> The Web is unique because it offers users unparalleled control over the content they experience. This control is the foundation of agency, but the reality has not always lived up to the promise, and we see threats to it going forward. Consequently, we seek to protect and expand the mechanisms that empower people to experience the Web on their own terms.
> we eventually chose to support EME, but nevertheless view it as a regrettable chapter in the Web’s evolution
These are a few interesting parts I saw. Overall this looks good and I haven't seen any part of this I disagree with.
Is this a new publication from Mozilla? When was this written? I don't see a date on it.
- "As a result of these and other changes, the fraction of encrypted page loads has gone from around 30% in 2015 to the vast majority of traffic in 2022. "
For the sake of argument.. isn't the fact that people can freely make those forks something of a guarantee around agency, and possibly also privacy?
My guess is that because Mozilla is a hostage (and arguably antitrust human shield) of Google etc, it can't be too aggressive in its privacy approach, but it can at least not intentionally break privacy enhancing patchsets and features.
Chromium is open source. You can freely fork it too.
There is a trade-off between privacy and convenience, and one between agency and simplicity. Mozilla is quite okay with pushing their own proprietary products and removing customization.
Reinterpretable content is necessary for control, but it's not sufficient: the browser needs to provide users with levers by which to control their experience.
...says the organisation that is continuously removing functionality, especially whenever they feel like redesigning the UI. Mozilla has been saying stuff like this for a long time (and "puts users in control" was the Firefox slogan for a while, before they did s/users/individuals/), but what they've done to Firefox is clearly in a different direction. I still use Firefox because it's the "least bad" of all the alternatives, but that's a pretty low bar and their continuing hypocrisy is definitely irritating.
Frankly most of the functionality was removed on the Android version. You can't even change your user agent anymore. All you get is that pathetic "show desktop version" checkbox which not only still tells websites you're on a mobile browser but breaks if you check it, tap a link, and then hit the back button. I still have to do half my mobile browsing in Chrome because it may be an ad-riddled mess but at least it doesn't constantly break.
You can access about:config and change your user agent if you use Firefox Beta or Firefox Nightly. The latter is annoying since you get constant updates, but the former is about as stable as normal Firefox.
Which about:config settings would you like to modify? Maybe those settings should be exposed or enabled with a proper UI instead of full about:config. Most about:config settings were not designed for end users to tweak and can break your Firefox in fatal or subtle ways.
They broke extensions, removed RSS bookmarks, removed bookmark descriptions, removed "compact" controls... And those are only the ones I remember because I used them, they've removed more things.
Mozilla is proud of this because it involves some Rust stuff, but it was a massive loss for the extensions world. It removed (or disabled) XUL, Netscape's extensions language:
«
This catalog contains 93,598 versions of 19,450 Firefox add-ons created by 14,274 developers over the past 15 years using XUL/XPCOM technology before Mozilla decided to ruin the classic extensions ecosystem and go exclusively to WebExtensions.
»
For me, before Firefox 57, it worked superbly for me. Afterwards, of my 13 essential addons, only 2 still worked and one of those was trivial and unimportant.
It destroyed my browser and drove me away from using Firefox after nearly 20 years, dozens of computers and ½ dozen different operating systems.
Other cut functionality:
The best cross-platform FOSS email client, by far, is Mozilla Thunderbird. Mozilla has repeatedly tried to kill it.
> For me, before Firefox 57, it worked superbly for me. Afterwards, of my 13 essential addons, only 2 still worked and one of those was trivial and unimportant.
What are those extensions? I myself use 16 extensions, and I don’t think it has ever happened that I wanted to use an extension that wasn’t compatible with post-57 Firefox.
> It's forced telemetry that kicked the entire browser offline for millions … And yet it includes a huge complicated "developer mode" that 99.9% of users never want and never see.
My question was, what features were removed? What does that have to do with telemetry and devtools?
Firefox provides, by far, more options for customizing the UI then any other browser. Don’t like the redesign? Then download Sidebery and have tree-style tab navigation, or change userChrome.css to remove tabs completely. Don’t act like Firefox has personally assaulted you just because you don’t like their redesign.
Firefox provides, by far, fewer options for customizing the UX than the same browser a few years ago. Don't act like that loss of control is irrelevant just because you don't use it.
The fact that you now need to set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets in order for userChrome.css to work, and that it has "legacy" in the name, is already a sign that route might disappear in the future.
More "then[sic] any other browser" is a really low bar, especially when the others are far worse.
I use Waterfox these days, and occasionally Firefox if there's a problem.
It's now significantly harder to customise either of them to the way I used to like pre-Quantum Firefox. A few more steps down this path and I won't be able to at all.
Most people don't care and the ones who do know Mozilla enough to know they failed miserably to live up to their standards. They dug a hole they can't get out of now.
Mozilla is still very relevant. Rust was built and, until recently, managed there. They maintain some of the best and accessible documentation about web technologies on the internet.
Firefox is actually pretty good again. They dropped the ball for a while and let Chrome eat their lunch, but I switched back a couple years ago when the whole fiasco that forced users with Google accounts to automatically log in with their browsers occurred. Google eventually added an option after the backlash, but I trust Mozilla's incentive structure more than Google's when it comes to my browser
I think that's a bit hyperbolic. They still maintain the web documentation that is used daily by web developers across the globe.
Rust is now managed by the Rust foundation. Having the language shepherded by a dedicated foundation is healthier than keeping it all in house.
It's definitely fair to argue that laying off some of the core Rust developers harms their relevance, but it's definitely more nuanced than "they just threw out..."
Despite the Mozilla leadership and the at times questionable investments, Firefox could never be more relevant.
We need a non-Chrome browser just as we need multiple operating systems with different design paradigms. It gives us flexibility, increased surface area for experimentation, and acts as an anchor for web standards (at least as long as non-Chrome browser share remains).
If running instructions should be free, so should reading information. Even if Chromium is itself open source, Firefox (and mostly Safari) keep Chrome from turning into a thin client that bakes in Google's self interested designs for the web.
I think Mozilla corporation should be acquired or merge with Canonical, Framework, or some other open-minded computing company. The leadership should build a strong "complete package" offering: laptop, phone, operating system, browser. That makes more sense to me than continued investments into weird side projects with little chance of developing traction.
And by weird side projects, I don't mean their efforts in VR or discontinued efforts in TTS. I think building open platforms in these domains makes a lot of sense. I just don't know if Mozilla should be the folks to do it. Their core mission - web - should be their singular focus.
The absolute best thing Mozilla could do, though, is spend money on marketing and partnerships to improve Firefox adoption and stem the losses. After they get growth back, the next thing to do is to develop stable, sensible revenue streams. The browser has become a commodity, which is why I think premium hardware sales could do the trick. Especially if it's "ethical" open hardware.
nrp (Framework founder's HN username), you should go have a chat with Mozilla folks sometime. Now isn't the time to consider an acquisition, but after you achieve growth and scale - please buy them out. Tout them as part of your offering, and use them as an additional funnel to drive Framework hardware sales.
They already do spend a lot of money on marketing. The issue is they spend a lot of money to market that they value privacy and then their actions show otherwise. I also think having Canonical aquire them would be a terrible decision. They need to spend less money on marketing and more on developing what they claim to support.
I can't speak for the user posting earlier and I don't know anything about the Mozilla marketing budget, but:
On the android platform Mozilla removed all extension sideloading capabilities.
Even their store extensions are now almost entirely off-limits for the user unless they create a Firefox account and link it to their device through some extension list ID.
The former just feels like an evil powergrab, the latter feels like a privacy reducing growth hack.
I really want Firefox to be great and do use it on all platforms, but many recent decisions regarding their products are not great.
In addition to that it seems that their toxic culture does appear to leave its mark on the brand.
> Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
However, if you look at what settings are enabled by default and with the recent announcement of them tracking installs and downloads, they are no better than Chromium.
How would such a competitor be created and work? How would they gain sufficient market share? How do they gain influence in the standards organisations to push for changes they want instead of what Google wants?
If such a competitor were to use Chromium/Blink, how do they differentiate from the other browsers? How do they avoid changes that Google push into Chromium/Blink that they don't want? Where do they get the resources to develop standards they want to support like MathML or several of the CSS drafts?
If such a competitor were to create their own web stack, where do they get the resources and time to build the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to a level that is competitive?
That's for anyone who wants to join the browser game to figure out. Mozilla is going downhill fast so everyone clinging to it is just delaying the inevitable. The new winning browser is either going to be a forked or new engine it certainly is not going to be Gecko with the Mozilla Foundation at the helm. It's just stupid to pretend that there is hope for Mozilla or Firefox if there is no purge at the top.
