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Comment by kvark | Hacker News Reader

That's the last call for anybody who thinks "it's good that Mozilla exists, and its mission is important, but I'm still using Chrome and derivatives". Mozilla can't exist solely because people think it has a good mission: it needs products that can pay the bills, or at least a large population of active users.

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What kills me is when people say they use Chrome cause they don't trust Mozilla cause they embedded Pocket, but like Chrome is literally shoved with a million Google bits, even Chromium (the open source variant of Google Chrome which is the proprietary variant almost everyone installs) has Google crapware at a much larger scale. Mozilla's Firefox still feels like the lesser of the two evils.

Edit: Added clarification about Chromium in case someone doesn't know the difference between Chromium (open source) vs Google Chrome (proprietary).

Well i think Mozilla made very clear in the past that they did all they can to avoid Pocket to be evasive, and they made it to respect your privacy, in case you choose to use it. Of course you can always turn it off on your Firefox and never come across it again.

I actively enjoy the Pocket integration, and I especially appreciate that it's suggesting things locally.

i also have no issues with it, if it was Google on the other hand i would probably disable it.

If it was Google, I don't think you'd be able to.

Somehow I feel like they could have avoided a lot of the backlash by renaming Pocket to Firefox Pocket (and thus being part of the Firefox Lockwise, Firefox Send, Firefox Sync etc suite). Instead of being / feeling like it’s own separate entity, it would have felt like an integral part of Firefox and thus enjoying the same privacy commitments. Even though I have Pocket disabled I don’t see much of a problem with it being in the browser. Isn’t it the same concept as Safari’s Reading List?

yeah that would be a good a idea i think the logical reason i can find for them to not do it was that Pocket was an independent business where probably Mozilla does not even own completely. Also by keeping them independent makes it easier to sell in the future.

Pocket isn't end to end encrypted. It doesn't enjoy the same privacy commitments as the rest of Firefox.

It's just a plugin. They could have put it in the store, put a message in the update info "try pocket, we'd like to ram it down your throat but someone here with sense suggested we could give you control over your browser". Ta-da.

No need to put it into people's toolbars, pretend it's integral then put it back in people's toolbars when they remove it.

It's just disdain for users and the exact sort of heavy handed tactics I use FOSS to avoid.

Same thing with changing start pages, just leave it alone - suggest new defaults on update and allow people to subscribe to adverts if they want them.

Did you mean invasive?

Pocket isn't end to end encrypted. The Reading List it replaced was.

Protesting Pocket by using Chrome makes no sense but integrating Pocket objectively sacrificed user privacy for a revenue stream.

Pocket cannot be e2ee. It has to render the URL beautifully for each domain. It can only be done server side.

It also has to offer suggestions/recommendations, so they need to track you

Web pages can be rendered in web browsers.

Why do you think it has to offer suggestions? Reading List didn't. The equivalents in other browsers don't. Suggestions could be a separate opt in feature.

It is not a normal render. It has a particular layout for each domain.

It removes the ads, signups, etc. They call it 'Article View'. It is rendered per domain.

People actually like the suggestions thing. They get good articles to read.

Pocket's Article View is optional. Firefox has Reader View built in. Special handling for top sites could be built in. Special handling for any site could use a protocol designed for privacy like malware protection does.

People who want suggestions could opt in.

>you can always turn it off on your Firefox and never come across it again //

Are you aware that they reenabled it for users who had removed it (and of course made it a non-removable plugin in the first place), not sure if you were being sarcastic?

I still don't understand what Mozilla got out of forcing Pocket on people.

I love how those people complain about telemetry and other stuff while most likely typing those complains from a laptop running ChromeOS.

Sadly I had hopes for ChromeOS but I'm more saddened nothing like ChromeOS has popped up.

If Mozilla teamed up with someone like Ubuntu to produce a viable alternative I'd buy into it fairly quickly honestly.

In the meantime I'm considering an iPad Pro as a "Laptop" alternative and as a way to offload apps from my phone so my phone is just that, a phone with nothing but maybe the work apps on it and texting stuff. I don't want social media in my pocket anymore.

Edit: On another note, maybe if we see more ARM laptops it may be worthwhile for a new Netbook / ARM focused distro to crop up. One thing that kills me about Chromebooks is paying a thousand dollars for decent specs but I could pay the same amount and real a laptop with a real OS on it. The main selling factor with ChromeOS for me though has always been their security model.

> If Mozilla teamed up with someone like Ubuntu to produce a viable alternative I'd buy into it fairly quickly honestly.

The thing about that it is that it has really very little to do with Mozilla. ChromeOS is only that because a) ChromeOS and Chrome are both made by Google (there is no "teaming up"), and b) Google's incentive is for everything to be using their services in their browser.

