641–650 of 1001 posts
tldr (if I remember correctly): the higher ups is still paid a shit-ton of money despite firing their employees and begging for donations. Along with abandonware being created all the time (some of them were good ideas even).
More specifically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058534
> 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users…
Sure, power users can be a pain in the ass, but if everything were up to casual users, we'd all still be on IE 1x, i.e., whatever that wraps the same broken, insecure, non-standard-compliant MSHTML engine in the shiny Windows UI toolkit-du-jour. Power users were the first to pick up Firefox when it was split off from the old Mozilla suite, and power users were the ones who began using and recommending Chrome when it…
[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…
I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. The tragedy…
Now of course I'm particularly opinionated about Mozilla, since I donate regularly to the foundation, subscribe to their VPN, contribute to the Rust ecosystem, and use Firefox not only on desktop but mobile as well. So, perhaps I live in what might be called a bubble, but the idea that anybody would knock Mozilla because they are not profit-driven just doesn't make sense to me, and is actually the complete opposite of what I got from reading the comments in this thread, which, by the way, probably has decent international representation anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I certainly don't think the corporate doublespeak is reason to switch to Chrome, but I do think the corporate doublespeak in this announcement is just awful. When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layo…
> inviting a tidal wave of eye rolls. That depends entirely on how the reader feels about diversity. EDIT: I made a claim that the reader's reaction depends on what the reader is thinking, and six people claimed I was wrong, which means they can read minds. Nice. Critical thinking means removing your emotional bias from analysis.
[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…
I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. The tragedy…
Counterpoint: Craigslist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users…
> never, ever, ever market to power users; casual users are more numerous and less demanding. Truth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Mozilla management has me puzzled. They have a position that is incredibly strong, lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to Chrome or Edge. "But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests" Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There a…
A common refrain, but is anything but obvious. Focusing on the browser could be a losing strategy. I'd argue it probably is. The trajectory is terrible: the tech is being commoditized (WebKit, Chromium) and the market share picture is bleak. The opportunity cost is huge: maintaining a web engine, one which basically just tries to keep up with the others put out by Google et al, takes armies of people that could perha…
Someday they had a name which could be worth something, but I lost my trust in Mozilla ages ago. I don't believe their management, to me they have as much integrity as Facebook (ok, maybe a little more... I'm not sure). I am using Thunderbird and don't know a good alternative, so it would be a pity if it dies, but I'll get over it pretty quickly. Moreover, I don't really need any new features for Thunderbird, nothing but security updates.
Even more than that, I am not really that picky about the engine. Sure, I was always pretty enthusiastic about the technology in Mozilla (I mean — Rust! — do I even need to say more?). And I do like Gecko. But, you know, if they believe they will deliver better if they switch to WebKit, I'm kinda ok with it. If it won't break any plugins, chances are I won't even notice. I may cheer for Servo and stuff, but it's not why I use Firefox. The browser as a product is a bigger part of the UX for me than mere rendering engine. Also, Firefox is still a little less of a spyware than the competition. Fuck up that experience for me, and you lose a very loyal old-time user. Keep up with the competition while not fucking it up, and there's still enough momentum for me not to switch. I guess there's a lot of people like me in that regard.
Finally, Mozilla is not a startup with a core of energetic talented people, who can make miracles happen. It is a quite old non-profit organisation, entrenched with politics. Their biggest (only?) asset I know of is people, who know browser stuff. Well, maybe the brand, known for browser stuff. Do they have anything else at all?
So, yeah, anything is a bet, but I don't think I would bet on anything outside of Firefox. Not now, anyway. When everything is good financially and we have money to spare, well, looking for alternatives may be good. But when you are struggling for money and are about to lose everything you were keeping afloat for the last 20 years... As I said, Mozilla is not known for brilliant top-management, that has a crystal-clear vision and makes ingenious decisions that save the company when the business is struggling. The best thing I would expect them to be able to do is cutting costs, finding new sponsors and new ways to "slightly sell" Firefox without angering too many users. And even that they don't do very well.
The most radical thing I would reasonably expect them to pull of would be to switch all forces to mobile version of Firefox and win it, while loosing desktop version. But I doubt it.
[Also, in some parallel reality they could take advantage of political situation and sell Firefox OS to Huawei (or maybe get a sponsorship). But in this reality, Firefox OS is dead, Mozilla is too rigid to make wild moves like that, and Huawei is waaay more capable of building their own OS than Mozilla.]
I wish they would get their "Send" feature up & running again. It's so simple for one-off's, better than DropBox. https://send.firefox.com/
huh, I hope that they aren't planning to discontinue it. I've used it a couple of times and found it really useful.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-suspends-firefox-send-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. People in this business always discover this stuff and then they're always like "Why do they hate me?". The answer is "they never wanted to love you. They want to watch you fall". Like DDG with their favic…
I use Firefox. I have used it since it was called Phoenix, and I still use it today, extensively, on macOS, Linux, and Windows. I'm just disappointed about what Mozilla has become over the years. It wasn't supposed to be an "agile" tech company, with slick marketing and UI/UX, making deals to try to get market share. It was supposed to be a non-profit foundation, making an open-source cross-platform browser engine, p…
I have no reason to think that your assessment of what's "crap" is a good one, while the assessment of those who actually work at Mozilla is somehow worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes it feels like there are people out there who want Mozilla to fail and gleefully seek ways to make that happen (even by doing something as simple as amplifying misinformation), even though it is not really in their interests to do so.
I've never seen any indication that anyone wants Mozilla to fail. But after seeing several years of repeated strategic blunders and bad management, and Firefox slip from being the most popular web browser by a comfortable margin to a single digit percentage market share, which is still sliding down, I think the available evidence shows that they have failed quite badly, and for the most part through problems of their…
Not that I disagree, but it's probably easy being a captain from the outside.