7 ms·

The Mozilla Manifesto

88 points by flippant 6y ago

kyleee 6y ago
What is "Fræðast meira"?
- zamadatix 6y ago
  "learn more" in Icelandic since this page seems to be linked to that language version
- ryanf 6y ago
  This is the Icelandic page. English version here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- thdc 6y ago
  Check out the english version of the page: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ (probably means learn more)
plibither8 6y ago
English language version: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
- fireattack 6y ago
  Why is the Icelandic version missing the top part of the page though?
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, we'll change to that from https://www.mozilla.org/is/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/is/about/manifesto/. Thanks! Strange!
ekianjo 6y ago
Does Mozilla even follow their own Manifesto? > Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional. So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy? > Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource. We are still waiting for Pocket's server source code... > Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment. What does that even mean? They stopped at 9 and had no idea how to make it to 10 and ended up with wrapping buzz words into one sentence?
- kgraves 6y ago
  > So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy? This and the fact that they signed the deal with Google again makes me lose faith in Mozilla, caring about privacy yet making deals with the devil that is killing them.
  - joe-collins 6y ago
    I don't like it. I'd rather they moved to DDG. But if I let myself be an optimist for a short while, I can understand the compromise in order to establish a runway while they build up more ethical sources of income.
    - waheoo 6y ago
      Id rather they just automatically replace ad units on websites with their own adnetwork making money that way. Before you have a whinge about that idea, realise that google effectively does this already. All it would take is for Firefox to say fuck it, you want to serve ads to our users? Fine, but you sell adunits through our network that is focused on privacy, not the network through Google or Facebook.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      > I can understand the compromise in order to establish a runway while they build up more ethical sources of income. When? It's not pragmatism anymore, it has become pure laziness on the part of Mozilla. They have been accepting this business model (being fed by the hand of Google) forever now, instead of seriously trying to achieve financial autonomy. They have lost all credibility if they compromise on that front - it's such a huge conflict of interest.
FlyingSnake 6y ago
Sigh. Looks like Mozilla management hasn’t been able to sense the zeitgeist, after their latest downsizing, so let me spell it out for them: Dear Moz://a management: Everyone is already on board with your ideals of open Internet. What you need to do is get your house in order and focus on your core competency i.e. the web browser and related tooling. You won’t get a seat at the table of Internet biggies if you’re a has been entity.
- djaychela 6y ago
  > Everyone is already on board with your ideals of open Internet. I don't think that's the case. Increasingly content is being placed in walled gardens which you don't get full access to that content unless you have an account. Google is still pushing AMP. Chrome is becoming the new IE, and sites that 'work best' or only work with Chrome are not uncommon. Those (and many other) factors don't indicate to me that everyone is on board with the ideal of an open Internet.
  - aravindet 6y ago
    I think most people can (and do) agree with these ideals stated in the abstract, but still do things that violate them in their jobs / real life because of practical considerations such as pursuing a profit. Not unlike how most people understand the dangers of climate change, but continue to drive cars, fly, use air conditioning etc. Or, stated another way, we are all hypocrites to some extent.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Or, stated yet another way, we all suck at coordinating. It's a problem with our species. If something that requires self-sacrifice starts yielding value only after everyone (or majority) does it, it simply doesn't happen, not spontaneously. The history of human civilization - of governments, religions and movements, of gangs and corporations and worker unions - can be seen as attempts to surmount our inability to coordinate at scale. Laws, shared beliefs and ideologies, shunning, taboos, money - they're all tools for creating and maintaining coordination in large groups. A classic essay on that topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
tarkin2 6y ago
Has the op posted the Icelandic version to get it here as a new post and to make a point? Look, I’m saddened by the layoffs too. And I’m very sad the dev tools and servo teams teams in particular have been hit. And I would like to know why. Yet there are still 750 mozilla employees. The servo stuff was merged into ff already. I’m not saying it’s good that they’ve scaled down their R&D but the narrative that the C-suite have laid everyone off so they can drink more champagne on one more yacht gets tiring and obscures reasoned discussion about the lay offs.
- hellofunk 6y ago
  > The servo stuff was merged into ff already. Really? The project was done? That is at odds to what nearly every person I follow involved with the project has had to say recently.
  - Ygg2 6y ago
    It's not. Just look at outstanding issues in Servo. https://github.com/servo/servo https://github.com/servo/servo What Mozilla did was move few stable components to FireFox and shitcanned the rest.
  - tarkin2 6y ago
    On another post one of the dev teams said, although it’s not “finished”, a lot of the code has been merged into ff. It has already been useful. He even used the term “winding down”.
- Ygg2 6y ago
  To me, this manifesto is just empty platitudes. + We support privacy - Yet get millions from Google to keep their search engine default. + We believe in transparent community based decisions - Which is why we gutted several community darlings (Devtools, Servo, Wasmtime, MDN) Without Servo, Firefox is doomed to become a cheap Chrome knock-off. Why not fire like 650/750 and just base FireFox on Chromium? And in that case why should I use a knock-off, if I can have the real thing for free? Google controls the code, whatever tracking/control they build in is going to be hard to remove without a fork. A Fork Mozilla won't be able to afford. No amount of writing manifestos is going to change that fact.
aravindet 6y ago
