17 ms·

Leaving Mozilla

522 points by martey 4mo ago

eps 4mo ago
Who is this person?
- shevy-java 4mo ago
  Some mozilla software developer I guess. They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
  - flohofwoe 4mo ago
    > They still have not fixed their build system. FWIW the Firefox build instructions [1] look a lot saner to me than the Chromium build instructions [2]. [1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.ht... [2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/linux/build_instructions.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
  - userbinator 4mo ago
    Mozilla lives in the past. And one would hope they stay there, because all the newer stuff is far more user-hostile.
    - goolz 4mo ago
      Could not agree more. I am honestly confused by the need for more than what FF/Librewolf offers and have been actively doing frontend for a long time. Plus no hassle with uBlock. And their Focus mobile browser is nice. I have the same complaints about their leadership as most but at least I feel I have some autonomy with their browser.
- kentbrew 4mo ago
  That would be JR Conlin, national treasure. Worked with him on YDN in 2007 and Netflix in 2009; veterans of the Netflix API team will never forget his hack day entry, which was "Mac and Me" playing on a toaster oven.
  - abcd_f 4mo ago
    What is he notable for in the context of Mozilla?
    - flohofwoe 4mo ago
      Maybe read the blog post? Crazy suggestion, I know.
      - abcd_f 4mo ago
        Skimmed it before asking. It's written for people who already know who the author is. Hence the question.
    - altairprime 4mo ago
      Staying out of the public eye for his entire tenure. I remain envious.
shevy-java 4mo ago
> We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded. Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox.html https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox... mozconfig? In 2026? Seriously? There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile. This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already. I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work. The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_systemd_age_verification_isnt_about/ https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.
matsemann 4mo ago
Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now? Mozilla is surviving on the mercy of Google money, it's not a viable strategy. Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
- red_admiral 4mo ago
  The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback. I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
  - tokioyoyo 4mo ago
    AI is not, and was not the reason why the average user moved away from Firefox. AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.
    - red_admiral 4mo ago
      Oh, I agree - firefox was losing market share long before AI was a thing. I meant to use that as a recent example of the kind of decisions that Mozilla leadership repeatedly makes, that don't match up what their users want.
      - Melatonic 4mo ago
        How do you know what their users want ? Firefox may not have a massive market share but it's a much larger group than just the vocal ones here on HN
red_admiral 4mo ago
Respect. This is what Firefox could have been. In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai: browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled, browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled, pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload, pdfjs.enableGuessAltText A bit of community feedback later, and we've got one big "off" button, and me wondering which footgun the executives will shoot themselves with next.
- gib444 4mo ago
  And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible
- franga2000 4mo ago
  You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control" ... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible! What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!? What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default? I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that. Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?
  - noir_lord 4mo ago
    You either missed the point or deliberately missed the point. The issue was they shipped AI features built into everything and the only way to switch them off was to "about:config" a bunch of settings, they shouldn't have shipped it without the off switch and "Open about:settings and then disable things manually" isn't control for the average user.
klez 4mo ago
Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something (can't even remember what it was). I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla. But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest. This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore. So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.
- ktallett 4mo ago
  Do Mozilla really still need volunteers in this day and age? Tbh even in 2015. They are established enough to not need to exploit goodwill.
  - klez 4mo ago
    As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
    - TalkingCodeMonk 4mo ago
      This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects. Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. One example is the container VPN proxy, which only allows you to implement a VPN per container if you pay for Mozilla VPN. This is a feature that should be universally available to all users, and all VPN providers, but they locked it behind a paywall for profit. The is the same (logically analogous) reason I no longer use Reddit after the API changes in 2023, after using the platform for 15 years, and has become common among newer FOSS startups like OpenAI, minio, and bambu; using the philosophy of open source &/or unpaid community labor to achieve a certain level of trust, growth, users, funding, and market saturation, only to screw them all over in the name of profit. This for-profit parasitic greed and corruption in FLOSS is the antithesis to the philosophy of the FLOSS community. In a sane world this type of community exploitation would be criminally prosecutable. Reddit decision makers would see the inside of a prison cell; the moderators and commenters – as well as the developers who built the 3rd party apps that grew the company from nothing for over a decade – would be given shares/ownership, and paid from the company for their time and labor; same for every other scammer that exploits these "bait-and-switch" deceptive tactics to succeed in businesss. Unfortunately for us all, we live in a world ruled by parasites.
lawgimenez 4mo ago
I think Mozilla started getting nuts the day they ventured with Firefox OS. To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.
- JoshTriplett 4mo ago
  I think Firefox OS was great, and too early for its time, combined with the mistake of "let's run on extremely terrible hardware" (rather than designing for the flagships of the time, which wouldn't be flagships by the time it shipped).
