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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now? Mozilla is surviving on the mercy of Google money, it's not a viable strategy.

Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?

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> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?

It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both.

I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.

Keep in mind that while Firefox offered 20 extensions on mobile, Chrome offered zero and continues to lack any support for extensions whatsoever. Nobody ditched Firefox for Chrome because of the extensions thing.

The move to WebExtensions was painful, but it also made it possible to easily port Chrome extensions to Firefox, which was a great boost for the extension ecosystem, as well as being the thing that actually made mobile extensions possible.

I do agree they should've made the transition period longer though. There were like two years in between where some of the big Chrome extensions hadn't been ported yet, but their original Firefox counterparts were already killed. That probably made a few users move ti Chrome, but that was already during the great Chrome migration, so I can't imagine this made a huge difference.

I think your comment points towards the heart of my complaint, namely, that Firefox stopped extensions on its tracks to offer parity with a browser that doesn't care about extensions. It fits the post's complaint about doing things just because Chrome is doing them.

As for the effect of extensions, my feeling is that people care less about them now but used to care more about them back then. I think Firefox main selling point was always "my cousin who works in IT told me to install this instead of that", and once Firefox angered those power users away (at the same time when Chrome was trying to bring them in) the effect compounded.

It's especially backwards because most extensions worked fine when they were first cut down to that list of 20.

They (the proclaimed bastion of user choice and freedom) just didn't allow you to install them. Forks and self-built versions handled extensions just fine immediately, there was no technical blocker, just managerial. For years. While constantly proclaiming that it was just a brief temporary state.

I switched to some of those forks immediately, literally every extension I used before worked perfectly. None of them were in the blessed list.

I honestly can't see it as anything but an intentional self-harm move, behind a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.

I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.

AI is not, and was not the reason why the average user moved away from Firefox.

AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.

Oh, I agree - firefox was losing market share long before AI was a thing.

I meant to use that as a recent example of the kind of decisions that Mozilla leadership repeatedly makes, that don't match up what their users want.

How do you know what their users want ? Firefox may not have a massive market share but it's a much larger group than just the vocal ones here on HN

I'm going mainly off the OP, but Mozilla connect is the place I'd look:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message...

> AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.

How? By selling the position of preferred model? They can do that without implementing it in a way that means people who don't want it at all have to jump through hoops to opt-out.

Being able to turn AI summaries and such off by default was the final reason I started paying for Kagi. I know they use ML in the background no matter what, but as long as I get links to resources relevant to my search, that I can read/judge/summerise as needed, first and foremost, how they produce that list is not the issue.

You are not the target audience, that’s pretty much it. You can be very against AI, try to turn it off on Kagi, avoid Google AI summaries, discard ChatGPT/Claude, but billions of people still use them. At this point it has been argued so much that it’s kinda pointless.

People seem to enjoy to be told stuff and don’t really care about sources if the said content is somewhat correct.

You don't really need to turn it off in Kagi - it only gives you an AI answer if you put a " ? " after your query.

Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.

> don't think Fx can survive on only us.

not at the current employee and costs. But do they need to do that? Do they need to produce new products (and pay the cost to do so)?

Why can't they be lean and mean? Focus purely on browser experience without any BS, without any upsell? And there are volunteers out there that willingly contribute code/fixes for free.

I like having containers for different parts of my life built into the browser. I liked relay for quite a while (moved on to other setups). I like syncing between devices and the ability to push something from my phone to my computer on another continent currently with two taps.

Yeah they have rolled out a lot of nonsense I don’t care for, but they have also rolled out a lot of features I regularly use and enjoy. You can’t please everybody, but ultimately I’m glad it’s not “just a lean browser.”

If they truly wanted to be mean and lean and focus on the browser experience they would need to throw away their pride and port the browser from gecko to blink. I think they are too prideful to do that though.

> Why can't they be lean and mean?

Because they canceled the* project and laid off the lean and mean team that threatened their bloated C++ tower of rubble.

* https://servo.org/

> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now?

