I read a conspiracy that Google has paid off Mozilla management to specifically sabotage the browser development. Actions like this make it hard to dispute the moves that frequently seem deliberately anti-user.

It's not a conspiracy that Google pays Mozilla for default search engine placement.

Maybe that arrangement led to the stagnation of Firefox, without malicious intent from any party. Hanlon's razor, yadda yadda

Hanlon's razor only makes sense if you're a teenager posting on reddit. Just world theory and all that.

Once you get into corporate politics it's the exact opposite.

God help you if you ever get into the nuts and bolts of governmental, or gasp intergovernmental politics.

Eh, from my experience in several large companies there's some malice, but there's way more incompetence.

From my experience, companies are happy to strategically feign incompetence, blindness and deafness.

Th other conspiracy I've heard is Google subsidizes Mozilla so they have a credible claim there's competition in the market.

This is the correct answer

Why would Google try to prop up Firefox as a competitor? Both Safari and Edge on desktop are twice the market share of Firefox, so the browser market is competitive enough without Firefox.

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

Safari can probably be discounted since Apple discontinued the Windows version in 2012. A browser that can only run on 18% of desktops worldwide isn't necessarily the competitor Google is looking for.

Edge is available on Linux and macOS, so it would probably do. But that would allow one of Google's biggest competitors to drop an under-performing product and lobby for antitrust against Google. Unlikely to happen, but a risk Google might not want to take.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

Chrome, edge and safari are just, well chrome, on a single family of rendering engines

Google would probably prefer if Safari and Edge did not gain market share. They're both developed by large corporations that pose a major threat to Google. Firefox, not so much.

Safari and Edge (which is also Chrome) having twice the dismal market share of Firefox doesn't make the browser market competitive. Safari is an appliance delivered exclusively on machines manufactured by a single company that holds a small, though luxury, part of the market. Edge (is Chrome, and) is only available on one OS (although granted, it's a very widespread OS.

Firefox is the only "credible" competitor, although Firefox's only profitable customer is Google itself.

It is plausible that it's part of a broader antitrust litigation defense strategy

Doing both makes sense. Google has a clear motive to keep Firefox in the market, at the same time they have repeatedly shown that they want Firefox to have the smallest market share possible. For antitrust purposes it might be enough to show "people could to Firefox", even if nobody does.

If true, it really backfired on them as buying Mozilla's default search is currently being used against them in a search engine antitrust suit.

According to a weird definition of "really backfired," because they would without question have been hit a long time ago with credible antitrust if they hadn't kept Firefox afloat (though user-hostile enough to keep people on Chrome.)

There's such a marginal difference between the quality of the two browsers, and Chrome is held back in what it can be by the necessity of furthering Google's commercial interests. The only limit Firefox has had is that they can't abuse the trust of their users. Firefox had to voluntarily (and often aggressively) inflict a huge amount of reputational and functional damage on itself to reduce its market share to the place that it has.

edit: it's important to say that they didn't really backslide technically; it's user-hostile (management) decisions that have hurt the browser, not anything to do with the skill of Firefox developers.

> would without question have been hit a long time ago with credible antitrust if they hadn't kept Firefox afloat

It is questionable, and being declared a search engine monopoly would be far worse for Google than Chrome being a browser monopoly. They only make Chrome to push their search/ad network.

Conspiracy theory

That makes no sense. Mozilla goes so hard on the VPN ads exactly because it wants to diversify its revenues away from its vassalage to Google.

A pet theory of mine is Mozilla’s C-suite knows no matter how bad Firefox gets and how low their user count, Google will continue to fund them because Google likes something to point to if antitrust came knocking - in fact the lower Firefox’s influence the better as Chrome can then unilaterally control the web.

So they spend all of Mozilla’s money on various BS like Pocket and now VPN to try to make more money so they can further increase their already high salaries, instead of reinvesting into Firefox - hence the anti-user intrusive ads, the reduction of head count while paying themselves millions of dollars.

> I read a conspiracy that Google has paid off Mozilla management to specifically sabotage the browser development. Actions like this make it hard to dispute the moves that frequently seem deliberately anti-user.

IIRC, didn't Mozilla lay off some R&D team that was doing some promising work on modernizing and improving its browser engine?

That "promising work" was "inventing the Rust programming language," and, yes.