  - robotbikes 4mo ago
    I mean the fact that a fork of FirefoxOS KaiOS is still around and being used shows that there was some merit to the idea but yeah it was executed as a start-up without a long-term plan but thanks to the open nature of the code its still in use. It would be great if Mozilla as an organization tool the opposite approach of Google and if they started a project you knew it would be supported for the long run and if not internally it was handed over to the community of users and stewarded along, sort of how Apache seems to adopt projects but mostly for corporate/enterprise users.
    - mort96 4mo ago
      And the fact that Mozilla used licenses for FirefoxOS which allowed a closed-source fork to come in and take the market is a huge loss.
- utopiah 4mo ago
  Firefox OS was amazing and, sadly, would STILL be amazing today. Boot-to-Gecko is brilliant because honestly most apps today... are Web pages packaged in an "app". Most PWA with desktop shortcuts (and ideally offline responsive mode) show that. Very few "apps" genuinely need to be apps. Consequently being "just" a phone with basic connectivity and delegating the rest to the browser made perfect sense. I didn't work because it didn't make sense or wasn't technically feasible. It didn't work because anybody who made a mobile OS wanted THEIR own walled gardens. The fact that today we are stuck with Android an iOS shows how needed it was and still is.
kubafu 4mo ago
First of all thanks for posting what's on your mind and everything you did at Mozilla. Sorry to hear you are burnt out, hope you get better with time. I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around. I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional. Yet, I'm hopeful for the future.
samiv 4mo ago
Why can't people just leave? What compels them to write these lengthy self grandiosing posts "zomg I'm leaving company X".
- probably_wrong 4mo ago
  Oh, the irony...
- z0ltan 4mo ago
  [dead]
- klez 4mo ago
  I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.
- dgellow 4mo ago
  "Why do people want to share their thoughts and feelings with others"
- utopiah 4mo ago
  I can't speak for the author but I can say that I left companies or institutions on my own despite loving both the (idealized) mission and the team. I wanted to stay but the strategy was wrong, to my own moral compass. Consequently leaving in silence, without being able to express why, and maybe even what could possibly be fixed, feels like giving up. Leaving while telling whomever might want to hear what problems were, and possibly how to fix them, helps to move on while being truthful.
- Lord-Jobo 4mo ago
  I would say about 99% of the population views software corporations as these monolithic inhuman cubes of pure shitanium. What these posts are important for is 1: reminding the average population that corporations are just abstract human pyramids and made up of normal people. And 2: doing that through a very human, biased, and filtered perspective that can provide some genuine insight into the function of these opaque systems. Now, does the average consumer of hacker news get all that? Probably not, but I do think insider perspective is still valuable.
user3939382 4mo ago
If Mozilla believed in the values it espoused, Librewolf wouldn’t exist. It would just be called Firefox. One of the first betrayals was putting ads in their new tab page, the forced AI comes as a Mozilla tradition now of user respect as marketing only. At the same time it simply may not be a viable business. Firefox was popular originally because Chrome didn’t exist and Internet Explorer especially 6 back was awful. The browser is now an OS on top of an OS, it requires massive resources to maintain. So Mozilla has a cursed mission now and related or unrelated in any case they’re full of it and have lost my respect. Open source and user respect still means something to me even if it doesn’t to Mozilla.
- account42 4mo ago
  Does it have to be a viable business though? It's essential infrastructure.
z0ltan 4mo ago
[dead]
GreenSalem 4mo ago
Rust was an own goal foot gun. Interesting language with a passionate community / cult, but the value to Mozilla was vanishingly close to zero.
- sunaookami 4mo ago
  They did rewrite a lof of important parts of Firefox in Rust so the value is a lot higher to Mozilla.
- dzogchen 4mo ago
  This. They learned nothing from Netscape.
nubinetwork 4mo ago
> I'm not kidding when I said that Firefox is a niche browser. Folk have to actively look to use it. There was once a time where IE was only ever used to download Firefox... Mozilla squandered that.
- mike_hock 4mo ago
  Firefox was indeed blowing past all the other browsers and set to become the standard. That's when Google realized they had to do something. The market could not be allowed to be dominated by a pro-freedom, pro-privacy product.
- mort96 4mo ago
  To some degree, yeah they did, by leaving space for a lean and mean competitor like Google Chrome to come around and eat their lunch. And when it was introduced, Google Chrome truly was the lean and mean browser, less bloated than both Firefox and IE. But I'm not sure how much they could've done. Maybe they could've invested a ton of engineering resources into a project similar to Firefox Quantum earlier, so that Firefox didn't leave as much room for a leaner browser? But half the reason people complain about Firefox today is that they broke XUL extensions, which was an absolutely necessary step in making Firefox a competitive, fast browser. I can only imagine the backlash they would've seen if they did that before Chrome ate their lunch. And I'm not sure how much it would've really helped, since 1) Chrome would've still been a less bloated browser simply through having been around for a shorter time and having fewer features, and 2) Google would've still had immense marketing opportunities by plastering Chrome ads all over Google Search etc.
adm4 4mo ago
beautifully sad well put prose mentor encouraged
Lapsa 4mo ago
[dead]
krautburglar 4mo ago
Literal who has left the company that provides Google's antitrust insurance policy. That Mozilla still manages to swing "non-profit" status as they do this is outrageous. I would like to see Mozilla's entire board leave Mozilla... in a PERP WALK.
- altairprime 4mo ago
  Mozilla Corporation, owner and operator of the Firefox brand and recipient of Google’s payments, is not a non-profit. U.S. law permits non-profits to have for-profit subsidiaries if one accepts severe limitations, such as the corporation’s profits being largely severed from the non-profit’s use. Severance isn’t just a science fiction show, it’s a compulsory auditable requirement.
  - krautburglar 4mo ago
