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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla has really lost touch with its users.

Good on them for backtracking on this, but it's a symptom of high level decisions taken without running them past anybody else. Pocket is another one of those symptoms.

There is no reason these things can get past development and the various betas without people yelling out "hey, we should not be doing this, it's damaging to our product". This happens in companies that have become too large to understand their own users.

And it's not limited to Firefox - Mozilla as a whole no longer understands its core mission. Its motto of "Freeing the web". Development on absolutely critical components of a free web such as Persona or a good email client stops, to make way for development on the completely unrealistic Firefox OS.

Not that the world doesn't need a free mobile OS, but Firefox OS is not it. Not only is it doomed to be awful (layers on top of layers on top of layers... browsers are not great for batteries), they're spending decades of manpower trying to match android 2.0, then selling that to users. I had the misfortune of trying out the Flame. What a disaster that was. I can't see myself ever trying out fxos again without a lot of changes and convincing, so go sell that to non-technical users...

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> it's a symptom of high level decisions taken without running them past anybody else

As much as I love and respect many of the people at Mozilla, and the project itself (I spent 5 years of my life volunteering in the early years), this has been a systemic problem all along, pretty much from day one. Certain types of decisions get made by a very small group of people who somehow acquire a tone-deafness when it comes to outside criticism. Then, when the decisions become public, the negative reaction is not only not understood, sometimes it's not believed, or not taken seriously, and simply serves to retrench the decision makers in their choice and they go radio silent. Then after a while, they may or may not reevaluate that without any form of communication as to what's going on inside. Then, a year or two later, it'll happen again.

I am NOT insulting people, there's no malice in that process, no lack of intelligence, no evil intents. I use the phrase "tone deafness" purposefully because I feel it conveys the idea that these bad decisions come simply from some acquired inability to perceive and understand. They're all god, smart people, but something happens in the Mozilla culture where communication with the outside world becomes difficult and of lessened importance. It's odd.

That's really sad to hear. I was hoping it was a more recent symptom, but something that has been ingrained much longer is ... much harder to get rid of.

If anyone from Mozilla is reading this, what can be done to fix it?

I think it was inherited from the Netscape culture, because it was present early on. And frankly, given that for so long NSCP could do no wrong, it's understandable to a point.

To be fair tho, it seemed like a decent revenue path to pursue. I can't see how it would bother users much. While revenue has increased this year that doesn't mean it will next year. I am all for Mozilla trying new ways to generate cash to stay around. If FF died, Chrome would be a lonely browser :)

I didn't care about it, but it got some people really up in arms.

> Mozilla has really lost touch with its users. Good on them for backtracking on this, but...

This kind of negativity is really common on HN and it makes me sad.

"This group of people did something I don't like, and then they changed their mind and stopped doing it. But rather than being happy about fixing their mistake, I'm going to keep criticizing them for making the mistake in the first place."

People (and groups of people) make mistakes. Spending your whole life holding grudges like this is a recipe for permanent grumpiness.

The mistake is being highlighted as a symptom of a larger problem. There's little indication the larger problem has been addressed to prevent the recurrence of such mistakes.

I understand you don't like the negativity.

So tell me now, how did this happen? "Sponsored tiles", nobody batted an eye?

Will you try telling me the devs themselves did not see this as a potential source of problem? (I know for a fact that's not the case)

OK, let's assume this is a simple mistake. Now what happened with Pocket? We all know devs want to make it into an extension (and are working on it)... so why was Pocket pushed so hard and couldn't wait a couple of Fx versions before being released in a way that would obviously create drama?

If you step back and think about these issues you'll see they're systemic. God damn right I'm concerned about Mozilla, a company I respect a lot, becoming a shell of what it claims it stands for.

> so why was Pocket pushed so hard

Was it?

All I saw was it being integrated into Firefox, and there being a lot of backlash. Against that backlash, there were a couple of people pushing hard to justify it, but they were either independent or Mozilla employees (often from a different team) posting independent opinions. I don't think Mozilla pushed Pocket a lot. Pushing features through the release cycle is pretty common.

