8 ms·

Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry p

Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't hills worth dying on. And now, because Mozilla didn't choose a hill to die on, they are going to die on no hill at all. When they aren't the browser that is standing up for interoperability and the freedom and privacy of their users, they have no way to differentiate themselves. Firefox is just another browser, and it's one that is architecturally dated and under-resourced compared to its rivals. I had assumed that when Mozilla had nothing left to lose as Firefox marketshare crashed, they would go back to being the scrappy underdog who advocates for the right thing. The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen.

fsflover 6y ago
So what are your suggestions? Let Mozilla die and enjoy Google monopoly in the web? No, thanks. I prefer a non-profit organization which "failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure". By the way, consider donating to Mozilla if you want them to (be able to) listen to you.
- rootsudo 6y ago
  Ironically, Google supports the Mozilla project https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/01/22/so-why-is-google-funding-its-own-competition-in-the-firefox-os/#1542f01c35c5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/01/22/so-why-i... Which means as Mozilla dries up, its only support is "Google." Meaning, soon to you, a chromium firefox based browser no different as to Edge, Brave or whatever else is out there. tl;dr Mozilla is propped up by Google. Google is no bueno.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    > Meaning, soon to you, a chromium firefox based browser no different as to Edge, Brave or whatever else is out there. Doubtful. I think of lot of the reason Google helps fund Mozilla is so there's a better answer to the question "Does Google have a monopoly in web browsers?" It's better for both Google (because they can point at competition) and Mozilla (because Google will still want to hand them money) if Mozilla has their own engine.
    - microcolonel 6y ago
      I think given the licensing model of Chromium, every major browser being Chromium-based† is still not really a Google monopoly on browsers, or even on browser engines. † In practice, it's already true, given that Firefox is niche even on desktop.
      - kbenson 6y ago
        It's less about whether they actually have a monopoly, and whether there's shielding from government scrutiny. Their current market share (greater than 60%) affords them quite a large influence on the direction of web standards (which seem to be lagging implementation in browsers). Google is already under constant investigation from various governments at this point. Money spent keeping a competitor alive when it's low market share means it doesn't have the same power as Google is probably money well spent.
        microcolonel 6y ago
        Influence or not, all a vendor needs to do if they want to compete with chrome is fork it. There can't be an honest way to construe that as a monopoly. Imagine the market was for PNG decoders, and all the major players were using libpng (just like real life). There is no way to conclude that there is a monopoly on that.
        kbenson 6y ago
        > Influence or not, all a vendor needs to do if they want to compete with chrome is fork it. Sure, but are they going to do a hard left and ignore Google commits, or if Google implements some new CSS features, are they going to pull those in because it's easy and the work is done then they haven't diverged as much, even if they might not have implemented them exactly that way if the incentives weren't aligned quite the same way? > There can't be an honest way to construe that as a monopoly. It doesn't really matter whether it is a monopoly, it matters whether governments see it as unfair. Antitrust laws didn't spring forth from the founders, they were passed by legislature, and then used shortly after to curtail what society perceived to be abuse of power. It also was not done in one go, the Sherman Act was passed in 1890, and then it was updated through both the Clayton Act and Federal Trade Commission Act in 1914.There's nothing to say that laws couldn't be passed to change how antitrust applies slightly (especially in Europe, where they seem to have for appetite for this recently than the US). That might sound a little preposterous, but we're talking about one of the largest companies in the world, which is traditionally when laws like this have been passed in the past. While I doubt if an antitrust case was brought against Google it would be because of Chrome, reducing any example people can point to when justifying making a case is probably worthwhile when operating at Google's scale. > Imagine the market was for PNG decoders, and all the major players were using libpng (just like real life). PNG is a standard, that standard is not changing to any appreciable degree, and if there was a major push to extend PNG and many readers couldn't read PNG's correctly because they used proprietary extensions, we would definitely be having discussions about whether there's enough viable alternatives on the market, do they have enough market share. Keep in mind, this is just a revised instance of Microsoft's strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish where they've learned to be more circumspect and more careful about the "extinguish" step to avoid too much unwanted attention, so it's more nuanced.
- matt-attack 6y ago
  For what it’s worth I just signed up for the VPN service today. Hopefully that helps a bit.
  - benbristow 6y ago
    Their VPN is a bit pointless at the moment though. They're basically reselling Mullvad. You can get the same servers & more connectivity options (e.g. bypassing their client) for the same price by just going direct.
    - ChrisSD 6y ago
      The point is their client can be agnostic to the backing service. If Mullvad is ever found to have problems (privacy, security, etc), Mozilla can switch to a better service without affecting end users at all.
      - benbristow 6y ago
        For Mozilla, sure, but for the customer...
- surround 6y ago
  Does the Mozilla foundation fund browser development?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- yoran 6y ago
