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:
Look, I absolutely agree it sucks they didn't deliver the opt-out/in interface day one, it was obvious people would want it, and yes, it's not the first time they've blundered.
At the same time, they did listen to the feedback and deliver. It now has a genuinely good interface for it where you don't have to opt out of everything, but can opt-in where you want it. It's not just a big off button, it's a general out-out including new features, but that then exposes individual opt-ins if you want for each feature. Most other browsers won't respond at all. Firefox is still by far the best browser out there for people who care about their privacy.
Especially on HN, Firefox just gets so much more hate than software that is way more user hostile for much less bad behaviour. I'm not saying we shouldn't hold it to a higher standard when that is what it's selling itself on: clearly we can't allow "not as bad" to let it slip into worse and worse, but at the same time, I don't understand how the narrative seems to trend towards "they are essentially the same as google" when that is so clearly not true (to be clear, not saying you are saying that in this post, just that's the vibe of HN's commentary as a whole).
That is true - Firefox is definitely held to a higher standard here and elsewhere. They marketed those values to us. So the criticisms, in my opinion, are definitely justified. And no, they aren't listening to their users.
If they had listened to their users they would have delivered what every users wants - just a browser. Not some kind of "platform" stuffed with lot of unwanted crap that makes it bloated and introduces possibly new unnecessary attack vectors in it (both malicious and / or privacy exploits). All those additional craps that every new management wants in Firefox should have been a browser extensions or a plugin, instead of being bundled into the core browser. When a user installs / updates Firefox, they could be asked if they want to install any of these new feature available as an extension / plugin. That keeps the browser lean, transfers the choice completely to the user and is genuinely respectful of the user. The current way of force bundling everything into the browser, making it bloated, and then pretending that "users can opt-out" is not just arrogance but also misleading (to be polite) as it is common knowledge among software firms that most people often never change the default settings.
(Note that I know that some of these features are indeed implemented as an extension. But not as user controlled ones as they cannot be completely uninstalled. All the user can do is turn it "off or on". Why? It is stuff like this that makes it harder to trust claims of caring about user Privacy.)
People had to raise hell to get that, while being made fun of by their CMs on social media. Even the opt-out is full of silicon valley dark patterns. Whoever is calling shots about the product at Mozilla doesn't have your best interests at heart.
What are those dark patterns? It's an off button, it works, and it does not get back on. It's the polar opposite of the "maybe later, I'll ask again every week and reset the setting in your back" unfortunate norm that plagues a lot of major proprietary software/service.
The only correct move would be remove the option, remove all AI code, and move it into extensions. If the extension security policies, and other restrictions, don't allow all the things they want to put in, then GOOD, they don't go in.
I think Mozilla is still mostly made up of tech-optimist people, so they were open and interested in ai from day one. I highly doubt there was any malicious intent.
And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible
Good for you. The point is that a lot of Firefox users actively didn't want these sorts of features enabled and pushed on them. That was clear and obvious to anyone paying attention to general reactions to unsolicited AI helper tools, going back decades. For Mozilla to turn this on without any respect for those users’ preferences was a huge mistake that they keep making over and over again.
More specifically: they chose Firebox because it doesn't have those kind of features. If the just wanted a (sorta-kinda) open-source browser filled with all the latest hype features they would've simply used Chromium.
Using Firefox is a political choice. People use it because it's one of the few remaining traditional browsers which isn't a tentacle of Big Tech. Chasing the competition and adding the stuff your users are actively trying to avoid isn't going to work.
They KEEP adding utter cancerous garbage to the homepage/new tab page. I recently installed Firefox from scratch for a coworker who was having chrome-only issues(yes, they do exist!) and was blown away by how insanely gross the default settings are now. It’s straight up adware junk bullshit
You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control"
... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible!
What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!?
What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default?
I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that.
Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?
You either missed the point or deliberately missed the point.
The issue was they shipped AI features built into everything and the only way to switch them off was to "about:config" a bunch of settings, they shouldn't have shipped it without the off switch and "Open about:settings and then disable things manually" isn't control for the average user.
I know what the point is. But what I don't get is why people are expecting hiding certain features and buttons should be a first-class setting. Again, they're just UI elements, they don't do anything until you tell them to.
The user has the choice to not use these features. It's not like Firefox was sending data to AI companies by default. But if you want to completely make them disappear, so you can live in your fantasy world where LLMs were never invented, then yes, that's a niche personal preference and an advanced customization. That's why it goes under about:config.
Well, from version 151 there is now a setting to turn all the built-in AI off. So people in some part of Mozilla disagreed with your position sufficiently to provide a setting.
PS: I do actually find Google's ai thing in the search useful now and again, so no fantasy world.
This attitude is exactly why Mozilla is failing. Total contempt and ignorance of the users that are the core of Firefox’s user base. If someone doesn’t want to use AI features, that’s not “living in a fantasy world”. And if Mozilla had any respect for its users, they would have realized the need to make this sort of thing a first class setting. Pretending that their core users are delusional freaks who only deserve “niche” settings is exactly why they are rapidly losing that audience.
You're missing the point. If someone doesn't want to use AI features, they can just NOT. USE. THEM. That's it. Just don't press the AI button. Is it that hard? Would you say Mozilla is deleting all your data because there's a "Delete cookies and history" button in the menu? You can just NOT. PRESS. THE. BUTTON.
The master AI switch doesn't actually change whether the browser uses AI features - it never does unless you specifically run them. What it does is hides them from the user, pretending they don't exist.
Browsers that don't respect their users' choices about using AI do things like automatically download large models in the background, integrate cloud-based speech recognition and synthesis as an API available to any website and make the default search engine which they also own show LLM slop above actual results.
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?
> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?
It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both.
I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.
Keep in mind that while Firefox offered 20 extensions on mobile, Chrome offered zero and continues to lack any support for extensions whatsoever. Nobody ditched Firefox for Chrome because of the extensions thing.
The move to WebExtensions was painful, but it also made it possible to easily port Chrome extensions to Firefox, which was a great boost for the extension ecosystem, as well as being the thing that actually made mobile extensions possible.
I do agree they should've made the transition period longer though. There were like two years in between where some of the big Chrome extensions hadn't been ported yet, but their original Firefox counterparts were already killed. That probably made a few users move ti Chrome, but that was already during the great Chrome migration, so I can't imagine this made a huge difference.
I think your comment points towards the heart of my complaint, namely, that Firefox stopped extensions on its tracks to offer parity with a browser that doesn't care about extensions. It fits the post's complaint about doing things just because Chrome is doing them.
As for the effect of extensions, my feeling is that people care less about them now but used to care more about them back then. I think Firefox main selling point was always "my cousin who works in IT told me to install this instead of that", and once Firefox angered those power users away (at the same time when Chrome was trying to bring them in) the effect compounded.
It's especially backwards because most extensions worked fine when they were first cut down to that list of 20.
They (the proclaimed bastion of user choice and freedom) just didn't allow you to install them. Forks and self-built versions handled extensions just fine immediately, there was no technical blocker, just managerial. For years. While constantly proclaiming that it was just a brief temporary state.
I switched to some of those forks immediately, literally every extension I used before worked perfectly. None of them were in the blessed list.
I honestly can't see it as anything but an intentional self-harm move, behind a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.
I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.
not at the current employee and costs. But do they need to do that? Do they need to produce new products (and pay the cost to do so)?
Why can't they be lean and mean? Focus purely on browser experience without any BS, without any upsell? And there are volunteers out there that willingly contribute code/fixes for free.
I like having containers for different parts of my life built into the browser. I liked relay for quite a while (moved on to other setups). I like syncing between devices and the ability to push something from my phone to my computer on another continent currently with two taps.
Yeah they have rolled out a lot of nonsense I don’t care for, but they have also rolled out a lot of features I regularly use and enjoy. You can’t please everybody, but ultimately I’m glad it’s not “just a lean browser.”
If they truly wanted to be mean and lean and focus on the browser experience they would need to throw away their pride and port the browser from gecko to blink. I think they are too prideful to do that though.
> AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.
How? By selling the position of preferred model? They can do that without implementing it in a way that means people who don't want it at all have to jump through hoops to opt-out.
Being able to turn AI summaries and such off by default was the final reason I started paying for Kagi. I know they use ML in the background no matter what, but as long as I get links to resources relevant to my search, that I can read/judge/summerise as needed, first and foremost, how they produce that list is not the issue.
You are not the target audience, that’s pretty much it. You can be very against AI, try to turn it off on Kagi, avoid Google AI summaries, discard ChatGPT/Claude, but billions of people still use them. At this point it has been argued so much that it’s kinda pointless.
People seem to enjoy to be told stuff and don’t really care about sources if the said content is somewhat correct.
That wasn't my point, really. But that they chastise Mozilla leadership without offering any other alternative direction than "keeping doing as in 2009".
> 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?
I worked at Mozilla for a bit over six years and really enjoyed my time there. There were lots of brilliant people attracted by the mission and the work was technically interesting. I left in part because I came to the conclusion that the answer to these questions was no. Google's distribution advantages with Chrome and getting boxed out of mobile by the bundled Android/iOS browsers was simply too much to overcome by making a better product. People can gripe about Mozilla's management or product decisions all they want but the fundamental problem is the structure of the web browser market.
if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?
I really don’t think it would.
One thing “Do what you did before when you were successful!” is missing is that Firefox was sleek, fast, extendable, new, and cool.
It was cool partly because of its “sleek, fast, extendable”, but also because of its “new”, and it can’t get “new” back.
Perhaps launching a completely new piece of software, like the Netscape -> Firefox change (although that was organic, not planned) - but only if it’s actually something new and cool that comes out of it. A rebadge won’t work.
I don’t think there’s a playbook that works here. I’m struggling to think of many major pieces of tech (or non-tech!) that ever got its cool back. Netscape -> Firefox? Apple and/or the Mac? IE4? Lego? Elvis? “New Nixon”?...
Alongside all of the successes there are orders of magnitude more failures, and I don’t think they’re all on merit.
There is a pool of opportunities they largely refuse to jump into: those requiring curation. Pocket, the sole exception, ended up as yet another unforced error.
> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)
This, in part. The swift deprecation of XUL extensions felt like a kick in the gonads and made me switch to Pale Moon for a while, after which I landed on Firefox ESR to avoid the inmediate impact of bad decisions, and accumulated a veritable landslide of user.js and userchrome.css tweaks I keep having to maintain.
On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.
I used Firefox and made sure everybody in my circle family and social used it. I had donated 5$ to Mozilla when I was making 360$ per month. I believed in mozilla, I was naive. Soon after I learned the money didn't go to Firefox. They soon after launched a political campaign in my country. I realized this and every other fancy they had, was where my money was going. Stopped using it and stopped caring a long while back. Can't wait for Servo/Ladybird to replace it.
The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as:
* Wanting niche features that don't benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.
* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).
* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)
* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.
These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.
Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.
I don't think workflow concerns can just be brushed off. Breaking changes and constant design churn is devastating for user retention.
What users want is a working browser that gets out of the way and them browse the web. That's what Chrom(e,ium) is. It's like air, it's everywhere but you can't see it.
Firefox is not. Every time you open Firefox, there's a new dialog announcing some change or shilling some product. It's cut from the same cloth as that car that Homer Simpson designed. Every time you open Firefox, it works a bit differently, so you have to unlearn some habit and learn a new one[1]. This is friction. This grates. You have some task to perform, which is why you opened the browser, but now you your blood pressure is up 20 points because firefox can't just let you browse, it's always telling you stuff in a dozen different channels, popups, toasts, notifications, there's always something it throws in your face, often multiple calls to action at once. So you say for fucks sake, and go back to chrome which just lets you browse with none of that nonsense.
These are all the calls to action I get when I open firefox. Which I opened yesterday as well, so it's not a clean install.
Why is there a dialog announcing widgets, when I can see the widgets already? It's literally telling me what I see on the screen. Why do you need this exposition to inform me of something that is plain to see in front of my eyes? It's like bad fiction writing, except in the form of annoying UX.
Like is anyone working on Firefox actually using the browser, in its vanilla configuration? How can they not see how infuriating it is to be a Firefox user?
[1] 5 years ago we changed which kitchen drawer we keep the cutlery in, and I still reach for the wrong one every time.
Yeah, definitely agree with this. I still use Firefox a bit on some machines but it is constantly popping up little things - "are you finding tabs overwhelming? try tab groups" / "try vertical tabs" / whatever. I'm not finding them overwhelming, just shut up please.
Also the context menus are super noisy, I tried cutting some bits out in config, but there's just so much crap in there. Obviously all the AI stuff, but also just the basics; right-clicking on a tab has a sub-menu for "Close Multiple Tabs" which hides "Close other tabs" and "Close tabs to the right" which are probably what I use the most. In Chromium they're top-level menu items.
And it went through a phase a few months ago where the context menus were sometimes offset or goofily sized; I think that's fixed now.
I guess it's easy to criticise, but it just doesn't feel like this stuff is well aligned to actually using the browser, whereas Chromium feels like a solid product.
