9 ms·

I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally aga

I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. The tragedy of Mozilla is a very human one, with special embellishments added by the prevailing culture in the US, its home...

DivisionSol 6y ago
How do I pay for Firefox directly? Donating to the foundation seems noble, but like other commentators have mentioned it all gets absorbed into the foundation or is part of a 'bonus product' bundle that (in my mind) overvalues a service I don't want (VPN, Pocket, whatever.) I don't think Mozilla/Firefox is failing because no one will pay for it, but, because it won't take money for Firefox directly.
- dblohm7 6y ago
  It would also help MoCo funding simply if more people used Firefox.
  - DivisionSol 6y ago
    I’m just curious as to why. Bigger market share == bigger marketing/advertising share, specifically? Or something else?
    - dblohm7 6y ago
      Two reasons, one primary and one secondary: 1. Mozilla's revenue from the Google search deal depends on users searching for things using Firefox. More searches through the Firefox search bar, more revenue for MoCo. 2. Marketshare == developer mindshare. Declining marketshare has created a positive feedback loop where devs (or their managers) become less concerned about supporting Firefox. This induces more web compat issues, which causes more people to switch away, cycle repeats.
      - DivisionSol 6y ago
        Sounds reasonable, thanks! Didn’t know of the Google search deal.
      - Silhouette 6y ago
        It's a tough spot to be in, for sure. Firefox used to have two major advantages, at least for me as a user rather than a developer: customisability and the respect for privacy. The former went under a bus with Quantum and has never recovered. The latter is still there, but the single biggest hole in it is the use of Google for search, so that's probably the first thing that many privacy-sensitive users are going to change. I do still use Firefox as my primary browser, despite having reconsidered several times in recent years. However, as a dev I have all the others readily to hand, and I do find myself forced to use others because pages simply don't work in Firefox with noticeable frequency now. From the opposite angle, I also can't remember the last time a client specified Firefox compatibility for a new project. It's usually Chrome, iOS Safari if mobile is relevant, and maybe Edge in corporate settings now. Unfortunately the vicious cycle of market share and compatibility has been established, and while I think we'll all end up worse off for it, I'm not sure there's much anyone can do about it at this point, at least not as long as most of the actual functionality in Firefox is (unsurprisingly) so similar to other browsers.
    - sp332 6y ago
      Big-money donors are more interested if they see that the project is making a big difference.
- leeoniya 6y ago
  1000% this. i was literally writing the same comment. just have an easy way for me to selectively donate $15/month to Rust, Servo, Firefox, Thunderbird, whatever. instead you get some generic bucket with no possibility to really vote with your money. e.g. i would have never paid for the A/R stuff they distracted their Servo engineers with (plus the Magic Leap entanglement). i would have also withheld funding for the non-removable Pocket integration fiasco. and the jack-in-the-box Mr. Robot promotion - once my tools start to become Mozilla's agents rather then user's agents, they cease to be my tools. i should add that people who choose to use firefox rather than the default are those who are most likely to pay. not listening to them is absolute nonsense.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - leshow 6y ago
    Apparently they fired the servo devs so you may not be able to support them at mozilla anymore anyway.
- yarrel 6y ago
  This. Mozilla is misaligned incentives all the way down.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
floatingatoll 6y ago
What they want is for {product X} to solely focus on their needs {set Y}, disregarding everyone else's needs that conflict. This selfishness is expressed for lots of things, not just Mozilla, but things like Ubuntu and Homebrew too. I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you".
- renewiltord 6y ago
  > I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you". I know a couple of guys who posted their stuff here. They don't care about the complainers because the complainers don't have and don't offer to have skin in the game. They did the sensible thing, which is to be polite and respond noncommittally thanking them for the feedback or to ignore them. Because you don't get information that will improve the product from them, they aren't potential customers, and they usually don't know what they're talking about anyway.
  - behnamoh 6y ago
    I wish there was a term for these kinds of customers. "Cyber Karens", maybe?
    - floatingatoll 6y ago
      I don't think it's necessary or appropriate to assign an insulting stereotype label to that subset of customers, especially not on HN. People who behave in this manner can be readily found on HN in many discussions (for example, virtually all about telemetry), and while I don't understand them I don't condone insulting them either.
      - Igelau 6y ago
        Not to mention there are some lovely people named Karen.
dblohm7 6y ago
Sometimes it feels like there are people out there who want Mozilla to fail and gleefully seek ways to make that happen (even by doing something as simple as amplifying misinformation), even though it is not really in their interests to do so.
- kgraves 6y ago
  Who are these people who want Mozilla to fail?
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120742
    - jefftk 6y ago
      Note that both of those comments are [dead]. Wanting Mozilla to fail is a very fringe opinion.
    - dependenttypes 6y ago
      The first person wants mozilla to experience a failure as to wake them up and make them focus on the browser, not for mozilla to fail in general. The second person does not say that they want mozilla to fail.