    Corporations get up to so many rotten things, most of which are entirely legal, but shouldn't be. Mozilla Corporation thanks you for the free ball-washing & PR work. If you reach out to their non-profit parent, you may even be able to deduct this on your taxes.
    - altairprime 4mo ago
      > Mozilla Corporation thanks you for the free ball-washing & PR work I already left Mozilla in disgust, and I completely agree that corporations should, to use in-kind language, 'get fucked', so you may have misread. Don't mistake being corrected about the legality of a corporate structure for supporting it personally. > Corporations get up to so many rotten things, most of which are entirely legal, but shouldn't be Once I exit the other side of the next couple degrees, I'll have the skills to work as a forensic accountant with a specialty in piercing tech worker lies to reveal real and serious corporate malfeasance, and use that skill to start dissecting and dissolving corporations for criminal acts that no one realizes are occurring. (Sadly, I possess no non-public information on instances of such, or I'd be eligible for a rather significant whistleblower payout.) Or, if I decide to pursue a doctorate, one of the thesis options I've been considering would chop down a cornerstone principle of economics as leverage into forcing corporations to pay up. That decision's a couple years away, though it is a tempting option for sure. But, hey, it's rude to just talk about me. What are you doing that will productively combat capitalism?
magpi3 4mo ago
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy absolutely applies here: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch technicians, and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers' union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that, in every case, the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules and control promotions within the organization."
- Angostura 4mo ago
  I hate this. It basically takes as axiomatic that anyone in an administrative position in an organisation has zero interest in the goals of the organisation -and that those at the coal-face have no interest in the organisation and that there is little or no overlap in interest. Its reductionist, divisive and stupid.
  - magpi3 4mo ago
    It takes the view that anyone in an administrative position will put the survival of the organization as their primary goal, while lower-level employees (who are far less invested in the organization) can remain invested in the organization's ostensible goals. I find it to be very true after almost 30 years in the working world, and I always keep it in mind wherever I work.
  - rafaelcosta 4mo ago
    I don’t think that it is reductionist at all. The examples provided are either qualified with “dedicated” or “many of”. It’s also not surprising at all that people who have an interest in driving the goals of the organization usually gravitate more to operational roles and people who have no interest in it at all gravitate towards organizational roles – but that’s not a rule. I would totally be pissed as someone in an “organizational” role of someone reduced me to someone “not interested in the goals of the organization”, but magpi3 didn’t do that. They correctly stated a pattern. If you are around organizational/administrative people, ask yourself honestly if the pattern isn’t the least bit accurate…
ReptileMan 4mo ago
But at least they are not homophobic like Eich.
mschuster91 4mo ago
> Another delusion comes about because of self-reinforcement. Say you're going to release some, controversial feature. Maybe it's browser based DRM, maybe it's AI, maybe it's Push Notifications. Listening to your users can be a bit challenging[2], because while some might tell you, most probably won't. They'll just leave. That means that your source of information will be the people that stick around, so you wind up getting artificially high approval rates for things. This is a bit ironic, because... there's a bunch of low hanging fruit that are lacking and that keeps driving the nerds off of Firefox. Take Meshcore/Meshtastic or, frankly, the entire ESP32 world for example - in the Chromium ecosystem, you can use WebUSB and WebSerial to flash and communicate with these things from the browser. It does not get more convenient. Meanwhile, WebUSB still isn't supported in Firefox at all and only two weeks ago Firefox at least gained WebSerial [1]. [1] https://www.heise.de/news/Firefox-151-Endlich-Web-Serial-fuer-den-beliebten-Browser-11314905.html https://www.heise.de/news/Firefox-151-Endlich-Web-Serial-fue...
- sethops1 4mo ago
  I've been bitching about it for like a decade but I still won't use Firefox until it supports window based profiles. Safari has them now, ffs.
  - throw-the-towel 4mo ago
    Why not use container tabs instead?
- cyberrock 4mo ago
  He's right. The nerds who want WebUSB are leaving or using Chromium on the side. Firefox has just been collecting the nerds who want absolute safety and privacy at the cost of any functionality (which apparently includes removing extensions according to one). I was floored when I discovered that Firefox rejected Web NFC because they were afraid of it being used on specific outdated Yubikeys. I could understand if they were concerned about it being used to steal credit cards, but the Yubikey scenario is just so out of touch. I can only hope that Web Serial represents a pivot away from that.
deanc 4mo ago
I really wish Mozilla would focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. I don’t want extensions (attack vector), vpns, fancy bookmarking services that are deprecated later on etc. I want to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.
- MatejKafka 4mo ago
  How do you expect Mozilla to make enough money from just Firefox to survive if Google ever decides to stop paying them for being the default search engine?
  - ricardobeat 4mo ago
    > make enough money from just Firefox According to 2025 filings, 86%+ of revenue came from the Google deal. Google pays Mozilla because of the browser. How would shifting focus to the browser make that worse?
    - account42 4mo ago
      Seeing as google keeps paying them more and more even as they shift away from improving the browser, you have to reevaluate what they are really being paid for.
  - deanc 4mo ago
    Charge me. I’ll pay. I’m not going to donate to the org right now as I don’t use Firefox as it uses (noticeably) too much battery on my MacBook compared to safari and chrome.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4mo ago
      Notably, also, it's not currently possible to donate to Firefox; you can only give Mozilla money to use on unrelated projects. As a Firefox user, the inability to pay for the thing I actually want is grating.
  - 4mo ago
dash2 4mo ago
"We shouldn't try to be like the big browsers because that's not what our Community wants." This is just a path to irrelevance. Firefox had the ambition to be the default browser, what Chrome is now! It's a shame if they're going to spiral off into their niche.
