I see 0 problems with this. Disney gets their exposure. Mozilla gets some money (I hope) and exposure. The users don't really get negatively affected. I hope this helps increase Firefox's market share to make it more competitive to Chrome.

The fact that Disney use DRM means that Mozilla should not have done this is a weak point at best. DRM is used by most media companies.

I feel like people just get angry at Mozilla for the hell of it without understanding that they have to pay their employees somehow. Also Mozilla could "team up" with any org and someone would find a way to get angry over it.

Mozilla is like Barack Obama for certain people, it's a symbol of everything they politically hate.

Teaming up with Disney is like Wearing a Tan suit or a bicycle helmet, it's only the worst thing ever when your politcal enemy is doing it and you have nothing better to complain about.

Disney is one of the worlds worst companies. Mozilla teaming up with them is bad because Disney is bad. It's straight forward.

Disliking the choices Mozilla has been making doesn't mean you instantly love Google/Chrome. We're fighting for a better web, not a less worse web.

Google literally works (or worked) on robots and AI for the military and participated in mass surveillance.

But Mozilla has a marketing deal with a Pixar movie with a Red Panda, and everyone loses their minds. Typical HN.

Yes, Google and Disney are bad companies.

Disney is one of the worst companies in the world? The rest of the world certainly doesn't think so. The rest of the world thinks of Disney as a company that pursues family content like Star Wars. Then we have mercenaries, weapons manufacturers, energy titans, big tobacco, or mega conglomerates like Nestle.

The context matters - when it comes to technology, the web and the Internet, Disney is pretty hostile as a media company that has an interest in restricting user's freedom when consuming media - going totally opposite of what Mozilla stands for (or rather, pretends to).

Nestle or oil companies have their own problems but at least those are completely unrelated to Mozilla's purported mission.

Yes, Nestle is a bad company. Disney is a bad company.

Do you guys all work for the same bot farm or something? Just because another company is bad, doesn't mean Disney isn't also bad.

If a news report placed Disney in the same conversation as the worst or most morally offensive companies, it would also be appropriate to accuse that outlet of engaging in intellectual shrieking.

So you should stop doing that if you believe they aren't related.

sure, especially if they owned said outlet

Really the worst company? Worse than Facebook or all this crypto companies.

I don't think Pixar/Disney have done any damages to web/tech. Only that should matter to mozilla

Yes Disney and Facebook are bad companies. Mozilla should strive to be better than Disney and Facebook.

This is like seeing Obama do a charity event with Halliburton and Dick Cheney.

Disney is probably the company most directly aligned against the values that Mozilla purportedly holds. They spent decades funding projects to kill the modern web.

Has Disney indicated that they have stopped being the bad guys? As far as I can tell, Disney is still pushing their dystopian nightmare world. The least that Mozilla can do is not normalize them.

> I hope this helps increase Firefox's market share to make it more competitive to Chrome.

It's got a long way to go :(

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

As of posting, it's at 4.18%, similar to MS Edge, and basically in the bottom-rung of the also-rans. For comparison, the real contenders are Chrome at 63% and Safari at 19.84%.

I'm always skeptical of these reports because they rely on tracking data collection that Firefox has been stricter and stricter about blocking. Inside Mozilla we had different numbers which didn't line up with the public marketshare figures. StatCounter in particular was infamous for under-reporting.

> Inside Mozilla we had different numbers which didn't line up with the public marketshare figures

How did they obtain those numbers?

How much higher would the internal numbers tend to be vs StatCounter?

> Inside Mozilla we had different numbers which didn't line up with the public marketshare figures

People inside Mozilla are more likely to use Firefox - big surprise?

They'll push it as an ad pop-up, is the problem.

Modern Firefox borders on being adware, like Opera was back when Phoenix was first released. And it's more aggressive about pushing ads than that ever was. At least those were constant and stayed in a little banner area, rather than interrupting you while you're trying to do stuff.

I use Firefox as a daily driver and I've never seen a pop-up ad from Mozilla. Are you fantasizing about what you imagine might happen, or what has actually happened? If the latter, please provide some evidence.

They use pop-up ads for Pocket, or their recent "color ways" thing, or whatever, pretty often. They also like to pop in new tabs and move focus to them, which is at least as bad.

The evidence is using Firefox for any length of time, with default settings (maybe there's a way to turn this off, I dunno, I use Safari most of the time these days so it hasn't been worth figuring out, but happens enough to be pretty annoying even in my limited use of FF on my Windows gaming PC)

Pocket only appears on the new tab screen. That's not a pop-up.

Colorways did have a pop-up, but it was an announcement of a new feature, not an ad, and didn't repeat.

I haven't seen the pop in new tab behavior you're talking about. That's so far out of left field I have to wonder if you have some sort of extension installed that's causing your problems.

Maybe it's a matter of configuration—I've been using Firefox since it was named Phoenix and I could have turned off the behavior you're upset about. But a quick web search for "firefox pop-ups" and "firefox advertisements" doesn't show anybody else complaining about this. Given that people hold Mozilla/Firefox to a much higher standard than other browsers, I'm inclined to believe it doesn't exist.

And all that aside, you've still provided no evidence that Mozilla plans to make this Disney ad a pop-up. It's just a fantasy you've concocted.

> Pocket only appears on the new tab screen. That's not a pop-up.

I've seen nag "notification"-type pop-ups advertising Pocket and other things, that I have to dismiss.

> I haven't seen the pop in new tab behavior you're talking about. That's so far out of left field I have to wonder if you have some sort of extension installed that's causing your problems.