I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser. A paid email service is also something many have been asking for a while. People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.
> I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser.
You did not read the comments of this submission?[1]
This is common.[2][3][4][5] And those were comments which were easy to find because they said Firefox and VPN. Many other comments said they should focus on Firefox solely. Or eliminate all side projects.
> People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.
People can give money to Mozilla Corporation by purchasing Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, or MDN Plus.
Rules for businesses to solicit donations are strict. Mozilla would have to be more careful than most because people confuse non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And many of the small minority of Firefox users who said they would donate implied or said plainly a condition was Mozilla would abandon other income.
> You did not read the comments of this submission?[1] This is common.[2][3][4][5] And those were comments which were easy to find because they said Firefox and VPN.
Fair, there are complaints out there, but I'd rank the response very mild compared to AI and the upcoming Nova design.
> Many other comments said they should focus on Firefox solely. Or eliminate all side projects.
Of course, since most of their money comes from search royalties for having Firefox users.
> People can give money to Mozilla Corporation by purchasing Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, or MDN Plus. Rules for businesses to solicit donations are strict. Mozilla would have to be more careful than most because people confuse non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And many of the small minority of Firefox users who said they would donate implied or said plainly a condition was Mozilla would abandon other income.
Yes, but what I'm saying is there's no general opposition from "enthusiasts" to Firefox making money like the parent commenter stated. The more popular take I've seen is to support Firefox via paying for VPN, etc.
It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.
Firefox's market share peaked in 2009. Eich was CEO for 2 weeks in 2014. He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position. The same lawyer lady Mitchell Baker had every top job from 1999 to 2008.
"He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position."
At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.
That engineer went on to create Brave, a browser that pays you Monopoly money for watching ads, injected affiliate links, installed their commercial VPN without asking, and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its "privacy" mode. I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there.
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.
I think “IRC (an open protocol)” served more to explain the why than the what here. It frames the whole rest of the story and why GP felt alienated.
It wasn’t because Mozilla stopped using GP’s favorite chat software. It’s because GP was a believer in the mission and the principles. Switching from an open system to a corny corporate one made the whole illusion fall apart. Mozilla was a corp all along and they took their volunteers for a ride.
Another feeling when reading "(I woudn't know, uBlock is pretty effective)" coming from a volunteer for MDN
Who else would be likely to look at what a web page is trying to get the browser to do, e.g., trigger requests for ads using Javascript. There are a variety of places to look, it is not like this is seriously hidden from those with even the slightest curiousity
That a former MDN volunteer is apparently disappointed by ads on MDN yet satisfied with MDN anyway because of a community-sourced browser add-on. An add-on that can be rendered useless at any time by the browser vendor, including the one that puts ads on MDN
It is not unimaginable that one day uBlock Origin may cease to work on Firefox when Mozilla sells search data to Google as its primary source of income and is actively working on such things as "making ads more private"
I thank the volunteer for their past work on MDN, I'm not singling him out, nor am I holding it against anyone for thinking this way, but I wonder how many uBlock Origin users believe themselves to possess some "specialised knowledge",^1 for lack of a better term, but would be all but helpless against advertising without a solution provided by someone else, e.g., a browser extension
The point I'm making is that today it seems like "knowing which app to install and how to install it" is considered specialised knowledge instead of actually knowing how to avoid ads to an extent where if the app stopped working they could devise another solution
There are definitely some HN users who can do it, and you, dear reader may be amongst them, but it seems, based on the comments I have seen over the years, there are many, many more who cannot. In that sense the situation is a bit like the IRC comment
The more one understands about online ads, the more clear it should be that so-called "ad blockers" is only a temporary solution at best, and these only work with web browsers
IMHO it is important that more people who wish to avoid ads become more curious about how they work instead of only installing a browser extension and concluding the problem is solved for the long-term
1. Many calling themselves "engineers" for example
So far, I've only found clients with different bugs. Calling them good would be a stretch. Passable, perhaps. But the scene as a whole is more of a choose-the-bugs-to-live-with situation than choose-a-good-client.
Case-in-point: just started a new chat with a new person (we had a previous room in common)--My desktop client, NeoChat, shows "This message is encrypted and the sender has not shared the key with this device." for all of their messages. FluffyChat on my phone shows their messages correctly.
Welcome to Matrix. It's the best option there is, and it's not very good.
I'm sorry but I lost interest in matrix in 2017 ish when I tried to use my existing matrix log in when trying to sign into the Mozilla matrix and I simply couldn't. At the end I ended up creating a new account on Mozilla side just so I could use it for a few days.
I've never thought of matrix as a mature technology ever since.
That's not how federation works? You wouldn't log into Mozilla's matrix server with another Matrix server's login, you would just join the :mozilla.org rooms with your normal Matrix account. That's the whole point of federation.
It sounds like you were trying to login to Mozilla's Element web client and it was only set up to authenticate against the Mozilla homeserver but A) that's a client setting unrelated to federation or really the protocol in general and B) not what you were supposed to be doing to begin with.
Mastodon does not have persistence of data though. Your instance shuts down? All your posts are gone. I naively assumed I could just move them to a new instance and found out the hard way. I have felt disillusioned with Mastodon ever since.
In practice "better UI" would mean things like being able to trivially share files and images, or quote/link a specific message, or even making it easier to distinguish between users with similar nicks via their profile pictures. And those UI improvements are actually features which are integral to its protocol, so they can't easily be bolted on by a custom IRC client in a backwards-compatible way.
Literally every single modern chat platform has support for stuff like that, and for a reason. Discord became popular because it combined those modern chat features with the ability for every community to create its own private little "server" - while at the same time making it trivial to participate in multiple "servers" at once.
Quoting/linking is a client feature, not a server one.
IRC servers do also support profiles.
I think the real “issue” with IRC is that its users generally prefer the minimal UI. So there isn’t an high enough demand to make prettier UIs. But there are web clients that are a little less basic.
For what it’s worth, I’m in that minimal camp too. I wish I could still connect Slack to IRC.
I'd guess the important feature for Discord is it is easier for the administrators to get hosted and online, but "you could create a client with a better UI than discord" is a terrible line of argument. People could do lots of things in the OSS world and they don't. I can't recall any IRC client that I have found as easy to use as the Discord client except - ironically given the topic - ChatZilla which died off years ago because Mozilla decided that extensions were more of a 2000s technology than something they wanted to support.
Email is OK. The point is that most conversations moved to other media (mainly chats) and so 90% of my mail is notifications, 9% is newsletters, 1% are real messages. They used to be 99%.
The entire reason Mozilla came into being is to do things like improve the user experience for IRC so we can keep the internet open. There has never been any other reason for Mozilla as an organization to exist.
It's been a while since I last used IRC, but afaik one of the issues with it was that servers revealed the IP address of users to every other user by default. Since the IP is geographic that's one piece of information you could use to doxx someone.
IP addresses aren't linked to a complete street address, and many times don't even show the right town, especially those on CG-NAT or a plain ol' direct public dynamic address. I have seen some IPs, like on AT&T and Comcast home Internet, showing a different state.
So in many cases, you don't need a VPN to prevent revealing your actual geographic location.
The fact that this is needed at all is a serious problem. Making people who aren't aware of some obscure details accidentally doxx themselves is incredibly user-hostile.
Netsplits, missed messages and bot wars over channel and nick ownership were an integral part of IRC UX, and they were direct consequences the IRC protocol. If Discord was run on top of IRC protocol, it would have the same. Discord would probably be its own network and the people who prefer IRCnet, EFnet or QuakeNet would never touch it.
It's not inherent to the protocol. https://ergo.chat/ does not have netsplits (from having a single server) and https://github.com/Libera-Chat/sable replaces the server-to-server protocol to eliminate netsplits as well.
And even when not eliminated entirely, they are infrequent and barely visible on well-managed networks like Libera.Chat. Many chat platforms have more (and longer) outages than Libera has netsplits.
Solved decades ago thanks to NickServ and ChanServ (though I'll admit they are ad-hoc additions on top of the protocol). And ~15 years ago we got native support for authentication (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/sasl-3.1)
So... Usually it's claimed that one of the advantages of IRC is that it doesn't depend on a single server, so using a single server feels a bit like cheating. Replacing the server-to-server protocol sounds a lot like it's not really IRC protocol any more. The chathistory link says "This specification may change at any time and we do not recommend implementing it in a production environment." right on top. And yes, NickServ and ChanServ exist on some networks and IIRC they were one of the major points in debates over which network is the best and which ones to not touch with a ten feet pole. A hypothetical IRC-based Discord-like service could have it.
I mean the word "Relay" in Internet Relay Chat was meant to refer to relaying between servers. Larger networks even had some hub servers that didn't allow users to connect at all, and existed to be server interchanges.
IRCv3 missed the boat by years. By 2016, when the working group was formed, IRC was already well past its glory years. Even then, it took til the 2020s before any major network fully adopted it. Because - and I say this as a nerd who held an O line on two of those major networks at one point in my life - a bunch of nerds got hung up on arguing about implementation specs rather than looking at features and functionality organically. Ironically, in the quest to avoid becoming a closed Discord/Slack/what-have-you ecosystem product, they needed a product manager to remind them that what they needed to build in that working group was an evolution to IRCv2, not endless arguments over the format of configuration files for server daemons, for but one example.
IRCv3 was already late to the party and when I saw that the Working Group's mailing list was composed of lots of debates on formats for server daemon configuration files, it was clear many couldn't see the forest for the trees.
>Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense
Sure it does, when all browsers have more or less the same, and the context makes clear we're not talking about the mere programmatic consumption of HTTP (like through some REST api).
"But it's a protocol and not a client" is pedantically irrelevant, given that the clients for that protocol all follow the same conventions. The parent already said they meant the UX of it "which is arguably similar between implementations".
Besides, protocols impose some concepts and models of interaction and consumption, which informs any UX created on top of them. So it's not like that client sameness is merely accidental and unrelated to the protocol either.
It's gatekeeping. Don't be surprised when your pet project slowly dies because potential new contributors choose to join less hostile communities instead.
Yes, I'd echo thanks to parent, the OA and all still in the trenches.
Since 2007 in my case which is when I started using Linux at home. The distributions I use come with Firefox as the Web browser (Ubuntu, Debian and latterly Slackware).
I do find myself turning things off more now than I used to.
Last I heard the ads were introduced to be less dependent on Google money - they actually cover the costs/salaries of the internal MDN team and thus secure the existence of MDN within the organisation.
Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla.
So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am surprised that the people visiting MDN don't use an ad blocker anyhow).
I support MDN by disabling UBO. This is not (much) of a burden: there is no animation, and the advertised products are always technical and possibly of interest. Only complaint is the occasional large light areas, which do not play well with dark mode.
> 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.
I feel the same way after seeing what they've done with AI chatbots in the sidebar. Five cloud providers. No local AI option. I don't see a reason to use Firefox today and it's been my main browser since it was called Phoenix. I use it only because it's what I've been using for a long time. There's no relationship between Mozilla of today and the group that placed the ad in the NY Times in 2004.
The AI chatbot thing was just the latest happening, but it shows how devoid of meaning that organization has become when you have a technology like AI and nobody even looks to Mozilla to provide leadership on an issue like that. Sure, send all your data to a large cloud outfit, that's the corporate world of Mozilla in 2026. It would actually be shocking to see Mozilla promote AI data privacy. Ironically, the local model I run the most is provided by Google, and it's not the least bit surprising that they're making it possible.
> 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).
IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.
Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.
Mozilla ended up switching from IRC to Matrix. Maybe they tested Yahoo Messenger at some point but I'm pretty confident there was never any switch to it (I left in 2016).
As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects.
Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. One example is the container VPN proxy, which only allows you to implement a VPN per container if you pay for Mozilla VPN. This is a feature that should be universally available to all users, and all VPN providers, but they locked it behind a paywall for profit.
The is the same (logically analogous) reason I no longer use Reddit after the API changes in 2023, after using the platform for 15 years, and has become common among newer FOSS startups like OpenAI, minio, and bambu; using the philosophy of open source &/or unpaid community labor to achieve a certain level of trust, growth, users, funding, and market saturation, only to screw them all over in the name of profit. This for-profit parasitic greed and corruption in FLOSS is the antithesis to the philosophy of the FLOSS community.
In a sane world this type of community exploitation would be criminally prosecutable. Reddit decision makers would see the inside of a prison cell; the moderators and commenters – as well as the developers who built the 3rd party apps that grew the company from nothing for over a decade – would be given shares/ownership, and paid from the company for their time and labor; same for every other scammer that exploits these "bait-and-switch" deceptive tactics to succeed in businesss. Unfortunately for us all, we live in a world ruled by parasites.
"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic"
Incidentally, I have recently come across some Mozilla job postings with salary ranges I would consider to be at a considerable "discount to market". For example, here is a senior role at 59 000 euro per year: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/7843229
> I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation.
Thunderbird is no longer owned by the Mozilla corporation, so now you can donate directly to them.
WebKit (as used by Safari) was a fork of kHTML (written by the KDE team). And Google forked WebKit. Now we have dozens of Blink forks including Microsoft’s own browser: Blink.
