I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions, but they are in a difficult position, and the anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless. Some common demands:
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google
- Mozilla should not monetize Firefox
- Mozilla should only focus on Firefox
- Mozilla should develop cool research projects
- Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business
- Mozilla should have a salary cap and expect executives to treat it like a passion project
Some of these goals are opposite ends of the same slider, so it's not possible to maximize both. Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. For example, my understanding is that while salaries are quite decent, they tend to be below what Apple and Google will offer for similar roles.
Maybe it's seen as waffling whenever they shift these sliders, and maybe that's a fair criticism. But nobody else seems to be able to put together a clear and realistic alternative plan. Most of them pick and choose contradictory goals, other plans like Zawinski's are at least clear, but too radical for those who still want revenue to pay developers or to be able to watch Netflix in their browser.
Exactly, and to your point, a lot of the charges against Mozilla are mutually exclusive, contradictory, or barely even half-made attempts at arguments. You've outlined the make money/don't make money contradiction. But to add a few more of the crazy criticisms, sincerely made:
- Implying without evidence that the VPN is run at prohibitively massive cost and at the expense of other programs
- Claiming that Mozilla has "run out of money" (they have over $1 billion in assets)
- Overstating costs of Mozilla's dabbling in blockchain (they wrote a paper or two)
- Claiming the CEO pay has crippled Mozilla's ability to work on core browser (it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue)
- Claiming without any mechanism or argument that there's a missing feature Mozilla could have developed that would have restored all their market share
- Related to the above, completely ignoring that Chrome drove market share in its own proactive ways, leveraging its search and Android dominance, rolling out affordable Chromebooks and that these drove the market share more than anything specific to Mozilla
- Firefox has become bloated and slow (Outdated talking point, it was true for a time, but then they did the dang thing and delivered Quantum, which delivered the major advances in speed in stability that everyone asked for)
That's not to say there's no valid criticisms, there are plenty. There seems to be real cause and effect, for instance, on Firefox's investments in FirefoxOS and the ability to invest resources in the browser, and that did happen over a time where market share was lost. And the dabbling in ads risks compromising the soul of their mission in critical ways.
But meanwhile these (above) have all generally been basically misunderstandings or bad arguments with no internal logic, but claimed over and over again in the backwaters of internet comment sections with complete impunity. The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.
In a lot of industries, 1% revenue is rather a lot. Many domains have profit margins of 5% or even less; that would be fully 20% of your earnings.
Software development is not "many industries", and Mozilla isn't most software development companies. So it's hard for me to say whether that specific CEO salary is appropriate. But I'd rather see his salary described by earnings, rather than revenue, since revenue by itself could just be churn.
If it impresses you that the CEO pay is 20% of earnings, then, well, software development is going to be something like 500% of earnings, overhead will be 250%, and so on. The relative proportions of the different expenses will be the same. They just look bigger when you compare them to profits.
The CEO pay certainly matters and it's more than I would like, but I don't see how considering it as 20% of profits rather than 1% of revenue demonstrates that it's taking more away from development than any other 1% of their spending.
Yes, but now you're comparing the CEO to entire departments. Each individual software developer is receiving less than 1% of earnings. Is the CEO really 20 times more productive than they are?
Would it be possible to increase net earnings with a CEO who took home only 19% of net earnings? Changing out a single developer for a cheaper one is not going to be meaningful. But a CEO who takes home a significant fraction of the profit could probably be replaced by somebody who does 99.9% as good a job for 95% of the salary.
In fact, there's a good chance that one of those developers could do 50% as good a job for 1% of the salary. The shareholders would take home more money.
I feel like I've been consistent throughout by evaluating costs as a percentage of revenue. That’s the actual denominator Mozilla uses when allocating its budget. There’s no switch or sleight of hand happening here. One percent of revenue is one percent of the available operating budget.
It seems like you've changed your framing entirely. Your original point was that CEO pay is significant because it's 20 percent of net earnings. That implied this metric better captured the weight of the cost. But now you’ve moved to a different argument, comparing the CEO’s compensation to individual developers and bringing in a shareholder-return perspective. These are entirely separate lines of reasoning and don’t follow from the point you started with.
Also, Mozilla doesn’t have shareholders? So the idea that the CEO should be compensated in a way that maximizes shareholder earnings doesn’t really apply. Mozilla’s spending decisions should be judged in terms of how well they serve its mission, not whether they increase a surplus that could be distributed to hypothetical owners.
I’m not even necessarily defending the CEO pay on its own. I just don't think you can make the case that it crippled their ability to work on needed features, and I think the logic you’re using has shifted in a way that doesn’t hold up when applied to Mozilla’s actual structure or purpose.
> Is the CEO really 20 times more productive than they are?
People up the ladder are getting more money not for their productiveness, but for the risks. A single developer can't ruin the company/sales (well, most of the times). A single C-level can do that with ease.
Isn't the general employee at higher risk than the CEO? Entire departments can be RIFfed at the stroke of a pen and the employees don't have a Golden Parachute or a revolving door to the next corporation.
If the turtle-saving foundation I donate to has a windfall, I would expect it to save more turtles, not to instead also focus on feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children. This does not mean that feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children is wrong, it is an even more important goal than saving the turtles, but somewhere in the process, there pillaged a decision maker that misinterpreted (acceptable) or ignored (unacceptable) the intentions of the benefactors.
Except the foundations mission statement isn't turtle-saving, that's just what you think is clearly the most important part of their work that they should solely focus on, in your opinion. And it's not wrong of you to want to be able to donate towards the parts that you care about, but it's an obvious disconnect from the reality of what their stated goals are (and hence you blame decision makers for decisions that are actually fully in line with the mission statements).
Mozilla Foundation never was the Firefox Development Foundation, as much as some of us want it to be. Wikimedia never was the Wikipedia Development and Operations Foundation. If you dislike that, donate to entities with narrower goals (I personally prefer directing money towards OSM and KDE for example)
If a foundation spins off a project's community with certain goals, they take on to some degree the goals and the vision of the people that built it. Those are opinions, and they are important to the cited goals. If then a foreign element enters the system due to the sad state of the technology/corporate enterprises nowadays and changes the mission statement, you have not changed the spirit it was created with, you changed a business strategy in a way that is disconnected and hostile to the initial goal. A lot of the times the goals aren't really stated at all clearly, are protected by different acts like codes of conduct, and open to modification by impassionate people with ephemeral leadership positions who don't care what happens to the organization down the line.
Sure, I can become the chairman of Turtle saving international and change our charter to prioritize feeding hotdogs to hungry Somalis, but I am still doing an ideological disservice to the grassroots initiative that built the foundation and created the position for me to be sitting on, no?
Also, this seems to me extremely fragile when situations are reversed, say that an outright awful organization like an international petrol company gets a new mission statement. Should all they did before and after that be forgiven because their stated goals say otherwise?
I personally see this as little less than a ground truth, but perhaps there is some way that stated goals stand above all regardless.
EDIT: I do see how you make a very good point when you're looking mostly from the present towards the future, though.
In both cases, their "wide" mission statements have been around for a long time, it's not a recent thing. E.g. you maybe can say that Mozilla Foundation in 2003 was presented as something else than what it decided to adopt in 2007 with the Mozilla Manifesto, but well, that's a 4 year period that ended 18 years ago and happened under the original leadership, it's not later executives somehow distorting it.
> Both Mozilla and the Wikipedia Foundation seem to have the same problem of doing everything but focusing on their core raison d'être.
At least for Wikimedia... running Wikipedia itself isn't expensive, they're not running it as a resume-driven-development project in some hyperscaler that brings associated costs, they run bare metal servers to this day (and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup).
Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.
> Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.
but then why do they constantly run banners implying that Wikipedia will shut down if I don't donate right now?
Capitalism, plain and simple. I don't like it either, but that's the way all fundraising has devolved down to. And hell, it's been that way even decades ago with images of starving little African kids being used for emotional manipulation.
In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
I don’t believe that ‘capitalism’ is a good explanation for the behaviour of a charitable organisation with no shareholders.
An issue with private funding for charitable projects is, as you note, appeals to the emotions of private donors.
An issue with the public funding for charitable projects you propose is appeals to the emotions of both legislators and executive agents. Another issue is corruption: a project which can figure out how to both receive money from taxes and influence elections can ultimately write its own meal ticket.
You said that the Wikimedia Foundation's core mission is to basically do good things. Their core goal is not to keep Wikipedia running (as most people believe).
Wikimedia runs very prominent banner ads all the time on Wikipedia, saying that they need money to keep Wikipedia running, and that they're a small team that depends on community funding to keep Wikipedia running, and they can't do it without you, and please please please donate by this date. I think it is very reasonable for your average Wikipedia user to believe the following, thanks to how Wikimedia advertises:
* Wikimedia is the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia. They're basically the same thing, since Wikimedia's goal is running Wikipedia.
* Wikipedia is run by a small team
* Wikipedia is heavily reliant on donations from normal people
* Wikipedia needs money all the time. I know this because they're constantly running big highlighted banner ads urgently asking for money before $DATE
If what you said is true, and Wikimedia's core mission is not in fact, to preserve Wikipedia, then they're engaging in deceptive advertising. They're giving the impression that they need money right now to keep Wikipedia's funding source secure, but in reality, their goal is much broader than just Wikipedia. I think it's reasonable to assume that Wikipedia's funding could be much more secure if the Wikimedia Foundation solely focused on running Wikipedia. In other words, if they stopped spending on $NOT_WIKIPEDIA_REL_COST they would be fine.
What does this have to do with capitalism or $ENTITY using pictures of starving African children?
> In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
I want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your words. Are you saying that it's okay for Wikimedia to engage in knowingly deceptive advertising because otherwise poor countries won't be able to get their economy running?
Are we agreeing that they're knowingly being deceptive, and that they wouldn't need to be deceptive if they just focused on Wikipedia? And we're disagreeing on whether that deception is moral or immoral?
> What does this have to do with capitalism or $ENTITY using pictures of starving African children?
To show that, thanks to capitalism, deception has become the norm in advertising (of all kind, frankly), and either you go along and play the game, or you go six feet under. It's immoral, sure, but I'd much more prefer to see the system itself fixed than to only nab random offenders.
> I want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your words. Are you saying that it's okay for Wikimedia to engage in knowingly deceptive advertising because otherwise poor countries won't be able to get their economy running?
No. The part with the poor countries refers to that I don't want to see any kind of fundraiser stuff that should be a government's job, and on top of that I disdain many of the charity campaigns relating to Africa because the "aid" we gave utterly crushed the local agricultural and textile industry, sending off many countries into a disastrous dependency loop - if you want to read more on that, look up "mitumba".
> Capitalism, plain and simple. I don't like it either, but that's the way all fundraising has devolved down to.
No.
*Even under a socialist framework*, the tactics used for fundraising would not be alien. The main difference would be to court either (a) the public votes for funding approval, or (b) the leadership votes that hold the administration's purse strings.
Don't blame it on the system. There are only so many ways to gather resources before the different methods overlap with each other.
> In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
Counterpoint: Why is it *my* burden to bear on building up *their* economy/business/organization? They're not as inept as implied in your saviour complex.
I've noticed this as well. It's in especially stark contrast when you compare to other browsers, such as Brave, whose gaffes and controversies tend to be overlooked, excused, or forgotten about.
EDIT: For me, my choice of browser is simplified by the fact that I don't trust any chromium browser to keep long-term compatibility with extensions I rely upon, especially uBlock Origin.
Not really, but I will say Brave has had more controversies and they're more severe than anything Firefox or Mozilla have done. But you wouldn't gather that from online comments.
> Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground.
Deeply disagree.
I think you are avoiding looking at facts by presenting the issue as a matter of contradicting opinions.
Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure by a minority linked to things unrelated to his tenure.
Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things. Worse, there were multiple events leading to negative marketing created by poor strategy.
Despite this string of failures, top management has been significantly increasing their compensation. The issue is not knowing if these compensations are competitive. Everything points to the top management being grossly incompetent. Nobody wants them to treat it like a passion project. People want them out.
I mean except Google of course which is all to happy that they meet the goal assigned to them: not being a competitor in the browser market and being an useful umbrella in case competition authorities wants to take a look at Chrome.
>Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things.
This right here is the myth that keeps getting repeated without evidence. As I said in a different comment, most of these widely criticized side bets happened long after the market share decline, so the attempt to tie that to cause and effect just doesn't work. And the "significant" money invested in the side bets is almost never quantified (normally people trying to make this argument, once you ask for numbers, are just browsing the 990 for the first time and making random guesses).
The VPN cost seems like it was utterly trivial, the amount to purchase Pocket was never disclosed but I read of fundraising around $14MM and implied valuations in the low to mid tens of millions, which may be the ballpark of what Pocket costed to acquire. And Pocket did bring in revenue, also possibly on the order of tens of millions. So the worst case is that they lost low tens of millions, the best case is that it was a wash.
So that's not nothing, but that's what it looks like to attach these claims to facts. It's probably less than what their endowment earns them in a year, and relatively small against their annual revenue. But it doesn't tell a story of side bets triggering a collapse in market share like people keep claiming.
And it seems like I keep having to repeat this, but these kinds of narratives completely ignore what were likely the real drivers of market share change, which was Google leveraging its powerful position in search, on Android, the rollout of Chromebooks.
>Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure
Sidebar for this one. Seems like you are referring to Brandon Eich who was CEO for all of 11 days. He was significant to Mozilla in other ways before that, but interestingly, it's his career at Mozilla that most intersects with the period of major collapse in market share.
>while they barely fought on the marketing side of things
Mozilla has long had a rather huge marketing budget that, depending on the person, is something for which they're criticized. I foget the exact numbers, but after software and development, "operations", and legal, marketing is the biggest chunk of spending and it's comparable to those other departments. If you wanted to argue that they are spending too much that actually would, imo, be one of the stronger charges to make against Mozilla, depending on what you think their priorities should be.
I'll happily credit Eich for his successes if he ever again applies his talents to a non Chromium browser. But right now that's Firefox, and hopefully soon, Ladybird.
The TV thing meant the Fire TV version? How much did it cost? How much did Amazon pay Mozilla?
What was Eich's track record of good decisions? He supported Firefox OS. This seems a bad decision according to you. Many people say Firefox was much inferior to Chrome from 2008 to 2017 at least. Eich was CTO from 2005 to 2014. His track record at Brave includes multiple events which led to negative marketing.
Eich's tenure as Mozilla's CEO included failing to prepare for a predictable PR crisis, declining to apologize for harming people, and declining to say he wouldn't do it again.
You’re twisting what people ask for. The real versions are not contradictory.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google.
- Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.
- Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox.
- Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.
- Mozilla should be well run.
- Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.
This is a company that has repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding. They defined themselves as the advocate for users on the web, then started selling user data and lied about it. Sure there’s a grey area, but Mozilla is far from it.
Points 3 and 4 are contradictory, or at least, very difficult to reconcile. The use of "mainly" means you can technically say it's possible to achieve both but I doubt any of Mozilla's critics will ever be happy with their attempts to do so.
Points 1 to 3 also seem very difficult to reconcile. If they need to develop revenue independent of Google, and they need to focus mainly on Firefox, then at some stage they need to monetise other aspects of the browser. How do they do that in a way that is respectful to its users? What is the way for Mozilla to develop a new revenue stream, via Firefox (their main focus), that everyone is happy with?
Points 5 and 6 are too vague, I don't see how they could ever objectively be measured against those principles (other than by looking at the other principles).
All of this is to say that they can't win. They launch new products to try and make money, they are selling out and abandoning their core mission. They try instead to make money from their main product, they are selling out and betraying their users. They try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are dumbing it down and letting down their power users. They don't try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are failing to stay relevant.
I've seen the comments they are talking about, so I don't agree they are twisting anything. Your aspirationally consistent restatement of the case is vague, and the contradictions are specific. Does the existence of the investment fund count as failing to focus on Firefox or succeeding at developing revenue independent of Google? How about the VPN, another potential revenue source?
Is advocating for open web standards (as mentioned in the article as an example of a good thing) a distraction from Firefox (as I've seen commenters here suggest), or respecting users by giving a voice to their users in standards deliberation where their voice would otherwise be excluded?
And how confident are you that your answers are the unique and consistent representation of what users really want, and that I won't be able to quote half a dozen commenters coming to completely different diagnoses of the same questions?
> repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things
I don't claim to know Mozilla's internal workings, but my wife works for an education-space 501c3, and there are very strict rules about how they can fundraise, how they can spend money that's been donated, etc. I'm sure Mozilla Foundation is large enough to manage this stuff, but things like per-project bank accounts and tax records are still overhead they would have to deal with. I know one of their (my wife's org's) thorniest areas is around what money can be spent on non-"core mission" expenses.
There are strict rules for businesses soliciting donations. Mozilla Corporation would have to be more careful than most because of confusion between the non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. And many people who claim they would donate to Mozilla Corporation demand per project accounting if they don't demand elimination of all projects they dislike.
> - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google.
> - Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.
These are contradictory, because how, exactly, do you expect them to make money?
They push and advertise a paid VPN service and everyone loses their minds and acts like Mozilla is the evilest company there ever darn was. But they do nothing, and then they "respect users", but they rely on Google for revenue.
> - Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox.
> - Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.
These are also contradictory and even contradict the first two. These side projects were not very successful, they were just well-liked. There's a difference.
If they push these side-projects, they're not focusing on Firefox, and they're disrespecting users, AND they're irresponsibly using their revenue. Oops.
And, on the topic of side projects, it seems to me that everyone rallies around them and calls them stupid and unnecessary... until they're killed. Then suddenly, magically, everyone and their Mom was using them. Really? Where was this support before? Are the supporters just unusually silent?
Like Pocket. I heard nothing, NOTHING, but ridicule for Pocket. Until it got discontinued. Then everyone loved it, it was the darling child of Mozilla, it was the best, and everyone used it. Really? Yeah, okay.
