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From the link:

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/n...

"Messaging System"

"Vision"

"Firefox must be an opinionated user agent that keeps folks safe, informed and effective while browsing the Web. In order to have an opinion, Firefox must have a voice."

"That voice will respect the user’s attention while surfacing contextually relevant and timely information tailored to their individual needs and choices."

Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** who orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product. And then cajole/order/encourage another subordinate to write a florid virtuous editorial justifying their belligerent idea.

> write a florid virtuous editorial

Related: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/mozilla-now-only-...

Thanks so much for linking that. This is 1000% on point and I'm so confused with what mozilla has been doing the past few years. It's like the organization as a whole suffered a stroke, and the result is this flowery meaningless prose.

As JRRM wrote, "any man who must say 'I am king' is no true king at all."

Any browser who constantly reminds you how private and user-empowering it is, is probably neither.

Add to that a vaguely liberal-sounding rethoric that could be right out of Ron Desantis' worst "woke lib" stereotypes - without even actually being liberal.

Like, not that I'd see the browser an appropriate location for that, but if they actually wanted to commit to a liberal political view, I'd at least have expected "diverse voices" somewhere. But I have no clue what "independent voices" is supposed to mean.

>JRRM

I know of JRR Tolkien, and GRR Martin, but...

As Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll wrote, "If your thoughts incline ever so little towards fuming,” you will say “fuming-furious;” if they turn, by even a hair's breadth, towards “furious,” you will say “furious-fuming;” but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious.”"

...to add something of more topical substance, I generally agree with the perfectly-balanced opinion above, in that it's a surprisingly mealy-mouthed justification for what is pretty clearly awful behaviour. I'd respect the hustle a lot more if the response hadn't been so verbally Corporate Memphis.

What a beautiful comment. And I agree!

As an aside, I’ve started adding Lewis Carrol, mainly Alice, quotes to the bottom of my weekly status reports and gotten some weirdly positive feedback on this.

That was beautiful.

...and yeah, it was late. Sorry.

Underrated comment.

I think it means independent from any grasp on reality.

It's not just Mozilla. Western society as a whole is transitioning from one where discourse and consensus is based on reason, to one where it is based on feelings.

Listen to some prominent politicians today. Politicians have always had to speak in convoluted and stupid ways to conceal or deflect the truth, but generally they were coherent, the sequence of words had some meaning you could understand even if it was wrong or they were lying. Now it's just complete gibberish with feel-good words sprinkled in.

It's primarily being driven by a transition to low engagement media, such as social media and cable news, being the primary thought drivers of society. The average person was always pretty unwise, but they typically had to engage with their community in a productive way and would know an elder who was vaunted for being kind, fair, and intelligent, and who could be consulted when difficult situations were encountered. Now our society has been horrifically fractured into small atoms, so when people encounter confusing situations, they have a talking head (who's primary motivation is high viewership) explain something in a way that emotionally makes sense but doesn't actually encompass the complexity of a topic.

and worse than that, it is loaded with all the latest "current things" that are deemed unattackable, or any mainstream powers will label you one or more "ists", and work to silence you at best, or get you blacklisted from any work using bully methods

Western society has had discourse on feelings for hundreds of years (see nationalism/imperialism in the 19th century and authoritarian ideologies in the 20th)

You misunderstand. I didn't say western society had no discourse on feelings. On the contrary, the fathers of reason in the west like Aristotle talked extensively about feelings, far longer than just hundreds of years ago.

I said based on reason. It's quite possible to reason about feelings.

Anyway, what's this "discourse on feelings" that was related nationalism/imperialism and authoritarianism you're talking about? I've never heard of it, it sounds interesting.

Anyway, what's this "discourse on feelings" that was related nationalism/imperialism and authoritarianism you're talking about? I've never heard of it, it sounds interesting.

The KdF movement might be considered an example (Kraft durch Freude, Strength through Joy). Rearming Germany after WWI required the Nazis to rally the population by means ranging from technical to emotional to spiritual. From Wikipedia:

>Hitler's architect and Minister for Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, said in his final speech at the Nuremberg trials: "Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man..." [11]

If you can read that without feeling a chill at the base of your spine, well, maybe it's just me.

And of course, any appeal to religion is ultimately an appeal to feelings, since there's nothing objective behind it. A Wehrmacht soldier who started to question his role in the war needed only to look down at his belt buckle to remind himself that God was on his side.

It's all very interesting to consider, but it doesn't have much to do with Mozilla (I hope).

Sounds like a stretch. You can link any subject or event to how people feel about it.

I don't think there was any notable "discourse on feelings" related to those things.

This is why Mozilla lost a lot of volunteers, too, including me.

I did not wish to contribute to a political organization. I wished to contribute to a browser. It’s not possible to do one without the other at Mozilla, although it used to be.

It doesn't feel like politics to me. More like marketing and economics.

A browser could theoretically be politically engaged by ensuring open web standards and accessibility etc. but this is not that, me thinks.

When people oppose "Politics" they usually mean politics they don't agree with. The politics they do agree with aren't "politics" to them, that's just a normal part of everyday life and it's crazy that other people try to claim that's "politics".

If you have a broader understanding of what politics is in the first place you're not going to object to an organisation having "politics" because of course it does, it's composed of people, it exists to further somebody's goals or else it wouldn't exist, it's not like organisations can spontaneously wish themselves into existence.

I think this is an uncharitable interpretation.

My understanding to people opposing politics in certain things, is typically about opposing unrelated political messaging in said thing.

For a free open source web browser, obviously there is will be politics somewhere. FOSS is political in nature. Web standards involve politics, with multiple parties wanting to influence them for their own reasons. Hell, challenging a multi-billion corporation monopoly is inherently political.

Having political messaging about "celebrating voices making the world a better place" is odd and misplaced political messaging, orthogonal to the politics of a free open source web browser, and will alienate part of the people that are not interested in something this unrelated, irrespective to their agreement to said messaging.

I am personally in favor of universal health care. I wouldn't like to see messaging about it in a web browser, just to give a silly example.

Precisely why I abandoned Tor and shut down my relays. It went from a technical project that solved an interesting problem to a "human rights" project that wanted to shape the world in a liberal Western fashion. That's a no-no from me.

> I'm so confused with what mozilla has been doing the past few years

Past Few years? I assume you mean from something like 2020? We are now in 2023 they are close to have been doing it for a decade.

I am still surprised to see how the acknowledgement curve plays out in real time. It takes 5 - 8 years before it even hit mainstream.

If your parent is like myself, as I have gotten older, the perceived delta between "close to a decade" and "past few years" has converged to approximately nothing.

I know. I am old from pre-Netscape era. Generally speaking I use few years as 3-4 years. Close to a decade as ~8 years. But in this case, worth considering Firefox ( Or Phoenix ) was established 20 years ago. 5 years is quarter of its life time.

> As for "making the world a better place", again, there seems to be some kind of implicit political agenda.

Ironically, Firefox could make the world a slightly better place (in a very specific aspect of the world) if they focused simply in making a great web browser, without unnecessary bells and whistles and without any politic posturing, but that aimed at denting the Chrome monopoly.

That's no longer their goal, though. Their goal is to appear like they care about making a better browser, while actually doing whatever makes the executives the most money.

So, is Firefox effectively on life-support, and functioning purely as a corpse from which the MBA-type vultures who encircle it can pluck morsels of resumé-fluff at the browser's expense?

It's just my opinion, but yes and no. There's still quite a few decent people working on the browser, and they deserve props. The browser is really good code-wise. The problem is everything else around it.

The current CEO, Mitchell Baker, is clearly in it for the money. She got a salary increase while cutting 250 employees last year, and still had the audacity to say it wasn't enough. Brendan Eich had a bit of political controversy, but being a technical person I think he would've been better as far as focusing on the actual browser.

> Brendan Eich had a bit of political controversy, but being a technical person I think he would've been better as far as focusing on the actual browser.

He didn't have a political controversy. He was pushed out because he didn't subscribe to the US democrat partisan allowed views, but quite the opposite, which is a fireable offense, apparently.

I don't agree with him on that stance but it shouldn't matter to run a tech company.

I absolutely know that those who censor and fire for political differences definitely don't have my best interests at heart and, while claiming to represent me and my "diversity", they'll brush me aside with a label as soon as I'm not convenient to them or go against their power hungry messaging.

Brendan Eich was a sign of the authoritarian and censorious movement which also tried to bring down the likes of Linus Torvalds or RMS but ultimately failed because it doesn't really produce value and they do, far too much.

Just because someone says they're doing good while claiming you're evil if you don't agree with their non debatable measures doesn't mean they're right, consistent and/or honest.

Eich was in a position to benefit from the size and scope of Mozilla's user base, much as Mitchell Baker is today. The difference is, AFAIK Baker doesn't use her money and influence to rally the electorate to deprive other people of their rights.

It's disingenuous in the extreme for you to cite Eich's victimhood at the hands of a mythical "cancel culture" when the real cancel culture is powered by government-backed forces that he helped to nurture and guide.

In short, if you want to leverage your celebrity and influence to make the world a worse place rather than a better one, you can't expect people to ignore it. There's a fellow named Musk who is likely to learn the same lesson if he doesn't step off the path he's on now.

I wrote a whole reply and then deleted when you're basically: - pushing for deplatforming based on your own authoritarianism. - claiming whatever you do is right and should allow no debate. - threatening Elon mask för some weird reason.

Authoritarians who feel right to censor, attack and deplatform are a problem no matter if they're Religious conservatives or identity politics fanatics.

Both are rabid and don't make the world a better place.

You seem to be one of them and your threats are tired at this point.

No one censored Eich. They just exercised their right to determine whom they associated with... a right I suspect you'd defend to the death in other circumstances.

It's all fun and games until the guns come out. At that point, the person who initiates force, or who supports those who do, is the bad guy. That would be Eich.

> No one censored Eich. They just exercised their right to determine whom they associated with... a right I suspect you'd defend to the death in other circumstances.

That is semantic bullshit. Anyone who is paying a modicum of attention knows that a mixture of woke/US democrat pushed causes have a very specific narrative that, when you oppose them, your person, job, funding, etc might be attacked no matter how many people agree with you. It's not about democracy or diversity but power. BLM or trans issues are the most obvious ones at the moment.

I don't agree with Eich on that particular point but that doesn't matter. Most of the woke mob didn't think those things either until suddenly "they had to".

A very apt man for the job was set aside because he had dared contributed politically to a cause that US democrat narrative decided in "current year" that was bad (funny how current year - N, they might be held those positions).

> It's all fun and games until the guns come out. At that point, the person who initiates force, or who supports those who do, is the bad guy. That would be Eich

No. That would be you and the woke mob, camper bob. Because you posit that words or political opinions are guns or force, which is insane. You call speech violence in order to justify using violence or censorship yourself. But you're the very type of thing you claim to be against, the bully that attacks pretending they're the victim and simply responding in kind.

