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Comment by zirak | Hacker News Reader

How do we define "failure"? Let's say we can measure how much Mozilla fights for the user and put it on a scale:

         |--------------------|
    anti-user              pro-user

Where on the scale is "failure"? Let's say Mozilla is on the M, and Google is on the G:

         |----G-------M-------|
    anti-user              pro-user

Is Mozilla failing?

The sentiment I seem to see is that anything short of perfect is failure.

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They take so many active anti user steps.

Pocket, cliq, Push Notifications for Mozilla Blog without user consent, Mr robot, Firefox Suggest etc they are littered with mistakes and scandals and have never improved their governance or process.

I can give them a pass on technical decisions like Thunderbird or breaking extensions but when it's purely commercial it has to be judged differently.

Ok, now write the same list for Google. And then we can compare.

List for Chrome might be smaller: DRM videos, Manifest v3, this crap, JPEG-XL, ...

Problem is that Chrome is massive. If Chrome decides it will go left, most of websites will go left.

If you want to compare with Google the list is way more subjective.

The only one in that list that bothers me is the push notifications, and even that I can't care about too much.

Seems like a good record to me.

Announcing that Pocket would be baked directly into the browser, against the will of users—rather than being a promoted extension and despite the fact that it was at the time a completely unrelated company selling closed source SaaS and in the business of collecting telemetry—and then proceeding despite the widespread backlash doesn't bother you? Issuing misleading PR statements carefully worded to strongly suggest that there was no money changing hands re Pocket integration while maintaining plausible deniability concerning the truth, which is that there was money changing hands—that doesn't bother you? That the subterfuge was so effective that Mozilla employees themselves who were not otherwise in the know took it as a statement that there were no kickbacks involved—and then showed up in places like HN comments outright saying that there weren't kickbacks—that doesn't bother you? The fact that when Pocket was bought, it was understood and even claimed that it would be open source (just like all the other Mozilla Foundation IP), and yet we are in our seventh year after the acquisition and it's no more open source today than it was then—this doesn't bother you?

Is there any threshold for mendacity that if crossed would bother you?

It's not that I'm cool with the Pocket bullshit. It's just that I can't bring myself to more than a shrug when I put it next to Google or Microsoft.

I mean, Chrome (including Chromium, IIRC) literally collects and ships a bunch of tracking data to Google THE FIRST FUCKING TIME YOU LAUNCH THE APPLICATION.

Context matters. If Firefox did the Pocket nonsense in an environment where we had multiple decent free (as in freedom) browsers, then I'd grab my pitchfork. As it stands, I just can't feel the righteous indignation your comment is trying to rouse. It's truly NOTHING compared to the other options.

If those breaches in user trust don't bother you, why not use Chrome then? I can't recall any campaign Chrome has pushed that breached privacy as severely.

Okay, and this one proposal by Google has outweighed all of those exponentially.

So it's ok for me to stab you if my buddy then chops your head off?

No but I'll forgive you for startling me.

Which is the scale of Mozilla "badness" compared to the rest, even you.

And especially in the ligh of the good things they do.

You can be a critic, but be so in balance with the good things, otherwise you are making doing good something so ingrate a lot of people will give up.

If you thing doing the right thing is easy, you have not been doing a lot of it.

If those are the options, yes a stab is better than decapitation.

Of course a stab is better than decapitation. The point of the analogy is to ask whether the stabber is your friend.

If he didn't decapitate me, but stabbed me instead I'd say he's a friend

The more apt analogy in that case might be "would you prefer I decapitate you, or forget to buy you a souvenir on my road trip," to better illustrate the difference in severity between Google's and Mozilla's actions.

And the biggest: not allowing you to contribute to the FireFox project directly but only to Mozilla which will use the funds in many other pet projects besides doing what they should be doing.

The fact that an easter egg about a TV show makes the list of the worst things they've ever done speaks volumes. It was a bad decision, but it was not malicious and it had negligible impact on users. Google does something 10x worse every single day.

I was about to post this comment. I can't BELIEVE people are still hung up on the Mr. Robot thing. This is exactly what we're talking about in this thread when we say that HN has a strong anti-Mozilla bias for some reason.

Whenever I see this I just assume it's people that are against Firefox/Mozilla anyway and are looking for any possible excuse to shit on them. Yes, it was bad, and an ideal organization would not have done it. But it is orders of magnitude less severe than what Google does to us every day. Not even a comparison.

No but things like hiding the favicon when the audio playing notification is on the tab, changing UIs for no good reason, removing features for no good reason...these are the things that piss people off. Mostly designers making life shit for no good reasons, and then the CEO whining about low pay and constantly increasing her salary (after firing the rust team)

In a situation like that, it's not just about any direct harm that may have arisen.

