Firefox And Pixar Animation Studios team up to help you show your true colors
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
The fact that Disney use DRM means that Mozilla should not have done this is a weak point at best. DRM is used by most media companies.
I feel like people just get angry at Mozilla for the hell of it without understanding that they have to pay their employees somehow. Also Mozilla could "team up" with any org and someone would find a way to get angry over it.
What are their employees doing though? If they're churning out BS like this, are they even necessary?
Most Firefox features that gave it marketshare long ago have been left to rot if not outright deprecated. What remains is a terrible Chrome knockoff.
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Edit: this comment is rage/venting so I'll elaborate: my problem with Mozilla's recent (~5 years?) evolution is that Firefox's power-user features that not only gave it its original marketshare but are the last line of defense in an increasingly user-hostile web are being left to rot if not outright killed off while being replaced by useless garbage like this and while their marketshare continues to dwindle (no surprise there considering any differentiating features are on the back-burner), their CEO increased their compensation to ridiculous levels.
Firefox is the most user-hostile FOSS software I know of - on-par if not worse than a lot of paid, proprietary software. Upon first run it'll load several tabs with Google Analytics spyware, has Pocket, ads/sponsored links and telemetry enabled by default (the latter is in breach of the GDPR) and makes bold claims about privacy while it doesn't even come with a built-in adblocker (even its strongest tracking protection is inferior to uBlock Origin and not even enabled by default). Every update will interrupt your flow with a useless "what's new" tab (and I think the recent "Colorways" update had its own tab/modal in addition to the usual update). I'm worried this new development will also have its own annoying notification next time I start the browser.
This really isn't hard to find: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/
Mozilla recently laid off a significant portion of Firefox developers, while announcing that they are "reducing investment in [...] platform feature development, and transitioning adjacent security/privacy products to our New Products and Operations team", all the while increasing upper management remuneration (management had already made up close to 50% of salary expenditure in recent foundation financial reports)
The diffs are linked and it is pretty easy to see if the authors have mozilla.com email addresses.
I don't really think it is all that simplistic - you can very easily see what at least a portion of their employees are doing. I think people can fairly easily judge based on that whether they think they are necessary.
Perhaps if the poster had asked a different question, a more "sufficient" response could have been provided.
Yes, I agree that it's still less evil, but it used to be so much better and clearly going downhill. Initiatives like this don't inspire confidence it's going to become any better.
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Chrome: ...and so our company's puppy kicking campaign was a total success. In other news, we're updating our terms of service so that you agree to hand over your first born child.
HN: Meh, I'll still use Chrome though.
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Firefox: Today we fixed a bug that...
HN: OMG FIREFOX SUCKS. I'M USING CHROME NOW.
The thing is Mozilla get more than 80% of its revenue from Google.
It’s fine to question if they are not just an extension of Google at that point. They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers; while pushing things like https everywhere that makes ads and trackers life easier.
Really? Take a look at https://blog.mozilla.org/security/category/privacy/
You could, but you would be wrong, right?
There are a bunch of valid reason to dislike Mozilla, this is a really weird hill to die on...
Why criticize them for this in a thread _about_ Mozilla diversifying their revenue?
Half of HN seems to hate them for being so dependent on Google and the other half seems to hate them for having profitable (if small) ventures that reduce their dependence on Google, like the VPN or Pocket, or this.
>They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers
This is total garbage and I suspect you know that. If not, please do some more research.
https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi...
https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest...
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#native-file-s...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...
The gains in the average 401k are primarily due to the 40% of it that is Tesla / Facebook / Apple / Amazon / Alphabet.
Microsoft (Bing) has their own browser so why would they bother with Firefox, same for Apple. Yahoo is dead. Facebook is evil. Google probably only does it for antitrust reasons.
I believe there's enough value in a user-agent in a world where browsers are increasingly user-hostile. Sell a browser with out-of-the-box security & privacy features such as ad blocking (with officially-maintained & reviewed filter lists), spyware protection and some enterprise-friendly features that are best implemented in the browser (TLS interception, DLP, etc) instead of shitty middleboxes.
I take the bait.
> https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185
Firefox doesn't block Google Analytics. This is not true.
The rest is PR fluff. Can you cite one feature that provide better privacy than Brave that blocks ads and trackers natively?
Google went through this a decade ago, when people stopped believing don't be evil was something Google cared about.
If you ignore the privacy aspect, Chrome is actually a very good browser and has a healthy ecosystem of extensions. A lot of productivity-enhancing tools are distributed as Chrome extensions.
