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Comment by ploggingdev | Hacker News Reader

One of the interesting aspects about the recent Firefox Quantum launch, apart from the amazing product itself, is the marketing. It's been incredible to read the well written blog posts that appeal to a variety of audiences. Though most are focused on the tech behind Firefox, a few, like the linked post, appeal to a wider audience. Anecdotal, but the blog posts leading up to the launch got me excited enough to download and use the beta version of Firefox for the first time and it lived up to the marketing. I've tried switching to Firefox multiple times over the past few years, but I always ended up switching back to Chrome for the speed. It might be different this time.

What happened to the controversial cliqz program that they were testing? Last I checked, Mozilla did not respond to the privacy concerns of the integration.

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> It's been incredible to read the well written blog posts that appeal to a variety of audiences.

I enjoyed the read, but this is somewhat irrelevant unless a variety of people actually read it. I'm reasonably confident none of my friends read Mozilla's blog.

> I'm reasonably confident none of my friends read Mozilla's blog

People find it through social media channels anyway. I'm only aware of it because of HN/reddit

I realize how they get there, and I went the same path. However, it's also well established most people don't get past the headlines (or the first paragraph). I'm venturing a guess that most people that read HN currently work or have previously worked in tech. Same with the people that managed to get to it through reddit. I think it's also a somewhat safe guess that only people interested in the topic to begin with would be reading the article.

It's the top bar ad on reddit for me right now (the topic, not this blog post). All the commentary is how people dislike it and are reverting to a prior version. Many are simply because it looks different. There is one person who talked tech, and in typical reddit fashion, he was called a corporate shill.

In no way am I saying the content is bad, I just struggle to view it as any significant or meaningful marketing strategy.

They probably don’t read it regularly, but they might get annoyed at browser slowness one day and Google “chrome firefox which is faster”.

Should they "Google" it? How about "DuckDuckGo"ing it?

Edit: Not trolling, pretty serious. Would Google allow the webpages favouring Firefox over Chrome to show up on the top search results (or even the first page)? I'm not sure about it.

I doubt any of my non-technical friends know what DDG is.

A quick google search suggests that yes, they would allow this.

I doubt they're manipulating this sort of thing.

But, when you're engineering search results to manipulate public perception, you don't just obliterate all of the undesirable content with hamfisted obviousness. You just weight the content differently. Maybe you ensure that anyone already looking for that content can find it, but ensure that a more generic search is favorable. Maybe you just manipulate the heap to ensure the top result is the good one. Maybe you merely aim for a favorable ratio of desirable to undesirable content.

Consider: "best search engine"

The results are full of discussions about alternate search engines. Both duckduckgo and dogpile make the front page. Yet, the #1 result is an article about how Google is the most popular search engine: https://www.reliablesoft.net/top-10-search-engines-in-the-wo...

Is that true? Sure. Is the result manipulated? Probably not. But if I was google and I was going to manipulate a search result, that's exactly how I'd do it. I'd maintain the illusion of impartiality by presenting lots of alternatives, but I'd ensure the most prominent result was the one I wanted.

In any case: a quick search is insufficient to detect search bias and proves nothing.

Most people who read blog articles get there from social media or search engines rather than being a regular reader of the blog. This seems to be a pretty established form of marketing.

Dunno how well it works, but a pretty common strategy for tech products is to pitch to technical people and hope that "the masses" tend to adapt whatever their more technically savy friends are doing.

Plus Mozilla is a non-profit, so they're probably more interested in their reputation specifically amongst HN readers and the like than they would be if they were a commercial company just trying to sell as many widgets as possible.

> I'm reasonably confident none of my friends read Mozilla's blog.

The point, though, is that they could. If you wanted to drop links to them with more details about why the should be excited about Firefox again, Mozilla is actually producing those.

This is one of those things that only seems unimportant until people stop doing it. Then you find out it was actually a pretty big deal.

Mozilla has definitely done a good job so far.

If we do our part then everyone might be rewarded with a healthier ecosystem over the next months. (And "everyone " includes die hard Chrome users as well as people forced to use IE at work.)

Edit: what I mean is that all consumers generally benefits from healthy competition.