- account42 4mo ago
  That's a weird claim to make considering how trying to be just like Chrome has lead to their current market share.
hxinbos 4mo ago
[flagged]
ilovegp 4mo ago
[flagged]
ricardobeat 4mo ago
De-prioritizing Servo is something I will never understand. Aside from making Firefox attractive again, desktop software has migrated almost entirely to web-based stacks. They could have owned the foundation layer of almost every hardware device if they managed to make Servo faster and slimmer than the options we currently have. What a blunder.
docsptl 4mo ago
another thing is that the weirdos who were using firefox didn't switch to chrome either, mainly just to other firefox forks or brave, vivaldi.. casual users just use whatever but use firefox less and less
ssssksk 4mo ago
Mozilla continues to exist because Google funds them, and Google funds them so they can claim that their Chrome browser isn't a monopoly. That's why Firefox continues to be a niche browser. Its actual goal, never outright stated by Mozilla leadership, is to occupy just enough market share to prop up their behemoth benefactor.
drewfax 4mo ago
Some things Mozilla could have done correctly: - Kept Rust and sold best-in-class tooling like IDEs to enterprises. - Polished Firefox OS and distributed apps in their store for a 1% commission. - Kept Servo and made the most secure and fast browser that no one else had made. - Partnered with OEMs to offer Firefox as the default browser. Yet the best they could do was pay their CEO for nothing.
sylware 4mo ago
Last time I did exchange thoughts about somebody who actually worked at mozilla in my country: "some kind of cult".
penguin_booze 4mo ago
> Remember who you're working for. Whom you're working for.
dzonga 4mo ago
Firefox leadership had a recovery the time when Brendan Eich was CEO, then he was kicked out. since then it has been downhill since.
- LocutusOfBorges 4mo ago
  Eich was CEO for 11 days. You’re wildly misremembering how much of an impact he had in that post.
  - altairprime 4mo ago
    It was an eleven day war and the casualty was their future. Eich was the last time that Mozilla hired a CEO from the ranks of its own engineers. Eich would not have prevented the economic external challenges faced, but Eich and other such engineer-leaders would have prevented the unforced errors Mozilla is known for today. Every CEO after that was business, not engineer. This placed the company onto the same runway of mediocrity and collapse that we see Boeing crashing planes into with some regularity. What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane (2 years ago, 532 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39856413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39856413
  - BrendanEich 4mo ago
    I was a real founder (not retconned fake founder). My contributions were almost entirely before taking the CEO job, of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44544226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44544226 "Lots of decline after I left, but I'll take some blame for decline before I quit, if you credit me for all the growth from inception."
delfugal 4mo ago
It's easy to leave a place. Harder to stay and fix the things you don't like. How many people regret leaving the place they invested 12+ years, rather than fighting back while in a position to do so? If you're burned out, no longer fun, we all get it. But don't leave your investment into a product just because some new direction took over unless you plan to kick their backside.
- account42 4mo ago
  On the other hand the burnt cost fallacy is probably much more common.
Surac 4mo ago
just today i came back to firefox from brave. firefox at one point in time was not able to work with the onshape web cad system and i needed a chrome based browser but was not ready to leave adblockers behind. brave war the only one suporting manifest 2 addons. but today i tried onshape in firefox and now it works. glad to be back
t_gamer_kle 4mo ago
34 occurrences of "folk". Remarkably grating affectation. Is something wrong with other nouns for groups of individuals?
- GaryBluto 4mo ago
  I noticed too; I managed to ignore it at first but it eventually became so grating I stopped reading shortly before I reached the end of the article. I'm not exactly sure of the reason for the overuse but the sheer amount of times it is used feels artificial. Not "artificial" in an "artificial intelligence" sense but perhaps a corporate, "inclusive" thing[1] that may have rubbed off on the author during his time at Mozilla, or a political convention (which is possible considering the large "Fump Truck" text on his Mastodon page). [1] https://acorn.firefox.com/latest/content/inclusive-writing/overview-DH3O5SwX https://acorn.firefox.com/latest/content/inclusive-writing/o...
palata 4mo ago
I like that take. There is a tendency in the software world to dream about becoming the BigTech we all hate. I believe that the people who want Firefox want it because it's different, just like the people who want Linux want it because it is different. And similarly in Linux, many people keep explaining how Linux should look more like Windows if it wants the year of the Linux Desktop. But I wouldn't be on Linux if I wanted Windows. I am not on Linux because I want everybody to be on Linux, on the contrary. Same applies for Firefox.
- account42 4mo ago
  There is also the fact that even if FF was changed into being exactly like Chrome it would not get much of its market share as Google still has more ways to push it onto people. So to compete FF needs to actually provide real advantages and with the much smaller budget the only way it can do that is by competing with features that Google can't or doesn't want to compete in.
jms703 4mo ago
Sad to see so much vacation time go unused.
- BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago
  Is it normal to give vacation time in hours? It's about 25 days.
musicale 4mo ago
> That doesn't mean we can't become big. We did this before. When we listened to our Community, gave them what they wanted, let them work with us to build something amazing, they told their friends Exactly this. Mozilla/Firefox lost their way when they stopped listening to the community. Which is not to say you shouldn't try to build new cool things that the community hasn't thought of yet - but you should listen to them when they tell you it is terrible garbage that they do not want and there is no way to opt out.
tech234a 4mo ago
One example of the move towards being more closed is that addons on the catalog used to be reviewed by volunteers: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Add-ons%2FReviewers&type=revision&diff=1238919&oldid=1223872 https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Add-ons%2FReviewers... I don't know how well it worked in practice but it sounded like it was a cool way to engage the community.