I think it’s pretty safe to assume that forking the code is a low incentive for change
Band-aids like this have existed for many years, plenty of time for Mozilla to listen. And in all that time, they never had the idea to make the band-aids redundant.
I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore.
Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?
Of all the forks I think Waterfox is the one with the strongest case that they can continue on even if they have to fully decouple from Mozilla Firefox.
"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."
I want to put it in other words based on philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche -
Exploitation is the key characteristic of living beings. This is applicable not only to humans but also to single celled life forms. (There are exceptions to this). So, those who are dedicated to the org itself are the one who are exploiting. And those who are working for the goal of the org are the exploited. There is always fight between these two group. Some time, a symbiotic relationship, some times status quo. etc.
Those who recognize this will be at peace since they understand the soul of bureaucracy.
This is new to me. Not sure I totally agree but it's a useful heuristic. Despite being easy targets, orgs do in fact need coordinators, middle managers, administrators, etc. Especially as they scale. (And no AI won't render them obsolete.) Finding the balance between productivity and bureaucracy is the hard part.
It's true that large orgs need all that bureaucracy. But is it still true that productivity needs large orgs? We see a lot of massive hits coming from small teams - whether it's startups, movies, indie games, etc.
With almost no exceptions, movies are never made by small teams beyond the student film level. Even then, dozens of people are usually involved in some way. Writing, acting, score, foley, editing, distribution, graphic design, color grading, wardrobe, effects, lighting, cinematography, scheduling, props, location scouting, set decoration, casting, mixing… the list goes on. Any one of those things sucking badly enough can make the whole movie suck. And that’s kind of the point with a lot of this stuff. I know from having plenty of experience on both sides of the fence that tech folks often don’t realize that most non-tech roles are as-or-more difficult than tech roles, many requiring years of hard-won expertise, and directly contribute far more to the outcome than they imagine.
Not to mention smaller (successful) production teams are often comprised of veterans of the industry who have worked on large scale productions and bring that knowledge set with them. Same with many indie games. You have to play with the big dogs to understand what is and isn’t necessary for a product. You can’t just walk in with a plucky attitude and a dream unless you want to waste a lot of time and money.
The part that is also usually glossed over is how exploitative the production is (low pay/awful hours), even if it’s sometimes self-inflicted.
Not just knowledge but personal connections for favors. “Hey, [talented editor] it’s [famous DP], do you think you could tame a crack at this scene in your spare time? I’m trying to make something out of nothing and I’m positive you’ve got the chops.”
I don’t think anyone could reasonably call any of the exploitation self-inflicted. You have to take shit work a lot of times because a) nothing else is available and you still need to eat, or b) that’s the only way to get your foot in the door for the chance of being slightly less exploited. Unfortunately the industry collapsed when I graduated school as a career switcher getting into Houdini simulations. The software skill set is utterly devalued on the open market. I couldn’t get exploited if I wanted to. Now I’m a union tradesman. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I worked in the industry for over a decade and unfortunately it is very exploitative :/ i’ve watched line producers pressure production assistants, the lowest of the low on set, into lying about their hours so they don’t have to pay them OT under the guise of “being team players.” Lots of nonsense like that, mostly on non-union gigs.
The self-inflicted comment is a bit tongue in cheek because they do it to their own production to effectively “crunch” (to use video game parlance) but they also crunch themselves in the process. Difference is they have way more to gain. The sound mixer on an indie darling isn’t getting much out of it.
It’s pretty sad. I knew a lot of people in the union crafts (New England, which is way different from LA from what I hear) during the good times and they said it was all great, but as soon as things got tight, it was tribal as fuck. (The IATSE set building roster went from a few hundred dues-paying members to a couple dozen, and most of them were persistently out of work… it is in pretty bad shape, so there’s only so much you can do I guess.) Most of the other people I know were in VFX houses/animation and that hasn’t been non-exploitative in like 20 years. Considering how much money a few people make in that business, it’s pathetic.
Totally agree the hits are coming. But from the POV of someone at a large and still growing org that's fully embraced AI, it's so obvious to me where the limitations are (and might always be). The nuances/complexities of leadership, decision-making, strategy, creative marketing, sales, comms, etc., feel too abstract to be replaceable. As the hard skill means of production are commodified, whatever alpha is left will lie in the soft skills. In other words, the models would be A+ STEM students, but they don't have the sauce for liberal arts.
>In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself.
>History
>The phrase appeared to have been first used in 1991–1992, in a book about Gulf War weapons systems by Norman Friedman, and On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA's bureaucracy, to describe the relationship between the Space Shuttle and Space Station.
That is rarely true. If an organization ceases to exist but people still have the same goal then they create a new organization or act individually without an incorporated bureaucracy.
On the contrary, the existence of a mismanaged organization nominally dedicated to a given purpose often prevents its nominal goal from being achieved, because people assume giving time or money to that organization will be the best way to further the goal. Then the organization squanders them when those resources would otherwise have gone to some other organization or people with greater effectiveness towards the goal.
> On the contrary, the existence of a mismanaged organization nominally dedicated to a given purpose often prevents its nominal goal from being achieved
This gives rise to another type of person within an organisation. Someone opposed to the goals of the organisation, and who understands this all too well.
In the UK we have a variety of arrangements for schools. Some are local authority managed, some are 'academy status' which means that they are self managed but often with a cluster of schools sharing a management layer to save money. There are also 'free schools' which are community run with often an 'alternative' ethos. And there are religious schools, run by churches (and other religious organisations). All of those are state funded using a funding formula, and they have to teach the national curriculum, and are subject to inspections. Academy status schools used to get a bit extra but not any more, they can however employ staff who are not qualified teachers (Qualified Teacher Status is a defined set of training and experience requirements).
There are also private schools (some famously called public schools like Eaton or Harrow, but most actually just private companies often with charitable status).
Schools are usually fairly small organisations and generally the management have risen through the ranks as teachers, year heads, and so on. It isn't a sector in which fortunes are made.
So, yes, I think a range of funding and organisational models are possible. But note the role of regulation (direct inspection of what happens in classrooms on a regular basis without much in the way of warning).
You seem to be questioning the possibility of private schools existing when they obviously do. Moreover, you could have publicly funded education without having a state-operated school bureaucracy, or without that bureaucracy having a monopoly on the funding.
I hate this. It basically takes as axiomatic that anyone in an administrative position in an organisation has zero interest in the goals of the organisation -and that those at the coal-face have no interest in the organisation and that there is little or no overlap in interest. Its reductionist, divisive and stupid.
I don’t think that it is reductionist at all. The examples provided are either qualified with “dedicated” or “many of”. It’s also not surprising at all that people who have an interest in driving the goals of the organization usually gravitate more to operational roles and people who have no interest in it at all gravitate towards organizational roles – but that’s not a rule.
I would totally be pissed as someone in an “organizational” role of someone reduced me to someone “not interested in the goals of the organization”, but magpi3 didn’t do that. They correctly stated a pattern. If you are around organizational/administrative people, ask yourself honestly if the pattern isn’t the least bit accurate…
That's not what it says though? There is no reason type 1 people can't be in an administrative position. It's merely hypothesising that since it is not their primary goal (but it is for type 2 people) that they will eventually be out-competed by type 2's for management type positions.
I don't have that reading at all. The phrasing even seems (carefully?) chosen to avoid this interpretation: it's "Examples are many of the administrators [...]", not "Examples are the administrators [...]".
I see it as a pointed observation that the people who focus on a goal will accomplish that goal. There are organizations with administrative-focused people who work in alignment with the mission-focused people, and that also follows this law as well. It's just that the same dynamic can cause organisations to spiral into an extractive, stale, ossifying, change-resistent focus instead.
The premise of the rule is that the second one is the end state.
The essential problem is that if one person spends their time e.g. fixing bugs in the code and another person spends their time weaseling their way onto the budget committee because they want to divert resources to their cronies, it's the second person who ends up on the budget committee. Then the first person gets laid off so their salary can be redirected to the cronies.
There are various ways to try to inhibit this with varying levels of effectiveness, essentially checks and balances. But the kleptocrats will be constantly trying to circumvent, weaken and vilify the things designed to constrain them. It's the sort of thing in the same nature as "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance".
I agree. It's a false binary. I'd never heard of this one before, but even if the premise is reductive there's some truth in it. If nothing else, it might be a helpful lens for evaluating an org.
It takes the view that anyone in an administrative position will put the survival of the organization as their primary goal, while lower-level employees (who are far less invested in the organization) can remain invested in the organization's ostensible goals.
I find it to be very true after almost 30 years in the working world, and I always keep it in mind wherever I work.
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.
To some degree, yeah they did, by leaving space for a lean and mean competitor like Google Chrome to come around and eat their lunch. And when it was introduced, Google Chrome truly was the lean and mean browser, less bloated than both Firefox and IE.
But I'm not sure how much they could've done. Maybe they could've invested a ton of engineering resources into a project similar to Firefox Quantum earlier, so that Firefox didn't leave as much room for a leaner browser? But half the reason people complain about Firefox today is that they broke XUL extensions, which was an absolutely necessary step in making Firefox a competitive, fast browser. I can only imagine the backlash they would've seen if they did that before Chrome ate their lunch.
And I'm not sure how much it would've really helped, since 1) Chrome would've still been a less bloated browser simply through having been around for a shorter time and having fewer features, and 2) Google would've still had immense marketing opportunities by plastering Chrome ads all over Google Search etc.
I really wish Mozilla would focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. I don’t want extensions (attack vector), vpns, fancy bookmarking services that are deprecated later on etc. I want to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.
I wouldn't want a browser without extensions. Ad blocking in particular.
To me, ad blocking belongs in extensions. The job of a web browser is to show web pages as intended according to the standards. It includes all the ads, tracking, etc... the page has put in. If you want to block stuff or deviate from the standards in any way, that's what extensions are for.
And extension like ad blocking are an arms race, websites will deploy countermeasures to make them less effective and to which extensions can respond. Again I dont want the core browser to participate in an arms race. Keeping it free of vulnerabilities is already hard enough not to fight against standard behavior.
Extensions are the primary threat to your security today. Nothing else comes close. Organizations are not basically competent if they are not restricting or blocking extensions, and you should not have more than one to three very trusted extensions in your browser. I'd argue the case for eliminating them in favor of in house code is significant.
As a reminder: Extensions execute with post-decryption access to the websites you view, and they update to new code silently and without asking for permission. HTTPS might as well not bother existing if you have extensions you do not have incredible trust in.
I would argue that building in extension-like features inside the browser is worse. In both cases, that's extra code, with security implications, but in case of extensions, you can choose not to have it.
Now, that's a question of whether you trust those who write the browser more than those who write the extension.
And by the way, the argument you have is the same that justifies the much hated "manifestV3", which makes extensions less powerful for security reasons. But it also limits the blocking capabilities of browsers to a simple, less effective blacklist. That Firefox still supports the old "insecure" way is a big selling point over Chrome.
We obviously know Chrome team is not doing things for security reasons, they are doing things for ad revenue reasons. But it's also true that blocking ads requires an insane amount of trust: The uBlock Origin author can choose to read your bank account numbers and passwords. (Although he is high profile enough this would be caught quite quickly.)
Arguably the problem is that Manifest V3 proposed removing an ad blocking capability without replacement, whereas I would argue just as popup blocking was a couple decades ago, it belongs as a first class browser feature, not outsourcing extremely sensitive capabilities to random outside parties. Browsers should not be operated by (or funded by.........) ad networks, and should built high quality, secure tools to filter unwanted content from their users.
If I couldn't use the ublock origin extension with Firefox, I'd leave for another browser. I consider it essential for privacy reasons as well as for adblocking, and I can't imagine it hurts battery life compared to all the ads and other crap it blocks.
Firefox's VPN service also has its privacy-related uses (yes, I'm aware of the limitations), but I think it mostly serves as a possible source of non-google revenue for Mozilla.
Extensions were why Firefox was so popular among those considered 'abnormal.' Chrome just copied the idea. VPNs, Pocket, and sync services are all great features; it's their implementation and execution that is so poor.
All Mozilla (and Firefox) needs is to be run by developers, not the fucking MBAs.
> focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. [...] to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.
"Nothing more," you say.
The chief focus should be Privacy... Privacy and Performance... Our two chief focuses should be Privacy and Performance... and Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... Our three chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, and Safety on the Web... Our four chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, Safety on the Web, and ruthless Efficiency in Preserving Battery Life... Our five... no... Amongst our chief focuses... Amongst our non-trivial chief focuses that users think are easy... are such elements as Privacy, Safety on the Web, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... I'll come in again.
How do you expect Mozilla to make enough money from just Firefox to survive if Google ever decides to stop paying them for being the default search engine?
Charge me. I’ll pay. I’m not going to donate to the org right now as I don’t use Firefox as it uses (noticeably) too much battery on my MacBook compared to safari and chrome.
Notably, also, it's not currently possible to donate to Firefox; you can only give Mozilla money to use on unrelated projects. As a Firefox user, the inability to pay for the thing I actually want is grating.