- rleigh 6y ago
  I've never seen any indication that anyone wants Mozilla to fail. But after seeing several years of repeated strategic blunders and bad management, and Firefox slip from being the most popular web browser by a comfortable margin to a single digit percentage market share, which is still sliding down, I think the available evidence shows that they have failed quite badly, and for the most part through problems of their own making. Now, I'd like to use Firefox again, but they have regain strong technical focus first. They are all over the place doing irrelevant stuff. I'm surprised they even have that many staff to lay off in the first place given their financial situation. There must be a large percentage of non-jobs amongst that thousand, because they certainly weren't all dedicated to making a good web browser.
craigsmansion 6y ago
> is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. It might be the other way around in this case. Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot. Throughout the years when choices had to be made Mozilla didn't always side with the open web or the users, and whenever they were asked about it, the answer was always the same: "Not our hill to die on. We need the clout we would lose, otherwise we won't be big enough to have any say when the next thing comes around." and then the next thing came around, and the next... The problem is that Mozilla seems to have revenue as an important goal. I imagine that's why people clamour for them to focus on the browser instead of pointlessly playing corporation with borrowed feathers. They sold out.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  Mozilla rose to the top because IE6 was obsolete trash, Opera cost money, and Chrome didn’t exist. The “promise of an open web” didn’t enter into it.
  - spanhandler 6y ago
    ... and the installer would download very quickly on your mom's dial-up, unlike the full Mozilla Suite which was huge, and it was much lighter-weight, better-performing, and had better default features for people who didn't need all of Mozilla Suite, so you could install it on there so she'd stop getting 500 pop-unders and then ending up with a virus and ten "browser bars" you had to fix. Otherwise, yes, you've nailed it.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    When IE6 came into the market it was the best on its class, the only problem was Microsoft declaring victory and dismantling the team to create Avalon (WPF), which is also the background why CSS Grid came from WPF.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
rsync 6y ago
"What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else." Yes, you have perfectly described what I want. To be fair, I also want this from typical, corporate, for-profit entities ...
luckylion 6y ago
> And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. I'm not sure how many there are that would pay for it, but I'm sure it's not zero. I believe a browser is like an IDE, and I'm quite happy to pay for mine, as are plenty of other people apparently, JetBrains & Co are making good money. They are focused on their users though, which Firefox isn't. I'm pretty sure that Firefox could get plenty of paying users at $100/yr even just by focusing on good developer experience. They don't though, and Chromium does.
- apeescape 6y ago
  That's a good point. A business plan along the lines of, for $8/month you get the pro edition which has all the latest features and updates, which the free tier would get 6 months later or so. I use FF (dev edition) as my primary dev browser, and it's made a lot of progress on DX. Chromium has a smoother experience overall, but FF is not too shabby nowadays.
betterunix2 6y ago
"the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal" It is more like people are willing to dismiss bad behavior when there is a clear profit motive, since it seems obvious that when someone is in it for the money they will ignore other considerations. Take the profit motive out of the picture and people start to imagine other motives or attribute bad behavior to negative character traits, even when the behavior is generally better than the for-profit counterparts'.
- acheron9383 6y ago
  Well, people expect a company to not try to ride the high horse down the low road. I don't personally think Mozilla has really done anything bad, I get it, they are a real company, with real employees who work for a living. Sometimes the realities of running a company clash with their PR of being some sort of public good. FWIW, I like Mozilla, and a lot of their values, and the products they put out, but their marketing does leave them open to ridicule in ways that a company who always answers "money" to the "why did you do this?" question is not.
bloppe 6y ago
I get it that the US federal government has been antagonizing the world on overdrive for the past ~4 years, but as an "insider" I really don't understand how you arrived at any of these conclusions. The very notion of "collective psyche" is entirely nonsensical in the US as there is almost nothing that is very broadly agreed-upon. Now of course I'm particularly opinionated about Mozilla, since I donate regularly to the foundation, subscribe to their VPN, contribute to the Rust ecosystem, and use Firefox not only on desktop but mobile as well. So, perhaps I live in what might be called a bubble, but the idea that anybody would knock Mozilla because they are not profit-driven just doesn't make sense to me, and is actually the complete opposite of what I got from reading the comments in this thread, which, by the way, probably has decent international representation anyway.
1024core 6y ago
> I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. Counterpoint: Craigslist.
belorn 6y ago
Mozilla can always give up firefox and let it has it own non-profit organization that take the revenue from the google deal. That way Mozilla can continue to focus on their advocacy product which they get paid so much for.

