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Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#531

Post by glenstein »

tokai wrote: post #450
derbOac wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading comments here about problems using Firefox is odd to me as I never run into them. I feel like people are taking about totally different browsers. I don't remember the last time I had page rendering issues or was asked to use a different browser.

Its the same kind of people that claim Linux is too unstable for them, and when you ask when they tried it they say 15 years ago.

My favorite anecdote on this front: someone posted a comment on Lemmy, a fediverse alternative to Reddit, claiming Arch was "broken" and Linux users were delusional for thinking it was functional for the average person.

And when people ask them what they meant, they revealed that they used some package from the arch user repository that apparently required manual compiling for every update.

And instead of thinking that this wasn't the unusual behavior of a particular package, they insisted that this was the normal Linux packaging experience, which was why Linux as a whole was a terrible operating system.

A bunch of commenters chimed in emphasizing that the whole package distribution system in Linux is designed to among other things, handle dependencies and avoid manual compiling (though it's available as an option), and they were all dismissed as just being fanboy apologists.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#532

Post by SoftTalker »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #523
SoftTalker wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux development is paid for either directly or in-kind by companies including Red Hat, IBM, Canonical, Oracle, and others. It's free to use and mostly open source but if it existed only on passion it would be something far less than it actually is. People need to eat and have a roof over their heads.

Those companies pay the improvements they want for their usage case, which is usually far removed from what normal users want. I don't really need support for thousands of CPUs and terabytes of RAM.

Do you remember what Linux was like before the big corporations started contributing/supporting it? Just getting X11 working with your video card and monitor could take hours or days. Setting up a single server could easily be a "project" taking weeks. And god forbid you ever had to update it.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#533

Post by broof »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #468
miroljub wrote: post #457

The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox. The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.

I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.

Are you referring to his donation to prop 8? Im a younger dev and a bit out of the loop but how would that be anti-miscegenation? Wasn’t that more related to gay marriage?

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#534

Post by matheusmoreira »

lxgr wrote: post #41

>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission. > It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”. Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M US…

"It feels off-mission" is incredibly weak opposition to something that would go against core values. It just means this guy's price is higher than 150 million dollars.

Everybody has their price. I'm ideologically opposed to advertising but if someone put 150 million dollars on my table and told me to stop making an issue out of it I think I'd take the money. Being set for life trumps being called a hypocrite.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#535

Post by prmph »

arjie wrote: post #509
glenstein wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's a common cognitive error called Moral Thought-Action Fusion. The idea is that thinking about an action implies a desire to perform the action. You will see these in other circumstances as well. One place it is commonly used is in describing non-religious moral systems that must form their moral bases without axioms from God. A non-religious person may form a considered position against murder, for instance, but…

Don't really agree here. The point against him is thinking in a very shallow way that stopping ad block means bringing in so much, which I guess is true in a certain basic level, but ignores how shitty that would contribute to making the internet.

And believe it or not, human behavior is such that something that is not even i in the space of possibilities is much less likely to occur that something that has been considered and rejected. It might have been rejected ow, but what the calculus changes?

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#536

Post by bigstrat2003 »

dweinus wrote: post #480
miroljub wrote: post #457

The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox. The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.

A) Firing a CEO because there is an immediate, massive public shaming of them is entirely rational from a business perspective B) This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?

> This is the hill you want to die on? That being a bigot should be a protected status for CEOs?

That is a wildly uncharitable take. I'm not OP, but I believe that nobody, CEOs or otherwise, should be fired for their activities outside of work. That can be political beliefs, but doesn't have to be either. And yes, that means that sometimes someone whose beliefs you find repugnant is going to have a good job. That is the price of a free society, and I think it's worth it.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#538

Post by yen223 »

rbits wrote: post #200
darkwater wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which country are you seeing that? For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and t…

I live in Australia and I can't log into government services using my myGov account on Firefox. Works fine on Chromium.

I live in Australia and have been using Firefox for all my myGov needs without even thinking about it

Which service do you have issues with?

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#539

Post by glenstein »

OvervCW wrote: post #273
csin wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 3% number is deceptive. The whole desktop market is cratering. I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile. Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs. So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.

It is the desktop where Firefox has a 4% market share right now. Once you consider all traffic it drops down to 2%. Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

I think you're right, but it's important to emphasize many of these attempts to tell the story of market share get major facts catastrophically wrong. The decline in Firefox market share from like 33% to below 10% is mostly because the world pivoted to mobile, and Firefox "dominance" was in a world of desktop browsers. It was defaults and distribution lock-in as the world pivoted to mobile that led to the change in market share. As well as the web as a whole effectively tripling in number of users, and Google leveraging its search monopoly and pushing out Chromebooks effectively at cost.

For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#540

Post by arjie »

sltkr wrote: post #526
pavel_lishin wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.

So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product. That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that…

I think the correct formulation is: "There are political views that the CEO of Mozilla could hold which would be sufficient for me to abandon the use of products that Mozilla makes". And I think that would be non-controversial for most people.
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