- 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.
"We shouldn't try to be like the big browsers because that's not what our Community wants."
This is just a path to irrelevance. Firefox had the ambition to be the default browser, what Chrome is now! It's a shame if they're going to spiral off into their niche.
> To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.
I do not think that this was that confusing. People [1] looked around at the beginning of the 2010's and saw
1) Mobile usage was growing exponentially and desktop was... not [2].
2) Every mobile OS shipped their own browser by default, or even went so far as to prevent other browsers from being used at all (iOS) [3].
3) Because Android and iOS both had non-trivial marketshare, neither could be called a "monopoly" so there was no way to use anti-trust law to get Firefox on devices as was done with Windows (not that this would have been a compelling strategy even if it were possible).
People took that set of facts and concluded Mozilla needed its own mobile OS in order to stay relevant.
What they underestimated was the amount of investment needed to make such an OS and get it on devices and the amount of time it would have to exist in a state of not being very good before it could compete with the established players (who were not standing still... people forget how bad Android was in the beginning). But if you look at the actual world we ended up in, with no mobile OS from Mozilla and a total Firefox marketshare that is less than desktop Safari's, it is hard to say that initial conclusion was incorrect.
[1] Full disclosure: I was a Mozilla employee at the time, though not involved in any of these decisions.
[2] I would say "desktop was shrinking", but to everyone's surprise it actually remained fairly steady in absolute numbers, although it did become a smaller slice of a much larger pie. In 2010 everyone expected it to shrink, though.
[3] Mozilla did ship a re-skin around mobile Safari to try to get some brand presence, but was still at the mercy of what web standards Safari chose to implement, and you could hardly call it a first-class experience. Eventually iOS loosened their rules, but no one could have predicted that back then.
Thanks for the explanation, and thank you for your work at Mozilla. I guess what I'm saying is that I wish Mozilla could have just focused on the browser.
I think Firefox OS was great, and too early for its time, combined with the mistake of "let's run on extremely terrible hardware" (rather than designing for the flagships of the time, which wouldn't be flagships by the time it shipped).
I mean the fact that a fork of FirefoxOS KaiOS is still around and being used shows that there was some merit to the idea but yeah it was executed as a start-up without a long-term plan but thanks to the open nature of the code its still in use.
It would be great if Mozilla as an organization tool the opposite approach of Google and if they started a project you knew it would be supported for the long run and if not internally it was handed over to the community of users and stewarded along, sort of how Apache seems to adopt projects but mostly for corporate/enterprise users.
Firefox OS was amazing and, sadly, would STILL be amazing today.
Boot-to-Gecko is brilliant because honestly most apps today... are Web pages packaged in an "app". Most PWA with desktop shortcuts (and ideally offline responsive mode) show that. Very few "apps" genuinely need to be apps.
Consequently being "just" a phone with basic connectivity and delegating the rest to the browser made perfect sense.
I didn't work because it didn't make sense or wasn't technically feasible. It didn't work because anybody who made a mobile OS wanted THEIR own walled gardens. The fact that today we are stuck with Android an iOS shows how needed it was and still is.
Firefox OS was a brilliant idea. Imagine cross platform and open apps based on HTML/JavaScript that feel native and polished. 2026 would have been amazing if Mozilla executed it right.
It was an eleven day war and the casualty was their future. Eich was the last time that Mozilla hired a CEO from the ranks of its own engineers. Eich would not have prevented the economic external challenges faced, but Eich and other such engineer-leaders would have prevented the unforced errors Mozilla is known for today. Every CEO after that was business, not engineer. This placed the company onto the same runway of mediocrity and collapse that we see Boeing crashing planes into with some regularity.
just today i came back to firefox from brave. firefox at one point in time was not able to work with the onshape web cad system and i needed a chrome based browser but was not ready to leave adblockers behind. brave war the only one suporting manifest 2 addons. but today i tried onshape in firefox and now it works. glad to be back
First of all thanks for posting what's on your mind and everything you did at Mozilla. Sorry to hear you are burnt out, hope you get better with time.
I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around.
I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional.
Mozilla continues to exist because Google funds them, and Google funds them so they can claim that their Chrome browser isn't a monopoly.
That's why Firefox continues to be a niche browser. Its actual goal, never outright stated by Mozilla leadership, is to occupy just enough market share to prop up their behemoth benefactor.
It's easy to leave a place. Harder to stay and fix the things you don't like. How many people regret leaving the place they invested 12+ years, rather than fighting back while in a position to do so?
If you're burned out, no longer fun, we all get it. But don't leave your investment into a product just because some new direction took over unless you plan to kick their backside.
That would be JR Conlin, national treasure. Worked with him on YDN in 2007 and Netflix in 2009; veterans of the Netflix API team will never forget his hack day entry, which was "Mac and Me" playing on a toaster oven.
They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
Could not agree more. I am honestly confused by the need for more than what FF/Librewolf offers and have been actively doing frontend for a long time. Plus no hassle with uBlock. And their Focus mobile browser is nice. I have the same complaints about their leadership as most but at least I feel I have some autonomy with their browser.
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.
another thing is that the weirdos who were using firefox didn't switch to chrome either, mainly just to other firefox forks or brave, vivaldi.. casual users just use whatever but use firefox less and less
> Another delusion comes about because of self-reinforcement. Say you're going to release some, controversial feature. Maybe it's browser based DRM, maybe it's AI, maybe it's Push Notifications. Listening to your users can be a bit challenging[2], because while some might tell you, most probably won't. They'll just leave. That means that your source of information will be the people that stick around, so you wind up getting artificially high approval rates for things.
This is a bit ironic, because... there's a bunch of low hanging fruit that are lacking and that keeps driving the nerds off of Firefox. Take Meshcore/Meshtastic or, frankly, the entire ESP32 world for example - in the Chromium ecosystem, you can use WebUSB and WebSerial to flash and communicate with these things from the browser. It does not get more convenient. Meanwhile, WebUSB still isn't supported in Firefox at all and only two weeks ago Firefox at least gained WebSerial [1].
He's right. The nerds who want WebUSB are leaving or using Chromium on the side. Firefox has just been collecting the nerds who want absolute safety and privacy at the cost of any functionality (which apparently includes removing extensions according to one).
I was floored when I discovered that Firefox rejected Web NFC because they were afraid of it being used on specific outdated Yubikeys. I could understand if they were concerned about it being used to steal credit cards, but the Yubikey scenario is just so out of touch. I can only hope that Web Serial represents a pivot away from that.
> We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded.
Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this:
There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile.
This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already.
I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work.
The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.
Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.
What if the EU bought some big chunk of Mozilla, something like Mozilla EU, and then ran it? Would the US then cry out against EU buying US companies and start to fund Mozilla?
American here. We'd bitch, piss, and moan about the EU buying US companies. We wouldn't fund Firefox though, we'd be more likely to give a huge government contract to facebook to reskin chrome or some other stupid shit.
Literal who has left the company that provides Google's antitrust insurance policy. That Mozilla still manages to swing "non-profit" status as they do this is outrageous.
I would like to see Mozilla's entire board leave Mozilla... in a PERP WALK.
Mozilla Corporation, owner and operator of the Firefox brand and recipient of Google’s payments, is not a non-profit. U.S. law permits non-profits to have for-profit subsidiaries if one accepts severe limitations, such as the corporation’s profits being largely severed from the non-profit’s use. Severance isn’t just a science fiction show, it’s a compulsory auditable requirement.
I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.
I would say about 99% of the population views software corporations as these monolithic inhuman cubes of pure shitanium. What these posts are important for is
1: reminding the average population that corporations are just abstract human pyramids and made up of normal people.
And
2: doing that through a very human, biased, and filtered perspective that can provide some genuine insight into the function of these opaque systems.
Now, does the average consumer of hacker news get all that? Probably not, but I do think insider perspective is still valuable.
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.
Look, I absolutely agree it sucks they didn't deliver the opt-out/in interface day one, it was obvious people would want it, and yes, it's not the first time they've blundered.
At the same time, they did listen to the feedback and deliver. It now has a genuinely good interface for it where you don't have to opt out of everything, but can opt-in where you want it. It's not just a big off button, it's a general out-out including new features, but that then exposes individual opt-ins if you want for each feature. Most other browsers won't respond at all. Firefox is still by far the best browser out there for people who care about their privacy.
Especially on HN, Firefox just gets so much more hate than software that is way more user hostile for much less bad behaviour. I'm not saying we shouldn't hold it to a higher standard when that is what it's selling itself on: clearly we can't allow "not as bad" to let it slip into worse and worse, but at the same time, I don't understand how the narrative seems to trend towards "they are essentially the same as google" when that is so clearly not true (to be clear, not saying you are saying that in this post, just that's the vibe of HN's commentary as a whole).
That is true - Firefox is definitely held to a higher standard here and elsewhere. They marketed those values to us. So the criticisms, in my opinion, are definitely justified. And no, they aren't listening to their users.
If they had listened to their users they would have delivered what every users wants - just a browser. Not some kind of "platform" stuffed with lot of unwanted crap that makes it bloated and introduces possibly new unnecessary attack vectors in it (both malicious and / or privacy exploits). All those additional craps that every new management wants in Firefox should have been a browser extensions or a plugin, instead of being bundled into the core browser. When a user installs / updates Firefox, they could be asked if they want to install any of these new feature available as an extension / plugin. That keeps the browser lean, transfers the choice completely to the user and is genuinely respectful of the user. The current way of force bundling everything into the browser, making it bloated, and then pretending that "users can opt-out" is not just arrogance but also misleading (to be polite) as it is common knowledge among software firms that most people often never change the default settings.
(Note that I know that some of these features are indeed implemented as an extension. But not as user controlled ones as they cannot be completely uninstalled. All the user can do is turn it "off or on". Why? It is stuff like this that makes it harder to trust claims of caring about user Privacy.)
> it's not the first time they've blundered
It's a recurring pattern of not reading the room
Indeed, and it's on purpose.
Everyone was forced to be exposed to it. To see it. Only after that happened, did they let users disable it.
It's effectively the equivalent of a spam campaign.
People had to raise hell to get that, while being made fun of by their CMs on social media. Even the opt-out is full of silicon valley dark patterns. Whoever is calling shots about the product at Mozilla doesn't have your best interests at heart.
What are those dark patterns? It's an off button, it works, and it does not get back on. It's the polar opposite of the "maybe later, I'll ask again every week and reset the setting in your back" unfortunate norm that plagues a lot of major proprietary software/service.
The only correct move would be remove the option, remove all AI code, and move it into extensions. If the extension security policies, and other restrictions, don't allow all the things they want to put in, then GOOD, they don't go in.
I think Mozilla is still mostly made up of tech-optimist people, so they were open and interested in ai from day one. I highly doubt there was any malicious intent.
And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible
Maybe I just love downvotes, but the Firefox AI sidebar is incredibly useful and I make use of it nearly every day.
Good for you. The point is that a lot of Firefox users actively didn't want these sorts of features enabled and pushed on them. That was clear and obvious to anyone paying attention to general reactions to unsolicited AI helper tools, going back decades. For Mozilla to turn this on without any respect for those users’ preferences was a huge mistake that they keep making over and over again.
More specifically: they chose Firebox because it doesn't have those kind of features. If the just wanted a (sorta-kinda) open-source browser filled with all the latest hype features they would've simply used Chromium.
Using Firefox is a political choice. People use it because it's one of the few remaining traditional browsers which isn't a tentacle of Big Tech. Chasing the competition and adding the stuff your users are actively trying to avoid isn't going to work.
> If the just wanted a (sorta-kinda) open-source browser filled with all the latest hype features they would've simply used Chromium.
I don't mind features existing, especially if I can switch them off if I don't want them. I definitely mind Chrom(ium|e).
I don't see how the existence of the Firefox AI sidebar gives Google effective control over web specs.
The main reason for using Firefox is because they support Manifest v2 / Ad-Blockers.
This increases security while also harming Google's business model. Win-Win.
They KEEP adding utter cancerous garbage to the homepage/new tab page. I recently installed Firefox from scratch for a coworker who was having chrome-only issues(yes, they do exist!) and was blown away by how insanely gross the default settings are now. It’s straight up adware junk bullshit
You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control" ... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible!
What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!?
What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default?
I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that.
Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?
You either missed the point or deliberately missed the point.
The issue was they shipped AI features built into everything and the only way to switch them off was to "about:config" a bunch of settings, they shouldn't have shipped it without the off switch and "Open about:settings and then disable things manually" isn't control for the average user.
I know what the point is. But what I don't get is why people are expecting hiding certain features and buttons should be a first-class setting. Again, they're just UI elements, they don't do anything until you tell them to.
The user has the choice to not use these features. It's not like Firefox was sending data to AI companies by default. But if you want to completely make them disappear, so you can live in your fantasy world where LLMs were never invented, then yes, that's a niche personal preference and an advanced customization. That's why it goes under about:config.
Well, from version 151 there is now a setting to turn all the built-in AI off. So people in some part of Mozilla disagreed with your position sufficiently to provide a setting.
