Comment by spinningslate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spinningslate | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm.. at a loss. Please, if any Mozillers are on here, can you explain? I want Mozilla to be successful as a proponent of the open web. I've said before I'd gladly pay for it. With real, hard, proper money.

My biggest concern is the unhealthy dependence on Google. I want a successful Mozilla precisely because I value the free web, not the contorted surveillance monster that Google, Facebook et al seem intent on.

So in the absence of convincing rationale, I assume announcements like this to be nefarious intervention at Google's behest. Return on that $300M "contribution".

Please, Mozilla. Don't give in to the dark side. There is a palpable increase in privacy awareness - you can be at the nexus of growing it, and grow yourself accordingly. Or you can side with the Emperor. Who will crush you once you've served your purpose.

OK, maybe that's dubiously allegorical. Here's the brutal commercial interpretation. The _only_ way for you to reverse your declining market share is to have a differentiator. People need a reason to use Firefox. You can choose that path. Google isn't "supporting" you - it's adopted the "embrace, extend, extinguish" mantra so beloved of 90s/00s era Microsoft. To be clear: you're well into stage 3.

Seems to me you have two choices. Find a differentiator and adopt a growth business plan for independence. Or remain at best Google's sop against anti-competitive accusations, and be fully extinguished when you're not needed any more.

I have said this over and over again.

Look back at the initial success when they were up against Internet Explorer 6. They offered users what Microsoft wouldn't. They didn't hamstring themselves with IE6 compatibility, and instead broke the rules of what a browser was supposed to be by only considering what was best for the user, and spurning harmful standards and technologies.

Where Microsoft hid extensions away in the registry, and their extensions had degenerated to the point where most of them were malicious, Firefox did the revolutionary thing of offering direct access to them by users. There's a lot wrong with Chrome, like their draconian and invasive updater that sometimes damages people's computers and can not be easily turned off.[1] Or how Chrome's extensions, while safer, are also crippled and prone to abuse by their forced updates.

Mozilla could easily leverage Google's weaknesses against them, as they did with Microsoft. Mozilla is not a for-profit platform, they can afford to make the things Google can not. They can have a powerful community driven extension architecture that empowers users to do things Google never would. So of course instead of improving and securing their old extension architecture, or replacing it with something just as powerful, they copied Chrome again.

It may be hard to believe, but including a built in popup blocker was revolutionary. It was called "irresponsible" by advertisers, and forced everyone else to change. Could you ever imagine Mozilla undermining the big players like that today? Even though bold moves like that are what got them their success in the first place. It wasn't branding or PR or any of that crap!

I think the only good thing they've done is containers. And containers are such a good thing for users that I am convinced that many in Mozilla were opposed to it and fought against it, and that it will be deprecated with a flimsy UX metrics justification. And toadies on HN will try to justify it because "why are you thinking about this so much? This is fine, stop complaining, jeez."

One of the smartest things Mozilla used to do was not try to implement bad technologies. They didn't try to re-create the quirks of the Trident engine; they didn't let Micosoft dictate the standards, so Javascript could not eject the CD tray, and you could not change the color of the scroll bars! They didn't waste effort trying to copy Microsoft's Windows-first proprietary ActiveX model. A much better compromise was the community created IETab extension, which just ran an instance of Internet Explorer in one of the tabs for when you needed it.[3] Could you imagine the Mozilla of today saying that if you wanted to watch DRM'd Netflix, you should just use Chrome? Is Firefox even technically capable of having something like Chrome tab anymore? Think of the resources that would be freed up if they stopped trying to have feature parity with Microsoft/Apple/Google.

They just need to have the courage to say "that technology is evil, we won't support it. Maybe someone will make an extension to support it". Instead, essential technologies like RSS are deprecated and left to the community to implement, while DRM and proprietary and problematic standards are given first class support.

Mozilla has made all of the wrong moves in the last 10 years. Their priorities are completely misguided. And I am certain that if they just centered the user over the big platforms, they would experience more popularity than a billion dollars in marketing and PR.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21064663

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233041

[3]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/682975

It may be hard to believe, but including a built in popup blocker was revolutionary. It was called "irresponsible" by advertisers, and forced everyone else to change. Could you ever imagine Mozilla undermining the big players like that today?

I mean yeah... they're doing that right now. https://github.com/ehsan/popup-reporter

Edit: and Tracking Protection already launched https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

That is not at all the same as when they first did it. When they did it, popups (that is, ads that would open a new browser window) were a staple of online advertizing, and they disrupted it.

Google is also doing the same thing, including punishing websites that use abusive interstitials and popups[1]. It would not be all that disruptive at all, in fact it is actually helping Google and the big platforms by forcing ads to be more palatable.

I doubt that any of Mozilla's underwriters have a problem with this.

Something that would be disruptive would be if Firefox bundled uBlock by default, which Google is trying to prevent users of Chrome from using[2]. If Google wanted to, they have the means to remove and blacklist the extension from most users computers immediately, thanks to their updating mechanism. They could even push changes to Chrome that break the extension or any like it, immediately. Frankly I think the only thing that acts as a counter balance is Firefox, but they making themselves less relevant by the day.

[1]: https://searchengineland.com/interstitialgeddon-google-warns...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233041

Thank you. It's a relief to see someone else finally saying the same things I have ever since Australis was teased. We need more clear voices saying this.

