As much as I love and respect many of the people at Mozilla, and the project itself (I spent 5 years of my life volunteering in the early years), this has been a systemic problem all along, pretty much from day one. Certain types of decisions get made by a very small group of people who somehow acquire a tone-deafness when it comes to outside criticism. Then, when the decisions become public, the negative reaction is not only not understood, sometimes it's not believed, or not taken seriously, and simply serves to retrench the decision makers in their choice and they go radio silent. Then after a while, they may or may not reevaluate that without any form of communication as to what's going on inside. Then, a year or two later, it'll happen again.
I am NOT insulting people, there's no malice in that process, no lack of intelligence, no evil intents. I use the phrase "tone deafness" purposefully because I feel it conveys the idea that these bad decisions come simply from some acquired inability to perceive and understand. They're all god, smart people, but something happens in the Mozilla culture where communication with the outside world becomes difficult and of lessened importance. It's odd.
If anyone from Mozilla is reading this, what can be done to fix it?
This kind of negativity is really common on HN and it makes me sad.
"This group of people did something I don't like, and then they changed their mind and stopped doing it. But rather than being happy about fixing their mistake, I'm going to keep criticizing them for making the mistake in the first place."
People (and groups of people) make mistakes. Spending your whole life holding grudges like this is a recipe for permanent grumpiness.
So tell me now, how did this happen? "Sponsored tiles", nobody batted an eye?
Will you try telling me the devs themselves did not see this as a potential source of problem? (I know for a fact that's not the case)
OK, let's assume this is a simple mistake. Now what happened with Pocket? We all know devs want to make it into an extension (and are working on it)... so why was Pocket pushed so hard and couldn't wait a couple of Fx versions before being released in a way that would obviously create drama?
If you step back and think about these issues you'll see they're systemic. God damn right I'm concerned about Mozilla, a company I respect a lot, becoming a shell of what it claims it stands for.
Was it?
All I saw was it being integrated into Firefox, and there being a lot of backlash. Against that backlash, there were a couple of people pushing hard to justify it, but they were either independent or Mozilla employees (often from a different team) posting independent opinions. I don't think Mozilla pushed Pocket a lot. Pushing features through the release cycle is pretty common.
Bear in mind that Mozilla integrated Pocket because it was the kind of feature it wanted to have in Sync (or Accounts, whatever it's called), but decided to use a third party service instead of making their own. From that POV it's much more reasonable. Not denying that it could have been done better with a pluggable open API and an open source equivalent (or whatever), but it's not that bad from that lens.
Sponsored tiles was an experiment, IIRC. Mozilla wanted to see if non-annoying, easy-to-disable ads could be used to fill otherwise blank space. It seems to have failed. But I would guess that a lot of the devs were hopeful about this experiment. I (not a Mozilla employee, but I do contribute a lot) was, at least.
I am in the boat that wishes it was removable, perhaps as some kind of "default add-on", but it's not. I'm not removing FF because of it.
And as for ads: Were they tracking people with them? Were they sending back GUIDs of my browser every time I loaded a new tab? This is a legit question that would affect my opinion on the matter. The ads I see are brief, and cannot take more than a miniscule amount of data to serve. By those metrics, I have no problem with them.
...like most other features. Doesn't require pushing. That's how it works.
> obscure 3rd party service
Apparently it was a rather popular addon in Firefox?
> obscure 3rd party service Apparently it was a rather popular addon in Firefox? ==> What do you think the ratio of (# of pocket extension users / # of total firefox users) is? It's totally fine if FF had supported it as a pure "extension" (doesn't come preinstalled but required users to search and "pull" themselves if they wanted) but the criticism came from the fact that this 3rd party extension came preinstalled and was "pushed" to users.
No, I don't. They did with Pocket what they do with every nontrivial feature. Implemented it, and sherriffed it through the release trains. I don't think it was immediately plopped on a Firefox release, I recall seeing it on Developer/Aurora much earlier, which means it went through the release trains like everything else. The OP said, quote, "so why was Pocket pushed _so hard_ and couldn't wait a couple of Fx versions". How was it "pushed" "hard" if they did the _same thing_ they do for other features?