PS: I do actually find Google's ai thing in the search useful now and again, so no fantasy world.
This attitude is exactly why Mozilla is failing. Total contempt and ignorance of the users that are the core of Firefox’s user base. If someone doesn’t want to use AI features, that’s not “living in a fantasy world”. And if Mozilla had any respect for its users, they would have realized the need to make this sort of thing a first class setting. Pretending that their core users are delusional freaks who only deserve “niche” settings is exactly why they are rapidly losing that audience.
You're missing the point. If someone doesn't want to use AI features, they can just NOT. USE. THEM. That's it. Just don't press the AI button. Is it that hard? Would you say Mozilla is deleting all your data because there's a "Delete cookies and history" button in the menu? You can just NOT. PRESS. THE. BUTTON.
The master AI switch doesn't actually change whether the browser uses AI features - it never does unless you specifically run them. What it does is hides them from the user, pretending they don't exist.
Browsers that don't respect their users' choices about using AI do things like automatically download large models in the background, integrate cloud-based speech recognition and synthesis as an API available to any website and make the default search engine which they also own show LLM slop above actual results.
And you missed the question about a GPU composition toggle.
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?
> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?
It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both.
I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.
Keep in mind that while Firefox offered 20 extensions on mobile, Chrome offered zero and continues to lack any support for extensions whatsoever. Nobody ditched Firefox for Chrome because of the extensions thing.
The move to WebExtensions was painful, but it also made it possible to easily port Chrome extensions to Firefox, which was a great boost for the extension ecosystem, as well as being the thing that actually made mobile extensions possible.
I do agree they should've made the transition period longer though. There were like two years in between where some of the big Chrome extensions hadn't been ported yet, but their original Firefox counterparts were already killed. That probably made a few users move ti Chrome, but that was already during the great Chrome migration, so I can't imagine this made a huge difference.
I think your comment points towards the heart of my complaint, namely, that Firefox stopped extensions on its tracks to offer parity with a browser that doesn't care about extensions. It fits the post's complaint about doing things just because Chrome is doing them.
As for the effect of extensions, my feeling is that people care less about them now but used to care more about them back then. I think Firefox main selling point was always "my cousin who works in IT told me to install this instead of that", and once Firefox angered those power users away (at the same time when Chrome was trying to bring them in) the effect compounded.
It's especially backwards because most extensions worked fine when they were first cut down to that list of 20.
They (the proclaimed bastion of user choice and freedom) just didn't allow you to install them. Forks and self-built versions handled extensions just fine immediately, there was no technical blocker, just managerial. For years. While constantly proclaiming that it was just a brief temporary state.
I switched to some of those forks immediately, literally every extension I used before worked perfectly. None of them were in the blessed list.
I honestly can't see it as anything but an intentional self-harm move, behind a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.
I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.
> don't think Fx can survive on only us.
not at the current employee and costs. But do they need to do that? Do they need to produce new products (and pay the cost to do so)?
Why can't they be lean and mean? Focus purely on browser experience without any BS, without any upsell? And there are volunteers out there that willingly contribute code/fixes for free.
> Why can't they be lean and mean?
Because they canceled the* project and laid off the lean and mean team that threatened their bloated C++ tower of rubble.
* https://servo.org/
I like having containers for different parts of my life built into the browser. I liked relay for quite a while (moved on to other setups). I like syncing between devices and the ability to push something from my phone to my computer on another continent currently with two taps.
Yeah they have rolled out a lot of nonsense I don’t care for, but they have also rolled out a lot of features I regularly use and enjoy. You can’t please everybody, but ultimately I’m glad it’s not “just a lean browser.”
If they truly wanted to be mean and lean and focus on the browser experience they would need to throw away their pride and port the browser from gecko to blink. I think they are too prideful to do that though.
AI is not, and was not the reason why the average user moved away from Firefox.
AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.
Oh, I agree - firefox was losing market share long before AI was a thing.
I meant to use that as a recent example of the kind of decisions that Mozilla leadership repeatedly makes, that don't match up what their users want.
> AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.
How? By selling the position of preferred model? They can do that without implementing it in a way that means people who don't want it at all have to jump through hoops to opt-out.
Being able to turn AI summaries and such off by default was the final reason I started paying for Kagi. I know they use ML in the background no matter what, but as long as I get links to resources relevant to my search, that I can read/judge/summerise as needed, first and foremost, how they produce that list is not the issue.
You are not the target audience, that’s pretty much it. You can be very against AI, try to turn it off on Kagi, avoid Google AI summaries, discard ChatGPT/Claude, but billions of people still use them. At this point it has been argued so much that it’s kinda pointless.
People seem to enjoy to be told stuff and don’t really care about sources if the said content is somewhat correct.
> it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit.
Leaders are accountable for their decisions, their statements, their strategies, and their care for the organisation(s) that they lead.
That wasn't my point, really. But that they chastise Mozilla leadership without offering any other alternative direction than "keeping doing as in 2009".
Its weird how quickly people are to excuse the class literally paid to be responsible.
> 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?
I worked at Mozilla for a bit over six years and really enjoyed my time there. There were lots of brilliant people attracted by the mission and the work was technically interesting. I left in part because I came to the conclusion that the answer to these questions was no. Google's distribution advantages with Chrome and getting boxed out of mobile by the bundled Android/iOS browsers was simply too much to overcome by making a better product. People can gripe about Mozilla's management or product decisions all they want but the fundamental problem is the structure of the web browser market.
It has merit. I left for similar reasons after a similar tour. I largely agree with their reasons. No further notes.
if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?
I really don’t think it would.
One thing “Do what you did before when you were successful!” is missing is that Firefox was sleek, fast, extendable, new, and cool.
It was cool partly because of its “sleek, fast, extendable”, but also because of its “new”, and it can’t get “new” back.
Perhaps launching a completely new piece of software, like the Netscape -> Firefox change (although that was organic, not planned) - but only if it’s actually something new and cool that comes out of it. A rebadge won’t work.
I don’t think there’s a playbook that works here. I’m struggling to think of many major pieces of tech (or non-tech!) that ever got its cool back. Netscape -> Firefox? Apple and/or the Mac? IE4? Lego? Elvis? “New Nixon”?...
Alongside all of the successes there are orders of magnitude more failures, and I don’t think they’re all on merit.
There is a pool of opportunities they largely refuse to jump into: those requiring curation. Pocket, the sole exception, ended up as yet another unforced error.
> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)
This, in part. The swift deprecation of XUL extensions felt like a kick in the gonads and made me switch to Pale Moon for a while, after which I landed on Firefox ESR to avoid the inmediate impact of bad decisions, and accumulated a veritable landslide of user.js and userchrome.css tweaks I keep having to maintain.
On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.
>if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?
Yes.
I used Firefox and made sure everybody in my circle family and social used it. I had donated 5$ to Mozilla when I was making 360$ per month. I believed in mozilla, I was naive. Soon after I learned the money didn't go to Firefox. They soon after launched a political campaign in my country. I realized this and every other fancy they had, was where my money was going. Stopped using it and stopped caring a long while back. Can't wait for Servo/Ladybird to replace it.
The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as:
* Wanting niche features that don't benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.
* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).
* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)
* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.
These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.
Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.
[1] https://xkcd.com/1172/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18
I don't think workflow concerns can just be brushed off. Breaking changes and constant design churn is devastating for user retention.
What users want is a working browser that gets out of the way and them browse the web. That's what Chrom(e,ium) is. It's like air, it's everywhere but you can't see it.
Firefox is not. Every time you open Firefox, there's a new dialog announcing some change or shilling some product. It's cut from the same cloth as that car that Homer Simpson designed. Every time you open Firefox, it works a bit differently, so you have to unlearn some habit and learn a new one[1]. This is friction. This grates. You have some task to perform, which is why you opened the browser, but now you your blood pressure is up 20 points because firefox can't just let you browse, it's always telling you stuff in a dozen different channels, popups, toasts, notifications, there's always something it throws in your face, often multiple calls to action at once. So you say for fucks sake, and go back to chrome which just lets you browse with none of that nonsense.
These are all the calls to action I get when I open firefox. Which I opened yesterday as well, so it's not a clean install.
https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/firefox.png
Why is there a dialog announcing widgets, when I can see the widgets already? It's literally telling me what I see on the screen. Why do you need this exposition to inform me of something that is plain to see in front of my eyes? It's like bad fiction writing, except in the form of annoying UX.
Like is anyone working on Firefox actually using the browser, in its vanilla configuration? How can they not see how infuriating it is to be a Firefox user?
[1] 5 years ago we changed which kitchen drawer we keep the cutlery in, and I still reach for the wrong one every time.
Yeah, definitely agree with this. I still use Firefox a bit on some machines but it is constantly popping up little things - "are you finding tabs overwhelming? try tab groups" / "try vertical tabs" / whatever. I'm not finding them overwhelming, just shut up please.
Also the context menus are super noisy, I tried cutting some bits out in config, but there's just so much crap in there. Obviously all the AI stuff, but also just the basics; right-clicking on a tab has a sub-menu for "Close Multiple Tabs" which hides "Close other tabs" and "Close tabs to the right" which are probably what I use the most. In Chromium they're top-level menu items.
And it went through a phase a few months ago where the context menus were sometimes offset or goofily sized; I think that's fixed now.
I guess it's easy to criticise, but it just doesn't feel like this stuff is well aligned to actually using the browser, whereas Chromium feels like a solid product.
I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser. A paid email service is also something many have been asking for a while. People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.
> I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser.
You did not read the comments of this submission?[1]
This is common.[2][3][4][5] And those were comments which were easy to find because they said Firefox and VPN. Many other comments said they should focus on Firefox solely. Or eliminate all side projects.
> People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.
People can give money to Mozilla Corporation by purchasing Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, or MDN Plus.
Rules for businesses to solicit donations are strict. Mozilla would have to be more careful than most because people confuse non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And many of the small minority of Firefox users who said they would donate implied or said plainly a condition was Mozilla would abandon other income.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515030
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225892
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434873
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065167
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46323661
> You did not read the comments of this submission?[1] This is common.[2][3][4][5] And those were comments which were easy to find because they said Firefox and VPN.
Fair, there are complaints out there, but I'd rank the response very mild compared to AI and the upcoming Nova design.
> Many other comments said they should focus on Firefox solely. Or eliminate all side projects.
Of course, since most of their money comes from search royalties for having Firefox users.
> People can give money to Mozilla Corporation by purchasing Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, or MDN Plus. Rules for businesses to solicit donations are strict. Mozilla would have to be more careful than most because people confuse non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And many of the small minority of Firefox users who said they would donate implied or said plainly a condition was Mozilla would abandon other income.
Yes, but what I'm saying is there's no general opposition from "enthusiasts" to Firefox making money like the parent commenter stated. The more popular take I've seen is to support Firefox via paying for VPN, etc.
It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.
Firefox's market share peaked in 2009. Eich was CEO for 2 weeks in 2014. He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position. The same lawyer lady Mitchell Baker had every top job from 1999 to 2008.
"He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position."
At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.
It was.
It’s not.
That engineer went on to create Brave, a browser that pays you Monopoly money for watching ads, injected affiliate links, installed their commercial VPN without asking, and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its "privacy" mode. I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there.
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.
Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC.
Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads.
What a wonderful thing we've created.
I think “IRC (an open protocol)” served more to explain the why than the what here. It frames the whole rest of the story and why GP felt alienated.
It wasn’t because Mozilla stopped using GP’s favorite chat software. It’s because GP was a believer in the mission and the principles. Switching from an open system to a corny corporate one made the whole illusion fall apart. Mozilla was a corp all along and they took their volunteers for a ride.
Another feeling when reading "(I woudn't know, uBlock is pretty effective)" coming from a volunteer for MDN
Who else would be likely to look at what a web page is trying to get the browser to do, e.g., trigger requests for ads using Javascript. There are a variety of places to look, it is not like this is seriously hidden from those with even the slightest curiousity
That a former MDN volunteer is apparently disappointed by ads on MDN yet satisfied with MDN anyway because of a community-sourced browser add-on. An add-on that can be rendered useless at any time by the browser vendor, including the one that puts ads on MDN
It is not unimaginable that one day uBlock Origin may cease to work on Firefox when Mozilla sells search data to Google as its primary source of income and is actively working on such things as "making ads more private"
I thank the volunteer for their past work on MDN, I'm not singling him out, nor am I holding it against anyone for thinking this way, but I wonder how many uBlock Origin users believe themselves to possess some "specialised knowledge",^1 for lack of a better term, but would be all but helpless against advertising without a solution provided by someone else, e.g., a browser extension
The point I'm making is that today it seems like "knowing which app to install and how to install it" is considered specialised knowledge instead of actually knowing how to avoid ads to an extent where if the app stopped working they could devise another solution
There are definitely some HN users who can do it, and you, dear reader may be amongst them, but it seems, based on the comments I have seen over the years, there are many, many more who cannot. In that sense the situation is a bit like the IRC comment
The more one understands about online ads, the more clear it should be that so-called "ad blockers" is only a temporary solution at best, and these only work with web browsers
IMHO it is important that more people who wish to avoid ads become more curious about how they work instead of only installing a browser extension and concluding the problem is solved for the long-term
1. Many calling themselves "engineers" for example
*wouldn't
Is there a widely-used open modern chat network? Specifically, I'm fine with the feature set of IRC, but I want durable messages and a mobile client.