It's every single time it updates even if there's nothing any normal user needs to know about in it. Just today I remoted in to a work machine with FF on it, and already open, and sure enough, there one of these was, staring right at me. Somehow I get by OK in Safari and every browser before FF started doing this, without having changelogs pushed at me as an excuse to raise my "brand awareness", which I assume is why they do this.

> And all that aside, you've still provided no evidence that Mozilla plans to make this Disney ad a pop-up. It's just a fantasy you've concocted.

You don't expect them to do what they did with the Colorways announcement? Maybe they won't, but I'd be surprised. I don't know why they'd do this and not push it out over their favorite (and, if counted by audience size and effectiveness, practically only) advertising channel, which is to push it at people using their browser.

[EDIT] Oh man, it just occurred to me that they probably did the obnoxious Colorways announcement in the first place to measure its "engagement" precisely in order to sell this kind of stuff. Otherwise there was no reason to make such a big splash and interrupt people's workflows over putting some UI theming back in a browser that already had it, years ago. I'd wondered why they made such a big deal out of that and pushed it out in such a strange way, but that makes all the pieces fit together.

> I've seen nag "notification"-type pop-ups advertising Pocket and other things, that I have to dismiss.

Any chance you have a screenshot of this? I see those kinds of notifications for Safari and Edge (on macOS and Windows), but not Firefox.

Nah, but they're UI tooltip-type mini-windows attached to the relevant UI element (the Pocket button, usually), IIRC, except not requested by user action. If I install FF fresh or sometimes after updates it'll decide it needs to try to sell me Pocket again.

[EDIT] Also, I've not seen what you're talking about with Safari (but I believe you—I probably haven't seen it because I use Safari almost exclusively, on Apple operating systems) but I know exactly what you're talking about with Edge. Ugh. That and the little nags about OneDrive and shit down in the system tray. It's weird, back in the heyday of hating Windows—when I was even a really heavy Linux user, in fact!—I never really hated them, but I kinda do now, mostly over their turning into ad- and spy-ware (hm, there's a pattern here).

> Nah, but they're UI tooltip-type mini-windows attached to the relevant UI element (the Pocket button, usually), IIRC, except not requested by user action.

This sounds like a popover (not sure what the Firefox term is), but I have only ever seen it in response to an action.

As others have mentioned, there are definitely pages that are opened by default on browser starts/restarts, along with tab modal dialogs (also on restart). But yeah - I can't recall seeing a popover featuring Pocket that just happened by itself.

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popover_(GUI)

If people using Disney+ get an ad for Firefox, that would be great. Firefox needs more exposure to combat Chrome's ads in all of Google's apps.

Now that might be an interesting arrangement.

I'm still skeptical that more focus-stealing advertising in a browser that saw early success in no small part precisely because it eliminated focus-stealing advertising from the Web, is a promising direction to be heading. But this take is at least interesting.

> they have to pay their employees somehow

What are their employees doing though? If they're churning out BS like this, are they even necessary?

Most Firefox features that gave it marketshare long ago have been left to rot if not outright deprecated. What remains is a terrible Chrome knockoff.

---

Edit: this comment is rage/venting so I'll elaborate: my problem with Mozilla's recent (~5 years?) evolution is that Firefox's power-user features that not only gave it its original marketshare but are the last line of defense in an increasingly user-hostile web are being left to rot if not outright killed off while being replaced by useless garbage like this and while their marketshare continues to dwindle (no surprise there considering any differentiating features are on the back-burner), their CEO increased their compensation to ridiculous levels.

Firefox is the most user-hostile FOSS software I know of - on-par if not worse than a lot of paid, proprietary software. Upon first run it'll load several tabs with Google Analytics spyware, has Pocket, ads/sponsored links and telemetry enabled by default (the latter is in breach of the GDPR) and makes bold claims about privacy while it doesn't even come with a built-in adblocker (even its strongest tracking protection is inferior to uBlock Origin and not even enabled by default). Every update will interrupt your flow with a useless "what's new" tab (and I think the recent "Colorways" update had its own tab/modal in addition to the usual update). I'm worried this new development will also have its own annoying notification next time I start the browser.

I'm always confused by the Mozilla hate here on HN. I mean Firefox works quite well as far as a browser goes, it's infinitely less evil than Google who is molding the web to their advantage and it's way more customizable than Safari.

It's truly weird and I don't understand it. I mean not to defend Firefox but the HN reaction is almost comically extreme.

---

Chrome: ...and so our company's puppy kicking campaign was a total success. In other news, we're updating our terms of service so that you agree to hand over your first born child.

HN: Meh, I'll still use Chrome though.

----

Firefox: Today we fixed a bug that...

HN: OMG FIREFOX SUCKS. I'M USING CHROME NOW.

You can use de-Googled variants of Chrome that serve less telemetry, by default, and are more private, by default, than Firefox. They're also faster. And they're open source.

Do these forks also undo the changes that google makes to chromium to push their agenda?

If variants are on the table, there's also IceCat and LibreWolf for the Firefox side.

Behaviours that break expectations they've built up themselves hurt more than people just expecting Google to do Google things. I would posit that people that feel that way generally do not use Google's products, so it's viewed as not their problem, and also not surprising, when Google does something they don't like, but for Mozilla, it's felt as a betrayal of trust.

Google went through this a decade ago, when people stopped believing don't be evil was something Google cared about.

With Google it's fairly clear there is no expectation of privacy - Google doesn't particularly boast about it, and the fact that there's a ToS and "privacy" policy link below the download button on the Chrome website's page reinforces that.

