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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Watching the whole thing unfold has been heartbreaking. Most mozillians do not support this. This Twitter thread is one insight into it: https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/941709048529014784

Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users, and they pull this crap right after. They absolutely should know better. They should have known better with Pocket; they should have learned from Pocket.

"Fork it" is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it's with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they're an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them. There's tons of Firefox forks, none of them get the point though, you might as well use Chromium. If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's).

Mozilla's role goes beyond the web browser as well. Its mission was to "keep the web open", "keep the web free". This goal was reflected in projects such as Firefox OS, Hello and Persona (and to some extent, Thunderbird)... but atrocious management made those projects a waste of time and money.

It's not Firefox you need to fork, it's Mozilla.

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It's surprising that people are surprised by these things. Mozilla is not on a slippery slope. That was true years ago, but it proceeded unmitigated. By now, though, these things are the natural result of that decay.

There's a lot of power in branding, apparently. People keep saying things like, "Mozilla is a good company at heart", and I'm at a loss. Mozilla 2017 is nothing like the Mozilla that existed when the Foundation was established, or when the Mozilla Manifesto was adopted. Tons of key people left in a few different waves: first when Google pulled them off the project to go build Chrome, and then lots more who trickled out over the years during and after the Kovacs/FirefoxOS era. What remains is (a derivative of) the codebase + the name "Mozilla" + and, like, Mitchell. But that's it. Keep calling it the same thing, though, and somehow folks act like we're talking about the same thing.

Mozilla imploded—or rather, got Netscapified—years ago. To believe that Mozilla or Firefox is your old friend who's still helping you fight the good fight is incredibly naive and can only come from someone who hasn't actually been paying attention and is easily fooled by (trivially contradicted) surface-level details (like a name). I mean, it's not even like some philosophically tricky ship-of-Theseus problem. Mozilla is dead, people, and this isn't news.

Sorry but where's your evidence?

Mozilla is still today doing incredible work. The work on Quantum was extremely forward-thinking in a way that most corporations cannot support; it brought us Rust, which is a fantastic contribution to the ecosystem.

Furthermore, Mozilla has always had troubles with judgement and mismanagement, this is not new. The problems that have been surfacing are old problems, they're just getting more severe.

Evidence? How about the article link we're all commenting on? How is that not enough for you?

Uh, looking glass was not supported or worked on by the vast majority of the fantastic engineers at mozilla. This was a marketing stunt probably thrown together by a single intern, and greenlighted by an out-of-touch marketing department.

The engineers at mozilla are NOT the problem.

Ah, a privacy oriented browser where a single intern with an out-of-touch marketing department can push crap to millions of users.

>"This was a marketing stunt probably thrown together by a single intern, and greenlighted by an out-of-touch marketing department."

Doesn't the fact that that's even allowed to happen point to a larger problem?

Sorry, I don't care much about engineers. I care about people in charge. People high in decision making process. If intern and marketing department are able to do this it's really bad. No number of good engineers can change that.

If the yardstick for Mozilla's mission is how fast they can make a browser, why do we need Mozilla? There are arguably better equipped entities doing that.

Their whole mission is to have better judgement and management, advocating for the user instead of a corporation (or foundation). So it sounds like you're in agreement with the GP that Mozilla's decay is not news.

> If the yardstick for Mozilla's mission is how fast they can make a browser, why do we need Mozilla? There are arguably better equipped entities doing that.

Are there? I see no evidence to support that assertion and a lot of evidence against it.

Market share matters. The last vote at the W3C about DRM video being the most recent example.

I mean, I probably qualify as reasonably savvy, and I have used exactly 4 browsers in the last 10 years: Firefox, Chrome, IE/Edge, and Safari.

>>The last vote at the W3C about DRM video being the most recent example.

Which Mozilla enthusiastically and Fully supported Google, MS, and Netflix in support of DRM.

Their fake unwillingness from 2014 was about as transparent as netflix's where by netflix claims it is "all the MPAA/Studios" why at the same time closing down all Open Access API's, and Locking down all their own wholey owned content behind DRM

This is not the first time user privacy has been invaded on Firefox or by Mozilla and it will not be the last

The fact that these Data Reporting features, and allowing FF to run "studies" on you is a OPT-OUT setting not a OPT-IN setting is all the proof I need that the Mozilla of old is long dead.. A Privacy respecting company would make such things OPT-IN, not OPT-OUT..

