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I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions, but they are in a difficult position, and the anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague an

I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions, but they are in a difficult position, and the anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless. Some common demands: - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google - Mozilla should not monetize Firefox - Mozilla should only focus on Firefox - Mozilla should develop cool research projects - Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business - Mozilla should have a salary cap and expect executives to treat it like a passion project Some of these goals are opposite ends of the same slider, so it's not possible to maximize both. Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. For example, my understanding is that while salaries are quite decent, they tend to be below what Apple and Google will offer for similar roles. Maybe it's seen as waffling whenever they shift these sliders, and maybe that's a fair criticism. But nobody else seems to be able to put together a clear and realistic alternative plan. Most of them pick and choose contradictory goals, other plans like Zawinski's are at least clear, but too radical for those who still want revenue to pay developers or to be able to watch Netflix in their browser.

rightbyte 1y ago
Both Mozilla and the Wikipedia Foundation seem to have the same problem of doing everything but focusing on their core raison d'être. Like, what is there even to say but constantly complain about that.
- detaro 1y ago
  Or rather, people disagree with the Foundations on what their purpose should be.
  - rightbyte 1y ago
    Yes but for rethorical reasons I pretend to not know what you mean. That would validify their claims.
  - kristjank 1y ago
    If the turtle-saving foundation I donate to has a windfall, I would expect it to save more turtles, not to instead also focus on feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children. This does not mean that feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children is wrong, it is an even more important goal than saving the turtles, but somewhere in the process, there pillaged a decision maker that misinterpreted (acceptable) or ignored (unacceptable) the intentions of the benefactors.
    - detaro 1y ago
      Except the foundations mission statement isn't turtle-saving, that's just what you think is clearly the most important part of their work that they should solely focus on, in your opinion. And it's not wrong of you to want to be able to donate towards the parts that you care about, but it's an obvious disconnect from the reality of what their stated goals are (and hence you blame decision makers for decisions that are actually fully in line with the mission statements). Mozilla Foundation never was the Firefox Development Foundation, as much as some of us want it to be. Wikimedia never was the Wikipedia Development and Operations Foundation. If you dislike that, donate to entities with narrower goals (I personally prefer directing money towards OSM and KDE for example)
      - kristjank 1y ago
        If a foundation spins off a project's community with certain goals, they take on to some degree the goals and the vision of the people that built it. Those are opinions, and they are important to the cited goals. If then a foreign element enters the system due to the sad state of the technology/corporate enterprises nowadays and changes the mission statement, you have not changed the spirit it was created with, you changed a business strategy in a way that is disconnected and hostile to the initial goal. A lot of the times the goals aren't really stated at all clearly, are protected by different acts like codes of conduct, and open to modification by impassionate people with ephemeral leadership positions who don't care what happens to the organization down the line. Sure, I can become the chairman of Turtle saving international and change our charter to prioritize feeding hotdogs to hungry Somalis, but I am still doing an ideological disservice to the grassroots initiative that built the foundation and created the position for me to be sitting on, no? Also, this seems to me extremely fragile when situations are reversed, say that an outright awful organization like an international petrol company gets a new mission statement. Should all they did before and after that be forgiven because their stated goals say otherwise? I personally see this as little less than a ground truth, but perhaps there is some way that stated goals stand above all regardless. EDIT: I do see how you make a very good point when you're looking mostly from the present towards the future, though.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > Both Mozilla and the Wikipedia Foundation seem to have the same problem of doing everything but focusing on their core raison d'être. At least for Wikimedia... running Wikipedia itself isn't expensive, they're not running it as a resume-driven-development project in some hyperscaler that brings associated costs, they run bare metal servers to this day (and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup). Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.
  - DoctorOW 1y ago
    > and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup Bad news. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/404231/we-re-finally-going-to-the-cloud https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/404231/we-re-finall...
  - umbra07 1y ago
    > Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad. but then why do they constantly run banners implying that Wikipedia will shut down if I don't donate right now?
