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ddevault

Some ways they have not kept Firefox working for you in 2020:

- Laying off 25% of their engineers

- Investing in a 400% increase in leadership salaries and bonuses during record-low market share

- Adding more advertising to an end-user application

- Sending all of your browsing history to Cloudflare

- Launching a VPN grift which sends all of your data to another third-party (and charges you for the pleasure)

- Terminated Firefox Send and Firefox Notes

- Failed to open source Pocket, 3 years since their promise to

View on HN

Don't forget

- Removing browser features (tab groups) by factoring them out into extensions, then

- Breaking the extension API such that such extensions are no longer possible, then

- Say you'll add new extension APIs to allow such features but actually don't implement anything for several years (https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding / https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447)

- Separately, break all extensions on the mobile version of firefox and then decree that the only extensions allowed on mobile must be specifically whitelisted by Mozilla

Its just as if someone paid them good money to not compete with Chrome!

(I'm not saying that is part of the deal but I don't know what more Google could realistically hope for...)

I tend to believe that it is naive to think that Google would want Firefox to die.

So... with the huge caveat that I don't actually believe this... if we're going full conspiracy theory, Google probably benefits the most from Firefox being as weak as possible while staying technically alive. That is, Firefox needs to stay technically an option to stave off antitrust issues, but evil-google doesn't want anybody to actually use them, so it's preferable that Firefox is as buggy and feature-poor as possible.

Again, not something I actually believe, but the presented position is at least internally consistent/valid.

It's reasonable, thanks.

This is starting to look more and more realistic :-/

The number of tested extensions supported in Firefox for Android is growing and in the meantime you can install any extension from addons.mozilla.org in Firefox Nightly for Android:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Average user here. Not really interested in jumping through hoops to get addons that seem like they were arbitrarily taken from me. The mobile rewrite shouldn't've been released until it was actually ready, because average users _do not care_ about Mozilla's development convenience.

Good tip, but it should never have become necessary.

> in the meantime you can install any extension from addons.mozilla.org in Firefox Nightly for Android

That was done after much screaming, and there are no plans to ever bring that out of Nightly.

All of these are valid criticisms.

And the elephant in the room is the tiny and ever-shrinking user base. Not only do they fail to confront this single, existentially threatening fact, but they don't even bring it up.

It's like the titanic captain listing all the features which will keep you comfortable for the second half of the voyage.

The world would be better if firefox could succeed, but it's increasingly difficult to even imagine what this would look like, or how it could come to pass.

> Adding more advertising to an end-user application

That concerns me on a technical level; Mozilla-the-organisation now has control over the tiles on the default New Tab page which people are accustomed to using as bookmarks.

It's feasible that a bad actor could use that vector to replace valid URLs with nefarious ones as part of targeted phishing.

The cloudflare thing is encrypted DNS, which I'm not sure Mozilla should be running it's own DNS. You can easily opt out our use your own DNS, but what's the better option? Google? You're ISP (Comcast? Lol!)?

The Mullvad (VPN) thing is completely optional and you have to opt in by paying money. You are not required to use a VPN. I'm not sure why anyone is even remotely upset by this at all. What's the issue? Honestly, I don't understand.

Both these companies have good track records. I'm not sure what the issue is here. #2 seems to be my only concern.

The VPN game is a grift. It's based on using fearmongering to sell services people don't need without adequately explaining the tradeoffs and risks. I lump it in the same category as multi-level marketing scams, and it's not something Mozilla should be involved in.

>- Investing in a 400% increase in leadership salaries and bonuses during record-low market share

Source? The last financial release detailed 2018, one year after Mozilla's highest revenue year. Additionally, their CEO resigned and I doubt Baker got a raise at all, certainly not for more than Chris Beard's salary.

http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

The data is only as recent as 2018, indeed, but I don't have any reason to suspect that they've corrected course. It's an especially bad look when they're also laying off large swaths of their staff.

It's worth noting that in 2015 Mozilla negotiated a deal with Yahoo netting them an additional $100+ million a year. It makes sense that in 2016 the board would see a significant raise for however long their next contract is. I doubt this trend continues after 2018, when the sale of Yahoo saw a huge drop in revenue. They likely should have judged more on market share, but it's a fairly understandable move.

Also, that huge spike on the chart was roughly $4.5 million of the over $100 million in increased revenue.

They may have negotiated the $100M deal, but who was responsible for the value creation that made the deal possible in the first place?

The staff. The staff, who were subsequently fired.

Look at your graph again. The usage dropped from 30% to 10% from 2010-2015, and 10% to 5% from 2015 to 2020. It doesn't seem clear that the staff had significantly raised the value of the product before the deal, and there is at least an argument to be made that the huge influx of cash stemmed the bleeding.

While I won't claim the leadership has been truly outstanding, I think the extreme criticism of their salary is unwarranted.

