I just use Firefox with some extensions and have seen nothing like this. I also used Thunderbird briefly (like a month). What am I missing? Do you have specific examples?

If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it? The browser starts, I get to work, end of story. I get that Firefox has made some decisions people don’t like (Pocket and the suggested links on new tab) but that doesn’t mean they are annoying users on every chance or breaking my ability to work.

People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here.

Perception is Mozilla is not ran as an open source organization, but as an advertisement company with similar tricks to make users "engage with the product".

This stuff bugs power users, but if you watch people who aren't in the power-user set, it's pure usability poison to them. Ditto UI elements moving around after an auto-update. Confuses the living hell out of them. It's about as far from good UX as you can get—a mediocre UI that never changes is far better UX than a good one that behaves unpredictably, and I mean from the perspective of normal people, not HN nerds.

As someone who is annoyed now:

Partially true I'd say. I've also been surprised once or twice before by people who were oh so critical about Mozilla and then recommended using Chrome/Chromium or a derivative instead.

There's always been someone to hate on Firefox, at least since they introduced the awesomebar a long time ago.

And here I sit, wondering if

- it finally catched up with me what others had seen a long time

- if I changed

- if Mozilla changed

- or if I am the target of a successful smear campaign against Mozilla

I don't know. Right now however I want I want Google to work like in 2009 and my old Firefox extensions to work with the new supposedly (I think so, honestly, but I don't know) safer API, I want corona gone and I want my insanely powerful laptop to feel insanely powerful instead of sitting here waiting for a double digit GB more RAM to arrive :-/

No, everyone cared. Firefox went from market dominance to a rounding error usershare and consistently dropping. HN users aren't a significant enough portion of browser traffic to account for more than 0.001% of that. People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.

A browser that sold itself on its openness and extensibility is only slightly more open than Chromium, and explicitly limits its possible extensibility to wherever Chrome chooses to set it. Firefox has relegated itself to being a wonky Chrome that isn't connected to Google services. Nobody would choose that over Chrome except out of nostalgia or stubbornness. This is why Google pays all of Firefox's bills.

Personally I think the decline of Firefox usage had a lot more to do with Chrome’s performance superiority and objectively better stability for close to a decade. For close to 10 years, until the release of Firefox Quantum in late 2017, Firefox was stuck on a model where browser processes were shared between tabs. Chrome was the first browser to go process-per-tab with its release in 2008.

Process per tab was huge. Flash was still everywhere but tabs had just become a thing and people’s browsers were crashing more and more due to this combination. Mobile was barely a thing. Chrome grew and grew. If a tab crashed it didn’t take down the whole browser session. It was isolated. It’s comparable, for heavy web surfers, to when operating systems got protected memory, multithreading, and preemptive multitasking. A new world of performance.

Today the web is more stable because Flash is gone, mobile has helped push websites to be less piggish on memory use (I mean, obviously they are still pretty bad), ad blockers are more common, and so it’s easy to forget the history. But I switched from FF to Chrome in this period and then came back after FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab, and after Chrome got tied in ever closer to Google’s tracking business.

It's something more complicated, to balance resources with stability. I don't know the rules, but for example I have 3 windows with ~700 tabs split across them, which appear to be using 6 processes with 193 threads. (Also I use Auto Tab Suspender, so that probably influences it as well)

Sure, workflows I'm used to change, and sure they add in the odd experiment from time to time that is later abandoned, but it's at nowhere near the frequency Google does the same thing. Yes, Google cops a lot of criticism for this, but language used to criticise Google pales compared to level of vindictiveness I see thrown at Mozilla just in the comments here. It's like they been betrayed by their own mother.

It's even harder to explain given Firefox has clearly gotten better over the years. It's a bumpy ride like all software changes, but it's faster, more reliable, and more standards compliant than ever before. Yes, addon compatibility has been sacrificed to make that happen, but happened for a pretty good reason unlike say Google removing the interfaces that allow ad blockers to work effectively.

In the process they've made some hard core advances in the art, like Rust, and like WASM. From where I sit they've been more effective at this recently than Google. And yet what we hear about here is how Pocket doesn't work as they like. Really - does it matter, compared to the amount of good work that comes out of Mozilla?

Wikipedia relies on user donations, and yet they still spend vast sums of money on what might be described as frivolous side projects (eg. Wikipedia Zero).

Not so long ago (late 2000s) wikipedia ran on 39 servers, mostly squid proxies, and did not cost very much money to keep running. Given the increase in server performance I imagine they could run on a similar number of servers these days (maybe less with help from a CDN).

Now they spend nearly $100m per year.

So there is no guarantee that this would help Mozilla.

Compare the Wikimedia numbers given (nearly $100m per year to keep running) to Mozilla's, who last reported spending much more than that (over $173m) just in their non-software development spending.

Wikipedia raises more than it can spend, resulting in rising assets: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statis...

You're saying that Wikimedia's spending is somewhat rational, whereas Mozilla's revenue might disappear as the result of a single party making a decision to walk away. You're not saying that Mozilla is a ragtag group of browser developers with barely any money. (There was too much focus on "Mozilla obviously doesn't [have the money to waste]" in the earlier reading.)

We discussed this yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129794

For example, consider two features: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100 DumdumFeature - budget has $200

They currently receive $300 in donations, $50 of which have no strings attached. So there’s donation stream A with strings and $250, and donation stream B with no strings and $50.

Allocation looks like this: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$75, B$25 DumdumFeature - budget has $200, funded with A$175, B$25.

If I donate $25 and say “this can only go to awesome feature” the budgets after my donation end up as.

AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$100 DumdumFeature - budget has $225, funded with A$175, B$50.

If they allowed targeted donations to firefox/quantum/rust/MDN I would donate, as I'm sure many other will. As it is, I don't and won't even if firefox were to fail.

I’m not mad at anyone, I just want my donations to do as much good as I think they can do.

Best Practical, the company that does most of the work on the open source RT ticketing system, allows for sponsoring specific features or fixes:

* https://rt.bestpractical.com/NoAuth/Featured

I’m curious, what unneeded side-projects do they have?

Also annoying is how they constantly kill useful features like RSS or bookmark descriptions.

I use Firefox because I still like it better than Chrome and I like to support free software, but it's obvious to me that Mozilla doesn't really care about their users and they're too busy chasing shiny things. I expect they'll keep losing market share until they become irrelevant and disappear.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_(service)

Isn't this a symptom of being detached from reality? In a sense that they are in their bubble, and didn't had the need to look outside of it?

Maybe that's the problem, they didn't have to make it work because the money was already there.