Any browser who constantly reminds you how private and user-empowering it is, is probably neither.
Add to that a vaguely liberal-sounding rethoric that could be right out of Ron Desantis' worst "woke lib" stereotypes - without even actually being liberal.
Like, not that I'd see the browser an appropriate location for that, but if they actually wanted to commit to a liberal political view, I'd at least have expected "diverse voices" somewhere. But I have no clue what "independent voices" is supposed to mean.
I know of JRR Tolkien, and GRR Martin, but...
As Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll wrote, "If your thoughts incline ever so little towards fuming,” you will say “fuming-furious;” if they turn, by even a hair's breadth, towards “furious,” you will say “furious-fuming;” but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious.”"
As an aside, I’ve started adding Lewis Carrol, mainly Alice, quotes to the bottom of my weekly status reports and gotten some weirdly positive feedback on this.
...and yeah, it was late. Sorry.
Listen to some prominent politicians today. Politicians have always had to speak in convoluted and stupid ways to conceal or deflect the truth, but generally they were coherent, the sequence of words had some meaning you could understand even if it was wrong or they were lying. Now it's just complete gibberish with feel-good words sprinkled in.
I said based on reason. It's quite possible to reason about feelings.
Anyway, what's this "discourse on feelings" that was related nationalism/imperialism and authoritarianism you're talking about? I've never heard of it, it sounds interesting.
The KdF movement might be considered an example (Kraft durch Freude, Strength through Joy). Rearming Germany after WWI required the Nazis to rally the population by means ranging from technical to emotional to spiritual. From Wikipedia:
>Hitler's architect and Minister for Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, said in his final speech at the Nuremberg trials: "Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man..." [11]
If you can read that without feeling a chill at the base of your spine, well, maybe it's just me.
And of course, any appeal to religion is ultimately an appeal to feelings, since there's nothing objective behind it. A Wehrmacht soldier who started to question his role in the war needed only to look down at his belt buckle to remind himself that God was on his side.
It's all very interesting to consider, but it doesn't have much to do with Mozilla (I hope).
I don't think there was any notable "discourse on feelings" related to those things.
I did not wish to contribute to a political organization. I wished to contribute to a browser. It’s not possible to do one without the other at Mozilla, although it used to be.
A browser could theoretically be politically engaged by ensuring open web standards and accessibility etc. but this is not that, me thinks.
If you have a broader understanding of what politics is in the first place you're not going to object to an organisation having "politics" because of course it does, it's composed of people, it exists to further somebody's goals or else it wouldn't exist, it's not like organisations can spontaneously wish themselves into existence.
My understanding to people opposing politics in certain things, is typically about opposing unrelated political messaging in said thing.
For a free open source web browser, obviously there is will be politics somewhere. FOSS is political in nature. Web standards involve politics, with multiple parties wanting to influence them for their own reasons. Hell, challenging a multi-billion corporation monopoly is inherently political.
Having political messaging about "celebrating voices making the world a better place" is odd and misplaced political messaging, orthogonal to the politics of a free open source web browser, and will alienate part of the people that are not interested in something this unrelated, irrespective to their agreement to said messaging.
I am personally in favor of universal health care. I wouldn't like to see messaging about it in a web browser, just to give a silly example.
Past Few years? I assume you mean from something like 2020? We are now in 2023 they are close to have been doing it for a decade.
I am still surprised to see how the acknowledgement curve plays out in real time. It takes 5 - 8 years before it even hit mainstream.
I think he has missed the current year jargon which is a mix of corporate BS words and Buzzfeed diversity and inclusion crap. It usually means nothing other than:
"We are doing this because of profit or because we want to further censor discussion about something because the right view is X and that's what you're allowed to think and say.
Any dissent will be responded with a negative label on your person and, if possible, deplatforming, which is good, because we know what the one true way is"
They will phrase it as "in order to improve things for consumers, everyone" while literally screwing over a myriad of those people.
Firefox is still a great browser but Mozilla has long been a company that we can barely trust, in the way that it actively is telling us that we need to subscribe to its very US centric partisan politics and view of the world, which has shifted from actual fairness and openness for all vi virtue of being a customizable browser.
This will lead to subtle issues over time, making Firefox usage shrink even faster.
I still love you though, Firefox. Your heart is in the right place. You're now a lone wolf in a ocean of Chromium and wonky WebKits.