I think Canonical would be the second last "open source" organization (after Mozilla) that I would want in charge of Firefox development. They are almost as hostile to running an open source project rather than an (open source) product as Moz corp.
You can bash Mozilla (deservedly) all you want but I will keep using Firefox. After all it's the only serious competitor to Chrome and competition's a good thing, right?
Until you realize that Mozilla is doing the same telemetry. Just like politicians, I don't think it matters if you use Firefox or Chromium. They are two sides to the same coin.
They are not. Mozilla with all its flaws is still a foundation while Google is .. not. Even if they were two sides of the same coin I'd rather have a coin with two sides so I can flip it if I want.
In my opinion a non-profit where workers are legally prevented (by contract) from talking about their pay and where CEO makes more money than other people should not be called a non-profit. A non-profit should have equal pay for everyone, from office cleaners to administrators.
I'm personally not convinced that organizations not meeting that criteria can do do "good", as they are aligned with the "bad" status quo. Of course not everything is so binary, but most non-profits nowadays are indistinguishable from for-profits in what they produce and how they operate, and i think that's a problem.
EDIT: To name an infamous example that's often cited here on HN: Mozilla. If it was operated like a non-profit, by people driven by vision not money, it would probably have saved the web from whatever Google has turned it into.
Hopefully Librewolf can create some official packages for Arch Linux. In the meantime, Chromium with policies works well and is relatively safe minus a few APIs that send more data than I'd like (client hints).
It's disingenuous, to say the least, to equate Mozilla's telemetry with Google's data gathering to feed its advertising business. These things are vastly different.
Chromium is open source too. You can see what settings and telemetry are sent by default, and Mozilla sends just as much. In regards to Chromium using the data for advertising, I'm not sure there is much difference between Google using telemetry data for advertising vs Mozilla sending it to their partners.
Does Google document what telemetry data it collects? Mozilla is not sending telemetry data to partners or using telemetry data for advertising purposes. Here is Mozilla's documentation of the telemetry Firefox records:
It is surprisingly easy to disable telemetry in Chromium as well, and when configuring Firefox using a similar method they send just as much telemetry as Chromium by default.
Mozilla, if anything, does the equivalent of a security guard clicking away in the entrance of a shopping mall so that in case of a fire they know how many people are inside.
Google on the other hand can connect your live location with your search queries, your photos, your email, your browser history, with all of your friends’ listed items. Let’s not goddamn compare the two as counting how many people use firefox is not at all intrusive to noone. They are simply not comparable.
Is it though? IE had a larger market share and came preinstalled on most people’s computers. It was also closed source so you couldn’t even take Trident and write your own browser around it (best you could do was embed Trident as a COM object).
Chromium being open source is a red herring here. The web is a protocol, with both clients and servers. If we accept that Google singlehandedly dominates the protocol in practice, then having control over the client is insufficient. If Google adds something to the protocol that you don't like, then it doesn't matter if you fork the browser, because servers will expect the addition and your fork will be incompatible with the web. On the other hand, if you want to add something to the protocol but Google doesn't want to add it, then it doesn't matter if you fork the browser to add it, because servers will not expect it and therefore no sites will use it, making the addition useless.
TL;DR: it doesn't suffice to fork the client, you have to fork the entire web.
You’ve completely and utter missed my point. The fact that I’m in a thread advocating Firefox usage should demonstrate that I’m in favour of people using Gecko. I’m not saying Chromium being open source makes everything ok. I was only disagreeing with the GPs point that things are worse now than they were in the 90s and 00s. To use your example, back then MS owned the protocol AND the browser code.
Just because I disagree that things are worse that doesn’t mean that I like the status quo either. Which is why I use Firefox (well, one of the many reasons. But a pretty big reason).
I remember writing my own web browser around 1999 (give or take a couple years). Just a toy thing but born out of frustration with Internet Explorer, or Internet Exploiter as I used to call it. That was a massive undertaking. But these days if Google do stagnate Chrome then it’s still possible to fork Chromium and push it in a different direction. Not to mention we also have WebKit, kHTML and Gecko too. That alone makes this situation better than it was when Microsoft owned the web. Add to that, Chome doesn’t come pre-installed on as many computers as IE did (lots if you count Android but at least Apple hardware ship something else. Opinions of Safari aside).
This doesn’t mean we should be complacent nor assume Google doesn’t still have a stranglehold but it does mean the GPs point is inaccurate.
That worked because IE was a steaming pile of garbage after years of neglect. That was also a time when the web was younger and users were more techno-literate. I’d argue that IE was a hedge against the web displacing the OS. After it succeeded in killing off Netscape there wasn’t much to hedge against. A hedge does not make for good product.
Chrome on the other hand is not a hedge, it’s a key strategic interest for Google. It’s a great product from the users perspective, free, fast, leading experience. That’s likely not to falter.
Firefox is a great counterbalance but don’t expect it to lead with average consumers any time soon. From what I can tell it’s playing catch up on core features and it’s innovating in areas where more techno-literate users might care.
> That worked because IE was a steaming pile of garbage after years of neglect.
From our perspective that’s true. But it also worked fine for a great many non-technical people.
> That was also a time when the web was younger and users were more techno-literate.
That’s not true. By the time IE6 arrived most offices had either dedicated internet terminals or their workstations were connected to the internet. U.K. libraries had been providing internet access for years already, several years of kids would have used the internet at college, and dial up was already common in homes.
I remember this well because I managed network infrastructure for schools and offices in the late 90s and early 00s.
> I’d argue that IE was a hedge against the web displacing the OS. After it succeeded in killing off Netscape there wasn’t much to hedge against
No need to argue there, Microsoft have admitted that themselves. But the motives behind IE don’t alter the point we are discussing (though still interesting).
> Chrome on the other hand is not a hedge, it’s a key strategic interest for Google
The two point aren’t mutually exclusive: It’s a hedge against users not consuming Google’s advertising.
Much like how IE was a core strategy for Microsoft as well as a hedge to keep people on Windows.
> It’s a great product from the users perspective, free, fast, leading experience
So was internet explorer. It was developers that hated IE, not your average desktop user.
IE was faster than FF, free (unlike Opera) and compatible with more sites too (if just because web developers didn’t have much other choice than to support IE).
> Firefox is a great counterbalance but don’t expect it to lead with average consumers any time soon
I don’t ever expect it to lead again. And it’s also worth noting it took years to displace IE last time around so why would anyone expect it to happen quickly this time?
> From what I can tell it’s playing catch up on core features and it’s innovating in areas where more techno-literate users might care.
Funny enough this is similar to Netscape back when IE first started to take the edge (back in the IE 3 and 4 days when IE was actually a good browser).
What people sometimes forget is that IE didn’t just dominate because it was installed on every Windows desktop. While that certainly helped (as well as being the reason it remained dominant after it stagnated), it had already largely beaten the competition by the time IE 4 was released. IE was, for a while, genuinely the best browser.
So the situation then and now isn’t that different.
It's just an input to the decision making process, not a single factor. FF and Chromium based products are essentially at feature and performance parity so these second order effects become more important because there are so few first order effects, and the first order effects are minor.
WebKit and WebKitGtk. The later needs more developers!
We're down to three browser engines {Blink, Gecko, WebKit} and I don't expect any new because the web piles up complexity. We've lost Trident, KHTML and Opera. While nobody will miss the first, we're missing a heterogeneous web. We're down to an oligopoly with a tendency to a monopoly by Google. I cannot recommend just avoiding Chrome and replacing it by Chromium. Most complaints about WebKit and Gecko are actually not about them but that they are not Blink (i.e. Chrome).
I'm neither a fan of the present usage of JavaScript. To be precise, how it used in modern web. It didn't improve experience of the users. We now have random websites which consume resources and drain the battery. My impression is, that all engines stopped make the JS engines faster? Now it looks like the engines try to figure out which website is consuming resources through JS. Too late? Well. Modern JS is required often but isn't necessary for the web. The best use case is Stackoverflow and the worst are modern Cookie-Dialogs. In Europe the ill formed cookie directive created a new business-model and companys providing aggregate remote cookie banners, storing the cookies actually on their systems.
Hacker News: Works well without JS.
Amazon: Works well without JS.
Stackoverflow: Complains, but works well without JS.
Interestingly?
I want web-browsers to add an permission "Allow JavaScript" alongside the "Allow {Adds, Geolocation, Cookies, ...}" and therefore contain its usage.
There were many reason not to use Flash but Steve Jobs eradicated Flash for one reason, it's draining batteries. He had his point. I think it is possible to get rid of JS in a lot of parts of the web. And the others should better provide us a good reason why we shoud even allow them using it.
PS: I'm coding myself also with JavaScript and want to avoid using it.
Wow, this thread is a shitshow. The single non-commercial browser option, one of essentially just three remaining players in the market, and they get nothing but scorn for trying to survive.