Leaving Mozilla

522 points by martey 4mo ago

eps 4mo ago

Who is this person?

shevy-java 4mo ago
Some mozilla software developer I guess. They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
- flohofwoe 4mo ago
  > They still have not fixed their build system. FWIW the Firefox build instructions [1] look a lot saner to me than the Chromium build instructions [2]. [1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.ht... [2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/linux/build_instructions.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
- userbinator 4mo ago
  Mozilla lives in the past. And one would hope they stay there, because all the newer stuff is far more user-hostile.
  - goolz 4mo ago
    Could not agree more. I am honestly confused by the need for more than what FF/Librewolf offers and have been actively doing frontend for a long time. Plus no hassle with uBlock. And their Focus mobile browser is nice. I have the same complaints about their leadership as most but at least I feel I have some autonomy with their browser.
kentbrew 4mo ago
That would be JR Conlin, national treasure. Worked with him on YDN in 2007 and Netflix in 2009; veterans of the Netflix API team will never forget his hack day entry, which was "Mac and Me" playing on a toaster oven.
- abcd_f 4mo ago
  What is he notable for in the context of Mozilla?
  - flohofwoe 4mo ago
    Maybe read the blog post? Crazy suggestion, I know.
    - abcd_f 4mo ago
      Skimmed it before asking. It's written for people who already know who the author is. Hence the question.
  - altairprime 4mo ago
    Staying out of the public eye for his entire tenure. I remain envious.

shevy-java 4mo ago

> We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded. Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox.html https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox... mozconfig? In 2026? Seriously? There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile. This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already. I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work. The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_systemd_age_verification_isnt_about/ https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.

matsemann 4mo ago

Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now? Mozilla is surviving on the mercy of Google money, it's not a viable strategy. Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?

red_admiral 4mo ago
The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback. I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
- tokioyoyo 4mo ago
  AI is not, and was not the reason why the average user moved away from Firefox. AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.
  - red_admiral 4mo ago
    Oh, I agree - firefox was losing market share long before AI was a thing. I meant to use that as a recent example of the kind of decisions that Mozilla leadership repeatedly makes, that don't match up what their users want.
    - Melatonic 4mo ago
      How do you know what their users want ? Firefox may not have a massive market share but it's a much larger group than just the vocal ones here on HN

red_admiral 4mo ago

Respect. This is what Firefox could have been. In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai: browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled, browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled, pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload, pdfjs.enableGuessAltText A bit of community feedback later, and we've got one big "off" button, and me wondering which footgun the executives will shoot themselves with next.

gib444 4mo ago
And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible
franga2000 4mo ago
You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control" ... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible! What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!? What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default? I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that. Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?
- noir_lord 4mo ago
  You either missed the point or deliberately missed the point. The issue was they shipped AI features built into everything and the only way to switch them off was to "about:config" a bunch of settings, they shouldn't have shipped it without the off switch and "Open about:settings and then disable things manually" isn't control for the average user.

klez 4mo ago

Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something (can't even remember what it was). I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla. But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest. This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore. So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.

ktallett 4mo ago
Do Mozilla really still need volunteers in this day and age? Tbh even in 2015. They are established enough to not need to exploit goodwill.
- klez 4mo ago
  As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
  - TalkingCodeMonk 4mo ago
    This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects. Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. One example is the container VPN proxy, which only allows you to implement a VPN per container if you pay for Mozilla VPN. This is a feature that should be universally available to all users, and all VPN providers, but they locked it behind a paywall for profit. The is the same (logically analogous) reason I no longer use Reddit after the API changes in 2023, after using the platform for 15 years, and has become common among newer FOSS startups like OpenAI, minio, and bambu; using the philosophy of open source &/or unpaid community labor to achieve a certain level of trust, growth, users, funding, and market saturation, only to screw them all over in the name of profit. This for-profit parasitic greed and corruption in FLOSS is the antithesis to the philosophy of the FLOSS community. In a sane world this type of community exploitation would be criminally prosecutable. Reddit decision makers would see the inside of a prison cell; the moderators and commenters – as well as the developers who built the 3rd party apps that grew the company from nothing for over a decade – would be given shares/ownership, and paid from the company for their time and labor; same for every other scammer that exploits these "bait-and-switch" deceptive tactics to succeed in businesss. Unfortunately for us all, we live in a world ruled by parasites.

lawgimenez 4mo ago

I think Mozilla started getting nuts the day they ventured with Firefox OS. To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.

JoshTriplett 4mo ago
I think Firefox OS was great, and too early for its time, combined with the mistake of "let's run on extremely terrible hardware" (rather than designing for the flagships of the time, which wouldn't be flagships by the time it shipped).
- robotbikes 4mo ago
  I mean the fact that a fork of FirefoxOS KaiOS is still around and being used shows that there was some merit to the idea but yeah it was executed as a start-up without a long-term plan but thanks to the open nature of the code its still in use. It would be great if Mozilla as an organization tool the opposite approach of Google and if they started a project you knew it would be supported for the long run and if not internally it was handed over to the community of users and stewarded along, sort of how Apache seems to adopt projects but mostly for corporate/enterprise users.
  - mort96 4mo ago
    And the fact that Mozilla used licenses for FirefoxOS which allowed a closed-source fork to come in and take the market is a huge loss.
utopiah 4mo ago
Firefox OS was amazing and, sadly, would STILL be amazing today. Boot-to-Gecko is brilliant because honestly most apps today... are Web pages packaged in an "app". Most PWA with desktop shortcuts (and ideally offline responsive mode) show that. Very few "apps" genuinely need to be apps. Consequently being "just" a phone with basic connectivity and delegating the rest to the browser made perfect sense. I didn't work because it didn't make sense or wasn't technically feasible. It didn't work because anybody who made a mobile OS wanted THEIR own walled gardens. The fact that today we are stuck with Android an iOS shows how needed it was and still is.

