> The cherry on top was being specifically targeted for harassment that same week after the release by unhappy users of Firefox looking for someone to direct their frustrations at.
Thats lovely.
Thats lovely.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200801082154/https://twitter.c...
Despite maintaining two of the handful of extensions currently available for Firefox for Android and developing for the beta versions of Fenix leading up the release, I had a very hard time finding my footing as a user in the new browser, and I ended up switching to Samsung Internet.
I'm not familiar with the harassment she has suffered, and it's saddening if people have singled her out, though I can see how people might have overreacted to her nonchalant attitude about the workflows of millions of users being thrown belly up.
The team was understaffed so the OP took up the slack by working massive overtime to push out a half baked release. Users complained about the half baked release, the OP gives the users the finger, and neither party seemed happy with the outcome.
I'm glad to see that the OP has identified that work-life balance is important; it isn't worth burning yourself out for a job.
Refreshing to read this, compared to the "it was all so much better before"
Today most people are on FB & social medias under their real name & with their real face and everything is stored & will hunt you for the rest of your life. With fingerprinting, facial recognition, surveillance, etc. there is now no way to speech freely without having your identity tied to it.
Some people claim this is great because you say less crap when they're forced to put their name on it, I think this is a very poor argumentation when we look at what we're losing in exchange. There is a reason why in most democracies voting is anonymous.
Erm. Really? Aren't you a bit exagerating?
You can still post anonymous in lots of places. Like right here, for example.
But there are plenty of places left, where you can literaly say anything.
Just like in the beginning. Btw. some IRC clients or forums from the old days still run today.
> It is not their duty to ensure that you can say anything here.
I'm not saying it's their duty. I am saying you can't at the same time claim anonymity is alive and well and say nobody actually will protect your anonymity once push comes to shove. If that's the case, then anonymity essentially does not exist where it counts. Nobody cares that you can anonymously praise the Dear Leader. Anonymity is only important when somebody has real reasons to want to break it. It's like with free speech - nobody worries about speech that everybody likes being free. You only need free speech protections when somebody actually wants to censor, otherwise it's just vacuous.
That's funny, because going through old usenet posts from the 90s I got precisely the opposite impression – noticeably more people posting under their full names than you'd find a decade or two later in comparable forums.
I've also made the same observation for the online community of a long running simulation game I frequent: A lot of the old-time members dating back to twenty years ago or so are posting under their full names, whereas with newer members abbreviated (last) names or outright pseudonyms are clearly predominating.
There is a reddit thread that links to deleted tweets that appears like it might be related: https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/i8nuyb
> Harassing someone because one doesn't like an update to a piece of software
Harassment is probably never okay butneither is directing obscene gestures at people.
Thank you for your contributions to open source software. Many web users, myself included, rely on free and open source projects for our work and recreation and these products would not exist without the generous contributions of kind and skilled persons such as yourself.
I hope you recover from your burnout and find a fulfilling role somewhere that respects your mental health and values your contributions.
But as someone who is still using Firefox despite Mozilla management (not the devs) ignoring us, belittling us when we voice our concerns and destroy the software we fell in love with more than a decade ago over "ux" I can understand why people are frustrated:
Firefox was in another league.
Someone wrote about Pale Moon the other day, I can sadly not recommend using it as the main browser, I'm not in a position to vouch for the security, but if anyone wonders they could try to create a few ugly modern apps or open a few known safe websites and have a look :
it feels snappy, even years after Firefox diverged! And it looks so good with all the old extensions.
A real shame even I don't really dare to use it, but the web is a harsh environment.
Thank you for your work!
It's an eye-opener for me that people would do that. I can't even name a single developer for any software I use, let alone find and harass them on social media.
It also happens more when people decide someone doesn’t belong in the field: if you’re visibly a white male your odds are pretty low. I’ve heard more a few accounts of how the tone changes from “I found a bug” or “I don’t like this change” to “who told you that you were good enough to be a developer”.
Context for those who don't use Firefox on Android: the "whining" was people complaining that Mozilla had replaced a stable working product with what was clearly an inferior version, with less functionality (no addons) and less stability (this is the first version of Firefox to repeatedly crash on Android, in about a decade). Framing it as "different decisions than they wanted" is disingenuous and misleading. (I'd been a regular Firefox user for about a decade on Android, but have had to mostly switch to Brave because of this update. That's how bad it is.)
We still see the same dynamic on most desktop Firefox release threads here where someone will be very angry that Mozilla doesn’t let them direct development and will go strangely silent when asked how they’d deal with that problems which lead to those decisions in the first place.
And why does Mozilla have a "small team" working on Firefox Android? Their flagship product on the operating system with the largest install base.
But Android is also the most casual install base, and it comes with Chrome by default. It's probably the hardest market to gain marketshare in.