If you ignore the privacy aspect, Chrome is actually a very good browser and has a healthy ecosystem of extensions. A lot of productivity-enhancing tools are distributed as Chrome extensions.

Firefox on the other hand constantly boasts about privacy which just gives a false sense of security - actually obtaining privacy with Firefox requires not only opting out of Mozilla's own bullshit such as Pocket, sponsored tabs/links and telemetry (the latter should be opt-in as per the GDPR) but also install a third-party ad blocker such as uBlock Origin.

Browser-wise, Firefox isn't stellar - it's slower than Chrome, lacks certain features and the extensions ecosystem is boring with a lot of the extensions that used to make it great have been killed off with the switch to Web Extensions.

At least with Google the business model is very clear, while Mozilla pretends to be on your side and fight for a better web experience while in reality being as nasty (if not more) than the competition.

> At least with Google the business model is very clear, while Mozilla pretends to be on your side and fight for a better web experience while in reality being as nasty (if not more) than the competition.

Really? They are as nasty (or nastier) than Google.

> Firefox on the other hand constantly boasts about privacy which just gives a false sense of security - actually obtaining privacy with Firefox requires not only opting out of Mozilla's own bullshit such as Pocket, sponsored tabs/links and telemetry (the latter should be opt-in as per the GDPR) but also install a third-party ad blocker such as uBlock Origin.

Presumably, they are nastier than Google because they have relatively anonymous telemetry data that doesn't include anything remotely private (seriously, take a look at `about:telemetry` and let us know what you find that breaches your trust), or because their sync product is end to end encrypted by default (unlike Google) or because they allow you to run your own sync server if you wish. Or maybe it is because the entire package is open source and extensively configurable and includes legitimately useful features like containers and tracking protection (wait, Google doesn't include that?).

Someone needs to stop taking hyperbole pills.

this exactly plus also Mozilla used to be the "underdog" you rooted for when they were still small and weren't doing massive marketing campaigns and instead were innovating and doing cool stuff. somewhere I still have my Firefox logo shirt from when I was in high school. only a fool would maintain loyalty to a brand name despite massive personnel and mission statement changes over the years. I would like to like Firefox and Mozilla again but they haven't done anything to earn that from me in years.

Every other browser caught up on features, and some bad things FireFox didn't have originally, it now has (ads, spyware). I don't really know why I'd recommend it to anyone these days. Early on, I was installing it everywhere anyone would let me, because it was so great compared to the alternatives.

I think it gets emotional because a lot of us used to really like Firefox, and we've watched it wither and rot due to bad decisions and what sure looks like a bunch of parasites feeding on its cooling corpse (and, to be fair, some really tough competition from Google and their massive advertising push for Chrome).

Meanwhile, the organization did manage to spin off a couple really great or promising side-projects (Rust, Servo, MDN) but then pulled the rug out from under them.

I wonder how many of these people complaining have even used it lately. Firefox with ublock is indispensable for me. I can't do DNS blocking everywhere all the time. You can disable any BS experiment stuff they put out through the about:config page. Chrome OTOH is spyware trash with a google account forced login dark pattern built right into the browser. I could do degoogled chrome but I don't see the point. What do I get? Floc style experiments?

I am using it lately (I have to use it, as on Windows and Linux there isn't anything better), which is why I'm so pissed off at it.

I agree with you that Firefox with uBlock Origin is a killer combo, however getting it to that stage takes a bit of effort (why should I have to do that in a browser that boasts about privacy all the time?) and it feels like you have to constantly fight Mozilla - whether it's opting-out of various built-in spyware such as telemetry, crapware such as Pocket or "features" such as sponsored sites/tabs (again, all in a browser that boasts about privacy), redesigns such as the new tab bar, or the constant nags after every update.

It is - my comment is just pent up rage/venting in hindsight, I'll edit it.

Yes, I agree that it's still less evil, but it used to be so much better and clearly going downhill. Initiatives like this don't inspire confidence it's going to become any better.

i think you are misunderstanding a lot of the negative sentiment towards mozilla, IMHO much of it is frustration rather than hate. people expect all the BS from an evil surveillance ad giant like google, but as someone else said below, all the dumb decisions feel like betrayal to those who have been and are still loyal firefox users

I'm seeing active misinformation/free floating hostility in this post. There are ways to express discontent that don't sound like Mozilla murdered your puppy, but that is somehow the tone of some of these posts.

> it's infinitely less evil than Google

The thing is Mozilla get more than 80% of its revenue from Google.

It’s fine to question if they are not just an extension of Google at that point. They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers; while pushing things like https everywhere that makes ads and trackers life easier.

>The thing is Mozilla get more than 80% of its revenue from Google.

Why criticize them for this in a thread _about_ Mozilla diversifying their revenue?

Half of HN seems to hate them for being so dependent on Google and the other half seems to hate them for having profitable (if small) ventures that reduce their dependence on Google, like the VPN or Pocket, or this.

>They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers

This is total garbage and I suspect you know that. If not, please do some more research.

https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi...

https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest...

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#native-file-s...

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

Diversifying their revenue with equally-hostile sources is not really solving the problem, not to mention that if Mozilla needs money, maybe better management of their existing money would be a good start.

What other sources of money exist? Look around you, years of lax anti-trust enforcement has left a wasteland for any tech company that's not funded by Saudi Oil money (YC / Softbank / Venture Capital generally) or a top N tech company like Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft. And the situation outside of tech is way worse.

