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I get why people are pissed at Mozilla, but I do feel like people on HN also underestimate how much hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier. It alm

I get why people are pissed at Mozilla, but I do feel like people on HN also underestimate how much hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier. It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”. Like, in general, I find that any HN thread where most of the comments are just agreeing, one-upping and yes-anding while invoking the same talking points and terminology (CEO ghouls, etc.) is probably a topic we might need to chill out on.

agilob 1y ago
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer Let's start hating and discussing how much Chrome leads are paid too.
thoroughburro 1y ago
You imply it’s the hackers or Hacker News that has changed to create a negative atmosphere. From my perspective, however, it’s the direct result of a very long series of hostile-to-hackers decisions made by Mozilla.
- Uehreka 1y ago
  To quote myself: > I get why people are pissed at Mozilla My issue is that when you try to have discourse but everyone’s on the same side, it can easily devolve into a circlejerk where everyone is trying to see who can most dramatically burn the strawman. These kinds of feedback loops are just bad—it doesn’t really matter who the target is or how malicious they are—because they cause the participants to drift further and further from the reality of the conflict. In the best case, if the target really is bad, the participants may just look foolish when they later deploy their anti-strawman ballistic missile against someone who actually has a slightly good pro-target argument they hadn’t thought of. In the worst case, this is how mobs work themselves up to eventually justify violence against a target that’s totally harmless. One thing’s for sure though, once a circlejerk like this starts, rational thought ends.
  - kelnos 1y ago
    You seem to be really keen on whining about how people here hate on Mozilla, but seem not to be interested in arguing the merits of Mozilla and its actions over the years, and whether or not they deserve that hate. So basically, you're a part of the problem you're complaining about. You're just being the contrarian looking down on the rest of us for having an opinion. Tell me, why shouldn't we criticize Mozilla? What wonderful things have they done over the past several years? How does their behavior and performance make Firefox's cratered market share understandable and ok and reasonable? How is their failure to find alternative revenue streams, over and over again, ok and reasonable? Many people in these threads are listing concrete evidence of Mozilla's poor behavior and performance, and you're just continuing, over and over, to whine about some sort of circlejerk you've imagined up. Either actually argue a useful point about Mozilla itself, or just stop posting about this.
    - godelski 1y ago
      I don't see how you're responding to the parent's comment. You seem to be exemplifying it tbh. The parent isn't saying Firefox and Mozilla are without problems. In fact, they actively recognized them! So I'm not sure why you respond as if they don't. The parent is saying that the complaints are often used as social signaling. The fact that this happens makes it harder to address legitimate issues. Which Mozilla, without a doubt, has issues. The result of all this is very apparent: it helps Google. You can even think Mozilla is evil, but you have to ask: is Mozilla more evil than Google? It's hard to argue yes. Frankly, they don't even have the capacity to do as much harm
  - gr4vityWall 1y ago
    [dead]
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  This was probably the day that Firefox jumped the shark for me: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115346/https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115346/https://www.theve... I still use it, but I lost all respect for the management. This level of tone deafness should cause everyone on the board and c suite to personally write an open letter of apology to the users, but instead we got a half-hearted victim-blaming non-apology: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-looking-glass-add... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115352/https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115352/https://blog.mozi... This is really rather telling. Here is how Mozilla articulates what they think users have a problem with: > We’re sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community. While there was no intention or mechanism to collect or share your data or private information and The Looking Glass was an opt-in and user activated promotion, we should have given users the choice to install this add-on. Mozilla is willfully inept. They think that pre-loading third-party non-free code and ads without my knowledge or consent is not an issue! Moreover, Mozilla thinks that this doesn't conflict with Mozilla's interpretation of what opt-in means and the values it embodies. Mozilla is looking more and more like controlled opposition. Mozilla undermined their own users' faith in Mozilla's add-on/extension capabilities and act like releasing the source after the fact resolves any issue at all regarding doing this without consulting users or receiving prior affirmative consent. This comment is getting long enough as it is. I'll just leave this here. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-firefox-data-collection-privacy-settings https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-firefox-data-col...