  100% agree with that. Maybe Mozilla's greatest skill really is in PR and that it is a rotten organization inside (which so many comments on HN seem to imply), but I don't buy that. When you try to do good, you always put yourself in a vulnerable position. As soon as you make a single mistake, people love to point the finger and criticize for being a hypocrite and not living up to your standards. When an evil company does something good, we applaud them. When a good company makes a mistake, we bash them. As a consumer of the web and a developer on the web, Mozilla is one of the few "big" players in the web ecosystem that I see who are really fighting for keeping the web open. We were just having this discussion with a friend the other day, on the topic of the anti-trust hearings. What if the web didn't evolve to be open like it was today, but instead had followed the evolution of the mobile space, dominated and fully controlled by only two players? What if it was impossible to run a website from a server in your bedroom but instead had to submit your website to some corporation and wait a couple of days before some semi-human reviewer approved it (or not)? The transformative power of the web on global society would never have been as big as it has been if it had evolved in that model. For that reason alone, I applaud Mozilla and I decided to start donating today. I would hate for the web to be under the tyranny of some corporation because that would be such a loss for humanity. And we need people and organizations that put up the fight against the Googles of this world.
  - zobzu 6y ago
    Nah Mozilla's PR is mainly due to historical stuff, not to new marketing (post FxOS era more or less) The org inside is.. like many old orgs, half rotten, half fine. There's a lot of good engineering and even good leaders, thought the ones that are genuine tend to be pushed aside over time for ... more evil reasons, friendship, money, wrong color, you name it. You like you said when you try to do good you put yourself in a vulnerable position and its valid externally just as well as internally as I'm sure you're aware (all companies have this problem to some extent and Mozilla is in my opinion on the "worse side" of the slider atm) Note also that Mozilla Corp is not Mozilla Foundation. Pretty much none of your donations go to the web browser itself.
    - fsflover 6y ago
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  We have heard this argument many times from Mozilla advocates on HN. I don't buy it. To me, this sounds like an argument for the status quo. It may be a rational descriotion of the reasoning what Mozilla is continuing to pursue, but essentially it argues, "No one can do better. Therefore, don't change anything". Well, if the comments in this thread (and many others) are any indication, there are some users who want change. Mozilla is not "good enough" for these users. Things could be better. No one knows what would happen if things changed. Sometimes we have to take risks, experiment. The portrayal of Mozilla as being like a little boy with his (Firefox) finger in the dike saving us all from being flooded over by the (Google) sea is an oft-told fairy tale. It is arguable that Mozilla is already "dead" and has been for quite some time. Google already has a "monopoly in the web", and they in fact control Mozilla by being its essential source of revenue. The "non-profit" bit is also getting old. Is it supposed to mean something by implied comparison to other non-profit organisations? Mozilla is a corporation, it has employees doing the same work as Google as it tries to maintain faeature parity, including gathering data on users through telemetry. It is dependent on Google, it relies on the sale of web advertising in order to be able to pay those employees. Web advertising is the very thing that Firefox users want to be protected against. How is that preventing Google from enjoying a "monopoly in the web"? Google could pull the plug on Mozilla at any time. As others point out, it probably prefers to prop Mozilla up instead. My suggestion is to release a different sort of browser, smaller. In fact, release multiple browsers, each with a different focus. These specialised browsers could use pieces of Firefox code but would be small enough any user could compile in a short time on an underpoweered computer. Of course they could also be more secure what with reduced complexity and attack surface. There are so many annoyances with the web that could easily be solved by going in a different direction, away from advertising and the idea of a web browser as an "all-in-one" program. I believe there are markets for this, although no one knows the size of them, because users are coerced to use the same handful of overgrown, corporate-sponsored web browsers, forever increasing in complexity, insecure and in need of a patch. At this point in web history, trying to achieve 100% feature parity with a corporate-sponsored web browser funded by advertising is a waste of time, IMO. What is worth the time are features that those corporations will never pursue. These are the most interesting things Mozilla has been doing with Firefox. I am typing this using a text-only browser that I can edit and re-compile in minutes. Much faster than Firefox; no ads, tracking or telemetry. I certainly do not need a major web browser to read HN or the sites posted to it. Using the same program to read HN as I use for, e.g., internet banking, is silly, IMO. I actually have better ability to read sites posted to HN than some readers who consistently get thwarted by crazy web designs, phoney paywalls, etc. There should be many browsers in between linemode and "modern" browser. There should be a spectrum of choice of user-agents, each with different feature sets, not always the same ones.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
  Why would one donate to an organisation the fires workers whilst paying millions to execs?
kungato 6y ago
Do they have to be better in anything? I'm totally ok if they are just a little worse than Chrome but relatively independant. I don't see the browser space that endangered right now. As a casual user I din't see a problem if there even was a feature freeze for some time. I get that things are moving in some direction always but all this innovation about dumb websites is maybe overengineering
nugget 6y ago