kubafu 4mo ago

First of all thanks for posting what's on your mind and everything you did at Mozilla. Sorry to hear you are burnt out, hope you get better with time. I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around. I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional. Yet, I'm hopeful for the future.

samiv 4mo ago

Why can't people just leave? What compels them to write these lengthy self grandiosing posts "zomg I'm leaving company X".

probably_wrong 4mo ago
Oh, the irony...
z0ltan 4mo ago
[dead]
klez 4mo ago
I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.
dgellow 4mo ago
"Why do people want to share their thoughts and feelings with others"
utopiah 4mo ago
I can't speak for the author but I can say that I left companies or institutions on my own despite loving both the (idealized) mission and the team. I wanted to stay but the strategy was wrong, to my own moral compass. Consequently leaving in silence, without being able to express why, and maybe even what could possibly be fixed, feels like giving up. Leaving while telling whomever might want to hear what problems were, and possibly how to fix them, helps to move on while being truthful.
Lord-Jobo 4mo ago
I would say about 99% of the population views software corporations as these monolithic inhuman cubes of pure shitanium. What these posts are important for is 1: reminding the average population that corporations are just abstract human pyramids and made up of normal people. And 2: doing that through a very human, biased, and filtered perspective that can provide some genuine insight into the function of these opaque systems. Now, does the average consumer of hacker news get all that? Probably not, but I do think insider perspective is still valuable.

user3939382 4mo ago

If Mozilla believed in the values it espoused, Librewolf wouldn’t exist. It would just be called Firefox. One of the first betrayals was putting ads in their new tab page, the forced AI comes as a Mozilla tradition now of user respect as marketing only. At the same time it simply may not be a viable business. Firefox was popular originally because Chrome didn’t exist and Internet Explorer especially 6 back was awful. The browser is now an OS on top of an OS, it requires massive resources to maintain. So Mozilla has a cursed mission now and related or unrelated in any case they’re full of it and have lost my respect. Open source and user respect still means something to me even if it doesn’t to Mozilla.

account42 4mo ago
Does it have to be a viable business though? It's essential infrastructure.

z0ltan 4mo ago

[dead]

GreenSalem 4mo ago

Rust was an own goal foot gun. Interesting language with a passionate community / cult, but the value to Mozilla was vanishingly close to zero.

sunaookami 4mo ago
They did rewrite a lof of important parts of Firefox in Rust so the value is a lot higher to Mozilla.
dzogchen 4mo ago
This. They learned nothing from Netscape.

nubinetwork 4mo ago

> I'm not kidding when I said that Firefox is a niche browser. Folk have to actively look to use it. There was once a time where IE was only ever used to download Firefox... Mozilla squandered that.

mike_hock 4mo ago
Firefox was indeed blowing past all the other browsers and set to become the standard. That's when Google realized they had to do something. The market could not be allowed to be dominated by a pro-freedom, pro-privacy product.
mort96 4mo ago
To some degree, yeah they did, by leaving space for a lean and mean competitor like Google Chrome to come around and eat their lunch. And when it was introduced, Google Chrome truly was the lean and mean browser, less bloated than both Firefox and IE. But I'm not sure how much they could've done. Maybe they could've invested a ton of engineering resources into a project similar to Firefox Quantum earlier, so that Firefox didn't leave as much room for a leaner browser? But half the reason people complain about Firefox today is that they broke XUL extensions, which was an absolutely necessary step in making Firefox a competitive, fast browser. I can only imagine the backlash they would've seen if they did that before Chrome ate their lunch. And I'm not sure how much it would've really helped, since 1) Chrome would've still been a less bloated browser simply through having been around for a shorter time and having fewer features, and 2) Google would've still had immense marketing opportunities by plastering Chrome ads all over Google Search etc.

adm4 4mo ago

beautifully sad well put prose mentor encouraged

Lapsa 4mo ago

[dead]

krautburglar 4mo ago

Literal who has left the company that provides Google's antitrust insurance policy. That Mozilla still manages to swing "non-profit" status as they do this is outrageous. I would like to see Mozilla's entire board leave Mozilla... in a PERP WALK.