Bear in mind that Mozilla integrated Pocket because it was the kind of feature it wanted to have in Sync (or Accounts, whatever it's called), but decided to use a third party service instead of making their own. From that POV it's much more reasonable. Not denying that it could have been done better with a pluggable open API and an open source equivalent (or whatever), but it's not that bad from that lens.

Sponsored tiles was an experiment, IIRC. Mozilla wanted to see if non-annoying, easy-to-disable ads could be used to fill otherwise blank space. It seems to have failed. But I would guess that a lot of the devs were hopeful about this experiment. I (not a Mozilla employee, but I do contribute a lot) was, at least.

"Pushed hard", since the feature made it all the way to production versions which rolled out to every firefox user. This is a significant business decision which can change people's perception towards Mozilla. It definitely did for me. It IS a big deal that a popular browser supports some obscure 3rd party service as primary bookmarking service when there are many other 3rd party bookmarking services in the market such as Instapaper.

> since the feature made it all the way to production versions which rolled out to every firefox user

...like most other features. Doesn't require pushing. That's how it works.

> obscure 3rd party service

Apparently it was a rather popular addon in Firefox?

> since the feature made it all the way to production versions which rolled out to every firefox user ...like most other features. Doesn't require pushing. That's how it works. ==> Do we really need to define what "pushing" means? I'm sure you know what I mean by pushing, you're just doing wordplay. That's not how it works.

> obscure 3rd party service Apparently it was a rather popular addon in Firefox? ==> What do you think the ratio of (# of pocket extension users / # of total firefox users) is? It's totally fine if FF had supported it as a pure "extension" (doesn't come preinstalled but required users to search and "pull" themselves if they wanted) but the criticism came from the fact that this 3rd party extension came preinstalled and was "pushed" to users.

> I'm sure you know what I mean by pushing, you're just doing wordplay. That's not how it works.

No, I don't. They did with Pocket what they do with every nontrivial feature. Implemented it, and sherriffed it through the release trains. I don't think it was immediately plopped on a Firefox release, I recall seeing it on Developer/Aurora much earlier, which means it went through the release trains like everything else. The OP said, quote, "so why was Pocket pushed _so hard_ and couldn't wait a couple of Fx versions". How was it "pushed" "hard" if they did the _same thing_ they do for other features?

Yes, they made the decision to implement this feature. That doesn't count as pushing. I already illustrated why that decision made sense at the time.

Perhaps there was some backlash as it was on Aurora/Beta, I don't recall the exact timelines. IMO it's still okay to let the feature -- one which you still think makes sense and would benefit the userbase -- continue to ride the trains and hit a release while you try to understand the criticism and come up with a solution. It may be a better solution to disable it until a decision is made, but that depends on the perceived severity of the problem. Again, I don't see any hard pushing here, just a somewhat justifiable choice. I too would have preferred if they removed the feature when there was backlash, but I don't see anything wrong with the other solution. If you immediately backtracked every time there was criticism nothing would get done.

> but the criticism came from the fact that this 3rd party extension came preinstalled and was "pushed" to users.

Sure. But you gave the example of Instapaper (which you seem to be more okay with Firefox integrating with); I'm suggesting it was probably less popular than Pocket in FF or at least comparable popularity. I'm not disagreeing that integrating with a closed third party service is not good. I'm just pointing out a flaw in your Instapaper comment.

I realize this conversation is going nowhere since you decide to interpret things in ways that fit your argument just to fight, which is why I said you're just word-playing. I will go ahead and answer but you will probably disagree anyway: I didn't say I'm ok with them implementing Instapaper, and I definitely never said Instapaper is more popular. Go back and read again. I just pointed out how picking a single 3rd party service--NOT developed by Mozilla--and promoting it to the entire user base when there's a whole industry of read-it-later service ecosystem out there is a "non-trivial" issue, just like you even wrote. Therefore it would have been the same if they implemented Instapaper only, just like they did with Pocket only. And like you admitted, it is a "non trivial" feature, and in my book, when a feature is shipped and it's non-trivial, it was "pushed hard". This is again where you decide to disagree based on your own definition of "pushed hard". Your interpretation of "push" is intentionally narrow to only fit your interest. The original commenter and I simply pointed out how a non trivial feature like this was "promoted" (pushed) to users in an unusual way. Any decision to highlight a 3rd party product inside your main product (such as Firefox featuring Yahoo or Google as main home page) is a big deal, and just like how I would consider FF implementing Yahoo as homepage "pushing hard", I consider Pocket bookmarklet incident "pushing hard". You probably know what I'm trying to say but are just arguing based on semantics of these words.

