Mozilla’s Vision for the Evolution of the Web
webvision.mozilla.org
webvision.mozilla.org
...says the organisation that is continuously removing functionality, especially whenever they feel like redesigning the UI. Mozilla has been saying stuff like this for a long time (and "puts users in control" was the Firefox slogan for a while, before they did s/users/individuals/), but what they've done to Firefox is clearly in a different direction. I still use Firefox because it's the "least bad" of all the alternatives, but that's a pretty low bar and their continuing hypocrisy is definitely irritating.
"Actions speak louder than words."
The fact that you now need to set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets in order for userChrome.css to work, and that it has "legacy" in the name, is already a sign that route might disappear in the future.
More "then[sic] any other browser" is a really low bar, especially when the others are far worse.
I use Waterfox these days, and occasionally Firefox if there's a problem.
It's now significantly harder to customise either of them to the way I used to like pre-Quantum Firefox. A few more steps down this path and I won't be able to at all.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork...
The big change for millions of us was Firefox Quantum, which came out in November 2017.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum
Mozilla is proud of this because it involves some Rust stuff, but it was a massive loss for the extensions world. It removed (or disabled) XUL, Netscape's extensions language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL
To quote from the Classic Addons Archive:
« This catalog contains 93,598 versions of 19,450 Firefox add-ons created by 14,274 developers over the past 15 years using XUL/XPCOM technology before Mozilla decided to ruin the classic extensions ecosystem and go exclusively to WebExtensions. »
https://github.com/JustOff/ca-archive
For me, before Firefox 57, it worked superbly for me. Afterwards, of my 13 essential addons, only 2 still worked and one of those was trivial and unimportant.
It destroyed my browser and drove me away from using Firefox after nearly 20 years, dozens of computers and ½ dozen different operating systems.
Other cut functionality:
The best cross-platform FOSS email client, by far, is Mozilla Thunderbird. Mozilla has repeatedly tried to kill it.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/30/mozilla_thunderbird_h...
Mozilla also has cut off Seamonkey, the original Mozilla Internet Suite.
https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
Mozilla code is the one remaining FOSS WYSIWYG HTML editor, as included in Seamonkey.
It threw it out.
So far the following forks tried to maintain it:
Kompozer: https://sourceforge.net/projects/kompozer/
NVu: http://www.nvu.com/
BlueGriffon: http://bluegriffon.org/
Mozilla has no real idea why people use Firefox or what they want. It has forced wildly unpopular new features on people, such as the Australis theme.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/974802
It's forced telemetry that kicked the entire browser offline for millions:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/18/foxstuck_firefox_brow...
And yet it includes a huge complicated "developer mode" that 99.9% of users never want and never see.
Mozilla's Boot2Gecko became FirefoxOS which became KaiOS, the fastest-growing mobile OS in the world.
Mozilla abandoned FirefoxOS.
KaiOS is proprietary. Mozilla licensing should make that illegal. Is Mozilla enforcing it? No. Who wrote the license? Mozilla CEO Mitch Baker.
Salary: $3 million in 2020.
Also 2020: Mozilla fired 250 people, quarter of its workforce. https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/11/mozilla_staff_layoffs...
Summary – cut functionality from Mozilla products this century:
• XUL extensions
• Email, both integrated and standalone client
• Newsgroup reading
• FTP support
• XMPP Chat
• Web editing
• Native FOSS mobile OS
• Multiple themes.
And so on.
What are those extensions? I myself use 16 extensions, and I don’t think it has ever happened that I wanted to use an extension that wasn’t compatible with post-57 Firefox.
> It's forced telemetry that kicked the entire browser offline for millions … And yet it includes a huge complicated "developer mode" that 99.9% of users never want and never see.
My question was, what features were removed? What does that have to do with telemetry and devtools?
Vertical tabs.
Flat bookmarks.
Unified sidebar.
DownThemAll + DTA Anti-Container.
Status4ever.
Downloads Tab.
BugMeNot.
AutoPagerizer.
Readability.
All stuff that tweaks the browser UI. WebExtensions mostly can't do that: they're trivial little things.