I worked at Mozilla for a bit over six years and really enjoyed my time there. There were lots of brilliant people attracted by the mission and the work was technically interesting. I left in part because I came to the conclusion that the answer to these questions was no. Google's distribution advantages with Chrome and getting boxed out of mobile by the bundled Android/iOS browsers was simply too much to overcome by making a better product. People can gripe about Mozilla's management or product decisions all they want but the fundamental problem is the structure of the web browser market.

This is a good take honestly - Firefox could be perfect and efficient and secure but if the defaults are good enough why would people make the effort to switch ?

What we really need is normalised effort to provide an alternative to the systemic issues you are starting to bring up. Not just the browser market but the entrenchment of big tech in general. An organisation that can deliver on what the idealists individually want in a big, cohesive way.

Personally in our current day an age I think that's what a labor union can provide (in addition to the obvious other resources).

> it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit.

Leaders are accountable for their decisions, their statements, their strategies, and their care for the organisation(s) that they lead.

Its weird how quickly people are to excuse the class literally paid to be responsible.

That wasn't my point, really. But that they chastise Mozilla leadership without offering any other alternative direction than "keeping doing as in 2009".

I used Firefox and made sure everybody in my circle family and social used it. I had donated 5$ to Mozilla when I was making 360$ per month. I believed in mozilla, I was naive. Soon after I learned the money didn't go to Firefox. They soon after launched a political campaign in my country. I realized this and every other fancy they had, was where my money was going. Stopped using it and stopped caring a long while back. Can't wait for Servo/Ladybird to replace it.

What was the campaign?

Can't remember now it was at least 10-13 years ago.

Agreed

Firefox is a top notch browser we all are provided with for free. And it's been great and free for longer than any other browser. Ever.

Browsers are notoriously difficult to build and maintain. I think we owe all the engineers and people behind it a lot of appreciation.

Have they made a few missteps over the years trying out the new hot thing ? Yes. And it temporarily upset a niche of technical people. And last time I checked none of these things were very hard to avoid or turn off.

> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?

A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)

This, in part. The swift deprecation of XUL extensions felt like a kick in the gonads and made me switch to Pale Moon for a while, after which I landed on Firefox ESR to avoid the inmediate impact of bad decisions, and accumulated a veritable landslide of user.js and userchrome.css tweaks I keep having to maintain.

On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.

It has merit. I left for similar reasons after a similar tour. I largely agree with their reasons. No further notes.

if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?

I really don’t think it would.

One thing “Do what you did before when you were successful!” is missing is that Firefox was sleek, fast, extendable, new, and cool.

It was cool partly because of its “sleek, fast, extendable”, but also because of its “new”, and it can’t get “new” back.

Perhaps launching a completely new piece of software, like the Netscape -> Firefox change (although that was organic, not planned) - but only if it’s actually something new and cool that comes out of it. A rebadge won’t work.

I don’t think there’s a playbook that works here. I’m struggling to think of many major pieces of tech (or non-tech!) that ever got its cool back. Netscape -> Firefox? Apple and/or the Mac? IE4? Lego? Elvis? “New Nixon”?...

Alongside all of the successes there are orders of magnitude more failures, and I don’t think they’re all on merit.

There is a pool of opportunities they largely refuse to jump into: those requiring curation. Pocket, the sole exception, ended up as yet another unforced error.

The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as:

* Wanting niche features that don't benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.

* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).

* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)

* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.

These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.

Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1172/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18

I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser. A paid email service is also something many have been asking for a while. People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.

> I didn't hear any enthusiasts complain about the new VPN integration, which helps fund the browser.

You did not read the comments of this submission?[1]

This is common.[2][3][4][5] And those were comments which were easy to find because they said Firefox and VPN. Many other comments said they should focus on Firefox solely. Or eliminate all side projects.

> People even want to donate money for browser development, but can't due to the foundation structure.

People can give money to Mozilla Corporation by purchasing Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, or MDN Plus.

Rules for businesses to solicit donations are strict. Mozilla would have to be more careful than most because people confuse non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And many of the small minority of Firefox users who said they would donate implied or said plainly a condition was Mozilla would abandon other income.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515030

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225892

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434873

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065167

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46323661

> You did not read the comments of this submission?[1] This is common.[2][3][4][5] And those were comments which were easy to find because they said Firefox and VPN.