Like an addict, Mozilla became dependent upon the revenue they earned from their Google and Yahoo search deals. Search compliance requirements then prevented them from innovating in the areas you mentioned (and others). Mozilla had an opportunity to reduce the search dependency and transition to a subscription business around 2014-2015 when the paid consumer VPN market started to scale, but based on the internal incentives present at the time, they found the search money too lucrative to resist.
- Zenbit_UX 6y ago
  While this seems largely factual, it's certainly not a generous interpretation. I view Mozilla as a privacy leader in a very small market dominated by giants. Microsoft gets users for free thanks to Windows, Apple does the same twice as well thanks to iOS, Mac and the browser not being complete cancer. Chrome has Google and YouTube to drive its users, not to mention first mover advantage in the industry. What does Mozilla have to drive Firefox users? Nothing, it's not a tech giant. The shear fact alone that they exist and can swing with the big boys is an unbelievable accomplishment in my book, certainly worthy of praise and a more nuanced interpretation of events. Privacy is their only angle as it's all that's left to them to compete. They're getting better and better and marketing this fact but that's also because the general population is getting more educated to the value of their data thanks to Snowdon and The Zuck. To assert with confidence that they should have started charging users a subscription fee 6 years ago is ludicrous, you can't know that would have worked out. It still may not. Additionally the VPN boom we've seen - and Mozilla is only now capitalizing on - is largely a symbiotic evolution which coincides with the rise of the streaming giants. e.g. The only reason my parents know what a VPN is, is because they want access to Netflix's US catalog which is far superior and geofenced.
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    Ironically streaming services work hard to detect and block VPN endpoints in order to enforce geofencing.
    - Zenbit_UX 6y ago
news12klm 6y ago
They may have made mistakes over EME but would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?
- techntoke 6y ago
  Yes, but they also have significantly failed the Linux community as well in terms of performance.
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  Of course, I keep EME disabled everywhere anyway.
  - diag 6y ago
    Intellectual purity isn't good for the end user.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      DRM isn't good for the end user.
- shock 6y ago
  Computers are powerful enough these days to have multiple browsers installed and running simultaneously. One could have used Firefox for general browsing and just used Chrome for Netflix.
  - est31 6y ago
    Power users might do it, but most people don't.
    - shock 6y ago
      There are enough power users in the world to keep Firefox relevant.
boogies 6y ago
I largely agree, but however far Mozilla is from the peaks it could theoretically be on, I still wouldn't criticize it like this without qualifying my complaint by adding the fact that it still has much lower to to sink before it's as bad as Chrome. I don't use Firefox anymore and I don't love Mozilla, but I appreciate the efforts they do make in favor of privacy and interoperability and especially the fact that still make the best fairly drop-in alternative to the engine with 80% domination of the browser market. I still would recommend Firefox to any nontechnical person who uses Chrome or Edge now (it's at least as fast, uses maybe 40% less RAM, and just happens to be less evil). (And I personally still use a browser that benefits from their work, Palemoon, which is also flawed (corrupted to a much smaller degree than FF by a much less evil search engine than Google — DuckDuckGo — but I'd use any browser —even the old Edge, if someone maintained a version for my OS— that's not based on Chromium, if it slowed down the growth of Google's evil empire/monopoly)).
- pkilgore 6y ago
  Have you ever contacted an elected representative with your concerns that Google is a monopoly and that laws should be either enforced against them or re-written to abate that, in addition to changing your own behavior? If not, why? What would make you do so?
est31 6y ago
> They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME I agree about the EME point, but for h.264 they did stand up and lost. I can remember h.264 not working in Firefox for a long time while it did work on Chrome. It probably cost them a lot of users, but at some point you have to stop and realize that you are harming yourself more than advancing the cause.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  As a point of interest, Google had announced that Chrome would not be supporting H.264 around that same period, but then backtracked and never removed it. Edit: IIRC, it may have been the built-in support/licence for H.264 on Windows and Macs that kept the support in Chrome, so those running Chrome on other OSes might not have been so lucky.
- bscphil 6y ago
  > for h.264 they did stand up and lost. You might argue they lost the battle but won the war. A technological split between traditional media companies and web companies has developed: the former are continuing to pursue MPEG-LA endorsed codecs that enable their industry to keep a stranglehold on the market (i.e. H.264, HEVC, VVC), while the latter have moved to alternatives: a lot of hardware comes with VP9 decoding support already, and there's an enormous push (with nearly 100% buy-in) to make AV1 the web's next default video codec. This means that the web is moving towards media streaming on mostly royalty-free codecs, which was exactly the goal Mozilla originally had.
  - themacguffinman 6y ago
    > You might argue they lost the battle but won the war. The tide of the war is turning, little thanks to them IMO. VP9 was a Google initiative and they were already interested in royalty free codecs because of YouTube. Chrome didn't have to lose the H264 battle to get to work on VP9 and other royalty free technologies. Mozilla didn't do anyone any favors by losing the battle of H264 on its own. It has only made them weaker for future battles.
hitpointdrew 6y ago
> Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem So what do you suggest one use as a browser then? Don't you dare say Chrome or Brave. Firefox is the best of the worst. Yeah, it would be good if they were better, but I am not going to be moving to Chrome or Brave anytime soon.
dheera 6y ago