> And, on the topic of side projects, it seems to me that everyone rallies around them and calls them stupid and unnecessary... until they're killed. Then suddenly, magically, everyone and their Mom was using them. Really? Where was this support before? Are the supporters just unusually silent?
> Like Pocket. I heard nothing, NOTHING, but ridicule for Pocket. Until it got discontinued. Then everyone loved it, it was the darling child of Mozilla, it was the best, and everyone used it. Really? Yeah, okay.
I agreed with you before this. I saw positive comments about Pocket before Mozilla announced they would shut it down. And HN comments after the announcement were more mixed than your summary.
Few complaints about Pocket were about the reading list service. They were about Mozilla integrating it. Or buying it. Or breaking their promise to open the source. Or lying about privacy. Or trying to hide Pocket paid them. Or the chum box on the new tab page. Almost any discussion of Mozilla or Firefox would prompt 1 or more of these complaints.
Frankly I think people are going to be mad at Mozilla no matter what, and at this point I treat the discourse like a psyop.
Does Mozilla make mistakes? Of course. But when their competitors, Chrome, make the same mistakes but orders of magnitude worse, and nobody says anything, I can't take it seriously.
Does Mozilla disrespect their users? A bit, sometimes, in specific circumstances. Google's entire business model is disrespecting their users. So, if that's your gauge, then you're actually arguing in favor of Firefox. Same thing goes for ads. Same things go for shady payments.
This is not to say that we shouldn't critique Mozilla or Firefox. We should. But, I can't help but feel that the critique is disproportionate. And, it makes me wonder how much of it is critique, and how much of it is suspicious praise towards Google.
It's this sort of expectation problem. Maybe there's a word for it. But, since Google has shown so much bad behavior, they've set that expectation for themselves. And now, they're off the hook. They're playing a different game all together. Mozilla has one set of standards, and Chrome has another.
In this universe, Mozilla is a PhD student and Chrome is a toddler. We don't knock the toddler for shitting their pants because it's what we expect. And, we certainly wouldn't expect the toddler to construct a bibliography!
> - Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.
The problem is, when searching for high-level executives, you're not competing against other NGOs, you're competing with the wide free market - and salaries there are, frankly, out of control and have been so for decades [1]. Either Mozilla Foundation plays the dirty game just like everyone else does, or they go out of business.
It's the system that's broken at a fundamental level, not individual actors.
One might ask why Mozilla needs to search for a high-level executive in the first place. Most open source projects, even very large ones, function reasonably well without a hired executive - so what makes Mozilla different such that it requires this luxury good?
> Most open source projects, even very large ones, function reasonably well without a hired executive - so what makes Mozilla different such that it requires this luxury good?
For a certain definition of "reasonably well", that is.
And often enough, big money is at play, it's just hidden from the public eye - just look how much money IBM, RedHat, Google, Meta and other very large players spend on salaries for kernel and other OSS developers - and their managers in turn are paid the usual ridiculous executive salaries. That just doesn't show up on any public finance report.
How does "failing to attract an executive whose primary differentiating characteristic is demanding exorbitant amounts of money" lead to them going out of business?
> I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions
That's a very twisted way of putting it. Mozilla has almost always made egregiously bad decisions, especially with its money. Indeed, "I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions"
I am sorry that my response is so long, but you raised so many often repeated points that I wanted to reply somewhere near them.
To me, the motives of the users were always pretty clear and aligned with freedom, privacy and empowering end-users with free software. Then the suits came and reinterpreted it enough that if you look at it from the right angle, which is coincidentally always somewhere up Google's ass, it may align with what they're doing now.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google: true, but it could be in a different form than a search engine deal that effectively pipes all of user's queries to the most agressive advertising spyware syndicate of the world.
- Mozilla should not monetize Firefox: this is true. They can monetize adjacent support services like they did with the VPN and Relay (which I gladly paid for), but not the main product if they want it to be omnipresent.
- Mozilla should only focus on Firefox: strongly disagree. Mozilla should work on TECHNOLOGIES. TFA describes very well how Mozilla produced Rust and Servo, which are clearly more widely used software than Firefox. The difference between those two and Firefox is that they aren't a product to be marketed, they are technologies used in other projects! This makes it pretty easy to gain market share and get a higher user share to sit with the big players. Technologies, unlike products, are however very unappealing to the managerial caste since they need to mature a great deal more. This is a sociological problem. If a well-designed commercial product can be cathedral, a lot of technology projects I've seen people build resemble zen gardens. A midwit paid six figures to do nothing always tends to despise those who, for the same amount of money, tend to a zen-garden-like project with passion and intent. This also aligns somewhat with "Mozilla should develop cool research projects."
- Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business: nah. adjacent services could, but not really. Most successful software companies work off of cloud services and support nowadays. The shipped product is maybe 5% of the extracted value. A non-enshittified browser won't do much better, so I think it better to discard the thought altogether and focus on the free browser, then sell subscriptions to Relay, Pocket, or something else that works well with the free browser.
I guess my main gripe is that I see huge projects like Apache, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, PFSense, Proxmox, etc. Which are huge software projects that thrive by developing technologies. Some like PFSense and Proxmox then provide a product on top of it, but the focus is on the technology. Mozilla turned from a company developing software and technology to a company that's selling a free product and trying to profit from it. And hiring more executives won't bring better tech in.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can't cash in a good product for more than a few months, but you can capitalize on a good technology practically forever. And Mozilla can't seem to understand that software can be either, both, or none of the above, so it's starting to do what their clueless executives are good at: extract value.
Looking at your list of contradictory demands, I will point out that Mozilla themselves seemed to act the way you criticize their critics for acting. They tried to pull themselves in every direction all at once and it turns out Mozilla can't really do that.
I mean, everyone shits on Wikimedia for ballooning expenses, but at least they figured out crowdfunding.
That's not to say Mozilla can't make any strategic bets. It's just that they have to be both:
1. Complimentary or integral to their flagship browser product, Firefox, and,
2. Have a reasonable path to success
Let's look at Boot2Gecko, or "Firefox OS", through this lens. Firefox needs to be on as many operating systems as possible, including mobile OSes. And it was true that one particular mobile OS vendor was loud and proud in banning Gecko. The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS. This doesn't get Firefox in the hands of more people, but it sure as hell ties up expensive engineer time on building an entirely new platform.
Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.
Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.
The reason why I focus on Firefox is because it's the only power Mozilla has to negotiate with. When Hollywood wanted to be able to use DRM in browser, Mozilla surrendered, almost unconditionally. And they had to, because the answer to "Firefox remains principled and doesn't put DRM in the browser" is "every streaming service tells people to uninstall Firefox".
Compare that to Apple, who was able to singlehandedly block any requirement for baseline video codec support in HTML5 because they didn't want to implement Ogg Theora. That's what being a big player in the browser market gets you.
Furthermore, Zawinski's plan is the only option. Mozilla is out of time, the DOJ is actively attempting to shut off Google's antitrust insurance and that basically spells doom for Mozilla. Hell, Mozilla themselves put out an extremely morally compromised position statement, because selling the search default is the only thing Mozilla managed to make stick. If Mozilla doesn't implement Zawinski's plan, they'll collapse and cease operating.
[0] In practice, just Android. I don't remember if Windows Phone had the same limitations as iOS did, but it's market share was so limited it did not matter.
> The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS.
Firefox was losing market share to Chrome on desktop platforms which Google did not own and which did not bundle Chrome. It was not and is not obvious a better Android Firefox would have halted the decline. And any Windows Phone effort would have been wasted.
Some people think Mozilla gave up Firefox OS too soon.
In another history all iOS browsers are Safari, all Windows Phone browsers are Internet Explorer, and all Android browsers distributed through Google Play are Chrome. HN comments say Mozilla were foolish to bet this would not happen.
> Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.
Firefox includes components prototyped in Servo. It is not used as a developer tool as far as I know. Many tangible improvements to the browser were delivered without Servo.
Many companies rely on Rust without funding it. Mozilla passing Rust to an independent foundation was painful for Rust. It is unclear it harmed Mozilla.
> Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.
Why do you call Firefox OS its development name? Boot2Gecko may have been a side project. Firefox OS was the main project according to people who worked for Mozilla then.
Mozilla shut down Pocket to refocus on Firefox because Pocket was unprofitable or insufficiently profitable apparently.
Mozilla acquired Anonym last year. I think Mozilla owning an advertising company will enshittify Firefox. But how did you determine so soon it was dead weight?
> Zawinski's plan
Does Zawinski's plan mean Building THE reference implementation web browser, and Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees? The 1st part is a vague objective. Not a plan. And the 2nd part depends on the 1st part.
>anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless.
No they aren't. People just want a good product that's free from bloat and doesn't change the UI every week, interrupting you when you open it to advertise some sponsored affiliate websites on the home page (Otto and Adidas in my case) or new features I never asked for and will never use like Pocket or the VPN.
The org and leadership should also focus their funds on the technical development of the product itself, instead on social and political activism and virtue signaling since I don't want lectures form my products.
Basically, Mozilla just needs to "PUT THE FRIES IN THE BAG" and everyone would be happy, and even throw in a few bucks every now and then as a gesture of appreciation and good will.
But Mozilla lost users by doing the exact opposite of that, being drunk on the Google funded gravy train and knowledge that they're untouchable, being only thing preventing Chrome being considered a monopoly by regulators.
So good riddance from me, you reap what you sow, RIP BOZO, I can't support a bad product run by incompetent people just on idealism alone, it actually needs to be technically superior first and foremost.
Then how come Chrome does everything I need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What's this business strategy called?
I call it "not shooting yourself in the foot". Mozilla management should try it.
Like I said, Mozilla can win by "putting the fries in the bag". Nobody switched from Chrome to Firefox because they had Pocket or some VPN or they had affiliate websites on the home page. On the contrary.
>Then how come Chrome does everything I need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They let you block ads and respect your privacy? Or are you insisting on behalf of Mozilla's user base that those are not things being requested?
I would go so far as to say that respecting privacy has been one of the biggest requests from critics of Mozilla, one of the biggest senses of violation, and that replicating Chrome's abandonment of privacy is, therefore, one of the bigger examples of a contradictory request.
Google also doesn't make money from Chrome directly, yet that's what is asked of Mozilla. So how do they do what Chrome does while simultaneously fulfill the user request to leverage their browser to make money?
>Nobody switched from Chrome to Firefox because they had Pocket or some VPN or they had affiliate websites on the home page
Look up the history of Firefox market share and tell me if you can find a cause and effect relationship between market share change and any particular side bet. Because I can't find any, with one exception I'll get to in a second. Most of the side bets people complain about came in after Chrome already rose to dominance and had nothing to do with the change in market share. If words mean things, that should matter when people make this argument, but I feel like people forgot they're supposed to actually make real arguments to back these claims up.
The only exception I can find is Firefox OS, which, again, highlights the contradiction between wanting Mozilla to diversify its offerings but criticizing them when they do. It was actually one of their better big picture vision ideas in my estimation and was given favorable gloss in the article we're all talking about. But you can argue it siphoned away resources, and many people do.
So I think the criticisms are pretty all over the map, and the article linked here is actually one the best pieces I've seen that strikes the right balance.
Chrome does everything you need because Chrome is your baseline that you are used to and because of that your requirement is "it does what Chrome does".
Firefox has features that people "need" but they only know they want it because they already use it and they won't switch away from Firefox unless whatever they'd switch to has the same feature.
Ex: I will never switch away to another browser unless it has extensions that allow you to group tabs and "store them in the background" like you can with Firefox's Simple Tab Groups. Likewise I know people who won't switch to a manifest v3 browser because they don't want their adblock crippled.
TLDR: Your requirements are "whatever I currently use but better". You will never win users by trying to beat a better funded and better staffed project at that. Instead you have to try to do new things and discover what can make your project stand out.
I used Opera before FF due to its unique and innovative features, then FF when Opera became Chinese, then Chrome when FF went to shit by changing its UI for the worst every week.
None of the new features FF introduced did I ever need, and judging by its market share I am not alone. FF just focuses on useless features that nobody asked for. If you asked for those feature, congrats, you're part of the 0,001% userbase, too bad that's irrelevant. Bad leadership. You can defend FF all you want but the market share speaks for itself.
They had unlimited money from Google and they squandered it. That's like playing a game with cheat codes and coming in last every time. Mozilla leadership should resign and go flip burghers at McDs instead as they're shit at their tech jobs.
Mozilla had to just not fuck with the UI, features and put ads, and it would have been as easy win.
> Did you know there's already a special developer's edition? No web designer is building on Firefox first any more. We're lucky if they even test on it. All the functionality attached to Firefox's "Browser tools" sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer's edition.
Though, it would be more plain, if they wrote "could" instead of "should".
What's the benefit for Firefox and its users if dev tools are removed from stable Firefox and "banished" to the Developer Edition?
Dev tools are part of all browsers. Even Safari, which tries to keep things very simple, ships dev tools on the stable version. I really don't see the point in removing them.
The thinking is that users are a danger to themselves and will be tricked by threat actors to add some CA cert to the trust store, paste commands into the js console, or download and sideload malicious extensions no matter what controls are in place so therefore these possibilities must be removed.
Those same users will be tricked into downloading the "secure bowser" which has these tools. This is a nonsensical argument.
To this day, firefox is still the only browser that prevents its users from running custom extensions without Mozilla's blessing, likely motivated by the same garbage argument.
I have very little hope for Mozilla at this point and sincerely hope that they fail soon so that better open source browsers can take its place.
No, you can. In regular Firefox (without doing any shenanigans) the extension will be installed for the session (until the browser is closed), but Firefox Developer Edition lets you just install and run unsigned/invalid extensions (which is very useful if you occasionally have to change your clock back to 2018 and don’t want to lose all extensions).
Why would anyone want to install another browser to use as a developer?
What the computing world needs is less separation of users and developers. Developers use programs all day, every day. And users should be able to write programs any time they wish. One of the most commonly used pieces of software in the world is a programming system: Excel.
One of my problems with iOS is the implicit assumption that users will not and should not extend the systems they use.
What a strange take. I'm arguably a web designer, though its only one of many hats I wear. I design for Firefox first and then patch the places where chrome/safari break. If dev tools were only present on developer edition, which tracks the unreleased beta version, I wouldn't actually be able to test on Firefox that regular people are using.
As a developer who develops on Firefox, and only tests on other browsers just before deployment, I'd reconsider supporting it for end users if they're not going to be able to hit F12 to help me diagnose any issues that come up on their side.
Some of TFA is more grounded. That particular paragraph though…
It exemplifies why beneficial change is so hard sometimes. The loudest voice in the room can go "here are the problems", we can all nod along in agreement, and then "and here's what we should do" … and it's just out there. I've seen this happen numerous times — borderline continuously — in politics.
Even ealier in the article, they (rightly, IMO) skewer Mozilla for laying off the Rust and Servo teams, but then TFA utterly undercuts its own thesis with,
> It shouldn't be trying to capitalize on [projects such as Rust or Servo].
What? What's the point of Rust, or Servo, then, if not to develop a better Firefox?
Yeah! Marx is the most extreme example of this in world history, probably. His critiques of capitalism are absolutely some of the truest words ever written. They are essential. They should be required reading for the entire human race, even for the most better-dead-than-red capitalist. Embracing capitalism without acknowledging the downsides is just about the most dangerous thing imaginable.
But then, Marx's proposed solutions... well, you know. They've never worked out too well. To make the understatement of a lifetime.
Compared to the people running Chrome, the people running Firefox are merely annoying.
My main issue with the people running Mozilla is that they have wasted vast sums of money on executive salaries and their half baked notions of new initiatives the company should take up (and later abandon) that don't involve building web browsers, email clients, or supporting development tools.
All that money wasted is the whole point of Mozilla. It’s been captured by Google. The role of Mozilla is to provide a fig leaf of “competition” while using Google money to pay executives who fulfill that duty. Anything that is successful or innovative, like Rust, Servo, or FakeSpot need to be jettisoned because they are a distraction from Mozilla’s true mission.
i wish firefox would have hoarded away their billions of dollars they've received and simply run as a lean mission-oriented company for the next 20 years from those funds. get rid of expensive execs and middle managers and sales and whatever else. have passionate, well-paid developers and open source advocates and nothing else. both make the best possible open source software, and also use your influence and resources to make the pressure from companies like google make the web less shitty
> My main issue with the people running Mozilla is that they have wasted vast sums of money on executive salaries and their half baked notions of new initiatives the company should take up (and later abandon) that don't involve building web browsers, email clients, or supporting development tools.
Your main issue is in direct contradiction to most people's issue with Firefox - it relies on Chrome for revenue.
They repeatedly try other revenue streams and people hate them for that too. It's a lose-lose, because, for some reason, people hate Mozilla almost viscerally. They're held to such a frankly insane standard as compared to Chrome.
I mean, Chrome shits on users in every way you could possibly imagine and nobody seems to care. Chrome is married to Google and nobody complains. But Firefox is less married to Google and it's a 100x bigger problem. How? What's the formula here?
> In mid-2024, he pointed out its "Original Sin" of adopting digital rights management.
I disagree on that one. Maybe it could have been an option 15-20 years ago, when Firefox was a significant force. But now, if it didn't have DRM, platforms that use DRM would just tell people to use another browser, or a specialized app. And people who are not activists would just switch to "the browser that runs $service", and then you give free reign to whoever controls these browsers, including making the DRM more restrictive and more invading.
DRM is an addon, it lets you do thing that you can't do without (i.e. watching protected content), but it won't affect non-DRM content. You can turn it off if you want, you just won't be able to watch Netflix (or whatever), making it a worse user experience.
If you refuse to support DRM (and therefore denying your users of some content), hoping that it will discourage adoption of DRM by platforms, you have to keep your users captive so that they won't just switch. And considering that Firefox doesn't rely on lock-in: they don't have the means to do so, and it is against the spirit in the first place, they have to offset that by offering something else. And unfortunately, they don't have much to offer besides ideology.
The original sin, if we can call it that, is that Firefox technically lagged behind Chrome: slower, more bugs, less secure,... Having to accept DRM, as well as anything Google decided was standard is a consequence of that.