That is with out even getting into the whole Orwellian Ministry of Truth they are creating, or about 100 other things

> I mean, I probably qualify as reasonably savvy, and I have used exactly 4 browsers in the last 10 years: Firefox, Chrome, IE/Edge, and Safari.

I probably don't count as savvy, but my browser experience over the last 10 years has been a somewhat broader list. Having started with Firefox at V2, I switched (around '06) to my primary browser being Opera, with SeaMonkey as a secondary - especially when I want IRC; Firefox, K-Meleon, and Links are all in the background ready to go. I also used QtWeb for a brief period.

When Opera switched to being a Chrome clone, I jumped ship. SeaMonkey didn't provide the ease-of-use I wanted for an everyday browser, so I went back to Firefox. I'm now more often on Pale Moon.

> There's a lot of power in branding, apparently. People keep saying things like, "Mozilla is a good company at heart", and I'm at a loss. Mozilla 2017 is nothing like the Mozilla that existed when the Foundation was established, or when the Mozilla Manifesto was adopted.

I don't know, Rust and Servo seem to show that there's still the hacker spirit that was there at the beginning, it's just they accumulated a lot of 'business types' if you will over the years and they need to put that engineering face back at the top, instead of being too focused at running a multi-million dollar enterprise.

What good are Rust and Servo if they just use them to force unwanted extensions on me?

I hope you're not pretending that Servo is somehow the fastest way to browse the web...

Servo? No. Firefox 57+, which is based on it? Yes. But that's completely besides the point here, because yeah, serving unwanted extensions - which aren't even remotely useful - is ... stupid. I allow experiments so Mozilla can test new things which will benefit others later. But I don't see any world where the Mr. Robot extension will benefit anyone.

Have you tried Chrome?

Firefox 57+ is absolutely not the fastest way to browse the web. I'm sorry, I tried.

I think ultimately it's very dependant on which sites you frequent. Like with many things, it's absolutely a case where the only good answer is YMMV.

As far as I can tell, any website that uses a less than negligible amount of JS runs better on Chrome, and that's about 80% of the sites I visit.

Yes. It's my second browser (and was my main browser until I switched to FF Nightly in the summer). And no, it isn't faster - at least not for me. And it hogs memory as if there's no other software running on my PC. I'm really happy that I can use FF again instead.

  it hogs my memory if there's no other software running

What exactly is wrong with that? Do you understand how RAM works on a computer?

Maybe your system is different, but for me, FF 57+ uses much more CPU than Chrome, and unlike RAM, that's a statistic that actually affects something in a meaningful way (increased power consumption).

If you're worried about Chrome using RAM when nothing else is, you might be fetishizing the concept of free RAM.

I wrote as if, not if - i.e. I run other programs that could use the RAM if Chrome wouldn't take it.

Chrome keeps asking me to log in to Google.

FF nightly and now stable have been my default browser for almost a year, and I have to agree with you. FF in all variants (as of today) regularly consumes more RAM than Chrome for my day-to-day usage. FF crashes on me several times per week. Netflix, YouTube, and it seems most React sites consistently seem to just chug in FF, but do fine in Chrome. I'm not sure what's happening here, but the hype about FF's new performance gains has not been fulfilled in my experience.

I've stuck with FF because I'm a web developer-- sadly, the money led me there from other more interesting lines of dev work-- and I don't want to see a single browser dominate the web the way IE used to.

As far as Nightly goes, I'd always imagine a debug/testing build would use more RAM by a fair margin.

elsewise, I'd say, try creating a new FF profile, unfortunately afaik older profiles can still jank up the browser a bit

The ship exists but whether it remains the same ship is a matter of opinion; and yet Theseus sails onward.

I see Mozilla as suffering from a crisis of identity, internally; it's acting as though it is staffed by believers in the manifesto but is now steered by those enamoured with The Bay Area and its ways.

Rust, Firefox 57, and even FirefoxOS are/were noble efforts to succeed in delivering on the manifesto. Pocket and this latest advert update smack of an executive that is thirsty to exploit the Mozilla brand for profit.

The problem is that Theseus jumped the boat too.

Indeed. The first indication was perhaps when they freaked out and decided to chase Google on version numbers.

After that they got into all kinds of "social signaling" shenanigans, and the rest is history.

I miss Brendan Eich.

Certainly as CTO. If he had stayed on after suddenly having been declared CEO without so much as a review process, our opinions would probably be very different by now.

So, this is my fault, for leaving in 2014?

> There's a lot of power in branding, apparently.

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy applies to do-good missions just as easily as it does to the worst of avaricious corporations or bloated gov't depts.

