Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#581

Post by mattmcal » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

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.

I've been using Linux on my desktop for ten years and I definitely experience bugs and performance issues with Firefox from time to time that don't occur in Chrome. It's rare but common enough to keep Chrome around as a fallback.

A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#582

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

nialv7 wrote: post #81

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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#583

Post by im3w1l » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

arjie wrote: post #495

guenthert wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.

Each Firefox add-on has a counter of the number of users. It doesn't require some "data trove of telemetry".

In a purely hypothetical world people could have disabled telemetry and also shared add ons on floppies instead of installing them from the store.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#584

Post by broof » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 6:31 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #576

broof wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I used anti-miscegenation as a stand-in, as an example of a ludicrous, indefensible position to hold today, while there are still holdouts who apparently think that gay marriage is some sort of affront to the moral fabric of society.

Oh okay, I see. It is wild to see how much things change because amongst my generation your analogy makes sense, but at the time prop 8 was passed by a majority of Californians.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#585

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 6:32 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #547

PaulHoule wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(1) I like to think that professional web developers are foxier than average

(2) It just takes one on the team to make the difference

(3) Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#586

Post by im3w1l » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 6:33 PM UTC

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…

To some extent I agree, but if someone is deep in the weeds of speculation, not just saying pros and cons of murder in general but also having drawn up lists of people with pros and cons of murdering each of them and possible ways of doing so, then that's starting to get a little suspicious. Perhaps not bad in itself, but suspicious.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#587

Post by agumonkey » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 6:36 PM UTC

immibis wrote: post #577

agumonkey wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must be hard to resist letting some ads through for life changing money...

They say everyone has a price. Wouldn't you for ten million? A hundred million? A billion dollars? It would be extremely irrational not to. You could always donate 70% of it to Ladybird, and still come out ahead. You could always secretly continue helping the adblocking mission under a different name. Even if you signed a contract not to.

lots of possible paths indeed

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#588

Post by nbf_1995 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 6:46 PM UTC

Iolaum wrote: post #114

The web without ublock origin is a hellscape. Whenever I try another browser, I immediately go back to firefox. Do these people even know their users? For example: Fedora Silverblue default Firefox install had an issue with some Youtube videos due to codecs. So I tried watching youtube on Chromium. Ads were so annoying I stopped watching by the second time I tried to watch a video. Stopped watching youtube until I un…

> Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop linux

https://github.com/secureblue/Trivalent

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#589

Post by samgranieri » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 6:46 PM UTC

throwaway613745 wrote: post #300

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 have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades. If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB. The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.

have you tried using pi-hole or adblock plus running on a raspberry pi on your network?

whenever i'm off my home wifi network, i have wireguard configured to connect home and get me that ad blocking. it's so nice.

yes, i prefer to use brave for personal stuff and i use edge for work stuff (reasons,,, don't ask)

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#590

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 6:47 PM UTC

mghackerlady wrote: post #527

PaulHoule wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's complicated. If you are running a company in San Francisco I think you want to be sensitive to the culture there. That cause of gay marriage that he opposed was not one of these radicalism for the sake of radicalism queer positions you see on Twitter-dervied platforms but something mainstream at the root. I think of how on The Bulwark podcasts you hear gay people with a conservative but never-Trump viewp…

I wish there was anyone in Minneapolis or MN anymore. IBM left, crays been gone forever, and what's left is basically just medtech

Yeah, I can't say I feel comfortable in the medtech culture around Boston. I worked remote at a clinical notes startup based in research triangle park -- our mission was "CRUSH EPIC!" and do that through user-centric thinking and I think medtech culture would be a buzzkill for that.