Hacker News Reader

Comment by Santosh83 | Hacker News Reader

I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product.

The tragedy of Mozilla is a very human one, with special embellishments added by the prevailing culture in the US, its home...

View on HN

"the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal"

It is more like people are willing to dismiss bad behavior when there is a clear profit motive, since it seems obvious that when someone is in it for the money they will ignore other considerations. Take the profit motive out of the picture and people start to imagine other motives or attribute bad behavior to negative character traits, even when the behavior is generally better than the for-profit counterparts'.

Well, people expect a company to not try to ride the high horse down the low road. I don't personally think Mozilla has really done anything bad, I get it, they are a real company, with real employees who work for a living. Sometimes the realities of running a company clash with their PR of being some sort of public good. FWIW, I like Mozilla, and a lot of their values, and the products they put out, but their marketing does leave them open to ridicule in ways that a company who always answers "money" to the "why did you do this?" question is not.

> is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal.

It might be the other way around in this case.

Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot.

Throughout the years when choices had to be made Mozilla didn't always side with the open web or the users, and whenever they were asked about it, the answer was always the same:

"Not our hill to die on. We need the clout we would lose, otherwise we won't be big enough to have any say when the next thing comes around."

and then the next thing came around, and the next...

The problem is that Mozilla seems to have revenue as an important goal. I imagine that's why people clamour for them to focus on the browser instead of pointlessly playing corporation with borrowed feathers.

They sold out.

Mozilla rose to the top because IE6 was obsolete trash, Opera cost money, and Chrome didn’t exist. The “promise of an open web” didn’t enter into it.

... and the installer would download very quickly on your mom's dial-up, unlike the full Mozilla Suite which was huge, and it was much lighter-weight, better-performing, and had better default features for people who didn't need all of Mozilla Suite, so you could install it on there so she'd stop getting 500 pop-unders and then ending up with a virus and ten "browser bars" you had to fix.

Otherwise, yes, you've nailed it.

When IE6 came into the market it was the best on its class, the only problem was Microsoft declaring victory and dismantling the team to create Avalon (WPF), which is also the background why CSS Grid came from WPF.

> Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot.

No, they had a free browser with tabs.

So this was because of the tabs?

"MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – December 15th, 2004 – [..]The ad, coordinated by Spread Firefox, features the names of the thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation’s fundraising campaign to support last month’s highly successful launch of the open source Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser.

Spread Firefox is the volunteer-run Mozilla advocacy site, with over 50,000 registered members, where community marketing activities are organized to raise awareness and to promote the adoption of Firefox."

(https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...)

That's how you hear about a free browser with tabs, not how you finally satisfy that deep, nagging yearn for an open web.

At least that's how I remember it. Tabs were a huge improvement to the web browsing experience.

Before Firefox, Opera was known as "The Tabbed Browser".

> We need the clout we would lose, otherwise we won't be big enough to have any say when the next thing comes around.

As John J. Chapman said in 1900:

> I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

How do I pay for Firefox directly? Donating to the foundation seems noble, but like other commentators have mentioned it all gets absorbed into the foundation or is part of a 'bonus product' bundle that (in my mind) overvalues a service I don't want (VPN, Pocket, whatever.)

I don't think Mozilla/Firefox is failing because no one will pay for it, but, because it won't take money for Firefox directly.

It would also help MoCo funding simply if more people used Firefox.

I’m just curious as to why. Bigger market share == bigger marketing/advertising share, specifically? Or something else?

Two reasons, one primary and one secondary:

1. Mozilla's revenue from the Google search deal depends on users searching for things using Firefox. More searches through the Firefox search bar, more revenue for MoCo.

2. Marketshare == developer mindshare. Declining marketshare has created a positive feedback loop where devs (or their managers) become less concerned about supporting Firefox. This induces more web compat issues, which causes more people to switch away, cycle repeats.

Sounds reasonable, thanks! Didn’t know of the Google search deal.

It's a tough spot to be in, for sure.

Firefox used to have two major advantages, at least for me as a user rather than a developer: customisability and the respect for privacy. The former went under a bus with Quantum and has never recovered. The latter is still there, but the single biggest hole in it is the use of Google for search, so that's probably the first thing that many privacy-sensitive users are going to change.

I do still use Firefox as my primary browser, despite having reconsidered several times in recent years. However, as a dev I have all the others readily to hand, and I do find myself forced to use others because pages simply don't work in Firefox with noticeable frequency now. From the opposite angle, I also can't remember the last time a client specified Firefox compatibility for a new project. It's usually Chrome, iOS Safari if mobile is relevant, and maybe Edge in corporate settings now.

