I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions, but they are in a difficult position, and the anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless. Some common demands:
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google
- Mozilla should not monetize Firefox
- Mozilla should only focus on Firefox
- Mozilla should develop cool research projects
- Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business
- Mozilla should have a salary cap and expect executives to treat it like a passion project
Some of these goals are opposite ends of the same slider, so it's not possible to maximize both. Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. For example, my understanding is that while salaries are quite decent, they tend to be below what Apple and Google will offer for similar roles.
Maybe it's seen as waffling whenever they shift these sliders, and maybe that's a fair criticism. But nobody else seems to be able to put together a clear and realistic alternative plan. Most of them pick and choose contradictory goals, other plans like Zawinski's are at least clear, but too radical for those who still want revenue to pay developers or to be able to watch Netflix in their browser.
Exactly, and to your point, a lot of the charges against Mozilla are mutually exclusive, contradictory, or barely even half-made attempts at arguments. You've outlined the make money/don't make money contradiction. But to add a few more of the crazy criticisms, sincerely made:
- Implying without evidence that the VPN is run at prohibitively massive cost and at the expense of other programs
- Claiming that Mozilla has "run out of money" (they have over $1 billion in assets)
- Overstating costs of Mozilla's dabbling in blockchain (they wrote a paper or two)
- Claiming the CEO pay has crippled Mozilla's ability to work on core browser (it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue)
- Claiming without any mechanism or argument that there's a missing feature Mozilla could have developed that would have restored all their market share
- Related to the above, completely ignoring that Chrome drove market share in its own proactive ways, leveraging its search and Android dominance, rolling out affordable Chromebooks and that these drove the market share more than anything specific to Mozilla
- Firefox has become bloated and slow (Outdated talking point, it was true for a time, but then they did the dang thing and delivered Quantum, which delivered the major advances in speed in stability that everyone asked for)
That's not to say there's no valid criticisms, there are plenty. There seems to be real cause and effect, for instance, on Firefox's investments in FirefoxOS and the ability to invest resources in the browser, and that did happen over a time where market share was lost. And the dabbling in ads risks compromising the soul of their mission in critical ways.
But meanwhile these (above) have all generally been basically misunderstandings or bad arguments with no internal logic, but claimed over and over again in the backwaters of internet comment sections with complete impunity. The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.
In a lot of industries, 1% revenue is rather a lot. Many domains have profit margins of 5% or even less; that would be fully 20% of your earnings.
Software development is not "many industries", and Mozilla isn't most software development companies. So it's hard for me to say whether that specific CEO salary is appropriate. But I'd rather see his salary described by earnings, rather than revenue, since revenue by itself could just be churn.
> Both Mozilla and the Wikipedia Foundation seem to have the same problem of doing everything but focusing on their core raison d'être.
At least for Wikimedia... running Wikipedia itself isn't expensive, they're not running it as a resume-driven-development project in some hyperscaler that brings associated costs, they run bare metal servers to this day (and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup).
Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.
I've noticed this as well. It's in especially stark contrast when you compare to other browsers, such as Brave, whose gaffes and controversies tend to be overlooked, excused, or forgotten about.
EDIT: For me, my choice of browser is simplified by the fact that I don't trust any chromium browser to keep long-term compatibility with extensions I rely upon, especially uBlock Origin.
> Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground.
Deeply disagree.
I think you are avoiding looking at facts by presenting the issue as a matter of contradicting opinions.
Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure by a minority linked to things unrelated to his tenure.
Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things. Worse, there were multiple events leading to negative marketing created by poor strategy.
Despite this string of failures, top management has been significantly increasing their compensation. The issue is not knowing if these compensations are competitive. Everything points to the top management being grossly incompetent. Nobody wants them to treat it like a passion project. People want them out.
I mean except Google of course which is all to happy that they meet the goal assigned to them: not being a competitor in the browser market and being an useful umbrella in case competition authorities wants to take a look at Chrome.
>Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things.
This right here is the myth that keeps getting repeated without evidence. As I said in a different comment, most of these widely criticized side bets happened long after the market share decline, so the attempt to tie that to cause and effect just doesn't work. And the "significant" money invested in the side bets is almost never quantified (normally people trying to make this argument, once you ask for numbers, are just browsing the 990 for the first time and making random guesses).
The VPN cost seems like it was utterly trivial, the amount to purchase Pocket was never disclosed but I read of fundraising around $14MM and implied valuations in the low to mid tens of millions, which may be the ballpark of what Pocket costed to acquire. And Pocket did bring in revenue, also possibly on the order of tens of millions. So the worst case is that they lost low tens of millions, the best case is that it was a wash.
So that's not nothing, but that's what it looks like to attach these claims to facts. It's probably less than what their endowment earns them in a year, and relatively small against their annual revenue. But it doesn't tell a story of side bets triggering a collapse in market share like people keep claiming.
And it seems like I keep having to repeat this, but these kinds of narratives completely ignore what were likely the real drivers of market share change, which was Google leveraging its powerful position in search, on Android, the rollout of Chromebooks.
>Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure
Sidebar for this one. Seems like you are referring to Brandon Eich who was CEO for all of 11 days. He was significant to Mozilla in other ways before that, but interestingly, it's his career at Mozilla that most intersects with the period of major collapse in market share.
>while they barely fought on the marketing side of things
Mozilla has long had a rather huge marketing budget that, depending on the person, is something for which they're criticized. I foget the exact numbers, but after software and development, "operations", and legal, marketing is the biggest chunk of spending and it's comparable to those other departments. If you wanted to argue that they are spending too much that actually would, imo, be one of the stronger charges to make against Mozilla, depending on what you think their priorities should be.
The TV thing meant the Fire TV version? How much did it cost? How much did Amazon pay Mozilla?
What was Eich's track record of good decisions? He supported Firefox OS. This seems a bad decision according to you. Many people say Firefox was much inferior to Chrome from 2008 to 2017 at least. Eich was CTO from 2005 to 2014. His track record at Brave includes multiple events which led to negative marketing.
