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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Since YouTube has massive resources and famed tooling&processes, presumably either they knew about the Firefox problems before deploying, or (if there was a genuine QA mistake) they'd know about it very soon after deploy, when they'd be able to rollback if they wanted to.

(Obviously, they know about Firefox, they've developed for it since it was available, and they've even been funding it.)

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Google funding Firefox is part of the problem. It contributes to the perception of corruption around the Mozilla organization, just as it does when the bus has a supergraphic ad for a car dealership on it.

If the EU was serious about privacy they'd fully fund Firefox.

The perception of corruption is not without merit. Mozilla is pretty corrupt at this point. (Source: I work here).

I really don’t get where this whole “the EU should fund it” idea came from and why it’s repeated so often. Why would the EU throw their tax payer money at another corrupt American corporation? Mozilla has been in bed with Google for several years, has horrible web compatibility, and is only barely still in the privacy lane.

Besides, Europe isn’t the land of open source software and privacy. Look at the laws in the UK, France, and Germany; they’re not exactly privacy friendly. Look at the tech stacks at companies in the UK and Germany, they lean very heavily into the Microsoft/.NET world.

Then they should fork it and start a new organization.

The EU and the world could have a privacy focused browser if they paid for it. If they don't they're going to always be waiting for the market to do it and it won't. Given that Mozilla wastes a lot of resources on things that are thoroughly pizzled (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac) a browser could be maintained for much less than the current Mozilla budget. This is why "fully funded" as opposed to "funded" is key. So long as the organization feels the need to go around with its hat out it is going to be corrupt.

They can fork Chromium instead. Doesn't mean Firefox is the best base to start.

… and there are many Chromium forks out there. For web standards to really be standards and not “Chromium” there has to be a viable non-Chromium browser.

The illusion of choice:

You can have any color car as long as its black. I mean you can run any browser you want, as long as its Chrome.

If Firefox had 90% of the market would it be a choice?

Yes, because Mozilla can't force is onto it by making google finance and YouTube run like shit on competing browsers

Can you elaborate on specifics of corruption?

Basically, follow the money.

To keep nonprofit/tax benefits, the work has to be done for some sort of public benefit. That work never gets done, instead it’s constant reorganizations, hiring/firing, and shuffling money around. We’re always profitable, and every few years there seems to be decent to huge layoffs even though we’re beating revenue estimates and behind on our hiring goals.

Money keeps going up from Google, usage keeps going down, start new projects, never staff them to what is budgeted, cut project, fire people, and the money disappears into the foundation. Foundation sends money out to various levels of ghost and shell corporations.

Most of this sounds like poor management and not corruption. But perhaps the corruption is intentional mismanagement to keep it uncompetitive

I wonder what your thoughts are on Firefox's absence of an AdBlocker on iOS? Edge has one, Brave has one, but Firefox still doesn't have one. I know that on iOS they can't run plugins, but since the other browsers can, it feels like a lost opportunity.

Could Google's funding be related?

Why would EU fund a US corporation?

EU has funded Servo, which is a lot better than giving money to already-rich Mozilla CxOs: https://nlnet.nl/project/Verso/

I always find these comments a bit rediculous. You think that big corporations are incapable of having accidental bugs?

Wish that were true. The world would be a much less buggy place.

> I always find these comments a bit rediculous. You think that big corporations are incapable of having accidental bugs?

I didn't say they that they couldn't have accidental bugs.

I did note that they'd normally be able to rollback a deploy with problems.

Why do you say that's ridiculous to comment?

I don't think it's ridiculous, it's just they might not necessarily care enough. They will consider it a bug if there's enough uproar, for now there are just a couple of unhappy users here and there, no reasons to revert something that presumably took a lot of work to implement, especially if the fix takes more effort than the original implementation (I wouldn't be surprised since we're talking about performance differences between browser engines).

I kinda hope that time-to-render is in their A/B rollout metrics to prevent rollouts...

In the world of fail early, fail often this stuff is bound to happen. That said YouTube works fine for me minus the obvious resolution issues that YouTube has been enforcing forever because of DMCAon some videos

You’d be shocked how shitty the development practices inside a bigco can be. Working at a FAANG-level company is profoundly disillusioning.

One of recent Chromium updates (affected Chrome's and Edge's wide release, not just betas) completely broke all pages with select elements containing a large amount of option elements. We're talking 100+ times slower parsing of the page. An internal tool of ours went from rendering pretty much instantly to 30s long hangs and/or crashes.

Found the bug: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/341095522

From the thread:

> We’re now directing users to move away from Chrome

…to where, exactly?

It feels more like YouTube just doesn't prioritize an unpopular browser. Google only put resources into Firefox so they can say they're not a monopoly, but that strategy didn't really pan out. So, now, they're probably going to stop caring about Firefox altogether.

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