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Watching the whole thing unfold has been heartbreaking. Most mozillians do not support this. This Twitter thread is one insight into it: https://twitter.com/ste

Watching the whole thing unfold has been heartbreaking. Most mozillians do not support this. This Twitter thread is one insight into it: https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/941709048529014784 https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/941709048529014784 Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users, and they pull this crap right after. They absolutely should know better. They should have known better with Pocket; they should have learned from Pocket. "Fork it" is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it's with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they're an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them. There's tons of Firefox forks, none of them get the point though, you might as well use Chromium. If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's). Mozilla's role goes beyond the web browser as well. Its mission was to "keep the web open", "keep the web free". This goal was reflected in projects such as Firefox OS, Hello and Persona (and to some extent, Thunderbird)... but atrocious management made those projects a waste of time and money. It's not Firefox you need to fork, it's Mozilla.

Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
The trouble is, it costs money (or a lot of time from talented people) to support a project the size of a browser. I would imagine getting some funding helps keep things afloat. You even say, "maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's)". I suppose we should expect the goodwill of corporate sponsorship, but this relationship can quickly turn into the "sponsor" asking for things in exchange for donations. This situation exposes a weakness and requires the recognition of the fragility of the open source model (at least for larger-scale projects). We've seen weird corporate-backed things in NPM projects before. It happens, but what is the better alternative? How do we prevent it? Most corporations only support open source projects out of self-interest: that is, they have a stake in seeing a particular project succeed because their stack may depend on the software.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  Everyone keeps coming with the money problem. But... how about they maintain a browser, with browser functions only? No PDF-JS, no Pocket, no Hello, etc. Just core browser functions and features. Yes, it might mean scaling back, which is one of the swear words in a growth-oriented belief, but that way, the money should be enough - it was enough for a decade, what changed?
  - baq 9y ago
    With all due respect, rendering PDFs is something I consider core browser functionality. Pocket, most certainly not, though it's nice I suppose. Hello was... I don't know what it was. Checking if the market is there at all? Not something I expected to be in a browser.
    - crankylinuxuser 9y ago
      pdf.js seems to work quite nicely. Seems that's no different than opening with external program, or using a plugin, or using an extension. After all,those things can be updated, whereas the browser should have more core functionality that enable new document types to being opened.
      - garaetjjte 9y ago
        pdf.js performance is horrible, and now without NPAPI it is impossible to view PDF in firefox tab.
        amluto 9y ago
        PDF.js performs quite well for me and works fine in tabs. It has always been a better experience for me than PDFium, for example.
    - hedora 9y ago
      I never understood why anyone wanted their browser to render pdfs. PDF.js is slow, buggy, and can’t edit documents. Every major OS ships with a better PDF reader, and there are still better open source PDF readers available on all major platforms.
misnome 9y ago
> Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users This was the new interface, right? I just saw this the other day and though it looked pretty good; was actually considering a trial switch back (after moving to chrome years ago, when a single bad tab would take down the entire browser). That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me. I’m of the view that getting (most) people to consider switching browsers only comes every few years and requires a very large incentive; “We’ve fixed that one incremental problem” isn’t enough. A complete revamp would do it, but takes time to permeate into conciousness. And in the meantime they do this. “Squandered goodwill” seems to be spot-on.
- k__ 9y ago
  It was quantum. Firefox got faster than Chrome with it.
- codewithcheese 9y ago
  update your conciousness because a complete revamp is what happened. what mozilla did was stupid but its nothing compared to being tracked by google.
- clairity 9y ago
  > "That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me." so that's why you stick with chrome, a browser designed to send all your browsing habits straight to google, the largest online advertising company and commercial tracker in the world?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Chrome may be what you described, but Chromium is pretty reasonable.
    - hedora 9y ago
      The open source version of android used to be reasonable too. How long will that be true of Chromium without open source alternatives?