Eich's tenure as Mozilla's CEO included failing to prepare for a predictable PR crisis, declining to apologize for harming people, and declining to say he wouldn't do it again.
You’re twisting what people ask for. The real versions are not contradictory.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google.
- Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.
- Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox.
- Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.
- Mozilla should be well run.
- Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.
This is a company that has repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding. They defined themselves as the advocate for users on the web, then started selling user data and lied about it. Sure there’s a grey area, but Mozilla is far from it.
Points 3 and 4 are contradictory, or at least, very difficult to reconcile. The use of "mainly" means you can technically say it's possible to achieve both but I doubt any of Mozilla's critics will ever be happy with their attempts to do so.
Points 1 to 3 also seem very difficult to reconcile. If they need to develop revenue independent of Google, and they need to focus mainly on Firefox, then at some stage they need to monetise other aspects of the browser. How do they do that in a way that is respectful to its users? What is the way for Mozilla to develop a new revenue stream, via Firefox (their main focus), that everyone is happy with?
Points 5 and 6 are too vague, I don't see how they could ever objectively be measured against those principles (other than by looking at the other principles).
All of this is to say that they can't win. They launch new products to try and make money, they are selling out and abandoning their core mission. They try instead to make money from their main product, they are selling out and betraying their users. They try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are dumbing it down and letting down their power users. They don't try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are failing to stay relevant.
I've seen the comments they are talking about, so I don't agree they are twisting anything. Your aspirationally consistent restatement of the case is vague, and the contradictions are specific. Does the existence of the investment fund count as failing to focus on Firefox or succeeding at developing revenue independent of Google? How about the VPN, another potential revenue source?
Is advocating for open web standards (as mentioned in the article as an example of a good thing) a distraction from Firefox (as I've seen commenters here suggest), or respecting users by giving a voice to their users in standards deliberation where their voice would otherwise be excluded?
And how confident are you that your answers are the unique and consistent representation of what users really want, and that I won't be able to quote half a dozen commenters coming to completely different diagnoses of the same questions?
> repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things
I don't claim to know Mozilla's internal workings, but my wife works for an education-space 501c3, and there are very strict rules about how they can fundraise, how they can spend money that's been donated, etc. I'm sure Mozilla Foundation is large enough to manage this stuff, but things like per-project bank accounts and tax records are still overhead they would have to deal with. I know one of their (my wife's org's) thorniest areas is around what money can be spent on non-"core mission" expenses.
> - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google.
> - Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.
These are contradictory, because how, exactly, do you expect them to make money?
They push and advertise a paid VPN service and everyone loses their minds and acts like Mozilla is the evilest company there ever darn was. But they do nothing, and then they "respect users", but they rely on Google for revenue.
> - Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox.
> - Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.
These are also contradictory and even contradict the first two. These side projects were not very successful, they were just well-liked. There's a difference.
If they push these side-projects, they're not focusing on Firefox, and they're disrespecting users, AND they're irresponsibly using their revenue. Oops.
And, on the topic of side projects, it seems to me that everyone rallies around them and calls them stupid and unnecessary... until they're killed. Then suddenly, magically, everyone and their Mom was using them. Really? Where was this support before? Are the supporters just unusually silent?
Like Pocket. I heard nothing, NOTHING, but ridicule for Pocket. Until it got discontinued. Then everyone loved it, it was the darling child of Mozilla, it was the best, and everyone used it. Really? Yeah, okay.
> - Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.
The problem is, when searching for high-level executives, you're not competing against other NGOs, you're competing with the wide free market - and salaries there are, frankly, out of control and have been so for decades [1]. Either Mozilla Foundation plays the dirty game just like everyone else does, or they go out of business.
It's the system that's broken at a fundamental level, not individual actors.
> I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions
That's a very twisted way of putting it. Mozilla has almost always made egregiously bad decisions, especially with its money. Indeed, "I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions"
I am sorry that my response is so long, but you raised so many often repeated points that I wanted to reply somewhere near them.
To me, the motives of the users were always pretty clear and aligned with freedom, privacy and empowering end-users with free software. Then the suits came and reinterpreted it enough that if you look at it from the right angle, which is coincidentally always somewhere up Google's ass, it may align with what they're doing now.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google: true, but it could be in a different form than a search engine deal that effectively pipes all of user's queries to the most agressive advertising spyware syndicate of the world.
- Mozilla should not monetize Firefox: this is true. They can monetize adjacent support services like they did with the VPN and Relay (which I gladly paid for), but not the main product if they want it to be omnipresent.
- Mozilla should only focus on Firefox: strongly disagree. Mozilla should work on TECHNOLOGIES. TFA describes very well how Mozilla produced Rust and Servo, which are clearly more widely used software than Firefox. The difference between those two and Firefox is that they aren't a product to be marketed, they are technologies used in other projects! This makes it pretty easy to gain market share and get a higher user share to sit with the big players. Technologies, unlike products, are however very unappealing to the managerial caste since they need to mature a great deal more. This is a sociological problem. If a well-designed commercial product can be cathedral, a lot of technology projects I've seen people build resemble zen gardens. A midwit paid six figures to do nothing always tends to despise those who, for the same amount of money, tend to a zen-garden-like project with passion and intent. This also aligns somewhat with "Mozilla should develop cool research projects."
- Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business: nah. adjacent services could, but not really. Most successful software companies work off of cloud services and support nowadays. The shipped product is maybe 5% of the extracted value. A non-enshittified browser won't do much better, so I think it better to discard the thought altogether and focus on the free browser, then sell subscriptions to Relay, Pocket, or something else that works well with the free browser.
I guess my main gripe is that I see huge projects like Apache, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, PFSense, Proxmox, etc. Which are huge software projects that thrive by developing technologies. Some like PFSense and Proxmox then provide a product on top of it, but the focus is on the technology. Mozilla turned from a company developing software and technology to a company that's selling a free product and trying to profit from it. And hiring more executives won't bring better tech in.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can't cash in a good product for more than a few months, but you can capitalize on a good technology practically forever. And Mozilla can't seem to understand that software can be either, both, or none of the above, so it's starting to do what their clueless executives are good at: extract value.
