6 ms·

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

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
        I'm going mainly off the OP, but Mozilla connect is the place I'd look: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?advanced=false&allow_punctuation=false&q=AI https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message...
  - dspillett 4mo ago
    > AI is however a potential avenue for raising money. How? By selling the position of preferred model? They can do that without implementing it in a way that means people who don't want it at all have to jump through hoops to opt-out. Being able to turn AI summaries and such off by default was the final reason I started paying for Kagi. I know they use ML in the background no matter what, but as long as I get links to resources relevant to my search, that I can read/judge/summerise as needed, first and foremost, how they produce that list is not the issue.
    - tokioyoyo 4mo ago
      You are not the target audience, that’s pretty much it. You can be very against AI, try to turn it off on Kagi, avoid Google AI summaries, discard ChatGPT/Claude, but billions of people still use them. At this point it has been argued so much that it’s kinda pointless. People seem to enjoy to be told stuff and don’t really care about sources if the said content is somewhat correct.
      - Melatonic 4mo ago
        You don't really need to turn it off in Kagi - it only gives you an AI answer if you put a " ? " after your query.
- matsemann 4mo ago
  Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.
  - chii 4mo ago
    > don't think Fx can survive on only us. not at the current employee and costs. But do they need to do that? Do they need to produce new products (and pay the cost to do so)? Why can't they be lean and mean? Focus purely on browser experience without any BS, without any upsell? And there are volunteers out there that willingly contribute code/fixes for free.
    - Forgeties79 4mo ago
      I like having containers for different parts of my life built into the browser. I liked relay for quite a while (moved on to other setups). I like syncing between devices and the ability to push something from my phone to my computer on another continent currently with two taps. Yeah they have rolled out a lot of nonsense I don’t care for, but they have also rolled out a lot of features I regularly use and enjoy. You can’t please everybody, but ultimately I’m glad it’s not “just a lean browser.”
    - charcircuit 4mo ago
      If they truly wanted to be mean and lean and focus on the browser experience they would need to throw away their pride and port the browser from gecko to blink. I think they are too prideful to do that though.
    - altairprime 4mo ago
      > Why can't they be lean and mean? Because they canceled the* project and laid off the lean and mean team that threatened their bloated C++ tower of rubble. * https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/
flohofwoe 4mo ago
> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline? A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)
- mid-kid 4mo ago
  This, in part. The swift deprecation of XUL extensions felt like a kick in the gonads and made me switch to Pale Moon for a while, after which I landed on Firefox ESR to avoid the inmediate impact of bad decisions, and accumulated a veritable landslide of user.js and userchrome.css tweaks I keep having to maintain. On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.
supriyo-biswas 4mo ago
The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as: * Wanting niche features that don't benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue. * Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness). * General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.) * Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads. These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction. Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine. [1] https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18
- megnu 4mo ago
  I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser. A paid email service is also something many have been asking for a while. People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.
  - pseudalopex 4mo ago
    > I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser. You did not read the comments of this submission?[1] This is common.[2][3][4][5] And those were comments which were easy to find because they said Firefox and VPN. Many other comments said they should focus on Firefox solely. Or eliminate all side projects. > People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure. People can give money to Mozilla Corporation by purchasing Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, or MDN Plus. Rules for businesses to solicit donations are strict. Mozilla would have to be more careful than most because people confuse non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And many of the small minority of Firefox users who said they would donate implied or said plainly a condition was Mozilla would abandon other income. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515030 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225892 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434873 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065167 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46323661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46323661
probably_wrong 4mo ago
> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both. I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.
- franga2000 4mo ago
  Keep in mind that while Firefox offered 20 extensions on mobile, Chrome offered zero and continues to lack any support for extensions whatsoever. Nobody ditched Firefox for Chrome because of the extensions thing. The move to WebExtensions was painful, but it also made it possible to easily port Chrome extensions to Firefox, which was a great boost for the extension ecosystem, as well as being the thing that actually made mobile extensions possible. I do agree they should've made the transition period longer though. There were like two years in between where some of the big Chrome extensions hadn't been ported yet, but their original Firefox counterparts were already killed. That probably made a few users move ti Chrome, but that was already during the great Chrome migration, so I can't imagine this made a huge difference.