tempaccount420 1y ago
Or maybe... Mozilla has to change?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
ericpauley 1y ago
Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much just works, supports a rich collection of (vetted!) extensions, and performs exceptionally well with sometimes hundreds of tabs. Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.
- WhyNotHugo 1y ago
  Firefox works, but it’s got thousands of annoying issues (many of them just paper cuts, but still). The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs. Imagine how many of those issues could have been ironed out over the years.
  - sealeck 1y ago
    The issue with the salary is not that it costs the same as 30 developers – good leadership can make a difference worth >30 developers over the same timespan (especially in an organisation with 1000s of staff). The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend. It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
    - bell-cot 1y ago
      This. Unfortunately, in our current "Greed is God" late-stage capitalist world, it's virtually impossible to find a competent tech CEO who is willing to work for mere honest wages. And (evidently) too difficult to even find one who's willing to work for 30X.
      - Aeolun 1y ago
        I think if you are paying 30x engineer salary you are always going to find CEO’s that optimize for money.
arp242 1y ago
Many people on HN hold Mozilla to impossible and conflicting standards. It is simultaneously a compromised propaganda arm of Google for taking the Google bribe, while also being compromised money-grabbing wankers diluting their mission when they try to generate alternative revenues of income. I realise that HN has different people posting different arguments, but I've seen many people post both over the years. All of that is frequently married with an the amount of vitriol that seems out of place and downright bizarre. There is typically a lack of constructive discourse or suggestions, beyond vague hand-waving about how they should "just do better", or "just do this or that". Well, if it's that easy then why don't you start a browser? In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox. These threads bring out the absolute worst of the site and many people with more nuanced views probably make a habit of staying out of them. When I've commented on this before I've been accosted with highly aggressive personal attacks. So now I often just hide them.
- danotdead 1y ago
  It’s not about getting overly vitriolic. It’s simply that they said this: “The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers” And then, they changed it: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/03/02/mozilla_introduces_terms_of_use/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/03/02/mozilla_introduce... Google also had an unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil” and said: “Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating” https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/ https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/ And they changed it. So- sure, sometimes people change their minds. But, Google never promised it wouldn’t sell your data. Mozilla did, and users continued to use it, many without knowledge of it; it should be a banner over all the pages: “Hey, we sell your data. Click here to acknowledge.”
  - chillingeffect 1y ago
    I cant buy your firefox data. I can buy a huge block of aggregate data that has some things of yours in it.
rapnie 1y ago
Though weighing "Let me pay for firefox" browser against potential conflicts of interest that Mozilla has wrt that browser is only prudent.
pixxel 1y ago
[dead]
wpietri 1y ago
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”. On a site that gives people attention and points for saying strident things that emotionally resonate with people? How surprising! That aside, Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. It was the browser of choice for a lot of people here for a long time. Watching its continuing flailing and ongoing failure has been excruciating. I still use it, but more out of stubbornness than anything. So whether or not it's fashionable to hate on Firefox, I think there's a lot of legitimate energy there.
- halostatue 1y ago
  > … Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness It literally was not. The Mozilla project and foundation (which led to the MPL) was a dying corporation's attempt to ensure that its source code would outlive its destruction by a monopolist. There was some push from hacker idealists inside said corporation to make this happen, but it still took the corporation's positive action in order for this to happen and not result in everything being sold to the highest bidder in a firesale. Firefox was an independent hacker's reimagining of what just Mozilla the Browser might be if it didn't have all the other parts which made Mozilla the Suite. After it picked up steam and development stalled on the excessively complex suite, it was adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation and has become what people have used for a couple of decades. Pure speculation on my part, but I think reasonably well informed: if Firefox hadn't been adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation, it's highly unlikely that the Foundation would have remained relevant but it's also highly unlikely that Firefox would have survived even as long as it has. There simply wasn't enough momentum for it to become a Linux-like project, and Firefox would have disappeared from desktop even faster.
- godelski 1y ago
  > Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. So people are rebelling so hard that they just end up embracing the epitome of what they hate? There sure is good reason to criticize Firefox but what's crazy to me is that this generally leads to using Chrome. You're not a rebel if you turn to the enemy, you're a saboteur
Aeolun 1y ago
I think the reason for that is that we are still using the Firefox that was made 5 years ago. Then the whole team that was working on making the browser more modern and speedier was fired (as I understand it anyway). I love Firefox, and I’m happy that there’s a foundation working on it that magically gets funded, but I see that money going to things I don’t care about far too often to be comfortable with it. It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  > It always seems Firefox is an afterthought. I'll bet if Mozilla thought they could get away with canceling Firefox, they would. It feels like Firefox is treated as lead generation for whatever new boat Mozilla builds to sell Firefox users down the river on next time. It's "finished" in that regard; it is a widget that passes network traffic to Mozilla and third parties, and in exchange, Mozilla gets a pittance from Google. How any of this is supposed to be accepted with a straight face is beyond me.
wkat4242 1y ago
I don't really agree. By sitting at the big tech table you give up a lot of ethics. I think it's similar to NGOs like Greenpeace. I respected them when they were using rubber boats to blockade toxic waste dumping. Now they have a millions earning CEO rubbing shoulders with the pollutors and ostensibly "changing the system from within". Which creates watered down measures and too much dependency on the industry. Just like Reagan's "trickle down" fallacy this doesn't work. Money and power corrupts. Also yes a lot of us use Firefox but not because we still love it so much. But because it's the least worst option. Kinda the only option if you want to run the real Ublock Origin now.
gr4vityWall 1y ago
> hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier I respectfully disagree. It's one of the conclusions one can reach upon following Firefox development over the last decade. I'm not going to imply it's the "correct" one. It is a common one in hacker communities. > It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)” Unfortunately, I can't say much besides that this isn't my intention at all, and that I don't sense anything like that from the comments. I can't know for sure the intent behind other poster.
isaacremuant 1y ago
[flagged]
- wkat4242 1y ago
  He wasn't fired. He stepped down because of the uproar not in Mozilla itself but in the user communities. Because that's what the shareholders care about, disgruntled employees don't affect the share value but a dark shadow over the brand does. I was personally also happy to see him go. You can't be inclusive when you try to deny people you have nothing to do with their equality.
  - isaacremuant 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    I don't agree I'm not inclusive. I don't mind if other people have other opinions. I'm totally fine if they go to church, want to stay in the closet if they're gay etc. They're not doing themselves any favours but that's fine. I'm not trying to stop them from marrying. Where it gets exclusive is trying to prevent other people from being what they are by campaigning for laws. The figurehead (not just any employee!) of an organisation that purports to be inclusive shouldn't be doing that. It's not opinions but limiting other people's rights that I have a problem with. It's the same reason I won't buy things from Musk. When I said I was glad he left I was a bit harsh though, true. I would have been fine if he had stayed and disavowed his actions.