DivisionSol 6y ago

How do I pay for Firefox directly? Donating to the foundation seems noble, but like other commentators have mentioned it all gets absorbed into the foundation or is part of a 'bonus product' bundle that (in my mind) overvalues a service I don't want (VPN, Pocket, whatever.) I don't think Mozilla/Firefox is failing because no one will pay for it, but, because it won't take money for Firefox directly.

dblohm7 6y ago
It would also help MoCo funding simply if more people used Firefox.
- DivisionSol 6y ago
  I’m just curious as to why. Bigger market share == bigger marketing/advertising share, specifically? Or something else?
  - dblohm7 6y ago
    Two reasons, one primary and one secondary: 1. Mozilla's revenue from the Google search deal depends on users searching for things using Firefox. More searches through the Firefox search bar, more revenue for MoCo. 2. Marketshare == developer mindshare. Declining marketshare has created a positive feedback loop where devs (or their managers) become less concerned about supporting Firefox. This induces more web compat issues, which causes more people to switch away, cycle repeats.
    - DivisionSol 6y ago
      Sounds reasonable, thanks! Didn’t know of the Google search deal.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      It's a tough spot to be in, for sure. Firefox used to have two major advantages, at least for me as a user rather than a developer: customisability and the respect for privacy. The former went under a bus with Quantum and has never recovered. The latter is still there, but the single biggest hole in it is the use of Google for search, so that's probably the first thing that many privacy-sensitive users are going to change. I do still use Firefox as my primary browser, despite having reconsidered several times in recent years. However, as a dev I have all the others readily to hand, and I do find myself forced to use others because pages simply don't work in Firefox with noticeable frequency now. From the opposite angle, I also can't remember the last time a client specified Firefox compatibility for a new project. It's usually Chrome, iOS Safari if mobile is relevant, and maybe Edge in corporate settings now. Unfortunately the vicious cycle of market share and compatibility has been established, and while I think we'll all end up worse off for it, I'm not sure there's much anyone can do about it at this point, at least not as long as most of the actual functionality in Firefox is (unsurprisingly) so similar to other browsers.
  - sp332 6y ago
    Big-money donors are more interested if they see that the project is making a big difference.
leeoniya 6y ago
1000% this. i was literally writing the same comment. just have an easy way for me to selectively donate $15/month to Rust, Servo, Firefox, Thunderbird, whatever. instead you get some generic bucket with no possibility to really vote with your money. e.g. i would have never paid for the A/R stuff they distracted their Servo engineers with (plus the Magic Leap entanglement). i would have also withheld funding for the non-removable Pocket integration fiasco. and the jack-in-the-box Mr. Robot promotion - once my tools start to become Mozilla's agents rather then user's agents, they cease to be my tools. i should add that people who choose to use firefox rather than the default are those who are most likely to pay. not listening to them is absolute nonsense.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- leshow 6y ago
  Apparently they fired the servo devs so you may not be able to support them at mozilla anymore anyway.
yarrel 6y ago
This. Mozilla is misaligned incentives all the way down.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

floatingatoll 6y ago

What they want is for {product X} to solely focus on their needs {set Y}, disregarding everyone else's needs that conflict. This selfishness is expressed for lots of things, not just Mozilla, but things like Ubuntu and Homebrew too. I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you".

renewiltord 6y ago
> I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you". I know a couple of guys who posted their stuff here. They don't care about the complainers because the complainers don't have and don't offer to have skin in the game. They did the sensible thing, which is to be polite and respond noncommittally thanking them for the feedback or to ignore them. Because you don't get information that will improve the product from them, they aren't potential customers, and they usually don't know what they're talking about anyway.
- behnamoh 6y ago
  I wish there was a term for these kinds of customers. "Cyber Karens", maybe?
  - floatingatoll 6y ago
    I don't think it's necessary or appropriate to assign an insulting stereotype label to that subset of customers, especially not on HN. People who behave in this manner can be readily found on HN in many discussions (for example, virtually all about telemetry), and while I don't understand them I don't condone insulting them either.
    - Igelau 6y ago
      Not to mention there are some lovely people named Karen.

dblohm7 6y ago

Sometimes it feels like there are people out there who want Mozilla to fail and gleefully seek ways to make that happen (even by doing something as simple as amplifying misinformation), even though it is not really in their interests to do so.