eberkund 9y ago
> needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's) You touch on an interesting point, maybe Firefox should be soliciting donations from governments who are concerned about the US surveillance state instead of relying so heavily on search ad revenue and being forced to turn to things like this to make a buck.
- fnl 9y ago
  No offense, but "like, China?" I don't see how involving government(s) and therefore politicising the whole thing is going to make the situation any better. Even if it were support from a government you (but others not) would find acceptable.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    TOR is funded by the government, among others (others including Mozilla, heh). https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en Although they should probably not be in charge of the actual development, is it really crazy to think that Firefox could be funded by governments? At some point it is a public service.
carussell 9y ago
It's surprising that people are surprised by these things. Mozilla is not on a slippery slope. That was true years ago, but it proceeded unmitigated. By now, though, these things are the natural result of that decay. There's a lot of power in branding, apparently. People keep saying things like, "Mozilla is a good company at heart", and I'm at a loss. Mozilla 2017 is nothing like the Mozilla that existed when the Foundation was established, or when the Mozilla Manifesto was adopted. Tons of key people left in a few different waves: first when Google pulled them off the project to go build Chrome, and then lots more who trickled out over the years during and after the Kovacs/FirefoxOS era. What remains is (a derivative of) the codebase + the name "Mozilla" + and, like, Mitchell. But that's it. Keep calling it the same thing, though, and somehow folks act like we're talking about the same thing. Mozilla imploded—or rather, got Netscapified—years ago. To believe that Mozilla or Firefox is your old friend who's still helping you fight the good fight is incredibly naive and can only come from someone who hasn't actually been paying attention and is easily fooled by (trivially contradicted) surface-level details (like a name). I mean, it's not even like some philosophically tricky ship-of-Theseus problem. Mozilla is dead, people, and this isn't news.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Sorry but where's your evidence? Mozilla is still today doing incredible work. The work on Quantum was extremely forward-thinking in a way that most corporations cannot support; it brought us Rust, which is a fantastic contribution to the ecosystem. Furthermore, Mozilla has always had troubles with judgement and mismanagement, this is not new. The problems that have been surfacing are old problems, they're just getting more severe.
  - electrograv 9y ago
    Evidence? How about the article link we're all commenting on? How is that not enough for you?
    - ripdog 9y ago
      Uh, looking glass was not supported or worked on by the vast majority of the fantastic engineers at mozilla. This was a marketing stunt probably thrown together by a single intern, and greenlighted by an out-of-touch marketing department. The engineers at mozilla are NOT the problem.
agumonkey 9y ago
This is indeed comically sad after the nice Quantum boost. It was a poor taste joke at the wrong time.. Mozilla is gonna regret this.
Silhouette 9y ago
Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users Let's not overstate things. Firefox 57 gained good will from some users. It also seriously annoyed others, both because of the loss of many useful extensions, and because the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time. The one thing Mozilla still had going for them compared to Google or Microsoft was the emphasis on privacy and respecting the user, and yet I've read about several different cases in recent weeks where that trust has been undermined, this being the latest.
- vesak 9y ago
  >because the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time. Really? I haven't experienced a single crash, and I was on nightlies before 57 was released, so I could try Quantum.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    Yes, sadly. I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed on me prior to 57. I've lost count of the number of crashes/hangs since the update, but it's well into double figures by now. Whether it's Firefox itself or the handful of extensions I have installed, I can't tell for sure, but it's much worse here on a Windows box with more extensions installed than a Linux box with just a few. In any case, if the new runtime model is supposed to make things more robust then unfortunately my experience has been quite the opposite.
    - eeks 9y ago
      57 user on OpenBSD here. No extension installed (at least to my knowledge ;)), no crash to report. It has been a pretty smooth experience so far.
- AsyncAwait 9y ago
  > the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time That has not been my experience, so let's not overstate personal anecdotes as facts.
api 9y ago
The business model of the Internet is surveillance and advertising. It's incredibly hard to resist. It seems like there's an infinite amount of money available if you're willing to surveil and sell out your users.
Moru 9y ago
Noone can hate with more fierceness than someone that once loved. If you depend on your users to love you, be careful with their trust.