I think parent is refering to the servo team.

My annoyance is more the half-brained projects which Mozilla pursues. Then surprised Pikachu when they have to cut budgets and Firefox is impacted.

Reminds of good old Mr Elop.

(Not the OP.) Nope, and I also didn't miss the torrent of HNers saying "what's the problem, you already trust them to provide the software, you should trust anything they want to send along with it."

The execution was definitely terrible, but "browser company ships promotional easter egg" isn't that bad as "browser company inserts ads into browsing experience" in my opinion. These ads are why Windows 10+ has become a trash fire despite all the technical improvements made to Windows.

Mozilla were stupid enough to try and sneak this Roboto stuff in, probably as part of the requirements or intentions of the ad campaign, rather than be transparent about it. Stupidity rather than malice.

The VPN ad is a targeted decision comingffrom within the non-profit. I sort of get it, Mozilla is desperate for income because Google is keeping them afloat, barely anyone who donates cares about anything but the browser, and the for-profit ventures aren't gaining much success.

The thing is, if I was somewhat interested in a Mozilla VPN service, this spectacularly idiotic decision to deploy full-page intrusive advertising into Firefox makes it 100% certain I will never buy the Mozilla VPN service--because, how can I trust that they won't do the equivalent to that service? What's to stop them from blocking certain sites (on the other side of the VPN) as part of some promotion? Or worse?

They've made it clear they don't believe their own language about privacy and user choice. They've compromised one product to advertise another. And perhaps worse, they doubled-down about it in Bugzilla with corporate doublespeak, which to me is the tell that they'll absolutely do it again.

It's amazing how apt the trust-thermocline analogy is.

I see what you're saying but.. it's one popup. Maybe you can't, but I can live with that.

Correct. There’s a bit of entitlement here by some.

Slippery slope has people scared.

Isn't the Mozilla VPN service just a white label of Mullvad? They don't own it

how are you differentiating "promotional easter egg" from "ad"?

They did a better job of hiding the promotional easter egg.

You had to enable extensions.pug.lookingglass before it even loaded the code.

> The execution was definitely terrible, but "browser company ships promotional easter egg" isn't that bad as "browser company inserts ads into browsing experience" in my opinion. These ads are why Windows 10+ has become a trash fire despite all the technical improvements made to Windows.

I'm not sure I agree. The Mr. Robot "promotional easter egg" was done by installing an add-on via the Shield Study system. This system is enabled by default, and it is intended to allow the Firefox devs to run A/B tests with browser features.[1] This sort of system already makes some non-trivial minority of users bristle. For Mozilla to co-opt it specifically for an advertising campaign perfectly validates the concerns of that group of people. So then we get a thread on HN[2] in which several Firefox devs post about how badly they and their colleagues felt about the whole debacle, and how it would undoubtedly lead to many internal conversations. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that happened, and apparently[1] Shield Studies now require some level of scientific rigor behind them before they are deployed. But unfortunately, the marketing department still seems to be willing to sacrifice the ever-diminishing good will their remaining users seem to place in Mozilla as the steward of Firefox the browser. It doesn't feel to me like they fully appreciated the lessons of 2017.

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Shield/Shield_Studies

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144

They could have hard coded it, would that have been better or worse in your view?

Hmm...if you mean, would it be better or worse if they distributed the Looking Glass add-on in an automatically installed update, I think that would be...roughly equivalent? I feel like they're breaking some sort of implicit social contract: my browser shouldn't automatically install add-on software not foundational to its operation that I didn't ask for.

If you mean would it be better or worse if they did a more traditional pop-up ad promotion for Mr. Robot like they did for their VPN service...I dunno, unfortunately I've grown to expect new Firefox releases to have found excuses for promoting Mozilla services, even though I've done a fair amount of work to try to disable all that nonsense.

At the end of the day, it's all pretty gross really. What I'd really like is a way to pay Mozilla actual money in a way that ensured it was directed solely at development of Firefox in exchange for not doing any of this stuff to me. But for some reason this doesn't seem possible.

> my browser shouldn't automatically install add-on software

I mean if it wasn't an add-on at all. If it was a piece of javascript or even C++ contained directly inside the program, that triggered on the same about:config setting. A traditional easter egg.

I would say that would be worse. Presumably there would be no way to remove it without patching the source.