6 ms·

I noticed this yesterday. I've been using Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox as my primary browser for over 20 years. They've made some questionable calls, sure,

I noticed this yesterday. I've been using Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox as my primary browser for over 20 years. They've made some questionable calls, sure, but most of the recent things that have bothered people (like Pocket integration) haven't really irked me. This is the first time where I got a visceral feeling that maybe this isn't the browser I knew and loved anymore. It's not like I'm uninstalling and switching to something else, but I do feel bummed out.

ilikepi 3y ago
Did you miss the episode in 2017 in which they used an internal control to force the installation of an add-on as part of a promotion for a television show? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144 I feel similarly to you...long-time user, bummed out by stuff like this. Sometimes it feels like Firefox would be a lot better off without Mozilla occasionally making deals like this.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  I read a conspiracy that Google has paid off Mozilla management to specifically sabotage the browser development. Actions like this make it hard to dispute the moves that frequently seem deliberately anti-user.
  - evv 3y ago
    It's not a conspiracy that Google pays Mozilla for default search engine placement. Maybe that arrangement led to the stagnation of Firefox, without malicious intent from any party. Hanlon's razor, yadda yadda
    - letsdothisagain 3y ago
      Hanlon's razor only makes sense if you're a teenager posting on reddit. Just world theory and all that. Once you get into corporate politics it's the exact opposite. God help you if you ever get into the nuts and bolts of governmental, or gasp intergovernmental politics.
      - orangecat 3y ago
        Eh, from my experience in several large companies there's some malice, but there's way more incompetence.
        pessimizer 3y ago
        From my experience, companies are happy to strategically feign incompetence, blindness and deafness.
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    Th other conspiracy I've heard is Google subsidizes Mozilla so they have a credible claim there's competition in the market.
    - mozman 3y ago
      This is the correct answer
      - warkdarrior 3y ago
        Why would Google try to prop up Firefox as a competitor? Both Safari and Edge on desktop are twice the market share of Firefox, so the browser market is competitive enough without Firefox. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
        kuratkull 3y ago
        Chrome, edge and safari are just, well chrome, on a single family of rendering engines
        wongarsu 3y ago
        Safari can probably be discounted since Apple discontinued the Windows version in 2012. A browser that can only run on 18% of desktops worldwide isn't necessarily the competitor Google is looking for. Edge is available on Windows, Linux and macOS, so it would probably do. But that would allow one of Google's biggest competitors to drop an under-performing product and lobby for antitrust against Google. Unlikely to happen, but a risk Google might not want to take. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
        jonas21 3y ago
        Google would probably prefer if Safari and Edge did not gain market share. They're both developed by large corporations that pose a major threat to Google. Firefox, not so much.
        3y ago
  - DANmode 3y ago
    Conspiracy theory
  - philistine 3y ago
