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Comment by MiddleEndian | Hacker News Reader

It's an experiment in hurting the good will of their brand.

I still use Firefox but it's painful sometimes. Not as painful as Chrome, but Mozilla seems determined to come up with unexpected new ways to fuck up Firefox for some reason.

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Yep. I once considered donating to them for developing a browser I quite like and that's needed in the current landscape, but they obviously want to be for profit in the scummiest way possible, so - yeah.

There should be another organisation taking over Firefox development.

Firefox was born from Netscape, so maybe a similar jump is possible!

It's simple: $$$$$.

Every one of these actions is a short-term cash grab. The real amazing part is how privacy advocates let these transgressions, or what Mozilla calls "experiments", slide.

Is there anything to suggest that this violated people's privacy? If not, I see no reason why privacy advocates should have a problem with it.

Phoning home by default, necessary to display such "snippets" of course violates people’s privacy. That this is done not to pointlessly wish a happy new year but with commercial motives makes it even worse.

It's already phoning home to retrieve vital security updates, without which your privacy would be at much greater risk than Mozilla learning that a certain IP address uses Firefox.

People use privacy to also mean "you violated the sanctity of my mind by beaming propaganda onto my retinas".

I don't think that's a proper meaning for privacy.

I consider privacy to be that it is my choice how much of my personal data I reveal to a third party not directly involved with any of the parties I am doing business with.

Showing privacy-conserving ads doesn't violate what I consider privacy, some people might object to ads in general but there doesn't seem to be a better funding model (considering Mozilla doesn't want to continue being 90% funded by deals with search engines and donations being a drop in the bucket).

Open Source needs to figure out a funding model and Mozilla seems to be making positive headway into the realm of privacy-sensitive ads. Google and Chromium on the other hand is making headway into privacy-violation ads.

Here's reality, though:

The minimum annual cash burn to have a high quality browser engine, js runtime, and UI seems to be several hundred million dollars.

FF is now utterly dependent on google for cash (and to be fair, google really needs FF to exist to pretend chrome isn't close to a monopoly). But who knows how long that will last and if/when google will exert control. One of the best things for Mozilla to do as an org is to figure out a non-google-dependent revenue stream.

Privacy respecting ads are a good compromise.

Yes but Mozilla does a lot more now than produce and maintain software. For example, in 2017 it spent $24m on its internet health project [1].

I’m making no judgement about that but there are two sides to fiscal longevity: getting more money is one, the other is to focus spending.

1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/

If Firefox proved they could survive with less money, they would likely be given less money. What's their incentive to do that?

Firefox exists partially outside the regular market, so normal strategies may not apply quite the same way.

Oh, don't get me wrong: Mozilla wanking about with firefox phone from 2011 to 2015 while watching their browser marketshare crater from 30% to 15% is infuriating. However, they're the only alternative we've got.

Those are entirely different buckets of money. Money the foundation spends on things like the IHR, do not come out of the revenue from the Google search deal. Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corp are two different entities (though MoFo owns MoCo). In the same way, donations to MoFo do not pay for browser developer salaries.

I sometimes wonder why Firefox needs to be actively developed at all. The Web already has all the features it needs to be insanely successful, as evidenced by the fact that it's insanely successful. Why do we need to add more?

Sure, security fixes are important, but it seems like browser developers spend more of their time on new features. Things like a new and exciting way to use asterisks in JavaScript, or another UI redesign, or an API for websites to interact directly with smart waffle irons. Maybe if Mozilla didn't develop these things, they wouldn't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their browser.

Even if you were right about that, Firefox doesn't really have a say. Chrome is intent on rapidly adding more Web features. If Firefox doesn't keep up with the pace, websites will stop working in Firefox because they use the new Chrome-supported features. This is a huge threat to Firefox, and has been made even worse by Edge adopting Chromium. Chromium now has huge market share, making any feature adopted by Chrome essentially mandatory for all browsers.

This is why Mozilla needs a stable source of revenue - both for the engineering work to remain competitive, and for marketing so they can persuade users to use Firefox and lessen Google's influence over the Web.

Is there a reason to keep doing that? I mean what is the point in reimplementing Chromium as Firefox? Shouldn't they just fork Chromium and stop wasting resources chasing it? And focus those resources on something that can give them competitive advantage over Google.

If they fork Chromium then Google has won and we enter the next IE-era of the web; one browser engine to rule them all, terrible for everyone involved except Google.

I'm not sure I agree that Mozilla bears no responsibility for Web feature bloat. While you're right that Google currently appears to be stuffing every feature imaginable into their web browser at a breakneck pace in a desperate attempt to make it literally impossible for anyone else to write one, other browser vendors don't need to take it lying down. Imagine if Mozilla, Apple, and (pre-Chromium-fork) Microsoft all collectively agreed not to implement any more Web features: would websites really give up ~30% of their audience (including the lucrative iPhone crowd!) just to use some Chrome-only dingus?

As a nonprofit, Mozilla is in a great position to lead a charge like that. But they've chosen instead to make the problem even worse. On top of everything Google does, Mozilla also creates and implements its own dubiously necessary features (WebVR comes to mind) and uses venues like the Mozilla Hacks blog to promote them to developers.

> would websites really give up ~30% of their audience (including the lucrative iPhone crowd!) just to use some Chrome-only dingus?

Websites? Maybe not that much (at first, at least). But from IE experience: There are many intranet-style tools that would most certainly go "well, our tool X is only supported on Chrome, deal with it"[1]. Which, of course, only further cements Chrome's monopoly because everyone would just go "well, I have to run Chrome anyway, so why bother installing another browser?"

[1]: Yes, SAP, I'm looking at you.

Well there is "privacy" in the sense of people not accumulating dossiers on you and then there is "privacy" as the "right to be left alone".

I see pop up messages that have to be dismissed as harassment, pure and simple.

Firefox has a chance to show it is different from Google but it harasses me just like Google and refuses to hire developers in the same 99% of the world that Google won't hire developers, why should I expect Firefox to be any different from Chrome?

Long-term the answer for us is a migration away from "The Google Platform" and towards Gopher, telnet BBSes, and anything else where hipsters fear to tread.

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