5 ms·

This pretty much feels to me what is happening to Mozilla as an organization from an outsider perspective. Engineering is no longer as important as the evangeli

This pretty much feels to me what is happening to Mozilla as an organization from an outsider perspective. Engineering is no longer as important as the evangelism and management is making strange decisions that lack focus on what the target audience really is.

pessimizer 4y ago
The evangelism is even bad. It was more coherent and convincing back when the browser was better.
- Filligree 4y ago
  The evangelism is mostly about stuff that nobody outside the USA cares about. It just looks like the browser is made by crazy people.
  - smachiz 4y ago
    It would seem not many people inside the USA care about it either given their market share...
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    The evangelism was about web standards, web privacy, and user control. They deferred on standards to Google, and became positively hostile to the latter two subjects. I neither care about woke messaging, nor notice them doing very much of it because I'm not the kind of guy who thinks an interracial couple in a tv commercial is commie globalist mind control. My problem is that: 1) their messages on standards are incoherent and not backed by taking firm stands. The only reason I'm confident that they won't break uBlock (i.e. will hold the line on a portion of manifest v3) any time soon is because they would drop from 4% market share to 0.5% market share in a month. This is not a good reason to be confident, because they lost a similar proportion of market share to get to where they're at now, and they didn't seem bothered. 2) Other than uBlock, they've taken away or left to languish things like javascript enable/disable whitelist/blacklists etc. and fine cookie control, and murdered their extension ecosystem that was filled with privacy protecting extensions, and 4/5ths of the ones that are there now look scary and I wouldn't install them. Too bad they lost the community that would have vetted those extensions in moments in favor of the technical solutions of nerfed webextension APIs formulated by a company whose entire business model is exfiltrating data from unsuspecting users. So much for user privacy. 3) Firefox started putting things into the browser that couldn't be turned off, removing configuration options, and pushing a "wrecker" or "overly-vocal minority" narrative at their users who objected to that. So much for user control. Also, and I have no inside knowledge, it always seems like the people that write the website copy for whatever their latest PR effort is weren't even at the company for their last PR effort, and don't know anyone who was. I'm getting the impression that firefox is a place you go to burnish your resume/portfolio before getting a real job, which is the reason for the constant stupid tiny UI changes. Do people stay there for more than a year or two?
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      > I neither care about woke messaging, nor notice them doing very much of it A lot of it is at Mozilla.org, the non profit parent of Mozilla.com
dblohm7 4y ago
My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit whining and just do what they're told.
- allendoerfer 4y ago
  Can anyone defend product management to me? Shouldn't this basically be UX/UI designers working together with developers based on user input acquired in some scientific way (either quantitative or qualitative)? How do product managers provide additional value?
  - dblohm7 4y ago
    IMHO: Product managers are super important: it's their job to understand the market (where it was, where it is, and where it is going), the competitive landscape, and work with leadership on strategic planning. However, all three groups (UX, PM, Eng) need to work symbiotically. Everybody needs to be sharing information and acting as partners in the work they're doing.
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      > it's their job to understand the market It’s their job to understand and copy chrome. Fixed that for you.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - sph 4y ago
        If they're copying Chrome, I'm not seeing it. Chrome has more or less had the same interface while Firefox rewrites it completely every few years, dropping features along the way each time.
    - zamalek 4y ago
5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
Most of that evangelism doesn't even make any sense to me as a non-USian. I understand the US has its own share of internal problems, but feeding that to the whole world when I just want to download the damn browser seems weird. I won't post any links here to avoid offending anyone, but they should be pretty obvious.
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  As a resident of a flyover state, I re-read that with California instead of US, and it still made sense.
- soundnote 4y ago
  Not only does it not make sense, they presume they know better than their poor users what their users should see and what opinion on web content they should have. If I want activist browser developers, give me teams like Brave and Vivaldi, thankyouverymuch. Both actually do things that serve the end user in their own way. Insofar as the browsers have politics, they are politics about the browser itself like antitracking, privacy and user control. Also not American and yeah, if California would stay in California, that would be great.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > if California would stay in California, that would be great Then you wouldn't have most of the IT industry and especially FOSS.
    - yeetsfromhellL2 4y ago
      >especially FOSS. I just wanted to log in and point out that Free Software got started at MIT.
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        That did cross my mind as I wrote the GP, but the center of it has been and is CA.
flflflldsl 4y ago
lfksodjsn 4y ago
- branon 4y ago
  Conservative comments are not removed, bad-faith discourse probably gets flagged. I've said some pretty spicy things here and never noticed an issue. Check yourself maybe?
- pcwalton 4y ago
  The reason you're getting downvoted has nothing to do with the "progressive narrative" and everything to do with the fact that your posts are off-topic. Political complaints about Mozilla from a left perspective would be equally irrelevant. Availability of browser add-ons is obviously not a political issue.
- strunz 4y ago
  Are you kidding me? HN is one of the most transparently conservative comment sections on the internet.
bitwize 4y ago
[flagged]
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
why should mozilla continue to pay for a CEO and "managerial staff"? i don't mean accountants and all, but bosses and "managers" who are not paid by the work done but instead based on "market rates" as i read in some mozilla report sometime ago? what benefit does having a CEO to mozilla do when insiders and outsiders like me see no tangible benefit? its not like apple which has to pay their CEO top dollar to show they are so good. can the mozilla org not hire X number of developers who would be doing the actual work instead of a single CEO whose job, according to me at least seems to be doing everything in their power to ruin the good name of mozilla? its as if they are paid to take all the bad decisions. strange

pessimizer 4y ago

The evangelism is even bad. It was more coherent and convincing back when the browser was better.