That's why I had high hopes with Servo. It had the potential to make Firefox a "better browser", giving them some weight when deciding not to support some anti-feature, but they lost it.
They also lost an opportunity on mobile by not supporting extensions for too long, and generally, for not being taken seriously. Why did it take them so long to support DNS-over-HTTPS for instance?
Now, they have an opportunity regarding ad-blocking, I don't know how they are going to waste that one, but knowing them, they are probably going to manage it.
i have yet to find a site where i needed to activate DRM. even on sites where firefox did tell me to activate DRM, i just ignored it and the site worked fine. that said, having the feature built in doesn't bother me as long as i have the option to ignore it or keep it turned off
Those sites offer lower fidelity resolutions either way, DRM plugin is worthless. Heck, Netflix doesn't offer 4K streams even on a fully locked devices with L1 certificate, they have a separate licensing program that device vendors must participate in to get their products to be able to run Netflix.
Hey, I am sure people are payed very good money for these!
I wonder what the people making these videos are thinking. They know what people think of them, if they actually watch them before taking the usually obvious questionnaire that follows (hint: the answer is always "talk to your manager").
It reminds me of the time we took an electrical certification that we honestly didn't need but legally, we had to. It was in person, and the guy was actually great, and I think it is in a good part because he knew his place. He quickly got passed the regulatory aspects, then spent the rest of the time explaining stuff about house wiring, how breakers work, told us some entertaining (if sometimes a little morbid) stories and shown videos about electrical accidents. So it was maybe 10% what we were supposed to be for and 90% general information we could make use of in our daily life, all while keeping things entertaining.
The original sin, if we can call it that, is that Firefox technically lagged behind Chrome: slower, more bugs, less secure
I only want to comment on the more bugs component because for a time it seemed like all of the sites least likely to work in Firefox were Google run. Google was choosing to exclusively code to Chrome’s latest standard. When people cannot run YouTube, Gmail, whatever, but Chrome can, not surprising when users flee.
I am not talking about website compatibility, in fact, for as far as I can tell, I had no problem with Google services using Firefox. Some degradation maybe, but not enough for me to notice.
May seem trivial, but that's with bugs like these that you lose users. I wanted my mouse to zoom, my mouse didn't zoom on Firefox (and only on Firefox), I tried Chrome, it worked, found no (technical) downside, it was faster, so I stayed with Chrome. I continued using Firefox on another PC, and I saw a lot more crashes, slowdowns, etc... on Firefox, also, a single tab could crash the entire browser (it was before Electrolysis and Quantum). Website incompatibility wasn't actually that much of a problem, it mostly affected corporate intranets, which were equal part Chrome-only and IE-only during that time.
Things have improved on the Firefox side (Quantum!), and I don't use that mouse anymore, so I am back on Firefox for most part, the ad-blocking thing pushed me back, hoping that they don't to anything crazy to push me away like they did before.
> Mozilla's leadership is directionless and flailing because it's never had to do, or be, anything else. It's never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit. It's no wonder it has no real direction or vision or clue: it never needed them. It's role-playing being a business.
Roads are also a model of corruption and inefficiency, fully captured by private actors (in Europe, Vinci etc). And I think there's no way around it past some size, but that might not be the direction we wish for Firefox.
The abstract out rights says it's just using a PPP adjusted price vs quality measurement not actually studying real measurable corruption just their arms length proxy measurement. All that really shows is the US gets crappier product for the 'same' money (PPP comparisons are really squishy).
Yes, we know. We are not saying "privatize the browser" because as you rightly pointed out, privatisation is a guaranteed route to the utmost corruption.
Thank you but I don’t think the EU is a good steward. Look how much it spent in funding startups across Europe, and what little we have for it. Look at the decision-making in the EU stack.
Sweden or the Netherlands should buy it. The EU, no.
Been saying that for years but it's never been a popular opinion. For one thing people solidly blame the EU for those awful cookie banners -- and I think those cookie banners broke down any resistance to web sites popping up modals that cover up other modals all asking for your email..
The EU didn't force the banners. They restricted opt-out data collection without consent, which is a good thing to do. The banners is malicious compliance.
That's true, but I'm still going to blame the EU. The nag screens were absolutely a predictable response, and if the regulators didn't spend half an hour thinking about unscrupulous data marketers would react to the regulations, then they are bad at their jobs. And even after that, they've had years to fix the regulations and haven't done so.
Consent for privacy is a broken model. It needs to be "Respect DNT or go to directly to jail, do not pass Go" It's a predictable result and if the EU is not "consenting" with it they should change the law.
I'm a bit of a tinkerer with software and will occasionally "wander" over the fence to see if it really is greener on the other side; I always come back to Firefox. I've tried:
Brave: love the mission/execution, don't care for Chrome
Arc: interesting idea, but ultimately removed too much of the things I need in exchange for things I might use, but don't need
Orion: Firefox extensions (even on iOS!) + native performance? Love it, but it crashes all the time and the extensions' compatibility comes and goes
Safari: I don't mind paying for software, but paying for extensions that will probably disappear in 6 months is a pass
I've recently settled on the Zen Firefox flavor: It brings a lot of what Arc, custom Firefox themes aim for in a stable package, while maintaining full compatibility with all the Firefox extensions I use. The only issue I still experience is the occasional "this site only works on Chrome".
Does it actually not work with Firefox, or is it just checking the User-Agent and not even trying? Snapchat's web view is/was doing that last I checked (I have since permanently switched to serving Chrome's UA everywhere)
I think the primary thing I've learned about open vs closed source products this last decade, is that the difference in marketing is huge.
Both Firefox and Chrome are great browsers, end stop.
But most articles on HN about Chrome start with glowing praise.
And most articles on HN about Firefox start with "What's wrong with FF" and condescention.
I'm past the point of thinking that this is actually reflective about the browsers and their organizations.
Chrome is actively ending ad block support in its plugins. Its CEO is actively engaging in the political process. Firefox has always had a messy relationship with advertising, in which it generally tries to walk the line between reality and ideology. There are pros and cons to both products, depending on what you care about. The fact that articles on each browser so consistently fall into the same pattern does not seem reflective of the actual products themselves.
Weird mix of complaints, attacking Mozilla both from the ultra purity of non-profit web standards side via JWZ while simultaneously complaining they don't run it like a business.
People here should be much more angry at the collection of parasites running Mozilla, draining the foundation of money until Firefox finally dies with Mozilla going down right after them.
They are extracting millions while consistently fucking up any hopes of a future for Firefox. Fuck Mozilla, Fuck those Parasites and fuck all the Bootlickers here making excuses for them.
This. Mozilla has long appeared to exist as little more than a vehicle to enrich management, with a vestigial browser project attached to it. Google did its job very, very well here.
Firefox code is not fine. It is 25 years old code, with many stuff bolted on top (multithreading). It does not even have a proper security sandboxing for renderer!
This codebase was underfunded for a very long time! And all rewrites and major refactorings were cancelled!
Nobody embeds Gecko engine anymore. There are good reasons for that!
Fact! Firefox Security is atrociously behind modern standards and Firefox can only safely be used as a throwaway browser with additional external sand boxing.
How much of that is due to the difference in the amount of attention paid to each code base, do you reckon? If you're a security researcher, spending months of work on a browser with market share of more than 90% makes a lot more sense than on a browser with a market share of 2%, unless you're going after a specific individual who you know for sure uses that specific browser.
Both are giant C++ codebases executing random code of the internet. Of course they are both security nightmares. But Chrome has significant hardening that Firefox lacks [0].
I know, but I was trying to find vulnerabilities that could meaningfully hurt me, and imperfect hardening that hasn't yet/knowingly been exploited isn't super important to me.
I don't have government-funded security researchers out to get me. I hope.
> We can point at what we'd like to see, sure. Did you know there's already a special developer's edition? No web designer is building on Firefox first any more. We're lucky if they even test on it. All the functionality attached to Firefox's "Browser tools" sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer's edition.
If they're still developing the dev tools (which I'd argue they need to if they want any companies to support the browser), then what's there to gain by removing it from the regular build? I don't get it.
Librewolf, firefox fork, is the way to go; available on flathub. Obviously Brave still being main browser.
Mozilla went wrong long ago. They publicly went political and followed through with the firings. They have blogs from the ceo straight up calling for political censorship.
Even more odd, it was mostly just US politics which stands out to non-americans. They are focused on everything except the browser and so it was inevitable to decline.
I tried librewolf and it made all the exact same calls out that Firefox did on shutdown. Now I just disable the network before killing Firefox and then run bleachbit. I also mount some directories as tmpfs. What are the benefits of librewolf over Firefox? I could not find any. AFAIK its still just Firefox under the hood.
All the same non user initiated calls to Mozilla and other endpoints. Run tcpdump to see them. (both TCP and UDP now) I run a command before I close internet applications and all outbound connections are logged in dmesg via netfilter. Be sure to also log all DNS queries on your firewall.
I'm not OP, and I'm at work so I can't get the links for you, but the CEO/company was pretty vocal about the need for censorship, especially around and after the 2016 election. It's a legitimate concern, and it's why I don't use Mozilla products if possible. The company is run by ideology and could blow up at any moment
Not GP but their mention brings to memory these HN discussion I had read years ago and the comments probably already have more than this thread will discuss:
She builds off of "requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms" with "Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation". Whether deplatforming or "amplifying factual voices over disinformation" are seen as a good thing, they are censorship. She also mixes some good ideas in that (particularly platform algorithm transparency) of course.
Inherently by nature of existing no, but they can be easily implemented as such.
The censorship problems in the above are in the call to continue silencing/removals of political actors from discussion platforms and in pushing for centralized platforms to decide which political statements are factual. If you go an abstraction layer above that it gets too generic to universally claim as for censorship and if you go an abstraction layer below that it most often becomes an individual's choice.
Ad-blocking is turned off by default in most browsers.
Also basically no one wants to see ads, it is functionally useless, you can just go search for the thing you want to buy.
Censoring someone because you think they are harmful isn’t similar to this. You can develop a trump-blocker extension but having this enabled on default in a browser like chrome would be obvious censorship
> Whether deplatforming or "amplifying factual voices over disinformation" are seen as a good thing, they are censorship
this seems like an interesting, strongly-principled, almost legalistically pedantic twisting of intent - not that i can really claim to know her intent. what you call censorship can be reasonably understood as a cry against abuses of freedom of speech.
there are very clearly bad actors who profit from the abuse of freedom of speech, who argue in bad faith and spread misinformation in order to benefit themselves at all of our expense. not all speech is valuable, and a lot of it is harmful.
i'm not saying i have an answer, but a blind devotion to the principle of free speech (or any principle, really) necessarily comes with blind spots that people more cynical than you or me are capable of (and demonstrably very willing to) exploit. this world sucks.
I'm not posting that it should be seen as good or bad, just that's the prime example of the CEO calling for political censorship in a blog post someone was asking for a link to. As I said, even if one sees such actions as a good thing they are still censorship.
To me the main problem with the blog post was less the specific calls to action but the complete distraction from core technology, such as Firefox, Mozilla should have been focusing more on at the time. This is likely why the blog post ended up getting pulled - it served as a distracted from the mission more than it made any progress for it.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply you felt one way or the other, just responding to the general idea. I guess freedom of speech and censorship are pretty inextricable. It’s an interesting dichotomy to roll around in your head.
The article praises Jamie Zawinksi, for calling out Mozilla on its failings. My take is that listening to him is the quickest way to irrelevance.
He calls out Mozilla for accepting crypto donations, so they stop it. Now they get less donations but there's no actual reduction in harm. Crypto still exists and has only grown.
He calls out Mozilla for digging into AI. As a very generic anti-AI take. According to him, Mozilla should not invest in mitigating the risks of Big Tech AI, it should simply not play at all. And this way magically AI harm will be eliminated.
He calls out the "original sin", DRM video. People that invest hundreds of millions into making a movie, aren't going to allow you to "right-click, save" on paid content. There's nothing morally wrong with paid content.
I could go on but all of these takes are performative and useless. If you want to make the internet a better place you need to engage with the real world and not maneuver yourself into a tiny corner of irrelevance where you self-congratulate your theoretical moral purity to your 3 Mastodon friends that are equally obnoxious and out of touch.
I can confirm this use case does exist. My boyfriend (despite my constant disapproval) uses his tabs as essentially a bookmark manager and has around 100+ tabs open at any single time. His tab bar is composed of only barely recognizable icons, but he still manages to find things (more or less). I can not convince him to use tab groups, bookmarks, or sidebar tabs... :)
Speaking as someone who used to have few hundreds if not a thousand tabs opened.
Bookmarks are for long term storage. In some sense it is more like Stared History, something may be we need to return in the far future for reference. If browser have a function where it would record everything I read, bookmark would be stared piece of information where I think it is important.
Tabs Opened are reading list or To-do list. 30 Tabs on Toothbrush because I haven't decided which one to buy. Another 30 Tab on "each" different items which I planned to buy. 50 Tabs on HN because I haven't had time to read it yet. Sometimes I opened them when I visit HN front page and read it later. I must admit about 200 tabs wouldn't be needed if I am at 200K+ salary I just buy the top range without thinking. But I am frugal. Shopping on Amazon Prime, another 50 tabs.
SideBar Tabs doesn't work for me. Mostly because the Desktop web isn't designed for squashed layout. I would imagine it would work much better if I am on a 21:9 ultra wide monitor. But I haven't had the luxury to test it out.
> His tab bar is composed of only barely recognizable icons
I assume he is on Chrome? Because Firefox doesn't squeeze out the Tabs to Fav icons only.
> 30 Tabs on Toothbrush because I haven't decided which one to buy.
I mean, really? A tootbrush is a $2 item. They are all basically the same, some bristles on a handle. Why would you spend the time reading or even opening 30 different pages about this?
Personally I just use the free one I get from the dentist with each cleaning/checkup.
I missed out the word "electric" toothbrush. But after some research I now have a fairly decent understanding of the pros and cons of Oral-B vs Philip SonicCare.
Just want to add. I really wish i am like a lot of my friends who could just pick one up and start using it and care about things less. But I do. I care about many things and in way too much detail.
> SideBar Tabs doesn't work for me. Mostly because the Desktop web isn't designed for squashed layout. I would imagine it would work much better if I am on a 21:9 ultra wide monitor.
... Are you still on an old 4:3 screen? Standard 1080p is wide enough, if a bit short. I tend to do half-width and full-height on a 4k screen, with a tab sidebar.
Another option is the Add-On "Vertical Tabs Reloaded" which I'm still using since before they added vertical tabs in the sidebar. Seems a bit more compact.
i am fully with ksec. the issue with sidebars is that they not only take up space, which feels wasted, but are also a distraction. i have the browser always on fullsceen, the tabbar at the top fades into the background letting me focus on the page i an currently reading. when i want to search for a tab then i use the dropdown which takes more space than the sidebar but also shows more of the title of each tab.
Luckily in the mentioned 140 you can now configure Firefox to show tabs in the sidebar, and then actually use the Tree Style Tabs sidebar instead, not showing the native tabs at all.
The built-in vertical tabs are awful. Hit F11 for full-screen and all of the chrome disappears except for the vertical tabs. Who would want that? I'll try Tree Style instead.
LOL this could have been written by my wife, I'm just as guilty of that. But only on Apple devices... even on a measly 8GB M2 MBA, Chrome can easily deal with 200+ tabs. But an 8GB Lenovo ThinkPad X1 with Windows? Performance goes down the drain at about 15-20 open tabs. It's utterly ridiculous.
Does your boyfriend ever put his tools away after finishing a mechanical project?
Is his desk clean?
Is he strong enough to lift a feather duster and whip the vacuum cleaner around?
Having a mountain of tabs open is the equivalent of not putting your tools away, keeping your desk tidy or keeping your house clean.
People that get stuff done tend to be those that keep things tidy. Millions of tabs open might give the impression of 'genius at work', but do the deliverables get delivered?
This might not be a popular opinion, however, after having to tidy up my dad's estate (he never put tools away and his computer had billions of tabs open), I have formed my own conclusions on this.
I hat tip your bravery for pointing out an indulgence likely common among readers. Guilty as charged right here. But.
The comparison doesn't really hold. This is not like an untidy workbench. Modern browsers don't incur a significant penalty for having hundreds or even thousands of tabs. There are workflows that benefit from Never Closing, and I'm glad to see browsers now don't turn into a nipple bar to expose me.
Indeed after years and dozens of times where someone looks over my shoulder to see many tabs and abandons our topic to engage in Shame Time, I am fully innoculated to their barbs and feel it says more about the person pointing than myself. I manage to engage in a world with noise. Some people can't. The worst of them reach for grand overarching conclusions, as you have done here.
I also sometimes leave the evening dishes for the morning cleaning session.
Too much tidying up is procrastination, so hat tip for you doing the dishes in the morning, that makes sense.
I have recently learned a lot about highly effective people and tidiness is a common trait, even with browser tabs.
For most of my life I have been working with far too many tabs open, however, I do have this habit of bookmarking all tabs monthly, to then go to about twenty tabs across (the forever tabs) to then 'close all tabs to the right'.
You would be amazed at how few of those 'vital' tabs get reopened.
Each of them is a promise to one's future self to do something or read something, and rarely does one's future self do that.
I can relate to the pursuit of tidiness. It is satisfying to purge. I makes more room for the things that are neglected amongst the distraction. What's left over on my desk from yesterday's adventures is best cleared away. My patch cables on the synthesizer are often best pulled even if I end up putting them back in place.
I just don't see open tabs as burdensome, any more than my Steam backlog. If I get to them I do, if I don't, I don't. I also don't defrag my SSD and when I reboot my RAM starts fresh.
Tidiness and entropy are always at tension, and it's often best to let the balance be.
In my personal cases, a have multiple windows with each easily having thousand of tabs. I guess I might have around 2k to 10k of them at a single time in my computer.
Depending of the computer and phone, it might be the same thing in Firefox or Chrome.
