foot". Mozilla management should try it.
Like I said, Mozilla can win by "putting the fries in the bag". Nobody switched from Chrome to Firefox because they had Pocket or some VPN or they had affiliate websites on the home page. On the contrary.
Firefox has features that people "need" but they only know they want it because they already use it and they won't switch away from Firefox unless whatever they'd switch to has the same feature.
Ex: I will never switch away to another browser unless it has extensions that allow you to group tabs and "store them in the background" like you can with Firefox's Simple Tab Groups. Likewise I know people who won't switch to a manifest v3 browser because they don't want their adblock crippled.
TLDR: Your requirements are "whatever I currently use but better". You will never win users by trying to beat a better funded and better staffed project at that. Instead you have to try to do new things and discover what can make your project stand out.
None of the new features FF introduced did I ever need, and judging by its market share I am not alone. FF just focuses on useless features that nobody asked for. If you asked for those feature, congrats, you're part of the 0,001% userbase, too bad that's irrelevant. Bad leadership. You can defend FF all you want but the market share speaks for itself.
They had unlimited money from Google and they squandered it. That's like playing a game with cheat codes and coming in last every time. Mozilla leadership should resign and go flip burghers at McDs instead as they're shit at their tech jobs.
Mozilla had to just not fuck with the UI, features and put ads, and it would have been as easy win.
They let you block ads and respect your privacy? Or are you insisting on behalf of Mozilla's user base that those are not things being requested?
I would go so far as to say that respecting privacy has been one of the biggest requests from critics of Mozilla, one of the biggest senses of violation, and that replicating Chrome's abandonment of privacy is, therefore, one of the bigger examples of a contradictory request.
Google also doesn't make money from Chrome directly, yet that's what is asked of Mozilla. So how do they do what Chrome does while simultaneously fulfill the user request to leverage their browser to make money?
>Nobody switched from Chrome to Firefox because they had Pocket or some VPN or they had affiliate websites on the home page
Look up the history of Firefox market share and tell me if you can find a cause and effect relationship between market share change and any particular side bet. Because I can't find any, with one exception I'll get to in a second. Most of the side bets people complain about came in after Chrome already rose to dominance and had nothing to do with the change in market share. If words mean things, that should matter when people make this argument, but I feel like people forgot they're supposed to actually make real arguments to back these claims up.
The only exception I can find is Firefox OS, which, again, highlights the contradiction between wanting Mozilla to diversify its offerings but criticizing them when they do. It was actually one of their better big picture vision ideas in my estimation and was given favorable gloss in the article we're all talking about. But you can argue it siphoned away resources, and many people do.
So I think the criticisms are pretty all over the map, and the article linked here is actually one the best pieces I've seen that strikes the right balance.
I may be in the minority here but I’d be fine with them trying to push SaaS add-ons like a VPN if they would stop moving UI elements around.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google.
- Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.
- Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox.
- Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.
- Mozilla should be well run.
- Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.
This is a company that has repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding. They defined themselves as the advocate for users on the web, then started selling user data and lied about it. Sure there’s a grey area, but Mozilla is far from it.
I don't claim to know Mozilla's internal workings, but my wife works for an education-space 501c3, and there are very strict rules about how they can fundraise, how they can spend money that's been donated, etc. I'm sure Mozilla Foundation is large enough to manage this stuff, but things like per-project bank accounts and tax records are still overhead they would have to deal with. I know one of their (my wife's org's) thorniest areas is around what money can be spent on non-"core mission" expenses.
The problem is, when searching for high-level executives, you're not competing against other NGOs, you're competing with the wide free market - and salaries there are, frankly, out of control and have been so for decades [1]. Either Mozilla Foundation plays the dirty game just like everyone else does, or they go out of business.
It's the system that's broken at a fundamental level, not individual actors.
For a certain definition of "reasonably well", that is.
And often enough, big money is at play, it's just hidden from the public eye - just look how much money IBM, RedHat, Google, Meta and other very large players spend on salaries for kernel and other OSS developers - and their managers in turn are paid the usual ridiculous executive salaries. That just doesn't show up on any public finance report.