The gains in the average 401k are primarily due to the 40% of it that is Tesla / Facebook / Apple / Amazon / Alphabet.

Microsoft (Bing) has their own browser so why would they bother with Firefox, same for Apple. Yahoo is dead. Facebook is evil. Google probably only does it for antitrust reasons.

In the good old days there was the concept of making a product and getting your customers to pay for it.

I believe there's enough value in a user-agent in a world where browsers are increasingly user-hostile. Sell a browser with out-of-the-box security & privacy features such as ad blocking (with officially-maintained & reviewed filter lists), spyware protection and some enterprise-friendly features that are best implemented in the browser (TLS interception, DLP, etc) instead of shitty middleboxes.

> This is total garbage and I suspect you know that. If not, please do some more research.

I take the bait.

> https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185

Firefox doesn't block Google Analytics. This is not true.

The rest is PR fluff. Can you cite one feature that provide better privacy than Brave that blocks ads and trackers natively?

Yes it does. It isn't enabled by default because it breaks some websites. Enhanced tracking protection is not marketing fluff.

err, sorry, but what? HTTPS everywhere does not help ads/trackers at all. It _does_ prevent your ISP to inject ads in your webpages, something that was done by quite a few US ISPs. And more importantly, it prevents anyone not between you and the TLS termination from snooping on the contents of your communication, which is a definite upside.

There are a bunch of valid reason to dislike Mozilla, this is a really weird hill to die on...

Imagine thinking HTTPS is a bad thing, jesus... They'd probably be even madder if they found out how much involvement Mozilla had in getting LetsEncrypt off the ground.

> They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers

Really? Take a look at https://blog.mozilla.org/security/category/privacy/

The vast majority of these have been doable for a decade with open-source, permissively-licensed add-ons such as uBlock Origin so they're quite late to the party (especially when they could literally bundle the aforementioned add-ons as built-ins), not to mention that a lot of these only work on the strictest level of tracking protection which isn't enabled by default - providing a false sense of security to less technically-savvy users.

That is a different argument than doing nothing.

You could argue that they're doing nothing in the sense that they're not doing anything extra that other browsers (who don't boast about privacy at every possible opportunity) don't already do. For a browser & company that makes privacy claims all the time I'd expect them to be ahead of the others, especially when permissively-licensed solutions exist that can be bundled with little effort.

> You could argue that they're doing nothing in the sense that they're not doing anything extra that other browsers (who don't boast about privacy at every possible opportunity) don't already do.

You could, but you would be wrong, right?

Well yes indeed, feel free to disagree; just trying to explain my understanding of the parent's argument.

> What are their employees doing though?

This really isn't hard to find: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/

While the comment above is certainly hyperbolic, a Mercurial link listing non-hyperlinked usernames of committers that may or may not be direct employees is a somewhat simplistic & ultimately insufficient response.

Mozilla recently laid off a significant portion of Firefox developers, while announcing that they are "reducing investment in [...] platform feature development, and transitioning adjacent security/privacy products to our New Products and Operations team", all the while increasing upper management remuneration (management had already made up close to 50% of salary expenditure in recent foundation financial reports)

> While the comment above is certainly hyperbolic, a Mercurial link listing non-hyperlinked usernames of committers that may or may not be direct employees is a somewhat simplistic & ultimately insufficient response.

The diffs are linked and it is pretty easy to see if the authors have mozilla.com email addresses.

I don't really think it is all that simplistic - you can very easily see what at least a portion of their employees are doing. I think people can fairly easily judge based on that whether they think they are necessary.

Perhaps if the poster had asked a different question, a more "sufficient" response could have been provided.

whoa! Don't hold back...

> In celebration of “Turning Red,” streaming on Disney+ on March 11th, we are creating new Firefox desktop colorways and mobile wallpapers based on the movie as an optional way to show your personality through your browser. We’ve also created a destination for all things 2002 nostalgia and will be having conversations with people about their journeys to embrace their true colors online.

Making a couple themes and an ad site couldn't have been a big project, presumably this is the sort of thing a couple marketing interns can throw together in a couple months, right? If this got Mozilla a nice check from The Mouse which they can use to fund browser development, I don't see any downsides here.

I'll agree. It also seems like taking good advantage of a coincidence:

The movie main character looks like a red panda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_panda) which I think is the mythical firefox.

What makes you think this money is going to development of the browser instead of… everything else they do?

Money is fungible, some of the pot goes to development, this is adding to the pot.

This is clearly a commercial arrangement for Firefox. That would be the province of the Mozilla Corporation, which runs the browser.

> I don't see any downsides here.

I do. Next time I see a blog.mozilla.org post here I will ignore it and maybe miss a great technology blog post.

The headline is posted here, it should be possible to determine if it is a technical post or not.

If you've decided to impose some extra downside on yourself... I think that's a bad idea, but the rest of us don't suffer for it.

The great tech posts are mostly on hacks.mozilla.org. I think blog.mozilla.org is mostly for firefox update stuff and Mozilla Foundation stuff.

Not sure how many new users last colorways experiment has brought, but I think Mozilla should prioritize working on actual browser features to catch up with Chrome. There are still problems with chat/video conferencing apps, e.g. MS Teams, that work even on Safari. And there are smaller things too: https://wpt.fyi/compat2021?feature=summary

It's not either/or. They can do both. AFAIK, marketing people aren't coding C/C++/Rust browser engines so they're free to do their own thing.

Mozilla let go a large number of developers recently.

They were, for the most part, not Firefox developers though. Most of them were working full time on Rust or research projects like Servo.

