Instead of flocking here to complain, go to bugzilla at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c64 and complain there.
Mozilla is not reading HN threads, you want something you need to reach out through bugzilla.
Mozilla is not reading HN threads, you want something you need to reach out through bugzilla.
(tl;dr they're asking to stop spamming the bug thread with support for the feature)
Marco Bonardo [:mak]
Comment 67 • 2 days ago
Hello everyone.
Even if you care a lot of about his feature, please don't post me-too comments or opinions in this engineering bug tracker. Technical insight, like comment 53 or comment 58, is always welcome.
Otherwise, we may have to limit commenting in the bug, and we don't like to do that.
The Engineering team is well aware of the community feedback.
How can you express your opinion then?
You can continue commenting in the Reddit/HN threads that made this bug viral, both are frequented by Mozilla employees. Or you can chat in real time with us, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix, and join https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-community:mozill....
As you quoted they are well aware of the feedback, given that it makes little sense to spam the bug tracker anymore (at this point in time) as this wouldn't add any value for anyone. It wouldn't make them aware of the feed back (they already are) nor does it add anything constructive.
Or in other words, your opinion is already fully expressed through other people. (If you planed to only comment "me too" or similar.)
Highlighting quotes as such is nice ... but reading them properly is so too ;=)
This is false. The difference between 20 people speaking up versus 200 or 2,000 is huge, especially if they are saying the same thing. If they don't want that thread being spammed then they should reverse the decision to remove the feature .
Only, If the Bug tracker would be the only source of feedback. But it isn't. It's not even meant to be a source of feedback, but a place to report technical bugs.
And if you have some people giving feedback over the bug tracker and many many more giving feedback over other channels (like HN, Twitter, etc.) then there is very little value in any [EDIT: spamming] additional feedback [EDIT: which doesn't add anything to the discussion]. And yes it would not matter if 20 or 200 people comment with "me too" in the bug tracker if they already got much feedback from other sources.
Also spamming a BUG tracker because you don't like something which is not a bug is never going to change anything and just not helpful for anyone at all. It's like a "soft"/"harmless" DOS attack on the issue of the bug tracker preventing any proper discussion, i.e. not helpful at all.
1. PMs don't use bugzilla, just engineers [2]
2. Engineers are aware and raised that people (and apparently the engineer in question) don't like the change
3. The unnamed product manager has decided to go ahead anyway [3], they're a bit buffered from the feedback in a non-public JIRA.
4. It is the same engineers involved in the r/firefox thead as the ticket.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_...
[3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c36
The unnamed product manager has decided to go ahead anyway
A stark and infuriating contrast from all the democratic-sounding marketing "you can help build the browser of the future/etc." doublespeak that Mozilla loves to evangelise in a lot of places to recruit developers, but then...
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute
"Thanks for your interest in contributing to Mozilla! The Mozilla Project welcomes contributions from everyone who shares our goals"
In other words: "do what we say, or fuck off."
Something I've been saying for a long time is that there's a split in open source software, between projects that are true community projects in the spirit of open source (KDE, Deluge) and projects run by an insular organization that happens to release the source code with an open source license because it suits their interests (Android, Windows Calculator).
They both may accept contributions in theory, but in practice the latter projects are exclusively managed by a tiny group of stakeholders in service of their own interests.
Mozilla was increasingly becoming more like the latter type of organization for many years, and is now, I would argue, all the way there. Putting ads in the browser chrome was in some sense the nail in the coffin, because it's not something a community would ever have done to the browser it created and uses.
Personally, the first type of project is what I want to spend my time contributing to.
Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular this is, but are going to go ahead nevertheless?
Is there even a single person who wants this feature to be removed?
We should have a name for the fallacy of ”Jobs/Ford/etc ignored user requests and they were geniuses. If I ignore users, I’m a genius”
Jobs actively fought against the App Store within the company until someone finally convinced him it was actually worth doing. A bad leader would have just overruled his team, but a good leader will know when to back down because his team is right.