"new focus", "new mindset", "organizing ourselves differently", "new structure", "thinka bout a different world". These are all euphemisms for death. Why don't corporations simply be straightforward and say "We are facing imminent death and we need your financial assistance if you don't want a Google-monopolized world"? This "changing world" fluff is a huge turnoff for people actually wanting to help Mozilla's mission.
- yokto 6y ago
  This, yes! I had to scroll quite a bit to find it. I don't want them to change all that much. Making Firefox seems hard enough...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
adventured 6y ago
> And now, because Mozilla didn't choose a hill to die on, they are going to die on no hill at all. The part you get wrong is that they were always going to die, hill or no hill. It has been a slow grind downward as Firefox has practically vanished as a product among mainstream Internet users. It's merely slowly going to the same grave as Opera and IE. Chrome won, on both the desktop and mobile. The only major holdout is the Apple ecosystem with Safari, because Apple can do what it likes. What else is Mozilla other than Firefox? Not much in terms of revenue sources. I've been using Firefox daily for 15 or so years, and I've watched as everyone I know stopped using it one after another. Chrome is a good browser for most purposes, the average user - which is what Firefox requires for Mozilla to stay alive financially - doesn't care about the things you apparently think they do.
phkahler 6y ago
Do you use their browser? If not, why not? FTR I do and never stopped.
betterunix2 6y ago
"The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen. " Maybe you have not noticed that money actually matters? Mozilla maintains a global infrastructure for serving Firefox updates and new installs; they have to pay developers to keep up with bugs, vulnerabilities, and new web standards; they have to pay lawyers to deal with the various legal issues that come up when a project has millions of users across multiple jurisdictions; etc. Donations have never been sufficient for Mozilla to do the core development work on Firefox, which is why they signed those search deals.
- terminalcommand 6y ago
  Having to pay lawyers for legal issues shouldn't be a reason to lay off 250 employees. It certainly can cost a lot, if they are getting service from top-legal firms, working on billable hours. But they can choose to stick retain lawyers for important matters such as IP-rights, etc., get help from the community for other legal matters and work. For example debian has the debian-legal mailing list, where a lot of lawyers hang out and are ready to help. I certainly would like to contribute if any questions regarding my area of expertise popped up. Big law firms also do a lot of pro-bono work. Since Mozilla is a foundation they might also try to exercise these channels. If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it. Covid-19 crisis shouldn't affect Mozilla, everyone is still using browsers while working at home. There are also other ways to raise money for a corporation, for example Mozilla can go public to raise money to sustain their workforce and finance important infrastructure updates such as Servo engine.
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    "If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it." Debian receives hardware to test and develop on, infrastructure, and other non-monetary support from various corporations that view Debian as a project with strategic value to their businesses. Debian also benefits from only having to package software and forward bugs to the appropriate upstream maintainers -- including Mozilla. I mentioned the lawyers at Mozilla only as an example of something they actually do need money to pay for, and I strongly suspect that Mozilla's legal team has more work to do than Debian's but do not have any first-hand knowledge. Technical work is probably a larger expense for Mozilla than legal, just by the nature of developing and maintaining a web browser that has to support the modern web (which is more application runtime than document delivery). "Mozilla can go public" At which point they will be beholden to their shareholders and will have to be even more revenue-focused, which is what I was replying to in the first place.
jcranmer 6y ago
> They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. But they did stand up to industry pressure, to a larger degree than most are willing to give them credit for. On H.264, they refused to implement it, arguing that while the licensing requirements were acceptable at the moment, there was no guarantee that the patent pools would get greedy later on (boy did that turn out prescient with H.265). And they got Google to agree to rip out H.264 support from Chrome... except Google appears to have no intention of doing so, and it took Mozilla a year to realize that they had lost the battle. On EME, Netflix faced the problem that it couldn't implement its contractual obligations to encrypt films without Silverlight, which was clearly on its last gasp. I believe it was Google and Microsoft who brought the original specification, based on their existing implementations. Mozilla objected vociferously and continuously, trying to get more parts of the system specified (such as communication between the browser and the CDM), and generally trying to make the CDMs as narrow as possible and as open as possible. They ultimately lost on most, if not all, of those issues, but it's not for a lack of trying!
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
> The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen. You have to be able to pay the bills first IMO. I don't fault them for that at all.
jm4 6y ago
Mozilla certainly has its faults, but how is generating revenue an indication of how far they have fallen? Why don't you contribute to the project for free? Most of us aren't going to do that so it's a little unreasonable to fault them for having to generate revenue to keep the lights on.
croutonwagon 6y ago
Mozilla is probably one of the most customizable, with defaults that are relatively pro-privacy and therefore privacy focused player in the browser market. Fly by nights like brave have come in and then realized its hard to do in a sustainable way. Chrome is certainly not privacy focused. Ie and edge arent either. There is a reason tor browser is basically firefox code under the hood.

