Firefox accounts renamed Mozilla accounts
support.mozilla.org
support.mozilla.org
to me, the word mozilla reminds me of the ueeless board members.
> Mozilla Social’s vision is to develop an integrated platform that empowers users through seamless communication, content discovery, curation, and sharing capabilities, enabling them to stay up-to-date, explore new perspectives, and engage within a safe and enriching experience. Define and own the technical execution of our long term ML strategy with a particular focus on developing industry leading recommender system techniques.
> Mozilla’s Innovation Studio is a fast-paced organization of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial minded individuals. We build new products and experiment quickly to improve and extend the way people access and engage on the Web. We are looking for a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help us develop and grow new machine learning driven products and tools.
> The Firefox team is a community of engineers who care deeply about delivering the fastest, friendliest, most usable browser possible. We are responsible for making the things you see in the browser work securely, quickly, and well! We are looking for a Principal Engineer to help us develop and grow new machine learning driven products and tools. You will play a key role in enabling safe and healthy machine learning and AI driven experiences in Firefox.
> Firefox is used by hundreds of millions worldwide and the Director of Product for Search and AI is a critical role in the product management team. The role will lead a team of PMs and be responsible for the product strategy, vision, and execution of our Search and AI investments. You’ll combine product excellence with strong leadership skills and help build a smart browser that helps our users be productive online.
"I can't trust Mozilla, they get too much of their income from Google"
(Mozilla tries to branch out so that they're less dependent on Google) "I wish Mozilla would just stick to Firefox"
(Mozilla tries to find a non-Google revenue source for Firefox) "How dare they try to monetize Firefox, the one and only product I want them to produce."
It would be nice if those critical of Mozilla offered solutions.
I agree with alot of the points raised, but I also empathize with the tough position Mozilla is in. I know squat about product management and would love to hear some knowledgeable input.
How many is core? I don't know. Not 750 though. To change course now would mean layoffs which nobody likes. But I argue they never should have hired that many folks, and to continue with that headcount is throwing good money after bad.
If the purpose of the Mozilla organisation was to fund Firefox into the future then they have catastrophically failed at their job. If their purpose was to spread the money they had around to a bunch of people as quickly as possible before it runs out, whilst putting on a good face, then they've succeeded 100%
The mission statement of the Mozilla Foundation is not about Firefox:
> Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
Apache can do it... want a web server? Apache webserver. Want java? Get tomcat. Data streaming? Kafka. All apache, but separate.
Look at microsoft.. you need their email account just to be able to install the OS (in many cases). Look at google... get banned on youtube, lose gmail, google analytics, etc.
Some of Mozilla's ventures seem cool. Like Mozilla VPN seems like a win/win; it supports Mullvad, you get a reasonable service, no complaints from me. But the thing that sucks is, Mozilla clearly needs to expand and build a large business to properly support Firefox, but their avenues for doing so in an ethically reasonable way that connects with the general mission seem pretty limited. Like it would be better if they could operate leaner and more directly focused on just building a good browser, but a lot of their options for monetizing Firefox itself are absolutely terrible. Ever since the whole debacle with using Firefox Studies to advertise, I don't even use upstream Firefox anymore. I do use Thunderbird and even donate sometimes, but I'm terrified that despite being donation-driven Thunderbird will somehow start to be enshittified too as part of their strategy to try to grow at any cost.
All of this signals, to me, a more general issue: it seems that maintaining a feasible mainstream web browser has become generally unsustainable.
Where can I read about this? If it’s hard to link to a blog post, maybe expand on it for the curious!
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/i8dwht/mozilla_have...
God forbid they’d just make us pay for it…
Give me a $10/month Firefox subscription and I’d pay it in a heartbeat. But I don’t want it to be a $10/month ‘other bizarre Mozilla projects’ subscription. Right now it’s hard to trust that any money I give them would go to a better browser.
Edit: Leared that you could only donate to mozilla foundation which is not the same.
