I am consistently disappointed by any thread involving Mozilla on Hacker News. Somehow Mozilla is held to an impossible standard. For the one company out there holding the internet away from a WebKit monoculture, they sure get the short end of the stick by people here.
I do honestly wonder if there is some sort of campaign against Mozilla and Firefox at this point. It might not be a paid thing or some sort of conspiracy, but just an echo chamber effect that keeps getting more intense over time.
In every single thread it's the same stuff rehashed over and over, and dramatic takes about absolutely trivial changes or people being mad over Mozilla political stuff like them canning a former CEO (which was totally deserved). Very rarely do I ever see a positive comment or thread title, and most of the problems people bring up are basically non-issues for 99% of users or completely made up. There are of course some legitimate issues here and there, but they are the exception.
Every time I open these threads it's pretty confusing, I don't know if I am living in a different reality or what's up. I have had zero issues with Firefox in any way and have no complaints about the direction it's moving in. It has the best Wayland support, has great performance, now isolates each site in an OS level process (which further improves performance on modern machines), gets rapid security updates and builds in 1/4th the time and space that chromium takes. I don't notice anything missing compared to using chromium either.
Them removing Yandex from the default search engine options is barely news worthy. Users who want to use it still can, users who don't will continue not to, there is no real issue here.
It's not like this is unique to Mozilla though. Once you get big enough, you end up attracting a critical mass of people who like to rehash the same old grievances. Take any HN thread about Google, for example.
Except with Google, Google keeps committing the sins, and when even informed that they are doing it, executives at Google just respond "working as intended, WONTFIX".
I don't have much else to add because your post perfectly sums it up. To me it seems it started when Brandon Eich was outed, a segment of the tech community never let it go and views everything they do with extreme scrutiny. I don't feel like it's deserved at all. Mozilla has new leadership and Brandon has moved on to other great things like the browser Brave. Mozilla and the work they've done for open source is irreplaceable. I still use Firefox and filezilla all the time and Rust has been such a massive success that even Microsoft is using it in Windows.
I believe some of the Chromium folks are partly responsible for this. Though it's probably not a planned "campaign" of any sort, I've seen some prominent figures constantly direct hatred toward other browser vendors online, and countless webdevs piling on. I'm not posting links because many of them are highly toxic, but browser developers on the receiving end has expressed their frustrations more than once.
Because people want to see them spend their efforts on holding the Internet back from a WebKit monoculture, and donate to that cause, but they keep wasting resources on political activism, pointless bs like time-limited themes, etc. while downsizing their engineering team. Not doing those isn’t “impossible”, in fact they go out of their way to disappoint people with those distractions.
Yes, I’m aware of that. People would like to donate specifically to Firefox development though, and some donate to Mozilla Foundation under the impression that it would help. I’ve certainly done that in the past.
I'm also confused by the reaction here. Firefox isn't censoring anything. Yandex is no longer listed as a default search engine but, as others have pointed out, you can add it back if you want it.
Firefox, at least where I am in the US, also doesn't list Baidu as a possible search engine. If Firefox had decided to remove Google from this list because of privacy issues, HN would be cheering loudest.
The CEO raised her own wage repeatedly while the Firefox market share tanked, during which she directed spending to useless projects that were all eventually shelved and proceeded to plaster Firefox in ads (full page after update) when it became obvious her strategy was an abject failure.
Firefox development itself has been rudderless and lethargic for a long time. WebKit introduced backdrop filters 7 years ago and Firefox is still working on implementing them. [1]
I don't think that's a particularly high standard. The CEO is a failure and the board is incompetent for not firing her years ago.
Baker became provisional CEO in December 2019, and formally took the job in 2020. We only have salary information for one year she held the position, if that. I'm not sure if 2019 or 2020 is the last available.
And when executive salaries were rising and user share dropping, revenues were way up. From $120 million in 2010 to $520 million in 2016. Of course some of that will go to the people in charge.
The extra cash is not because Firefox is more successful, it's an additional bribe from Google so they can point to an alternative browser when governments come after them for browser anti-trust.
Most of their non-Firefox pet projects have been failures.
Implying she joined in December 2019 is seriously underplaying her role before then. [1]
Her accomplishments as CEO are tanking growth, a slew of failed projects, massive layoffs and the expansion of obnoxious full-page banner ads baked into the browser.
>extra cash is not because Firefox is more successful, it's an additional bribe from Google so they can point to an alternative browser when governments come after them for browser anti-trust.
Except yknow, 2016 where the majority of their money came from Yahoo. Because that money is buying something of value, Google is just the company that most wants the product.
>Implying she joined in December 2019 is seriously underplaying her role before then.
She became provisional CEO in 2019, like I said. And I'd have to guess she was officially hired as nobody better wanted the job for the salary.
The list goes on of conservative woman CEOs, but you probably should do some personal introspection on why the concept of such a person makes you upset.
Mozilla is just another corporation and they continuously work on things other than their primary product. It's not an impossible standard -- it's just what Hacker News wants from Mozilla and what Mozilla wants from Mozilla are two different things.
As a user of Firefox, I just want them to make a better browser both on the desktop and mobile. Mozilla wants to find ways to make more revenue.
I'm fine with this move but Mozilla has sunk well below an acceptable bar. The company sucks and has failed us all. The CEO is a joke and should have never been in the position.
They are in the business of building a web browser, and Firefox is a good web browser (I would say an excellent web browser). Their direction and trajectory is concerning, but they have clearly not sunk below an ‘acceptable bar’.
My "hate" is for the executives, not Mozilla. Firing a ton of engineers "because covid" from promising projects while taking huge, ever increasing bonuses as the browser's market share falls, is inexcusable. I'd criticize any executive for the same thing.