You're the problem because you think your moral superiority should allow you to exert violence whenever you want for you have the "righteousness" on your side.

In any case, people are wising up to it. If all ethnicities, country of origin, creeds, etc. They don't want to be attacked (themselves or their livelihoods) because they don't hold the right opinion TM: Identity Politics, the current year war (Iraq, Libya, Ukraine) or whatever else US centric thing people push down our throats.

That is semantic bullshit.

No it's not. It follows directly from the dictionary definition of what "censorship" means. Which unfortunately is widely misunderstood.

You think your moral superiority should allow you to exert violence whenever you want for you

They don't, and the conversation is starting to go way off the rails here.

Feels like more liberal arts than MBA.

Due to the blatant activism.

I really feel they shouldn't go all in on it right now. Winds are changing and they'll end up alienating the new youth that I see hints of starting to push back at the feel good activism for the sake of activism.

how about never going "all in" on shit on things affected by "changing winds".

I want the foundation of my house to be rock solid, whether the winds are calm, stormy, tornado.

I want my browser like my foundation, I want it to be rock solid, and not busy catering to whatever is the current thing

Yes. It's become clearly exactly that, although some do not want to hear it.

I keep hearing people say this, but what exactly do you mean?

In what significant ways could Firefox be improved, such that it would help most users, over Chrome?

Why, make a browser that is lighter, faster, and more privacy focused. And with excellent support for plugin developers. Let the bells and whistles be plugins developed by third parties.

Chrome is the product of a company whose mandate is extracting as much data as possible from its users to feed their ad business. Firefox can and should be better, as they could be 100% user focused.

A Chrome monopoly in the browser space has the potential to be more damaging to the web than the Microsoft monopoly in days gone by. They want to make the world a better place? Well, they could have made the web a better place, if they could meaningfully take some share away from Chrome.

It's going to be hard, almost impossible, to be faster than chrome, with the huge amount of money and man-power Google can throw at things. They can probably get "lighter" (as in support fewer things), but I don't think that's going to make things any faster.

Also, experience tells us that being fast and light is incompatible with excellent plugin support, as the more hooks you provide for plugins, the less you can change without breaking those plugins -- that was Firefox's previous problem.

I am not convinced.

Google's main focus is in extracting rent from their dominance, not in making the browser faster, lighter or whatever.

As for plugin support, that's the challenge no? Make it so the contract for third party plugins can be maintained without breaking them every 6 months as the browser improves.

Firefox has excellent developers. The fact that it still has some relevance despite many years of mismanagement is testament to that. I bet if the company behind the browser was laser focused in making it as good as possible, with no compromise, they could challenge Chrome dominant position.

> In what significant ways could Firefox be improved, such that it would help most users, over Chrome?

Finish making gecko reusable so people can use it instead of blink whenever someone wants to make a custom skin, or instead of electron for "desktop" apps. I grant that it's not immediately user-facing, but it would help give them the actual market share so that web devs have a reason to care about gecko.

For devs: Time travel debugging. Ah wait, they fired the engineers on that.

A complete new fast browser in rust - ah wait they also fired these engineers.

Not being multiples years late on some browsers features: you can't import es modules in a webworker yet.

FWIW, the Firefox devs who were doing the WebReplay time travel debugging POC weren't, as far as I know, fired. Instead, they left and started Replay ( https://replay.io ), a true time-traveling debugger for JavaScript.

I joined Replay as a senior front-end dev a year ago. It's real, it works, we're building it, and it's genuinely life-changing as a developer :)

Not sure how well this would have fit into Firefox as a specific feature, given both the browser C++ runtime customizations and cloud wizardry needed to make this work. But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.

Obligatory sales pitch while I'm writing this:

The basic idea of Replay: Use our special browser to make a recording of your app, load the recording in our debugger, and you can pause at any point in the recording. In fact, you can add print statements to any line of code, and it will show you what it would have printed _every time that line of code ran_!

From there, you can jump to any of those print statement hits, and do typical step debugging and inspection of variables. So, it's the best of both worlds - you can use print statements and step debugging, together, at any point in time in the recording.

See https://replay.io/record-bugs for the getting started steps to use Replay, or drop by our Discord at https://replay.io/discord and ask questions.

> Not sure how well this would have fit into Firefox as a specific feature, given both the browser C++ runtime customizations and cloud wizardry needed to make this work.

Well it worked on firefox before, but only on macOS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDq1AN1kSn4

https://web.archive.org/web/20210331133857/https://developer...

> But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.

It could has been a feature that make firefox the browsers for developers, instead it's a new paid subscription dev product.

One improvement would be to have their actions reflect their messaging. They claim their browser is about privacy, yet I am tweaking more and more settings as time goes on. Sometimes it is to enjoy the features where they are available. In other cases, it is to circumvent their actions which are contrary to my definition of privacy.

For Android, Firefox still only allows a small list of "recommend" add-ons. The developer workaround requires listing them in some online account.

I want a way to instal things on my system without a third party graciously allowing me to, that's what I'd consider freedom and why I try to avoid the playstore like the plague. Seeing Mozilla to not be better either is just sad :(

Perhaps some of these? It says ‘10000 bugs found’.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=Firefox&que...

In one sentence: Make it the browser that fixes the web. E.g. Remove ads, privacy popups , paywalls, ad tracking, and other annoyances. Make the plugin ecosystem so good that people flock to help you with that and then people will only want go browse the web that way.

It should be a noble goal that acts as a beacon for others to follow. It'll lose money at first, but they'll keep their core privacy and power user base, until people come around.

Oh and stop following google and privacy advocates supposed efforts to make the web "safer". Those are all mostly propaganda and feel good initiatives whilst the tracking still happens. But that's a long side rant from a pet peeve of mine.

[dead]

Not pushing pocket everywhere, not showing literal popup ads to users

> write a florid virtuous editorial

Frankly, it's much less problematic than Google writing a blog post bragging to it's advertising customers that it has started buying a copy of everyone's credit/debit card transaction data so they can spy on potential customers more than ever.

> as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.

So, if you buy stuff with a card, there’s a less than one-in-three chance that Google doesn’t know about it.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...

If you live in California your issuing bank has to let you opt out of CC data sharing

Wow, really? You’re actually _allowed_ to opt-out from your bank sharing all of your financial transactions with unspecified third parties? That’s so generous of them! What a great world we live in where certain municipalities provide basic protection over private information!!

Uh… yeah. I just wanted to share a quick tip for those who wanted to opt out of the panopticon.

[flagged]

Hmm.

On one hand, I largely agree with everything that blog posts says.

BUT!

it presents it as some universal, self-evident truth, and I think it's not. Just because the blog author and I and some others think so, doesn't mean it's the only perspective or that everybody feels that way.

I think there exist people who will enjoy that language, who will understand that language, and to whom that language speaks. My wife, possibly. My sister, almost certainly. Many others in my circle of friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.

And, it's Mozilla. I don't think it's 100% accurate to say "you're a tech company" or that FireFox is "just a browser". Mozilla foundation is non-profit, and it does have goals and vision. It is, I think inherently "political", though not necessarily in the current American sense of "political" which seems to mean "partisan" or "bad". It has a goal and perspective and a point of view. It's trying to do something beyond generate profit for shareholders, so I don't think it's accurate to brand it as "just a tech company" (whether one agrees with its goals, methods and progress is orthogonal).

Ultimately, some people DO choose Firefox as a political statement (that statement perhaps being as simple as "I support independent choice of technology" or "I want my browser to work for me" or even "I don't want Google to COMPLETELY own my life" :). Some people DO see it as a way to vote, or impart a change.

> I think there exist people who will enjoy that language, who will understand that language, and to whom that language speaks. My wife, possibly. My sister, almost certainly. Many others in my circle of friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.

But the desire to achieve self-expression through consumer choice is a fucking soul sickness. It's an empty simulation of meaningful self-expression. It's a (often deliberately!) useless substitute for actual political activity. Just because that kind of bullshit is pervasive and, in our society, widely effective for marketing purposes, doesn't mean it should be further propagated.

Free software is largely a refuge from that kind of bullshit, or at least the most cynical, cliche, shiny forms of it. Infesting Firefox with appeals of that kind is not the end of the world, I guess. But it is polluting the clean air I come to Firefox for in the first place with the same smog that's suffocating me everywhere else.

Perhaps Mozilla has figured out that you can't corner the market if you focus on nerds with privacy concerns;

these people (which are also the majority of posters in this thread) are a vanishingly thin slice of the cake. They're trying to corner a totally different market by using that kind of language and design, if that annoys the HN crowd, so be it; they're not the target for this kind of copy.

The problem is that they're not actually getting the other market either. If they wanted to sacrifice the hacker-types but got more non-hacker-types to use Firefox, I'd be annoyed (since, y'know, I'm the hacker-type), but I'd understand. What they've actually done is sacrifice the things that made them good (other than uBlock Origin, every one of my favorite extensions is dead or degraded) and alienated the hacker-types and still not gotten traction with wider audiences.

>Perhaps Mozilla has figured out that you can't corner the market if you focus on nerds with privacy concerns;

True, but "cornering the market" is such an outlandish goal at this point, they shouldn't be holding themselves to that standard. It's enough to capture a respectable 3rd place, rather than the sub-3% afterthought they are now.

And they originally got the respectable showing in the early days by being the "one your geek friend recommends", not by pretending they can out-market the big players with unlimited budgets.

> you can't corner the market if you focus on nerds with privacy concerns

Mozilla seems to use a different strategy that is even worse.

Among nerds with privacy concerns you can at least plausibly get money/code contributions with significant worth.

Mozilla cornering the market: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/StatCoun...

Can you ask your wife or sister to translate that language to language that the rest of us will understand? What are they saying?

I mean sure, or I can do a decent job myself ; are you asking to make a point, or a genuine request?

I would like to know more about what "Color can change culture. The latest colorways celebrates voices making the world a better place." means.

What the words mean is that you can feel good about yourself and believe that you are "standing with" the oppressed flavor of the month, "resisting" whatever is to be resisted today, and generally be an "ally" by using the products and services of corporations that say these words.

It's like landing at Normandy, but from the comfort of your living room.

How is that related to a web browser?

It's alluding to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_psychology

For example, how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker-Miller_pink is used in prisons to foster a less violent culture among the prisoners.

"voices making the world a better place" is referring to Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think it would have been better if they simply said "Firefox is now pink to make you a nicer person" so that more people could understand.

So they're conducting psy-ops on their users to manipulate them into behaving in a way that Mozilla decided is best? I'm a fan of Firefox, but that's bizarre.

" I don't want a Web browser company to "make the world a better place""

I do actually would like the non profit Mozilla to make the world a better place: by focussing again on building a 100% open source and user controlled browser, that has no ads or tracking (studies) enabled by default.