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization." [0]

[0] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

I usually refer to Stross's summary- "The iron law of bureaucracy states that for all organizations, most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective."

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106983

More generic form of this would be to state that in any system, those who are willing to go furthest in protecting their position will usually have the upper hand.

E.g. the company owner remains a company owner only as long as they are willing to go sufficient far to keep the company profitable; those who don't go bankrupt and lose their position.

The bureaucrat is not special in that respect - they are "just" the natural foot soldier of those who want to maintain an organisation for the sake of the organisation.

As such the backbone of any long-lasting organisation will be made up of those who are good at both maintaining their position in an organisation, and in protecting the organisation against inside and outside "threats".

Unfortunately such threats can include those who want to focus resources on the original goal of the organisation, at the risk of diminishing the role of the organisation.

Since Pournelle mentions the Soviets: to me this is one of the most dangerous parts of Leninist party theory: it involves rules meant to strengthen a party organisation against the threat of outside force, but it also made the Bolshevik party ideally suited for party bureaucrats and power mongers, whose prime goal quickly became the perpetuation of the party and the privileges of power.

A lesson should be to make any organization as weak as it can possibly be while retaining its ability to function. Unfortunately to function that needs an even playing field, or "as weak as it can possibly be" in the face of competing with multinational corporations quickly means something much bigger than we might hope.

all things equal, one dedicated to get power in an organization will get power over those that are dedicated to produce for the organization

this works for company, bureaucracies and everything else in life and is part of the entropy an organization accrues with time.

giving bureaucrats a weaker initial position will only extend the time before takeover.

Wait, just because the old guard is gone, implies that the people there no longer care at all about the original mission? I get where you're coming from, but throwing up ones hands and saying Mozilla is already fucked is not helpful—Mozilla is our best chance at maintaining an open web. If we just roll over and let Google have the web because things aren't perfect then we are well and truly fucked because there's really no question of the agenda there. No, we should be holding their feet to the fire, not giving up in impotent cynicism.

Exactly. I'm totally fed up with this "Mozilla is a good company at heart" contrary to every evidence (letting FF slip b/c of all the side projects, Pocket, now this).

There is a natural tension between the desire to do good and the need to make money.

If you can't be financially self-sustaining, then no level of desire to do good in the world will result in the long term ability to continue doing good.

It is like the phrase, Justice without power is inefficient and power without justice is tyranny. You need both profit and philosophy to do good.

I strong disagree that Mozilla is a good company at heart.

They are horribly mismanaged on every level.

They have burned hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a second rate browser that has seen its market share collapse.

They took hundreds of millions from Google and in exchange unquestioningly supported Google's advertising and surveillance agenda.

They have consistently failed to introduce new features that would actually benefit new users.

They blame the "standards process" for their lack of innovation and features that benefit users when they know that the standards process is a b.s. game. For profit corporations break standards whenever it benefits them. Firefox is the only browser that follows standards written by Google, Microsoft, and Apple, while the other 3 break them, or force through their own changes whenever it benefits them.

Apple blocked 3rd party cookies and Microsoft defaulted to Do Not Track while Firefox kept doing Google's bidding to collect their checks. Just one example of many.

In the place of real innovation, being truly independent, and actually standing up for users Mozilla gives people dumb crusades like Net Neutrality.

Firefox could have used their market share to develop truly innovative features, like what Opera tried. For that matter they could have partnered with Opera to create standards for a true open web, but of course they never did that because the Google bucks were just to sweet for them.

Mozilla has been a failed organization for a long time. This is only the latest reminder.

The trouble is, it costs money (or a lot of time from talented people) to support a project the size of a browser. I would imagine getting some funding helps keep things afloat.

You even say, "maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's)".

I suppose we should expect the goodwill of corporate sponsorship, but this relationship can quickly turn into the "sponsor" asking for things in exchange for donations.

This situation exposes a weakness and requires the recognition of the fragility of the open source model (at least for larger-scale projects). We've seen weird corporate-backed things in NPM projects before. It happens, but what is the better alternative? How do we prevent it? Most corporations only support open source projects out of self-interest: that is, they have a stake in seeing a particular project succeed because their stack may depend on the software.

Everyone keeps coming with the money problem. But... how about they maintain a browser, with browser functions only? No PDF-JS, no Pocket, no Hello, etc. Just core browser functions and features.

Yes, it might mean scaling back, which is one of the swear words in a growth-oriented belief, but that way, the money should be enough - it was enough for a decade, what changed?