Yes, they made the decision to implement this feature. That doesn't count as pushing. I already illustrated why that decision made sense at the time.
Perhaps there was some backlash as it was on Aurora/Beta, I don't recall the exact timelines. IMO it's still okay to let the feature -- one which you still think makes sense and would benefit the userbase -- continue to ride the trains and hit a release while you try to understand the criticism and come up with a solution. It may be a better solution to disable it until a decision is made, but that depends on the perceived severity of the problem. Again, I don't see any hard pushing here, just a somewhat justifiable choice. I too would have preferred if they removed the feature when there was backlash, but I don't see anything wrong with the other solution. If you immediately backtracked every time there was criticism nothing would get done.
> but the criticism came from the fact that this 3rd party extension came preinstalled and was "pushed" to users.
Sure. But you gave the example of Instapaper (which you seem to be more okay with Firefox integrating with); I'm suggesting it was probably less popular than Pocket in FF or at least comparable popularity. I'm not disagreeing that integrating with a closed third party service is not good. I'm just pointing out a flaw in your Instapaper comment.
The Pocket tracking bug was filed in April 2015 [1] but the feature shipped with Firefox 38.0.5 in June 2015, just two months later.
On the bright side, that has lead to a more serious look at shipping parts of the browser as first-party extensions. I'm very much looking forward to that, even if I end up leaving all of them on.
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
38.0 was released on 2015-05-12. 38.0.5 then sat in the Beta channel for two weeks of testing and then it was released on 2015-06-02:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar#Past_branch_d...
I think I've seen this done for other features in the past, but yeah, this doesn't sit well with me.
(Still mostly okay with it though)
I feel that making the decision to make a feature (when there are good reasons behind it) is okay for Mozilla to do. Nothing wrong or malicious there. You evidently don't: we'll have to agree to disagree there. :)
I wasn't twisting definitions to fit my argument, I didn't feel there was anything wrong with deciding to implement something (when there are good reasons to) so I assumed you and the OP were troubled about something else.
Sorry about the pointless argument!
It sure seems to me it was pushed hard.
Given the deep pockets that have risen to develop the Web to new lengths, Mozilla has needed more money and more developers. They are lacking in the chrome (the UI), in tooling, in platform presence (the iOS version came very late!), and little by little, in Web features. Not to mention musts like tab separation into processes, things that are now implemented in every browser but them.
(Edit: removed parallelism.)
Imagine you saw that issue, and need increased revenues. You don't want to impact existing users, as you know they would be mad. What do new users see that old users don't? Those empty tiles in about:newtab. Those tiles are useless anyway, and from a UX perspective, new users don't understand what they stand for. Having a few example websites would be a good indication. It fits marvellously in the constraints they had.
How about Pocket? As we discussed, their chrome is getting old. In particular, the bookmarks feature is both old, has a lot of old bugs that don't get fixed, and they have wanted to do an overhaul for a long time (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697359). But they lack development effort.
If only there was a company that did bookmarks better than we did, we wouldn't have to do the work! Oh, there is: Pocket.
One last thing that they can do to increase revenue is to make competition among search engines be felt. So they switched to Yahoo!. However, Yahoo!'s perspective was to show the world that Yahoo! Search had grown to be much better. Unfortunately, it is still behind as a product in terms of UI cluttering, quality of results, range of inputs... They still don't have a cartographic service! Let alone a worldwide routing engine and a GTFS crawler... So they may disappear.
It has become phenomenally hard to compete against Google. Their best shot at relevance is Servo now, but given the huge amount of work that is, they will still need deeper pockets.
No browser engine is particularly parallel. Gecko is not really more or less parallel than any other engine.
Now we know they got another search deal but that wasn't always a given.