FOSS is what makes the world a better place. Making the world a better place is not making the world a better place actually because the value of FOSS is eternal and making the world a better place is temporal (o tempora, o mores!).

> I'm sorry, Mozilla. It's been a good ride this past few decades, but I think it's time we parted, because with all due respect, I am now questioning the sanity of your staff. This is not how any normal person or company would describe its new software innovations. This is the language of lunacy. Frankly, you sound unhinged

I think he has missed the current year jargon which is a mix of corporate BS words and Buzzfeed diversity and inclusion crap. It usually means nothing other than:

"We are doing this because of profit or because we want to further censor discussion about something because the right view is X and that's what you're allowed to think and say.

Any dissent will be responded with a negative label on your person and, if possible, deplatforming, which is good, because we know what the one true way is"

They will phrase it as "in order to improve things for consumers, everyone" while literally screwing over a myriad of those people.

Firefox is still a great browser but Mozilla has long been a company that we can barely trust, in the way that it actively is telling us that we need to subscribe to its very US centric partisan politics and view of the world, which has shifted from actual fairness and openness for all vi virtue of being a customizable browser.

I wonder if Mozilla knows that their politicking will affect some percent of developers who will no longer open Firefox when writing web applications.

This will lead to subtle issues over time, making Firefox usage shrink even faster.

Lol. Maybe, although the reason this sort of stuff is fashionable corp aesthetic is because it is, in fact, popular. For me, personally, it's like having escaped the Matrix to a refugee camp, and the morale officer there is annoying. Who cares?! The alternative is fucking vat slavery!!! I would assume a non-negligible percentage of people who use Firefox are techies who feel the same; otherwise, why in the world would they not be on Chrome?

The man who typed those artisanal words of inspiration to Firefox Connect deserves our most authentic kudos for bringing that insightful vision of change to the world.

Mozilla brand managers should be the first jobs replaced by AI.

Mozilla brand managers should be the first jobs replaced by AI.

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what Mozilla's underlying strategy is, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

-- with apologies to Douglas Adams

Wow. Just wow. WTF Mozilla o_O

I still love you though, Firefox. Your heart is in the right place. You're now a lone wolf in a ocean of Chromium and wonky WebKits.

and this is why firefox was in freefall.. focus changed from making good product, to making anything but. The worst part is mozilla doesnt even understand.

also, what is up with the employees there? arent people in tech privileged enough to be able to find jobs? how can they live with themselves participating in crap like that? How do they stand in front of the mirror?

Heh. I am a developer at Mozilla, so I guess you're addressing this (partly) to me.

Yes, I suspect I could find another job. I interview well—don't tell any of my potential future employers, but honestly I interview better than I do actual work. (I will say that the massive layoffs introduce some doubt. I haven't had to look seriously in a tough market, and just having recruiters still pinging me regularly doesn't mean much. Hopefully it still helps to be on the list of people who have turned down offers at $big_places?)

I'm not really feeling it hard to live with myself. Quite the opposite, really; one thing that keeps me here is the mission. It would be hard to switch to a place where I had to work to convince myself that I was net contributing to humanity. I'm not curing cancer or eliminating poverty, but I would probably be crap at those.

But I think you're specifically referring to working at a place where Marketing occasionally makes some boneheaded moves, ones that are sometimes counter to the things that keep me here? Yeah, it's hard when that happens. But (1) I still think that it's largely better here than most other places, and (2) we have this teeny little existential problem that absolutely requires marketing to do Stuff. Despite what a vocal contingent on HN thinks, Firefox's market share is not going to turn around based only on engineering work or pouring effort into improved addons and making nice with the community. Those are things that are near and dear to my heart, and I wish we lived in a world where those mattered more, but sadly I have to live in reality. And if you want marketing people to do marketing, you can't exactly tell them what to do and what not to do. Without the ability to screw things up they won't be able to find the things that will make a dent.

Mozilla is a relatively small company, but big enough that my day to day work really doesn't feel a whole lot like "...participating in crap like that". I don't feel that involved in marketing whether it's good or bad, not even when I'm complaining about or brainstorming marketing-related ideas on internal message boards (and yes, it bothers me that those conversations happen on internal boards). I'm in a different corner of the organization, writing code and doing things to hopefully make Firefox more secure, faster, and less memory-hungry. I don't feel personally responsible for what marketing or legal or HR or whoever is doing.

As for how I stand in front of the mirror... well, sometimes I do it naked, thanks for asking. I don't think either of us wants me to give you a picture.

> Marketing occasionally makes some boneheaded moves, ones that are sometimes counter to the things that keep me here? Yeah, it's hard when that happens

What's obnoxious is when the stupid infects the code itself.

As GP said:

> Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** who orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product.

I'm annoyed whenever I find a new pro-tracking, anti-privacy, or pro-spam setting which is ON by default and usually with a poorly documented setting hidden in about:config rather than a logical place in Settings.

I am sure that pocket and mozilla VPN are perfectly good things for some people, but abusing Firefox itself to push ads (especially when such ads are hard to turn off) is a dark pattern.

I'm sure that analytics can be helpful in some cases, but it's tracking and should be off and opt-in by default.

Marketing seems to corrupt the open source aspect as well, as pro-user changes that marketing disagrees with are rejected; when users submit issue reports complaining about the obnoxiousness and suggesting changes, they are closed because the dark pattern or obnoxiousness is an intentional feature that marketing wanted and refuses to give up on.

> Despite what a vocal contingent on HN thinks, Firefox's market share is not going to turn around based only on engineering work or pouring effort into improved addons and making nice with the community.

And how has this marketing worked out for FF market share exactly? FF grew when it focused on tech. It's in freefall now.

> And if you want marketing people to do marketing, you can't exactly tell them what to do and what not to do.

Why not? There are there to help not dictate the course of the company. Or at least they shouldn't be.

firefox and before that name firebird/phoenix did not gain explosive growth due to central marketing efforts, it did because it was a great product that worked for people.

also,

> It would be hard to switch to a place where I had to work to convince myself that I was net contributing to humanity.

Not sure you are now, but okay. a halfassed solution like what firefox is now, is allowed to live forever without addressing it properly. If it wasnt there anymore, perhaps a real solution would emerge

> a halfassed solution like what firefox is now, is allowed to live forever without addressing it properly. If it wasnt there anymore, perhaps a real solution would emerge

That's why Google keeps paying for it. Or at least part of it.

[flagged]

More of this is coming down the road, it's the kind of vapid nonsense that children are being force fed from school right into uni. Along with wondering if the internet has improved life in general, I now seriously suspect that education was better when it was truly elitist.

I just installed Firefox on a new machine today. The number of switches I had to manually turn off to make it not collect data from me and not show me ads was surprisingly large. And even though I turned off all the ones I saw, I don't know if it was a complete solution.

I really don't want to use Chrome. Please stop with the enshittification, Firefox.

And even though I turned off all the ones I saw, I don't know if it was a complete solution.

Look in about:config if you haven't already, and take a grep through the source for the full list of settings that you can adjust. It is indeed disturbingly large and the majority of them aren't officially documented either.

> Look in about:config ... it is indeed disturbingly large and the majority of them aren't officially documented either.

It really is an insane situation. What is up with Firefox's stealth anti-privacy and spammy marketing features controlled by hidden, undocumented settings that are set to (violate privacy and spam me) by default?

What's up is that Firefox is not an open source project (the source is open, the project is not) and Mozilla is an advertisement company. The ad slot is the default search engine and you are the product being sold to Google. This is how advertisement companies behave. They don't care about you. They collect all the data they can, legally or not.

Some settings do not show up until you know the strings and add them, though.

You can grep the source code (or more expeditiously, unpack the omni.ja and grep that) for all occurrences of the functions that retrieve the preferences: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3796084/about-config-pre...

Figuring out what they do is a different story, but at least that's one way to get a list of all of the possible ones.

Unfortunately about:config isn't reliably browsable in that way. Many of them do nothing, for example.

Also some of the settings are more of a silent cry "please stop doing this" because the browser will disregard them a few versions later.

Whenever I read or hear “opinionated” I always get reminded of the saying: “opinions are like assholes; everybody has one and all of them stink”.

In many cases some opinions are clearly superior over others.

Compare "war crimes are bad for multiple reasons" and "lets torture, murder and loot and that is fine because they are subhumans".

Universal bothsideism is not a good idea.

Unfortunately, many people are able to not only justify war crimes, they also see it as a good thing when it’s their side that’s engaging in said war crimes.

Oh definitely. It is not easy to solve problem.

But "all opinions are equal" does not work.

> In many cases some opinions are clearly superior over others.

Normally my opinions are clearly superior. Other people's opinions are shit.

I expect the same to be true for everyone.

That's been my experience since I first saw the word applied to programming languages, and I mentally replied 'ok, but your opinion is objectively wrong!'

I prefer "and no one wants to hear yours".

The "that voice" part is actually hilarious.

When I read "... Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** ...", I couldn't help but think of the Bill Burr bit on "chain restaurants":

https://youtu.be/QWCINJ8uvIc?t=1m8s

(cut out some of background to focus on where he gets to similar patter)

In any case, fully agree. There are always these environmental pressures and "agents" (to evoke / use a sort of game theory modeling context) that lead to this sort of nonsense. Depending on the incentives, scope of power of people making decisions, training (esp., MBAs - simply being trained to look at "numbers in spreadsheets", essentially), etc., it's all too easy, these days, to end up with this kind of B$.

> orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product

Sometimes it's a person, sure, but I think often it's the broad system of reviews and promotions. Above a certain size, it's impossible for higher-ups in an organization to know what everyone below them is doing, and the organization has to rely on metrics. Things that are easy to measure get prioritized.

> Firefox must be an opinionated user agent that keeps folks safe, informed and effective while browsing the Web. In order to have an opinion, Firefox must have a voice.

It’s ironic (and extremely sad) how they say that but staunchly refuse to add ad-blocking to iOS Firefox. And the code is already right there, in Firefox Focus.

I’ve pushed everyone in my circle to Brave and told them to disable / ignore the crypto bits.

Safety first, and unfortunately Mozilla does not care about iOS users their safety.

Firefox can't even be Firefox on iOS and is only a reskinned Safari. So, I'm more concerned that Firefox for iOS even exists since it's kind of a bait&switch to what a Firefox user would expect the browser to be. How would we all fell if we downloaded a browser like Firefox or Chrome on the desktop but to find out it was really a totally different browser?

So playing by the reskinned rules, blockers are not allowed in the way someone using Firefox would expect. Not just blockers, but any extension. It's such a totally not-Firefox experience, that it is even hard to type that it is Firefox.

That’s all very well and good but users want sync between their desktop and mobile browser. Firefox on iOS (which can have a built-in blocker just fine, reskinned Safari or not, see: Firefox Focus) does not have a blocker and thus is wildly unsafe. I will actively steer people away from unsafe browsers.

That’s all peachy but what’s that got to do with anything I had said?