How does "failing to attract an executive whose primary differentiating characteristic is demanding exorbitant amounts of money" lead to them going out of business?
And then you get articles like these complaining about Mozilla re-selling a VPN service.
(I agree with your points.)
Not only that, but their competitors are also selling - or at the very least promoting - VPN services.
Points 1 to 3 also seem very difficult to reconcile. If they need to develop revenue independent of Google, and they need to focus mainly on Firefox, then at some stage they need to monetise other aspects of the browser. How do they do that in a way that is respectful to its users? What is the way for Mozilla to develop a new revenue stream, via Firefox (their main focus), that everyone is happy with?
Points 5 and 6 are too vague, I don't see how they could ever objectively be measured against those principles (other than by looking at the other principles).
All of this is to say that they can't win. They launch new products to try and make money, they are selling out and abandoning their core mission. They try instead to make money from their main product, they are selling out and betraying their users. They try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are dumbing it down and letting down their power users. They don't try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are failing to stay relevant.
Remember when Mitchell Baker was the problem?
I've seen the comments they are talking about, so I don't agree they are twisting anything. Your aspirationally consistent restatement of the case is vague, and the contradictions are specific. Does the existence of the investment fund count as failing to focus on Firefox or succeeding at developing revenue independent of Google? How about the VPN, another potential revenue source?
Is advocating for open web standards (as mentioned in the article as an example of a good thing) a distraction from Firefox (as I've seen commenters here suggest), or respecting users by giving a voice to their users in standards deliberation where their voice would otherwise be excluded?
And how confident are you that your answers are the unique and consistent representation of what users really want, and that I won't be able to quote half a dozen commenters coming to completely different diagnoses of the same questions?
EDIT: For me, my choice of browser is simplified by the fact that I don't trust any chromium browser to keep long-term compatibility with extensions I rely upon, especially uBlock Origin.
- Implying without evidence that the VPN is run at prohibitively massive cost and at the expense of other programs
- Claiming that Mozilla has "run out of money" (they have over $1 billion in assets)
- Overstating costs of Mozilla's dabbling in blockchain (they wrote a paper or two)
- Claiming the CEO pay has crippled Mozilla's ability to work on core browser (it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue)
- Claiming without any mechanism or argument that there's a missing feature Mozilla could have developed that would have restored all their market share
- Related to the above, completely ignoring that Chrome drove market share in its own proactive ways, leveraging its search and Android dominance, rolling out affordable Chromebooks and that these drove the market share more than anything specific to Mozilla
- Firefox has become bloated and slow (Outdated talking point, it was true for a time, but then they did the dang thing and delivered Quantum, which delivered the major advances in speed in stability that everyone asked for)
That's not to say there's no valid criticisms, there are plenty. There seems to be real cause and effect, for instance, on Firefox's investments in FirefoxOS and the ability to invest resources in the browser, and that did happen over a time where market share was lost. And the dabbling in ads risks compromising the soul of their mission in critical ways.
But meanwhile these (above) have all generally been basically misunderstandings or bad arguments with no internal logic, but claimed over and over again in the backwaters of internet comment sections with complete impunity. The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.
I have long suspected that a good chunk of the controversy surrounding Mozilla that I've seen is...let's just call it motivated reasoning.
In a lot of industries, 1% revenue is rather a lot. Many domains have profit margins of 5% or even less; that would be fully 20% of your earnings.
Software development is not "many industries", and Mozilla isn't most software development companies. So it's hard for me to say whether that specific CEO salary is appropriate. But I'd rather see his salary described by earnings, rather than revenue, since revenue by itself could just be churn.
I mean, everyone shits on Wikimedia for ballooning expenses, but at least they figured out crowdfunding.
That's not to say Mozilla can't make any strategic bets. It's just that they have to be both:
1. Complimentary or integral to their flagship browser product, Firefox, and,
2. Have a reasonable path to success
Let's look at Boot2Gecko, or "Firefox OS", through this lens. Firefox needs to be on as many operating systems as possible, including mobile OSes. And it was true that one particular mobile OS vendor was loud and proud in banning Gecko. The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS. This doesn't get Firefox in the hands of more people, but it sure as hell ties up expensive engineer time on building an entirely new platform.
Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.
Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.
The reason why I focus on Firefox is because it's the only power Mozilla has to negotiate with. When Hollywood wanted to be able to use DRM in browser, Mozilla surrendered, almost unconditionally. And they had to, because the answer to "Firefox remains principled and doesn't put DRM in the browser" is "every streaming service tells people to uninstall Firefox".
Compare that to Apple, who was able to singlehandedly block any requirement for baseline video codec support in HTML5 because they didn't want to implement Ogg Theora. That's what being a big player in the browser market gets you.
Furthermore, Zawinski's plan is the only option. Mozilla is out of time, the DOJ is actively attempting to shut off Google's antitrust insurance and that basically spells doom for Mozilla. Hell, Mozilla themselves put out an extremely morally compromised position statement, because selling the search default is the only thing Mozilla managed to make stick. If Mozilla doesn't implement Zawinski's plan, they'll collapse and cease operating.
[0] In practice, just Android. I don't remember if Windows Phone had the same limitations as iOS did, but it's market share was so limited it did not matter.
To me, the motives of the users were always pretty clear and aligned with freedom, privacy and empowering end-users with free software. Then the suits came and reinterpreted it enough that if you look at it from the right angle, which is coincidentally always somewhere up Google's ass, it may align with what they're doing now.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google: true, but it could be in a different form than a search engine deal that effectively pipes all of user's queries to the most agressive advertising spyware syndicate of the world.
- Mozilla should not monetize Firefox: this is true. They can monetize adjacent support services like they did with the VPN and Relay (which I gladly paid for), but not the main product if they want it to be omnipresent.
- Mozilla should only focus on Firefox: strongly disagree. Mozilla should work on TECHNOLOGIES. TFA describes very well how Mozilla produced Rust and Servo, which are clearly more widely used software than Firefox. The difference between those two and Firefox is that they aren't a product to be marketed, they are technologies used in other projects! This makes it pretty easy to gain market share and get a higher user share to sit with the big players. Technologies, unlike products, are however very unappealing to the managerial caste since they need to mature a great deal more. This is a sociological problem. If a well-designed commercial product can be cathedral, a lot of technology projects I've seen people build resemble zen gardens. A midwit paid six figures to do nothing always tends to despise those who, for the same amount of money, tend to a zen-garden-like project with passion and intent. This also aligns somewhat with "Mozilla should develop cool research projects."
- Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business: nah. adjacent services could, but not really. Most successful software companies work off of cloud services and support nowadays. The shipped product is maybe 5% of the extracted value. A non-enshittified browser won't do much better, so I think it better to discard the thought altogether and focus on the free browser, then sell subscriptions to Relay, Pocket, or something else that works well with the free browser.
I guess my main gripe is that I see huge projects like Apache, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, PFSense, Proxmox, etc. Which are huge software projects that thrive by developing technologies. Some like PFSense and Proxmox then provide a product on top of it, but the focus is on the technology. Mozilla turned from a company developing software and technology to a company that's selling a free product and trying to profit from it. And hiring more executives won't bring better tech in.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can't cash in a good product for more than a few months, but you can capitalize on a good technology practically forever. And Mozilla can't seem to understand that software can be either, both, or none of the above, so it's starting to do what their clueless executives are good at: extract value.
Literally zero people have asked for Mozilla to do this to the detriment of Firefox. But this is what we’re getting.
This codebase was underfunded for a very long time! And all rewrites and major refactorings were cancelled!
Nobody embeds Gecko engine anymore. There are good reasons for that!
Looks like Chrome actually had the most recent RCE only requiring someone to click a link.
Also, most recent CVE is a terrible metric.
[0] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
- He’s already built a modestly successful competitor in Brave, so there might not be much incentive for him to jump ship. - It’s possible that bringing him back may risk the ire of the LGBTQ+ community. (His comments against same-sex marriage led to his resignation as CEO of Mozilla back in 2014.)
However, this is just my speculation.
I disagree on that one. Maybe it could have been an option 15-20 years ago, when Firefox was a significant force. But now, if it didn't have DRM, platforms that use DRM would just tell people to use another browser, or a specialized app. And people who are not activists would just switch to "the browser that runs $service", and then you give free reign to whoever controls these browsers, including making the DRM more restrictive and more invading.