Google created Chrome, in part, to become less dependent on browser defaults. That worked, and Mozilla's main source of revenue was/is almost certain to dry up.
So they bundled a service or two at some point. You clicked 'no' and were never bothered again.
That's too much of an ask? You are free to donate, instead. You, and everyone else, was always free to do so, of course. It didn't work, it doesn't work, and it will never work, but that doesn't stop anyone from suggesting it, in this case and every other (music, journalism).
People mouth off about privacy and security but will not follow through with $5/yr if they aren't forced to. They'll get their fix from Google or Microsoft, use the same pretentious arguments about security to also screw the people that write what they like reading and act surprised when they wake up in a paywalled garden. I bet it's the same people that litter whenever nobody is watching.
> they get nothing but scorn for trying to survive
I guess selling user data is fine as long as it is done ‘to survive’? Nah… I’ll take the browser with the best privacy and that is sadly just not Firefox anymore.
The problem with your audience being contrarians is that they're impossible to please, and while you're competition gets blind followers, you're left with nothing but criticism.
Okay, you have some issues with how things are being run, maybe some or all of those are even valid. But show some support for the only other player, or at the very least some _constructions_ feedback.
You are right. A lot of people here seem very proud of themselves for installing a Chromium derivative or using Chrome itself. They don't seem to realize that without Mozilla, Google effectively controls web standards far more than Microsoft was ever able to dream of. The web is going to be whatever they dictate it to be. There's nobody left to challenge them. Most of the old competition has thrown the hat in the ring. Opera killed their browsing engine long time ago. MS followed when they released Edge. Apple is still holding out with Safari of course but only on Apple controlled operating systems. There are a few independent engines with minuscule market share. And there is Mozilla.
There are a gazillion Chromium based browsers and they are each dependent on Google developing and maintaining that. Google controls its roadmap, the internals that render your pages, it employs the engineers working on it, and the gate keepers vetting the occasional pull request from outside Google. But lets be honest, most of the work is done by Google engineers. Nothing happens to Chromium without their consent and backing. They control it completely.
So, the likes of Brave, Edge, Opera, etc. might do a fine job adding their window dressing, minor tweaks, and what not. But they are outsourcing the core browsing components to Google.
Without Mozilla it's down to just Apple and Google running the show. Apple has Safari and Google has Chrome. The rest does not really matter since it is effectively all Chromium. Unless you are paying the Apple tax, you'll have just one choice: consume the web via a Google provided code base.
That's why it is important to keep Mozilla going. With three major browsing engines, most websites have to make sure to work with all of them. Apple, Mozilla, and Google have been doing great work together in standardizing what they do and collaborating on new non exclusive features that each of them then implement in a way that works the same in each browser. Mozilla has a crucial role in keeping the other two honest. It matters.
And Firefox is pretty nice. I use it on desktop and on Android.
I agree on the general position. And I use Firefox as my main browser on my secondary laptop. But I think your rant goes too far in the other direction. For instance:
> You are free to donate, instead.
Donations go to the Mozilla Foundation, which allocates money to various internal and external projects. So why donate if it doesn't fund the web browser? From their own words:
"Mozilla Fellows and Awardees represent a range of disciplines and geographies: They are policymakers in Kenya, journalists in Brazil, engineers in Germany, privacy activists in the United States, and data scientists in the Netherlands." in https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/
> So they bundled a service or two at some point. You clicked 'no' and were never bothered again.
That's not the only problem, and far from it. As a power user, I've been annoyed by the removal of features. At some point, to keep vertical tabs, I had to modify obscure config files, and venture into the poorly document about:config. And Firefox last rewrite of their download manager was full of bugs, with half of them still there a year after. If not for the free software and web engine competitor, I would not use Firefox.
For my aging parents, the Firefox experience is far from smooth. An upgrade lost their frontpage bookmarks. Several others changed the UI to the point they had to call me.
Firefox is open source. If people don't like how mozilla is spending it's money, there is nothing stopping another foundation being set up solely to fund developers to work on it.
Unlike Mozilla, it wouldn't be in control of the releases. But features are certainly less likely to disappear if someone is there to maintain them.
At the moment Mozilla does feel like an eggs in one basket situation for the community.
The only one that can stand anything against Chrome is Safari, and Apple's resistance to adopt everything that Google thinks of into iOS.
Mozilla has long lost the browser war.
Browsers are the modern thin clients into Cloud OSes, and there Mozilla has very little that they can push.
I still use Firefox whenever I can, but the writing is on the wall, without Apple's resistance (naturally due to native store apps), the correct title for Web developers would be ChromeOS developer.
Mozilla gets criticism because they do things that deserve criticism. That there are others who are worse is irrelevant. If anything, not having a better alternative makes is more important to keep Mozilla from getting even less user-focused.
This notion that they should not be criticized for the shit they pull because hey they are the good guys* is ridiculous.
* relatively, conditions apply
> You are free to donate, instead.
You CANNOT donate to Firefox browser development. Mozilla corp does not accept donations. Mozilla org does not do any browser development. Even if Mozilla corp did accept donations it would be ridiculous for anyone to donate to an organization that pays thear leadership an amonout that is ridiculously high compared to even the US average income.
> People mouth off about privacy and security but will not follow through with $5/yr if they aren't forced to.
I donate to plenty of organizations. I would't donate to Mozilla corp even if I could because they don't want to be a non-profit organization that exists to serve a mission but rather a SV for profit corporation that focuses on competitive executive compensation complete with all the bullshit that comes with that like ignoring user feedback and replacing it with telemetry.
Huh? Apart from the fact that your donation goes to Mozilla Foundation, who will likely spend it on something you don't care about and don't want (and not) to Firefox), making a donation in the hope that some misfeature will be removed for you is magical thinking. It's in the nature of a donation that it's given freely, not in exchange for some consideration, and that once it's given you no longer control it.
A "gift" made in exchange for a consideration is usually called a contract.
Like, how much do I have to donate to get them to rip out Pocket?
Well, the talk is good. I'd like to see Mozilla do the walk and not just talk.
I still use firefox, and I still think it's a good browser. I hope Mozilla's recent forays into VPNs and such helps stabilize their ship and lets them focus back on their mission and not forcing pocket on me.
Ditched Chrome for FireFox years ago. But now I get increasing concerned on the direction Mozilla is moving towards.
A couple of recent moves:
1. Pockets and Accounts.
2. Unique Ids on installer downloads.
3. DNS over HTTP push.
All those moves can directly be linked to user tracking and I just feels something like "Block others and allows myself and myself only to track". So far I've no evidence to support it but let's wait and see.
There are reasons not to like DNS over HTTP, but it's not there to let Mozilla track you. We have had ample evidence for years that ISPs have been using your unencrypted DNS traffic to track and profile you. Providing DNS over HTTP out of the box makes it easier for users to configure the browser based on their own threat model (Cloudflare is the default DoH target, but you can also provide your own).
Yes, I fully understand the context and that's why I mentioned as it could be used to track us rather than was used to track us in the first place.
Providing DNS over HTTPS can be deemed as goodwill as it indeed make it easier for some of the people. But making it default is something questionable, might be I remembered it wrong though. Pointing to Cloudflare does not make it any better as: 1. It can be changed anytime in the future and for most if not all users, they can hardly tell if there were changes to their DNS settings. 2. As end users, we have no idea what's the deal behind the scene between Mozilla and Cloudflare, and what was Cloudflare doing with the data collected. I might have worried too much about it for now. But at least, such move broke the design principle as DNS was never meant to be concerns at application level.
I don't know, I feel Mozilla in the last decade or so had good politicians that produce texts like this, definitely some good developers but no vision, let alone visionaries ( the ones that actually deliver, not good talkers who adopt the lingo of whatever the industry they are in and fake it until they make it [ out of there ])
These are good ideas and concepts and stuff, but.. it misses something.
This need to purge people with wrong-think is going to destroy science and technology advancement. Many, many people who we recognize as major players in our understanding of the universe were absolutely abhorrent on a personal level with terrible ideas about the world.
Many people pushing the boundaries of tech are also super high functioning autistics. Punishing them for bad social takes is just punishing a handicapped person because you can't stand the sight of a one-legged person.
If someone were going around telling me that they don’t think my husband and I should be married isn’t hate, then I’m not sure hate as a word has a lot of meaning left.
This is a bit off topic from the article, but to say why I think that: in the US a great deal of rights are conferred to married couples. Being able to have a child through surrogacy and have both of us presumed parents, being able to visit my husband in the hospital, getting to be on his health insurance. If anyone wishes that we don’t have access to those things but claims to not hate me, I think they are carefully choosing to ignore the ramifications of their opinion.
