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They take so many active anti user steps. Pocket, cliq, Push Notifications for Mozilla Blog without user consent, Mr robot, Firefox Suggest etc they are litter

They take so many active anti user steps. Pocket, cliq, Push Notifications for Mozilla Blog without user consent, Mr robot, Firefox Suggest etc they are littered with mistakes and scandals and have never improved their governance or process. I can give them a pass on technical decisions like Thunderbird or breaking extensions but when it's purely commercial it has to be judged differently.

jacquesm 3y ago
And the biggest: not allowing you to contribute to the FireFox project directly but only to Mozilla which will use the funds in many other pet projects besides doing what they should be doing.
mlok 3y ago
Ok, now write the same list for Google. And then we can compare.
- Ygg2 3y ago
  List for Chrome might be smaller: DRM videos, Manifest v3, this crap, JPEG-XL, ... Problem is that Chrome is massive. If Chrome decides it will go left, most of websites will go left. If you want to compare with Google the list is way more subjective.
dontlaugh 3y ago
The only one in that list that bothers me is the push notifications, and even that I can't care about too much. Seems like a good record to me.
- cxr 3y ago
  Announcing that Pocket would be baked directly into the browser, against the will of users—rather than being a promoted extension and despite the fact that it was at the time a completely unrelated company selling closed source SaaS and in the business of collecting telemetry—and then proceeding despite the widespread backlash doesn't bother you? Issuing misleading PR statements carefully worded to strongly suggest that there was no money changing hands re Pocket integration while maintaining plausible deniability concerning the truth, which is that there was money changing hands—that doesn't bother you? That the subterfuge was so effective that Mozilla employees themselves who were not otherwise in the know took it as a statement that there were no kickbacks involved—and then showed up in places like HN comments outright saying that there weren't kickbacks—that doesn't bother you? The fact that when Pocket was bought, it was understood and even claimed that it would be open source (just like all the other Mozilla Foundation IP), and yet we are in our seventh year after the acquisition and it's no more open source today than it was then—this doesn't bother you? Is there any threshold for mendacity that if crossed would bother you?
  - ragnese 3y ago
    It's not that I'm cool with the Pocket bullshit. It's just that I can't bring myself to more than a shrug when I put it next to Google or Microsoft. I mean, Chrome (including Chromium, IIRC) literally collects and ships a bunch of tracking data to Google THE FIRST FUCKING TIME YOU LAUNCH THE APPLICATION. Context matters. If Firefox did the Pocket nonsense in an environment where we had multiple decent free (as in freedom) browsers, then I'd grab my pitchfork. As it stands, I just can't feel the righteous indignation your comment is trying to rouse. It's truly NOTHING compared to the other options.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    [flagged]
- jimmydorry 3y ago
  If those breaches in user trust don't bother you, why not use Chrome then? I can't recall any campaign Chrome has pushed that breached privacy as severely.
willdr 3y ago
Okay, and this one proposal by Google has outweighed all of those exponentially.
- account42 3y ago
  So it's ok for me to stab you if my buddy then chops your head off?
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    No but I'll forgive you for startling me. Which is the scale of Mozilla "badness" compared to the rest, even you. And especially in the ligh of the good things they do. You can be a critic, but be so in balance with the good things, otherwise you are making doing good something so ingrate a lot of people will give up. If you thing doing the right thing is easy, you have not been doing a lot of it.
  - Ygg2 3y ago
    If those are the options, yes a stab is better than decapitation.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      Of course a stab is better than decapitation. The point of the analogy is to ask whether the stabber is your friend.
      - Ygg2 3y ago
        If he didn't decapitate me, but stabbed me instead I'd say he's a friend
      - skeaker 3y ago
        The more apt analogy in that case might be "would you prefer I decapitate you, or forget to buy you a souvenir on my road trip," to better illustrate the difference in severity between Google's and Mozilla's actions.
TheCoelacanth 3y ago
The fact that an easter egg about a TV show makes the list of the worst things they've ever done speaks volumes. It was a bad decision, but it was not malicious and it had negligible impact on users. Google does something 10x worse every single day.
- ragnese 3y ago
  I was about to post this comment. I can't BELIEVE people are still hung up on the Mr. Robot thing. This is exactly what we're talking about in this thread when we say that HN has a strong anti-Mozilla bias for some reason.
  - mostlysimilar 3y ago
    Whenever I see this I just assume it's people that are against Firefox/Mozilla anyway and are looking for any possible excuse to shit on them. Yes, it was bad, and an ideal organization would not have done it. But it is orders of magnitude less severe than what Google does to us every day. Not even a comparison.
    - donkeybeer 3y ago
      No but things like hiding the favicon when the audio playing notification is on the tab, changing UIs for no good reason, removing features for no good reason...these are the things that piss people off. Mostly designers making life shit for no good reasons, and then the CEO whining about low pay and constantly increasing her salary (after firing the rust team)
  - VancouverMan 3y ago
    In a situation like that, it's not just about any direct harm that may have arisen. It's also about the loss of trust. That particular incident, for example, was completely unnecessary. It involved a significant display of unbelievably poor judgment, and a total lack of foresight. It shouldn't have happened. The fact that it did happen, despite it being such an obviously bad idea, raised a lot of questions and doubt. It causes people to wonder what other incidents, which could potentially be far worse, might happen in the future. It's remembered years later because it involved such a major loss of trust for so many people.
seba_dos1 3y ago
To be honest, everything you listed seems either irrelevant or a small mishap that at worst just leaves some bad taste.
drdaeman 3y ago
I see it differently. I couldn't care less about Pocket integration and Mr.Robot easter egg, but Mozilla became hostile toward power users and open web idealists. They killed Weave (aka Sync 1.0; which was somewhat weird but simple enough to comprehend, reimplement and self-host), replacing it with an NIH-reeking over-engineered abomination that's the very antithesis of standard, open or public. Most people just ignored it as "that's Mozilla own infrastructure, they don't have to make it open, design it well, think of others, or anything else". I could not. They tried to push a fundamentally flawed Persona/BrowserID standard that continued the trend to remove users from their "own" identities while claiming it's a pro-user pro-privacy move. I can see the logic, but I'm of firm opinion that it would've done more harm than good. I'm glad the project died without gaining any traction and WebAuthn (which has its issues, but where users are the source of their identities) took over. That's what BrowserID should've been, but Mozilla just went with the flow and refused or failed to fight for identity ownership. It's things like those what made me regret using Firefox (but again, everything else is worse), not some home page sponsored links. That's where they stopped to differ from the rest for me. Mozilla used to be a beacon of doing things right even if it was challenging, fighting for a better web. And they became just another software company, that put their glorious past on all the ads (how they're so pro-everything good) while failing to live up to those high standards. They had an user agent, but they butchered it and made it just a browser.

