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Leaving Mozilla

blog.unitedheroes.net

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Re: Leaving Mozilla

#51

Post by franga2000 »

probably_wrong wrote: post #32
matsemann wrote: post #5

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 d…

> 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…

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.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#52

Post by teaearlgraycold »

red_admiral wrote: post #6

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.linkPrevi…

Maybe I just love downvotes, but the Firefox AI sidebar is incredibly useful and I make use of it nearly every day.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#53

Post by 2b3a51 »

alex_be wrote: post #38
klez wrote: post #7

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-corpora…

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.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#55

Post by franga2000 »

noir_lord wrote: post #47
franga2000 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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 .

[flagged]

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#56

Post by 2b3a51 »

bluebarbet wrote: post #46
ngold wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#57

Post by dgellow »

samiv wrote: post #29

Why can't people just leave? What compels them to write these lengthy self grandiosing posts "zomg I'm leaving company X".

"Why do people want to share their thoughts and feelings with others"

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#58

Post by krautburglar »

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.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#59

Post by CamouflagedKiwi »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #31
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. I…

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.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#60

Post by probably_wrong »

franga2000 wrote: post #51
probably_wrong wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

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.

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