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> Do you people suffer split personality or something?

There are downsides to doing design and development in the open, sometimes looking that way is one of them. But the benefits are worth it.

At the same time, you have to acknowledge that Mozilla suffered a huge backlash from its user base when Australis was landed on release. For the exact opposite reason you're describing.

I'm not sure if these events are related, but Firefox developers have been talking about this decision in the mailing list for a while. This doesn't come to me as a surprise.

I wouldnt call the Australis reaction a backlash, in fact I believe it was very positive considering it was a big change. If your point was that there was and will always be people who protest against a change, then yup.

What is it that makes you think that the reception of Australis was "very positive"?

I'd consider the reception of a software product update to merely be "positive" if there was generally praise, basically no negativity at all, and people expressing that they are now significantly better off.

"Very positive" would involve no negativity, and complete and total jubilation from users. This is extremely rare.

A lot of people are not happy about Australis, and justifiably so. While Firefox has been imitating Chrome the past few years, Australis sealed the deal and made them nearly identical in the most critical ways.

The only mitigating factor is that there really isn't a viable alternative to either Chrome or Firefox these days. Opera has basically become Chrome, and Safari obviously has very similar roots. IE is engaging in the same imitation of Chrome. Both IE and Safari suffer from a lack of portability, too.

Many Firefox users are extremely disappointed with Australis, but they have no recourse. Switching browsers isn't really an option. And we wouldn't be in this position had Mozilla listened to all of the past feedback they've been given, so giving more feedback is probably a pointless exercise. So they suck it up, as best they can.

Australis was a debacle, at best. I think you're deceiving yourself, and people not familiar with the situation, to suggest otherwise.

I wonder how long it will be before Mozilla are in real danger of losing control of the browser they call Firefox, if they continue on their recent trajectory. We're talking about Open Source here, so it is always possible to fork it under different branding, and a few groups already have for one reason or another.

Of course, in reality, forking and then establishing the fork as a mainstream replacement that aligns more closely with the traditional advantages of Firefox would be a huge undertaking. For any new browser to gain traction outside of geek communities would surely require both a substantial user base and substantial support from the development community.

But it's been done before, even for large and high profile projects, when the existing corporate stewardship wasn't getting the job done: the LibreOffice/OpenOffice split is the first example that comes to mind. If I were this week's CEO at Mozilla, I would consider a mainstream fork to be at least a plausible threat by now.

I think that they've already voluntarily given up control over the destiny of Firefox, in a sense. By imitating Chrome so closely these past few years, we haven't seen any real innovation out of Mozilla. They've been following, rather than leading. Since they aren't calling the shots, they don't really have true control over the future of Firefox.

The less tech savvy users that are unhappy about the Australis UI changes don't know who they can complain to or where they can complain. I think that the backlash from power users has been lessened because addons (Classic Theme Restorer and Classic Toolbar Buttons) can successfully undo the distasteful and unnecessary Australis UI changes. It is telling that one of the best rated extensions for FF is an addon that undoes supposedly positive changes.

Reliance on third party addons for functionality is almost always a step backwards, but it is possible to run the latest Nightly with the pre-Australis UI.

Users can report their [dis]satisfaction using Firefox Input, the happy/sad feedback form in Firefox's Help menu (if you know to look). And user comments are public and tracked closely. It can be a cesspool, but it is enlightening: https://input.mozilla.org

> I'd consider the reception of a software product update to merely be "positive" if there was generally praise, basically no negativity at all, and people expressing that they are now significantly better off.

I've never known a company to pull that off. Even Apple, praised for their design sense, has, according to you, never had a "positive" release of any software.

> A lot of people are not happy about Australis, and justifiably so.

The same exact thing can be said about the previous UI.

> And we wouldn't be in this position had Mozilla listened to all of the past feedback they've been given

That's a fairly selfish attitude to take. What you are really saying is that you'd rather piss off many other Firefox users who don't share your opinion.

>Australis sealed the deal and made them nearly identical in the most critical ways.