Most companies in the world couldn't dream of customers that care that deeply about the product. That doesn't mean you shouldn't take unpopular decisions when necessary, but it means you have to be deeply in contact with what your users care about.
Apparently Firefox users didn't care much for commercials in the browsers. Who knew?
This wasn't a one off mistake. It was calculated business decision that is a part of an industry trend.
Turning a blind eye to this is a recipe for getting perpetually reamed so others can turn a larger profit.
> "This group of people did something I don't like, and then they changed their mind and stopped doing it. But rather than being happy about fixing their mistake, I'm going to keep criticizing them for making the mistake in the first place."
You mistake negativity for the keeping of and referring to a tally sheet.
You would -no doubt- find little to object to in the following hypothetical statement:
"I'm still dreadfully concerned about my abusive spouse. My spouse has backtracked on the terribly bad policy of random bouts of unfocused rage followed by sporadic, intense emotional and physical violence directed toward my person. Good on my spouse for backtracking, but I still remember the long-standing pattern of similar behavior in our relationship. This pattern saddens and worries me. I'm still strongly considering walking out the door. I wish my spouse the best, but I'm fairly certain that I cannot trust my spouse and that my spouse does not have my best interests at heart."
Please note carefully that I'm not comparing poor corporate governance to spousal abuse.
I am -however- making the point that it pays to remember when people or companies fail to behave in a way that indicates that they even try to have your interests at heart. A momentary shift in strategy or behavior often fails to either turn into a lasting habit, or happens far too late to undo past harms.
If you allow yourself to get strung along by the latest olive branch, without considering the history of the entity making the offer in order to judge the offer's sincerity, you're gonna get played, time after time, after time.
Don't be disingenuous. That's a ridiculous and awful comparison and you know it. You should be ashamed.
I'm absolutely not being disingenuous. As I said, I am -in fact- not making a comparison between the situation with Mozilla and my hypothetical statement.
As I stated, I'm illustrating the general point that it often pays to keep track of when an entity has wronged you so you can weigh their current attempts at reconciliation against their history of wrongs.
Remember also that I was replying to the following statement:
> This kind of negativity is really common on HN and it makes me sad. ... "This group of people did something I don't like, and then they changed their mind and stopped doing it. But rather than being happy about fixing their mistake, I'm going to keep criticizing them for making the mistake in the first place."
I address the author's misconceptions in the first 'graph of my reply.
I pointed to and accounted for everything in my original comment and the follow-on comment.
When did I deny that anything I brought up in my original topic should be brought up? That's not what's going on here.
You appear to be claiming that -despite my repeated assertions to the contrary- I compared poor corporate governance to spousal abuse in my original comment.
I didn't.
I don't know how much clearer I can make this for you.
Edit: I remembered an old comment that I wrote a while back that explains how I feel about writing and how I try to structure my writing. [0] Maybe this might make things clearer for you.
To save you a click, I'll quote it inline:
"The world would be a far better place if fewer people would read between the lines of a given statement, and more people would make a habit of carefully parsing statements that others make.
When one writes words for general consumption, it's oh so tiresome to front-load one's writing with a bevy of disclaimers and preemptive clarifications. You will inevitably fail to include one clause or another, causing someone, somewhere to successfully misunderstand your words.
It's better to write exactly what you mean, as clearly as you are able, and -when writing for capable adults- trust that your audience is capable adults who know how to read what has been written and know not to infer meaning in inappropriate places."
Dropping Persona and preparing to lobotimize Firefox are my main annoyances.
Of course I was never much involved outside of using it sinve v1 and getting new users by installing it everywhere and talking about it since shortly after that
Most developers and the community are great. But the management level incl. their new CEO and their UI designers have little clue about their products and what their community is all about. Mr Eich was part of Netscape and Mozilla from the very beginning and created the Javascript language in a few days - he understood the community definitely better.
The transition from Gecko to Servo in their products will be critical for Mozilla. It will give them a competitive advantage.
