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Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#541

Post by sltkr »

i80and wrote: post #482
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.

Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. But (2) you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions. People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.

> Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better.

Nobody knows this for sure. We do know that Eich was fired for political reasons, and not because of his technological direction.

This betrays a decision making process that prioritizes political correctness above leadership qualities and technical contributions.

> you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.

Why not? Why can't the CEO of Mozilla have his own private political views just like anyone else, and donate his own private money to whatever democratic causes he likes?

This really isn't obvious to anyone except the people, like you, who view Mozilla as a political project first, and as a software project a distant second.

Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party only makes sense if you assume the purpose of Mozilla is to push American Democratic politics, rather than make good software that anyone in the world may use (spoiler alert: many users of open-source software are not American Democrats!)

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#542

Post by glenstein »

mosquitobiten wrote: post #209
p-e-w wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.

that 3% is of total users including mobile which chrome is king because it's basically force fed to users. this is important because there is no choice with browsers for the common mobile user, most of them don't know what is a browser even if they used it every day. also in the 2000s IE was king because guess what? that was what came preinstalled with winxp

Exactly! I keep banging this drum but I'm fascinated by the possibility of Android being required to have a pop-up where people can choose different browsers, as a potential remedy to Google's monopoly. Because engineering a path dependency on Google search, from mobile hardware, to software, to default browsers, to default search on the browser, I think is part of how they've enforced their monopoly. There's been a legal judgment that they are, in fact a monopoly, but I don't think any remedy has been decided on yet. And there's a lot of historical precedent for a pop-up to select a default as a remedy to software monopolies.

Granted in Google's case, it seems that the Monopoly judgment was with respect to ad markets, but locking people into search to serve ads might be understood as part of the structure of that monopoly.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#543

Post by Herring »

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?

In the US, bigots instinctively recognize and protect each other like impostors in Among Us.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#544

Post by Tadpole9181 »

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.

The guy who runs an affiliate link farming crypto browser built on Chromium now and put money toward denying equal rights to the queer community?

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#545

Post by Tadpole9181 »

sltkr wrote: post #541
i80and wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. But (2) you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions. People with an axe to grind always hide what Brendan Eich did behind "politics" which is a dishonest slight of hand.

> Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better. Nobody knows this for sure. We do know that Eich was fired for political reasons, and not because of his technological direction. This betrays a decision making process that prioritizes political correctness above leadership qualities and technical contributions. > you can't donate to stop your own…

> Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party

This is not what happened. He gave money to a cause with the explicit goal of using that money to prevent his coworkers and users from having equal civil rights based on an inalienable trait they were born with.

That's not an "American Democratic Party" alignment issue, and if you genuinely believe it is, your dog whistle may be broken. It's sounding an awful lot like a normal whistle.

He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#546

Post by zajio1am »

ffuxlpff wrote: post #404
JoeJonathan wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many others, the ability to run uBO is the main reason I use Firefox. Otherwise I'd use Chrome or Safari.

I use both uBO and NoScript and wondered if I really needed uBO if I blocked YouTube as I've planned. However, it leads to Mozilla's earlier weird design choice where you have to install addon if you only want to disable JavaScript on sites - or allow it from only the selected domains. Years later I haven't found a sensible explanation why they ditched that choice. I've understood that you can still do it in Chrom(e/…

On my desktop i use just NoScript and i do not need uBO, as almost no ad is shown without JS.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#547

Post by matheusmoreira »

PaulHoule wrote: post #530
matheusmoreira wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Without uBlock Origin I'll drop Firefox. There are very few reasons to put up with its "niche browser that nobody tests" status if they won't even allow me to block ads. They should just give up and end Firefox development already if they're going down that route.

I'm doing as much to keep Firefox alive as anybody. Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time. I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away tha…

I developed and tested my personal site on Firefox. If I were a professional web developer, I'd work just like you do.

But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford to lose because it's less work for them if they do.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#548

Post by scruple »

guywhocodes wrote: post #325
Silhouette wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think it was a mistake for Firefox to dump its old plugin model. The customisation was a USP for Firefox and many useful tweaks and minor features have never been replaced. Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the big…

It made me stop using FF on android.

What are you using as an alternative?

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#549

Post by prmph »

beloch wrote: post #386
nialv7 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money. No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.

The current pattern in software is, sadly: 1. Innovate 2. Dominate 3. Enshitify to cash in. You can't skip step #2. Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but…

Indeed, Mozilla has a particular bad habit of not listening to customers.

It shows even in the UI design. Features like tab pinning and tab groups work in ways that are sub-optimal to how users want to use them. A pinned tab should not be tied to a specific URL. If you go their forums you see a lot complaints, and weird thing is all the nonsensical arguments that their reps advance as to how these features should work the way they currently are. I as a longtime Firefox user can immediately see what is wrong with these features as implemented, but the devs won't listen. I wonder if they use FF themselves.

Firefox is also the only app on my MacBook that consistently brings the system to a crawl. Almost every single time my machines slows down, the solution is to kill Firefox. It's got to the point I don't even need to use Activity Monitor, I just kill Firefox and and system recovers.

It's gotten to the point I'm seriously looking at alternatives, trying out Orion and Helium browsers.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#550

Post by glenstein »

pnt12 wrote: post #423
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…

I'm concerned about the original quote which has a very weak sentiment. "it feels off-mission". Not something strong like "I'm completely against it" or "we'll never do that". Even better would be similar to the article sentiment: "we could get 150 million now but degrade one of our few features that distinguishes us from other browsers + break a lot user trust, which would bring greater losses in the long term".

That just seems like an ordinary case of purity test syndrome. What they said is they don't want to do it, but they're being convicted of a hypothetical belief in wanting to hypothetically do it maybe, maybe which is the last refuge of scoundrels who have no stronger sourcing for more well-grounded accusations. But in internet comment sections there's no need for accountability or charitable interpretation, and so you can accuse someone of practically anything and it's their job to bend over backwards against the most skeptical interpretations to pass the purity test. So there's a metagame not just of indicating your values but of extrapolating as to all the possible permutations of uncharitable interpretation that could lead to accusations so that you have to artfully construct your phrasing to get out ahead of that. It's never on the internet trolls making the accusation to be accountable to ordinary norms of charitable interpretation.
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