871–880 of 1001 posts
Mozilla might be going through a rough patch, and they now need our support more than ever. Hopefully Firefox will be around a lot longer than the people currently running the show.
I will not stop using Firefox, and will continue to try and help people move away from Chrome.
[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…
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 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…
Only one thing lingers in my mind about Mozilla. When Brendan Eich was made CEO, Mozilla employees did everything possible to make sure that he wouldn’t stay; all due to a single political donation from six years beforehand. While I don’t agree with his position, the whole fiasco tarnished Mozilla and the people in it, at least in my mind. Far from being held to an impossible standard, I feel like it suffered from a…
I'm Jewish. If it came out that the new CEO of my company made white supremacist statements half a decade ago, without any indication they had changed their position since, you better believe I would refuse to continue working for that company until and unless they were no longer CEO.
This isn't a disagreement about the marginal tax rates to apply to millionaires, or a political difference about some minutiae of government regulation. Prop. 8 was directly opposed to the basic human rights of a segment of the population. Why would I, as a gay person, work for someone who seeks to deny me the basic right of an equal-under-the-law domestic partnership? Why would I, as a person with gay friends, overlook something like that, just because the CEO gives vague promises of being "supportive and welcoming" without actually disavowing any of their discriminatory viewpoints?
Human rights are not a political position, and opposing them is not simply a friendly disagreement. No one is obligated to tolerate your attempts to deny people basic human rights in the name of inclusiveness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
[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…
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…
> 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…
Basically, there's money in being an ecosystem like Apple's or Google's app store - you can take a 30% cut just for being the platform if you play it right - but Microsoft noticed with Windows phone and UWP that you can't just set up a store and rake in the cast unless you can attract developers to build things on your platform.
Then there's anchor products, a term from supermarkets for things like coke/pepsi (depending on the country you're in) - the idea being, if you don't stock these then your customers will shop somewhere else. If Facebook/Uber/Whatsapp/$COMPANY decides to develop their app for mobile OS 1 and 2 but not 3, then that's a strong disincentive for some people to buy OS 3, even if it's privacy-respecting and open-source and diverse and whatever. (The desktop counterpart to this is MS Office. For most companies, the choice is between Win and Mac, and will remain so unless Office ever becomes natively supported on Linux.)
Even the government has realised this, with their "clean app stores" plan - I read this part as "we won't outright ban US citizens from buying Huawei phones, but we'll make sure they only have access to a segregated app store and we'll lean on major companies not to develop a separate version for this store.
So if you ever want to launch a new platform, service or similar with a business plan that third parties will develop software for it, you'd better keep these third parties happy with decent developer tools.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance. I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.
The opening, coming from a super well paid CEO, pissed me off. I need a good browser, maybe with accompaigned products but no save the internet, racism, bl, etc. Most likely won't ever support Mozilla with such language.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is how a lack of a vision manifests - if there was a vision, there would be meaningful work for everyone, instead of people inventing unwanted features to keep themselves busy.
And of course, vision needs user & customer research, it's not a thing a 'leader' could hallucinate with no external inputs.
WTF?! I mean, maybe you should actually build the best web browser instead of doing politics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance. I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.
The opening, coming from a super well paid CEO, pissed me off. I need a good browser, maybe with accompaigned products but no save the internet, racism, bl, etc. Most likely won't ever support Mozilla with such language.
There's no way to donate directly to Firefox development.
[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…
One thing I've learned in my time as an engineer is that ultimately, the course and attitude of a company comes from the top. Thus, what upper management chooses to say is a great indicator of the health and direction of a company, especially to a non-employee or someone without other knowledge of the company. I can understand why people would react strongly to this latest missive from Mozilla - apparently, everything we like about Mozilla and Firefox is going to be dismantled to aid in the fight against systematic racism (and starting immediately with the mass layoff of the Servo team). Yes, this is enough to make me consider switching.