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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

> They seem to be trying to gather a lot of telemetry to measure how they can boost popularity of Firefox.

This might sound like a crazy idea, but they could always try listening to users! Everytime I get annoyed by something in Firefox and try to find a fix for it, I find a lot of people with the same issue across HN, Reddit, the Mozilla forums, etc. There is rarely any sign that a decision maker from Mozilla cares one bit. But rather than listening to the many vocal complaints, suggestions, and other copious public feedback... they add a unique download identifier. Ok then.

I really, really hope that Mozilla gets new management before it's too late (if it's not already).

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Yes. This is a very similar idea to this recent post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702660

> Our sacred cow was excellent US-based phone support. That is quite expensive. If there were bugs in our product, users would call in, and our call center costs would increase because we'd have to have more people working. So every week in our team meeting, we would look at summaries of calls, and take on engineering work to address the most common class of problems. That let us scale up the business and still provide friendly and competent phone support, because we were reducing the problems that people called in about.

> Because we had that "sacred cow", every obscure bug that we spent months fixing not only made the product better and were intellectually stimulating to finally figure out, but had a concrete impact on how costly it was to deliver the service.

> What most companies would do here to reduce costs is simple. Don't fix DERP bugs, just charge for it. Don't fix "black screen" bugs, just hide the phone number on your website so people can't figure out to call.

I have observed this as well, and not just with Mozilla.

It is so easy to just ignore feedback because it's difficult to parse, just set up some automated telemetry and focus on nothing but that. Removing the human element here is a big optimization in the cycle of receiving feedback, and it's also critically damaging to the effectiveness of decisions made based on that feedback cycle...

I don't know how to claw back a company like Mozilla that has strayed this far. Perhaps the political culls they had are responsible for the breakdown in decision making competence. Perhaps they've just gotten too big. Either way they aren't serving the original market of firefox, and if they continue straying this way the only option is a unified effort by the community to create a true competitor, likely starting as a fork. Maybe one of the forks that exist now can launch themselves successfully into prominence with proper funding and achieve independence from the Mozilla branch.

yeah the pay of the higher ups does not seem to be tied to success of the browser or the relationship they have with their users; endlessly depressing TBH

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