All that said, as it was said elsewhere, Eich wasn’t fired, he resigned because of the backlash. The public has just as much a right to protest and boycott as someone does to spout off hate.
> If someone were going around telling me that they don’t think my husband and I should be married isn’t hate, then I’m not sure hate as a word has a lot of meaning left.
While I personally am all for same-sex marriage, I think the problem is that hate has too many meanings these days. Any disagreement on hot topics is often construed as hate. The world isn't all hate or love, black and white, with or against us. What you're asking for is conformity.
While Eich could have spared his personal controversial thoughts as a tech CEO, like everybody else he is free to think whatever he wants. Voting against someone else's ideals in a democratic process isn't hate; it's called a trick question when only one answer is valid and acceptable.
There's certainly a lot of hate for Mozilla based on the specious argument that actively trying to deny other people the right to marry the person they love isn't hate.
That's a pretty lazy and entitled argument to make when you're not on the receiving end of Brendan Eich's irrational homophobia and attempted sabotaging of your own marriage.
The word "hate" having too many meanings isn't a problem. People trying to deny other people's humanity and human right to marry the person they love is a problem, whatever word you choose to label it with.
While I agree on the principle of same-sex marriage and people should be able to do and love whoever they want,
> People trying to deny other people's humanity
why was Proposition 8, the proposal to ban same-sex marriage, a referendum, if by your standards one choice is good and the other is denying other people's humanity? What is the point of democracy and referendums if one possible answer is deemed incorrect and inhumane a priori?
That said, I think we're straying too far off topic, and I usually am one that hates when any discussion about Mozilla or Brave touches on Eich's controversy. So I will stop now.
For the same reason legalizing slavery should not be up to a referendum, and "states rights" don't include the right to deny other people's humanity by legalizing owning another human being as property.
If you will recall, the United States fought a bloody war about that, and the traitors on the pro-slavery side lost.
And I'll remind you that the US Supreme Court already strongly affirmed that human rights are not up for a vote, when it legalized same sex marriage.
>Supreme Court affirms my human rights are not up for a vote
>Human rights should never be subjected to a popular vote. The will of the people does not matter in the slightest. The Supreme Court did not give LGBT citizens anything today. Countries merely recognize the rights that already exist, and protect them.
>“…the right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty. The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them.” -Justice Anthony Kennedy
>Human rights do not stem from the will of the majority in any nation. Ayn Rand (even a broken clock is right twice a day) said, “…individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities.” If this is true, the inverse is also true; a majority has no right to permit or grant the rights of a minority.
You yourself just admitted that "I usually am one that hates when any discussion about Mozilla or Brave touches on Eich's controversy", after complaining that hate has too many definitions. With such a low bar for hatred, which you admit to yourself, how can you at the same time deny that Brendan's dehumanizing homophobic anti-human-rights beliefs aren't hateful?
Your hatred of discussions about Brendan's beliefs doesn't ruin people's lives or deny their humanity. But Brendan's hateful beliefs about same sex marriage do ruin people's lives and deny their humanity.
So why don't you just stop hating those discussions, and learn to tolerate free speech?
And why doesn't Brendan Eich simply stop hating gays, and tolerate same sex marriages, which the Supreme Court has affirmed is a "fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person"?
Isn't it ironic that so many of the same people who attempt to raise the goalposts so high by redefining "hate" to not include denying another person's basic human rights as hatred, also claim to hate Mozilla so much?
Why is Brendan Eich voluntarily deciding to cancel himself by resigning from Mozilla of his own free will so much more of an atrocity to some bigots than Brendan denying other human beings against their will the simple universal human right to marry the person they love?
It's not just an opposing view of somebody's favorite color or brand, it's a fundamental disagreement about human rights, and the Supreme Court has already ruled that human rights shouldn't be decided by the popular vote, that same sex marriage is a "fundamental right inherent in the liberty of a person", and that Brendan Eich is incorrect in his beliefs that same sex marriage should be against the law, and is on the wrong side of history, law, and the US Constitution.
>“…the right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty. The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them.” -Justice Anthony Kennedy
And the same people who are so offended at calling Brendan's dehumanization of same sex couples "hate" are usually the same ones also claiming to "hate" Mozilla and "hate" discussions about Brendan Eich's support for Proposition 8, so they've already set the bar extremely low for the definition of "hate", and they don't have a leg to stand on trying to move the goalposts by redefining "hate" in the next sentence.
It was certainly damn shoddy that Brendan Eich got pushed out - but then again, that was the start of Brave, which is actually implementing a new vision for the internet (BAT).
> Brendan Eich was certainly successful at sabotaging Mozilla by turning homophobes and GamerGate trolls against his former employer, and making himself a poster child of the Alt-Right
I'm pretty sure he just sabotaged himself. He was a decent CEO but his ideals didn't fit the company, so there was backlash, drama and he resigned. Mozilla didn't suffer permanent damage from Eich's tenure.
The current management though, they're actually ruining Mozilla and driving it off a cliff.
Mozilla did cancel Eich and the fact that he was resigning out of free will is not in conflict with that assessment.
We probably all know from school how easy it is to bully someone into doing quite a lot of ridiculous things out of free will.
There is nothing hateful or resentful about recognizing this event and describing it in this specific way, even though there are some people who don't agree with the description.
It doesn't make you a troll, "Mozilla-hating", "alt-right", "GamerGate" or part of any other team description. Those are designed to polarize. Labels like that discourage intellectually honest conversation.
Mozilla is well known for their problematic culture, irrespective of the whole Eich-event. They make it a brand-statement to demand from their employees to ideologically fall in line behind their leaders.
I think they should be allowed to do that, sure. I'm probably, (unfortunately) implicitly supporting it by using their browser.
I'm also personally very happy to work in an inclusive, diverse and intellectually open environment where there is no such pressure to conform. I'd personally love to see a Mozilla with this kind of company culture instead of the thing they are doing right now.
If someone is criticizing a company it does not need to be founded in hate or the desire to spark conflict. Mozilla is an emotional brand that started with an unusually important mission providing a life-shaping product. I use it for hours a day.
Enthusiastic criticism can be motivated by users that care so strongly for the product, they spend their free time taking part debating its future with strangers on the internet. What would other brands give for this kind of engagement.
People who have visions should go see a doctor, as Helmut Schmidt put it.
There are concrete steps that Moz could be taking, such as working towards drastically simplifying the web by eg defining HTML/CSS profiles/subsets, define formal semantics of CSS, separate-out stuff only there in support of apps vs content-oriented sites, address conflicting goals of security vs questionable protocol complexity (HTTP/3, DoH), stop engaging in "web standards" activities where the user doesn't sit at the table, ...
Basically everything quoted has been table stakes for a while, especially between Chrome pushing speed and extensibility and Safari privacy. There doesn’t seem to be much vision here, and certainly nothing original. That’s quite disappointing.
I agree with most of this vision, think these values are important, and would love to see Mozilla realize them.
Given the values outlined here, I was sad to see that Mozilla doesn't seem to be looking much beyond the centralized platforms of today's commercial web. They see the "minimal barriers to entry for both users and publishers" as one of the key properties that makes the web such an important communication medium, and "Site-Building Ergonomics" is a top-level area where they see possibilities for improvement. Despite this, I don't see any recognition that it's still too difficult for ordinary users to publish their own information, which is why we have big commercial platforms where people do this, funded by ads, with all the problems that come along with that.
I think the most revolutionary thing Mozilla (and other browser makers) could do to realize this vision would be to turn their browser into a publishing platform. Browsers already have excellent tools for editing HTML, CSS, and JS built in, and they already speak the relevant protocols. Why not give every user a base URL for their personal site, and serve pages under it directly from the browser running on their computer? That would really lower the barrier to entry for users to become publishers and help realize the values of Openness and Agency.
Of course, such sites wouldn't be available 100% of the time, but they would probably be available enough to cover most of things people use the big platforms for: sharing text, photos and videos with their family and Internet friends. They would not need to be ad-supported and wouldn't raise the associated privacy issues. There are other problems to solve, but Mozilla is uniquely qualified to solve them.
I feel like Mozilla could do more to fund and otherwise support/promote such efforts for re-decentralizing the web, to bring the power balance back to the user.
This is a great idea, but the big problem with Beaker is the network effects: only Beaker users can see other Beaker users' sites. To be successful, I think the idea needs to run over regular HTTP(S) so that other browsers can still access these personal sites. This means, at least at the beginning, that someone needs to run the infrastructure that maps stable URLs to a P2P connection to individual browsers. Mozilla is in a good position to do that.
ICQ99 also added a feature like this, despite being an instant messenger, not a web browser.
