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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

When a shirt is dirty, one stain doesn't stand out much.

When a shirt is white and clean, the smallest stain stands out.

Mozilla is one of the rare companies with a mostly white clean shirt.

It is been judged harshly, while we should rejoice that they have been doing amazing things for 20 years despite the competition being terrible people playing dirty.

If we keep doing this, they will be no more Mozilla in the world. Who wants to be the good guys if you are held up against impossible standards when your competitors are paid handsomely to destroy the world?

I know some groups that target perfect ethics: they do nothing, because it's impossible to do anything without screwing up sometimes.

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I disagree. The shirt isn't white anymore but turning beige. Precisely because people let a lot of Mozilla's shit slide just because "there aren't any better alternatives".

We're not holding Mozilla to higher standards than Google - we just have already discarded Google as an option.

Not collecting telemetry that many users have explicitly stated they do not want and even turned off at every opportunity is not a particularly high standard. Not wanting advertisements integrated into the web browser is not a particularly high standard. Criticizing that the CEO salary has been increasing to absurd levels while the browser has been declining and regular engineers are facing is not holding them to a particlarly high standard. Not wanting the last remaining competitive free web browser run as a commercial project rather than a non-profit foundation is not a high standard. Mozilla chooses to be shittier and shittier. Inaction would be better.

Spectrum of goodness:

    [M. theresa...VLC foundation....Mozilla.......You.......................Microsoft.......................................Nazis]

I think your comment only shows how spoiled we are by open source.

Off topic: Mother Theresa wasn't a particularly great person.

So-called "Mother Theresa" should not be used as an example of extreme good. She's more accurately described as an example of extremely good PR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa

Very true. I just like to add their strategic investment in Hubert Burda's Cliqz. A thinly disguised attempt to shut out Google ads and replace them with the ones from the Burda empire. Their mendacious user privacy rhetoric still makes me sick and is on par with what we've read in the Web Integrity Standard.

> The shirt isn't white anymore but turning beige. Precisely because people let a lot of Mozilla's shit slide just because "there aren't any better alternatives".

There's some nuance there, too.

It's "turned beige", in part, because people refused to use it while it was still "white". Mozilla has had to make the tough calculation of whether to be pure with zero users and therefore zero good impact, or to be beige to try to get some of these fickle users back and maybe have SOME good impact.

So, basically, people aren't satisfied when Mozilla is pure/idealist, and they aren't satisfied when it's compromising/pragmatic ("If they do that, I might as well keep using Chrome!").

I'm not letting Mozilla off the hook, or giving my blessing for every single decision that's been made. But, there's probably some utility to us taking the view of "just shut up and use Firefox" for the next N years.

> Mozilla has had to make the tough calculation of whether to be pure with zero users and therefore zero good impact, or to be beige to try to get some of these fickle users back and maybe have SOME good impact.

I can't really recall any decisions made that were unpopular with existing users, but likely to lure new users in. Ads on new tabs doesn't seem like something that would bring new users in. Pocket doesn't either, since iirc you could install the extension in Chrome if you really wanted it.

Most of the controversies I remember were either to increase Mozilla's revenue, or boondoggles like their mobile OS. My major annoyance was that the increase in revenue seems like it was spent on boondoggles or weird, unrelated charity rather than going back into improving the browser.

I'm still also a Firefox user, but it's like 99% because ads are not their primary source of revenue rather than any remaining fondness towards Mozilla.

I was thinking of EME, specifically, when I wrote that.

But, also, bringing money in is proxy enough for being able to do "good" for whatever definition we'd like to use. So, money or users, I think my general point about compromising their ideals for pragmatism is still valid (not necessarily true or correct, but it's an argument that can potentially be made).

> So, basically, people aren't satisfied when Mozilla is pure/idealist, and they aren't satisfied when it's compromising/pragmatic ("If they do that, I might as well keep using Chrome!").

I suspect those are mostly different groups. And my personal take is that Mozilla did indeed make that calculation... and proceeded to sacrifice the die-hard core userbase in order to get wider appeal, but they managed to not actually get the wider audience to buy in either, leaving them with nothing.

I agree with your assessment and I always suspected that would be the case, even when these decisions were being made.

Has there ever been a case of an underdog company/product actually gaining market share by becoming less different than the market leader? It always seems like a mistake from the outside, to me. I feel like an underdog is more likely to succeed by actually being different and attracting people who would prefer those differences. Why would anyone change from what they're currently using to an alternative that is almost exactly the same?

> Mozilla is one of the rare companies with a mostly white clean shirt.

No. Not even close.

> while we should rejoice that they have been doing amazing things for 20 years despite the competition being terrible people playing dirty.

I reject the "other"-ness in this comment. I was a Mozillian. I was helping do those things. The notion that I should heap accolades upon a bunch of folks who are only now affiliated with Mozilla and who were not contributing during the era in which Mozilla was doing the great things actually deserving of the goodwill associated with its name? And who have themselves been positively poor torchbearers for that name? Condescending.

2023 is the project's 25th birthday. It did amazing things for about 15 of them—by which I mean the people who made up the project. "Mozilla" is merely a legal fiction.

So? Is using Chrome better? What is your recommendation?

Please don't change the subject like this. It's annoying.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117242>

There's no reason your question couldn't have been posted in a relevant (sub)thread, instead of here, where it's (i) not on topic for the current subject, but (ii) looks like it could be, and therefore (iii) has the same effect as moving the goalposts.

They did shift the goalposts, but I do wonder what browser you'd recommend (and I won't make a bad faith assumption that its chrome like they did). Brave?

The browser with a built-in crypto wallet? No thanks.

I stick to Safari and Firefox. They're not perfect but they're the only modern browsers that don't use Blink, which is what gives Google the power to make moves like this.

I run firefox with ublock origin, some tampermonkey scripts, and decentraleyes.

So many people recommend it, but I've been iffy on using brave. Thanks for giving me a little insight on your choices and reasoning behind it.

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