mathiaspoint 1y ago
They have ads on MDN. It's over.
pxc 1y ago
Using Firefox is also ingroup signaling. I have been using Firefox since quite some time before they had even fully settled on the name Firefox— the days of "Firebird" and the "Firesomething" extension making fun of the rename. I used to wear a Firefox T-shirt to school when I was a kid. I remember reading jwz's blog with wonder and admiration when I was in high school, and reading all the secret lore pages like about:mozilla. Firefox is dear to me and it has been for a very long time now. Perhaps these feelings are "tribal" in some metaphorical sense, but that's because the fate of Firefox has already long felt personal to me, not because it seems like something people on this website (which I care much less about than Firefox!) seem to think I should care about. (That said, I do think Firefox still works very well, and it's fast and capable. From a technical point of view these are far from the darkest days in Firefox's history.)
adamtaylor_13 1y ago
It’s not just Mozilla. HN in general has become quite a hostile and unpleasant place to hang out digitally.
- immibis 1y ago
  It's not just HN. The public Internet in general has become quite a hostile and unpleasant place to hang out digitally.
freedomben 1y ago
As someone who spends a lot of time on HN, I fully agree with you. I am beyond bored of seeing the same things just continually reposted and take over some good threads. I actually got to a point where I would not click on comment threads that had anything to do with anything that Elon touches, because it just got ridiculous. On the flip side though, I know there are a ton of readers who only occasionally Read the interesting story, who are part of today's lucky thousand who haven't heard yet. For that reason, my position has become somewhat moderate in that I think the hyperbolic hate posts are still ridiculous, including some informative and reasonable comments is probably good. To be clear though, The majority of this thread is not that :-D
soulofmischief 1y ago
It's not so black and white. Firefox is my daily driver, this doesn't mean that I can't have concerns about the direction of the Mozilla Foundation or express them online with others who share those concerns.
kelnos 1y ago
Or maybe we are genuinely upset that a browser we've supported and watch grow for decades at this point has fallen so low. Market share matters a ton, and Mozilla has been a very poor steward of Firefox's market share. Maybe stop ascribing incorrect motivations to those of us who are angry but also care very deeply. I'm so tired of others assuming some sort of ill intent or virtue signaling or whatever, and using that as a way to derail a conversation.
godelski 1y ago
Honestly, the result of it is highly beneficial to Google. Like it or not, that's the end result. Hacking on a chromium browser doesn't de-googleify the internet, it deepens the moat. Did we forget the old joke? There's two types of programs: - Those with bugs - Those that nobody uses We can both hold Mozilla to a high starved AND recognize that they're the only serious alternative to Chrome. We can criticize things while being happy they exist. Criticism is about making things better. We're engineers, so it should be easy to find faults. That's the first step to fixing things! But the criticisms of Firefox have just become a cliché. I guarantee 90+% of people will not notice differences in speed, battery life, or anything else like that. Mostly the differences are cosmetic. Do we really want to hate on Mozilla so much that we'd lick the big boot just out of spite? I have plenty of problems with how Mozilla has handled many issues, but it's laughable to compare these to Google or Microsoft. Seriously, WTF
OhMeadhbh 1y ago
I disagree. It is perfectly possible to hate on FF for purely technical reasons. But after 30 years I'm much more familiar w/ the FF codebase than with other browsers, so I still use FF even though I have a Love/Hate relationship with it.
revlolz 1y ago
Unfortunately, I strongly believe these posts often get scraped by social media aggregators or sentiment analysis platforms. So, when public sentiment appears to have "dropped by X%" because we all chilled out, it becomes a justification for decisions by non-technical program or product leaders even though users actually disliked what was being done. I see the only way forward through continued expression, so I'm assuming our happy compromise would be to have constructive negative feedback and try to hold our peer commenters accountable to quality over "upboat" mentality.
fud101 1y ago
I've got a petty reason for hating Mozilla but it's not from a developer perspective, it's from a user perspective. For years all i've wanted is to use my my Google chrome state over to Firefox. I don't want to do an import, I want to type in my gmail credentials and just have all my tabs and passwords to use. If they gave that feature to me i'd have switched years ago.

