There's a lot of power in branding, apparently. People keep saying things like, "Mozilla is a good company at heart", and I'm at a loss. Mozilla 2017 is nothing like the Mozilla that existed when the Foundation was established, or when the Mozilla Manifesto was adopted. Tons of key people left in a few different waves: first when Google pulled them off the project to go build Chrome, and then lots more who trickled out over the years during and after the Kovacs/FirefoxOS era. What remains is (a derivative of) the codebase + the name "Mozilla" + and, like, Mitchell. But that's it. Keep calling it the same thing, though, and somehow folks act like we're talking about the same thing.
Mozilla imploded—or rather, got Netscapified—years ago. To believe that Mozilla or Firefox is your old friend who's still helping you fight the good fight is incredibly naive and can only come from someone who hasn't actually been paying attention and is easily fooled by (trivially contradicted) surface-level details (like a name). I mean, it's not even like some philosophically tricky ship-of-Theseus problem. Mozilla is dead, people, and this isn't news.
Mozilla is still today doing incredible work. The work on Quantum was extremely forward-thinking in a way that most corporations cannot support; it brought us Rust, which is a fantastic contribution to the ecosystem.
Furthermore, Mozilla has always had troubles with judgement and mismanagement, this is not new. The problems that have been surfacing are old problems, they're just getting more severe.
Their whole mission is to have better judgement and management, advocating for the user instead of a corporation (or foundation). So it sounds like you're in agreement with the GP that Mozilla's decay is not news.
Are there? I see no evidence to support that assertion and a lot of evidence against it.
Market share matters. The last vote at the W3C about DRM video being the most recent example.
I mean, I probably qualify as reasonably savvy, and I have used exactly 4 browsers in the last 10 years: Firefox, Chrome, IE/Edge, and Safari.
I probably don't count as savvy, but my browser experience over the last 10 years has been a somewhat broader list. Having started with Firefox at V2, I switched (around '06) to my primary browser being Opera, with SeaMonkey as a secondary - especially when I want IRC; Firefox, K-Meleon, and Links are all in the background ready to go. I also used QtWeb for a brief period.
When Opera switched to being a Chrome clone, I jumped ship. SeaMonkey didn't provide the ease-of-use I wanted for an everyday browser, so I went back to Firefox. I'm now more often on Pale Moon.
Which Mozilla enthusiastically and Fully supported Google, MS, and Netflix in support of DRM.
Their fake unwillingness from 2014 was about as transparent as netflix's where by netflix claims it is "all the MPAA/Studios" why at the same time closing down all Open Access API's, and Locking down all their own wholey owned content behind DRM
This is not the first time user privacy has been invaded on Firefox or by Mozilla and it will not be the last
The fact that these Data Reporting features, and allowing FF to run "studies" on you is a OPT-OUT setting not a OPT-IN setting is all the proof I need that the Mozilla of old is long dead.. A Privacy respecting company would make such things OPT-IN, not OPT-OUT..
That is with out even getting into the whole Orwellian Ministry of Truth they are creating, or about 100 other things
The engineers at mozilla are NOT the problem.
Doesn't the fact that that's even allowed to happen point to a larger problem?
I don't know, Rust and Servo seem to show that there's still the hacker spirit that was there at the beginning, it's just they accumulated a lot of 'business types' if you will over the years and they need to put that engineering face back at the top, instead of being too focused at running a multi-million dollar enterprise.
I hope you're not pretending that Servo is somehow the fastest way to browse the web...
Firefox 57+ is absolutely not the fastest way to browse the web. I'm sorry, I tried.
it hogs my memory if there's no other software running
Maybe your system is different, but for me, FF 57+ uses much more CPU than Chrome, and unlike RAM, that's a statistic that actually affects something in a meaningful way (increased power consumption).
If you're worried about Chrome using RAM when nothing else is, you might be fetishizing the concept of free RAM.
I've stuck with FF because I'm a web developer-- sadly, the money led me there from other more interesting lines of dev work-- and I don't want to see a single browser dominate the web the way IE used to.
elsewise, I'd say, try creating a new FF profile, unfortunately afaik older profiles can still jank up the browser a bit
I see Mozilla as suffering from a crisis of identity, internally; it's acting as though it is staffed by believers in the manifesto but is now steered by those enamoured with The Bay Area and its ways.