Mozilla brand managers should be the first jobs replaced by AI.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what Mozilla's underlying strategy is, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
-- with apologies to Douglas Adams
On one hand, I largely agree with everything that blog posts says.
BUT!
it presents it as some universal, self-evident truth, and I think it's not. Just because the blog author and I and some others think so, doesn't mean it's the only perspective or that everybody feels that way.
I think there exist people who will enjoy that language, who will understand that language, and to whom that language speaks. My wife, possibly. My sister, almost certainly. Many others in my circle of friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.
And, it's Mozilla. I don't think it's 100% accurate to say "you're a tech company" or that FireFox is "just a browser". Mozilla foundation is non-profit, and it does have goals and vision. It is, I think inherently "political", though not necessarily in the current American sense of "political" which seems to mean "partisan" or "bad". It has a goal and perspective and a point of view. It's trying to do something beyond generate profit for shareholders, so I don't think it's accurate to brand it as "just a tech company" (whether one agrees with its goals, methods and progress is orthogonal).
Ultimately, some people DO choose Firefox as a political statement (that statement perhaps being as simple as "I support independent choice of technology" or "I want my browser to work for me" or even "I don't want Google to COMPLETELY own my life" :). Some people DO see it as a way to vote, or impart a change.
For example, how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker-Miller_pink is used in prisons to foster a less violent culture among the prisoners.
"voices making the world a better place" is referring to Martin Luther King, Jr.
It's like landing at Normandy, but from the comfort of your living room.
these people (which are also the majority of posters in this thread) are a vanishingly thin slice of the cake. They're trying to corner a totally different market by using that kind of language and design, if that annoys the HN crowd, so be it; they're not the target for this kind of copy.
Mozilla seems to use a different strategy that is even worse.
Among nerds with privacy concerns you can at least plausibly get money/code contributions with significant worth.
True, but "cornering the market" is such an outlandish goal at this point, they shouldn't be holding themselves to that standard. It's enough to capture a respectable 3rd place, rather than the sub-3% afterthought they are now.
And they original got the respectable showing in the early days by being the "one your geek friend recommends", not by pretending they can out-market the big players with unlimited budgets.
But the desire to achieve self-expression through consumer choice is a fucking soul sickness. It's an empty simulation of meaningful self-expression. It's a (often deliberately!) useless substitute for actual political activity. Just because that kind of bullshit is pervasive and, in our society, widely effective for marketing purposes, doesn't mean it should be further propagated.
Free software is largely a refuge from that kind of bullshit, or at least the most cynical, cliche, shiny forms of it. Infesting Firefox with appeals of that kind is not the end of the world, I guess. But it is polluting the clean air I come to Firefox for in the first place with the same smog that's suffocating me everywhere else.
Ironically, Firefox could make the world a slightly better place (in a very specific aspect of the world) if they focused simply in making a great web browser, without unnecessary bells and whistles and without any politic posturing, but that aimed at denting the Chrome monopoly.
In what significant ways could Firefox be improved, such that it would help most users, over Chrome?
A complete new fast browser in rust - ah wait they also fired these engineers.
Not being multiples years late on some browsers features: you can't import es modules in a webworker yet.
I joined Replay as a senior front-end dev a year ago. It's real, it works, we're building it, and it's genuinely life-changing as a developer :)
Not sure how well this would have fit into Firefox as a specific feature, given both the browser C++ runtime customizations and cloud wizardry needed to make this work. But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.
Obligatory sales pitch while I'm writing this:
The basic idea of Replay: Use our special browser to make a recording of your app, load the recording in our debugger, and you can pause at any point in the recording. In fact, you can add print statements to any line of code, and it will show you what it would have printed _every time that line of code ran_!
From there, you can jump to any of those print statement hits, and do typical step debugging and inspection of variables. So, it's the best of both worlds - you can use print statements and step debugging, together, at any point in time in the recording.
See https://replay.io/record-bugs for the getting started steps to use Replay, or drop by our Discord at https://replay.io/discord and ask questions.
Well it worked on firefox before, but only on macOS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDq1AN1kSn4
https://web.archive.org/web/20210331133857/https://developer...
> But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.
It could has been a feature that make firefox the browsers for developers, instead it's a new paid subscription dev product.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=Firefox&que...
