11 ms·

Our Year in Review: How we’ve kept Firefox working for you in 2020

68 points by joeyespo 6y ago

jph 6y ago
I appreciate Firefox and donate to Mozilla. If you like open source, consider donating to Mozilla Foundation or any other group that helps keep the free open internet working, such as Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Software Foundation (FSF), Linux Foundation, etc.
- orev 6y ago
  To anyone ready to say “you can’t donate to Firefox, only the Mozilla Corp” — don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
  - spenat 6y ago
    But you cannot even donate to the Mozilla Corp (those who actually coordinate Firefox development), but to the Mozilla Foundation, which AFAIK does advocacy. I honestly don't know if how much each 1$ donated to the Mozilla Foundation contributes to Firefox development, if at all.
  - _Microft 6y ago
    Does earmarking for donations exist in the US, i.e. could you donate under the condition that the money is only to be used for development of Firefox?
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      Yeah, they used to do that for Thunderbird. I assume it wasn't worth the hassle, and unless you are donating a serious amount of money they won't agree to take on the risk involved.
      - pwdisswordfish5 6y ago
        Once upon a time, someone affiliated with Thunderbird project maintenance/governance posted a detailed reply to HN describing how hard it was to get Mozilla to release funds that it had been been collecting from Thunderbird donors. That comment is obviously not lost to the sands of time, but it has proven quite difficult to relocate.
        boomboomsubban 6y ago
        It sounds like there was a period of time where the donations just sat there before a system was developed to allow Thunderbird total control. It's somewhat understandable, at the time Thunderbird shared many resources with Firefox but if some of the donation money was used for Firefox they'd break the terms of the donations.
        pwdisswordfish5 6y ago
        This is nothing more than apologetics, and not even good apologetics. Instead, speculative apologetics, i.e. no solid footing by which to understand the premise.
        boomboomsubban 6y ago
        Compared to "I'm pretty sure I read once things were bad." Sometimes things are hard, Thunderbird didn't seem very upset as they decided to stay with Mozilla during the period.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    It's not "perfect vs good", it's "completely useless vs good".
  - pseudo0 6y ago
    The Mozilla Foundation minus Firefox doesn't seem like a good use of charitable funds compared to say, the EFF. For example, they funded this hit piece on P2P technology [0] and a browser extension to solicit complaints about YouTube recommendations [1]. Meanwhile they're laying off key developers and gutting the future of their core product, while paying execs bloated salaries to manage this array of white elephant advocacy projects. [0] - https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/fellow-research-decentralized-web-hate/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/fellow-research-decen... [1] - https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/regrets-reporter/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/regrets-reporter...
  - LockAndLol 6y ago
    How is donating directly to a project "perfect"? That's a pretty normal expectation, imo. Framing something normal as "perfect" is definitely a fallacy. Would you really be OK with donating to a cause whose major service is their most visible one and for your money to instead go into mostly, completely different things? I'm not and therefore I won't donate to Mozilla. I donated to other projects with clear goals, limited scope and visible results - there are quite a few of those. If the firefox team decided to split from Mozilla or a team decided to build a browser upon a new browser engine (like quantum or whatever that new rust browser engine is), I'd be glad to donate directly to the project. Mozilla leadership has proven that they are too scatterbrained and insensitive to reality to be trusted with donations. Their priorities aren't aligned with the ones stated by the org. I try my best not to give money to people like that.
ddevault 6y ago
Some ways they have not kept Firefox working for you in 2020: - Laying off 25% of their engineers - Investing in a 400% increase in leadership salaries and bonuses during record-low market share - Adding more advertising to an end-user application - Sending all of your browsing history to Cloudflare - Launching a VPN grift which sends all of your data to another third-party (and charges you for the pleasure) - Terminated Firefox Send and Firefox Notes - Failed to open source Pocket, 3 years since their promise to