  - probably_wrong 4mo ago
    I think your comment points towards the heart of my complaint, namely, that Firefox stopped extensions on its tracks to offer parity with a browser that doesn't care about extensions. It fits the post's complaint about doing things just because Chrome is doing them. As for the effect of extensions, my feeling is that people care less about them now but used to care more about them back then. I think Firefox main selling point was always "my cousin who works in IT told me to install this instead of that", and once Firefox angered those power users away (at the same time when Chrome was trying to bring them in) the effect compounded.
RobotToaster 4mo ago
It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.
- pseudalopex 4mo ago
  Firefox's market share peaked in 2009. Eich was CEO for 2 weeks in 2014. He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position. The same lawyer lady Mitchell Baker had every top job from 1999 to 2008.
  - gdwatson 4mo ago
    "He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position." At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.
    - altairprime 4mo ago
      It was.
      - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
        I don't believe that for one second, and neither should you. Every single CEO who gets fired is made to "voluntarily" resign.
        altairprime 4mo ago
        You weren’t there.
        BrendanEich 4mo ago
        Were you? I have no idea who you are, but the only "other C-level position" was an unspecified throwaway line from Reid Hoffman, who didn't have authority to create any such "Chief of Special Projects" position anyway. The CEO makes the C-level org chart; the new CEO after me was waiting in the wings but in no position to make promises. You seem awfully eager to assert something false, possibly out of bad conscience. No one involved in my departure had a good solution for my staying at Mozilla, including me.
eklavya 4mo ago
I used Firefox and made sure everybody in my circle family and social used it. I had donated 5$ to Mozilla when I was making 360$ per month. I believed in mozilla, I was naive. Soon after I learned the money didn't go to Firefox. They soon after launched a political campaign in my country. I realized this and every other fancy they had, was where my money was going. Stopped using it and stopped caring a long while back. Can't wait for Servo/Ladybird to replace it.
- Melatonic 4mo ago
  What was the campaign?
  - eklavya 4mo ago
    Can't remember now it was at least 10-13 years ago.
heresie-dabord 4mo ago
> it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. Leaders are accountable for their decisions, their statements, their strategies, and their care for the organisation(s) that they lead.
- tokai 4mo ago
  Its weird how quickly people are to excuse the class literally paid to be responsible.
- matsemann 4mo ago
  That wasn't my point, really. But that they chastise Mozilla leadership without offering any other alternative direction than "keeping doing as in 2009".
noosphr 4mo ago
>if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Yes.
khuey 4mo ago
> 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? I worked at Mozilla for a bit over six years and really enjoyed my time there. There were lots of brilliant people attracted by the mission and the work was technically interesting. I left in part because I came to the conclusion that the answer to these questions was no. Google's distribution advantages with Chrome and getting boxed out of mobile by the bundled Android/iOS browsers was simply too much to overcome by making a better product. People can gripe about Mozilla's management or product decisions all they want but the fundamental problem is the structure of the web browser market.
- Melatonic 4mo ago
  This is a good take honestly - Firefox could be perfect and efficient and secure but if the defaults are good enough why would people make the effort to switch ? What we really need is normalised effort to provide an alternative to the systemic issues you are starting to bring up. Not just the browser market but the entrenchment of big tech in general. An organisation that can deliver on what the idealists individually want in a big, cohesive way. Personally in our current day an age I think that's what a labor union can provide (in addition to the obvious other resources).
jrmg 4mo ago
if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? I really don’t think it would. One thing “Do what you did before when you were successful!” is missing is that Firefox was sleek, fast, extendable, new, and cool. It was cool partly because of its “sleek, fast, extendable”, but also because of its “new”, and it can’t get “new” back. Perhaps launching a completely new piece of software, like the Netscape -> Firefox change (although that was organic, not planned) - but only if it’s actually something new and cool that comes out of it. A rebadge won’t work. I don’t think there’s a playbook that works here. I’m struggling to think of many major pieces of tech (or non-tech!) that ever got its cool back. Netscape -> Firefox? Apple and/or the Mac? IE4? Lego? Elvis? “New Nixon”?... Alongside all of the successes there are orders of magnitude more failures, and I don’t think they’re all on merit.
- altairprime 4mo ago
  There is a pool of opportunities they largely refuse to jump into: those requiring curation. Pocket, the sole exception, ended up as yet another unforced error.
altairprime 4mo ago
It has merit. I left for similar reasons after a similar tour. I largely agree with their reasons. No further notes.
Melatonic 4mo ago
Agreed Firefox is a top notch browser we all are provided with for free. And it's been great and free for longer than any other browser. Ever. Browsers are notoriously difficult to build and maintain. I think we owe all the engineers and people behind it a lot of appreciation. Have they made a few missteps over the years trying out the new hot thing ? Yes. And it temporarily upset a niche of technical people. And last time I checked none of these things were very hard to avoid or turn off.