I found it really interesting to observe as well, and I think they've done a great job in appealing to technically-minded people with their posts. Well, apart from their Firefox Frontier blog [1], with its awful hip-ish language. I guess that is targeted at a different type of person than I am.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/

> What happened to the controversial cliqz program that they were testing?

They are probably proceeding, sadly. I have not seen anything indicating the opposite.

Given the amount of outcry, I would take your assumption with a giant grain of salt. If they were to proceed with that, we'd surely hear about it again. I'm following the Bugzilla issue and no progress has been reported there yet.

The reasonable thing to expect at this point is that it is still at the phase of being an experiment for 1% of German users.

Yeah, I meant "proceeding with what they have announced", which was that they would push it to some German users. The outcry was on that push, and as far as I know the decision was not reversed. What comes after that was never officially announced.

Ah, yes, that's what I would expect as well. (And it'd be nice if there were some more public response to this from whoever is working on it.)

> What happened to the controversial cliqz program that they were testing? Last I checked, Mozilla did not respond to the privacy concerns of the integration.

Mozilla owns parts of Cliqz, so they have insight into the business process, and they have a contract with Cliqz/Burda that says that no personal data is allowed to be stored.

So, even if Burda decided to violate the contract/law, Mozilla would notice that and could pull out by simply shutting the sending of data off in Firefox.

Mozilla also has made an official statement that no personal data will be collected, so if they did anyways, it would be misleading of consumers, so Mozilla themselves would then violate the law.

Meaning that, unless you have no faith at all into the legal system, I don't think there's a reason to be concerned.

It's just controversial, because you can easily spin a wholly different story by leaving out some facts, which is of course extremely convenient for Google/Microsoft/Apple, anyone who's for whatever reason salty about Mozilla, and last but definitely not least, clickbait journalists.

It's controversial because some people believe, reasonably, that opt-in is the only ethical model for collecting potentially sensitive information like browsing history, "anonymized" or not.

Mozilla stated "Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox"[1], which is very different from "no personal data will be collected". Even just a list of domains can be enough to reveal someone's identity.

[1]https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

> It's controversial because some people believe, reasonably, that opt-in is the only ethical model for collecting potentially sensitive information like browsing history, "anonymized" or not.

You presuppose that it's reasonable, but is it? If you can prove that you're doing everything right to protect the user, should you not be allowed to collect the data?

If we just call every non-opt-in data collection unethical, no matter if it can actually negatively affect users or not, then you're levelling the playing field in favor of those that actually collect and use data unethically. Because you're essentially saying that it's all the same, unless you're not collecting data at all.

And for some services, you simply do need to collect data, and sometimes you even do need it to be non-opt-in, because otherwise your data sample will have a severe bias.

> Mozilla stated "Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox"[1], which is very different from "no personal data will be collected". Even just a list of domains can be enough to reveal someone's identity.

If you just so happen to read one sentence further than that, it says "Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user’s IP address once the data is collected.". That says exactly that no personal data is collected.

And yes, a list of visited domains can be used to identify a person, but it's not necessary to store the visited domains aggregated by each individual user for this. They'll just intermix the domain lists from all users.

Try turning WebM off in about:config.

Otherwise it's a known bug. Apparently not enough people complained about it so it is perceived to not be a blocking bug for 57.

Indeed. I actually mentioned this before they ever mentioned "Project Quamtum" (last year), that if they ever plan on releasing a major overhaul of Firefox based on components written in Rust, it also needs to come with a new look as well as new branding. Otherwise, most people wouldn't perceive what's really new about the new release, even if it's indeed faster, more secure, etc.

This is what Microsoft also did with Edge and at least from a branding point of view, it worked quite well for them, because people do believe it's a new start from Internet Explorer. It's just that many didn't think that this new fresh start was better than Chrome for the most part (the fact that even now it only works with 70 extensions is a big reason for that belief, too).

I think Project Quantum hit the right spots for the most part. Headlines didn't just mention "Firefox 57" but "Firefox Quantum edition."

Hopefully the Mozilla team is writing down all of the things that worked well for them this time around (as a tactic checklist) so that they can repeat them for future major releases, too.

Was having a shower thought the other day that frankly v57 broke so sharply with legacy Firefox that they should have just given it a new name and version number.

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