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Capitalism, plain and simple. I don't like it either, but that's the way all fundraising has devolved down to. And hell, it's been that way even decades ago with images of starving little African kids being used for emotional manipulation. In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
      - 1y ago
- kmeisthax 1y ago
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FirmwareBurner 1y ago
>anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless. No they aren't. People just want a good product that's free from bloat and doesn't change the UI every week, interrupting you when you open it to advertise some sponsored affiliate websites on the home page (Otto and Adidas in my case) or new features I never asked for and will never use like Pocket or the VPN. The org and leadership should also focus their funds on the technical development of the product itself, instead on social and political activism and virtue signaling since I don't want lectures form my products. Basically, Mozilla just needs to "PUT THE FRIES IN THE BAG" and everyone would be happy, and even throw in a few bucks every now and then as a gesture of appreciation and good will. But Mozilla lost users by doing the exact opposite of that, being drunk on the Google funded gravy train and knowledge that they're untouchable, being only thing preventing Chrome being considered a monopoly by regulators. So good riddance from me, you reap what you sow, RIP BOZO, I can't support a bad product run by incompetent people just on idealism alone, it actually needs to be technically superior first and foremost.
- hooverd 1y ago
  I also see people complain that Firefox doesn't the feature you don't like, or they're focusing on the wrong different features. They can't win.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    Then how come Chrome does everything I need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ What's this business strategy called? I call it "not shooting yourself in the foot". Mozilla management should try it. Like I said, Mozilla can win by "putting the fries in the bag". Nobody switched from Chrome to Firefox because they had Pocket or some VPN or they had affiliate websites on the home page. On the contrary.
    - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
      Chrome does everything you need because Chrome is your baseline that you are used to and because of that your requirement is "it does what Chrome does". Firefox has features that people "need" but they only know they want it because they already use it and they won't switch away from Firefox unless whatever they'd switch to has the same feature. Ex: I will never switch away to another browser unless it has extensions that allow you to group tabs and "store them in the background" like you can with Firefox's Simple Tab Groups. Likewise I know people who won't switch to a manifest v3 browser because they don't want their adblock crippled. TLDR: Your requirements are "whatever I currently use but better". You will never win users by trying to beat a better funded and better staffed project at that. Instead you have to try to do new things and discover what can make your project stand out.
handsclean 1y ago
You’re twisting what people ask for. The real versions are not contradictory. - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google. - Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users. - Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox. - Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox. - Mozilla should be well run. - Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business. This is a company that has repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding. They defined themselves as the advocate for users on the web, then started selling user data and lied about it. Sure there’s a grey area, but Mozilla is far from it.
- ang_cire 1y ago
  > repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things I don't claim to know Mozilla's internal workings, but my wife works for an education-space 501c3, and there are very strict rules about how they can fundraise, how they can spend money that's been donated, etc. I'm sure Mozilla Foundation is large enough to manage this stuff, but things like per-project bank accounts and tax records are still overhead they would have to deal with. I know one of their (my wife's org's) thorniest areas is around what money can be spent on non-"core mission" expenses.
  - ang_cire 1y ago
    Tried to provide insight into this, but apparently they just wanted to hate on Mozilla. xD
    - bmn__ 1y ago
      Alternative view-point: the Mozilla Corporation exists, which is not bound by these rules. (I did not downvote you. The HN users who did so without explanation are lamers.)
      - pseudalopex 1y ago
        There are strict rules for businesses soliciting donations. Mozilla Corporation would have to be more careful than most because of confusion between the non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. And many people who claim they would donate to Mozilla Corporation demand per project accounting if they don't demand elimination of all projects they dislike.
LexiMax 1y ago
I've noticed this as well. It's in especially stark contrast when you compare to other browsers, such as Brave, whose gaffes and controversies tend to be overlooked, excused, or forgotten about. EDIT: For me, my choice of browser is simplified by the fact that I don't trust any chromium browser to keep long-term compatibility with extensions I rely upon, especially uBlock Origin.
- pixxel 1y ago
  Brave is dragged at any available half-chance opportunity…
