Mozilla, the browser, is great.
Mozilla efforts, such as Rust, have been historically great.
Mozilla leadership is currently awful. They focus is on the wrong things - web VR and low-quality foundational AI models. Maybe because they think the web is at risk of disappearing outright. But the true enemy is Google, and they're currently its well-behaved prisoner.
Mozilla can't bite the hand that feeds it, but someone needs to point the FTC, Congress, and the EU at Google. Everything they do, buy, and work on is to point an overwhelming majority of internet users at its ad products. Chrome, Search, Android, YouTube, Apple default search engine deal, etc. Google has become inescapable. And that's rather anti-competitive if you're trying to advertise your business or selling ad tech.
Nevermind that the web commons and standards are constantly in Google's blast radius for funneling everyone into their gaping maw.
Microsoft and Apple dont have a good history so assuming there is something big here?
I'd personally call it embezzlement or misappropriation of funds, but that's just me.
It's also not a particularly good look when your own salary keeps rising while you're laying people off and market share keeps plummeting (in my neck of the woods, Firefox actually used to be domminant at 60%+)...
That said, I haven't looked at this in any kind of detail, and all I know of Baker is what her Wikipedia article tells me, which includes writing the Mozilla Public License, managing mozilla.org on a volunteer basis for a while and being instrumental in the creation of the Mozilla Foundation.
Sure, let's do that. Here's the highest paid employee of all three in 2021 (as that's the last year where there's data on all three):
Internet Archive: $158,777 (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...)
Wikimedia Foundation: $406,339 (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...)
Mozilla Foundation: $337,714 (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...)
I wouldn't classify any of those salaries as exorbitantly large. Hell, I'm fairly certain at least some people shitting on them here earn more than that a for-profit.
Of course, there's also criticism for attempting those.
If I could/had to pay/donate for it - I'd gladly do, but it's virtually impossible.
That said, I think income from Firefox's default search engine pretty much dwarfs any income that could potentially be gained from donations/buy-to-support.
1. Under her leadership Mozilla has lost virtually all of its users. It has been reduced to less than 10% of what it had before.
2. At the beginning of Covid, a time when remote work was on the rise and tech valuations were through the roof, she took her largest payout and fired hundreds of employees. She was compensated at over $5M dollars, enough money to pay a team of engineers for years.
3. Firefox has utterly failed to capture Enterprise market, where Chrome has managed to dominate. I doubt most people are even aware that a corp managed Firefox is an option, they have done such a poor job marketing it.
She has failed in every conceivable way as a CEO. She has failed in terms of the mission, she has failed her employees, she has failed her users, she has failed to be an example as a leader.
Mozilla, as it exists today, is a convenient project for Chrome to point to and say "look, there's competition" - perhaps the only reason why Google continues to fund Mozilla.
Microsoft and Apple are at least competently run and have incentives to push to reduce Chrome's power.
From what I understand, the arguments about self-preferencing kind of always get thrown out due to a more strict interpretation of the law. Did with Apple, and with Facebook when they were acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp.
Moz has gotten significantly better recently & reevaluated many of these staunch anti-stances & started working towards figuring out how to adopt, rather than piss around. But for quite a while their standards positions on supporting new use cases & expanding the platform was no no no no no no no. As a web company it's hard to see what their cause was. I'll leave aside their execution & org structure as there are already fair comments on that, & they don't bear on what I care about most; I just wanted a Moz that wanted a better more capable web, but it felt like they saw dunking on possibility as better for their prospects than helping & participating, like safari had done forever, at a long critical juncture.
Please do grow good again! You've been getting better. But what a shitty long duration of being against everything, Mozilla. The web is essentially a committee based system, with far too few players in general & less trying to move forward; disruptive negative elements have massively outside presence and Mozilla was playing on team evil team anti for quite a while.
The rest of these sound like extra bits of fingerprintable entropy here and there. Like, in no way will a website knowing how much RAM I have will improve my experience, but it'll help add a few bits of data to my web advertising fingerprints. Magnetometers and battery status would absolutely be fingerprintable; individual device characteristics would be unavoidably measurable.
The page you linked to actually lists all this out, and that should be enough to convince you that these standards shouldn't be implemented.
We can argue over how they should be accessible. Mozilla came out swinging for the perspective that they shouldn't be part of the web at all.