When you think about it, it's actually crazy that some websites prevent you from copy-pasting. That you need to learn how to use the "network" tab to save a video you came across online. I wish some browser prioritized going beyond the URL and actually turning content back into files we can share.
I would like something a kin to Gopher but with videos, forums, games, search engines etc. All neatly in document formats that I have full control over.
These are good ideas and concepts and stuff, but.. it misses something.
I still use firefox, and I still think it's a good browser. I hope Mozilla's recent forays into VPNs and such helps stabilize their ship and lets them focus back on their mission and not forcing pocket on me.
All those moves can directly be linked to user tracking and I just feels something like "Block others and allows myself and myself only to track". So far I've no evidence to support it but let's wait and see.
>Privacy
multiple forks exist exactly because agency and privacy are not mozilla's values anymore. just half-hearted lip service
My guess is that because Mozilla is a hostage (and arguably antitrust human shield) of Google etc, it can't be too aggressive in its privacy approach, but it can at least not intentionally break privacy enhancing patchsets and features.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic about them though.
There is a trade-off between privacy and convenience, and one between agency and simplicity. Mozilla is quite okay with pushing their own proprietary products and removing customization.
> The Web is unique because it offers users unparalleled control over the content they experience. This control is the foundation of agency, but the reality has not always lived up to the promise, and we see threats to it going forward. Consequently, we seek to protect and expand the mechanisms that empower people to experience the Web on their own terms.
> we eventually chose to support EME, but nevertheless view it as a regrettable chapter in the Web’s evolution
These are a few interesting parts I saw. Overall this looks good and I haven't seen any part of this I disagree with.
Is this a new publication from Mozilla? When was this written? I don't see a date on it.
- "As a result of these and other changes, the fraction of encrypted page loads has gone from around 30% in 2015 to the vast majority of traffic in 2022. "
Given the values outlined here, I was sad to see that Mozilla doesn't seem to be looking much beyond the centralized platforms of today's commercial web. They see the "minimal barriers to entry for both users and publishers" as one of the key properties that makes the web such an important communication medium, and "Site-Building Ergonomics" is a top-level area where they see possibilities for improvement. Despite this, I don't see any recognition that it's still too difficult for ordinary users to publish their own information, which is why we have big commercial platforms where people do this, funded by ads, with all the problems that come along with that.
I think the most revolutionary thing Mozilla (and other browser makers) could do to realize this vision would be to turn their browser into a publishing platform. Browsers already have excellent tools for editing HTML, CSS, and JS built in, and they already speak the relevant protocols. Why not give every user a base URL for their personal site, and serve pages under it directly from the browser running on their computer? That would really lower the barrier to entry for users to become publishers and help realize the values of Openness and Agency.
Of course, such sites wouldn't be available 100% of the time, but they would probably be available enough to cover most of things people use the big platforms for: sharing text, photos and videos with their family and Internet friends. They would not need to be ad-supported and wouldn't raise the associated privacy issues. There are other problems to solve, but Mozilla is uniquely qualified to solve them.
The very first web browser had this feature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb#Features And it seems the perfect way to realize much of this vision. Why not bring it back?
Your description reminds me of Beaker, the "peer-to-peer Web browser".
I feel like Mozilla could do more to fund and otherwise support/promote such efforts for re-decentralizing the web, to bring the power balance back to the user.
https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/discussions/1944
https://atek.cloud/blog/hello-world
This is a great idea, but the big problem with Beaker is the network effects: only Beaker users can see other Beaker users' sites. To be successful, I think the idea needs to run over regular HTTP(S) so that other browsers can still access these personal sites. This means, at least at the beginning, that someone needs to run the infrastructure that maps stable URLs to a P2P connection to individual browsers. Mozilla is in a good position to do that.
I wonder if you could just write a Firefox extension that did this. It seems like the sort of thing that could be a viral sensation to get teens using your product--a new MySpace--but unlikely to have a transformative effect on the web.
My only actual hope would be if they could partner with someone who didn't find user content so distasteful and was willing to put in the work. There have always been dreams that crypto could literally hide all the hard work that's required, but it's just a cop out.
Actually making it work requires proxies and other complexities to cover any reasonable number of users. Those hosted tools take on a lot of the liabilities of user content even if the content isn't directly served.