hedora 9y ago
Is Mozilla strapped for cash or something? I’m happy to donate a bit if it keeps them independent. Google’s behavior with Android/AOSP suggests they’re more than willing to make the open source version of Chrome useless in practice the second there is no viable competition. I don’t see any organization other than Mozilla that can keep them honest.
- baybal2 9y ago
  No, otherwise Mozilla C-Levels would not be getting $500000+ salaries (Google it, it is real) and flying on privately chartered business jets
  - ksk 9y ago
    If you can do the job at a lower salary, you should apply !
    - baybal2 9y ago
      Well, they can't do that job as we all see. The original reason behind them establishing Mozilla Corporation over Mozilla Foundation was that they can keep this practice going while being safe from taxmen reprimanding them for pocketing what is a charity income from tax standpoint. Now, Mozilla Corporation bills Mozilla Foundation for "service offered at a market price" to do its "socially beneficial, free of charge and any expectation of remuneration" activity, which is selling ads.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Figs 9y ago
  > Is Mozilla strapped for cash or something? Nope. According to their financial statement, the Mozilla Foundation had $69M in "cash and cash equivalents" at the end of last year, about $329M in investments, and literally gave away millions of dollars in grant funding. It's not entirely clear to me how the financial interaction works between them, but the privately-held Mozilla Corporation (i.e. the 1000+(!) employee company that actually makes Firefox, and which the Foundation owns as a subsidiary) had over $500M in revenue from their search engine deals... See "State of Mozilla 2016" https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ and also check out the Foundation's financial statement and tax form PDFs on the bottom for more details.
djhworld 9y ago
I really didn't mind the Pocket integration, probably because I'm a Pocket user myself so can't see the problem. This is pretty bad though, I'd say this is worse than the Pocket thing because it's abusing the trust and good will of their users
legohead 9y ago
Firefox 57 has no love from a lot of web developers I know. It broke things that were working just fine before.
- TheRealPomax 9y ago
  Curious what those things are, because all I can think of is workaround that exploited out-of-spec behaviour (and, of course, web extensions, which has been covered to such a degree it's not just a dead horse but a fresh patch of grass by now)
  - fuckyouzilla 9y ago
    1. Telemetry enabled by default. 2. Selling telemetry data about users to evilcorps like google. 3. Ruining interface with project Australis (during the 3.6 > 4.0 update [status bar got removed], tab-bar got degraded). 4. Breaking XPCOM. 5. Implementing a system of stealth add-on installations. The add-ons don't just get installed stealthily, they are also not listed by add-ons manager. 6. Pocket. 7. Using the system of stealth add-on installations to spy ('gather telemetry to improve users browsing experience') on users and adding ads. Adding ads to the start page. Nothing useful ever was deployed via the stealth add-on installation system. 8. Breaking users' preferences they set once. 9. Breaking XUL. Mozilla is now even more malicious than Google. Point 9 is the reason that firefox is dead to me since version 57: I will not update anymore and I'll have to switch my browser to a firefox fork because of that on holidays. Oh, and all those issues - is just what is on the surface, the real problems are way deeper: 1. Mozilla rejects communication with users and developers. 2. Mozilla censors incoming messages. 3. Mozilla has betrayed the trust of its users by betraying its own ideals. 4. I thought Mike Beltzner (aka beltznebooth) was a dumb fucker that took stupid decisions, but turns out - he was the best of management Mozilla ever had: since he stepped away - the browser's degradation accelerated in supersonic speed. 5. Mozilla did too many mistakes and never acknowledged the failure, no conclusions were made, which means that the history to be repeated again and again.
catnaroek 9y ago
> If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's). Perhaps the problem is the fact that the Web is so complex that popular web browsers could only possibly be developed by corporations to begin with.
qbaqbaqba 9y ago
I feel really sorry for Steve and other real developers. Mozilla is not different from any other managers driven corporation. Very sad. I almost wonder if that's an organized action aiming at removing competition. It's too bad to be unintentional.
4bpp 9y ago