There's a lot of ya'll with poisonous rotten shit running through your veins. Thank you for at least speaking up, not just silently being part of the muting silencing horror. But it's still a vicious shitty crypto-native ardency that believes the web should always have it's wings clipped. That's the vicious force at bay here. It's a toxic mentality. It was here too. It had no regard, no middle ground, nothing but the same utterly uncompromising anti-web charge that Safari had begat mere days before.
These words are now mute, since I have indeed been voted under with anti-web zeal. What a sad lot these shallow anti-web foes are.
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The sentiment I seem to see is that anything short of perfect is failure.
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These kinds of discussions are frustrating to me since it feels like we've been dealt a very bad hand. But it's not just this hand, the dealer is firmly set on us only receiving bad hands in any game we play.
Like in a card game, this is the only hand that we'll get. What other corporation do we have to push these kinds of values? What other avenue do we have? It's sad that we've come to this situation, but if the choice is the currently perceived-to-be-failing Mozilla and no Mozilla, I pick the failing Mozilla.
The thing is, Mozilla shouldn't even be a for-profit corporation in the first place.
Pocket, cliq, Push Notifications for Mozilla Blog without user consent, Mr robot, Firefox Suggest etc they are littered with mistakes and scandals and have never improved their governance or process.
I can give them a pass on technical decisions like Thunderbird or breaking extensions but when it's purely commercial it has to be judged differently.
Problem is that Chrome is massive. If Chrome decides it will go left, most of websites will go left.
If you want to compare with Google the list is way more subjective.
Seems like a good record to me.
Is there any threshold for mendacity that if crossed would bother you?
I mean, Chrome (including Chromium, IIRC) literally collects and ships a bunch of tracking data to Google THE FIRST FUCKING TIME YOU LAUNCH THE APPLICATION.
Context matters. If Firefox did the Pocket nonsense in an environment where we had multiple decent free (as in freedom) browsers, then I'd grab my pitchfork. As it stands, I just can't feel the righteous indignation your comment is trying to rouse. It's truly NOTHING compared to the other options.
Motherfucker you are comparing the browser made by people who are terrible at business decisions with the one made by the many billionaire corporation actively trying to make it impossible to be anonymous on the internet.
If such a thing actually bothered you, you would use wget, not fucking chrome.
Which is the scale of Mozilla "badness" compared to the rest, even you.
And especially in the ligh of the good things they do.
You can be a critic, but be so in balance with the good things, otherwise you are making doing good something so ingrate a lot of people will give up.
If you thing doing the right thing is easy, you have not been doing a lot of it.
It's also about the loss of trust.
That particular incident, for example, was completely unnecessary. It involved a significant display of unbelievably poor judgment, and a total lack of foresight. It shouldn't have happened.
The fact that it did happen, despite it being such an obviously bad idea, raised a lot of questions and doubt.
It causes people to wonder what other incidents, which could potentially be far worse, might happen in the future.
It's remembered years later because it involved such a major loss of trust for so many people.
It's remembered now only by a very small, though vocal, minority.
"Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360)
"Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085642)
That's another incident that just shouldn't have ever happened to begin with, in my opinion.
It's the lack of foresight and the lack of good judgment that I don't see getting fixed.
Both of those incidents should have been completely avoidable with even the most minimal of forethought.
All valid concerns, but why post about them on the internet? Especially when it's nothing concrete--you used the words "questions", "doubts", and "might happen"? If someone is taking the effort to post FUD (literally) about Mozilla and "trust", why the hell aren't they using that same effort to post about Google or Microsoft and "trust"? Aren't those obviously much bigger problems?
Again, it's not wrong, per se, but I feel like it's bordering on some kind of astroturfing for people to complain about the fucking Mr. Robot non-story that happened years ago when TFA is about Mozilla at least signalling the right thing while Google is trying to be overtly evil YET AGAIN. I can actually type "Fuck Google" faster than I can type "Mr. Robot", so I'd have to have some kind of weird agenda or priorities to bring up Firefox's Mr. Robot thing.
I don't think that there's "a strong anti-Mozilla bias" here, as you put it earlier. The people affected by that incident, and by others, were probably among the most ardent Firefox supporters. After all, they were still using it long after so many others had already moved to Chrome.
Loss of trust is something that isn't easily forgotten, and it's a relevant factor worthy of bringing up in discussion.
It's a non-story because you had to opt-in to Firefox's "experiments" feature to get the extension pushed to you. Opting in to the experiments feature is *literally* granting permission for Mozilla to change the behavior of your Firefox browser remotely in between official releases. So, Mozilla had your permission to change your browser. I simply will not shed a tear for anyone who felt betrayed by something they signed up for.