    That makes no sense. Mozilla goes so hard on the VPN ads exactly because it wants to diversify its revenues away from its vassalage to Google.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      A pet theory of mine is Mozilla’s C-suite knows no matter how bad Firefox gets and how low their user count, Google will continue to fund them because Google likes something to point to if antitrust came knocking - in fact the lower Firefox’s influence the better as Chrome can then unilaterally control the web. So they spend all of Mozilla’s money on various BS like Pocket and now VPN to try to make more money so they can further increase their already high salaries, instead of reinvesting into Firefox - hence the anti-user intrusive ads, the reduction of head count while paying themselves millions of dollars.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > I read a conspiracy that Google has paid off Mozilla management to specifically sabotage the browser development. Actions like this make it hard to dispute the moves that frequently seem deliberately anti-user. IIRC, didn't Mozilla lay off some R&D team that was doing some promising work on modernizing and improving its browser engine?
    - slondr 3y ago
      That "promising work" was "inventing the Rust programming language," and, yes.
      - mlry 3y ago
        I think parent is refering to the servo team.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
      My annoyance is more the half-brained projects which Mozilla pursues. Then surprised Pikachu when they have to cut budgets and Firefox is impacted.
  - crossroadsguy 3y ago
    Reminds of good old Mr Elop.
- SilasX 3y ago
  (Not the OP.) Nope, and I also didn't miss the torrent of HNers saying "what's the problem, you already trust them to provide the software, you should trust anything they want to send along with it."
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  The execution was definitely terrible, but "browser company ships promotional easter egg" isn't that bad as "browser company inserts ads into browsing experience" in my opinion. These ads are why Windows 10+ has become a trash fire despite all the technical improvements made to Windows. Mozilla were stupid enough to try and sneak this Roboto stuff in, probably as part of the requirements or intentions of the ad campaign, rather than be transparent about it. Stupidity rather than malice. The VPN ad is a targeted decision comingffrom within the non-profit. I sort of get it, Mozilla is desperate for income because Google is keeping them afloat, barely anyone who donates cares about anything but the browser, and the for-profit ventures aren't gaining much success.
  - isomorphic 3y ago
    The thing is, if I was somewhat interested in a Mozilla VPN service, this spectacularly idiotic decision to deploy full-page intrusive advertising into Firefox makes it 100% certain I will never buy the Mozilla VPN service--because, how can I trust that they won't do the equivalent to that service? What's to stop them from blocking certain sites (on the other side of the VPN) as part of some promotion? Or worse? They've made it clear they don't believe their own language about privacy and user choice. They've compromised one product to advertise another. And perhaps worse, they doubled-down about it in Bugzilla with corporate doublespeak, which to me is the tell that they'll absolutely do it again. It's amazing how apt the trust-thermocline analogy is.
    - s3p 3y ago
      I see what you're saying but.. it's one popup. Maybe you can't, but I can live with that.
      - cyanwave 3y ago
        Correct. There’s a bit of entitlement here by some.
      - InCityDreams 3y ago
        Slippery slope has people scared.
ionioniodfngio 3y ago
It's not that I like Firefox so much as that all the competition is unusable. Firefox has gone downhill, but at least it's extensible enough that I can largely reverse the decay.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  It's not that I like Firefox so much as that all the competition is unusable. I'm inching closer to using the Duck browser full-time. If you haven't tried it, give it a shot to see if it works for you. It's not as customizable as Chrome or Firefox, but it gets the job done if you don't do a lot of heavy lifting with your browser. Right now, I'm 60% Safari, 10% Firefox, and 30% Duck. And I use Firefox less and less lately.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Firefox is much less configurable than it used to be, though. I can no longer fix all of the stuff in it that needs fixing.
the_duke 3y ago
