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Comment by alfapla | Hacker News Reader

It's little more than a year ago that Brendan Eich was ousted from Mozilla by an ugly orchestrated cabal. When I read Mitchell Baker's vapid blog post [1] on the decision, filled with polite backstabbing and politically correct buzzwordery I understood that Mozilla has been taken over by politicians and that its decline is just a matter of time.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/03/brendan-eich-steps-...

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He quit, he wasn't fired. If you have evidence to the contrary, please post it.

You could say the same about Richard Nixon

I can't think of many OSS projects that aren't being manipulated by a strong community of liberals.

Is that the US definition of 'liberal'? i.e. the one that would apply to most center-right parties in the rest of the world?

"Liberals" in the US - democrats - are indeed center-right of the rest of the world. Look at Obama, Clinton, Biden. They are very center on some issues and quite right on others.

Probably. I've always considered both US parties to be so far right wrt the rest of the world, that anything even remotely moderate would be labeled "liberal" or "communist". Both terms used with extreme prejudice and disdain, of course.

There is no equivalent of a European left in mainstream US politics. You see bits and pieces in some small-time candidates like Bernie Sanders, but nothing serious. The red scare did its job.

A U.S. "liberal" is very socially-progressive (pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, pro-environment, anti-racist, mostly pro-regulation and anti-corporate). I think that's the sort of people the parent poster intended to describe. In Europe "liberals" are usually pro-business and socially-conservative.

(Btw, I wouldn't say a U.S. liberal will automatically sit on the right of the European discourse, today. Traditional socialism has virtually disappeared as a political choice in Europe as well, so really there is very little disagreement today between a U.S. liberal and a European with mainstream social-democratic sensibilities -- except maybe on foreign policy.)

I have been looking at https://input.mozilla.org/ now and then for a long time, and I am still astounded at how it's typically around 90% unhappy, 10% happy.

I know that some Mozilla supporters will justify that huge difference by saying, "but unhappy people will always complain and happy people won't say anything", but I don't think that's necessarily the case. Here we have Mozilla's own stats saying that a lot of their users are extremely unhappy with Firefox.

Clearly something is very wrong for the disapproval rating to be so high, and the satisfaction rating to be so low. In other situations, such a high disapproval rating would be met with extreme concern, immediate retrospection, and panic.

Even in the case of US presidents, where people don't have an immediate alternative like they do with web browsers, and where people's emotions run rampant, it's very rare to see an approval rating under 40%. The very worst approval ratings still are around 25%.

So something is seriously wrong for Mozilla's products to consistently have an approval rating of only 10%, or even 20% if we're being generous.

Take a look at the platform statistics there. Nearly half of the feedback (46%) comes from Android users. Reading the comments, they seem like the (very uninsightful) reviews you typically see in the Google Play Store where the "unhappy people will complain" seems to be quite true.

Firefox for Android is a fundamentally different beast from the browser on Windows/Linux/MacOS. I am quite happy with the desktop version, yet I find the mobile experience quite underwhelming.

If you limit the selection by platform, on Android it will even show "100% sad, 0% happy" -- Mozilla has some work to do there. On Windows 7 you get "81% sad, 19% happy". Still bad, I agree, but don't just dismiss the inherent bias of a feedback system. And compare them to the stats for competitors, too.

Those approval ratings you speak of are usually reported as a part of representative studies. What do you think is the approval rating of Obama, if you only ask people who support Jeb Bush's campaign?

Input is anything but representative, it's not meant to be. It's there to catch things as early as possible.

I had never seen input.* before so I checked it out. I was pleasantly reminded of the variety of user-cases when I read this comment:

"I accidentally installed a prank addon/script (can't remember the name or which one, though it did come with a clear warning). Now my Facebook comments are garbled (scrambles text (makes it worse when I use punctuation-multiplies it). Please use and add some malware cleaner in some future update to get rid of this nasty prank script/addon. I use Stylish addon and I'm guessing I got it from this! Makes using Facebook defunct and troublesome!"

Input is not an approval rating, not even close. That is what Heartbeat is for.

Mozilla Heartbeat is constantly asking for ratings from a random sample of Firefox users.

The Heartbeat rating for Firefox Desktop is currently about 4.3/5- or 86%.

P.s. Despite the amount of negative feedback in Input, the portion of feedback which is positive is about twice what it was in May.

"I have been looking at https://input.mozilla.org/ now and then for a long time, and I am still astounded at how it's typically around 90% unhappy, 10% happy."

I've been reading Mozilla's bug system for 17 years and the bug numbers keep going up. That can't be a good sign.</sarcasm>

It's disappointing to see Mozilla's leadership respond with sarcasm and denial when faced with the fact that 80% or more of their users are not happy with recent versions of Firefox.

That should be 80% of the users who have some reason to be poking around in Firefox's Help menu and are motivated enough to click "Submit Feedback". That group does not include many people who have a perfectly good experience with Firefox.

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