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Not really, but I will say Brave has had more controversies and they're more severe than anything Firefox or Mozilla have done. But you wouldn't gather that from online comments.
  - red-iron-pine 1y ago
    Brave deserves to be dragged sometimes
glenstein 1y ago
Exactly, and to your point, a lot of the charges against Mozilla are mutually exclusive, contradictory, or barely even half-made attempts at arguments. You've outlined the make money/don't make money contradiction. But to add a few more of the crazy criticisms, sincerely made: - Implying without evidence that the VPN is run at prohibitively massive cost and at the expense of other programs - Claiming that Mozilla has "run out of money" (they have over $1 billion in assets) - Overstating costs of Mozilla's dabbling in blockchain (they wrote a paper or two) - Claiming the CEO pay has crippled Mozilla's ability to work on core browser (it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue) - Claiming without any mechanism or argument that there's a missing feature Mozilla could have developed that would have restored all their market share - Related to the above, completely ignoring that Chrome drove market share in its own proactive ways, leveraging its search and Android dominance, rolling out affordable Chromebooks and that these drove the market share more than anything specific to Mozilla - Firefox has become bloated and slow (Outdated talking point, it was true for a time, but then they did the dang thing and delivered Quantum, which delivered the major advances in speed in stability that everyone asked for) That's not to say there's no valid criticisms, there are plenty. There seems to be real cause and effect, for instance, on Firefox's investments in FirefoxOS and the ability to invest resources in the browser, and that did happen over a time where market share was lost. And the dabbling in ads risks compromising the soul of their mission in critical ways. But meanwhile these (above) have all generally been basically misunderstandings or bad arguments with no internal logic, but claimed over and over again in the backwaters of internet comment sections with complete impunity. The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.
- LexiMax 1y ago
  > The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself. I have long suspected that a good chunk of the controversy surrounding Mozilla that I've seen is...let's just call it motivated reasoning.
- jfengel 1y ago
  (it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue) In a lot of industries, 1% revenue is rather a lot. Many domains have profit margins of 5% or even less; that would be fully 20% of your earnings. Software development is not "many industries", and Mozilla isn't most software development companies. So it's hard for me to say whether that specific CEO salary is appropriate. But I'd rather see his salary described by earnings, rather than revenue, since revenue by itself could just be churn.
kmeisthax 1y ago
Looking at your list of contradictory demands, I will point out that Mozilla themselves seemed to act the way you criticize their critics for acting. They tried to pull themselves in every direction all at once and it turns out Mozilla can't really do that. I mean, everyone shits on Wikimedia for ballooning expenses, but at least they figured out crowdfunding. That's not to say Mozilla can't make any strategic bets. It's just that they have to be both: 1. Complimentary or integral to their flagship browser product, Firefox, and, 2. Have a reasonable path to success Let's look at Boot2Gecko, or "Firefox OS", through this lens. Firefox needs to be on as many operating systems as possible, including mobile OSes. And it was true that one particular mobile OS vendor was loud and proud in banning Gecko. The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS. This doesn't get Firefox in the hands of more people, but it sure as hell ties up expensive engineer time on building an entirely new platform. Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser. Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down. The reason why I focus on Firefox is because it's the only power Mozilla has to negotiate with. When Hollywood wanted to be able to use DRM in browser, Mozilla surrendered, almost unconditionally. And they had to, because the answer to "Firefox remains principled and doesn't put DRM in the browser" is "every streaming service tells people to uninstall Firefox". Compare that to Apple, who was able to singlehandedly block any requirement for baseline video codec support in HTML5 because they didn't want to implement Ogg Theora. That's what being a big player in the browser market gets you. Furthermore, Zawinski's plan is the only option. Mozilla is out of time, the DOJ is actively attempting to shut off Google's antitrust insurance and that basically spells doom for Mozilla. Hell, Mozilla themselves put out an extremely morally compromised position statement, because selling the search default is the only thing Mozilla managed to make stick. If Mozilla doesn't implement Zawinski's plan, they'll collapse and cease operating. [0] In practice, just Android. I don't remember if Windows Phone had the same limitations as iOS did, but it's market share was so limited it did not matter.
kristjank 1y ago
