Historically Google has been a really close Mozilla partner, not only sponsoring search, but also developers.

Today, Mozillas relationship with Google is extremely complicated.

ZDNET had an article back in April [1], that somewhat sums up how the relationship soured, but doesn't really touch on why and how they are still intermingled.

> Google, including services that track users such as Analytics?

Mozilla has a special deal with Google, that does not allow Google to use that information as part of their greater analytics or sell it to 3rd parties, as per [2].

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14

Sorry for being pedantic, as I'm sure this is what you intended anyway, but I do think its worthwhile pointing out explicitly: it does not contractually allow Google.

There are no technical restrictions in place; e.g. Google haven't provided Mozilla with an alternative analytics mechanism that consumes less data. All data is still sent by Mozilla to Google. They've just then promosed to do nothing with it.

A small but, I believe, notable distinction.

[1] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397

> data sharing settings in Google Analytics [1] letting you control how much analytics data is shared with Google.

It's in Google Analytics. It's all shared with Google. Or—more accurately—none of it is "shared" with Google, Google is just sharing some of it with you.

There may be settings allowing you to indicate your preference for what they will use for whatever internal purposes, but... Google have collected the data. There's no question of whether they receive it or not.

This really depends on your trust model. Do you trust Google engineers to implement their own permissions correctly? Are you concerned about mistakes, or that they're entirely lawless?

Physical control means you can independently verify that no sharing is done, but it's not the only trust model.

This is obviously not a viable approach pragmatically (Mozilla must e.g. trust the hosting provider for their own data, distribution pipelines for their software, etc.), but these are all cases where reasonable precaution can be taken (signing, etc.). Google Analytics' APIs support no such measures.

> Are you concerned ... that they're entirely lawless?

This is a bit of a strawman / hyperbolic question. A company or its employees needn't be "entirely lawless" (whatever this extreme phrase even means), to be outside of regulatory compliance. And the latter is something Google are found to be on a very regular basis.

They aren’t operating like a charitable trust that accumulates money during good times and then lives off the residuals. Which means if they ever piss off google we’re kind of fucked.

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-m...

Or use a Blink based web browser whose development is steered by Google.

Completely, utterly hypocritical. I'm sorry if you are blind to it.

Of course, you have to give up a few things to use it...

If you know something, feel free to say so. Otherwise you're just one more person on the internet spreading FUD instead of knowledge about one more company. We have enough of that already, don't we?

Twitter links seem to rarely work without having the app on mobile, it's disgustingly blatant dark pattern stuff.

> The http://mozilla.org tab discussing the importance of Privacy loads in the background, bringing along with it the Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. Hello, Google.

Anyway, I think Mozilla should address all these concerns ASAP.

If you click yes, it tries to set a cookie. If it can't set a cookie, it throws up a page saying "We've detected that JavaScript is disabled in your browser. Would you like to proceed to legacy Twitter?" etc.

https://threader.app/thread/1165858896176660480

Never trust businesses talking about values, or believe they are out there to protect you. Some of them are better than other for sure, but at the core companies don’t have values they stand for - they have hobbies, that they like to use to get more publicity.

Note that "customer" doesn't mean "user," the customer is the person that pays you money. Sometimes user and customer is one in the same, but with regards to free (as in no purchase by the end user) software and services the customer potentially has a very different set of values than the user.

So they don’t object to Facebook’s data privacy practices. They object to Facebook’s media-perceived role in Trump’s election. The reality is that if they applied the standard they are using to exclude Facebook from their advertising plan in a non-hypocritical way, they would quickly run out of places to advertise online. Most major online media outlets, including Google, have data practices that actual privacy activists consider to be abhorrent. Their policy isn’t about privacy - it’s about politics.

So please do not accuse me of “making stuff up”. I was simply repeating what literally every article on this matter says. If the entire media got that wrong, then fine. Ultimately only you know why you left. But I “made up” nothing.

You also seem to have assumed that the “employees” who called for my resignation reported to me. Not so: they all worked for the smaller Mozilla Foundation, which has arms-length structure as parent non-profit to the for-profit Mozilla Corporation of which I was CEO.

Again, that’s not “made up”. It’s a logical conclusion based upon the facts of what happened. You are saying that the facts of your case are not evidence that this could possibly happen to anyone else at that organization in the future. I hope you’re right. But the reality is that if they pushed one person out because of ideological differences, it is quite probable that it has happened to others and will continue to happen.