Servo was the experimental renderer that may have become the future renderer for Firefox. Without an experimental/skunkworks team the development of Firefox will remain iterative and focused on maintenance and feature parity.

Firing the Servo team was Firefox tapping out. That's it. From here on out expect it to be nothing more than a vehicle to serve comarketing needs of the broader Mozilla organization.

I have commits in the Servo project, I know what it is. Probably better than you do.

The parts of Servo that could easily be integrated in Firefox are already integrated into Firefox. The remaining parts, like the layout engine for example, had a lot of design flaws and they were in the early stages of completely rewriting it when the project was cancelled.

https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020

So when you say "may have been", that needs to be read with the understanding that it literally would have been years before that investment _might_ pay off, and that's a hard sell when everyone is screaming that Firefox ought to be improved now.

I'm disappointed about it nonetheless though, it was a fun and welcoming project for outsiders. And I thought that Pathfinder was pretty close to being usable, so that's disappointing too.

I understood that those flaws existed. If Servo were just an iterative improvement those flaws would be scandalous, but the flaws are to be expected because it was a radical experiment.

The whole point of having an experimental feature team is to have someone working on things that may not pay off, because some of the time those efforts will push the product forward by strides; AFAIK, Mozilla has no such team for Firefox anymore. Those opportunities to easily integrate experimental-borne improvements simply no longer exist for Mozilla.

Firefox is a dead product; there's no serious efforts underway to meaningfully improve its user share. Mozilla is obviously, openly pivoting its focus towards other services and goals.

Marketing people aren't free either. I'd rather have that money go towards browser development.

Marketing people can be free if their work generates enough revenue for the company that it exceeds their salary. They can literally be profit generators. Same goes for any employee, really.

That reasoning applies to all employees, of all roles.

However, the behaviour of certain employees can undermine the profitability of others. Mozilla appears to be on the path of being a reseller of services and marketer of brands, at the expense of attracting FOSS developers.

Firefox is already as good or better than Chrome.

In the long HN thread from a few days ago the consensus was that Mozilla should focus on Firefox and actively engage in promoting Firefox to increase market share. Here Mozilla is clearly doing that and very well IMO, and now its "stop wasting money blah blah blah." It just so easy to tear people down, that listening to it is usually a waste of time.

> Firefox is already as good or better than Chrome.

I've been a Firefox user since its inception, but I don't think it's better than Chrome and it hasn't been for a very long time.

Chrome is faster on all the devices I've tried it on, and by default it serves less telemetry to external sources than default Firefox does. It also supports uBlock, Decentraleyes, et cetera and de-Googled forks, like Chromium, are easily available.

I disagree; I used Chrome for a decade but recently switched back to Firefox because I found it increasingly bloated, and the Chrome team keeps making user-hostile decisions that works to circumvent privacy on the web.

Saying "Chrome supports the open source package its built on" seems like a cop-out as well, because it's not the same browser. That's like saying MacOS is awesome because it was built on BSD, and BSD is easily available. They bare little resemblance to each other.

uBlock origin is incompatible with the upcoming Manifestv3.

That's a bummer; will that effect all chrome-based browsers?

Most likely. I can't see any of the open source projects having the resources to maintain backwards compatibility for anything Google doesn't want.

I use Firefox because the unlock support on Chrome is patchy. I still use Chrome for desktop mostly, but never on other platforms

> by default it serves less telemetry to external sources than default Firefox does

What do you mean by this?

Shhhh, this money's going to a good cause. Namely middle management bonuses... /s

>but I think Mozilla should prioritize working on actual browser features to catch up with Chrome.

But how would that promote Mozilla's brand awareness while generating corporate synergy?

Does MS Teams actually work in Safari? I was under the impression that it was Chrome/Edge only.

I believe it does if you disable the tracking protection. The disgusting mess that is Microsoft auth relies on dozens of separate domains and I guess ITP blocks cross-domain cookie access. I don't know of a way to disable it per-site though so you either have to use a separate browser or severely compromise your privacy by disabling it globally.

While some features does not work on Safari, at least it allows joining call and participating with voice chat. Opening Teams meeting link on Firefox doesn't even display "Continue on this browser" button.

'We're committed to an open web - that's why we're teaming up with Disney, the company that locks all their content behind DRM.'

Mozilla fought battles against H264 and video DRM and lost both, giving up marketshare to Google and Apple in the bargain. Why keep wasting energy on a war they already lost? The market spoke and HN posters like you and me are the only people who care.

Because for every battle they lost, they won several others. The only reason we're not all using Internet Explorer is because Firefox lost some battles and won many others.

Yes, that’s right. The perfect way to operate is to have complete ideological purity. As a matter of fact, it is embarrassing that Firefox even runs on Windows (a closed source operating system that has integrated telemetry) and dare I say that perhaps Intel processors are unacceptable too?

Firefox should only run on completely open source and open firmware open architectures. Anything less is tantamount to endorsing crimes against mankind.

I am currently preparing a breadboard and expect to be completed with my port by 2042. I am going to have to sift for metals in my local stream in order to create resistors that were manufactured by pure provenance.

Currently uncertain about my own personal lineage, though. Have I had an unkind ancestor who did not believe in open source? Is it ethical for me to participate given such a taint? Questions of great import. I will consult a pure institutional review board before proceeding.

These same people would then complain that Firefox's market share is abysmal.

There's a large difference between running on top of a platform built by an ideologically-opposed organization, and actively aiding an ideologically-opposed organization with marketing agreements.

n-gate sprung a leak again

a new pasta is born?