Chrome is the product of a company whose mandate is extracting as much data as possible from its users to feed their ad business. Firefox can and should be better, as they could be 100% user focused.
A Chrome monopoly in the browser space has the potential to be more damaging to the web than the Microsoft monopoly in days gone by. They want to make the world a better place? Well, they could have made the web a better place, if they could meaningfully take some share away from Chrome.
Also, experience tells us that being fast and light is incompatible with excellent plugin support, as the more hooks you provide for plugins, the less you can change without breaking those plugins -- that was Firefox's previous problem.
Google's main focus is in extracting rent from their dominance, not in making the browser faster, lighter or whatever.
As for plugin support, that's the challenge no? Make it so the contract for third party plugins can be maintained without breaking them every 6 months as the browser improves.
Firefox has excellent developers. The fact that it still has some relevance despite many years of mismanagement is testament to that. I bet if the company behind the browser was laser focused in making it as good as possible, with no compromise, they could challenge Chrome dominant position.
Finish making gecko reusable so people can use it instead of blink whenever someone wants to make a custom skin, or instead of electron for "desktop" apps. I grant that it's not immediately user-facing, but it would help give them the actual market share so that web devs have a reason to care about gecko.
I want a way to instal things on my system without a third party graciously allowing me to, that's what I'd consider freedom and why I try to avoid the playstore like the plague. Seeing Mozilla to not be better either is just sad :(
It should be a noble goal that acts as a beacon for others to follow. It'll lose money at first, but they'll keep their core privacy and power user base, until people come around.
Oh and stop following google and privacy advocates supposed efforts to make the web "safer". Those are all mostly propaganda and feel good initiatives whilst the tracking still happens. But that's a long side rant from a pet peeve of mine.
The current CEO, Mitchell Baker, is clearly in it for the money. She got a salary increase while cutting 250 employees last year, and still had the audacity to say it wasn't enough. Brendan Eich had a bit of political controversy, but being a technical person I think he would've been better as far as focusing on the actual browser.
It's disingenuous in the extreme for you to cite Eich's victimhood at the hands of a mythical "cancel culture" when the real cancel culture is powered by government-backed forces that he helped to nurture and guide.
In short, if you want to leverage your celebrity and influence to make the world a worse place rather than a better one, you can't expect people to ignore it. There's a fellow named Musk who is likely to learn the same lesson if he doesn't step off the path he's on now.
Authoritarians who feel right to censor, attack and deplatform are a problem no matter if they're Religious conservatives or identity politics fanatics.
Both are rabid and don't make the world a better place.
You seem to be one of them and your threats are tired at this point.
It's all fun and games until the guns come out. At that point, the person who initiates force, or who supports those who do, is the bad guy. That would be Eich.
That is semantic bullshit. Anyone who is paying a modicum of attention knows that a mixture of woke/US democrat pushed causes have a very specific narrative that, when you oppose them, your person, job, funding, etc might be attacked no matter how many people agree with you. It's not about democracy or diversity but power. BLM or trans issues are the most obvious ones at the moment.
I don't agree with Eich on that particular point but that doesn't matter. Most of the woke mob didn't think those things either until suddenly "they had to".
A very apt man for the job was set aside because he had dared contributed politically to a cause that US democrat narrative decided in "current year" that was bad (funny how current year - N, they might be held those positions).
> It's all fun and games until the guns come out. At that point, the person who initiates force, or who supports those who do, is the bad guy. That would be Eich
No. That would be you and the woke mob, camper bob. Because you posit that words or political opinions are guns or force, which is insane. You call speech violence in order to justify using violence or censorship yourself. But you're the very type of thing you claim to be against, the bully that attacks pretending they're the victim and simply responding in kind.
You're the problem because you think your moral superiority should allow you to exert violence whenever you want for you have the "righteousness" on your side.
In any case, people are wising up to it. If all ethnicities, country of origin, creeds, etc. They don't want to be attacked (themselves or their livelihoods) because they don't hold the right opinion TM: Identity Politics, the current year war (Iraq, Libya, Ukraine) or whatever else US centric thing people push down our throats.
No it's not. It follows directly from the dictionary definition of what "censorship" means. Which unfortunately is widely misunderstood.
You think your moral superiority should allow you to exert violence whenever you want for you
No they don't, and the conversation is starting to go way off the rails here.
