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Comment by Yoric | Hacker News Reader

I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security.

I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is right, but the bad will of the tech crowd is a bit exhausting.

Writing this as a former Firefox contributor.

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I never worked on Firefox, and am often critical of Mozilla, but I can second this sentiment. It's seemed like everything Mozilla does makes everyone mad, all the time. It's frustrating.

I'm still happy with mozilla. Keep it up!

Also, compared to the scale of harm that Google does and the risk of it de facto controlling the web with the chromium engine, all the things that Mozilla does to piss people off should be small potatoes.

It's the "vocal minority", right? Sure it's not fun to receive threats but it's a known fact that communicating over the Internet makes people unhinged. Maybe there's stuff to complain about but I am a happy Firefox user for .. what? over two decades! :) so, thanks for that.

I get that. Somehow this feels different. Mozilla recently changing the privacy policy I think caused a bunch of it, and then leaning heavily into AI initiatives at a time where I think people just don't want it, contributes too.

It feels deeper somehow than just raging at UI changes or something, since the FAQ change basically betrays what Mozilla has been touting all along, so the trust in their future promises is hurt a lot too. Willingness to change this indicates some kind of internal change that doesn't bode well.

Sure, it's probable that their intent was not the way it was interpreted but we only have what they say to go on. We don't read into things like lawyers or give companies the benefit of the doubt; almost every time this happens it hurts the user.

If no one is sending you stupid threats online, are you even alive?

As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon situation since it broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned.

At least that's how it looked from this side. I switched to Vivaldi some 4-5 years ago, and it looks and works pretty much the same since I started using it. New features and changes have happened, but they've been able to be ignored/disabled/hidden without doing CSS brain surgery.

If/when the Google Adblockerblocker changes trickles down to Vivaldi I may have to crawl back to Firefox, but I dread the prospect.

In the latest version they changed something AGAIN, when you drag a tab too far to the left it's pinned automatically. Literally nobody asked for it and it makes me so angry, god I hate Mozilla. I only use Fiefox because it's the last browser with Manifest V2 (I have a lot of these add-ons) and as an add-on dev they made me even more angry with having double standards regarding their shitty add-on review system.

> And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned.

When I worked on Firefox, most of the changes happened exactly because user research determined that users wanted them and/or that not having them hurt the product. We changed the tabs at least once because users thought that the old shape of tabs made the browser feel slow (true story, sadly). We changed the add-on API (after having warned add-on developers for at least 6 years) because the old API was incompatible with multi-threading, multi-process, sandboxing, which in turn was really bad for both performance and security.

I'll absolutely grant you that Mozilla hasn't been very good at communicating these choices, but again, the sheer hostility of tech crowds is exhausting.

Anyone can hip fire an accusation from the philosopher's chair (potty), and it's like that thing about a falsehood circling the world five times before the truth even gets out of bed.

Against the avalanche of claims that they've "done nothing", it can be tedious to pull out examples of, say, major projects achieving huge performance improvements in WebGPU, but meanwhile it costs nothing to claim Firefox has "done nothing since Quantum" which I've heard claimed in these parts in full sincerity.

I don't know but I've been using Firefox since forever and I can't even recall the tabs changing at all. Of course they have changed many times over the course of years, but that happens in every browser. I don't know what happened to tabs that affected you so badly? I feel like it's an excuse for some people sometime that if some little thing in the UI changes that they claim their whole flow is now compromised so that is the reason they are now using this other software, where the same stuff happens as far as I can see.

I'm obviously not just talking about the tabs. And "some little UI thing" can absolutely break your workflow - UI isn't just how things look. Mozilla purged lots of minor features over the years, and the goto excuse was usually "parity with Chrome" or "telemetry".

> broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons

> I switched to Vivaldi

You refer to important security improvements as "vague technical reasons" and you switched to Vivaldi, a browser that is based[1] on extended stable Chromium, which is not "recommended for any team where security is a primary concern"[2].

It seems you don't care about security.

[1] https://help.vivaldi.com/android/android-privacy/security-fa...

[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/p...

You're right - security is not my primary concern.

>security fixes that are relevant to any Chrome Browser platforms will be landed on the extended stable branch

>complex and risky changes [...] may not be viable to backport

Big deal.

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