Looking at your list of contradictory demands, I will point out that Mozilla themselves seemed to act the way you criticize their critics for acting. They tried to pull themselves in every direction all at once and it turns out Mozilla can't really do that.
I mean, everyone shits on Wikimedia for ballooning expenses, but at least they figured out crowdfunding.
That's not to say Mozilla can't make any strategic bets. It's just that they have to be both:
1. Complimentary or integral to their flagship browser product, Firefox, and,
2. Have a reasonable path to success
Let's look at Boot2Gecko, or "Firefox OS", through this lens. Firefox needs to be on as many operating systems as possible, including mobile OSes. And it was true that one particular mobile OS vendor was loud and proud in banning Gecko. The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS. This doesn't get Firefox in the hands of more people, but it sure as hell ties up expensive engineer time on building an entirely new platform.
Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.
Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.
The reason why I focus on Firefox is because it's the only power Mozilla has to negotiate with. When Hollywood wanted to be able to use DRM in browser, Mozilla surrendered, almost unconditionally. And they had to, because the answer to "Firefox remains principled and doesn't put DRM in the browser" is "every streaming service tells people to uninstall Firefox".
Compare that to Apple, who was able to singlehandedly block any requirement for baseline video codec support in HTML5 because they didn't want to implement Ogg Theora. That's what being a big player in the browser market gets you.
Furthermore, Zawinski's plan is the only option. Mozilla is out of time, the DOJ is actively attempting to shut off Google's antitrust insurance and that basically spells doom for Mozilla. Hell, Mozilla themselves put out an extremely morally compromised position statement, because selling the search default is the only thing Mozilla managed to make stick. If Mozilla doesn't implement Zawinski's plan, they'll collapse and cease operating.
[0] In practice, just Android. I don't remember if Windows Phone had the same limitations as iOS did, but it's market share was so limited it did not matter.
> The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS.
Firefox was losing market share to Chrome on desktop platforms which Google did not own and which did not bundle Chrome. It was not and is not obvious a better Android Firefox would have halted the decline. And any Windows Phone effort would have been wasted.
Some people think Mozilla gave up Firefox OS too soon.
In another history all iOS browsers are Safari, all Windows Phone browsers are Internet Explorer, and all Android browsers distributed through Google Play are Chrome. HN comments say Mozilla were foolish to bet this would not happen.
> Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.
Firefox includes components prototyped in Servo. It is not used as a developer tool as far as I know. Many tangible improvements to the browser were delivered without Servo.
Many companies rely on Rust without funding it. Mozilla passing Rust to an independent foundation was painful for Rust. It is unclear it harmed Mozilla.
> Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.
Why do you call Firefox OS its development name? Boot2Gecko may have been a side project. Firefox OS was the main project according to people who worked for Mozilla then.
Mozilla shut down Pocket to refocus on Firefox because Pocket was unprofitable or insufficiently profitable apparently.
Mozilla acquired Anonym last year. I think Mozilla owning an advertising company will enshittify Firefox. But how did you determine so soon it was dead weight?
> Zawinski's plan
Does Zawinski's plan mean Building THE reference implementation web browser, and Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees? The 1st part is a vague objective. Not a plan. And the 2nd part depends on the 1st part.
>anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless.
No they aren't. People just want a good product that's free from bloat and doesn't change the UI every week, interrupting you when you open it to advertise some sponsored affiliate websites on the home page (Otto and Adidas in my case) or new features I never asked for and will never use like Pocket or the VPN.
The org and leadership should also focus their funds on the technical development of the product itself, instead on social and political activism and virtue signaling since I don't want lectures form my products.
Basically, Mozilla just needs to "PUT THE FRIES IN THE BAG" and everyone would be happy, and even throw in a few bucks every now and then as a gesture of appreciation and good will.
But Mozilla lost users by doing the exact opposite of that, being drunk on the Google funded gravy train and knowledge that they're untouchable, being only thing preventing Chrome being considered a monopoly by regulators.
So good riddance from me, you reap what you sow, RIP BOZO, I can't support a bad product run by incompetent people just on idealism alone, it actually needs to be technically superior first and foremost.
> Did you know there's already a special developer's edition? No web designer is building on Firefox first any more. We're lucky if they even test on it. All the functionality attached to Firefox's "Browser tools" sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer's edition.
Though, it would be more plain, if they wrote "could" instead of "should".
What's the benefit for Firefox and its users if dev tools are removed from stable Firefox and "banished" to the Developer Edition?
Dev tools are part of all browsers. Even Safari, which tries to keep things very simple, ships dev tools on the stable version. I really don't see the point in removing them.
Why would anyone want to install another browser to use as a developer?
What the computing world needs is less separation of users and developers. Developers use programs all day, every day. And users should be able to write programs any time they wish. One of the most commonly used pieces of software in the world is a programming system: Excel.
One of my problems with iOS is the implicit assumption that users will not and should not extend the systems they use.
What a strange take. I'm arguably a web designer, though its only one of many hats I wear. I design for Firefox first and then patch the places where chrome/safari break. If dev tools were only present on developer edition, which tracks the unreleased beta version, I wouldn't actually be able to test on Firefox that regular people are using.
As a developer who develops on Firefox, and only tests on other browsers just before deployment, I'd reconsider supporting it for end users if they're not going to be able to hit F12 to help me diagnose any issues that come up on their side.
Some of TFA is more grounded. That particular paragraph though…
It exemplifies why beneficial change is so hard sometimes. The loudest voice in the room can go "here are the problems", we can all nod along in agreement, and then "and here's what we should do" … and it's just out there. I've seen this happen numerous times — borderline continuously — in politics.
Even ealier in the article, they (rightly, IMO) skewer Mozilla for laying off the Rust and Servo teams, but then TFA utterly undercuts its own thesis with,
> It shouldn't be trying to capitalize on [projects such as Rust or Servo].