I really feel they shouldn't go all in on it right now. Winds are changing and they'll end up alienating the new youth that I see hints of starting to push back at the feel good activism for the sake of activism.
I want the foundation of my house to be rock solid, whether the winds are calm, stormy, tornado.
I want my browser like my foundation, I want it to be rock solid, and not busy catering to whatever is the current thing
Frankly, it's much less problematic than Google writing a blog post bragging to it's advertising customers that it has started buying a copy of everyone's credit/debit card transaction data so they can spy on potential customers more than ever.
> as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
So, if you buy stuff with a card, there’s a less than one-in-three chance that Google doesn’t know about it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...
I do actually would like the non profit Mozilla to make the world a better place: by focussing again on building a 100% open source and user controlled browser, that has no ads or tracking (studies) enabled by default.
also, what is up with the employees there? arent people in tech privileged enough to be able to find jobs? how can they live with themselves participating in crap like that? How do they stand in front of the mirror?
Yes, I suspect I could find another job. I interview well—don't tell any of my potential future employers, but honestly I interview better than I do actual work. (I will say that the massive layoffs introduce some doubt. I haven't had to look seriously in a tough market, and just having recruiters still pinging me regularly doesn't mean much. Hopefully it still helps to be on the list of people who have turned down offers $big_places?)
I'm not really feeling it hard to live with myself. Quite the opposite, really; one thing that keeps me here is the mission. It would be hard to switch to a place where I had to work to convince myself that I was net contributing to humanity. I'm not curing cancer or eliminating poverty, but I would probably be crap at those.
But I think you're specifically referring to working at a place where Marketing occasionally makes some boneheaded moves, ones that are sometimes counter to the things that keep me here? Yeah, it's hard when that happens. But (1) I still think that it's largely better here than most other places, and (2) we have this teeny little existential problem that absolutely requires marketing to do Stuff. Despite what a vocal contingent on HN thinks, Firefox's market share is not going to turn around based only on engineering work or pouring effort into improved addons and making nice with the community. Those are things that are near and dear to my heart, and I wish we lived in a world where those mattered more, but sadly I have to live in reality. And if you want marketing people to do marketing, you can't exactly tell them what to do and what not to do. You have to let them screw things up, because without the ability to screw things up they won't be able to find the things that will make a dent.
Mozilla is a relatively small company, but big enough that my day to day work really doesn't feel a whole lot like "...participating in crap like that". Even when it's not crap, I don't really feel like I'm participating in stuff I would regard as good outreach or meaningful messaging. I'm in a different corner of the organization, writing code and doing things to hopefully make Firefox more secure, faster, and less memory-hungry. I don't feel personally responsible for what marketing or legal or HR or whoever is doing.
As for how I stand in front of the mirror... sometimes I do it naked, thanks for asking. I don't think either of us wants me to give you a picture.
also,
> It would be hard to switch to a place where I had to work to convince myself that I was net contributing to humanity.
Not sure you are now, but okay. a halfassed solution like what firefox is now, is allowed to live forever without addressing it properly. If it wasnt there anymore, perhaps a real solution would emerge
That's why Google keeps paying for it. Or at least part of it.
What's obnoxious is when the stupid infects the code itself.
As GP said:
> Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** who orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product.
I'm annoyed whenever I find a new pro-tracking, anti-privacy, or pro-spam setting which is ON by default and usually with a poorly documented setting hidden in about:config rather than a logical place in Settings.
I am sure that pocket and mozilla VPN are perfectly good things for some people, but abusing Firefox itself to push ads (especially when such ads are hard to turn off) is a dark pattern.
I'm sure that analytics can be helpful in some cases, but it's tracking and should be off and opt-in by default.
Marketing seems to corrupt the open source aspect as well, as pro-user changes that marketing disagrees with are rejected; when users submit issue reports complaining about the obnoxiousness and suggesting changes, they are closed because the dark pattern or obnoxiousness is an intentional feature that marketing wanted and refuses to give up on.
And how has this marketing worked out for FF market share exactly? FF grew when it focused on tech. It's in freefall now.
> And if you want marketing people to do marketing, you can't exactly tell them what to do and what not to do.
Why not? There are there to help not dictate the course of the company. Or at least they shouldn't be.
Related: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/mozilla-now-only-...