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Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

I don't get how this relates to Mozilla's mission, I especially don't understand how technologies that are core to their mission (open communication with Thunderbird, open identity with Persona) are left abandoned. I'm not offended by the extension, I'm more befuddled why they're wasting their time and money on something very few people want. My friends/social network are going to suggest cool stuff to read, not some startup's bot reading by browsing history.

Mozilla's mission is the reason people use Firefox. Chrome (and siblings) are better supported by developers and have significantly better performance. Mozilla's marketshare will continue to dwindle if they continue to invest their time in projects like this.

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The really mystifying part is that one of the key value propositions of Firefox is "here is a browser that respects your privacy," and yet Mozilla keeps flirting with bolting things on to Firefox that actively undermine that value proposition. They repeatedly sabotage the success of their only product! It's astounding.

It reeks of a lack of integrity. They say they respect your privacy, but the fact that they're considering things like this in the first place means their convictions are negotiable.

It's too much to hope that products could just focus on doing what they do, and doing it well, rather than bodging on miscellaneous shit until it resembles the Homermobile.

Build a browser. Implement the standards fully. Make it scream. That's your job.

I, for one, will not donate a cent until this happens.

so the thing is they're building a browser but they also care about having an internet to browse on.

> They repeatedly sabotage

As this is now (and has been for some time) a pattern of this kind of behavior, what's causing it? While other explanations exist, I believe it might be worthwhile to at lest consider the idea that sabotage is goal. Placing people into positions of power for so they can dismantle/sabotage has recently been a popular tactic (e.g. some of the current presidential cabinet appointments). Would anybody even recognize that this kind of tactic was happening before the damage to Firefox becomes fatal?

(to be very clear: I'm speaking hypothetically and not making any explicit or implied accusations about anybody at Mozilla)

Not once have I opened a blank browser and thought “Gee, I wish my browser could tell me what web site to go to!” I’m almost convinced that “getting opaque product recommendations” is almost never an end-user desired feature of any product. It is a company-desired feature because it lets the company market, promote and editorialize anything it wants to, under the guise of being helpful.

Users are supposed to tell computers what to do, not the other way around. I’m afraid that so much more R&D and innovation is happening in the area of computers telling humans what to do and it’s mildly scary.

> My friends/social network are going to suggest cool stuff to read, not some startup's bot reading by browsing history.

Isn't that how we ended up with Facebook's ad targeting algorithms controlling most people's web experience? Running a cheap experiment testing how alternatives might work seems like important if you care about not having network effects giving a couple of companies significant control over the web.

> Chrome (and siblings) … and have significantly better performance.

That was never generally true and it really hasn't been accurate for the last year or two, where performance has been very competitive depending on what you're measuring.

Why are Laserlike's ad targeting algorithms better than Facebook? The alternative to Facebook is not a smaller younger Facebook, it's open protocols.

If you want to send all your browser history into a black box and get recomendations on what to read use Chrome.

Think about what you're describing: if the goal is to offer a new UI feature and see how users react, do you a) spend years standardizing a new protocol or b) use a single source to try it immediately while you independently explore the long-term options?

The goal of that private company is take history data, aggregate it and sell it to the highest bidder.

The "recommendations" are ads. Ads are not "features", so they will never be protocols.

Otherwise they would be a news aggregator, and so competing with Huffington Post or the zillion others.

> Isn't that how we ended up with Facebook's ad targeting algorithms controlling most people's web experience? Running a cheap experiment testing how alternatives might work seems like important if you care about not having network effects giving a couple of companies significant control over the web.

A social network doesn't mean Facebook. It could be an open platform like RSS or Mastodon (the latter I think is more closely aligned with Mozilla's mission, and could use the funding). Friends sharing content with me typically do so over Slack or Discord. I don't know how many people could be convinced to use an app that will algorithmically find something cool if you let it watch what you do all day. That's creepy and the value generated is pretty minimal.

> That was never generally true and it really hasn't been accurate for the last year or two, where performance has been very competitive depending on what you're measuring.

In my case, performance has been slow/stuttery on macOS to the point where I keep actively trying to use it, even enabling WebRender, and falling back to Chrome or Safari. I've also noticed the performance issues on Android. It seems fine on Windows, but not noticeably faster than Chrome or Edge.

Mozilla is in a tough place. They build a product for an ecosystem where invasive tracking and surveillance are required to make decent money, and they have to monetize that product or die, all while presenting themselves as a benevolent non-profit that cares about privacy and keeping the web healthy.

Money? Are you paying for any of their products? Relying on Google's payment for selecting them as a search engine only goes so far...

They should really come up with paid services insted of these schemes.

agree, agree! mozilla have forgotten their root objective. someone should fork mozilla, remove unneeded features and publish a slimmer, focused version under a new licence.

There are plenty of forks of mozilla products. The real value that mozilla brings is their engineering organization.

i'm talking about the entire org, not their products. the org is not bringing in any value by making their engineers research and develop a website recommendation tool in their browser. it should be forked and re-booted by a community with new values and focuses.

You can't really fork concrete assets? Are you suggesting that someone starts a new org and tries to hire up as much mozilla staff as possible? If so, how would starting a new organization with all the same people change anything?

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