I am sorry that my response is so long, but you raised so many often repeated points that I wanted to reply somewhere near them. To me, the motives of the users were always pretty clear and aligned with freedom, privacy and empowering end-users with free software. Then the suits came and reinterpreted it enough that if you look at it from the right angle, which is coincidentally always somewhere up Google's ass, it may align with what they're doing now. - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google: true, but it could be in a different form than a search engine deal that effectively pipes all of user's queries to the most agressive advertising spyware syndicate of the world. - Mozilla should not monetize Firefox: this is true. They can monetize adjacent support services like they did with the VPN and Relay (which I gladly paid for), but not the main product if they want it to be omnipresent. - Mozilla should only focus on Firefox: strongly disagree. Mozilla should work on TECHNOLOGIES. TFA describes very well how Mozilla produced Rust and Servo, which are clearly more widely used software than Firefox. The difference between those two and Firefox is that they aren't a product to be marketed, they are technologies used in other projects! This makes it pretty easy to gain market share and get a higher user share to sit with the big players. Technologies, unlike products, are however very unappealing to the managerial caste since they need to mature a great deal more. This is a sociological problem. If a well-designed commercial product can be cathedral, a lot of technology projects I've seen people build resemble zen gardens. A midwit paid six figures to do nothing always tends to despise those who, for the same amount of money, tend to a zen-garden-like project with passion and intent. This also aligns somewhat with "Mozilla should develop cool research projects." - Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business: nah. adjacent services could, but not really. Most successful software companies work off of cloud services and support nowadays. The shipped product is maybe 5% of the extracted value. A non-enshittified browser won't do much better, so I think it better to discard the thought altogether and focus on the free browser, then sell subscriptions to Relay, Pocket, or something else that works well with the free browser. I guess my main gripe is that I see huge projects like Apache, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, PFSense, Proxmox, etc. Which are huge software projects that thrive by developing technologies. Some like PFSense and Proxmox then provide a product on top of it, but the focus is on the technology. Mozilla turned from a company developing software and technology to a company that's selling a free product and trying to profit from it. And hiring more executives won't bring better tech in. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can't cash in a good product for more than a few months, but you can capitalize on a good technology practically forever. And Mozilla can't seem to understand that software can be either, both, or none of the above, so it's starting to do what their clueless executives are good at: extract value.
giingyui 1y ago
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StopDisinfo910 1y ago
> Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. Deeply disagree. I think you are avoiding looking at facts by presenting the issue as a matter of contradicting opinions. Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure by a minority linked to things unrelated to his tenure. Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things. Worse, there were multiple events leading to negative marketing created by poor strategy. Despite this string of failures, top management has been significantly increasing their compensation. The issue is not knowing if these compensations are competitive. Everything points to the top management being grossly incompetent. Nobody wants them to treat it like a passion project. People want them out. I mean except Google of course which is all to happy that they meet the goal assigned to them: not being a competitor in the browser market and being an useful umbrella in case competition authorities wants to take a look at Chrome.
- glenstein 1y ago
  >Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things. This right here is the myth that keeps getting repeated without evidence. As I said in a different comment, most of these widely criticized side bets happened long after the market share decline, so the attempt to tie that to cause and effect just doesn't work. And the "significant" money invested in the side bets is almost never quantified (normally people trying to make this argument, once you ask for numbers, are just browsing the 990 for the first time and making random guesses). The VPN cost seems like it was utterly trivial, the amount to purchase Pocket was never disclosed but I read of fundraising around $14MM and implied valuations in the low to mid tens of millions, which may be the ballpark of what Pocket costed to acquire. And Pocket did bring in revenue, also possibly on the order of tens of millions. So the worst case is that they lost low tens of millions, the best case is that it was a wash. So that's not nothing, but that's what it looks like to attach these claims to facts. It's probably less than what their endowment earns them in a year, and relatively small against their annual revenue. But it doesn't tell a story of side bets triggering a collapse in market share like people keep claiming. And it seems like I keep having to repeat this, but these kinds of narratives completely ignore what were likely the real drivers of market share change, which was Google leveraging its powerful position in search, on Android, the rollout of Chromebooks.
Ferret7446 1y ago
> I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions That's a very twisted way of putting it. Mozilla has almost always made egregiously bad decisions, especially with its money. Indeed, "I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions"