What? What's the point of Rust, or Servo, then, if not to develop a better Firefox?
Compared to the people running Chrome, the people running Firefox are merely annoying.
My main issue with the people running Mozilla is that they have wasted vast sums of money on executive salaries and their half baked notions of new initiatives the company should take up (and later abandon) that don't involve building web browsers, email clients, or supporting development tools.
All that money wasted is the whole point of Mozilla. It’s been captured by Google. The role of Mozilla is to provide a fig leaf of “competition” while using Google money to pay executives who fulfill that duty. Anything that is successful or innovative, like Rust, Servo, or FakeSpot need to be jettisoned because they are a distraction from Mozilla’s true mission.
i wish firefox would have hoarded away their billions of dollars they've received and simply run as a lean mission-oriented company for the next 20 years from those funds. get rid of expensive execs and middle managers and sales and whatever else. have passionate, well-paid developers and open source advocates and nothing else. both make the best possible open source software, and also use your influence and resources to make the pressure from companies like google make the web less shitty
> My main issue with the people running Mozilla is that they have wasted vast sums of money on executive salaries and their half baked notions of new initiatives the company should take up (and later abandon) that don't involve building web browsers, email clients, or supporting development tools.
Your main issue is in direct contradiction to most people's issue with Firefox - it relies on Chrome for revenue.
They repeatedly try other revenue streams and people hate them for that too. It's a lose-lose, because, for some reason, people hate Mozilla almost viscerally. They're held to such a frankly insane standard as compared to Chrome.
I mean, Chrome shits on users in every way you could possibly imagine and nobody seems to care. Chrome is married to Google and nobody complains. But Firefox is less married to Google and it's a 100x bigger problem. How? What's the formula here?
> In mid-2024, he pointed out its "Original Sin" of adopting digital rights management.
I disagree on that one. Maybe it could have been an option 15-20 years ago, when Firefox was a significant force. But now, if it didn't have DRM, platforms that use DRM would just tell people to use another browser, or a specialized app. And people who are not activists would just switch to "the browser that runs $service", and then you give free reign to whoever controls these browsers, including making the DRM more restrictive and more invading.
DRM is an addon, it lets you do thing that you can't do without (i.e. watching protected content), but it won't affect non-DRM content. You can turn it off if you want, you just won't be able to watch Netflix (or whatever), making it a worse user experience.
If you refuse to support DRM (and therefore denying your users of some content), hoping that it will discourage adoption of DRM by platforms, you have to keep your users captive so that they won't just switch. And considering that Firefox doesn't rely on lock-in: they don't have the means to do so, and it is against the spirit in the first place, they have to offset that by offering something else. And unfortunately, they don't have much to offer besides ideology.
The original sin, if we can call it that, is that Firefox technically lagged behind Chrome: slower, more bugs, less secure,... Having to accept DRM, as well as anything Google decided was standard is a consequence of that.
That's why I had high hopes with Servo. It had the potential to make Firefox a "better browser", giving them some weight when deciding not to support some anti-feature, but they lost it.
They also lost an opportunity on mobile by not supporting extensions for too long, and generally, for not being taken seriously. Why did it take them so long to support DNS-over-HTTPS for instance?
Now, they have an opportunity regarding ad-blocking, I don't know how they are going to waste that one, but knowing them, they are probably going to manage it.
i have yet to find a site where i needed to activate DRM. even on sites where firefox did tell me to activate DRM, i just ignored it and the site worked fine. that said, having the feature built in doesn't bother me as long as i have the option to ignore it or keep it turned off
The original sin, if we can call it that, is that Firefox technically lagged behind Chrome: slower, more bugs, less secure
I only want to comment on the more bugs component because for a time it seemed like all of the sites least likely to work in Firefox were Google run. Google was choosing to exclusively code to Chrome’s latest standard. When people cannot run YouTube, Gmail, whatever, but Chrome can, not surprising when users flee.
I am not talking about website compatibility, in fact, for as far as I can tell, I had no problem with Google services using Firefox. Some degradation maybe, but not enough for me to notice.
May seem trivial, but that's with bugs like these that you lose users. I wanted my mouse to zoom, my mouse didn't zoom on Firefox (and only on Firefox), I tried Chrome, it worked, found no (technical) downside, it was faster, so I stayed with Chrome. I continued using Firefox on another PC, and I saw a lot more crashes, slowdowns, etc... on Firefox, also, a single tab could crash the entire browser (it was before Electrolysis and Quantum). Website incompatibility wasn't actually that much of a problem, it mostly affected corporate intranets, which were equal part Chrome-only and IE-only during that time.
Things have improved on the Firefox side (Quantum!), and I don't use that mouse anymore, so I am back on Firefox for most part, the ad-blocking thing pushed me back, hoping that they don't to anything crazy to push me away like they did before.
> Mozilla's leadership is directionless and flailing because it's never had to do, or be, anything else. It's never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit. It's no wonder it has no real direction or vision or clue: it never needed them. It's role-playing being a business.
Roads are also a model of corruption and inefficiency, fully captured by private actors (in Europe, Vinci etc). And I think there's no way around it past some size, but that might not be the direction we wish for Firefox.
Thank you but I don’t think the EU is a good steward. Look how much it spent in funding startups across Europe, and what little we have for it. Look at the decision-making in the EU stack.
Sweden or the Netherlands should buy it. The EU, no.
Been saying that for years but it's never been a popular opinion. For one thing people solidly blame the EU for those awful cookie banners -- and I think those cookie banners broke down any resistance to web sites popping up modals that cover up other modals all asking for your email..
I think the primary thing I've learned about open vs closed source products this last decade, is that the difference in marketing is huge.
Both Firefox and Chrome are great browsers, end stop.
But most articles on HN about Chrome start with glowing praise.
And most articles on HN about Firefox start with "What's wrong with FF" and condescention.
I'm past the point of thinking that this is actually reflective about the browsers and their organizations.