If there are any Mozillians here, I'm curious about how the organization balances its technology development and advocacy functions. Do you think it has been shifting one way or another? Do you think that both roles are represented equally in leadership?
cinquemb 6y ago
As someone who has been running my own personal fork off ff for the past half decade because no way the things i want in (and left out) would get adopted due to the conflict of interests at Mozilla, I see these times a great opportunity for more performant adversive additions (and removals of cruft) into browsers directly vs third party addons or custom hacks people may have to do personally now (spoofing data browsers make available to servers/js, noscript, null routing on the fly, etc).
- smabie 6y ago
  What changes did you make? I've always wanted to nuke the keybindings and change them to Emacs ones, but never mustered the will.
  - cinquemb 6y ago
    Spoofing browser data sampled from existing browsers and past versions that is usually sent in http headers for every request in the nsHttpHandler, removing the home page stuff, compiling out telemetry stuff, disableing stuff in CanvasRenderingContext2D, removed some css url stuff in servo url.rs.
mvn9 6y ago
>The Internet is an integral part of modern life—a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole. What if Mozilla had used the internet and hadn't spent their billions on bay-area engineers but on hiring young third-world talents and offered them a job that educated them in web- and browser development? There could be thousands of engineers working on Firefox and servo with the benefit that they would develop content that would be guaranteed to work on Firefox.
- makapuf 6y ago
  Theres also literally a world between bay area and third world.
emerged 6y ago
I wonder if #8 is the issue here
Khaine 6y ago
How does partnering with Pocket promote the open web? How does the iRobot stunt align with the manifesto? Mozilla use to live and breath the open web, now they are just empty platitudes like Facebook and Google's commitment to privacy.
- 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
  > iRobot stunt You mean Mr Robot, right?
  - Khaine 6y ago
    I do, thanks for correcting me.
dang 6y ago
A thread from 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5770461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5770461
causality0 6y ago
The Mozilla Manifesto is very weird when you consider the context. Mozilla as we know it exists solely because Google needs a shield against antitrust investigations, and having a "competitor" browser that only takes 5% of the browser market is why Google pays Mozilla the majority of its revenue. Firefox is literally sponsored by Chrome.
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  I don’t know if you heard the news but they just stopped. Also Mozilla existed quite a while before Chrome.
  - distances 6y ago
    Renewed: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...
    - freshsqueeze 6y ago
      Collect the $500M ad money and then turn around and claim Google is evil and they are the only company fighting for internet freedom and world peace.
alwahi 6y ago
is it time to jump ship from mozilla????????????
sunseb 6y ago
I don't get it. Is Mozilla a Neo-Marxist organization now? Why don't you talk about software development instead? About building FireFox? About disrupting tech? It seems Mozilla is now run by people more interested into communism than actually building a fucking software and bringing value to the world. RIP Mozilla.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Were you under the impression that mozilla wasn't ideologically driven previously? Hell look at the imagery of some of their early logos. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi... Not to mention that this document is pretty old. I think the main difference is it feels a lot less authentic now. Less grassroots and more a corporate-ish attempt to appeal to the masses.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
tsujp 6y ago
I _want_ to use Firefox, and Mozilla's kit but every single time I've come onboard after watching improvements etc I get shafted by updates which change major things every few weeks, this is mostly around Firefox having constantly had a different URL bar every update and them removing the ability to search for preferences in my preference list. It feels like they are fighting my ability to make Firefox exactly how I want it and that results in me going to a better take-it-how-you-get-it browser: Chromium. It's a shame but I don't see it being any better the next time I inevitably try.
- 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
  If you want less frequent updates but a very stable build I'd suggest tying Firefox ESR.
- JBiserkov 6y ago
  >removing the ability to search for preferences in my preference list They did what? frantically clicks Hamburger -> Options, which opened about:preferences, "Find in Options" is top and center. Firefox 79, Windows 10.
  - tsujp 6y ago
    I meant `about:config` but regardless I stand corrected, it's back! Yes!
MrDresden 6y ago
I think it deserves mentioning that if any individual here believes that what Mozilla does is valuable, either to them selves or to others, and would like to "put money where their mouth is" as it were, then they can do so here: https://donate.mozilla.org https://donate.mozilla.org I had not thought about donating until these recent layoffs, but have now set a monthly 5$ donation up, as Mozilla's tools and work mean enough to my own interests, as well as being important enough for the internet as a whole, for me to donate. Sadly the public donations will never be enough to cover their whole operational expenses, but every little bit helps.
- yelloworangefog 6y ago
  I really don’t think feeding more money to their flagrantly incompetent and greedy management right now is at all the best course of action if you want to see them do well. The absolute best thing you can hope for that the public backlash to their recent decisions is strong enough to manifest a financial incentive for those in charge at moz to reconsider their business strategy. By encouraging others to donate, you’re essentially rewarding this behavior and reaffirming that this strategy is financially lucrative for them.
prepend 6y ago
Seems like open expression is an important requirement of an open internet. Not sure if that’s in one of the 10 or not there because it conflicts with their ad revenue (ie, open expression doesn’t mesh with ads), or conflicts with authoritarian regimes (eg, Great Firewall of China), or conflicts with “language is violence” or conflicts with “nudity offends me” or something else. It seems like one of the big things at risk now is the ability of the internet to allow direct connections between people without intermediaries. I feel like standards bodies kind of help with this (ie, protocols over platforms).