FirefoxOS runs highend Android smartphone just as fast as Android 5x. So it definitely has a future, like WebOS is nowadays in every LG SmartTV, and Bada/Tizen is in every Samsung SmartTV (they use a 4 or 8 core ARM board with 2+GB RAM). And ChromeOS works fine on lower end notebooks.
Their new CEO Chris Beard has been with Mozilla for a long time as well, with a break. I also expect it was his decision to pull the plug on sponsored tiles in order to focus 100% on making content discovery awesome for users (maybe with monetization as an afterthought). Saying he has little clue about the community just when he made a decision I imagine the majority of the community supports seems a bit odd. One could argue he should have done this earlier, but don't forget that Mozilla needs revenue to survive, and 90+% of the revenue coming from a single partner is a risk that will bite Mozilla sooner or later. So in order to diversify revenue, this was a reasonable experiment.
> FirefoxOS runs highend Android smartphone just as fast as Android 5x. So it definitely has a future, like WebOS is nowadays in every LG SmartTV, and Bada/Tizen is in every Samsung SmartTV (they use a 4 or 8 core ARM board with 2+GB RAM). And ChromeOS works fine on lower end notebooks.
And Firefox OS is on Panasonic smart TVs.
I hope new management can come on board and bring back life, energy and trust to mozilla
I understand them wanting to make it in mobile space but the bar to entry in the mobile market is so damn high not even Microsoft can do it.
See this thread (including my replies to it) the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099816
While this might work for some (where leader is visionary and strong), I believe that the problem is here - companies that are seeing drop in growth are fixated on getting better numbers instead of increase engagement and user value. They will forsake their core functions, ignore users and make a "better" clone of existing competitor for short term bump in engagement. Every huge company did that before sliding downhill.
This idea could even be pushed further: they could have several alternative downloads that are simply pre-bundled extensions. Alongside their normal version they could have "minimalist", "dev tools", "max privacy", "social/chat helpers", and the like. Most people would still download the normal version, but this might introduce more people to extensions, who would normally never even know about addons.mozilla.org.
This is a real, non-rhetorical question: I started occasionally using the addon when pocket was still read-it-later and never changed usage patterns since.
I don't care about it by the way, I like Pocket and I use the functionality. But it was obvious that there would be drama.
Edit: In reply to the dead comment below, no I do not think Pocket should be preinstalled, and I really hope that's not the message that's getting through in my posts.
I think If people really cared that much about it, they would do something themselves, but alas its all to easy to moan and do nothing. /me shrugs
The probability of complaining, that actually solves any given problem in that moment, hovers around zero. Especially after all the BS people have been saying they have been seeing with Mozilla for some time now (enough time over the years to see hundreds of c/c++ code samples, walkthroughs, and to read their build instructions[0]) … its quite banal at this point. Too many people have worked too hard to share their knowledge on the internet for me to be satisfied with complaining about something that we all have a capacity to do ourselves to some degree if were commenting on hacker news.
But that's just how I feel, everyone else is free to feel differently.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...
There are like 50 build options, any random combination of which is likely to result in build failure, and your only option is to try a combination, wait 10-40 minutes for it to fail, try to diagnose what went wrong and fix it.
There's also the matter that Linux distro maintainers know more about building than you do, and include things like exploit mitigation, which you'll be missing out on.
And of course you need to monitor Firefox for security updates, and rebuild every time there's an update.
It gets boring pretty quickly. Even GNU barely manages to update their IceCat fork.
Nothing you mention isn't uncommon for any decent size project. It shouldn't act as a deterrent for expanding ones horizons, and implementing something you want done where there will be no chance in hell it will be added/removed upstream in any decent amount of time for free (10-40 min, but you don't have to compile the whole project while debugging… I made some mods in dom/base/ and netwerk/protocol/http as well as other places, and neither took more than 10-20 seconds to compile standalone while debugging). I tend to think security is mostly security theater anyways for what its worth. So many ways to get owned, and the user is usually the weakest link… and if you are targeted and don't know it, game over…
And if its boring for someone, they obviously don't have enough motivation, but maybe just enough to moan. Then again, the only user I have to support is myself for the things I want in the browser instead of a bunch of people who will probably never push a line of code with their complaints masquerading as requests… yeah, I can see how that can get boring.
Compromise is the name of the game, and if BSD development is any indicator, security/privacy focus users are not ones to jump in and help keep lights on in most circumstances
That said I'm not sure FF could have done better things, but in their situation I would be trying to find some revenue streams that weren't Google
In most cases, I'd agree.However, it's never a good idea to compromize on your mission statement. How does pre-bundled Pocket integration promote an open web? IMO, it goes against it.
While they are losing market-share, Mozilla are not running out of cash any time soon and they are not in a death spiral. They can afford to, and should think long and hard about how they diversify their revenue streams, rather than trying random decisions that alienate part of their userbase trying to find anything that sticks - which is the impression I'm getting.
If the declining trend continues, desktop Firefox would approximate zero market share in less than 4 years from now.
On mobile phones, the market share of Firefox is so small, it doesn't even show up on anyone's chart.[2]
Users wouldn't be fleeing in droves if they liked what Firefox has turned into.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#St...
[2] http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-december-2015-fight-...
I remember using Firefox since I was in college in 2004 and I can tell you what happened when I first tried Firefox 4. The performance was horrible for a very simple reason: the system requirements were increased _tenfold_ and it was pretty much impossible to enjoy browsing using it on older hardware.
Extensions started breaking and the menu options would suddenly change place, function or disappear altogether without any prior warning or explanation. Meanwhile, Mozilla devs would either ignore the feedback or post snickering comments on their blogs.
The constant version change made it so things were rapidly falling apart - you could no longer rely on Firefox to stay one and the same for any period of time.
I saw that Firefox was going downhill, but it was still far superior to all browsers simply due to the wealth of extensions it had. And now, what is the most recent change to Firefox paradigm? Locking the extension ecosystem inside a walled garden.
I currently use Palemoon and I look forward to Edge, which promises a basically open-source environment, which will include extensions. Now that´s irony.
It's just painfully stupid in every way. If it was a built in extension that by-default talked to a Mozilla hosted open source Pocket clone, we might be having a different conversation.... but I'd still be annoyed.
Just as annoyed as I am that Chromium (yes, Chromium, not Chrome) comes with a god damn Google Docs extension.
http://www.wired.com/2015/12/mozilla-is-flailing-when-the-we...
Can you explain what the revenue sharing agreement is, especially after so many Mozilla employees have vehemently denied that Mozilla got money from Pocket for the tie-up?
If they think it's what "the majority" wants - let them just ignore the hater devs and leave it. See how far that gets them.
They are removing it because it's a poor idea that's poorly thought out. People won't bite the PR.
With double the market share, maybe Mozilla could have pushed back longer and harder, but unfortunately that's not the reality we live in anymore.
I hold Mozilla to a higher standard, just as Mozilla ought to.
1. http://www.wired.com/2015/12/mozilla-is-flailing-when-the-we...
Good on them for backtracking on this, but it's a symptom of high level decisions taken without running them past anybody else. Pocket is another one of those symptoms.
There is no reason these things can get past development and the various betas without people yelling out "hey, we should not be doing this, it's damaging to our product". This happens in companies that have become too large to understand their own users.
And it's not limited to Firefox - Mozilla as a whole no longer understands its core mission. Its motto of "Freeing the web". Development on absolutely critical components of a free web such as Persona or a good email client stops, to make way for development on the completely unrealistic Firefox OS.
Not that the world doesn't need a free mobile OS, but Firefox OS is not it. Not only is it doomed to be awful (layers on top of layers on top of layers... browsers are not great for batteries), they're spending decades of manpower trying to match android 2.0, then selling that to users. I had the misfortune of trying out the Flame. What a disaster that was. I can't see myself ever trying out fxos again without a lot of changes and convincing, so go sell that to non-technical users...