Firefox on the other hand constantly boasts about privacy which just gives a false sense of security - actually obtaining privacy with Firefox requires not only opting out of Mozilla's own bullshit such as Pocket, sponsored tabs/links and telemetry (the latter should be opt-in as per the GDPR) but also install a third-party ad blocker such as uBlock Origin.
Browser-wise, Firefox isn't stellar - it's slower than Chrome, lacks certain features and the extensions ecosystem is boring with a lot of the extensions that used to make it great have been killed off with the switch to Web Extensions.
At least with Google the business model is very clear, while Mozilla pretends to be on your side and fight for a better web experience while in reality being as nasty (if not more) than the competition.
Really? They are as nasty (or nastier) than Google.
> Firefox on the other hand constantly boasts about privacy which just gives a false sense of security - actually obtaining privacy with Firefox requires not only opting out of Mozilla's own bullshit such as Pocket, sponsored tabs/links and telemetry (the latter should be opt-in as per the GDPR) but also install a third-party ad blocker such as uBlock Origin.
Presumably, they are nastier than Google because they have relatively anonymous telemetry data that doesn't include anything remotely private (seriously, take a look at `about:telemetry` and let us know what you find that breaches your trust), or because their sync product is end to end encrypted by default (unlike Google) or because they allow you to run your own sync server if you wish. Or maybe it is because the entire package is open source and extensively configurable and includes legitimately useful features like containers and tracking protection (wait, Google doesn't include that?).
Someone needs to stop taking hyperbole pills.
I think it gets emotional because a lot of us used to really like Firefox, and we've watched it wither and rot due to bad decisions and what sure looks like a bunch of parasites feeding on its cooling corpse (and, to be fair, some really tough competition from Google and their massive advertising push for Chrome).
Meanwhile, the organization did manage to spin off a couple really great or promising side-projects (Rust, Servo, MDN) but then pulled the rug out from under them.
I agree with you that Firefox with uBlock Origin is a killer combo, however getting it to that stage takes a bit of effort (why should I have to do that in a browser that boasts about privacy all the time?) and it feels like you have to constantly fight Mozilla - whether it's opting-out of various built-in spyware such as telemetry, crapware such as Pocket or "features" such as sponsored sites/tabs (again, all in a browser that boasts about privacy), redesigns such as the new tab bar, or the constant nags after every update.
Modern Firefox borders on being adware, like Opera was back when Phoenix was first released. And it's more aggressive about pushing ads than that ever was. At least those were constant and stayed in a little banner area, rather than interrupting you while you're trying to do stuff.
I'm still skeptical that more focus-stealing advertising in a browser that saw early success in no small part precisely because it eliminated focus-stealing advertising from the Web, is a promising direction to be heading. But this take is at least interesting.
The evidence is using Firefox for any length of time, with default settings (maybe there's a way to turn this off, I dunno, I use Safari most of the time these days so it hasn't been worth figuring out, but happens enough to be pretty annoying even in my limited use of FF on my Windows gaming PC)
Colorways did have a pop-up, but it was an announcement of a new feature, not an ad, and didn't repeat.
I haven't seen the pop in new tab behavior you're talking about. That's so far out of left field I have to wonder if you have some sort of extension installed that's causing your problems.
Maybe it's a matter of configuration—I've been using Firefox since it was named Phoenix and I could have turned off the behavior you're upset about. But a quick web search for "firefox pop-ups" and "firefox advertisements" doesn't show anybody else complaining about this. Given that people hold Mozilla/Firefox to a much higher standard than other browsers, I'm inclined to believe it doesn't exist.
And all that aside, you've still provided no evidence that Mozilla plans to make this Disney ad a pop-up. It's just a fantasy you've concocted.
I've seen nag "notification"-type pop-ups advertising Pocket and other things, that I have to dismiss.
> I haven't seen the pop in new tab behavior you're talking about. That's so far out of left field I have to wonder if you have some sort of extension installed that's causing your problems.
It's every single time it updates even if there's nothing any normal user needs to know about in it. Just today I remoted in to a work machine with FF on it, and already open, and sure enough, there one of these was, staring right at me. Somehow I get by OK in Safari and every browser before FF started doing this, without having changelogs pushed at me as an excuse to raise my "brand awareness", which I assume is why they do this.
> And all that aside, you've still provided no evidence that Mozilla plans to make this Disney ad a pop-up. It's just a fantasy you've concocted.