With all due respect, rendering PDFs is something I consider core browser functionality.

Pocket, most certainly not, though it's nice I suppose. Hello was... I don't know what it was. Checking if the market is there at all? Not something I expected to be in a browser.

pdf.js seems to work quite nicely.

Seems that's no different than opening with external program, or using a plugin, or using an extension. After all,those things can be updated, whereas the browser should have more core functionality that enable new document types to being opened.

pdf.js performance is horrible, and now without NPAPI it is impossible to view PDF in firefox tab.

PDF.js performs quite well for me and works fine in tabs. It has always been a better experience for me than PDFium, for example.

I never understood why anyone wanted their browser to render pdfs. PDF.js is slow, buggy, and can’t edit documents. Every major OS ships with a better PDF reader, and there are still better open source PDF readers available on all major platforms.

> PDF.js is slow, buggy, and can’t edit documents.

That is leagues ahead of native PDF plugins which are slow, buggy, full of vulnerabilities, closed source, require a deprecated plugin infrastructure and usually can't edit documents either.

PDF.js is one of the better things to come out of Mozilla.

PDF.js has had a huge amount of its own vulnerabilities.

Okay. But the solution is to not involve the browser at all. It's there to browse. Once you find and download the file have it open in a real application designed for reading pdf.

Ideally, yeah. But often PDFs are integrated with the web experience as another web page. Or atleast that's how I treat them. I have 2-5 research papers open in my tabs at all times, and I browse through them like I would with any other article.

Sure if it piques my interest I would download it, organize it but I wouldn't go through the pains of doing that for every pdf I lay my eyes upon.

>download it, organize it but I wouldn't go through the pains of doing that for every pdf I lay my eyes upon.

You don't have to do that. Just set your browser to open the file in a real application. It'll automagically download to some temp dir (ie, /tmp) and you won't have to care about file paths or organization at all (unless you want to).

I have tens of research papers open in my tabs at all times. But for a good experience reading I open the full text in my pdf reader.

I don't think you've spent any time with regular people. The vast majority of the world finds computers to be confusing. The less buttons they have to click the better. All they want really is another appliance that has fixed functionality.

You're being needlessly down-voted here (I can only guess at what silly HN tripwire you've activated) but you're absolutely right. Tech people like us might think it's completely obvious that a browser shouldn't render pdfs or make your toast. But end users don't care. Browser x lets them read stuff quicker without switching to another app. They want the monolith.

We can dislike it, but we need to reconcile it.

Yeah, and I know this first hand. I work at a biotech startup and we have some super intelligent people who regularly get confused with modern UIs. For e.g. Not everyone understands that the hamburger menu is actually a menu. Or that flat shaded text can actually be a UI button element.

This gets to the heart of the matter: what is the core functionality?

For some saving bookmarks isn't effective while a solution like Pocket fits them better. Hello was an experiment to see if making video communication more accessible would connect people. Consider the saying about how no one uses every part of Microsoft Word, yet everyone uses a different ~10%.

Anyway, I think it's great that Mozilla experiment and try pushing the web forward. If only they were more transparent and consistently made these things opt in.

ESPECIALLY since there exists a whole "add-ons" infrastructure to handle extras.

This is not interesting to the people involved.

They hijacked Mozilla to have a private playground for fun projects paid for by the search engine integration.

Building a secure, fast, usable web browser is a near-impossible task on its own. Anything else they do involves a couple of orders of magnitude less effort. Mozilla would still need the vast majority of funding they currently get to do that.

The problem isn't that they're doing too much - it's that they have nearly no business model, and any attempt to create a business model appears to be selling out to users.

No. It is actually pretty easy. Just fork chromium, strip out the spyware, and add your own layer of features on top.

There are a lot of companies doing this now and Mozilla would be far more successful if they followed this model instead of trying to copy chrome's user experience on top of their inferior browser engine.

Yet we also need variety in our engines. Otherwise it's IE6 all over again. Diversity makes us stronger.

Then we get one company deciding which features should and should not be available to a web page.

Are those things really taking up much employee time? Frankly, they don't seem like it. And some side projects are nice - like Rust and Servo. Persona too, even if it didn't caught on.

There are plenty of open source companies. The company I founded is built on open source principles many of them inspired by Mozilla. It's a bigger challenge, because it restricts your freedoms as a company in favour of the user's freedoms. However Mozilla's mistakes are not due to the open source nature of the company at all, they are due to mismanagement.