Fair, there are complaints out there, but I'd rank the response very mild compared to AI and the upcoming Nova design.

> Many other comments said they should focus on Firefox solely. Or eliminate all side projects.

Of course, since most of their money comes from search royalties for having Firefox users.

> People can give money to Mozilla Corporation by purchasing Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, or MDN Plus. Rules for businesses to solicit donations are strict. Mozilla would have to be more careful than most because people confuse non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. It is well known in fund raising most people who say they would donate will not donate. And many of the small minority of Firefox users who said they would donate implied or said plainly a condition was Mozilla would abandon other income.

Yes, but what I'm saying is there's no general opposition from "enthusiasts" to Firefox making money like the parent commenter stated. The more popular take I've seen is to support Firefox via paying for VPN, etc.

I don't think workflow concerns can just be brushed off. Breaking changes and constant design churn is devastating for user retention.

What users want is a working browser that gets out of the way and them browse the web. That's what Chrom(e,ium) is. It's like air, it's everywhere but you can't see it.

Firefox is not. Every time you open Firefox, there's a new dialog announcing some change or shilling some product. It's cut from the same cloth as that car that Homer Simpson designed. Every time you open Firefox, it works a bit differently, so you have to unlearn some habit and learn a new one[1]. This is friction. This grates. You have some task to perform, which is why you opened the browser, but now you your blood pressure is up 20 points because firefox can't just let you browse, it's always telling you stuff in a dozen different channels, popups, toasts, notifications, there's always something it throws in your face, often multiple calls to action at once. So you say for fucks sake, and go back to chrome which just lets you browse with none of that nonsense.

These are all the calls to action I get when I open firefox. Which I opened yesterday as well, so it's not a clean install.

https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/firefox.png

Why is there a dialog announcing widgets, when I can see the widgets already? It's literally telling me what I see on the screen. Why do you need this exposition to inform me of something that is plain to see in front of my eyes? It's like bad fiction writing, except in the form of annoying UX.

Like is anyone working on Firefox actually using the browser, in its vanilla configuration? How can they not see how infuriating it is to be a Firefox user?

[1] 5 years ago we changed which kitchen drawer we keep the cutlery in, and I still reach for the wrong one every time.

Yeah, definitely agree with this. I still use Firefox a bit on some machines but it is constantly popping up little things - "are you finding tabs overwhelming? try tab groups" / "try vertical tabs" / whatever. I'm not finding them overwhelming, just shut up please.

Also the context menus are super noisy, I tried cutting some bits out in config, but there's just so much crap in there. Obviously all the AI stuff, but also just the basics; right-clicking on a tab has a sub-menu for "Close Multiple Tabs" which hides "Close other tabs" and "Close tabs to the right" which are probably what I use the most. In Chromium they're top-level menu items.

And it went through a phase a few months ago where the context menus were sometimes offset or goofily sized; I think that's fixed now.

I guess it's easy to criticise, but it just doesn't feel like this stuff is well aligned to actually using the browser, whereas Chromium feels like a solid product.

> Wanting niche features that don't benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.

Except power user features benefit everyone even if most people will only use some of them. Power users are users and users are potential power users.

> Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery

There is no such expectation. In fact, I'd much prefer it if there were NO breaking changes.

> General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows

Yes, that's a very reasonable expectation for a tool that people need daily.

> Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience

When you build infrastructure you don't go looking how to monetize your users, you look for funding. The lack of funding is 100% due to Mozilla preferring to suck on google's teat because Google doesn't question executive compensation as long as those executes do what they want.

>if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?

Yes.

It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.

Firefox's market share peaked in 2009. Eich was CEO for 2 weeks in 2014. He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position. The same lawyer lady Mitchell Baker had every top job from 1999 to 2008.

"He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position."

At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.

It was.

I don't believe that for one second, and neither should you. Every single CEO who gets fired is made to "voluntarily" resign.

You weren’t there.

Were you? I have no idea who you are, but the only "other C-level position" was an unspecified throwaway line from Reid Hoffman, who didn't have authority to create any such "Chief of Special Projects" position anyway. The CEO makes the C-level org chart; the new CEO after me was waiting in the wings but in no position to make promises.