Speaking as someone who hasn't run their own bouncer in 10+ years.
Yes, Matrix. It all seems a bit overengineered, but it's open and has good clients, and all the modern features you'd expect.
> has good clients
So far, I've only found clients with different bugs. Calling them good would be a stretch. Passable, perhaps. But the scene as a whole is more of a choose-the-bugs-to-live-with situation than choose-a-good-client.
Case-in-point: just started a new chat with a new person (we had a previous room in common)--My desktop client, NeoChat, shows "This message is encrypted and the sender has not shared the key with this device." for all of their messages. FluffyChat on my phone shows their messages correctly.
Welcome to Matrix. It's the best option there is, and it's not very good.
I'm sorry but I lost interest in matrix in 2017 ish when I tried to use my existing matrix log in when trying to sign into the Mozilla matrix and I simply couldn't. At the end I ended up creating a new account on Mozilla side just so I could use it for a few days.
I've never thought of matrix as a mature technology ever since.
even mastodon figured out federation.
That's not how federation works? You wouldn't log into Mozilla's matrix server with another Matrix server's login, you would just join the :mozilla.org rooms with your normal Matrix account. That's the whole point of federation.
It sounds like you were trying to login to Mozilla's Element web client and it was only set up to authenticate against the Mozilla homeserver but A) that's a client setting unrelated to federation or really the protocol in general and B) not what you were supposed to be doing to begin with.
Mastodon does not have persistence of data though. Your instance shuts down? All your posts are gone. I naively assumed I could just move them to a new instance and found out the hard way. I have felt disillusioned with Mastodon ever since.
Ultimately all things are ephemeral.
> but I want durable messages and a mobile client.
And IRCv3 has chat history to provide that. But https://snikket.org/ (XMPP) is more likely aligned with what you are looking for
For what it's worth there are some web front-ends to IRC that make it more approachable from the modern crowd. [1][2] These both have live demo's
[1] - https://thelounge.chat/
[2] - https://convos.chat/
I just run emacs with termux proot debian.
It just works.
Sounds like some decision-maker couldn't figure out how to connect to the IRC channel. That's not the right type of management for Mozilla.
IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.)
No wonder people don't want to join it.
(Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)
It's not like you couldn't create an IRC-client with better UI than discord. Not as many features, but whatever strength discord has it is not UI.
Email really could have been great, but html and bad actors have made it so much worse than it needs to be.
In practice "better UI" would mean things like being able to trivially share files and images, or quote/link a specific message, or even making it easier to distinguish between users with similar nicks via their profile pictures. And those UI improvements are actually features which are integral to its protocol, so they can't easily be bolted on by a custom IRC client in a backwards-compatible way.
Literally every single modern chat platform has support for stuff like that, and for a reason. Discord became popular because it combined those modern chat features with the ability for every community to create its own private little "server" - while at the same time making it trivial to participate in multiple "servers" at once.
Quoting/linking is a client feature, not a server one.
IRC servers do also support profiles.
I think the real “issue” with IRC is that its users generally prefer the minimal UI. So there isn’t an high enough demand to make prettier UIs. But there are web clients that are a little less basic.
For what it’s worth, I’m in that minimal camp too. I wish I could still connect Slack to IRC.
I'd guess the important feature for Discord is it is easier for the administrators to get hosted and online, but "you could create a client with a better UI than discord" is a terrible line of argument. People could do lots of things in the OSS world and they don't. I can't recall any IRC client that I have found as easy to use as the Discord client except - ironically given the topic - ChatZilla which died off years ago because Mozilla decided that extensions were more of a 2000s technology than something they wanted to support.
Email is OK. The point is that most conversations moved to other media (mainly chats) and so 90% of my mail is notifications, 9% is newsletters, 1% are real messages. They used to be 99%.
I really wish Google's Wave went somewhere. It was the real solution.
Which feature did you like most?
try deltachat. it's essentially a chat client with all the features you would expect but using SMTP as the protocol.
indeed, there is https://www.irccloud.com which is quite excellent!
I am puzzled by this comment. IRC is a protocol, it is not a software and doesn't have an UI. IRC clients do, and they aren't all the same.
> IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it.
I consider it a feature that acts as a filter.
if you consider a high bar for entry to be a good thing, don't be surprised when your community dies
The entire reason Mozilla came into being is to do things like improve the user experience for IRC so we can keep the internet open. There has never been any other reason for Mozilla as an organization to exist.
Dunno man, it’s miles better than discord which bombards me with ads every single time I log in.
It's been a while since I last used IRC, but afaik one of the issues with it was that servers revealed the IP address of users to every other user by default. Since the IP is geographic that's one piece of information you could use to doxx someone.
IP addresses aren't linked to a complete street address, and many times don't even show the right town, especially those on CG-NAT or a plain ol' direct public dynamic address. I have seen some IPs, like on AT&T and Comcast home Internet, showing a different state.
So in many cases, you don't need a VPN to prevent revealing your actual geographic location.
And some IPs stick to users for over a decade, and over time the data pieces add up and connect the dots.
Libera gives all registered users a cloak to hide their ip.
It'd be trivial (TM) for someone to make a web interface, and the connections would say "Connecting from some-data-center.aws-cloud.bl"...
There are many ways to mask your "real" ip address, VPN being an easy start.
The fact that this is needed at all is a serious problem. Making people who aren't aware of some obscure details accidentally doxx themselves is incredibly user-hostile.
UI? Its a protocol.
They probably meant UX, which is arguably similar between implementations.
Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense.
Discord could well run on top of IRC the protocol and be open to federation without any change of UX.
Netsplits, missed messages and bot wars over channel and nick ownership were an integral part of IRC UX, and they were direct consequences the IRC protocol. If Discord was run on top of IRC protocol, it would have the same. Discord would probably be its own network and the people who prefer IRCnet, EFnet or QuakeNet would never touch it.
> Netsplits
It's not inherent to the protocol. https://ergo.chat/ does not have netsplits (from having a single server) and https://github.com/Libera-Chat/sable replaces the server-to-server protocol to eliminate netsplits as well.
And even when not eliminated entirely, they are infrequent and barely visible on well-managed networks like Libera.Chat. Many chat platforms have more (and longer) outages than Libera has netsplits.
> missed messages
Solved by most server implementations using https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory
> bot wars over channel and nick ownership
Solved decades ago thanks to NickServ and ChanServ (though I'll admit they are ad-hoc additions on top of the protocol). And ~15 years ago we got native support for authentication (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/sasl-3.1)
So... Usually it's claimed that one of the advantages of IRC is that it doesn't depend on a single server, so using a single server feels a bit like cheating. Replacing the server-to-server protocol sounds a lot like it's not really IRC protocol any more. The chathistory link says "This specification may change at any time and we do not recommend implementing it in a production environment." right on top. And yes, NickServ and ChanServ exist on some networks and IIRC they were one of the major points in debates over which network is the best and which ones to not touch with a ten feet pole. A hypothetical IRC-based Discord-like service could have it.
I mean the word "Relay" in Internet Relay Chat was meant to refer to relaying between servers. Larger networks even had some hub servers that didn't allow users to connect at all, and existed to be server interchanges.
IRCv3 missed the boat by years. By 2016, when the working group was formed, IRC was already well past its glory years. Even then, it took til the 2020s before any major network fully adopted it. Because - and I say this as a nerd who held an O line on two of those major networks at one point in my life - a bunch of nerds got hung up on arguing about implementation specs rather than looking at features and functionality organically. Ironically, in the quest to avoid becoming a closed Discord/Slack/what-have-you ecosystem product, they needed a product manager to remind them that what they needed to build in that working group was an evolution to IRCv2, not endless arguments over the format of configuration files for server daemons, for but one example.
> And ~15 years ago we got native support for authentication (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/sasl-3.1)
The IRCv3 WG was convened near the end of 2016, so 9 or so.
> IRCv3 missed the boat by years
Because people invested/wasted their energy into building proprietary silos instead.
IRC doesn't have offline messages and standardized user accounts.
Just looked it up and there is IRCv3 to fix this, but idk what the state of that is.
"... not great".
IRCv3 was already late to the party and when I saw that the Working Group's mailing list was composed of lots of debates on formats for server daemon configuration files, it was clear many couldn't see the forest for the trees.
>Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense
Sure it does, when all browsers have more or less the same, and the context makes clear we're not talking about the mere programmatic consumption of HTTP (like through some REST api).
"But it's a protocol and not a client" is pedantically irrelevant, given that the clients for that protocol all follow the same conventions. The parent already said they meant the UX of it "which is arguably similar between implementations".
Besides, protocols impose some concepts and models of interaction and consumption, which informs any UX created on top of them. So it's not like that client sameness is merely accidental and unrelated to the protocol either.
It hasn't been the same since Comic Chat was discontinued
I wish there was an article on the oral history of comic chat.
What? I just want to share cat pics, video clips, and memes with my friends and respond to their stuff with not-inline emojis.
It's a skill check.
It's gatekeeping. Don't be surprised when your pet project slowly dies because potential new contributors choose to join less hostile communities instead.
What’s wrong with IRCs UI?
I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years as my default browser. Thank you for your work!
Yes, I'd echo thanks to parent, the OA and all still in the trenches.
Since 2007 in my case which is when I started using Linux at home. The distributions I use come with Firefox as the Web browser (Ubuntu, Debian and latterly Slackware).
I do find myself turning things off more now than I used to.
There were a few years where it was hard to justify using Firefox, it was just so slow compared to Chrome at the time. Nowadays it's fine again.
Last I heard the ads were introduced to be less dependent on Google money - they actually cover the costs/salaries of the internal MDN team and thus secure the existence of MDN within the organisation.
Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla.
So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am surprised that the people visiting MDN don't use an ad blocker anyhow).
I support MDN by disabling UBO. This is not (much) of a burden: there is no animation, and the advertised products are always technical and possibly of interest. Only complaint is the occasional large light areas, which do not play well with dark mode.
> 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.
I feel the same way after seeing what they've done with AI chatbots in the sidebar. Five cloud providers. No local AI option. I don't see a reason to use Firefox today and it's been my main browser since it was called Phoenix. I use it only because it's what I've been using for a long time. There's no relationship between Mozilla of today and the group that placed the ad in the NY Times in 2004.
The AI chatbot thing was just the latest happening, but it shows how devoid of meaning that organization has become when you have a technology like AI and nobody even looks to Mozilla to provide leadership on an issue like that. Sure, send all your data to a large cloud outfit, that's the corporate world of Mozilla in 2026. It would actually be shocking to see Mozilla promote AI data privacy. Ironically, the local model I run the most is provided by Google, and it's not the least bit surprising that they're making it possible.
> 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).
IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.
Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.
Mozilla ended up switching from IRC to Matrix. Maybe they tested Yahoo Messenger at some point but I'm pretty confident there was never any switch to it (I left in 2016).
Do Mozilla really still need volunteers in this day and age? Tbh even in 2015. They are established enough to not need to exploit goodwill.
As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects.
Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. One example is the container VPN proxy, which only allows you to implement a VPN per container if you pay for Mozilla VPN. This is a feature that should be universally available to all users, and all VPN providers, but they locked it behind a paywall for profit.
The is the same (logically analogous) reason I no longer use Reddit after the API changes in 2023, after using the platform for 15 years, and has become common among newer FOSS startups like OpenAI, minio, and bambu; using the philosophy of open source &/or unpaid community labor to achieve a certain level of trust, growth, users, funding, and market saturation, only to screw them all over in the name of profit. This for-profit parasitic greed and corruption in FLOSS is the antithesis to the philosophy of the FLOSS community.
In a sane world this type of community exploitation would be criminally prosecutable. Reddit decision makers would see the inside of a prison cell; the moderators and commenters – as well as the developers who built the 3rd party apps that grew the company from nothing for over a decade – would be given shares/ownership, and paid from the company for their time and labor; same for every other scammer that exploits these "bait-and-switch" deceptive tactics to succeed in businesss. Unfortunately for us all, we live in a world ruled by parasites.
Not to mention scandals like this...
"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic"
Incidentally, I have recently come across some Mozilla job postings with salary ranges I would consider to be at a considerable "discount to market". For example, here is a senior role at 59 000 euro per year: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/7843229
Failed their way to the top.
Imagine getting paid millions to kill a company, who needs enemies/competitors when you have “leaders” like that?
I remember Nokia and their CEO from Microsoft.
> I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation.
Thunderbird is no longer owned by the Mozilla corporation, so now you can donate directly to them.
How do we get this to happen with Firefox?
Libtewolf is hopefully there. Ublock origin is pre-installed
Librewolf, like all the forks, free-rides on the upstream work of paid Mozilla staff in order to be secure. It's a band-aid, not a solution.