How is that? Using the hamburger icon, which was used by Mozilla in mockups before Chrome used it, or rounded tabs (which Chrome doesn't actually use), or making the customization UI (something which Chrome doesn't have, yet again) not look like it's from the year 2000?

Please identify the critical ways in which it's imitating Chrome.

The most important aspects for me would be customization, and Chrome doesn't offer anything in the same ballpark. And with Chrome, you have to resort to tedious workarounds to install certain extensions if you don't want to login to your Google account. And if we ignore all of that, Firefox's add-on ecosystem wins too.

People get upset at every UI rehaul; you could hear much the same sentiment after Firefox 3.

> "That's not who we are at Mozilla". That's Mozilla talking about a Mozilla decision. Do you people suffer split personality or something?

Wow, this here is a textbook case of out-of-context quoting...even in a post that takes 30 seconds to read. Here's the context that the parent comment has completely failed to read:

> A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher, and worried that we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit.

> > That’s not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla.

"That's not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla"

- refers to the perceived fear that:

"we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit".

- NOT to an actual decision/policy that the Mozilla team is ostensibly standing behind. I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of your rant, but the fact that you so terribly misquoted the OP doesn't lend your argument much credence.

The grandparent comment was quietly asserting that the "perceived fear" was actually Mozilla's plan, and that they reversed course. I must admit, while I'd never really thought about Mozilla as an organization much before, the last month or two has prompted some thought about it, and this sort of "We're doing A. <time passes> No, wait, there's a perceived fear that we'll do A, but that's not who we are; we're doing B." seems like a good model of what they're doing lately. This saddens me, since I mostly use Firefox these days. :/

> The grandparent comment was quietly asserting that the "perceived fear" was actually Mozilla's plan, and that they reversed course.

Except nothing in the original announcement came close to the perceived fear. Essentially, people were extrapolating in such a way that this[0] comes to mine.

[0] http://xkcd.com/605/

> Do you people suffer split personality or something?

I think it was Marissa Meyer who said, "Companies don't do things. People do things."

Companies are just collections of people grouped together under some sort of legal structure. It doesn't mean that they actually all act as if they were one monolithic entity. Even at relatively small companies, it's not unusual for one team to have the authority to make a decision that later gets contradicted or reversed either higher up the chain, or in a different part of the organization.

I don't know if this is better or worse than average at Mozilla, but it's certainly present to at least some extent in any company of (almost) any size.

> I don't know if this is better or worse than average at Mozilla,

It's less about contradiction (which implies a final decision was made and then reversed) and more about being painfully open. Other companies may also have lots of instances where there's internal disagreement on things, but when your standard form of communication is mailing lists, IRC, and blog posts, it's a lot harder to maintain the façade of a unified mind.

You're exactly right.

This would be like a person who is unable to lead internal dialog, and everything they think, they say out loud.

A well run company acts as one person. That's what a brand means.

For good or bad, in the mind of people companies are allocated as a "person". We give personal characteristics to brands, so we value companies that act predictably, have certain well-known values and are consistent with their own values.

It's the utmost responsibility even if your CEO changes every month, that the next CEO ensure continuity in spirit and operation of a company.

After all, sure, companies don't do things, people do. But also people don't do things, brain cells do things. When a person is acting erratic and inconsistent, you don't talk about their internal brain cell conflicts, you see a problem at the person level.

Same way erratically behaving brands & companies will be written off, because they don't stand for anything and have no reliable characteristics.

Companies that act inconsistently are said to have "left hand doesn't know what right hand does" problem. It's not a feature, it's a bug. It's no coincidence the analogy is to that with the mind of a single person. You may be collection of brain parts, but for proper operations it's crucial you operate self-consistently. Companies are no different.

This isn't your average company, though. It's Mozilla. Their main product is a completely open-source browser, and nearly 100% of their decision making is done out in the open, with the community's input being a massive part of it. So, while I agree with your assessment when it comes to most companies that can act like that, this is different in my opinion.