18 ms·

I really don't understand it. - Content was used to spread malware/illegal content - It was not profitable How are those two things something you find out af

by kace91 6y ago

I really don't understand it. - Content was used to spread malware/illegal content - It was not profitable How are those two things something you find out after the fact? What was the reasoning for launching the product in the first place?

johannes1234321 6y ago
Mozilla Foundation, as owner of Mozilla Corp, is a non-profit. Thus the second argument is not that important. Also a single feature can be unprofitable if it helps to drive the related products. First argument is more relevant, I see it as underestimated the risk there and coming out of a technical experiment ... That all said: Mozilla Corp's "focussing" doesn't convince me.
- elithrar 6y ago
  > Mozilla Foundation, as owner of Mozilla Corp, is a non-profit. Thus the second argument is not that important. “Non-profit” doesn’t mean “don’t make profits” or “set a pile of money on fire”.
- kace91 6y ago
  > Mozilla Foundation, as owner of Mozilla Corp, is a non-profit. Thus the second argument is not that important. I included that argument because it's mentioned explicitly by them: > as we weighed the cost of our overall portfolio and strategic focus, we made the decision not to relaunch the service.
  - heftig 6y ago
    This doesn't imply the benefits that were weighted against the costs were monetary.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
I assume they expected some use to spread illegal content, but the ratio of illegal use to accepted use was far different than their expectations. Presumably the reason to launch it was to advertise Firefox by providing a useful tool that encourages linking to others.
- nottrobin 6y ago
  I assume this is more of a political miscalculation. Advocates of freedom of speech & from government oversight could argue that this sort of service is a good thing regardless. As in, yes people will share illegal content but enforcement of that should happen outside of the encrypted transfer, and the right to encrypted transfer for everyone should be protected. I assume this is broadly what Mozilla believe. They may have miscalculated their ability to ideologically separate the service from the content, legally or in popular opinion.
darkstar_16 6y ago
It's almost as if Mozilla does not understand how the Internet works!
- ekianjo 6y ago
  They also don't understand how to make money. They think eating in the hand of Google is a viable financial strategy.
  - btrask 6y ago
    Google is giving them so much money, for such a long time, that it is hard to replace. Golden handcuffs. Donations and $10/mo "Firefox subscriptions" aren't going to make up for it. There are ways they could make money and leverage their browser, such as becoming a certificate authority (they're literally outsourcing profit) or making their own search engine (which would probably be a bad idea for other reasons). Nothing else is going to replace $400m/year. Their real problem is not "making money." It's too much easy money making them go soft, and then wasting it.
    - liability 6y ago
      Google has already given them such a huge amount of money that if Mozilla managed it well and ran a lean organization they could coast decades without further payments. Instead they seem to spend it as fast as they get it. They've burned up billions with little to show for it (their declining market share is the proof of this) and now wonder how they will survive.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    Half the things people criticize them for are attempts to find revenue. The criticisms are often reasonable but you can't say they're content to rely on Google.
simias 6y ago
That does seem incredibly naive. Maybe the problem is not so much that it was used to spread malware/illegal content but that it failed to reach mainstream adoption and as such was mainly used to host malware/illegal content that would be rejected by other hosts, while not generating a lot of good publicity and new users for Firefox?
rvba 6y ago
Nearly all their "side projects" look like greenfields used by the project teams to boost their CVs so they can land better jobs. Those teams know very well that those projects have no use case, but they dont care. Foundation does not care either, since it is busy with increasing own remuneration and politics. Meanwhile their core product lost around 10 percentage points of market share (from 15% marketshare to 5%): 1) Nobody works on Firefox any more. From 1000 people in Mozilla and how many working on Firefox? 50? and 950 doing various (useless) side projects? 2) they don't understand their own product and its user base: they killed extensions, killed ability to customize anything. Basically they rebranded to a "worse Chrome". 3) They dont care about quality and ship a half baked product. Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited. 4) Countless bugs and problems caused by their own decisions (e.g. all extensions need to be signed - they forget to sign them so they stopped working..) 5) Not caring about the product at all because some people inside are stubborn dinosaurs. Firefox didnt have proper installers for business, just because someone inside didnt want to provide them. It's like sabotage. Their tech savy user base gets alienated every day: no more extensions, no more customization, constant broken workflow (changes for the sake of doing changes, while old things are never repaired - greenfileds are easier). At some point you start to wonder, why use a Chrome clone that is worse than Chrome? I expect that the marketshare will go from 5% to 0.% What will be terrible for everyone. We are already losing the address bar due to Google AMP. [on a sidenote: when Chrome pushed for Google AMP, Firefox didnt capitalize on it - in fact Firefox also changed the address bar as if the Firefox team wanted to secretly support AMP..] Those teams probably know very well that Firefox is a sinking ship, since development teams are not working on core product; but they dont care, they will jump. Meanwhile those few who worked on Firefox are left holding the bag, while they were "paying" for all those side projects, that just siphoned money / development time from core product that is Firefox.
- CodesInChaos 6y ago
  > Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited. Apart from extensions requiring whitelisting, how is it worse than the old mobile FF? I didn't notice any new bugs and it fixed the issues I had with the address bar hiding being fickle.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
If you were being cynical (and to be honest I don't think this is exclusively what happened here), you could view it purely as a short term marketing campaign. It generated lots of positive reporting about Firefox, associating them with: launching a new product, encryption, freedom and ease of use. It also had an element of virality, in that a passionate Firefox user could use the service to send to someone who doesn't use Firefox and forcibly introduce the brand to them. All of this helps to build brand and mindshare, which, in an ideal world, leads to more installations and more ad revenue. There are some comments about how they should focus on their browser. As much as I'd like to say otherwise, I'd argue that activities like this have a much better chance of pulling people over from Chrome than ticking off a few bug reports, or improving the certificate workflow for extensions.
- sfink 6y ago
  Heh. The marketing campaign idea does sound plausible, but I don't buy it. It's much easier to burn goodwill than generate it. People hate to lose existing stuff a lot more than they like to get new stuff. "There's no such thing as bad PR" only works when you can lock in your customers. I agree with your final paragraph.
karmakaze 6y ago
I thought Mozilla was a non-profit. And couldn't they have added a malware scanner to deal with the problem directly? As for illegal content that's true with any private communication but maybe DCMA or similar got involved. I can accept that fighting for private large file transfer detracts from the main goal.
- slipheen 6y ago
  The files were encrypted, Mozilla didn't have access to the contents.
  - notriddle 6y ago
    Which is, of course, exactly why they couldn't use any of the normal methods of dealing with malware. Technically, there are ways of scanning files without necessarily having access to them [1], but they're not production-ready yet. [1]: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2019/12/08/on-client-side-media-scanning/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2019/12/08/on-clien...
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Non profit companies still have expenses. Mozilla Corporation is a for profit subsidiary of the non profit Mozilla Foundation, technically.