88 points by flippant 6y ago

kyleee 6y ago

What is "Fræðast meira"?

zamadatix 6y ago
"learn more" in Icelandic since this page seems to be linked to that language version
ryanf 6y ago
This is the Icelandic page. English version here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thdc 6y ago
Check out the english version of the page: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ (probably means learn more)

plibither8 6y ago

English language version: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

fireattack 6y ago
Why is the Icelandic version missing the top part of the page though?
dang 6y ago
Ok, we'll change to that from https://www.mozilla.org/is/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/is/about/manifesto/. Thanks! Strange!

ekianjo 6y ago

Does Mozilla even follow their own Manifesto? > Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional. So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy? > Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource. We are still waiting for Pocket's server source code... > Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment. What does that even mean? They stopped at 9 and had no idea how to make it to 10 and ended up with wrapping buzz words into one sentence?

kgraves 6y ago
> So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy? This and the fact that they signed the deal with Google again makes me lose faith in Mozilla, caring about privacy yet making deals with the devil that is killing them.
- joe-collins 6y ago
  I don't like it. I'd rather they moved to DDG. But if I let myself be an optimist for a short while, I can understand the compromise in order to establish a runway while they build up more ethical sources of income.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    Id rather they just automatically replace ad units on websites with their own adnetwork making money that way. Before you have a whinge about that idea, realise that google effectively does this already. All it would take is for Firefox to say fuck it, you want to serve ads to our users? Fine, but you sell adunits through our network that is focused on privacy, not the network through Google or Facebook.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    > I can understand the compromise in order to establish a runway while they build up more ethical sources of income. When? It's not pragmatism anymore, it has become pure laziness on the part of Mozilla. They have been accepting this business model (being fed by the hand of Google) forever now, instead of seriously trying to achieve financial autonomy. They have lost all credibility if they compromise on that front - it's such a huge conflict of interest.