Unfortunately the vicious cycle of market share and compatibility has been established, and while I think we'll all end up worse off for it, I'm not sure there's much anyone can do about it at this point, at least not as long as most of the actual functionality in Firefox is (unsurprisingly) so similar to other browsers.

Big-money donors are more interested if they see that the project is making a big difference.

1000% this. i was literally writing the same comment. just have an easy way for me to selectively donate $15/month to Rust, Servo, Firefox, Thunderbird, whatever. instead you get some generic bucket with no possibility to really vote with your money.

e.g. i would have never paid for the A/R stuff they distracted their Servo engineers with (plus the Magic Leap entanglement). i would have also withheld funding for the non-removable Pocket integration fiasco. and the jack-in-the-box Mr. Robot promotion - once my tools start to become Mozilla's agents rather then user's agents, they cease to be my tools.

i should add that people who choose to use firefox rather than the default are those who are most likely to pay. not listening to them is absolute nonsense.

Apparently they fired the servo devs so you may not be able to support them at mozilla anymore anyway.

This.

Mozilla is misaligned incentives all the way down.

What they want is for {product X} to solely focus on their needs {set Y}, disregarding everyone else's needs that conflict.

This selfishness is expressed for lots of things, not just Mozilla, but things like Ubuntu and Homebrew too.

I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you".

> I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you".

I know a couple of guys who posted their stuff here. They don't care about the complainers because the complainers don't have and don't offer to have skin in the game. They did the sensible thing, which is to be polite and respond noncommittally thanking them for the feedback or to ignore them.

Because you don't get information that will improve the product from them, they aren't potential customers, and they usually don't know what they're talking about anyway.

"What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else."

Yes, you have perfectly described what I want.

To be fair, I also want this from typical, corporate, for-profit entities ...

I get it that the US federal government has been antagonizing the world on overdrive for the past ~4 years, but as an "insider" I really don't understand how you arrived at any of these conclusions. The very notion of "collective psyche" is entirely nonsensical in the US as there is almost nothing that is very broadly agreed-upon.

Now of course I'm particularly opinionated about Mozilla, since I donate regularly to the foundation, subscribe to their VPN, contribute to the Rust ecosystem, and use Firefox not only on desktop but mobile as well. So, perhaps I live in what might be called a bubble, but the idea that anybody would knock Mozilla because they are not profit-driven just doesn't make sense to me, and is actually the complete opposite of what I got from reading the comments in this thread, which, by the way, probably has decent international representation anyway.

> And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product.

I'm not sure how many there are that would pay for it, but I'm sure it's not zero.

I believe a browser is like an IDE, and I'm quite happy to pay for mine, as are plenty of other people apparently, JetBrains & Co are making good money. They are focused on their users though, which Firefox isn't.

I'm pretty sure that Firefox could get plenty of paying users at $100/yr even just by focusing on good developer experience. They don't though, and Chromium does.

That's a good point. A business plan along the lines of, for $8/month you get the pro edition which has all the latest features and updates, which the free tier would get 6 months later or so.

I use FF (dev edition) as my primary dev browser, and it's made a lot of progress on DX. Chromium has a smoother experience overall, but FF is not too shabby nowadays.

Sometimes it feels like there are people out there who want Mozilla to fail and gleefully seek ways to make that happen (even by doing something as simple as amplifying misinformation), even though it is not really in their interests to do so.

Who are these people who want Mozilla to fail?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120425

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120742

Note that both of those comments are [dead]. Wanting Mozilla to fail is a very fringe opinion.

The first person wants mozilla to experience a failure as to wake them up and make them focus on the browser, not for mozilla to fail in general.

The second person does not say that they want mozilla to fail.

I've never seen any indication that anyone wants Mozilla to fail.

But after seeing several years of repeated strategic blunders and bad management, and Firefox slip from being the most popular web browser by a comfortable margin to a single digit percentage market share, which is still sliding down, I think the available evidence shows that they have failed quite badly, and for the most part through problems of their own making. Now, I'd like to use Firefox again, but they have regain strong technical focus first. They are all over the place doing irrelevant stuff. I'm surprised they even have that many staff to lay off in the first place given their financial situation. There must be a large percentage of non-jobs amongst that thousand, because they certainly weren't all dedicated to making a good web browser.

> But after seeing several years of repeated strategic blunders and bad management

Not that I disagree, but it's probably easy being a captain from the outside.

> I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal.

Counterpoint: Craigslist.

Mozilla can always give up firefox and let it has it own non-profit organization that take the revenue from the google deal. That way Mozilla can continue to focus on their advocacy product which they get paid so much for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com