I wonder if you could just write a Firefox extension that did this. It seems like the sort of thing that could be a viral sensation to get teens using your product--a new MySpace--but unlikely to have a transformative effect on the web.
Unfortunately I believe Mozilla lacks the willpower and constitution to host user content. Hosting user content is messy and operational and forces the host to engage with the user content itself, and Mozilla will never be able to bring itself to do that. I'm sure they'll try again like they have tried before, but half-heartedly and once they realize what's involved they'll shut down the next experiment too.
My only actual hope would be if they could partner with someone who didn't find user content so distasteful and was willing to put in the work. There have always been dreams that crypto could literally hide all the hard work that's required, but it's just a cop out.
But my whole point was that they wouldn't be hosting content. The users would be hosting it themselves, on their local computers, serving it via their browser. Mozilla would just have to provide a way to give users a stable base URL (linked maybe to Firefox accounts) that they could give to other people.
Ah... I see, but I don't think it will help that much.
Actually making it work requires proxies and other complexities to cover any reasonable number of users. Those hosted tools take on a lot of the liabilities of user content even if the content isn't directly served.
The limitations will be hard to explain, content disappearing when your computer goes to sleep, or when your browser restarts for an update, or your firewall rules update, etc.
It's also open to abuse without the user's consent, and so Mozilla could become the conduit for hackers, phishing, etc.
Like crypto, I think this is just a dodge. Shifting responsibility to users who don't understand the responsibility they are given isn't an answer. This is hard work.
It's a "what the hell have we (browser vendors) been doing these past 20 years?" shout with a surprisingly clear path forward.
Additionally, this is as close to be anti-Chrome as possible without shouting "Anti-Chrome manifesto", which tells you a lot about Chrome-dominated web.
The Mozilla CEO went to the press to threaten an anonymous person on the internet with dismissal.
>And regardless, either way, they are not welcome to continue to participate in the Mozilla project. It is not who we are."
Lets say you dont even agree and even believe this anonymous person was hate speech. You can't stay with the project after the CEO does this crazy shit.
Mozilla lost the talent they needed to make improvements to firefox.
It's a mix of strict politics and financial problems. Millions of dollars may sound like a lot, but those are some of their only sources of income and they rarely seem viable.
Google has hired Lars Bak and many distinguished WebKit and Runtime environment developers to make a high performance browser. They're practically leading the standards, the aging Gecko/SpiderMonkey codebase can't keep up because no one feels secure working for a dying company that likely doesn't have a competitive salary. That combined with how little a development team there is to work with.
To work on the technical side of Firefox is philanthropic at this point, to steer away from Chromium dominance.
> California companies cannot fire employees for their political beliefs.
They can, however, fire people for creating a hostile environment for other emoloyees who report of workplace issues of discrimination on federally protected bases. In fact, they can under federal law be held liable for not taking sufficient action to prevent and respond to that kind of behavior.
What I wish they prioritized instead was empowering users to download things and share them.
When you think about it, it's actually crazy that some websites prevent you from copy-pasting. That you need to learn how to use the "network" tab to save a video you came across online. I wish some browser prioritized going beyond the URL and actually turning content back into files we can share.
I would like something a kin to Gopher but with videos, forums, games, search engines etc. All neatly in document formats that I have full control over.
Disappointing that their vision does not include the working user. For me, ability has higher priority than security, till a certain degree. But even more, we can even have MORE security, by offering different abilities. But for a long time now, Mozilla is reducing ability, breaking promises and driving users away who are not just consumers.
This is really sad, and I don't think this is healthy for the web either. Knowledge Workers and power users are a strong force for the web. Neglecting them will harm the world in the long run. If you want a free and open web, open it for everyone, not just for the low-hanging fruits with low demand.
Here is a (in my humble opinion, vastly superior, and definitely, much more radical) vision for the evolution of the web:
- move to a totally content-centric system (something like IPFS maybe)
- give new browsers (and web assembly) first-class networking support such as direct UDP and TCP
- simplify browser into three categories of functionality: applications (web assembly), text (markdown/rst), and data (JSON? RDF?)
- drop CSS (can be used for user styles if implemented in particular browsers, but text advertisements that really needs to be formatted can be images)
- encrypted content should be handled in a different, non-authoritarian way. HTTPS ensures that state actors can access data with MITM.
- create at least two tiers for data sizes. one intended for low-bandwidth or very fast browsing that severely limits the size of files transferred.
> - encrypted content should be handled in a different, non-authoritarian way. HTTPS ensures that state actors can access data with MITM.
Given what happened the last two times Kazakhstan tried to MITM their entire country, I don't think you can honestly say that "HTTPS ensures that state actors can access data with MITM."
146 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] thread> The Web is unique because it offers users unparalleled control over the content they experience. This control is the foundation of agency, but the reality has not always lived up to the promise, and we see threats to it going forward. Consequently, we seek to protect and expand the mechanisms that empower people to experience the Web on their own terms.
> we eventually chose to support EME, but nevertheless view it as a regrettable chapter in the Web’s evolution
These are a few interesting parts I saw. Overall this looks good and I haven't seen any part of this I disagree with.
Is this a new publication from Mozilla? When was this written? I don't see a date on it.
- "As a result of these and other changes, the fraction of encrypted page loads has gone from around 30% in 2015 to the vast majority of traffic in 2022. "
>Privacy
multiple forks exist exactly because agency and privacy are not mozilla's values anymore. just half-hearted lip service
My guess is that because Mozilla is a hostage (and arguably antitrust human shield) of Google etc, it can't be too aggressive in its privacy approach, but it can at least not intentionally break privacy enhancing patchsets and features.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic about them though.
There is a trade-off between privacy and convenience, and one between agency and simplicity. Mozilla is quite okay with pushing their own proprietary products and removing customization.
...says the organisation that is continuously removing functionality, especially whenever they feel like redesigning the UI. Mozilla has been saying stuff like this for a long time (and "puts users in control" was the Firefox slogan for a while, before they did s/users/individuals/), but what they've done to Firefox is clearly in a different direction. I still use Firefox because it's the "least bad" of all the alternatives, but that's a pretty low bar and their continuing hypocrisy is definitely irritating.
"Actions speak louder than words."
The big change for millions of us was Firefox Quantum, which came out in November 2017.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum
Mozilla is proud of this because it involves some Rust stuff, but it was a massive loss for the extensions world. It removed (or disabled) XUL, Netscape's extensions language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL
To quote from the Classic Addons Archive:
« This catalog contains 93,598 versions of 19,450 Firefox add-ons created by 14,274 developers over the past 15 years using XUL/XPCOM technology before Mozilla decided to ruin the classic extensions ecosystem and go exclusively to WebExtensions. »
https://github.com/JustOff/ca-archive
For me, before Firefox 57, it worked superbly for me. Afterwards, of my 13 essential addons, only 2 still worked and one of those was trivial and unimportant.
It destroyed my browser and drove me away from using Firefox after nearly 20 years, dozens of computers and ½ dozen different operating systems.
Other cut functionality:
The best cross-platform FOSS email client, by far, is Mozilla Thunderbird. Mozilla has repeatedly tried to kill it.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/30/mozilla_thunderbird_h...
Mozilla also has cut off Seamonkey, the original Mozilla Internet Suite.
https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
Mozilla code is the one remaining FOSS WYSIWYG HTML editor, as included in Seamonkey.
It threw it out.
So far the following forks tried to maintain it:
Kompozer: https://sourceforge.net/projects/kompozer/
NVu: http://www.nvu.com/
BlueGriffon: http://bluegriffon.org/
Mozilla has no real idea why people use Firefox or what they want. It has forced wildly unpopular new features on people, such as the Australis theme.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/974802
It's forced telemetry that kicked the entire browser offline for millions:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/18/foxstuck_firefox_brow...
And yet it includes a huge complicated "developer mode" that 99.9% of users never want and never see.
Mozilla's Boot2Gecko became FirefoxOS which became KaiOS, the fastest-growing mobile OS in the world.
https://www.kaiostech.com/
Mozilla abandoned FirefoxOS.
KaiOS is proprietary. Mozilla licensing should make that illegal. Is Mozilla enforcing it? No. Who wrote the license? Mozilla CEO Mitch Baker.
Salary: $3 million in 2020.
Also 2020: Mozilla fired 250 people, quarter of its workforce. https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/11/mozilla_st...
What are those extensions? I myself use 16 extensions, and I don’t think it has ever happened that I wanted to use an extension that wasn’t compatible with post-57 Firefox.
> It's forced telemetry that kicked the entire browser offline for millions … And yet it includes a huge complicated "developer mode" that 99.9% of users never want and never see.
My question was, what features were removed? What does that have to do with telemetry and devtools?
Vertical tabs.
Flat bookmarks.
Unified sidebar.