FlyingSnake 6y ago

Sigh. Looks like Mozilla management hasn’t been able to sense the zeitgeist, after their latest downsizing, so let me spell it out for them: Dear Moz://a management: Everyone is already on board with your ideals of open Internet. What you need to do is get your house in order and focus on your core competency i.e. the web browser and related tooling. You won’t get a seat at the table of Internet biggies if you’re a has been entity.

djaychela 6y ago
> Everyone is already on board with your ideals of open Internet. I don't think that's the case. Increasingly content is being placed in walled gardens which you don't get full access to that content unless you have an account. Google is still pushing AMP. Chrome is becoming the new IE, and sites that 'work best' or only work with Chrome are not uncommon. Those (and many other) factors don't indicate to me that everyone is on board with the ideal of an open Internet.
- aravindet 6y ago
  I think most people can (and do) agree with these ideals stated in the abstract, but still do things that violate them in their jobs / real life because of practical considerations such as pursuing a profit. Not unlike how most people understand the dangers of climate change, but continue to drive cars, fly, use air conditioning etc. Or, stated another way, we are all hypocrites to some extent.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Or, stated yet another way, we all suck at coordinating. It's a problem with our species. If something that requires self-sacrifice starts yielding value only after everyone (or majority) does it, it simply doesn't happen, not spontaneously. The history of human civilization - of governments, religions and movements, of gangs and corporations and worker unions - can be seen as attempts to surmount our inability to coordinate at scale. Laws, shared beliefs and ideologies, shunning, taboos, money - they're all tools for creating and maintaining coordination in large groups. A classic essay on that topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

tarkin2 6y ago

Has the op posted the Icelandic version to get it here as a new post and to make a point? Look, I’m saddened by the layoffs too. And I’m very sad the dev tools and servo teams teams in particular have been hit. And I would like to know why. Yet there are still 750 mozilla employees. The servo stuff was merged into ff already. I’m not saying it’s good that they’ve scaled down their R&D but the narrative that the C-suite have laid everyone off so they can drink more champagne on one more yacht gets tiring and obscures reasoned discussion about the lay offs.

hellofunk 6y ago
> The servo stuff was merged into ff already. Really? The project was done? That is at odds to what nearly every person I follow involved with the project has had to say recently.
- Ygg2 6y ago
  It's not. Just look at outstanding issues in Servo. https://github.com/servo/servo https://github.com/servo/servo What Mozilla did was move few stable components to FireFox and shitcanned the rest.
- tarkin2 6y ago
  On another post one of the dev teams said, although it’s not “finished”, a lot of the code has been merged into ff. It has already been useful. He even used the term “winding down”.
Ygg2 6y ago
To me, this manifesto is just empty platitudes. + We support privacy - Yet get millions from Google to keep their search engine default. + We believe in transparent community based decisions - Which is why we gutted several community darlings (Devtools, Servo, Wasmtime, MDN) Without Servo, Firefox is doomed to become a cheap Chrome knock-off. Why not fire like 650/750 and just base FireFox on Chromium? And in that case why should I use a knock-off, if I can have the real thing for free? Google controls the code, whatever tracking/control they build in is going to be hard to remove without a fork. A Fork Mozilla won't be able to afford. No amount of writing manifestos is going to change that fact.

aravindet 6y ago

If there are any Mozillians here, I'm curious about how the organization balances its technology development and advocacy functions. Do you think it has been shifting one way or another? Do you think that both roles are represented equally in leadership?

cinquemb 6y ago

As someone who has been running my own personal fork off ff for the past half decade because no way the things i want in (and left out) would get adopted due to the conflict of interests at Mozilla, I see these times a great opportunity for more performant adversive additions (and removals of cruft) into browsers directly vs third party addons or custom hacks people may have to do personally now (spoofing data browsers make available to servers/js, noscript, null routing on the fly, etc).

smabie 6y ago
What changes did you make? I've always wanted to nuke the keybindings and change them to Emacs ones, but never mustered the will.
- cinquemb 6y ago
  Spoofing browser data sampled from existing browsers and past versions that is usually sent in http headers for every request in the nsHttpHandler, removing the home page stuff, compiling out telemetry stuff, disableing stuff in CanvasRenderingContext2D, removed some css url stuff in servo url.rs.

mvn9 6y ago

>The Internet is an integral part of modern life—a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole. What if Mozilla had used the internet and hadn't spent their billions on bay-area engineers but on hiring young third-world talents and offered them a job that educated them in web- and browser development? There could be thousands of engineers working on Firefox and servo with the benefit that they would develop content that would be guaranteed to work on Firefox.

makapuf 6y ago
Theres also literally a world between bay area and third world.

emerged 6y ago

I wonder if #8 is the issue here

Khaine 6y ago

How does partnering with Pocket promote the open web? How does the iRobot stunt align with the manifesto? Mozilla use to live and breath the open web, now they are just empty platitudes like Facebook and Google's commitment to privacy.