But putting everything in the browser is not generally desirable in its own right. An interesting competitor would have a browser, but it would just be another application. And there have been several attempts at making security-first operating systems, from various Linux distros to OpenBSD, but none of them have Google's resources. And that isn't really a problem Mozilla can solve at this point either.

I would be fine if not everything is in the browser honestly. However the number of packages should be a slim amount to mimic how minimalist Chromebooks can be closely.

Putting everything in the browser doesn't buy you anything unless your goal is to put everything into your web services. Meanwhile it incurs a lot of costs because browsers are designed for client-server, which in Google's case was the point, but in a user-focused device it's a liability. You saddle yourself with javascript instead of better languages, you end up having to reimplement things like local storage and data transfer between applications, a lot of interesting applications will need access to lower level networking than browsers normally provide (e.g. ICMP, UDP, multicast) or some other access to hardware (e.g. access to USB devices).

Why build a second operating system inside the browser instead of just using the original operating system?

I'd be surprised if "people who know what telemetry is" and "people who choose to use ChromeOS" have much overlap.

I don't mean that as a dig on ChromeOS - personally I think its evolved into a pretty decent product for certain use cases. You can even use Firefox if you're so inclined.

So Firefox should aim to only be marginally better than Chrome, degrading itself along the way?

Firefox: 'I know we used to do cool stuff but Google rips it's users a new one on the regular so we need to be more shitty too, what're they going to do leave and use Chrome, lolz' /probably

More like, those that helped foster ChromeOS victory, should not lament that competition dies.

If it wasn't for iOS, I bet job offers for Web would have changed already for Chrome developers.

It's a great browser, even faster than Chromium. I especially appreciate that they offer 32 bit versions for download which run on my old Linux machines just by unpacking the ZIP to some directory.

Thing is, Google doesn't try to sell itself otherwise. Mozilla talks a good game about privacy and users-first, but then it goes and does things like Pocket, Mr. Robot, etc. that make it clear it is all just marketing.

Edit: Uh, my memory was faulty on this one. See below.

> Personally I'm still upset about that time they fired a guy for having a fetish and then pretending they cared about inclusivity.

Citation?

Apparently my memory is faulty and I'm conflating separate events at different companies even. Withdrawn.

Surely the best way to handle problems with the town's only firefighter isn't leaping into the raging flames?

What was the actual, real problem with Pocket? Adding an easily-removed link to the UI didn't leak your private data or otherwise cause problems.

Mozilla replaced a feature that was end to end encrypted with one that sent private data to a third party for data mining.

They denied getting paid for the integration. That was technically true. They eventually admitted they got paid for referrals.

They bought the company in 2017 and promised to release the source code. They still haven't.

The Pocket website says "as a member of the Firefox family, privacy is paramount."[1] The first part is misleading and the second part is simply false.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pocket/

The whole Pocket affair reeked of “Valley connections” and corruption, and resulted in a net loss of privacy for Firefox users compared to what was there before. I use Firefox and will likely never stop using it, but that and FFOS, I felt, were signs that MoCo was being run like “just another company” rather than something that should have a strong moral and ethical compass.

Here is the worst possible case scenario that is really happening with Chrome:

If I want to use a Google Property with Chrome (just tested with Google Search Console) I MUST be "signed into" Chrome with the same Google Account as I want use to access the service.

I am not "signed into" Chrome with a google account and I log into that service using the login process IN the web page I become automatically "signed into" Chrome.

Chrome just peeks throught the veil and I am now logged into my browser. Talk about overstepping boundaries.

So, I don't want to have my browser sessions associated to my google account so I "Sign Out" of the browser. BOOM! Logged out of the service as well.

This is a very sad day for the state of a free and open internet.

Preferences… > Sync and Google Services > Allow Chrome sign-in

> By turning this off, you can sign in to Google sites such as Gmail, without signing in to Chrome

Thank you for the pointer to the way to turn it off but damn Google for even having to have it in the first place.

And those options tend to work for a while, and then three releases down they get silently discontinued.

>it needs products that can pay the bills

the alternative is cutting the bills down somewhat. They made about 500 million in revenue in 2018, that's a healthy pile of cash.

They've got a pretty huge engineering team and still development on their products is painfully slow. Just take the password manager they've been offering, it can't even import or export passwords and it misses half of the features any of the free competitors have.

Adding even more stuff on top of it doesn't really give me a lot of confidence.

Also, please make a monthly donation to Mozilla if you can. You will contribute to saving the world.

https://donate.mozilla.org/

I wonder if it would work for companies/services to offer perks to their users in exchange for donation to Mozilla? It's a weak example but if, for a $50 donation, you could get an icon on your HN profile -- and that shows up with your comments -- that you're a financial supporter of Mozilla that might drive donations. Granted, HN is a pretty small community but if, say, Facebook offered a perk level for supporting Mozilla it might get the network effect going perhaps.