The limitations will be hard to explain, content disappearing when your computer goes to sleep, or when your browser restarts for an update, or your firewall rules update, etc.
It's also open to abuse without the user's consent, and so Mozilla could become the conduit for hackers, phishing, etc.
Like crypto, I think this is just a dodge. Shifting responsibility to users who don't understand the responsibility they are given isn't an answer. This is hard work.
This is really sad, and I don't think this is healthy for the web either. Knowledge Workers and power users are a strong force for the web. Neglecting them will harm the world in the long run. If you want a free and open web, open it for everyone, not just for the low-hanging fruits with low demand.
We're down to three browser engines {Blink, Gecko, WebKit} and I don't expect any new because the web piles up complexity. We've lost Trident, KHTML and Opera. While nobody will miss the first, we're missing a heterogeneous web. We're down to an oligopoly with a tendency to a monopoly by Google. I cannot recommend just avoiding Chrome and replacing it by Chromium. Most complaints about WebKit and Gecko are actually not about them but that they are not Blink (i.e. Chrome).
I'm neither a fan of the present usage of JavaScript. To be precise, how it used in modern web. It didn't improve experience of the users. We now have random websites which consume resources and drain the battery. My impression is, that all engines stopped make the JS engines faster? Now it looks like the engines try to figure out which website is consuming resources through JS. Too late? Well. Modern JS is required often but isn't necessary for the web. The best use case is Stackoverflow and the worst are modern Cookie-Dialogs. In Europe the ill formed cookie directive created a new business-model and companys providing aggregate remote cookie banners, storing the cookies actually on their systems.
Hacker News: Works well without JS.
Amazon: Works well without JS.
Stackoverflow: Complains, but works well without JS.
PS: I'm coding myself also with JavaScript and want to avoid using it.
Chrome on the other hand is not a hedge, it’s a key strategic interest for Google. It’s a great product from the users perspective, free, fast, leading experience. That’s likely not to falter.
Firefox is a great counterbalance but don’t expect it to lead with average consumers any time soon. From what I can tell it’s playing catch up on core features and it’s innovating in areas where more techno-literate users might care.
From our perspective that’s true. But it also worked fine for a great many non-technical people.
> That was also a time when the web was younger and users were more techno-literate.
That’s not true. By the time IE6 arrived most offices had either dedicated internet terminals or their workstations were connected to the internet. U.K. libraries had been providing internet access for years already, several years of kids would have used the internet at college, and dial up was already common in homes.
I remember this well because I managed network infrastructure for schools and offices in the late 90s and early 00s.
> I’d argue that IE was a hedge against the web displacing the OS. After it succeeded in killing off Netscape there wasn’t much to hedge against
No need to argue there, Microsoft have admitted that themselves. But the motives behind IE don’t alter the point we are discussing (though still interesting).
> Chrome on the other hand is not a hedge, it’s a key strategic interest for Google
The two point aren’t mutually exclusive: It’s a hedge against users not consuming Google’s advertising.
Much like how IE was a core strategy for Microsoft as well as a hedge to keep people on Windows.
> It’s a great product from the users perspective, free, fast, leading experience
So was internet explorer. It was developers that hated IE, not your average desktop user.
IE was faster than FF, free (unlike Opera) and compatible with more sites too (if just because web developers didn’t have much other choice than to support IE).
> Firefox is a great counterbalance but don’t expect it to lead with average consumers any time soon
I don’t ever expect it to lead again. And it’s also worth noting it took years to displace IE last time around so why would anyone expect it to happen quickly this time?
> From what I can tell it’s playing catch up on core features and it’s innovating in areas where more techno-literate users might care.
Funny enough this is similar to Netscape back when IE first started to take the edge (back in the IE 3 and 4 days when IE was actually a good browser).
What people sometimes forget is that IE didn’t just dominate because it was installed on every Windows desktop. While that certainly helped (as well as being the reason it remained dominant after it stagnated), it had already largely beaten the competition by the time IE 4 was released. IE was, for a while, genuinely the best browser.
So the situation then and now isn’t that different.
TL;DR: it doesn't suffice to fork the client, you have to fork the entire web.