> "Fork it" is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it's with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they're an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them. Well, how do you suggest doing this when it appears that the relevant decision-making parts of Mozilla do not answer to anyone "on our side" in any meaningful way? It seems to me that the only solution is to make an organisation with a fundamentally different system of governance. By virtue of institutional inertia, I figure it would be very hard to do this by actually raising a competing project from the ground up and hoping to capture any of Mozilla's market share or developer base (not to mention the amply made elsewhere in this thread point that Mozilla is big and expensive for a reason). The far easier, and quite well-tried, solution is to put financial and social pressure on the current leadership to voluntarily open itself to downstream control. The former may be most easily achieved by having an Iceweasel-style "condom organisation" gain traction - that is, someone who tries their best to replicate all of Mozilla's user-facing I/O (releases, sync servers...) in a timely fashion, systematically acts as a QC layer to strip bad decisions like this or Cliqz and otherwise does not waste developer time on niche interests like classic UIs. For the latter, whatever you may think of the person of the tactic, the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla. Even more cynically, it may be the case that they are the main way anything gets done these days. The (very significant, in my eyes) moral reservations aside, from a result-oriented perspective of what is most useful to reform Mozilla as an organisation, is there any good argument against the "identify a representative set of heads behind this latest measure and call for them" approach?
- racer-v 9y ago
  > the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla. Yes. If anyone wants to do a git bisect to find when the Mozilla Corporation lost its integrity, we can say it was definitely "bad" by the time they forced out Eich in April 2014.
  - mozthrow2017 9y ago
    How about when they implemented DRM in Firefox just roughly a month after Eich was ousted, which was the actual reason for his departure? He was the only one higher up keeping that from happening and they didn't even wait until the body was cold to push that agenda.
bradleyjg 9y ago
> https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/941709048529014784 https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/941709048529014784 This is such a terrible way to make an argument, present a case, or say anything that can't be said in a few dozen words. He has a blog, it's linked right there. I can't understand why people use twitter like this.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  So, the first post in the thread was ~11:30am. The last one was about ~5pm. I basically appended to it during the day, as my thoughts and feelings evolved on an issue. It's not like I completely tossed out all these tweets at once. That said, everyone uses Twitter differently. I tweet a lot. Some people don't. I personally blog when I have a long-form, well thought out thing to say. I tweet whatever is on my brain at a given moment. Twitter is more raw, more personal. This is a raw, personal issue for me.
B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
> Mozilla is a good company Not since the incident.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
I made my warning about Mozilla Corp+Found a week ago, and as I recall, it was not warmly received... by anyone! What a difference a week makes!
BoysenberryPi 9y ago
I like Pocket.
saas_co_de 9y ago
I strong disagree that Mozilla is a good company at heart. They are horribly mismanaged on every level. They have burned hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a second rate browser that has seen its market share collapse. They took hundreds of millions from Google and in exchange unquestioningly supported Google's advertising and surveillance agenda. They have consistently failed to introduce new features that would actually benefit new users. They blame the "standards process" for their lack of innovation and features that benefit users when they know that the standards process is a b.s. game. For profit corporations break standards whenever it benefits them. Firefox is the only browser that follows standards written by Google, Microsoft, and Apple, while the other 3 break them, or force through their own changes whenever it benefits them. Apple blocked 3rd party cookies and Microsoft defaulted to Do Not Track while Firefox kept doing Google's bidding to collect their checks. Just one example of many. In the place of real innovation, being truly independent, and actually standing up for users Mozilla gives people dumb crusades like Net Neutrality. Firefox could have used their market share to develop truly innovative features, like what Opera tried. For that matter they could have partnered with Opera to create standards for a true open web, but of course they never did that because the Google bucks were just to sweet for them. Mozilla has been a failed organization for a long time. This is only the latest reminder.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Firefox 57 was so nice I started using it every day and was actively migrating things to it from Chrome. I could live with the Pocket thing even though I wasn't wild about it. I hadn't gone as far as setting up a Mozilla cloud account because privacy was a high priority and I didn't want to swap one cloud service for another. Then this thing blew my machine up the other day, I lost days of work, and...hmm. I don't know why a company would ever do something like this, it's incredibly foolish.
davidp670 9y ago
I for one cannot stand the Pocket integration, I prefer Bookmark OS
jftuga 9y ago
Uninstall Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/uninstall-firefox-from-your-computer https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/uninstall-firefox-from-...

Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago

The trouble is, it costs money (or a lot of time from talented people) to support a project the size of a browser. I would imagine getting some funding helps keep things afloat. You even say, "maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's)". I suppose we should expect the goodwill of corporate sponsorship, but this relationship can quickly turn into the "sponsor" asking for things in exchange for donations. This situation exposes a weakness and requires the recognition of the fragility of the open source model (at least for larger-scale projects). We've seen weird corporate-backed things in NPM projects before. It happens, but what is the better alternative? How do we prevent it? Most corporations only support open source projects out of self-interest: that is, they have a stake in seeing a particular project succeed because their stack may depend on the software.

pmlnr 9y ago
Everyone keeps coming with the money problem. But... how about they maintain a browser, with browser functions only? No PDF-JS, no Pocket, no Hello, etc. Just core browser functions and features. Yes, it might mean scaling back, which is one of the swear words in a growth-oriented belief, but that way, the money should be enough - it was enough for a decade, what changed?
- baq 9y ago
  With all due respect, rendering PDFs is something I consider core browser functionality. Pocket, most certainly not, though it's nice I suppose. Hello was... I don't know what it was. Checking if the market is there at all? Not something I expected to be in a browser.
  - crankylinuxuser 9y ago
    pdf.js seems to work quite nicely. Seems that's no different than opening with external program, or using a plugin, or using an extension. After all,those things can be updated, whereas the browser should have more core functionality that enable new document types to being opened.
    - garaetjjte 9y ago
      pdf.js performance is horrible, and now without NPAPI it is impossible to view PDF in firefox tab.
      - amluto 9y ago
        PDF.js performs quite well for me and works fine in tabs. It has always been a better experience for me than PDFium, for example.
  - hedora 9y ago
    I never understood why anyone wanted their browser to render pdfs. PDF.js is slow, buggy, and can’t edit documents. Every major OS ships with a better PDF reader, and there are still better open source PDF readers available on all major platforms.

misnome 9y ago

> Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users This was the new interface, right? I just saw this the other day and though it looked pretty good; was actually considering a trial switch back (after moving to chrome years ago, when a single bad tab would take down the entire browser). That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me. I’m of the view that getting (most) people to consider switching browsers only comes every few years and requires a very large incentive; “We’ve fixed that one incremental problem” isn’t enough. A complete revamp would do it, but takes time to permeate into conciousness. And in the meantime they do this. “Squandered goodwill” seems to be spot-on.

k__ 9y ago
It was quantum. Firefox got faster than Chrome with it.
codewithcheese 9y ago
update your conciousness because a complete revamp is what happened. what mozilla did was stupid but its nothing compared to being tracked by google.
clairity 9y ago
> "That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me." so that's why you stick with chrome, a browser designed to send all your browsing habits straight to google, the largest online advertising company and commercial tracker in the world?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Chrome may be what you described, but Chromium is pretty reasonable.
  - hedora 9y ago
    The open source version of android used to be reasonable too. How long will that be true of Chromium without open source alternatives?

eberkund 9y ago

> needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's) You touch on an interesting point, maybe Firefox should be soliciting donations from governments who are concerned about the US surveillance state instead of relying so heavily on search ad revenue and being forced to turn to things like this to make a buck.

fnl 9y ago
No offense, but "like, China?" I don't see how involving government(s) and therefore politicising the whole thing is going to make the situation any better. Even if it were support from a government you (but others not) would find acceptable.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  TOR is funded by the government, among others (others including Mozilla, heh). https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en Although they should probably not be in charge of the actual development, is it really crazy to think that Firefox could be funded by governments? At some point it is a public service.