DownThemAll + DTA Anti-Container.
Status4ever.
Downloads Tab.
BugMeNot.
AutoPagerizer.
Readability.
All stuff that tweaks the browser UI. WebExtensions mostly can't do that: they're trivial little things.
The fact that you now need to set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets in order for userChrome.css to work, and that it has "legacy" in the name, is already a sign that route might disappear in the future.
More "then[sic] any other browser" is a really low bar, especially when the others are far worse.
I use Waterfox these days, and occasionally Firefox if there's a problem.
It's now significantly harder to customise either of them to the way I used to like pre-Quantum Firefox. A few more steps down this path and I won't be able to at all.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork...
Most people don't care and the ones who do know Mozilla enough to know they failed miserably to live up to their standards. They dug a hole they can't get out of now.
Firefox is actually pretty good again. They dropped the ball for a while and let Chrome eat their lunch, but I switched back a couple years ago when the whole fiasco that forced users with Google accounts to automatically log in with their browsers occurred. Google eventually added an option after the backlash, but I trust Mozilla's incentive structure more than Google's when it comes to my browser
What you're saying is that Mozilla threw out the very things that made them relevant?
Rust is now managed by the Rust foundation. Having the language shepherded by a dedicated foundation is healthier than keeping it all in house.
It's definitely fair to argue that laying off some of the core Rust developers harms their relevance, but it's definitely more nuanced than "they just threw out..."
Despite the Mozilla leadership and the at times questionable investments, Firefox could never be more relevant.
We need a non-Chrome browser just as we need multiple operating systems with different design paradigms. It gives us flexibility, increased surface area for experimentation, and acts as an anchor for web standards (at least as long as non-Chrome browser share remains).
If running instructions should be free, so should reading information. Even if Chromium is itself open source, Firefox (and mostly Safari) keep Chrome from turning into a thin client that bakes in Google's self interested designs for the web.
I think Mozilla corporation should be acquired or merge with Canonical, Framework, or some other open-minded computing company. The leadership should build a strong "complete package" offering: laptop, phone, operating system, browser. That makes more sense to me than continued investments into weird side projects with little chance of developing traction.
And by weird side projects, I don't mean their efforts in VR or discontinued efforts in TTS. I think building open platforms in these domains makes a lot of sense. I just don't know if Mozilla should be the folks to do it. Their core mission - web - should be their singular focus.
The absolute best thing Mozilla could do, though, is spend money on marketing and partnerships to improve Firefox adoption and stem the losses. After they get growth back, the next thing to do is to develop stable, sensible revenue streams. The browser has become a commodity, which is why I think premium hardware sales could do the trick. Especially if it's "ethical" open hardware.
nrp (Framework founder's HN username), you should go have a chat with Mozilla folks sometime. Now isn't the time to consider an acquisition, but after you achieve growth and scale - please buy them out. Tout them as part of your offering, and use them as an additional funnel to drive Framework hardware sales.
> market that they value privacy and then their actions show otherwise
Which actions?
On the android platform Mozilla removed all extension sideloading capabilities.
Even their store extensions are now almost entirely off-limits for the user unless they create a Firefox account and link it to their device through some extension list ID.
The former just feels like an evil powergrab, the latter feels like a privacy reducing growth hack.
I really want Firefox to be great and do use it on all platforms, but many recent decisions regarding their products are not great.
In addition to that it seems that their toxic culture does appear to leave its mark on the brand.
https://digiday.com/marketing/after-mozilla-stopped-spending...
Sadly, they mention here their Manifesto which states:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/MarketingGuide
> Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
However, if you look at what settings are enabled by default and with the recent announcement of them tracking installs and downloads, they are no better than Chromium.
If such a competitor were to use Chromium/Blink, how do they differentiate from the other browsers? How do they avoid changes that Google push into Chromium/Blink that they don't want? Where do they get the resources to develop standards they want to support like MathML or several of the CSS drafts?
If such a competitor were to create their own web stack, where do they get the resources and time to build the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to a level that is competitive?
Not exactly.
There is a Mozilla Foundation and a Mozilla Corporation
EDIT: To name an infamous example that's often cited here on HN: Mozilla. If it was operated like a non-profit, by people driven by vision not money, it would probably have saved the web from whatever Google has turned it into.
Chromium is. But Chrome isn't.
https://probes.telemetry.mozilla.org/
https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/
It is surprisingly easy to disable telemetry in Chromium as well, and when configuring Firefox using a similar method they send just as much telemetry as Chromium by default.
Google on the other hand can connect your live location with your search queries, your photos, your email, your browser history, with all of your friends’ listed items. Let’s not goddamn compare the two as counting how many people use firefox is not at all intrusive to noone. They are simply not comparable.
TL;DR: it doesn't suffice to fork the client, you have to fork the entire web.
Just because I disagree that things are worse that doesn’t mean that I like the status quo either. Which is why I use Firefox (well, one of the many reasons. But a pretty big reason).
I remember writing my own web browser around 1999 (give or take a couple years). Just a toy thing but born out of frustration with Internet Explorer, or Internet Exploiter as I used to call it. That was a massive undertaking. But these days if Google do stagnate Chrome then it’s still possible to fork Chromium and push it in a different direction. Not to mention we also have WebKit, kHTML and Gecko too. That alone makes this situation better than it was when Microsoft owned the web. Add to that, Chome doesn’t come pre-installed on as many computers as IE did (lots if you count Android but at least Apple hardware ship something else. Opinions of Safari aside).
This doesn’t mean we should be complacent nor assume Google doesn’t still have a stranglehold but it does mean the GPs point is inaccurate.
Chrome on the other hand is not a hedge, it’s a key strategic interest for Google. It’s a great product from the users perspective, free, fast, leading experience. That’s likely not to falter.
Firefox is a great counterbalance but don’t expect it to lead with average consumers any time soon. From what I can tell it’s playing catch up on core features and it’s innovating in areas where more techno-literate users might care.
From our perspective that’s true. But it also worked fine for a great many non-technical people.
> That was also a time when the web was younger and users were more techno-literate.
That’s not true. By the time IE6 arrived most offices had either dedicated internet terminals or their workstations were connected to the internet. U.K. libraries had been providing internet access for years already, several years of kids would have used the internet at college, and dial up was already common in homes.
I remember this well because I managed network infrastructure for schools and offices in the late 90s and early 00s.
> I’d argue that IE was a hedge against the web displacing the OS. After it succeeded in killing off Netscape there wasn’t much to hedge against
No need to argue there, Microsoft have admitted that themselves. But the motives behind IE don’t alter the point we are discussing (though still interesting).
> Chrome on the other hand is not a hedge, it’s a key strategic interest for Google
The two point aren’t mutually exclusive: It’s a hedge against users not consuming Google’s advertising.
Much like how IE was a core strategy for Microsoft as well as a hedge to keep people on Windows.
> It’s a great product from the users perspective, free, fast, leading experience
So was internet explorer. It was developers that hated IE, not your average desktop user.
IE was faster than FF, free (unlike Opera) and compatible with more sites too (if just because web developers didn’t have much other choice than to support IE).
> Firefox is a great counterbalance but don’t expect it to lead with average consumers any time soon
I don’t ever expect it to lead again. And it’s also worth noting it took years to displace IE last time around so why would anyone expect it to happen quickly this time?
> From what I can tell it’s playing catch up on core features and it’s innovating in areas where more techno-literate users might care.
Funny enough this is similar to Netscape back when IE first started to take the edge (back in the IE 3 and 4 days when IE was actually a good browser).
What people sometimes forget is that IE didn’t just dominate because it was installed on every Windows desktop. While that certainly helped (as well as being the reason it remained dominant after it stagnated), it had already largely beaten the competition by the time IE 4 was released. IE was, for a while, genuinely the best browser.
So the situation then and now isn’t that different.
We're down to three browser engines {Blink, Gecko, WebKit} and I don't expect any new because the web piles up complexity. We've lost Trident, KHTML and Opera. While nobody will miss the first, we're missing a heterogeneous web. We're down to an oligopoly with a tendency to a monopoly by Google. I cannot recommend just avoiding Chrome and replacing it by Chromium. Most complaints about WebKit and Gecko are actually not about them but that they are not Blink (i.e. Chrome).
I'm neither a fan of the present usage of JavaScript. To be precise, how it used in modern web. It didn't improve experience of the users. We now have random websites which consume resources and drain the battery. My impression is, that all engines stopped make the JS engines faster? Now it looks like the engines try to figure out which website is consuming resources through JS. Too late? Well. Modern JS is required often but isn't necessary for the web. The best use case is Stackoverflow and the worst are modern Cookie-Dialogs. In Europe the ill formed cookie directive created a new business-model and companys providing aggregate remote cookie banners, storing the cookies actually on their systems.