I'm not wordplaying; we just disagree on what kind of "pushing" is acceptable for Mozilla to do :)

I feel that making the decision to make a feature (when there are good reasons behind it) is okay for Mozilla to do. Nothing wrong or malicious there. You evidently don't: we'll have to agree to disagree there. :)

I wasn't twisting definitions to fit my argument, I didn't feel there was anything wrong with deciding to implement something (when there are good reasons to) so I assumed you and the OP were troubled about something else.

Sorry about the pointless argument!

From what I remember, Pocket was "fast tracked" to the Firefox 38 Beta channel just a couple weeks before release. It did not ride the trains from Nightly to Aurora to Beta. This was controversial within Mozilla. We have the pre-release channels for good reasons.

The Pocket tracking bug was filed in April 2015 [1] but the feature shipped with Firefox 38.0.5 in June 2015, just two months later.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=pocket#c0

Wasn't it fast tracked into the release channel? That is, 38.0.5 would have been a patch release on top of 38.0.4.

On the bright side, that has lead to a more serious look at shipping parts of the browser as first-party extensions. I'm very much looking forward to that, even if I end up leaving all of them on.

I see what you mean. 38.0.5 was a special marketing release to promote Pocket and new Hello features. You can see on Mozilla ftp server that the version numbers of the 38.0 patch releases jump from 38.0.1 to 38.0.5 (leaving room for any emergency patch releases of 38.0.1):

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

38.0 was released on 2015-05-12. 38.0.5 then sat in the Beta channel for two weeks of testing and then it was released on 2015-06-02:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar#Past_branch_d...

TIL. Thanks for the info :)

I think I've seen this done for other features in the past, but yeah, this doesn't sit well with me.

(Still mostly okay with it though)

That's not true at all. Bookmarks are as far as I can tell separate from Pocket. Pocket is a read later extension.

What's not true at all? When you say something is not true at all, you need to specify what exactly you are referring to. I mentioned several points in my comment. "Extension" is something that you extend your browser with and doesn't come pre-installed.

I guarantee you most Firefox users either use Pocket, or don't care that it's a default feature in the product now.

I am in the boat that wishes it was removable, perhaps as some kind of "default add-on", but it's not. I'm not removing FF because of it.

And as for ads: Were they tracking people with them? Were they sending back GUIDs of my browser every time I loaded a new tab? This is a legit question that would affect my opinion on the matter. The ads I see are brief, and cannot take more than a miniscule amount of data to serve. By those metrics, I have no problem with them.

I didn't remove FF because of it either, but these things pile up slowly--makes me think WTF were they thinking?--and if I see several more of these I will probably stop using it. As I mentioned in another thread somewhere, I agree a lot of people don't care or not aware, but if asked directly "would you rather have this Pocket extension come pre-installed or not?" I am sure majority of them would say they don't want it. Just because people don't complain doesn't mean they're fine with it. People live with shitty customer service from comcast but that doesn't mean they have good customer service.

They took away the status bar because it was superfluous (really they were just copying chrome) and then they integrate a third party extension into the browser.

It sure seems to me it was pushed hard.

Why would you expect MoCo not to act like a corporation? They do care for their users a lot, but they consider that they would not help them a lot if they did not exist.

Given the deep pockets that have risen to develop the Web to new lengths, Mozilla has needed more money and more developers. They are lacking in the chrome (the UI), in tooling, in platform presence (the iOS version came very late!), and little by little, in Web features. Not to mention musts like tab separation into processes, things that are now implemented in every browser but them.

(Edit: removed parallelism.)

Imagine you saw that issue, and need increased revenues. You don't want to impact existing users, as you know they would be mad. What do new users see that old users don't? Those empty tiles in about:newtab. Those tiles are useless anyway, and from a UX perspective, new users don't understand what they stand for. Having a few example websites would be a good indication. It fits marvellously in the constraints they had.