I think the way the dialog is designed says enough. There's "Get Mozilla VPN" and "not now".

No "stop showing me ads", "disable recommendations", "show privacy settings", instead, just "not now". This illusion of choice is a very common dark pattern that helps people feel like postponing ads was their choice (and their idea) rather than making them feel upset that ads have snuck into their browser in the first place. Websites run by trash marketeers like Reddit and Twitter do the same thing.

I wonder how long it'll take before I will just switch to some Chrome fork. This whole "privacy first" shtick is nice but if I need to turn off as many settings in Firefox to make my browser pleasant to use as I do privacy settings in Chrome, I don't see the advantage.

Last time I checked brave they were still pushing their shady crypto stuff and the UI was kind of meh. I wonder if I should reevaluate it with the ongoing erosion of Firefox as a browser.

> I think the way the dialog is designed says enough. There's "Get Mozilla VPN" and "not now".

Wasn't there a campaign that "no means no", and explicitly not "no means keep asking until you get the answer you were hoping for out of fatigue"?

Oh right. #metoo

Online ads are a scourge, but it seems really unfair to compare this to #metoo beyond the most superficial aspects.

It is not unfair, it’s the crux of “consent”. Consent does not mean “keep pestering until they give in”. When technology does not respect user consent by presenting them a false dichotomy of “yes or later”, that is bad. Not all ads do this, but many dark patterns do, it’s even built into the OS like in iOS and Windows.

[flagged]

The irony is that there are folks that think, in earnest, that seeing an ad and rape are comparable. Wait. Nope. It's not irony, but that speaks volumes about how me too came about.

Nobody is saying ads are just as bad as rape. At least what I’m saying is that the repeated “yes or not-now until you cave in” design anti pattern is bad for the same reason as other things that don’t respect consent are bad. Because consent is important.

Let me be clear, if you implement these as a dev, you are doing a bad thing. No it’s not as bad as rape. Is it comparable? Yes, because it’s bad for the same reason as rape is (violating consent), just obviously at a different magnitude.

I didn't consent to you replying to my comment. Should we compare the ways in which you're like a rapist? Should we call you a killer because you've killed a mosquito (an animal that serves no environmental purpose)? No, because your entire premise is absurd on its face.

You explicitly consented to the ads you dislike when you installed Firefox – Mozilla has been putting ads in Firefox in one form or another since at least 2015 and they've been very transparent about the whole thing. You can revoke your consent without penalty or lasting damage any time by uninstalling Firefox. You cannot do that with rape. You cannot uninstall rape and you cannot undo rape. These ads are not in any way comparable to rape.

Let me give you an example. Someone I know was raped in 2010. She never came forward to the police, but three other women, none of whom knew each other, did come forward to SFPD. Two of the three didn't even speak English. Despite all four of these women telling virtually identical stories all of the charges were dropped. How's that work? Turns out that without their knowing (and thus without their consent) this guy recorded everything including the initial implied consent. That all four of these women revoked their consent when things got way out of hand was ignored by the rapist and the court. No charges (e.g. illegal wiretapping) were ever brought against the rapist for illegally recording these women.

The woman I knew? She tried to kill herself shortly after. If I look back to 2010 I'd need more than one hand to count the number of women that have either attempted or succeeded in killing themselves as a result of rape. Go survey Firefox users and see how many have attempted suicide due to the harm these "non-consensual" ads caused. I'll wait.

You don't own the comment as in the replyable entity. That's part of HN. You explicitly chose to look at replies. There aren't even reply notifications here.

Since it's too late to edit my other reply, I forgot to qualify this sentence:

  If I look back to 2010 I'd need more than one hand to count the number of
  women that have either attempted or succeeded in killing themselves as a
  result of rape.

  If I look back to 2010 I'd need more than one hand to count the number of
  women *that I know* that have either attempted or succeeded in killing
  themselves as a result of rape.

They're both about the concept of consent.

No means no, not "maybe later".

The colloquialisms "earrape" and "eyerape" have also come into use to refer to the same lack of consent.

Coincidentally, there was the recent TV show, Anatomy of a Scandal, about a fictional rape case where the defense tried to argue that “not now” wasn’t sufficient to withdraw consent for sex.

Is there a chrome based browser which has an equivalent to Firefox’s multi-account containers? That’s the main feature keeping me on FF.

Yep. Specifically, the temporary containers keep me there for web dev stuff. People will always recommend profiles in chrome, but that can't replace a single hotkey to spawn a temporary throwaway container.

How is that different from private browsing?

I can have 3+ different temporary containers open at once, each with a distinct set of cookies, whereas private browsing gives me only one extra cookie jar.

It's massively helpful for testing interactions between users.

At least on my chromium variant each private window (not tab: window) gets its own isolated environment.

I frequently use this to log into websites with different user accounts for testing purposes.

Good to know, I'll take a look!

To be a little more explicit, I think you need to spawn a private window from a non-private window to get a new environment. If you do it from another private window it uses the same sandbox.

And unlike private browsing windows, they persist across browser restarts until all their tabs are closed.

Not that I've been able to find. Brave would be the obvious candidate to implement this, but the impression I get is that they're not all that interested.

I've been using Brave for awhile and I'm pretty happy with it. There is the shady crypto thing, and the shady VPN thing, and the dubious Tor thing, and I don't really trust them, but I can't really say any of that affects the browsing experience.

AFAIR Chrome/Chromium add-ons are unable to block ads and trackers properly - there's a gap between the page load and add-on activation.

There’s this weird new browser for mac that I think is called Arc?

I'm not sure about their user experience either. The website for it has zero concrete information and you can't even see that there is no windows support until you give it an email address.

Are they private by default or do you need to make adjustments to the settings to it? So far Brave seems to be the most private popular browser out-of-box.

Maybe it was Orion Browser?

Orion and Arc are both new-ish Mac browsers. Both proprietary though.

So because of an ad you'd switch to a browser which breaks ad-blocking add-ons?

Mozilla has pulled a lot of dumb crap over the years, but this crossed a hard red line.

I defended them with Pocket, with promotions in the new tab screen, with dumb wastes of time like Colorways. I've continued to evangelize Firefox in spite of the fact that I knew the company had lost touch with reality because I want there to be an alternative to chromium-based browsers.

Today I'm done. I can shrug off promos in the new tab page, in the settings, whatever. But there are no second chances for full-page pop-up ads, especially when the "oops" is in the timing code. "Oops, you were supposed to see that after 20 minutes inactivity" doesn't cut it.

Mozilla has lost it, and I'm done defending them and evangelizing for them.

Agreed. There have been many defenders of Firefox on HN. I’m not sure why after all the crap they have pulled over the years.

Unrelated mini rants.

1. They fill the default new tab page with garbage content. They have amazing reach with viewers. It’s a shame they can’t fill it with quality stuff. I understand you have to pay the bills, but at least find some balance.

2. Firefox 47.x was the greatest release. I’ve never been able to keep hundreds of tabs open with Firefox. Eventually Firefox eats up so much RAM and eventually crashes. Chromium based browsers can have multiple windows with hundreds of tabs each and not crash even after being open for days/weeks.

My desktop has over 2000 tabs open in Firefox. Memory footprint is slightly over 3 gigs. I usually manage to keep the laptop tab count under 1000. Honestly I think you're the first person I've ever heard praise Chrome(ium) for gracefully handling high tab counts.

I'm not a fan Mitchell Baker or many of the ways Mozilla works these days. But in the pulling crap department, Google and Microsoft have given Mozilla a very low bar to clear.

One question... why?

It costs nothing to keep a tab (you had every intention to revisit later) open, especially when tabs can be auto unloaded to free up memory, either by an addon or the browser itself. Firefox unlike Chrome does not keep squashing more tabs in the tab strip forever, but lets them scroll horizontally out of sight to maintain a readable minimum width for each tab. Over a long enough period of time you can get 2000 open tabs. Modern browsers can handle it.

This is not my personal experience. If I let a tab alone and that tab has a looping GIF then Firefox get slower and unresponsive (and eat memory).

You can try it with an imgur link: https://imgur.com/gallery/gom01RZ (sfw, vid/loop of a boa constrictor drinking water from a glass).

Not what I asked.

>I’m not sure why after all the crap they have pulled over the years.

Have you seen the competition?

It may be disturbingly similar to trying to vote for a decent politician, but there are absolutely degrees of badness.

Plus there are still forks.

Yes. Brave does a demonstrably better job at protecting my privacy and not making unwarranted connections to third parties I did not ask for.

How can you guys ever trust Brave again after the whole affiliate link injection nonsense?

Link injection, ad replacement, their own cryptocurrency... It's close to getting bingo on the questionable behavior card.

Not to claim it's worse, of course. Chrome practically has the whole card filled in, and has to add extensions for the new terrible things they've invented. They're playing multi-dimensional 7x9x3i bingo.

The same way people trust Mozilla after the whole fake promotional add-on nonsense. Actually I have to give Brave the W here too: they appear capable of learning from their mistakes. Mozilla just keeps doing shady shit over and over and over again.

Brave seems to work just fine for me, and gets out of the way.

> I understand you have to pay the bills

You mean like the 5 mil per year CEO salary? Not sure if theat is really a need and not a want.

We need an open source browser that's not operated like a paypig for a for profit company. Funding should be handled via seeking grants and donations, not by selling out the users.

Yeah, at this point things like LibreWolf seem to be what it's come down to:

https://librewolf.net

Not a fantastic situation, but at least it seems to work.

Mullvad Browser is also a really good candidate. The people behind it have a track record for fighting for user privacy unlike Mozilla which has a track record of doing the opposite.

What's ironic is the Mozilla VPN being advertised is a rebadged Mullvad VPN. It's actually a good product, I don't know why Mozilla had to be dicks about pushing it in everyone's face.

Yeah it's pretty bad, it does make me think. I've been a firefox user for probably ~ 2 decades.

Saying that, I haven't personally experienced any pop-ups or ads like this.

I've been downvoted here many times for voicing this same opinion for a long time. Consider switching to Orion (a fork of Safari WebKit, Mac only, still beta though) - https://browser.kagi.com/ - or PaleMoon (a hard fork of Firefox) - http://www.palemoon.org/, as they are the only browsers that respect your zero-telemetry wish, when you toggle the right settings. Tor Browser (stripped of Tor) - https://www.torproject.org/download/ - is also a very good privacy-hardened Firefox soft fork (though it is yet to fix a bug that still phones Mozilla) but using it generates a lot of Captchas from CloudFlare, and to a lesser extent Google, both seem to hate this browser with a vengeance. Vivaldi browser (a Chromium fork with better privacy options) is another a good option but a distant second because it insists on phoning home every time you use the browser, and Vivaldi has publicly said they will not turn that off as turning off those analytics impairs their monetizing options. (A good application firewall can block those though, and Vivaldi is a decent company).

Let me put first and foremost that this is shitty.

