Comment by soapdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soapdog | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

When thinking about a Mozilla offering, it is healthy to think beyond "money and product" as this type of analysis will usually leave you with a conclusion of "this doesn't make business sense".

Mozilla is in the game of keeping the internet healthy. Part of it involves products, such as Firefox and its quest to recover userbase. Parts of it involves money, such as MOSS awarding grants or prizes for FOSS stuff they use and see value.

But most of Mozilla actions can be thought on "how close they get Mozilla to achieve its mission as stated in the Mozilla Manifesto[1]". In the case of Firefox Send, it enables less friction sending files and protects the user privacy, so it IMHO advances item #4 of the manifesto: "Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional." It also serves as a nice branding reminder for people, as it works with other browsers, makes people using some other solution remember Firefox...

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

Not sure how true that is anymore. They seem to by trying hard to squander their reputation. First their MITI officially signaled they now consider themselves a political force, then the whole Cliqz debacle following shortly after showed their willingness to sacrifice their principles.

I dunno about all that :-)

MITI is Mozilla trying to keep the internet credible as a source of news and information. This is in keeping with Mozilla's core principles. Give the blog post a careful read, as it might change your mind: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information...

Re: Cliqz, working with a search-oriented company might be a way that Mozilla can help avoid monopolies in search. The goal is to find new ways to keep the web open, so that new challengers have a level playing field vs. dominant companies.

Andreas wrote a good blog post about the worrying monopolistic trends in search a couple years ago: https://andreasgal.com/2015/03/30/data-is-at-the-heart-of-se...

Edited to add: Cliqz is a very privacy-conscious company, and I think that respect for the user was a major factor in Mozilla partnering with Cliqz. This is just to say that, AIUI, the partnership was evaluated, again, in keeping with Mozilla's principles.

Also, here's the Mozilla manifesto, which documents those guiding principles: https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/

How is Mozilla been ever anything but a political force? Like 12 years ago, when Firefox came out, it was accompanied by probably the largest marketing campaign for an open project barring Wikipedia.

They followed that up with some ten years of "web standards! web standards! open web standards!". This is the game Mozilla plays. That's why they won on the web: everyone does it their way now, even if their browser isn't dominant.

What's MITI stand for here?

Mozilla Information Trust Initiative

Don't forget their switch to a walled garden for extensions in order to protect users from themselves.

That is FUD and also a lie. You can still distribute your extensions on whatever site you want, you just need to sign them on AMO.

The workflow is:

1 - Build webextension 2 - Upload to AMO 3 - Choose "distribute on AMO" or "sign and distribute on your site"

If I need to get Mozilla's approval before I can run code in the browser running on my machine then I see a wall. That they've automated it so much as to mitigate the protection a walled garden normally gives almost makes it worse.

You can install Firefox Beta or Nightly and have unrestricted extension installation options (or use a Linux distro's packages: most of such firefox packages do not require signed extensions).

It's a measure to prevent casual trojans, there are many ways around it for non-casuals and developers to employ.

>or use a Linux distro's packages: most of such firefox packages do not require signed extensions

That's actually pretty cool. Can you give me an example distro that does that with Firefox (w/FF brandings)?

Both Debian and Arch do this.

Power users can use unsigned add-ons in Dev Edition. Regular users would be exploited by any middle ground solution in the main release. It's unfortunate the web is a dangerous place for the average user.

Asking people to use beta as a main driver is part of the reason why people think,

>They seem to by trying hard to squander their reputation.

The other part of it is Mozilla building the browser for the lowest common denominator at the price of user control.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com