What media company does not use DRM?

I'm able to watch programs on PBS.org and the BBC iPlayer without Encrypted Media Extensions. Also The Late Show with Steven Colbert on CBS.com and Seth Myers on NBC. There are probably lots of others, I don't watch very much television.

iPlayer is regionlocked i think

To me there is a world of difference between refusing to send me files based on where you think I am and requiring me to run your code on my computer to ensure that I don't do something that you don't like with the files you sent me.

It is indeed, but it still doesn't use Encrypted Media Extensions.

GOG, Weightless Books and Bandcamp immediately spring to mind.

What movie company?

GOG sells a handful of DRM free movies, mostly gaming related.

Drafthouse

Sounds like you've got a decent list of companies where you can purchase DRM free media, do you have one released publicly somewhere?

... No.

I've been meaning to start a website. This article rather resonated with me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30328120

Please do start one! If you're open to the idea of it being on a pubnix, I run one at http://marvilde.cc, and would be happy to get you set up.

Or Linode/Hetzner are pretty cheap, I don't have experience with other VPS providers.

Mozilla died years ago. Sad to see what a zombie org it has become.

Mitchell Baker needs to step down.

This article is blatantly just an ad for a Disney movie with almost no interesting content. I'm not sure I have ever seen something like this rank so highly on HN. What am I missing? Why are people upvoting this?

Posts aren't only made for positive portrayal of their subject... it could just as easily have been made as a criticism of what Mozilla is doing.

I guess I am missing the criticism then. What is the problem with a sponsored content blog post? This will have zero impact on the average Firefox user. If people want to engage with this content, they can. If they don't, they are free to ignore it.

It's yet another example of Mozilla's insanity.

HN: Mozilla depends way too heavily on revenue from Google paying to be the default engine. They need to find other ways to make money.

Also HN: why is Mozilla wasting time promoting a Disney movie?

Maybe it should just align the incentives and get the users to pay for it? The Enterprise™ spends millions on very dubious security products. On the other hand, the browser is on the front line when it comes to online attacks - a paid browser with enterprise-level features such as ad, malware & phishing blocking or DLP could sell for decent money and actually provide tangible security benefits.

I'll take "fastest ways to kill a web browser for $200", Alex

There isn’t much left to kill though - marketshare is near zero already because casual users aren’t interested in a slower Chrome knockoff.

Differentiating themselves on features that Chrome can’t ever have (because of their business model) could actually reverse the trend.

Thats actually not a bad idea.

It would be a nice change from when I had to run to a different machine run citrix to logon to a windows NT machine to run IE because our time keeping software only worked on ie..

> get the users to pay for it

Unless they switched to a subscription-only model (which I don't think aligns with their mission) this would almost definitely doom them... users don't want to pay for shit, especially with freely available alternatives.

You could offer a free version and lock out the enterprise-specific features behind a subscription, or just sell support - a lot of companies seem to do fine on an open-source product and selling support or managed services.

then enterprise will just not use firefox.. they will use chrome that will have enterprise features available for free..

not that many enterprises use firefox to begin with..

Does Chrome have ad/malware blocking or DLP (for which companies currently use expensive middleboxes that break TLS and can cause problems)?

The point isn’t that they would pay for a Chrome equivalent, it’s that they would pay for something better than Chrome which Google won’t replicate as it’s against their entire business model.

The amount of money companies spend on various security products (some of which are dubious) suggests there's definitely an appetite for security and doing so at the browser level makes sense and could be a successful strategy.

Firefox already have better ad/malware blocking today and companies are not using it since they can just use middleboxes to do that in a central location without then having to worry about each computer configuration.

If companies wanted to go to that route they can do it today for free, and they are not doing it, so changing firefox from free to charge for enterprise stuff will not help in any way..

also, google will not replicate the ad/malware blocking capacities from firefox because they are the leaders. not firefox..

If ever chrome marketshare goes down to below 5% and firefox rise to chrome position above 60% then i bet that google will be willing to do better ad/malware blocking if that means changing the game..

Why is this being hated on? It's a revenue model for them to make the competitive browser we want...

Having these large branded cosmetic additions to firefox is kinda a genius non-intrusive or at least less intrusive way to do advertisements.

I'm frustrated with Mozilla because they talk really big, but their actions time and time again fail to line up with what they are actually saying.

They can't open their mouths without talking about how much they care about privacy, but at the same time making it nearly impossible to opt out of their telemetry. For Mozilla, invasion of privacy only appears to be bad when other people are doing it.

This just comes off as sanctimonious and hypocritical.

What's really frustrating is that they absolutely could do good. If they actually managed to live up to even half their words, they'd be amazing. But for some reason, they just... don't.

> They can't open their mouths without talking about how much they care about privacy

Agreed. Besides telemetry, merely achieving privacy when it comes to browsing requires manually turning up the tracking protection level to the strictest and installing a third-party add-on: uBlock Origin.

This gives a false sense of security to less tech-savvy users who (reasonably) believe that they'll actually have privacy by installing a privacy-focused browser from a company that claims to be on their side in all their marketing.

> but at the same time making it nearly impossible to opt out of their telemetry

It is one checkbox in the settings. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-data-mozilla-help...

Two if you don't want to be put into studies - I don't think Origin Trials in Chrome can be opted out of at all (if you know how, it'd be nice to tell us).

No, that only disables some telemetry. Here are some of the options you need to disable: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/joef72/is_t...

Be sure to read the top comment.