kgraves 6y ago
Who are these people who want Mozilla to fail?
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120742
  - jefftk 6y ago
    Note that both of those comments are [dead]. Wanting Mozilla to fail is a very fringe opinion.
  - dependenttypes 6y ago
    The first person wants mozilla to experience a failure as to wake them up and make them focus on the browser, not for mozilla to fail in general. The second person does not say that they want mozilla to fail.
rleigh 6y ago
I've never seen any indication that anyone wants Mozilla to fail. But after seeing several years of repeated strategic blunders and bad management, and Firefox slip from being the most popular web browser by a comfortable margin to a single digit percentage market share, which is still sliding down, I think the available evidence shows that they have failed quite badly, and for the most part through problems of their own making. Now, I'd like to use Firefox again, but they have regain strong technical focus first. They are all over the place doing irrelevant stuff. I'm surprised they even have that many staff to lay off in the first place given their financial situation. There must be a large percentage of non-jobs amongst that thousand, because they certainly weren't all dedicated to making a good web browser.

craigsmansion 6y ago

> is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. It might be the other way around in this case. Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot. Throughout the years when choices had to be made Mozilla didn't always side with the open web or the users, and whenever they were asked about it, the answer was always the same: "Not our hill to die on. We need the clout we would lose, otherwise we won't be big enough to have any say when the next thing comes around." and then the next thing came around, and the next... The problem is that Mozilla seems to have revenue as an important goal. I imagine that's why people clamour for them to focus on the browser instead of pointlessly playing corporation with borrowed feathers. They sold out.

umanwizard 6y ago
Mozilla rose to the top because IE6 was obsolete trash, Opera cost money, and Chrome didn’t exist. The “promise of an open web” didn’t enter into it.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  ... and the installer would download very quickly on your mom's dial-up, unlike the full Mozilla Suite which was huge, and it was much lighter-weight, better-performing, and had better default features for people who didn't need all of Mozilla Suite, so you could install it on there so she'd stop getting 500 pop-unders and then ending up with a virus and ten "browser bars" you had to fix. Otherwise, yes, you've nailed it.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  When IE6 came into the market it was the best on its class, the only problem was Microsoft declaring victory and dismantling the team to create Avalon (WPF), which is also the background why CSS Grid came from WPF.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

rsync 6y ago

"What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else." Yes, you have perfectly described what I want. To be fair, I also want this from typical, corporate, for-profit entities ...

luckylion 6y ago

> And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. I'm not sure how many there are that would pay for it, but I'm sure it's not zero. I believe a browser is like an IDE, and I'm quite happy to pay for mine, as are plenty of other people apparently, JetBrains & Co are making good money. They are focused on their users though, which Firefox isn't. I'm pretty sure that Firefox could get plenty of paying users at $100/yr even just by focusing on good developer experience. They don't though, and Chromium does.

apeescape 6y ago
That's a good point. A business plan along the lines of, for $8/month you get the pro edition which has all the latest features and updates, which the free tier would get 6 months later or so. I use FF (dev edition) as my primary dev browser, and it's made a lot of progress on DX. Chromium has a smoother experience overall, but FF is not too shabby nowadays.

betterunix2 6y ago

"the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal" It is more like people are willing to dismiss bad behavior when there is a clear profit motive, since it seems obvious that when someone is in it for the money they will ignore other considerations. Take the profit motive out of the picture and people start to imagine other motives or attribute bad behavior to negative character traits, even when the behavior is generally better than the for-profit counterparts'.

acheron9383 6y ago
Well, people expect a company to not try to ride the high horse down the low road. I don't personally think Mozilla has really done anything bad, I get it, they are a real company, with real employees who work for a living. Sometimes the realities of running a company clash with their PR of being some sort of public good. FWIW, I like Mozilla, and a lot of their values, and the products they put out, but their marketing does leave them open to ridicule in ways that a company who always answers "money" to the "why did you do this?" question is not.

bloppe 6y ago

I get it that the US federal government has been antagonizing the world on overdrive for the past ~4 years, but as an "insider" I really don't understand how you arrived at any of these conclusions. The very notion of "collective psyche" is entirely nonsensical in the US as there is almost nothing that is very broadly agreed-upon. Now of course I'm particularly opinionated about Mozilla, since I donate regularly to the foundation, subscribe to their VPN, contribute to the Rust ecosystem, and use Firefox not only on desktop but mobile as well. So, perhaps I live in what might be called a bubble, but the idea that anybody would knock Mozilla because they are not profit-driven just doesn't make sense to me, and is actually the complete opposite of what I got from reading the comments in this thread, which, by the way, probably has decent international representation anyway.

1024core 6y ago

> I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. Counterpoint: Craigslist.

belorn 6y ago

Mozilla can always give up firefox and let it has it own non-profit organization that take the revenue from the google deal. That way Mozilla can continue to focus on their advocacy product which they get paid so much for.