Gecko/Firefox developers on payroll are employed by Mozilla Corporation, which pays taxes etc. like any company.
It's a bit complicated so I drew up a little diagram:
1. Mozilla Foundation (not for profit) <- Donations accepted here
├── 2. Mozilla Corporation (for profit, wholly owned by the foundation so all profit goes to the foundation) X- No donations
│ └── 3. Firefox X- No donations
└── 4. Other social causes (??? it's not clear)
pkill Mozilla
What can't Firefox do that the better browser can? Mozilla improves Firefox all of the time.
Do you think "none" is the amount of a donation that will go towards a better browser? If so, donate $0 of your $10. Is it 10%? If so, donate $1.
* https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
I'd like a precise breakdown, too, but I'm not an accountant, and donating a few dollars is within my means.
* https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/
* https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
* https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...
* https://frankhecker.com/2020/08/15/how-mozilla-makes-money-a...
> How will my donation be used? At Mozilla, our mission is to keep the Internet healthy, open, and accessible for all. To learn how your donation is put to use, click here.
It links to foundation’s website, which has the following things listed as “Our areas of focus”: Rally Citizens, Connect Leaders and Shape the Agenda. Firefox is mentioned 0 times on that page.
But, sure, I'd like more information about funding Firefox in particular, too.
The issue here is that things like socialising, search and what have you to diversify revenue would have been really interesting back in Firefox 2.0 when they had a thriving extension ecosystem. There were things like ChatZilla where there were full fledged apps being built in browser to provide social options.
Mozilla killed that off when they removed the old XUL layers. They went with Google's strategy of everything being a HTML/Javascript web app. Cool I suppose but they've obsoleted themselves and there isn't an obvious way back into the game for them. They aren't competent at anything, thy're stewarding a 3rd rate product and they're wasting a lot of money. They'll struggle to do anything right under current conditions.
Despite everything , Firefox is still an amazing product. I just hope the Mozilla leadership gets thrown out before they finally kill Firefox through incompetence and neglect.
Your take also ignores the very real anti-competitive factors Firefox is up against. Google relentlessly promoting Chrome across their web presence and paying third parties to trick end users into installing it and setting it as their default for instance: https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj
Firefox isn't owed a market. Google have proved themselves, so far, to be better stewards of the world's browser engine than the people at Mozilla. It might have a new era in the sun one day, but right now there really isn't much of a niche for Firefox. And the fact that Chrome overran Firefox does sit with the Mozilla, whatever the argument is about competitive practices. Chrome was (likely: still is) just technically better.
I mean, Mozilla couldn't afford to pay Adobe, Avast, etc $3 per user to install an unwanted browser for years even if they'd cross the moral and ethical line to do so. So a chunk of that was outside of their control.
Firefox uses an entirely different engine underneath. So, from a 'health of the web' perspective, it helps prevent the mono-culture. It also supports extensions on Android, which is quite nice, and syncs my stuff between them. It can't support them on iOS since everything is just Safari Lite underneath.
The whole input behind linux was to have the central piece of computing managed by the community for the community. I'd wish something similar for the central piece of the internet.
If any other product lost so much market share, the CEO would be removed.
Also those "fun" projects are career boosters for people involved, not something that makes firefox better. It even makes it worse, since fewer resources go for firefox.
Their investment into AI yielded some cool things like on-device language translation that I use a lot in Firefox.
Rust is something that grew out of their investments into programming languages/tooling/etc.
Their investment into documentation and technical writing brought us MDN, which is a great resource for web development.
Mozilla's development of password managers, that they eventually walked back on rolling out as an independent product, yielded a better password manager built into Firefox, as well as Firefox Verify.
It's also important to make a distinction between the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit, and Mozilla the corporation. The non-profit is responsible for many of the non-browser investments.
Double title inflation! What’s before this? Junior Staff Machine Learning Engineer?
Or maybe this is how the order goes: Junior Staff -> Staff -> Senior Staff. No?
