Thanks so much for linking that. This is 1000% on point and I'm so confused with what mozilla has been doing the past few years. It's like the organization as a whole suffered a stroke, and the result is this flowery meaningless prose.
As JRRM wrote, "any man who must say 'I am king' is no true king at all."
Any browser who constantly reminds you how private and user-empowering it is, is probably neither.
Add to that a vaguely liberal-sounding rethoric that could be right out of Ron Desantis' worst "woke lib" stereotypes - without even actually being liberal.
Like, not that I'd see the browser an appropriate location for that, but if they actually wanted to commit to a liberal political view, I'd at least have expected "diverse voices" somewhere. But I have no clue what "independent voices" is supposed to mean.
As Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll wrote, "If your thoughts incline ever so little towards fuming,” you will say “fuming-furious;” if they turn, by even a hair's breadth, towards “furious,” you will say “furious-fuming;” but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious.”"
...to add something of more topical substance, I generally agree with the perfectly-balanced opinion above, in that it's a surprisingly mealy-mouthed justification for what is pretty clearly awful behaviour. I'd respect the hustle a lot more if the response hadn't been so verbally Corporate Memphis.
As an aside, I’ve started adding Lewis Carrol, mainly Alice, quotes to the bottom of my weekly status reports and gotten some weirdly positive feedback on this.
It's not just Mozilla. Western society as a whole is transitioning from one where discourse and consensus is based on reason, to one where it is based on feelings.
Listen to some prominent politicians today. Politicians have always had to speak in convoluted and stupid ways to conceal or deflect the truth, but generally they were coherent, the sequence of words had some meaning you could understand even if it was wrong or they were lying. Now it's just complete gibberish with feel-good words sprinkled in.
It's primarily being driven by a transition to low engagement media, such as social media and cable news, being the primary thought drivers of society. The average person was always pretty unwise, but they typically had to engage with their community in a productive way and would know an elder who was vaunted for being kind, fair, and intelligent, and who could be consulted when difficult situations were encountered. Now our society has been horrifically fractured into small atoms, so when people encounter confusing situations, they have a talking head (who's primary motivation is high viewership) explain something in a way that emotionally makes sense but doesn't actually encompass the complexity of a topic.
and worse than that, it is loaded with all the latest "current things" that are deemed unattackable, or any mainstream powers will label you one or more "ists", and work to silence you at best, or get you blacklisted from any work using bully methods
Western society has had discourse on feelings for hundreds of years (see nationalism/imperialism in the 19th century and authoritarian ideologies in the 20th)
You misunderstand. I didn't say western society had no discourse on feelings. On the contrary, the fathers of reason in the west like Aristotle talked extensively about feelings, far longer than just hundreds of years ago.
I said based on reason. It's quite possible to reason about feelings.
Anyway, what's this "discourse on feelings" that was related nationalism/imperialism and authoritarianism you're talking about? I've never heard of it, it sounds interesting.
Anyway, what's this "discourse on feelings" that was related nationalism/imperialism and authoritarianism you're talking about? I've never heard of it, it sounds interesting.
The KdF movement might be considered an example (Kraft durch Freude, Strength through Joy). Rearming Germany after WWI required the Nazis to rally the population by means ranging from technical to emotional to spiritual. From Wikipedia:
>Hitler's architect and Minister for Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, said in his final speech at the Nuremberg trials: "Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man..." [11]
If you can read that without feeling a chill at the base of your spine, well, maybe it's just me.
And of course, any appeal to religion is ultimately an appeal to feelings, since there's nothing objective behind it. A Wehrmacht soldier who started to question his role in the war needed only to look down at his belt buckle to remind himself that God was on his side.
It's all very interesting to consider, but it doesn't have much to do with Mozilla (I hope).
This is why Mozilla lost a lot of volunteers, too, including me.
I did not wish to contribute to a political organization. I wished to contribute to a browser. It’s not possible to do one without the other at Mozilla, although it used to be.
When people oppose "Politics" they usually mean politics they don't agree with. The politics they do agree with aren't "politics" to them, that's just a normal part of everyday life and it's crazy that other people try to claim that's "politics".
