6 ms·

Instead of flocking here to complain, go to bugzilla at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c64 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16

Instead of flocking here to complain, go to bugzilla at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c64 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c64 and complain there. Mozilla is not reading HN threads, you want something you need to reach out through bugzilla.

gbrown_ 6y ago
This would seem contrary to what Mozilla are saying https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67
- ancarda 6y ago
  >The Engineering team is well aware of the community feedback. Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular this is, but are going to go ahead nevertheless? Is there even a single person who wants this feature to be removed?
  - nikanj 6y ago
    Well, obviously the Visionary Leader wanted this feature removed. They’ll push against user feedback, quote Ford (”If I asked what the customers want, I would still be selling horses”). We should have a name for the fallacy of ”Jobs/Ford/etc ignored user requests and they were geniuses. If I ignore users, I’m a genius”
    - turbonoobie 6y ago
      “Visionary leader fallacy”
    - SllX 6y ago
      The thing about leadership is it only makes you the leader; a leader is no such thing without a good team. Jobs actively fought against the App Store within the company until someone finally convinced him it was actually worth doing. A bad leader would have just overruled his team, but a good leader will know when to back down because his team is right.
      - pseudalopex 6y ago
        A leader is someone people choose to follow. Most bosses aren't leaders.
        SllX 6y ago
        If you have romantic notions of what leaders and leadership is, then sure, that’s a wonderful definition! Thing is, if you’re in a position of leadership, you’re a leader. If people answer to you and you are in charge of them in any capacity, office, battlefield, whatever, then you’re a leader. Sometimes even in an unofficial capacity if you take it upon yourself to be the get shit done guy and protect others in your group from fallout; this could be called assuming leadership, and if you do it well, people might turn to you as a leader and choose to follow you. The President of the United States is a leader. He’s elected in a contentious election, and he is the leader of the government’s civil service and diplomacy corps. as well as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, even if there are people in their ranks that voted for a different guy. Now whether a leader practices leadership, or is a good leader are entirely different questions. You don’t have to respect your leaders, or like them, for them to be leaders.
        pseudalopex 6y ago
        I think calling a position of authority a position of leadership is a mistake too. Someone assuming leadership shows the difference. A contentious election is still an election. We have words like dictator and ruler for unelected political bosses.
        SllX 6y ago
        It is an election in which members of the government and Armed Forces can expressly choose a different guy to follow and lose, whilst still having their top leader not only replaced, but empowered to replace every member in the chain of command replaced by the person they didn’t choose. Which is totally legitimate, the President is elected through a constitutional process which is our law. That’s also why I think it makes a great counterpoint to your original assertion: you can choose who you want to follow, but who you actually follow isn’t always who you would choose. If you join a company either because you like the CEO or you like the guy you’ll be immediately reporting to, everyone else in that chain was chosen by someone else. Your lack of choice in the matter does not absolve them of their responsibility to be leaders, the question becomes whether they have the qualities necessary to be good leaders. And if you are the CEO or directly report to him? Great! You win! Now you’re the guy others are looking up to and hopefully you have good leadership qualities yourself because people will look to you for leadership whether you want them to or not.
    - rapnie 6y ago
      "Visionary overreach"
  - x0x0 6y ago
    I bet the QA team won't be sad. This looks like one of those features that requires a complete repass on a ton of UI.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    > Is there even a single person who wants this feature to be removed? It's about cost of maintenance not people wanting a feature to be removed. And while this feature specifically doesn't have to high of a cost (I think) it will sum up if many "hardly used" features are left in place. > >The Engineering team is well aware of the community > feedback. > > Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular this is, but are going to go ahead nevertheless? I think it means they decided it, then got feedback and now are potentially reevaluating it. Also maybe the group of people using it isn't very high but very vocal/loud, in which case going ahead anyway would be reasonable. Through I also would guess the group of people using that feature is also likely to have analytics disabled... Having "analytics disabled" correlate with "using that specific feature" is always a major problem for data driven decisions, worse it's a well hidden and hard to estimate problem.
    - riversflow 6y ago