DRM is an addon, it lets you do thing that you can't do without (i.e. watching protected content), but it won't affect non-DRM content. You can turn it off if you want, you just won't be able to watch Netflix (or whatever), making it a worse user experience.
If you refuse to support DRM (and therefore denying your users of some content), hoping that it will discourage adoption of DRM by platforms, you have to keep your users captive so that they won't just switch. And considering that Firefox doesn't rely on lock-in: they don't have the means to do so, and it is against the spirit in the first place, they have to offset that by offering something else. And unfortunately, they don't have much to offer besides ideology.
The original sin, if we can call it that, is that Firefox technically lagged behind Chrome: slower, more bugs, less secure,... Having to accept DRM, as well as anything Google decided was standard is a consequence of that.
That's why I had high hopes with Servo. It had the potential to make Firefox a "better browser", giving them some weight when deciding not to support some anti-feature, but they lost it.
They also lost an opportunity on mobile by not supporting extensions for too long, and generally, for not being taken seriously. Why did it take them so long to support DNS-over-HTTPS for instance?
Now, they have an opportunity regarding ad-blocking, I don't know how they are going to waste that one, but knowing them, they are probably going to manage it.
The original sin, if we can call it that, is that Firefox technically lagged behind Chrome: slower, more bugs, less secure
To give your an example, here is the bug that made me switch to Chrome: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429
May seem trivial, but that's with bugs like these that you lose users. I wanted my mouse to zoom, my mouse didn't zoom on Firefox (and only on Firefox), I tried Chrome, it worked, found no (technical) downside, it was faster, so I stayed with Chrome. I continued using Firefox on another PC, and I saw a lot more crashes, slowdowns, etc... on Firefox, also, a single tab could crash the entire browser (it was before Electrolysis and Quantum). Website incompatibility wasn't actually that much of a problem, it mostly affected corporate intranets, which were equal part Chrome-only and IE-only during that time.
Things have improved on the Firefox side (Quantum!), and I don't use that mouse anymore, so I am back on Firefox for most part, the ad-blocking thing pushed me back, hoping that they don't to anything crazy to push me away like they did before.
I wonder what the people making these videos are thinking. They know what people think of them, if they actually watch them before taking the usually obvious questionnaire that follows (hint: the answer is always "talk to your manager").
It reminds me of the time we took an electrical certification that we honestly didn't need but legally, we had to. It was in person, and the guy was actually great, and I think it is in a good part because he knew his place. He quickly got passed the regulatory aspects, then spent the rest of the time explaining stuff about house wiring, how breakers work, told us some entertaining (if sometimes a little morbid) stories and shown videos about electrical accidents. So it was maybe 10% what we were supposed to be for and 90% general information we could make use of in our daily life, all while keeping things entertaining.
What the union should do instead is to create a funding structure that had as it's mission to identify and financially support groups that develop open source software which is critical to both the people and companies that are based in the EU. Make it a requirement that the software be accessible, free and open source.
All these mega-rich US tech entrepreneurs can finance Firefox development. They have all the capital. The EU isn't a charity.
Brave: love the mission/execution, don't care for Chrome
Arc: interesting idea, but ultimately removed too much of the things I need in exchange for things I might use, but don't need
Orion: Firefox extensions (even on iOS!) + native performance? Love it, but it crashes all the time and the extensions' compatibility comes and goes
Safari: I don't mind paying for software, but paying for extensions that will probably disappear in 6 months is a pass
I've recently settled on the Zen Firefox flavor: It brings a lot of what Arc, custom Firefox themes aim for in a stable package, while maintaining full compatibility with all the Firefox extensions I use. The only issue I still experience is the occasional "this site only works on Chrome".
Perhaps you should name and shame.
They are extracting millions while consistently fucking up any hopes of a future for Firefox. Fuck Mozilla, Fuck those Parasites and fuck all the Bootlickers here making excuses for them.
>Firefox is in a bit of a mess – but, seriously, not such a bad mess. You're still better off with it – or one of its forks, because this is FOSS – than pretty much any of the alternatives.