agilob 1y ago

> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer Let's start hating and discussing how much Chrome leads are paid too.

thoroughburro 1y ago

You imply it’s the hackers or Hacker News that has changed to create a negative atmosphere. From my perspective, however, it’s the direct result of a very long series of hostile-to-hackers decisions made by Mozilla.

Uehreka 1y ago
To quote myself: > I get why people are pissed at Mozilla My issue is that when you try to have discourse but everyone’s on the same side, it can easily devolve into a circlejerk where everyone is trying to see who can most dramatically burn the strawman. These kinds of feedback loops are just bad—it doesn’t really matter who the target is or how malicious they are—because they cause the participants to drift further and further from the reality of the conflict. In the best case, if the target really is bad, the participants may just look foolish when they later deploy their anti-strawman ballistic missile against someone who actually has a slightly good pro-target argument they hadn’t thought of. In the worst case, this is how mobs work themselves up to eventually justify violence against a target that’s totally harmless. One thing’s for sure though, once a circlejerk like this starts, rational thought ends.
- kelnos 1y ago
  You seem to be really keen on whining about how people here hate on Mozilla, but seem not to be interested in arguing the merits of Mozilla and its actions over the years, and whether or not they deserve that hate. So basically, you're a part of the problem you're complaining about. You're just being the contrarian looking down on the rest of us for having an opinion. Tell me, why shouldn't we criticize Mozilla? What wonderful things have they done over the past several years? How does their behavior and performance make Firefox's cratered market share understandable and ok and reasonable? How is their failure to find alternative revenue streams, over and over again, ok and reasonable? Many people in these threads are listing concrete evidence of Mozilla's poor behavior and performance, and you're just continuing, over and over, to whine about some sort of circlejerk you've imagined up. Either actually argue a useful point about Mozilla itself, or just stop posting about this.
  - godelski 1y ago
    I don't see how you're responding to the parent's comment. You seem to be exemplifying it tbh. The parent isn't saying Firefox and Mozilla are without problems. In fact, they actively recognized them! So I'm not sure why you respond as if they don't. The parent is saying that the complaints are often used as social signaling. The fact that this happens makes it harder to address legitimate issues. Which Mozilla, without a doubt, has issues. The result of all this is very apparent: it helps Google. You can even think Mozilla is evil, but you have to ask: is Mozilla more evil than Google? It's hard to argue yes. Frankly, they don't even have the capacity to do as much harm
- gr4vityWall 1y ago
  [dead]
aspenmayer 1y ago
This was probably the day that Firefox jumped the shark for me: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115346/https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115346/https://www.theve... I still use it, but I lost all respect for the management. This level of tone deafness should cause everyone on the board and c suite to personally write an open letter of apology to the users, but instead we got a half-hearted victim-blaming non-apology: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-looking-glass-add... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115352/https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115352/https://blog.mozi... This is really rather telling. Here is how Mozilla articulates what they think users have a problem with: > We’re sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community. While there was no intention or mechanism to collect or share your data or private information and The Looking Glass was an opt-in and user activated promotion, we should have given users the choice to install this add-on. Mozilla is willfully inept. They think that pre-loading third-party non-free code and ads without my knowledge or consent is not an issue! Moreover, Mozilla thinks that this doesn't conflict with Mozilla's interpretation of what opt-in means and the values it embodies. Mozilla is looking more and more like controlled opposition. Mozilla undermined their own users' faith in Mozilla's add-on/extension capabilities and act like releasing the source after the fact resolves any issue at all regarding doing this without consulting users or receiving prior affirmative consent. This comment is getting long enough as it is. I'll just leave this here. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-firefox-data-collection-privacy-settings https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-firefox-data-col...

tempaccount420 1y ago

Or maybe... Mozilla has to change?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

ericpauley 1y ago

Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much just works, supports a rich collection of (vetted!) extensions, and performs exceptionally well with sometimes hundreds of tabs. Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.

WhyNotHugo 1y ago
Firefox works, but it’s got thousands of annoying issues (many of them just paper cuts, but still). The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs. Imagine how many of those issues could have been ironed out over the years.
- sealeck 1y ago
  The issue with the salary is not that it costs the same as 30 developers – good leadership can make a difference worth >30 developers over the same timespan (especially in an organisation with 1000s of staff). The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend. It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
  - bell-cot 1y ago
    This. Unfortunately, in our current "Greed is God" late-stage capitalist world, it's virtually impossible to find a competent tech CEO who is willing to work for mere honest wages. And (evidently) too difficult to even find one who's willing to work for 30X.
    - Aeolun 1y ago
      I think if you are paying 30x engineer salary you are always going to find CEO’s that optimize for money.

arp242 1y ago

Many people on HN hold Mozilla to impossible and conflicting standards. It is simultaneously a compromised propaganda arm of Google for taking the Google bribe, while also being compromised money-grabbing wankers diluting their mission when they try to generate alternative revenues of income. I realise that HN has different people posting different arguments, but I've seen many people post both over the years. All of that is frequently married with an the amount of vitriol that seems out of place and downright bizarre. There is typically a lack of constructive discourse or suggestions, beyond vague hand-waving about how they should "just do better", or "just do this or that". Well, if it's that easy then why don't you start a browser? In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox. These threads bring out the absolute worst of the site and many people with more nuanced views probably make a habit of staying out of them. When I've commented on this before I've been accosted with highly aggressive personal attacks. So now I often just hide them.

danotdead 1y ago
It’s not about getting overly vitriolic. It’s simply that they said this: “The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers” And then, they changed it: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/03/02/mozilla_introduces_terms_of_use/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/03/02/mozilla_introduce... Google also had an unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil” and said: “Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating” https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/ https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/ And they changed it. So- sure, sometimes people change their minds. But, Google never promised it wouldn’t sell your data. Mozilla did, and users continued to use it, many without knowledge of it; it should be a banner over all the pages: “Hey, we sell your data. Click here to acknowledge.”
- chillingeffect 1y ago
  I cant buy your firefox data. I can buy a huge block of aggregate data that has some things of yours in it.

rapnie 1y ago

Though weighing "Let me pay for firefox" browser against potential conflicts of interest that Mozilla has wrt that browser is only prudent.

