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Comment by nsebban | Hacker News Reader

> Is it a sinking ship? Only if we're not up for the challenge of fighting back corporations that want to lock the web being walled gardens. Time will tell, but someone should fight the good fight, even if it's a lost cause.

It definitely is a fight worth fighting. And most people will agree that having several good web-browser options is important.

What bothers me is the strategy that Mozilla used, to try and compete with Chrome by giving Firefox users a browser that looks like, and feeling like Chrome.

I wouldn't want to work for an organisation who makes such ill-advised choices.

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giving Firefox users a browser that looks like, and feeling like Chrome.

Yawn. What did we do this time? Make it faster? Follow platform guidelines or modernize the design style? Adopt an extension model that can be combined with replacing the browser internals? Use rounded tabs? No wait, scratch that, they're square again.

Next time, avoid the whole problem and make the browser layout more user-configurable (in an easy way).

I think there should also be a switch to make it faster.

Like that "turbo" switch on my 1990s PC!

Sure, sarcasm helps.

I think he meant a few checkboxes, for choosing things like round corners etc. which should not be too hard. Really necessary?

Maybe not, but you should realize, that you have a shrinking core group of users, while liked Firefox because they could modify it the way they wanted - and therefore did not liked it, when frequently changes broke their setup.

Sure, sarcasm helps.

So does not particularly well thought out criticism.

There's also shrinking core group of users, who liked Firefox before it fell back on many areas, crippled by having to maintain compatibility with add-ons that relied on internal workings. We realize that very well.

Configurability comes with an exponential testing and maintenance burden. So no, it's not just adding a few checkboxes. It's what happens with those afterwards.

> and therefore did not liked it, when frequently changes broke their setup.

Which is unfortunately an inherent problem with our legacy customization approach.

And it is clearly not something the vast majority of users want, if they left Firefox for another browser that appears to them less customizable but more stable. We have run numerous user studies about what users actually care for and they have all informed what Firefox is going to be in the future.

Made it impossible to use add-ons like Tab Groups, making impossible to use the browser with many tabs open (just like Chrome, but you can't open many tabs in it anyway because it eats so much memory per tab).

IIRC, the author of Tab Groups threw their toys out of the pram when told the extension model was changing and that if they needed a feature, they should post on bugzilla. I don't know quite what's happened since then.

EDIT: Looking at bugzilla, looks like the author of Tab Groups decided he was going to put together a report about a year ago, and then never did, so Mozilla doesn't even have any documentation of what functionality would be necessary to implement it, and there's currently nobody interested in implementing it.

It's not "throwing toys out of the pram" when add-on developers are forced to rewrite their entire code every damn year, and this time using an incredibly limited API from goddamn Google Chrome of all places. There are a plenty of bugs open in Bugzilla to implement necessary APIs so the old add-ons can work. The problem? Mozilla devs are closing them as WONTFIX because they're lazy and don't want to implement any more functionality than Chrome feature parity.

Also, Mozilla knows perfectly well which functionality is needed to implement Tab Groups because it was an actual feature of a browser before they decided "it should be a plugin". And now it's impossible to even write a plugin for it.

To circle back to the original question (what's it like to work at mozilla), it is a pretty great place as long as you don't mind being the subject of uninformed and hostile comments such as the one above.

It's one or the other.

Either the API gives very deep control, and it must evolve as the browser evolves, or it does not, and it can stay stable.

Experience says that Firefox was on the wrong side here by offering complete access, thereby either blocking the browser to evolve, or forcing add-on authors on a compatibility treadmill, effectively getting the worst of both worlds.

Maybe it's possible to do better. But we haven't managed to do so, and neither has our competition. So it's probably not easy.

The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/

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