Rust, Firefox 57, and even FirefoxOS are/were noble efforts to succeed in delivering on the manifesto. Pocket and this latest advert update smack of an executive that is thirsty to exploit the Mozilla brand for profit.
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy applies to do-good missions just as easily as it does to the worst of avaricious corporations or bloated gov't depts.
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 and 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." [0]
E.g. the company owner remains a company owner only as long as they are willing to go sufficient far to keep the company profitable; those who don't go bankrupt and lose their position.
The bureaucrat is not special in that respect - they are "just" the natural foot soldier of those who want to maintain an organisation for the sake of the organisation.
As such the backbone of any long-lasting organisation will be made up of those who are good at both maintaining their position in an organisation, and in protecting the organisation against inside and outside "threats".
Unfortunately such threats can include those who want to focus resources on the original goal of the organisation, at the risk of diminishing the role of the organisation.
Since Pournelle mentions the Soviets: to me this is one of the most dangerous parts of Leninist party theory: it involves rules meant to strengthen a party organisation against the threat of outside force, but it also made the Bolshevik party ideally suited for party bureaucrats and power mongers, whose prime goal quickly became the perpetuation of the party and the privileges of power.
A lesson should be to make any organization as weak as it can possibly be while retaining its ability to function. Unfortunately to function that needs an even playing field, or "as weak as it can possibly be" in the face of competing with multinational corporations quickly means something much bigger than we might hope.
this works for company, bureaucracies and everything else in life and is part of the entropy an organization accrues with time.
giving bureaucrats a weaker initial position will only extend the time before takeover.
If you can't be financially self-sustaining, then no level of desire to do good in the world will result in the long term ability to continue doing good.
It is like the phrase, Justice without power is inefficient and power without justice is tyranny. You need both profit and philosophy to do good.
After that they got into all kinds of "social signaling" shenanigans, and the rest is history.
They are horribly mismanaged on every level.
They have burned hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a second rate browser that has seen its market share collapse.
They took hundreds of millions from Google and in exchange unquestioningly supported Google's advertising and surveillance agenda.
They have consistently failed to introduce new features that would actually benefit new users.
They blame the "standards process" for their lack of innovation and features that benefit users when they know that the standards process is a b.s. game. For profit corporations break standards whenever it benefits them. Firefox is the only browser that follows standards written by Google, Microsoft, and Apple, while the other 3 break them, or force through their own changes whenever it benefits them.
Apple blocked 3rd party cookies and Microsoft defaulted to Do Not Track while Firefox kept doing Google's bidding to collect their checks. Just one example of many.
In the place of real innovation, being truly independent, and actually standing up for users Mozilla gives people dumb crusades like Net Neutrality.
Firefox could have used their market share to develop truly innovative features, like what Opera tried. For that matter they could have partnered with Opera to create standards for a true open web, but of course they never did that because the Google bucks were just to sweet for them.
Mozilla has been a failed organization for a long time. This is only the latest reminder.
You even say, "maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's)".
I suppose we should expect the goodwill of corporate sponsorship, but this relationship can quickly turn into the "sponsor" asking for things in exchange for donations.
This situation exposes a weakness and requires the recognition of the fragility of the open source model (at least for larger-scale projects). We've seen weird corporate-backed things in NPM projects before. It happens, but what is the better alternative? How do we prevent it? Most corporations only support open source projects out of self-interest: that is, they have a stake in seeing a particular project succeed because their stack may depend on the software.
They are due to poor understanding of your own userbase. Poor communication with users and employees. Complete lack of judgement.
These are sticks Mozilla puts in its own wheels. It's hard to make money, but it's easy to know what not to do. Simply asking your employees: "Is this a good idea?" would have yielded a clear "Fuck no". That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not.
> Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs
To call advertisements "user-enhancing" is an affront and betrays values like privacy that Mozilla claims to espouse
I do not (now -- at the time that person made that tweet, I did, but not on the browser) work at Mozilla.
However. The "tiles" concept was literally an experiment in whether it's possible to construct an ad system that does respect privacy.
