Hacker News Reader

Comment by stereoradonc | Hacker News Reader

Too many distractions from Mozilla (Firefox OS, VPN etc and a complete dissonance from the core- browser. It doesn't help when senior management takes fat bonuses and fires away employees during the pandemic. That doesn't make for pleasant optics and also distanced me away from their product.

View on HN

Firefox seems to be the only hope to avoid a duopoly dominated by forces that are anti-privacy and anti-user. I recently made the move from Safari to Firefox and I am very pleased.

This being said, I agree with you about the optics of Firefox management. There is a lot going on that isn't good and the personal enrichment of the executives feels all sorts of wrong.

If FF management can not be good stewards of a vital product, who can be? What sort of system could be set up to properly manage, motivate and pay for development?

Is there a way to simplify moving password management out of Keychain and into Firefox?

You can just use Firefox Sync and Lockwise on mobile to manage passwords etc instead of using Keychain I suspect. I'm not sure of the import functionality of that ecosystem but it wouldn't surprise me if someone figured it out already and posted the code.

I wish there was (and I hope someone comes along and tells us!) During my switch to FF, I kept the Safari prefs dialog open and then copy and pasted the passwords when requested by a site in FireFox. It was a total drag, but in a few days I was all set in cross-device password management with Firefox.

Yes, Safari 15 offers Password export.

Personally I'd love to see Firefox use the same Keychain for passwords (same with Chrome). It would make it FAR easier to switch browsers. I wouldn't even mind shared cookies and bookmarks for that matter. Let the best engine win, but keep it frictionless to move in-between.

Right, it's not productive to throw the baby out with the bathwater because you might not like the politics or management of Mozilla as an organization. Like it or not, Firefox is the last free browser and needs support from people who care about a free Internet.

I think we're eventually going to see more DAO's focused on purely FOSS where their members can pool some resources and autocompound their treasury in a decentralized overcollateralized lending protocol to fund core operations and free ourselves from some of these centralized foundations desires.

That sounds pretty darn cool. Are there any per-cursors or early examples of this today?

Of DAO's funding/incubating projects? shinedao does (though mostly revenue generating focus for now, although those projects can have r&d components, haven't seen pure foss dao's but i dont know everything going on in the space), probably others.

Of decentralized lending protocols? aave, compound, benqi, etc.

I was wondering about pure foss dao's or even closed ones. Anything to do with software, a service or even hardware.

Ahh, yeah don't know any outside of those that make specific defi protocols that are at least GPLv3. I'm deff interested in being apart of something like it in the future with shinedao (maybe being incubated by them in the future, anyone is free to join and put forth an initiative to the community to gauge interest though, for this or any other project), I just don't know of many people are the same and can actually contribute via code and also in the defi ecosystem (there are a few software devs and even hardware engineers in the community, but many more who aren't), but I think it will be a natural progression from all the GPLv3 stuff being put out there related to web3.

Not really, since they never found a proper business model. So far, how do they make money? How do they pay the developers? How do they plan to be sustainable? Is there any place where I can see who donated them? Which share of donations is given by large companies that are constantly breaking the values the Mozilla foundation stands for? Was the news that Google will pay $400M per year to be the default search engine confirmed? If so, which share of their budget does this represent?

A lot of questions are not answered, which makes the whole FF a bit shady. As a user, how much can I trust FF as a browser? Before answering, keep in mind that the browser is the single most important software we use every day since it carries most of our activities. Is it safe to use software made by someone who is not capable of sustaining themselves?

Do you use any open source software? Since most of it is made by people unable to sustain themselves from their projects.

Much of it is sustained by people who are paid by employers who use said open source in their profit centers.

Ehh, that's not really true IME. I'd say "most" is a broad generalization.

> Firefox seems to be the only hope to avoid a duopoly dominated by forces that are anti-privacy and anti-user. I recently made the move from Safari to Firefox and I am very pleased.

I've noticed that when the words "duopoly" / "monopoly" get thrown around in a thread about Firefox, it almost reads as if people use Firefox for the sole reason that it isn't Chromium.

In that vein, I've always wondered why some Firefox users tend to use it because of something it isn't?

Firefox OS was ahead of its time and the marketing and targeting set was a bit too niche, but it was (and is) a great idea to build a mobile OS around web tech. KaiOS has forked FxOS to some success on lower-end devices with a respectable feature set (though it seems tooling is limited and monetization isn't amazing which is a feedback loop). Imagine if FxOS was a better success and instead of Chromebooks if the education system, children were raised using Firefoxbooks (FxBooks for short) as their first machines.

I wish.

I'm starting to realize (taking off my rose-tinted glasses) that a lot of these companies really like children. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. etc.

I'm guessing it's because children will learn how to use their products and probably stick with it. I'd love to see some statistics of this in practice though.

One would assume children would rather a "proper computer" (read: Windows) when they grow up though. I'm not sure.

I would assume this is much the case as well. In the case of Chromebooks this lends legitimacy, high volumes, and starts building a brand/ecosystem familiarity. Maybe they would feel like Windows feels "off" like the first time I moved to OSX in college or the way I had to relearn interfaces and TUIs moving to GNU/Linux, stacking and tiling window managers. When I roll into a café and people see no task bar, terminal splits, etc. and raise eyebrows, maybe this is how kids will see Windows. I just hope they don't actually feel like walled-garden apps are the best solution for software ha.

The distractions are actually fine if they're revenue-positive.

There might still be a small window of opportunity for Mozilla to be the champion of the web platform. It has an excellent operations team. Its CDN still delivers updates to hundreds of millions of devices. I would have loved to see Moz Inc create a Netlify service for developers and a Shopify service for small businesses.

Agree with the management issues. Also their political activities have not made them look good. They need to focus more on the software.

Also, stop removing useful features from Firefox. It's insane the amount of functionality that has been totally chopped out.

You can't really blame management when even one this page there are plenty of non-management people calling for Mozilla having other revenue sources.

Firefox OS was a thing they actually won in reality but then gave up the game too soon. KaiOS is now the bedrock for low-cost mobile phones in India.

Sometimes the most important thing is persistence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com