It's also about the loss of trust.

That particular incident, for example, was completely unnecessary. It involved a significant display of unbelievably poor judgment, and a total lack of foresight. It shouldn't have happened.

The fact that it did happen, despite it being such an obviously bad idea, raised a lot of questions and doubt.

It causes people to wonder what other incidents, which could potentially be far worse, might happen in the future.

It's remembered years later because it involved such a major loss of trust for so many people.

I look at it similarly to the iPhone / U2 debacle.

It's remembered now only by a very small, though vocal, minority.

If anything, shouldn't the fallout reinforce trust that it won't happen again? Kind of like how plane crashes actually make planes safer.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way in this case. For example, there was an incident just a couple of months ago that was discussed here:

"Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360)

"Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085642)

That's another incident that just shouldn't have ever happened to begin with, in my opinion.

That's not great, but it's not the same as the Mr Robot thing. That much has already stopped. This is a different thing that similarly won't happen again now that backlash has occurred. A different cause of a plane crash that has now been analyzed to prevent in the future, going back to that analogy.

The underlying cause in both of those cases seems to me to be them doing something that fundamentally should not have been done in the first place.

It's the lack of foresight and the lack of good judgment that I don't see getting fixed.

Both of those incidents should have been completely avoidable with even the most minimal of forethought.

Here's the thing, though. You've used several key phrases in this comment: "a lot of questions and doubt," "wonder what other incidents [...] might happen in the future," and "major loss of trust."

All valid concerns, but why post about them on the internet? Especially when it's nothing concrete--you used the words "questions", "doubts", and "might happen"? If someone is taking the effort to post FUD (literally) about Mozilla and "trust", why the hell aren't they using that same effort to post about Google or Microsoft and "trust"? Aren't those obviously much bigger problems?

Again, it's not wrong, per se, but I feel like it's bordering on some kind of astroturfing for people to complain about the fucking Mr. Robot non-story that happened years ago when TFA is about Mozilla at least signalling the right thing while Google is trying to be overtly evil YET AGAIN. I can actually type "Fuck Google" faster than I can type "Mr. Robot", so I'd have to have some kind of weird agenda or priorities to bring up Firefox's Mr. Robot thing.

While you may consider it to be a "non-story", for some of the Firefox users who experienced it first-hand, it was a significant betrayal that can't be easily forgiven. The implications go far beyond the incident itself.

I don't think that there's "a strong anti-Mozilla bias" here, as you put it earlier. The people affected by that incident, and by others, were probably among the most ardent Firefox supporters. After all, they were still using it long after so many others had already moved to Chrome.

Loss of trust is something that isn't easily forgotten, and it's a relevant factor worthy of bringing up in discussion.

I'm sorry, but it's definitely a non-story, and all this talk about "betrayal" and "trust" is sophistry.

It's a non-story because you had to opt-in to Firefox's "experiments" feature to get the extension pushed to you. Opting in to the experiments feature is *literally* granting permission for Mozilla to change the behavior of your Firefox browser remotely in between official releases. So, Mozilla had your permission to change your browser. I simply will not shed a tear for anyone who felt betrayed by something they signed up for.

And, by the way, I was also "affected" by the Mr. Robot thing because I also opted in to the experiments feature.

Furthermore, the extension did nothing harmful. It didn't even collect any data as far as I know. You know why Mozilla pushed an extension that didn't even collect any data instead of one that does? Because they were acting in a trustworthy way!

Sure, it was a faux pax. Mozilla thought they could be cute the same way a lot of old school FLOSSy, hackery, software would include amusing Easter eggs and jokes. It was inappropriate and didn't land well for a variety of reasons, but there was no reason to lose trust in Mozilla at the time, and there's *certainly* no reason to even bring it up today, years later, when just about every other tech company and computer product is trying their damnedest to spy on you, sell your data, prevent you from having root control of your devices, and squeeze subscription money out of you.

Again, Chrome starts tracking you the instant you launch it for the first time. Microsoft tracks you when you log in to Windows and occasionally re-enables tracking features that you've disabled. Mozilla pushed a silly "fun" extension to users who opted in that didn't collect any data nor make Mozilla any money.

This discussion is nonsense. If you truly don't trust Mozilla after the harmless Mr. Robot extension was pushed to you after you chose to allow them to modify your browser remotely, then go ahead and stop using Firefox- I don't care. But please stop spreading FUD.

My God, you're right. With such poor judgement, they might someday do something really awful like try to force remote attestation into the web at large.

