>Up to this point, Opera was trialware and had to be purchased after the trial period ended. Version 5.0 (released in 2000) saw the end of this requirement. Instead, Opera became ad-sponsored, displaying advertisements to users who had not paid for it. Later versions of Opera gave the user the choice of seeing banner ads or targeted text advertisements from Google. With version 8.5 (released in 2005) the advertisements were removed entirely and primary financial support for the browser came through revenue from Google (which is by contract Opera's default search engine). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)
Does Opera still do the thing where the new tab page contains sponsored links, and if you try and edit the source for that page it refuses to start because it'll only accept a new tab page with an Opera digital signature?
I like that business model. Something that just works, no ads, nothing. The sublime text model is good too. I will happily pay a one time license for a browser for $100 if it meant no ads and they gave me some cool functionality for it, maybe additional customizations? Then add a solid built in password manager that I know is provably secure that they sync between my devices for me while allowing me to have my own backup, I’d pay $5/month for that through Firefox.
Even if you could buy a browser do you seriously believe that would change _anything_, like even in the slightest? These days they still track you whether you buy or not, the data is simply too valuable to ignore.
It was very common back before Firefox. Netscape, Opera and Omniweb (which in Mac OS X's early days was the best browser for that platform) were the biggest ones. Internet Explorer made it a very tough sell on Windows, and Firefox and later Chrome completely destroyed the market by giving away a better browser than the commercial ones or Explorer. Opera and Omniweb ended up going free as well because the market just wasn't there anymore.
I gave it a good strong shot when 57 came out (I had been on Vivaldi for a while). The performance was way better for sure, but it still wasn't quite there. I also hate how default zoom level still requires a plugin and isn't built into the browser.
Same, I had it as my default browser for a few weeks and it was a huge improvement, but ultimately I had to switch back to Chrome.
No default zoom or pinch-to-zoom were my biggest pain points, then performance (mostly comparable with Chrome, except videos consistently spike the CPU above 100%), and the last straw was the ridiculous number of OS X kernel panics I was getting. Beyond that, a lot of little enhancements would make a huge difference, like support for pasting without formatting, support for whatever clipboard APIs Google Docs needs, U2F support, and top-level await in the console.
I generally love the new Firefox and got my configuration in a state where I was sad to leave the UI/UX for Chrome's, but there were too many downsides to the point where it was becoming an obstacle to doing my job. Really hoping these issues can all be sorted out relatively soon.
Yeah, that part is more OS X's fault, but either way it makes Firefox unusable for me. It seems like it may be related to Firefox's video CPU spiking issue.
I've been using Opera since Mozilla shoved out Eich and Google fired Damore. As far as I know, the Opera folks aren't particularly authoritarian. Opera works pretty well; I actually like it better than Chrome.
EDIT: I wonder if the downvoters are more upset that I use Opera or that I'm critical of authoritarianism?
Opera can’t be considered trustworthy as of this event (cribbed from Wikipedia):
On 18 July 2016, Opera announced it had sold its browser, privacy and performance apps, and its name to Golden Brick Capital Private Equity Fund I Limited Partnership (a consortium of Chinese investors including Qihoo 360) for an amount of $600 million USD.
Because it's impossible to run a >$600 million US-Dollar business in China without involvement from the Chinese government. The same government that heavily spies on its citizens and blocks access to the internet with a huge firewall.
Not a downvoter, but I wouldn't change browser over those things, the browser is too important to any real computer nerd. An alternative browser would have to be open source, maintained by a major group, and have functionality that even the big two only achieve via third party addons.
That's not a reason not to use a fork though, I'm looking at Waterfox, but need to assess if I can trust the devs.
It's a huge annoyance, Mozilla seemed to have kept their ethics intact even with all the Google money but this is the last of several marketing blunders that to me show controlling forces on Firefox have sold out to commercialism over ideals.
Ideally Firefox will root out whoever has lead this current thrust towards selling out users.
You're right, the browser is so vital, that's why I've stuck with FF through technical issues in the past. I really don't trust them now.
They don't really care about that. They'd prefer to see Mozilla fail than to see someone with different opinions to them as CEO. Mozilla is just a battle field for their agenda, not a browser.
More specifically: Eich is not a human with failings and the chance to change his mind. Eich, to them, is simply an enemy like in a video game, where the only winning move is to strike him dead and collect the rare drops from his corpse. It's the politics of our generation.
And your words of support for Eich and Damore make you into such an inhuman enemy as well. And thus, your downvotes.
I started trying Vivaldi a while back, mainly due to performance issues. It's missing some of the features I've grown to like about Firefox and has some additional bugs, but overall it's considerably faster.
Somehow I'm not getting much improvement in speed with 57, it's been a bad transition technically for me too, aside from the privacy/marketing - lost addons (expected, but still), broken fonts, bookmarks not working, one users profile completely broken (other ones on same computer are fine), slow page load, lots of freezes, ... reversing the changes to the newtabpage and such.
Worst update in ages for me, only one as bad was one of the teens (19.0?) which needed new profiles making. I've only been using it since v0.6 or so though ^_^
Damn. This sound like the actions of a few inside Mozilla... Cause it's definitely not in line with the organization's stated goals. So where's the accountability? The people who made these decisions should be held accountable.
Also, even since 57, this week Firefox ("stable" build) consistently gets hung up with just one tab open and spins 100% CPU on one thread. I hope it isn't trying to invert the word "robot" when the thread gets stuck.
It does not matter how few they are, if they are the ones making the decisions then they represent Mozilla. Unless dramatic change occurs immediately, we can only conclude that Mozilla is shoveling crapware into Firefox.
Ultimately, and I don't say this as an excuse but as reality: if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. Yes Mozilla is a foundation and gets a lot of donations but you'd have a much stronger leg to stand on if you paid for the browser. Are you willing to pay $50 or more for a web browser so that there's no temptation for the vendor to sell out to advertisers?
Yes, actually. At the same time though, we see examples of trust eroded even with payment (cable companies, or the latest Windows 10 crap). I suspect that it’s no longer enough to merely pay for such things; you need a way to verify trustworthy behavior top to bottom.
Oh, stop that stupid trope already. There are many other ways of sustainable FOSS development, proven for decades. Look at sqlite, the Linux kernel, the GNU ecosystem etc.
Do we really need an update to a web browser every 6 weeks?
A web browser should display information FULL STOP. When the new HTML standard comes out, implement it. Until then just provide security fixes.
It's really not that hard or expensive (500 Million USD should be enough).
Stop changing the UI, adding crap that should be addons (that's why there's addons), adding adverts, adding spyware ("telemetry"), etc.
---
Curiously all the Mozilla developers and apologists who are so enthusiastic about defending Firefox (and down voting critical comments) have taken the day off...
> Curiously all the Mozilla developers and apologists who are so enthusiastic about defending Firefox (and down voting critical comments) have taken the day off...
I mean, it's Saturday, so yeah, they probably did. This comments section looks more like a pitchfork mob than a group that wants to have a reasonable and civil conversation about embedded extension policy and revenue models. I myself would prefer to spend it with my loved ones than arguing with a comments section mob on the internet.
Up to date browser engine (at least it seems that way, it does pretty well on https://html5test.com/), still gets security fixes, but the UI hasn't been changed significantly in years.
But you realise, that the web today is a bit more than static HTML and that it doesn't upgrade step by step with arbitrary standards, but rather all the time?
I've donated/paid more than $50 to open source projects that are less useful to me than Firefox. So yes, I would. While I know that Mozilla accepts donations, I don't think they've ever asked me for one.
Here is the closest I've seen to a statement: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/lookingglass.
I don't think the explanation that "The Mr. Robot series centers around the theme of online privacy and security" is what the users were looking for...
Well, I am uninstalling and switching to Iridium right now and it's not JUST because of this Mr Robot thing. I wasn't happy with the direction of Firefox for a while but waited for Quantum to see if things would change. The technology improved, but everything else got worse. So it's time for me to say 'bye, bye' to a browser I've used for more than a decade.
But they brought into their "experience" to become one with the mr robot brand in a unique and intuitive way which lines up perfectly with the Mozilla manifesto!
> Also, even since 57, this week Firefox ("stable" build) consistently gets hung up with just one tab open and spins 100% CPU on one thread.
I mean, this probably isn't the right venue to ask about this, but that sounds rather serious. I know you're probably a bit disenfranchised at this point, but could I ask you to capture a profile using https://perf-html.io and file a bug?
If filing a bug is too much work, you can email me (email in profile), but filing a bug will get more eyes on it quicker.
> updates have been known to re-enable it if you turn it off ... But it doesn’t matter - you’re going to re-enable it on the next update.
It's surprising how ... trustworthy Chrome is in this regard. My default search engine is set to DDG and through countless updates Chrome has never once attempted to reset it to Google.
My default search engine is set to DDG on Firefox and through countless updates Firefox has never once attempted to reset it to whatever Mozilla are taking money to promote now.
I know it’s kind of the opposite action, but I lost trust in Chrome over it persistently and repeatedly deleting my extensions. Searching for help reveals I have to “sign in” to keep my extensions. When a browser built by an advertising company wants me to sign in, the only conclusion I can make is they want to track my browsing behavior. I probably consented to that through the click wrap agreement, or maybe not. Who knows? I’m not about to spend a whole day reading 10 miles of legalese to find out.
You'll have to deal with warnings from websites that you're using an "insecure" browser. And eventually it will stop working at all because it lacks features that web developers assume everyone has.
You can disable most of Australis with a bit of css, so using firefox 24 for that reason is pretty heavy on the cutting off your nose to spite your face.
And the article doesn’t even mention the Cliqz controversy [1]. How can you try to promote your browser as the privacy-oriented, user-first alternative and at the same time run into shitstorms like this all the time? Shouldn’t there be someone who can properly judge the effect of decisions like this?
They're ruining their brand image. It's hard to be considered trustworthy when it appears like you compromise your values due to financial hardship. It reminds me of the Ubuntu Amazon integration thing as well. One of the Cardinal rules of free software seems to be don't sell your users by forcing 3rd party integration nobody asked for.
It's always interesting how this happens. Is it new executives how come to power and they never realize what the brand meant to users but see a short term stunt to get some extra profit and go for it.
It happened to Lenovo and other laptops when they started installing spyware (Superfish) on their machines. They basically ruined the brand image that took years to build up.
True and I'd still look at Thinkpads if I had to buy a new machine, but knowing what they did with the E, Y, G and Edge series would make me always look a bit harder at other brands first from now on.
Yeah I get impatient with the "they need to make money" apologist argument. Oh, I get it, you're saying I should trust them because they're in it for the money like everybody else. Makes sense thanx.
Especially as a company with over $440M in assets, $330M of which is invested, with less than $60M/year in accounts payable and liabilities, that received $500M in royalties last year.
I think the real issue is mozilla essentially gets an infinite supply of money from parties like Google, no matter how shockingly incompetent they are.
No, they're not in it for money. In the end (the foundation owns the corporation), Mozilla is a non-profit.
They need money to achieve their mission though: maintaining a browser (in a landscape of evolving security challenges, performance & web standards) and research (e.g. projects like Rust, Servo & pdf.js originated that way) is not cheap. And currently it mostly comes from search engine deals. If they cannot get a similar one, it all collapses.
I can see why they try to diversify their income. That said, I don't agree with the way they do it here.
If they want to diversify they can work on other projects making money instead of fucking up their current userbase.
IMO coding missile software to pay for those projects would be a lot more ethical than what they're doing. Yeah I consider the ad industry and its privacy crushing consequences worse than weapons almost never fired.
Im not certain I buy the arguement that the decline of mozilla is purely a bad management situation. In threads about this, or pocket or cliqz or any of the other mozilla diasaters of the last while, you have a huge amount of what appear to be line level engineer employees defending this crap voraciously.
Something has gone very wrong with the culture of mozilla in general, I think its a copout to suggest that its merely some evil pointy haired boss.
The accountability is at the top. In this case, I would be very surprised if that was not greenlighted by Mozilla's CMO. Whether others down the chain complained or not doesn't matter much, since not everyone can vote with their feet.
But this is happening way to often lately, and the typical "I stay at Moz because we are still doing good stuff and no one else would step in" you hear from employees is exactly the card that the management plays. It's sad, because the mission from Mozilla's manifesto is more important than ever, but MoCo is not the place where this important things will happen.
Switching from Firefox to Chrome is jumping from pan to flame. Google are at least as bad, and in all probability much worse. The Safari saga. In fact, the amount of protestations one here are deeply suspicious.
By it not actually being a privacy-concern and the "shitstorms" frankly being tiny. These are completely isolated to HN, Reddit, Slashdot and the like. No serious journalist is going to report on it, because doing even the tiniest bit of research shows you that there's nothing to report on. As such, the shitstorm is never going to reach roundabout 99% of their users.