0xdeadb00f 6y ago
> iRobot stunt You mean Mr Robot, right?
- Khaine 6y ago
  I do, thanks for correcting me.

dang 6y ago

A thread from 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5770461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5770461

causality0 6y ago

The Mozilla Manifesto is very weird when you consider the context. Mozilla as we know it exists solely because Google needs a shield against antitrust investigations, and having a "competitor" browser that only takes 5% of the browser market is why Google pays Mozilla the majority of its revenue. Firefox is literally sponsored by Chrome.

Synaesthesia 6y ago
I don’t know if you heard the news but they just stopped. Also Mozilla existed quite a while before Chrome.
- distances 6y ago
  Renewed: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...
  - freshsqueeze 6y ago
    Collect the $500M ad money and then turn around and claim Google is evil and they are the only company fighting for internet freedom and world peace.

alwahi 6y ago

is it time to jump ship from mozilla????????????

sunseb 6y ago

I don't get it. Is Mozilla a Neo-Marxist organization now? Why don't you talk about software development instead? About building FireFox? About disrupting tech? It seems Mozilla is now run by people more interested into communism than actually building a fucking software and bringing value to the world. RIP Mozilla.

bawolff 6y ago
Were you under the impression that mozilla wasn't ideologically driven previously? Hell look at the imagery of some of their early logos. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi... Not to mention that this document is pretty old. I think the main difference is it feels a lot less authentic now. Less grassroots and more a corporate-ish attempt to appeal to the masses.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

tsujp 6y ago

I _want_ to use Firefox, and Mozilla's kit but every single time I've come onboard after watching improvements etc I get shafted by updates which change major things every few weeks, this is mostly around Firefox having constantly had a different URL bar every update and them removing the ability to search for preferences in my preference list. It feels like they are fighting my ability to make Firefox exactly how I want it and that results in me going to a better take-it-how-you-get-it browser: Chromium. It's a shame but I don't see it being any better the next time I inevitably try.

0xdeadb00f 6y ago
If you want less frequent updates but a very stable build I'd suggest tying Firefox ESR.
JBiserkov 6y ago
>removing the ability to search for preferences in my preference list They did what? frantically clicks Hamburger -> Options, which opened about:preferences, "Find in Options" is top and center. Firefox 79, Windows 10.
- tsujp 6y ago
  I meant `about:config` but regardless I stand corrected, it's back! Yes!

MrDresden 6y ago

I think it deserves mentioning that if any individual here believes that what Mozilla does is valuable, either to them selves or to others, and would like to "put money where their mouth is" as it were, then they can do so here: https://donate.mozilla.org https://donate.mozilla.org I had not thought about donating until these recent layoffs, but have now set a monthly 5$ donation up, as Mozilla's tools and work mean enough to my own interests, as well as being important enough for the internet as a whole, for me to donate. Sadly the public donations will never be enough to cover their whole operational expenses, but every little bit helps.

yelloworangefog 6y ago
I really don’t think feeding more money to their flagrantly incompetent and greedy management right now is at all the best course of action if you want to see them do well. The absolute best thing you can hope for that the public backlash to their recent decisions is strong enough to manifest a financial incentive for those in charge at moz to reconsider their business strategy. By encouraging others to donate, you’re essentially rewarding this behavior and reaffirming that this strategy is financially lucrative for them.

prepend 6y ago

Seems like open expression is an important requirement of an open internet. Not sure if that’s in one of the 10 or not there because it conflicts with their ad revenue (ie, open expression doesn’t mesh with ads), or conflicts with authoritarian regimes (eg, Great Firewall of China), or conflicts with “language is violence” or conflicts with “nudity offends me” or something else. It seems like one of the big things at risk now is the ability of the internet to allow direct connections between people without intermediaries. I feel like standards bodies kind of help with this (ie, protocols over platforms).