So let's just keep using the browser from the company with 90% control of the web and ACTIVELY (see this article) trying to make it impossible for you to do things like block ads or write a web scraper just because of "some loss of trust"

There is no perfect option right now, and Mozilla will never be that perfect option because they are human and at least three people working there probably want to make some money.

So yeah, lets just keep making them irrelevant so in ten years I won't have a choice and be FORCED to use the browser that says ad blocking is stealing and spoofing your user agent is a violation of the CFAA and all this other blatantly user hostile shit.

It's such clear whataboutism, to have ANYTHING to hold against the only web browser that isn't actively controlled by the people with billions of dollars a year incentive to actually harm how you use the web.

To be honest, everything you listed seems either irrelevant or a small mishap that at worst just leaves some bad taste.

I see it differently. I couldn't care less about Pocket integration and Mr.Robot easter egg, but Mozilla became hostile toward power users and open web idealists.

They killed Weave (aka Sync 1.0; which was somewhat weird but simple enough to comprehend, reimplement and self-host), replacing it with an NIH-reeking over-engineered abomination that's the very antithesis of standard, open or public. Most people just ignored it as "that's Mozilla own infrastructure, they don't have to make it open, design it well, think of others, or anything else". I could not.

They tried to push a fundamentally flawed Persona/BrowserID standard that continued the trend to remove users from their "own" identities while claiming it's a pro-user pro-privacy move. I can see the logic, but I'm of firm opinion that it would've done more harm than good. I'm glad the project died without gaining any traction and WebAuthn (which has its issues, but where users are the source of their identities) took over. That's what BrowserID should've been, but Mozilla just went with the flow and refused or failed to fight for identity ownership.

It's things like those what made me regret using Firefox (but again, everything else is worse), not some home page sponsored links. That's where they stopped to differ from the rest for me. Mozilla used to be a beacon of doing things right even if it was challenging, fighting for a better web. And they became just another software company, that put their glorious past on all the ads (how they're so pro-everything good) while failing to live up to those high standards.

They had an user agent, but they butchered it and made it just a browser.

> Is Mozilla failing?

Firefox's usage dropping from about 30% down to likely less than 3% today, with almost no mobile usage, should be seen as a severe failure.

This failure isn't just about the product's uptake, too. It's also about the Firefox developers losing meaningful influence over the way the web evolves.

It's not about the absolute position on the scale, but the direction of change. Mozilla has been moving towards anti-user for years now.

They went from A to B (exact magnitude of change is of course part of the criticism):

         |------------B---A---|
    anti-user              pro-user

Is Mozilla still, currently, a failure at their job?

---

These kinds of discussions are frustrating to me since it feels like we've been dealt a very bad hand. But it's not just this hand, the dealer is firmly set on us only receiving bad hands in any game we play.

Like in a card game, this is the only hand that we'll get. What other corporation do we have to push these kinds of values? What other avenue do we have? It's sad that we've come to this situation, but if the choice is the currently perceived-to-be-failing Mozilla and no Mozilla, I pick the failing Mozilla.

> What other corporation do we have to push these kinds of values?

The thing is, Mozilla shouldn't even be a for-profit corporation in the first place.

Didn't they try being just a non-profit and it failed? IIRC they had to establish a corporation to sell defaults like search or they wouldn't have had enough funding to continue.

How do we define "evil"? Let's say we can measure how much evil Putin does and put it on a scale:

         |--------------------|
    anti-user              pro-user

Where on the scale is "failure"? Let's say Putin is on the P, and Hitler is on the H:

         |----H-------P-------|
    anti-user              pro-user

Is Putin evil?

The sentiment I seem to see is that anything short of sainthood is evil.

The answer of course is that relativism is not a good way to judge people or organizations. Mozilla chooses to do a lot of shitty things. They should be criticized for that even if someone else is worse.

We have a lot of other comparison points between Putin and Hitler of national leaders who are not generally considered evil, so it's not accurate that the sentiment is that anything short of sainthood is evil.

Besides, people aren't using relativism here. Relativism is the idea that nothing is truly good or bad, it's all a matter of personal or cultural preferences. That would mean that people were saying that that Mozilla's behavior about X, Y, and Z isn't really bad. But that's not really the argument here. People are generally saying that despite engaging in the bad behaviors X,Y and Z, Mozilla is still in balance better than Google, and arguably still worthy of some level of support. To phrase it in terms of Aristotelian ethics: "For the lesser evil can be seen in comparison with the greater evil as a good, since this lesser evil is preferable to the greater one, and whatever preferable is good". You're unquestionably correct that Mozilla should be criticized, even harshly so. But you can criticize a company (or person, or party, or country) and still support them. Or if short of support, still prefer them to the available alternatives.

I certainly wouldn't brand Putin as "pro-user".

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