Thing is, if you’re in a position of leadership, you’re a leader. If people answer to you and you are in charge of them in any capacity, office, battlefield, whatever, then you’re a leader. Sometimes even in an unofficial capacity if you take it upon yourself to be the get shit done guy and protect others in your group from fallout; this could be called assuming leadership, and if you do it well, people might turn to you as a leader and choose to follow you.
The President of the United States is a leader. He’s elected in a contentious election, and he is the leader of the government’s civil service and diplomacy corps. as well as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, even if there are people in their ranks that voted for a different guy.
Now whether a leader practices leadership, or is a good leader are entirely different questions. You don’t have to respect your leaders, or like them, for them to be leaders.
A contentious election is still an election. We have words like dictator and ruler for unelected political bosses.
Which is totally legitimate, the President is elected through a constitutional process which is our law. That’s also why I think it makes a great counterpoint to your original assertion: you can choose who you want to follow, but who you actually follow isn’t always who you would choose.
If you join a company either because you like the CEO or you like the guy you’ll be immediately reporting to, everyone else in that chain was chosen by someone else. Your lack of choice in the matter does not absolve them of their responsibility to be leaders, the question becomes whether they have the qualities necessary to be good leaders. And if you are the CEO or directly report to him? Great! You win! Now you’re the guy others are looking up to and hopefully you have good leadership qualities yourself because people will look to you for leadership whether you want them to or not.
Accepting someone has power over you isn't following them. We don't call prisoners followers for example.
I think giving out titles only when people earn them encourages responsibility.
Or are you saying that Jobs wasn't a leader either?
Or maybe you mean that a leader is someone who people follow, and would choose to follow if they were given a choice?
Sorry, maybe kind of nitpicky, but I feel like you're on the edge of saying something important and accurate, but this isn't quite it.
We don't call people with no choice followers usually. So I think following someone is a choice even when going where they tell you isn't.
It can be ambiguous. Some people joined Apple to work for Jobs. And he was famous for his management style. But I don't know how many people saw him as a leader and how many saw him as the boss.
It's about cost of maintenance not people wanting a feature to be removed. And while this feature specifically doesn't have to high of a cost (I think) it will sum up if many "hardly used" features are left in place.
> >The Engineering team is well aware of the community > feedback. > > Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular this is, but are going to go ahead nevertheless?
I think it means they decided it, then got feedback and now are potentially reevaluating it.
Also maybe the group of people using it isn't very high but very vocal/loud, in which case going ahead anyway would be reasonable.
Through I also would guess the group of people using that feature is also likely to have analytics disabled...
Having "analytics disabled" correlate with "using that specific feature" is always a major problem for data driven decisions, worse it's a well hidden and hard to estimate problem.
You know, I’m generally a privacy conscious consumer and default to opting out of analytics, but if a company asked me to do a survey about how I use the product I absolutely would! I enjoy giving feedback, but am always going to pass on dragnet surveillance.
I’ve never seen this though. Perhaps I’m naive to certain business interests or statistical techniques, but it seems like such a survey would be a necessary part of a robust decision making process based on mass-surveillance gathered analytics for a product that doesn’t earn money by directly selling that data. (if you only make money by tracking users, I understand why you might not care about users who prevent it, but even then with the power of network effects I’d expect a business would at least want a finger on the pulse)
I mean, I don’t have a degree in stats, but from what I do know this is the kind of due diligence that the foundation of trust in statistics is based on. Maybe I’m just confused and someone can correct me, but I’ve come to see the selective enforcement of good statistical practices as one of the major problems in the world today, because a) I see it so much, b) it gives certainty where little is deserved, c) it prevents us from getting to truth.
There is no maintenance cost as they are keeping the "touch" option. Unless checkboxes are somehow easier maintain than drop-downs.
It's a bit worse than even this suggests. Using any feature is correlated with having analytics disabled, because the more of a power user someone is, the more they'll use "advanced" features (anything beyond "clicking in the URL bar and typing a search term"), and obviously power users are the only people disabling analytics.
So if anything there's an all-encompassing metrics bias saying "users want fewer features and less complexity".
So I did.