Just because I disagree that things are worse that doesn’t mean that I like the status quo either. Which is why I use Firefox (well, one of the many reasons. But a pretty big reason).
I remember writing my own web browser around 1999 (give or take a couple years). Just a toy thing but born out of frustration with Internet Explorer, or Internet Exploiter as I used to call it. That was a massive undertaking. But these days if Google do stagnate Chrome then it’s still possible to fork Chromium and push it in a different direction. Not to mention we also have WebKit, kHTML and Gecko too. That alone makes this situation better than it was when Microsoft owned the web. Add to that, Chome doesn’t come pre-installed on as many computers as IE did (lots if you count Android but at least Apple hardware ship something else. Opinions of Safari aside).
This doesn’t mean we should be complacent nor assume Google doesn’t still have a stranglehold but it does mean the GPs point is inaccurate.
Not exactly.
There is a Mozilla Foundation and a Mozilla Corporation
EDIT: To name an infamous example that's often cited here on HN: Mozilla. If it was operated like a non-profit, by people driven by vision not money, it would probably have saved the web from whatever Google has turned it into.
Chromium is. But Chrome isn't.
https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/
It is surprisingly easy to disable telemetry in Chromium as well, and when configuring Firefox using a similar method they send just as much telemetry as Chromium by default.
Google on the other hand can connect your live location with your search queries, your photos, your email, your browser history, with all of your friends’ listed items. Let’s not goddamn compare the two as counting how many people use firefox is not at all intrusive to noone. They are simply not comparable.
They will just make some Chromium distribution and wrap it with Rust.
It's not that they can't afford. They get truckloads of free money every year.
The reason they dont have significant development is because they actively attacked their developers and pushed them to other projects.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9202067/mozilla-ceo-chris...
""If they are an employee, they will be fired.""
The Mozilla CEO went to the press to threaten an anonymous person on the internet with dismissal.
>And regardless, either way, they are not welcome to continue to participate in the Mozilla project. It is not who we are."
Lets say you dont even agree and even believe this anonymous person was hate speech. You can't stay with the project after the CEO does this crazy shit.
Mozilla lost the talent they needed to make improvements to firefox.
Google has hired Lars Bak and many distinguished WebKit and Runtime environment developers to make a high performance browser. They're practically leading the standards, the aging Gecko/SpiderMonkey codebase can't keep up because no one feels secure working for a dying company that likely doesn't have a competitive salary. That combined with how little a development team there is to work with.
To work on the technical side of Firefox is philanthropic at this point, to steer away from Chromium dominance.
They can, however, fire people for creating a hostile environment for other emoloyees who report of workplace issues of discrimination on federally protected bases. In fact, they can under federal law be held liable for not taking sufficient action to prevent and respond to that kind of behavior.
Google created Chrome, in part, to become less dependent on browser defaults. That worked, and Mozilla's main source of revenue was/is almost certain to dry up.
So they bundled a service or two at some point. You clicked 'no' and were never bothered again.
That's too much of an ask? You are free to donate, instead. You, and everyone else, was always free to do so, of course. It didn't work, it doesn't work, and it will never work, but that doesn't stop anyone from suggesting it, in this case and every other (music, journalism).
People mouth off about privacy and security but will not follow through with $5/yr if they aren't forced to. They'll get their fix from Google or Microsoft, use the same pretentious arguments about security to also screw the people that write what they like reading and act surprised when they wake up in a paywalled garden. I bet it's the same people that litter whenever nobody is watching.
> You are free to donate, instead.
Donations go to the Mozilla Foundation, which allocates money to various internal and external projects. So why donate if it doesn't fund the web browser? From their own words:
"Mozilla Fellows and Awardees represent a range of disciplines and geographies: They are policymakers in Kenya, journalists in Brazil, engineers in Germany, privacy activists in the United States, and data scientists in the Netherlands." in https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/
> So they bundled a service or two at some point. You clicked 'no' and were never bothered again.
That's not the only problem, and far from it. As a power user, I've been annoyed by the removal of features. At some point, to keep vertical tabs, I had to modify obscure config files, and venture into the poorly document about:config. And Firefox last rewrite of their download manager was full of bugs, with half of them still there a year after. If not for the free software and web engine competitor, I would not use Firefox.