      > Having "analytics disabled" correlate with "using that specific feature" is always a major problem for data driven decisions, worse it's a well hidden and hard to estimate problem. You know, I’m generally a privacy conscious consumer and default to opting out of analytics, but if a company asked me to do a survey about how I use the product I absolutely would! I enjoy giving feedback, but am always going to pass on dragnet surveillance. I’ve never seen this though. Perhaps I’m naive to certain business interests or statistical techniques, but it seems like such a survey would be a necessary part of a robust decision making process based on mass-surveillance gathered analytics for a product that doesn’t earn money by directly selling that data. (if you only make money by tracking users, I understand why you might not care about users who prevent it, but even then with the power of network effects I’d expect a business would at least want a finger on the pulse) I mean, I don’t have a degree in stats, but from what I do know this is the kind of due diligence that the foundation of trust in statistics is based on. Maybe I’m just confused and someone can correct me, but I’ve come to see the selective enforcement of good statistical practices as one of the major problems in the world today, because a) I see it so much, b) it gives certainty where little is deserved, c) it prevents us from getting to truth.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      > It's about cost of maintenance not people wanting a feature to be removed. And while this feature specifically doesn't have to high of a cost (I think) it will sum up if many "hardly used" features are left in place. There is no maintenance cost as they are keeping the "touch" option. Unless checkboxes are somehow easier maintain than drop-downs.
username91 6y ago
fwiw, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67 requests the inverse - asks people with non-technical feedback to keep-out of bugzilla and instead comment in places like this.
- soapdog 6y ago
  I know, but making noise on bugzilla appears to be the only way to get people to notice stuff. Those other channels are too easy to ignore.
djaychela 6y ago
They specifically say to go here: https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-community:mozilla.org https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-community:mozill... So I did.
kleer001 6y ago
From that bugzilla thread: (tl;dr they're asking to stop spamming the bug thread with support for the feature) Marco Bonardo [:mak] Comment 67 • 2 days ago Hello everyone. Even if you care a lot of about his feature, please don't post me-too comments or opinions in this engineering bug tracker. Technical insight, like comment 53 or comment 58, is always welcome. Otherwise, we may have to limit commenting in the bug, and we don't like to do that. The Engineering team is well aware of the community feedback. How can you express your opinion then? You can continue commenting in the Reddit/HN threads that made this bug viral, both are frequented by Mozilla employees. Or you can chat in real time with us, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix, and join https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-community:mozilla.org https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-community:mozill....
- dathinab 6y ago
  > How can you express your opinion then? As you quoted they are well aware of the feedback, given that it makes little sense to spam the bug tracker anymore (at this point in time) as this wouldn't add any value for anyone. It wouldn't make them aware of the feed back (they already are) nor does it add anything constructive. Or in other words, your opinion is already fully expressed through other people. (If you planed to only comment "me too" or similar.)
  - Macha 6y ago
    That question is also from the quote
    - dathinab 6y ago
      Wups, yes. Highlighting quotes as such is nice ... but reading them properly is so too ;=)
  - sthnblllII 6y ago
    >nor does it add anything constructive. This is false. The difference between 20 people speaking up versus 200 or 2,000 is huge, especially if they are saying the same thing. If they don't want that thread being spammed then they should reverse the decision to remove the feature .
russdpale 6y ago
what a waste of resources and man hours for a company worried about their bottom line.
Macha 6y ago
There's more in the r/firefox thread [1]: 1. PMs don't use bugzilla, just engineers [2] 2. Engineers are aware and raised that people (and apparently the engineer in question) don't like the change 3. The unnamed product manager has decided to go ahead anyway [3], they're a bit buffered from the feedback in a non-public JIRA. 4. It is the same engineers involved in the r/firefox thead as the ticket. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_remind_you_all_that_theres_currently/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_remind_you_all_that_theres_currently/gqwy9id/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_... [3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c36 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c36
- userbinator 6y ago
  Engineers are aware and raised that people (and apparently the engineer in question) don't like the change The unnamed product manager has decided to go ahead anyway A stark and infuriating contrast from all the democratic-sounding marketing "you can help build the browser of the future/etc." doublespeak that Mozilla loves to evangelise in a lot of places to recruit developers, but then... https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute "Thanks for your interest in contributing to Mozilla! The Mozilla Project welcomes contributions from everyone who shares our goals" In other words: "do what we say, or fuck off."
  - bscphil 6y ago
    Nailed it. Something I've been saying for a long time is that there's a split in open source software, between projects that are true community projects in the spirit of open source (KDE, Deluge) and projects run by an insular organization that happens to release the source code with an open source license because it suits their interests (Android, Windows Calculator). They both may accept contributions in theory, but in practice the latter projects are exclusively managed by a tiny group of stakeholders in service of their own interests. Mozilla was increasingly becoming more like the latter type of organization for many years, and is now, I would argue, all the way there. Putting ads in the browser chrome was in some sense the nail in the coffin, because it's not something a community would ever have done to the browser it created and uses. Personally, the first type of project is what I want to spend my time contributing to.