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
      I'm going mainly off the OP, but Mozilla connect is the place I'd look: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?advanced=false&allow_punctuation=false&q=AI https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message...
- dspillett 4mo ago
  > AI is however a potential avenue for raising money. How? By selling the position of preferred model? They can do that without implementing it in a way that means people who don't want it at all have to jump through hoops to opt-out. Being able to turn AI summaries and such off by default was the final reason I started paying for Kagi. I know they use ML in the background no matter what, but as long as I get links to resources relevant to my search, that I can read/judge/summerise as needed, first and foremost, how they produce that list is not the issue.
  - tokioyoyo 4mo ago
    You are not the target audience, that’s pretty much it. You can be very against AI, try to turn it off on Kagi, avoid Google AI summaries, discard ChatGPT/Claude, but billions of people still use them. At this point it has been argued so much that it’s kinda pointless. People seem to enjoy to be told stuff and don’t really care about sources if the said content is somewhat correct.
    - Melatonic 4mo ago
      You don't really need to turn it off in Kagi - it only gives you an AI answer if you put a " ? " after your query.
matsemann 4mo ago
Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.
- chii 4mo ago
  > don't think Fx can survive on only us. not at the current employee and costs. But do they need to do that? Do they need to produce new products (and pay the cost to do so)? Why can't they be lean and mean? Focus purely on browser experience without any BS, without any upsell? And there are volunteers out there that willingly contribute code/fixes for free.
  - Forgeties79 4mo ago
    I like having containers for different parts of my life built into the browser. I liked relay for quite a while (moved on to other setups). I like syncing between devices and the ability to push something from my phone to my computer on another continent currently with two taps. Yeah they have rolled out a lot of nonsense I don’t care for, but they have also rolled out a lot of features I regularly use and enjoy. You can’t please everybody, but ultimately I’m glad it’s not “just a lean browser.”
  - charcircuit 4mo ago
    If they truly wanted to be mean and lean and focus on the browser experience they would need to throw away their pride and port the browser from gecko to blink. I think they are too prideful to do that though.
  - altairprime 4mo ago
    > Why can't they be lean and mean? Because they canceled the* project and laid off the lean and mean team that threatened their bloated C++ tower of rubble. * https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/

flohofwoe 4mo ago

> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline? A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)

mid-kid 4mo ago
This, in part. The swift deprecation of XUL extensions felt like a kick in the gonads and made me switch to Pale Moon for a while, after which I landed on Firefox ESR to avoid the inmediate impact of bad decisions, and accumulated a veritable landslide of user.js and userchrome.css tweaks I keep having to maintain. On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.

supriyo-biswas 4mo ago

The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as: * Wanting niche features that don't benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue. * Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness). * General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.) * Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads. These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction. Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine. [1] https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18

megnu 4mo ago
I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser. A paid email service is also something many have been asking for a while. People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.
- pseudalopex 4mo ago
  > I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser. You did not read the comments of this submission?[1] This is common.[2][3][4][5] And those were comments which were easy to find because they said Firefox and VPN. Many other comments said they should focus on Firefox solely. Or eliminate all side projects. > People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure. People can give money to Mozilla Corporation by purchasing Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, or MDN Plus. Rules for businesses to solicit donations are strict. Mozilla would have to be more careful than most because people confuse non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And many of the small minority of Firefox users who said they would donate implied or said plainly a condition was Mozilla would abandon other income. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515030 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225892 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434873 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065167 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46323661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46323661

probably_wrong 4mo ago

> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both. I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.

franga2000 4mo ago
Keep in mind that while Firefox offered 20 extensions on mobile, Chrome offered zero and continues to lack any support for extensions whatsoever. Nobody ditched Firefox for Chrome because of the extensions thing. The move to WebExtensions was painful, but it also made it possible to easily port Chrome extensions to Firefox, which was a great boost for the extension ecosystem, as well as being the thing that actually made mobile extensions possible. I do agree they should've made the transition period longer though. There were like two years in between where some of the big Chrome extensions hadn't been ported yet, but their original Firefox counterparts were already killed. That probably made a few users move ti Chrome, but that was already during the great Chrome migration, so I can't imagine this made a huge difference.
- probably_wrong 4mo ago
  I think your comment points towards the heart of my complaint, namely, that Firefox stopped extensions on its tracks to offer parity with a browser that doesn't care about extensions. It fits the post's complaint about doing things just because Chrome is doing them. As for the effect of extensions, my feeling is that people care less about them now but used to care more about them back then. I think Firefox main selling point was always "my cousin who works in IT told me to install this instead of that", and once Firefox angered those power users away (at the same time when Chrome was trying to bring them in) the effect compounded.