Firefox at least exposes an endless amount of toggles to tweak pretty much every behaviour the browser has. This is includes settings for removing or disabling all the integration with Mozilla services and their ads. See for example: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- warkdarrior 3y ago
  Yes, but the default should be to show no ads. If I want ads, I'll use Chrome or Edge with no ad blocker.
  - 93po 3y ago
    Even Edge with adblocker shows a ton of ads and Microsoft shit that on one wants as part of the default browser behavior.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  FF removed the ability to delete the sites from MRU list in the address bar, the ability which it had since ages. It was removed when moved to Photon, 2017. They finally would add it back in FF 113, so 2023. Six / Fucking / Years
rwmj 3y ago
The Android version of Firefox recently started promoting commercial bookmarks on the home screen, another case where it seems they've lost the plot.
- stjohnswarts 3y ago
  You can't turn it off? I haven't used Android in a while, but always like Firefox made it easy to turn this type of stuff and telemetry off.
dabluecaboose 3y ago
A while back I got a push notification on my Android device to some preachy blogpost about Facebook being bad politically I don't want my browser to be a vector from which you push your blogs, Mozilla. I want a browser that isn't Chrome
JohnFen 3y ago
I switched away from Firefox a couple of years ago for a number of reasons that can be collectively summarized as "Firefox no longer meets my needs". But as a Firefox user from the very beginning, I still keep tabs on it, hoping that it will improve enough for me to return to it. Things like this, however, strongly indicate to me that Firefox is just lost and will never find its way back.
- lolinder 3y ago
  What did you switch to?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I'm using Brave right now as a stopgap until/unless I can find a better one. Brave isn't fantastic, but it works better for me than FF.
    - eep_social 3y ago
      Have you tried Vivaldi? I am still not switched over for various reasons but it seems to be well aligned for me.
- nulbyte 3y ago
  I wanted to like Firefox. So much so that I used to carry my keys on a Firefox branded lanyard. Eventually, I gave up and switched. Presently, Im trying Brave. I don't really like it, but I'm now at the point where I don't think there is such a thing as a user-friendly browser anymore.
  - johnsea 3y ago
    What don't you like?
    - nulbyte 3y ago
      In no specific order: the new Proton UI, Pocket, overemphasizing Mozilla's VPN, innocuously-sounding by sometimes privacy-invasive 'studies', automatic updates, the archane method of disabling automatic updates despite having a built-in configuration UI, having to restart the browser in the middle of my workflow due to automatic updates I did not want in the first place. In general, I get the feeling that Mozilla has adopted Reddit's business model of trashing their product by contuously fixing what isn't broken.
xuancanh 3y ago
The downturn of Firefox began a long time ago when Brendan Eich was forced to leave Mozilla in 2014. I highly recommend giving Brave browser a try, as Brendan Eich now serves as its CEO.
triyambakam 3y ago
I recently switched to Brave
intelVISA 3y ago
Same boat, used it since Win XP but they've been bleeding out badly since Eich left with no signs of recovery. I do want to like Brave, as it is Firefox II in spirit, but the combo of web3 crap, Chromium and the fact that it still pings outbound (with it all 'off') puts me off entirely. Maybe it's time for me to fork KHTML and do what needs to be done.
- Macha 3y ago
  Note that KHTML is dead: https://github.com/KDE/khtml/tree/master https://github.com/KDE/khtml/tree/master The writing was on the wall as KDE moved to first QtWebkit and then the Blink based QtWebEngine.
stjohnswarts 3y ago
As long as they make it easy to turn off, I simply don't care. I also don't understand others acting like it's the end of the world. Like this is the equivalent of your most beloved partner turning out to be a complete hoax. Give me a break. If anyone is looking for a nice "new tab" filler I highly suggest the "tabbliss" plugin.