Pfft, please. The staff cuts are among the least offensive things done under the Mozilla name. Much more value was created earlier by unpaid volunteers who were rewarded by having their project hijacked by a Valley-inspired corporate mania concerned with breaking into the mobile market (with a strategy that would be generous to even refer to it as DOA). The size of staff at the time of the cuts is something that only came about because of the absurd growth of the corporation that has became the new face of Mozilla over the last 10 years. Mozilla is an incompetent, bloated organization in need of further cuts still. So it's hard to seriously consider the cuts to be either unfortunate or tragic, particularly given the obnoxious tendency of those on staff to "other" non-MoCo employees whose contributions and involvement predated the layer of corporate sleaze that has come to be emblematic of the modern day Mozilla. Should we feel sorry? The fact that we're even talking in terms of cuts and layoffs means that those affected at least got paid at some point for their role in Mozilla's descent.

The only bad thing about the layoffs is that Mozilla leadership was shitty enough to do it during the middle of a pandemic. At this point though, keep it coming. It's been a bittersweet experience watching the tide turn against Mozilla over the last year, as the popular perception of it has only just now begun to align with how unworthy of an organization it has been for years already.

> in 2015 Mozilla negotiated a deal with Yahoo netting them an additional $100+ million

... after spending years saying that the relationship with Google regarding search royalties was a serendipitous one that involved getting paid for a decision that was the right thing for users whether money was changing hands or not, and that the default search engine spot wasn't actually for sell.

That lie is not unlike their carefully crafted PR statements that were intended to mislead people about the financial arrangement regarding the Pocket partnership. Those efforts turned out to be so successful that they hoodwinked many of Mozilla Corporation's own employees—who interpreted the statements to mean that there was no financial incentive, just as it was intended to be interpreted by the general public. Then those employees began showing up on places like HN and started saying explicitly that there was no money changing hands, even though that's not what the PR statements ever said and reality actually differed.

>after spending years saying that the relationship with Google regarding search royalties was a serendipitous one that involved getting paid for a decision that was the right thing for users whether money was changing hands or not, and that the default search engine spot wasn't actually for sell.

What? The default search engine is unambiguously for sale, that's what Google (and other companies depending on your country) are buying. And it was the right decision to sell it to the highest bidder to fund development, when Yahoo bid more than Google they sold it to Yahoo.

I genuinely have no idea what point you are trying to make.

> I genuinely have no idea what point you are trying to make.

The point, as already stated, is that people who were official mouthpieces for Mozilla said for years that the default search engine simply wasn't up for sale to just whomever would pay for it. That it pointed to Google because Google's search engine was the best search engine for Firefox's users. Just like Google was the default search engine before Mozilla ever signed a deal. Just like Wikipedia was added to the searchbar without anyone paying to make it happen. That any royalties were icing on the cake. (See "serendipitous" in the previous comment). What's hard to understand about this or the earlier comment?

>is that people who were official mouthpieces for Mozilla said for years that the default search engine simply wasn't up for sale to just whomever would pay for it.

This is untrue. They openly stated they sold it to Google in 2008, and in 2011 a bidding war between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo saw the price triple from 100 million to 300 million.[1]

Maybe at some point following a contract they had a generic "Google was the best choice" PR statement, but they've never hid that it was up for sale to whoever wanted it or that it made up most of their budget.

And even if they did say the royalties were icing on the cake, what would be wrong with then changing their policy to generate as much money for development as possible?

http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almos...

... and, Android Firefox now crashes frequently.

On the up side, it remembers where you were and returns there when it wakes up again. Still less bad than Chrome.

What? Android FF is superstable for me.

fwiw I can reproduce the problems with Firefox Android, the latest major update broke heaps of shit.

To be very precise, I use the Fennec build off of F-droid, so it may be trailing FF from the Play-store a bit. Sounds like an incident, not deteriorating quality in any case. I'm happy as a clam with FF/Fennec.

I use Fennec from F-Droid as well. The redesign broke many features for me and rendered it near unusable (or actually unusable for certain tasks, like downloading files).

The last major redesign broke/removed "Undo Close Tab", with a promise to bring it back. I found that decision to be staggering. It's not even clear what purpose the update served, except as an example of the development approach that jwz assigned the epithet of "CADT" 15+ years ago.

I'm on nightly and haven't noticed anything. How do you differentiate between crashed and GC-ed?

I am on LTS.

When it pops up two (count 'em, 2) dialog boxes announcing it has crashed and would you like to have it re-started, that seems pretty unambiguous. It happens about every day, lately, often when I click the "new tab" button.

> - Laying off 25% of their engineers

If Firefox need to cut costs to survive, this is part of keeping Firefox working for us.

> - Sending all of your browsing history to Cloudflare

Are you referring to DNS over HTTPS? That's not all my browsing history, though it is still more than I want going to CloudFlare.

>If Firefox need to cut costs to survive, this is part of keeping Firefox working for us.