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  >- Investing in a 400% increase in leadership salaries and bonuses during record-low market share Source? The last financial release detailed 2018, one year after Mozilla's highest revenue year. Additionally, their CEO resigned and I doubt Baker got a raise at all, certainly not for more than Chris Beard's salary.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html The data is only as recent as 2018, indeed, but I don't have any reason to suspect that they've corrected course. It's an especially bad look when they're also laying off large swaths of their staff.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      It's worth noting that in 2015 Mozilla negotiated a deal with Yahoo netting them an additional $100+ million a year. It makes sense that in 2016 the board would see a significant raise for however long their next contract is. I doubt this trend continues after 2018, when the sale of Yahoo saw a huge drop in revenue. They likely should have judged more on market share, but it's a fairly understandable move. Also, that huge spike on the chart was roughly $4.5 million of the over $100 million in increased revenue.
superkuh 6y ago
>HTTPS-Only mode ... will also ask for your permission before connecting to a website if it doesn't support secure connections. This is being done with the best of intentions but browsers scaremongering over HTTP sites as if they are dangerous is a bad thing. There is more to the web than commercial transactions! Human people cannot feasibly be cert authorities. Only corporations can. When browsers will only display sites that are authorized by corporations we're eventually going to be in big trouble. Yes, LetsEncrypt is a benevolent corporation, yes there are even options beyond LE, but as we know from the dot org fiasco as long as there is potential money to be made these benevolent dictorships will eventually go very bad. And that's ignoring all centralization making a very juicy target for government censorship. Encrypt, yes. But also allow plaintext. The potential for a down-grade attack on a "secure" site is worth far less to the world than being able to communicate person to person without a corporate intermediary approving every bit.
- jackconsidine 6y ago
  Not to mention many non-https sites have zero reason to be. A plain HTML portfolio site, for example, should not be flagged with a scary "insecure" logo because its content is not encrypted.
  - lol768 6y ago
    We need to protect the integrity of the information so that kit's not abused to serve malware or pages that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities to the end-user when they browse on an insecure network (which, if Snowden's publications are anything to go by, is every network). HTTPS is not just confidentiality - security is confidentiality, integrity and availability.
    - pbalau 6y ago
      Having a valid ssl cert does not stop a website from serving malware.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Scarbutt 6y ago
Did they stop working in the dev tools?
johnklos 6y ago
Oh, come on. This is such bullshit. Firefox is now about marketing. Mozilla isn't doing anyone any favors except themselves by "saving us" from one group or groups by giving our privacy away to other groups of their choosing.
solarkraft 6y ago
I love Firefox and hate the Chrome monopoly, but I'm so close to switching away. Most recently Firefox has been excruciatingly slow while Chromium was as fast as always, plus (likely WebRTC related) crashes every few hours Please get your shit together, Mozilla. But it seems like their model for the future is to sell worse versions of 3rd party services with their logo ...
- freebuju 6y ago
  In some cases relying on Firefox as your main browser can turn out to be a sadomasochistic endeavor. Sadly though 100% of the web is written with Chrom(e/ium) in mind. Firefox lost the ball on this too long ago for it to come back on this. I can't help but see Firefox as a headless running chicken sometimes. And doesn't help matters that Mozilla doesn't care enough to at least try and take back some of it's former glory.
OneLeggedCat 6y ago
I'm looking forward to the new and improved Mr. Robot v2 campaign.
TwoNineFive 6y ago
Mozilla blog posts read like hyperbolic corporate propaganda. The style is really off-putting to me. Grandiose claims with no authenticity. All the bad stuff and controversy gets quietly ignored. What about the layoffs? What about the executive pay? What about the obnoxious Chrome-sucking/mimicking URL bar? What about the certificate extirpation issue which NOBODY was ever held accountable for and for which it took MONTHS and MONTHS for a Friday-6PM-style oopsie announcement to even acknowledge. A little bit of reasonable descent could give Mozilla a lot of authenticity, but they seem incapable of that level of humility. Occasionally I see private blog/reddit/tweeter posts from employees, but never in an official manner, and always with a hint of trepidation that they could be fired for speaking out.

