Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

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>I'd love for real conversation about, say, keeping Servo, Web Assembly, the fallacy of "privacy preserving ads"

What is a "real" conversation? And what do those conversations help with here? Do you think Mozilla listens or cares about your conversations when they have all those billions coming from Google and can just sit and do nothing?

>how it would be nice to have a Firefox OS now with Android forcing "verified developers"

A lot of things would be nice, like ending world poverty and wars, but I'm being pragmatic and realistic instead of dreaming about things that won't realistically happen since in our world high level changes only happen, if big money or politics get involved.

>There's a rich conversation to be had about the role of Mozilla in the future of the internet

Conversations that would be a waste of time since Mozilla won't act based on our conversations. HN is full of such conversations. I'm being pragmatic, not entertaining some shallow philosophies of "wouldn't it be nice if" that don't lead anywhere since if 'ifs' were cookies I'd be fat.

Mozilla is constantly responding to community feedback, almost to a fault, encompassing everything from user interface changes, to features requests, to rolling back undesired changes. I would recommend reading more about Mozilla Connect, which I would argue was specifically launched to get ahead of spurious accusations like these. For a big flashy example, their blog post introducing Tab Groups is titled "You Asked for it, we built it", and the first line is "What happens when 4,500 people ask for the same feature? At Firefox, we build it."

Moreover they've revised their Terms of Use following criticism (much of it here on HN), wound down Pocket and Fakespot in response to feedback about these being outside of their core mission, implemented visual search in response to community requests, made it easier to switch between different profiles again based on community requests, added a rollback option for extensions to previously approved versions in response to developer requests, brought back night mode on iOS after having removed it because the community asked for it, changed the design of the iOS toolbar to get rid of the share button, centralized developer support tools in an all-in-one add on hub. And offered extensive explanations when choosing not to implement or maintain features (e.g. Live Bookmark tool).

The trouble with the real work of responding to requests is it's often granular and unsexy, even when examples abound, and it's easy to not know what they're really doing and reach for the pitchfork.

A good place to start is this explainer on all the community feedback they've been taking in: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/about-mozilla-connect/

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