fsflover 6y ago

So what are your suggestions? Let Mozilla die and enjoy Google monopoly in the web? No, thanks. I prefer a non-profit organization which "failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure". By the way, consider donating to Mozilla if you want them to (be able to) listen to you.

rootsudo 6y ago
Ironically, Google supports the Mozilla project https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/01/22/so-why-is-google-funding-its-own-competition-in-the-firefox-os/#1542f01c35c5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/01/22/so-why-i... Which means as Mozilla dries up, its only support is "Google." Meaning, soon to you, a chromium firefox based browser no different as to Edge, Brave or whatever else is out there. tl;dr Mozilla is propped up by Google. Google is no bueno.
- kbenson 6y ago
  > Meaning, soon to you, a chromium firefox based browser no different as to Edge, Brave or whatever else is out there. Doubtful. I think of lot of the reason Google helps fund Mozilla is so there's a better answer to the question "Does Google have a monopoly in web browsers?" It's better for both Google (because they can point at competition) and Mozilla (because Google will still want to hand them money) if Mozilla has their own engine.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    I think given the licensing model of Chromium, every major browser being Chromium-based† is still not really a Google monopoly on browsers, or even on browser engines. † In practice, it's already true, given that Firefox is niche even on desktop.
    - kbenson 6y ago
      It's less about whether they actually have a monopoly, and whether there's shielding from government scrutiny. Their current market share (greater than 60%) affords them quite a large influence on the direction of web standards (which seem to be lagging implementation in browsers). Google is already under constant investigation from various governments at this point. Money spent keeping a competitor alive when it's low market share means it doesn't have the same power as Google is probably money well spent.
      - microcolonel 6y ago
        Influence or not, all a vendor needs to do if they want to compete with chrome is fork it. There can't be an honest way to construe that as a monopoly. Imagine the market was for PNG decoders, and all the major players were using libpng (just like real life). There is no way to conclude that there is a monopoly on that.
        kbenson 6y ago
        > Influence or not, all a vendor needs to do if they want to compete with chrome is fork it. Sure, but are they going to do a hard left and ignore Google commits, or if Google implements some new CSS features, are they going to pull those in because it's easy and the work is done then they haven't diverged as much, even if they might not have implemented them exactly that way if the incentives weren't aligned quite the same way? > There can't be an honest way to construe that as a monopoly. It doesn't really matter whether it is a monopoly, it matters whether governments see it as unfair. Antitrust laws didn't spring forth from the founders, they were passed by legislature, and then used shortly after to curtail what society perceived to be abuse of power. It also was not done in one go, the Sherman Act was passed in 1890, and then it was updated through both the Clayton Act and Federal Trade Commission Act in 1914.There's nothing to say that laws couldn't be passed to change how antitrust applies slightly (especially in Europe, where they seem to have for appetite for this recently than the US). That might sound a little preposterous, but we're talking about one of the largest companies in the world, which is traditionally when laws like this have been passed in the past. While I doubt if an antitrust case was brought against Google it would be because of Chrome, reducing any example people can point to when justifying making a case is probably worthwhile when operating at Google's scale. > Imagine the market was for PNG decoders, and all the major players were using libpng (just like real life). PNG is a standard, that standard is not changing to any appreciable degree, and if there was a major push to extend PNG and many readers couldn't read PNG's correctly because they used proprietary extensions, we would definitely be having discussions about whether there's enough viable alternatives on the market, do they have enough market share. Keep in mind, this is just a revised instance of Microsoft's strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish where they've learned to be more circumspect and more careful about the "extinguish" step to avoid too much unwanted attention, so it's more nuanced.
matt-attack 6y ago
For what it’s worth I just signed up for the VPN service today. Hopefully that helps a bit.
- benbristow 6y ago
  Their VPN is a bit pointless at the moment though. They're basically reselling Mullvad. You can get the same servers & more connectivity options (e.g. bypassing their client) for the same price by just going direct.
  - ChrisSD 6y ago
    The point is their client can be agnostic to the backing service. If Mullvad is ever found to have problems (privacy, security, etc), Mozilla can switch to a better service without affecting end users at all.
    - benbristow 6y ago
      For Mozilla, sure, but for the customer...
surround 6y ago
Does the Mozilla foundation fund browser development?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
yoran 6y ago
