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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 bo

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.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      They may have negotiated the $100M deal, but who was responsible for the value creation that made the deal possible in the first place? The staff. The staff, who were subsequently fired.
      - boomboomsubban 6y ago
        Look at your graph again. The usage dropped from 30% to 10% from 2010-2015, and 10% to 5% from 2015 to 2020. It doesn't seem clear that the staff had significantly raised the value of the product before the deal, and there is at least an argument to be made that the huge influx of cash stemmed the bleeding. While I won't claim the leadership has been truly outstanding, I think the extreme criticism of their salary is unwarranted.
      - pwdisswordfish5 6y ago
        Pfft, please. The staff cuts are among the least offensive things done under the Mozilla name. Much more value was created earlier by unpaid volunteers who were rewarded by having their project hijacked by a Valley-inspired corporate mania concerned with breaking into the mobile market (with a strategy that would be generous to even refer to it as DOA). The size of staff at the time of the cuts is something that only came about because of the absurd growth of the corporation that has became the new face of Mozilla over the last 10 years. Mozilla is an incompetent, bloated organization in need of further cuts still. So it's hard to seriously consider the cuts to be either unfortunate or tragic, particularly given the obnoxious tendency of those on staff to "other" non-MoCo employees whose contributions and involvement predated the layer of corporate sleaze that has come to be emblematic of the modern day Mozilla. Should we feel sorry? The fact that we're even talking in terms of cuts and layoffs means that those affected at least got paid at some point for their role in Mozilla's descent. The only bad thing about the layoffs is that Mozilla leadership was shitty enough to do it during the middle of a pandemic. At this point though, keep it coming. It's been a bittersweet experience watching the tide turn against Mozilla over the last year, as the popular perception of it has only just now begun to align with how unworthy of an organization it has been for years already.
    - 6y ago
appleflaxen 6y ago
All of these are valid criticisms. And the elephant in the room is the tiny and ever-shrinking user base. Not only do they fail to confront this single, existentially threatening fact, but they don't even bring it up. It's like the titanic captain listing all the features which will keep you comfortable for the second half of the voyage. The world would be better if firefox could succeed, but it's increasingly difficult to even imagine what this would look like, or how it could come to pass.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Don't forget - Removing browser features (tab groups) by factoring them out into extensions, then - Breaking the extension API such that such extensions are no longer possible, then - Say you'll add new extension APIs to allow such features but actually don't implement anything for several years (https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding / https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447) - Separately, break all extensions on the mobile version of firefox and then decree that the only extensions allowed on mobile must be specifically whitelisted by Mozilla
- eitland 6y ago
  Its just as if someone paid them good money to not compete with Chrome! (I'm not saying that is part of the deal but I don't know what more Google could realistically hope for...)
  - tester756 6y ago
    I tend to believe that it is naive to think that Google would want Firefox to die.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      So... with the huge caveat that I don't actually believe this... if we're going full conspiracy theory, Google probably benefits the most from Firefox being as weak as possible while staying technically alive. That is, Firefox needs to stay technically an option to stave off antitrust issues, but evil-google doesn't want anybody to actually use them, so it's preferable that Firefox is as buggy and feature-poor as possible. Again, not something I actually believe, but the presented position is at least internally consistent/valid.
      - tester756 6y ago
        It's reasonable, thanks.
godelski 6y ago
The cloudflare thing is encrypted DNS, which I'm not sure Mozilla should be running it's own DNS. You can easily opt out our use your own DNS, but what's the better option? Google? You're ISP (Comcast? Lol!)? The Mullvad (VPN) thing is completely optional and you have to opt in by paying money. You are not required to use a VPN. I'm not sure why anyone is even remotely upset by this at all. What's the issue? Honestly, I don't understand. Both these companies have good track records. I'm not sure what the issue is here. #2 seems to be my only concern.
- ddevault 6y ago
  The VPN game is a grift. It's based on using fearmongering to sell services people don't need without adequately explaining the tradeoffs and risks. I lump it in the same category as multi-level marketing scams, and it's not something Mozilla should be involved in.
basicneo 6y ago
> - Laying off 25% of their engineers If Firefox need to cut costs to survive, this is part of keeping Firefox working for us. > - Sending all of your browsing history to Cloudflare Are you referring to DNS over HTTPS? That's not all my browsing history, though it is still more than I want going to CloudFlare.
- ddevault 6y ago
  >If Firefox need to cut costs to survive, this is part of keeping Firefox working for us. See also: >Investing in a 400% increase in leadership salaries and bonuses during record-low market share
ncmncm 6y ago
... and, Android Firefox now crashes frequently. On the up side, it remembers where you were and returns there when it wakes up again. Still less bad than Chrome.
- brnt 6y ago
  What? Android FF is superstable for me.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    fwiw I can reproduce the problems with Firefox Android, the latest major update broke heaps of shit.
    - brnt 6y ago
      To be very precise, I use the Fennec build off of F-droid, so it may be trailing FF from the Play-store a bit. Sounds like an incident, not deteriorating quality in any case. I'm happy as a clam with FF/Fennec.
      - ddevault 6y ago
        I use Fennec from F-Droid as well. The redesign broke many features for me and rendered it near unusable (or actually unusable for certain tasks, like downloading files).
      - cxr 6y ago
        The last major redesign broke/removed "Undo Close Tab", with a promise to bring it back. I found that decision to be staggering. It's not even clear what purpose the update served, except as an example of the development approach that jwz assigned the epithet of "CADT" 15+ years ago.
- gwenzek 6y ago
  I'm on nightly and haven't noticed anything. How do you differentiate between crashed and GC-ed?
dingaling 6y ago
> Adding more advertising to an end-user application That concerns me on a technical level; Mozilla-the-organisation now has control over the tiles on the default New Tab page which people are accustomed to using as bookmarks. It's feasible that a bad actor could use that vector to replace valid URLs with nefarious ones as part of targeted phishing.