You don't expect them to do what they did with the Colorways announcement? Maybe they won't, but I'd be surprised. I don't know why they'd do this and not push it out over their favorite (and, if counted by audience size and effectiveness, practically only) advertising channel, which is to push it at people using their browser.
[EDIT] Oh man, it just occurred to me that they probably did the obnoxious Colorways announcement in the first place to measure its "engagement" precisely in order to sell this kind of stuff. Otherwise there was no reason to make such a big splash and interrupt people's workflows over putting some UI theming back in a browser that already had it, years ago. I'd wondered why they made such a big deal out of that and pushed it out in such a strange way, but that makes all the pieces fit together.
Any chance you have a screenshot of this? I see those kinds of notifications for Safari and Edge (on macOS and Windows), but not Firefox.
[EDIT] Also, I've not seen what you're talking about with Safari (but I believe you—I probably haven't seen it because I use Safari almost exclusively, on Apple operating systems) but I know exactly what you're talking about with Edge. Ugh. That and the little nags about OneDrive and shit down in the system tray. It's weird, back in the heyday of hating Windows—when I was even a really heavy Linux user, in fact!—I never really hated them, but I kinda do now, mostly over their turning into ad- and spy-ware (hm, there's a pattern here).
This sounds like a popover (not sure what the Firefox term is), but I have only ever seen it in response to an action.
As others have mentioned, there are definitely pages that are opened by default on browser starts/restarts, along with tab modal dialogs (also on restart). But yeah - I can't recall seeing a popover featuring Pocket that just happened by itself.
For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popover_(GUI)
It's got a long way to go :(
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
As of posting, it's at 4.18%, similar to MS Edge, and basically in the bottom-rung of the also-rans. For comparison, the real contenders are Chrome at 63% and Safari at 19.84%.
People inside Mozilla are more likely to use Firefox - big surprise?
How did they obtain those numbers?
Teaming up with Disney is like Wearing a Tan suit or a bicycle helmet, it's only the worst thing ever when your politcal enemy is doing it and you have nothing better to complain about.
Disliking the choices Mozilla has been making doesn't mean you instantly love Google/Chrome. We're fighting for a better web, not a less worse web.
But Mozilla has a marketing deal with a Pixar movie with a Red Panda, and everyone loses their minds. Typical HN.
I don't think Pixar/Disney have done any damages to web/tech. Only that should matter to mozilla
Do you guys all work for the same bot farm or something? Just because another company is bad, doesn't mean Disney isn't also bad.
Nestle or oil companies have their own problems but at least those are completely unrelated to Mozilla's purported mission.
Disney is probably the company most directly aligned against the values that Mozilla purportedly holds. They spent decades funding projects to kill the modern web.
Has Disney indicated that they have stopped being the bad guys? As far as I can tell, Disney is still pushing their dystopian nightmare world. The least that Mozilla can do is not normalize them.
Making a couple themes and an ad site couldn't have been a big project, presumably this is the sort of thing a couple marketing interns can throw together in a couple months, right? If this got Mozilla a nice check from The Mouse which they can use to fund browser development, I don't see any downsides here.
The movie main character looks like a red panda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_panda) which I think is the mythical firefox.
I do. Next time I see a blog.mozilla.org post here I will ignore it and maybe miss a great technology blog post.
If you've decided to impose some extra downside on yourself... I think that's a bad idea, but the rest of us don't suffer for it.
But how would that promote Mozilla's brand awareness while generating corporate synergy?
In the long HN thread from a few days ago the consensus was that Mozilla should focus on Firefox and actively engage in promoting Firefox to increase market share. Here Mozilla is clearly doing that and very well IMO, and now its "stop wasting money blah blah blah." It just so easy to tear people down, that listening to it is usually a waste of time.
I've been a Firefox user since its inception, but I don't think it's better than Chrome and it hasn't been for a very long time.
Chrome is faster on all the devices I've tried it on, and by default it serves less telemetry to external sources than default Firefox does. It also supports uBlock, Decentraleyes, et cetera and de-Googled forks, like Chromium, are easily available.
Saying "Chrome supports the open source package its built on" seems like a cop-out as well, because it's not the same browser. That's like saying MacOS is awesome because it was built on BSD, and BSD is easily available. They bare little resemblance to each other.
What do you mean by this?
However, the behaviour of certain employees can undermine the profitability of others. Mozilla appears to be on the path of being a reseller of services and marketer of brands, at the expense of attracting FOSS developers.