Interestingly? I want web-browsers to add an permission "Allow JavaScript" alongside the "Allow {Adds, Geolocation, Cookies, ...}" and therefore contain its usage. There were many reason not to use Flash but Steve Jobs eradicated Flash for one reason, it's draining batteries. He had his point. I think it is possible to get rid of JS in a lot of parts of the web. And the others should better provide us a good reason why we shoud even allow them using it.PS: I'm coding myself also with JavaScript and want to avoid using it.
Google created Chrome, in part, to become less dependent on browser defaults. That worked, and Mozilla's main source of revenue was/is almost certain to dry up.
So they bundled a service or two at some point. You clicked 'no' and were never bothered again.
That's too much of an ask? You are free to donate, instead. You, and everyone else, was always free to do so, of course. It didn't work, it doesn't work, and it will never work, but that doesn't stop anyone from suggesting it, in this case and every other (music, journalism).
People mouth off about privacy and security but will not follow through with $5/yr if they aren't forced to. They'll get their fix from Google or Microsoft, use the same pretentious arguments about security to also screw the people that write what they like reading and act surprised when they wake up in a paywalled garden. I bet it's the same people that litter whenever nobody is watching.
(Unless you're on MacOS)
I guess selling user data is fine as long as it is done ‘to survive’? Nah… I’ll take the browser with the best privacy and that is sadly just not Firefox anymore.
The problem with your audience being contrarians is that they're impossible to please, and while you're competition gets blind followers, you're left with nothing but criticism.
Okay, you have some issues with how things are being run, maybe some or all of those are even valid. But show some support for the only other player, or at the very least some _constructions_ feedback.
There are a gazillion Chromium based browsers and they are each dependent on Google developing and maintaining that. Google controls its roadmap, the internals that render your pages, it employs the engineers working on it, and the gate keepers vetting the occasional pull request from outside Google. But lets be honest, most of the work is done by Google engineers. Nothing happens to Chromium without their consent and backing. They control it completely.
So, the likes of Brave, Edge, Opera, etc. might do a fine job adding their window dressing, minor tweaks, and what not. But they are outsourcing the core browsing components to Google.
Without Mozilla it's down to just Apple and Google running the show. Apple has Safari and Google has Chrome. The rest does not really matter since it is effectively all Chromium. Unless you are paying the Apple tax, you'll have just one choice: consume the web via a Google provided code base.
That's why it is important to keep Mozilla going. With three major browsing engines, most websites have to make sure to work with all of them. Apple, Mozilla, and Google have been doing great work together in standardizing what they do and collaborating on new non exclusive features that each of them then implement in a way that works the same in each browser. Mozilla has a crucial role in keeping the other two honest. It matters.
And Firefox is pretty nice. I use it on desktop and on Android.
> You are free to donate, instead.
Donations go to the Mozilla Foundation, which allocates money to various internal and external projects. So why donate if it doesn't fund the web browser? From their own words:
"Mozilla Fellows and Awardees represent a range of disciplines and geographies: They are policymakers in Kenya, journalists in Brazil, engineers in Germany, privacy activists in the United States, and data scientists in the Netherlands." in https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/
> So they bundled a service or two at some point. You clicked 'no' and were never bothered again.
That's not the only problem, and far from it. As a power user, I've been annoyed by the removal of features. At some point, to keep vertical tabs, I had to modify obscure config files, and venture into the poorly document about:config. And Firefox last rewrite of their download manager was full of bugs, with half of them still there a year after. If not for the free software and web engine competitor, I would not use Firefox.
For my aging parents, the Firefox experience is far from smooth. An upgrade lost their frontpage bookmarks. Several others changed the UI to the point they had to call me.
Unlike Mozilla, it wouldn't be in control of the releases. But features are certainly less likely to disappear if someone is there to maintain them.
At the moment Mozilla does feel like an eggs in one basket situation for the community.
Mozilla has long lost the browser war.
Browsers are the modern thin clients into Cloud OSes, and there Mozilla has very little that they can push.
I still use Firefox whenever I can, but the writing is on the wall, without Apple's resistance (naturally due to native store apps), the correct title for Web developers would be ChromeOS developer.
Mozilla gets criticism because they do things that deserve criticism. That there are others who are worse is irrelevant. If anything, not having a better alternative makes is more important to keep Mozilla from getting even less user-focused.
This notion that they should not be criticized for the shit they pull because hey they are the good guys* is ridiculous.
* relatively, conditions apply
> You are free to donate, instead.
You CANNOT donate to Firefox browser development. Mozilla corp does not accept donations. Mozilla org does not do any browser development. Even if Mozilla corp did accept donations it would be ridiculous for anyone to donate to an organization that pays thear leadership an amonout that is ridiculously high compared to even the US average income.
> People mouth off about privacy and security but will not follow through with $5/yr if they aren't forced to.
I donate to plenty of organizations. I would't donate to Mozilla corp even if I could because they don't want to be a non-profit organization that exists to serve a mission but rather a SV for profit corporation that focuses on competitive executive compensation complete with all the bullshit that comes with that like ignoring user feedback and replacing it with telemetry.
Huh? Apart from the fact that your donation goes to Mozilla Foundation, who will likely spend it on something you don't care about and don't want (and not) to Firefox), making a donation in the hope that some misfeature will be removed for you is magical thinking. It's in the nature of a donation that it's given freely, not in exchange for some consideration, and that once it's given you no longer control it.
A "gift" made in exchange for a consideration is usually called a contract.
Like, how much do I have to donate to get them to rip out Pocket?
I still use firefox, and I still think it's a good browser. I hope Mozilla's recent forays into VPNs and such helps stabilize their ship and lets them focus back on their mission and not forcing pocket on me.
All those moves can directly be linked to user tracking and I just feels something like "Block others and allows myself and myself only to track". So far I've no evidence to support it but let's wait and see.
These are good ideas and concepts and stuff, but.. it misses something.
Many people pushing the boundaries of tech are also super high functioning autistics. Punishing them for bad social takes is just punishing a handicapped person because you can't stand the sight of a one-legged person.
This is a bit off topic from the article, but to say why I think that: in the US a great deal of rights are conferred to married couples. Being able to have a child through surrogacy and have both of us presumed parents, being able to visit my husband in the hospital, getting to be on his health insurance. If anyone wishes that we don’t have access to those things but claims to not hate me, I think they are carefully choosing to ignore the ramifications of their opinion.
All that said, as it was said elsewhere, Eich wasn’t fired, he resigned because of the backlash. The public has just as much a right to protest and boycott as someone does to spout off hate.
While I personally am all for same-sex marriage, I think the problem is that hate has too many meanings these days. Any disagreement on hot topics is often construed as hate. The world isn't all hate or love, black and white, with or against us. What you're asking for is conformity.
While Eich could have spared his personal controversial thoughts as a tech CEO, like everybody else he is free to think whatever he wants. Voting against someone else's ideals in a democratic process isn't hate; it's called a trick question when only one answer is valid and acceptable.
That's a pretty lazy and entitled argument to make when you're not on the receiving end of Brendan Eich's irrational homophobia and attempted sabotaging of your own marriage.
The word "hate" having too many meanings isn't a problem. People trying to deny other people's humanity and human right to marry the person they love is a problem, whatever word you choose to label it with.
> People trying to deny other people's humanity
why was Proposition 8, the proposal to ban same-sex marriage, a referendum, if by your standards one choice is good and the other is denying other people's humanity? What is the point of democracy and referendums if one possible answer is deemed incorrect and inhumane a priori?
That said, I think we're straying too far off topic, and I usually am one that hates when any discussion about Mozilla or Brave touches on Eich's controversy. So I will stop now.
If you will recall, the United States fought a bloody war about that, and the traitors on the pro-slavery side lost.
And I'll remind you that the US Supreme Court already strongly affirmed that human rights are not up for a vote, when it legalized same sex marriage.
https://whyy.org/articles/supreme-court-affirms-my-human-rig...
>Supreme Court affirms my human rights are not up for a vote
>Human rights should never be subjected to a popular vote. The will of the people does not matter in the slightest. The Supreme Court did not give LGBT citizens anything today. Countries merely recognize the rights that already exist, and protect them.
>“…the right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty. The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them.” -Justice Anthony Kennedy
>Human rights do not stem from the will of the majority in any nation. Ayn Rand (even a broken clock is right twice a day) said, “…individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities.” If this is true, the inverse is also true; a majority has no right to permit or grant the rights of a minority.
You yourself just admitted that "I usually am one that hates when any discussion about Mozilla or Brave touches on Eich's controversy", after complaining that hate has too many definitions. With such a low bar for hatred, which you admit to yourself, how can you at the same time deny that Brendan's dehumanizing homophobic anti-human-rights beliefs aren't hateful?