Chrome is actively ending ad block support in its plugins. Its CEO is actively engaging in the political process. Firefox has always had a messy relationship with advertising, in which it generally tries to walk the line between reality and ideology. There are pros and cons to both products, depending on what you care about. The fact that articles on each browser so consistently fall into the same pattern does not seem reflective of the actual products themselves.
I'm a bit of a tinkerer with software and will occasionally "wander" over the fence to see if it really is greener on the other side; I always come back to Firefox. I've tried:
Brave: love the mission/execution, don't care for Chrome
Arc: interesting idea, but ultimately removed too much of the things I need in exchange for things I might use, but don't need
Orion: Firefox extensions (even on iOS!) + native performance? Love it, but it crashes all the time and the extensions' compatibility comes and goes
Safari: I don't mind paying for software, but paying for extensions that will probably disappear in 6 months is a pass
I've recently settled on the Zen Firefox flavor: It brings a lot of what Arc, custom Firefox themes aim for in a stable package, while maintaining full compatibility with all the Firefox extensions I use. The only issue I still experience is the occasional "this site only works on Chrome".
Weird mix of complaints, attacking Mozilla both from the ultra purity of non-profit web standards side via JWZ while simultaneously complaining they don't run it like a business.
Readit News
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google - Mozilla should not monetize Firefox - Mozilla should only focus on Firefox - Mozilla should develop cool research projects - Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business - Mozilla should have a salary cap and expect executives to treat it like a passion project
Some of these goals are opposite ends of the same slider, so it's not possible to maximize both. Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. For example, my understanding is that while salaries are quite decent, they tend to be below what Apple and Google will offer for similar roles.
Maybe it's seen as waffling whenever they shift these sliders, and maybe that's a fair criticism. But nobody else seems to be able to put together a clear and realistic alternative plan. Most of them pick and choose contradictory goals, other plans like Zawinski's are at least clear, but too radical for those who still want revenue to pay developers or to be able to watch Netflix in their browser.
- Implying without evidence that the VPN is run at prohibitively massive cost and at the expense of other programs
- Claiming that Mozilla has "run out of money" (they have over $1 billion in assets)
- Overstating costs of Mozilla's dabbling in blockchain (they wrote a paper or two)
- Claiming the CEO pay has crippled Mozilla's ability to work on core browser (it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue)
- Claiming without any mechanism or argument that there's a missing feature Mozilla could have developed that would have restored all their market share
- Related to the above, completely ignoring that Chrome drove market share in its own proactive ways, leveraging its search and Android dominance, rolling out affordable Chromebooks and that these drove the market share more than anything specific to Mozilla
- Firefox has become bloated and slow (Outdated talking point, it was true for a time, but then they did the dang thing and delivered Quantum, which delivered the major advances in speed in stability that everyone asked for)
That's not to say there's no valid criticisms, there are plenty. There seems to be real cause and effect, for instance, on Firefox's investments in FirefoxOS and the ability to invest resources in the browser, and that did happen over a time where market share was lost. And the dabbling in ads risks compromising the soul of their mission in critical ways.
But meanwhile these (above) have all generally been basically misunderstandings or bad arguments with no internal logic, but claimed over and over again in the backwaters of internet comment sections with complete impunity. The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.
In a lot of industries, 1% revenue is rather a lot. Many domains have profit margins of 5% or even less; that would be fully 20% of your earnings.
Software development is not "many industries", and Mozilla isn't most software development companies. So it's hard for me to say whether that specific CEO salary is appropriate. But I'd rather see his salary described by earnings, rather than revenue, since revenue by itself could just be churn.
I have long suspected that a good chunk of the controversy surrounding Mozilla that I've seen is...let's just call it motivated reasoning.
Like, what is there even to say but constantly complain about that.
At least for Wikimedia... running Wikipedia itself isn't expensive, they're not running it as a resume-driven-development project in some hyperscaler that brings associated costs, they run bare metal servers to this day (and so, notably, does StackOverflow who run a ridiculously lean setup).
Wikimedia's mission from the start was to be more than just "run Wikipedia and make sure it isn't bought off by some corporate interest", it always had outreach and social responsibility at its core. The problem is, for some people being a responsible citizen of society is already political in itself and, thus, bad.
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EDIT: For me, my choice of browser is simplified by the fact that I don't trust any chromium browser to keep long-term compatibility with extensions I rely upon, especially uBlock Origin.
Deeply disagree.
I think you are avoiding looking at facts by presenting the issue as a matter of contradicting opinions.
Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure by a minority linked to things unrelated to his tenure.
Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things. Worse, there were multiple events leading to negative marketing created by poor strategy.
Despite this string of failures, top management has been significantly increasing their compensation. The issue is not knowing if these compensations are competitive. Everything points to the top management being grossly incompetent. Nobody wants them to treat it like a passion project. People want them out.
I mean except Google of course which is all to happy that they meet the goal assigned to them: not being a competitor in the browser market and being an useful umbrella in case competition authorities wants to take a look at Chrome.
This right here is the myth that keeps getting repeated without evidence. As I said in a different comment, most of these widely criticized side bets happened long after the market share decline, so the attempt to tie that to cause and effect just doesn't work. And the "significant" money invested in the side bets is almost never quantified (normally people trying to make this argument, once you ask for numbers, are just browsing the 990 for the first time and making random guesses).
The VPN cost seems like it was utterly trivial, the amount to purchase Pocket was never disclosed but I read of fundraising around $14MM and implied valuations in the low to mid tens of millions, which may be the ballpark of what Pocket costed to acquire. And Pocket did bring in revenue, also possibly on the order of tens of millions. So the worst case is that they lost low tens of millions, the best case is that it was a wash.
So that's not nothing, but that's what it looks like to attach these claims to facts. It's probably less than what their endowment earns them in a year, and relatively small against their annual revenue. But it doesn't tell a story of side bets triggering a collapse in market share like people keep claiming.
And it seems like I keep having to repeat this, but these kinds of narratives completely ignore what were likely the real drivers of market share change, which was Google leveraging its powerful position in search, on Android, the rollout of Chromebooks.