carussell 9y ago

It's surprising that people are surprised by these things. Mozilla is not on a slippery slope. That was true years ago, but it proceeded unmitigated. By now, though, these things are the natural result of that decay. There's a lot of power in branding, apparently. People keep saying things like, "Mozilla is a good company at heart", and I'm at a loss. Mozilla 2017 is nothing like the Mozilla that existed when the Foundation was established, or when the Mozilla Manifesto was adopted. Tons of key people left in a few different waves: first when Google pulled them off the project to go build Chrome, and then lots more who trickled out over the years during and after the Kovacs/FirefoxOS era. What remains is (a derivative of) the codebase + the name "Mozilla" + and, like, Mitchell. But that's it. Keep calling it the same thing, though, and somehow folks act like we're talking about the same thing. Mozilla imploded—or rather, got Netscapified—years ago. To believe that Mozilla or Firefox is your old friend who's still helping you fight the good fight is incredibly naive and can only come from someone who hasn't actually been paying attention and is easily fooled by (trivially contradicted) surface-level details (like a name). I mean, it's not even like some philosophically tricky ship-of-Theseus problem. Mozilla is dead, people, and this isn't news.

scrollaway 9y ago
Sorry but where's your evidence? Mozilla is still today doing incredible work. The work on Quantum was extremely forward-thinking in a way that most corporations cannot support; it brought us Rust, which is a fantastic contribution to the ecosystem. Furthermore, Mozilla has always had troubles with judgement and mismanagement, this is not new. The problems that have been surfacing are old problems, they're just getting more severe.
- electrograv 9y ago
  Evidence? How about the article link we're all commenting on? How is that not enough for you?
  - ripdog 9y ago
    Uh, looking glass was not supported or worked on by the vast majority of the fantastic engineers at mozilla. This was a marketing stunt probably thrown together by a single intern, and greenlighted by an out-of-touch marketing department. The engineers at mozilla are NOT the problem.

agumonkey 9y ago

This is indeed comically sad after the nice Quantum boost. It was a poor taste joke at the wrong time.. Mozilla is gonna regret this.

Silhouette 9y ago

Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users Let's not overstate things. Firefox 57 gained good will from some users. It also seriously annoyed others, both because of the loss of many useful extensions, and because the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time. The one thing Mozilla still had going for them compared to Google or Microsoft was the emphasis on privacy and respecting the user, and yet I've read about several different cases in recent weeks where that trust has been undermined, this being the latest.

vesak 9y ago
>because the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time. Really? I haven't experienced a single crash, and I was on nightlies before 57 was released, so I could try Quantum.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  Yes, sadly. I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed on me prior to 57. I've lost count of the number of crashes/hangs since the update, but it's well into double figures by now. Whether it's Firefox itself or the handful of extensions I have installed, I can't tell for sure, but it's much worse here on a Windows box with more extensions installed than a Linux box with just a few. In any case, if the new runtime model is supposed to make things more robust then unfortunately my experience has been quite the opposite.
  - eeks 9y ago
    57 user on OpenBSD here. No extension installed (at least to my knowledge ;)), no crash to report. It has been a pretty smooth experience so far.
AsyncAwait 9y ago
> the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time That has not been my experience, so let's not overstate personal anecdotes as facts.

api 9y ago

The business model of the Internet is surveillance and advertising. It's incredibly hard to resist. It seems like there's an infinite amount of money available if you're willing to surveil and sell out your users.