68 points by joeyespo 6y ago

jph 6y ago

I appreciate Firefox and donate to Mozilla. If you like open source, consider donating to Mozilla Foundation or any other group that helps keep the free open internet working, such as Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Software Foundation (FSF), Linux Foundation, etc.

orev 6y ago
To anyone ready to say “you can’t donate to Firefox, only the Mozilla Corp” — don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
- spenat 6y ago
  But you cannot even donate to the Mozilla Corp (those who actually coordinate Firefox development), but to the Mozilla Foundation, which AFAIK does advocacy. I honestly don't know if how much each 1$ donated to the Mozilla Foundation contributes to Firefox development, if at all.
- _Microft 6y ago
  Does earmarking for donations exist in the US, i.e. could you donate under the condition that the money is only to be used for development of Firefox?
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Yeah, they used to do that for Thunderbird. I assume it wasn't worth the hassle, and unless you are donating a serious amount of money they won't agree to take on the risk involved.
    - pwdisswordfish5 6y ago
      Once upon a time, someone affiliated with Thunderbird project maintenance/governance posted a detailed reply to HN describing how hard it was to get Mozilla to release funds that it had been been collecting from Thunderbird donors. That comment is obviously not lost to the sands of time, but it has proven quite difficult to relocate.
      - boomboomsubban 6y ago
        It sounds like there was a period of time where the donations just sat there before a system was developed to allow Thunderbird total control. It's somewhat understandable, at the time Thunderbird shared many resources with Firefox but if some of the donation money was used for Firefox they'd break the terms of the donations.
        pwdisswordfish5 6y ago
        This is nothing more than apologetics, and not even good apologetics. Instead, speculative apologetics, i.e. no solid footing by which to understand the premise.
        boomboomsubban 6y ago
        Compared to "I'm pretty sure I read once things were bad." Sometimes things are hard, Thunderbird didn't seem very upset as they decided to stay with Mozilla during the period.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  It's not "perfect vs good", it's "completely useless vs good".
- pseudo0 6y ago
  The Mozilla Foundation minus Firefox doesn't seem like a good use of charitable funds compared to say, the EFF. For example, they funded this hit piece on P2P technology [0] and a browser extension to solicit complaints about YouTube recommendations [1]. Meanwhile they're laying off key developers and gutting the future of their core product, while paying execs bloated salaries to manage this array of white elephant advocacy projects. [0] - https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/fellow-research-decentralized-web-hate/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/fellow-research-decen... [1] - https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/regrets-reporter/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/regrets-reporter...
- LockAndLol 6y ago
  How is donating directly to a project "perfect"? That's a pretty normal expectation, imo. Framing something normal as "perfect" is definitely a fallacy. Would you really be OK with donating to a cause whose major service is their most visible one and for your money to instead go into mostly, completely different things? I'm not and therefore I won't donate to Mozilla. I donated to other projects with clear goals, limited scope and visible results - there are quite a few of those. If the firefox team decided to split from Mozilla or a team decided to build a browser upon a new browser engine (like quantum or whatever that new rust browser engine is), I'd be glad to donate directly to the project. Mozilla leadership has proven that they are too scatterbrained and insensitive to reality to be trusted with donations. Their priorities aren't aligned with the ones stated by the org. I try my best not to give money to people like that.

ddevault 6y ago

Some ways they have not kept Firefox working for you in 2020: - Laying off 25% of their engineers - Investing in a 400% increase in leadership salaries and bonuses during record-low market share - Adding more advertising to an end-user application - Sending all of your browsing history to Cloudflare - Launching a VPN grift which sends all of your data to another third-party (and charges you for the pleasure) - Terminated Firefox Send and Firefox Notes - Failed to open source Pocket, 3 years since their promise to

