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Comment by corty | Hacker News Reader

The author suggests getting donations to (partially) finance Firefox. That would never work without changing the culture of Mozilla Corporation in a huge way: Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes. They frivolously spend on side-projects nobody needs. People would be very quick to cease donating if they are being annoyed in such a way. The only reason people currently put up with Mozilla's behaviour is because they didn't pay for the product.

Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first.

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> Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes.

I just use Firefox with some extensions and have seen nothing like this. I also used Thunderbird briefly (like a month). What am I missing? Do you have specific examples?

If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it? The browser starts, I get to work, end of story. I get that Firefox has made some decisions people don’t like (Pocket and the suggested links on new tab) but that doesn’t mean they are annoying users on every chance or breaking my ability to work.

If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it?

People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here.

Perception is Mozilla is not ran as an open source organization, but as an advertisement company with similar tricks to make users "engage with the product".

> People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here.

As someone who is annoyed now:

Partially true I'd say. I've also been surprised once or twice before by people who were oh so critical about Mozilla and then recommended using Chrome/Chromium or a derivative instead.

There's always been someone to hate on Firefox, at least since they introduced the awesomebar a long time ago.

And here I sit, wondering if

- it finally catched up with me what others had seen a long time

- if I changed

- if Mozilla changed

- or if I am the target of a successful smear campaign against Mozilla

I don't know. Right now however I want I want Google to work like in 2009 and my old Firefox extensions to work with the new supposedly (I think so, honestly, but I don't know) safer API, I want corona gone and I want my insanely powerful laptop to feel insanely powerful instead of sitting here waiting for a double digit GB more RAM to arrive :-/

> People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about.

No, everyone cared. Firefox went from market dominance to a rounding error usershare and consistently dropping. HN users aren't a significant enough portion of browser traffic to account for more than 0.001% of that. People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.

A browser that sold itself on its openness and extensibility is only slightly more open than Chromium, and explicitly limits its possible extensibility to wherever Chrome chooses to set it. Firefox has relegated itself to being a wonky Chrome that isn't connected to Google services. Nobody would choose that over Chrome except out of nostalgia or stubbornness. This is why Google pays all of Firefox's bills.

> People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.

Personally I think the decline of Firefox usage had a lot more to do with Chrome’s performance superiority and objectively better stability for close to a decade. For close to 10 years, until the release of Firefox Quantum in late 2017, Firefox was stuck on a model where browser processes were shared between tabs. Chrome was the first browser to go process-per-tab with its release in 2008.

Process per tab was huge. Flash was still everywhere but tabs had just become a thing and people’s browsers were crashing more and more due to this combination. Mobile was barely a thing. Chrome grew and grew. If a tab crashed it didn’t take down the whole browser session. It was isolated. It’s comparable, for heavy web surfers, to when operating systems got protected memory, multithreading, and preemptive multitasking. A new world of performance.

Today the web is more stable because Flash is gone, mobile has helped push websites to be less piggish on memory use (I mean, obviously they are still pretty bad), ad blockers are more common, and so it’s easy to forget the history. But I switched from FF to Chrome in this period and then came back after FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab, and after Chrome got tied in ever closer to Google’s tracking business.

> FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab

It's something more complicated, to balance resources with stability. I don't know the rules, but for example I have 3 windows with ~700 tabs split across them, which appear to be using 6 processes with 193 threads. (Also I use Auto Tab Suspender, so that probably influences it as well)

You are right. After they ousted the inventor of Javascript, the woke crowd there set about making Firefox into a chrome clone. They also annoyed the users with everything else that was not a chrome feature. I knew this day would come. https://www.opensourceforu.com/2016/08/firefox-past-present-...

It's a very "loud" piece of software. Messages about various things they want me to try (ads), tabs popping up with a fancy page telling me the browser updated (this might be OK if it happened like twice a year, but it's more like every week or two), and a busy, distracting default page.

This stuff bugs power users, but if you watch people who aren't in the power-user set, it's pure usability poison to them. Ditto UI elements moving around after an auto-update. Confuses the living hell out of them. It's about as far from good UX as you can get—a mediocre UI that never changes is far better UX than a good one that behaves unpredictably, and I mean from the perspective of normal people, not HN nerds.

When they broke almost all existing Addons (some are gone to this day, like Classic Theme Restorer) with the Quantum Update for instance. Or when they decided to ditch Thunderbird for no reason at all. And then sort of undecided.

AIUI, Classic Theme Restorer has become redundant since Quantum brought back the "classic" look anyway. Of course there are many other examples of broken extensions.

I've used Firefox for decades now, and I have never understood the shear amount of vitriol that gets thrown at Mozilla when they change Firefox.

Sure, workflows I'm used to change, and sure they add in the odd experiment from time to time that is later abandoned, but it's at nowhere near the frequency Google does the same thing. Yes, Google cops a lot of criticism for this, but language used to criticise Google pales compared to level of vindictiveness I see thrown at Mozilla just in the comments here. It's like they been betrayed by their own mother.

It's even harder to explain given Firefox has clearly gotten better over the years. It's a bumpy ride like all software changes, but it's faster, more reliable, and more standards compliant than ever before. Yes, addon compatibility has been sacrificed to make that happen, but happened for a pretty good reason unlike say Google removing the interfaces that allow ad blockers to work effectively.

In the process they've made some hard core advances in the art, like Rust, and like WASM. From where I sit they've been more effective at this recently than Google. And yet what we hear about here is how Pocket doesn't work as they like. Really - does it matter, compared to the amount of good work that comes out of Mozilla?