Sidebar for this one. Seems like you are referring to Brandon Eich who was CEO for all of 11 days. He was significant to Mozilla in other ways before that, but interestingly, it's his career at Mozilla that most intersects with the period of major collapse in market share.
>while they barely fought on the marketing side of things
Mozilla has long had a rather huge marketing budget that, depending on the person, is something for which they're criticized. I foget the exact numbers, but after software and development, "operations", and legal, marketing is the biggest chunk of spending and it's comparable to those other departments. If you wanted to argue that they are spending too much that actually would, imo, be one of the stronger charges to make against Mozilla, depending on what you think their priorities should be.
The TV thing meant the Fire TV version? How much did it cost? How much did Amazon pay Mozilla?
What was Eich's track record of good decisions? He supported Firefox OS. This seems a bad decision according to you. Many people say Firefox was much inferior to Chrome from 2008 to 2017 at least. Eich was CTO from 2005 to 2014. His track record at Brave includes multiple events which led to negative marketing.
Eich's tenure as Mozilla's CEO included failing to prepare for a predictable PR crisis, declining to apologize for harming people, and declining to say he wouldn't do it again.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google.
- Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.
- Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox.
- Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.
- Mozilla should be well run.
- Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.
This is a company that has repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding. They defined themselves as the advocate for users on the web, then started selling user data and lied about it. Sure there’s a grey area, but Mozilla is far from it.
Points 1 to 3 also seem very difficult to reconcile. If they need to develop revenue independent of Google, and they need to focus mainly on Firefox, then at some stage they need to monetise other aspects of the browser. How do they do that in a way that is respectful to its users? What is the way for Mozilla to develop a new revenue stream, via Firefox (their main focus), that everyone is happy with?
Points 5 and 6 are too vague, I don't see how they could ever objectively be measured against those principles (other than by looking at the other principles).
All of this is to say that they can't win. They launch new products to try and make money, they are selling out and abandoning their core mission. They try instead to make money from their main product, they are selling out and betraying their users. They try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are dumbing it down and letting down their power users. They don't try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are failing to stay relevant.
Remember when Mitchell Baker was the problem?
I've seen the comments they are talking about, so I don't agree they are twisting anything. Your aspirationally consistent restatement of the case is vague, and the contradictions are specific. Does the existence of the investment fund count as failing to focus on Firefox or succeeding at developing revenue independent of Google? How about the VPN, another potential revenue source?
Is advocating for open web standards (as mentioned in the article as an example of a good thing) a distraction from Firefox (as I've seen commenters here suggest), or respecting users by giving a voice to their users in standards deliberation where their voice would otherwise be excluded?
And how confident are you that your answers are the unique and consistent representation of what users really want, and that I won't be able to quote half a dozen commenters coming to completely different diagnoses of the same questions?
And then you get articles like these complaining about Mozilla re-selling a VPN service.
(I agree with your points.)
I don't claim to know Mozilla's internal workings, but my wife works for an education-space 501c3, and there are very strict rules about how they can fundraise, how they can spend money that's been donated, etc. I'm sure Mozilla Foundation is large enough to manage this stuff, but things like per-project bank accounts and tax records are still overhead they would have to deal with. I know one of their (my wife's org's) thorniest areas is around what money can be spent on non-"core mission" expenses.
Those were which things?
These are contradictory, because how, exactly, do you expect them to make money?
They push and advertise a paid VPN service and everyone loses their minds and acts like Mozilla is the evilest company there ever darn was. But they do nothing, and then they "respect users", but they rely on Google for revenue.
> - Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox. > - Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.
These are also contradictory and even contradict the first two. These side projects were not very successful, they were just well-liked. There's a difference.
If they push these side-projects, they're not focusing on Firefox, and they're disrespecting users, AND they're irresponsibly using their revenue. Oops.
And, on the topic of side projects, it seems to me that everyone rallies around them and calls them stupid and unnecessary... until they're killed. Then suddenly, magically, everyone and their Mom was using them. Really? Where was this support before? Are the supporters just unusually silent?
Like Pocket. I heard nothing, NOTHING, but ridicule for Pocket. Until it got discontinued. Then everyone loved it, it was the darling child of Mozilla, it was the best, and everyone used it. Really? Yeah, okay.
The problem is, when searching for high-level executives, you're not competing against other NGOs, you're competing with the wide free market - and salaries there are, frankly, out of control and have been so for decades [1]. Either Mozilla Foundation plays the dirty game just like everyone else does, or they go out of business.
It's the system that's broken at a fundamental level, not individual actors.
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/
That's a very twisted way of putting it. Mozilla has almost always made egregiously bad decisions, especially with its money. Indeed, "I don't think Mozilla has always made the right decisions"
To me, the motives of the users were always pretty clear and aligned with freedom, privacy and empowering end-users with free software. Then the suits came and reinterpreted it enough that if you look at it from the right angle, which is coincidentally always somewhere up Google's ass, it may align with what they're doing now.
- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google: true, but it could be in a different form than a search engine deal that effectively pipes all of user's queries to the most agressive advertising spyware syndicate of the world.
- Mozilla should not monetize Firefox: this is true. They can monetize adjacent support services like they did with the VPN and Relay (which I gladly paid for), but not the main product if they want it to be omnipresent.
- Mozilla should only focus on Firefox: strongly disagree. Mozilla should work on TECHNOLOGIES. TFA describes very well how Mozilla produced Rust and Servo, which are clearly more widely used software than Firefox. The difference between those two and Firefox is that they aren't a product to be marketed, they are technologies used in other projects! This makes it pretty easy to gain market share and get a higher user share to sit with the big players. Technologies, unlike products, are however very unappealing to the managerial caste since they need to mature a great deal more. This is a sociological problem. If a well-designed commercial product can be cathedral, a lot of technology projects I've seen people build resemble zen gardens. A midwit paid six figures to do nothing always tends to despise those who, for the same amount of money, tend to a zen-garden-like project with passion and intent. This also aligns somewhat with "Mozilla should develop cool research projects."