You seem awfully eager to assert something false, possibly out of bad conscience. No one involved in my departure had a good solution for my staying at Mozilla, including me.

That engineer went on to create Brave, a browser that pays you Monopoly money for watching ads, injected affiliate links, installed their commercial VPN without asking, and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its "privacy" mode. I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there.

Brave engineer here.

> "Monopoly money for watching ads"

What does Firefox pay you for piping your keystrokes off to Google? BAT is a reward for your attention; far better arrangement and exchange than what has existed up to this point. It's not perfect, but what's your solution?

> "injected affiliate links"

You seem to be a little free and loose with _facts_. Rather than exchange your data for revenue, Brave explores revenue streams which won't keep us up at night. One such consideration was affiliate links. We had a couple (quite literally a couple/few), that would appear when you typed certain crypto-related keywords into the address bar. When suggestions were offered, so too would be our affiliate option.

This solution presented a means by which users could support Brave without involving their data. Unfortunately, a UI/UX bug caused the affiliate option to appear even for a fully-qualified domain, which meant a user who quickly typed a URL for which we offered an affiliate link and mashed Enter, could unintentionally have selected the affiliate option. That isn't _injection_.

The issue was identified pretty quickly, and a patch was sent out. Guess how much Brave made from the buggy behavior before it was patched? I'll help you: $0.

You can read more at https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/, though I must warn you ahead of time that it isn't as exciting or shocking as you might have liked.

You know what would be SHOCKING though? Imagine if Mozilla had tried to do something quite similar. Oh, wait… https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2021/10/firefox-revea....

> "installed their commercial VPN without asking"

This one is actually somewhat true. We did indeed ship an inert service for some Windows users. The goal was to have the VPN option be immediately available to users who wished to purchase it, as a means of supporting Brave. Details are in the GitHub issue: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/33726.

> "and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its 'privacy' mode."

Oh, this is one of my favorites. It's a classic story with depth, misdirection, unexpected side-effects of decisions made years in between, and more! This one is the type of thing I would have expected to read about in _Joel on Software_ many years ago.

So, we shipped a browser with a "privacy" mode, much like everybody else. But, we weren't fans of the common approach used by Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and others. Their approach doesn't really make you _incognito_, or _private_; it just creates an ephemeral account locally and basically does some file-system cleanup. We wanted something stronger!

As fans of the Tor project, we opted to bake-in support for Tor as an optional enhancement to private tabs. This would give you one extra, super-thick layer of incognito-ness. Tor Private Tabs were shipped back in mid 2018, and the next couple of years were pretty awesome. Brave users who enabled optional Tor support enjoyed a superior experience to that found in other popular browsers.

Years later—as the tracker wars waged on—some data-harvesters got the idea that they could evade detection by way of CNAMEs, giving them first-party privileges. So in late 2020, Brave shipped CNAME decloaking, unmasking more trackers than Mystery Inc., and dramatically expanding the privacy moat.

But the story wouldn't be all that exciting if it didn't have a twist, right!? Brave's new CNAME-decloaking didn't consider the Tor scenario, and performed DNS lookups outside of an existing proxy!

While the combination of these features didn't make Brave as porous as ordinary "incognito mode", it did punch an embarrassing hole in the Tor boundary: page traffic still went through Tor, but CNAME adblocking DNS lookups accidentally went out through the user's normal DNS path.

For that narrow slice of activity, Brave drifted uncomfortably close to what Mozilla calls "private browsing": https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/common-myths-about-priv... ("Private browsing [in Firefox] doesn't hide your activity from your ISP, mask your IP address or location, or stop websites from identifying or tracking you…)

> "I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there."

Let's check in again in another 5 years ;)

It’s not.

Agreed. For some reasons, the powers to be (Google?) didn't want someone who was independent (not be "guided" by Google), understood the core product technically and from an actual user's perspective, who may have been able to innovate Firefox into a better product and possibly even decouple Firefox from Google with alternative revenue streams (who knows, maybe instead of Brave Search, we may have had Firefox search?).

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