Their behavior here with regards to handling the bug tracker is exactly the same as with Cliqz. So this isn't a one off thing. It's the start of a pattern and a dark one at that.
And speaking of which, I made a post prior to FF57 asking where the Cliqz situation went and got no responses. Any idea as to what happened with it? I haven't seen any updates on the situation since and feel like it's just been swept under the rug.
I doubt they're going to change anything about Cliqz, as there's no actual privacy concern with it. There's the technological feasibility for Cliqz GmbH to steal user data, but Mozilla owns parts of Cliqz GmbH, so knows what's going on inside the company and they have a contract with Cliqz that prohibits the storing of personal data.
Mozilla has also made an official statement saying that no user data will be stored, so break that promise would be misleading of customers, and their Privacy Statement does not constitute the storing of such data, so allowing it anyways would count as violation of contract.
Additionally, they're testing it in Germany, where this sort of hidden collection of data either has to be obvious (for example, if you order something online, it's clear that they have to process your address), which is clearly not the case with Cliqz, or the user has to be prompted for opt-in, not either the case with Cliqz, or it may not be personal data. So, if it were personal data, they'd be violating German law.
And the handful of shitstorms in tech-focused online communities are hardly the end of the world for Mozilla. Making the internet rely less on search engines, which is what they're ultimately trying to achieve with Cliqz, is more important than that.
Mozilla must believe that privacy conscious users make up a small percentage of their user base. There's no other explanation for moves like this and their "differential privacy" fiasco from August.
Between that, broken U2F support in FF57, and pages that are broken in FF but work fine in Chrome (I assume due to devs catering to the huge market share) it's becoming increasingly difficult to stick with Firefox.
Or that the privacy conscious people don't bring in revenue. As soon as the foundation/corporation split happened, some people warned that the end game would be the corporation seeking profits at all costs.
Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users, and they pull this crap right after. They absolutely should know better. They should have known better with Pocket; they should have learned from Pocket.
"Fork it" is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it's with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they're an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them. There's tons of Firefox forks, none of them get the point though, you might as well use Chromium. If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's).
Mozilla's role goes beyond the web browser as well. Its mission was to "keep the web open", "keep the web free". This goal was reflected in projects such as Firefox OS, Hello and Persona (and to some extent, Thunderbird)... but atrocious management made those projects a waste of time and money.
The trouble is, it costs money (or a lot of time from talented people) to support a project the size of a browser. I would imagine getting some funding helps keep things afloat.
You even say, "maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's)".
I suppose we should expect the goodwill of corporate sponsorship, but this relationship can quickly turn into the "sponsor" asking for things in exchange for donations.
This situation exposes a weakness and requires the recognition of the fragility of the open source model (at least for larger-scale projects). We've seen weird corporate-backed things in NPM projects before. It happens, but what is the better alternative? How do we prevent it? Most corporations only support open source projects out of self-interest: that is, they have a stake in seeing a particular project succeed because their stack may depend on the software.
Everyone keeps coming with the money problem. But... how about they maintain a browser, with browser functions only? No PDF-JS, no Pocket, no Hello, etc. Just core browser functions and features.
Yes, it might mean scaling back, which is one of the swear words in a growth-oriented belief, but that way, the money should be enough - it was enough for a decade, what changed?
With all due respect, rendering PDFs is something I consider core browser functionality.
Pocket, most certainly not, though it's nice I suppose. Hello was... I don't know what it was. Checking if the market is there at all? Not something I expected to be in a browser.
Seems that's no different than opening with external program, or using a plugin, or using an extension. After all,those things can be updated, whereas the browser should have more core functionality that enable new document types to being opened.
I never understood why anyone wanted their browser to render pdfs. PDF.js is slow, buggy, and can’t edit documents. Every major OS ships with a better PDF reader, and there are still better open source PDF readers available on all major platforms.
> PDF.js is slow, buggy, and can’t edit documents.
That is leagues ahead of native PDF plugins which are slow, buggy, full of vulnerabilities, closed source, require a deprecated plugin infrastructure and usually can't edit documents either.
PDF.js is one of the better things to come out of Mozilla.
Okay. But the solution is to not involve the browser at all. It's there to browse. Once you find and download the file have it open in a real application designed for reading pdf.
Ideally, yeah. But often PDFs are integrated with the web experience as another web page. Or atleast that's how I treat them. I have 2-5 research papers open in my tabs at all times, and I browse through them like I would with any other article.
Sure if it piques my interest I would download it, organize it but I wouldn't go through the pains of doing that for every pdf I lay my eyes upon.
>download it, organize it but I wouldn't go through the pains of doing that for every pdf I lay my eyes upon.
You don't have to do that. Just set your browser to open the file in a real application. It'll automagically download to some temp dir (ie, /tmp) and you won't have to care about file paths or organization at all (unless you want to).
I have tens of research papers open in my tabs at all times. But for a good experience reading I open the full text in my pdf reader.
I don't think you've spent any time with regular people. The vast majority of the world finds computers to be confusing. The less buttons they have to click the better. All they want really is another appliance that has fixed functionality.
You're being needlessly down-voted here (I can only guess at what silly HN tripwire you've activated) but you're absolutely right. Tech people like us might think it's completely obvious that a browser shouldn't render pdfs or make your toast. But end users don't care. Browser x lets them read stuff quicker without switching to another app. They want the monolith.
Yeah, and I know this first hand. I work at a biotech startup and we have some super intelligent people who regularly get confused with modern UIs. For e.g. Not everyone understands that the hamburger menu is actually a menu. Or that flat shaded text can actually be a UI button element.
This gets to the heart of the matter: what is the core functionality?
For some saving bookmarks isn't effective while a solution like Pocket fits them better. Hello was an experiment to see if making video communication more accessible would connect people. Consider the saying about how no one uses every part of Microsoft Word, yet everyone uses a different ~10%.
Anyway, I think it's great that Mozilla experiment and try pushing the web forward. If only they were more transparent and consistently made these things opt in.
Building a secure, fast, usable web browser is a near-impossible task on its own. Anything else they do involves a couple of orders of magnitude less effort. Mozilla would still need the vast majority of funding they currently get to do that.
The problem isn't that they're doing too much - it's that they have nearly no business model, and any attempt to create a business model appears to be selling out to users.
No. It is actually pretty easy. Just fork chromium, strip out the spyware, and add your own layer of features on top.
There are a lot of companies doing this now and Mozilla would be far more successful if they followed this model instead of trying to copy chrome's user experience on top of their inferior browser engine.
Are those things really taking up much employee time? Frankly, they don't seem like it. And some side projects are nice - like Rust and Servo. Persona too, even if it didn't caught on.
There are plenty of open source companies. The company I founded is built on open source principles many of them inspired by Mozilla. It's a bigger challenge, because it restricts your freedoms as a company in favour of the user's freedoms. However Mozilla's mistakes are not due to the open source nature of the company at all, they are due to mismanagement.
They are due to poor understanding of your own userbase. Poor communication with users and employees. Complete lack of judgement.
These are sticks Mozilla puts in its own wheels. It's hard to make money, but it's easy to know what not to do. Simply asking your employees: "Is this a good idea?" would have yielded a clear "Fuck no". That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not.
I do not (now -- at the time that person made that tweet, I did, but not on the browser) work at Mozilla.
However. The "tiles" concept was literally an experiment in whether it's possible to construct an ad system that does respect privacy.
The basic idea was:
* Advertisers submit their ads to Mozilla. Mozilla wraps them up into "bundles", made up of a bunch of different ads along with metadata to use in determining which to show.
* The browser downloads the "bundles" from Mozilla, and caches them locally.
* The browser, based on local data only it has access to, and the metadata in the bundles, decides which ads to show.
In other words, unlike a Google-style model where the ads are stored remote, loaded on demand, and the decision of what to show is made on the server side, this stored all ad content locally and the decision of what to show was also made entirely locally. So neither the advertiser nor the distributor could know whether a particular person saw an ad or (if they happened to) why the decision was made to show them that ad rather than a different one.
You may not like that, and you're free not to like it. But to argue that it "betrays" privacy is simply factually false. And Mozilla's mission is, in large part, to find ways to advance and sustain the web in ways that respect the users. Trying to develop a privacy-respecting way to deliver ads -- since so much of the web is dependent on ads -- is entirely within that mission.
Most open-source software companies that are profitable rely on a consulting model. They develop and open-source the software, then work with clients to implement, customize and support it for them.
This clearly wouldn’t work for a consumer product like a web browser.
>Simply asking your employees: "Is this a good idea?" would have yielded a clear "Fuck no". That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not.
Running a company by polling random employees is not an established successful management style. Its only you who is suggesting it, and then claiming that because they didn't do it, its a bad sign.
> Running a company by polling random employees is not an established successful management style. Its only you who is suggesting it,
He's suggesting that the most simple, stupid check one could think of (polling random employees) would already have shown this to be a terrible idea. They didn't even go that far. That is indeed a bad sign.
its not polling for running the company, its a disaster check. If most of your employees hate the idea, it should be a sign of something wrong because I would expect Mozillians to be also users of Firefox.
You inserted the word "random" into the OP's statement in order to support your position. Your employees will ALWAYS have a better understanding of the state of affairs of projects they are developing, simply because they are the ones developing them. You cannot fully understand the complexities without doing the work yourself. Not factoring opinions about a product from the employees who are making it is incredibly irresponsible, and makes those employees much more likely to find an employer who will value them as subject matter experts.
>Not factoring opinions about a product from the employees who are making it is incredibly irresponsible, and makes those employees much more likely to find an employer who will value them as subject matter experts.
A developer is not a subject matter expert on how to market a product. Maybe you can restate your opinion.
Counter to your statement, "A developer is not a subject matter expert on how to market a product":
Most development experience I have had (open source, exclusively) comes with continual interaction with, and and feedback from, a subset of users who use the software. This subset is populated mostly by power users, those who rely on the software for work, and those who use it regularly. They are the ones who understand which needs the software is meeting and which it is failing to meet, and who ask for intelligent and sensible features to be added.
The marketing departments don't have this built in compass. They create ideas that they think will be profitable to the company, and they simply don't have the necessary connection with the users and with the software to know which of these ideas will be perceived as awful by the user.
The ones creating the software are the subject matter experts on what that software should do, how it should behave, and what the users will find most useful, in this instance.
The marketers are subject matter experts on... Other stuff? Advertisements and buzzwords and increasing revenues by targeting certain demographics of peoples? I have experience with the marketing side of business that has perhaps reflected poorly on that profession, so I'd love to hear from anyone that can fill my knowledge gap.
Plenty of companies conduct internal beta's. Plenty of companies conduct internal usability studies for new features or anything in their product they have the slightest worry could backfire. I mean they could have included this in the developer unpublished version for some time and just asked for general feedback before releasing it. These concepts are far from unheard of.
"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the new developer you hired" - HR
"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the fan choice for the new cafeteria's HVAC system " - Building Management
"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the calculations in the spreadsheets that the company CFO produced". - Finance department.
Hey, I think you're on to something here. We could eliminate entire departments here ! :)
Hmm, when you remove the expensive "we should hire a management consultant to tell us to ask employees about the new dev" it almost seems laughable, like people wouldn't trust or want a kind of 'democracy' and would prefer and respect 'dictates handed down from above'.
Maybe it needs to cost $100k for someone in a suit to say "ask your employees, make use of their knowledge" before it sounds respectable?
> The trouble is, it costs money [..] I would imagine getting some funding helps keep things afloat.
Mozilla has accrued a lot of money over the years. So much money that they could have funded--just on interest--a comfortable loft somewhere filled with hackers on a decent salary who are fanatical about the open web, and maybe a single guy with a tie to "call google", in perpetuity.
That should have been the base case for Mozilla: open web, modern browser, users first.
Unfortunately, brass doesn't vote itself out for the greater good. A modern browser is a delivery platform. The "open web" is a marketing tool. And users are not as important as advertisers.
The rationale is that without clout, they'll be unable to prevent worse things from happening, so they have to allow for these compromises on the open web to maintain that clout, and every setback is relegated to "not our hill to die on," with every next hill becoming "not our hill."
It seems like an unavoidable tragedy, but if we look at similar organisations, can we imagine the FSF or the EFF making compromises on their respective missions, even if they lose popularity or even run out of funding?
I feel they would rather cease to exist than allow for corruption of their stated mission.
I noticed a similar thing with Wikipedia and the ACLU. Too much money seems to in some ways be a curse. Organizations seem unable to Instead of just put a bunch of money away for a rainy day and then stop fundraising for a while when there's enough money to carry out the core mission. Instead they find more and more missions to expand into in order to spend whatever level of money is coming in.