If you have a broader understanding of what politics is in the first place you're not going to object to an organisation having "politics" because of course it does, it's composed of people, it exists to further somebody's goals or else it wouldn't exist, it's not like organisations can spontaneously wish themselves into existence.
My understanding to people opposing politics in certain things, is typically about opposing unrelated political messaging in said thing.
For a free open source web browser, obviously there is will be politics somewhere. FOSS is political in nature. Web standards involve politics, with multiple parties wanting to influence them for their own reasons. Hell, challenging a multi-billion corporation monopoly is inherently political.
Having political messaging about "celebrating voices making the world a better place" is odd and misplaced political messaging, orthogonal to the politics of a free open source web browser, and will alienate part of the people that are not interested in something this unrelated, irrespective to their agreement to said messaging.
I am personally in favor of universal health care. I wouldn't like to see messaging about it in a web browser, just to give a silly example.
Precisely why I abandoned Tor and shut down my relays. It went from a technical project that solved an interesting problem to a "human rights" project that wanted to shape the world in a liberal Western fashion. That's a no-no from me.
If your parent is like myself, as I have gotten older, the perceived delta between "close to a decade" and "past few years" has converged to approximately nothing.
I know. I am old from pre-Netscape era. Generally speaking I use few years as 3-4 years. Close to a decade as ~8 years. But in this case, worth considering Firefox ( Or Phoenix ) was established 20 years ago. 5 years is quarter of its life time.
> As for "making the world a better place", again, there seems to be some kind of implicit political agenda.
Ironically, Firefox could make the world a slightly better place (in a very specific aspect of the world) if they focused simply in making a great web browser, without unnecessary bells and whistles and without any politic posturing, but that aimed at denting the Chrome monopoly.
That's no longer their goal, though. Their goal is to appear like they care about making a better browser, while actually doing whatever makes the executives the most money.
So, is Firefox effectively on life-support, and functioning purely as a corpse from which the MBA-type vultures who encircle it can pluck morsels of resumé-fluff at the browser's expense?
It's just my opinion, but yes and no. There's still quite a few decent people working on the browser, and they deserve props. The browser is really good code-wise. The problem is everything else around it.
The current CEO, Mitchell Baker, is clearly in it for the money. She got a salary increase while cutting 250 employees last year, and still had the audacity to say it wasn't enough. Brendan Eich had a bit of political controversy, but being a technical person I think he would've been better as far as focusing on the actual browser.
> Brendan Eich had a bit of political controversy, but being a technical person I think he would've been better as far as focusing on the actual browser.
He didn't have a political controversy. He was pushed out because he didn't subscribe to the US democrat partisan allowed views, but quite the opposite, which is a fireable offense, apparently.
I don't agree with him on that stance but it shouldn't matter to run a tech company.
I absolutely know that those who censor and fire for political differences definitely don't have my best interests at heart and, while claiming to represent me and my "diversity", they'll brush me aside with a label as soon as I'm not convenient to them or go against their power hungry messaging.
Brendan Eich was a sign of the authoritarian and censorious movement which also tried to bring down the likes of Linus Torvalds or RMS but ultimately failed because it doesn't really produce value and they do, far too much.
Just because someone says they're doing good while claiming you're evil if you don't agree with their non debatable measures doesn't mean they're right, consistent and/or honest.
Eich was in a position to benefit from the size and scope of Mozilla's user base, much as Mitchell Baker is today. The difference is, AFAIK Baker doesn't use her money and influence to rally the electorate to deprive other people of their rights.
It's disingenuous in the extreme for you to cite Eich's victimhood at the hands of a mythical "cancel culture" when the real cancel culture is powered by government-backed forces that he helped to nurture and guide.
In short, if you want to leverage your celebrity and influence to make the world a worse place rather than a better one, you can't expect people to ignore it. There's a fellow named Musk who is likely to learn the same lesson if he doesn't step off the path he's on now.
I wrote a whole reply and then deleted when you're basically:
- pushing for deplatforming based on your own authoritarianism.
- claiming whatever you do is right and should allow no debate.