For my aging parents, the Firefox experience is far from smooth. An upgrade lost their frontpage bookmarks. Several others changed the UI to the point they had to call me.
Unlike Mozilla, it wouldn't be in control of the releases. But features are certainly less likely to disappear if someone is there to maintain them.
At the moment Mozilla does feel like an eggs in one basket situation for the community.
There are a gazillion Chromium based browsers and they are each dependent on Google developing and maintaining that. Google controls its roadmap, the internals that render your pages, it employs the engineers working on it, and the gate keepers vetting the occasional pull request from outside Google. But lets be honest, most of the work is done by Google engineers. Nothing happens to Chromium without their consent and backing. They control it completely.
So, the likes of Brave, Edge, Opera, etc. might do a fine job adding their window dressing, minor tweaks, and what not. But they are outsourcing the core browsing components to Google.
Without Mozilla it's down to just Apple and Google running the show. Apple has Safari and Google has Chrome. The rest does not really matter since it is effectively all Chromium. Unless you are paying the Apple tax, you'll have just one choice: consume the web via a Google provided code base.
That's why it is important to keep Mozilla going. With three major browsing engines, most websites have to make sure to work with all of them. Apple, Mozilla, and Google have been doing great work together in standardizing what they do and collaborating on new non exclusive features that each of them then implement in a way that works the same in each browser. Mozilla has a crucial role in keeping the other two honest. It matters.
And Firefox is pretty nice. I use it on desktop and on Android.
Mozilla gets criticism because they do things that deserve criticism. That there are others who are worse is irrelevant. If anything, not having a better alternative makes is more important to keep Mozilla from getting even less user-focused.
This notion that they should not be criticized for the shit they pull because hey they are the good guys* is ridiculous.
* relatively, conditions apply
> You are free to donate, instead.
You CANNOT donate to Firefox browser development. Mozilla corp does not accept donations. Mozilla org does not do any browser development. Even if Mozilla corp did accept donations it would be ridiculous for anyone to donate to an organization that pays thear leadership an amonout that is ridiculously high compared to even the US average income.
> People mouth off about privacy and security but will not follow through with $5/yr if they aren't forced to.
I donate to plenty of organizations. I would't donate to Mozilla corp even if I could because they don't want to be a non-profit organization that exists to serve a mission but rather a SV for profit corporation that focuses on competitive executive compensation complete with all the bullshit that comes with that like ignoring user feedback and replacing it with telemetry.
Mozilla has long lost the browser war.
Browsers are the modern thin clients into Cloud OSes, and there Mozilla has very little that they can push.
I still use Firefox whenever I can, but the writing is on the wall, without Apple's resistance (naturally due to native store apps), the correct title for Web developers would be ChromeOS developer.
I guess selling user data is fine as long as it is done ‘to survive’? Nah… I’ll take the browser with the best privacy and that is sadly just not Firefox anymore.
Huh? Apart from the fact that your donation goes to Mozilla Foundation, who will likely spend it on something you don't care about and don't want (and not) to Firefox), making a donation in the hope that some misfeature will be removed for you is magical thinking. It's in the nature of a donation that it's given freely, not in exchange for some consideration, and that once it's given you no longer control it.
A "gift" made in exchange for a consideration is usually called a contract.
Like, how much do I have to donate to get them to rip out Pocket?
The problem with your audience being contrarians is that they're impossible to please, and while you're competition gets blind followers, you're left with nothing but criticism.
Okay, you have some issues with how things are being run, maybe some or all of those are even valid. But show some support for the only other player, or at the very least some _constructions_ feedback.
(Unless you're on MacOS)
Additionally, this is as close to be anti-Chrome as possible without shouting "Anti-Chrome manifesto", which tells you a lot about Chrome-dominated web.
- move to a totally content-centric system (something like IPFS maybe)
- give new browsers (and web assembly) first-class networking support such as direct UDP and TCP
- simplify browser into three categories of functionality: applications (web assembly), text (markdown/rst), and data (JSON? RDF?)
- drop CSS (can be used for user styles if implemented in particular browsers, but text advertisements that really needs to be formatted can be images)
- encrypted content should be handled in a different, non-authoritarian way. HTTPS ensures that state actors can access data with MITM.