jacquesm 3y ago

And the biggest: not allowing you to contribute to the FireFox project directly but only to Mozilla which will use the funds in many other pet projects besides doing what they should be doing.

mlok 3y ago

Ok, now write the same list for Google. And then we can compare.

Ygg2 3y ago
List for Chrome might be smaller: DRM videos, Manifest v3, this crap, JPEG-XL, ... Problem is that Chrome is massive. If Chrome decides it will go left, most of websites will go left. If you want to compare with Google the list is way more subjective.

dontlaugh 3y ago

The only one in that list that bothers me is the push notifications, and even that I can't care about too much. Seems like a good record to me.

cxr 3y ago
Announcing that Pocket would be baked directly into the browser, against the will of users—rather than being a promoted extension and despite the fact that it was at the time a completely unrelated company selling closed source SaaS and in the business of collecting telemetry—and then proceeding despite the widespread backlash doesn't bother you? Issuing misleading PR statements carefully worded to strongly suggest that there was no money changing hands re Pocket integration while maintaining plausible deniability concerning the truth, which is that there was money changing hands—that doesn't bother you? That the subterfuge was so effective that Mozilla employees themselves who were not otherwise in the know took it as a statement that there were no kickbacks involved—and then showed up in places like HN comments outright saying that there weren't kickbacks—that doesn't bother you? The fact that when Pocket was bought, it was understood and even claimed that it would be open source (just like all the other Mozilla Foundation IP), and yet we are in our seventh year after the acquisition and it's no more open source today than it was then—this doesn't bother you? Is there any threshold for mendacity that if crossed would bother you?
- ragnese 3y ago
  It's not that I'm cool with the Pocket bullshit. It's just that I can't bring myself to more than a shrug when I put it next to Google or Microsoft. I mean, Chrome (including Chromium, IIRC) literally collects and ships a bunch of tracking data to Google THE FIRST FUCKING TIME YOU LAUNCH THE APPLICATION. Context matters. If Firefox did the Pocket nonsense in an environment where we had multiple decent free (as in freedom) browsers, then I'd grab my pitchfork. As it stands, I just can't feel the righteous indignation your comment is trying to rouse. It's truly NOTHING compared to the other options.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  [flagged]
jimmydorry 3y ago
If those breaches in user trust don't bother you, why not use Chrome then? I can't recall any campaign Chrome has pushed that breached privacy as severely.