They are due to poor understanding of your own userbase. Poor communication with users and employees. Complete lack of judgement.

These are sticks Mozilla puts in its own wheels. It's hard to make money, but it's easy to know what not to do. Simply asking your employees: "Is this a good idea?" would have yielded a clear "Fuck no". That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not.

https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 exemplifies the poor misunderstanding of the userbase:

> Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs

To call advertisements "user-enhancing" is an affront and betrays values like privacy that Mozilla claims to espouse

Time to do away with whoever led the charge on this one.

betrays values like privacy

I do not (now -- at the time that person made that tweet, I did, but not on the browser) work at Mozilla.

However. The "tiles" concept was literally an experiment in whether it's possible to construct an ad system that does respect privacy.

The basic idea was:

* Advertisers submit their ads to Mozilla. Mozilla wraps them up into "bundles", made up of a bunch of different ads along with metadata to use in determining which to show.

* The browser downloads the "bundles" from Mozilla, and caches them locally.

* The browser, based on local data only it has access to, and the metadata in the bundles, decides which ads to show.

In other words, unlike a Google-style model where the ads are stored remote, loaded on demand, and the decision of what to show is made on the server side, this stored all ad content locally and the decision of what to show was also made entirely locally. So neither the advertiser nor the distributor could know whether a particular person saw an ad or (if they happened to) why the decision was made to show them that ad rather than a different one.

You may not like that, and you're free not to like it. But to argue that it "betrays" privacy is simply factually false. And Mozilla's mission is, in large part, to find ways to advance and sustain the web in ways that respect the users. Trying to develop a privacy-respecting way to deliver ads -- since so much of the web is dependent on ads -- is entirely within that mission.

Most open-source software companies that are profitable rely on a consulting model. They develop and open-source the software, then work with clients to implement, customize and support it for them.

This clearly wouldn’t work for a consumer product like a web browser.

Thank you for this reply -- it illustrates why the model that works for other companies doesn't apply here.

>Simply asking your employees: "Is this a good idea?" would have yielded a clear "Fuck no". That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not.

Running a company by polling random employees is not an established successful management style. Its only you who is suggesting it, and then claiming that because they didn't do it, its a bad sign.

> Running a company by polling random employees is not an established successful management style. Its only you who is suggesting it,

He's suggesting that the most simple, stupid check one could think of (polling random employees) would already have shown this to be a terrible idea. They didn't even go that far. That is indeed a bad sign.

>would already have shown this to be a terrible idea.

What are you basing this on?

I'm just a FF user, and I don't think it was a terrible idea, even though I personally wouldn't have gone that route.

its not polling for running the company, its a disaster check. If most of your employees hate the idea, it should be a sign of something wrong because I would expect Mozillians to be also users of Firefox.

You inserted the word "random" into the OP's statement in order to support your position. Your employees will ALWAYS have a better understanding of the state of affairs of projects they are developing, simply because they are the ones developing them. You cannot fully understand the complexities without doing the work yourself. Not factoring opinions about a product from the employees who are making it is incredibly irresponsible, and makes those employees much more likely to find an employer who will value them as subject matter experts.

>Not factoring opinions about a product from the employees who are making it is incredibly irresponsible, and makes those employees much more likely to find an employer who will value them as subject matter experts.

A developer is not a subject matter expert on how to market a product. Maybe you can restate your opinion.

Counter to your statement, "A developer is not a subject matter expert on how to market a product":

Most development experience I have had (open source, exclusively) comes with continual interaction with, and and feedback from, a subset of users who use the software. This subset is populated mostly by power users, those who rely on the software for work, and those who use it regularly. They are the ones who understand which needs the software is meeting and which it is failing to meet, and who ask for intelligent and sensible features to be added.

The marketing departments don't have this built in compass. They create ideas that they think will be profitable to the company, and they simply don't have the necessary connection with the users and with the software to know which of these ideas will be perceived as awful by the user.

The ones creating the software are the subject matter experts on what that software should do, how it should behave, and what the users will find most useful, in this instance.

The marketers are subject matter experts on... Other stuff? Advertisements and buzzwords and increasing revenues by targeting certain demographics of peoples? I have experience with the marketing side of business that has perhaps reflected poorly on that profession, so I'd love to hear from anyone that can fill my knowledge gap.

Plenty of companies conduct internal beta's. Plenty of companies conduct internal usability studies for new features or anything in their product they have the slightest worry could backfire. I mean they could have included this in the developer unpublished version for some time and just asked for general feedback before releasing it. These concepts are far from unheard of.