And, by the way, I was also "affected" by the Mr. Robot thing because I also opted in to the experiments feature.
Furthermore, the extension did nothing harmful. It didn't even collect any data as far as I know. You know why Mozilla pushed an extension that didn't even collect any data instead of one that does? Because they were acting in a trustworthy way!
Sure, it was a faux pax. Mozilla thought they could be cute the same way a lot of old school FLOSSy, hackery, software would include amusing Easter eggs and jokes. It was inappropriate and didn't land well for a variety of reasons, but there was no reason to lose trust in Mozilla at the time, and there's *certainly* no reason to even bring it up today, years later, when just about every other tech company and computer product is trying their damnedest to spy on you, sell your data, prevent you from having root control of your devices, and squeeze subscription money out of you.
Again, Chrome starts tracking you the instant you launch it for the first time. Microsoft tracks you when you log in to Windows and occasionally re-enables tracking features that you've disabled. Mozilla pushed a silly "fun" extension to users who opted in that didn't collect any data nor make Mozilla any money.
This discussion is nonsense. If you truly don't trust Mozilla after the harmless Mr. Robot extension was pushed to you after you chose to allow them to modify your browser remotely, then go ahead and stop using Firefox- I don't care. But please stop spreading FUD.
There is no perfect option right now, and Mozilla will never be that perfect option because they are human and at least three people working there probably want to make some money.
So yeah, lets just keep making them irrelevant so in ten years I won't have a choice and be FORCED to use the browser that says ad blocking is stealing and spoofing your user agent is a violation of the CFAA and all this other blatantly user hostile shit.
It's such clear whataboutism, to have ANYTHING to hold against the only web browser that isn't actively controlled by the people with billions of dollars a year incentive to actually harm how you use the web.
They killed Weave (aka Sync 1.0; which was somewhat weird but simple enough to comprehend, reimplement and self-host), replacing it with an NIH-reeking over-engineered abomination that's the very antithesis of standard, open or public. Most people just ignored it as "that's Mozilla own infrastructure, they don't have to make it open, design it well, think of others, or anything else". I could not.
They tried to push a fundamentally flawed Persona/BrowserID standard that continued the trend to remove users from their "own" identities while claiming it's a pro-user pro-privacy move. I can see the logic, but I'm of firm opinion that it would've done more harm than good. I'm glad the project died without gaining any traction and WebAuthn (which has its issues, but where users are the source of their identities) took over. That's what BrowserID should've been, but Mozilla just went with the flow and refused or failed to fight for identity ownership.
It's things like those what made me regret using Firefox (but again, everything else is worse), not some home page sponsored links. That's where they stopped to differ from the rest for me. Mozilla used to be a beacon of doing things right even if it was challenging, fighting for a better web. And they became just another software company, that put their glorious past on all the ads (how they're so pro-everything good) while failing to live up to those high standards.
They had an user agent, but they butchered it and made it just a browser.
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The sentiment I seem to see is that anything short of sainthood is evil.
The answer of course is that relativism is not a good way to judge people or organizations. Mozilla chooses to do a lot of shitty things. They should be criticized for that even if someone else is worse.
Besides, people aren't using relativism here. Relativism is the idea that nothing is truly good or bad, it's all a matter of personal or cultural preferences. That would mean that people were saying that that Mozilla's behavior about X, Y, and Z isn't really bad. But that's not really the argument here. People are generally saying that despite engaging in the bad behaviors X,Y and Z, Mozilla is still in balance better than Google, and arguably still worthy of some level of support. To phrase it in terms of Aristotelian ethics: "For the lesser evil can be seen in comparison with the greater evil as a good, since this lesser evil is preferable to the greater one, and whatever preferable is good". You're unquestionably correct that Mozilla should be criticized, even harshly so. But you can criticize a company (or person, or party, or country) and still support them. Or if short of support, still prefer them to the available alternatives.
Firefox's usage dropping from about 30% down to likely less than 3% today, with almost no mobile usage, should be seen as a severe failure.
This failure isn't just about the product's uptake, too. It's also about the Firefox developers losing meaningful influence over the way the web evolves.
When a shirt is white and clean, the smallest stain stands out.
Mozilla is one of the rare companies with a mostly white clean shirt.