The problem with this is that the people working on this peripheral expansion missions don't think of themselves as peripheral. When there's a money crunch or a values conflict they will fight hard for theirs even at the expense of what the organization was always supposed to be about.
I think the trouble is that the "web" is an overcomplicated BS clusterf___ for exploiting the plebes.
Some guy posted here a week ago in wonderment over how Mozilla can maintain a browser for a mere $400M+ a year. $400M+ a year!!!
If it takes that much engineering to deliver something which is not substantially different than what we were using 17 years ago, I'd count that as an engineering failure.
At a high level the needle hasn't moved much. But even little movements do add up. I'd rather not go back to a web before fuzz testing, fewer accessibility standards, and password managers. Not to mention AOL and its kind dividing the world into disconnected, walled gardens.
I don't know how your year 2000 was, but in my year 2000, I had broadband, no AOL, and a functioning web browser (which was not IE or Netscape), that could:
* Display web pages
* Show images
* Play songs and videos
* Deliver applications (via Java instead of Javascript, granted)
* Download files, and more!
Almost anywhere outside of NYC and SoCal, $400M is still an epic shitload of money.
> Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users
This was the new interface, right? I just saw this the other day and though it looked pretty good; was actually considering a trial switch back (after moving to chrome years ago, when a single bad tab would take down the entire browser).
That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me.
I’m of the view that getting (most) people to consider switching browsers only comes every few years and requires a very large incentive; “We’ve fixed that one incremental problem” isn’t enough. A complete revamp would do it, but takes time to permeate into conciousness. And in the meantime they do this. “Squandered goodwill” seems to be spot-on.
> "That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me."
so that's why you stick with chrome, a browser designed to send all your browsing habits straight to google, the largest online advertising company and commercial tracker in the world?
It's what I call "Android." Google services were never part of AOSP. Bundling all the Google services together and naming the bundle didn't change anything in that respect.
You actually don't have real control over Chrome. Only Chromium is open source, and then you won't have all the features you surely use. Like videos working.
Edit: (+) Sir_Cmpwn, At least not working for me when I try seeing the pages with H264 encoded ones, and when I search, this is what I find:
I use chromium on Linux as my main desktop browser. I assure you it plays videos. The only thing it doesn't do is play DRM'd video, which is a feature.
> needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's)
You touch on an interesting point, maybe Firefox should be soliciting donations from governments who are concerned about the US surveillance state instead of relying so heavily on search ad revenue and being forced to turn to things like this to make a buck.
No offense, but "like, China?" I don't see how involving government(s) and therefore politicising the whole thing is going to make the situation any better. Even if it were support from a government you (but others not) would find acceptable.
Although they should probably not be in charge of the actual development, is it really crazy to think that Firefox could be funded by governments? At some point it is a public service.
It's surprising that people are surprised by these things. Mozilla is not on a slippery slope. That was true years ago, but it proceeded unmitigated. By now, though, these things are the natural result of that decay.
There's a lot of power in branding, apparently. People keep saying things like, "Mozilla is a good company at heart", and I'm at a loss. Mozilla 2017 is nothing like the Mozilla that existed when the Foundation was established, or when the Mozilla Manifesto was adopted. Tons of key people left in a few different waves: first when Google pulled them off the project to go build Chrome, and then lots more who trickled out over the years during and after the Kovacs/FirefoxOS era. What remains is (a derivative of) the codebase + the name "Mozilla" + and, like, Mitchell. But that's it. Keep calling it the same thing, though, and somehow folks act like we're talking about the same thing.
Mozilla imploded—or rather, got Netscapified—years ago. To believe that Mozilla or Firefox is your old friend who's still helping you fight the good fight is incredibly naive and can only come from someone who hasn't actually been paying attention and is easily fooled by (trivially contradicted) surface-level details (like a name). I mean, it's not even like some philosophically tricky ship-of-Theseus problem. Mozilla is dead, people, and this isn't news.
Mozilla is still today doing incredible work. The work on Quantum was extremely forward-thinking in a way that most corporations cannot support; it brought us Rust, which is a fantastic contribution to the ecosystem.
Furthermore, Mozilla has always had troubles with judgement and mismanagement, this is not new. The problems that have been surfacing are old problems, they're just getting more severe.
Uh, looking glass was not supported or worked on by the vast majority of the fantastic engineers at mozilla. This was a marketing stunt probably thrown together by a single intern, and greenlighted by an out-of-touch marketing department.
Sorry, I don't care much about engineers. I care about people in charge. People high in decision making process. If intern and marketing department are able to do this it's really bad. No number of good engineers can change that.
If the yardstick for Mozilla's mission is how fast they can make a browser, why do we need Mozilla? There are arguably better equipped entities doing that.
Their whole mission is to have better judgement and management, advocating for the user instead of a corporation (or foundation). So it sounds like you're in agreement with the GP that Mozilla's decay is not news.
> If the yardstick for Mozilla's mission is how fast they can make a browser, why do we need Mozilla? There are arguably better equipped entities doing that.
Are there? I see no evidence to support that assertion and a lot of evidence against it.
Market share matters. The last vote at the W3C about DRM video being the most recent example.
I mean, I probably qualify as reasonably savvy, and I have used exactly 4 browsers in the last 10 years: Firefox, Chrome, IE/Edge, and Safari.
>>The last vote at the W3C about DRM video being the most recent example.
Which Mozilla enthusiastically and Fully supported Google, MS, and Netflix in support of DRM.
Their fake unwillingness from 2014 was about as transparent as netflix's where by netflix claims it is "all the MPAA/Studios" why at the same time closing down all Open Access API's, and Locking down all their own wholey owned content behind DRM
This is not the first time user privacy has been invaded on Firefox or by Mozilla and it will not be the last
The fact that these Data Reporting features, and allowing FF to run "studies" on you is a OPT-OUT setting not a OPT-IN setting is all the proof I need that the Mozilla of old is long dead.. A Privacy respecting company would make such things OPT-IN, not OPT-OUT..
That is with out even getting into the whole Orwellian Ministry of Truth they are creating, or about 100 other things
> I mean, I probably qualify as reasonably savvy, and I have used exactly 4 browsers in the last 10 years: Firefox, Chrome, IE/Edge, and Safari.
I probably don't count as savvy, but my browser experience over the last 10 years has been a somewhat broader list. Having started with Firefox at V2, I switched (around '06) to my primary browser being Opera, with SeaMonkey as a secondary - especially when I want IRC; Firefox, K-Meleon, and Links are all in the background ready to go. I also used QtWeb for a brief period.
When Opera switched to being a Chrome clone, I jumped ship. SeaMonkey didn't provide the ease-of-use I wanted for an everyday browser, so I went back to Firefox. I'm now more often on Pale Moon.
> There's a lot of power in branding, apparently. People keep saying things like, "Mozilla is a good company at heart", and I'm at a loss. Mozilla 2017 is nothing like the Mozilla that existed when the Foundation was established, or when the Mozilla Manifesto was adopted.
I don't know, Rust and Servo seem to show that there's still the hacker spirit that was there at the beginning, it's just they accumulated a lot of 'business types' if you will over the years and they need to put that engineering face back at the top, instead of being too focused at running a multi-million dollar enterprise.
Servo? No. Firefox 57+, which is based on it? Yes. But that's completely besides the point here, because yeah, serving unwanted extensions - which aren't even remotely useful - is ... stupid. I allow experiments so Mozilla can test new things which will benefit others later. But I don't see any world where the Mr. Robot extension will benefit anyone.
Yes. It's my second browser (and was my main browser until I switched to FF Nightly in the summer). And no, it isn't faster - at least not for me. And it hogs memory as if there's no other software running on my PC. I'm really happy that I can use FF again instead.
it hogs my memory if there's no other software running
What exactly is wrong with that? Do you understand how RAM works on a computer?
Maybe your system is different, but for me, FF 57+ uses much more CPU than Chrome, and unlike RAM, that's a statistic that actually affects something in a meaningful way (increased power consumption).
If you're worried about Chrome using RAM when nothing else is, you might be fetishizing the concept of free RAM.
FF nightly and now stable have been my default browser for almost a year, and I have to agree with you. FF in all variants (as of today) regularly consumes more RAM than Chrome for my day-to-day usage. FF crashes on me several times per week. Netflix, YouTube, and it seems most React sites consistently seem to just chug in FF, but do fine in Chrome. I'm not sure what's happening here, but the hype about FF's new performance gains has not been fulfilled in my experience.
I've stuck with FF because I'm a web developer-- sadly, the money led me there from other more interesting lines of dev work-- and I don't want to see a single browser dominate the web the way IE used to.
The ship exists but whether it remains the same ship is a matter of opinion; and yet Theseus sails onward.
I see Mozilla as suffering from a crisis of identity, internally; it's acting as though it is staffed by believers in the manifesto but is now steered by those enamoured with The Bay Area and its ways.
Rust, Firefox 57, and even FirefoxOS are/were noble efforts to succeed in delivering on the manifesto. Pocket and this latest advert update smack of an executive that is thirsty to exploit the Mozilla brand for profit.
Certainly as CTO. If he had stayed on after suddenly having been declared CEO without so much as a review process, our opinions would probably be very different by now.
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization." [0]
I usually refer to Stross's summary- "The iron law of bureaucracy states that for all organizations, most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective."
More generic form of this would be to state that in any system, those who are willing to go furthest in protecting their position will usually have the upper hand.
E.g. the company owner remains a company owner only as long as they are willing to go sufficient far to keep the company profitable; those who don't go bankrupt and lose their position.
The bureaucrat is not special in that respect - they are "just" the natural foot soldier of those who want to maintain an organisation for the sake of the organisation.
As such the backbone of any long-lasting organisation will be made up of those who are good at both maintaining their position in an organisation, and in protecting the organisation against inside and outside "threats".
Unfortunately such threats can include those who want to focus resources on the original goal of the organisation, at the risk of diminishing the role of the organisation.
Since Pournelle mentions the Soviets: to me this is one of the most dangerous parts of Leninist party theory: it involves rules meant to strengthen a party organisation against the threat of outside force, but it also made the Bolshevik party ideally suited for party bureaucrats and power mongers, whose prime goal quickly became the perpetuation of the party and the privileges of power.
A lesson should be to make any organization as weak as it can possibly be while retaining its ability to function. Unfortunately to function that needs an even playing field, or "as weak as it can possibly be" in the face of competing with multinational corporations quickly means something much bigger than we might hope.
Wait, just because the old guard is gone, implies that the people there no longer care at all about the original mission? I get where you're coming from, but throwing up ones hands and saying Mozilla is already fucked is not helpful—Mozilla is our best chance at maintaining an open web. If we just roll over and let Google have the web because things aren't perfect then we are well and truly fucked because there's really no question of the agenda there. No, we should be holding their feet to the fire, not giving up in impotent cynicism.
Exactly. I'm totally fed up with this "Mozilla is a good company at heart" contrary to every evidence (letting FF slip b/c of all the side projects, Pocket, now this).
There is a natural tension between the desire to do good and the need to make money.
If you can't be financially self-sustaining, then no level of desire to do good in the world will result in the long term ability to continue doing good.
It is like the phrase, Justice without power is inefficient and power without justice is tyranny. You need both profit and philosophy to do good.
Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users
Let's not overstate things. Firefox 57 gained good will from some users. It also seriously annoyed others, both because of the loss of many useful extensions, and because the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time.
The one thing Mozilla still had going for them compared to Google or Microsoft was the emphasis on privacy and respecting the user, and yet I've read about several different cases in recent weeks where that trust has been undermined, this being the latest.
Yes, sadly. I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed on me prior to 57. I've lost count of the number of crashes/hangs since the update, but it's well into double figures by now. Whether it's Firefox itself or the handful of extensions I have installed, I can't tell for sure, but it's much worse here on a Windows box with more extensions installed than a Linux box with just a few. In any case, if the new runtime model is supposed to make things more robust then unfortunately my experience has been quite the opposite.
Please don't quote things out of context in a way that changes the meaning. What I actually wrote contrasted some people's good experience with others' bad experience. It wasn't a blanket statement as it appears when selectively quoted.
I happen to be an existence proof for the bad experience group, but a few seconds with your favourite search engine will readily confirm that I am not alone. I don't know what the ratio of lucky to unlucky users is, nor did I claim to.
The business model of the Internet is surveillance and advertising. It's incredibly hard to resist. It seems like there's an infinite amount of money available if you're willing to surveil and sell out your users.
Is Mozilla strapped for cash or something? I’m happy to donate a bit if it keeps them independent.