Reddit has been somewhat successful in this regard, but it doesn't feel like the most stable business model.

I would happily pay for a “premium” Firefox experience, even if that premium was only cosmetic. I have received so much value from Firefox over the years that it would be an honour to support them directly.

Yes I know I can donate. But I want to pay, and that’s different somehow.

Pay for their VPN! https://vpn.mozilla.org/

Huh, no Linux (or Mac) version yet.

I signed up on day 1 and have really liked it. Works much better than the other vpn software I've had. And having it on Android too had been great

Indeed, I do an occasional one every now and then, also for Thunderbird.

Do this! I procrastinated on switching from Chrome to Firefox for several months because I wasn't sure how much time and effort it would take. I set up a monthly donation to Mozilla during this time because it was easy and supported browser diversity.

When I did finally switch, it turned out to be pretty easy and fast to transfer my bookmarks and passwords to Firefox, and there are some features like the built-in containers and add-ons like Tree Style Tab [0] that I find pretty valuable.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

As some have pointed out above, the donations don’t go towards the browser by the way.

TST is pretty valuable, is it supported at all by Mozilla? They seem not to make it easy to use it.

While donating to Mozilla Foundation is a great cause [1], none of those funds go to funding Mozilla Corporation, and thus Firefox.

If you want your funds to go toward MoCo (and thus Firefox development), your best bet is to subscribe to Mozilla VPN or Pocket Premium.

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/

What does the Mozilla Foundation do if it doesn't develop Firefox? What do they spend their money on?

The salary of their senior employees[1]

1 - https://twitter.com/withoutboats/status/1217558588857544704

"The not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation supports open-source apps, web literacy curriculum, gender equality in tech and more."

Found on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/

Money is fungible and dollars are dollars. Donating money to the Foundation means less of the Corporation's dollars have to go to supporting the Foundation (which they do via dividend payments), and so more of the Corporation's dollars go to Firefox.

I don't disagree with your concept in theory, but I also don't think there is any evidence to suggest that MoCo's trademark royalty payments (as IIRC that's how they are structured according the financial docs) to MoFo are adjusted based on MoFo's donations.

Has that been mentioned in a meeting somewhere?

(301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24122250)

I wonder how many more people would donate if they knew the donation would be spent on making Firefox better and not on political activism.

That doesn't work with their current structure. Foundation can receive donations, Corporation (itself a subsidiary of the foundation) can sell products (like Mozilla VPN).

I wonder why the current structure is set up like that. I mean I don't think it's by accident – if it were set up like that by accident, surely, it could have been set up so people could direct donations directly at Firefox, if the CEO wanted that.

The structure is set up that because it reflects the goals of Mozilla. Firefox the browser is not the end goal, it's a means to making the internet a better place. And that's what the Foundation is about. The corporation also pays dividends to the Foundation in order to help fund their efforts, because it's the Foundation's work that matters more (in the long term) than Firefox.

It was established precisely so that the Corporation could pursue commercial operations that the Foundation legally couldn't before that, like business partnerships.

Also Mozilla Foundation didn't qualify as a public charity since it received less than 1/3rd of its revenue via donations, though I don't know if it can be considered as one now (15 years after the split).

AFAIK non-profits can receive donations bound to a specific purpose - they just don't like the accounting headache?

I hate to say it, but this is one of the reasons I stopped donating. Mozilla was getting a bit like EFF-lite and I've had enough of the EFF's non-mission nonsense as well.

I'm not sure why anyone would donate to a company paying an exec a $2.5M salary. They're exploiting donors.

I don't particularly care for the CEO, seems like an activist weirdo if I'm being honest(embodies idealism in an unproductive way).

While donations is a noble cause, it is a merely a drop in the ocean in the sea of money provided by Google.

I wonder how much of their money is from donations though, does Mozilla release these numbers?

> You will contribute to saving the world.

Cringed a bit there but to each to their own.

After hearing how their corporation is run and what their execs spend on flights I'm not convinced they deserve it.

Would rather they fall and a Phoenix rises out of the ashes for a second time.

Yes, I agree.

And the best product is a product that is useful to users.

To me, Mozilla felt like an ideology and not so much like a browser. That repelled me from Mozilla. I was annoyed by their attitude and puns toward Chrome, especially the prefix war and the comparison between IE6 and Chrome. That was way too much for me, even though they had a point. Ironically one of their evangelists, that made a lot of noise against Chrome, later moved on to Microsoft.

Microsoft has settled the prefix war in the way that they adopted Chromium.

Coming from Netscape, which I loved, and going through almost every iteration of the Internet and browsers, Mozilla feels like Assembler or C to me. Yes, Assembler was cool when you had your C64, and yes, you can do everything with C, but that is not the point. People need to get a job done, and yes, automated Garbage Collection is ok most of the time - I mean you Java, C#, Python, etc.