Even on Android, despite that chrome updates in the last years made it more sluggish and buggy to have lots of tabs than it used to be like 5 years ago.
I can't understand how Google/chrome team might be so incompetent, but often reopening the browser app in android, some times are overwritten or shifted in position. Very annoying.
Firefox history is one of the most annoying part of the browser. It is impossible to click on a historical page and keep the context of the other visited pages that date/time. As soon you click on it, it will put it on top of the history and remove the old historical position. If you don't use search and manually scroll down, and then click on one (even with middle button), it will then instantly whoosh you back to the top of the history list, forcing you to scroll down and find the other links and repeat the process for each one.
Thunderbird filter function understand what I want when searching old emails. If you search on an email and selects the one you are interested, and then remove the search, it will automatic scroll the navigation to that date and keep the selected email on view.
Open tabs are kinda halfway between history and bookmarks, for me. They generally represent a train of thought or investigation, but they have less clutter than history, since I do close irrelevant ones as I'm navigating (and AFAIK there's no way in most browsers to show the history as a tree of navigation paths like tree style tabs). Bookmarks I perhaps should use more but they are liable to quickly grow out of control as well, and they require a lot more active thought to organise, in comparison to a tree of tabs. I would absolutely love a browser to properly unify this, I think there's a few smaller ones but they don't seem to be good enough to switch away from firefox and tree style tabs.
Personally I find tabs destroy my productivity completely almost immediately and I have to be aggressive about closing them.
The consistent failure of bookmark managers is notable, doesn't matter if they are pure web-based or implemented as browser extensions the story is always that they're a "roach motel", somebody put in 30,000 bookmarks and realizes a few years later they didn't look back at them once.
A counter-example is my Fraxinus bookmark manager/personal webcrawler/image sorter that I've been running for about 15 months and probably accumulated about 1 million images (was 700k last I looked) I look at images from it every day. The backlog of image galleries in the primary classification queue is about 1000 and I dunno, I could probably put "bigtags" [1] on another 1500 galleries but I don't feel like I have to, it's not like I don't have enough content already.
I wish I had some consistent and simple way to export both bookmarks and history into all my devices so I could feed them into my AI, make them portable, etc.
[1] tags engineered to work with automated classification, namely it is possible for tags to be positive/indeterminate/negative
>Open tabs are kinda halfway between history and bookmarks, for me.
How do you feel about the fact that the author (of the web page) gets to decide whether a link opens in a new tab?
Point is that I ignore tabs unless I'm alternating between 2 tabs or a need a placeholder for a few minutes. If arbitrary web sites could add to my the list of bookmarks kept by my browser, I'd ignore that list, too.
I do usually have control, via left click or middle click, but it is annoying when this is overridden in one direction or another, yes (and I sometimes do a dance of opening/closing/rearranging tabs to get the result I want)
gnome too, there is no titlebar. just the tabs. and when you have many tabs you can't see the title unless you move the mouse over the tab. i haven't seen the new feature yet. the fedora or librewolf builds don't seem to have it
For years every Firefox discussion I saw would have some person saying "why are they wasting their time on X? I won't use it til they have vertical tabs" with scores of upvotes.
This perfectly encapsulates the Mozilla position. Every possible move makes people complain.
Mozilla and Firefox is a great example of having too many advocates and not enough engineers. It's easy to find plenty of people committed to spreading the good word of Firefox or willing to answer Reddit threads with "just use Firefox". But there just isn't enough engineering effort to keep up with Chrome or Chromium.
The suggestion for browsers to integrate an ad blocker always worries me. uBlock Origin benefits from being shielded from monetary incentives, as they don't even allow small donations to the maintainers.
That being said, Firefox frequently endorses the existing ecosystem of ad blockers in their featured extensions. They even featured AdNauseum, an ad blocker that attempts to DoS ad servers by sending fake clicks on every single ad. Google on the other hand labelled it malware and swiftly took it down. So right now, Mozilla is not at all an the enemy of arbitrary web content blocking.
I find that having Brendan Eich back in charge of Mozilla would be very unlikely for two reasons:
- He’s already built a modestly successful competitor in Brave, so there might not be much incentive for him to jump ship.
- It’s possible that bringing him back may risk the ire of the LGBTQ+ community. (His comments against same-sex marriage led to his resignation as CEO of Mozilla back in 2014.)
I thoroughly disagree. The EU and it's many organizations, does not know how to operate a long running software development project.
What the union should do instead is to create a funding structure that had as it's mission to identify and financially support groups that develop open source software which is critical to both the people and companies that are based in the EU. Make it a requirement that the software be accessible, free and open source.
I don't know what's going on in Mozilla. Just today on my security camera NVR, Firefox pops up a dialog in the notification area at the lower right screen of Windows 11, showing an ad for its vertical tab feature, urging me to try it out. The thing is Firefox is rarely used on the NVR and the browser is not running. The only program running is the camera video app (the popup of course obscured the video window). It must be done by the background Firefox Update process. This is a brazen abuse of the notification area that even Microsoft hasn't tried yet.
Heck, the other week I got an ad telling me “Doom: The Dark Ages” had been released and that it is “thrilling” in the toast area.
This despite me never having used the Xbox or windows gaming apps and actually having uninstalled them only for an update to decide it should reinstalled
I got this on all my automated test machines today too. It messes up my screenshots. I get the feeling Firefox is going to lose a lot of good will today.
I worked for a huge healthcare organization and the CEO was not a doctor, nor was she even familiar with the field before leading the organization.
CEOs are not "hands on the ground" in a functioning organization. When I hear things like this, it makes me wonder what CEO you have worked with and if they subscribed to the Jimmy Carter method of management or something. "No, no, let me diff the source on that, I am the CEO after all..."
Firefox is not fine. If you think it is, please tell me how to disable BASIC http auth in it. (This is a serious problem, as it will send passwords unencrypted over a non SSL connection, and my users have been trained to type their sso password into every box they see (I know.... Not my doing)).
I do want to applaud the author for something that, on the internet, is one of the most difficult things, namely being able to think two things at the same time:
>Firefox is in a bit of a mess – but, seriously, not such a bad mess. You're still better off with it – or one of its forks, because this is FOSS – than pretty much any of the alternatives.
Some of the punches landed here, e.g. axing Servo, are pretty devastating. Others, "why not buy an adblocker" (huh? they allow it via extensions which has been a longstanding tradition in the browser space), seem like non sequiturs. But the point remains:
>Like we said, don't blame the app. You're still better off with Firefox or a fork such as Waterfox. Chrome even snoops on you when in incognito mode, and as we warned you, Google removed the APIs ad-blocker extensions used. You still get better ad-blocking in Firefox.
Yes, exactly! It's a Two Things Can Be True situation.
Mitchell Baker ran it into the ground and made a fortune doing so. Almost to the point that one might wonder if there may have been some sort of undisclosed quid pro quo with Google.
This entire thread seems like generative AI. Nobody normal thinks Mozilla is doing fine, or behaving rationally. Nobody thinks they've made any good decisions for a long time, but they see that the decisions they've made coincidentally benefit the source of 90% of their revenue, one of the most powerful corporations on the planet.
This article is actually very complimentary. They haven't managed to totally destroy the browser itself yet. Some people working there must still love it.
Wild that this thread got sunk with almost as many comments as upvotes. It's almost like we think that flooding an article with comments gets it pushed off the front page.
been a firefox diehard for over a decade. moved to librewolf recently because the amount of ad-infested settings and "oopsie" default reversions to my settings that expose me yet again to ads and i yet again have to turn it off is just gross to me. i shouldnt have to fight against software and triple check my settings to not see mind polluting ads or have my information sold/shared
A couple years ago (~2018-9 or so) I realized that Firefox had a weird leak, I opened a lot of tabs often (heavy internet user plus dev) and I never really restart my pc unless absolutely necessary because I have too many things at once I'm working on and it's a pain to reopen everything including Windows Explorer instances (now tabs).
I talked about this leak and they kept gaslighting me like it didn't exist, Firefox at one point was taking 24 gbs of ram on my pc. (It did)
Another issue, Firefox Nighly, I 100% understand that it's an early bird preview and all that, but they would literally brick your browser whenever they wanted you to force to update it... what? I complain and they say "then don't use nighly", like brother, I understand that, I completely understand to use stable for stability, but there is no reason to FORCEFULLY brick a user's browser whenever you release an update, just have a popup and if they WANT TO they restart at the moment if not at the next restart period... and if you REALLY need for some critical issue you can have a flag with the update that forces a bricking but is only used in extremely important scenarios.
The amount of mismanagement at Mozilla is incredible really, I was a die hard Firefox user, I remember opening my youtube channel trying to right click on a background and not being able to copy the url/view image with chrome back in the day, that was when I realized that Google would force "its" web standards so I decided to go all in on Firefox, yet now I'm back on a chromium browser because Mozilla has completely destroyed the browser I loved, even worse now with all the weird privacy invasive stuff they've added in.
I’m a diehard Firefox user since day one, but today I updated to the 140.2 iOS build, and it broke my cookie jar, logged me out of most websites, and managed to switch LinkedIn to Spanish..
Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc, on iOS all use Webkit because of the platform rules. The EU forced them to open up in Europe, but you're not really using Firefox on your iPhone.
Just pointing it out as it's not the same as using Firefox on the desktop or Android.
It might be using the Safari engine underneath, but the issues they're describing are the sort of thing that would surface with a bad integration like a corrupted profile. Profile management on FF has always been a bit of a crapshoot. Personally speaking, it hasn't bit me in the last few years, but I've probably jinxed it now 8-/
Firefox performance is really bad in google sites like meet, calendar, docs, youtube. I wonder why they are not working on improving the situation. Everything else is already perfect, just iron out these few issues and be the undisputed leader.
Can't win if competition to whom the web belongs also tries to capture literally whole world in its ad-infested vision of future via its browser. There are tons of ways how to subtly degrade experience, or gain performance for oneself (like IE did back in the days of skipping ending connection as per protocols to gain some speed points).
I used to cheer for Google and its approach to customers, employees, and the world we live in. That ship has sailed long time ago, now its another greedy global mega corporation with thin veneer of 'we are good guys' (apple is similar but in a different way).
As pointed out in the article, Firefox performance has been steadily improving for years. It's not exactly on Mozilla that specific sites are optimized specifically for their rival's product.
> It's not exactly on Mozilla that specific sites are optimized specifically for their rival's product.
Firefox has less than 2% market share. It is absolutely on Mozilla to seek out the most used sites with performance problems and fix the browser so they are fast.
Originally no, and nowadays it seems like it's a result of that tech debt: Youtube did a frontend rewrite using an early spec of web components, that only Chrome ever fully implemented, and they used Polymer to polyfill other browsers with the idea that they'd implement the spec later and get a performance boost. But the spec changed, so they never did, and Youtube is still sending the Polymer-based version to other browsers - even though from other people's tests it looks like Youtube is capable of sending something that doesn't require the polyfill if it thinks Chrome is on the other end.
(This was the state as of a couple years ago, I don't know if there's been further developments since)
> Rust was developed at Mozilla. Mozilla axed it. In 2020, it laid off the whole team.
> As I reported back in 2023, the Servo browser engine is doing well. Early this year, its own figures show strong continued upticks in interest since Igalia took over development. You guessed it – Mozilla also gave Servo the boot in 2020.
You don't need to develop a new programming language to develop a decent browser engine. Maybe it would be nice, and maybe it could be better, but do you really have the resources to go off on such a tangent? Clearly the answer was no.
> 2020 is the same year Cathay Capital invested $50 million into KaiOStech, saying it would help bring the next billion people online. As The Register reported in 2018, KaiOS is Boot2Gecko, Mozilla's FirefoxOS rebranded. Mozilla killed its own version in 2015.
Calling it "FirefoxOS" was a mistake, but the idea wasn't all too bad. The rendering in HTML/CSS was a good idea, Java after all have Java Swing/JavaFX and that worked well, but I wouldn't have forced all of the apps to also be JS. I think it will be the future equivalent of an OS where all apps must be Adobe Flash. The rendering should have all been done in HTML/CSS, with the backend being any language of choice running in a tiny container.
I think Mozilla need to make things that do one thing well, and they also need to get better at developing MVPs that test the waters before pouring in years and millions into it.
You don’t need to but it certainly helped. And the Servo project also produced crates like HTML5ever which filled a huge gap in performant and safe document parsing for both browser and server. I’m very grateful that there are modular and easily usable projects like that, and rust is far easier to use than the complex c++ code and toolchains you’d need.
I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions, but they are in a difficult position, and the anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless. Some common demands:
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google - Mozilla should not monetize Firefox - Mozilla should only focus on Firefox - Mozilla should develop cool research projects - Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business - Mozilla should have a salary cap and expect executives to treat it like a passion project
Some of these goals are opposite ends of the same slider, so it's not possible to maximize both. Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. For example, my understanding is that while salaries are quite decent, they tend to be below what Apple and Google will offer for similar roles.
Maybe it's seen as waffling whenever they shift these sliders, and maybe that's a fair criticism. But nobody else seems to be able to put together a clear and realistic alternative plan. Most of them pick and choose contradictory goals, other plans like Zawinski's are at least clear, but too radical for those who still want revenue to pay developers or to be able to watch Netflix in their browser.
Exactly, and to your point, a lot of the charges against Mozilla are mutually exclusive, contradictory, or barely even half-made attempts at arguments. You've outlined the make money/don't make money contradiction. But to add a few more of the crazy criticisms, sincerely made:
- Implying without evidence that the VPN is run at prohibitively massive cost and at the expense of other programs
- Claiming that Mozilla has "run out of money" (they have over $1 billion in assets)
- Overstating costs of Mozilla's dabbling in blockchain (they wrote a paper or two)
- Claiming the CEO pay has crippled Mozilla's ability to work on core browser (it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue)
- Claiming without any mechanism or argument that there's a missing feature Mozilla could have developed that would have restored all their market share
- Related to the above, completely ignoring that Chrome drove market share in its own proactive ways, leveraging its search and Android dominance, rolling out affordable Chromebooks and that these drove the market share more than anything specific to Mozilla
- Firefox has become bloated and slow (Outdated talking point, it was true for a time, but then they did the dang thing and delivered Quantum, which delivered the major advances in speed in stability that everyone asked for)
That's not to say there's no valid criticisms, there are plenty. There seems to be real cause and effect, for instance, on Firefox's investments in FirefoxOS and the ability to invest resources in the browser, and that did happen over a time where market share was lost. And the dabbling in ads risks compromising the soul of their mission in critical ways.
But meanwhile these (above) have all generally been basically misunderstandings or bad arguments with no internal logic, but claimed over and over again in the backwaters of internet comment sections with complete impunity. The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.
(it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue)
In a lot of industries, 1% revenue is rather a lot. Many domains have profit margins of 5% or even less; that would be fully 20% of your earnings.
Software development is not "many industries", and Mozilla isn't most software development companies. So it's hard for me to say whether that specific CEO salary is appropriate. But I'd rather see his salary described by earnings, rather than revenue, since revenue by itself could just be churn.
If it impresses you that the CEO pay is 20% of earnings, then, well, software development is going to be something like 500% of earnings, overhead will be 250%, and so on. The relative proportions of the different expenses will be the same. They just look bigger when you compare them to profits.
The CEO pay certainly matters and it's more than I would like, but I don't see how considering it as 20% of profits rather than 1% of revenue demonstrates that it's taking more away from development than any other 1% of their spending.
Yes, but now you're comparing the CEO to entire departments. Each individual software developer is receiving less than 1% of earnings. Is the CEO really 20 times more productive than they are?
Would it be possible to increase net earnings with a CEO who took home only 19% of net earnings? Changing out a single developer for a cheaper one is not going to be meaningful. But a CEO who takes home a significant fraction of the profit could probably be replaced by somebody who does 99.9% as good a job for 95% of the salary.
In fact, there's a good chance that one of those developers could do 50% as good a job for 1% of the salary. The shareholders would take home more money.
I feel like I've been consistent throughout by evaluating costs as a percentage of revenue. That’s the actual denominator Mozilla uses when allocating its budget. There’s no switch or sleight of hand happening here. One percent of revenue is one percent of the available operating budget.
It seems like you've changed your framing entirely. Your original point was that CEO pay is significant because it's 20 percent of net earnings. That implied this metric better captured the weight of the cost. But now you’ve moved to a different argument, comparing the CEO’s compensation to individual developers and bringing in a shareholder-return perspective. These are entirely separate lines of reasoning and don’t follow from the point you started with.
Also, Mozilla doesn’t have shareholders? So the idea that the CEO should be compensated in a way that maximizes shareholder earnings doesn’t really apply. Mozilla’s spending decisions should be judged in terms of how well they serve its mission, not whether they increase a surplus that could be distributed to hypothetical owners.
I’m not even necessarily defending the CEO pay on its own. I just don't think you can make the case that it crippled their ability to work on needed features, and I think the logic you’re using has shifted in a way that doesn’t hold up when applied to Mozilla’s actual structure or purpose.
> Is the CEO really 20 times more productive than they are?
People up the ladder are getting more money not for their productiveness, but for the risks. A single developer can't ruin the company/sales (well, most of the times). A single C-level can do that with ease.
Isn't the general employee at higher risk than the CEO? Entire departments can be RIFfed at the stroke of a pen and the employees don't have a Golden Parachute or a revolving door to the next corporation.
> his salary
I may be wrong (I frequently am), but I think the current CEO is a woman, who replaced another woman (with a funny haircut).
Don't you have to look at Mozilla CEO's salary in the context of that of other non-profits?
Mozilla Corp isn’t a non-profit. Mozilla org is, but the discussion is about the corp ceo.
> The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.
I have long suspected that a good chunk of the controversy surrounding Mozilla that I've seen is...let's just call it motivated reasoning.
Well said, and this applies to most armchair experts on most subjects on the internet.
Both Mozilla and the Wikipedia Foundation seem to have the same problem of doing everything but focusing on their core raison d'être.
