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Leaving Mozilla

blog.unitedheroes.net

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Re: Leaving Mozilla

#71

Post by eklavya »

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…

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.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#72

Post by eklavya »

lawgimenez wrote: post #19

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.

It was a brilliant idea and some day someone will repeat it to make a fuckton of money.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#73

Post by sunaookami »

GreenSalem wrote: post #44

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.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#74

Post by robotbikes »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #36
lawgimenez wrote: post #19

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.

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.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#75

Post by veeti »

blackhaz wrote: post #61
TalkingCodeMonk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 peo…

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

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#76

Post by aboardRat4 »

nntwozz wrote: post #69
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…

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.

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.)

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#78

Post by Eisenstein »

magpi3 wrote: post #62

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 techni…

There are also:

* People who understand that the existence of the organization is necessary for the goals of the organization

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#79

Post by magpi3 »

Angostura wrote: post #70
magpi3 wrote: post #62

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 techni…

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.

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.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#80

Post by skywhopper »

franga2000 wrote: post #55
noir_lord wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

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.
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