altairprime 4mo ago
Mozilla Corporation, owner and operator of the Firefox brand and recipient of Google’s payments, is not a non-profit. U.S. law permits non-profits to have for-profit subsidiaries if one accepts severe limitations, such as the corporation’s profits being largely severed from the non-profit’s use. Severance isn’t just a science fiction show, it’s a compulsory auditable requirement.
- krautburglar 4mo ago
  Corporations get up to so many rotten things, most of which are entirely legal, but shouldn't be. Mozilla Corporation thanks you for the free ball-washing & PR work. If you reach out to their non-profit parent, you may even be able to deduct this on your taxes.
  - altairprime 4mo ago
    > Mozilla Corporation thanks you for the free ball-washing & PR work I already left Mozilla in disgust, and I completely agree that corporations should, to use in-kind language, 'get fucked', so you may have misread. Don't mistake being corrected about the legality of a corporate structure for supporting it personally. > Corporations get up to so many rotten things, most of which are entirely legal, but shouldn't be Once I exit the other side of the next couple degrees, I'll have the skills to work as a forensic accountant with a specialty in piercing tech worker lies to reveal real and serious corporate malfeasance, and use that skill to start dissecting and dissolving corporations for criminal acts that no one realizes are occurring. (Sadly, I possess no non-public information on instances of such, or I'd be eligible for a rather significant whistleblower payout.) Or, if I decide to pursue a doctorate, one of the thesis options I've been considering would chop down a cornerstone principle of economics as leverage into forcing corporations to pay up. That decision's a couple years away, though it is a tempting option for sure. But, hey, it's rude to just talk about me. What are you doing that will productively combat capitalism?

magpi3 4mo ago

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy absolutely applies here: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch technicians, and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers' union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that, in every case, the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules and control promotions within the organization."

Angostura 4mo ago
I hate this. It basically takes as axiomatic that anyone in an administrative position in an organisation has zero interest in the goals of the organisation -and that those at the coal-face have no interest in the organisation and that there is little or no overlap in interest. Its reductionist, divisive and stupid.
- magpi3 4mo ago
  It takes the view that anyone in an administrative position will put the survival of the organization as their primary goal, while lower-level employees (who are far less invested in the organization) can remain invested in the organization's ostensible goals. I find it to be very true after almost 30 years in the working world, and I always keep it in mind wherever I work.
- rafaelcosta 4mo ago
  I don’t think that it is reductionist at all. The examples provided are either qualified with “dedicated” or “many of”. It’s also not surprising at all that people who have an interest in driving the goals of the organization usually gravitate more to operational roles and people who have no interest in it at all gravitate towards organizational roles – but that’s not a rule. I would totally be pissed as someone in an “organizational” role of someone reduced me to someone “not interested in the goals of the organization”, but magpi3 didn’t do that. They correctly stated a pattern. If you are around organizational/administrative people, ask yourself honestly if the pattern isn’t the least bit accurate…

ReptileMan 4mo ago

But at least they are not homophobic like Eich.

mschuster91 4mo ago

> Another delusion comes about because of self-reinforcement. Say you're going to release some, controversial feature. Maybe it's browser based DRM, maybe it's AI, maybe it's Push Notifications. Listening to your users can be a bit challenging[2], because while some might tell you, most probably won't. They'll just leave. That means that your source of information will be the people that stick around, so you wind up getting artificially high approval rates for things. This is a bit ironic, because... there's a bunch of low hanging fruit that are lacking and that keeps driving the nerds off of Firefox. Take Meshcore/Meshtastic or, frankly, the entire ESP32 world for example - in the Chromium ecosystem, you can use WebUSB and WebSerial to flash and communicate with these things from the browser. It does not get more convenient. Meanwhile, WebUSB still isn't supported in Firefox at all and only two weeks ago Firefox at least gained WebSerial [1]. [1] https://www.heise.de/news/Firefox-151-Endlich-Web-Serial-fuer-den-beliebten-Browser-11314905.html https://www.heise.de/news/Firefox-151-Endlich-Web-Serial-fue...

sethops1 4mo ago
I've been bitching about it for like a decade but I still won't use Firefox until it supports window based profiles. Safari has them now, ffs.
- throw-the-towel 4mo ago
  Why not use container tabs instead?
cyberrock 4mo ago
He's right. The nerds who want WebUSB are leaving or using Chromium on the side. Firefox has just been collecting the nerds who want absolute safety and privacy at the cost of any functionality (which apparently includes removing extensions according to one). I was floored when I discovered that Firefox rejected Web NFC because they were afraid of it being used on specific outdated Yubikeys. I could understand if they were concerned about it being used to steal credit cards, but the Yubikey scenario is just so out of touch. I can only hope that Web Serial represents a pivot away from that.

deanc 4mo ago

I really wish Mozilla would focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. I don’t want extensions (attack vector), vpns, fancy bookmarking services that are deprecated later on etc. I want to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.

MatejKafka 4mo ago
How do you expect Mozilla to make enough money from just Firefox to survive if Google ever decides to stop paying them for being the default search engine?
- ricardobeat 4mo ago
  > make enough money from just Firefox According to 2025 filings, 86%+ of revenue came from the Google deal. Google pays Mozilla because of the browser. How would shifting focus to the browser make that worse?
  - account42 4mo ago
    Seeing as google keeps paying them more and more even as they shift away from improving the browser, you have to reevaluate what they are really being paid for.
- deanc 4mo ago
  Charge me. I’ll pay. I’m not going to donate to the org right now as I don’t use Firefox as it uses (noticeably) too much battery on my MacBook compared to safari and chrome.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4mo ago
    Notably, also, it's not currently possible to donate to Firefox; you can only give Mozilla money to use on unrelated projects. As a Firefox user, the inability to pay for the thing I actually want is grating.
- 4mo ago

dash2 4mo ago

"We shouldn't try to be like the big browsers because that's not what our Community wants." This is just a path to irrelevance. Firefox had the ambition to be the default browser, what Chrome is now! It's a shame if they're going to spiral off into their niche.

account42 4mo ago
That's a weird claim to make considering how trying to be just like Chrome has lead to their current market share.

