We've had lots of news about this coming for months, but with Mozilla's quite low market share, and the share of those users that use extensions - who's really caring about this other than some power users?
People b***h about Firefox's (lack of) market share, Mozilla doing stupid things (fair criticism), Firefox not having X (extension support on Mobile, moving from legacy extensions to standard manifest format)
Then people will still bring up this baggage even when something good happens, will refuse to move away from the browser monoculture/monopoly, s**t on Firefox devs
FFS, something good happened. No other browser has this. Yet people will find a way to lessen it. For what? What benefit?
Sadly, the browser world has almost become something of a mono culture with the majority of offerings using Chromium as their base. I liked Opera for years. Original engine. Tabbed. Now Vivaldi is the Opera successor, but sadly uses Chromium as the base. Vivaldi have said they are not going to allow the changes to affect them.
Again, sadly, I doubt that in the near term, anyone will try and offer up a new browser. Even Edge is nothing more than Chromium with MS's tech-nasty Kabuki makeup and overly-complicated proprietary plumbing. Is it too much to ask for a browser that just browses the web without all the garbage tie-ins? Tabs, ad blocking that I control, not add-ins. Like a Pi-hole, where I can add lists. I realize some browsers do this, but the tie-ins, notes, skins, email, political activism, it's all too much.
We could downvote all that stuff to oblivion. Instead, comments like it are voted to the top comment on almost every page.
If that ever really meant something, it has been so overused in the last few years that it's impossible to pick out any needles of serious use from the general default trendy grain silos of despair.
I'm not trying to get all of humanity to give up sex. I believe we can do better, here on HN, in this one regard. I am that insanely optimistic!
Thank you for your work!
HN should have an annual Appreciation Day, with no enshittification of threads.
The nerd rage is targeted at Mozilla's dishonest and incompetent managers, no? The actual dev work is top notch.
Even if it is, that kind of language doesn't help. These are all people you're talking about, trying their best to do a job they care about. Nothing gets better by your being a jerk.
I would not take that as a given for Mozilla's upper management. Many of their decisions seem to ignore what users want in deference to Google or other motivations.
Wether there is a formalized contract or not Mozilla makes choicses in the interest of Google over (especially power) users all the time. And in general its absurd to think that taking money (not to mention almost your entire funding) from someone isn't going to make you biased towards that person. As has been pointed out many times in discussions about this, you don't need any explicit deals for conflicts of interest to emerge. Having the wealth of Mozilla's leadership depend on Google's good graces is going to encourage them to make decisions that will keep Google happy.
Attacking users users that bring up grievances is not going to help your case here.
> There are some things Mozilla is disallowed from doing to Google Search results that Firefox displays, but that's basically it.
What exactly are those things? Is that why Firefox does not come with ad blocking by default?
What choices did they make in Google's interest?
Power users aren't happy that Firefox has been doing nothing but trailing Chrome for years, actively making the browser worse for power users by weakening extensions, baking ads into the browser, wilfully refusing to permit opt-out of telemetry, and lying about revenue-sharing with Pocket. [0][1][2][3][4][5][6]
Mozilla gave its CEO a raise of over $1m/year, from a starting point that was already over $1m/year, at a time when Firefox was losing usage share, while laying off engineers. Mozilla did all this while congratulating itself for putting people before profits! [7][8][9][10]
I still use Firefox as my primary desktop browser, and I really want to like Mozilla, but here we are.
(As an aside, I see Pocket is finally going to be made Free and Open Source Software, which is good news. [11])
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36841567
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24144137
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23391659
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754740
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616740
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10680925
[6] https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/17/mozilla-looks-to-its-next-...
[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569464
[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30723971
[9] https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...
I would also note that "managers" runs quite a wide gamut and my experience with engineering managers at Mozilla was generally positive; upper management was not so great.
Trolling used to be an amateur sport, but these days it's largely a professional endeavour. Astroturfing is an everyday occurrence on any decently-sized social media site, including this very one.
So, I'm glad they are expanding the extensions available. I just hope that this isn't tied to creating an account still. [EDIT] I was overjoyed to see that I was able to add an extension without creating an account. Yay!
This is one of the reasons it's so troubling when some techies latch onto some very closed platform (sometimes by a known-underhanded company) and start making it more attractive to others, by making open source software specific to it, making tutorials on hot employability topics that implicitly use the platform, etc. When open platforms exist, and could also benefit from this contribution and promotion.
At first it was "Jeebus, I wonder what's going on with that one person, who normally uses open source, stabbing themself in the back like that." Then it became "Jeebus, are we losing open platform ground with the majority of an entire generation of techies, after we'd finally won." (I have good guesses about why, and I also know at least a couple early maneuvers that I can't talk about, but it's still dismaying how vapid the collective behavior can be.)
Firefox's loss of market share in general is a direct consequence of its loss in market share among web developers, because web developers stopped testing their websites in Firefox.
Any time Firefox does something good for power users, it's a good thing for the whole web ecosystem.
I didn't say it was sh*t. I'm saying it's not newsworthy.
Clap for the devs. And install all the extensions. But we don't need a hundred posts about it. This isn't the big story Firefox marketing might think it is.
The fact news about Firefox gets upvoted clearly indicates it is newsworthy. You don't get to decide. The users of HN and their votes do.