Like, what is there even to say but constantly complain about that.
Or rather, people disagree with the Foundations on what their purpose should be.
If the turtle-saving foundation I donate to has a windfall, I would expect it to save more turtles, not to instead also focus on feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children. This does not mean that feeding hotdogs to hungry Somali children is wrong, it is an even more important goal than saving the turtles, but somewhere in the process, there pillaged a decision maker that misinterpreted (acceptable) or ignored (unacceptable) the intentions of the benefactors.
Except the foundations mission statement isn't turtle-saving, that's just what you think is clearly the most important part of their work that they should solely focus on, in your opinion. And it's not wrong of you to want to be able to donate towards the parts that you care about, but it's an obvious disconnect from the reality of what their stated goals are (and hence you blame decision makers for decisions that are actually fully in line with the mission statements).
Mozilla Foundation never was the Firefox Development Foundation, as much as some of us want it to be. Wikimedia never was the Wikipedia Development and Operations Foundation. If you dislike that, donate to entities with narrower goals (I personally prefer directing money towards OSM and KDE for example)
If a foundation spins off a project's community with certain goals, they take on to some degree the goals and the vision of the people that built it. Those are opinions, and they are important to the cited goals. If then a foreign element enters the system due to the sad state of the technology/corporate enterprises nowadays and changes the mission statement, you have not changed the spirit it was created with, you changed a business strategy in a way that is disconnected and hostile to the initial goal. A lot of the times the goals aren't really stated at all clearly, are protected by different acts like codes of conduct, and open to modification by impassionate people with ephemeral leadership positions who don't care what happens to the organization down the line.
Sure, I can become the chairman of Turtle saving international and change our charter to prioritize feeding hotdogs to hungry Somalis, but I am still doing an ideological disservice to the grassroots initiative that built the foundation and created the position for me to be sitting on, no?
Also, this seems to me extremely fragile when situations are reversed, say that an outright awful organization like an international petrol company gets a new mission statement. Should all they did before and after that be forgiven because their stated goals say otherwise?
I personally see this as little less than a ground truth, but perhaps there is some way that stated goals stand above all regardless.
EDIT: I do see how you make a very good point when you're looking mostly from the present towards the future, though.
In both cases, their "wide" mission statements have been around for a long time, it's not a recent thing. E.g. you maybe can say that Mozilla Foundation in 2003 was presented as something else than what it decided to adopt in 2007 with the Mozilla Manifesto, but well, that's a 4 year period that ended 18 years ago and happened under the original leadership, it's not later executives somehow distorting it.
The foundation’s mission was to enrich the board and advance their personal agendas.
Yes but for rethorical reasons I pretend to not know what you mean. That would validify their claims.
> Both Mozilla and the Wikipedia Foundation seem to have the same problem of doing everything but focusing on their core raison d'être.
At least for Wikimedia... running Wikipedia itself isn't expensive, they're not running it as a resume-driven-development project in some hyperscaler that brings associated costs, they run bare metal servers to this day (and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup).
Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.
> Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.
but then why do they constantly run banners implying that Wikipedia will shut down if I don't donate right now?
Capitalism, plain and simple. I don't like it either, but that's the way all fundraising has devolved down to. And hell, it's been that way even decades ago with images of starving little African kids being used for emotional manipulation.
In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
I don’t believe that ‘capitalism’ is a good explanation for the behaviour of a charitable organisation with no shareholders.
An issue with private funding for charitable projects is, as you note, appeals to the emotions of private donors.
An issue with the public funding for charitable projects you propose is appeals to the emotions of both legislators and executive agents. Another issue is corruption: a project which can figure out how to both receive money from taxes and influence elections can ultimately write its own meal ticket.
hmm, perhaps I was unclear.
You said that the Wikimedia Foundation's core mission is to basically do good things. Their core goal is not to keep Wikipedia running (as most people believe).
Wikimedia runs very prominent banner ads all the time on Wikipedia, saying that they need money to keep Wikipedia running, and that they're a small team that depends on community funding to keep Wikipedia running, and they can't do it without you, and please please please donate by this date. I think it is very reasonable for your average Wikipedia user to believe the following, thanks to how Wikimedia advertises:
* Wikimedia is the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia. They're basically the same thing, since Wikimedia's goal is running Wikipedia.
* Wikipedia is run by a small team
* Wikipedia is heavily reliant on donations from normal people
* Wikipedia needs money all the time. I know this because they're constantly running big highlighted banner ads urgently asking for money before $DATE
If what you said is true, and Wikimedia's core mission is not in fact, to preserve Wikipedia, then they're engaging in deceptive advertising. They're giving the impression that they need money right now to keep Wikipedia's funding source secure, but in reality, their goal is much broader than just Wikipedia. I think it's reasonable to assume that Wikipedia's funding could be much more secure if the Wikimedia Foundation solely focused on running Wikipedia. In other words, if they stopped spending on $NOT_WIKIPEDIA_REL_COST they would be fine.
What does this have to do with capitalism or $ENTITY using pictures of starving African children?
> In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
I want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your words. Are you saying that it's okay for Wikimedia to engage in knowingly deceptive advertising because otherwise poor countries won't be able to get their economy running?
Are we agreeing that they're knowingly being deceptive, and that they wouldn't need to be deceptive if they just focused on Wikipedia? And we're disagreeing on whether that deception is moral or immoral?
> What does this have to do with capitalism or $ENTITY using pictures of starving African children?
To show that, thanks to capitalism, deception has become the norm in advertising (of all kind, frankly), and either you go along and play the game, or you go six feet under. It's immoral, sure, but I'd much more prefer to see the system itself fixed than to only nab random offenders.
> I want to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your words. Are you saying that it's okay for Wikimedia to engage in knowingly deceptive advertising because otherwise poor countries won't be able to get their economy running?
No. The part with the poor countries refers to that I don't want to see any kind of fundraiser stuff that should be a government's job, and on top of that I disdain many of the charity campaigns relating to Africa because the "aid" we gave utterly crushed the local agricultural and textile industry, sending off many countries into a disastrous dependency loop - if you want to read more on that, look up "mitumba".
> Capitalism, plain and simple. I don't like it either, but that's the way all fundraising has devolved down to.
No.
*Even under a socialist framework*, the tactics used for fundraising would not be alien. The main difference would be to court either (a) the public votes for funding approval, or (b) the leadership votes that hold the administration's purse strings.
Don't blame it on the system. There are only so many ways to gather resources before the different methods overlap with each other.
> In any decent world, governments would use tax money to both fund projects like Wikimedia and help get poor countries off on a self-sustaining economy, but that ship has sailed I am afraid.
Counterpoint: Why is it *my* burden to bear on building up *their* economy/business/organization? They're not as inept as implied in your saviour complex.
> and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup
Bad news.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/404231/we-re-finall...
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I've noticed this as well. It's in especially stark contrast when you compare to other browsers, such as Brave, whose gaffes and controversies tend to be overlooked, excused, or forgotten about.
EDIT: For me, my choice of browser is simplified by the fact that I don't trust any chromium browser to keep long-term compatibility with extensions I rely upon, especially uBlock Origin.
Brave is dragged at any available half-chance opportunity…
Brave deserves to be dragged sometimes
Not really, but I will say Brave has had more controversies and they're more severe than anything Firefox or Mozilla have done. But you wouldn't gather that from online comments.
> Mozilla should develop cool research projects
Literally zero people have asked for Mozilla to do this to the detriment of Firefox. But this is what we’re getting.
> Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground.
Deeply disagree.
I think you are avoiding looking at facts by presenting the issue as a matter of contradicting opinions.
Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure by a minority linked to things unrelated to his tenure.
Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things. Worse, there were multiple events leading to negative marketing created by poor strategy.
Despite this string of failures, top management has been significantly increasing their compensation. The issue is not knowing if these compensations are competitive. Everything points to the top management being grossly incompetent. Nobody wants them to treat it like a passion project. People want them out.
I mean except Google of course which is all to happy that they meet the goal assigned to them: not being a competitor in the browser market and being an useful umbrella in case competition authorities wants to take a look at Chrome.
>Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things.
This right here is the myth that keeps getting repeated without evidence. As I said in a different comment, most of these widely criticized side bets happened long after the market share decline, so the attempt to tie that to cause and effect just doesn't work. And the "significant" money invested in the side bets is almost never quantified (normally people trying to make this argument, once you ask for numbers, are just browsing the 990 for the first time and making random guesses).
The VPN cost seems like it was utterly trivial, the amount to purchase Pocket was never disclosed but I read of fundraising around $14MM and implied valuations in the low to mid tens of millions, which may be the ballpark of what Pocket costed to acquire. And Pocket did bring in revenue, also possibly on the order of tens of millions. So the worst case is that they lost low tens of millions, the best case is that it was a wash.
So that's not nothing, but that's what it looks like to attach these claims to facts. It's probably less than what their endowment earns them in a year, and relatively small against their annual revenue. But it doesn't tell a story of side bets triggering a collapse in market share like people keep claiming.
And it seems like I keep having to repeat this, but these kinds of narratives completely ignore what were likely the real drivers of market share change, which was Google leveraging its powerful position in search, on Android, the rollout of Chromebooks.
>Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure
Sidebar for this one. Seems like you are referring to Brandon Eich who was CEO for all of 11 days. He was significant to Mozilla in other ways before that, but interestingly, it's his career at Mozilla that most intersects with the period of major collapse in market share.
>while they barely fought on the marketing side of things
Mozilla has long had a rather huge marketing budget that, depending on the person, is something for which they're criticized. I foget the exact numbers, but after software and development, "operations", and legal, marketing is the biggest chunk of spending and it's comparable to those other departments. If you wanted to argue that they are spending too much that actually would, imo, be one of the stronger charges to make against Mozilla, depending on what you think their priorities should be.
He's CEO of Brave which now has a third the amount of market share of Firefox and rapidly rising, while Firefox continues to crater.
I'll happily credit Eich for his successes if he ever again applies his talents to a non Chromium browser. But right now that's Firefox, and hopefully soon, Ladybird.
The smartphone things meant Firefox OS?
The TV thing meant the Fire TV version? How much did it cost? How much did Amazon pay Mozilla?
What was Eich's track record of good decisions? He supported Firefox OS. This seems a bad decision according to you. Many people say Firefox was much inferior to Chrome from 2008 to 2017 at least. Eich was CTO from 2005 to 2014. His track record at Brave includes multiple events which led to negative marketing.
Eich's tenure as Mozilla's CEO included failing to prepare for a predictable PR crisis, declining to apologize for harming people, and declining to say he wouldn't do it again.
You’re twisting what people ask for. The real versions are not contradictory.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google.
- Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.
- Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox.
- Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.
- Mozilla should be well run.
- Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.
This is a company that has repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding. They defined themselves as the advocate for users on the web, then started selling user data and lied about it. Sure there’s a grey area, but Mozilla is far from it.
Points 3 and 4 are contradictory, or at least, very difficult to reconcile. The use of "mainly" means you can technically say it's possible to achieve both but I doubt any of Mozilla's critics will ever be happy with their attempts to do so.
Points 1 to 3 also seem very difficult to reconcile. If they need to develop revenue independent of Google, and they need to focus mainly on Firefox, then at some stage they need to monetise other aspects of the browser. How do they do that in a way that is respectful to its users? What is the way for Mozilla to develop a new revenue stream, via Firefox (their main focus), that everyone is happy with?
Points 5 and 6 are too vague, I don't see how they could ever objectively be measured against those principles (other than by looking at the other principles).
All of this is to say that they can't win. They launch new products to try and make money, they are selling out and abandoning their core mission. They try instead to make money from their main product, they are selling out and betraying their users. They try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are dumbing it down and letting down their power users. They don't try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are failing to stay relevant.
Remember when Mitchell Baker was the problem?
Isn’t she still pulling the strings?
Baker resigned as Mozilla Corporation CEO last year. She resigned from all remaining Mozilla positions this year.
>You’re twisting what people ask for.
I've seen the comments they are talking about, so I don't agree they are twisting anything. Your aspirationally consistent restatement of the case is vague, and the contradictions are specific. Does the existence of the investment fund count as failing to focus on Firefox or succeeding at developing revenue independent of Google? How about the VPN, another potential revenue source?
Is advocating for open web standards (as mentioned in the article as an example of a good thing) a distraction from Firefox (as I've seen commenters here suggest), or respecting users by giving a voice to their users in standards deliberation where their voice would otherwise be excluded?
And how confident are you that your answers are the unique and consistent representation of what users really want, and that I won't be able to quote half a dozen commenters coming to completely different diagnoses of the same questions?
> Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google
And then you get articles like these complaining about Mozilla re-selling a VPN service.
(I agree with your points.)
> And then you get articles like these complaining about Mozilla re-selling a VPN service.
Not only that, but their competitors are also selling - or at the very least promoting - VPN services.
> repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things
I don't claim to know Mozilla's internal workings, but my wife works for an education-space 501c3, and there are very strict rules about how they can fundraise, how they can spend money that's been donated, etc. I'm sure Mozilla Foundation is large enough to manage this stuff, but things like per-project bank accounts and tax records are still overhead they would have to deal with. I know one of their (my wife's org's) thorniest areas is around what money can be spent on non-"core mission" expenses.
Tried to provide insight into this, but apparently they just wanted to hate on Mozilla. xD
Alternative view-point: the Mozilla Corporation exists, which is not bound by these rules.
(I did not downvote you. The HN users who did so without explanation are lamers.)
There are strict rules for businesses soliciting donations. Mozilla Corporation would have to be more careful than most because of confusion between the non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. And many people who claim they would donate to Mozilla Corporation demand per project accounting if they don't demand elimination of all projects they dislike.
> refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding
Those were which things?
> - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google. > - Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.
These are contradictory, because how, exactly, do you expect them to make money?
They push and advertise a paid VPN service and everyone loses their minds and acts like Mozilla is the evilest company there ever darn was. But they do nothing, and then they "respect users", but they rely on Google for revenue.
> - Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox. > - Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.
These are also contradictory and even contradict the first two. These side projects were not very successful, they were just well-liked. There's a difference.
If they push these side-projects, they're not focusing on Firefox, and they're disrespecting users, AND they're irresponsibly using their revenue. Oops.
And, on the topic of side projects, it seems to me that everyone rallies around them and calls them stupid and unnecessary... until they're killed. Then suddenly, magically, everyone and their Mom was using them. Really? Where was this support before? Are the supporters just unusually silent?
Like Pocket. I heard nothing, NOTHING, but ridicule for Pocket. Until it got discontinued. Then everyone loved it, it was the darling child of Mozilla, it was the best, and everyone used it. Really? Yeah, okay.
> And, on the topic of side projects, it seems to me that everyone rallies around them and calls them stupid and unnecessary... until they're killed. Then suddenly, magically, everyone and their Mom was using them. Really? Where was this support before? Are the supporters just unusually silent?
> Like Pocket. I heard nothing, NOTHING, but ridicule for Pocket. Until it got discontinued. Then everyone loved it, it was the darling child of Mozilla, it was the best, and everyone used it. Really? Yeah, okay.
I agreed with you before this. I saw positive comments about Pocket before Mozilla announced they would shut it down. And HN comments after the announcement were more mixed than your summary.
Few complaints about Pocket were about the reading list service. They were about Mozilla integrating it. Or buying it. Or breaking their promise to open the source. Or lying about privacy. Or trying to hide Pocket paid them. Or the chum box on the new tab page. Almost any discussion of Mozilla or Firefox would prompt 1 or more of these complaints.
Frankly I think people are going to be mad at Mozilla no matter what, and at this point I treat the discourse like a psyop.
Does Mozilla make mistakes? Of course. But when their competitors, Chrome, make the same mistakes but orders of magnitude worse, and nobody says anything, I can't take it seriously.
Does Mozilla disrespect their users? A bit, sometimes, in specific circumstances. Google's entire business model is disrespecting their users. So, if that's your gauge, then you're actually arguing in favor of Firefox. Same thing goes for ads. Same things go for shady payments.
This is not to say that we shouldn't critique Mozilla or Firefox. We should. But, I can't help but feel that the critique is disproportionate. And, it makes me wonder how much of it is critique, and how much of it is suspicious praise towards Google.
It's this sort of expectation problem. Maybe there's a word for it. But, since Google has shown so much bad behavior, they've set that expectation for themselves. And now, they're off the hook. They're playing a different game all together. Mozilla has one set of standards, and Chrome has another.
In this universe, Mozilla is a PhD student and Chrome is a toddler. We don't knock the toddler for shitting their pants because it's what we expect. And, we certainly wouldn't expect the toddler to construct a bibliography!
> - Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.
The problem is, when searching for high-level executives, you're not competing against other NGOs, you're competing with the wide free market - and salaries there are, frankly, out of control and have been so for decades [1]. Either Mozilla Foundation plays the dirty game just like everyone else does, or they go out of business.
It's the system that's broken at a fundamental level, not individual actors.
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/
One might ask why Mozilla needs to search for a high-level executive in the first place. Most open source projects, even very large ones, function reasonably well without a hired executive - so what makes Mozilla different such that it requires this luxury good?
> Most open source projects, even very large ones, function reasonably well without a hired executive - so what makes Mozilla different such that it requires this luxury good?
For a certain definition of "reasonably well", that is.
And often enough, big money is at play, it's just hidden from the public eye - just look how much money IBM, RedHat, Google, Meta and other very large players spend on salaries for kernel and other OSS developers - and their managers in turn are paid the usual ridiculous executive salaries. That just doesn't show up on any public finance report.
Thank God for Linus.
Maybe they should ditch the corposuits and let the engineers run the company à la Valve.
The name for the effect you are describing is Baumol’s cost disease
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
> or they go out of business.
How does "failing to attract an executive whose primary differentiating characteristic is demanding exorbitant amounts of money" lead to them going out of business?
Widen the hiring pool then. I'm sure there are plenty of competent people who do care deeply to keep an alternative browser in the market.