ilikepi 3y ago

Did you miss the episode in 2017 in which they used an internal control to force the installation of an add-on as part of a promotion for a television show? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144 I feel similarly to you...long-time user, bummed out by stuff like this. Sometimes it feels like Firefox would be a lot better off without Mozilla occasionally making deals like this.

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
I read a conspiracy that Google has paid off Mozilla management to specifically sabotage the browser development. Actions like this make it hard to dispute the moves that frequently seem deliberately anti-user.
- evv 3y ago
  It's not a conspiracy that Google pays Mozilla for default search engine placement. Maybe that arrangement led to the stagnation of Firefox, without malicious intent from any party. Hanlon's razor, yadda yadda
  - letsdothisagain 3y ago
    Hanlon's razor only makes sense if you're a teenager posting on reddit. Just world theory and all that. Once you get into corporate politics it's the exact opposite. God help you if you ever get into the nuts and bolts of governmental, or gasp intergovernmental politics.
    - orangecat 3y ago
      Eh, from my experience in several large companies there's some malice, but there's way more incompetence.
      - pessimizer 3y ago
        From my experience, companies are happy to strategically feign incompetence, blindness and deafness.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  Th other conspiracy I've heard is Google subsidizes Mozilla so they have a credible claim there's competition in the market.
  - mozman 3y ago
    This is the correct answer
    - warkdarrior 3y ago
      Why would Google try to prop up Firefox as a competitor? Both Safari and Edge on desktop are twice the market share of Firefox, so the browser market is competitive enough without Firefox. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
      - kuratkull 3y ago
        Chrome, edge and safari are just, well chrome, on a single family of rendering engines
      - wongarsu 3y ago
        Safari can probably be discounted since Apple discontinued the Windows version in 2012. A browser that can only run on 18% of desktops worldwide isn't necessarily the competitor Google is looking for. Edge is available on Windows, Linux and macOS, so it would probably do. But that would allow one of Google's biggest competitors to drop an under-performing product and lobby for antitrust against Google. Unlikely to happen, but a risk Google might not want to take. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
      - jonas21 3y ago
        Google would probably prefer if Safari and Edge did not gain market share. They're both developed by large corporations that pose a major threat to Google. Firefox, not so much.
      - 3y ago
- DANmode 3y ago
  Conspiracy theory
- philistine 3y ago
  That makes no sense. Mozilla goes so hard on the VPN ads exactly because it wants to diversify its revenues away from its vassalage to Google.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    A pet theory of mine is Mozilla’s C-suite knows no matter how bad Firefox gets and how low their user count, Google will continue to fund them because Google likes something to point to if antitrust came knocking - in fact the lower Firefox’s influence the better as Chrome can then unilaterally control the web. So they spend all of Mozilla’s money on various BS like Pocket and now VPN to try to make more money so they can further increase their already high salaries, instead of reinvesting into Firefox - hence the anti-user intrusive ads, the reduction of head count while paying themselves millions of dollars.
- tivert 3y ago
  > I read a conspiracy that Google has paid off Mozilla management to specifically sabotage the browser development. Actions like this make it hard to dispute the moves that frequently seem deliberately anti-user. IIRC, didn't Mozilla lay off some R&D team that was doing some promising work on modernizing and improving its browser engine?
  - slondr 3y ago
    That "promising work" was "inventing the Rust programming language," and, yes.
    - mlry 3y ago
      I think parent is refering to the servo team.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    My annoyance is more the half-brained projects which Mozilla pursues. Then surprised Pikachu when they have to cut budgets and Firefox is impacted.
- crossroadsguy 3y ago
  Reminds of good old Mr Elop.
SilasX 3y ago
(Not the OP.) Nope, and I also didn't miss the torrent of HNers saying "what's the problem, you already trust them to provide the software, you should trust anything they want to send along with it."
jeroenhd 3y ago
The execution was definitely terrible, but "browser company ships promotional easter egg" isn't that bad as "browser company inserts ads into browsing experience" in my opinion. These ads are why Windows 10+ has become a trash fire despite all the technical improvements made to Windows. Mozilla were stupid enough to try and sneak this Roboto stuff in, probably as part of the requirements or intentions of the ad campaign, rather than be transparent about it. Stupidity rather than malice. The VPN ad is a targeted decision comingffrom within the non-profit. I sort of get it, Mozilla is desperate for income because Google is keeping them afloat, barely anyone who donates cares about anything but the browser, and the for-profit ventures aren't gaining much success.
- isomorphic 3y ago
  The thing is, if I was somewhat interested in a Mozilla VPN service, this spectacularly idiotic decision to deploy full-page intrusive advertising into Firefox makes it 100% certain I will never buy the Mozilla VPN service--because, how can I trust that they won't do the equivalent to that service? What's to stop them from blocking certain sites (on the other side of the VPN) as part of some promotion? Or worse? They've made it clear they don't believe their own language about privacy and user choice. They've compromised one product to advertise another. And perhaps worse, they doubled-down about it in Bugzilla with corporate doublespeak, which to me is the tell that they'll absolutely do it again. It's amazing how apt the trust-thermocline analogy is.
  - s3p 3y ago
    I see what you're saying but.. it's one popup. Maybe you can't, but I can live with that.
    - cyanwave 3y ago
      Correct. There’s a bit of entitlement here by some.
    - InCityDreams 3y ago
      Slippery slope has people scared.

ionioniodfngio 3y ago

It's not that I like Firefox so much as that all the competition is unusable. Firefox has gone downhill, but at least it's extensible enough that I can largely reverse the decay.

reaperducer 3y ago
It's not that I like Firefox so much as that all the competition is unusable. I'm inching closer to using the Duck browser full-time. If you haven't tried it, give it a shot to see if it works for you. It's not as customizable as Chrome or Firefox, but it gets the job done if you don't do a lot of heavy lifting with your browser. Right now, I'm 60% Safari, 10% Firefox, and 30% Duck. And I use Firefox less and less lately.
JohnFen 3y ago
Firefox is much less configurable than it used to be, though. I can no longer fix all of the stuff in it that needs fixing.