100% agree with that. Maybe Mozilla's greatest skill really is in PR and that it is a rotten organization inside (which so many comments on HN seem to imply), but I don't buy that. When you try to do good, you always put yourself in a vulnerable position. As soon as you make a single mistake, people love to point the finger and criticize for being a hypocrite and not living up to your standards. When an evil company does something good, we applaud them. When a good company makes a mistake, we bash them. As a consumer of the web and a developer on the web, Mozilla is one of the few "big" players in the web ecosystem that I see who are really fighting for keeping the web open. We were just having this discussion with a friend the other day, on the topic of the anti-trust hearings. What if the web didn't evolve to be open like it was today, but instead had followed the evolution of the mobile space, dominated and fully controlled by only two players? What if it was impossible to run a website from a server in your bedroom but instead had to submit your website to some corporation and wait a couple of days before some semi-human reviewer approved it (or not)? The transformative power of the web on global society would never have been as big as it has been if it had evolved in that model. For that reason alone, I applaud Mozilla and I decided to start donating today. I would hate for the web to be under the tyranny of some corporation because that would be such a loss for humanity. And we need people and organizations that put up the fight against the Googles of this world.
- zobzu 6y ago
  Nah Mozilla's PR is mainly due to historical stuff, not to new marketing (post FxOS era more or less) The org inside is.. like many old orgs, half rotten, half fine. There's a lot of good engineering and even good leaders, thought the ones that are genuine tend to be pushed aside over time for ... more evil reasons, friendship, money, wrong color, you name it. You like you said when you try to do good you put yourself in a vulnerable position and its valid externally just as well as internally as I'm sure you're aware (all companies have this problem to some extent and Mozilla is in my opinion on the "worse side" of the slider atm) Note also that Mozilla Corp is not Mozilla Foundation. Pretty much none of your donations go to the web browser itself.
  - fsflover 6y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
We have heard this argument many times from Mozilla advocates on HN. I don't buy it. To me, this sounds like an argument for the status quo. It may be a rational descriotion of the reasoning what Mozilla is continuing to pursue, but essentially it argues, "No one can do better. Therefore, don't change anything". Well, if the comments in this thread (and many others) are any indication, there are some users who want change. Mozilla is not "good enough" for these users. Things could be better. No one knows what would happen if things changed. Sometimes we have to take risks, experiment. The portrayal of Mozilla as being like a little boy with his (Firefox) finger in the dike saving us all from being flooded over by the (Google) sea is an oft-told fairy tale. It is arguable that Mozilla is already "dead" and has been for quite some time. Google already has a "monopoly in the web", and they in fact control Mozilla by being its essential source of revenue. The "non-profit" bit is also getting old. Is it supposed to mean something by implied comparison to other non-profit organisations? Mozilla is a corporation, it has employees doing the same work as Google as it tries to maintain faeature parity, including gathering data on users through telemetry. It is dependent on Google, it relies on the sale of web advertising in order to be able to pay those employees. Web advertising is the very thing that Firefox users want to be protected against. How is that preventing Google from enjoying a "monopoly in the web"? Google could pull the plug on Mozilla at any time. As others point out, it probably prefers to prop Mozilla up instead. My suggestion is to release a different sort of browser, smaller. In fact, release multiple browsers, each with a different focus. These specialised browsers could use pieces of Firefox code but would be small enough any user could compile in a short time on an underpoweered computer. Of course they could also be more secure what with reduced complexity and attack surface. There are so many annoyances with the web that could easily be solved by going in a different direction, away from advertising and the idea of a web browser as an "all-in-one" program. I believe there are markets for this, although no one knows the size of them, because users are coerced to use the same handful of overgrown, corporate-sponsored web browsers, forever increasing in complexity, insecure and in need of a patch. At this point in web history, trying to achieve 100% feature parity with a corporate-sponsored web browser funded by advertising is a waste of time, IMO. What is worth the time are features that those corporations will never pursue. These are the most interesting things Mozilla has been doing with Firefox. I am typing this using a text-only browser that I can edit and re-compile in minutes. Much faster than Firefox; no ads, tracking or telemetry. I certainly do not need a major web browser to read HN or the sites posted to it. Using the same program to read HN as I use for, e.g., internet banking, is silly, IMO. I actually have better ability to read sites posted to HN than some readers who consistently get thwarted by crazy web designs, phoney paywalls, etc. There should be many browsers in between linemode and "modern" browser. There should be a spectrum of choice of user-agents, each with different feature sets, not always the same ones.
gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
Why would one donate to an organisation the fires workers whilst paying millions to execs?