Firing the Servo team was Firefox tapping out. That's it. From here on out expect it to be nothing more than a vehicle to serve comarketing needs of the broader Mozilla organization.
The parts of Servo that could easily be integrated in Firefox are already integrated into Firefox. The remaining parts, like the layout engine for example, had a lot of design flaws and they were in the early stages of completely rewriting it when the project was cancelled.
https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020
So when you say "may have been", that needs to be read with the understanding that it literally would have been years before that investment _might_ pay off, and that's a hard sell when everyone is screaming that Firefox ought to be improved now.
I'm disappointed about it nonetheless though, it was a fun and welcoming project for outsiders. And I thought that Pathfinder was pretty close to being usable, so that's disappointing too.
The whole point of having an experimental feature team is to have someone working on things that may not pay off, because some of the time those efforts will push the product forward by strides; AFAIK, Mozilla has no such team for Firefox anymore. Those opportunities to easily integrate experimental-borne improvements simply no longer exist for Mozilla.
Firefox is a dead product; there's no serious efforts underway to meaningfully improve its user share. Mozilla is obviously, openly pivoting its focus towards other services and goals.
I've been meaning to start a website. This article rather resonated with me:
Or Linode/Hetzner are pretty cheap, I don't have experience with other VPS providers.
Firefox should only run on completely open source and open firmware open architectures. Anything less is tantamount to endorsing crimes against mankind.
I am currently preparing a breadboard and expect to be completed with my port by 2042. I am going to have to sift for metals in my local stream in order to create resistors that were manufactured by pure provenance.
Currently uncertain about my own personal lineage, though. Have I had an unkind ancestor who did not believe in open source? Is it ethical for me to participate given such a taint? Questions of great import. I will consult a pure institutional review board before proceeding.
Also HN: why is Mozilla wasting time promoting a Disney movie?
Unless they switched to a subscription-only model (which I don't think aligns with their mission) this would almost definitely doom them... users don't want to pay for shit, especially with freely available alternatives.
not that many enterprises use firefox to begin with..
The point isn’t that they would pay for a Chrome equivalent, it’s that they would pay for something better than Chrome which Google won’t replicate as it’s against their entire business model.
The amount of money companies spend on various security products (some of which are dubious) suggests there's definitely an appetite for security and doing so at the browser level makes sense and could be a successful strategy.
If companies wanted to go to that route they can do it today for free, and they are not doing it, so changing firefox from free to charge for enterprise stuff will not help in any way..
also, google will not replicate the ad/malware blocking capacities from firefox because they are the leaders. not firefox..
If ever chrome marketshare goes down to below 5% and firefox rise to chrome position above 60% then i bet that google will be willing to do better ad/malware blocking if that means changing the game..
Differentiating themselves on features that Chrome can’t ever have (because of their business model) could actually reverse the trend.
It would be a nice change from when I had to run to a different machine run citrix to logon to a windows NT machine to run IE because our time keeping software only worked on ie..
Having these large branded cosmetic additions to firefox is kinda a genius non-intrusive or at least less intrusive way to do advertisements.
They can't open their mouths without talking about how much they care about privacy, but at the same time making it nearly impossible to opt out of their telemetry. For Mozilla, invasion of privacy only appears to be bad when other people are doing it.
This just comes off as sanctimonious and hypocritical.
What's really frustrating is that they absolutely could do good. If they actually managed to live up to even half their words, they'd be amazing. But for some reason, they just... don't.
It is one checkbox in the settings. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-data-mozilla-help...
Two if you don't want to be put into studies - I don't think Origin Trials in Chrome can be opted out of at all (if you know how, it'd be nice to tell us).
Be sure to read the top comment.
They are also doing this bullshit, which isn't even a little bit OK: https://mozilla.github.io/normandy/index.html
> Two if you don't want to be put into studies - I don't think Origin Trials in Chrome can be opted out of at all (if you know how, it'd be nice to tell us).
What Chrome does is completely irrelevant. I don't want a browser that is less bad than Chrome, I want one that is good.
Personally, I think it is totally fair to open a bug or submit an idea revisiting whether this is necessary anymore. I would assume that they now have a pretty good idea of what the opt out rate is in the wild.
If you file a bug, please post it, because I'd be curious to follow what happens afterwards.
Pretty much every single violation of privacy can be rationalized with someone feeling like they need the data for some reason or another. Mozilla does not get special dispensation to spy on their users.