The bottom line is this: You made a minor donation to a conservative political cause years before you became CEO. That ultimately led to your departure. I don’t think even you would dispute either of those facts. This pretty well supports the conclusion that anyone with even mildly conservative views is not welcome there. I’m not sure how else anyone would interpret that. You seem to have a much more charitable interpretation of it than the facts support, but that doesn’t mean that people interpreting what happened in the most obvious way are “making up” that interpretation.

I'm disputing your absolute-sounding "Mozilla’s employees are fiercely liberal". Even if you define "liberal" broadly, are they all? Really, no moderates or righties? As I happen to know some, and so do other people, you seem to be using hyperbole at best, if not making things up.

Also your absolute, unhedged "If you have a conservative bone in your body, you are not welcome on the Mozilla campus." Again, counterexamples are known personally to me and others on HN such as @roca. So instead of persuading, you're exaggerating for some reason (to divide and conquer, to get sympathy, it doesn't matter -- the exaggeration is the point and it blows back, assuming you are actually trying to persuade anyone; perhaps you are writing not to persuade?).

Mozilla would have trouble with state law if they actively fired or demoted anyone over past political acts, per California Labor Law 1101 and 1102. Let's agree that is not the case.

That leaves subtler biases. You could be right, especially after I left, that anyone who is known to be "on the right" (conservative is almost useless as a clear political term) would face subtler kinds of hostility, skepticism, pressure. You are probably right about executives, but that's true at a lot of places. Anyone pushing buttons by boosting Trump at lunch or water-cooler time, wearing a MAGA hat, etc., would run into complaints and escalations.

But at this point we are far from your absolute, unqualified assertions about "are fiercely liberal" and "not welcome". See what I mean?

P.S. See https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/04/fighting-media-narrativ... including all the comments. I'm not taking anyone's side there, but if it were as absolute and simple as you asserted, many righties would have quit too and we'd hear from them. If I missed such testimony, please link.

I probably should have hedged it to some degree, but I feel like you’re being pedantic. Of course there are exceptions to every rule. This was a comment on HN, not a research paper. I was making a generalization, perhaps one worded too broadly, but one that you seem to eventually concede to in the latter part of your last comment.

FWIW, I mentioned your case as an example because I think you suffered a terrible injustice. I can’t stand hypocrisy, and to have things like this being brought forth by people that belong to a party that calls itself the “party of tolerance” disgusts me in a way that I couldn’t fully describe in writing. I don’t even agree with your stance on the issue you donated to, but I think that incidents like yours have a chilling effect on free speech, and that isn’t good for anyone. Too much of this kind of thing happens across the board. I find it fascinating that you seem to be defending the other side in your situation, but I am sure you have your reasons.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

Eich was kinda a moron and I don't think they realized that after he was onboard. IIRC, he saw no reason to move forward with the Firefox Quantum support and generally had some other bad software decisions.

I suspect the anti-gay stuff was more to justify a way to get rid of him and score some points in the process.

Not even Brendan's worst enemies have ever accused him of being a moron.

Brendan was a leading figure at Mozilla since the very beginning of the project. Everyone very well knew who he was.

I didn't agree with all of Brendan's decisions. For example I think we should have prioritized process separation higher than we did, and Brendan was partly responsible for deprioritizing that, which I viewed as a serious mistake. But Brendan made a lot more good decisions than bad ones and from that point of view, everyone I know was confident in him as CEO.

Engineers certainly weren't looking for an "excuse to get rid of him". I assume executives and the board weren't either, or they wouldn't have made him CEO just before the controversy exploded.

Quantum (or part of it; much good work done in C++ code too) is based on Rust and Servo, projects for which I was sole executive sponsor from 2010 onward: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224047.

It's fair to say Rust and Servo would not exist as such if I hadn't been at Mozilla.

I'm among the actual founders of mozilla.org, we started working on it in fall 1997. Earliest wayback snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/19981202152141/http://www.mozill...

The GP is not trying to defend Facebook here. Their argument is that Mozilla is not acting fully ethically, by seemingly treating Google specially. Therefore tu quoque does not apply. (Moreover, the argument is logically sound.)