kungato 6y ago

Do they have to be better in anything? I'm totally ok if they are just a little worse than Chrome but relatively independant. I don't see the browser space that endangered right now. As a casual user I din't see a problem if there even was a feature freeze for some time. I get that things are moving in some direction always but all this innovation about dumb websites is maybe overengineering

nugget 6y ago

Like an addict, Mozilla became dependent upon the revenue they earned from their Google and Yahoo search deals. Search compliance requirements then prevented them from innovating in the areas you mentioned (and others). Mozilla had an opportunity to reduce the search dependency and transition to a subscription business around 2014-2015 when the paid consumer VPN market started to scale, but based on the internal incentives present at the time, they found the search money too lucrative to resist.

Zenbit_UX 6y ago
While this seems largely factual, it's certainly not a generous interpretation. I view Mozilla as a privacy leader in a very small market dominated by giants. Microsoft gets users for free thanks to Windows, Apple does the same twice as well thanks to iOS, Mac and the browser not being complete cancer. Chrome has Google and YouTube to drive its users, not to mention first mover advantage in the industry. What does Mozilla have to drive Firefox users? Nothing, it's not a tech giant. The shear fact alone that they exist and can swing with the big boys is an unbelievable accomplishment in my book, certainly worthy of praise and a more nuanced interpretation of events. Privacy is their only angle as it's all that's left to them to compete. They're getting better and better and marketing this fact but that's also because the general population is getting more educated to the value of their data thanks to Snowdon and The Zuck. To assert with confidence that they should have started charging users a subscription fee 6 years ago is ludicrous, you can't know that would have worked out. It still may not. Additionally the VPN boom we've seen - and Mozilla is only now capitalizing on - is largely a symbiotic evolution which coincides with the rise of the streaming giants. e.g. The only reason my parents know what a VPN is, is because they want access to Netflix's US catalog which is far superior and geofenced.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  Ironically streaming services work hard to detect and block VPN endpoints in order to enforce geofencing.
  - Zenbit_UX 6y ago

news12klm 6y ago

They may have made mistakes over EME but would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?

techntoke 6y ago
Yes, but they also have significantly failed the Linux community as well in terms of performance.
seba_dos1 6y ago
Of course, I keep EME disabled everywhere anyway.
- diag 6y ago
  Intellectual purity isn't good for the end user.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    DRM isn't good for the end user.
shock 6y ago
Computers are powerful enough these days to have multiple browsers installed and running simultaneously. One could have used Firefox for general browsing and just used Chrome for Netflix.
- est31 6y ago
  Power users might do it, but most people don't.
  - shock 6y ago
    There are enough power users in the world to keep Firefox relevant.

boogies 6y ago

I largely agree, but however far Mozilla is from the peaks it could theoretically be on, I still wouldn't criticize it like this without qualifying my complaint by adding the fact that it still has much lower to to sink before it's as bad as Chrome. I don't use Firefox anymore and I don't love Mozilla, but I appreciate the efforts they do make in favor of privacy and interoperability and especially the fact that still make the best fairly drop-in alternative to the engine with 80% domination of the browser market. I still would recommend Firefox to any nontechnical person who uses Chrome or Edge now (it's at least as fast, uses maybe 40% less RAM, and just happens to be less evil). (And I personally still use a browser that benefits from their work, Palemoon, which is also flawed (corrupted to a much smaller degree than FF by a much less evil search engine than Google — DuckDuckGo — but I'd use any browser —even the old Edge, if someone maintained a version for my OS— that's not based on Chromium, if it slowed down the growth of Google's evil empire/monopoly)).

pkilgore 6y ago
Have you ever contacted an elected representative with your concerns that Google is a monopoly and that laws should be either enforced against them or re-written to abate that, in addition to changing your own behavior? If not, why? What would make you do so?

est31 6y ago

> They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME I agree about the EME point, but for h.264 they did stand up and lost. I can remember h.264 not working in Firefox for a long time while it did work on Chrome. It probably cost them a lot of users, but at some point you have to stop and realize that you are harming yourself more than advancing the cause.

Silhouette 6y ago
As a point of interest, Google had announced that Chrome would not be supporting H.264 around that same period, but then backtracked and never removed it. Edit: IIRC, it may have been the built-in support/licence for H.264 on Windows and Macs that kept the support in Chrome, so those running Chrome on other OSes might not have been so lucky.
bscphil 6y ago
> for h.264 they did stand up and lost. You might argue they lost the battle but won the war. A technological split between traditional media companies and web companies has developed: the former are continuing to pursue MPEG-LA endorsed codecs that enable their industry to keep a stranglehold on the market (i.e. H.264, HEVC, VVC), while the latter have moved to alternatives: a lot of hardware comes with VP9 decoding support already, and there's an enormous push (with nearly 100% buy-in) to make AV1 the web's next default video codec. This means that the web is moving towards media streaming on mostly royalty-free codecs, which was exactly the goal Mozilla originally had.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  > You might argue they lost the battle but won the war. The tide of the war is turning, little thanks to them IMO. VP9 was a Google initiative and they were already interested in royalty free codecs because of YouTube. Chrome didn't have to lose the H264 battle to get to work on VP9 and other royalty free technologies. Mozilla didn't do anyone any favors by losing the battle of H264 on its own. It has only made them weaker for future battles.

hitpointdrew 6y ago

> Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem So what do you suggest one use as a browser then? Don't you dare say Chrome or Brave. Firefox is the best of the worst. Yeah, it would be good if they were better, but I am not going to be moving to Chrome or Brave anytime soon.