pixxel 1y ago

[dead]

wpietri 1y ago

> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”. On a site that gives people attention and points for saying strident things that emotionally resonate with people? How surprising! That aside, Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. It was the browser of choice for a lot of people here for a long time. Watching its continuing flailing and ongoing failure has been excruciating. I still use it, but more out of stubbornness than anything. So whether or not it's fashionable to hate on Firefox, I think there's a lot of legitimate energy there.

halostatue 1y ago
> … Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness It literally was not. The Mozilla project and foundation (which led to the MPL) was a dying corporation's attempt to ensure that its source code would outlive its destruction by a monopolist. There was some push from hacker idealists inside said corporation to make this happen, but it still took the corporation's positive action in order for this to happen and not result in everything being sold to the highest bidder in a firesale. Firefox was an independent hacker's reimagining of what just Mozilla the Browser might be if it didn't have all the other parts which made Mozilla the Suite. After it picked up steam and development stalled on the excessively complex suite, it was adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation and has become what people have used for a couple of decades. Pure speculation on my part, but I think reasonably well informed: if Firefox hadn't been adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation, it's highly unlikely that the Foundation would have remained relevant but it's also highly unlikely that Firefox would have survived even as long as it has. There simply wasn't enough momentum for it to become a Linux-like project, and Firefox would have disappeared from desktop even faster.
godelski 1y ago
> Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. So people are rebelling so hard that they just end up embracing the epitome of what they hate? There sure is good reason to criticize Firefox but what's crazy to me is that this generally leads to using Chrome. You're not a rebel if you turn to the enemy, you're a saboteur

Aeolun 1y ago

I think the reason for that is that we are still using the Firefox that was made 5 years ago. Then the whole team that was working on making the browser more modern and speedier was fired (as I understand it anyway). I love Firefox, and I’m happy that there’s a foundation working on it that magically gets funded, but I see that money going to things I don’t care about far too often to be comfortable with it. It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.

aspenmayer 1y ago
> It always seems Firefox is an afterthought. I'll bet if Mozilla thought they could get away with canceling Firefox, they would. It feels like Firefox is treated as lead generation for whatever new boat Mozilla builds to sell Firefox users down the river on next time. It's "finished" in that regard; it is a widget that passes network traffic to Mozilla and third parties, and in exchange, Mozilla gets a pittance from Google. How any of this is supposed to be accepted with a straight face is beyond me.

wkat4242 1y ago

I don't really agree. By sitting at the big tech table you give up a lot of ethics. I think it's similar to NGOs like Greenpeace. I respected them when they were using rubber boats to blockade toxic waste dumping. Now they have a millions earning CEO rubbing shoulders with the pollutors and ostensibly "changing the system from within". Which creates watered down measures and too much dependency on the industry. Just like Reagan's "trickle down" fallacy this doesn't work. Money and power corrupts. Also yes a lot of us use Firefox but not because we still love it so much. But because it's the least worst option. Kinda the only option if you want to run the real Ublock Origin now.

gr4vityWall 1y ago

> hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier I respectfully disagree. It's one of the conclusions one can reach upon following Firefox development over the last decade. I'm not going to imply it's the "correct" one. It is a common one in hacker communities. > It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)” Unfortunately, I can't say much besides that this isn't my intention at all, and that I don't sense anything like that from the comments. I can't know for sure the intent behind other poster.

isaacremuant 1y ago

[flagged]

wkat4242 1y ago
He wasn't fired. He stepped down because of the uproar not in Mozilla itself but in the user communities. Because that's what the shareholders care about, disgruntled employees don't affect the share value but a dark shadow over the brand does. I was personally also happy to see him go. You can't be inclusive when you try to deny people you have nothing to do with their equality.
- isaacremuant 1y ago
  [flagged]
- wkat4242 1y ago
  I don't agree I'm not inclusive. I don't mind if other people have other opinions. I'm totally fine if they go to church, want to stay in the closet if they're gay etc. They're not doing themselves any favours but that's fine. I'm not trying to stop them from marrying. Where it gets exclusive is trying to prevent other people from being what they are by campaigning for laws. The figurehead (not just any employee!) of an organisation that purports to be inclusive shouldn't be doing that. It's not opinions but limiting other people's rights that I have a problem with. It's the same reason I won't buy things from Musk. When I said I was glad he left I was a bit harsh though, true. I would have been fine if he had stayed and disavowed his actions.