But perhaps the existence of the forks tells the Mozilla management something?
WebKit (as used by Safari) was a fork of kHTML (written by the KDE team). And Google forked WebKit. Now we have dozens of Blink forks including Microsoft’s own browser: Blink.
I think it’s pretty safe to assume that forking the code is a low incentive for change
Band-aids like this have existed for many years, plenty of time for Mozilla to listen. And in all that time, they never had the idea to make the band-aids redundant.
I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore.
Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?
Of all the forks I think Waterfox is the one with the strongest case that they can continue on even if they have to fully decouple from Mozilla Firefox.
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."
I want to put it in other words based on philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche - Exploitation is the key characteristic of living beings. This is applicable not only to humans but also to single celled life forms. (There are exceptions to this). So, those who are dedicated to the org itself are the one who are exploiting. And those who are working for the goal of the org are the exploited. There is always fight between these two group. Some time, a symbiotic relationship, some times status quo. etc.
Those who recognize this will be at peace since they understand the soul of bureaucracy.
"The bureaucracy will expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." -- paraphrase of C. Northcote Parkinson [0]
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
This is new to me. Not sure I totally agree but it's a useful heuristic. Despite being easy targets, orgs do in fact need coordinators, middle managers, administrators, etc. Especially as they scale. (And no AI won't render them obsolete.) Finding the balance between productivity and bureaucracy is the hard part.
It's true that large orgs need all that bureaucracy. But is it still true that productivity needs large orgs? We see a lot of massive hits coming from small teams - whether it's startups, movies, indie games, etc.
With almost no exceptions, movies are never made by small teams beyond the student film level. Even then, dozens of people are usually involved in some way. Writing, acting, score, foley, editing, distribution, graphic design, color grading, wardrobe, effects, lighting, cinematography, scheduling, props, location scouting, set decoration, casting, mixing… the list goes on. Any one of those things sucking badly enough can make the whole movie suck. And that’s kind of the point with a lot of this stuff. I know from having plenty of experience on both sides of the fence that tech folks often don’t realize that most non-tech roles are as-or-more difficult than tech roles, many requiring years of hard-won expertise, and directly contribute far more to the outcome than they imagine.
Not to mention smaller (successful) production teams are often comprised of veterans of the industry who have worked on large scale productions and bring that knowledge set with them. Same with many indie games. You have to play with the big dogs to understand what is and isn’t necessary for a product. You can’t just walk in with a plucky attitude and a dream unless you want to waste a lot of time and money.
The part that is also usually glossed over is how exploitative the production is (low pay/awful hours), even if it’s sometimes self-inflicted.
> bring that knowledge set with them
Not just knowledge but personal connections for favors. “Hey, [talented editor] it’s [famous DP], do you think you could tame a crack at this scene in your spare time? I’m trying to make something out of nothing and I’m positive you’ve got the chops.”
I don’t think anyone could reasonably call any of the exploitation self-inflicted. You have to take shit work a lot of times because a) nothing else is available and you still need to eat, or b) that’s the only way to get your foot in the door for the chance of being slightly less exploited. Unfortunately the industry collapsed when I graduated school as a career switcher getting into Houdini simulations. The software skill set is utterly devalued on the open market. I couldn’t get exploited if I wanted to. Now I’m a union tradesman. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I worked in the industry for over a decade and unfortunately it is very exploitative :/ i’ve watched line producers pressure production assistants, the lowest of the low on set, into lying about their hours so they don’t have to pay them OT under the guise of “being team players.” Lots of nonsense like that, mostly on non-union gigs.
The self-inflicted comment is a bit tongue in cheek because they do it to their own production to effectively “crunch” (to use video game parlance) but they also crunch themselves in the process. Difference is they have way more to gain. The sound mixer on an indie darling isn’t getting much out of it.
It’s pretty sad. I knew a lot of people in the union crafts (New England, which is way different from LA from what I hear) during the good times and they said it was all great, but as soon as things got tight, it was tribal as fuck. (The IATSE set building roster went from a few hundred dues-paying members to a couple dozen, and most of them were persistently out of work… it is in pretty bad shape, so there’s only so much you can do I guess.) Most of the other people I know were in VFX houses/animation and that hasn’t been non-exploitative in like 20 years. Considering how much money a few people make in that business, it’s pathetic.
Totally agree the hits are coming. But from the POV of someone at a large and still growing org that's fully embraced AI, it's so obvious to me where the limitations are (and might always be). The nuances/complexities of leadership, decision-making, strategy, creative marketing, sales, comms, etc., feel too abstract to be replaceable. As the hard skill means of production are commodified, whatever alpha is left will lie in the soft skills. In other words, the models would be A+ STEM students, but they don't have the sauce for liberal arts.
There are 3 web engines generally useful. Each produced by 100s of people. Small teams have not matched their output. How would you explain this?
The issue is that most dedicated to caring for the bureaucracy tend to overvalue the organization and undervalue the mission.
Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone
>In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself.
>History
>The phrase appeared to have been first used in 1991–1992, in a book about Gulf War weapons systems by Norman Friedman, and On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA's bureaucracy, to describe the relationship between the Space Shuttle and Space Station.
[...]
damn! then what's happens at the EU where the "goals of the organization" are themselves to increase and champion bureaucracy?
> in any bureaucratic organization
So are there any exceptions?
There are also:
* People who understand that the existence of the organization is necessary for the goals of the organization
That is rarely true. If an organization ceases to exist but people still have the same goal then they create a new organization or act individually without an incorporated bureaucracy.
On the contrary, the existence of a mismanaged organization nominally dedicated to a given purpose often prevents its nominal goal from being achieved, because people assume giving time or money to that organization will be the best way to further the goal. Then the organization squanders them when those resources would otherwise have gone to some other organization or people with greater effectiveness towards the goal.
> On the contrary, the existence of a mismanaged organization nominally dedicated to a given purpose often prevents its nominal goal from being achieved
This gives rise to another type of person within an organisation. Someone opposed to the goals of the organisation, and who understands this all too well.
You think that it is practical for teachers to abolish school districts and create their own?
In the UK we have a variety of arrangements for schools. Some are local authority managed, some are 'academy status' which means that they are self managed but often with a cluster of schools sharing a management layer to save money. There are also 'free schools' which are community run with often an 'alternative' ethos. And there are religious schools, run by churches (and other religious organisations). All of those are state funded using a funding formula, and they have to teach the national curriculum, and are subject to inspections. Academy status schools used to get a bit extra but not any more, they can however employ staff who are not qualified teachers (Qualified Teacher Status is a defined set of training and experience requirements).
There are also private schools (some famously called public schools like Eaton or Harrow, but most actually just private companies often with charitable status).
Schools are usually fairly small organisations and generally the management have risen through the ranks as teachers, year heads, and so on. It isn't a sector in which fortunes are made.
So, yes, I think a range of funding and organisational models are possible. But note the role of regulation (direct inspection of what happens in classrooms on a regular basis without much in the way of warning).
You seem to be questioning the possibility of private schools existing when they obviously do. Moreover, you could have publicly funded education without having a state-operated school bureaucracy, or without that bureaucracy having a monopoly on the funding.
Perhaps I am confused about what you mean by bureaucracy. Can you define it?
I hate this. It basically takes as axiomatic that anyone in an administrative position in an organisation has zero interest in the goals of the organisation -and that those at the coal-face have no interest in the organisation and that there is little or no overlap in interest. Its reductionist, divisive and stupid.
I don’t think that it is reductionist at all. The examples provided are either qualified with “dedicated” or “many of”. It’s also not surprising at all that people who have an interest in driving the goals of the organization usually gravitate more to operational roles and people who have no interest in it at all gravitate towards organizational roles – but that’s not a rule.
I would totally be pissed as someone in an “organizational” role of someone reduced me to someone “not interested in the goals of the organization”, but magpi3 didn’t do that. They correctly stated a pattern. If you are around organizational/administrative people, ask yourself honestly if the pattern isn’t the least bit accurate…
That's not what it says though? There is no reason type 1 people can't be in an administrative position. It's merely hypothesising that since it is not their primary goal (but it is for type 2 people) that they will eventually be out-competed by type 2's for management type positions.
I don't have that reading at all. The phrasing even seems (carefully?) chosen to avoid this interpretation: it's "Examples are many of the administrators [...]", not "Examples are the administrators [...]".
I see it as a pointed observation that the people who focus on a goal will accomplish that goal. There are organizations with administrative-focused people who work in alignment with the mission-focused people, and that also follows this law as well. It's just that the same dynamic can cause organisations to spiral into an extractive, stale, ossifying, change-resistent focus instead.
The premise of the rule is that the second one is the end state.
The essential problem is that if one person spends their time e.g. fixing bugs in the code and another person spends their time weaseling their way onto the budget committee because they want to divert resources to their cronies, it's the second person who ends up on the budget committee. Then the first person gets laid off so their salary can be redirected to the cronies.
There are various ways to try to inhibit this with varying levels of effectiveness, essentially checks and balances. But the kleptocrats will be constantly trying to circumvent, weaken and vilify the things designed to constrain them. It's the sort of thing in the same nature as "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance".
I agree. It's a false binary. I'd never heard of this one before, but even if the premise is reductive there's some truth in it. If nothing else, it might be a helpful lens for evaluating an org.
It takes the view that anyone in an administrative position will put the survival of the organization as their primary goal, while lower-level employees (who are far less invested in the organization) can remain invested in the organization's ostensible goals.
I find it to be very true after almost 30 years in the working world, and I always keep it in mind wherever I work.
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.
> 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.
To some degree, yeah they did, by leaving space for a lean and mean competitor like Google Chrome to come around and eat their lunch. And when it was introduced, Google Chrome truly was the lean and mean browser, less bloated than both Firefox and IE.
But I'm not sure how much they could've done. Maybe they could've invested a ton of engineering resources into a project similar to Firefox Quantum earlier, so that Firefox didn't leave as much room for a leaner browser? But half the reason people complain about Firefox today is that they broke XUL extensions, which was an absolutely necessary step in making Firefox a competitive, fast browser. I can only imagine the backlash they would've seen if they did that before Chrome ate their lunch.
And I'm not sure how much it would've really helped, since 1) Chrome would've still been a less bloated browser simply through having been around for a shorter time and having fewer features, and 2) Google would've still had immense marketing opportunities by plastering Chrome ads all over Google Search etc.
Firefox was indeed blowing past all the other browsers and set to become the standard.
That's when Google realized they had to do something. The market could not be allowed to be dominated by a pro-freedom, pro-privacy product.
I really wish Mozilla would focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. I don’t want extensions (attack vector), vpns, fancy bookmarking services that are deprecated later on etc. I want to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.
I wouldn't want a browser without extensions. Ad blocking in particular.
To me, ad blocking belongs in extensions. The job of a web browser is to show web pages as intended according to the standards. It includes all the ads, tracking, etc... the page has put in. If you want to block stuff or deviate from the standards in any way, that's what extensions are for.
And extension like ad blocking are an arms race, websites will deploy countermeasures to make them less effective and to which extensions can respond. Again I dont want the core browser to participate in an arms race. Keeping it free of vulnerabilities is already hard enough not to fight against standard behavior.
Extensions are the primary threat to your security today. Nothing else comes close. Organizations are not basically competent if they are not restricting or blocking extensions, and you should not have more than one to three very trusted extensions in your browser. I'd argue the case for eliminating them in favor of in house code is significant.
As a reminder: Extensions execute with post-decryption access to the websites you view, and they update to new code silently and without asking for permission. HTTPS might as well not bother existing if you have extensions you do not have incredible trust in.
I would argue that building in extension-like features inside the browser is worse. In both cases, that's extra code, with security implications, but in case of extensions, you can choose not to have it.
Now, that's a question of whether you trust those who write the browser more than those who write the extension.
And by the way, the argument you have is the same that justifies the much hated "manifestV3", which makes extensions less powerful for security reasons. But it also limits the blocking capabilities of browsers to a simple, less effective blacklist. That Firefox still supports the old "insecure" way is a big selling point over Chrome.
We obviously know Chrome team is not doing things for security reasons, they are doing things for ad revenue reasons. But it's also true that blocking ads requires an insane amount of trust: The uBlock Origin author can choose to read your bank account numbers and passwords. (Although he is high profile enough this would be caught quite quickly.)
Arguably the problem is that Manifest V3 proposed removing an ad blocking capability without replacement, whereas I would argue just as popup blocking was a couple decades ago, it belongs as a first class browser feature, not outsourcing extremely sensitive capabilities to random outside parties. Browsers should not be operated by (or funded by.........) ad networks, and should built high quality, secure tools to filter unwanted content from their users.
If I couldn't use the ublock origin extension with Firefox, I'd leave for another browser. I consider it essential for privacy reasons as well as for adblocking, and I can't imagine it hurts battery life compared to all the ads and other crap it blocks.
Firefox's VPN service also has its privacy-related uses (yes, I'm aware of the limitations), but I think it mostly serves as a possible source of non-google revenue for Mozilla.
