Comment by sleepysysadmin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sleepysysadmin | Hacker News Reader

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Recently reinstalled OS and tried Firefox for some time. Could only last a couple weeks before dumping firefox.

I guess Safari is still their own. KDE Konqueror still their own. Sad that opera became chrome. Guess I'll be staying Brave for awhile.

Firefox's huge decline also makes sense to me. Firefox stopped building their browser ~5 years ago? It's not that Chromium is inherently just better, it's that Mozilla moved off of firefox. When you lose focus on firefox, you lag behind.

https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/mozilla-diversity-inclusion...

They are far more concerned with hiring women. They hired themselves a 'Culture Manager' and 'people managers' and 'diversity managers'. Note how these are not Rust Software developer manager, protocol developer manager.

https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/mozilla-introduces-gender-t...

Imagine how good firefox could be if they weren't so concerned with their staffing diversity and instead worked on their browser.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

They are concerned about political activism, calling for people to be deplatformed, etc.

For that reason, firefox isn't even an alternative.

Why do you think inclusion and good engineering are mutually exclusive?

In my experience woke activists are attention vampires who drain focus away from doing things to doing activism. It is one thing to have activist organizations, but these types invariably try to turn production-focused organizations into activist ones.

For example, the recent move to switch from master branches to main branches provides near zero benefits, mass gnashing of teeth, and hours upon hours of wasted time. It is time spent increasing adherence to a cause and beating down dissent to the cause, and time spent away from things like producing code or, on the activists' part, doing things like teaching people if you're of the opinion that their cause is a good one.

I've seen far more environments turn for the worse after their entry, than become better for it (though a small handful have done so)

>Why do you think inclusion and good engineering are mutually exclusive?

I would not agree that is what I said. I'm not opposed to inclusion. I'm not even saying their decision is wrong. Maybe they are exactly what we need on the internet. I fully support their choice to do what they have done.

I have made a judgement against firefox. It has very clearly been neglected. There are a myriad of problems that have been unsolved for years and this is recent experience. I suspect nobody can refute this very real experience. I remember a time in history when firefox was a top contender with tons of market share.

So did I say that they are mutually exclusive? Certainly not, but in Mozilla's case their priorities are clear and the consequence of a bad browser is reality. they lost focus on their browser and it lagged behind.

I'm interested in why you asserted I said more than I did. Do you believe inclusion and good engineering are mutually exclusive? It certainly looks bad for Mozilla.

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