mathiaspoint 1y ago

They have ads on MDN. It's over.

pxc 1y ago

Using Firefox is also ingroup signaling. I have been using Firefox since quite some time before they had even fully settled on the name Firefox— the days of "Firebird" and the "Firesomething" extension making fun of the rename. I used to wear a Firefox T-shirt to school when I was a kid. I remember reading jwz's blog with wonder and admiration when I was in high school, and reading all the secret lore pages like about:mozilla. Firefox is dear to me and it has been for a very long time now. Perhaps these feelings are "tribal" in some metaphorical sense, but that's because the fate of Firefox has already long felt personal to me, not because it seems like something people on this website (which I care much less about than Firefox!) seem to think I should care about. (That said, I do think Firefox still works very well, and it's fast and capable. From a technical point of view these are far from the darkest days in Firefox's history.)

adamtaylor_13 1y ago

It’s not just Mozilla. HN in general has become quite a hostile and unpleasant place to hang out digitally.

immibis 1y ago
It's not just HN. The public Internet in general has become quite a hostile and unpleasant place to hang out digitally.

freedomben 1y ago

As someone who spends a lot of time on HN, I fully agree with you. I am beyond bored of seeing the same things just continually reposted and take over some good threads. I actually got to a point where I would not click on comment threads that had anything to do with anything that Elon touches, because it just got ridiculous. On the flip side though, I know there are a ton of readers who only occasionally Read the interesting story, who are part of today's lucky thousand who haven't heard yet. For that reason, my position has become somewhat moderate in that I think the hyperbolic hate posts are still ridiculous, including some informative and reasonable comments is probably good. To be clear though, The majority of this thread is not that :-D

soulofmischief 1y ago

It's not so black and white. Firefox is my daily driver, this doesn't mean that I can't have concerns about the direction of the Mozilla Foundation or express them online with others who share those concerns.

kelnos 1y ago

Or maybe we are genuinely upset that a browser we've supported and watch grow for decades at this point has fallen so low. Market share matters a ton, and Mozilla has been a very poor steward of Firefox's market share. Maybe stop ascribing incorrect motivations to those of us who are angry but also care very deeply. I'm so tired of others assuming some sort of ill intent or virtue signaling or whatever, and using that as a way to derail a conversation.

godelski 1y ago

Honestly, the result of it is highly beneficial to Google. Like it or not, that's the end result. Hacking on a chromium browser doesn't de-googleify the internet, it deepens the moat. Did we forget the old joke? There's two types of programs: - Those with bugs - Those that nobody uses We can both hold Mozilla to a high starved AND recognize that they're the only serious alternative to Chrome. We can criticize things while being happy they exist. Criticism is about making things better. We're engineers, so it should be easy to find faults. That's the first step to fixing things! But the criticisms of Firefox have just become a cliché. I guarantee 90+% of people will not notice differences in speed, battery life, or anything else like that. Mostly the differences are cosmetic. Do we really want to hate on Mozilla so much that we'd lick the big boot just out of spite? I have plenty of problems with how Mozilla has handled many issues, but it's laughable to compare these to Google or Microsoft. Seriously, WTF

OhMeadhbh 1y ago

I disagree. It is perfectly possible to hate on FF for purely technical reasons. But after 30 years I'm much more familiar w/ the FF codebase than with other browsers, so I still use FF even though I have a Love/Hate relationship with it.

revlolz 1y ago

Unfortunately, I strongly believe these posts often get scraped by social media aggregators or sentiment analysis platforms. So, when public sentiment appears to have "dropped by X%" because we all chilled out, it becomes a justification for decisions by non-technical program or product leaders even though users actually disliked what was being done. I see the only way forward through continued expression, so I'm assuming our happy compromise would be to have constructive negative feedback and try to hold our peer commenters accountable to quality over "upboat" mentality.

fud101 1y ago

I've got a petty reason for hating Mozilla but it's not from a developer perspective, it's from a user perspective. For years all i've wanted is to use my my Google chrome state over to Firefox. I don't want to do an import, I want to type in my gmail credentials and just have all my tabs and passwords to use. If they gave that feature to me i'd have switched years ago.