Reading back through their mailing lists from 12 years ago is so telling.

So many responses to users who were complaining that they wanted features from Internet Explorer were met with "then use Internet Explorer, we but we refuse to embrace their vision of the web".

And like I said in prev post, extensions like IE Tab would let users appropriate proprietary technology without embracing it. And the extension architecture was powerful enough to do stuff like that. They should have tried doing something like that with Chrome, while keeping their technology.

In 2009, I would watch Hulu on Linux using instructions I found on a forum, which used a python scraping script and fed it to my Firefox VLC plugin. It was the first solution that the community came to for watching Hulu. That was the culture back then.

So, I can see why the big platforms hated it so much. Such a powerful extension architecture and the culture around it had big potential to undermine their platforms.

I really miss the old Firefox. I miss how I could quickly cut through mountains of pages with hierarchical vertical tabs, and export or mirror groups of urls in bulk. And it was faster, because I had a lot more power to restrict what content was loaded.

There were so many powerful extensions that gave me direct access to the content I wanted, which are impossible to use now.

Yes, it had security problems, but those are solvable. Just on my own, I cobbled together some fairly good sandboxing systems. I wish they had just worked to improve XUL.

It's worth noting that Tree Style Tabs still exists and works really well. You can multi-select tabs and move them around or bookmark them, too.

Firefox is dramatically faster now, and you still have full abilities to restrict content loading with WebExtensions like uBlock Origin and NoScript. What functionality relating to restricting content loading are you missing?

Excuse me, but post-e10s Firefox is not anywhere near as fast as old Firefox. It's a slow mess that freezes constantly, and the switch from XUL to WebExtensions (and the changes to the rendering engine resultant from that) have made it agonizing to even load basic HTML without CSS, ECMAScript, or XML content.

I switched to Pale Moon for performance and philosophy, and because it has worked since then exactly as I need it and want it to, and has been uniformly faster (now I can confirm on all three machines I use - the x64s at work and x86 at home), and it has given me no security concerns, I've made a 100% switch.

> "It's worth noting that Tree Style Tabs still exists and works really well."

YMMV. I use it but I find it buggy and slow. Once or twice a week it seems to crash completely and although it comes back up by itself, it takes a minute or so with large numbers of tabs. In the past, although not recently, I've also had trouble with it flattening my tab hierarchy when firefox is restarted, and having tabs at the wrong indentation level or no longer displayed under their parents.

Also, you can't have the bookmarks sidebar and the TST sidebar open at the same time anymore, which is a real bummer.

I think you may be experiencing the addon updating itself. It has to restart when this happens.

I admit I've lost my tree once or twice, but again not for a while.

I tried it recently and it was buggier and slower than in 2011. It's pretty heartbreaking for me, I don't want to do it.

I heard that it wasn't going to be possible to do tree style tabs, but Mozilla hacked it enough so that it would work, and convinced the original author to re-implement it. It feels like a hack.

This is not progress.

Maybe, but I don't think so. It tends to happen when I'm interacting with it, often dragging subtrees around. It might be coincidental, but it sure seems to me like there are lots of unstable edgecases.

> Could you ever imagine Mozilla undermining the big players like that today?

Enhanced tracking protection[1] was turned on by default for all users recently. This is a feature that hits at Google and Facebook's bottom line.. so I guess yeah, I can imagine Mozilla undermining the big players today. Not to mention other privacy initiatives like Containers/Facebook Container.

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

> "Not to mention other privacy initiatives like Containers/Facebook Container.

Except the Multi-Account Containers extension has a trash UX[0], and there is no Google Container extension from Mozilla. Why does Mozilla give us a first party Facebook Container extension but force people to rely on a community provided Google Container extension?

Am I supposed to give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and assume that the lack of Google Container extension has nothing to do with Mozilla getting more funding from Google than they do Facebook? And that Mozilla's failure to throw a few engineers at fixing up Multi-Account Containers has nothing to do with such extensions earning them no good will from Google/etc?

[0] I realize calling something trash might be considered inflammatory, so let me defend that remark. The number of steps needed to say "always open hacker news in a container called 'hacker news'" is absurd:

1) Click the Multi-Account Containers button.

2) Click the "Create new container" button.

3) Enter a name, select from a (senselessly limited and visually similar) number of colors and icons, and press Ok.

4) Click the Multi-Account Containers button a second time, then click your new container to switch to it.

5) In the new container tab, navigate to news.ycombinator.com

6) Click the Multi-Account Containers button a third time.

7) Check the "Always open in [container]" box

8) Open a new regular tab.

9) Navigate to news.ycombinator.com a second time.

10) Check "Remember my decision for this site"

11) Click "Open in [container] Container"

The redundancy in steps 7 through 11 is particularly frustrating.

Nitpicking butt Trident is the IE engine you were thinking of, not Triton.

That's jumping to conclusions, isn't it? It doesn't require a conspiracy for Mozilla to remove a feature.

It wouldn't even make sense for this to be part of a conspiracy, since this doesn't affect the list of search engines included by default.

According to the related forum discussion, it sounds like the blog post was imprecise and the change only affects search add-ons, not adding search engines via browser menus: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/deprecation-of-opensearch-xm...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com