Maybe the comparison is not the best, but Mozilla's priority seems right this time: new product(s).

Best of luck, Mozilla!

> Mozilla can't exist solely because people think it has a good mission: it needs products that can pay the bills, or at least a large population of active users.

Absolutely. It has to stand on its own feet. Yet the only reason Mozilla is being kept alive is due to Google paying them to be the default search engine as part of a deal which is where the majority of their revenue is from. [0]

Funny how their mission in "supporting internet privacy" also somehow means we must have deals with companies with the likes of Google who don't believe in Mozilla's own mission in order to survive.

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/

Well, you have to pick your battles, right? Maybe in some future when Mozilla has their own privacy-oriented open-source search engine, as well as an independent solid source of income, it would cease to sign contracts with Google. We aren't there yet, and may never be.

Wow.

> Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath (which was the subject of litigation the parties resolved in 2019.)

I would pay for firefox if that's what it takes for it to continue existing and to be as good as other browsers.

I donate $20 a year to Mozilla. I like the product. I hope they will keep focus making great browser and not get distracted with other things.

While donating to Mozilla Foundation is a great cause [1], none of those funds go to funding Mozilla Corporation, and thus Firefox.

If you want your funds to go toward MoCo (and thus Firefox development), your best bet is to subscribe to Mozilla VPN or Pocket Premium.

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/

Why not just offer a paid version of firefox then? That is really what I am offer. I don't use pocket or the VPN.

I am willing to pay for a license if they continue to support the browser.

This is actually sad - because i have limited use for either of those products. I likely want the VPN, but the value of having it on my phone is minimal to me.

So while i think i will get the VPN, Pocket on the otherhand... is just meh to me. Products where i give some cloud company a ton of data, even if a good company, is just not an interesting problem for an honest company to solve.

VPN is meaningful. Privacy in general is meaningful. Basic necessities like identity and communication are meaningful.

Pocket is a really nice feature and a good UX, but just not interesting to me for the company goals. If it makes them money i'm happy, but it's just mildly more interesting to me than Mozilla Tiktok might be.

I really hope they embrace the essentials to the web, and make a profit doing so. VPN seems like the right direction (though i'm dying for it on desktop). Pocket, less so... to me.

Is it actually true that Mozilla’s core business (develop Firefox, funded by search bar traffic) loses money? Or is the crises that this core business doesn’t generate enough surplus to fund the overhead of other activities that Mozilla engages in?

I subscribe to Pocket Premium to support Firefox development because I think it's critical for it to continue existing, but I use Chrome as my daily driver because it's almost 2x faster on my Mac.

I give FF a try every few months and will happily switch if they ever manage to get it to having comparable performance to Chrome or Safari on my architecture.

I spent the last month switching to FF because Chrome is getting dog slow and I wanted to support it, despite multiple issues since switching I stuck along.

Seeing this "diversification" strategy I just installed Edge and am giving it a try, FF wasn't a great experience but I was willing to stick with it to support Chrome alternatives - but it's obvious it needs a lot of work - and removing focus is a signal people should be moving off not coming back to it.

Well, I want to use products from companies that I support. Mozilla is simply pushing too much politics that I strongly disagree with so I cannot support them.

Brave is more private and respecting of the user, without the politics. It's all whats good with Mozilla leaving out the bad part.

We could have had that in Mozilla today, but because virtue signaling they had to fire Brendan. This was probably the nail that lead to the coffin for Mozilla.

"Firing Eich because of his political views is virtue signalling. I don't use Firefox because of Mozilla's political views."

Yes, do you have something to say or do you just like to quote me?

I dislike companies that push a political agenda when the product or service itself has little to do with it. Privacy politics is fine, since that is a core part of Mozilla and Firefox and is very neutral since everyone can enjoy privacy. It is also part of the browsing experience.

But pushing stuff like "white privilege" is just pushing away users like me. I use Brave, which is a company founded by Brendan and they don't push anti gay marriage politics on me even if that is what they may support.

I just don't want that in my browser, it makes it a shitty experience. I don't understand what's hard to understand about that. I am also a web developer, so pissing me off will just result in me not testing the website in Firefox unless my users specifically requests it.

> I just don't want that in my browser, it makes it a shitty experience.

How? If you don't care about politics, why would the politics of the organization running the browser affect your experience? Aren't you therefore virtue signalling (in this case for maximal free speech) by not using Firefox for political reasons? You haven't mentioned any product features/decisions made as a result of Mozilla's "virtue signalling" that affected the day-to-day experience of using Firefox.

Just pointing out the hypocrisy of your statements. Seems like it's only "virtue signalling" when you disagree with the virtues.

My reason for using Firefox and never trying Brave is the same: I strongly disagree with Brendan Eich's politics. If using Brave means Brendan Eich profits from it then I'll never use it.

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