How about Pocket? As we discussed, their chrome is getting old. In particular, the bookmarks feature is both old, has a lot of old bugs that don't get fixed, and they have wanted to do an overhaul for a long time (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697359). But they lack development effort.

If only there was a company that did bookmarks better than we did, we wouldn't have to do the work! Oh, there is: Pocket.

One last thing that they can do to increase revenue is to make competition among search engines be felt. So they switched to Yahoo!. However, Yahoo!'s perspective was to show the world that Yahoo! Search had grown to be much better. Unfortunately, it is still behind as a product in terms of UI cluttering, quality of results, range of inputs... They still don't have a cartographic service! Let alone a worldwide routing engine and a GTFS crawler... So they may disappear.

It has become phenomenally hard to compete against Google. Their best shot at relevance is Servo now, but given the huge amount of work that is, they will still need deeper pockets.

> parallelism, things that are now implemented in every browser but them.

No browser engine is particularly parallel. Gecko is not really more or less parallel than any other engine.

Sorry. It was part of a point I wanted to make about how hard it would be to make Firefox have the features that Servo will offer, like tiled rendering or parallel layout, which is a step further from merely getting to parity with Chrome and Safari architecture-wise.

As a long time Firefox user and enthusiast neither sponsored tiles nor the phone thingy annoyed me to much, especially the tiles thingy could actually have reduced the dependency on Google if it had worked.

Now we know they got another search deal but that wasn't always a given.

One logical explanation why it wasn't made an extension is if somebody was planning on neutering the extensions already back then. :-/

Exactly. This would have been on a roadmap somewhere.

Trust has to be earned once it has been broken.

This wasn't a one off mistake. It was calculated business decision that is a part of an industry trend.

Turning a blind eye to this is a recipe for getting perpetually reamed so others can turn a larger profit.

> This kind of negativity is really common on HN and it makes me sad.

> "This group of people did something I don't like, and then they changed their mind and stopped doing it. But rather than being happy about fixing their mistake, I'm going to keep criticizing them for making the mistake in the first place."

You mistake negativity for the keeping of and referring to a tally sheet.

You would -no doubt- find little to object to in the following hypothetical statement:

"I'm still dreadfully concerned about my abusive spouse. My spouse has backtracked on the terribly bad policy of random bouts of unfocused rage followed by sporadic, intense emotional and physical violence directed toward my person. Good on my spouse for backtracking, but I still remember the long-standing pattern of similar behavior in our relationship. This pattern saddens and worries me. I'm still strongly considering walking out the door. I wish my spouse the best, but I'm fairly certain that I cannot trust my spouse and that my spouse does not have my best interests at heart."

Please note carefully that I'm not comparing poor corporate governance to spousal abuse.

I am -however- making the point that it pays to remember when people or companies fail to behave in a way that indicates that they even try to have your interests at heart. A momentary shift in strategy or behavior often fails to either turn into a lasting habit, or happens far too late to undo past harms.

If you allow yourself to get strung along by the latest olive branch, without considering the history of the entity making the offer in order to judge the offer's sincerity, you're gonna get played, time after time, after time.

> Please note carefully that I'm not comparing poor corporate governance to spousal abuse.

Don't be disingenuous. That's a ridiculous and awful comparison and you know it. You should be ashamed.

> Don't be disingenuous.

I'm absolutely not being disingenuous. As I said, I am -in fact- not making a comparison between the situation with Mozilla and my hypothetical statement.

As I stated, I'm illustrating the general point that it often pays to keep track of when an entity has wronged you so you can weigh their current attempts at reconciliation against their history of wrongs.

Remember also that I was replying to the following statement:

> This kind of negativity is really common on HN and it makes me sad. ... "This group of people did something I don't like, and then they changed their mind and stopped doing it. But rather than being happy about fixing their mistake, I'm going to keep criticizing them for making the mistake in the first place."

I address the author's misconceptions in the first 'graph of my reply.

Bringing up a subject while denying it should be brought up generally considered a dirty rhetorical trick, particularly when done in a distasteful way like you did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis.

> Bringing up a subject while denying it should be brought up...

I pointed to and accounted for everything in my original comment and the follow-on comment.

When did I deny that anything I brought up in my original topic should be brought up? That's not what's going on here.

