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Leaving Mozilla

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Re: Leaving Mozilla

#101

Post by zipy124 »

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.

That's not what it says though? There is no reason type 1 people can't be in an administrative position. It's merely hypothesising that since it is not their primary goal (but it is for type 2 people) that they will eventually be out-competed by type 2's for management type positions.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#102

Post by gsich »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #76
nntwozz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It's a skill check.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#103

Post by mschuster91 »

> Another delusion comes about because of self-reinforcement. Say you're going to release some, controversial feature. Maybe it's browser based DRM, maybe it's AI, maybe it's Push Notifications. Listening to your users can be a bit challenging[2], because while some might tell you, most probably won't. They'll just leave. That means that your source of information will be the people that stick around, so you wind up getting artificially high approval rates for things.

This is a bit ironic, because... there's a bunch of low hanging fruit that are lacking and that keeps driving the nerds off of Firefox. Take Meshcore/Meshtastic or, frankly, the entire ESP32 world for example - in the Chromium ecosystem, you can use WebUSB and WebSerial to flash and communicate with these things from the browser. It does not get more convenient. Meanwhile, WebUSB still isn't supported in Firefox at all and only two weeks ago Firefox at least gained WebSerial [1].

[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Firefox-151-Endlich-Web-Serial-fue...

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#104

Post by xmprt »

duffydotsvg wrote: post #96
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…

This is new to me. Not sure I totally agree but it's a useful heuristic. Despite being easy targets, orgs do in fact need coordinators, middle managers, administrators, etc. Especially as they scale. (And no AI won't render them obsolete.) Finding the balance between productivity and bureaucracy is the hard part.

It's true that large orgs need all that bureaucracy. But is it still true that productivity needs large orgs? We see a lot of massive hits coming from small teams - whether it's startups, movies, indie games, etc.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#105

Post by b112 »

ekianjo wrote: post #88
Latty wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I absolutely agree it sucks they didn't deliver the opt-out/in interface day one, it was obvious people would want it, and yes, it's not the first time they've blundered. At the same time, they did listen to the feedback and deliver. It now has a genuinely good interface for it where you don't have to opt out of everything, but can opt-in where you want it. It's not just a big off button, it's a general out-out…

> it's not the first time they've blundered It's a recurring pattern of not reading the room

Indeed, and it's on purpose.

Everyone was forced to be exposed to it. To see it. Only after that happened, did they let users disable it.

It's effectively the equivalent of a spam campaign.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#106

Post by mike_hock »

nubinetwork wrote: post #45

> I'm not kidding when I said that Firefox is a niche browser. Folk have to actively look to use it. There was once a time where IE was only ever used to download Firefox... Mozilla squandered that.

Firefox was indeed blowing past all the other browsers and set to become the standard.

That's when Google realized they had to do something. The market could not be allowed to be dominated by a pro-freedom, pro-privacy product.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#107

Post by netsharc »

AlienRobot wrote: post #94
aboardRat4 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It's been a while since I last used IRC, but afaik one of the issues with it was that servers revealed the IP address of users to every other user by default. Since the IP is geographic that's one piece of information you could use to doxx someone.

It'd be trivial (TM) for someone to make a web interface, and the connections would say "Connecting from some-data-center.aws-cloud.bl"...

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#108

Post by deanc »

I really wish Mozilla would focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. I don’t want extensions (attack vector), vpns, fancy bookmarking services that are deprecated later on etc. I want to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#109

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone

>In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself.

>History

>The phrase appeared to have been first used in 1991–1992, in a book about Gulf War weapons systems by Norman Friedman, and On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA's bureaucracy, to describe the relationship between the Space Shuttle and Space Station.

[...]

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#110

Post by dash2 »

"We shouldn't try to be like the big browsers because that's not what our Community wants."

This is just a path to irrelevance. Firefox had the ambition to be the default browser, what Chrome is now! It's a shame if they're going to spiral off into their niche.

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