>These concepts are far from unheard of.

Sure, and not doing any of that isn't a "terrible sign" as the OP claimed. Which is the point I'm countering.

Joel Test step 12 is more or less "grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of what you're working on".

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

>Joel Test step 12 is more or less

That's brilliant!

"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the new developer you hired" - HR

"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the fan choice for the new cafeteria's HVAC system " - Building Management

"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the calculations in the spreadsheets that the company CFO produced". - Finance department.

Hey, I think you're on to something here. We could eliminate entire departments here ! :)

Hmm, when you remove the expensive "we should hire a management consultant to tell us to ask employees about the new dev" it almost seems laughable, like people wouldn't trust or want a kind of 'democracy' and would prefer and respect 'dictates handed down from above'.

Maybe it needs to cost $100k for someone in a suit to say "ask your employees, make use of their knowledge" before it sounds respectable?

> The trouble is, it costs money [..] I would imagine getting some funding helps keep things afloat.

Mozilla has accrued a lot of money over the years. So much money that they could have funded--just on interest--a comfortable loft somewhere filled with hackers on a decent salary who are fanatical about the open web, and maybe a single guy with a tie to "call google", in perpetuity.

That should have been the base case for Mozilla: open web, modern browser, users first.

Unfortunately, brass doesn't vote itself out for the greater good. A modern browser is a delivery platform. The "open web" is a marketing tool. And users are not as important as advertisers.

The rationale is that without clout, they'll be unable to prevent worse things from happening, so they have to allow for these compromises on the open web to maintain that clout, and every setback is relegated to "not our hill to die on," with every next hill becoming "not our hill."

It seems like an unavoidable tragedy, but if we look at similar organisations, can we imagine the FSF or the EFF making compromises on their respective missions, even if they lose popularity or even run out of funding?

I feel they would rather cease to exist than allow for corruption of their stated mission.

I noticed a similar thing with Wikipedia and the ACLU. Too much money seems to in some ways be a curse. Organizations seem unable to Instead of just put a bunch of money away for a rainy day and then stop fundraising for a while when there's enough money to carry out the core mission. Instead they find more and more missions to expand into in order to spend whatever level of money is coming in.

The problem with this is that the people working on this peripheral expansion missions don't think of themselves as peripheral. When there's a money crunch or a values conflict they will fight hard for theirs even at the expense of what the organization was always supposed to be about.

What is the Aclu doing that isn't part of its mission?

I think the trouble is that the "web" is an overcomplicated BS clusterf___ for exploiting the plebes.

Some guy posted here a week ago in wonderment over how Mozilla can maintain a browser for a mere $400M+ a year. $400M+ a year!!!

If it takes that much engineering to deliver something which is not substantially different than what we were using 17 years ago, I'd count that as an engineering failure.

At a high level the needle hasn't moved much. But even little movements do add up. I'd rather not go back to a web before fuzz testing, fewer accessibility standards, and password managers. Not to mention AOL and its kind dividing the world into disconnected, walled gardens.

I don't know how your year 2000 was, but in my year 2000, I had broadband, no AOL, and a functioning web browser (which was not IE or Netscape), that could:

* Display web pages * Show images * Play songs and videos * Deliver applications (via Java instead of Javascript, granted) * Download files, and more!

Almost anywhere outside of NYC and SoCal, $400M is still an epic shitload of money.

This.

I like my niche obscure anti marketing parasite browsers. But I am well aware there's a lot of Mozilla code in Waterfox and Pale Moon.

And ultimately its MS, Mozilla and Google who run this show. And out of those Mozilla is still the least bad.

> "Fork it" is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it's with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they're an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them.

Well, how do you suggest doing this when it appears that the relevant decision-making parts of Mozilla do not answer to anyone "on our side" in any meaningful way?

It seems to me that the only solution is to make an organisation with a fundamentally different system of governance. By virtue of institutional inertia, I figure it would be very hard to do this by actually raising a competing project from the ground up and hoping to capture any of Mozilla's market share or developer base (not to mention the amply made elsewhere in this thread point that Mozilla is big and expensive for a reason).

The far easier, and quite well-tried, solution is to put financial and social pressure on the current leadership to voluntarily open itself to downstream control. The former may be most easily achieved by having an Iceweasel-style "condom organisation" gain traction - that is, someone who tries their best to replicate all of Mozilla's user-facing I/O (releases, sync servers...) in a timely fashion, systematically acts as a QC layer to strip bad decisions like this or Cliqz and otherwise does not waste developer time on niche interests like classic UIs. For the latter, whatever you may think of the person of the tactic, the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla. Even more cynically, it may be the case that they are the main way anything gets done these days. The (very significant, in my eyes) moral reservations aside, from a result-oriented perspective of what is most useful to reform Mozilla as an organisation, is there any good argument against the "identify a representative set of heads behind this latest measure and call for them" approach?

