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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

Does the new Firefox have a password sync feature like Chrome's? I'd much rather trust Mozilla with that sort of thing (especially if I could host my own backend to it somewhere) than Google.

As an aside, one silly thing that tarnished Mozilla's brand for me was the treatment of Brendan Eich. I may not agree with his donation of money but I think impinging on his rights is a far more fundamental immorality than what he was accused of.

It's like Twitter's controversy over blue ticks. If they'd only given them as a result of identity verification, and not used them to indicate Twitter's approval of someone's beliefs, then they wouldn't be where they are now.

Stick to good tech and fighting for relevant causes, e.g. net neutrality, I say.

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Eich did not have his rights impinged on. He chose to resign--he chose that--because the community far beyond Mozilla didn't approve of his donations and he saw that he'd lost a lot of people's trust in him. His actions had consequences, which he recognized and owned.

He has, presumably, gone on to find other work, after resigning, he still has a platform, he can still talk and associate freely.

You can dislike the fact that he resigned, but blaming anyone for his actions but him doesn't make sense.

>Eich did not have his rights impinged on. He chose to resign--he chose that--because the community far beyond Mozilla didn't approve of his donations and he saw that he'd lost a lot of people's trust in him. His actions had consequences, which he recognized and owned.

Yes, this is a key point people forget. No one fired Eich. However, a large chunk of Mozilla's open source contributors (along with a decent chunk of their paid employees) were ready to resign.

Eich may not have had good politics, but he legitimately cared about the organization and was not going to let it implode on his account.

Funny how so-called-libertarians love at will employment until it's used to pressure a bigot to resign.

> However, a large chunk of Mozilla's open source contributors (along with a decent chunk of their paid employees) were ready to resign.

Citation, please. I'm a Mozilla employee, and was a Mozilla employee at the time. I'm not going to claim everyone was ecstatic about things; there was a lot of soul-searching going on for some people. But I don't recall any "Mozilla employees", in the sense of people working for the Mozilla Corporation, saying they would resign, nor calling for Brendan to do so.

There _were_ a few such calls from interns, and a few employees, at the Mozilla Foundation. People who were not involved in Firefox in any way, did not know Brendan, and were not relevant to the things that Mozilla is actually known for doing.

Of course the press spun the story in such a way as to make it seem like there was mass unhappiness internally... And most people read the press spin, not the actual blog posts actual Mozilla employees were writing at the time.

>Citation, please. I'm a Mozilla employee, and was a Mozilla employee at the time. I'm not going to claim everyone was ecstatic about things; there was a lot of soul-searching going on for some people. But I don't recall any "Mozilla employees", in the sense of people working for the Mozilla Corporation, saying they would resign, nor calling for Brendan to do so.

I'm not saying there was an organized "we, a group, will resing". I'm only repeating what I was told hanging out on the deck during one of the cantinas - that there would have be a lot of turnover if he hadn't left :)

IIRC Eich indirectly acknowledged this when he resigned when he said he didn't want to hurt Mozilla.

No, I did not acknowledge that. Stop putting your preferred narrow interpretation on a (too-broad) fact pattern and then attributing your interpretation to me. Doing so takes a low road and can be used against your views as well as for them.

I didn't mean to imply you did.

I was merely pointing out that it is my understanding that you resigned, that you mentioned care for Mozilla as why you did, and that many people would have resigned if you hadn't. I thought I made that clear when I said "indirectly acknowledged". I guess my understanding was wrong. Sorry for that.

I definitely don't want to take a low road. We never met, but even the people who disagreed with your politics all thought you were a pleasant person and would mention missing you at the various company events. I hope you know that.

"many people would have resigned" is unfalsifiable, but if you mean the six Mozilla Foundation employees who tweeted on day 2 that I should resign, those people never worked for me. For whatever reason they almost all resigned for other jobs within a year of my leaving, anyway. I hope you weren't thinking of them when making the "would have resigned" imponderable claim.

> Does the new Firefox have a password sync feature like Chrome's?

It's had that for years, and I'm yet to have a problem with it.

> As an aside, one silly thing that tarnished Mozilla's brand for me was the treatment of Brendan Eich. I may not agree with his donation of money but I think impinging on his rights is a far more fundamental immorality than what he was accused of.

I can't decide if what they did was wrong or not, but I'm not totally comfortable with that issue either... no person or company is perfect though.

Does it still allow you to see the password in the settings? I think that’s a not so great idea. I remember messing with friends by getting their saved passwords.

Yes. The same as Chrome. As it should be. If they weren't in the UI, you could just extract them from the browser's data files or process memory. All that preventing access does is annoy users and give them a false sense of security.

If you set a master password, you need to type it again to see the saved passwords.

The thing with Brendan happened ~3 years ago now. A lot of the leadership that was there at the time is gone now. How long should Mozilla be punished for that?

No one is being punished - I'm not their parent not their government.

Which is sort of my original concern. Mozilla was neither of those things to Brendan Eich, and yet more and more we see employers and influencers behaving as though they are.

I don't mean to rehash old arguments but in his position he was representing Mozilla. And Mozilla is an advocacy organisation with a deep interest in policy. They aren't just a browser maker; Firefox is merely their most widely known campaign.

If the organisation felt he didn't represent them then it doesn't make sense for him to be CEO. It would have been less of an issue if he were in a more purely technical role.

That's my point - I don't want them to spend their money on being a general-purpose morality organisation.

I want a browser maker who specifically argues for the most foundational and important of needs regarding the internet. I don't want a social justice crusader who values PR above all.

Ah, the acceptable bigotry of "those [people in my outgroup] can be CTOs but not CEOs". Well done.

In fact, my leaving had nothing to do with advocacy _per se_. As Erin Kissane wrote at the time, if Mozilla were to become a narrow "progressive" advocacy group, it would fail at its stated mission. Whether it has taken or will take that fall, I won't attempt to evaluate here. But that's the risk Erin cited, and I agree.

Well, and Chrome's maker fired someone for a certain inflammatory manifesto. I don't think that at this point it is realistic to run a tech company of any sort in the US without some amount of displays of political loyalty to the vocal majority of your recruitment and customer base.

Yes, it had that for years - including master password protection.

"As an aside, one silly thing that tarnished Mozilla's brand for me was the treatment of Brendan Eich. I may not agree with his donation of money but I think impinging on his rights is a far more fundamental immorality than what he was accused of."

It wasn't about his rights as a private person. It was that he gave a non-trivial amount of financial support to a campaign to remove rights from other people, which did not seem consistent with the values of the non-profit that he wanted to publicly represent as CEO.

Flat wrong on "remove rights". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845509

Firefox Sync can sync passwords across desktop/mobile.

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