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  • Hacker News
  • If Mozilla believed in the values it espoused, Librewolf wouldn’t exist. It would just be called Firefox.

    One of the first betrayals was putting ads in their new tab page, the forced AI comes as a Mozilla tradition now of user respect as marketing only.

    At the same time it simply may not be a viable business. Firefox was popular originally because Chrome didn’t exist and Internet Explorer especially 6 back was awful.

    The browser is now an OS on top of an OS, it requires massive resources to maintain. So Mozilla has a cursed mission now and related or unrelated in any case they’re full of it and have lost my respect. Open source and user respect still means something to me even if it doesn’t to Mozilla.

    by user3939382
  • > I'm not kidding when I said that Firefox is a niche browser. Folk have to actively look to use it.

    There was once a time where IE was only ever used to download Firefox... Mozilla squandered that.

    by nubinetwork
  • Some things Mozilla could have done correctly:

        - Kept Rust and sold best-in-class tooling like IDEs to enterprises.
    - Polished Firefox OS and distributed apps in their store for a 1% commission.
    - Kept Servo and made the most secure and fast browser that no one else had made.
    - Partnered with OEMs to offer Firefox as the default browser.
    Yet the best they could do was pay their CEO for nothing.
    by drewfax
  • De-prioritizing Servo is something I will never understand. Aside from making Firefox attractive again, desktop software has migrated almost entirely to web-based stacks. They could have owned the foundation layer of almost every hardware device if they managed to make Servo faster and slimmer than the options we currently have. What a blunder.
    by ricardobeat
  • Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy absolutely applies here:

    https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

    "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, 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."

    by magpi3
  • Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something (can't even remember what it was).

    I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.

    But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.

    This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.

    So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.

    by klez
  • Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now? Mozilla is surviving on the mercy of Google money, it's not a viable strategy.

    Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?

    by matsemann
  • Respect. This is what Firefox could have been.

    In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:

    browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled, browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled, pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload, pdfjs.enableGuessAltText

    A bit of community feedback later, and we've got one big "off" button, and me wondering which footgun the executives will shoot themselves with next.

    by red_admiral

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