hxinbos 4mo ago

[flagged]

ilovegp 4mo ago

[flagged]

ricardobeat 4mo ago

De-prioritizing Servo is something I will never understand. Aside from making Firefox attractive again, desktop software has migrated almost entirely to web-based stacks. They could have owned the foundation layer of almost every hardware device if they managed to make Servo faster and slimmer than the options we currently have. What a blunder.

docsptl 4mo ago

another thing is that the weirdos who were using firefox didn't switch to chrome either, mainly just to other firefox forks or brave, vivaldi.. casual users just use whatever but use firefox less and less

ssssksk 4mo ago

Mozilla continues to exist because Google funds them, and Google funds them so they can claim that their Chrome browser isn't a monopoly. That's why Firefox continues to be a niche browser. Its actual goal, never outright stated by Mozilla leadership, is to occupy just enough market share to prop up their behemoth benefactor.

drewfax 4mo ago

Some things Mozilla could have done correctly: - Kept Rust and sold best-in-class tooling like IDEs to enterprises. - Polished Firefox OS and distributed apps in their store for a 1% commission. - Kept Servo and made the most secure and fast browser that no one else had made. - Partnered with OEMs to offer Firefox as the default browser. Yet the best they could do was pay their CEO for nothing.

sylware 4mo ago

Last time I did exchange thoughts about somebody who actually worked at mozilla in my country: "some kind of cult".

penguin_booze 4mo ago

> Remember who you're working for. Whom you're working for.

dzonga 4mo ago

Firefox leadership had a recovery the time when Brendan Eich was CEO, then he was kicked out. since then it has been downhill since.

LocutusOfBorges 4mo ago
Eich was CEO for 11 days. You’re wildly misremembering how much of an impact he had in that post.
- altairprime 4mo ago
  It was an eleven day war and the casualty was their future. Eich was the last time that Mozilla hired a CEO from the ranks of its own engineers. Eich would not have prevented the economic external challenges faced, but Eich and other such engineer-leaders would have prevented the unforced errors Mozilla is known for today. Every CEO after that was business, not engineer. This placed the company onto the same runway of mediocrity and collapse that we see Boeing crashing planes into with some regularity. What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane (2 years ago, 532 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39856413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39856413
- BrendanEich 4mo ago
  I was a real founder (not retconned fake founder). My contributions were almost entirely before taking the CEO job, of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44544226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44544226 "Lots of decline after I left, but I'll take some blame for decline before I quit, if you credit me for all the growth from inception."

delfugal 4mo ago

It's easy to leave a place. Harder to stay and fix the things you don't like. How many people regret leaving the place they invested 12+ years, rather than fighting back while in a position to do so? If you're burned out, no longer fun, we all get it. But don't leave your investment into a product just because some new direction took over unless you plan to kick their backside.

account42 4mo ago
On the other hand the burnt cost fallacy is probably much more common.

Surac 4mo ago

just today i came back to firefox from brave. firefox at one point in time was not able to work with the onshape web cad system and i needed a chrome based browser but was not ready to leave adblockers behind. brave war the only one suporting manifest 2 addons. but today i tried onshape in firefox and now it works. glad to be back

t_gamer_kle 4mo ago

34 occurrences of "folk". Remarkably grating affectation. Is something wrong with other nouns for groups of individuals?

GaryBluto 4mo ago
I noticed too; I managed to ignore it at first but it eventually became so grating I stopped reading shortly before I reached the end of the article. I'm not exactly sure of the reason for the overuse but the sheer amount of times it is used feels artificial. Not "artificial" in an "artificial intelligence" sense but perhaps a corporate, "inclusive" thing[1] that may have rubbed off on the author during his time at Mozilla, or a political convention (which is possible considering the large "Fump Truck" text on his Mastodon page). [1] https://acorn.firefox.com/latest/content/inclusive-writing/overview-DH3O5SwX https://acorn.firefox.com/latest/content/inclusive-writing/o...

palata 4mo ago

I like that take. There is a tendency in the software world to dream about becoming the BigTech we all hate. I believe that the people who want Firefox want it because it's different, just like the people who want Linux want it because it is different. And similarly in Linux, many people keep explaining how Linux should look more like Windows if it wants the year of the Linux Desktop. But I wouldn't be on Linux if I wanted Windows. I am not on Linux because I want everybody to be on Linux, on the contrary. Same applies for Firefox.

account42 4mo ago
There is also the fact that even if FF was changed into being exactly like Chrome it would not get much of its market share as Google still has more ways to push it onto people. So to compete FF needs to actually provide real advantages and with the much smaller budget the only way it can do that is by competing with features that Google can't or doesn't want to compete in.

jms703 4mo ago

Sad to see so much vacation time go unused.

BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago
Is it normal to give vacation time in hours? It's about 25 days.

musicale 4mo ago

> That doesn't mean we can't become big. We did this before. When we listened to our Community, gave them what they wanted, let them work with us to build something amazing, they told their friends Exactly this. Mozilla/Firefox lost their way when they stopped listening to the community. Which is not to say you shouldn't try to build new cool things that the community hasn't thought of yet - but you should listen to them when they tell you it is terrible garbage that they do not want and there is no way to opt out.

tech234a 4mo ago

One example of the move towards being more closed is that addons on the catalog used to be reviewed by volunteers: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Add-ons%2FReviewers&type=revision&diff=1238919&oldid=1223872 https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Add-ons%2FReviewers... I don't know how well it worked in practice but it sounded like it was a cool way to engage the community.