The basic idea was:
* Advertisers submit their ads to Mozilla. Mozilla wraps them up into "bundles", made up of a bunch of different ads along with metadata to use in determining which to show.
* The browser downloads the "bundles" from Mozilla, and caches them locally.
* The browser, based on local data only it has access to, and the metadata in the bundles, decides which ads to show.
In other words, unlike a Google-style model where the ads are stored remote, loaded on demand, and the decision of what to show is made on the server side, this stored all ad content locally and the decision of what to show was also made entirely locally. So neither the advertiser nor the distributor could know whether a particular person saw an ad or (if they happened to) why the decision was made to show them that ad rather than a different one.
You may not like that, and you're free not to like it. But to argue that it "betrays" privacy is simply factually false. And Mozilla's mission is, in large part, to find ways to advance and sustain the web in ways that respect the users. Trying to develop a privacy-respecting way to deliver ads -- since so much of the web is dependent on ads -- is entirely within that mission.
Running a company by polling random employees is not an established successful management style. Its only you who is suggesting it, and then claiming that because they didn't do it, its a bad sign.
A developer is not a subject matter expert on how to market a product. Maybe you can restate your opinion.
Most development experience I have had (open source, exclusively) comes with continual interaction with, and and feedback from, a subset of users who use the software. This subset is populated mostly by power users, those who rely on the software for work, and those who use it regularly. They are the ones who understand which needs the software is meeting and which it is failing to meet, and who ask for intelligent and sensible features to be added.
The marketing departments don't have this built in compass. They create ideas that they think will be profitable to the company, and they simply don't have the necessary connection with the users and with the software to know which of these ideas will be perceived as awful by the user.
The ones creating the software are the subject matter experts on what that software should do, how it should behave, and what the users will find most useful, in this instance.
The marketers are subject matter experts on... Other stuff? Advertisements and buzzwords and increasing revenues by targeting certain demographics of peoples? I have experience with the marketing side of business that has perhaps reflected poorly on that profession, so I'd love to hear from anyone that can fill my knowledge gap.
He's suggesting that the most simple, stupid check one could think of (polling random employees) would already have shown this to be a terrible idea. They didn't even go that far. That is indeed a bad sign.
What are you basing this on?
I'm just a FF user, and I don't think it was a terrible idea, even though I personally wouldn't have gone that route.
Sure, and not doing any of that isn't a "terrible sign" as the OP claimed. Which is the point I'm countering.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
That's brilliant!
"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the new developer you hired" - HR
"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the fan choice for the new cafeteria's HVAC system " - Building Management
"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the calculations in the spreadsheets that the company CFO produced". - Finance department.
Hey, I think you're on to something here. We could eliminate entire departments here ! :)
Maybe it needs to cost $100k for someone in a suit to say "ask your employees, make use of their knowledge" before it sounds respectable?
This clearly wouldn’t work for a consumer product like a web browser.
Mozilla has accrued a lot of money over the years. So much money that they could have funded--just on interest--a comfortable loft somewhere filled with hackers on a decent salary who are fanatical about the open web, and maybe a single guy with a tie to "call google", in perpetuity.
That should have been the base case for Mozilla: open web, modern browser, users first.
Unfortunately, brass doesn't vote itself out for the greater good. A modern browser is a delivery platform. The "open web" is a marketing tool. And users are not as important as advertisers.
The rationale is that without clout, they'll be unable to prevent worse things from happening, so they have to allow for these compromises on the open web to maintain that clout, and every setback is relegated to "not our hill to die on," with every next hill becoming "not our hill."
It seems like an unavoidable tragedy, but if we look at similar organisations, can we imagine the FSF or the EFF making compromises on their respective missions, even if they lose popularity or even run out of funding?
I feel they would rather cease to exist than allow for corruption of their stated mission.
The problem with this is that the people working on this peripheral expansion missions don't think of themselves as peripheral. When there's a money crunch or a values conflict they will fight hard for theirs even at the expense of what the organization was always supposed to be about.
Yes, it might mean scaling back, which is one of the swear words in a growth-oriented belief, but that way, the money should be enough - it was enough for a decade, what changed?
Pocket, most certainly not, though it's nice I suppose. Hello was... I don't know what it was. Checking if the market is there at all? Not something I expected to be in a browser.