It is been judged harshly, while we should rejoice that they have been doing amazing things for 20 years despite the competition being terrible people playing dirty.
If we keep doing this, they will be no more Mozilla in the world. Who wants to be the good guys if you are held up against impossible standards when your competitors are paid handsomely to destroy the world?
I know some groups that target perfect ethics: they do nothing, because it's impossible to do anything without screwing up sometimes.
We're not holding Mozilla to higher standards than Google - we just have already discarded Google as an option.
Not collecting telemetry that many users have explicitly stated they do not want and even turned off at every opportunity is not a particularly high standard. Not wanting advertisements integrated into the web browser is not a particularly high standard. Criticizing that the CEO salary has been increasing to absurd levels while the browser has been declining and regular engineers are facing is not holding them to a particlarly high standard. Not wanting the last remaining competitive free web browser run as a commercial project rather than a non-profit foundation is not a high standard. Mozilla chooses to be shittier and shittier. Inaction would be better.
[M. theresa...VLC foundation....Mozilla.......You.......................Microsoft.......................................Nazis]
There's some nuance there, too.
It's "turned beige", in part, because people refused to use it while it was still "white". Mozilla has had to make the tough calculation of whether to be pure with zero users and therefore zero good impact, or to be beige to try to get some of these fickle users back and maybe have SOME good impact.
So, basically, people aren't satisfied when Mozilla is pure/idealist, and they aren't satisfied when it's compromising/pragmatic ("If they do that, I might as well keep using Chrome!").
I'm not letting Mozilla off the hook, or giving my blessing for every single decision that's been made. But, there's probably some utility to us taking the view of "just shut up and use Firefox" for the next N years.
I can't really recall any decisions made that were unpopular with existing users, but likely to lure new users in. Ads on new tabs doesn't seem like something that would bring new users in. Pocket doesn't either, since iirc you could install the extension in Chrome if you really wanted it.
Most of the controversies I remember were either to increase Mozilla's revenue, or boondoggles like their mobile OS. My major annoyance was that the increase in revenue seems like it was spent on boondoggles or weird, unrelated charity rather than going back into improving the browser.
I'm still also a Firefox user, but it's like 99% because ads are not their primary source of revenue rather than any remaining fondness towards Mozilla.
But, also, bringing money in is proxy enough for being able to do "good" for whatever definition we'd like to use. So, money or users, I think my general point about compromising their ideals for pragmatism is still valid (not necessarily true or correct, but it's an argument that can potentially be made).
I suspect those are mostly different groups. And my personal take is that Mozilla did indeed make that calculation... and proceeded to sacrifice the die-hard core userbase in order to get wider appeal, but they managed to not actually get the wider audience to buy in either, leaving them with nothing.
Has there ever been a case of an underdog company/product actually gaining market share by becoming less different than the market leader? It always seems like a mistake from the outside, to me. I feel like an underdog is more likely to succeed by actually being different and attracting people who would prefer those differences. Why would anyone change from what they're currently using to an alternative that is almost exactly the same?
No. Not even close.
> while we should rejoice that they have been doing amazing things for 20 years despite the competition being terrible people playing dirty.
I reject the "other"-ness in this comment. _I_ was a Mozillian. _I_ was helping do those things. The notion that I should heap accolades upon a bunch of folks who are only now affiliated Mozilla and who were not contributing during the era in which Mozilla was doing the great things actually deserving of the goodwill associated with its name? And who have themselves been positively poor torchbearers for that name? Condescending.
2023 is Mozilla's 25th birthday. It did amazing things for about 15 of them—by which I mean the people who made up the project. "Mozilla" is merely a legal fiction.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117242>
There's no reason your question couldn't have been posted in a relevant (sub)thread, instead of here, where it's (a) not on topic for the current subject, but (b) looks like it could be, and therefore (c) has the same effect as moving the goalposts.
I stick to Safari and Firefox. They're not perfect but they're the only modern browsers that don't use Blink, which is what gives Google the power to make moves like this.
So many people recommend it, but I've been iffy on using brave. Thanks for giving me a little insight on your choices and reasoning behind it.
They get hate only for bad or useless things (like the famous "independent voices") but a lot of love for the actual work being done, especially Firefox Containers, enormous performance improvements etc. I'm using Firefox on a daily basis and just the Containers feature make it so much superior to Chrome.
Ultimately I think we must permanently return to browser ballots back by the law, like the IE bundling fallout. Otherwise friction and incentives will continue to entrench one dominant player.