Mozilla broke features that did not need fixing. They also removed features such as RSS support. RSS supports anonymity and does not add dollars to Google's kitty. So, Mozilla's policy was lockstep with Google's.

> Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first.

Wikipedia relies on user donations, and yet they still spend vast sums of money on what might be described as frivolous side projects (eg. Wikipedia Zero).

Not so long ago (late 2000s) wikipedia ran on 39 servers, mostly squid proxies, and did not cost very much money to keep running. Given the increase in server performance I imagine they could run on a similar number of servers these days (maybe less with help from a CDN).

Now they spend nearly $100m per year.

So there is no guarantee that this would help Mozilla.

Donations to Wikipedia more than pay for the technical infrastructure, they do have lots of money to waste. Mozilla obviously doesn't. So as a donor, Mozilla wasting money is more of a problem, because as a donor I see it is actually not keeping Mozilla running and if I stop donating it will hurt far worse.

There's either a misconception in this comment or a misreading of it on this side.

Compare the Wikimedia numbers given (nearly $100m per year to keep running) to Mozilla's, who last reported spending much more than that (over $173m) just in their non-software development spending.

Absolute numbers are irrelevant here. The relation between expenses and incoming donations is important.

Wikipedia raises more than it can spend, resulting in rising assets: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statis...

It looks like the misreading part was the right one, then. The intent of your original comment is clearer now, in light of this response.

You're saying that Wikimedia's spending is somewhat rational, whereas Mozilla's revenue might disappear as the result of a single party making a decision to walk away. You're not saying that Mozilla is a ragtag group of browser developers with barely any money. (There was too much focus on "Mozilla obviously doesn't [have the money to waste]" in the earlier reading.)

I'm seeing lots of successful developments from the Wikimedia folks. Their latest project, namely Wikidata is already bigger than Wikipedia ever was; not to mention the projects they launched before that. (Wikimedia Commons free media repository, Wikivoyage travel guide etc.)

It would be possible for Mozilla to accept donations with strings attached that specify what the funds are to be spent on. Currently, they probably don't accept such donations (as far as I can tell), but that's on Mozilla.

We discussed this yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129794

Money is the ultimate fungible asset, any restricted funds going to development frees up money that would have gone to development otherwise to go to something else instead. The only way this works is if the restricted fund donations exceed what the dev investment would have been otherwise, then it starts making a difference.

"This idea works better the more people do it" it the most milquetoast criticism ever.

It doesn’t work at all until a lot of people do it. Below a certain, fairly high threshold all the contributions achieve essentially nothing.

As a donor I don’t like this method because unless all donations were like this, since funds are fungible, budgets would still shift around.

For example, consider two features: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100 DumdumFeature - budget has $200

They currently receive $300 in donations, $50 of which have no strings attached. So there’s donation stream A with strings and $250, and donation stream B with no strings and $50.

Allocation looks like this: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$75, B$25 DumdumFeature - budget has $200, funded with A$175, B$25.

If I donate $25 and say “this can only go to awesome feature” the budgets after my donation end up as.

AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$100 DumdumFeature - budget has $225, funded with A$175, B$50.

What you are saying as you don't want to fund your future because you are mad that other people fund their features.

In the case of Mozilla, it's more than the money can go to one of two places: Firefox development, or the black-hole of Mozilla's other projects and expenditures, including their overpaid leadership.

What I’m saying is that there are lots of charities working toward a future I think is really good. I’d rather donate there.

I’m not mad at anyone, I just want my donations to do as much good as I think they can do.

Technically yes, they could shift spending like that, but it would look bad enough, I think at least some would help where you want. Either way, asking for them not to shift funding as appropriate would be asking to control other finances not your own.

If they allowed targeted donations to firefox/quantum/rust/MDN I would donate, as I'm sure many other will. As it is, I don't and won't even if firefox were to fail.

> It would be possible for Mozilla to accept donations with strings attached that specify what the funds are to be spent on.

Best Practical, the company that does most of the work on the open source RT ticketing system, allows for sponsoring specific features or fixes:

* https://rt.bestpractical.com/NoAuth/Featured

> They frivolously spend on side-projects nobody needs.

I’m curious, what unneeded side-projects do they have?

Just go through https://github.com/mozilla and I bet you didn't hear about 90% of them. If you paginate further, you'll see most of them aren't maintained much anymore.

WebThings ? There are OSS projects in this space and I don't see how they plan on capturing value for the organisation or provide value to the community by building yet another solution that currently has very weak integration with 3rd party devices.

The new crappy address bar that nobody asked for, pocket, hubs, three different mobile browsers, some useless award and probably more that I don't remember.

Also annoying is how they constantly kill useful features like RSS or bookmark descriptions.

I use Firefox because I still like it better than Chrome and I like to support free software, but it's obvious to me that Mozilla doesn't really care about their users and they're too busy chasing shiny things. I expect they'll keep losing market share until they become irrelevant and disappear.

Isn't pocket a sponsor of Mozilla? I always thought that was why it was there.

Mozilla bought pocket

Pocket was a third party service when it became a default Firefox feature in 2015. Mozilla acquired it in 2017.[0] I could not find any data on what they paid.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_(service)

Meanwhile, to use Web Bluetooth Web (very cool and practical) there is no other option than Chrome[0].

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...

Mozilla acquired Pocket https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...

Instead of hiring devs to fix browser bugs

> Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes. They frivolously spend on side-projects nobody needs.

Isn't this a symptom of being detached from reality? In a sense that they are in their bubble, and didn't had the need to look outside of it?

Maybe that's the problem, they didn't have to make it work because the money was already there.

I’m perfectly happy to pay a reasonable monthly amount to keep the firefox team alive.

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