Your hatred of discussions about Brendan's beliefs doesn't ruin people's lives or deny their humanity. But Brendan's hateful beliefs about same sex marriage do ruin people's lives and deny their humanity.
So why don't you just stop hating those discussions, and learn to tolerate free speech?
And why doesn't Brendan Eich simply stop hating gays, and tolerate same sex marriages, which the Supreme Court has affirmed is a "fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person"?
Isn't it ironic that so many of the same people who attempt to raise the goalposts so high by redefining "hate" to not include denying another person's basic human rights as hatred, also claim to hate Mozilla so much?
Why is Brendan Eich voluntarily deciding to cancel himself by resigning from Mozilla of his own free will so much more of an atrocity to some bigots than Brendan denying other human beings against their will the simple universal human right to marry the person they love?
>“…the right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty. The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them.” -Justice Anthony Kennedy
And the same people who are so offended at calling Brendan's dehumanization of same sex couples "hate" are usually the same ones also claiming to "hate" Mozilla and "hate" discussions about Brendan Eich's support for Proposition 8, so they've already set the bar extremely low for the definition of "hate", and they don't have a leg to stand on trying to move the goalposts by redefining "hate" in the next sentence.
A much shadier one at that.
I'm pretty sure he just sabotaged himself. He was a decent CEO but his ideals didn't fit the company, so there was backlash, drama and he resigned. Mozilla didn't suffer permanent damage from Eich's tenure.
The current management though, they're actually ruining Mozilla and driving it off a cliff.
We probably all know from school how easy it is to bully someone into doing quite a lot of ridiculous things out of free will.
There is nothing hateful or resentful about recognizing this event and describing it in this specific way, even though there are some people who don't agree with the description.
It doesn't make you a troll, "Mozilla-hating", "alt-right", "GamerGate" or part of any other team description. Those are designed to polarize. Labels like that discourage intellectually honest conversation.
Mozilla is well known for their problematic culture, irrespective of the whole Eich-event. They make it a brand-statement to demand from their employees to ideologically fall in line behind their leaders.
I think they should be allowed to do that, sure. I'm probably, (unfortunately) implicitly supporting it by using their browser.
I'm also personally very happy to work in an inclusive, diverse and intellectually open environment where there is no such pressure to conform. I'd personally love to see a Mozilla with this kind of company culture instead of the thing they are doing right now.
If someone is criticizing a company it does not need to be founded in hate or the desire to spark conflict. Mozilla is an emotional brand that started with an unusually important mission providing a life-shaping product. I use it for hours a day.
Enthusiastic criticism can be motivated by users that care so strongly for the product, they spend their free time taking part debating its future with strangers on the internet. What would other brands give for this kind of engagement.
People who have visions should go see a doctor, as Helmut Schmidt put it.
There are concrete steps that Moz could be taking, such as working towards drastically simplifying the web by eg defining HTML/CSS profiles/subsets, define formal semantics of CSS, separate-out stuff only there in support of apps vs content-oriented sites, address conflicting goals of security vs questionable protocol complexity (HTTP/3, DoH), stop engaging in "web standards" activities where the user doesn't sit at the table, ...
Given the values outlined here, I was sad to see that Mozilla doesn't seem to be looking much beyond the centralized platforms of today's commercial web. They see the "minimal barriers to entry for both users and publishers" as one of the key properties that makes the web such an important communication medium, and "Site-Building Ergonomics" is a top-level area where they see possibilities for improvement. Despite this, I don't see any recognition that it's still too difficult for ordinary users to publish their own information, which is why we have big commercial platforms where people do this, funded by ads, with all the problems that come along with that.
I think the most revolutionary thing Mozilla (and other browser makers) could do to realize this vision would be to turn their browser into a publishing platform. Browsers already have excellent tools for editing HTML, CSS, and JS built in, and they already speak the relevant protocols. Why not give every user a base URL for their personal site, and serve pages under it directly from the browser running on their computer? That would really lower the barrier to entry for users to become publishers and help realize the values of Openness and Agency.
Of course, such sites wouldn't be available 100% of the time, but they would probably be available enough to cover most of things people use the big platforms for: sharing text, photos and videos with their family and Internet friends. They would not need to be ad-supported and wouldn't raise the associated privacy issues. There are other problems to solve, but Mozilla is uniquely qualified to solve them.
The very first web browser had this feature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb#Features And it seems the perfect way to realize much of this vision. Why not bring it back?
Your description reminds me of Beaker, the "peer-to-peer Web browser".
https://beakerbrowser.com/
I feel like Mozilla could do more to fund and otherwise support/promote such efforts for re-decentralizing the web, to bring the power balance back to the user.
https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/discussions/1944
https://atek.cloud/blog/hello-world
This is a great idea, but the big problem with Beaker is the network effects: only Beaker users can see other Beaker users' sites. To be successful, I think the idea needs to run over regular HTTP(S) so that other browsers can still access these personal sites. This means, at least at the beginning, that someone needs to run the infrastructure that maps stable URLs to a P2P connection to individual browsers. Mozilla is in a good position to do that.
I wonder if you could just write a Firefox extension that did this. It seems like the sort of thing that could be a viral sensation to get teens using your product--a new MySpace--but unlikely to have a transformative effect on the web.
My only actual hope would be if they could partner with someone who didn't find user content so distasteful and was willing to put in the work. There have always been dreams that crypto could literally hide all the hard work that's required, but it's just a cop out.
Actually making it work requires proxies and other complexities to cover any reasonable number of users. Those hosted tools take on a lot of the liabilities of user content even if the content isn't directly served.
The limitations will be hard to explain, content disappearing when your computer goes to sleep, or when your browser restarts for an update, or your firewall rules update, etc.
It's also open to abuse without the user's consent, and so Mozilla could become the conduit for hackers, phishing, etc.
Like crypto, I think this is just a dodge. Shifting responsibility to users who don't understand the responsibility they are given isn't an answer. This is hard work.
Additionally, this is as close to be anti-Chrome as possible without shouting "Anti-Chrome manifesto", which tells you a lot about Chrome-dominated web.
Firefox has good engineers who work hard and deserve your trust but they don't set the product direction. The lawyers and politicians do.
They will just make some Chromium distribution and wrap it with Rust.
It's not that they can't afford. They get truckloads of free money every year.
The reason they dont have significant development is because they actively attacked their developers and pushed them to other projects.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9202067/mozilla-ceo-chris...
""If they are an employee, they will be fired.""
The Mozilla CEO went to the press to threaten an anonymous person on the internet with dismissal.
>And regardless, either way, they are not welcome to continue to participate in the Mozilla project. It is not who we are."
Lets say you dont even agree and even believe this anonymous person was hate speech. You can't stay with the project after the CEO does this crazy shit.
Mozilla lost the talent they needed to make improvements to firefox.
Google has hired Lars Bak and many distinguished WebKit and Runtime environment developers to make a high performance browser. They're practically leading the standards, the aging Gecko/SpiderMonkey codebase can't keep up because no one feels secure working for a dying company that likely doesn't have a competitive salary. That combined with how little a development team there is to work with.
To work on the technical side of Firefox is philanthropic at this point, to steer away from Chromium dominance.
They can, however, fire people for creating a hostile environment for other emoloyees who report of workplace issues of discrimination on federally protected bases. In fact, they can under federal law be held liable for not taking sufficient action to prevent and respond to that kind of behavior.
When you think about it, it's actually crazy that some websites prevent you from copy-pasting. That you need to learn how to use the "network" tab to save a video you came across online. I wish some browser prioritized going beyond the URL and actually turning content back into files we can share.
I would like something a kin to Gopher but with videos, forums, games, search engines etc. All neatly in document formats that I have full control over.
This is really sad, and I don't think this is healthy for the web either. Knowledge Workers and power users are a strong force for the web. Neglecting them will harm the world in the long run. If you want a free and open web, open it for everyone, not just for the low-hanging fruits with low demand.
- move to a totally content-centric system (something like IPFS maybe)
- give new browsers (and web assembly) first-class networking support such as direct UDP and TCP
- simplify browser into three categories of functionality: applications (web assembly), text (markdown/rst), and data (JSON? RDF?)
- drop CSS (can be used for user styles if implemented in particular browsers, but text advertisements that really needs to be formatted can be images)
- encrypted content should be handled in a different, non-authoritarian way. HTTPS ensures that state actors can access data with MITM.
- create at least two tiers for data sizes. one intended for low-bandwidth or very fast browsing that severely limits the size of files transferred.
Given what happened the last two times Kazakhstan tried to MITM their entire country, I don't think you can honestly say that "HTTPS ensures that state actors can access data with MITM."