Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaving Mozilla

blog.unitedheroes.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 346 posts

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#141

Post by ricardobeat »

MatejKafka wrote: post #117
deanc wrote: post #108

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.

How do you expect Mozilla to make enough money from just Firefox to survive if Google ever decides to stop paying them for being the default search engine?

> make enough money from just Firefox

According to 2025 filings, 86%+ of revenue came from the Google deal.

Google pays Mozilla because of the browser. How would shifting focus to the browser make that worse?

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#142

Post by derf_ »

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.

> To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.

I do not think that this was that confusing. People [1] looked around at the beginning of the 2010's and saw

1) Mobile usage was growing exponentially and desktop was... not [2].

2) Every mobile OS shipped their own browser by default, or even went so far as to prevent other browsers from being used at all (iOS) [3].

3) Because Android and iOS both had non-trivial marketshare, neither could be called a "monopoly" so there was no way to use anti-trust law to get Firefox on devices as was done with Windows (not that this would have been a compelling strategy even if it were possible).

People took that set of facts and concluded Mozilla needed its own mobile OS in order to stay relevant.

What they underestimated was the amount of investment needed to make such an OS and get it on devices and the amount of time it would have to exist in a state of not being very good before it could compete with the established players (who were not standing still... people forget how bad Android was in the beginning). But if you look at the actual world we ended up in, with no mobile OS from Mozilla and a total Firefox marketshare that is less than desktop Safari's, it is hard to say that initial conclusion was incorrect.

[1] Full disclosure: I was a Mozilla employee at the time, though not involved in any of these decisions.

[2] I would say "desktop was shrinking", but to everyone's surprise it actually remained fairly steady in absolute numbers, although it did become a smaller slice of a much larger pie. In 2010 everyone expected it to shrink, though.

[3] Mozilla did ship a re-skin around mobile Safari to try to get some brand presence, but was still at the mercy of what web standards Safari chose to implement, and you could hardly call it a first-class experience. Eventually iOS loosened their rules, but no one could have predicted that back then.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#144

Post by j-bos »

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.

The issue is that most dedicated to caring for the bureaucracy tend to overvalue the organization and undervalue the mission.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#145

Post by coldtea »

47282847 wrote: post #113
setopt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably meant UX, which is arguably similar between implementations.

Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense. Discord could well run on top of IRC the protocol and be open to federation without any change of UX.

>Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense

Sure it does, when all browsers have more or less the same, and the context makes clear we're not talking about the mere programmatic consumption of HTTP (like through some REST api).

"But it's a protocol and not a client" is pedantically irrelevant, given that the clients for that protocol all follow the same conventions. The parent already said they meant the UX of it "which is arguably similar between implementations".

Besides, protocols impose some concepts and models of interaction and consumption, which informs any UX created on top of them. So it's not like that client sameness is merely accidental and unrelated to the protocol either.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#146

Post by DrewADesign »

xmprt wrote: post #104
duffydotsvg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With almost no exceptions, movies are never made by small teams beyond the student film level. Even then, dozens of people are usually involved in some way. Writing, acting, score, foley, editing, distribution, graphic design, color grading, wardrobe, effects, lighting, cinematography, scheduling, props, location scouting, set decoration, casting, mixing… the list goes on. Any one of those things sucking badly enough can make the whole movie suck. And that’s kind of the point with a lot of this stuff. I know from having plenty of experience on both sides of the fence that tech folks often don’t realize that most non-tech roles are as-or-more difficult than tech roles, many requiring years of hard-won expertise, and directly contribute far more to the outcome than they imagine.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#147

Post by pseudalopex »

megnu wrote: post #27
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 didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser. A paid email service is also something many have been asking for a while. People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.

> I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser.

You did not read the comments of this submission?[1]

This is common.[2][3][4][5] And those were comments which were easy to find because they said Firefox and VPN. Many other comments said they should focus on Firefox solely. Or eliminate all side projects.

> People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.

People can give money to Mozilla Corporation by purchasing Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, or MDN Plus.

Rules for businesses to solicit donations are strict. Mozilla would have to be more careful than most because people confuse non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And many of the small minority of Firefox users who said they would donate implied or said plainly a condition was Mozilla would abandon other income.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515030

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225892

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434873

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065167

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46323661

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#148

Post by docsptl »

another thing is that the weirdos who were using firefox didn't switch to chrome either, mainly just to other firefox forks or brave, vivaldi.. casual users just use whatever but use firefox less and less

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#149

Post by Lord-Jobo »

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…

They KEEP adding utter cancerous garbage to the homepage/new tab page. I recently installed Firefox from scratch for a coworker who was having chrome-only issues(yes, they do exist!) and was blown away by how insanely gross the default settings are now. It’s straight up adware junk bullshit

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#150

Post by collabs »

nicoburns wrote: post #136
CGamesPlay wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a widely-used open modern chat network? Specifically, I'm fine with the feature set of IRC, but I want durable messages and a mobile client. Speaking as someone who hasn't run their own bouncer in 10+ years.

Yes, Matrix. It all seems a bit overengineered, but it's open and has good clients, and all the modern features you'd expect.

I'm sorry but I lost interest in matrix in 2017 ish when I tried to use my existing matrix log in when trying to sign into the Mozilla matrix and I simply couldn't. At the end I ended up creating a new account on Mozilla side just so I could use it for a few days.

I've never thought of matrix as a mature technology ever since.

even mastodon figured out federation.

Post reply on HN