You appear to be claiming that -despite my repeated assertions to the contrary- I compared poor corporate governance to spousal abuse in my original comment.

I didn't.

I don't know how much clearer I can make this for you.

Edit: I remembered an old comment that I wrote a while back that explains how I feel about writing and how I try to structure my writing. [0] Maybe this might make things clearer for you.

To save you a click, I'll quote it inline:

"The world would be a far better place if fewer people would read between the lines of a given statement, and more people would make a habit of carefully parsing statements that others make.

When one writes words for general consumption, it's oh so tiresome to front-load one's writing with a bevy of disclaimers and preemptive clarifications. You will inevitably fail to include one clause or another, causing someone, somewhere to successfully misunderstand your words.

It's better to write exactly what you mean, as clearly as you are able, and -when writing for capable adults- trust that your audience is capable adults who know how to read what has been written and know not to infer meaning in inappropriate places."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10445737

Problem is there are many questionable choices

Dropping Persona and preparing to lobotimize Firefox are my main annoyances.

Of course I was never much involved outside of using it sinve v1 and getting new users by installing it everywhere and talking about it since shortly after that

What you call negativity is people that care.

Most companies in the world couldn't dream of customers that care that deeply about the product. That doesn't mean you shouldn't take unpopular decisions when necessary, but it means you have to be deeply in contact with what your users care about.

Apparently Firefox users didn't care much for commercials in the browsers. Who knew?

> Mozilla has really lost touch with its users

Most developers and the community are great. But the management level incl. their new CEO and their UI designers have little clue about their products and what their community is all about. Mr Eich was part of Netscape and Mozilla from the very beginning and created the Javascript language in a few days - he understood the community definitely better.

The transition from Gecko to Servo in their products will be critical for Mozilla. It will give them a competitive advantage.

FirefoxOS runs highend Android smartphone just as fast as Android 5x. So it definitely has a future, like WebOS is nowadays in every LG SmartTV, and Bada/Tizen is in every Samsung SmartTV (they use a 4 or 8 core ARM board with 2+GB RAM). And ChromeOS works fine on lower end notebooks.

Mozilla has become a shadow of itself. Sadly I think it is like yahoo and going to slowly fade away.

I hope new management can come on board and bring back life, energy and trust to mozilla

> Most developers and the community are great. But the management level incl. their new CEO and their UI designers have little clue about their products and what their community is all about. Mr Eich was part of Netscape and Mozilla from the very beginning and created the Javascript language in a few days - he understood the community definitely better.

Their new CEO Chris Beard has been with Mozilla for a long time as well, with a break. I also expect it was his decision to pull the plug on sponsored tiles in order to focus 100% on making content discovery awesome for users (maybe with monetization as an afterthought). Saying he has little clue about the community just when he made a decision I imagine the majority of the community supports seems a bit odd. One could argue he should have done this earlier, but don't forget that Mozilla needs revenue to survive, and 90+% of the revenue coming from a single partner is a risk that will bite Mozilla sooner or later. So in order to diversify revenue, this was a reasonable experiment.

> FirefoxOS runs highend Android smartphone just as fast as Android 5x. So it definitely has a future, like WebOS is nowadays in every LG SmartTV, and Bada/Tizen is in every Samsung SmartTV (they use a 4 or 8 core ARM board with 2+GB RAM). And ChromeOS works fine on lower end notebooks.

And Firefox OS is on Panasonic smart TVs.

Mozilla's Content Services project predated Chris Beard's role as CEO. The Content Services team was publicly announced in February 2014. Chris Beard rejoined Mozilla as interim CEO in April 2014.

I would have been interested to see a Firefox OS in the same vein as Chrome OS. A clean, functional Linux distro that works out of the box with a simple (yet maybe hidden) switch to open it up to running native apps. With XUL extensions they were actually in a get position years ago to provide more powerful extensions than Chrome could. But they are killing off XUL in the future to be some kind of Chrome-copy. Unfortunately I feel the world is going to be Webkit oriented in the future with Chrome, Safari and even Edge being mostly compatible (extension wise, apparently, time will tell).

I understand them wanting to make it in mobile space but the bar to entry in the mobile market is so damn high not even Microsoft can do it.

