6 ms·

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 di

by 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.
    - blackhaz 4mo ago
      Not to mention scandals like this... "In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic"
      - tjpnz 4mo ago
        Failed their way to the top.
        archerx 4mo ago
        Imagine getting paid millions to kill a company, who needs enemies/competitors when you have “leaders” like that?
        pmontra 4mo ago
        I remember Nokia and their CEO from Microsoft.
      - veeti 4mo ago
        Incidentally, I have recently come across some Mozilla job postings with salary ranges I would consider to be at a considerable "discount to market". For example, here is a senior role at 59 000 euro per year: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/7843229 https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/7843229
        account42 4mo ago
        That salary would be OK for an actual charity where you work there because you believe in the mission. The problem is that Mozilla is confused and thinks they should be a for profit corporation with a bloated executive.
- account42 4mo ago
  They wouldn't be "exploiting" that goodwill if they were still following their original mission instead of larping as a silicon valley startup / tech giant (whichever is more convenient).
kunalBOOP 4mo ago
[flagged]
alex_be 4mo ago
I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years as my default browser. Thank you for your work!
- 2b3a51 4mo ago
  Yes, I'd echo thanks to parent, the OA and all still in the trenches. Since 2007 in my case which is when I started using Linux at home. The distributions I use come with Firefox as the Web browser (Ubuntu, Debian and latterly Slackware). I do find myself turning things off more now than I used to.
- cinntaile 4mo ago
  There were a few years where it was hard to justify using Firefox, it was just so slow compared to Chrome at the time. Nowadays it's fine again.
ngold 4mo ago
Libtewolf is hopefully there. Ublock origin is pre-installed
- bluebarbet 4mo ago
  Librewolf, like all the forks, free-rides on the upstream work of paid Mozilla staff in order to be secure. It's a band-aid, not a solution.
  - 2b3a51 4mo ago
    But perhaps the existence of the forks tells the Mozilla management something?
    - classified 4mo ago
      Band-aids like this have existed for many years, plenty of time for Mozilla to listen. And in all that time, they never had the idea to make the band-aids redundant.
    - hnlmorg 4mo ago
      WebKit (as used by Safari) was a fork of kHTML (written by the KDE team). And Google forked WebKit. Now we have dozens of Blink forks including Microsoft’s own browser: Blink. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that forking the code is a low incentive for change
- klez 4mo ago
  I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore. Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?
  - 4mo ago
PurpleRamen 4mo ago
> 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). IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.
- saghm 4mo ago
  Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.
  - khuey 4mo ago
    Mozilla ended up switching from IRC to Matrix. Maybe they tested Yahoo Messenger at some point but I'm pretty confident there was never any switch to it (I left in 2016).
nntwozz 4mo ago
Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC. Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads. What a wonderful thing we've created.
- aboardRat4 4mo ago
  IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it. (Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)
  - ekianjo 4mo ago
    UI? Its a protocol.
    - setopt 4mo ago
      They probably meant UX, which is arguably similar between implementations.
      - 47282847 4mo ago
        Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense. Discord could well run on top of IRC the protocol and be open to federation without any change of UX.
        luke5441 4mo ago
        IRC doesn't have offline messages and standardized user accounts. Just looked it up and there is IRCv3 to fix this, but idk what the state of that is.
        FireBeyond 4mo ago
        "... not great". IRCv3 was already late to the party and when I saw that the Working Group's mailing list was composed of lots of debates on formats for server daemon configuration files, it was clear many couldn't see the forest for the trees.
vitalyan1234 4mo ago
[flagged]
spython 4mo ago
Last I heard the ads were introduced to be less dependent on Google money - they actually cover the costs/salaries of the internal MDN team and thus secure the existence of MDN within the organisation. Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla. So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am surprised that the people visiting MDN don't use an ad blocker anyhow).
- everybodyknows 4mo ago
  I support MDN by disabling UBO. This is not (much) of a burden: there is no animation, and the advertised products are always technical and possibly of interest. Only complaint is the occasional large light areas, which do not play well with dark mode.
bachmeier 4mo ago
> 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. I feel the same way after seeing what they've done with AI chatbots in the sidebar. Five cloud providers. No local AI option. I don't see a reason to use Firefox today and it's been my main browser since it was called Phoenix. I use it only because it's what I've been using for a long time. There's no relationship between Mozilla of today and the group that placed the ad in the NY Times in 2004. The AI chatbot thing was just the latest happening, but it shows how devoid of meaning that organization has become when you have a technology like AI and nobody even looks to Mozilla to provide leadership on an issue like that. Sure, send all your data to a large cloud outfit, that's the corporate world of Mozilla in 2026. It would actually be shocking to see Mozilla promote AI data privacy. Ironically, the local model I run the most is provided by Google, and it's not the least bit surprising that they're making it possible.

