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Leaving Mozilla

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Re: Leaving Mozilla

#211

Post by yason »

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.)

> IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it.

I consider it a feature that acts as a filter.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#212

Post by bachmeier »

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 felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.

I feel the same way after seeing what they've done with AI chatbots in the sidebar. Five cloud providers. No local AI option. I don't see a reason to use Firefox today and it's been my main browser since it was called Phoenix. I use it only because it's what I've been using for a long time. There's no relationship between Mozilla of today and the group that placed the ad in the NY Times in 2004.

The AI chatbot thing was just the latest happening, but it shows how devoid of meaning that organization has become when you have a technology like AI and nobody even looks to Mozilla to provide leadership on an issue like that. Sure, send all your data to a large cloud outfit, that's the corporate world of Mozilla in 2026. It would actually be shocking to see Mozilla promote AI data privacy. Ironically, the local model I run the most is provided by Google, and it's not the least bit surprising that they're making it possible.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#213

Post by bachmeier »

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.)

The entire reason Mozilla came into being is to do things like improve the user experience for IRC so we can keep the internet open. There has never been any other reason for Mozilla as an organization to exist.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#214

Post by khuey »

saghm wrote: post #204
PurpleRamen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.

Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.

Mozilla ended up switching from IRC to Matrix. Maybe they tested Yahoo Messenger at some point but I'm pretty confident there was never any switch to it (I left in 2016).

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#215

Post by noosphr »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #130
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.

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.

I just run emacs with termux proot debian.

It just works.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#216

Post by ocdtrekkie »

GuB-42 wrote: post #194
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.

I wouldn't want a browser without extensions. Ad blocking in particular. To me, ad blocking belongs in extensions. The job of a web browser is to show web pages as intended according to the standards. It includes all the ads, tracking, etc... the page has put in. If you want to block stuff or deviate from the standards in any way, that's what extensions are for. And extension like ad blocking are an arms race, websit…

Extensions are the primary threat to your security today. Nothing else comes close. Organizations are not basically competent if they are not restricting or blocking extensions, and you should not have more than one to three very trusted extensions in your browser. I'd argue the case for eliminating them in favor of in house code is significant.

As a reminder: Extensions execute with post-decryption access to the websites you view, and they update to new code silently and without asking for permission. HTTPS might as well not bother existing if you have extensions you do not have incredible trust in.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#217

Post by noosphr »

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 made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?

Yes.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#218

Post by khuey »

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? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now?

I worked at Mozilla for a bit over six years and really enjoyed my time there. There were lots of brilliant people attracted by the mission and the work was technically interesting. I left in part because I came to the conclusion that the answer to these questions was no. Google's distribution advantages with Chrome and getting boxed out of mobile by the bundled Android/iOS browsers was simply too much to overcome by making a better product. People can gripe about Mozilla's management or product decisions all they want but the fundamental problem is the structure of the web browser market.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#219

Post by Eisenstein »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #159
Eisenstein wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that it is practical for teachers to abolish school districts and create their own?

You seem to be questioning the possibility of private schools existing when they obviously do. Moreover, you could have publicly funded education without having a state-operated school bureaucracy, or without that bureaucracy having a monopoly on the funding.

Perhaps I am confused about what you mean by bureaucracy. Can you define it?

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#220

Post by cyberrock »

mschuster91 wrote: post #103

> 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…

He's right. The nerds who want WebUSB are leaving or using Chromium on the side. Firefox has just been collecting the nerds who want absolute safety and privacy at the cost of any functionality (which apparently includes removing extensions according to one).

I was floored when I discovered that Firefox rejected Web NFC because they were afraid of it being used on specific outdated Yubikeys. I could understand if they were concerned about it being used to steal credit cards, but the Yubikey scenario is just so out of touch. I can only hope that Web Serial represents a pivot away from that.

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