What irks me about these comment threads is that people hold Mozilla to a standard that nobody holds Google to. The negativity spiral, deserved as it may be, seems to then tip a lot of people (self-proclaimed) towards going with Chrome when that is still the worse option. Looking at Firefox' market share, I feel bad for the shit it gets and what it has to pull to try and stay relevant (.: to pay the devs). At the same time, I would also not mind an unmozillad firefox, perhaps in exchange for a certain donation amount per year.

I currently don't donate much to Mozilla because they keep making the experience worse time and again (I'm still salty on a daily basis because the new mouse gestures "extension" is crap compared to the "add-on"-based one from before Firefox 57), because donating adds your email address to their spam list, and because I can't tell them to spend it on useful things like Thunderbird and Firefox rather than developing yet another VPN frontend or buying Pocket. Having a Firefox subscription that gets rid of their ads would not limit what they can spend it on, but it would send a clear message of what it is that I'm wanting to pay for. Wouldn't solve all problems but I wonder if this might help.

Firefox is supposed to hold itself to a higher standard than Google. It's why it exists, it's why I evangelized it all these years. It's supposed to be the browser that respects its users as human beings, not as conversion numbers.

If Mozilla becomes as bad as Google, then there's no reason to choose them over the larger and more stable platform. That's why we hold them to a higher standard—if they can't meet that standard they have no reason to exist at all.

> I currently don't donate much to Mozilla because they keep making the experience worse time and again

Money donated to Mozilla isn't used to develop Firefox: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/

I'd be fine paying or donating to help Firefox development, but I can't.

I think money spent on VPN and mdn+ goes more directly to funding Mozilla. But I would actually prefer to see a Mozilla that tries to become fiscally independent of partnerships like Google and fully commit to the donation model (+ maybe selling a few products like VPN and mdn+) closer to what Wikipedia is doing.

Funding Mozilla is still a step removed from "used to develop Firefox". Mozilla has ridiculous overhead, including a 5 mil per year CEO salary.

> What irks me about these comment threads is that people hold Mozilla to a standard that nobody holds Google to.

We have already accepted Google as the “bad guy”. “Good guys” are held to a different standard. If Mozilla want to be a “bad guy” too, they will lose to Google who has the better product.

>What irks me about these comment threads is that people hold Mozilla to a standard that nobody holds Google to.

Yes, because FF’s only advantage left is that they’ll actually respect your privacy and control of your machine. They have nothing else! If you want a browser that’s the fastest, or has full featured addons, or is mostly like to work on sites where you need it, sorry, Chrome has them hopelessly, irrevocably beaten.

Privacy is the one area where they could actually claim to be better and yet every so often they’ve shown willingness to abandon that advantage for the slimmest of upsides.

Interesting that you talk about standards because I think the alt browsers are not judged to the same standards as chrome. Brave injected affiliate links. Microsoft edge injected ads on random third party sites, now it’s Mozilla. You won’t see google doing these type of (shady) things. You won’t get explicit stuff from google injected into properties they don’t own without explicit permission from the site owners.

Imagine if google injected random stuff without permission in a site like ycombinator, people would go absolutely nuts and google would be considered diabolic, yet for some reason all other browsers have done similar stuff and they somehow get a pass?

If Firefox is not achieving a better standard than Google, then what is the reason for using it over the better resourced Google Chrome? Being better than Google is the bar it needs to meet to overcome the inertia of Chrome's market share

> At the same time, I would also not mind an unmozillad firefox, perhaps in exchange for a certain donation amount per year.

LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) is essentially this: Firefox, with the telemetry and Mozilla adware disabled. And you can use homebrew or other package managers to handle updates (instead of getting spammed by update dialogs every day or two in the browser itself).

Not to diminish the point you're making in any way but I thought you could donate directly to Thunderbird development. Did this change?

Last year Firefox displayed a Disney ad (for the movie 'Turning Red') on the whats-new tab, the tab gets diplayed by default after you upgrade to a new Firefox version I think. US users only.

Screenshot https://web.archive.org/web/20220308222503/https://www.mozil...

HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608022

Don’t forget the Mr. Robot debacle: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...

They pull this crap all the time and never learn their lessons.

Or how about how they still replace pinned shortcuts in the new page with sponsored ads. Like the magical top left one that I don't even look at before clicking because it's a link to my mail.

Two years later and they're still doing it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ppludl/since_when_...

Not to defend Firefox, but I believe Mr Robot is what caused them to make a visible toggle for experiments. Sadly it's not off by default, but once it's turned off, you don't really have to worry about it. That said, I never saw this VPN popup.

I can sort of live with that? The what’s new page is not my content that is being invaded with ads.

When they start popping it up all over the place is when I draw the line.

I bet that more than a few users were "turning red" --- with anger --- when they saw that shit. "Did I get infected with something?" No, it's just Firefox itself being the adware.

One of the related tickets [1] seems to give some hints on the root cause - which in a way almost makes it worse IMO.

Basically, what they wanted to do was to build a background process that detects when you're away from the PC and then pops up the message, so it's the first thing you see what you get back.

Unfortunately (or maybe not) the detection logic had a bug, which caused the message to pop up right away sometimes, spoiling the whole thing.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835175

> what they wanted to do was to build a background process that detects when you're away from the PC and then pops up the message, so it's the first thing you see what you get back

This unnecessary bullshit is how you introduce security bugs into software. Mozilla can preach all they want about security and privacy but this shows that it's all rotten to the core.

This is terrible. I don't want their popups ever. Why do they feel they can block popups by default from others but their popups are fine?

Really hate Firefox doing this kind of thing. It's supposed to be a browser that cares about the user.

I think it worked entirely 'correctly', and yet still annoyed the shit out of me.

Are you sure that code is related to this? That looks specific to the new tab page while the linked bug on HN shows a random website.

It was linked in the "related" section of the original bug.

This is unacceptable. Mozilla has shown they are incapable of not abusing Firefox. There shouldn't be an advertising channel/system in the browser.

If you want to advertise, have a newsletter that people can opt into.

If you need money, allow people to pay for just Firefox.

> If you need money, allow people to pay for just Firefox.

I think many people overestimate how many people would pay for Firefox.

I absolutely would if the money went to development of Firefox and not to the different activism projects. But that isn't an option.

But you’re the minority. Firefox is already free and has what, like 3% of the market share? If it became a paid browser it’d lose like 98% of its users (if we consider an industry standard conversion rate of about 2%).

There is a difference between "paid" and "accepts donations", but as people pointed out, Firefox does not accept donations (the Mozilla Foundation does, but that goes towards activism, not towards Firefox development/MDN).

Exactly. Allow me to donate to Firefox development.

Money pays devs, not market share. It's obvious in a small market with few competitors (my company pays 10k € /yr for a simulation software seldomly used), but it's still true imo in a large market with many. Competitors that uses tracking and have more users, will often have more money for dev and advertisement, and there is the risk that webdevs won't care for the browser (already happening), but it still can work, even more if it noticabely better or pertains to uses cases not covered by others.

I've been donating to them every year for the past 5+ years. Given them every benefit of the doubt... Even defended them. Then this popup came up on all my machines this morning, so no more.

Now to find another browser... Maybe some Firefox fork or something? Like WTF every other browser is Chromium... Man this sucks, I'm about ready to quit the internet.

No you haven't been donating to them. You probably donated to a Mozilla foundation that is related, but no dollars went to funding Firefox.

The Mozilla Foundation should really sever all ties with the Mozilla Corporation. There’s no way that they should want to be associated with such a scummy company as a public charity.

Mozilla Corporation CEO: Mitchell Baker

Mozilla Foundation Chair: Mitchell Baker

If it helps, I've been using LibreWolf as a secondary browser for a while and haven't noticed issues:

https://librewolf.net

> I think many people overestimate how many people would pay for Firefox.

I certainly would never pay them if they keep doing that kind of shit

Most wouldn't pay or donate, but some would.

Thunderbird, for example, gained a new life because of donations: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

For how often it comes up one would think a $5/m subscription plan would be worth it just to not have the constant complaints about it. Even if 0.0001% of the MAU users (so ~2,000 die hard users) did a $5/month subscription that's $5*12*2,000=$120,000/y. Surely that's enough to implement it if they find pop-up ads for their VPN service over other pages worthwhile.

Instead the current pitch is "buy this $5/m VPN, of which we'll get a small cut of from reselling Mullvad, and still get all of the ads you were complaining about in the browser anyways".

Thankfully Firefox needs nothing else than be popular and they can forever sell the default search engine for many many millions a year, which I think is a perfectly fine way to fund its development.

Unfortunately they hired a bunch of incompetent executives who would much rather starve Firefox development while spending all of the money on realizing their big business vision where they acquire useless startups then ruin the browser by turning it into a marketing platform for the aforementioned. Besides bonuses and big salary bumps, of course.

I don't think people with realistic expectations have any illusions. Servo couldn't get 10k per year for infra alone.

I guess the question is if you can get any significant number of users to pay more than Mozilla would make off of ads for the same users. If you can make $1/mo off of most users and $5/mo off a smaller set of users, the smaller set doesn't have to be that big to make it worth doing financially.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money...

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/paid-firefox-to-get-rid...

we need to make those the most popular ideas on mozilla connect

This was them trying to let people pay for Firefox. It was Mozilla VPN.

Everyone gets angry and has an opinion of how this sucks. There's no way for this to work out for Mozilla. Nothing they do will work or make everyone happy.

Google won.

People pay for Firefox by using it. They make money from Google being the default search engine. They were previously getting paid to have yahoo be the default. Bing wants them to switch to them.

The VPN pop-up isn't an effort to provide funding for a dying browser. This is greed, pure and simple.

> This is greed, pure and simple.

A single revenue source is incredibly risky and they're foolish if they aim to rely on search sponsorship revenue alone.

Since when is it greedy to want to raise capital for the expensive thing you're building? I think it's lazy to waste momentum and let it peter out into nothingness. At least this is an attempt to stand on their own legs.

Why does Mozilla draw this ire when literally every entity out there is hustling against the gradient of entropy? We single out Mozilla to lambaste.

The thing I'm angry about is that Mozilla isn't trying hard enough, and that when they do try, they're not playing smart. They're making bets that I perceive to be foolish - "ethical AI", "VR/metaverse", etc. These are not good synergies or paths to profitability. They're wasting their limited resources on things outside of their scope, that do not matter to their core mission, and that won't turn a profit.

As I see it, the web may not even have another 15 years left if AI takes over question answering, content generation, etc. Maybe it's foolish to even try to prop up Mozilla at this point. The world has moved on and left them in the dust.

Mozilla is simply an antitrust defense strategy for tech giants. Not a good place to be in as the gravity starts to move away from websites.

> A single revenue source is incredibly risky and they're foolish if they aim to rely on just search sponsorship revenue.

As I pointed out, they have other avenues for revenue. If Google decided to not renew their contract there's other search engines they can turn to.