rightbyte 1y ago

Both Mozilla and the Wikipedia Foundation seem to have the same problem of doing everything but focusing on their core raison d'être. Like, what is there even to say but constantly complain about that.

detaro 1y ago
Or rather, people disagree with the Foundations on what their purpose should be.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  Yes but for rethorical reasons I pretend to not know what you mean. That would validify their claims.
- kristjank 1y ago
  If the turtle-saving foundation I donate to has a windfall, I would expect it to save more turtles, not to instead also focus on feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children. This does not mean that feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children is wrong, it is an even more important goal than saving the turtles, but somewhere in the process, there pillaged a decision maker that misinterpreted (acceptable) or ignored (unacceptable) the intentions of the benefactors.
  - detaro 1y ago
    Except the foundations mission statement isn't turtle-saving, that's just what you think is clearly the most important part of their work that they should solely focus on, in your opinion. And it's not wrong of you to want to be able to donate towards the parts that you care about, but it's an obvious disconnect from the reality of what their stated goals are (and hence you blame decision makers for decisions that are actually fully in line with the mission statements). Mozilla Foundation never was the Firefox Development Foundation, as much as some of us want it to be. Wikimedia never was the Wikipedia Development and Operations Foundation. If you dislike that, donate to entities with narrower goals (I personally prefer directing money towards OSM and KDE for example)
    - kristjank 1y ago
      If a foundation spins off a project's community with certain goals, they take on to some degree the goals and the vision of the people that built it. Those are opinions, and they are important to the cited goals. If then a foreign element enters the system due to the sad state of the technology/corporate enterprises nowadays and changes the mission statement, you have not changed the spirit it was created with, you changed a business strategy in a way that is disconnected and hostile to the initial goal. A lot of the times the goals aren't really stated at all clearly, are protected by different acts like codes of conduct, and open to modification by impassionate people with ephemeral leadership positions who don't care what happens to the organization down the line. Sure, I can become the chairman of Turtle saving international and change our charter to prioritize feeding hotdogs to hungry Somalis, but I am still doing an ideological disservice to the grassroots initiative that built the foundation and created the position for me to be sitting on, no? Also, this seems to me extremely fragile when situations are reversed, say that an outright awful organization like an international petrol company gets a new mission statement. Should all they did before and after that be forgiven because their stated goals say otherwise? I personally see this as little less than a ground truth, but perhaps there is some way that stated goals stand above all regardless. EDIT: I do see how you make a very good point when you're looking mostly from the present towards the future, though.
mschuster91 1y ago
> Both Mozilla and the Wikipedia Foundation seem to have the same problem of doing everything but focusing on their core raison d'être. At least for Wikimedia... running Wikipedia itself isn't expensive, they're not running it as a resume-driven-development project in some hyperscaler that brings associated costs, they run bare metal servers to this day (and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup). Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.
- DoctorOW 1y ago
  > and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup Bad news. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/404231/we-re-finally-going-to-the-cloud https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/404231/we-re-finall...
- umbra07 1y ago
  > Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad. but then why do they constantly run banners implying that Wikipedia will shut down if I don't donate right now?
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Capitalism, plain and simple. I don't like it either, but that's the way all fundraising has devolved down to. And hell, it's been that way even decades ago with images of starving little African kids being used for emotional manipulation. In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
    - 1y ago
kmeisthax 1y ago
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FirmwareBurner 1y ago

>anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless. No they aren't. People just want a good product that's free from bloat and doesn't change the UI every week, interrupting you when you open it to advertise some sponsored affiliate websites on the home page (Otto and Adidas in my case) or new features I never asked for and will never use like Pocket or the VPN. The org and leadership should also focus their funds on the technical development of the product itself, instead on social and political activism and virtue signaling since I don't want lectures form my products. Basically, Mozilla just needs to "PUT THE FRIES IN THE BAG" and everyone would be happy, and even throw in a few bucks every now and then as a gesture of appreciation and good will. But Mozilla lost users by doing the exact opposite of that, being drunk on the Google funded gravy train and knowledge that they're untouchable, being only thing preventing Chrome being considered a monopoly by regulators. So good riddance from me, you reap what you sow, RIP BOZO, I can't support a bad product run by incompetent people just on idealism alone, it actually needs to be technically superior first and foremost.

hooverd 1y ago
I also see people complain that Firefox doesn't the feature you don't like, or they're focusing on the wrong different features. They can't win.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  Then how come Chrome does everything I need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ What's this business strategy called? I call it "not shooting yourself in the foot". Mozilla management should try it. Like I said, Mozilla can win by "putting the fries in the bag". Nobody switched from Chrome to Firefox because they had Pocket or some VPN or they had affiliate websites on the home page. On the contrary.
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
    Chrome does everything you need because Chrome is your baseline that you are used to and because of that your requirement is "it does what Chrome does". Firefox has features that people "need" but they only know they want it because they already use it and they won't switch away from Firefox unless whatever they'd switch to has the same feature. Ex: I will never switch away to another browser unless it has extensions that allow you to group tabs and "store them in the background" like you can with Firefox's Simple Tab Groups. Likewise I know people who won't switch to a manifest v3 browser because they don't want their adblock crippled. TLDR: Your requirements are "whatever I currently use but better". You will never win users by trying to beat a better funded and better staffed project at that. Instead you have to try to do new things and discover what can make your project stand out.

handsclean 1y ago

You’re twisting what people ask for. The real versions are not contradictory. - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google. - Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users. - Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox. - Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox. - Mozilla should be well run. - Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business. This is a company that has repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding. They defined themselves as the advocate for users on the web, then started selling user data and lied about it. Sure there’s a grey area, but Mozilla is far from it.

ang_cire 1y ago
> repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things I don't claim to know Mozilla's internal workings, but my wife works for an education-space 501c3, and there are very strict rules about how they can fundraise, how they can spend money that's been donated, etc. I'm sure Mozilla Foundation is large enough to manage this stuff, but things like per-project bank accounts and tax records are still overhead they would have to deal with. I know one of their (my wife's org's) thorniest areas is around what money can be spent on non-"core mission" expenses.
- ang_cire 1y ago
  Tried to provide insight into this, but apparently they just wanted to hate on Mozilla. xD
  - bmn__ 1y ago
    Alternative view-point: the Mozilla Corporation exists, which is not bound by these rules. (I did not downvote you. The HN users who did so without explanation are lamers.)
    - pseudalopex 1y ago
      There are strict rules for businesses soliciting donations. Mozilla Corporation would have to be more careful than most because of confusion between the non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. And many people who claim they would donate to Mozilla Corporation demand per project accounting if they don't demand elimination of all projects they dislike.

LexiMax 1y ago

I've noticed this as well. It's in especially stark contrast when you compare to other browsers, such as Brave, whose gaffes and controversies tend to be overlooked, excused, or forgotten about. EDIT: For me, my choice of browser is simplified by the fact that I don't trust any chromium browser to keep long-term compatibility with extensions I rely upon, especially uBlock Origin.