Extensions were why Firefox was so popular among those considered 'abnormal.' Chrome just copied the idea. VPNs, Pocket, and sync services are all great features; it's their implementation and execution that is so poor.
All Mozilla (and Firefox) needs is to be run by developers, not the fucking MBAs.
> focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. [...] to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.
"Nothing more," you say.
The chief focus should be Privacy... Privacy and Performance... Our two chief focuses should be Privacy and Performance... and Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... Our three chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, and Safety on the Web... Our four chief focuses should be Privacy, Performance, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity, Safety on the Web, and ruthless Efficiency in Preserving Battery Life... Our five... no... Amongst our chief focuses... Amongst our non-trivial chief focuses that users think are easy... are such elements as Privacy, Safety on the Web, Cross-Platform Executables with Functional Parity... I'll come in again.
Software Engineering Apologies to...
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Inquisition_(Monty...
100%. Browsers are considered a commodity but I'd happily pay for a browser that:
1. Could do all the stuff chrome does as well as chrome. (Eg, canvas rendering speed etc). So I can actually use web apps.
2. Just doesn't ever have anti privacy code, pro ad code, etc in it.
I use brave and a self managed lan which is just an ad hoc half assed attempt to reach the above goals. Because there is no other option.
Sounds like Orion from kagi
How do you expect Mozilla to make enough money from just Firefox to survive if Google ever decides to stop paying them for being the default search engine?
> make enough money from just Firefox
According to 2025 filings, 86%+ of revenue came from the Google deal.
Google pays Mozilla because of the browser. How would shifting focus to the browser make that worse?
Charge me. I’ll pay. I’m not going to donate to the org right now as I don’t use Firefox as it uses (noticeably) too much battery on my MacBook compared to safari and chrome.
Notably, also, it's not currently possible to donate to Firefox; you can only give Mozilla money to use on unrelated projects. As a Firefox user, the inability to pay for the thing I actually want is grating.
> I don’t want extensions (attack vector)
How do you block ads and invasive trackers? DNS only?
Some things Mozilla could have done correctly:
Yet the best they could do was pay their CEO for nothing."We shouldn't try to be like the big browsers because that's not what our Community wants."
This is just a path to irrelevance. Firefox had the ambition to be the default browser, what Chrome is now! It's a shame if they're going to spiral off into their niche.
I think Mozilla started getting nuts the day they ventured with Firefox OS. To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.
> To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.
I do not think that this was that confusing. People [1] looked around at the beginning of the 2010's and saw
1) Mobile usage was growing exponentially and desktop was... not [2].
2) Every mobile OS shipped their own browser by default, or even went so far as to prevent other browsers from being used at all (iOS) [3].
3) Because Android and iOS both had non-trivial marketshare, neither could be called a "monopoly" so there was no way to use anti-trust law to get Firefox on devices as was done with Windows (not that this would have been a compelling strategy even if it were possible).
People took that set of facts and concluded Mozilla needed its own mobile OS in order to stay relevant.
What they underestimated was the amount of investment needed to make such an OS and get it on devices and the amount of time it would have to exist in a state of not being very good before it could compete with the established players (who were not standing still... people forget how bad Android was in the beginning). But if you look at the actual world we ended up in, with no mobile OS from Mozilla and a total Firefox marketshare that is less than desktop Safari's, it is hard to say that initial conclusion was incorrect.
[1] Full disclosure: I was a Mozilla employee at the time, though not involved in any of these decisions.
[2] I would say "desktop was shrinking", but to everyone's surprise it actually remained fairly steady in absolute numbers, although it did become a smaller slice of a much larger pie. In 2010 everyone expected it to shrink, though.
[3] Mozilla did ship a re-skin around mobile Safari to try to get some brand presence, but was still at the mercy of what web standards Safari chose to implement, and you could hardly call it a first-class experience. Eventually iOS loosened their rules, but no one could have predicted that back then.
Thanks for the explanation, and thank you for your work at Mozilla. I guess what I'm saying is that I wish Mozilla could have just focused on the browser.
I think Firefox OS was great, and too early for its time, combined with the mistake of "let's run on extremely terrible hardware" (rather than designing for the flagships of the time, which wouldn't be flagships by the time it shipped).
I mean the fact that a fork of FirefoxOS KaiOS is still around and being used shows that there was some merit to the idea but yeah it was executed as a start-up without a long-term plan but thanks to the open nature of the code its still in use.
It would be great if Mozilla as an organization tool the opposite approach of Google and if they started a project you knew it would be supported for the long run and if not internally it was handed over to the community of users and stewarded along, sort of how Apache seems to adopt projects but mostly for corporate/enterprise users.
And the fact that Mozilla used licenses for FirefoxOS which allowed a closed-source fork to come in and take the market is a huge loss.
Firefox OS was amazing and, sadly, would STILL be amazing today.
Boot-to-Gecko is brilliant because honestly most apps today... are Web pages packaged in an "app". Most PWA with desktop shortcuts (and ideally offline responsive mode) show that. Very few "apps" genuinely need to be apps.
Consequently being "just" a phone with basic connectivity and delegating the rest to the browser made perfect sense.
I didn't work because it didn't make sense or wasn't technically feasible. It didn't work because anybody who made a mobile OS wanted THEIR own walled gardens. The fact that today we are stuck with Android an iOS shows how needed it was and still is.
Firefox OS was a brilliant idea. Imagine cross platform and open apps based on HTML/JavaScript that feel native and polished. 2026 would have been amazing if Mozilla executed it right.
WebOS did it too
Remember, the best product doesn't necessarily win
It was a brilliant idea and some day someone will repeat it to make a fuckton of money.
They are already doing that with a literal fork of Firefox OS. Look up KaiOS.
That is not ambitious enough.
Firefox leadership had a recovery the time when Brendan Eich was CEO, then he was kicked out.
since then it has been downhill since.
Eich was CEO for 11 days. You’re wildly misremembering how much of an impact he had in that post.
It was an eleven day war and the casualty was their future. Eich was the last time that Mozilla hired a CEO from the ranks of its own engineers. Eich would not have prevented the economic external challenges faced, but Eich and other such engineer-leaders would have prevented the unforced errors Mozilla is known for today. Every CEO after that was business, not engineer. This placed the company onto the same runway of mediocrity and collapse that we see Boeing crashing planes into with some regularity.
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane (2 years ago, 532 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39856413
just today i came back to firefox from brave. firefox at one point in time was not able to work with the onshape web cad system and i needed a chrome based browser but was not ready to leave adblockers behind. brave war the only one suporting manifest 2 addons. but today i tried onshape in firefox and now it works. glad to be back
First of all thanks for posting what's on your mind and everything you did at Mozilla. Sorry to hear you are burnt out, hope you get better with time.
I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around.
I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional.
Yet, I'm hopeful for the future.
Mozilla continues to exist because Google funds them, and Google funds them so they can claim that their Chrome browser isn't a monopoly.
That's why Firefox continues to be a niche browser. Its actual goal, never outright stated by Mozilla leadership, is to occupy just enough market share to prop up their behemoth benefactor.
It's easy to leave a place. Harder to stay and fix the things you don't like. How many people regret leaving the place they invested 12+ years, rather than fighting back while in a position to do so?
If you're burned out, no longer fun, we all get it. But don't leave your investment into a product just because some new direction took over unless you plan to kick their backside.
Who is this person?
That would be JR Conlin, national treasure. Worked with him on YDN in 2007 and Netflix in 2009; veterans of the Netflix API team will never forget his hack day entry, which was "Mac and Me" playing on a toaster oven.
What is he notable for in the context of Mozilla?
Staying out of the public eye for his entire tenure. I remain envious.
Maybe read the blog post? Crazy suggestion, I know.
Skimmed it before asking. It's written for people who already know who the author is. Hence the question.
Some mozilla software developer I guess.
They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
> They still have not fixed their build system.
FWIW the Firefox build instructions [1] look a lot saner to me than the Chromium build instructions [2].
[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.ht...
[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
Mozilla lives in the past.
And one would hope they stay there, because all the newer stuff is far more user-hostile.
Could not agree more. I am honestly confused by the need for more than what FF/Librewolf offers and have been actively doing frontend for a long time. Plus no hassle with uBlock. And their Focus mobile browser is nice. I have the same complaints about their leadership as most but at least I feel I have some autonomy with their browser.
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.
Rust was an own goal foot gun.
Interesting language with a passionate community / cult, but the value to Mozilla was vanishingly close to zero.
They did rewrite a lof of important parts of Firefox in Rust so the value is a lot higher to Mozilla.
This. They learned nothing from Netscape.
another thing is that the weirdos who were using firefox didn't switch to chrome either, mainly just to other firefox forks or brave, vivaldi.. casual users just use whatever but use firefox less and less
Last time I did exchange thoughts about somebody who actually worked at mozilla in my country: "some kind of cult".
> Another delusion comes about because of self-reinforcement. Say you're going to release some, controversial feature. Maybe it's browser based DRM, maybe it's AI, maybe it's Push Notifications. Listening to your users can be a bit challenging[2], because while some might tell you, most probably won't. They'll just leave. That means that your source of information will be the people that stick around, so you wind up getting artificially high approval rates for things.
This is a bit ironic, because... there's a bunch of low hanging fruit that are lacking and that keeps driving the nerds off of Firefox. Take Meshcore/Meshtastic or, frankly, the entire ESP32 world for example - in the Chromium ecosystem, you can use WebUSB and WebSerial to flash and communicate with these things from the browser. It does not get more convenient. Meanwhile, WebUSB still isn't supported in Firefox at all and only two weeks ago Firefox at least gained WebSerial [1].
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Firefox-151-Endlich-Web-Serial-fue...
He's right. The nerds who want WebUSB are leaving or using Chromium on the side. Firefox has just been collecting the nerds who want absolute safety and privacy at the cost of any functionality (which apparently includes removing extensions according to one).
I was floored when I discovered that Firefox rejected Web NFC because they were afraid of it being used on specific outdated Yubikeys. I could understand if they were concerned about it being used to steal credit cards, but the Yubikey scenario is just so out of touch. I can only hope that Web Serial represents a pivot away from that.
I've been bitching about it for like a decade but I still won't use Firefox until it supports window based profiles. Safari has them now, ffs.
Why not use container tabs instead?
> We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded.
Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this:
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...
mozconfig? In 2026? Seriously?
There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile.
This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already.
I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work.
The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.
You might be able to get Firefox to work with apulse (pa emulation for alsa), i dont know if it still works.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1387154/using-alsa-on-firefo...
https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse
SeaMonkey may be an alternative. It's closer to what I want than Firefox.
https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
Options have a maintenance cost. Pulseaudio is the current Linux audio stack, like plain ALSA was before when it replaced OSS.
The current one is PipeWire (it's much better)
But PulseAudio API is still the "standard".
True, but the bad outcomes are mostly a thing of the past. PipeWire has better reliability, lower CPU usage, and lower latency.
Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.
What if the EU bought some big chunk of Mozilla, something like Mozilla EU, and then ran it? Would the US then cry out against EU buying US companies and start to fund Mozilla?
American here. We'd bitch, piss, and moan about the EU buying US companies. We wouldn't fund Firefox though, we'd be more likely to give a huge government contract to facebook to reskin chrome or some other stupid shit.
Servo [0] is EU funded via NLnet. You can build a browser from that.
[0] https://servo.org/
beautifully sad well put prose mentor encouraged
But at least they are not homophobic like Eich.
Literal who has left the company that provides Google's antitrust insurance policy. That Mozilla still manages to swing "non-profit" status as they do this is outrageous.
I would like to see Mozilla's entire board leave Mozilla... in a PERP WALK.
Mozilla Corporation, owner and operator of the Firefox brand and recipient of Google’s payments, is not a non-profit. U.S. law permits non-profits to have for-profit subsidiaries if one accepts severe limitations, such as the corporation’s profits being largely severed from the non-profit’s use. Severance isn’t just a science fiction show, it’s a compulsory auditable requirement.
> Remember who you're working for.
Whom you're working for.
34 occurrences of "folk". Remarkably grating affectation. Is something wrong with other nouns for groups of individuals?
Why can't people just leave? What compels them to write these lengthy self grandiosing posts "zomg I'm leaving company X".
I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.
I can't speak for the author but I can say that I left companies or institutions on my own despite loving both the (idealized) mission and the team.
I wanted to stay but the strategy was wrong, to my own moral compass.
Consequently leaving in silence, without being able to express why, and maybe even what could possibly be fixed, feels like giving up.
Leaving while telling whomever might want to hear what problems were, and possibly how to fix them, helps to move on while being truthful.
Oh, the irony...
I would say about 99% of the population views software corporations as these monolithic inhuman cubes of pure shitanium. What these posts are important for is
1: reminding the average population that corporations are just abstract human pyramids and made up of normal people.
And
2: doing that through a very human, biased, and filtered perspective that can provide some genuine insight into the function of these opaque systems.
Now, does the average consumer of hacker news get all that? Probably not, but I do think insider perspective is still valuable.
"Why do people want to share their thoughts and feelings with others"