gbrown_ 6y ago

This would seem contrary to what Mozilla are saying https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67

ancarda 6y ago
>The Engineering team is well aware of the community feedback. Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular this is, but are going to go ahead nevertheless? Is there even a single person who wants this feature to be removed?
- nikanj 6y ago
  Well, obviously the Visionary Leader wanted this feature removed. They’ll push against user feedback, quote Ford (”If I asked what the customers want, I would still be selling horses”). We should have a name for the fallacy of ”Jobs/Ford/etc ignored user requests and they were geniuses. If I ignore users, I’m a genius”
  - turbonoobie 6y ago
    “Visionary leader fallacy”
  - SllX 6y ago
    The thing about leadership is it only makes you the leader; a leader is no such thing without a good team. Jobs actively fought against the App Store within the company until someone finally convinced him it was actually worth doing. A bad leader would have just overruled his team, but a good leader will know when to back down because his team is right.
    - pseudalopex 6y ago
      A leader is someone people choose to follow. Most bosses aren't leaders.
      - SllX 6y ago
        If you have romantic notions of what leaders and leadership is, then sure, that’s a wonderful definition! Thing is, if you’re in a position of leadership, you’re a leader. If people answer to you and you are in charge of them in any capacity, office, battlefield, whatever, then you’re a leader. Sometimes even in an unofficial capacity if you take it upon yourself to be the get shit done guy and protect others in your group from fallout; this could be called assuming leadership, and if you do it well, people might turn to you as a leader and choose to follow you. The President of the United States is a leader. He’s elected in a contentious election, and he is the leader of the government’s civil service and diplomacy corps. as well as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, even if there are people in their ranks that voted for a different guy. Now whether a leader practices leadership, or is a good leader are entirely different questions. You don’t have to respect your leaders, or like them, for them to be leaders.
        pseudalopex 6y ago
        I think calling a position of authority a position of leadership is a mistake too. Someone assuming leadership shows the difference. A contentious election is still an election. We have words like dictator and ruler for unelected political bosses.
        SllX 6y ago
        It is an election in which members of the government and Armed Forces can expressly choose a different guy to follow and lose, whilst still having their top leader not only replaced, but empowered to replace every member in the chain of command replaced by the person they didn’t choose. Which is totally legitimate, the President is elected through a constitutional process which is our law. That’s also why I think it makes a great counterpoint to your original assertion: you can choose who you want to follow, but who you actually follow isn’t always who you would choose. If you join a company either because you like the CEO or you like the guy you’ll be immediately reporting to, everyone else in that chain was chosen by someone else. Your lack of choice in the matter does not absolve them of their responsibility to be leaders, the question becomes whether they have the qualities necessary to be good leaders. And if you are the CEO or directly report to him? Great! You win! Now you’re the guy others are looking up to and hopefully you have good leadership qualities yourself because people will look to you for leadership whether you want them to or not.
  - rapnie 6y ago
    "Visionary overreach"
- x0x0 6y ago
  I bet the QA team won't be sad. This looks like one of those features that requires a complete repass on a ton of UI.
- dathinab 6y ago
  > Is there even a single person who wants this feature to be removed? It's about cost of maintenance not people wanting a feature to be removed. And while this feature specifically doesn't have to high of a cost (I think) it will sum up if many "hardly used" features are left in place. > >The Engineering team is well aware of the community > feedback. > > Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular this is, but are going to go ahead nevertheless? I think it means they decided it, then got feedback and now are potentially reevaluating it. Also maybe the group of people using it isn't very high but very vocal/loud, in which case going ahead anyway would be reasonable. Through I also would guess the group of people using that feature is also likely to have analytics disabled... Having "analytics disabled" correlate with "using that specific feature" is always a major problem for data driven decisions, worse it's a well hidden and hard to estimate problem.
  - riversflow 6y ago
    > Having "analytics disabled" correlate with "using that specific feature" is always a major problem for data driven decisions, worse it's a well hidden and hard to estimate problem. You know, I’m generally a privacy conscious consumer and default to opting out of analytics, but if a company asked me to do a survey about how I use the product I absolutely would! I enjoy giving feedback, but am always going to pass on dragnet surveillance. I’ve never seen this though. Perhaps I’m naive to certain business interests or statistical techniques, but it seems like such a survey would be a necessary part of a robust decision making process based on mass-surveillance gathered analytics for a product that doesn’t earn money by directly selling that data. (if you only make money by tracking users, I understand why you might not care about users who prevent it, but even then with the power of network effects I’d expect a business would at least want a finger on the pulse) I mean, I don’t have a degree in stats, but from what I do know this is the kind of due diligence that the foundation of trust in statistics is based on. Maybe I’m just confused and someone can correct me, but I’ve come to see the selective enforcement of good statistical practices as one of the major problems in the world today, because a) I see it so much, b) it gives certainty where little is deserved, c) it prevents us from getting to truth.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    > It's about cost of maintenance not people wanting a feature to be removed. And while this feature specifically doesn't have to high of a cost (I think) it will sum up if many "hardly used" features are left in place. There is no maintenance cost as they are keeping the "touch" option. Unless checkboxes are somehow easier maintain than drop-downs.