- threatening Elon mask för some weird reason.
Authoritarians who feel right to censor, attack and deplatform are a problem no matter if they're Religious conservatives or identity politics fanatics.
Both are rabid and don't make the world a better place.
You seem to be one of them and your threats are tired at this point.
No one censored Eich. They just exercised their right to determine whom they associated with... a right I suspect you'd defend to the death in other circumstances.
It's all fun and games until the guns come out. At that point, the person who initiates force, or who supports those who do, is the bad guy. That would be Eich.
> No one censored Eich. They just exercised their right to determine whom they associated with... a right I suspect you'd defend to the death in other circumstances.
That is semantic bullshit. Anyone who is paying a modicum of attention knows that a mixture of woke/US democrat pushed causes have a very specific narrative that, when you oppose them, your person, job, funding, etc might be attacked no matter how many people agree with you. It's not about democracy or diversity but power. BLM or trans issues are the most obvious ones at the moment.
I don't agree with Eich on that particular point but that doesn't matter. Most of the woke mob didn't think those things either until suddenly "they had to".
A very apt man for the job was set aside because he had dared contributed politically to a cause that US democrat narrative decided in "current year" that was bad (funny how current year - N, they might be held those positions).
> It's all fun and games until the guns come out. At that point, the person who initiates force, or who supports those who do, is the bad guy. That would be Eich
No. That would be you and the woke mob, camper bob. Because you posit that words or political opinions are guns or force, which is insane. You call speech violence in order to justify using violence or censorship yourself. But you're the very type of thing you claim to be against, the bully that attacks pretending they're the victim and simply responding in kind.
You're the problem because you think your moral superiority should allow you to exert violence whenever you want for you have the "righteousness" on your side.
In any case, people are wising up to it. If all ethnicities, country of origin, creeds, etc. They don't want to be attacked (themselves or their livelihoods) because they don't hold the right opinion TM: Identity Politics, the current year war (Iraq, Libya, Ukraine) or whatever else US centric thing people push down our throats.
I really feel they shouldn't go all in on it right now. Winds are changing and they'll end up alienating the new youth that I see hints of starting to push back at the feel good activism for the sake of activism.
Why, make a browser that is lighter, faster, and more privacy focused. And with excellent support for plugin developers. Let the bells and whistles be plugins developed by third parties.
Chrome is the product of a company whose mandate is extracting as much data as possible from its users to feed their ad business. Firefox can and should be better, as they could be 100% user focused.
A Chrome monopoly in the browser space has the potential to be more damaging to the web than the Microsoft monopoly in days gone by. They want to make the world a better place? Well, they could have made the web a better place, if they could meaningfully take some share away from Chrome.
It's going to be hard, almost impossible, to be faster than chrome, with the huge amount of money and man-power Google can throw at things. They can probably get "lighter" (as in support fewer things), but I don't think that's going to make things any faster.
Also, experience tells us that being fast and light is incompatible with excellent plugin support, as the more hooks you provide for plugins, the less you can change without breaking those plugins -- that was Firefox's previous problem.
Google's main focus is in extracting rent from their dominance, not in making the browser faster, lighter or whatever.
As for plugin support, that's the challenge no? Make it so the contract for third party plugins can be maintained without breaking them every 6 months as the browser improves.
Firefox has excellent developers. The fact that it still has some relevance despite many years of mismanagement is testament to that. I bet if the company behind the browser was laser focused in making it as good as possible, with no compromise, they could challenge Chrome dominant position.
> In what significant ways could Firefox be improved, such that it would help most users, over Chrome?
Finish making gecko reusable so people can use it instead of blink whenever someone wants to make a custom skin, or instead of electron for "desktop" apps. I grant that it's not immediately user-facing, but it would help give them the actual market share so that web devs have a reason to care about gecko.
FWIW, the Firefox devs who were doing the WebReplay time travel debugging POC weren't, as far as I know, fired. Instead, they left and started Replay ( https://replay.io ), a true time-traveling debugger for JavaScript.