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.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    They may have negotiated the $100M deal, but who was responsible for the value creation that made the deal possible in the first place? The staff. The staff, who were subsequently fired.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      Look at your graph again. The usage dropped from 30% to 10% from 2010-2015, and 10% to 5% from 2015 to 2020. It doesn't seem clear that the staff had significantly raised the value of the product before the deal, and there is at least an argument to be made that the huge influx of cash stemmed the bleeding. While I won't claim the leadership has been truly outstanding, I think the extreme criticism of their salary is unwarranted.
    - pwdisswordfish5 6y ago
      Pfft, please. The staff cuts are among the least offensive things done under the Mozilla name. Much more value was created earlier by unpaid volunteers who were rewarded by having their project hijacked by a Valley-inspired corporate mania concerned with breaking into the mobile market (with a strategy that would be generous to even refer to it as DOA). The size of staff at the time of the cuts is something that only came about because of the absurd growth of the corporation that has became the new face of Mozilla over the last 10 years. Mozilla is an incompetent, bloated organization in need of further cuts still. So it's hard to seriously consider the cuts to be either unfortunate or tragic, particularly given the obnoxious tendency of those on staff to "other" non-MoCo employees whose contributions and involvement predated the layer of corporate sleaze that has come to be emblematic of the modern day Mozilla. Should we feel sorry? The fact that we're even talking in terms of cuts and layoffs means that those affected at least got paid at some point for their role in Mozilla's descent. The only bad thing about the layoffs is that Mozilla leadership was shitty enough to do it during the middle of a pandemic. At this point though, keep it coming. It's been a bittersweet experience watching the tide turn against Mozilla over the last year, as the popular perception of it has only just now begun to align with how unworthy of an organization it has been for years already.
  - 6y ago

appleflaxen 6y ago

All of these are valid criticisms. And the elephant in the room is the tiny and ever-shrinking user base. Not only do they fail to confront this single, existentially threatening fact, but they don't even bring it up. It's like the titanic captain listing all the features which will keep you comfortable for the second half of the voyage. The world would be better if firefox could succeed, but it's increasingly difficult to even imagine what this would look like, or how it could come to pass.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

