This is a much better path forward than some of their other gimmicks. Hopefully it works as billed and is successful.

They could have been where Proton is -- offering a security/privacy-first suite of tools -- had they not spent time and resources chasing Pocket and invasive ad campaigns.

The deeds speak more than the words, so I'm highly skeptical of their stance on privacy and attitude toward their users in general. I fail to see how it's any better than your average corporate "we highly value your privacy here at $corpName". Yes, of course, they aren't as obnoxious as Google or Facebook - spam and big data hoarding is not their business. But it's not that they're any particularly good, the world-wide enshittificaton just made us move the plank so much lower, that anyone not blatantly trying to make buck from anything they can touch is considered "good" those days.

Heck, modern Mozilla seem to be very comparable to Apple - both use the same themes of "oh look we're so pro-privacy (when it makes sense to us)", while becoming increasingly user-hostile and "knowing better". Apple aren't my friends, so aren't Mozilla - yet I'm practically forced to use and trust them, because the competition is no better or, typically, even worse (and tech is too convenient to forgo entirely).

The most obvious example - and my favorite pet peeve - is how they dealt with sync. They went the most typical corporate road - made their own unique system, extremely poorly designed (I've mentioned this a few times, it's exceptionally bad engineering), requiring an account with them, somewhat documented but with zero practical chances of being interoperable. And the ability to self-host and have a separate account wasn't anything more than an afterthought - I'm 99% sure it's there only because they needed to test against non-production servers, not because anyone cared about end users the slightest tiniest bit. If someone would've cared, and their voice would've been heard, the world would've been a somewhat better place - most likely, we would've had a simple (or, at least, sane) interoperable standard on storing and synchronizing browser data, and praised Mozilla for it, like in the old good days. That hadn't happened.

They sure had some ideals, but they lost the sight of them, yet they pretend they didn't.

And I'm sorry for those folks at Mozilla who have those ideals. I'm sure there are decent, good people there, who care and are passionate about what they do. But talking about the company as a whole, I can't say I'm happy to trust Mozilla - I do so begrudgingly. Their interests are certainly not aligned with mine.

I always enjoy the vague yet threatening online comment. I'm of the opinion that this is from one of the better bot farms who have learned if you make people nervous, you can control their choices.

Agreed. I ceaselessly flag comments like this online. Scary passive voice messages would be worthless even if they weren't from an influence campaign.

Say what you mean or hold your tongue! I have zero patience for cowards using vague passive voice.

I agree about vagueness, and it's great that there's more awareness about rhetorical technique. Still, it's written in active voice.

I see how I was too vague. I decided to post without elaborating because I thought the concerns were obvious from previous HN discussions about Mozilla announcements of different sorts, and because I was running out of time, which probably was a mistake.

The Pocket partnership and acquisition, the 250 layoffs with the 4x CEO pay increase, the Mullad partnership for a worse offering, are all concerning and they do destroy trust, but my primary concern is the apparent lack of focus. Can Mozilla sustain all these potentially positive initiatives (like this recent announcement or https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/)? I very much doubt it. And I hope this changes before Firefox usage drops even further.

I'm not a Mozilla hater. I have contributed Firefox translations in the past, built extensions, and I even collaborate actively with some of the projects that I think are distracting Mozilla.

Not sure I understand how this comment follows the announcement. What about it makes you lose trust in Mozilla?

The consistent lack of focus. I should have elaborated in my comment.

> I lose trust in Mozilla

Why did you lose trust in Mozilla? What other browser would you recommend instead?

Brave

Mozilla != Firefox

The ceo is a joke and the org sucks.

Not sure why this is downvoted. Mitchell has been a disaster for Mozilla (her only accomplishment is squeezing more money out of Google for the search deal despite an ever dwindling user base for FF - we measure DAU and MAU and the hemorrhaging hasn’t stopped).

Very few people in the org actually work on FF. It’s increasingly other bets that don’t pan out or weird acquisitions: Hubs, Pocket, FakeSpot, VPN, Relay, now Monitor. Eventually these lose enough money and they’ll cut them. Then inevitably Mitchell will run a surplus in the budget by cutting projects early and squeezing more money out of Google, funnel the money back to the Mozilla foundation which she also chairs, and then doll it out to her pet political projects.