Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

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Hmm.

On one hand, I largely agree with everything that blog posts says.

BUT!

it presents it as some universal, self-evident truth, and I think it's not. Just because the blog author and I and some others think so, doesn't mean it's the only perspective or that everybody feels that way.

I think there exist people who will enjoy that language, who will understand that language, and to whom that language speaks. My wife, possibly. My sister, almost certainly. Many others in my circle of friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.

And, it's Mozilla. I don't think it's 100% accurate to say "you're a tech company" or that FireFox is "just a browser". Mozilla foundation is non-profit, and it does have goals and vision. It is, I think inherently "political", though not necessarily in the current American sense of "political" which seems to mean "partisan" or "bad". It has a goal and perspective and a point of view. It's trying to do something beyond generate profit for shareholders, so I don't think it's accurate to brand it as "just a tech company" (whether one agrees with its goals, methods and progress is orthogonal).

Ultimately, some people DO choose Firefox as a political statement (that statement perhaps being as simple as "I support independent choice of technology" or "I want my browser to work for me" or even "I don't want Google to COMPLETELY own my life" :). Some people DO see it as a way to vote, or impart a change.

> I think there exist people who will enjoy that language, who will understand that language, and to whom that language speaks. My wife, possibly. My sister, almost certainly. Many others in my circle of friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.

But the desire to achieve self-expression through consumer choice is a fucking soul sickness. It's an empty simulation of meaningful self-expression. It's a (often deliberately!) useless substitute for actual political activity. Just because that kind of bullshit is pervasive and, in our society, widely effective for marketing purposes, doesn't mean it should be further propagated.

Free software is largely a refuge from that kind of bullshit, or at least the most cynical, cliche, shiny forms of it. Infesting Firefox with appeals of that kind is not the end of the world, I guess. But it is polluting the clean air I come to Firefox for in the first place with the same smog that's suffocating me everywhere else.

Perhaps Mozilla has figured out that you can't corner the market if you focus on nerds with privacy concerns;

these people (which are also the majority of posters in this thread) are a vanishingly thin slice of the cake. They're trying to corner a totally different market by using that kind of language and design, if that annoys the HN crowd, so be it; they're not the target for this kind of copy.

The problem is that they're not actually getting the other market either. If they wanted to sacrifice the hacker-types but got more non-hacker-types to use Firefox, I'd be annoyed (since, y'know, I'm the hacker-type), but I'd understand. What they've actually done is sacrifice the things that made them good (other than uBlock Origin, every one of my favorite extensions is dead or degraded) and alienated the hacker-types and still not gotten traction with wider audiences.

>Perhaps Mozilla has figured out that you can't corner the market if you focus on nerds with privacy concerns;

True, but "cornering the market" is such an outlandish goal at this point, they shouldn't be holding themselves to that standard. It's enough to capture a respectable 3rd place, rather than the sub-3% afterthought they are now.

And they originally got the respectable showing in the early days by being the "one your geek friend recommends", not by pretending they can out-market the big players with unlimited budgets.

> you can't corner the market if you focus on nerds with privacy concerns

Mozilla seems to use a different strategy that is even worse.

Among nerds with privacy concerns you can at least plausibly get money/code contributions with significant worth.

Mozilla cornering the market: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/StatCoun...

Can you ask your wife or sister to translate that language to language that the rest of us will understand? What are they saying?

I mean sure, or I can do a decent job myself ; are you asking to make a point, or a genuine request?

I would like to know more about what "Color can change culture. The latest colorways celebrates voices making the world a better place." means.

What the words mean is that you can feel good about yourself and believe that you are "standing with" the oppressed flavor of the month, "resisting" whatever is to be resisted today, and generally be an "ally" by using the products and services of corporations that say these words.

It's like landing at Normandy, but from the comfort of your living room.

How is that related to a web browser?

It's alluding to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_psychology

For example, how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker-Miller_pink is used in prisons to foster a less violent culture among the prisoners.

"voices making the world a better place" is referring to Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think it would have been better if they simply said "Firefox is now pink to make you a nicer person" so that more people could understand.

So they're conducting psy-ops on their users to manipulate them into behaving in a way that Mozilla decided is best? I'm a fan of Firefox, but that's bizarre.

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