- Mozilla should be run like a competitive and professional business: nah. adjacent services could, but not really. Most successful software companies work off of cloud services and support nowadays. The shipped product is maybe 5% of the extracted value. A non-enshittified browser won't do much better, so I think it better to discard the thought altogether and focus on the free browser, then sell subscriptions to Relay, Pocket, or something else that works well with the free browser.
I guess my main gripe is that I see huge projects like Apache, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, PFSense, Proxmox, etc. Which are huge software projects that thrive by developing technologies. Some like PFSense and Proxmox then provide a product on top of it, but the focus is on the technology. Mozilla turned from a company developing software and technology to a company that's selling a free product and trying to profit from it. And hiring more executives won't bring better tech in.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can't cash in a good product for more than a few months, but you can capitalize on a good technology practically forever. And Mozilla can't seem to understand that software can be either, both, or none of the above, so it's starting to do what their clueless executives are good at: extract value.
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I mean, everyone shits on Wikimedia for ballooning expenses, but at least they figured out crowdfunding.
That's not to say Mozilla can't make any strategic bets. It's just that they have to be both:
1. Complimentary or integral to their flagship browser product, Firefox, and,
2. Have a reasonable path to success
Let's look at Boot2Gecko, or "Firefox OS", through this lens. Firefox needs to be on as many operating systems as possible, including mobile OSes. And it was true that one particular mobile OS vendor was loud and proud in banning Gecko. The obvious choice would have been to put all your effort into making a good mobile browser on other mobile OSes[0], but instead Mozilla decided to make a whole OS. This doesn't get Firefox in the hands of more people, but it sure as hell ties up expensive engineer time on building an entirely new platform.
Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.
Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.
The reason why I focus on Firefox is because it's the only power Mozilla has to negotiate with. When Hollywood wanted to be able to use DRM in browser, Mozilla surrendered, almost unconditionally. And they had to, because the answer to "Firefox remains principled and doesn't put DRM in the browser" is "every streaming service tells people to uninstall Firefox".
Compare that to Apple, who was able to singlehandedly block any requirement for baseline video codec support in HTML5 because they didn't want to implement Ogg Theora. That's what being a big player in the browser market gets you.
Furthermore, Zawinski's plan is the only option. Mozilla is out of time, the DOJ is actively attempting to shut off Google's antitrust insurance and that basically spells doom for Mozilla. Hell, Mozilla themselves put out an extremely morally compromised position statement, because selling the search default is the only thing Mozilla managed to make stick. If Mozilla doesn't implement Zawinski's plan, they'll collapse and cease operating.
[0] In practice, just Android. I don't remember if Windows Phone had the same limitations as iOS did, but it's market share was so limited it did not matter.
Firefox was losing market share to Chrome on desktop platforms which Google did not own and which did not bundle Chrome. It was not and is not obvious a better Android Firefox would have halted the decline. And any Windows Phone effort would have been wasted.
Some people think Mozilla gave up Firefox OS too soon.
In another history all iOS browsers are Safari, all Windows Phone browsers are Internet Explorer, and all Android browsers distributed through Google Play are Chrome. HN comments say Mozilla were foolish to bet this would not happen.
> Now, let's look at Rust and Servo. Those are critical developer tools. Firefox is built with them. But Mozilla jettisoned them, unceremoniously, even though they were delivering tangible improvements to the browser.
Firefox includes components prototyped in Servo. It is not used as a developer tool as far as I know. Many tangible improvements to the browser were delivered without Servo.
Many companies rely on Rust without funding it. Mozilla passing Rust to an independent foundation was painful for Rust. It is unclear it harmed Mozilla.
> Zawinski's plan seems too radical now because Mozilla larded themselves up on side projects like Boot2Gecko and acquisitions like Pocket and Anonym, while tossing things like Rust and Servo out the window. To be clear, if Mozilla had used Pocket to make themselves Google-independent, I wouldn't be complaining about it, but instead they shut it down.
Why do you call Firefox OS its development name? Boot2Gecko may have been a side project. Firefox OS was the main project according to people who worked for Mozilla then.
Mozilla shut down Pocket to refocus on Firefox because Pocket was unprofitable or insufficiently profitable apparently.
Mozilla acquired Anonym last year. I think Mozilla owning an advertising company will enshittify Firefox. But how did you determine so soon it was dead weight?
> Zawinski's plan
Does Zawinski's plan mean Building THE reference implementation web browser, and Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees? The 1st part is a vague objective. Not a plan. And the 2nd part depends on the 1st part.
No they aren't. People just want a good product that's free from bloat and doesn't change the UI every week, interrupting you when you open it to advertise some sponsored affiliate websites on the home page (Otto and Adidas in my case) or new features I never asked for and will never use like Pocket or the VPN.
The org and leadership should also focus their funds on the technical development of the product itself, instead on social and political activism and virtue signaling since I don't want lectures form my products.
Basically, Mozilla just needs to "PUT THE FRIES IN THE BAG" and everyone would be happy, and even throw in a few bucks every now and then as a gesture of appreciation and good will.
But Mozilla lost users by doing the exact opposite of that, being drunk on the Google funded gravy train and knowledge that they're untouchable, being only thing preventing Chrome being considered a monopoly by regulators.
So good riddance from me, you reap what you sow, RIP BOZO, I can't support a bad product run by incompetent people just on idealism alone, it actually needs to be technically superior first and foremost.
I may be in the minority here but I’d be fine with them trying to push SaaS add-ons like a VPN if they would stop moving UI elements around.
I hope this is some kind of sarcastic take I am not getting. What a weird thing to stand for.
> Did you know there's already a special developer's edition? No web designer is building on Firefox first any more. We're lucky if they even test on it. All the functionality attached to Firefox's "Browser tools" sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer's edition.
Though, it would be more plain, if they wrote "could" instead of "should".
Dev tools are part of all browsers. Even Safari, which tries to keep things very simple, ships dev tools on the stable version. I really don't see the point in removing them.