the_duke 3y ago

Firefox at least exposes an endless amount of toggles to tweak pretty much every behaviour the browser has. This is includes settings for removing or disabling all the integration with Mozilla services and their ads. See for example: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
warkdarrior 3y ago
Yes, but the default should be to show no ads. If I want ads, I'll use Chrome or Edge with no ad blocker.
- 93po 3y ago
  Even Edge with adblocker shows a ton of ads and Microsoft shit that on one wants as part of the default browser behavior.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
FF removed the ability to delete the sites from MRU list in the address bar, the ability which it had since ages. It was removed when moved to Photon, 2017. They finally would add it back in FF 113, so 2023. Six / Fucking / Years

rwmj 3y ago

The Android version of Firefox recently started promoting commercial bookmarks on the home screen, another case where it seems they've lost the plot.

stjohnswarts 3y ago
You can't turn it off? I haven't used Android in a while, but always like Firefox made it easy to turn this type of stuff and telemetry off.

dabluecaboose 3y ago

A while back I got a push notification on my Android device to some preachy blogpost about Facebook being bad politically I don't want my browser to be a vector from which you push your blogs, Mozilla. I want a browser that isn't Chrome

JohnFen 3y ago

I switched away from Firefox a couple of years ago for a number of reasons that can be collectively summarized as "Firefox no longer meets my needs". But as a Firefox user from the very beginning, I still keep tabs on it, hoping that it will improve enough for me to return to it. Things like this, however, strongly indicate to me that Firefox is just lost and will never find its way back.

lolinder 3y ago
What did you switch to?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I'm using Brave right now as a stopgap until/unless I can find a better one. Brave isn't fantastic, but it works better for me than FF.
  - eep_social 3y ago
    Have you tried Vivaldi? I am still not switched over for various reasons but it seems to be well aligned for me.
nulbyte 3y ago
I wanted to like Firefox. So much so that I used to carry my keys on a Firefox branded lanyard. Eventually, I gave up and switched. Presently, Im trying Brave. I don't really like it, but I'm now at the point where I don't think there is such a thing as a user-friendly browser anymore.
- johnsea 3y ago
  What don't you like?
  - nulbyte 3y ago
    In no specific order: the new Proton UI, Pocket, overemphasizing Mozilla's VPN, innocuously-sounding by sometimes privacy-invasive 'studies', automatic updates, the archane method of disabling automatic updates despite having a built-in configuration UI, having to restart the browser in the middle of my workflow due to automatic updates I did not want in the first place. In general, I get the feeling that Mozilla has adopted Reddit's business model of trashing their product by contuously fixing what isn't broken.

xuancanh 3y ago

The downturn of Firefox began a long time ago when Brendan Eich was forced to leave Mozilla in 2014. I highly recommend giving Brave browser a try, as Brendan Eich now serves as its CEO.

triyambakam 3y ago

I recently switched to Brave

intelVISA 3y ago

Same boat, used it since Win XP but they've been bleeding out badly since Eich left with no signs of recovery. I do want to like Brave, as it is Firefox II in spirit, but the combo of web3 crap, Chromium and the fact that it still pings outbound (with it all 'off') puts me off entirely. Maybe it's time for me to fork KHTML and do what needs to be done.

Macha 3y ago
Note that KHTML is dead: https://github.com/KDE/khtml/tree/master https://github.com/KDE/khtml/tree/master The writing was on the wall as KDE moved to first QtWebkit and then the Blink based QtWebEngine.

stjohnswarts 3y ago

As long as they make it easy to turn off, I simply don't care. I also don't understand others acting like it's the end of the world. Like this is the equivalent of your most beloved partner turning out to be a complete hoax. Give me a break. If anyone is looking for a nice "new tab" filler I highly suggest the "tabbliss" plugin.