Additionally, there's nothing wrong with Mozilla securing other revenue sources. There is something wrong with how they're advertising it to their users.

> Why does Mozilla draw this ire when literally every entity out there is hustling against the gradient of entropy

This ire does exist for every company that pulls this nonsense. What are you on about? Why should Mozilla be exempt?

> As I see it, the web may not even have another 15 years left if AI takes over...

This is a Nostradamus level of nonsense. It doesn't belong in this conversation. Regardless of what AI does or doesn't do, trying to project 15 years out into the future to dismiss today's bad behaviours is ridiculous.

> This ire does exist for every company that pulls this nonsense. What are you on about? Why should Mozilla be exempt?

What are you on about? We've all got to eat. Making money is good and essential for survival.

> This is a Nostradamus level of nonsense. [...] trying to project 15 years out into the future [...]

This is what every investor, innovator, or leader does. If you're not thinking about the future, you're flying without guidance.

> It doesn't belong in this conversation.

Absolutely it does. Mozilla painted themselves into a dark corner and the walls are closing in.

I'm not the only one predicting that the web may dry up. It was already happening with increased centralization and platforms before AI even entered into the conversation.

If, hypothetically, AI can answer all of your questions, why do you need to search for websites? Why do you even need websites?

ChatGPT is already trying to get companies to build themselves as plugins within their walled fiefdom. Don't you see that as a distinct possibility? A terrifying one? It's already happened on our phones and app stores, and it can happen again.

> What are you on about? We've all got to eat. Making money is good and essential for survival.

Yeah. The Mozilla foundation is struggling to keep food on the table with the hundreds of millions paid to them from Google. Totally.

> This is what every investor, innovator, or leader does. If you're not thinking about the future, what are you doing?

Again, you're attempting to justify current bad behaviour by what might happen the future. That's what ridiculous. I never said no one should plan for the future.

If Mozilla is going to pull moves like this then they deserve to get called out for it. Defending bad behaviour like this only helps things become worse.

>A single revenue source is incredibly risky and they're foolish if they aim to rely on search sponsorship revenue alone.

Correct, but there’s a better way to reduce that dependence:

- Stop bleeding money on bullshit unrelated to the core mission.

- Build up an endowment with that sponsorship money to the point that the income it generates is sufficient for their needs.

Mozilla VPN is not Firefox. It's an unrelated service.

It's actually pretty simple for this to work out for Mozilla. Remove the ad system.

>This was them trying to let people pay for Firefox. It was Mozilla VPN.

... what kind of logic is this?

>There's no way for this to work out for Mozilla.

Sure there is - give people an option to pay for Firefox itself.

I actually have Mozilla VPN but still got the ad. Granted, the VPN wasn't active at the time, but now I feel less about paying for it.

> Google won.

Because Mozilla and its execs were asleep at the wheel while Google started to eat its share. This is what you get when you stop competing.

Um, they appear to have orchestrated a change in management, then cozied up to Google to get a personal bonus (I read, I don't have a good source, sorry), then continued to leech money from Firefox whilst giving little in return.

The execs are still competing, they're winning, and getting exactly what they aim for, personal wealth.

> Because Mozilla and its execs were asleep at the wheel while Google started to eat its share

I mean... it was probably that too, but Google abusing its search monopoly to market Chrome probably played a major role as well. Or if you like - Mozilla's mistakes are such that Google probably could have won fair, but that's not what actually happened.

I know right? Mozilla has tried showing ads to people multiple times, ignored their privacy preferences at every opportunity, keeps protecting them from working extensions and generally copies Chrome whenever possible and their market share still keeps going donw. If only it wasn't for the damned entitled users Mozilla would have been successful by now.

Google won indeed. They won by making Mozilla into their little bitch insted of real competition.

They allow donations too. Nothing has stopped anybody from paying. All you had to do was go pay. Pick some amount. Even five fucking dollars.

It's fine for them to create Mozilla VPN. It's never, ever fine to use the same old dark bullshit patterns, and interrupt me on all my computers, same as all these other dirtbag tech companies. They are supposed to be different, and give a shit about the user. Sorry if this is their only way to advertise, but it's not okay.

I don't donate to Mozilla because I want to fund Firefox, not fund exorbitant CEO salaries and hordes of tangential products while Firefox dwindles and dies.

> They allow donations too. Nothing has stopped anybody from paying. All you had to do was go pay. Pick some amount. Even five fucking dollars.

They literally do not allow donations to Firefox. It is not, and never has been, possible.

This is completely false. You can only donate to the Mozilla foundation, which has nothing to do with the development of Firefox.

Why would I want to buy a VPN if I just wanted to buy Firefox ?

Per https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1414266#answer-1...

> Thank you for reaching out with your concern. Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first, as such we quickly stopped running the ad experience, and are reviewing internally.

I’m always glad that PR people can’t help but speak in such inhuman language that makes it obvious that it’s not a real sentiment but just part of the play.

Honestly, I thought it was a pretty strong statement. They basically said "we screwed up."

"Stopped running the ad experience" tells me the kind of language they've been using internally to describe projects like this, and it is not language that I'm okay with from Mozilla. Using the toxic language in the retraction doesn't breed confidence that they really understand what the error was.

It’s not an “error,” it’s an “ad experience misadventure.”

They used the words "stopped running" instead of "removed"...

I mean, I wouldn’t expect them to be able to pull the whole thing out of the code at the drop of a hat.

For a browser that claims to be privacy focused, I would expect them to tightly contain the code in an external module that can easily be turned off.

I would absolutely expect them to pull the whole thing out.

Then you are either a fool or extremely naive. The statement they made actually says "we expected the frog to be more used to the heat by now and will try again later when it is".

> Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first, as such we quickly stopped running the ad experience, and are reviewing internally.

Should read as:

> Oops, we got caught again doing stuff that our core users don't like. Let us remove this until we find a better way to make you angry

> Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first

This phrase is approaching a Betteridge's law level tell for who’s at the wheel - nobody needs to insist they’re putting people first unless it’s really obvious they’re not.

“My corporate doublespeak has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my corporate doublespeak.”

> Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first, as such we quickly stopped running the ad experience, and are reviewing internally.

That says to me that Firefox is aware the ad experience did not put people first, and that Firefox broke their commitment. They are discussing internally how this was allowed to happen.

Is there a single normal human being outside a corporate environment that would even talk about an "ad experience"? Ads by definition do not put people first, putting ads over unrelated content in your app is definitionally user hostile, and nobody in any context outside an advertising department would ever think otherwise. To even get to the point where you're having to assert your 'people first' bonafides over something so transparently anti-people requires the kind of utter blindness to the entirely of the human experience that can only occur in an organization who's priorities absolutely put ads in front of people.

It’s absolutely possible to do ads in a way that puts people first. This just isn’t it.

Absolutely not. Advertisements are a malignant cancer of capitalism, and will show up anywhere they are allowed or encouraged. And in a short time, they will crowd out human voices to the fake voice of "buy this shit"... And soon, even those fake voices are crowded out by louder signs of "buy this shit".

There is no ethical advertisement. At the root of advertisements are intentional psychological engineering used to manipulate people.

I am rather belligerently anti-ad, but when I sit quietly to contemplate alternatives I must admit that in certain limited contexts, I found advertising incredibly useful in the [relatively] distant past: I would pick up the computer paper specifically for the ads, as they provided the cost lists for items sold by the various vendors on College St (Toronto), and without them such information was essentially unattainable. There were also occasions when Google's original search-relevant text ads were exceptionally welcome.

Given that there has been a context previously where it was welcome, there may well be contemporaneous contexts where ads could exist in harmony with independently motivated user objectives. Basically all of what I see today, though, ain't it.

I'm not entirely convinced of it being impossible: https://vimeo.com/233586784

Most people on HN rely on the adtech industry for their paycheck, you won’t see much agreement here.

> Advertisements are a malignant cancer of capitalism

I'm stealing this.

I'm guessing that you don't like capitalism and believe humans can actually have a nice egalitarian non-capitalistic society where everyone shares across the entire planet?

Ok, I’ll bite. How?

This rule doesn't hold in general though... eg. "putting the customer first" is code for treating employees as interchangeable cogs without any voice. But it does mean that they are actually putting the customer ahead of employees.

I just saw this a half hour ago... it's still happening.

I was on reddit, and couldn't be sure that it wasn't reddit doing it. Though I half-suspected Firefox. Imagine my surprise when I saw this post.

Nothing about this seems "quickly stopped". The timestamp on your link says nearly 7 hours ago.

It was edited later:

May 25, 2023 at 3:56:49 PM PDT

Well, then it was still going strong an hour and a half later, if not 6 hours.

They are certainly putting people first --- those people being precisely the bastards who came up with this crap.

I still remember when the slogan was something like "putting users in control of their online experience", got silently changed to "individuals" instead of "users" at some point, and apparently it's just "people" now.

What’s stupid about this is the only people still using Firefox are the people they have to know are going to hate this shit the most. I’d prefer they just charge for the software instead of doing this over and over again, and saying “oops we’re sorry, won’t happen again” every single time.

I'm using firefox and I don't ever see this sort of stuff people complain about. Where does it even appear? I have new tab set to blank page. Are people leaving new tab at default with suggested content?

At the end of the day firefox is a last refuge of a browser that allows me to block tracking and ads. As long as ublock origin works here and nowhere else this is the browser that I will be using. It's that simple, the internet is just too unusable without ad blocking.

I was incredibly surprised today while checking my gmail to see a modal with a darkened background pop-up to cover the entire web page. It was an ad for Mozilla VPN. I did some googling to find out if it was a gmail ad or a FireFox ad but didn't find anything until the bug report was shared here.

This is what bothers me a lot yes. Especially in terms of features.

Mozilla is still targeting the mainstream user that uses Chrome. Spending a lot of time on gloss and removing 'power' features.

Yet they don't understand they already lost the chrome user years ago so badly that they don't even remember the name. And they're now alienating their remaining userbase.

I wish Mozilla or Microsoft or friends would let me pay $50 extra for a no-bullshit version of their products. It is infuriating when your UX is ruined by a corporation trying to make a couple fucking pennies off you

Many users on Mozilla support communities and Reddit are reporting that their browsing sessions were suddenly interrupted by an overlay ad for Mozilla VPN today.

To disable this, users need to set browser.vpn_promo.enabled to false on the about:config page.

The list of Mozilla bullshit you have to use about:config to get rid of grows ever longer. Still annoyed that Pocket can’t be removed like a regular extension, only disabled in about:config.

Also, about:config is disabled on mobile unless you're running a nightly build.

Mull (https://github.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix) is a great fork with privacy improvements, and about:config is accessible.

Does it have all the usual codecs, or are some of them considered too proprietary to give users the option of using them?

You can access about:config and use add-on collections on Firefox Beta too now.