by kace91 6y ago

johannes1234321 6y ago

Mozilla Foundation, as owner of Mozilla Corp, is a non-profit. Thus the second argument is not that important. Also a single feature can be unprofitable if it helps to drive the related products. First argument is more relevant, I see it as underestimated the risk there and coming out of a technical experiment ... That all said: Mozilla Corp's "focussing" doesn't convince me.

elithrar 6y ago
> Mozilla Foundation, as owner of Mozilla Corp, is a non-profit. Thus the second argument is not that important. “Non-profit” doesn’t mean “don’t make profits” or “set a pile of money on fire”.
kace91 6y ago
> Mozilla Foundation, as owner of Mozilla Corp, is a non-profit. Thus the second argument is not that important. I included that argument because it's mentioned explicitly by them: > as we weighed the cost of our overall portfolio and strategic focus, we made the decision not to relaunch the service.
- heftig 6y ago
  This doesn't imply the benefits that were weighted against the costs were monetary.

boomboomsubban 6y ago

I assume they expected some use to spread illegal content, but the ratio of illegal use to accepted use was far different than their expectations. Presumably the reason to launch it was to advertise Firefox by providing a useful tool that encourages linking to others.

nottrobin 6y ago
I assume this is more of a political miscalculation. Advocates of freedom of speech & from government oversight could argue that this sort of service is a good thing regardless. As in, yes people will share illegal content but enforcement of that should happen outside of the encrypted transfer, and the right to encrypted transfer for everyone should be protected. I assume this is broadly what Mozilla believe. They may have miscalculated their ability to ideologically separate the service from the content, legally or in popular opinion.

darkstar_16 6y ago

It's almost as if Mozilla does not understand how the Internet works!