willdr 3y ago

Okay, and this one proposal by Google has outweighed all of those exponentially.

account42 3y ago
So it's ok for me to stab you if my buddy then chops your head off?
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  No but I'll forgive you for startling me. Which is the scale of Mozilla "badness" compared to the rest, even you. And especially in the ligh of the good things they do. You can be a critic, but be so in balance with the good things, otherwise you are making doing good something so ingrate a lot of people will give up. If you thing doing the right thing is easy, you have not been doing a lot of it.
- Ygg2 3y ago
  If those are the options, yes a stab is better than decapitation.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    Of course a stab is better than decapitation. The point of the analogy is to ask whether the stabber is your friend.
    - Ygg2 3y ago
      If he didn't decapitate me, but stabbed me instead I'd say he's a friend
    - skeaker 3y ago
      The more apt analogy in that case might be "would you prefer I decapitate you, or forget to buy you a souvenir on my road trip," to better illustrate the difference in severity between Google's and Mozilla's actions.

TheCoelacanth 3y ago

The fact that an easter egg about a TV show makes the list of the worst things they've ever done speaks volumes. It was a bad decision, but it was not malicious and it had negligible impact on users. Google does something 10x worse every single day.

ragnese 3y ago
I was about to post this comment. I can't BELIEVE people are still hung up on the Mr. Robot thing. This is exactly what we're talking about in this thread when we say that HN has a strong anti-Mozilla bias for some reason.
- mostlysimilar 3y ago
  Whenever I see this I just assume it's people that are against Firefox/Mozilla anyway and are looking for any possible excuse to shit on them. Yes, it was bad, and an ideal organization would not have done it. But it is orders of magnitude less severe than what Google does to us every day. Not even a comparison.
  - donkeybeer 3y ago
    No but things like hiding the favicon when the audio playing notification is on the tab, changing UIs for no good reason, removing features for no good reason...these are the things that piss people off. Mostly designers making life shit for no good reasons, and then the CEO whining about low pay and constantly increasing her salary (after firing the rust team)
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  In a situation like that, it's not just about any direct harm that may have arisen. It's also about the loss of trust. That particular incident, for example, was completely unnecessary. It involved a significant display of unbelievably poor judgment, and a total lack of foresight. It shouldn't have happened. The fact that it did happen, despite it being such an obviously bad idea, raised a lot of questions and doubt. It causes people to wonder what other incidents, which could potentially be far worse, might happen in the future. It's remembered years later because it involved such a major loss of trust for so many people.

seba_dos1 3y ago

To be honest, everything you listed seems either irrelevant or a small mishap that at worst just leaves some bad taste.

drdaeman 3y ago

I see it differently. I couldn't care less about Pocket integration and Mr.Robot easter egg, but Mozilla became hostile toward power users and open web idealists. They killed Weave (aka Sync 1.0; which was somewhat weird but simple enough to comprehend, reimplement and self-host), replacing it with an NIH-reeking over-engineered abomination that's the very antithesis of standard, open or public. Most people just ignored it as "that's Mozilla own infrastructure, they don't have to make it open, design it well, think of others, or anything else". I could not. They tried to push a fundamentally flawed Persona/BrowserID standard that continued the trend to remove users from their "own" identities while claiming it's a pro-user pro-privacy move. I can see the logic, but I'm of firm opinion that it would've done more harm than good. I'm glad the project died without gaining any traction and WebAuthn (which has its issues, but where users are the source of their identities) took over. That's what BrowserID should've been, but Mozilla just went with the flow and refused or failed to fight for identity ownership. It's things like those what made me regret using Firefox (but again, everything else is worse), not some home page sponsored links. That's where they stopped to differ from the rest for me. Mozilla used to be a beacon of doing things right even if it was challenging, fighting for a better web. And they became just another software company, that put their glorious past on all the ads (how they're so pro-everything good) while failing to live up to those high standards. They had an user agent, but they butchered it and made it just a browser.