> the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla.

Yes. If anyone wants to do a git bisect to find when the Mozilla Corporation lost its integrity, we can say it was definitely "bad" by the time they forced out Eich in April 2014.

How about when they implemented DRM in Firefox just roughly a month after Eich was ousted, which was the actual reason for his departure?

He was the only one higher up keeping that from happening and they didn't even wait until the body was cold to push that agenda.

> Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users

This was the new interface, right? I just saw this the other day and though it looked pretty good; was actually considering a trial switch back (after moving to chrome years ago, when a single bad tab would take down the entire browser).

That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me.

I’m of the view that getting (most) people to consider switching browsers only comes every few years and requires a very large incentive; “We’ve fixed that one incremental problem” isn’t enough. A complete revamp would do it, but takes time to permeate into conciousness. And in the meantime they do this. “Squandered goodwill” seems to be spot-on.

It was quantum. Firefox got faster than Chrome with it.

update your conciousness because a complete revamp is what happened. what mozilla did was stupid but its nothing compared to being tracked by google.

> "That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me."

so that's why you stick with chrome, a browser designed to send all your browsing habits straight to google, the largest online advertising company and commercial tracker in the world?

Chrome may be what you described, but Chromium is pretty reasonable.

The open source version of android used to be reasonable too. How long will that be true of Chromium without open source alternatives?

AOSP is still reasonable, though.

It's just increasingly more separate from what people usually call "Android".

It's what I call "Android." Google services were never part of AOSP. Bundling all the Google services together and naming the bundle didn't change anything in that respect.

If you care about that you just turn them off though.

https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.htm...

You actually don't have real control over Chrome. Only Chromium is open source, and then you won't have all the features you surely use. Like videos working.

Edit: (+) Sir_Cmpwn, At least not working for me when I try seeing the pages with H264 encoded ones, and when I search, this is what I find:

https://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what%E2%80%99s-the-differen...

"What Chrome Has That Chromium Doesn’t

AAC, H.264, and MP3 Support.

Adobe Flash (PPAPI)."

Chromium is not equal Chrome.

Videos work on Chromium.

I just tested it, seems to work fine on Chromium.

I use chromium on Linux as my main desktop browser. I assure you it plays videos. The only thing it doesn't do is play DRM'd video, which is a feature.

It plays non-DRM H.264 videos? Or maybe you're depending on sites to have multiple versions?

> a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me.

Remember, the extension was not there to advertise the show!

I don't know if that affects the way you're using the term "for advertising", but it affects how I care a lot.

Is Mozilla strapped for cash or something? I’m happy to donate a bit if it keeps them independent.

Google’s behavior with Android/AOSP suggests they’re more than willing to make the open source version of Chrome useless in practice the second there is no viable competition.

I don’t see any organization other than Mozilla that can keep them honest.

No, otherwise Mozilla C-Levels would not be getting $500000+ salaries (Google it, it is real) and flying on privately chartered business jets

If you can do the job at a lower salary, you should apply !

Well, they can't do that job as we all see.

The original reason behind them establishing Mozilla Corporation over Mozilla Foundation was that they can keep this practice going while being safe from taxmen reprimanding them for pocketing what is a charity income from tax standpoint.

Now, Mozilla Corporation bills Mozilla Foundation for "service offered at a market price" to do its "socially beneficial, free of charge and any expectation of remuneration" activity, which is selling ads.

> Is Mozilla strapped for cash or something?

Nope. According to their financial statement, the Mozilla Foundation had $69M in "cash and cash equivalents" at the end of last year, about $329M in investments, and literally gave away millions of dollars in grant funding. It's not entirely clear to me how the financial interaction works between them, but the privately-held Mozilla Corporation (i.e. the 1000+(!) employee company that actually makes Firefox, and which the Foundation owns as a subsidiary) had over $500M in revenue from their search engine deals...

See "State of Mozilla 2016" https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ and also check out the Foundation's financial statement and tax form PDFs on the bottom for more details.

For those that want to donate: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

> needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's)

You touch on an interesting point, maybe Firefox should be soliciting donations from governments who are concerned about the US surveillance state instead of relying so heavily on search ad revenue and being forced to turn to things like this to make a buck.