> I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions
That's a very twisted way of putting it. Mozilla has almost always made egregiously bad decisions, especially with its money. Indeed, "I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions"
I am sorry that my response is so long, but you raised so many often repeated points that I wanted to reply somewhere near them.
To me, the motives of the users were always pretty clear and aligned with freedom, privacy and empowering end-users with free software. Then the suits came and reinterpreted it enough that if you look at it from the right angle, which is coincidentally always somewhere up Google's ass, it may align with what they're doing now.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google: true, but it could be in a different form than a search engine deal that effectively pipes all of user's queries to the most agressive advertising spyware syndicate of the world.
- Mozilla should not monetize Firefox: this is true. They can monetize adjacent support services like they did with the VPN and Relay (which I gladly paid for), but not the main product if they want it to be omnipresent.
- Mozilla should only focus on Firefox: strongly disagree. Mozilla should work on TECHNOLOGIES. TFA describes very well how Mozilla produced Rust and Servo, which are clearly more widely used software than Firefox. The difference between those two and Firefox is that they aren't a product to be marketed, they are technologies used in other projects! This makes it pretty easy to gain market share and get a higher user share to sit with the big players. Technologies, unlike products, are however very unappealing to the managerial caste since they need to mature a great deal more. This is a sociological problem. If a well-designed commercial product can be cathedral, a lot of technology projects I've seen people build resemble zen gardens. A midwit paid six figures to do nothing always tends to despise those who, for the same amount of money, tend to a zen-garden-like project with passion and intent. This also aligns somewhat with "Mozilla should develop cool research projects."
- Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business: nah. adjacent services could, but not really. Most successful software companies work off of cloud services and support nowadays. The shipped product is maybe 5% of the extracted value. A non-enshittified browser won't do much better, so I think it better to discard the thought altogether and focus on the free browser, then sell subscriptions to Relay, Pocket, or something else that works well with the free browser.
I guess my main gripe is that I see huge projects like Apache, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, PFSense, Proxmox, etc. Which are huge software projects that thrive by developing technologies. Some like PFSense and Proxmox then provide a product on top of it, but the focus is on the technology. Mozilla turned from a company developing software and technology to a company that's selling a free product and trying to profit from it. And hiring more executives won't bring better tech in.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can't cash in a good product for more than a few months, but you can capitalize on a good technology practically forever. And Mozilla can't seem to understand that software can be either, both, or none of the above, so it's starting to do what their clueless executives are good at: extract value.
Looking at your list of contradictory demands, I will point out that Mozilla themselves seemed to act the way you criticize their critics for acting. They tried to pull themselves in every direction all at once and it turns out Mozilla can't really do that.
I mean, everyone shits on Wikimedia for ballooning expenses, but at least they figured out crowdfunding.
That's not to say Mozilla can't make any strategic bets. It's just that they have to be both:
1. Complimentary or integral to their flagship browser product, Firefox, and,
2. Have a reasonable path to success
Let's look at Boot2Gecko, or "Firefox OS", through this lens. Firefox needs to be on as many operating systems as possible, including mobile OSes. And it was true that one particular mobile OS vendor was loud and proud in banning Gecko. The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS. This doesn't get Firefox in the hands of more people, but it sure as hell ties up expensive engineer time on building an entirely new platform.
Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.
Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.
The reason why I focus on Firefox is because it's the only power Mozilla has to negotiate with. When Hollywood wanted to be able to use DRM in browser, Mozilla surrendered, almost unconditionally. And they had to, because the answer to "Firefox remains principled and doesn't put DRM in the browser" is "every streaming service tells people to uninstall Firefox".
Compare that to Apple, who was able to singlehandedly block any requirement for baseline video codec support in HTML5 because they didn't want to implement Ogg Theora. That's what being a big player in the browser market gets you.
Furthermore, Zawinski's plan is the only option. Mozilla is out of time, the DOJ is actively attempting to shut off Google's antitrust insurance and that basically spells doom for Mozilla. Hell, Mozilla themselves put out an extremely morally compromised position statement, because selling the search default is the only thing Mozilla managed to make stick. If Mozilla doesn't implement Zawinski's plan, they'll collapse and cease operating.
[0] In practice, just Android. I don't remember if Windows Phone had the same limitations as iOS did, but it's market share was so limited it did not matter.
> The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS.
Firefox was losing market share to Chrome on desktop platforms which Google did not own and which did not bundle Chrome. It was not and is not obvious a better Android Firefox would have halted the decline. And any Windows Phone effort would have been wasted.
Some people think Mozilla gave up Firefox OS too soon.
In another history all iOS browsers are Safari, all Windows Phone browsers are Internet Explorer, and all Android browsers distributed through Google Play are Chrome. HN comments say Mozilla were foolish to bet this would not happen.
> Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.
Firefox includes components prototyped in Servo. It is not used as a developer tool as far as I know. Many tangible improvements to the browser were delivered without Servo.
Many companies rely on Rust without funding it. Mozilla passing Rust to an independent foundation was painful for Rust. It is unclear it harmed Mozilla.
> Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.
Why do you call Firefox OS its development name? Boot2Gecko may have been a side project. Firefox OS was the main project according to people who worked for Mozilla then.
Mozilla shut down Pocket to refocus on Firefox because Pocket was unprofitable or insufficiently profitable apparently.
Mozilla acquired Anonym last year. I think Mozilla owning an advertising company will enshittify Firefox. But how did you determine so soon it was dead weight?
> Zawinski's plan
Does Zawinski's plan mean Building THE reference implementation web browser, and Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees? The 1st part is a vague objective. Not a plan. And the 2nd part depends on the 1st part.
>anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless.
No they aren't. People just want a good product that's free from bloat and doesn't change the UI every week, interrupting you when you open it to advertise some sponsored affiliate websites on the home page (Otto and Adidas in my case) or new features I never asked for and will never use like Pocket or the VPN.
The org and leadership should also focus their funds on the technical development of the product itself, instead on social and political activism and virtue signaling since I don't want lectures form my products.
Basically, Mozilla just needs to "PUT THE FRIES IN THE BAG" and everyone would be happy, and even throw in a few bucks every now and then as a gesture of appreciation and good will.
But Mozilla lost users by doing the exact opposite of that, being drunk on the Google funded gravy train and knowledge that they're untouchable, being only thing preventing Chrome being considered a monopoly by regulators.
So good riddance from me, you reap what you sow, RIP BOZO, I can't support a bad product run by incompetent people just on idealism alone, it actually needs to be technically superior first and foremost.
> interrupting you when you open it to advertise some affiliate websites on the home page or new features I never asked for and will never use.
I may be in the minority here but I’d be fine with them trying to push SaaS add-ons like a VPN if they would stop moving UI elements around.
I also see people complain that Firefox doesn't the feature you don't like, or they're focusing on the wrong different features. They can't win.
Then how come Chrome does everything I need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What's this business strategy called?
I call it "not shooting yourself in the foot". Mozilla management should try it.
Like I said, Mozilla can win by "putting the fries in the bag". Nobody switched from Chrome to Firefox because they had Pocket or some VPN or they had affiliate websites on the home page. On the contrary.
>Then how come Chrome does everything I need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They let you block ads and respect your privacy? Or are you insisting on behalf of Mozilla's user base that those are not things being requested?
I would go so far as to say that respecting privacy has been one of the biggest requests from critics of Mozilla, one of the biggest senses of violation, and that replicating Chrome's abandonment of privacy is, therefore, one of the bigger examples of a contradictory request.
Google also doesn't make money from Chrome directly, yet that's what is asked of Mozilla. So how do they do what Chrome does while simultaneously fulfill the user request to leverage their browser to make money?
>Nobody switched from Chrome to Firefox because they had Pocket or some VPN or they had affiliate websites on the home page
Look up the history of Firefox market share and tell me if you can find a cause and effect relationship between market share change and any particular side bet. Because I can't find any, with one exception I'll get to in a second. Most of the side bets people complain about came in after Chrome already rose to dominance and had nothing to do with the change in market share. If words mean things, that should matter when people make this argument, but I feel like people forgot they're supposed to actually make real arguments to back these claims up.
The only exception I can find is Firefox OS, which, again, highlights the contradiction between wanting Mozilla to diversify its offerings but criticizing them when they do. It was actually one of their better big picture vision ideas in my estimation and was given favorable gloss in the article we're all talking about. But you can argue it siphoned away resources, and many people do.
So I think the criticisms are pretty all over the map, and the article linked here is actually one the best pieces I've seen that strikes the right balance.
Chrome does everything you need because Chrome is your baseline that you are used to and because of that your requirement is "it does what Chrome does".
Firefox has features that people "need" but they only know they want it because they already use it and they won't switch away from Firefox unless whatever they'd switch to has the same feature.
Ex: I will never switch away to another browser unless it has extensions that allow you to group tabs and "store them in the background" like you can with Firefox's Simple Tab Groups. Likewise I know people who won't switch to a manifest v3 browser because they don't want their adblock crippled.
TLDR: Your requirements are "whatever I currently use but better". You will never win users by trying to beat a better funded and better staffed project at that. Instead you have to try to do new things and discover what can make your project stand out.
I used Opera before FF due to its unique and innovative features, then FF when Opera became Chinese, then Chrome when FF went to shit by changing its UI for the worst every week.
None of the new features FF introduced did I ever need, and judging by its market share I am not alone. FF just focuses on useless features that nobody asked for. If you asked for those feature, congrats, you're part of the 0,001% userbase, too bad that's irrelevant. Bad leadership. You can defend FF all you want but the market share speaks for itself.
They had unlimited money from Google and they squandered it. That's like playing a game with cheat codes and coming in last every time. Mozilla leadership should resign and go flip burghers at McDs instead as they're shit at their tech jobs.
Mozilla had to just not fuck with the UI, features and put ads, and it would have been as easy win.
> All the functionality attached to Firefox's "Browser tools" sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer's edition.
I hope this is some kind of sarcastic take I am not getting. What a weird thing to stand for.
Yes; it's obvious you include the full context:
> Did you know there's already a special developer's edition? No web designer is building on Firefox first any more. We're lucky if they even test on it. All the functionality attached to Firefox's "Browser tools" sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer's edition.
Though, it would be more plain, if they wrote "could" instead of "should".
What's the benefit for Firefox and its users if dev tools are removed from stable Firefox and "banished" to the Developer Edition?
Dev tools are part of all browsers. Even Safari, which tries to keep things very simple, ships dev tools on the stable version. I really don't see the point in removing them.
I have dealt with site outages where we have support talk customers through using the debug tools to help gather information.
They are very good to have available to everyone.
"Safety".
The thinking is that users are a danger to themselves and will be tricked by threat actors to add some CA cert to the trust store, paste commands into the js console, or download and sideload malicious extensions no matter what controls are in place so therefore these possibilities must be removed.
Those same users will be tricked into downloading the "secure bowser" which has these tools. This is a nonsensical argument.
To this day, firefox is still the only browser that prevents its users from running custom extensions without Mozilla's blessing, likely motivated by the same garbage argument.
I have very little hope for Mozilla at this point and sincerely hope that they fail soon so that better open source browsers can take its place.
No, you can. In regular Firefox (without doing any shenanigans) the extension will be installed for the session (until the browser is closed), but Firefox Developer Edition lets you just install and run unsigned/invalid extensions (which is very useful if you occasionally have to change your clock back to 2018 and don’t want to lose all extensions).
Why would anyone want to install another browser to use as a developer?
What the computing world needs is less separation of users and developers. Developers use programs all day, every day. And users should be able to write programs any time they wish. One of the most commonly used pieces of software in the world is a programming system: Excel.
One of my problems with iOS is the implicit assumption that users will not and should not extend the systems they use.
What a strange take. I'm arguably a web designer, though its only one of many hats I wear. I design for Firefox first and then patch the places where chrome/safari break. If dev tools were only present on developer edition, which tracks the unreleased beta version, I wouldn't actually be able to test on Firefox that regular people are using.
multiple people working on projects with web UIs at my org daily drive firefox. the author's arguments come off as hotheaded and poorly researched.
Even with the whole contex this did not read very clear to me.
As a developer who develops on Firefox, and only tests on other browsers just before deployment, I'd reconsider supporting it for end users if they're not going to be able to hit F12 to help me diagnose any issues that come up on their side.
It would be insanity. Even the most dedicated developers would switch to Chrome instantly.
Well, that saved me a click on the article. This take is insane or a troll.
Some of TFA is more grounded. That particular paragraph though…
It exemplifies why beneficial change is so hard sometimes. The loudest voice in the room can go "here are the problems", we can all nod along in agreement, and then "and here's what we should do" … and it's just out there. I've seen this happen numerous times — borderline continuously — in politics.
Even ealier in the article, they (rightly, IMO) skewer Mozilla for laying off the Rust and Servo teams, but then TFA utterly undercuts its own thesis with,
> It shouldn't be trying to capitalize on [projects such as Rust or Servo].
What? What's the point of Rust, or Servo, then, if not to develop a better Firefox?
But then, Marx's proposed solutions... well, you know. They've never worked out too well. To make the understatement of a lifetime.
Compared to the people running Chrome, the people running Firefox are merely annoying.
My main issue with the people running Mozilla is that they have wasted vast sums of money on executive salaries and their half baked notions of new initiatives the company should take up (and later abandon) that don't involve building web browsers, email clients, or supporting development tools.
All that money wasted is the whole point of Mozilla. It’s been captured by Google. The role of Mozilla is to provide a fig leaf of “competition” while using Google money to pay executives who fulfill that duty. Anything that is successful or innovative, like Rust, Servo, or FakeSpot need to be jettisoned because they are a distraction from Mozilla’s true mission.
i wish firefox would have hoarded away their billions of dollars they've received and simply run as a lean mission-oriented company for the next 20 years from those funds. get rid of expensive execs and middle managers and sales and whatever else. have passionate, well-paid developers and open source advocates and nothing else. both make the best possible open source software, and also use your influence and resources to make the pressure from companies like google make the web less shitty
> My main issue with the people running Mozilla is that they have wasted vast sums of money on executive salaries and their half baked notions of new initiatives the company should take up (and later abandon) that don't involve building web browsers, email clients, or supporting development tools.
Your main issue is in direct contradiction to most people's issue with Firefox - it relies on Chrome for revenue.
They repeatedly try other revenue streams and people hate them for that too. It's a lose-lose, because, for some reason, people hate Mozilla almost viscerally. They're held to such a frankly insane standard as compared to Chrome.
I mean, Chrome shits on users in every way you could possibly imagine and nobody seems to care. Chrome is married to Google and nobody complains. But Firefox is less married to Google and it's a 100x bigger problem. How? What's the formula here?
> In mid-2024, he pointed out its "Original Sin" of adopting digital rights management.
I disagree on that one. Maybe it could have been an option 15-20 years ago, when Firefox was a significant force. But now, if it didn't have DRM, platforms that use DRM would just tell people to use another browser, or a specialized app. And people who are not activists would just switch to "the browser that runs $service", and then you give free reign to whoever controls these browsers, including making the DRM more restrictive and more invading.
DRM is an addon, it lets you do thing that you can't do without (i.e. watching protected content), but it won't affect non-DRM content. You can turn it off if you want, you just won't be able to watch Netflix (or whatever), making it a worse user experience.
If you refuse to support DRM (and therefore denying your users of some content), hoping that it will discourage adoption of DRM by platforms, you have to keep your users captive so that they won't just switch. And considering that Firefox doesn't rely on lock-in: they don't have the means to do so, and it is against the spirit in the first place, they have to offset that by offering something else. And unfortunately, they don't have much to offer besides ideology.
The original sin, if we can call it that, is that Firefox technically lagged behind Chrome: slower, more bugs, less secure,... Having to accept DRM, as well as anything Google decided was standard is a consequence of that.
That's why I had high hopes with Servo. It had the potential to make Firefox a "better browser", giving them some weight when deciding not to support some anti-feature, but they lost it.
They also lost an opportunity on mobile by not supporting extensions for too long, and generally, for not being taken seriously. Why did it take them so long to support DNS-over-HTTPS for instance?
Now, they have an opportunity regarding ad-blocking, I don't know how they are going to waste that one, but knowing them, they are probably going to manage it.
i have yet to find a site where i needed to activate DRM. even on sites where firefox did tell me to activate DRM, i just ignored it and the site worked fine. that said, having the feature built in doesn't bother me as long as i have the option to ignore it or keep it turned off
Many streaming services will offer lower fidelity options if DRM is not enabled due to licensing agreements with third party content owners.
Those sites offer lower fidelity resolutions either way, DRM plugin is worthless. Heck, Netflix doesn't offer 4K streams even on a fully locked devices with L1 certificate, they have a separate licensing program that device vendors must participate in to get their products to be able to run Netflix.
Netflix is a pretty big deal.
Seemingly making netflix play at a good resolution is kinda impossible anyway.
The crappy compliance videos at my job have DRM :D As if anyone would like to watch them when not forced to.
Hey, I am sure people are payed very good money for these!
I wonder what the people making these videos are thinking. They know what people think of them, if they actually watch them before taking the usually obvious questionnaire that follows (hint: the answer is always "talk to your manager").
It reminds me of the time we took an electrical certification that we honestly didn't need but legally, we had to. It was in person, and the guy was actually great, and I think it is in a good part because he knew his place. He quickly got passed the regulatory aspects, then spent the rest of the time explaining stuff about house wiring, how breakers work, told us some entertaining (if sometimes a little morbid) stories and shown videos about electrical accidents. So it was maybe 10% what we were supposed to be for and 90% general information we could make use of in our daily life, all while keeping things entertaining.
Try Spotify’s web player.
I am not talking about website compatibility, in fact, for as far as I can tell, I had no problem with Google services using Firefox. Some degradation maybe, but not enough for me to notice.