What the computing world needs is less separation of users and developers. Developers use programs all day, every day. And users should be able to write programs any time they wish. One of the most commonly used pieces of software in the world is a programming system: Excel.
One of my problems with iOS is the implicit assumption that users will not and should not extend the systems they use.
It exemplifies why beneficial change is so hard sometimes. The loudest voice in the room can go "here are the problems", we can all nod along in agreement, and then "and here's what we should do" … and it's just out there. I've seen this happen numerous times — borderline continuously — in politics.
Even ealier in the article, they (rightly, IMO) skewer Mozilla for laying off the Rust and Servo teams, but then TFA utterly undercuts its own thesis with,
> It shouldn't be trying to capitalize on [projects such as Rust or Servo].
What? What's the point of Rust, or Servo, then, if not to develop a better Firefox?
My main issue with the people running Mozilla is that they have wasted vast sums of money on executive salaries and their half baked notions of new initiatives the company should take up (and later abandon) that don't involve building web browsers, email clients, or supporting development tools.
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Your main issue is in direct contradiction to most people's issue with Firefox - it relies on Chrome for revenue.
They repeatedly try other revenue streams and people hate them for that too. It's a lose-lose, because, for some reason, people hate Mozilla almost viscerally. They're held to such a frankly insane standard as compared to Chrome.
I mean, Chrome shits on users in every way you could possibly imagine and nobody seems to care. Chrome is married to Google and nobody complains. But Firefox is less married to Google and it's a 100x bigger problem. How? What's the formula here?
I disagree on that one. Maybe it could have been an option 15-20 years ago, when Firefox was a significant force. But now, if it didn't have DRM, platforms that use DRM would just tell people to use another browser, or a specialized app. And people who are not activists would just switch to "the browser that runs $service", and then you give free reign to whoever controls these browsers, including making the DRM more restrictive and more invading.
DRM is an addon, it lets you do thing that you can't do without (i.e. watching protected content), but it won't affect non-DRM content. You can turn it off if you want, you just won't be able to watch Netflix (or whatever), making it a worse user experience.
If you refuse to support DRM (and therefore denying your users of some content), hoping that it will discourage adoption of DRM by platforms, you have to keep your users captive so that they won't just switch. And considering that Firefox doesn't rely on lock-in: they don't have the means to do so, and it is against the spirit in the first place, they have to offset that by offering something else. And unfortunately, they don't have much to offer besides ideology.
The original sin, if we can call it that, is that Firefox technically lagged behind Chrome: slower, more bugs, less secure,... Having to accept DRM, as well as anything Google decided was standard is a consequence of that.
That's why I had high hopes with Servo. It had the potential to make Firefox a "better browser", giving them some weight when deciding not to support some anti-feature, but they lost it.
They also lost an opportunity on mobile by not supporting extensions for too long, and generally, for not being taken seriously. Why did it take them so long to support DNS-over-HTTPS for instance?
Now, they have an opportunity regarding ad-blocking, I don't know how they are going to waste that one, but knowing them, they are probably going to manage it.
To give your an example, here is the bug that made me switch to Chrome: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429
May seem trivial, but that's with bugs like these that you lose users. I wanted my mouse to zoom, my mouse didn't zoom on Firefox (and only on Firefox), I tried Chrome, it worked, found no (technical) downside, it was faster, so I stayed with Chrome. I continued using Firefox on another PC, and I saw a lot more crashes, slowdowns, etc... on Firefox, also, a single tab could crash the entire browser (it was before Electrolysis and Quantum). Website incompatibility wasn't actually that much of a problem, it mostly affected corporate intranets, which were equal part Chrome-only and IE-only during that time.
Things have improved on the Firefox side (Quantum!), and I don't use that mouse anymore, so I am back on Firefox for most part, the ad-blocking thing pushed me back, hoping that they don't to anything crazy to push me away like they did before.
Maybe the EU can buy it and maintain the browser as a critical piece of infrastructure, the same way roads etc are.
Roads are also a model of corruption and inefficiency, fully captured by private actors (in Europe, Vinci etc). And I think there's no way around it past some size, but that might not be the direction we wish for Firefox.
Thank you but I don’t think the EU is a good steward. Look how much it spent in funding startups across Europe, and what little we have for it. Look at the decision-making in the EU stack.
Sweden or the Netherlands should buy it. The EU, no.
Both Firefox and Chrome are great browsers, end stop.
But most articles on HN about Chrome start with glowing praise.
And most articles on HN about Firefox start with "What's wrong with FF" and condescention.
I'm past the point of thinking that this is actually reflective about the browsers and their organizations.
Chrome is actively ending ad block support in its plugins. Its CEO is actively engaging in the political process. Firefox has always had a messy relationship with advertising, in which it generally tries to walk the line between reality and ideology. There are pros and cons to both products, depending on what you care about. The fact that articles on each browser so consistently fall into the same pattern does not seem reflective of the actual products themselves.
I think the difference is down to marketing.
No, Chrome sucks.
Chrome is for all intents and purposes, open source. Yes, there is 0.000001% that's not. It's hard to argue that tiny portion is the difference.
> Chrome is actively ending ad block support in its plugins.
Chrome has not ended ad blocking - I'm using ublock lite and ads are blocked.
Brave: love the mission/execution, don't care for Chrome
Arc: interesting idea, but ultimately removed too much of the things I need in exchange for things I might use, but don't need
Orion: Firefox extensions (even on iOS!) + native performance? Love it, but it crashes all the time and the extensions' compatibility comes and goes
Safari: I don't mind paying for software, but paying for extensions that will probably disappear in 6 months is a pass
I've recently settled on the Zen Firefox flavor: It brings a lot of what Arc, custom Firefox themes aim for in a stable package, while maintaining full compatibility with all the Firefox extensions I use. The only issue I still experience is the occasional "this site only works on Chrome".
Perhaps you should name and shame.
"...the anti-Mozilla arguments are typically much more vague and directionless..."
... wasn't completely unreasonable.