Moru 9y ago

Noone can hate with more fierceness than someone that once loved. If you depend on your users to love you, be careful with their trust.

hedora 9y ago

Is Mozilla strapped for cash or something? I’m happy to donate a bit if it keeps them independent. Google’s behavior with Android/AOSP suggests they’re more than willing to make the open source version of Chrome useless in practice the second there is no viable competition. I don’t see any organization other than Mozilla that can keep them honest.

baybal2 9y ago
No, otherwise Mozilla C-Levels would not be getting $500000+ salaries (Google it, it is real) and flying on privately chartered business jets
- ksk 9y ago
  If you can do the job at a lower salary, you should apply !
  - baybal2 9y ago
    Well, they can't do that job as we all see. The original reason behind them establishing Mozilla Corporation over Mozilla Foundation was that they can keep this practice going while being safe from taxmen reprimanding them for pocketing what is a charity income from tax standpoint. Now, Mozilla Corporation bills Mozilla Foundation for "service offered at a market price" to do its "socially beneficial, free of charge and any expectation of remuneration" activity, which is selling ads.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Figs 9y ago
> Is Mozilla strapped for cash or something? Nope. According to their financial statement, the Mozilla Foundation had $69M in "cash and cash equivalents" at the end of last year, about $329M in investments, and literally gave away millions of dollars in grant funding. It's not entirely clear to me how the financial interaction works between them, but the privately-held Mozilla Corporation (i.e. the 1000+(!) employee company that actually makes Firefox, and which the Foundation owns as a subsidiary) had over $500M in revenue from their search engine deals... See "State of Mozilla 2016" https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ and also check out the Foundation's financial statement and tax form PDFs on the bottom for more details.

djhworld 9y ago

I really didn't mind the Pocket integration, probably because I'm a Pocket user myself so can't see the problem. This is pretty bad though, I'd say this is worse than the Pocket thing because it's abusing the trust and good will of their users

legohead 9y ago

Firefox 57 has no love from a lot of web developers I know. It broke things that were working just fine before.

TheRealPomax 9y ago
Curious what those things are, because all I can think of is workaround that exploited out-of-spec behaviour (and, of course, web extensions, which has been covered to such a degree it's not just a dead horse but a fresh patch of grass by now)
- fuckyouzilla 9y ago
  1. Telemetry enabled by default. 2. Selling telemetry data about users to evilcorps like google. 3. Ruining interface with project Australis (during the 3.6 > 4.0 update [status bar got removed], tab-bar got degraded). 4. Breaking XPCOM. 5. Implementing a system of stealth add-on installations. The add-ons don't just get installed stealthily, they are also not listed by add-ons manager. 6. Pocket. 7. Using the system of stealth add-on installations to spy ('gather telemetry to improve users browsing experience') on users and adding ads. Adding ads to the start page. Nothing useful ever was deployed via the stealth add-on installation system. 8. Breaking users' preferences they set once. 9. Breaking XUL. Mozilla is now even more malicious than Google. Point 9 is the reason that firefox is dead to me since version 57: I will not update anymore and I'll have to switch my browser to a firefox fork because of that on holidays. Oh, and all those issues - is just what is on the surface, the real problems are way deeper: 1. Mozilla rejects communication with users and developers. 2. Mozilla censors incoming messages. 3. Mozilla has betrayed the trust of its users by betraying its own ideals. 4. I thought Mike Beltzner (aka beltznebooth) was a dumb fucker that took stupid decisions, but turns out - he was the best of management Mozilla ever had: since he stepped away - the browser's degradation accelerated in supersonic speed. 5. Mozilla did too many mistakes and never acknowledged the failure, no conclusions were made, which means that the history to be repeated again and again.

catnaroek 9y ago

> If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's). Perhaps the problem is the fact that the Web is so complex that popular web browsers could only possibly be developed by corporations to begin with.

qbaqbaqba 9y ago

I feel really sorry for Steve and other real developers. Mozilla is not different from any other managers driven corporation. Very sad. I almost wonder if that's an organized action aiming at removing competition. It's too bad to be unintentional.

