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Comment by dandellion | Hacker News Reader

I hope whoever replaces him will inspire the Firefox team to stop dropping support for features I use. Probably not, but one can dream.

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Firefox is an open source project. I'm sure if you pitched in with time and / or money to maintain said features, they'd be much less likely to disappear.

Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead... Firefox is an open source project, but here is no openness in the product management. The decisions regarding features to keep or discard are determined by politics internal to Mozilla.

> Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead

I sincerely hope it's neither. I'm well aware that a third party can't direct Mozilla as to how to channel its resources. They can however ensure there are sufficient contributors external to Mozilla to maintain the features they wish to keep.

Even if the end decision is still made by Mozilla internals, the decision to keep functionality is much easier if they don't have to battle for resources to maintain it thanks to external contributors being willing to do so.

At the end of the day, being an open project does not require the maintainers to do work simply because a subset of users wishes it.

> Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead

Can you please edit out gratuitous swipes like that from your HN posts? It breaks a number of the site guidelines and your comment would be fine (with higher signal/noise) without it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sorry you feel that way, but I'm interested to know why you feel that way. "It's open source, so it's your fault something doesn't meet your preferences" is an extremely common conversation bomb in this space. I included the opening phrase to highlight the fact that I'm aware of the possibility that this was a bad-faith response, but I chose to interpret it in the best possible light.

What's gratuitous? Is "naive" considered an insult on Hacker News?

Sure, naive is a pejorative. But the insinuation of "deliberate attempt to mislead" is worse. The site guidelines ask everyone simply to assume good faith, so there's no need to highlight the possibility of bad faith. Doing that doesn't add any information and just distracts from the rest of your comment.

Smarmy replies like "just send in the patches" are at least as toxic and assuming bad faith as what op said, yet are completely unchecked.

If you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20830097, that's not what jsty said. Please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not.

It may have been a bit of a stock comment, but I see no evidence that it wasn't in good faith.

I already contribute to other software projects that are more important to me than Firefox. And it would be impossible for me to contribute every feature I want to every open source project I use anyway, so what you propose is not very practical and doesn't really help, does it?

On the other hand, it only takes me a few seconds to complain on the official channels when they add a feature I don't need or remove one that I use so I think I'll keep doing that. Maybe enough users will agree and Mozilla might react to the complaints. Probably not though, they've been pretty deaf to the community lately. A change of CEO might be a chance for that to improve, so that's why I made my comment.

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