> To disable this, users need to set browser.vpn_promo.enabled to false on the about:config page

How the fuck are you supposed to know about this in advance and prevent this from happening‽

If you knew about it ahead of time they would have changed it. The point is to show you advertising that you don't want to see.

Usually you would just use one of the common user.js files for fixing firefox, for example https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox

look at the source code! Simple!

I got that too. They just closed the ticket too:

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED

Closed: 1 minute ago

Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME

Yeah, that closure was completely uncommented and mysterious. A later comment linked to a bug saying that the ad had been disabled, presumably because it was showing up where it shouldn't? WORKSFORME doesn't seem like the right resolution for that.

The two bugs were also closed as duplicates of each other, which feels a little sloppy.

What in the bloody hell!?!? Why does everything around the "web ecosystem" seem to grow paternalising adware/spyware-infested user-hostile "features" over time (I have observed this with other software, but browsers in particular seem to be the worst)? This is disturbingly close to Microsoft's tactics with Edge.

A browser doesn't need popups, a "messaging system", "telemetry", or anything other than to show me the content of URLs that I tell it to visit.

Maybe relevant:

"Firefox VPN Spotlight modal test content" [0]

We are running a/b tests on a VPN spotlight modal in Firefox. Here's a link to the project info: Google doc

There are two versions of content, identical except for the inclusion of a promotional code in one of them. Where the tests also differ is in the imagery used, which you can see in the Figma file linked in this ticket.

Also,

"Add vpn spotlight targeting" [1]

Targeting to support https://mozilla-hub.atlassian.net/browse/OMC-419 - Existing users with a profile >28 days old, at least 1 day of use in the last 28 days, on Windows 10+, no VPN or Enterprise policy

[0] https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/nimbus-l10n/issues/5

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/experimenter/pull/8853

Apparently the "fix" is to fix the bug in the idle time calculation.

They marked it Resolved but the popup will still happen after 20 mins of idle time after the fix, if I read the Bug details correctly.

Happened to me too, even though I thought all ads were disabled in my modified libre/wolf profile.

I guess I have to go back to ungoogled chromium as my main browser again and start working again on RetroKit.

Good bye Mozilla, thanks for now being the corporation hell hole that you initially fought against.

I guess that's what happens if you fire the people that actually cared for the project.

You can unmozila firefox just like your chromium too. When I open a new tab I see a blank page, no pocket, no suggested whatever, no bullshit. I'd take firefox just to be able to use full on ublock origin (1).

1. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

At this point I just wonder whether Firefox userbase will flee the browser in droves if someone will make its unmozilled tracking fork sustained by easily payable tips, that has all the BS disabled and uBlock + couple of other top 10 extensions like Stylus and Tampermonkey natively implemented in it, with a good unified UI and all, for added value.

The issue I have with the TOR browser (as an example of an actual real fork) is that they only stub away the APIs they know of, they don't really remove them and from time to time other methods of tracking glitch through; including all the fingerprinting requests when opening a fresh browser session.

I guess with a hard fork they couldn't keep up with upstream.

But honestly, I would totally be okay with a browser that doesn't have modern Web APIs because literally all of them from the last 10 years were just integrated to allow "appifying websites".

If I wanna see a fancy WebGL demo I can also use a temporary chrome, but my main browser should not have that amount of (unmaintained) attack surfaces.

All "forks" of Firefox usually aren't forks but just profiles with user.js configs. The only real fork of the engine itself is Pale Moon, and that project is a political shitshow and super outdated (which would be okay if it focussed on stability instead).

Firefox shows literal advertisements in the “new tab” window. I recently started using Firefox again because I was told I was being “ridiculous” when I said Firefox shows me literal advertisements. And then I get this pop-up on a window which hadn’t been refreshed in several hours.

Every time I open Firefox it presents me with some message instead of content I want. Usually in the form of a new tab. Sometimes, it's a pop-under new window (I think this is some weird interaction with its restoration of previous sessions). Every now and then, it's one of those plus some call-out bubble message or a pop-up window.

Safari practically never does that shit, which is one of the reasons I prefer it on platforms where it's available. IDK why modern Firefox is so damn eager to interrupt me. Just open a window with my last session or my default tab and shut up. I don't care if you just updated. I don't care if you're weirdly-enthusiastic about introducing me to a feature that hasn't been novel in a browser in at least a couple decades (color themes—LOL, that was just embarrassing). I certainly don't want an actual advertisement. And for god's sake, no, I still don't care about Pocket, and I never will.

For less-technical users, this stuff isn't just annoying, it can disrupt their entire browsing session. "Wait... where's my email? Is it gone? Is this the right program?" Firefox (and other teams that do crap like this, in their products) should knock it off. It is not OK.

Just set new tab to blank page. the benefits from using something like firefox and ublock origin outweigh the cons of, well I don't even know what the cons are considering my firefox is just a pure web browser as configured. One thing that's proved true over my years in tech is that there isn't any tool that works perfectly out of the box as I expect without at least some configuration and settings fiddling.

You can disable them in less than a minute.

I haven’t seen a single ad since the moment I installed Firefox and clicked “don’t suggest stuff”.

The reason people are upset isn't because you can't disable it. The frustration comes from the fact you need to be able to trust your web browser. And mistakes like this, mistakes that are so egregious, and demonstrate such bad judgement, that it makes it harder to trust something that you need to be able to trust.

Ads by default are still not acceptable to me.

Yes, I am willing to pay say 100$/year for web browser if money would entirely go to development. Maybe something to support staff like CEO. But not over 5 000 000 per year ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary... )

And if such browser would be actually user-first, without ads for VPN and Disney movies (especially without ads pretending to not be ads).

I did—I saw this one. I can't keep opting out of every new abusive system Mozilla puts in. I'm done.

Where's the "don't suggest stuff" box? That seems much easier than the multiple about:config changes I'd have to do to turn off all of the new avenues for advertising

I disabled suggestions on installation some time ago.

Then it appears they recently added an additional sponsored option, and defaulted it to enabled, in an update, even for users like myself who had every other sponsored option disabled.

They're hardly the only organization that does this, but it is extremely disappointing. Were Firefox not the only major browser with very useful extensions, I'd certainly switch to something else.

Yeah they were weird to see until I turned them off immediately. I don't like the direction they've taken Pocket in with so much focus on "editorial" content. Instapaper's better at getting out of the way (even if it feels neglected).

I have. Every time it updates it opens a new tab to spam about their VPN (or whatever the flavour of the month is).

I've been using IceCat recently as part of a video project I'm doing. I started using Guix just for fun and IceCat happens to be the version of Firefox they have available by default. It has some quirks but it's overall pretty usable and strips Mozilla branding.

It's a shame because I pay for Mozilla features, including Mozilla VPN. But I find this behavior (1) kind of gross, and (2) a clear signal of either desperation or indifference to their mission.

It's really weird how every time this happens, Firefox promises it will never happen again until next time.

I've had the Mozilla VPN website open for a few days with an intent to purchase when I get around to it. Not anymore.

I love you Mozilla, but you've gotta do better. Please.

It’s like Google and Mozilla just don’t want me to leave Apple’s phone OS and its browser, respectively.

At least in Google’s case it makes good business sense - as in, it already works for them and their target audience already has been using the OS with all that, and doesn’t care about it, ads and tracking; besides there aren’t too many phone OS options.

But in the case of Mozilla? Heck the target audience cares very much about these things and not liking shit like this was a reason they were in Firefox for. Now a lot have already dumped it for Safari, Brave etc. Then they keep doing such tricks.

Someone at Mozilla has to be especially dumb to have done this.

> the target audience cares very much about these things

I recently switched from Edge to Firefox (on both Desktop and phone) specifically because Edge was showing me irrelevant "news" articles (which I assume are just ads in disguise) [1].

I guess on phone I can move back to Safari (which I abandoned due to a bug where scroll position is frequently lost when navigating backwards), since it is apparently the only major browser that hasn't tried to show me ads.

Not sure what to do about desktop...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35705502

Yeah, I guess they’re aware that there’s basically no alternatives for their audience?

If there were a viable non-chromium alternative to Firefox I’d already have switched.

I've been using Firefox as my main browser to support its decreasing market share, alongside Safari for development and Ungoogled Chromium when things are unexpectedly broken in Firefox (due to strict privacy settings most of the time). I'm considering dropping Firefox because I don't want to deal with updating about:config anymore to remove ads, telemetry, etc. The other two browsers just work for me.

Edit: this is not completely true - I enabled Private Relay (Safari only) and installed uMatrix and uBlock Origin on Chromium, but that's about it.

But you can't run uBlock Origin on Apple as far as I'm aware?

firefox is an extremely hard product to recommend to friends/family

it's becoming more and more user hostile with every upgrade

pocket everywhere, telemetry, vpn ads, disney ads, amazon ads etc

(and despite the constant UI changes it still feels like something out of 1997)

And yet it’s someone the least shitty browser there is.

It's all quite easy to turn off, or just recommend librewolf to them

No, it's not. Every few months there's a new garbage "experience" released under a new about:config setting. Playing whack-a-mole with ads from the browser by navigating through a scary-looking UI that warns you that it's dangerous is not an experience I can recommend to family or friends.

Just set new tab to blank page. Thats where they live anyhow right? I haven't seen any of these ads people complain about and I suspect its because of my new tab setting.

My new tab is a blank page. This promo today popped up over an open webpage while I was working on another monitor.

I ironically got the same popup while sitting on the HackerNews homepage.

The top article on the homepage was this one, visible through the dark-ish tint behind the ad.

Lol.

This happened to me while I was working on a site. It may even have been localhost. This seriously erodes my trust in Firefox

I switched to LibreWolf (A fork of Firefox with privacy enhancements and ublock preinstalled) and haven't had to deal with anything like this since.

Just have in mind that some advanced privacy enhancements (like toggling privacy.resistFingerprinting) can break sites in random ways: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1666160 .

Breaking (shitty and user-hostile) websites by default is still a lot better than ignoring your privacy preferences and trying to psychologically manipulate you by default.

privacy.resistFingerprinting is something I had to set to false in my user.js, but I had my own user.js with my own privacy settings anyway. The rest of the settings it provides are very good for a default though.

What’s your user agent with that browser?

Same as FireFox normal.

Interesting. When I used Iceweasel it was different enough to break sites.

I'm guessing that was because Debian refused/wasn't able to sue the Firefox branding and they extended that to the user agent. So a ton of sites just saw Iceweasel as the UA and broke because it was unexpected.

Yeah I’m surprised more forks don’t have this issue. Maybe they’re too small for Mozilla to care.

LibreWolf isn't strictly a fork of Firefox, it's a preconfigured installation that locks things down and disables anti-features. So it's strictly accurate to use the Firefox user agent, because that's what actually gets compiled.

Mozilla apparently fixed this (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815006) so it sounds like forks don't have that issue now?