I joined Replay as a senior front-end dev a year ago. It's real, it works, we're building it, and it's genuinely life-changing as a developer :)
Not sure how well this would have fit into Firefox as a specific feature, given both the browser C++ runtime customizations and cloud wizardry needed to make this work. But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.
Obligatory sales pitch while I'm writing this:
The basic idea of Replay: Use our special browser to make a recording of your app, load the recording in our debugger, and you can pause at any point in the recording. In fact, you can add print statements to any line of code, and it will show you what it would have printed _every time that line of code ran_!
From there, you can jump to any of those print statement hits, and do typical step debugging and inspection of variables. So, it's the best of both worlds - you can use print statements and step debugging, together, at any point in time in the recording.
> Not sure how well this would have fit into Firefox as a specific feature, given both the browser C++ runtime customizations and cloud wizardry needed to make this work.
Well it worked on firefox before, but only on macOS:
One improvement would be to have their actions reflect their messaging. They claim their browser is about privacy, yet I am tweaking more and more settings as time goes on. Sometimes it is to enjoy the features where they are available. In other cases, it is to circumvent their actions which are contrary to my definition of privacy.
For Android, Firefox still only allows a small list of "recommend" add-ons. The developer workaround requires listing them in some online account.
I want a way to instal things on my system without a third party graciously allowing me to, that's what I'd consider freedom and why I try to avoid the playstore like the plague. Seeing Mozilla to not be better either is just sad :(
In one sentence: Make it the browser that fixes the web. E.g. Remove ads, privacy popups , paywalls, ad tracking, and other annoyances. Make the plugin ecosystem so good that people flock to help you with that and then people will only want go browse the web that way.
It should be a noble goal that acts as a beacon for others to follow. It'll lose money at first, but they'll keep their core privacy and power user base, until people come around.
Oh and stop following google and privacy advocates supposed efforts to make the web "safer". Those are all mostly propaganda and feel good initiatives whilst the tracking still happens. But that's a long side rant from a pet peeve of mine.
Frankly, it's much less problematic than Google writing a blog post bragging to it's advertising customers that it has started buying a copy of everyone's credit/debit card transaction data so they can spy on potential customers more than ever.
> as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
So, if you buy stuff with a card, there’s a less than one-in-three chance that Google doesn’t know about it.
Wow, really? You’re actually _allowed_ to opt-out from your bank sharing all of your financial transactions with unspecified third parties? That’s so generous of them! What a great world we live in where certain municipalities provide basic protection over private information!!
On one hand, I largely agree with everything that blog posts says.
BUT!
it presents it as some universal, self-evident truth, and I think it's not. Just because the blog author and I and some others think so, doesn't mean it's the only perspective or that everybody feels that way.
I think there exist people who will enjoy that language, who will understand that language, and to whom that language speaks. My wife, possibly. My sister, almost certainly. Many others in my circle of friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.
And, it's Mozilla. I don't think it's 100% accurate to say "you're a tech company" or that FireFox is "just a browser". Mozilla foundation is non-profit, and it does have goals and vision. It is, I think inherently "political", though not necessarily in the current American sense of "political" which seems to mean "partisan" or "bad". It has a goal and perspective and a point of view. It's trying to do something beyond generate profit for shareholders, so I don't think it's accurate to brand it as "just a tech company" (whether one agrees with its goals, methods and progress is orthogonal).
Ultimately, some people DO choose Firefox as a political statement (that statement perhaps being as simple as "I support independent choice of technology" or "I want my browser to work for me" or even "I don't want Google to COMPLETELY own my life" :). Some people DO see it as a way to vote, or impart a change.
> I think there exist people who will enjoy that language, who will understand that language, and to whom that language speaks. My wife, possibly. My sister, almost certainly. Many others in my circle of friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.
But the desire to achieve self-expression through consumer choice is a fucking soul sickness. It's an empty simulation of meaningful self-expression. It's a (often deliberately!) useless substitute for actual political activity. Just because that kind of bullshit is pervasive and, in our society, widely effective for marketing purposes, doesn't mean it should be further propagated.
Free software is largely a refuge from that kind of bullshit, or at least the most cynical, cliche, shiny forms of it. Infesting Firefox with appeals of that kind is not the end of the world, I guess. But it is polluting the clean air I come to Firefox for in the first place with the same smog that's suffocating me everywhere else.
Perhaps Mozilla has figured out that you can't corner the market if you focus on nerds with privacy concerns;
these people (which are also the majority of posters in this thread) are a vanishingly thin slice of the cake. They're trying to corner a totally different market by using that kind of language and design, if that annoys the HN crowd, so be it; they're not the target for this kind of copy.
The problem is that they're not actually getting the other market either. If they wanted to sacrifice the hacker-types but got more non-hacker-types to use Firefox, I'd be annoyed (since, y'know, I'm the hacker-type), but I'd understand. What they've actually done is sacrifice the things that made them good (other than uBlock Origin, every one of my favorite extensions is dead or degraded) and alienated the hacker-types and still not gotten traction with wider audiences.
>Perhaps Mozilla has figured out that you can't corner the market if you focus on nerds with privacy concerns;
True, but "cornering the market" is such an outlandish goal at this point, they shouldn't be holding themselves to that standard. It's enough to capture a respectable 3rd place, rather than the sub-3% afterthought they are now.
And they originally got the respectable showing in the early days by being the "one your geek friend recommends", not by pretending they can out-market the big players with unlimited budgets.
What the words mean is that you can feel good about yourself and believe that you are "standing with" the oppressed flavor of the month, "resisting" whatever is to be resisted today, and generally be an "ally" by using the products and services of corporations that say these words.
It's like landing at Normandy, but from the comfort of your living room.
So they're conducting psy-ops on their users to manipulate them into behaving in a way that Mozilla decided is best? I'm a fan of Firefox, but that's bizarre.
" I don't want a Web browser company to "make the world a better place""
I do actually would like the non profit Mozilla to make the world a better place: by focussing again on building a 100% open source and user controlled browser, that has no ads or tracking (studies) enabled by default.
FOSS is what makes the world a better place. Making the world a better place is not making the world a better place actually because the value of FOSS is eternal and making the world a better place is temporal (o tempora, o mores!).
> I'm sorry, Mozilla. It's been a good ride this past few decades, but I think it's time we parted, because with all due respect, I am now questioning the sanity of your staff. This is not how any normal person or company would describe its new software innovations. This is the language of lunacy. Frankly, you sound unhinged
I think he has missed the current year jargon which is a mix of corporate BS words and Buzzfeed diversity and inclusion crap. It usually means nothing other than:
"We are doing this because of profit or because we want to further censor discussion about something because the right view is X and that's what you're allowed to think and say.
Any dissent will be responded with a negative label on your person and, if possible, deplatforming, which is good, because we know what the one true way is"
They will phrase it as "in order to improve things for consumers, everyone" while literally screwing over a myriad of those people.
Firefox is still a great browser but Mozilla has long been a company that we can barely trust, in the way that it actively is telling us that we need to subscribe to its very US centric partisan politics and view of the world, which has shifted from actual fairness and openness for all vi virtue of being a customizable browser.
Lol. Maybe, although the reason this sort of stuff is fashionable corp aesthetic is because it is, in fact, popular. For me, personally, it's like having escaped the Matrix to a refugee camp, and the morale officer there is annoying. Who cares?! The alternative is fucking vat slavery!!! I would assume a non-negligible percentage of people who use Firefox are techies who feel the same; otherwise, why in the world would they not be on Chrome?
The man who typed those artisanal words of inspiration to Firefox Connect deserves our most authentic kudos for bringing that insightful vision of change to the world.
Mozilla brand managers should be the first jobs replaced by AI.
Mozilla brand managers should be the first jobs replaced by AI.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what Mozilla's underlying strategy is, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
and this is why firefox was in freefall.. focus changed from making good product, to making anything but. The worst part is mozilla doesnt even understand.
also, what is up with the employees there? arent people in tech privileged enough to be able to find jobs? how can they live with themselves participating in crap like that? How do they stand in front of the mirror?
Heh. I am a developer at Mozilla, so I guess you're addressing this (partly) to me.
Yes, I suspect I could find another job. I interview well—don't tell any of my potential future employers, but honestly I interview better than I do actual work. (I will say that the massive layoffs introduce some doubt. I haven't had to look seriously in a tough market, and just having recruiters still pinging me regularly doesn't mean much. Hopefully it still helps to be on the list of people who have turned down offers at $big_places?)
I'm not really feeling it hard to live with myself. Quite the opposite, really; one thing that keeps me here is the mission. It would be hard to switch to a place where I had to work to convince myself that I was net contributing to humanity. I'm not curing cancer or eliminating poverty, but I would probably be crap at those.
But I think you're specifically referring to working at a place where Marketing occasionally makes some boneheaded moves, ones that are sometimes counter to the things that keep me here? Yeah, it's hard when that happens. But (1) I still think that it's largely better here than most other places, and (2) we have this teeny little existential problem that absolutely requires marketing to do Stuff. Despite what a vocal contingent on HN thinks, Firefox's market share is not going to turn around based only on engineering work or pouring effort into improved addons and making nice with the community. Those are things that are near and dear to my heart, and I wish we lived in a world where those mattered more, but sadly I have to live in reality. And if you want marketing people to do marketing, you can't exactly tell them what to do and what not to do. Without the ability to screw things up they won't be able to find the things that will make a dent.
Mozilla is a relatively small company, but big enough that my day to day work really doesn't feel a whole lot like "...participating in crap like that". I don't feel that involved in marketing whether it's good or bad, not even when I'm complaining about or brainstorming marketing-related ideas on internal message boards (and yes, it bothers me that those conversations happen on internal boards). I'm in a different corner of the organization, writing code and doing things to hopefully make Firefox more secure, faster, and less memory-hungry. I don't feel personally responsible for what marketing or legal or HR or whoever is doing.
As for how I stand in front of the mirror... well, sometimes I do it naked, thanks for asking. I don't think either of us wants me to give you a picture.
> Marketing occasionally makes some boneheaded moves, ones that are sometimes counter to the things that keep me here? Yeah, it's hard when that happens
What's obnoxious is when the stupid infects the code itself.
As GP said:
> Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** who orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product.
I'm annoyed whenever I find a new pro-tracking, anti-privacy, or pro-spam setting which is ON by default and usually with a poorly documented setting hidden in about:config rather than a logical place in Settings.
I am sure that pocket and mozilla VPN are perfectly good things for some people, but abusing Firefox itself to push ads (especially when such ads are hard to turn off) is a dark pattern.
I'm sure that analytics can be helpful in some cases, but it's tracking and should be off and opt-in by default.
Marketing seems to corrupt the open source aspect as well, as pro-user changes that marketing disagrees with are rejected; when users submit issue reports complaining about the obnoxiousness and suggesting changes, they are closed because the dark pattern or obnoxiousness is an intentional feature that marketing wanted and refuses to give up on.
> Despite what a vocal contingent on HN thinks, Firefox's market share is not going to turn around based only on engineering work or pouring effort into improved addons and making nice with the community.
And how has this marketing worked out for FF market share exactly? FF grew when it focused on tech. It's in freefall now.
> And if you want marketing people to do marketing, you can't exactly tell them what to do and what not to do.
Why not? There are there to help not dictate the course of the company. Or at least they shouldn't be.
firefox and before that name firebird/phoenix did not gain explosive growth due to central marketing efforts, it did because it was a great product that worked for people.
also,
> It would be hard to switch to a place where I had to work to convince myself that I was net contributing to humanity.
Not sure you are now, but okay. a halfassed solution like what firefox is now, is allowed to live forever without addressing it properly. If it wasnt there anymore, perhaps a real solution would emerge
> a halfassed solution like what firefox is now, is allowed to live forever without addressing it properly. If it wasnt there anymore, perhaps a real solution would emerge
That's why Google keeps paying for it. Or at least part of it.
More of this is coming down the road, it's the kind of vapid nonsense that children are being force fed from school right into uni. Along with wondering if the internet has improved life in general, I now seriously suspect that education was better when it was truly elitist.
Related: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/mozilla-now-only-...