The biggest reason I use Firefox over Chrome is because of DownThemAll; an extension that would stop working when turn off XUL support. Trying to follow market trends is whats gonna kill Firefox.

Eliminating XUL isn't being done for the fun of it—there are significant benefits. This comment also presupposes that there's no way to implement DownThemAll in the Web Extensions model.

See this thread (including my replies to it) the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099816

aside: can DownThemAll download html websites in a scraping fashion?

I am not presupposing anything, here is DownThemAll's own blog post on the subject: http://www.downthemall.net/the-likely-end-of-downthemall/

FirefoxOS cant even offer a more meaningfully free experience than android, because they used the same brain damaged closed source driver model. Meaning not only is your OS partly non free and unable to be modified, you are locked into a single kernel version forever, that is very likely soon to have exploits. I have absolutely no idea why it even exists.

I wouldn't mind using a polished phone from Mozilla if it gave me full control over it (ie. not limit all software to non-overridable restrictions) and was well supported (ie. not abandoned or put on maintenance after 2 years) and didn't assume I want to send personal data to a server by default.

This is silly. People openly criticize Mozilla for their action, there is general uproar - yet company decides to ignore its "power users" and do whatever they think they should.

While this might work for some (where leader is visionary and strong), I believe that the problem is here - companies that are seeing drop in growth are fixated on getting better numbers instead of increase engagement and user value. They will forsake their core functions, ignore users and make a "better" clone of existing competitor for short term bump in engagement. Every huge company did that before sliding downhill.

Mozilla had already committed to decoupling Pocket following a developer summit this Summer, due in part (presumably) to the vocal minority of users that hated the very idea of it.

I'm well aware. My point is that if the company knew its userbase, it would not have happened.

I don't care about it by the way, I like Pocket and I use the functionality. But it was obvious that there would be drama.

Edit: In reply to the dead comment below, no I do not think Pocket should be preinstalled, and I really hope that's not the message that's getting through in my posts.

I like Google Voice and I use the functionality. Should every single Firefox user have a Google Voice extension pre-installed?

It's just painfully stupid in every way. If it was a built in extension that by-default talked to a Mozilla hosted open source Pocket clone, we might be having a different conversation.... but I'd still be annoyed.

Just as annoyed as I am that Chromium (yes, Chromium, not Chrome) comes with a god damn Google Docs extension.

I think you underestimate the diversity of the userbase. Especially in places like Europe until Chrome ate their lunch, Firefox users were basically a random sample of the population.

Right, but at least in the US, there is a significant contingent of firefox users and advocates that are very privacy sensitive. Call it the Jonathan Mayer wing. FF should have known these people would be very upset.

I hope so but sometimes tradeoffs have to be made.

Compromise is the name of the game, and if BSD development is any indicator, security/privacy focus users are not ones to jump in and help keep lights on in most circumstances

That said I'm not sure FF could have done better things, but in their situation I would be trying to find some revenue streams that weren't Google

There was no compromise necessary. Pocket is possible as an extension, cf the work being done right now to integrate it as one. Why was it rushed out before? What was so pressing about it that it needed to be in "the next firefox version" and massively damage Mozilla's reputation, instead of waiting a few months and passing it without a fuss?

> Compromise is the name of the game

In most cases, I'd agree.However, it's never a good idea to compromize on your mission statement. How does pre-bundled Pocket integration promote an open web? IMO, it goes against it.

While they are losing market-share, Mozilla are not running out of cash any time soon and they are not in a death spiral. They can afford to, and should think long and hard about how they diversify their revenue streams, rather than trying random decisions that alienate part of their userbase trying to find anything that sticks - which is the impression I'm getting.

how significant is it really? anybody ever put numbers to it?

The most significant number that anyone needs to know about Mozilla is that the global desktop browser market share of Firefox has fallen 50% over the last 5 years (from 31.64% in January 2010 to 14.7% in November 2015).[1][2]

If the declining trend continues, desktop Firefox would approximate zero market share in less than 4 years from now.

On mobile phones, the market share of Firefox is so small, it doesn't even show up on anyone's chart.[2]

Users wouldn't be fleeing in droves if they liked what Firefox has turned into.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#St...