4bpp 9y ago

> "Fork it" is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it's with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they're an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them. Well, how do you suggest doing this when it appears that the relevant decision-making parts of Mozilla do not answer to anyone "on our side" in any meaningful way? It seems to me that the only solution is to make an organisation with a fundamentally different system of governance. By virtue of institutional inertia, I figure it would be very hard to do this by actually raising a competing project from the ground up and hoping to capture any of Mozilla's market share or developer base (not to mention the amply made elsewhere in this thread point that Mozilla is big and expensive for a reason). The far easier, and quite well-tried, solution is to put financial and social pressure on the current leadership to voluntarily open itself to downstream control. The former may be most easily achieved by having an Iceweasel-style "condom organisation" gain traction - that is, someone who tries their best to replicate all of Mozilla's user-facing I/O (releases, sync servers...) in a timely fashion, systematically acts as a QC layer to strip bad decisions like this or Cliqz and otherwise does not waste developer time on niche interests like classic UIs. For the latter, whatever you may think of the person of the tactic, the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla. Even more cynically, it may be the case that they are the main way anything gets done these days. The (very significant, in my eyes) moral reservations aside, from a result-oriented perspective of what is most useful to reform Mozilla as an organisation, is there any good argument against the "identify a representative set of heads behind this latest measure and call for them" approach?

racer-v 9y ago
> the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla. Yes. If anyone wants to do a git bisect to find when the Mozilla Corporation lost its integrity, we can say it was definitely "bad" by the time they forced out Eich in April 2014.
- mozthrow2017 9y ago
  How about when they implemented DRM in Firefox just roughly a month after Eich was ousted, which was the actual reason for his departure? He was the only one higher up keeping that from happening and they didn't even wait until the body was cold to push that agenda.

bradleyjg 9y ago

> https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/941709048529014784 https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/941709048529014784 This is such a terrible way to make an argument, present a case, or say anything that can't be said in a few dozen words. He has a blog, it's linked right there. I can't understand why people use twitter like this.

steveklabnik 9y ago
So, the first post in the thread was ~11:30am. The last one was about ~5pm. I basically appended to it during the day, as my thoughts and feelings evolved on an issue. It's not like I completely tossed out all these tweets at once. That said, everyone uses Twitter differently. I tweet a lot. Some people don't. I personally blog when I have a long-form, well thought out thing to say. I tweet whatever is on my brain at a given moment. Twitter is more raw, more personal. This is a raw, personal issue for me.

B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago

> Mozilla is a good company Not since the incident.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

I made my warning about Mozilla Corp+Found a week ago, and as I recall, it was not warmly received... by anyone! What a difference a week makes!

BoysenberryPi 9y ago

I like Pocket.

saas_co_de 9y ago

I strong disagree that Mozilla is a good company at heart. They are horribly mismanaged on every level. They have burned hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a second rate browser that has seen its market share collapse. They took hundreds of millions from Google and in exchange unquestioningly supported Google's advertising and surveillance agenda. They have consistently failed to introduce new features that would actually benefit new users. They blame the "standards process" for their lack of innovation and features that benefit users when they know that the standards process is a b.s. game. For profit corporations break standards whenever it benefits them. Firefox is the only browser that follows standards written by Google, Microsoft, and Apple, while the other 3 break them, or force through their own changes whenever it benefits them. Apple blocked 3rd party cookies and Microsoft defaulted to Do Not Track while Firefox kept doing Google's bidding to collect their checks. Just one example of many. In the place of real innovation, being truly independent, and actually standing up for users Mozilla gives people dumb crusades like Net Neutrality. Firefox could have used their market share to develop truly innovative features, like what Opera tried. For that matter they could have partnered with Opera to create standards for a true open web, but of course they never did that because the Google bucks were just to sweet for them. Mozilla has been a failed organization for a long time. This is only the latest reminder.

anigbrowl 9y ago

Firefox 57 was so nice I started using it every day and was actively migrating things to it from Chrome. I could live with the Pocket thing even though I wasn't wild about it. I hadn't gone as far as setting up a Mozilla cloud account because privacy was a high priority and I didn't want to swap one cloud service for another. Then this thing blew my machine up the other day, I lost days of work, and...hmm. I don't know why a company would ever do something like this, it's incredibly foolish.

davidp670 9y ago

I for one cannot stand the Pocket integration, I prefer Bookmark OS

jftuga 9y ago

Uninstall Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/uninstall-firefox-from-your-computer https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/uninstall-firefox-from-...