- create at least two tiers for data sizes. one intended for low-bandwidth or very fast browsing that severely limits the size of files transferred.
Given what happened the last two times Kazakhstan tried to MITM their entire country, I don't think you can honestly say that "HTTPS ensures that state actors can access data with MITM."
When was this shipped? I have no idea why this is a thing now, but it's incredibly annoying.
They don't answer to their users and hence they have no skin in the game to abide by these values or make sure they are accountable for them.
It's just cheap talk.
Firefox has good engineers who work hard and deserve your trust but they don't set the product direction. The lawyers and politicians do.
A much shadier one at that.
I just posted: "Mozilla might be irreparably damaged by their political activism."
What exactly could Mozilla do to get themselves out of this hole.
I really struggle to fathom what they could do.
They have had multiple new leaders with no change.
It was Mozilla CEO Chris Beard who went to the press to threaten anonymous people on the internet.
It was Michelle Baker who said deplatforming trump isnt enough. She was involved in deplatforming the new social media sites off of firefox.
So I don't think the leaders at the top are anywhere near enough.
How far the mighty has fallen. Firefox was once the best browser.
We could go into Mozilla's political activism that led up to this utter collapse. That's unnecessary. Mozilla's political activism was clearly toxic to their organization and they didn't have the vision of the damage they were doing to themselves.
So what value does this vision for the web have? Mozilla clearly needs to fix their own house before telling the entire world what we should do.
>The experience of using the Web must not subject individuals to harm.
I read through this vision and it's all things that are already true today. It's difficult to find things they truly wish to change or improve upon.
My take is that this is really what this entire vision is about the "harm" they perceive. This is what they want to change. They don't want to harm people on the internet. Which in a high level virtually everyone agrees. Everyone already agrees Scams, Fraud, phishing, malware, etc should not be allowed on the internet. No vision needs to be written on this. Mozilla wants to go further than this.
>This can lead to situations in which users have very negative experiences (including misinformation, .... in the past platforms have actively cooperated in abusive behavior, for instance via providing extremely fine-grained targeting for advertisements designed to manipulate users' political behavior.
So they are worried about misinformation and manipulating user's political behaviour?
Mozilla and firefox is more than welcome to keep going down this road. I won't try to stop them. That 3% can go lower and lower.
>Every company is influenced by its own agenda, business needs, and politics. Left unchecked, those pressures can easily result in the inclusion of ill-conceived features that everyone comes to regret.
The irony is that Mozilla clearly proved in this document they haven't fixed anything internally. They clearly have not given up their political activism.
>The Web’s multi-stakeholder development process is far from perfect, but nonetheless serves as a powerful bulwark against a corporate agenda-du-jour pushing bad ideas into the Web.
"corporate agenda pushing bad ideas"
That's what this is really about isn't it. Bad ideas. Misinformation. Mozilla wants to do "more than deplatform" their political opponents. Who gets to decide what is misinformation? Mozilla? Some single government who gets to unilaterally censor the internet for all other countries?
No. This is just Mozilla still derailed and crashing.
Mozilla might be irreparably damaged by their political activism.
It all reminds me of Paul Graham's What You Can't Say essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)
"The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true."
In the context of Mozilla. I fully support their intention of stamping out 'misinformation' and 'bad ideas' and I highly recommend to anyone and everyone they must stop using firefox or anything related to mozilla. They are hostile actors.
How about society? We had a major societal inflection point in Canada recently. We don't quite know what all the consequences will be at this point. This wasn't new or out of the blue. Unfortunately this denouncement of PM Trudeau and his actions was across the political spectrum.
While the current situation is a disaster, it's worse with what is about to come. 'It's the government's responsibility to regulate online speech to prevent radicalization'. Obviously this is being done under the guise of 'misinformation', 'hate speech', 'denazification, and 'anti-racism'
This upcoming reality of censoring speech will target dissent far far more often than any sort of nazis in canada which isnt really a thing.
The reasoning or why this is happening is far more important. Once you understand this and you really understand why Canada is in this situation.