Don't forget - Removing browser features (tab groups) by factoring them out into extensions, then - Breaking the extension API such that such extensions are no longer possible, then - Say you'll add new extension APIs to allow such features but actually don't implement anything for several years (https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding / https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447) - Separately, break all extensions on the mobile version of firefox and then decree that the only extensions allowed on mobile must be specifically whitelisted by Mozilla

eitland 6y ago
Its just as if someone paid them good money to not compete with Chrome! (I'm not saying that is part of the deal but I don't know what more Google could realistically hope for...)
- tester756 6y ago
  I tend to believe that it is naive to think that Google would want Firefox to die.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    So... with the huge caveat that I don't actually believe this... if we're going full conspiracy theory, Google probably benefits the most from Firefox being as weak as possible while staying technically alive. That is, Firefox needs to stay technically an option to stave off antitrust issues, but evil-google doesn't want anybody to actually use them, so it's preferable that Firefox is as buggy and feature-poor as possible. Again, not something I actually believe, but the presented position is at least internally consistent/valid.
    - tester756 6y ago
      It's reasonable, thanks.

godelski 6y ago

The cloudflare thing is encrypted DNS, which I'm not sure Mozilla should be running it's own DNS. You can easily opt out our use your own DNS, but what's the better option? Google? You're ISP (Comcast? Lol!)? The Mullvad (VPN) thing is completely optional and you have to opt in by paying money. You are not required to use a VPN. I'm not sure why anyone is even remotely upset by this at all. What's the issue? Honestly, I don't understand. Both these companies have good track records. I'm not sure what the issue is here. #2 seems to be my only concern.

ddevault 6y ago
The VPN game is a grift. It's based on using fearmongering to sell services people don't need without adequately explaining the tradeoffs and risks. I lump it in the same category as multi-level marketing scams, and it's not something Mozilla should be involved in.

basicneo 6y ago

> - Laying off 25% of their engineers If Firefox need to cut costs to survive, this is part of keeping Firefox working for us. > - Sending all of your browsing history to Cloudflare Are you referring to DNS over HTTPS? That's not all my browsing history, though it is still more than I want going to CloudFlare.

ddevault 6y ago
>If Firefox need to cut costs to survive, this is part of keeping Firefox working for us. See also: >Investing in a 400% increase in leadership salaries and bonuses during record-low market share

ncmncm 6y ago

... and, Android Firefox now crashes frequently. On the up side, it remembers where you were and returns there when it wakes up again. Still less bad than Chrome.

brnt 6y ago
What? Android FF is superstable for me.
- ddevault 6y ago
  fwiw I can reproduce the problems with Firefox Android, the latest major update broke heaps of shit.
  - brnt 6y ago
    To be very precise, I use the Fennec build off of F-droid, so it may be trailing FF from the Play-store a bit. Sounds like an incident, not deteriorating quality in any case. I'm happy as a clam with FF/Fennec.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      I use Fennec from F-Droid as well. The redesign broke many features for me and rendered it near unusable (or actually unusable for certain tasks, like downloading files).
    - cxr 6y ago
      The last major redesign broke/removed "Undo Close Tab", with a promise to bring it back. I found that decision to be staggering. It's not even clear what purpose the update served, except as an example of the development approach that jwz assigned the epithet of "CADT" 15+ years ago.
gwenzek 6y ago
I'm on nightly and haven't noticed anything. How do you differentiate between crashed and GC-ed?

dingaling 6y ago

> Adding more advertising to an end-user application That concerns me on a technical level; Mozilla-the-organisation now has control over the tiles on the default New Tab page which people are accustomed to using as bookmarks. It's feasible that a bad actor could use that vector to replace valid URLs with nefarious ones as part of targeted phishing.