Some of the punches landed here, e.g. axing Servo, are pretty devastating. Others, "why not buy an adblocker" (huh? they allow it via extensions which has been a longstanding tradition in the browser space), seem like non sequiturs. But the point remains:
>Like we said, don't blame the app. You're still better off with Firefox or a fork such as Waterfox. Chrome even snoops on you when in incognito mode, and as we warned you, Google removed the APIs ad-blocker extensions used. You still get better ad-blocking in Firefox.
Yes, exactly! It's a Two Things Can Be True situation.
If they're still developing the dev tools (which I'd argue they need to if they want any companies to support the browser), then what's there to gain by removing it from the regular build? I don't get it.
they do whatever is needed to increase their own compensation, eventually killing the host, at which point they move on
the nominet drama a few years back ([1]) is one of the few cases where they were forcibly removed (due to its unique structure)
[1]: https://openuk.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/The-Stack_Openi...
- Right click context menu cleanup - I don't need Inspect Accessibility Properties, Email image, Set image as desktop background etc. - Disable telemetry - Minimal theme - Clean up search engines - Disable pocket, top sites, ads, what's new, search suggest - Disable tab groups, container, hover preview - Disable recommended extensions
These can all be done through config or userChrome.css.
After that, I install three extensions - uBlock, skip redirect, I don't care about cookies.
I have never cared about signing into browser or syncing bookmarks. All I want is a minimal browser that doesn't bother me on each run.
incomingpain•11h ago
I've been done with firefox for many years.
Librewolf, firefox fork, is the way to go; available on flathub. Obviously Brave still being main browser.
Mozilla went wrong long ago. They publicly went political and followed through with the firings. They have blogs from the ceo straight up calling for political censorship.
Even more odd, it was mostly just US politics which stands out to non-americans. They are focused on everything except the browser and so it was inevitable to decline.
Bender•10h ago
karambanoonoo•6h ago
Bender•6h ago
GuinansEyebrows•8h ago
got any links?
zamadatix•8h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29884342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690941
It looks like the blog post was taken down several months later, so I had to pull this copy to see what it was https://web.archive.org/web/20210108192114/https://blog.mozi...
happymellon•7h ago
> Transparency on advertisers
Sounds good.
> Transparency on "algorithms"
Also sounds good.
> Improve algorithms to highlight facts over fiction
Considering he isn't calling for anyone to be censored, only promote facts, I don't see much issue.
zamadatix•7h ago
saubeidl•6h ago
ozgrakkurt•6h ago
Also basically no one wants to see ads, it is functionally useless, you can just go search for the thing you want to buy.
Censoring someone because you think they are harmful isn’t similar to this. You can develop a trump-blocker extension but having this enabled on default in a browser like chrome would be obvious censorship
zamadatix•5h ago
The censorship problems in the above are in the call to continue silencing/removals of political actors from discussion platforms and in pushing for centralized platforms to decide which political statements are factual. If you go an abstraction layer above that it gets too generic to universally claim as for censorship and if you go an abstraction layer below that it most often becomes an individual's choice.
GuinansEyebrows•5h ago
this seems like an interesting, strongly-principled, almost legalistically pedantic twisting of intent - not that i can really claim to know her intent. what you call censorship can be reasonably understood as a cry against abuses of freedom of speech.
there are very clearly bad actors who profit from the abuse of freedom of speech, who argue in bad faith and spread misinformation in order to benefit themselves at all of our expense. not all speech is valuable, and a lot of it is harmful.
i'm not saying i have an answer, but a blind devotion to the principle of free speech (or any principle, really) necessarily comes with blind spots that people more cynical than you or me are capable of (and demonstrably very willing to) exploit. this world sucks.
zamadatix•5h ago
To me the main problem with the blog post was less the specific calls to action but the complete distraction from core technology, such as Firefox, Mozilla should have been focusing more on at the time. This is likely why the blog post ended up getting pulled - it served as a distracted from the mission more than it made any progress for it.
GuinansEyebrows•3h ago
happymellon•3h ago
guywithahat•7h ago
saubeidl•6h ago
Everything is run by ideology, since that's how ideology operates.
RedComet•6h ago