pixxel 1y ago
Brave is dragged at any available half-chance opportunity…
- const_cast 1y ago
  Not really, but I will say Brave has had more controversies and they're more severe than anything Firefox or Mozilla have done. But you wouldn't gather that from online comments.
- red-iron-pine 1y ago
  Brave deserves to be dragged sometimes

glenstein 1y ago

Exactly, and to your point, a lot of the charges against Mozilla are mutually exclusive, contradictory, or barely even half-made attempts at arguments. You've outlined the make money/don't make money contradiction. But to add a few more of the crazy criticisms, sincerely made: - Implying without evidence that the VPN is run at prohibitively massive cost and at the expense of other programs - Claiming that Mozilla has "run out of money" (they have over $1 billion in assets) - Overstating costs of Mozilla's dabbling in blockchain (they wrote a paper or two) - Claiming the CEO pay has crippled Mozilla's ability to work on core browser (it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue) - Claiming without any mechanism or argument that there's a missing feature Mozilla could have developed that would have restored all their market share - Related to the above, completely ignoring that Chrome drove market share in its own proactive ways, leveraging its search and Android dominance, rolling out affordable Chromebooks and that these drove the market share more than anything specific to Mozilla - Firefox has become bloated and slow (Outdated talking point, it was true for a time, but then they did the dang thing and delivered Quantum, which delivered the major advances in speed in stability that everyone asked for) That's not to say there's no valid criticisms, there are plenty. There seems to be real cause and effect, for instance, on Firefox's investments in FirefoxOS and the ability to invest resources in the browser, and that did happen over a time where market share was lost. And the dabbling in ads risks compromising the soul of their mission in critical ways. But meanwhile these (above) have all generally been basically misunderstandings or bad arguments with no internal logic, but claimed over and over again in the backwaters of internet comment sections with complete impunity. The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.

LexiMax 1y ago
> The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself. I have long suspected that a good chunk of the controversy surrounding Mozilla that I've seen is...let's just call it motivated reasoning.
jfengel 1y ago
(it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue) In a lot of industries, 1% revenue is rather a lot. Many domains have profit margins of 5% or even less; that would be fully 20% of your earnings. Software development is not "many industries", and Mozilla isn't most software development companies. So it's hard for me to say whether that specific CEO salary is appropriate. But I'd rather see his salary described by earnings, rather than revenue, since revenue by itself could just be churn.

kmeisthax 1y ago

Looking at your list of contradictory demands, I will point out that Mozilla themselves seemed to act the way you criticize their critics for acting. They tried to pull themselves in every direction all at once and it turns out Mozilla can't really do that. I mean, everyone shits on Wikimedia for ballooning expenses, but at least they figured out crowdfunding. That's not to say Mozilla can't make any strategic bets. It's just that they have to be both: 1. Complimentary or integral to their flagship browser product, Firefox, and, 2. Have a reasonable path to success Let's look at Boot2Gecko, or "Firefox OS", through this lens. Firefox needs to be on as many operating systems as possible, including mobile OSes. And it was true that one particular mobile OS vendor was loud and proud in banning Gecko. The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS. This doesn't get Firefox in the hands of more people, but it sure as hell ties up expensive engineer time on building an entirely new platform. Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser. Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down. The reason why I focus on Firefox is because it's the only power Mozilla has to negotiate with. When Hollywood wanted to be able to use DRM in browser, Mozilla surrendered, almost unconditionally. And they had to, because the answer to "Firefox remains principled and doesn't put DRM in the browser" is "every streaming service tells people to uninstall Firefox". Compare that to Apple, who was able to singlehandedly block any requirement for baseline video codec support in HTML5 because they didn't want to implement Ogg Theora. That's what being a big player in the browser market gets you. Furthermore, Zawinski's plan is the only option. Mozilla is out of time, the DOJ is actively attempting to shut off Google's antitrust insurance and that basically spells doom for Mozilla. Hell, Mozilla themselves put out an extremely morally compromised position statement, because selling the search default is the only thing Mozilla managed to make stick. If Mozilla doesn't implement Zawinski's plan, they'll collapse and cease operating. [0] In practice, just Android. I don't remember if Windows Phone had the same limitations as iOS did, but it's market share was so limited it did not matter.