Google’s behavior with Android/AOSP suggests they’re more than willing to make the open source version of Chrome useless in practice the second there is no viable competition.
I don’t see any organization other than Mozilla that can keep them honest.
The original reason behind them establishing Mozilla Corporation over Mozilla Foundation was that they can keep this practice going while being safe from taxmen reprimanding them for pocketing what is a charity income from tax standpoint.
Now, Mozilla Corporation bills Mozilla Foundation for "service offered at a market price" to do its "socially beneficial, free of charge and any expectation of remuneration" activity, which is selling ads.
Nope. According to their financial statement, the Mozilla Foundation had $69M in "cash and cash equivalents" at the end of last year, about $329M in investments, and literally gave away millions of dollars in grant funding. It's not entirely clear to me how the financial interaction works between them, but the privately-held Mozilla Corporation (i.e. the 1000+(!) employee company that actually makes Firefox, and which the Foundation owns as a subsidiary) had over $500M in revenue from their search engine deals...
Curious what those things are, because all I can think of is workaround that exploited out-of-spec behaviour (and, of course, web extensions, which has been covered to such a degree it's not just a dead horse but a fresh patch of grass by now)
2. Selling telemetry data about users to evilcorps like google.
3. Ruining interface with project Australis (during the 3.6 > 4.0 update [status bar got removed], tab-bar got degraded).
4. Breaking XPCOM.
5. Implementing a system of stealth add-on installations.
The add-ons don't just get installed stealthily, they are also not listed by add-ons manager.
6. Pocket.
7. Using the system of stealth add-on installations to spy ('gather telemetry to improve users browsing experience') on users and adding ads.
Adding ads to the start page.
Nothing useful ever was deployed via the stealth add-on installation system.
8. Breaking users' preferences they set once.
9. Breaking XUL.
Mozilla is now even more malicious than Google.
Point 9 is the reason that firefox is dead to me since version 57: I will not update anymore and I'll have to switch my browser to a firefox fork because of that on holidays.
Oh, and all those issues - is just what is on the surface, the real problems are way deeper:
1. Mozilla rejects communication with users and developers.
2. Mozilla censors incoming messages.
3. Mozilla has betrayed the trust of its users by betraying its own ideals.
4. I thought Mike Beltzner (aka beltznebooth) was a dumb fucker that took stupid decisions, but turns out - he was the best of management Mozilla ever had: since he stepped away - the browser's degradation accelerated in supersonic speed.
5. Mozilla did too many mistakes and never acknowledged the failure, no conclusions were made, which means that the history to be repeated again and again.
> If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's).
Perhaps the problem is the fact that the Web is so complex that popular web browsers could only possibly be developed by corporations to begin with.
I feel really sorry for Steve and other real developers. Mozilla is not different from any other managers driven corporation. Very sad.
I almost wonder if that's an organized action aiming at removing competition. It's too bad to be unintentional.
> "Fork it" is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it's with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they're an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them.
Well, how do you suggest doing this when it appears that the relevant decision-making parts of Mozilla do not answer to anyone "on our side" in any meaningful way?
It seems to me that the only solution is to make an organisation with a fundamentally different system of governance. By virtue of institutional inertia, I figure it would be very hard to do this by actually raising a competing project from the ground up and hoping to capture any of Mozilla's market share or developer base (not to mention the amply made elsewhere in this thread point that Mozilla is big and expensive for a reason).
The far easier, and quite well-tried, solution is to put financial and social pressure on the current leadership to voluntarily open itself to downstream control. The former may be most easily achieved by having an Iceweasel-style "condom organisation" gain traction - that is, someone who tries their best to replicate all of Mozilla's user-facing I/O (releases, sync servers...) in a timely fashion, systematically acts as a QC layer to strip bad decisions like this or Cliqz and otherwise does not waste developer time on niche interests like classic UIs. For the latter, whatever you may think of the person of the tactic, the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla. Even more cynically, it may be the case that they are the main way anything gets done these days. The (very significant, in my eyes) moral reservations aside, from a result-oriented perspective of what is most useful to reform Mozilla as an organisation, is there any good argument against the "identify a representative set of heads behind this latest measure and call for them" approach?
> the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla.
Yes. If anyone wants to do a git bisect to find when the Mozilla Corporation lost its integrity, we can say it was definitely "bad" by the time they forced out Eich in April 2014.
This is such a terrible way to make an argument, present a case, or say anything that can't be said in a few dozen words. He has a blog, it's linked right there. I can't understand why people use twitter like this.
So, the first post in the thread was ~11:30am. The last one was about ~5pm. I basically appended to it during the day, as my thoughts and feelings evolved on an issue. It's not like I completely tossed out all these tweets at once.
That said, everyone uses Twitter differently. I tweet a lot. Some people don't. I personally blog when I have a long-form, well thought out thing to say. I tweet whatever is on my brain at a given moment. Twitter is more raw, more personal. This is a raw, personal issue for me.
I strong disagree that Mozilla is a good company at heart.
They are horribly mismanaged on every level.
They have burned hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a second rate browser that has seen its market share collapse.
They took hundreds of millions from Google and in exchange unquestioningly supported Google's advertising and surveillance agenda.
They have consistently failed to introduce new features that would actually benefit new users.
They blame the "standards process" for their lack of innovation and features that benefit users when they know that the standards process is a b.s. game. For profit corporations break standards whenever it benefits them. Firefox is the only browser that follows standards written by Google, Microsoft, and Apple, while the other 3 break them, or force through their own changes whenever it benefits them.
Apple blocked 3rd party cookies and Microsoft defaulted to Do Not Track while Firefox kept doing Google's bidding to collect their checks. Just one example of many.
In the place of real innovation, being truly independent, and actually standing up for users Mozilla gives people dumb crusades like Net Neutrality.
Firefox could have used their market share to develop truly innovative features, like what Opera tried. For that matter they could have partnered with Opera to create standards for a true open web, but of course they never did that because the Google bucks were just to sweet for them.
Mozilla has been a failed organization for a long time. This is only the latest reminder.
Firefox 57 was so nice I started using it every day and was actively migrating things to it from Chrome. I could live with the Pocket thing even though I wasn't wild about it. I hadn't gone as far as setting up a Mozilla cloud account because privacy was a high priority and I didn't want to swap one cloud service for another.
Then this thing blew my machine up the other day, I lost days of work, and...hmm. I don't know why a company would ever do something like this, it's incredibly foolish.
Define "affected". The extension might have gotten installed. The extension did not actually do anything, though, if you did not enable its function via about:config.
I think it's time there was a legitimate, organized fork of Firefox. None of this Iceweasel nonsense, but a proper, mature, organized initiative to diverge from Mozilla's codebase. They've made it very clear with the addition of Pocket, suggested sites, and now this addon that their calling has been diluted in pursuit of sustaining their own existence.
Could you please expand those 'good reasons'? I honestly don't see them. I see a world in 2017 where my instant messenger lacks functions I had in ICQ in 2000 (p2p file sharing, for example); I see video conferencing struggle to work which I had in 2007 (p2p skype); I see my browser spying on me and coming with baked in backdoors.
Erm... no. The trouble with video calls is that it's webrtc these days and melting CPUs with their inefficiency. The messenger apps are built on electron, and a unicorns with rainbows IRC client can eat 4GB of memory (yes, I'm talking about Slack). Everything is forced through HTTP. Those were only examples though.
Actually a big part of the problem is hinted in your examples: feature creep from native programs into the browser.
I think it would be an interesting, more private, and safer online world if browsers only displayed HTML and a minimum of JS rather than being entire operating systems, and anything like media playing and high interactivity occurred in native programs.
The fact it ought to be an extension that pocket users could add by visiting addons.mozilla.org but instead it was rolled into the core browser.
People assume Pocket offered Mozilla a lot of money, as there's really no other reason Pocket shouldn't be an extension.
People are naturally nervous when browsers start deploying third-party code in exchange for cash. Especially when auto-update mechanisms are used.
Some would see that as an important line to cross - will they be able to resist the much larger sums they'll be offered to "help users see more relevant ads" and "help users keep safe from viruses"?
Mozilla owns Pocket, though. It's more of a bookmarking UI/service than a 3rd party add-on. Sort of like Safari's Reading List feature.
That's how I've always seen it anyway. I didn't know there was controversy around it, but I can understand how people would be sensitive to seeing another company's logo in the URL bar.
It makes a fine browser extension. It ABSOLUTELY does not make good embedded code.
There is no good reason for it to be "core functionality" in a browser, other than the fact that Moz://a got a fistfull of dollars and foisted it upon us.
EDIT: For example, what would be a good use of core functionality, is if Moz://a included IPFS resolution and native support. That is a protocol level support, and thus would need native support rather than plugins. Plugins do indeed work, but require significant workarounds. For example, native could be ipfs://hash whereas the plugins need to specify http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs/hash
I respect that everyone does not want it in their browser, but you could also say that about developer tools, screenshots, even bookmarks are not "core browsing". By this point Pocket is just another feature, fully owned and developed by Mozilla.
It is impossible to fork Firefox and survive. If you destroy Mozilla all the users will migrate to Chrome. There is no successful financial model for browser development. Browser development is a financial black hole and requires alternative revenue streams for developers to put food on the table.
That wasn't a Mozilla vs Pale Moon contest, anyway if Mozilla would close Pale Moon would likely inherit at least part of its developers and user base. Surviving economically however would be a totally different beast.
So, people are angry because of an easter egg in Firefox?
It did not collect any data, it did not have any effect on the browser (unless you turned on the preference) except look spooky if you look at your list of add-ons.
So yeah, it was spooky, and it could certainly have been done better, but come on, it was an easter egg dedicated to a spooky tv series.
Well it's probably not fair to call it an Easter egg if it had a commercial tie-in and presumably resulted in money for Firefox. Those are called ads. No matter how whimsically they're packaged
But yes, people do like to get up in arms about free code bases that they don't pay for. People need to keep in mind the Facebook rule -- that when you don't pay for a service, you aren't the customer, you are the product.
Yeah, that attemp at positive spin won't fly here, not with this audience. Silent sideload of a paid-placement extension that changes headers and page content is not an easter egg. Maybe if it were activated by a ctrl sequence, but even then... this is a hole in perimeter security. It's the sort of thing that makes me reconsider my institution's security policy to sanction Firefox as a supported and authorized browser. Not cool Mozilla, we can get by with chrome and IE / Edge... MS might not be bleeding edge in browsers but at least they understand this sort of Enterprise requirement. MS might pull some ad placement bs on windows home, but they were smart enough to avoid it with pro.
Well, thankfully the extension did not actually do anything at all. You would have had to manually enable it in about:config, before it would have done what you described.
Chrome is sponsored by one of the largest companies in the world. How will a free open-source project ever compete with that? Of course they’re trying to make money.
Mozilla silently injecting ads into the content of websites through the browser is unacceptable. Full stop.
This is the same type of scummy shit that ISPs have been pulling for years. But unlike ISPs, there's competition in the browser space. Mozilla must hold themselves to a higher standard if they want to survive.
The article was misleading here. Zero people unexpectedly had content change as a result of this. The only way that could happen is if you edit an undocumented config option. That is not what the controversy is about. It's about Firefox adding an addon with a name that sounded suspicious to many, and whose purpose was marketing-related and did not provide any functionality benefit to the user.
Present or not, enabled or not, it didn't actually do anything without explicit user action. But that's not the point, for people whom this bothered.
Many FOSS projects compete with proprietary software without compromising their FOSS principles. There's nothing wrong with Mozilla wanting to make money, but if Mozilla is indeed a for-profit enterprise then they should clearly say so, so users know what to expect. Deceiving the public about their real intentions, that's not acceptable.
It would be cool if someone with insight into the mozilla community's structure could elaborate on how consensus to deploy experiments like this is established. I know that mozilla is very open, but as a fairly huge community it's still somewhat opaque to outsiders like me and I wouldn't know where to start looking. Are there pertinent mailing lists? Are things like this hatchd out on bug comments filed against the Shield product on bugzilla?
I'm pretty curious about this as well. I sent an email to their governance list[0] a number of months ago that never got any reply. As someone who's not involved in day-to-day, it would be extremely entitled if me to expect my views to be automatically taken on board, but the absolute silence (and general low level of activity) gave me the vague impression there must be discussion taking place elsewhere.
I've also tried lurking on a few IRC channels, which were similarly lacking in content on this (beyond idle chat, or helping out beginners new to the channels).
If the answer is that I need to email some individual to get into some private group to participate in (or even just to observe) discussion on governance, then that really isn't very transparent. Certainly public mailing lists I've checked don't seem to contain enormous amounts of contextual content on these kinds of things.
Mozilla Corporation is, well, a corporation. There was almost certainly not any sort of community governance process involved. The marketing department presumably got a "cool" idea and had someone implement it. How they got the OK to deploy it to everybody is another question but that process doesn't involve the greater community either.
It's really an astounding accomplishment to make a browser developed by a non-profit less trustworthy in this respect than the one developed by the world's largest advertising company.
I got massively downloaded about a month ago for complaining about the direction that Firefox was going. I was hoping I'd be wrong about the general direction they seem to be taking in this article doesn't give me much hope for that prospect.
Just post and damn the internet points. There are hundreds of firefox employees browsing every firefox thread, and a far larger proportion of them are going to downvote than would a more representative group of technologists or firefox users. Bad PR for firefox could potentially financially affect them personally, so it's totally understandable and human (though annoying.)
Mozilla has taken on all of the worst qualities of a modern University...ostensibly for the "public good", but really just a vehicle for the whims of a few "enlightened intellectuals" who will "save us all" (from ourselves apparently)
but hey, Mr Robot uses Kali Linux (they only show us this about twenty times per episode) so he should be fine
I am deeply disappointed in so much software lately, especially by the folks who once championed software freedom, privacy, and quality.
A lot of people thought the Mr. Robot stunt meant that they had been hacked. Well, you know what? They were hacked. Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent.
(Side note: I also discovered last night that Firefox Quantum does not use or support userContent.css - maybe this is a Stylo thing but it really annoyed me.)
(EDIT: per the below, my experience with userContent.css doesn't seem to be shared. I may have messed it up on my end. Will report back when I get a chance.)
Except this wasn’t an auto update - it’s a completely different infrastructure pushing stuff into the browser without affirmative consent or even knowledge. And in true malvertising fashion, this system is both opt-out and turns itself back on sometimes.
Auto-update doesn't carry the implicit moral right to install anything company behind it wants.
Auto-update is a consensual agreement with the user. If you use auto-update to deploy something that a vast majority of your users do not want and did not expect, and intentionally so (refusing to roll back a 'mistake'), then you have broken that agreement or moral code.
You cannot use the excuse of "oh well if they don't like it they can uninstall it and use another product" to condone this bait-and-switch behavior. Just because the behavior is legal does not make it moral.
This behavior is absolutely immoral and must be condemned.
We can fork Firefox, but I agree with many other commenters that a fork isn't sufficient.
It is the underlying concept I am trying to shine a light on: software should serve the user. When Mozilla becomes user-hostile, we can establish new guards for our future security. But if we, the software writers, become user-hostile, then there will be no one left.
The fundamental problem is that the software that serves the user needs to be paid for. If every FF user would chip in a small sum, that might work, but people would rather switch to chrome.
It’s not a misconception. Firefox could be sold, the problem is that nobody would buy it. Opera tried to sell a browser, people stuck with the cost-free alternatives. People would rather use chrome than pay for FF.
Stallman's issue is that he comes across as a fundamentalist extremist, and most of his suggestions require making huge sacrifices to one's quality of life.
Take Stallman's own website[1]. It is mostly text. While this makes it fast, it doesn't make it readable at all. And finding specific stuff is nearly impossible. Yeah, there is a search feature, but is extremely rudimentary and very user-hostile.
If it were up to Stallman, the entire Internet would look and work like this. This was OK in 1990. It no longer is. Sorry.
I think Stallman's website says more about Stallman's design sensibilities than it does about the ability of plain text to be readable or for search to be effective.
Wut? That's his website and he makes it however he likes. I haven't ever heard him telling people to make websites with default HTML layouts or not use interactivity or better search tools etc. WRT websites his opinions regard the tracking they force upon the users and the closed-source-ness of them. Maybe you should read things before you link them, eh?
I think the website is a bad example, but the above characterization of Stallman being a fanatic who is blind to other's needs is not incorrect. There have been multiple cases with him recommending people forgo having working software and hardware if it isn't 100% free. That might be the ideologically pure stance, but it's also massively impractical. As a true believer he just does not understand that the vast majority of the users just want to do work with their equipment, and that choosing to forgo working drivers for some abstract right to modify that 99.9999% of users will never exercise is just utter nonsense.
Also, Stallman is a grade A asshole. I've met him, and he is a deeply unpleasant man to be around.
WRT your first point, well, he's an eat-your-own-dogfood philosopher, and he sets an example to what is possible with his own behaviour. And he just does not make trade-offs in his views. What we should collect from them is what's useful to us. It would be kind of hypocritical if he was telling non-free software is evil, but recommended some such software.
WRT your second point, that is subjective and ad hominem. I live in Emacs and without GNU I was stuck with Windows. Without GNU none of the good things we have today would've existed, Linux wouldn't have existed, we were all programming in ASP.NET or C# or what not. So even if he is an asshole, he's a very, very, very important one.
HN has a coherent layout, nice spacing, a sensical grouping of content and functionality per component and view or page. stallman.org is a pile of unstyled textual content which was clearly assembled without actually being designed. Regardless of the validity of his site as an example of what he thinks everybody else on the internet needs to do, the two examples are not not in the same ballpark for readability. Between the two, the ratio of structural elements to textual elements isn't even close.
That's an argument that can be just as easily applied to FOSS software, yet I see no one in the FOSS community warning against the slippery slope of evil that is free software.
No it can't. FOSS can't be misused to take away a user's access to the software and data produced by said software. Other types of misuse isn't relevant because FOSS can't do anything about them.
>No it can't. FOSS can't be misused to take away a user's access to the software and data produced by said software. Other types of misuse isn't relevant because FOSS can't do anything about them.
You're moving the goalposts now. You claimed that if proprietary software can be misused, it will be, and therefore therefore Stallman is right about all proprietary software being malicious - yet it's precisely those types of misuse you now want to deem irrelevant which underpin the entire moral argument behind the free software ethos.
The argument has never been that proprietary software is immoral merely because the code isn't free, but that the code not being free is what allows those other abuses to occur.
> You're moving the goalposts now. You claimed that if proprietary software can be misused, it will be, and therefore therefore Stallman is right about all proprietary software being malicious - yet it's precisely those types of misuse you now want to deem irrelevant which underpin the entire moral argument behind the free software ethos.
No, you just didn't understand the goalposts in the proper context. "Harm" and "misuse" in FOSS have never been about any type of harm in which software may take part, simply the types of harm that can be achieved by software and licensing.
In FOSS, harm means restricting a user's freedom and ability to control their information, privacy and the devices they own.
Stallman puts himself forward as an authority on the best way to use the internet, even though doesn't actually use the internet in any recognizable way.[1] He comes off like an internal combustion engine designer who has never been in a car, declaring himself a traffic flow expert.
[1] "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation)." (https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)
Maybe that worked in the past, but these days, time and time again we see companies offering paid software and services with an extra layer of advertising on top. Old adages like "you're either a paying customer, or the one being sold" no longer apply, you can be a paying customer and sold for extra profit. Companies, by their nature, will try to maximize profits, and that translates to them using any means they can get away with.
I don't agree. This is entirely the choice of the team.
The idea that 'you are being sold' is not fair either.
You choose what to use, for how much, and the resulting product.
So if you want to pay $ a month AND have ads. Well, then do that. If not - don't.
If Mozilla wants to have an 'add free non-profit' they can do that.
But they can't because for whatever reasons - people won't pay.
Some people won't pay because they simply don't want to - and are willing to live with the alternative choice of 'having a sideload now and then'.
Other people use insufferable intellectualizations about all of it.
But mostly it's kind of greedy and irrational.
We get immense value out of web browsers. A $1 a month fee would enable Mozilla to forge ahead being the best browser, free for those who can't afford it - and ad free.
But we can't have that because we are not as intelligently organized as we need to be.
I'm still not really sure what would lead you to believe that they would even consider ceasing their advertising schemes if they had this additional income. You seem to be admonishing people for not taking nonexistent steps that would probably never exist to begin with.
"I'm still not really sure what would lead you to believe that "they would even consider ceasing their advertising schemes if they had this additional income. "
For the same reason Mozilla exists today as 'kind of a non-profit' in the first place without tons of ads.
For the same reason that Wikipedia has no ads.
I'm not 'admonishing' anyone so much as pointing out we can't seem to grasp that nothing is going to happen for free.
The only path to 'ad free' is for someone to pay for it - and that's going to have to be users - or in the very rare case -a 'Big Corp' who sees the strategic value in it.
And yes - I do agree that 'most corps' would try to stick in ads.
Heck - even 'non-profits' like Mozilla - are sticking in ads!
But given what Mozilla is today, if they had the resources necessary, I suggest they would not be pushing ads. It's the last thing they want to do.
Finally - there are tons of services that people pay for that are not full of ads.
I don't get ads when I buy MP3s, and none of my paid apps have ads.
Do you think there are ads for t-shirts in my Salesforce app? Or SAP? Of course not.
Likely because the 'profit maximizing' option for Salesforce is to not put ads there in the first place.
So 'big corp' incentives can definitely align with user needs if things are right.
> Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent.
this is what was wrong about the whole thing. What Jascha Kaykas-Wolff heard from the community, that "the experience [we] created caused confusion" is NOT the point.
That was my initial reaction too, but I think it misses a subtlety.
Mozilla installs software on our computers without our explicit consent all the time, each time you update Firefox; or when you visit mozilla.org and your browser downloads some JS.
It would be impossible for most people to give genuine informed consent, because they'd have to understand what each part of the software does. Most people have not learned to read source code and don't want to. (And the source is available for people sufficiently motivated.) Practically, there isn't time to personally code-review every software update on your system. We defer this to distributors we trust.
And in this case, Mozilla genuinely didn't run any questionable code. They could have done (and arguably have in the past), but didn't. They installed software that actually does nothing. (about:mozilla at least engages the CSS parser; this doesn't even do that.)
I think the problem is just that they're messing with our stuff. Like if someone rearranged the books on your bookshelf to spell out the name of your least favourite whatever, they haven't actually done you any practical damage, but it's really annoying and rude. On principle, it's my stuff and they should leave it alone. Stop being a bad roommate, Mozilla!
This is nothing new. There has always been "sell offs" in the Open/Free Software sphere. An old-ish example that comes to mind is SourceForge. When it started, it was the place to host and search for Open Source or Free Software. It was amasing. Little by little, the service started to rot, became full of ads and just felt sketchy.
Then GitHub arrived, and a fresh platforfm for hosting open source software was born.
(After others here said userContent.css was working for them, I fiddled a bit more. Found an earlier rule in the file that I had somehow mangled and it seems that somehow affected the parsing of the file. Removed the earlier lines, everything works great. So yeah, my fault, not Firefox's.)
I am trying to switch from Chrome to FF, but FF is making it really hard. Some sites freeze regularly. Facebook the other day was trying to open a YouTube link. 30 seconds of complete unresponsiveness. Google products work unreliable as well (inbox freezes, black tab on google maps). Just very frustrating overall and I keep finding myself back on Chrome until I realize what I am doing and conscientiously switch back
I haven't seen the series, but I also find the idea of ARGs interesting.
What it's being discussed here is not if the addon is interesting or not, it's the fact that Mozilla, a supposedly freedom and privacy advocate has installed something in all of our computers, without our knowledge or permission as a publicity stunt for a different company and, when found out, the best explanation we've received is "Oops! You guys shouldn't have seen that".
If they roll out the "Firefox user affluence survey" and start reading all your bank account balances (or do whatever you would find objectionable) I'll make sure to remind you of this post.
Personally, I'd much rather have them make money through these sort of small tidbits than rely entirely on Google money. If they actually were on a slippery slope and selling out user privacy or whatnot for profit, I'd also not think of it to be acceptable, but to me there's always a clear distance from that slope in anything that Mozilla does, by ensuring that no privacy violations or anything along those lines happen. Specifically with things that people will spin conspiracy theories about and bring out the pitchforks, they always go the extra mile to ensure that really nothing is actually bad about it.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] thread> We didn't make any money off of this; it was intended as an easter egg in Firefox for fans of the show. https://www.metafilter.com/171227/Your-Reality-Is-Driven-By-...
>Up to this point, Opera was trialware and had to be purchased after the trial period ended. Version 5.0 (released in 2000) saw the end of this requirement. Instead, Opera became ad-sponsored, displaying advertisements to users who had not paid for it. Later versions of Opera gave the user the choice of seeing banner ads or targeted text advertisements from Google. With version 8.5 (released in 2005) the advertisements were removed entirely and primary financial support for the browser came through revenue from Google (which is by contract Opera's default search engine). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)
Theres also a nice iPhone app with tons of functionality
I like that business model. Something that just works, no ads, nothing. The sublime text model is good too. I will happily pay a one time license for a browser for $100 if it meant no ads and they gave me some cool functionality for it, maybe additional customizations? Then add a solid built in password manager that I know is provably secure that they sync between my devices for me while allowing me to have my own backup, I’d pay $5/month for that through Firefox.
No default zoom or pinch-to-zoom were my biggest pain points, then performance (mostly comparable with Chrome, except videos consistently spike the CPU above 100%), and the last straw was the ridiculous number of OS X kernel panics I was getting. Beyond that, a lot of little enhancements would make a huge difference, like support for pasting without formatting, support for whatever clipboard APIs Google Docs needs, U2F support, and top-level await in the console.
I generally love the new Firefox and got my configuration in a state where I was sad to leave the UI/UX for Chrome's, but there were too many downsides to the point where it was becoming an obstacle to doing my job. Really hoping these issues can all be sorted out relatively soon.
EDIT: I wonder if the downvoters are more upset that I use Opera or that I'm critical of authoritarianism?
On 18 July 2016, Opera announced it had sold its browser, privacy and performance apps, and its name to Golden Brick Capital Private Equity Fund I Limited Partnership (a consortium of Chinese investors including Qihoo 360) for an amount of $600 million USD.
It's a huge annoyance, Mozilla seemed to have kept their ethics intact even with all the Google money but this is the last of several marketing blunders that to me show controlling forces on Firefox have sold out to commercialism over ideals.
Ideally Firefox will root out whoever has lead this current thrust towards selling out users.
You're right, the browser is so vital, that's why I've stuck with FF through technical issues in the past. I really don't trust them now.
More specifically: Eich is not a human with failings and the chance to change his mind. Eich, to them, is simply an enemy like in a video game, where the only winning move is to strike him dead and collect the rare drops from his corpse. It's the politics of our generation.
And your words of support for Eich and Damore make you into such an inhuman enemy as well. And thus, your downvotes.
Source: the blog post
Worst update in ages for me, only one as bad was one of the teens (19.0?) which needed new profiles making. I've only been using it since v0.6 or so though ^_^
Also, even since 57, this week Firefox ("stable" build) consistently gets hung up with just one tab open and spins 100% CPU on one thread. I hope it isn't trying to invert the word "robot" when the thread gets stuck.
How many people would need to pay that to fund the Firefox team for the next five years though? My guess is: not enough.
A web browser should display information FULL STOP. When the new HTML standard comes out, implement it. Until then just provide security fixes.
It's really not that hard or expensive (500 Million USD should be enough).
Stop changing the UI, adding crap that should be addons (that's why there's addons), adding adverts, adding spyware ("telemetry"), etc.
---
Curiously all the Mozilla developers and apologists who are so enthusiastic about defending Firefox (and down voting critical comments) have taken the day off...
You'd lose the non-security bug fixes and the performance improvements. I wouldn't like it, and it would surely be obsolete/irrelevant extremely fast.
Sometimes it seems it's more about job security. How many rewrites do you need?
Mozilla's Law:
(Use McConaughey Voice)
As Intel processors get faster... Mozilla's software stays the same... speed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
I mean, it's Saturday, so yeah, they probably did. This comments section looks more like a pitchfork mob than a group that wants to have a reasonable and civil conversation about embedded extension policy and revenue models. I myself would prefer to spend it with my loved ones than arguing with a comments section mob on the internet.
By summarily dismissing a bunch of legitimate concerns by multiple users you are basically saying users don't matter.
That kind of ivory tower attitude never worked well without leverage.
https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
Up to date browser engine (at least it seems that way, it does pretty well on https://html5test.com/), still gets security fixes, but the UI hasn't been changed significantly in years.
considering how overly complicated and insecure browsers have become, probably yeah
Debian. FreeBSD. OpenBSD. Dillo. Netsurf.
Or, Windows 10.
Sometimes, free stuff is a product. Sometimes, you pay and are still the product.
This is like PR 101 to me. The most shocking thing so far is their silence -- Mozilla is not a new organization!!
Not uninstalling or anything but now I'm keeping an eye on my about:preferences
There’s no need to be hyperbolic.
I mean, this probably isn't the right venue to ask about this, but that sounds rather serious. I know you're probably a bit disenfranchised at this point, but could I ask you to capture a profile using https://perf-html.io and file a bug?
If filing a bug is too much work, you can email me (email in profile), but filing a bug will get more eyes on it quicker.
It's surprising how ... trustworthy Chrome is in this regard. My default search engine is set to DDG and through countless updates Chrome has never once attempted to reset it to Google.
Firefox 24 in a VM
It's insecure, slow, but it's the last good version of Firefox.
Anything after 24, has Australis, which is the beginning of the end of Mozilla IMHO.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708
It happened to Lenovo and other laptops when they started installing spyware (Superfish) on their machines. They basically ruined the brand image that took years to build up.
They need money to achieve their mission though: maintaining a browser (in a landscape of evolving security challenges, performance & web standards) and research (e.g. projects like Rust, Servo & pdf.js originated that way) is not cheap. And currently it mostly comes from search engine deals. If they cannot get a similar one, it all collapses.
I can see why they try to diversify their income. That said, I don't agree with the way they do it here.
IMO coding missile software to pay for those projects would be a lot more ethical than what they're doing. Yeah I consider the ad industry and its privacy crushing consequences worse than weapons almost never fired.
Something has gone very wrong with the culture of mozilla in general, I think its a copout to suggest that its merely some evil pointy haired boss.
But this is happening way to often lately, and the typical "I stay at Moz because we are still doing good stuff and no one else would step in" you hear from employees is exactly the card that the management plays. It's sad, because the mission from Mozilla's manifesto is more important than ever, but MoCo is not the place where this important things will happen.
If there is causality, Cliqz wasn't just a controversy, it was a loss that the benefit of Quantum will have a hard time counteracting.
We will have to see what drop, if any, the Robot controversy brings.
And speaking of which, I made a post prior to FF57 asking where the Cliqz situation went and got no responses. Any idea as to what happened with it? I haven't seen any updates on the situation since and feel like it's just been swept under the rug.
Mozilla has also made an official statement saying that no user data will be stored, so break that promise would be misleading of customers, and their Privacy Statement does not constitute the storing of such data, so allowing it anyways would count as violation of contract.
Additionally, they're testing it in Germany, where this sort of hidden collection of data either has to be obvious (for example, if you order something online, it's clear that they have to process your address), which is clearly not the case with Cliqz, or the user has to be prompted for opt-in, not either the case with Cliqz, or it may not be personal data. So, if it were personal data, they'd be violating German law.
And the handful of shitstorms in tech-focused online communities are hardly the end of the world for Mozilla. Making the internet rely less on search engines, which is what they're ultimately trying to achieve with Cliqz, is more important than that.
Between that, broken U2F support in FF57, and pages that are broken in FF but work fine in Chrome (I assume due to devs catering to the huge market share) it's becoming increasingly difficult to stick with Firefox.
Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users, and they pull this crap right after. They absolutely should know better. They should have known better with Pocket; they should have learned from Pocket.
"Fork it" is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it's with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they're an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them. There's tons of Firefox forks, none of them get the point though, you might as well use Chromium. If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's).
Mozilla's role goes beyond the web browser as well. Its mission was to "keep the web open", "keep the web free". This goal was reflected in projects such as Firefox OS, Hello and Persona (and to some extent, Thunderbird)... but atrocious management made those projects a waste of time and money.
It's not Firefox you need to fork, it's Mozilla.
You even say, "maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's)".
I suppose we should expect the goodwill of corporate sponsorship, but this relationship can quickly turn into the "sponsor" asking for things in exchange for donations.
This situation exposes a weakness and requires the recognition of the fragility of the open source model (at least for larger-scale projects). We've seen weird corporate-backed things in NPM projects before. It happens, but what is the better alternative? How do we prevent it? Most corporations only support open source projects out of self-interest: that is, they have a stake in seeing a particular project succeed because their stack may depend on the software.
Yes, it might mean scaling back, which is one of the swear words in a growth-oriented belief, but that way, the money should be enough - it was enough for a decade, what changed?
Pocket, most certainly not, though it's nice I suppose. Hello was... I don't know what it was. Checking if the market is there at all? Not something I expected to be in a browser.
Seems that's no different than opening with external program, or using a plugin, or using an extension. After all,those things can be updated, whereas the browser should have more core functionality that enable new document types to being opened.
That is leagues ahead of native PDF plugins which are slow, buggy, full of vulnerabilities, closed source, require a deprecated plugin infrastructure and usually can't edit documents either.
PDF.js is one of the better things to come out of Mozilla.
Sure if it piques my interest I would download it, organize it but I wouldn't go through the pains of doing that for every pdf I lay my eyes upon.
You don't have to do that. Just set your browser to open the file in a real application. It'll automagically download to some temp dir (ie, /tmp) and you won't have to care about file paths or organization at all (unless you want to).
I have tens of research papers open in my tabs at all times. But for a good experience reading I open the full text in my pdf reader.
We can dislike it, but we need to reconcile it.
For some saving bookmarks isn't effective while a solution like Pocket fits them better. Hello was an experiment to see if making video communication more accessible would connect people. Consider the saying about how no one uses every part of Microsoft Word, yet everyone uses a different ~10%.
Anyway, I think it's great that Mozilla experiment and try pushing the web forward. If only they were more transparent and consistently made these things opt in.
They hijacked Mozilla to have a private playground for fun projects paid for by the search engine integration.
The problem isn't that they're doing too much - it's that they have nearly no business model, and any attempt to create a business model appears to be selling out to users.
There are a lot of companies doing this now and Mozilla would be far more successful if they followed this model instead of trying to copy chrome's user experience on top of their inferior browser engine.
They are due to poor understanding of your own userbase. Poor communication with users and employees. Complete lack of judgement.
These are sticks Mozilla puts in its own wheels. It's hard to make money, but it's easy to know what not to do. Simply asking your employees: "Is this a good idea?" would have yielded a clear "Fuck no". That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not.
> Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs
To call advertisements "user-enhancing" is an affront and betrays values like privacy that Mozilla claims to espouse
I do not (now -- at the time that person made that tweet, I did, but not on the browser) work at Mozilla.
However. The "tiles" concept was literally an experiment in whether it's possible to construct an ad system that does respect privacy.
The basic idea was:
* Advertisers submit their ads to Mozilla. Mozilla wraps them up into "bundles", made up of a bunch of different ads along with metadata to use in determining which to show.
* The browser downloads the "bundles" from Mozilla, and caches them locally.
* The browser, based on local data only it has access to, and the metadata in the bundles, decides which ads to show.
In other words, unlike a Google-style model where the ads are stored remote, loaded on demand, and the decision of what to show is made on the server side, this stored all ad content locally and the decision of what to show was also made entirely locally. So neither the advertiser nor the distributor could know whether a particular person saw an ad or (if they happened to) why the decision was made to show them that ad rather than a different one.
You may not like that, and you're free not to like it. But to argue that it "betrays" privacy is simply factually false. And Mozilla's mission is, in large part, to find ways to advance and sustain the web in ways that respect the users. Trying to develop a privacy-respecting way to deliver ads -- since so much of the web is dependent on ads -- is entirely within that mission.
This clearly wouldn’t work for a consumer product like a web browser.
Running a company by polling random employees is not an established successful management style. Its only you who is suggesting it, and then claiming that because they didn't do it, its a bad sign.
He's suggesting that the most simple, stupid check one could think of (polling random employees) would already have shown this to be a terrible idea. They didn't even go that far. That is indeed a bad sign.
What are you basing this on?
I'm just a FF user, and I don't think it was a terrible idea, even though I personally wouldn't have gone that route.
A developer is not a subject matter expert on how to market a product. Maybe you can restate your opinion.
Most development experience I have had (open source, exclusively) comes with continual interaction with, and and feedback from, a subset of users who use the software. This subset is populated mostly by power users, those who rely on the software for work, and those who use it regularly. They are the ones who understand which needs the software is meeting and which it is failing to meet, and who ask for intelligent and sensible features to be added.
The marketing departments don't have this built in compass. They create ideas that they think will be profitable to the company, and they simply don't have the necessary connection with the users and with the software to know which of these ideas will be perceived as awful by the user.
The ones creating the software are the subject matter experts on what that software should do, how it should behave, and what the users will find most useful, in this instance.
The marketers are subject matter experts on... Other stuff? Advertisements and buzzwords and increasing revenues by targeting certain demographics of peoples? I have experience with the marketing side of business that has perhaps reflected poorly on that profession, so I'd love to hear from anyone that can fill my knowledge gap.
Sure, and not doing any of that isn't a "terrible sign" as the OP claimed. Which is the point I'm countering.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
That's brilliant!
"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the new developer you hired" - HR
"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the fan choice for the new cafeteria's HVAC system " - Building Management
"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the calculations in the spreadsheets that the company CFO produced". - Finance department.
Hey, I think you're on to something here. We could eliminate entire departments here ! :)
Maybe it needs to cost $100k for someone in a suit to say "ask your employees, make use of their knowledge" before it sounds respectable?
Mozilla has accrued a lot of money over the years. So much money that they could have funded--just on interest--a comfortable loft somewhere filled with hackers on a decent salary who are fanatical about the open web, and maybe a single guy with a tie to "call google", in perpetuity.
That should have been the base case for Mozilla: open web, modern browser, users first.
Unfortunately, brass doesn't vote itself out for the greater good. A modern browser is a delivery platform. The "open web" is a marketing tool. And users are not as important as advertisers.
The rationale is that without clout, they'll be unable to prevent worse things from happening, so they have to allow for these compromises on the open web to maintain that clout, and every setback is relegated to "not our hill to die on," with every next hill becoming "not our hill."
It seems like an unavoidable tragedy, but if we look at similar organisations, can we imagine the FSF or the EFF making compromises on their respective missions, even if they lose popularity or even run out of funding?
I feel they would rather cease to exist than allow for corruption of their stated mission.
The problem with this is that the people working on this peripheral expansion missions don't think of themselves as peripheral. When there's a money crunch or a values conflict they will fight hard for theirs even at the expense of what the organization was always supposed to be about.
Some guy posted here a week ago in wonderment over how Mozilla can maintain a browser for a mere $400M+ a year. $400M+ a year!!!
If it takes that much engineering to deliver something which is not substantially different than what we were using 17 years ago, I'd count that as an engineering failure.
* Display web pages * Show images * Play songs and videos * Deliver applications (via Java instead of Javascript, granted) * Download files, and more!
Almost anywhere outside of NYC and SoCal, $400M is still an epic shitload of money.
I like my niche obscure anti marketing parasite browsers. But I am well aware there's a lot of Mozilla code in Waterfox and Pale Moon.
And ultimately its MS, Mozilla and Google who run this show. And out of those Mozilla is still the least bad.
This was the new interface, right? I just saw this the other day and though it looked pretty good; was actually considering a trial switch back (after moving to chrome years ago, when a single bad tab would take down the entire browser).
That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me.
I’m of the view that getting (most) people to consider switching browsers only comes every few years and requires a very large incentive; “We’ve fixed that one incremental problem” isn’t enough. A complete revamp would do it, but takes time to permeate into conciousness. And in the meantime they do this. “Squandered goodwill” seems to be spot-on.
so that's why you stick with chrome, a browser designed to send all your browsing habits straight to google, the largest online advertising company and commercial tracker in the world?
https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.htm...
Edit: (+) Sir_Cmpwn, At least not working for me when I try seeing the pages with H264 encoded ones, and when I search, this is what I find:
https://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what%E2%80%99s-the-differen...
"What Chrome Has That Chromium Doesn’t
AAC, H.264, and MP3 Support.
Adobe Flash (PPAPI)."
Chromium is not equal Chrome.
Remember, the extension was not there to advertise the show!
I don't know if that affects the way you're using the term "for advertising", but it affects how I care a lot.
You touch on an interesting point, maybe Firefox should be soliciting donations from governments who are concerned about the US surveillance state instead of relying so heavily on search ad revenue and being forced to turn to things like this to make a buck.
Although they should probably not be in charge of the actual development, is it really crazy to think that Firefox could be funded by governments? At some point it is a public service.
There's a lot of power in branding, apparently. People keep saying things like, "Mozilla is a good company at heart", and I'm at a loss. Mozilla 2017 is nothing like the Mozilla that existed when the Foundation was established, or when the Mozilla Manifesto was adopted. Tons of key people left in a few different waves: first when Google pulled them off the project to go build Chrome, and then lots more who trickled out over the years during and after the Kovacs/FirefoxOS era. What remains is (a derivative of) the codebase + the name "Mozilla" + and, like, Mitchell. But that's it. Keep calling it the same thing, though, and somehow folks act like we're talking about the same thing.
Mozilla imploded—or rather, got Netscapified—years ago. To believe that Mozilla or Firefox is your old friend who's still helping you fight the good fight is incredibly naive and can only come from someone who hasn't actually been paying attention and is easily fooled by (trivially contradicted) surface-level details (like a name). I mean, it's not even like some philosophically tricky ship-of-Theseus problem. Mozilla is dead, people, and this isn't news.
Mozilla is still today doing incredible work. The work on Quantum was extremely forward-thinking in a way that most corporations cannot support; it brought us Rust, which is a fantastic contribution to the ecosystem.
Furthermore, Mozilla has always had troubles with judgement and mismanagement, this is not new. The problems that have been surfacing are old problems, they're just getting more severe.
The engineers at mozilla are NOT the problem.
Doesn't the fact that that's even allowed to happen point to a larger problem?
Their whole mission is to have better judgement and management, advocating for the user instead of a corporation (or foundation). So it sounds like you're in agreement with the GP that Mozilla's decay is not news.
Are there? I see no evidence to support that assertion and a lot of evidence against it.
Market share matters. The last vote at the W3C about DRM video being the most recent example.
I mean, I probably qualify as reasonably savvy, and I have used exactly 4 browsers in the last 10 years: Firefox, Chrome, IE/Edge, and Safari.
Which Mozilla enthusiastically and Fully supported Google, MS, and Netflix in support of DRM.
Their fake unwillingness from 2014 was about as transparent as netflix's where by netflix claims it is "all the MPAA/Studios" why at the same time closing down all Open Access API's, and Locking down all their own wholey owned content behind DRM
This is not the first time user privacy has been invaded on Firefox or by Mozilla and it will not be the last
The fact that these Data Reporting features, and allowing FF to run "studies" on you is a OPT-OUT setting not a OPT-IN setting is all the proof I need that the Mozilla of old is long dead.. A Privacy respecting company would make such things OPT-IN, not OPT-OUT..
That is with out even getting into the whole Orwellian Ministry of Truth they are creating, or about 100 other things
I probably don't count as savvy, but my browser experience over the last 10 years has been a somewhat broader list. Having started with Firefox at V2, I switched (around '06) to my primary browser being Opera, with SeaMonkey as a secondary - especially when I want IRC; Firefox, K-Meleon, and Links are all in the background ready to go. I also used QtWeb for a brief period.
When Opera switched to being a Chrome clone, I jumped ship. SeaMonkey didn't provide the ease-of-use I wanted for an everyday browser, so I went back to Firefox. I'm now more often on Pale Moon.
I don't know, Rust and Servo seem to show that there's still the hacker spirit that was there at the beginning, it's just they accumulated a lot of 'business types' if you will over the years and they need to put that engineering face back at the top, instead of being too focused at running a multi-million dollar enterprise.
I hope you're not pretending that Servo is somehow the fastest way to browse the web...
Firefox 57+ is absolutely not the fastest way to browse the web. I'm sorry, I tried.
Maybe your system is different, but for me, FF 57+ uses much more CPU than Chrome, and unlike RAM, that's a statistic that actually affects something in a meaningful way (increased power consumption).
If you're worried about Chrome using RAM when nothing else is, you might be fetishizing the concept of free RAM.
I've stuck with FF because I'm a web developer-- sadly, the money led me there from other more interesting lines of dev work-- and I don't want to see a single browser dominate the web the way IE used to.
elsewise, I'd say, try creating a new FF profile, unfortunately afaik older profiles can still jank up the browser a bit
I see Mozilla as suffering from a crisis of identity, internally; it's acting as though it is staffed by believers in the manifesto but is now steered by those enamoured with The Bay Area and its ways.
Rust, Firefox 57, and even FirefoxOS are/were noble efforts to succeed in delivering on the manifesto. Pocket and this latest advert update smack of an executive that is thirsty to exploit the Mozilla brand for profit.
After that they got into all kinds of "social signaling" shenanigans, and the rest is history.
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy applies to do-good missions just as easily as it does to the worst of avaricious corporations or bloated gov't depts.
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization." [0]
[0] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106983
E.g. the company owner remains a company owner only as long as they are willing to go sufficient far to keep the company profitable; those who don't go bankrupt and lose their position.
The bureaucrat is not special in that respect - they are "just" the natural foot soldier of those who want to maintain an organisation for the sake of the organisation.
As such the backbone of any long-lasting organisation will be made up of those who are good at both maintaining their position in an organisation, and in protecting the organisation against inside and outside "threats".
Unfortunately such threats can include those who want to focus resources on the original goal of the organisation, at the risk of diminishing the role of the organisation.
Since Pournelle mentions the Soviets: to me this is one of the most dangerous parts of Leninist party theory: it involves rules meant to strengthen a party organisation against the threat of outside force, but it also made the Bolshevik party ideally suited for party bureaucrats and power mongers, whose prime goal quickly became the perpetuation of the party and the privileges of power.
A lesson should be to make any organization as weak as it can possibly be while retaining its ability to function. Unfortunately to function that needs an even playing field, or "as weak as it can possibly be" in the face of competing with multinational corporations quickly means something much bigger than we might hope.
this works for company, bureaucracies and everything else in life and is part of the entropy an organization accrues with time.
giving bureaucrats a weaker initial position will only extend the time before takeover.
If you can't be financially self-sustaining, then no level of desire to do good in the world will result in the long term ability to continue doing good.
It is like the phrase, Justice without power is inefficient and power without justice is tyranny. You need both profit and philosophy to do good.
It was a poor taste joke at the wrong time.. Mozilla is gonna regret this.
Let's not overstate things. Firefox 57 gained good will from some users. It also seriously annoyed others, both because of the loss of many useful extensions, and because the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time.
The one thing Mozilla still had going for them compared to Google or Microsoft was the emphasis on privacy and respecting the user, and yet I've read about several different cases in recent weeks where that trust has been undermined, this being the latest.
Really? I haven't experienced a single crash, and I was on nightlies before 57 was released, so I could try Quantum.
That has not been my experience, so let's not overstate personal anecdotes as facts.
I happen to be an existence proof for the bad experience group, but a few seconds with your favourite search engine will readily confirm that I am not alone. I don't know what the ratio of lucky to unlucky users is, nor did I claim to.
Google’s behavior with Android/AOSP suggests they’re more than willing to make the open source version of Chrome useless in practice the second there is no viable competition.
I don’t see any organization other than Mozilla that can keep them honest.
The original reason behind them establishing Mozilla Corporation over Mozilla Foundation was that they can keep this practice going while being safe from taxmen reprimanding them for pocketing what is a charity income from tax standpoint.
Now, Mozilla Corporation bills Mozilla Foundation for "service offered at a market price" to do its "socially beneficial, free of charge and any expectation of remuneration" activity, which is selling ads.
Nope. According to their financial statement, the Mozilla Foundation had $69M in "cash and cash equivalents" at the end of last year, about $329M in investments, and literally gave away millions of dollars in grant funding. It's not entirely clear to me how the financial interaction works between them, but the privately-held Mozilla Corporation (i.e. the 1000+(!) employee company that actually makes Firefox, and which the Foundation owns as a subsidiary) had over $500M in revenue from their search engine deals...
See "State of Mozilla 2016" https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ and also check out the Foundation's financial statement and tax form PDFs on the bottom for more details.
This is pretty bad though, I'd say this is worse than the Pocket thing because it's abusing the trust and good will of their users
2. Selling telemetry data about users to evilcorps like google.
3. Ruining interface with project Australis (during the 3.6 > 4.0 update [status bar got removed], tab-bar got degraded).
4. Breaking XPCOM.
5. Implementing a system of stealth add-on installations. The add-ons don't just get installed stealthily, they are also not listed by add-ons manager.
6. Pocket.
7. Using the system of stealth add-on installations to spy ('gather telemetry to improve users browsing experience') on users and adding ads. Adding ads to the start page. Nothing useful ever was deployed via the stealth add-on installation system.
8. Breaking users' preferences they set once.
9. Breaking XUL.
Mozilla is now even more malicious than Google.
Point 9 is the reason that firefox is dead to me since version 57: I will not update anymore and I'll have to switch my browser to a firefox fork because of that on holidays.
Oh, and all those issues - is just what is on the surface, the real problems are way deeper:
1. Mozilla rejects communication with users and developers.
2. Mozilla censors incoming messages.
3. Mozilla has betrayed the trust of its users by betraying its own ideals.
4. I thought Mike Beltzner (aka beltznebooth) was a dumb fucker that took stupid decisions, but turns out - he was the best of management Mozilla ever had: since he stepped away - the browser's degradation accelerated in supersonic speed.