To give your an example, here is the bug that made me switch to Chrome: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429
May seem trivial, but that's with bugs like these that you lose users. I wanted my mouse to zoom, my mouse didn't zoom on Firefox (and only on Firefox), I tried Chrome, it worked, found no (technical) downside, it was faster, so I stayed with Chrome. I continued using Firefox on another PC, and I saw a lot more crashes, slowdowns, etc... on Firefox, also, a single tab could crash the entire browser (it was before Electrolysis and Quantum). Website incompatibility wasn't actually that much of a problem, it mostly affected corporate intranets, which were equal part Chrome-only and IE-only during that time.
Things have improved on the Firefox side (Quantum!), and I don't use that mouse anymore, so I am back on Firefox for most part, the ad-blocking thing pushed me back, hoping that they don't to anything crazy to push me away like they did before.
> Mozilla's leadership is directionless and flailing because it's never had to do, or be, anything else. It's never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit. It's no wonder it has no real direction or vision or clue: it never needed them. It's role-playing being a business.
The "real" fix would be for Mozilla to become an actual proper non-profit entity.
Maybe the EU can buy it and maintain the browser as a critical piece of infrastructure, the same way roads etc are.
> the same way roads etc are
Roads are also a model of corruption and inefficiency, fully captured by private actors (in Europe, Vinci etc). And I think there's no way around it past some size, but that might not be the direction we wish for Firefox.
In the US, road construction is actually pretty competitive. I'm sure there's some corruption, but I think it's done pretty well overall.
The following study lists the U.S. as having "moderate to high corruption" in road construction industries:
https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR25213001321
The abstract out rights says it's just using a PPP adjusted price vs quality measurement not actually studying real measurable corruption just their arms length proxy measurement. All that really shows is the US gets crappier product for the 'same' money (PPP comparisons are really squishy).
And google is full of examples such as the following:
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/construction-company...
Those are much better to point to, I wasn't saying there isn't any corruption more that the study is a bad measure of that issue.
The way I see it, one is quantifying bounds on the scale of the other. Both are relevant.
Yes, we know. We are not saying "privatize the browser" because as you rightly pointed out, privatisation is a guaranteed route to the utmost corruption.
> Maybe the EU can buy it
Thank you but I don’t think the EU is a good steward. Look how much it spent in funding startups across Europe, and what little we have for it. Look at the decision-making in the EU stack.
Sweden or the Netherlands should buy it. The EU, no.
Ugh please no, the first thing they would integrate is mandatory censorship of sites they don't like because of "hate speech".
Been saying that for years but it's never been a popular opinion. For one thing people solidly blame the EU for those awful cookie banners -- and I think those cookie banners broke down any resistance to web sites popping up modals that cover up other modals all asking for your email..
The EU didn't force the banners. They restricted opt-out data collection without consent, which is a good thing to do. The banners is malicious compliance.
The banners is malicious compliance.
That's true, but I'm still going to blame the EU. The nag screens were absolutely a predictable response, and if the regulators didn't spend half an hour thinking about unscrupulous data marketers would react to the regulations, then they are bad at their jobs. And even after that, they've had years to fix the regulations and haven't done so.
Consent for privacy is a broken model. It needs to be "Respect DNT or go to directly to jail, do not pass Go" It's a predictable result and if the EU is not "consenting" with it they should change the law.
> It needs to be [heavy-handed reprimands]
What is the realistic chance for such a regulation to pass all hurdles before being signed/coming into effect?
It's like that video of a fledgling Myna opening its beak towards a crawling catepillar and expecting it to jump in automatically.
I'm a bit of a tinkerer with software and will occasionally "wander" over the fence to see if it really is greener on the other side; I always come back to Firefox. I've tried:
Brave: love the mission/execution, don't care for Chrome
Arc: interesting idea, but ultimately removed too much of the things I need in exchange for things I might use, but don't need
Orion: Firefox extensions (even on iOS!) + native performance? Love it, but it crashes all the time and the extensions' compatibility comes and goes
Safari: I don't mind paying for software, but paying for extensions that will probably disappear in 6 months is a pass
I've recently settled on the Zen Firefox flavor: It brings a lot of what Arc, custom Firefox themes aim for in a stable package, while maintaining full compatibility with all the Firefox extensions I use. The only issue I still experience is the occasional "this site only works on Chrome".
> The only issue I still experience is the occasional "this site only works on Chrome".
Perhaps you should name and shame.
Riverside.fm only works on Edge/Chrome (or at least as of June 2025) which is really annoying
Does it actually not work with Firefox, or is it just checking the User-Agent and not even trying? Snapchat's web view is/was doing that last I checked (I have since permanently switched to serving Chrome's UA everywhere)
I think the primary thing I've learned about open vs closed source products this last decade, is that the difference in marketing is huge.
Both Firefox and Chrome are great browsers, end stop.
But most articles on HN about Chrome start with glowing praise.
And most articles on HN about Firefox start with "What's wrong with FF" and condescention.
I'm past the point of thinking that this is actually reflective about the browsers and their organizations.
Chrome is actively ending ad block support in its plugins. Its CEO is actively engaging in the political process. Firefox has always had a messy relationship with advertising, in which it generally tries to walk the line between reality and ideology. There are pros and cons to both products, depending on what you care about. The fact that articles on each browser so consistently fall into the same pattern does not seem reflective of the actual products themselves.
I think the difference is down to marketing.
> Both Firefox and Chrome are great browser.
No, Chrome sucks.
> open vs closed source products
Chrome is for all intents and purposes, open source. Yes, there is 0.000001% that's not. It's hard to argue that tiny portion is the difference.
> Chrome is actively ending ad block support in its plugins.
Chrome has not ended ad blocking - I'm using ublock lite and ads are blocked.
Just like Android is open source!
Is that a fair comparison? There is almost nothing Google adds to Chromium to get Chrome. It's fully usable without the 0.001% that Google adds.
Android though, IIUC, it's effectively not usable without Google Play services.
Weird mix of complaints, attacking Mozilla both from the ultra purity of non-profit web standards side via JWZ while simultaneously complaining they don't run it like a business.
It's almost as if cjpearson's unreasonable criticism atop this thread,
"...the anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless..."
... wasn't completely unreasonable.
People here should be much more angry at the collection of parasites running Mozilla, draining the foundation of money until Firefox finally dies with Mozilla going down right after them.
They are extracting millions while consistently fucking up any hopes of a future for Firefox. Fuck Mozilla, Fuck those Parasites and fuck all the Bootlickers here making excuses for them.
This. Mozilla has long appeared to exist as little more than a vehicle to enrich management, with a vestigial browser project attached to it. Google did its job very, very well here.
Firefox code is not fine. It is 25 years old code, with many stuff bolted on top (multithreading). It does not even have a proper security sandboxing for renderer!
This codebase was underfunded for a very long time! And all rewrites and major refactorings were cancelled!
Nobody embeds Gecko engine anymore. There are good reasons for that!
> Nobody embeds Gecko engine anymore. There are good reasons for that!
The reasons no one embeds Gecko are Gecko never very well supported embedding and Mozilla stopped trying around 15 years ago.
I'm confused why Firefox thinks it needs its entire own codebase to make an alternative browser.
Microsoft (a $3.7 trillion competitor to Google!) even decided to base their browser on Chrome.
Fact! Firefox Security is atrociously behind modern standards and Firefox can only safely be used as a throwaway browser with additional external sand boxing.
However, with some quick googling it looks like (in the last couple years anyways) Firefox is just as unsafe to use as Chrome.
Looks like Chrome actually had the most recent RCE only requiring someone to click a link.
How much of that is due to the difference in the amount of attention paid to each code base, do you reckon? If you're a security researcher, spending months of work on a browser with market share of more than 90% makes a lot more sense than on a browser with a market share of 2%, unless you're going after a specific individual who you know for sure uses that specific browser.
Definitely a lot of it - however, isn't it reasonable to assume that the bad guys also target Chrome more, for the same reasons?
Except of course the targeted attacks.
Both are giant C++ codebases executing random code of the internet. Of course they are both security nightmares. But Chrome has significant hardening that Firefox lacks [0].
Also, most recent CVE is a terrible metric.
[0] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
I know, but I was trying to find vulnerabilities that could meaningfully hurt me, and imperfect hardening that hasn't yet/knowingly been exploited isn't super important to me.
I don't have government-funded security researchers out to get me. I hope.
> We can point at what we'd like to see, sure. Did you know there's already a special developer's edition? No web designer is building on Firefox first any more. We're lucky if they even test on it. All the functionality attached to Firefox's "Browser tools" sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer's edition.
If they're still developing the dev tools (which I'd argue they need to if they want any companies to support the browser), then what's there to gain by removing it from the regular build? I don't get it.
Great article, i missed the original that spawned this article: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/17/opinion_column_firefo...
I've been done with firefox for many years.
Librewolf, firefox fork, is the way to go; available on flathub. Obviously Brave still being main browser.
Mozilla went wrong long ago. They publicly went political and followed through with the firings. They have blogs from the ceo straight up calling for political censorship.
Even more odd, it was mostly just US politics which stands out to non-americans. They are focused on everything except the browser and so it was inevitable to decline.
I tried librewolf and it made all the exact same calls out that Firefox did on shutdown. Now I just disable the network before killing Firefox and then run bleachbit. I also mount some directories as tmpfs. What are the benefits of librewolf over Firefox? I could not find any. AFAIK its still just Firefox under the hood.
What calls?
All the same non user initiated calls to Mozilla and other endpoints. Run tcpdump to see them. (both TCP and UDP now) I run a command before I close internet applications and all outbound connections are logged in dmesg via netfilter. Be sure to also log all DNS queries on your firewall.
> They have blogs from the ceo straight up calling for political censorship.
got any links?
I'm not OP, and I'm at work so I can't get the links for you, but the CEO/company was pretty vocal about the need for censorship, especially around and after the 2016 election. It's a legitimate concern, and it's why I don't use Mozilla products if possible. The company is run by ideology and could blow up at any moment
Deplatforming is not the same as censorship.
Everything is run by ideology, since that's how ideology operates.
If all major platforms do so in concert, it actually is the same.
Not GP but their mention brings to memory these HN discussion I had read years ago and the comments probably already have more than this thread will discuss:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29884342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690941
It looks like the blog post was taken down several months later, so I had to pull this copy to see what it was https://web.archive.org/web/20210108192114/https://blog.mozi...
Doesn't look like censorship at all.
> Transparency on advertisers
Sounds good.
> Transparency on "algorithms"
Also sounds good.
> Improve algorithms to highlight facts over fiction
Considering he isn't calling for anyone to be censored, only promote facts, I don't see much issue.
She builds off of "requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms" with "Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation". Whether deplatforming or "amplifying factual voices over disinformation" are seen as a good thing, they are censorship. She also mixes some good ideas in that (particularly platform algorithm transparency) of course.
Is ad-blocking censorship? What about spam filters?
Inherently by nature of existing no, but they can be easily implemented as such.
The censorship problems in the above are in the call to continue silencing/removals of political actors from discussion platforms and in pushing for centralized platforms to decide which political statements are factual. If you go an abstraction layer above that it gets too generic to universally claim as for censorship and if you go an abstraction layer below that it most often becomes an individual's choice.
Ad-blocking is turned off by default in most browsers.
Also basically no one wants to see ads, it is functionally useless, you can just go search for the thing you want to buy.
Censoring someone because you think they are harmful isn’t similar to this. You can develop a trump-blocker extension but having this enabled on default in a browser like chrome would be obvious censorship
In that case they already are "censoring" because they amplify certain voices over others.
> Whether deplatforming or "amplifying factual voices over disinformation" are seen as a good thing, they are censorship
this seems like an interesting, strongly-principled, almost legalistically pedantic twisting of intent - not that i can really claim to know her intent. what you call censorship can be reasonably understood as a cry against abuses of freedom of speech.
there are very clearly bad actors who profit from the abuse of freedom of speech, who argue in bad faith and spread misinformation in order to benefit themselves at all of our expense. not all speech is valuable, and a lot of it is harmful.
i'm not saying i have an answer, but a blind devotion to the principle of free speech (or any principle, really) necessarily comes with blind spots that people more cynical than you or me are capable of (and demonstrably very willing to) exploit. this world sucks.
I'm not posting that it should be seen as good or bad, just that's the prime example of the CEO calling for political censorship in a blog post someone was asking for a link to. As I said, even if one sees such actions as a good thing they are still censorship.
To me the main problem with the blog post was less the specific calls to action but the complete distraction from core technology, such as Firefox, Mozilla should have been focusing more on at the time. This is likely why the blog post ended up getting pulled - it served as a distracted from the mission more than it made any progress for it.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply you felt one way or the other, just responding to the general idea. I guess freedom of speech and censorship are pretty inextricable. It’s an interesting dichotomy to roll around in your head.
After each Firefox install, I do:
- Right click context menu cleanup - I don't need Inspect Accessibility Properties, Email image, Set image as desktop background etc. - Disable telemetry - Minimal theme - Clean up search engines - Disable pocket, top sites, ads, what's new, search suggest - Disable tab groups, container, hover preview - Disable recommended extensions
These can all be done through config or userChrome.css.
After that, I install three extensions - uBlock, skip redirect, I don't care about cookies.
I have never cared about signing into browser or syncing bookmarks. All I want is a minimal browser that doesn't bother me on each run.
The article praises Jamie Zawinksi, for calling out Mozilla on its failings. My take is that listening to him is the quickest way to irrelevance.
He calls out Mozilla for accepting crypto donations, so they stop it. Now they get less donations but there's no actual reduction in harm. Crypto still exists and has only grown.
He calls out Mozilla for digging into AI. As a very generic anti-AI take. According to him, Mozilla should not invest in mitigating the risks of Big Tech AI, it should simply not play at all. And this way magically AI harm will be eliminated.
He calls out the "original sin", DRM video. People that invest hundreds of millions into making a movie, aren't going to allow you to "right-click, save" on paid content. There's nothing morally wrong with paid content.
I could go on but all of these takes are performative and useless. If you want to make the internet a better place you need to engage with the real world and not maneuver yourself into a tiny corner of irrelevance where you self-congratulate your theoretical moral purity to your 3 Mastodon friends that are equally obnoxious and out of touch.
I have a far more different gripe than this.
Firefox seems to needlessly introduce features I barely need. Check their new release, 140.0
They introduced a toggle in the address bar to show the window title. Who tf is asking for this?
This browser just needs to be as simple as it can, without all this feature bloat.
IDK, a lot of people claim to need to be able to manage several hundred of open tabs.
I can confirm this use case does exist. My boyfriend (despite my constant disapproval) uses his tabs as essentially a bookmark manager and has around 100+ tabs open at any single time. His tab bar is composed of only barely recognizable icons, but he still manages to find things (more or less). I can not convince him to use tab groups, bookmarks, or sidebar tabs... :)
Speaking as someone who used to have few hundreds if not a thousand tabs opened.
Bookmarks are for long term storage. In some sense it is more like Stared History, something may be we need to return in the far future for reference. If browser have a function where it would record everything I read, bookmark would be stared piece of information where I think it is important.
Tabs Opened are reading list or To-do list. 30 Tabs on Toothbrush because I haven't decided which one to buy. Another 30 Tab on "each" different items which I planned to buy. 50 Tabs on HN because I haven't had time to read it yet. Sometimes I opened them when I visit HN front page and read it later. I must admit about 200 tabs wouldn't be needed if I am at 200K+ salary I just buy the top range without thinking. But I am frugal. Shopping on Amazon Prime, another 50 tabs.
SideBar Tabs doesn't work for me. Mostly because the Desktop web isn't designed for squashed layout. I would imagine it would work much better if I am on a 21:9 ultra wide monitor. But I haven't had the luxury to test it out.
> His tab bar is composed of only barely recognizable icons
I assume he is on Chrome? Because Firefox doesn't squeeze out the Tabs to Fav icons only.
> 30 Tabs on Toothbrush because I haven't decided which one to buy.
I mean, really? A tootbrush is a $2 item. They are all basically the same, some bristles on a handle. Why would you spend the time reading or even opening 30 different pages about this?
Personally I just use the free one I get from the dentist with each cleaning/checkup.
I missed out the word "electric" toothbrush. But after some research I now have a fairly decent understanding of the pros and cons of Oral-B vs Philip SonicCare.
Just want to add. I really wish i am like a lot of my friends who could just pick one up and start using it and care about things less. But I do. I care about many things and in way too much detail.
> SideBar Tabs doesn't work for me. Mostly because the Desktop web isn't designed for squashed layout. I would imagine it would work much better if I am on a 21:9 ultra wide monitor.
... Are you still on an old 4:3 screen? Standard 1080p is wide enough, if a bit short. I tend to do half-width and full-height on a 4k screen, with a tab sidebar.
Another option is the Add-On "Vertical Tabs Reloaded" which I'm still using since before they added vertical tabs in the sidebar. Seems a bit more compact.
i am fully with ksec. the issue with sidebars is that they not only take up space, which feels wasted, but are also a distraction. i have the browser always on fullsceen, the tabbar at the top fades into the background letting me focus on the page i an currently reading. when i want to search for a tab then i use the dropdown which takes more space than the sidebar but also shows more of the title of each tab.
Yeah but the solution to that has been Treestyle tab for ages...
It's just annoying that firefox took away the original tree style tab's ability to hide the main tab bar...
Luckily in the mentioned 140 you can now configure Firefox to show tabs in the sidebar, and then actually use the Tree Style Tabs sidebar instead, not showing the native tabs at all.
The built-in vertical tabs are awful. Hit F11 for full-screen and all of the chrome disappears except for the vertical tabs. Who would want that? I'll try Tree Style instead.
LOL this could have been written by my wife, I'm just as guilty of that. But only on Apple devices... even on a measly 8GB M2 MBA, Chrome can easily deal with 200+ tabs. But an 8GB Lenovo ThinkPad X1 with Windows? Performance goes down the drain at about 15-20 open tabs. It's utterly ridiculous.
I bet you these are the same people who then turn around and complain about how much RAM browsers use.
Does your boyfriend ever put his tools away after finishing a mechanical project?
Is his desk clean?
Is he strong enough to lift a feather duster and whip the vacuum cleaner around?