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
boomboomsubban 6y ago
>- Investing in a 400% increase in leadership salaries and bonuses during record-low market share Source? The last financial release detailed 2018, one year after Mozilla's highest revenue year. Additionally, their CEO resigned and I doubt Baker got a raise at all, certainly not for more than Chris Beard's salary.
- ddevault 6y ago
  http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html The data is only as recent as 2018, indeed, but I don't have any reason to suspect that they've corrected course. It's an especially bad look when they're also laying off large swaths of their staff.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    It's worth noting that in 2015 Mozilla negotiated a deal with Yahoo netting them an additional $100+ million a year. It makes sense that in 2016 the board would see a significant raise for however long their next contract is. I doubt this trend continues after 2018, when the sale of Yahoo saw a huge drop in revenue. They likely should have judged more on market share, but it's a fairly understandable move. Also, that huge spike on the chart was roughly $4.5 million of the over $100 million in increased revenue.

superkuh 6y ago

>HTTPS-Only mode ... will also ask for your permission before connecting to a website if it doesn't support secure connections. This is being done with the best of intentions but browsers scaremongering over HTTP sites as if they are dangerous is a bad thing. There is more to the web than commercial transactions! Human people cannot feasibly be cert authorities. Only corporations can. When browsers will only display sites that are authorized by corporations we're eventually going to be in big trouble. Yes, LetsEncrypt is a benevolent corporation, yes there are even options beyond LE, but as we know from the dot org fiasco as long as there is potential money to be made these benevolent dictorships will eventually go very bad. And that's ignoring all centralization making a very juicy target for government censorship. Encrypt, yes. But also allow plaintext. The potential for a down-grade attack on a "secure" site is worth far less to the world than being able to communicate person to person without a corporate intermediary approving every bit.

jackconsidine 6y ago
Not to mention many non-https sites have zero reason to be. A plain HTML portfolio site, for example, should not be flagged with a scary "insecure" logo because its content is not encrypted.
- lol768 6y ago
  We need to protect the integrity of the information so that kit's not abused to serve malware or pages that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities to the end-user when they browse on an insecure network (which, if Snowden's publications are anything to go by, is every network). HTTPS is not just confidentiality - security is confidentiality, integrity and availability.
  - pbalau 6y ago
    Having a valid ssl cert does not stop a website from serving malware.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

Scarbutt 6y ago

Did they stop working in the dev tools?

johnklos 6y ago

Oh, come on. This is such bullshit. Firefox is now about marketing. Mozilla isn't doing anyone any favors except themselves by "saving us" from one group or groups by giving our privacy away to other groups of their choosing.

solarkraft 6y ago

I love Firefox and hate the Chrome monopoly, but I'm so close to switching away. Most recently Firefox has been excruciatingly slow while Chromium was as fast as always, plus (likely WebRTC related) crashes every few hours Please get your shit together, Mozilla. But it seems like their model for the future is to sell worse versions of 3rd party services with their logo ...

freebuju 6y ago
In some cases relying on Firefox as your main browser can turn out to be a sadomasochistic endeavor. Sadly though 100% of the web is written with Chrom(e/ium) in mind. Firefox lost the ball on this too long ago for it to come back on this. I can't help but see Firefox as a headless running chicken sometimes. And doesn't help matters that Mozilla doesn't care enough to at least try and take back some of it's former glory.

OneLeggedCat 6y ago

I'm looking forward to the new and improved Mr. Robot v2 campaign.

TwoNineFive 6y ago

Mozilla blog posts read like hyperbolic corporate propaganda. The style is really off-putting to me. Grandiose claims with no authenticity. All the bad stuff and controversy gets quietly ignored. What about the layoffs? What about the executive pay? What about the obnoxious Chrome-sucking/mimicking URL bar? What about the certificate extirpation issue which NOBODY was ever held accountable for and for which it took MONTHS and MONTHS for a Friday-6PM-style oopsie announcement to even acknowledge. A little bit of reasonable descent could give Mozilla a lot of authenticity, but they seem incapable of that level of humility. Occasionally I see private blog/reddit/tweeter posts from employees, but never in an official manner, and always with a hint of trepidation that they could be fired for speaking out.