[2] http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-december-2015-fight-...

This is my experience with Firefox, there will be no sources provided.

I remember using Firefox since I was in college in 2004 and I can tell you what happened when I first tried Firefox 4. The performance was horrible for a very simple reason: the system requirements were increased _tenfold_ and it was pretty much impossible to enjoy browsing using it on older hardware.

Extensions started breaking and the menu options would suddenly change place, function or disappear altogether without any prior warning or explanation. Meanwhile, Mozilla devs would either ignore the feedback or post snickering comments on their blogs.

The constant version change made it so things were rapidly falling apart - you could no longer rely on Firefox to stay one and the same for any period of time.

I saw that Firefox was going downhill, but it was still far superior to all browsers simply due to the wealth of extensions it had. And now, what is the most recent change to Firefox paradigm? Locking the extension ecosystem inside a walled garden.

I currently use Palemoon and I look forward to Edge, which promises a basically open-source environment, which will include extensions. Now that´s irony.

Idk, for me I got tired of dealing with all the BS long ago, so I just run off a fork of nightly and remove/add then compile whatever I want… it's great.

I think If people really cared that much about it, they would do something themselves, but alas its all to easy to moan and do nothing. /me shrugs

Yeah so unless you know how to fork the project and remove/add + compile whatever you want, you don't really have a right to complain. But I guess if you do know how to do that, you also have no right to complain.

People can complain all they want, I wasn't saying one doesn't have any right to complain, people are free to have their opinions and I was speaking my mind like everyone complaining is, I apologize for that, maybe I should have joined in on the fun in the echo chamber, probably would get more internet points for that.

The probability of complaining, that actually solves any given problem in that moment, hovers around zero. Especially after all the BS people have been saying they have been seeing with Mozilla for some time now (enough time over the years to see hundreds of c/c++ code samples, walkthroughs, and to read their build instructions[0]) … its quite banal at this point. Too many people have worked too hard to share their knowledge on the internet for me to be satisfied with complaining about something that we all have a capacity to do ourselves to some degree if were commenting on hacker news.

But that's just how I feel, everyone else is free to feel differently.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

Building Firefox isn't so easy.

There are like 50 build options, any random combination of which is likely to result in build failure, and your only option is to try a combination, wait 10-40 minutes for it to fail, try to diagnose what went wrong and fix it.

There's also the matter that Linux distro maintainers know more about building than you do, and include things like exploit mitigation, which you'll be missing out on.

And of course you need to monitor Firefox for security updates, and rebuild every time there's an update.

It gets boring pretty quickly. Even GNU barely manages to update their IceCat fork.

Isn't so easy compared to what? Complaining? Sure, but the research I work on is way harder than this for me… as well as a host of ill defined problems that require way more than just being able to write software…

Nothing you mention isn't uncommon for any decent size project. It shouldn't act as a deterrent for expanding ones horizons, and implementing something you want done where there will be no chance in hell it will be added/removed upstream in any decent amount of time for free (10-40 min, but you don't have to compile the whole project while debugging… I made some mods in dom/base/ and netwerk/protocol/http as well as other places, and neither took more than 10-20 seconds to compile standalone while debugging). I tend to think security is mostly security theater anyways for what its worth. So many ways to get owned, and the user is usually the weakest link… and if you are targeted and don't know it, game over…

And if its boring for someone, they obviously don't have enough motivation, but maybe just enough to moan. Then again, the only user I have to support is myself for the things I want in the browser instead of a bunch of people who will probably never push a line of code with their complaints masquerading as requests… yeah, I can see how that can get boring.

Compiling something for yourself has an effect on exactly one person: you. "Complaining" affects other people and often enough actually reaches people who have a more direct line of effect on the product (especially in the foss world).

Wow, the corporate speak is strong with this one.

If they think it's what "the majority" wants - let them just ignore the hater devs and leave it. See how far that gets them.

They are removing it because it's a poor idea that's poorly thought out. People won't bite the PR.

They arn't even removing it, they are turning it into an extension and then still bundling it.

Given how strongly Mozilla has pushed extensions in the past (traditionally core features pushed into extensions several times), what they should have done is simply offer Pocket as an "officially bundled" extension for the normal download. They could then trivially offer alternative downloads without the extension, making everybody happy.