They are also doing this bullshit, which isn't even a little bit OK: https://mozilla.github.io/normandy/index.html

> Two if you don't want to be put into studies - I don't think Origin Trials in Chrome can be opted out of at all (if you know how, it'd be nice to tell us).

What Chrome does is completely irrelevant. I don't want a browser that is less bad than Chrome, I want one that is good.

From what I recall, the reason for the telemetry opt out telemetry is because they wanted to know whether the telemetry data was actually representative.

Personally, I think it is totally fair to open a bug or submit an idea revisiting whether this is necessary anymore. I would assume that they now have a pretty good idea of what the opt out rate is in the wild.

If you file a bug, please post it, because I'd be curious to follow what happens afterwards.

I honestly don't care how they rationalize it, either they respect their users' privacy, or they don't. They have demonstrably chosen the second option. Having opt-out telemetry and experiments is really bad. Not actually disabling the telemetry when you opt out of it is absolutely inexcusable. There is just no other way of interpreting it than that they don't give a flying fuck about what their users want. The fact that they want the data is enough to disregard any choices made by the users.

Pretty much every single violation of privacy can be rationalized with someone feeling like they need the data for some reason or another. Mozilla does not get special dispensation to spy on their users.

I feel like you are just ranting at this point. You can try to be part of the solution by making your case to the project - your choice.

Mozilla's actions not living up to their lofty words is not a bug in the software. Half of the problematic features have little to no legitimate reason to exist in the first place.

Firefox's closest competition, feature-wise, in early versions was Opera, which was adware with a pay-to-remove-ads option and already did pretty much everything that Firefox brought to the table, and then some. I loved Phoenix/Firebird/early-Firefox, but it's hard to make the case it was better than Opera for ordinary users at the time—except that it didn't have ads, and was a little smaller/leaner.

Firefox became far more successful than Opera, at least outside the embedded market.

Maybe the adware browser model can make a comeback and be super-successful this time because things have changed, but it didn't work very well the first time.

("But these aren't ads, they're optional themes" true, but you wanna bet they won't advertise it with one or more pop-ups and/or focus-stealing-to-new-advertising-tab thingies, like they do with everything else? Which is funny because one of their big selling points originally was automatically blocking pop-up ads)

I used phoenix/firebird/early-firefox too.

It was never really smaller than the mozilla suite, they just simplified the UI. This is not intended as an insult, it was exactly what was needed and worked out really well for everybody, it's just amazing how much the reality got lost.

In particular, Opera while going the opposite way with their "everything and the kitchen sink" interface for the power user market were legendary for small, fast and nimble code, which is how they ended up running on the Wii and Nintendo DS around this time.

I'd be very suprised if they weren't always a smaller download, even with bitorrent, email, ftp clients and whatever other crazy nonsense they had built in.

I'm going to check though, just in case it's me that's mistaken.

Pheonix 0.1 was double the size of the Opera download at the time.

0.5's installer is a little over half the size of Mozilla 1.0 (~6Mb vs. ~11Mb, for the Win32 versions, both from 2002) which fits with my recollection that it was noticeably faster to download than Mozilla (on, say, Dial Up). I wanna say the on-disk install footprint saw an even bigger difference, but I don't have a great way to test that out quickly. I think we'd definitely class a browser [edit: a modern browser, that is, I'm making the comparison to illustrate that 5Mb wasn't a small difference back in 2002] with an install size a little over half that of Chrome's as notably lighter-weight—though, sure, they did get there largely by just cutting stuff out.

You're probably[1 EDIT] right that I'm mis-remembering Opera's download size. I recall it feeling heavier in use, but that was probably something to do with the feel of its particular (non-native) UI, and maybe the extra system resource strain from loading and displaying banner ads for the ad-supported version (there were still some really weak computers in wide use in 2002).

[1] I only wrote "probably", originally, because I didn't bother to verify it—not because I don't believe you on that point. I didn't express that very well.

Grumps: Why is FF losing market share!?

Mozilla: Does stuff to gain market share.

Grumps: Pissed off Mozilla does stuff to gain market share.

It's a freaking browser. Browsers peaked like 30 years ago. They're ALL on maintenance at this point.

How is pushing ads at users going to gain them market share? I know it'll get them more money, but it'll annoy users and I've not seen evidence that the reason they're struggling is because they're capital-constrained.

How does this gain market share? It's still a knockoff, slower version of Chrome, just that you can install a Disney theme.

In its default configuration, it doesn't bring anything to the table that Chrome doesn't already have, and making it actually privacy-respecting requires being tech-savvy enough to configure it and install the right third-party ad blocking add-on - which if you are tech-savvy enough, chances are that you're already running it.

> Browsers peaked like 30 years ago. They're ALL on maintenance at this point.

The web is changing and is getting more user-hostile every day. A browser that's actually a user-agent would be a great tool to fight back. Unfortunately Mozilla only claims to be on your side but actually does very little at the technical level.

> In its default configuration, it doesn't bring anything to the table that Chrome doesn't already have

That is clearly false, and you have replied to my comments referencing this demonstrating that you ought to know better.

See:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/01/07/firefox-72-fing...

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/03/23/introducing-sma...

No opt-ins required, and features that Chrome doesn't have at all.

I'm never giving any more money to this BS organization unless they can get back to their roots and focus on making a competitive web browser.

Kind of curious, how much money have you given them and how did you give it?

Definitely less than $100 via past pocket subscription and Firefox vpn. Wanted to support the org but canceled both. I hated pocket and realized the vpn service is just a mullvad resale.