Wasn't the issue with the Iceweasel UA purely on Debian's end, them not like or agreeing to the Firefox terms? I don't think most forks would have that issue

No, it was a trademark issue, raised by Mozilla (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622) and seemingly resolved on their (Mozilla's) end (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815006). For what it's worth, the recent Rust trademark issue seems to be of a similar vein (and the justifications around the Firefox sound like those used in Rust).

Can you provide any evidence that the User Agent name was a trademark issue. As in the name exposed to websites. Because that is the only thing that matters here and also where everyone claims to be a variant of Mozilla for compatibility.

Thanks for clarifying!

> I switched to Librefox

You mean LibreWolf?

Yes, thanks. Fixed.

If any readers here are from Mozilla -- everyone involved in this frankly needs to be fired immediately.

I don't know about the engineer who wrote the feature, but definitely any layer of management who came up with the idea and approved it, should be shown the door immediately. It's clear they don't understand the values they're supposed to uphold.

I'd fire the engineer too. There's no due obedience in software engineering.

I've often said that Firefox is the most user-hostile piece of free & open source software I've used. It is much worse than a lot of paid, proprietary software.

Open source ended up being exactly what it says: you can see (and change, with enough time and effort) the source code. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't say anything about the incentives of its authors and their alignment with yours.

I'd still rather patch the binary (which is actually largely a zipped collection of JS that implements most of the UI) than figure out how to compile Firefox from scratch.

Android (at least the AOSP part) and Linux is a similar situation.

Mozilla. They must have some really great and well meaning employees. Otherwise a good product like Firefox (or Thunderbird) would never come out of such a garbage company. Imagine if they were actually a good company with a tech focus.

This bug is closed as a duplicate of a bug which is itself closed as a duplicate of this bug.

I haven't trusted Mozilla since the Pocket incident. I see they haven't learned the lesson.

That "WORKSFORME" tag is such a powerful insult at the users.

Go arken. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

This thread led to my discovering and switching to LibreWolf. Here's to a Firefox-ish browser that does better!

reposted, since they are trying to silence and confuse:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835182

Firefox has been going downhill for a while now, so it's not surprising.

That said, if you don't want to use Chrome, a fairly good alternative would be Vivaldi [0] - a surprisingly neat browser created by the ex-founder of Opera. It's based on the Chromium engine, so no weird rendering shenanigans, but at the same time is quite technically capable, with ad blocking, mouse gestures, email client, etc.

[0] https://vivaldi.com/

> It's based on the Chromium engine

Google has enough control over the internet as is, thank you.

I'd really wish there were other gecko browsers now. Epiphany was good but they switched to Webkit.

Edit: Just learned of LibreWolf. Might be looking into migrating over.

I have a saner list of defaults here: https://gist.github.com/Snuupy/6dbb69bf667385db0a530ccb85926...

There's also Mullvad browser: https://mullvad.net/en/browser

we need alternatives that are not based on chromium.

Why? Chromium works well and is easy to extend. It also comes with many security features, includes the latest and greatest standards, has good performance, and is actively maintained.

It lets you focus on creating the best browser possible instead of wasting time working on the parts of the browser engine which aren't relevant to your product.

> is actively maintained

By Google

How do they make money?

Last time I checked, they basically resold aggregated behaviour data.

One day, maybe, someone might finally understand that web browsers have become utilities, and regulate them.

Can someone recommend how to disable the firefox update popup on osx latest ? I have already disabled the updates checking background service.

(disclaimer: i agree to security issues and stuff due to not updating, i manage my firwalls and adblocks to prevent getting hacked, and take full responsibility in case i get hacked, thank you).

> RESOLVED WORKSFORME

Why does this resolution even exist as an option? There’s no way the big filer will find that satisfactory.

It makes sense for when a user claims there is a bug but then doesn't provide any evidence or other information than can be used to track it down and perhaps just disappears entirely. Happens often enough with any even remotely large project.

The problem is using without trying to triage the bug at all.

I had this happen... I didn't and still don't understand what was going on.

Edit: as noted in the linked ticket, there are some discussions going on about this in https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/ .

I have no idea how I consistently miss all of the random advertisements Mozilla apparently does in Firefox. Then again, I have a heavily customized Firefox and I'm used to every 5 or so versions breaking something in my userChrome.css or hiding a button I didn't ask for.

Yep, I got this too. Absolutely unacceptable.

From the screenshots it looks like the popup greyed out the entire browser window, including the window controls. Did this make the window controls non-interactive? If so I will add this to the long list of reasons why application developers cannot be trusted with client-side window decorations.

Mozilla deserves to fail. This is absolutely unacceptable, it makes me irrationally angry. I've been using Firefox since 2004, I'm tired of these tactics. We're now playing whack a mole with their settings with things like advertising on the new tab page, user studies (which seems to randomly get re-enabled on updates), and now I need to add an opt out for this specific advertisement in my about:config? How many future advertisements am I going to need to opt out of on an individual basis as they come up? It's akin to what Microsoft is doing with their many toggles required to change the default browser settings.

Even if there were a setting to opt out of everything it would be unacceptable. Might as well use Chromium if they are going to pull this shit. I'm just done with this, Mozilla deserves to fail.

Yes it deserves to fail. But can any of us afford for it to do so?

Yes. Can we afford for it to not fail and keep preventing any real alternative from gaining momentum?

I turned off ads as soon as they added them and have no issues. I'm not sure why everyone is being overly dramatic about this. Furthermore, I subscribe to their relay service, so it pitches a couple bucks a month to them. I vote with my wallet. I don't think everything should be free or lose my mind when I see an annoyance in something that I get a ton of utility out of. The world isn't a perfect place.

I turned off ads and I still saw this ad today. It sounds like this one is behind a new setting.

> I subscribe to their relay service, so it pitches a couple bucks a month to them. I vote with my wallet.

I would love to vote with my wallet. I want to donate to Firefox directly. If they'd given me an option to donate and have the money go to Firefox and not Mozilla's other pet projects, I'd happily have set up a recurring monthly donation for it.

That's the thing no?

I really like Firefox. I want it to succeed. I really came to dislike the company behind it over the years though. It almost feels like they purposefully worsen Firefox over time in order to serve the desires of their benefactors at Google.

Why the bug is closed, is this wontfix? Sorry for not trying hard enough to figure out what's up with this bug, all I can see is

" Opened 8 hours ago Closed 6 hours ago "

Probably this whole story comes down to "there's 'Allow Firefox to make personalized extension recommendations setting' and it is on by default".

IDK if they’re ready for the limelight, but if you’re an internet enthusiast and on the market for a non-Mozilla non-FAANG browser, you should check out The Browser Company’s Arc.

No affiliation, just a happy user for the last year or so. After being a long, long time FF supporter, even through all this tragic disintegration.

Their website really doesn't tell me anything I want to know about a new browser. Most importantly, is it Chromium based?

Yep, Chromium.

I know it's incredibly hard to build a browser engine, but any browser build in chromium is just giving Google more market share, which is a hard pass for me.

Agreed that it'd be nice to have a less ethically-ambiguous alternative.

Since you seem to be pretty knowledgeable in this space, are you aware of any competitive FOSS engines and/or browsers built around those engines?

Maybe it's time to focus more on servo, a browser engine written in rust, originally created, but later abandoned by Mozilla. Seems like it starts rolling again. https://servo.org/

Yep, this happened completely at random and I'm pretty sure the browser focused itself.

This happened to me a couple hours ago. The page it displayed over was chat gpt. I thought, well I guess mozilla has to make money somehow!

Absolute rule of the attention economy: If someone has your attention, they will eventually try and make money off of it.

When this kind of things happened, I'm sure it's an honest mistake and someone has learned a very good lesson.

That should be a accessibility disaster baked right into the browser(related to yesterday's anti-modal post)

Just. Let. Me. Pay. For. The. Browser.

There are lots of forks of Firefox. Is there a reliable one without all the crap?

Upvoting as I feel most posts critical of Mozilla get flagged.

> WORKSFORME

Looks like this feature is working as Mozilla intended.

I just got this ad when opening a new tab. Wild.

so are we switching to Brave now?

Usually you want to switch to something better, not worse.

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No, the other way round: People who support Firefox fight the dominance of the Chromium engine. If anything, one engine dominating is bad for the Web. (There is also Safari, but for Apple OSes only.)

If Firefox was bad for Google then would Google be paying them 500m a year?

You could argue they do this in order to keep antitrust from looking at chrome too closely.

Google paid Firefox for search before Chrome even existed.

Of course but their reasoning will have changed over time. Because Firefox's market share has changed tremendously as well.

Yes, and at that point it was because Firefox was the second most popular browser. Motivations do change.

What are people who need a browser supposed to use? Chrome..? Would that make for a healthier web?

and what would that be? google with chrome? mozilla and firefox are the only thing standing between a near monopoly of google on the browser market. safari on mac os doesn't count because it is not available on other systems.

I was stating this when Microsoft ditched the Trident system. I don't use windows but it was the last hold out against Google completely crushing the browser market. What I didnt anticipate was just how poorly Mozilla would take the opportunity and ruin it. Nowadays the last Bastian of freedom seems to be on the Firefox forks some which are very distro specific.

You can download browsers on Linux based on the same engine as Safari. https://webkit.org/downloads/

How? Fork the engine or whole thing? How to pay for it? Costs many $$$ to build. Would maybe cost less without the stupid things they do but...seems a difficult calculation to make.

There are dozens of smaller browsers that don't abuse their users. When Firefox loses the mind share it no longer deserves they will finally get enough money to hire a full-time developer.

Which all use chromium, which is in practice no different to using chrome in regards to extending google's web dominance?

What's better?

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Developing a browser is almost as close to an effort as writing an OS. Read the Flexbox specs alone. It's complicated and then there are hundreds of such specs. And then it is a moving target, constantly.

Alternatives to Firefox are free. If this software has to survive than enough people will have to pay either directly or indirectly as in case of ads.

What are other ways that an open source software can survive that cannot have "Open core" or "On premise" options available to it?

> What are other ways that an open source software can survive that cannot have "Open core" or "On premise" options available to it?

Ask for money? Hell there's still not actually any way to pay for Firefox. Even this ad doesn't actually allow you to pay for Firefox, but instead for a service that's useless to the vast majority of people and relies on fear-mongering to sell itself.

I don't think Mullvad is bad, but I prefer signing up with them directly instead of through Firefox, so I can use it with more different devices. Also whatever they get through the Mullvad deal nurse be a fraction of what you pay. After all Mullvad must supply the service for this money also and make a profit.

What I'd actually pay for is something more elaborate like icloud private relay. Unfortunately Mozilla just cancelled that and it was only in beta in the US.

I'd also pay for Firefox itself if I could (I already donate to the other projects I use a lot like KDE) but I feel a bit disenfranchised with Mozilla still aiming very hard at the mainstream user they have long lost.

I'm merely genuinely asking what models exist for free open source software.