That is leagues ahead of native PDF plugins which are slow, buggy, full of vulnerabilities, closed source, require a deprecated plugin infrastructure and usually can't edit documents either.
PDF.js is one of the better things to come out of Mozilla.
Sure if it piques my interest I would download it, organize it but I wouldn't go through the pains of doing that for every pdf I lay my eyes upon.
You don't have to do that. Just set your browser to open the file in a real application. It'll automagically download to some temp dir (ie, /tmp) and you won't have to care about file paths or organization at all (unless you want to).
I have tens of research papers open in my tabs at all times. But for a good experience reading I open the full text in my pdf reader.
We can dislike it, but we need to reconcile it.
For some saving bookmarks isn't effective while a solution like Pocket fits them better. Hello was an experiment to see if making video communication more accessible would connect people. Consider the saying about how no one uses every part of Microsoft Word, yet everyone uses a different ~10%.
Anyway, I think it's great that Mozilla experiment and try pushing the web forward. If only they were more transparent and consistently made these things opt in.
Seems that's no different than opening with external program, or using a plugin, or using an extension. After all,those things can be updated, whereas the browser should have more core functionality that enable new document types to being opened.
The problem isn't that they're doing too much - it's that they have nearly no business model, and any attempt to create a business model appears to be selling out to users.
There are a lot of companies doing this now and Mozilla would be far more successful if they followed this model instead of trying to copy chrome's user experience on top of their inferior browser engine.
They hijacked Mozilla to have a private playground for fun projects paid for by the search engine integration.
I like my niche obscure anti marketing parasite browsers. But I am well aware there's a lot of Mozilla code in Waterfox and Pale Moon.
And ultimately its MS, Mozilla and Google who run this show. And out of those Mozilla is still the least bad.
Some guy posted here a week ago in wonderment over how Mozilla can maintain a browser for a mere $400M+ a year. $400M+ a year!!!
If it takes that much engineering to deliver something which is not substantially different than what we were using 17 years ago, I'd count that as an engineering failure.
* Display web pages * Show images * Play songs and videos * Deliver applications (via Java instead of Javascript, granted) * Download files, and more!
Almost anywhere outside of NYC and SoCal, $400M is still an epic shitload of money.
Well, how do you suggest doing this when it appears that the relevant decision-making parts of Mozilla do not answer to anyone "on our side" in any meaningful way?
It seems to me that the only solution is to make an organisation with a fundamentally different system of governance. By virtue of institutional inertia, I figure it would be very hard to do this by actually raising a competing project from the ground up and hoping to capture any of Mozilla's market share or developer base (not to mention the amply made elsewhere in this thread point that Mozilla is big and expensive for a reason).
The far easier, and quite well-tried, solution is to put financial and social pressure on the current leadership to voluntarily open itself to downstream control. The former may be most easily achieved by having an Iceweasel-style "condom organisation" gain traction - that is, someone who tries their best to replicate all of Mozilla's user-facing I/O (releases, sync servers...) in a timely fashion, systematically acts as a QC layer to strip bad decisions like this or Cliqz and otherwise does not waste developer time on niche interests like classic UIs. For the latter, whatever you may think of the person of the tactic, the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla. Even more cynically, it may be the case that they are the main way anything gets done these days. The (very significant, in my eyes) moral reservations aside, from a result-oriented perspective of what is most useful to reform Mozilla as an organisation, is there any good argument against the "identify a representative set of heads behind this latest measure and call for them" approach?
Yes. If anyone wants to do a git bisect to find when the Mozilla Corporation lost its integrity, we can say it was definitely "bad" by the time they forced out Eich in April 2014.
He was the only one higher up keeping that from happening and they didn't even wait until the body was cold to push that agenda.
This was the new interface, right? I just saw this the other day and though it looked pretty good; was actually considering a trial switch back (after moving to chrome years ago, when a single bad tab would take down the entire browser).
That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me.
I’m of the view that getting (most) people to consider switching browsers only comes every few years and requires a very large incentive; “We’ve fixed that one incremental problem” isn’t enough. A complete revamp would do it, but takes time to permeate into conciousness. And in the meantime they do this. “Squandered goodwill” seems to be spot-on.
so that's why you stick with chrome, a browser designed to send all your browsing habits straight to google, the largest online advertising company and commercial tracker in the world?
https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.htm...