Agreed. Besides telemetry, merely achieving privacy when it comes to browsing requires manually turning up the tracking protection level to the strictest and installing a third-party add-on: uBlock Origin.
This gives a false sense of security to less tech-savvy users who (reasonably) believe that they'll actually have privacy by installing a privacy-focused browser from a company that claims to be on their side in all their marketing.
Firefox became far more successful than Opera, at least outside the embedded market.
Maybe the adware browser model can make a comeback and be super-successful this time because things have changed, but it didn't work very well the first time.
("But these aren't ads, they're optional themes" true, but you wanna bet they won't advertise it with one or more pop-ups and/or focus-stealing-to-new-advertising-tab thingies, like they do with everything else? Which is funny because one of their big selling points originally was automatically blocking pop-up ads)
It was never really smaller than the mozilla suite, they just simplified the UI. This is not intended as an insult, it was exactly what was needed and worked out really well for everybody, it's just amazing how much the reality got lost.
In particular, Opera while going the opposite way with their "everything and the kitchen sink" interface for the power user market were legendary for small, fast and nimble code, which is how they ended up running on the Wii and Nintendo DS around this time.
I'd be very suprised if they weren't always a smaller download, even with bitorrent, email, ftp clients and whatever other crazy nonsense they had built in.
I'm going to check though, just in case it's me that's mistaken.
Pheonix 0.1 was double the size of the Opera download at the time.
You're probably[1 EDIT] right that I'm mis-remembering Opera's download size. I recall it feeling heavier in use, but that was probably something to do with the feel of its particular (non-native) UI, and maybe the extra system resource strain from loading and displaying banner ads for the ad-supported version (there were still some really weak computers in wide use in 2002).
[1] I only wrote "probably", originally, because I didn't bother to verify it—not because I don't believe you on that point. I didn't express that very well.
Mozilla: Does stuff to gain market share.
Grumps: Pissed off Mozilla does stuff to gain market share.
It's a freaking browser. Browsers peaked like 30 years ago. They're ALL on maintenance at this point.
In its default configuration, it doesn't bring anything to the table that Chrome doesn't already have, and making it actually privacy-respecting requires being tech-savvy enough to configure it and install the right third-party ad blocking add-on - which if you are tech-savvy enough, chances are that you're already running it.
> Browsers peaked like 30 years ago. They're ALL on maintenance at this point.
The web is changing and is getting more user-hostile every day. A browser that's actually a user-agent would be a great tool to fight back. Unfortunately Mozilla only claims to be on your side but actually does very little at the technical level.
That is clearly false, and you have replied to my comments referencing this demonstrating that you ought to know better.
See:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/01/07/firefox-72-fing...
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/03/23/introducing-sma...
No opt-ins required, and features that Chrome doesn't have at all.
I can't remember exactly why because this was years ago, but I just didn't find it useful beyond a simple bookmarking system. Not worth the annual/monthly fee. It's also just bloat in the browser and given how resource hungry FF is nowadays I just don't want unnecessary shit in my browser.
I was actively looking for ways to fund Mozilla via purchasing their products. I WISH they could survive without Googles boot on their neck. I can just see the writing on the wall the org is dying and it seems that management is to blame.
I will continue to use FF on Linux, but on my Mac devices safari/orion are just so much more performant. I really noticed when I started watching memory consumption. FF is bloated and huge. I wonder if they should go all in on desktop linux and heavily optimize performance on linux systems. That way they can retain their niche of power users and also help advance FOSS consumer-facing software.
They could be competitive on certain features (security & privacy comes to mind - it should be private out of the box, users shouldn't have to spend 15 minutes installing an ad-blocker and opting out of all kinds of bullshit) but they choose not to.
I'm glad you made it so obvious how seriously your opinion should be taken.
It personally feels a bit deceitful that they're, in a sense, tricking people into signing up for Firefox news under the guise of a sweepstake that many people won't be eligible for.
I'm confused. Isn't the animal on the logo a... (fire) fox? Not a red panda?
Make it and sell it, generate revenue and get off Google’s tit.
I guess nobody even at Mozilla gives a damn anymore, just make the browser an equivalent of a mobile app for browsing tiktok and consuming media already, because between that and pushing color themes, there's nothing on the horizon for people who just want an usable browser.At this point i expect even Edge to catch-up heavily, at least we're expecting consistent garbage from Microsoft so in that regard there won't be any surprises.
(Not saying it is worse than anything else, just that it used to be better.)
whatever mozilla do or don't, it's not good.