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Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#591

Post by fwip »

broof wrote: post #584
pavel_lishin wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's how these things go, sadly.

As an example, Loving v Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down all anti-miscegenation laws, was in 1967. In 1968, a Gallup poll indicated that less that 20% of white Americans "approved of marriage between whites and non-whites."

Three decades later, in 2000, Alabama finally voted to repeal its (inactive) law, and a full 40% of voters voted to keep the racist, useless law in their state constitution.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#592

Post by pessimizer »

vintermann wrote: post #192

Sorry to get on one of my political hobby horses but... We actually need to consider the possibility that yes, it is. More precisely, that the new CEO is trying to do that. It doesn't take a grand conspiracy to join an organisation on false premises. It's totally easy. You can, today, go join a political party without agreeing with them at all, with the intent to sabotage them. Or another organization, including a wo…

I see you're familiar with Stephen Elop. Also, remember that the people who hired Elop probably hired him with the intention of making a fortune off of that destruction.

It's not that he's some secret agent or some mentally ill person who wants to destroy the company while twirling his mustache, it's that he's a person carefully chosen by people who have made large fortunes from Firefox through indirect means. He would be chosen to destroy it in a way optimized for their gain, like Elop was chosen by the board to turn Nokia into a cheap, obvious Microsoft buy, Clegg was chosen to enable the Tory government, or Sturgeon to make sure that indyref2 never happened.

Google is under no antitrust threat at all anymore. Obama judges don't believe in antitrust. Google wants to get out of paying that 500M/yr, and shitting up Firefox is a great way to do it. They'd be more than happy to throw a couple dozen of those Ms to Enzor-DeMeo or whoever will help them get that done.

How much you willing to bet that he becomes Mozilla's highest paid CEO in history, ruins the product completely, then leaves and ends up an exec at Google or some 80% owned by Google offshoot founded by a Google alum?

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#593

Post by kirth_gersen »

immibis wrote: post #570
mghackerlady wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an extension that limits JS to things that actually improve websites (like the bare minimum needed to render a page usable under most metrics)

NoScript, but you can only control it per domain.

+1 for NoScript. It is kind of a pain for the first few days when you have to spend 10-30 seconds reloading sites to allow the minimum needed. It is also eye opening to see how much bloat is added and how fast pages load without all the extra bs.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#594

Post by sltkr »

pseudalopex wrote: post #564
sltkr wrote: post #541

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. 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…

> Eich was fired Eich resigned. > private political views Donations are public material support. Not private views.

We both know that CEOs are never fired, but there is a difference between resigning on their own accord and “resigning” because they had no organizational support. What happened to Eich was the CEO-equivalent of getting fired.

> Donations are public material support. Not private views.

Not really? Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.

Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever? Or are you simply saying that you Mozillians aren't allowed to donate money to conservative causes? Because it sounds a lot like the second one, and then we're back to the original allegation: that Mozilla today is a political project first, and a technological project second. Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#595

Post by Foriney »

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.

In 2008. You know, the year the majority of Americans didn't approve of gay marriage? [1] The year Obama said that marriage is between a man and a woman? [2]

Applying modern sensibilities to history is stupid.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111017161259/http://www.quinni...

[2] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/08/obama-says-...

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#597

Post by phendrenad2 »

arjie wrote: post #540
sltkr wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like we've awakened from a dream. I look around, and I see that the hyper-transphobe's book series has become a best-selling videogame. I wish I were asleep like you...

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#598

Post by rchaud »

zajio1am wrote: post #484
rchaud wrote: post #474

Disabling ad blocking goes hand in hand with an "AI Browser" strategy. Ad blocking relies on the ability to use filters to block network requests at the browser level, and visual elements at the DOM level. "AI Browsers" are designed to add bloat to the browsing experience, by offering to summarize something, or providing contextual information like say, a product recommendation that pulls data from a third party site…

On the contrary, ad blockers and 'AI browsers' goes hand in hand. On one side is naive browser that displays pages as-is, on the other is user agent that shows what is relevant to the user. Ad blockers are just more static / more deterministic variants of that.

What centralized organization with a budget and a CEO is ever going to do that? They are all under pressure to not piss off the giant advertising octopus that has its tentacles in every part of the tech industry.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#599

Post by graeme »

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.

Where this analogy breaks is that at the time (2008), Eich's position had majority support in the US. The proposition he wad funding passed with majority support. Mixed marriages by contrast had overwhelming support in 2008.

Eich didn't suddenly come out against anything in 2014. People dug up his prior funding.

Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic. You can beat someone in a process (Eich's side lost) without demanding total victory forever or declaring more than half of a whole society as permanent villains. In 2008 55% of the US opposed gay marriage, 36% supported it.

https://poll.qu.edu/Poll-Release-Legacy?releaseid=1194

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#600

Post by luckylion »

roenxi wrote: post #65
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…

Yeah, the article's quoting didn't help its case. It doesn't seem fair to quote someone saying [I don't think X is a good idea] as evidence they are about to do X. That being said, in the original context [0] it does sound a lot more like an option on the table. That original article presents it as the weakest of a list of things they're about to explore - but who knows, maybe the journalist has butchered what was sa…

It might just as well have been something that was supposed to sound young and fun ("I don't want to do that") and ends up leaving too much room for interpretation.

If you have the power to do something, saying you might do it but that you don't want to makes people imagine you'd do it. If you have a knife and talk about how you "might stab people, but don't want to", that's a very different message than having a knife and saying "obviously I'm not going to stab people, violence is not an option".

The latter reassures, the former depends heavily on what the recipient of the message thinks of you, and whether they can imagine you stabbing people.

If that quote was accurate, then either he just said something and wanted to wing it, or they should reconsider their communication strategists.

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