by klez 4mo ago

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.
  - blackhaz 4mo ago
    Not to mention scandals like this... "In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic"
    - tjpnz 4mo ago
      Failed their way to the top.
      - archerx 4mo ago
        Imagine getting paid millions to kill a company, who needs enemies/competitors when you have “leaders” like that?
        pmontra 4mo ago
        I remember Nokia and their CEO from Microsoft.
    - veeti 4mo ago
      Incidentally, I have recently come across some Mozilla job postings with salary ranges I would consider to be at a considerable "discount to market". For example, here is a senior role at 59 000 euro per year: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/7843229 https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/7843229
      - account42 4mo ago
        That salary would be OK for an actual charity where you work there because you believe in the mission. The problem is that Mozilla is confused and thinks they should be a for profit corporation with a bloated executive.
account42 4mo ago
They wouldn't be "exploiting" that goodwill if they were still following their original mission instead of larping as a silicon valley startup / tech giant (whichever is more convenient).

kunalBOOP 4mo ago

[flagged]

alex_be 4mo ago

I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years as my default browser. Thank you for your work!

2b3a51 4mo ago
Yes, I'd echo thanks to parent, the OA and all still in the trenches. Since 2007 in my case which is when I started using Linux at home. The distributions I use come with Firefox as the Web browser (Ubuntu, Debian and latterly Slackware). I do find myself turning things off more now than I used to.
cinntaile 4mo ago
There were a few years where it was hard to justify using Firefox, it was just so slow compared to Chrome at the time. Nowadays it's fine again.

ngold 4mo ago

Libtewolf is hopefully there. Ublock origin is pre-installed

bluebarbet 4mo ago
Librewolf, like all the forks, free-rides on the upstream work of paid Mozilla staff in order to be secure. It's a band-aid, not a solution.
- 2b3a51 4mo ago
  But perhaps the existence of the forks tells the Mozilla management something?
  - classified 4mo ago
    Band-aids like this have existed for many years, plenty of time for Mozilla to listen. And in all that time, they never had the idea to make the band-aids redundant.
  - hnlmorg 4mo ago
    WebKit (as used by Safari) was a fork of kHTML (written by the KDE team). And Google forked WebKit. Now we have dozens of Blink forks including Microsoft’s own browser: Blink. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that forking the code is a low incentive for change
klez 4mo ago
I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore. Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?
- 4mo ago

PurpleRamen 4mo ago

> 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). IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.

saghm 4mo ago
Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.
- khuey 4mo ago
  Mozilla ended up switching from IRC to Matrix. Maybe they tested Yahoo Messenger at some point but I'm pretty confident there was never any switch to it (I left in 2016).

nntwozz 4mo ago

Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC. Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads. What a wonderful thing we've created.

aboardRat4 4mo ago
IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it. (Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)
- ekianjo 4mo ago
  UI? Its a protocol.
  - setopt 4mo ago
    They probably meant UX, which is arguably similar between implementations.
    - 47282847 4mo ago
      Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense. Discord could well run on top of IRC the protocol and be open to federation without any change of UX.
      - luke5441 4mo ago
        IRC doesn't have offline messages and standardized user accounts. Just looked it up and there is IRCv3 to fix this, but idk what the state of that is.
        FireBeyond 4mo ago
        "... not great". IRCv3 was already late to the party and when I saw that the Working Group's mailing list was composed of lots of debates on formats for server daemon configuration files, it was clear many couldn't see the forest for the trees.

vitalyan1234 4mo ago

[flagged]

spython 4mo ago

Last I heard the ads were introduced to be less dependent on Google money - they actually cover the costs/salaries of the internal MDN team and thus secure the existence of MDN within the organisation. Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla. So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am surprised that the people visiting MDN don't use an ad blocker anyhow).

everybodyknows 4mo ago
I support MDN by disabling UBO. This is not (much) of a burden: there is no animation, and the advertised products are always technical and possibly of interest. Only complaint is the occasional large light areas, which do not play well with dark mode.

bachmeier 4mo ago

> 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. I feel the same way after seeing what they've done with AI chatbots in the sidebar. Five cloud providers. No local AI option. I don't see a reason to use Firefox today and it's been my main browser since it was called Phoenix. I use it only because it's what I've been using for a long time. There's no relationship between Mozilla of today and the group that placed the ad in the NY Times in 2004. The AI chatbot thing was just the latest happening, but it shows how devoid of meaning that organization has become when you have a technology like AI and nobody even looks to Mozilla to provide leadership on an issue like that. Sure, send all your data to a large cloud outfit, that's the corporate world of Mozilla in 2026. It would actually be shocking to see Mozilla promote AI data privacy. Ironically, the local model I run the most is provided by Google, and it's not the least bit surprising that they're making it possible.