This idea could even be pushed further: they could have several alternative downloads that are simply pre-bundled extensions. Alongside their normal version they could have "minimalist", "dev tools", "max privacy", "social/chat helpers", and the like. Most people would still download the normal version, but this might introduce more people to extensions, who would normally never even know about addons.mozilla.org.

I agree, but i had heard that certain components wouldnt work as an extension. That being said, they should have extended their api to make it work as an extension

That's exactly why it came bundled as a non extension. So they could figure out how exactly they needed to extend the extensions API after having in built in a for a while.

They could have done such experimentation in an unreleased fork of the browser. Or if they needed wider testing, they could have released this separate, experimental branch and clearly labeled it so that people would know what they were getting into if they installed it. Mozilla didn't need to force Pocket on so many Firefox users who wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

Why the rush to distribute it first and figure it out later? Couldn't they figure out the API extensions required during development, but before shipping?

Pocket? What exactly is the integration doing that the addon wasn't able to do?

This is a real, non-rhetorical question: I started occasionally using the addon when pocket was still read-it-later and never changed usage patterns since.

Wasn't pocket original an extension?

addons.mozilla.org has a "Collections" category where anyone can curate a list of add-ons. It would be good if an entire collection could be installed with one click instead of installing each add-on individually.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/

The work to move Pocket to an add-on is happening in Firefox bug 1215694:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694

> Although the company emphasizes that Pocket and Telefonica didn’t pay for placement in the Firefox browser, Mozilla Corp. chief legal and business officer Denelle Dixon-Thayer told WIRED that Mozilla has revenue sharing arrangements with both companies.

http://www.wired.com/2015/12/mozilla-is-flailing-when-the-we...

Can you explain what the revenue sharing agreement is, especially after so many Mozilla employees have vehemently denied that Mozilla got money from Pocket for the tie-up?

This would be outright stupid. While I do not want any default ties to external services like Pocket in the browser I for sure hope that such a data harvesting and customer acquisition effort at least yields money for Mozilla to further fund open source development.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10681622

If you ran a survey to every firefox user asking "Would you prefer this Pocket bookmarklet show up by default or not", I'm sure this wouldn't have been a "vocal minority" group. Most people (in terms of ratio) hadn't heard of Pocket and to them it's just a spammy new bookmarklet. Most people are not "vocal" about it because they don't know where to complain. Just because you don't see vocal people doesn't mean it's all fine.

Once they sold out on DRM my attitude to the whole project was "why bother". If I want a browser made by people who cheerfully assist my enemies I may as well use one that's not mediocre in every other aspect.

Sold out how? They tried but at some point it was a lost cause with every other relevant browser and the content industry pushing for DRM. Within a few years, users would have been unable to access services like Netflix in Firefox and switched to other browsers. How would that have helped save the web?

With double the market share, maybe Mozilla could have pushed back longer and harder, but unfortunately that's not the reality we live in anymore.

Does anyone who shares this criticism have a reasonable, realistic plan for how Mozilla can make money? There's a very large payroll keeping this project alive, and apart from advertising revenue, I just don't see how you monetize a browser.

If you cannot monetize core product create some additional ones that will bring you revenue. They do not need to make money from browser, but they can make money by using this platform to promoting other, paid products.

Pocket is not monetized. The sponsored tiles happened to be, but the symptoms are not related to greed... which arguably is even scarier.

Well, apparently there is a "revenue sharing agreement" with regards to Pocket, despite the previous statements that Pocket didn't pay for the integration.

Pocket didn't pay for the integration, period. Now, whether there's money flowing as a result of the integration is an interesting question. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10681622

The question is how much money and at what (ideological) cost? Employing people is not Mozilla's core mission. As the recent Wired article[1] says "...the Mozilla Corp. must still find ways to make money so it can pay the people to develop Firefox. But if its money-making schemes stray too far from Mozilla’s ideological roots, there will be little to distinguish Mozilla from every other Silicon Valley outfit"

I hold Mozilla to a higher standard, just as Mozilla ought to.

1. http://www.wired.com/2015/12/mozilla-is-flailing-when-the-we...

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