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Comment by jorgec | Hacker News Reader

Since where Mozilla is the good guy?. In fact, since Mozilla fired one of the founders for political reason, Mozilla is turning from bad to worse: a) Is breaking plugins just for the good of change. b) The browser is bloating more and more for each new version. c) Is adding new features that never asked for.

Developers aren't happy, customers aren't happy and now, partners aren't happy. Google is happy.

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1) Since they did not fire that founder, he retreated, 2) they broke those plugins to achieve significantly better performance, security, and an easier to work with, less often breaking extension API, 3) they need to bloat their browser to keep up with webstandards, other browser vendors are doing it just as well for the same reason and 4) is adding features that maybe you didn't ask for, but they've probably received good feedback for. They know more about their users than you do.

> a) Is breaking plugins just for the good of change.

Nobody will take you seriously if you think that the biggest browser re-write since Microsoft introduced Edge is "just for the good of change".

Mozilla has always been the good guy, but only sometimes for technical reasons. They have been the good guy for their constant fight to keep the web open. They are the only for profit company that I happily give the benefit of the doubt.

Well, and they're hardly "for-profit". The Mozilla Corporation technically is, but the Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, which is legally a Non-Profit, so is forced to invest their money into their specified mission.

Therefore if the Corporation makes more money than they feel like investing, they either have to put it aside for later investments or pay it out to the Foundation, which is then legally forced to invest it.

The only real thing where they could shove money to the side is with paying their workers too high wages.

>Developers aren't happy, customers aren't happy

I am both of these and could not disagree more.

Everyone I know who uses Firefox is happy with it. None have switched from Firefox to Chrome due to the plugin system changing. I think you vastly overstate the number of people this has adversely affected.

Firefox is removing an absolute ton of bloat. It's slimmer than it ever has been in a long time.

Except on Mobile. (Let's ignore Firefox iOS since that's really just webkit with a better UI.)

Either Mozilla know something I don't, or they're sticking with a sinking ship and forgot to jump to the robust ship that was launched quite a few years back.

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