dheera 6y ago

"new focus", "new mindset", "organizing ourselves differently", "new structure", "thinka bout a different world". These are all euphemisms for death. Why don't corporations simply be straightforward and say "We are facing imminent death and we need your financial assistance if you don't want a Google-monopolized world"? This "changing world" fluff is a huge turnoff for people actually wanting to help Mozilla's mission.

yokto 6y ago
This, yes! I had to scroll quite a bit to find it. I don't want them to change all that much. Making Firefox seems hard enough...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

adventured 6y ago

> And now, because Mozilla didn't choose a hill to die on, they are going to die on no hill at all. The part you get wrong is that they were always going to die, hill or no hill. It has been a slow grind downward as Firefox has practically vanished as a product among mainstream Internet users. It's merely slowly going to the same grave as Opera and IE. Chrome won, on both the desktop and mobile. The only major holdout is the Apple ecosystem with Safari, because Apple can do what it likes. What else is Mozilla other than Firefox? Not much in terms of revenue sources. I've been using Firefox daily for 15 or so years, and I've watched as everyone I know stopped using it one after another. Chrome is a good browser for most purposes, the average user - which is what Firefox requires for Mozilla to stay alive financially - doesn't care about the things you apparently think they do.

phkahler 6y ago

Do you use their browser? If not, why not? FTR I do and never stopped.

betterunix2 6y ago

"The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen. " Maybe you have not noticed that money actually matters? Mozilla maintains a global infrastructure for serving Firefox updates and new installs; they have to pay developers to keep up with bugs, vulnerabilities, and new web standards; they have to pay lawyers to deal with the various legal issues that come up when a project has millions of users across multiple jurisdictions; etc. Donations have never been sufficient for Mozilla to do the core development work on Firefox, which is why they signed those search deals.

terminalcommand 6y ago
Having to pay lawyers for legal issues shouldn't be a reason to lay off 250 employees. It certainly can cost a lot, if they are getting service from top-legal firms, working on billable hours. But they can choose to stick retain lawyers for important matters such as IP-rights, etc., get help from the community for other legal matters and work. For example debian has the debian-legal mailing list, where a lot of lawyers hang out and are ready to help. I certainly would like to contribute if any questions regarding my area of expertise popped up. Big law firms also do a lot of pro-bono work. Since Mozilla is a foundation they might also try to exercise these channels. If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it. Covid-19 crisis shouldn't affect Mozilla, everyone is still using browsers while working at home. There are also other ways to raise money for a corporation, for example Mozilla can go public to raise money to sustain their workforce and finance important infrastructure updates such as Servo engine.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  "If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it." Debian receives hardware to test and develop on, infrastructure, and other non-monetary support from various corporations that view Debian as a project with strategic value to their businesses. Debian also benefits from only having to package software and forward bugs to the appropriate upstream maintainers -- including Mozilla. I mentioned the lawyers at Mozilla only as an example of something they actually do need money to pay for, and I strongly suspect that Mozilla's legal team has more work to do than Debian's but do not have any first-hand knowledge. Technical work is probably a larger expense for Mozilla than legal, just by the nature of developing and maintaining a web browser that has to support the modern web (which is more application runtime than document delivery). "Mozilla can go public" At which point they will be beholden to their shareholders and will have to be even more revenue-focused, which is what I was replying to in the first place.

jcranmer 6y ago

> They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. But they did stand up to industry pressure, to a larger degree than most are willing to give them credit for. On H.264, they refused to implement it, arguing that while the licensing requirements were acceptable at the moment, there was no guarantee that the patent pools would get greedy later on (boy did that turn out prescient with H.265). And they got Google to agree to rip out H.264 support from Chrome... except Google appears to have no intention of doing so, and it took Mozilla a year to realize that they had lost the battle. On EME, Netflix faced the problem that it couldn't implement its contractual obligations to encrypt films without Silverlight, which was clearly on its last gasp. I believe it was Google and Microsoft who brought the original specification, based on their existing implementations. Mozilla objected vociferously and continuously, trying to get more parts of the system specified (such as communication between the browser and the CDM), and generally trying to make the CDMs as narrow as possible and as open as possible. They ultimately lost on most, if not all, of those issues, but it's not for a lack of trying!

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

> The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen. You have to be able to pay the bills first IMO. I don't fault them for that at all.

jm4 6y ago

Mozilla certainly has its faults, but how is generating revenue an indication of how far they have fallen? Why don't you contribute to the project for free? Most of us aren't going to do that so it's a little unreasonable to fault them for having to generate revenue to keep the lights on.

croutonwagon 6y ago

Mozilla is probably one of the most customizable, with defaults that are relatively pro-privacy and therefore privacy focused player in the browser market. Fly by nights like brave have come in and then realized its hard to do in a sustainable way. Chrome is certainly not privacy focused. Ie and edge arent either. There is a reason tor browser is basically firefox code under the hood.