No offense, but "like, China?" I don't see how involving government(s) and therefore politicising the whole thing is going to make the situation any better. Even if it were support from a government you (but others not) would find acceptable.

TOR is funded by the government, among others (others including Mozilla, heh). https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en

Although they should probably not be in charge of the actual development, is it really crazy to think that Firefox could be funded by governments? At some point it is a public service.

Noone can hate with more fierceness than someone that once loved. If you depend on your users to love you, be careful with their trust.

Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users

Let's not overstate things. Firefox 57 gained good will from some users. It also seriously annoyed others, both because of the loss of many useful extensions, and because the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time.

The one thing Mozilla still had going for them compared to Google or Microsoft was the emphasis on privacy and respecting the user, and yet I've read about several different cases in recent weeks where that trust has been undermined, this being the latest.

>because the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time.

Really? I haven't experienced a single crash, and I was on nightlies before 57 was released, so I could try Quantum.

Yes, sadly. I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed on me prior to 57. I've lost count of the number of crashes/hangs since the update, but it's well into double figures by now. Whether it's Firefox itself or the handful of extensions I have installed, I can't tell for sure, but it's much worse here on a Windows box with more extensions installed than a Linux box with just a few. In any case, if the new runtime model is supposed to make things more robust then unfortunately my experience has been quite the opposite.

57 user on OpenBSD here. No extension installed (at least to my knowledge ;)), no crash to report. It has been a pretty smooth experience so far.

> the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time

That has not been my experience, so let's not overstate personal anecdotes as facts.

Please don't quote things out of context in a way that changes the meaning. What I actually wrote contrasted some people's good experience with others' bad experience. It wasn't a blanket statement as it appears when selectively quoted.

I happen to be an existence proof for the bad experience group, but a few seconds with your favourite search engine will readily confirm that I am not alone. I don't know what the ratio of lucky to unlucky users is, nor did I claim to.

I've been using Firefox 57 since the release, and had zero crashes.

I've seen firefox running on computers everywhere during meetings and presentations which I haven't seen for a long time.

The business model of the Internet is surveillance and advertising. It's incredibly hard to resist. It seems like there's an infinite amount of money available if you're willing to surveil and sell out your users.

This is indeed comically sad after the nice Quantum boost.

It was a poor taste joke at the wrong time.. Mozilla is gonna regret this.

> https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/941709048529014784

This is such a terrible way to make an argument, present a case, or say anything that can't be said in a few dozen words. He has a blog, it's linked right there. I can't understand why people use twitter like this.

So, the first post in the thread was ~11:30am. The last one was about ~5pm. I basically appended to it during the day, as my thoughts and feelings evolved on an issue. It's not like I completely tossed out all these tweets at once.

That said, everyone uses Twitter differently. I tweet a lot. Some people don't. I personally blog when I have a long-form, well thought out thing to say. I tweet whatever is on my brain at a given moment. Twitter is more raw, more personal. This is a raw, personal issue for me.

I really didn't mind the Pocket integration, probably because I'm a Pocket user myself so can't see the problem.

This is pretty bad though, I'd say this is worse than the Pocket thing because it's abusing the trust and good will of their users

I made my warning about Mozilla Corp+Found a week ago, and as I recall, it was not warmly received... by anyone!

What a difference a week makes!

I feel really sorry for Steve and other real developers. Mozilla is not different from any other managers driven corporation. Very sad. I almost wonder if that's an organized action aiming at removing competition. It's too bad to be unintentional.

Firefox 57 was so nice I started using it every day and was actively migrating things to it from Chrome. I could live with the Pocket thing even though I wasn't wild about it. I hadn't gone as far as setting up a Mozilla cloud account because privacy was a high priority and I didn't want to swap one cloud service for another.

Then this thing blew my machine up the other day, I lost days of work, and...hmm. I don't know why a company would ever do something like this, it's incredibly foolish.

> If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's).

Perhaps the problem is the fact that the Web is so complex that popular web browsers could only possibly be developed by corporations to begin with.

I for one cannot stand the Pocket integration, I prefer Bookmark OS

I like Pocket.

> Mozilla is a good company

Not since the incident.

Firefox 57 has no love from a lot of web developers I know. It broke things that were working just fine before.

Curious what those things are, because all I can think of is workaround that exploited out-of-spec behaviour (and, of course, web extensions, which has been covered to such a degree it's not just a dead horse but a fresh patch of grass by now)

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