Edit: (+) Sir_Cmpwn, At least not working for me when I try seeing the pages with H264 encoded ones, and when I search, this is what I find:
https://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what%E2%80%99s-the-differen...
"What Chrome Has That Chromium Doesn’t
AAC, H.264, and MP3 Support.
Adobe Flash (PPAPI)."
Chromium is not equal Chrome.
Remember, the extension was not there to advertise the show!
I don't know if that affects the way you're using the term "for advertising", but it affects how I care a lot.
Google’s behavior with Android/AOSP suggests they’re more than willing to make the open source version of Chrome useless in practice the second there is no viable competition.
I don’t see any organization other than Mozilla that can keep them honest.
Nope. According to their financial statement, the Mozilla Foundation had $69M in "cash and cash equivalents" at the end of last year, about $329M in investments, and literally gave away millions of dollars in grant funding. It's not entirely clear to me how the financial interaction works between them, but the privately-held Mozilla Corporation (i.e. the 1000+(!) employee company that actually makes Firefox, and which the Foundation owns as a subsidiary) had over $500M in revenue from their search engine deals...
See "State of Mozilla 2016" https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ and also check out the Foundation's financial statement and tax form PDFs on the bottom for more details.
The original reason behind them establishing Mozilla Corporation over Mozilla Foundation was that they can keep this practice going while being safe from taxmen reprimanding them for pocketing what is a charity income from tax standpoint.
Now, Mozilla Corporation bills Mozilla Foundation for "service offered at a market price" to do its "socially beneficial, free of charge and any expectation of remuneration" activity, which is selling ads.
You touch on an interesting point, maybe Firefox should be soliciting donations from governments who are concerned about the US surveillance state instead of relying so heavily on search ad revenue and being forced to turn to things like this to make a buck.
Although they should probably not be in charge of the actual development, is it really crazy to think that Firefox could be funded by governments? At some point it is a public service.
Let's not overstate things. Firefox 57 gained good will from some users. It also seriously annoyed others, both because of the loss of many useful extensions, and because the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time.
The one thing Mozilla still had going for them compared to Google or Microsoft was the emphasis on privacy and respecting the user, and yet I've read about several different cases in recent weeks where that trust has been undermined, this being the latest.
Really? I haven't experienced a single crash, and I was on nightlies before 57 was released, so I could try Quantum.
That has not been my experience, so let's not overstate personal anecdotes as facts.
I happen to be an existence proof for the bad experience group, but a few seconds with your favourite search engine will readily confirm that I am not alone. I don't know what the ratio of lucky to unlucky users is, nor did I claim to.
It was a poor taste joke at the wrong time.. Mozilla is gonna regret this.
This is such a terrible way to make an argument, present a case, or say anything that can't be said in a few dozen words. He has a blog, it's linked right there. I can't understand why people use twitter like this.
That said, everyone uses Twitter differently. I tweet a lot. Some people don't. I personally blog when I have a long-form, well thought out thing to say. I tweet whatever is on my brain at a given moment. Twitter is more raw, more personal. This is a raw, personal issue for me.
This is pretty bad though, I'd say this is worse than the Pocket thing because it's abusing the trust and good will of their users
What a difference a week makes!
Then this thing blew my machine up the other day, I lost days of work, and...hmm. I don't know why a company would ever do something like this, it's incredibly foolish.
Perhaps the problem is the fact that the Web is so complex that popular web browsers could only possibly be developed by corporations to begin with.
Not since the incident.
Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users, and they pull this crap right after. They absolutely should know better. They should have known better with Pocket; they should have learned from Pocket.
"Fork it" is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it's with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they're an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them. There's tons of Firefox forks, none of them get the point though, you might as well use Chromium. If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's).
Mozilla's role goes beyond the web browser as well. Its mission was to "keep the web open", "keep the web free". This goal was reflected in projects such as Firefox OS, Hello and Persona (and to some extent, Thunderbird)... but atrocious management made those projects a waste of time and money.
It's not Firefox you need to fork, it's Mozilla.