ekianjo 6y ago
They also don't understand how to make money. They think eating in the hand of Google is a viable financial strategy.
- btrask 6y ago
  Google is giving them so much money, for such a long time, that it is hard to replace. Golden handcuffs. Donations and $10/mo "Firefox subscriptions" aren't going to make up for it. There are ways they could make money and leverage their browser, such as becoming a certificate authority (they're literally outsourcing profit) or making their own search engine (which would probably be a bad idea for other reasons). Nothing else is going to replace $400m/year. Their real problem is not "making money." It's too much easy money making them go soft, and then wasting it.
  - liability 6y ago
    Google has already given them such a huge amount of money that if Mozilla managed it well and ran a lean organization they could coast decades without further payments. Instead they seem to spend it as fast as they get it. They've burned up billions with little to show for it (their declining market share is the proof of this) and now wonder how they will survive.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Half the things people criticize them for are attempts to find revenue. The criticisms are often reasonable but you can't say they're content to rely on Google.

simias 6y ago

That does seem incredibly naive. Maybe the problem is not so much that it was used to spread malware/illegal content but that it failed to reach mainstream adoption and as such was mainly used to host malware/illegal content that would be rejected by other hosts, while not generating a lot of good publicity and new users for Firefox?

rvba 6y ago

Nearly all their "side projects" look like greenfields used by the project teams to boost their CVs so they can land better jobs. Those teams know very well that those projects have no use case, but they dont care. Foundation does not care either, since it is busy with increasing own remuneration and politics. Meanwhile their core product lost around 10 percentage points of market share (from 15% marketshare to 5%): 1) Nobody works on Firefox any more. From 1000 people in Mozilla and how many working on Firefox? 50? and 950 doing various (useless) side projects? 2) they don't understand their own product and its user base: they killed extensions, killed ability to customize anything. Basically they rebranded to a "worse Chrome". 3) They dont care about quality and ship a half baked product. Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited. 4) Countless bugs and problems caused by their own decisions (e.g. all extensions need to be signed - they forget to sign them so they stopped working..) 5) Not caring about the product at all because some people inside are stubborn dinosaurs. Firefox didnt have proper installers for business, just because someone inside didnt want to provide them. It's like sabotage. Their tech savy user base gets alienated every day: no more extensions, no more customization, constant broken workflow (changes for the sake of doing changes, while old things are never repaired - greenfileds are easier). At some point you start to wonder, why use a Chrome clone that is worse than Chrome? I expect that the marketshare will go from 5% to 0.% What will be terrible for everyone. We are already losing the address bar due to Google AMP. [on a sidenote: when Chrome pushed for Google AMP, Firefox didnt capitalize on it - in fact Firefox also changed the address bar as if the Firefox team wanted to secretly support AMP..] Those teams probably know very well that Firefox is a sinking ship, since development teams are not working on core product; but they dont care, they will jump. Meanwhile those few who worked on Firefox are left holding the bag, while they were "paying" for all those side projects, that just siphoned money / development time from core product that is Firefox.

CodesInChaos 6y ago
> Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited. Apart from extensions requiring whitelisting, how is it worse than the old mobile FF? I didn't notice any new bugs and it fixed the issues I had with the address bar hiding being fickle.

tweetle_beetle 6y ago

If you were being cynical (and to be honest I don't think this is exclusively what happened here), you could view it purely as a short term marketing campaign. It generated lots of positive reporting about Firefox, associating them with: launching a new product, encryption, freedom and ease of use. It also had an element of virality, in that a passionate Firefox user could use the service to send to someone who doesn't use Firefox and forcibly introduce the brand to them. All of this helps to build brand and mindshare, which, in an ideal world, leads to more installations and more ad revenue. There are some comments about how they should focus on their browser. As much as I'd like to say otherwise, I'd argue that activities like this have a much better chance of pulling people over from Chrome than ticking off a few bug reports, or improving the certificate workflow for extensions.

sfink 6y ago
Heh. The marketing campaign idea does sound plausible, but I don't buy it. It's much easier to burn goodwill than generate it. People hate to lose existing stuff a lot more than they like to get new stuff. "There's no such thing as bad PR" only works when you can lock in your customers. I agree with your final paragraph.

karmakaze 6y ago

I thought Mozilla was a non-profit. And couldn't they have added a malware scanner to deal with the problem directly? As for illegal content that's true with any private communication but maybe DCMA or similar got involved. I can accept that fighting for private large file transfer detracts from the main goal.

slipheen 6y ago
The files were encrypted, Mozilla didn't have access to the contents.
- notriddle 6y ago
  Which is, of course, exactly why they couldn't use any of the normal methods of dealing with malware. Technically, there are ways of scanning files without necessarily having access to them [1], but they're not production-ready yet. [1]: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2019/12/08/on-client-side-media-scanning/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2019/12/08/on-clien...
pseudalopex 6y ago
Non profit companies still have expenses. Mozilla Corporation is a for profit subsidiary of the non profit Mozilla Foundation, technically.