Filligree 4y ago
The evangelism is mostly about stuff that nobody outside the USA cares about. It just looks like the browser is made by crazy people.
- smachiz 4y ago
  It would seem not many people inside the USA care about it either given their market share...
- pessimizer 4y ago
  The evangelism was about web standards, web privacy, and user control. They deferred on standards to Google, and became positively hostile to the latter two subjects. I neither care about woke messaging, nor notice them doing very much of it because I'm not the kind of guy who thinks an interracial couple in a tv commercial is commie globalist mind control. My problem is that: 1) their messages on standards are incoherent and not backed by taking firm stands. The only reason I'm confident that they won't break uBlock (i.e. will hold the line on a portion of manifest v3) any time soon is because they would drop from 4% market share to 0.5% market share in a month. This is not a good reason to be confident, because they lost a similar proportion of market share to get to where they're at now, and they didn't seem bothered. 2) Other than uBlock, they've taken away or left to languish things like javascript enable/disable whitelist/blacklists etc. and fine cookie control, and murdered their extension ecosystem that was filled with privacy protecting extensions, and 4/5ths of the ones that are there now look scary and I wouldn't install them. Too bad they lost the community that would have vetted those extensions in moments in favor of the technical solutions of nerfed webextension APIs formulated by a company whose entire business model is exfiltrating data from unsuspecting users. So much for user privacy. 3) Firefox started putting things into the browser that couldn't be turned off, removing configuration options, and pushing a "wrecker" or "overly-vocal minority" narrative at their users who objected to that. So much for user control. Also, and I have no inside knowledge, it always seems like the people that write the website copy for whatever their latest PR effort is weren't even at the company for their last PR effort, and don't know anyone who was. I'm getting the impression that firefox is a place you go to burnish your resume/portfolio before getting a real job, which is the reason for the constant stupid tiny UI changes. Do people stay there for more than a year or two?
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    > I neither care about woke messaging, nor notice them doing very much of it A lot of it is at Mozilla.org, the non profit parent of Mozilla.com

dblohm7 4y ago

My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit whining and just do what they're told.

allendoerfer 4y ago
Can anyone defend product management to me? Shouldn't this basically be UX/UI designers working together with developers based on user input acquired in some scientific way (either quantitative or qualitative)? How do product managers provide additional value?
- dblohm7 4y ago
  IMHO: Product managers are super important: it's their job to understand the market (where it was, where it is, and where it is going), the competitive landscape, and work with leadership on strategic planning. However, all three groups (UX, PM, Eng) need to work symbiotically. Everybody needs to be sharing information and acting as partners in the work they're doing.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    > it's their job to understand the market It’s their job to understand and copy chrome. Fixed that for you.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - sph 4y ago
      If they're copying Chrome, I'm not seeing it. Chrome has more or less had the same interface while Firefox rewrites it completely every few years, dropping features along the way each time.
  - zamalek 4y ago

5e92cb50239222b 4y ago

Most of that evangelism doesn't even make any sense to me as a non-USian. I understand the US has its own share of internal problems, but feeding that to the whole world when I just want to download the damn browser seems weird. I won't post any links here to avoid offending anyone, but they should be pretty obvious.

theandrewbailey 4y ago
As a resident of a flyover state, I re-read that with California instead of US, and it still made sense.
soundnote 4y ago
Not only does it not make sense, they presume they know better than their poor users what their users should see and what opinion on web content they should have. If I want activist browser developers, give me teams like Brave and Vivaldi, thankyouverymuch. Both actually do things that serve the end user in their own way. Insofar as the browsers have politics, they are politics about the browser itself like antitracking, privacy and user control. Also not American and yeah, if California would stay in California, that would be great.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > if California would stay in California, that would be great Then you wouldn't have most of the IT industry and especially FOSS.
  - yeetsfromhellL2 4y ago
    >especially FOSS. I just wanted to log in and point out that Free Software got started at MIT.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      That did cross my mind as I wrote the GP, but the center of it has been and is CA.

flflflldsl 4y ago

lfksodjsn 4y ago

branon 4y ago
Conservative comments are not removed, bad-faith discourse probably gets flagged. I've said some pretty spicy things here and never noticed an issue. Check yourself maybe?
pcwalton 4y ago
The reason you're getting downvoted has nothing to do with the "progressive narrative" and everything to do with the fact that your posts are off-topic. Political complaints about Mozilla from a left perspective would be equally irrelevant. Availability of browser add-ons is obviously not a political issue.
strunz 4y ago
Are you kidding me? HN is one of the most transparently conservative comment sections on the internet.

bitwize 4y ago

[flagged]

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

why should mozilla continue to pay for a CEO and "managerial staff"? i don't mean accountants and all, but bosses and "managers" who are not paid by the work done but instead based on "market rates" as i read in some mozilla report sometime ago? what benefit does having a CEO to mozilla do when insiders and outsiders like me see no tangible benefit? its not like apple which has to pay their CEO top dollar to show they are so good. can the mozilla org not hire X number of developers who would be doing the actual work instead of a single CEO whose job, according to me at least seems to be doing everything in their power to ruin the good name of mozilla? its as if they are paid to take all the bad decisions. strange