681–690 of 1001 posts
The "make Firefox a secondary goal" faction has won again. "Mozilla exists so the internet can help the world collectively meet the range of challenges a moment like this presents. Firefox is a part of this. 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. Over the last while, it has been clear that Mozilla is not struc…
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I don't want to invalidate what you've said, so please don't interpret my comment that way. I would encourage you to think a bit more about a few things: > For example, Google executives don't release statements after employees die trashing the employee because of an underlying difference in personality and/or political views. While I agree that it was probably a mistake for Mitchell to have made that post, I think t…
Please don't worry about offending me / invalidating what I say - it's an internet forum, I don't take it that seriously. Please take my response in the same frame of mind. Your defenses... aren't. It's not airing the letter to the general public that was problematic. It's thinking that those are appropriate things to say out loud that's a problem. One of my coworkers passed from cancer a few years back. Frankly, a l…
It is notable that in your summary you refer to this as political fashion swings, and "unpopular" political views, and an overreaction. Would you characterize the civil right movement in the same fashion?
You also seem to correlate competent technical leadership with someone who sympathizes with Eich's views. That in my experience doesn't follow at all. If anything competent leadership means you have worked with many people of all different backgrounds and have excelled at leading and empowering them. Mozilla likely has many LGBTQ employees, and if your personal prejudices stifle their contributions, then you are not competent by definition of leadership.
I think that train started rolling when they forced Eich out as CEO.
Ever since then, Mozilla seems to be less about best-in-class technology, and more about virtue signalling.
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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'm not quite sure who the intended audience of the release is. Releasing a statement announcing the layoff of many employees while trying to position the company as "a technical powerhouse of the internet activist movement" just screams insincerity.
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How do I pay for Firefox directly? Donating to the foundation seems noble, but like other commentators have mentioned it all gets absorbed into the foundation or is part of a 'bonus product' bundle that (in my mind) overvalues a service I don't want (VPN, Pocket, whatever.) I don't think Mozilla/Firefox is failing because no one will pay for it, but, because it won't take money for Firefox directly.
1000% this. i was literally writing the same comment. just have an easy way for me to selectively donate $15/month to Rust, Servo, Firefox, Thunderbird, whatever. instead you get some generic bucket with no possibility to really vote with your money. e.g. i would have never paid for the A/R stuff they distracted their Servo engineers with (plus the Magic Leap entanglement). i would have also withheld funding for the…
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Nerd and power-user evangelists are the only reason FF ever had any market share to begin with. We installed it on everyone's computer we had access to. We did this because even non-nerds could tell it was better than the OS' default browser, out of the box. Non-nerds can no longer tell it's better, so I stopped doing that. No longer worth the effort, might even end up adding to my friends-and-family tech support bur…
You forgot something, Chrome was also significantly better than all other browsers technically.
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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…
> 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…
But I know what you mean. In the Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths text (which I don't necessarily fully subscribe to except for the naming conventions - which are useful), these people are the Mops. They aren't people who are actually concerned about security (Vanta is a successful product for those people) or privacy. They are the Mops of the Sec/Priv group.
They can't give you anything and you can't give them anything. So there's little point engaging with them. If you're interested, I have a friend working on something he calls overlay networks, to allow the Geeks to communicate with other Geeks while allowing Mops to provide the cultural mass.
I've met other people who were part of Firefox's big grassroots campaign that forever changed the web and won all of us the new standards-compliant web that Chrome has thrived in and a lot of them have remained Geeks. And I suppose almost all of them were Power Users. So I don't quite disagree with you, I just think the group is refinable and you definitely want the Geek Power User on your team - they become the fabled first adopter.
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For me, the feeling of getting kicked in the shins by a diva designer every-other update has risen dramatically in the past few years, as has the prominence of (at least the feeling of) 'closed wontfix dontagree' issues for common and longstanding gripes on the bug tracker and GitHub. The unfortunate nature of a bad feeling is that it will outweigh a positive feeling from another change of equal consequence. I would…
The 'closed wontfix dontagree' attitude, or letting important requests sit there open for over a decade -- some with tens of thousands of comments -- is what killed Firefox more than anything. In the enterprise world, Firefox lacked a few, small, but critical features: 1) MSI Installers 2) Group Policy Administrative Templates 3) Proxy configuration from Windows 4) Enterprise PKI integration Some of these are support…
Why was that important? I was under the impression that exe and msi installer had no real difference between them. Obviously I am incorrect but I am wondering why.
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For me, the feeling of getting kicked in the shins by a diva designer every-other update has risen dramatically in the past few years, as has the prominence of (at least the feeling of) 'closed wontfix dontagree' issues for common and longstanding gripes on the bug tracker and GitHub. The unfortunate nature of a bad feeling is that it will outweigh a positive feeling from another change of equal consequence. I would…
> I would not be surprised if it was the same for other users. Yep, you can count me in this group as well. The Firefox team goes out of it's way to make so many changes that just seem useless or annoying; it's baffling to me. It really feels like a team with too many devs and designers sitting around needing to create work. I very much doubt that's actually the case, but that just means it's a widespread management…
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> Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close... Source? Based on which criteria? If you have even the slightest belief in the wisdom of the crowds, you'll realize that there must be something really appealing in Chrome which has resulted in its 68% market share. Compare that to Firefox's 7%.[0] [0]: https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx
There's no secret sauce to chrome. It's single super power which made it the standard for non-tech users is googles ability to slap a bar on every single one of their sites telling users to use chrome. Google told them, so that's what they did. End of story.
I have tried to switch back to FF (and even to Edge), but every time I realize Chrome - despite all its problems - is a much smoother experience. YMMV.