I didnt realize that pocket was a subscription service. What did you hate about it? I took the other approach, recently subscribed for a year of nextDNS and starting paying for mullvad.

Well they have a free version and paid subscription with extra benefits.

I can't remember exactly why because this was years ago, but I just didn't find it useful beyond a simple bookmarking system. Not worth the annual/monthly fee. It's also just bloat in the browser and given how resource hungry FF is nowadays I just don't want unnecessary shit in my browser.

I was actively looking for ways to fund Mozilla via purchasing their products. I WISH they could survive without Googles boot on their neck. I can just see the writing on the wall the org is dying and it seems that management is to blame.

I will continue to use FF on Linux, but on my Mac devices safari/orion are just so much more performant. I really noticed when I started watching memory consumption. FF is bloated and huge. I wonder if they should go all in on desktop linux and heavily optimize performance on linux systems. That way they can retain their niche of power users and also help advance FOSS consumer-facing software.

Kind of curious, how much money has Mozilla spend on BS unrelated to their core product over the last 10 years?

I am sure you could look that up and spin it anyway you see fit. Generally curious if donation support is commonplace considering the income of these companies based on gsearch payments is quite large. Mozilla has tried a number of things, which is quite common for any tech company as the talent needs to build to learn and grow. Based on your posting history, I am sure you would just throw gas on the closest fire you see.

When it comes to donations, all of it. As far as I know, donations go to the Mozilla Foundation while the browser is developed by the Mozilla Corporation.

They HAVE a competitive web browser that needs market share, which means it needs promotion, which this is.

The browser is nowhere near competitive. It's a terrible Chrome knockoff, and the features that used to differentiate it from Chrome have been abandoned and removed long ago.

They could be competitive on certain features (security & privacy comes to mind - it should be private out of the box, users shouldn't have to spend 15 minutes installing an ad-blocker and opting out of all kinds of bullshit) but they choose not to.

>users shouldn't have to spend 15 minutes installing an ad-blocker

I'm glad you made it so obvious how seriously your opinion should be taken.

I don't believe it's right that users have to search for and install the right third-party plugin (as there are fakes/knockoffs/malicious ones) to get some privacy in a browser that boasts about privacy at every possible opportunity.

Although I don't have a problem with this kind of promo, I think it's a shame the sweepstake page [0] does not clearly explain that only US residents who haven't previously subscribed to Disney+ are eligible. To find this out, you have to click a tiny link to the official rules [1] which are full of legalese.

It personally feels a bit deceitful that they're, in a sense, tricking people into signing up for Firefox news under the guise of a sweepstake that many people won't be eligible for.

[0] https://truecolors.firefox.com/contest

[1] https://truecolors.firefox.com/contest/rules

How ironic - two once innovative companies that have completely lost their imagination and become basically corporate shills.

>Firefox has a soft spot for red pandas thanks to our logo

I'm confused. Isn't the animal on the logo a... (fire) fox? Not a red panda?

Phew, it's just a sponsored Firefox theme. I was so worried when I saw the headline that they were doing something like Proprietary Disney+ HDR...

Mozilla leadership is an embarrassment. They just need to make things that Google cancels - RSS/news aggregator, Google Inbox like email client, etc.

Make it and sell it, generate revenue and get off Google’s tit.

Well well.. seems like I really nailed this one [0] 2 days ago we had a thread about FF losing market share and what some would do to help that.I was right in pointing out Mozilla's priorities: color themes & data-collecting extensions, definitely not for fueling ad-based companies with data which trickle down in profit for both parties.

I guess nobody even at Mozilla gives a damn anymore, just make the browser an equivalent of a mobile app for browsing tiktok and consuming media already, because between that and pushing color themes, there's nothing on the horizon for people who just want an usable browser.At this point i expect even Edge to catch-up heavily, at least we're expecting consistent garbage from Microsoft so in that regard there won't be any surprises.

[0] (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30336317)

ceo is getting paid so what do they care? i'm sure there are some other c levels pillaging the coffers as well

Why in the heck is Firefox trying to sell itself as something you use to "show your true colors"? That promotional video tells me nothing other than that Disney has another movie coming out. Is it referring to installing themes/skins? This just seems way out of touch, in which case Disney is the right company for Mozilla.

I thought it was colours as in pride colours, as damage control after the Brandon Eich thing. Which also made me chuckle a bit when they said “be brave”.

They are still worried about something that happened years ago?

What's interesting here is that "good different, different good" is both completely meaningless, and also the exact argument that comes up on HN whenever firefox is brought up as an alternative to chromium browsers.

Damn, I was hoping this had to do with color calibration.

I expected this to be related to colour gamuts or calibration or something like that.

Me too. I was hoping that video color management is finally coming to Firefox. I have to use a Chromium-based browser for YouTube and such, since Firefox is unusable for video on wide-gamut displays. But no, it’s wallpapers.

if history is any indication of progress, expect Microsoft to secure the ever coveted 'Edge sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends' soon.

For those who didn't find, there is actually a sweepstake of 500 disney+ subscriptions sponsored by Mozilla Corporation.

https://truecolors.firefox.com/contest

As long as it doesn't get in the way of fixing it it cannot hurt to spread awareness of Firefox.

(Not saying it is worse than anything else, just that it used to be better.)

hacker news is so frustrating with firefox, if it's love, it's toxic love :)

whatever mozilla do or don't, it's not good.

Showing true colors? No thanks, I prefer people wear their masks of polite discourse in public.

So bold. So brave. Good grief.