5. Mozilla did too many mistakes and never acknowledged the failure, no conclusions were made, which means that the history to be repeated again and again.
Perhaps the problem is the fact that the Web is so complex that popular web browsers could only possibly be developed by corporations to begin with.
Well, how do you suggest doing this when it appears that the relevant decision-making parts of Mozilla do not answer to anyone "on our side" in any meaningful way?
It seems to me that the only solution is to make an organisation with a fundamentally different system of governance. By virtue of institutional inertia, I figure it would be very hard to do this by actually raising a competing project from the ground up and hoping to capture any of Mozilla's market share or developer base (not to mention the amply made elsewhere in this thread point that Mozilla is big and expensive for a reason).
The far easier, and quite well-tried, solution is to put financial and social pressure on the current leadership to voluntarily open itself to downstream control. The former may be most easily achieved by having an Iceweasel-style "condom organisation" gain traction - that is, someone who tries their best to replicate all of Mozilla's user-facing I/O (releases, sync servers...) in a timely fashion, systematically acts as a QC layer to strip bad decisions like this or Cliqz and otherwise does not waste developer time on niche interests like classic UIs. For the latter, whatever you may think of the person of the tactic, the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla. Even more cynically, it may be the case that they are the main way anything gets done these days. The (very significant, in my eyes) moral reservations aside, from a result-oriented perspective of what is most useful to reform Mozilla as an organisation, is there any good argument against the "identify a representative set of heads behind this latest measure and call for them" approach?
Yes. If anyone wants to do a git bisect to find when the Mozilla Corporation lost its integrity, we can say it was definitely "bad" by the time they forced out Eich in April 2014.
He was the only one higher up keeping that from happening and they didn't even wait until the body was cold to push that agenda.
This is such a terrible way to make an argument, present a case, or say anything that can't be said in a few dozen words. He has a blog, it's linked right there. I can't understand why people use twitter like this.
That said, everyone uses Twitter differently. I tweet a lot. Some people don't. I personally blog when I have a long-form, well thought out thing to say. I tweet whatever is on my brain at a given moment. Twitter is more raw, more personal. This is a raw, personal issue for me.
Not since the incident.
What a difference a week makes!
They are horribly mismanaged on every level.
They have burned hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a second rate browser that has seen its market share collapse.
They took hundreds of millions from Google and in exchange unquestioningly supported Google's advertising and surveillance agenda.
They have consistently failed to introduce new features that would actually benefit new users.
They blame the "standards process" for their lack of innovation and features that benefit users when they know that the standards process is a b.s. game. For profit corporations break standards whenever it benefits them. Firefox is the only browser that follows standards written by Google, Microsoft, and Apple, while the other 3 break them, or force through their own changes whenever it benefits them.
Apple blocked 3rd party cookies and Microsoft defaulted to Do Not Track while Firefox kept doing Google's bidding to collect their checks. Just one example of many.
In the place of real innovation, being truly independent, and actually standing up for users Mozilla gives people dumb crusades like Net Neutrality.
Firefox could have used their market share to develop truly innovative features, like what Opera tried. For that matter they could have partnered with Opera to create standards for a true open web, but of course they never did that because the Google bucks were just to sweet for them.
Mozilla has been a failed organization for a long time. This is only the latest reminder.
Then this thing blew my machine up the other day, I lost days of work, and...hmm. I don't know why a company would ever do something like this, it's incredibly foolish.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/uninstall-firefox-from-...
1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Edit: Apparently some have: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1424977#c0
Browsers are very complex and expensive to keep cutting edge.
I think it would be an interesting, more private, and safer online world if browsers only displayed HTML and a minimum of JS rather than being entire operating systems, and anything like media playing and high interactivity occurred in native programs.
People assume Pocket offered Mozilla a lot of money, as there's really no other reason Pocket shouldn't be an extension.
People are naturally nervous when browsers start deploying third-party code in exchange for cash. Especially when auto-update mechanisms are used.
Some would see that as an important line to cross - will they be able to resist the much larger sums they'll be offered to "help users see more relevant ads" and "help users keep safe from viruses"?
That's how I've always seen it anyway. I didn't know there was controversy around it, but I can understand how people would be sensitive to seeing another company's logo in the URL bar.
There is no good reason for it to be "core functionality" in a browser, other than the fact that Moz://a got a fistfull of dollars and foisted it upon us.
EDIT: For example, what would be a good use of core functionality, is if Moz://a included IPFS resolution and native support. That is a protocol level support, and thus would need native support rather than plugins. Plugins do indeed work, but require significant workarounds. For example, native could be ipfs://hash whereas the plugins need to specify http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs/hash
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnuzilla.git/tree/makeicec...
Pale Moon did this a while ago and is still around, although in need of donations as many other volunteer-driven projects. https://www.palemoon.org/
It did not collect any data, it did not have any effect on the browser (unless you turned on the preference) except look spooky if you look at your list of add-ons.
So yeah, it was spooky, and it could certainly have been done better, but come on, it was an easter egg dedicated to a spooky tv series.
But yes, people do like to get up in arms about free code bases that they don't pay for. People need to keep in mind the Facebook rule -- that when you don't pay for a service, you aren't the customer, you are the product.
Chrome is sponsored by one of the largest companies in the world. How will a free open-source project ever compete with that? Of course they’re trying to make money.
This is just greed.
This is the same type of scummy shit that ISPs have been pulling for years. But unlike ISPs, there's competition in the browser space. Mozilla must hold themselves to a higher standard if they want to survive.
Present or not, enabled or not, it didn't actually do anything without explicit user action. But that's not the point, for people whom this bothered.
I've also tried lurking on a few IRC channels, which were similarly lacking in content on this (beyond idle chat, or helping out beginners new to the channels).
If the answer is that I need to email some individual to get into some private group to participate in (or even just to observe) discussion on governance, then that really isn't very transparent. Certainly public mailing lists I've checked don't seem to contain enormous amounts of contextual content on these kinds of things.
[0] https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/mozilla.governance
but hey, Mr Robot uses Kali Linux (they only show us this about twenty times per episode) so he should be fine
I thought Mozilla was an exception, Oh well. :/
are you kidding me? Mozilla risks our opsec and I did't even know?
A lot of people thought the Mr. Robot stunt meant that they had been hacked. Well, you know what? They were hacked. Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent.
(Side note: I also discovered last night that Firefox Quantum does not use or support userContent.css - maybe this is a Stylo thing but it really annoyed me.)
(EDIT: per the below, my experience with userContent.css doesn't seem to be shared. I may have messed it up on my end. Will report back when I get a chance.)
I'd suggest raising a bug.
Auto-updating software has been the norm for a while. This is nothing new, just because it was put into an extension instead.
Auto-update is a consensual agreement with the user. If you use auto-update to deploy something that a vast majority of your users do not want and did not expect, and intentionally so (refusing to roll back a 'mistake'), then you have broken that agreement or moral code.
You cannot use the excuse of "oh well if they don't like it they can uninstall it and use another product" to condone this bait-and-switch behavior. Just because the behavior is legal does not make it moral.
This behavior is absolutely immoral and must be condemned.
Did they refuse to roll it back? It's marked as "complete" on my Firefox installation and is no longer present on the Extensions page.
We can fork Firefox, but I agree with many other commenters that a fork isn't sufficient.
It is the underlying concept I am trying to shine a light on: software should serve the user. When Mozilla becomes user-hostile, we can establish new guards for our future security. But if we, the software writers, become user-hostile, then there will be no one left.
(Libre is not the same as Gratis.)
Take Stallman's own website[1]. It is mostly text. While this makes it fast, it doesn't make it readable at all. And finding specific stuff is nearly impossible. Yeah, there is a search feature, but is extremely rudimentary and very user-hostile.
If it were up to Stallman, the entire Internet would look and work like this. This was OK in 1990. It no longer is. Sorry.
[1]https://stallman.org/
Also, Stallman is a grade A asshole. I've met him, and he is a deeply unpleasant man to be around.
When you want something to change you can't have only moderates as they're in fact happy with the status quo.
WRT your second point, that is subjective and ad hominem. I live in Emacs and without GNU I was stuck with Windows. Without GNU none of the good things we have today would've existed, Linux wouldn't have existed, we were all programming in ASP.NET or C# or what not. So even if he is an asshole, he's a very, very, very important one.
that is the weirdest comment ever. On HN no less which is literally just text.
"doesn't make it readable" is not weird at all.
He's right that proprietary software can be used for malicious purposes or evil intent, but he's incorrect that it must be.
Perhaps it must be simply because if it can be misused, it inevitably will be. Therefore, Stallman is correct.
You're moving the goalposts now. You claimed that if proprietary software can be misused, it will be, and therefore therefore Stallman is right about all proprietary software being malicious - yet it's precisely those types of misuse you now want to deem irrelevant which underpin the entire moral argument behind the free software ethos.
The argument has never been that proprietary software is immoral merely because the code isn't free, but that the code not being free is what allows those other abuses to occur.
No, you just didn't understand the goalposts in the proper context. "Harm" and "misuse" in FOSS have never been about any type of harm in which software may take part, simply the types of harm that can be achieved by software and licensing.
In FOSS, harm means restricting a user's freedom and ability to control their information, privacy and the devices they own.
[1] "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation)." (https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)
PAY. FOR. IT.
What can you expect from a group of people working for you for free, trying to scratch together their salaries from wherever they can.
The answer is not 'fork it' - because the existential question remains: who will develop the fork?
You?
Me?
A magical person who works without income?
More likely - someone who needs an income, and will have to find creative, weird ways like 'Mr Robot' to make it work.
A simple answer is 'pay for it'. A company / non-profit can still be committed to those things you mentioned.
The idea that 'you are being sold' is not fair either.
You choose what to use, for how much, and the resulting product.
So if you want to pay $ a month AND have ads. Well, then do that. If not - don't.
If Mozilla wants to have an 'add free non-profit' they can do that.
But they can't because for whatever reasons - people won't pay.
Some people won't pay because they simply don't want to - and are willing to live with the alternative choice of 'having a sideload now and then'.
Other people use insufferable intellectualizations about all of it.
But mostly it's kind of greedy and irrational.
We get immense value out of web browsers. A $1 a month fee would enable Mozilla to forge ahead being the best browser, free for those who can't afford it - and ad free.
But we can't have that because we are not as intelligently organized as we need to be.
For the same reason Mozilla exists today as 'kind of a non-profit' in the first place without tons of ads.
For the same reason that Wikipedia has no ads.
I'm not 'admonishing' anyone so much as pointing out we can't seem to grasp that nothing is going to happen for free.
The only path to 'ad free' is for someone to pay for it - and that's going to have to be users - or in the very rare case -a 'Big Corp' who sees the strategic value in it.
And yes - I do agree that 'most corps' would try to stick in ads.
Heck - even 'non-profits' like Mozilla - are sticking in ads!
But given what Mozilla is today, if they had the resources necessary, I suggest they would not be pushing ads. It's the last thing they want to do.
Finally - there are tons of services that people pay for that are not full of ads.
I don't get ads when I buy MP3s, and none of my paid apps have ads.
Do you think there are ads for t-shirts in my Salesforce app? Or SAP? Of course not.
Likely because the 'profit maximizing' option for Salesforce is to not put ads there in the first place.
So 'big corp' incentives can definitely align with user needs if things are right.
this is what was wrong about the whole thing. What Jascha Kaykas-Wolff heard from the community, that "the experience [we] created caused confusion" is NOT the point.
Mozilla installs software on our computers without our explicit consent all the time, each time you update Firefox; or when you visit mozilla.org and your browser downloads some JS.
It would be impossible for most people to give genuine informed consent, because they'd have to understand what each part of the software does. Most people have not learned to read source code and don't want to. (And the source is available for people sufficiently motivated.) Practically, there isn't time to personally code-review every software update on your system. We defer this to distributors we trust.
And in this case, Mozilla genuinely didn't run any questionable code. They could have done (and arguably have in the past), but didn't. They installed software that actually does nothing. (about:mozilla at least engages the CSS parser; this doesn't even do that.)
I think the problem is just that they're messing with our stuff. Like if someone rearranged the books on your bookshelf to spell out the name of your least favourite whatever, they haven't actually done you any practical damage, but it's really annoying and rude. On principle, it's my stuff and they should leave it alone. Stop being a bad roommate, Mozilla!
Then GitHub arrived, and a fresh platforfm for hosting open source software was born.
What it's being discussed here is not if the addon is interesting or not, it's the fact that Mozilla, a supposedly freedom and privacy advocate has installed something in all of our computers, without our knowledge or permission as a publicity stunt for a different company and, when found out, the best explanation we've received is "Oops! You guys shouldn't have seen that".