username91 6y ago

fwiw, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67 requests the inverse - asks people with non-technical feedback to keep-out of bugzilla and instead comment in places like this.

soapdog 6y ago
I know, but making noise on bugzilla appears to be the only way to get people to notice stuff. Those other channels are too easy to ignore.

djaychela 6y ago

They specifically say to go here: https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-community:mozilla.org https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-community:mozill... So I did.

kleer001 6y ago

From that bugzilla thread: (tl;dr they're asking to stop spamming the bug thread with support for the feature) Marco Bonardo [:mak] Comment 67 • 2 days ago Hello everyone. Even if you care a lot of about his feature, please don't post me-too comments or opinions in this engineering bug tracker. Technical insight, like comment 53 or comment 58, is always welcome. Otherwise, we may have to limit commenting in the bug, and we don't like to do that. The Engineering team is well aware of the community feedback. How can you express your opinion then? You can continue commenting in the Reddit/HN threads that made this bug viral, both are frequented by Mozilla employees. Or you can chat in real time with us, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix, and join https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-community:mozilla.org https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-community:mozill....

dathinab 6y ago
> How can you express your opinion then? As you quoted they are well aware of the feedback, given that it makes little sense to spam the bug tracker anymore (at this point in time) as this wouldn't add any value for anyone. It wouldn't make them aware of the feed back (they already are) nor does it add anything constructive. Or in other words, your opinion is already fully expressed through other people. (If you planed to only comment "me too" or similar.)
- Macha 6y ago
  That question is also from the quote
  - dathinab 6y ago
    Wups, yes. Highlighting quotes as such is nice ... but reading them properly is so too ;=)
- sthnblllII 6y ago
  >nor does it add anything constructive. This is false. The difference between 20 people speaking up versus 200 or 2,000 is huge, especially if they are saying the same thing. If they don't want that thread being spammed then they should reverse the decision to remove the feature .

russdpale 6y ago

what a waste of resources and man hours for a company worried about their bottom line.

Macha 6y ago

There's more in the r/firefox thread [1]: 1. PMs don't use bugzilla, just engineers [2] 2. Engineers are aware and raised that people (and apparently the engineer in question) don't like the change 3. The unnamed product manager has decided to go ahead anyway [3], they're a bit buffered from the feedback in a non-public JIRA. 4. It is the same engineers involved in the r/firefox thead as the ticket. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_remind_you_all_that_theres_currently/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_remind_you_all_that_theres_currently/gqwy9id/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_... [3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c36 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c36

userbinator 6y ago
Engineers are aware and raised that people (and apparently the engineer in question) don't like the change The unnamed product manager has decided to go ahead anyway A stark and infuriating contrast from all the democratic-sounding marketing "you can help build the browser of the future/etc." doublespeak that Mozilla loves to evangelise in a lot of places to recruit developers, but then... https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute "Thanks for your interest in contributing to Mozilla! The Mozilla Project welcomes contributions from everyone who shares our goals" In other words: "do what we say, or fuck off."
- bscphil 6y ago
  Nailed it. Something I've been saying for a long time is that there's a split in open source software, between projects that are true community projects in the spirit of open source (KDE, Deluge) and projects run by an insular organization that happens to release the source code with an open source license because it suits their interests (Android, Windows Calculator). They both may accept contributions in theory, but in practice the latter projects are exclusively managed by a tiny group of stakeholders in service of their own interests. Mozilla was increasingly becoming more like the latter type of organization for many years, and is now, I would argue, all the way there. Putting ads in the browser chrome was in some sense the nail in the coffin, because it's not something a community would ever have done to the browser it created and uses. Personally, the first type of project is what I want to spend my time contributing to.