Imagine going to your favorite pizzeria and they keep trying to push you to buy some newspapers, clothing or car servicing, because the pizzeria executives want to fill up their resume.
And I think you see that most in foundations (Wikipedia, Linux, etc.) because they have no profit motive, so the ranks get filled by hundreds of unproductive activists or parasites while the tech staff is still a tiny core and doing the actual work.
This links to a page which... primarily consists of "Firefox" branded products. VPN is the _only_ Mozilla one. What are they driving awareness of?
It seems banal enough, I'm too suspicious for my own good.
https://www.theverge.com/23778208/kobo-pocket-ebook-reader-i...
They've abandoned the old one and the new one isn't finished and not even released... It's been like this for years.
Regardless of Mozilla being an "opensource friendly" company, this is perverted.
You can fiddle with other Mozilla branded stuff or not ... no biggie - its still your choice.
No perverts were harmed producing the preceding paragraph.
On the copy of Firefox I'm typing this in, the only obvious mention of Mozilla is in the About dialog, where it says somewhere in the blurb in the middle that "Firefox is designed by Mozilla". The main app menu (macOS) says Firefox. The icon when you switch apps says Firefox. The app you start when you Cmd-Space is Firefox. The install directory is /Applications/Firefox.app.
There's another "More from Mozilla" in the Preferences, but the icon, which kinda has to be a Mozilla icon, looks out of place with the other icons.
Mozilla's messaging over the past few years has always been perverted, all talk and no action.
They "care about your privacy", yet their tracking protection was for a long time whitelisting known malicious domains from trackers. Their telemetry implementation in the browser to this day does not comply with the GDPR as it's opt-out rather than opt-in.
The browser, despite being free, open-source and supposedly on your side (a purported user-agent), uses many user-hostile tactics typical of malicious closed-source software such as frequent nagging, bad/annoying defaults, etc.
Other stuff such as pocket..Grrr
This is just a corporate PR (or enterprise bullshit). Nothing to do with reality.
No one should ever trust corpirate PR in the same way other human beings are trusted. Because a company is not a human being. Although both __can__ speak similar language (of words and sentences). The difference is that the corporation is (almost) never held responsible for any words it outputs. It literally can say anything and get dry out of water later even for a complete bullshit.
Do you attach a Mac account to your MacBook or an Apple ID?
Tying the arguably weaker brand to the stronger one is so commonplace in the industry that it’s a bit laughable to call it perverted.
When I used Windows 10 (and all the way back to... 3.1, I think? I'm only middle-aged), I logged into that OS with a username and password. No way was I going to use a Microsoft account, and now it's moot since I just use Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), since I like what both the Mint and Debian teams are doing so far.
Same for my work computer (local government entity/utility).
Perverted does seem like overly strong language to describe something I just prefer not be the case but which many others (presumably) could care less about.
I didn't attach an Apple ID to my Macbook either.
They know there's nothing they can do to save Firefox (since they are the problem that led to the decline of FF in the first place), so they are preparing for its demise (or takeover by competitor/FOSS community) by trying to disassociate other Mozilla services from the Firefox brand, in hopes that users stick around with those services post-Firefox.
Thus, you get this strategy of trying to make Mozilla survive post-Firefox, even though everyone knows the music stops when the Google money stops.
Brand recognition for Mozilla: Almost nonexistent outside of FOSS communities.
Brand recognition for Mozilla after this rebrand: 1% larger than previously.
The service is frustratingly amateur. They spam you with a series of emails even when you unsubscribe and the syncing items, which are just URLs, is extremely slow and unpredictable.
I don't recommend signing up, and this post reminds me I should figure out how to delete the account.
I did file a support ticket once and the support person clearly didn’t understand or read my request and instead sent back some pre-formulated response to another query. That was kind of annoying. But other than that I’m quite happy to pay the few bucks a year for the service.
I know the Corporation need to find some crazy new passion project to spend whatever is left of the Google money after they've been handsomely paid, but I wish FF got more love, or got sold to a company who gave a shit about it.