Having a mountain of tabs open is the equivalent of not putting your tools away, keeping your desk tidy or keeping your house clean.
People that get stuff done tend to be those that keep things tidy. Millions of tabs open might give the impression of 'genius at work', but do the deliverables get delivered?
This might not be a popular opinion, however, after having to tidy up my dad's estate (he never put tools away and his computer had billions of tabs open), I have formed my own conclusions on this.
I hat tip your bravery for pointing out an indulgence likely common among readers. Guilty as charged right here. But.
The comparison doesn't really hold. This is not like an untidy workbench. Modern browsers don't incur a significant penalty for having hundreds or even thousands of tabs. There are workflows that benefit from Never Closing, and I'm glad to see browsers now don't turn into a nipple bar to expose me.
Indeed after years and dozens of times where someone looks over my shoulder to see many tabs and abandons our topic to engage in Shame Time, I am fully innoculated to their barbs and feel it says more about the person pointing than myself. I manage to engage in a world with noise. Some people can't. The worst of them reach for grand overarching conclusions, as you have done here.
I also sometimes leave the evening dishes for the morning cleaning session.
Too much tidying up is procrastination, so hat tip for you doing the dishes in the morning, that makes sense.
I have recently learned a lot about highly effective people and tidiness is a common trait, even with browser tabs.
For most of my life I have been working with far too many tabs open, however, I do have this habit of bookmarking all tabs monthly, to then go to about twenty tabs across (the forever tabs) to then 'close all tabs to the right'.
You would be amazed at how few of those 'vital' tabs get reopened.
Each of them is a promise to one's future self to do something or read something, and rarely does one's future self do that.
I can relate to the pursuit of tidiness. It is satisfying to purge. I makes more room for the things that are neglected amongst the distraction. What's left over on my desk from yesterday's adventures is best cleared away. My patch cables on the synthesizer are often best pulled even if I end up putting them back in place.
I just don't see open tabs as burdensome, any more than my Steam backlog. If I get to them I do, if I don't, I don't. I also don't defrag my SSD and when I reboot my RAM starts fresh.
Tidiness and entropy are always at tension, and it's often best to let the balance be.
> People that get stuff done tend to be those that keep things tidy.
Not my experience at all.
In my personal cases, a have multiple windows with each easily having thousand of tabs. I guess I might have around 2k to 10k of them at a single time in my computer.
Depending of the computer and phone, it might be the same thing in Firefox or Chrome.
Even on Android, despite that chrome updates in the last years made it more sluggish and buggy to have lots of tabs than it used to be like 5 years ago.
I can't understand how Google/chrome team might be so incompetent, but often reopening the browser app in android, some times are overwritten or shifted in position. Very annoying.
I can't see why people don't just use their history, maybe some of it is that people have a psychological need not to know their history is there.
Firefox history is one of the most annoying part of the browser. It is impossible to click on a historical page and keep the context of the other visited pages that date/time. As soon you click on it, it will put it on top of the history and remove the old historical position. If you don't use search and manually scroll down, and then click on one (even with middle button), it will then instantly whoosh you back to the top of the history list, forcing you to scroll down and find the other links and repeat the process for each one.
Thunderbird filter function understand what I want when searching old emails. If you search on an email and selects the one you are interested, and then remove the search, it will automatic scroll the navigation to that date and keep the selected email on view.
Open tabs are kinda halfway between history and bookmarks, for me. They generally represent a train of thought or investigation, but they have less clutter than history, since I do close irrelevant ones as I'm navigating (and AFAIK there's no way in most browsers to show the history as a tree of navigation paths like tree style tabs). Bookmarks I perhaps should use more but they are liable to quickly grow out of control as well, and they require a lot more active thought to organise, in comparison to a tree of tabs. I would absolutely love a browser to properly unify this, I think there's a few smaller ones but they don't seem to be good enough to switch away from firefox and tree style tabs.
Personally I find tabs destroy my productivity completely almost immediately and I have to be aggressive about closing them.
The consistent failure of bookmark managers is notable, doesn't matter if they are pure web-based or implemented as browser extensions the story is always that they're a "roach motel", somebody put in 30,000 bookmarks and realizes a few years later they didn't look back at them once.
A counter-example is my Fraxinus bookmark manager/personal webcrawler/image sorter that I've been running for about 15 months and probably accumulated about 1 million images (was 700k last I looked) I look at images from it every day. The backlog of image galleries in the primary classification queue is about 1000 and I dunno, I could probably put "bigtags" [1] on another 1500 galleries but I don't feel like I have to, it's not like I don't have enough content already.
I wish I had some consistent and simple way to export both bookmarks and history into all my devices so I could feed them into my AI, make them portable, etc.
[1] tags engineered to work with automated classification, namely it is possible for tags to be positive/indeterminate/negative
I strongly recommend using https://markwise.app
>Open tabs are kinda halfway between history and bookmarks, for me.
How do you feel about the fact that the author (of the web page) gets to decide whether a link opens in a new tab?
Point is that I ignore tabs unless I'm alternating between 2 tabs or a need a placeholder for a few minutes. If arbitrary web sites could add to my the list of bookmarks kept by my browser, I'd ignore that list, too.
I do usually have control, via left click or middle click, but it is annoying when this is overridden in one direction or another, yes (and I sometimes do a dance of opening/closing/rearranging tabs to get the result I want)
> I can't see why people
You've discovered the source of many-o-wars throughout human history.
Thankfully Firefox tabs likely won't bring that 'round.
> They introduced a toggle in the address bar to show the window title. Who tf is asking for this?
Actually a lot of people. For example on a Mac you can't see the window title except the first word or two in the tab.
It's actually not that unusual for the browser to run in a system without window controls.
(I know macs are hard to use, but work requires one, so can't be helped.)
gnome too, there is no titlebar. just the tabs. and when you have many tabs you can't see the title unless you move the mouse over the tab. i haven't seen the new feature yet. the fedora or librewolf builds don't seem to have it
> For example on a Mac
The title already addresses individuals with serious personal dysfunction.
Vertical tabs is really great.
But there were already extensions for that, which is a better approach than Firefox developing a feature only a small subset of people will use1.
For years every Firefox discussion I saw would have some person saying "why are they wasting their time on X? I won't use it til they have vertical tabs" with scores of upvotes.
This perfectly encapsulates the Mozilla position. Every possible move makes people complain.
Hard disagree. The extensions were terrible, at least for what I want, and probably can't integrate with the UI in the same way.
And buying and killing pro-consumer and public utility apps.
Related from last month:
Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44298286
The thing that keeps me on Firefox/Librewolf is the Holy Trinity of features:
- Profiles (with selector in-browser since 139 AFAIR)
- Container tabs
- Temporary containers
When some of the other browsers will have all these features, maybe I'll make the switch.
Mozilla and Firefox is a great example of having too many advocates and not enough engineers. It's easy to find plenty of people committed to spreading the good word of Firefox or willing to answer Reddit threads with "just use Firefox". But there just isn't enough engineering effort to keep up with Chrome or Chromium.
like most successful, supposedly focused non-profits, eventually the parasitical professional management class infiltrate it
they do whatever is needed to increase their own compensation, eventually killing the host, at which point they move on
the nominet drama a few years back ([1]) is one of the few cases where they were forcibly removed (due to its unique structure)
[1]: https://openuk.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/The-Stack_Openi...
The suggestion for browsers to integrate an ad blocker always worries me. uBlock Origin benefits from being shielded from monetary incentives, as they don't even allow small donations to the maintainers.
That being said, Firefox frequently endorses the existing ecosystem of ad blockers in their featured extensions. They even featured AdNauseum, an ad blocker that attempts to DoS ad servers by sending fake clicks on every single ad. Google on the other hand labelled it malware and swiftly took it down. So right now, Mozilla is not at all an the enemy of arbitrary web content blocking.
Can they get Brendan Eich back?
I find that having Brendan Eich back in charge of Mozilla would be very unlikely for two reasons:
- He’s already built a modestly successful competitor in Brave, so there might not be much incentive for him to jump ship. - It’s possible that bringing him back may risk the ire of the LGBTQ+ community. (His comments against same-sex marriage led to his resignation as CEO of Mozilla back in 2014.)
However, this is just my speculation.
The EU should fork firefox and develop it as a public benefit
I thoroughly disagree. The EU and it's many organizations, does not know how to operate a long running software development project.
What the union should do instead is to create a funding structure that had as it's mission to identify and financially support groups that develop open source software which is critical to both the people and companies that are based in the EU. Make it a requirement that the software be accessible, free and open source.
> The EU should fork firefox and develop it as a public benefit
All these mega-rich US tech entrepreneurs can finance Firefox development. They have all the capital. The EU isn't a charity.
They're already doing that, and look where we are as the result.
The EU has different strategic interests from the mega-rich US tech companies
I don't know what's going on in Mozilla. Just today on my security camera NVR, Firefox pops up a dialog in the notification area at the lower right screen of Windows 11, showing an ad for its vertical tab feature, urging me to try it out. The thing is Firefox is rarely used on the NVR and the browser is not running. The only program running is the camera video app (the popup of course obscured the video window). It must be done by the background Firefox Update process. This is a brazen abuse of the notification area that even Microsoft hasn't tried yet.
> This is a brazen abuse of the notification area that even Microsoft hasn't tried yet.
Microsoft has advertised OneDrive and other products with scare prompts in those toast notifications.
Heck, the other week I got an ad telling me “Doom: The Dark Ages” had been released and that it is “thrilling” in the toast area.
This despite me never having used the Xbox or windows gaming apps and actually having uninstalled them only for an update to decide it should reinstalled
I got this on all my automated test machines today too. It messes up my screenshots. I get the feeling Firefox is going to lose a lot of good will today.
One of the most important open source projects in the world did not have a CEO who could read code since 2014?
I am not surprised they are in trouble.
I worked for a huge healthcare organization and the CEO was not a doctor, nor was she even familiar with the field before leading the organization.
CEOs are not "hands on the ground" in a functioning organization. When I hear things like this, it makes me wonder what CEO you have worked with and if they subscribed to the Jimmy Carter method of management or something. "No, no, let me diff the source on that, I am the CEO after all..."
Firefox is not fine. If you think it is, please tell me how to disable BASIC http auth in it. (This is a serious problem, as it will send passwords unencrypted over a non SSL connection, and my users have been trained to type their sso password into every box they see (I know.... Not my doing)).
about:config → network.http.basic_http_auth.enabled = false
All my hopes are with Ladybird now.
This could be a line in a post apocalyptic movie
There are also Arc & Orion to look forward to as they mature.
Looks like xkcd should remake their comics replacing operating systems with browsers and GNU/Hurd with Ladybird, https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1508:_Operating_Syste...
I do want to applaud the author for something that, on the internet, is one of the most difficult things, namely being able to think two things at the same time:
>Firefox is in a bit of a mess – but, seriously, not such a bad mess. You're still better off with it – or one of its forks, because this is FOSS – than pretty much any of the alternatives.
Some of the punches landed here, e.g. axing Servo, are pretty devastating. Others, "why not buy an adblocker" (huh? they allow it via extensions which has been a longstanding tradition in the browser space), seem like non sequiturs. But the point remains:
>Like we said, don't blame the app. You're still better off with Firefox or a fork such as Waterfox. Chrome even snoops on you when in incognito mode, and as we warned you, Google removed the APIs ad-blocker extensions used. You still get better ad-blocking in Firefox.
Yes, exactly! It's a Two Things Can Be True situation.
Mitchell Baker ran it into the ground and made a fortune doing so. Almost to the point that one might wonder if there may have been some sort of undisclosed quid pro quo with Google.
This entire thread seems like generative AI. Nobody normal thinks Mozilla is doing fine, or behaving rationally. Nobody thinks they've made any good decisions for a long time, but they see that the decisions they've made coincidentally benefit the source of 90% of their revenue, one of the most powerful corporations on the planet.
This article is actually very complimentary. They haven't managed to totally destroy the browser itself yet. Some people working there must still love it.
Wild that this thread got sunk with almost as many comments as upvotes. It's almost like we think that flooding an article with comments gets it pushed off the front page.
been a firefox diehard for over a decade. moved to librewolf recently because the amount of ad-infested settings and "oopsie" default reversions to my settings that expose me yet again to ads and i yet again have to turn it off is just gross to me. i shouldnt have to fight against software and triple check my settings to not see mind polluting ads or have my information sold/shared
same for intel
That reads dangerously close to an obituary.
A couple years ago (~2018-9 or so) I realized that Firefox had a weird leak, I opened a lot of tabs often (heavy internet user plus dev) and I never really restart my pc unless absolutely necessary because I have too many things at once I'm working on and it's a pain to reopen everything including Windows Explorer instances (now tabs).
I talked about this leak and they kept gaslighting me like it didn't exist, Firefox at one point was taking 24 gbs of ram on my pc. (It did)
Another issue, Firefox Nighly, I 100% understand that it's an early bird preview and all that, but they would literally brick your browser whenever they wanted you to force to update it... what? I complain and they say "then don't use nighly", like brother, I understand that, I completely understand to use stable for stability, but there is no reason to FORCEFULLY brick a user's browser whenever you release an update, just have a popup and if they WANT TO they restart at the moment if not at the next restart period... and if you REALLY need for some critical issue you can have a flag with the update that forces a bricking but is only used in extremely important scenarios.
The amount of mismanagement at Mozilla is incredible really, I was a die hard Firefox user, I remember opening my youtube channel trying to right click on a background and not being able to copy the url/view image with chrome back in the day, that was when I realized that Google would force "its" web standards so I decided to go all in on Firefox, yet now I'm back on a chromium browser because Mozilla has completely destroyed the browser I loved, even worse now with all the weird privacy invasive stuff they've added in.
I truly hope ladybird browser is successful.
It still leaks GPU memory on Windows.
It's still a great browser, though. A bigger problem is that the web is now a mono-culture of Chrome/Chromium. Many sites don't work 100% on Firefox.
I’m a diehard Firefox user since day one, but today I updated to the 140.2 iOS build, and it broke my cookie jar, logged me out of most websites, and managed to switch LinkedIn to Spanish..
> iOS build
Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc, on iOS all use Webkit because of the platform rules. The EU forced them to open up in Europe, but you're not really using Firefox on your iPhone.
Just pointing it out as it's not the same as using Firefox on the desktop or Android.
It might be using the Safari engine underneath, but the issues they're describing are the sort of thing that would surface with a bad integration like a corrupted profile. Profile management on FF has always been a bit of a crapshoot. Personally speaking, it hasn't bit me in the last few years, but I've probably jinxed it now 8-/
Until Firefox introduce scoped CSS they are IE6 to me.
Firefox performance is really bad in google sites like meet, calendar, docs, youtube. I wonder why they are not working on improving the situation. Everything else is already perfect, just iron out these few issues and be the undisputed leader.
Can't win if competition to whom the web belongs also tries to capture literally whole world in its ad-infested vision of future via its browser. There are tons of ways how to subtly degrade experience, or gain performance for oneself (like IE did back in the days of skipping ending connection as per protocols to gain some speed points).
I used to cheer for Google and its approach to customers, employees, and the world we live in. That ship has sailed long time ago, now its another greedy global mega corporation with thin veneer of 'we are good guys' (apple is similar but in a different way).
As pointed out in the article, Firefox performance has been steadily improving for years. It's not exactly on Mozilla that specific sites are optimized specifically for their rival's product.
> It's not exactly on Mozilla that specific sites are optimized specifically for their rival's product.
Firefox has less than 2% market share. It is absolutely on Mozilla to seek out the most used sites with performance problems and fix the browser so they are fast.
Didn’t youtube sabotage firefox performance deliberately?
Originally no, and nowadays it seems like it's a result of that tech debt: Youtube did a frontend rewrite using an early spec of web components, that only Chrome ever fully implemented, and they used Polymer to polyfill other browsers with the idea that they'd implement the spec later and get a performance boost. But the spec changed, so they never did, and Youtube is still sending the Polymer-based version to other browsers - even though from other people's tests it looks like Youtube is capable of sending something that doesn't require the polyfill if it thinks Chrome is on the other end.
(This was the state as of a couple years ago, I don't know if there's been further developments since)
That could be accident or malice or a combination of the two.
Google sabotage firefox performance deliberately
> Rust was developed at Mozilla. Mozilla axed it. In 2020, it laid off the whole team.
> As I reported back in 2023, the Servo browser engine is doing well. Early this year, its own figures show strong continued upticks in interest since Igalia took over development. You guessed it – Mozilla also gave Servo the boot in 2020.
You don't need to develop a new programming language to develop a decent browser engine. Maybe it would be nice, and maybe it could be better, but do you really have the resources to go off on such a tangent? Clearly the answer was no.
> 2020 is the same year Cathay Capital invested $50 million into KaiOStech, saying it would help bring the next billion people online. As The Register reported in 2018, KaiOS is Boot2Gecko, Mozilla's FirefoxOS rebranded. Mozilla killed its own version in 2015.
Calling it "FirefoxOS" was a mistake, but the idea wasn't all too bad. The rendering in HTML/CSS was a good idea, Java after all have Java Swing/JavaFX and that worked well, but I wouldn't have forced all of the apps to also be JS. I think it will be the future equivalent of an OS where all apps must be Adobe Flash. The rendering should have all been done in HTML/CSS, with the backend being any language of choice running in a tiny container.
I think Mozilla need to make things that do one thing well, and they also need to get better at developing MVPs that test the waters before pouring in years and millions into it.
You don’t need to but it certainly helped. And the Servo project also produced crates like HTML5ever which filled a huge gap in performant and safe document parsing for both browser and server. I’m very grateful that there are modular and easily usable projects like that, and rust is far easier to use than the complex c++ code and toolchains you’d need.
It's moreso that actively burning off your only successful endeavor in uncountable years is a sign of bad, bad management.
> You don't need to develop a new programming language to develop a decent browser engine.
Thank You!
Just one additional suggestion: Stop throwing plug-in developers under the bus!
p.s. I'm writing this in seamonkey... and still pine for NPAPI 8-(