>It all reminds me of Paul Graham's What You Can't Say essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)
Yes precisely but what makes things so dramatically different compared to today. Incidentally HN is well confirmed as having been taken over in this wrong way.
Something that I wish I could do is do this analysis for right before the american civil war. I bet it wasn't even as bad as it is today.
>"The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true."
What happened to the universities? Used to be the bastions of free speech but are literally the opposite today. I am 100% certain I understand what's happening and why. I just wish I could see how this will be solved and I just don't see how.
Most people don't care and the ones who do know Mozilla enough to know they failed miserably to live up to their standards. They dug a hole they can't get out of now.
Firefox is actually pretty good again. They dropped the ball for a while and let Chrome eat their lunch, but I switched back a couple years ago when the whole fiasco that forced users with Google accounts to automatically log in with their browsers occurred. Google eventually added an option after the backlash, but I trust Mozilla's incentive structure more than Google's when it comes to my browser
What you're saying is that Mozilla threw out the very things that made them relevant?
Rust is now managed by the Rust foundation. Having the language shepherded by a dedicated foundation is healthier than keeping it all in house.
It's definitely fair to argue that laying off some of the core Rust developers harms their relevance, but it's definitely more nuanced than "they just threw out..."
Despite the Mozilla leadership and the at times questionable investments, Firefox could never be more relevant.
We need a non-Chrome browser just as we need multiple operating systems with different design paradigms. It gives us flexibility, increased surface area for experimentation, and acts as an anchor for web standards (at least as long as non-Chrome browser share remains).
If running instructions should be free, so should reading information. Even if Chromium is itself open source, Firefox (and mostly Safari) keep Chrome from turning into a thin client that bakes in Google's self interested designs for the web.
I think Mozilla corporation should be acquired or merge with Canonical, Framework, or some other open-minded computing company. The leadership should build a strong "complete package" offering: laptop, phone, operating system, browser. That makes more sense to me than continued investments into weird side projects with little chance of developing traction.
And by weird side projects, I don't mean their efforts in VR or discontinued efforts in TTS. I think building open platforms in these domains makes a lot of sense. I just don't know if Mozilla should be the folks to do it. Their core mission - web - should be their singular focus.
The absolute best thing Mozilla could do, though, is spend money on marketing and partnerships to improve Firefox adoption and stem the losses. After they get growth back, the next thing to do is to develop stable, sensible revenue streams. The browser has become a commodity, which is why I think premium hardware sales could do the trick. Especially if it's "ethical" open hardware.
nrp (Framework founder's HN username), you should go have a chat with Mozilla folks sometime. Now isn't the time to consider an acquisition, but after you achieve growth and scale - please buy them out. Tout them as part of your offering, and use them as an additional funnel to drive Framework hardware sales.
> market that they value privacy and then their actions show otherwise
Which actions?
On the android platform Mozilla removed all extension sideloading capabilities.
Even their store extensions are now almost entirely off-limits for the user unless they create a Firefox account and link it to their device through some extension list ID.
The former just feels like an evil powergrab, the latter feels like a privacy reducing growth hack.
I really want Firefox to be great and do use it on all platforms, but many recent decisions regarding their products are not great.
In addition to that it seems that their toxic culture does appear to leave its mark on the brand.
https://digiday.com/marketing/after-mozilla-stopped-spending...
Sadly, they mention here their Manifesto which states:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/MarketingGuide
> Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
However, if you look at what settings are enabled by default and with the recent announcement of them tracking installs and downloads, they are no better than Chromium.
If such a competitor were to use Chromium/Blink, how do they differentiate from the other browsers? How do they avoid changes that Google push into Chromium/Blink that they don't want? Where do they get the resources to develop standards they want to support like MathML or several of the CSS drafts?
If such a competitor were to create their own web stack, where do they get the resources and time to build the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to a level that is competitive?
People who have visions should go see a doctor, as Helmut Schmidt put it.
There are concrete steps that Moz could be taking, such as working towards drastically simplifying the web by eg defining HTML/CSS profiles/subsets, define formal semantics of CSS, separate-out stuff only there in support of apps vs content-oriented sites, address conflicting goals of security vs questionable protocol complexity (HTTP/3, DoH), stop engaging in "web standards" activities where the user doesn't sit at the table, ...