RobotToaster 4mo ago

It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.

pseudalopex 4mo ago
Firefox's market share peaked in 2009. Eich was CEO for 2 weeks in 2014. He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position. The same lawyer lady Mitchell Baker had every top job from 1999 to 2008.
- gdwatson 4mo ago
  "He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position." At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.
  - altairprime 4mo ago
    It was.
    - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
      I don't believe that for one second, and neither should you. Every single CEO who gets fired is made to "voluntarily" resign.
      - altairprime 4mo ago
        You weren’t there.
        BrendanEich 4mo ago
        Were you? I have no idea who you are, but the only "other C-level position" was an unspecified throwaway line from Reid Hoffman, who didn't have authority to create any such "Chief of Special Projects" position anyway. The CEO makes the C-level org chart; the new CEO after me was waiting in the wings but in no position to make promises. You seem awfully eager to assert something false, possibly out of bad conscience. No one involved in my departure had a good solution for my staying at Mozilla, including me.

eklavya 4mo ago

I used Firefox and made sure everybody in my circle family and social used it. I had donated 5$ to Mozilla when I was making 360$ per month. I believed in mozilla, I was naive. Soon after I learned the money didn't go to Firefox. They soon after launched a political campaign in my country. I realized this and every other fancy they had, was where my money was going. Stopped using it and stopped caring a long while back. Can't wait for Servo/Ladybird to replace it.

Melatonic 4mo ago
What was the campaign?
- eklavya 4mo ago
  Can't remember now it was at least 10-13 years ago.

heresie-dabord 4mo ago

> it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. Leaders are accountable for their decisions, their statements, their strategies, and their care for the organisation(s) that they lead.

tokai 4mo ago
Its weird how quickly people are to excuse the class literally paid to be responsible.
matsemann 4mo ago
That wasn't my point, really. But that they chastise Mozilla leadership without offering any other alternative direction than "keeping doing as in 2009".

noosphr 4mo ago

>if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Yes.

khuey 4mo ago

> 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? I worked at Mozilla for a bit over six years and really enjoyed my time there. There were lots of brilliant people attracted by the mission and the work was technically interesting. I left in part because I came to the conclusion that the answer to these questions was no. Google's distribution advantages with Chrome and getting boxed out of mobile by the bundled Android/iOS browsers was simply too much to overcome by making a better product. People can gripe about Mozilla's management or product decisions all they want but the fundamental problem is the structure of the web browser market.

Melatonic 4mo ago
This is a good take honestly - Firefox could be perfect and efficient and secure but if the defaults are good enough why would people make the effort to switch ? What we really need is normalised effort to provide an alternative to the systemic issues you are starting to bring up. Not just the browser market but the entrenchment of big tech in general. An organisation that can deliver on what the idealists individually want in a big, cohesive way. Personally in our current day an age I think that's what a labor union can provide (in addition to the obvious other resources).

jrmg 4mo ago

if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? I really don’t think it would. One thing “Do what you did before when you were successful!” is missing is that Firefox was sleek, fast, extendable, new, and cool. It was cool partly because of its “sleek, fast, extendable”, but also because of its “new”, and it can’t get “new” back. Perhaps launching a completely new piece of software, like the Netscape -> Firefox change (although that was organic, not planned) - but only if it’s actually something new and cool that comes out of it. A rebadge won’t work. I don’t think there’s a playbook that works here. I’m struggling to think of many major pieces of tech (or non-tech!) that ever got its cool back. Netscape -> Firefox? Apple and/or the Mac? IE4? Lego? Elvis? “New Nixon”?... Alongside all of the successes there are orders of magnitude more failures, and I don’t think they’re all on merit.

altairprime 4mo ago
There is a pool of opportunities they largely refuse to jump into: those requiring curation. Pocket, the sole exception, ended up as yet another unforced error.

altairprime 4mo ago

It has merit. I left for similar reasons after a similar tour. I largely agree with their reasons. No further notes.

Melatonic 4mo ago

Agreed Firefox is a top notch browser we all are provided with for free. And it's been great and free for longer than any other browser. Ever. Browsers are notoriously difficult to build and maintain. I think we owe all the engineers and people behind it a lot of appreciation. Have they made a few missteps over the years trying out the new hot thing ? Yes. And it temporarily upset a niche of technical people. And last time I checked none of these things were very hard to avoid or turn off.