kristjank 1y ago

I am sorry that my response is so long, but you raised so many often repeated points that I wanted to reply somewhere near them. To me, the motives of the users were always pretty clear and aligned with freedom, privacy and empowering end-users with free software. Then the suits came and reinterpreted it enough that if you look at it from the right angle, which is coincidentally always somewhere up Google's ass, it may align with what they're doing now. - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google: true, but it could be in a different form than a search engine deal that effectively pipes all of user's queries to the most agressive advertising spyware syndicate of the world. - Mozilla should not monetize Firefox: this is true. They can monetize adjacent support services like they did with the VPN and Relay (which I gladly paid for), but not the main product if they want it to be omnipresent. - Mozilla should only focus on Firefox: strongly disagree. Mozilla should work on TECHNOLOGIES. TFA describes very well how Mozilla produced Rust and Servo, which are clearly more widely used software than Firefox. The difference between those two and Firefox is that they aren't a product to be marketed, they are technologies used in other projects! This makes it pretty easy to gain market share and get a higher user share to sit with the big players. Technologies, unlike products, are however very unappealing to the managerial caste since they need to mature a great deal more. This is a sociological problem. If a well-designed commercial product can be cathedral, a lot of technology projects I've seen people build resemble zen gardens. A midwit paid six figures to do nothing always tends to despise those who, for the same amount of money, tend to a zen-garden-like project with passion and intent. This also aligns somewhat with "Mozilla should develop cool research projects." - Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business: nah. adjacent services could, but not really. Most successful software companies work off of cloud services and support nowadays. The shipped product is maybe 5% of the extracted value. A non-enshittified browser won't do much better, so I think it better to discard the thought altogether and focus on the free browser, then sell subscriptions to Relay, Pocket, or something else that works well with the free browser. I guess my main gripe is that I see huge projects like Apache, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, PFSense, Proxmox, etc. Which are huge software projects that thrive by developing technologies. Some like PFSense and Proxmox then provide a product on top of it, but the focus is on the technology. Mozilla turned from a company developing software and technology to a company that's selling a free product and trying to profit from it. And hiring more executives won't bring better tech in. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can't cash in a good product for more than a few months, but you can capitalize on a good technology practically forever. And Mozilla can't seem to understand that software can be either, both, or none of the above, so it's starting to do what their clueless executives are good at: extract value.

giingyui 1y ago

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StopDisinfo910 1y ago

> Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. Deeply disagree. I think you are avoiding looking at facts by presenting the issue as a matter of contradicting opinions. Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure by a minority linked to things unrelated to his tenure. Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things. Worse, there were multiple events leading to negative marketing created by poor strategy. Despite this string of failures, top management has been significantly increasing their compensation. The issue is not knowing if these compensations are competitive. Everything points to the top management being grossly incompetent. Nobody wants them to treat it like a passion project. People want them out. I mean except Google of course which is all to happy that they meet the goal assigned to them: not being a competitor in the browser market and being an useful umbrella in case competition authorities wants to take a look at Chrome.

glenstein 1y ago
>Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things. This right here is the myth that keeps getting repeated without evidence. As I said in a different comment, most of these widely criticized side bets happened long after the market share decline, so the attempt to tie that to cause and effect just doesn't work. And the "significant" money invested in the side bets is almost never quantified (normally people trying to make this argument, once you ask for numbers, are just browsing the 990 for the first time and making random guesses). The VPN cost seems like it was utterly trivial, the amount to purchase Pocket was never disclosed but I read of fundraising around $14MM and implied valuations in the low to mid tens of millions, which may be the ballpark of what Pocket costed to acquire. And Pocket did bring in revenue, also possibly on the order of tens of millions. So the worst case is that they lost low tens of millions, the best case is that it was a wash. So that's not nothing, but that's what it looks like to attach these claims to facts. It's probably less than what their endowment earns them in a year, and relatively small against their annual revenue. But it doesn't tell a story of side bets triggering a collapse in market share like people keep claiming. And it seems like I keep having to repeat this, but these kinds of narratives completely ignore what were likely the real drivers of market share change, which was Google leveraging its powerful position in search, on Android, the rollout of Chromebooks.

Ferret7446 1y ago

> I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions That's a very twisted way of putting it. Mozilla has almost always made egregiously bad decisions, especially with its money. Indeed, "I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions"