While waterfax highlights a problematic section of Mozilla's change:
> UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice. (Emphasis mine)
And they mention that we need to see the context behind this change -- but what they don't to -- is point out that the update clarification makes the whole situation even more problematic than it was previously.
The private notice indicates they use data to:
1. To provide and improve search functionality
2. To serve relevant content and advertising on Firefox New Tab
3. To provide Mozilla accounts
4. To provide AI Chatbots
5. To provide Review Checker, including serving sponsored content
6. To provide and enable add-ons (addons.mozilla.org)
7. To maintain and improve features, performance and stability
8. To improve security
9. To understand usage of Firefox
10. To market our services
11. To pseudonymize, de-identify, aggregate or anonymize data
12. To communicate with you
13. To comply with applicable laws, and identify and prevent harmful, unauthorized or illegal activity
1,2,4,5,10 are problematic. We don't want those things. Mozilla wants those things. The problem isn't the lack of context behind the changes, the problem is Mozilla wants to be able to use our 'input' data for whatever they want, and I don't want them to.
They said they're the privacy focused browser; and they're not. That's a lie. I moved from Chrome to Firefox precisely because I couldn't trust Google. Now I can't trust Firefox.
> Browsers without formal governance may offer appealing features or privacy claims, but users have little recourse if those promises are broken. There’s no entity to hold accountable, no legal framework within which to address grievances, and often no transparency about decision-making processes.
Do we get any of those with Mozilla? They can change their ToC whenever they want and keep adding things that users don't want. I don't think they are much better than a random developer building their own fork.
Wait, Mozilla is banning the use of their Firefox browser for porn? That's going to hurt adoption.
What's with the mixup of their browser and services policies?
[1] Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
[2] You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to:
* Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence,
Yeah, and that makes sense in the context of an acceptable use policy for Mozilla services that are not your use of the Firefox browser.
But the same AUP for the services is now explicitly referenced in the TOS for the browser. How are you supposed to read it - the AUP only applies to your use of the browser to access the services? Isn't that already implicit if you're using the services? Surely it can't be attempting to apply the services AUP to any non-service use of the browser?
Very confusing, it seems badly written to me.
Same thing with the "Some Services in Firefox Require a Mozilla Account" and then the "Termination" with a notification to the (optional) account. Somewhat disconcerting.
[1] Mozilla can suspend or end anyone’s access to Firefox at any time for any reason, including if Mozilla decides not to offer Firefox anymore. If we decide to suspend or end your access, we will try to notify you at the email address associated with your account or the next time you attempt to access your account.
That strikes me as very odd. How does that gel with Firefox being Free and Open Source software?
Firefox is released under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0, a Free and Open Source licence approved by both the FSF and the OSI. Both those organisations require that in order to be approved, a licence must not forbid any particular kind of use. The FSF calls this Freedom 0, The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose, and the OSI calls it Criterion 6, No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor. [0][1]
Is Mozilla's position that Firefox is actually subject to the union of the MPL2.0 and their other terms? If so, that disqualifies it as Free and Open Source software according to the usual definitions.
edit I see I'm not the first to point this out on HN. [2]
From the Firefox Terms of Use: "These Terms only apply to the Executable Code version of Firefox, not the Firefox source code."
From the MPL 2.0 text: "If You distribute Covered Software in Executable Form then: [...] You may distribute such Executable Form under the terms of this License, or sublicense it under different terms, provided that the license for the Executable Form does not attempt to limit or alter the recipients’ rights in the Source Code Form under this License."
If you compile Firefox yourself, you can do whatever you want with it, subject to the MPL's terms. You can even put your own Terms of Use on your own executable copy. Though if you do this, Mozilla may demand that you rename it so that it doesn't use their trademarks (see: the whole Iceweasel story).
So Mozilla, an organisation that commends itself for working to put control of the internet back in the hands of the people using it, [0] is creating a situation where the FOSS community needs to maintain its own 'cleansed' builds, akin to VS Code/VS Codium [1] and, to a lesser extent, Chrome/Chromium. [2] (The Chromium case is somewhat different; Google maintains both the FOSS Chromium builds and the non-Free Chrome builds.)
4 years ago I commented that It's just non-stop with Mozilla, isn't it? They have the curious pairing of technical excellence, and a long history of awful non-technical decision-making. Little seems to have changed. [3]
>Mozilla is banning the use of their Firefox browser for porn? That's going to hurt adoption.
If you'd like an alternative, the State of Utopia[1] could eventually finish building one.
Our browser does not currently have any usage terms (we are still writing our code of laws so it is too early to have terms and conditions), you can use it to browse whatever you want right now, but it barely works:
(Read it, install the required libraries and run it with Python.)
The browser can access URL's and can load and display images. It currently doesn't include all of html, css, and JavaScript because that is too difficult for AI to do.
If there is interest we will continue to use state resources to create our state-run browser. It doesn't collect any analytics of any kind.
You might want to see some proof that State of Utopia will actually be able to make useful things for you:
- A complete free implementation of chess, it is fun for people and has no analytics or ads:
here is a Skype/Zoom replacement that is free, peer-to-peer, has no analytics or terms of use, and supports video, audio, and chat via WebRTC. It is the Utopian communications infrastructure at the moment:
If you want us to continue to put resources into a working browser, we believe that html, css, and javascript are very well-defined and AI will be able to autonomously make a complete state-run browser eventually.
At the moment the State of Utopia owns $221/month in AI and $180/month in compute. We are exploring the possibility of letting people get to Utopia faster by donating computing resources, but so far the feedback has been mixed. People would like to get free stuff without contributing anything themselves. This is fine, the State of Utopia will still happen, but since the State owns such little infrastructure at present, it will be a bit slower than if people contribute their GPU's.
Let us know if you are interested in the State completing our browser, and if so, we will put additional resources into it.
[1] a sovereign state where AI controls everything and owns state-run companies, giving out free money, goods and services to citizens/beneficiaries. It will be available at: https://stateofutopia.com or https://stofut.com when ready. Citizenship is free (compare Form N-400 to become a U.S. citizen which costs $640 plus an $85 biometric services fee, totaling $725). The difference between a company and a country is that companies exist to maximize the value of their shareholders whereas countries exist to maximize the welfare of their citizens.
Man, Waterfox huh. I used to use that, but knowing it's owned by a marketing company and seeing development kind of lack behind Librewolf, there didn't seem to be much reason to use it anymore. However, being able to open a new private or tor tab in the same window as a normal tab is pretty nice.
Someone needs to write a book on the how and why Mozilla became whatever the hell it is now, and why they would drop the ball so hard on Firefox while jumping from one unsustainable idea nobody wants to another. Why is there no adult in the room to say no to the nonsense and direct resources towards the one thing people actually do want?
Off-topic; it’s great to see a good old-fashioned XHTML web page – with a Strict doctype to boot! I remember hand-crafting websites using XHTML (at first Transitional, then Strict) using Server Side Includes as the only backend technology and being proud at how semantic and human-readable the source code was. The markup on this page is elegant, clear and readable while the rendered XHTML is both accessible and responsive.
Not every "user-hostile" change listed was a net negative for users. For example, the page strongly opposes XUL deprecation, but that was a necessary change for e10s, which benefitted users in both performance and security.
Getting rid of Brendan Eich was a bad idea in hindsight. Yes he supported Prop 8 and people didn't like his political views but given the current US climate that seems all very tame in comparison and I'm not sure exactly how that conflicts with running a Web Browser development agency.
> Getting rid of Brendan Eich was a bad idea in hindsight.
You mean the guy who then did the Brave browser, which inserted referral codes and installed VPN services without users' consent, and wants you to earn monopoly money for watching ads? Yeah, he surely would've been the savior of Firefox.
These are all true but the browser is open source. When they say "we don't do that" (even if the stuff is in the gui) I don't have to take their word for it. I can check it.
And yet the closed-source Safari is less scummy than open-source Brave. "I can check myself" is, for the vast majority of people, a purely theoretical option. Even if you happen to be a C++ wizard, diving into a 65k+ files code base is not done over a weekend.
Under Eich Mozilla mostly abandoned Firefox development to focus on his big bet that failed: Firefox OS. It took Mozilla many years to recover from that technically after it finally killed FirefoxOS.
It was a good bet. But it did not work out. No leader is infallible.
While the FirefoxOS brand didn't survive, the technology itself took off as KaiOS and is more popular that iOS in many markets. It just took a Chinese company with some TCL money to manage distribution successfully.
KaiOS is actually dead now; and the market share is now irrelevant - even WhatsApp has shut down their app on the platform, and the App Store is no longer working. Completely cannibalized by cheap Android.
Wow, you're right, last update was in 2022. I still see a lot of devices in use though. I guess the OS updates don't matter too much. Didn't know about the app store. I guess most people I've seen using them just use the preinstalled apps anyway. The last time I used one someone asked me to sideload something, and adb worked fine for it. The website was at least updated recently.
Didn't Firefox OS actually bring various new APIs to Firefox browser itself?
That's what I understood from their postmortem post:
"Engineering — Have a clear separation between “chrome” and web content rather than try to force the web to do things it isn’t suited to. Create device APIs using REST & WebSockets on the server side of the web stack rather than privileged JavaScript DOM APIs on the client side. Create a community curated directory of web apps on the web rather than an app store of submitted packaged apps."
It's always a difficult situation. Employees want leaders that represent their values and are halfway competent at being data-driven. I don't know much about his political views or whether internally there was anything other than the Prop 8 stuff going around. However some of his later comments regarding COVID suggest biases in basic interpretation of data.
So current employees want a leader that basically only thinks about said leader's salary, I guess?
That is a shared value among many, can't argue with that.
Is this a veiled comment about the interim CEO Laura Chambers? I don't know much about her but some brief googling suggests a worldview quite aligned with the majority of tech workers in the West:
* Focus on employee wellness, including mental wellbeing
* Support for making the internet free, open and accessible to all
* History of working for non-profits and traditionally neglected sectors
* Stated opposition to current influence of money and big tech in politics
I think that's a symptom and not the cause of the current situation.
Without getting into the politics of Eich's firing, It simply looked like people there just didn't care about the browser there anymore.
If they did, the people who were vocal enough to get a CEO fired would obviously have raised a voice against the dropping marketshare (aka their own bottomline), money squandered on various non browser projects (pocket), all these PR nightmares (mr robot, recent layoffs ) etc ...
Needless to say when i say people, i mean at least the vocal ones in power and obviously not everyone.
Lots of companies have political silliness going on inside them but are still able to produce good products. For example - the CCP stuff at Bytedance, the Cheobol stuff at Samsung and the various stuff at Google.
Those companies aren't propped up by substantial quantities of volunteer labor. The volunteers rebelled against Eich when he made it clear he would not apologize for trying to take away the human rights of the people volunteering to support the project. It was a complete failure of leadership on his part.
Seán, how do you feel about the sign "No Irish Need Apply"? Would you be happy working for a company where the boss pays campaigners who want to discriminate against you?
If not, you can perhaps see why people didn't want Eich's bigotry around their project.
I do wonder how much of it was really in their control.
Firefox had its rise when Microsoft had basically slowed IE development to a crawl, which allowed them to build a lead of how much better they were than IE that no browser developer would be dumb enough to allow to reoccur. Tabs, Adblock, Firebug, performance for youtube and google maps that wasn't appalling at a time when these apps were themselves new and exciting.
Like you could show a normal person who was using IE6 tabs and adblock, and that's a clear use case to switch browsers. The only feature anywhere near that compelling in the recent or not-so-recent past is sync, which is why every browser manufacturer has their own version of it. And sync still isn't tabs or adblock.
And they had a clear revenue model with Google (and not yet irrelevant competitors) paying for search and not yet starting to squeeze them. I'm sure that revenue model was partly undermined when they moved to yahoo in the US and everyone just went and switched back to Google, which caused Google to question how valuable that really was.
At the same time, Google developed Chrome because it let them push features that were useful for their revenue generating products. And google pushed hard. Some of its early market share was to wooing us with performance and tab isolation, for sure. But a lot of it was bundling with new laptops, flash player, anti-virus programs etc. to automatically set it as the default for non-tech users who may not recognise what a browser is really.
And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop.
One of the big misses from Firefox was being so late to Android. They couldn't have Firefox on iOS, and it took ages for government regulation to meaningfully change that, but they could have been on Android much sooner, and used some of their desktop network effects and sync to build market share, but instead they left it so late and missed the mobile market such that their poor mobile market share turned browser sync into something that harmed their desktop market share, as people wanted a desktop browser to sync their mobile Chrome tabs etc.
Firefox's headcount (and the pace of web platform development) had ballooned over this period, and this was fine when the Google money was still a given, but now that's looked to be decreasing or entirely at risk, Mozilla has needed to make Firefox pay for Firefox (unlike Chrome, which doesn't really need to pay for Chrome as long as it's a channel for Google's revenue generating products). This has put them in pretty direct conflict with their users, as ways to monetise the browser goes against a lot of why their remaining users are their users to begin with.
> And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop.
The tech influencer effect also switched to pushing Chrome at the time, especially outside of Linux/FLOSS communities.
Chrome was released back when Google was still viewed favorably. People were high on gmail, google docs, and they still had "don't be evil." It took pretty much no time at all to start seeing Chrome everywhere Firefox used to be.
So yeah, I agree with you - no doubt some of it is Mozilla's doing, but I think more or less it was out of their control and I think "we" (the tech crowd) are just as much at fault for Chrome's dominance and the downfall of Firefox. It only took 5 years from release for Chrome to surpass Firefox, and the tech crowd were very much the early adopters and drivers of that.
Yeah, Firefox made a lot of sense when the problem was Microsoft’s incompetence and inability to make any real progress or support standards.
In the modern era, Google is the opposite problem. They DDoS the community by developing standards fast enough that nobody can keep up with them. Actually, it seems impossible to compete with them on their turf. We need an alternative that somehow avoids that competition.
Unfortunately Google is quite good, they managed to embrace-extend the whole internet. Not sure what the options are. Somewhere a filter needs to be applied to reject more proposals.
It’s a bit obvious. Happens to everyone with an achievable goal. They set out to create an open source web browser and web standards and now every browser is OSS and the web is on standards. Now they have no reason to exist and so the org is trying to sustain itself while finding another purpose.
Angry crowd: “Mozilla should do things to diverse revenue!”
Also angry crowd: “No! No! Not that thing! How dare you explore alternative revenue streams! You are Mozilla, just pick and the execute a successful 100 million dollar idea!”
Fundamentally I think having people pay for a browser is a hard sell. I do think complementary services being sold to fund the browser are a good idea though.
E.g. VPN, search, bookmarking service - great. Charge for them, have the money go into browser dev, focus on privacy and be done with it.
I don't know if you know this, but browsers don't generate revenue (with the exception of Google paying you hush money to pretend they aren't a browser monopoly)
I sure have. Mozillas main and perhaps only real mistake was that they didn't meaningfully attempt to become independent from Google the second Google started building Chrome (with Mozillas help, no less!). A truly independent Mozilla would not have needed to implement DRM, and would be shipping with adblock by default - which incidentally is exactly what made people switch from IE to FF in the first place, popup ads.
Now the ship has beached itself and the crew is frantically trying something - anything - to plug the leaks, prevent her from capsizing and trying to get her back afloat. I don't know if they'll manage, or if ladybird is the alternative to the new IE that is Chrome
Angry crowd all over my tech bubble: "Mozilla should make a subscription that directly funds the development of Firefox, and not the salary of the CEO that does nothing."
Also angry crowd: "No, not ads or AI, it's stupid."
The correct word for all of the recent changes is a result of the fundamental misunderstanding of exactly what constitutes acceptable use is censorship.
In the United States of America, freedom of speech is a fundamental right guaranteed by our constitution. That means you can use language or show content that I may find offensive. I may do the same for you. My choice is whether or not I wish to view it or permit my non-adult children to view it. This is not the vendor's prerogative; it is my responsibility as a parent.
Mozilla's "terms and conditions" mean that fear has taken hold.
Freedom is hard. Allowing a vendor to restrict use that infringes on a basic right is unacceptable. In the final analysis, their terms of use are probably unenforceable. Think about it. What are they going to do? Stop me and everyone else from sharing cute baby pictures? Ones in our grandparents' scrapbooks?
The Constitution only protects you from the government, it doesn't bind individuals or companies. The government cannot make laws that take away your freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean other people or companies are legally obligated to let you say whatever you want on their turf.
Yes, but a browser is like a wirephoto. The recipient gets an exact copy of the original -- not retouched. Spelling errors, bad grammar, "warts and all."
The browser is supposed to be transparent -- what you send is what I see. How I react is up to me. It is not up to the intervening service to add or remove content.
》This situation reveals a recurring issue in how Mozilla communicates with its user base
Mozilla is very clear at its communication! They even got new leadership and rebranded recently! Their updated Privacy Policy is also very clear! Maybe they had not implement everything yet, but they are heading in clear direction. And real hammer will come in a few months, if they lose deal with Google!
At this point Mozilla is a toxic organization when it comes to privacy, something like Google with Chrome. Dismissing it as a "communication issue" is not sufficient! Waterfox needs clear separation from Mozilla!
> We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses
The text is confusing on purpose and mixes Firefox, the Mozilla Services (Sync maybe? That's it?), AI, and their new AD-platform (without mentioning the last two). And why are they talking about a license when it's a ToS? Everything is confusing about it, even their answers.
> to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible
The very same thing they did for more than 20 year without such a ToS? Why now? I think it's about AI and ads but I'm sure they are smarter than me and will explain everything in precise details to clear up such a "big confusion."
> we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches
That's a fucking lie of course. They did that last year without any issue. You can get the text from the search box (like mSearchBox->getText() in C++, wow I'm a Mozilla engineer), and put that in the URL of my favorite search engine as part of the query.
> or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice
I don't care about the ownership, I want to know why, why now, and I want them to explain all the details that definitely do NOT appear in their Privacy Notice.
My conclusion is that they are moving away from Firefox for some reason, they pretended to fire the last CEO which keeps on working on the AI, and they want a lot of information like everyone else which is difficult when you're supposed to be the open-source knight of privacy.
But I'm only typing that because I am bitter and have already moved on. They fucked with us too many times, I don't care anymore even if the only alternative left was Links.
I hate it when companies say “there’s been some confusion about…”
There hasn’t been confusion. There’s almost never confusion. Making an announcement requires clear communication. If reasonable people are interpreting their communication in a way they didn’t intend, it isn’t confusion, they just miscommunicated at best.
I think it goes further than just bad communication though. This policy is the typical cover-your-ass method of giving yourself as broad of a license to user data as legally possible.
An organization like Mozilla should take a stance and do the opposite by making their policy as narrow as possible.
This costs more in legal costs, but for an organization that defines itself as a champion of user privacy and control this should be the natural choice.
Mozilla is both a non-profit foundation and also a corporation. You aren't legally allowed to use charitable donations to fund web browser development, so the corporation has to handle that.
That's not how charities work as a legal construct.
The point of incorporating as a charity is that it makes you exempt from taxes. Obviously the government that collects taxes wants to make sure that every corporation doesn't incorporate as a charity solely to avoid taxes, so it places strict limits on what you're allowed to do with charitable donations.
The Mozilla Foundation (as distinct from the Mozilla Corporation) is specifically a 501(c)(3) charity under US law. That means it can use its funds for the following:
"The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency."
> Notably, developing a free web browser is not one of the charitable activities that the IRS recognizes.
I find your argument uninsightful. If I were on a jury, I would find developing a free web browser to be charitable under multiple statements:
- preventing cruelty to children
Childrens' browsing habits should not should not be available for sale.
- relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged
A free browser will help the poor, and the distressed, and the underprivileged. There are poor people who are poor because they are data-mined by advertisers. There are people who are distressed about their privacy. There are underprivileged people whose livelihoods are abused by corporations.
- advancement of education or science
A free browser is both educational (handy for learning how to write software or build websites) and scientific (generating studies and reports on internet capabilities and safety).
> defending human and civil rights secured by law
Do you really want to argue that a free browser does not defend freedom and privacy in the US (since you cite US definition of charity) as heavily implied by the US Bill of Rights and as supported by US Courts [0]?
I'm not arguing my opinion, I'm quoting the laws that Congress passed to govern the IRS. We could pass a law to make web browser development an explicitly legally charitable act. But that's not how the law has been interpreted up to this point. You want to take it up with your senator. Until then, Mozilla's legal counsel isn't going to play games like this with a judge.
Mozilla has been around for 25 years at this point, they'd be as thrilled as anyone if this were the case. What they have is the structure that their legal counsel recommended. Anyone can play fast and loose with tax law up until the point that the IRS comes knocking.
A non-profit foundation is allowed to earn revenue from a product. It just can't transfer that revenue to the owners of the foundation or spend it on dividends.
People who have never worked for a non-profit always think they're better. People who have worked for a non-profit know they're just as dysfunctional as corporations.
I hate the Mozilla 'clarification' because they gave no example. The only information I type into Firefox is using websites. Them being 100% vague makes it feel even worse.
I was going to comment that one of them (WaterFox) has a shady sponsor (System1, an advertising company) but it seems WaterFox has been an independent project again since 2023 [0]
While branding System1 an adtech company is correct, its bread and butter [at the time] was search aggregation and in effect contextual advertising (System1 didn't want to deal with PII). The ownership made a lot of sense, and of course having a view inside the company, I could see how everything worked.
It was impossible to get that point across, especially as S1 wanted to have the final say on what was said. A lot of heartache all across the board could've been saved by just being able to say things as a matter of fact.
But unfortunately people jump to conclusions, don't have good faith discussions and loved just get involved in internet drama.
I never used Waterfox but Librewolf seems to have more stricts settings, whereas people describe Waterfox as being closer to Firefox.
Librewolf has sensible but annoying default settings that you have to change. For example, cookies are deleted when quitting, or you can't have night mode out of the box since it could be a privacy issue. IMHO it's a cleaner Firefox and I enjoy it so far.
I contributed UX for a 'save cookies for this site' dropdown feature in the navbar, a poc was made which looked good, but it got lost in other work and eventually didn't land in a release that I'm aware of. Shame because that one feature would make it practical to use the recommended clear cookies behavior by default except for particular sites and overall boost everyone's privacy and security because I'm pretty sure most people turn it off after getting sick of logging in. After a couple of months I went back to Firefox and hardened it making it basically the same as LF but not being a month behind in updates. I guess I'll revisit the project now
I created a post[0] on /r/LibreWolf to discuss usability tweaks for new LibreWolf users who might not know all the ins and outs of the more strict settings.
Firefox of course. It has the most add-ons, most compatibility/support with other sites, services, software. And it has fewer bugs than newer browsers. If you just want a general purpose browser, Firefox is it. Chrome is always an option too, and they certainly have some useful extra features, but they'll also remove support for things if it conflicts with Daddy Alphabet.
I don't think so, but in practice when running uBlock on Chrome I still don't see ads. It's less efficient under the surface but the user experience hasn't changed significantly.
Why do we always have to blame the people who want to make things better? Why can’t we blame Eich for it based on his political activism trying to hurt his employees and users? Or the church for teaching Eich that their sexual hangups are more important than being good to people?
> Why do we always have to blame the people who want to make things better?
Because they are not necessarily making things better, they are making things worse (and "good intentions" are no excuse here).
In my view, discriminating against someone professionally (and publicly dragging their convictions through the mud) because of privately held political/religious opinions is not acceptable behavior, full stop.
I would have some understanding if Eich had been nasty with coworkers, or if his convictions had affected his work. But there were no accusations of this.
Lets just flip the thing a bit to make my point clearer:
If Eich had been discovered to be (secretly) a stout, godless atheist (sponsoring anti-religious campaigns)-- do you think the same kind of smear campaign/discrimination/career-killing would have been adequate?
> Why don't we consider trying to pass laws that hurt your coworkers to qualify as "being nasty with coworkers"?
Because "advocating for laws that potentially negatively affect coworkers" and "actually being nasty with coworkers" is a difference in proportion of at least 100000 (maybe slightly less if your advocacy effects a lot of votes).
By cancel-campaigning against Eich you basically
1) Discriminate against someone for a political view they held (5 years ago!)
2) Suffocate honest discussion/debate about any affected topic
3) Directly promote creation of cultural echo chambers
You also make the workplace an observably more hostile place for anyone that leans more on Eichs side on the topic.
On the other hand, what does the whole thing actually achieve? I don't even see accusations of anyone actually being affected, in the workplace, by Eichs views (and that would be the bare minimum to demonstrate actual harm).
And helping to pass Prop 8 does those same things but worse. What's your argument, that it shouldn't count because it probably didn't affect the outcome very much? "You put non-trivial personal resources into denying basic rights to people, but it's pretty small in the grand scheme of things so let's just ignore it" doesn't make much sense to me.
You don't think it creates a hostile place for workers when their CEO is trying to deny them basic right?
Eich's view was totally private and pulled up by reporters. The USA is a democracy, it's completely unnecessary to cancel Eich. Just advocate for the opposing view if that's your wish.
His name was on a published list of donors. It's not like reporters went digging through his trash. Making a donation where there's a legal requirement to publish your contribution is not "totally private."
Why is it OK for Eich to try to prevent certain people from getting married, but it's not OK for Eich's employees to try to prevent him from having a certain job? Please explain using small words so I can understand the difference.
Is a wealthy person losing their job worse than the state making it illegal to marry the person you love because they don't like the way your genitals match?
No one can pass silly purity tests. There are people who unironically believe that if you believe in money you are a bad person and are oppressing them.
Just like it would be silly for someone to blame you for being on this website founded by someone who has some questionable views, if you go looking. Or, for using this very much American website, an America that's becoming increasingly hostile. Is your participation here an implicit agreement with the current administration?
Perhaps not before, but now that you've read this comment one could argue your continued participation makes you complicit.
You show me someone's views and associations and I can make them a devil.
Thinking that you should treat people well regardless of which genitals they prefer is not a “silly purity test,” it’s basic decency, at least in this millennium.
You are helping enrich someone who is sympathetic towards it. It's funny how you are immediately trying to disassociate yourself from the simple fact that you -> hacker news -> pg -> musk.
There are people who don't use Twitter for the simple reason that Musk owns it. You can do the same with HN, no?
So first of all, no I'm not. And second of all, "helping enrich someone who is sympathetic towards it" and "helping to get a law passed" are not the same thing.
> And second of all, "helping enrich someone who is sympathetic towards it" and "helping to get a law passed" are not the same thing.
I have never made this claim.
And yes, Hacker News is literally a marketing site for Y Combinator, of which pg has a stake.
In any case I've already ascertained your level of conviction so we can let it go. At least redditors had enough to leave reddit over simple API changes.
You're telling me that I'm inconsistent in my views because I think Eich deserves blame for what happened when he helped enact a bad law, but I don't stop posting to HN. That implies these two activities are comparable. If you never made that claim then what the hell is the point of your comments? You're just making shit up and holding me to a standard I never expressed. It's completely pointless and stupid.
I am saying that this site's cofounder is sympathetic to DOGE, which is not treating people well.
Either you disagree with that view, in which case you should stop supporting this site with your participation, or you agree, and you can continue to post.
Of course you can make whatever excuse you'd like to explain how just because you're here doesn't mean you're aligned with pg.
Honestly, one man's "silly purity test" is another's non-negotiable moral principle. Would you work for someone who publicly endorsed racism, cannibalism, slavery, <insert your personal red-line here>?
IMHO the issue is the collapse of any broadly-shared moral and ethical framework. I don't know how you resolve that, except perhaps by trying to peacefully partition society.
I’ve heard this before and I keep hearing it. Maybe I don’t understand it fully but I just can’t see how what we have now is different from the days of old. Do you have any material about the collapse of the shared moral and ethical framework?
It's definitely true for certain things. To consider a relevant example, it wasn't too long ago that homosexuality was broadly considered to be immoral. Now there's strong disagreement over this.
Of course, for this particular example this is actually a good thing. It would be even better if there was broad agreement that homosexuality wasn't immoral, but having a substantial number of people on that side is better than having almost none.
I think the other comment misattributes the problem. The problem isn't the loss of the old broadly shared morality, the problem is that we haven't yet managed to coalesce around a new and better one.
I think you're misapplying "irony". The comment you're responding to doesn't argue for some kind of wishy-washy moral equivalence: they're explicitly advocating for the superiority of their preferred values. Nothing you've offered is an effective rebuttal to their assertion that having 50% "good people" is preferable to 0% "good people" (in the interest of unity).
It’s a ridiculous purity test that many of your coworkers probably fail and you are unaware of, especially minorities. I would invite you to look at the demographic breakdown of support for this bill.
People around the world have very different views on social issues - tech workers just know they aren’t supposed to voice them publicly in the US, or that the law can be more open than their personal views. And this isn’t just 2012, check in on blind.
Tolerance is a good policy on this topic, but compromise doesn’t work if you are then going to sniff out private mental states of your coworkers.
I'm not talking about private mental states. I'm talking about concrete activities attempting to formally change how the state treats certain people.
And yeah, you're not supposed to voice them. That's not some sort of gotcha, that's common sense. If you think some of your coworkers are lesser, then you'd better keep that shit under your hat, or leave. You cannot expect to make those views public and then stick around like everything's still fine.
Once again, Brendan Eich did not publicly advocate - journalists searched through small donations.
> If you think some of your coworkers are lesser,
Im sure all of my coworkers hold religious, ethnic, cultural, and gender biases of many kinds. Because they are people. I hope we can minimize these and treat each other with care and respect, and I would not tolerate mistreatment.
Eich's donation was well-known. The lists are public. Lots of Mozilla folks were aware and unimpressed, but they tolerated it because Eich (CTO) was a respected member of the corp with a long history of technical excellence. As well as no workplace hostility etc.
Then Eich was to be promoted to CEO, which is a nontechnical job that involves being the public face of the corporation and speaking on behalf of all employees.
A substantial portion of Mozilla employees felt that this new expanded role would not be appropriate for Eich or anyone who had expressed hostility to a marginalized group, that Eich did not represent the values of Mozilla, and that they did not want to promote him or to be led by him.
So they created an internal stir which gathered a lot of internal support, bled into public forums, and led Eich to back out of the CEO role. He probably could have gone back to CTO, but he decided to resign from the organization instead.
A coworker might be questionable. We're talking about the CEO. I think a CEO who tries to take basic rights away from their employees and users should go.
> the harm was when he gave $1000 which is when a bias because mistreatment
Sorry, I'm having a lot of trouble understanding what the second half of this is supposed to mean. The harm is taking a position opposed to basic rights of people who work for you and who use your product, and backing that up with cash.
I really doubt all of you saying that this isn't a big deal would be so blase about it if the CEO of your company donated a thousand bucks to a cause that considers you to be sub-human. But you're probably not the target of this sort of thing so you don't care.
Yeah, they seem to be missing the plot. Eich has never been on record saying anything homophobic. It's cancel culture through and through. If you sift through the private views of anyone, there will always be something disagreeable.
Eich faced those consequences that you would have wanted -- so he wasn't tolerated -- and was forced to step down. Now we're faced with a Web were all Browsers come from large companies and people are wondering why his successors aren't up to the job. The world is made entirely of trade-offs. Your like that boss who doesn't get the Quality/Speed/Price triangle and says I want it all.
Right, he was just trying to enshrine lesser status in state law. He wanted a bunch of people at Mozilla to be officially lesser in the eyes of the state. But that’s ok, he didn’t try to fire them!
They can be tolerated if the alternative is worse. Having a good browser captained by a homophobe can be better than not having the browser. That doesn't mean the homophobia is good.
At the time, no one thought that getting rid of the homophobe would mean there wouldn't be a browser at all. We (the world) got rid of the homophobe, because homophobes are rightfully quite bad, and we didn't think that would stop there from also being a browser.
This is flame war now, but there are > 1 person who can run a company successfully. No Eich != bad company. Blame current leadership not lack of specific leadership.
Cancel culture was assuredly the weapon used to silence Eich, but we should not be fooled into thinking that cancel culture was "at fault."
Remember, canceling is a tool. People who want to conceal their real goals use this tool to slander and eliminate their enemies, and that's why we need to end it. But these people don't actually care about whatever values cancel culture purports to uphold - they are just savvy sociopaths. Ultimately these sociopaths all try to do the same thing, which is promote some kind of deception, fraud or graft.
I think Eich was one of the last guys at Mozilla who was dedicated to building a compelling rival to Chrome and preserving a free and open web. And I think these things have not been the mission of Mozilla for a long time. I think that Mozilla is an arm of Google, to know that, all you need to do is follow the money.
Mozilla has been marching to the beat of Google's drum for many years, and when it made sense for Google to claim it wasn't a monopoly, they ordered Mozilla to behave a certain way. Now that President Trump has sued Google, President Biden has won the case, and it's back on Trump to determine the sentencing as Pichai kisses the ring, there is too much power arrayed against Google and they have stopped trying to maintain the lie that they are innocent.
So now Google is deploying new orders to their bootlickers. We will see a variety of changes at Mozilla now that the mask is off.
We should not forget that the prime evil here is the convicted criminal enterprise that is Google.
While waterfax highlights a problematic section of Mozilla's change:
> UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice. (Emphasis mine)
And they mention that we need to see the context behind this change -- but what they don't to -- is point out that the update clarification makes the whole situation even more problematic than it was previously.
The private notice indicates they use data to:
1. To provide and improve search functionality 2. To serve relevant content and advertising on Firefox New Tab 3. To provide Mozilla accounts 4. To provide AI Chatbots 5. To provide Review Checker, including serving sponsored content 6. To provide and enable add-ons (addons.mozilla.org) 7. To maintain and improve features, performance and stability 8. To improve security 9. To understand usage of Firefox 10. To market our services 11. To pseudonymize, de-identify, aggregate or anonymize data 12. To communicate with you 13. To comply with applicable laws, and identify and prevent harmful, unauthorized or illegal activity
1,2,4,5,10 are problematic. We don't want those things. Mozilla wants those things. The problem isn't the lack of context behind the changes, the problem is Mozilla wants to be able to use our 'input' data for whatever they want, and I don't want them to.
They said they're the privacy focused browser; and they're not. That's a lie. I moved from Chrome to Firefox precisely because I couldn't trust Google. Now I can't trust Firefox.
13 is no less problematic, because there's no explantion who decides what activity is authorized and harmless.
It was supposed to be User's Agent, dammit.
> Browsers without formal governance may offer appealing features or privacy claims, but users have little recourse if those promises are broken. There’s no entity to hold accountable, no legal framework within which to address grievances, and often no transparency about decision-making processes.
Do we get any of those with Mozilla? They can change their ToC whenever they want and keep adding things that users don't want. I don't think they are much better than a random developer building their own fork.
Wait, Mozilla is banning the use of their Firefox browser for porn? That's going to hurt adoption.
What's with the mixup of their browser and services policies?
[1] Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.
[2] You may not use any of Mozilla’s services to:
* Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that includes graphic depictions of sexuality or violence,
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/#you... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/acceptable-use/
That, or some variant of that, has been there for ages.
2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20181223004526/http://www.mozill...
Wording was slightly different earlier than that, e.g. 2015:
"Upload, download, transmit, display, or grant access to content that:
[...]
Is inappropriate such as obscene or pornographic materials, graphic depictions of sexuality or violence, or images that exploit or harm children"
https://web.archive.org/web/20150331013034/https://www.mozil...
Yeah, and that makes sense in the context of an acceptable use policy for Mozilla services that are not your use of the Firefox browser.
But the same AUP for the services is now explicitly referenced in the TOS for the browser. How are you supposed to read it - the AUP only applies to your use of the browser to access the services? Isn't that already implicit if you're using the services? Surely it can't be attempting to apply the services AUP to any non-service use of the browser?
Very confusing, it seems badly written to me.
Same thing with the "Some Services in Firefox Require a Mozilla Account" and then the "Termination" with a notification to the (optional) account. Somewhat disconcerting.
[1] Mozilla can suspend or end anyone’s access to Firefox at any time for any reason, including if Mozilla decides not to offer Firefox anymore. If we decide to suspend or end your access, we will try to notify you at the email address associated with your account or the next time you attempt to access your account.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/#moz...
>Mozilla services that are not your use of the Firefox browser.
The 2015 policy I quoted applied to "Mozilla’s services and products". The 2018 version just references "services", leaving out the "products" part.
I don't know. They've muddied the water and I'm disappointed with recent changes.
[flagged]
That strikes me as very odd. How does that gel with Firefox being Free and Open Source software?
Firefox is released under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0, a Free and Open Source licence approved by both the FSF and the OSI. Both those organisations require that in order to be approved, a licence must not forbid any particular kind of use. The FSF calls this Freedom 0, The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose, and the OSI calls it Criterion 6, No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor. [0][1]
Is Mozilla's position that Firefox is actually subject to the union of the MPL2.0 and their other terms? If so, that disqualifies it as Free and Open Source software according to the usual definitions.
edit I see I'm not the first to point this out on HN. [2]
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms
[1] https://opensource.org/osd
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43205721
From the Firefox Terms of Use: "These Terms only apply to the Executable Code version of Firefox, not the Firefox source code."
From the MPL 2.0 text: "If You distribute Covered Software in Executable Form then: [...] You may distribute such Executable Form under the terms of this License, or sublicense it under different terms, provided that the license for the Executable Form does not attempt to limit or alter the recipients’ rights in the Source Code Form under this License."
If you compile Firefox yourself, you can do whatever you want with it, subject to the MPL's terms. You can even put your own Terms of Use on your own executable copy. Though if you do this, Mozilla may demand that you rename it so that it doesn't use their trademarks (see: the whole Iceweasel story).
Thanks, good spot.
So Mozilla, an organisation that commends itself for working to put control of the internet back in the hands of the people using it, [0] is creating a situation where the FOSS community needs to maintain its own 'cleansed' builds, akin to VS Code/VS Codium [1] and, to a lesser extent, Chrome/Chromium. [2] (The Chromium case is somewhat different; Google maintains both the FOSS Chromium builds and the non-Free Chrome builds.)
4 years ago I commented that It's just non-stop with Mozilla, isn't it? They have the curious pairing of technical excellence, and a long history of awful non-technical decision-making. Little seems to have changed. [3]
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/about/
[1] https://vscodium.com/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26873740
>Mozilla is banning the use of their Firefox browser for porn? That's going to hurt adoption.
If you'd like an alternative, the State of Utopia[1] could eventually finish building one.
Our browser does not currently have any usage terms (we are still writing our code of laws so it is too early to have terms and conditions), you can use it to browse whatever you want right now, but it barely works:
https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/feb2025/84toy-toy-browser-w...
(Read it, install the required libraries and run it with Python.)
The browser can access URL's and can load and display images. It currently doesn't include all of html, css, and JavaScript because that is too difficult for AI to do.
If there is interest we will continue to use state resources to create our state-run browser. It doesn't collect any analytics of any kind.
You might want to see some proof that State of Utopia will actually be able to make useful things for you:
- A complete free implementation of chess, it is fun for people and has no analytics or ads:
https://taonexus.com/chess.html
- a fun version that shows blunders, so you can practice not making serious mistakes:
https://taonexus.com/blunderfreechess.html
- an alternative rendering of it, with heatmaps on the squares:
https://taonexus.com/blunderfreechess2.html
- infrastructure:
here is a Skype/Zoom replacement that is free, peer-to-peer, has no analytics or terms of use, and supports video, audio, and chat via WebRTC. It is the Utopian communications infrastructure at the moment:
http://taonexus.com/p2p-voice-video-chat.html
If you want us to continue to put resources into a working browser, we believe that html, css, and javascript are very well-defined and AI will be able to autonomously make a complete state-run browser eventually.
At the moment the State of Utopia owns $221/month in AI and $180/month in compute. We are exploring the possibility of letting people get to Utopia faster by donating computing resources, but so far the feedback has been mixed. People would like to get free stuff without contributing anything themselves. This is fine, the State of Utopia will still happen, but since the State owns such little infrastructure at present, it will be a bit slower than if people contribute their GPU's.
Let us know if you are interested in the State completing our browser, and if so, we will put additional resources into it.
[1] a sovereign state where AI controls everything and owns state-run companies, giving out free money, goods and services to citizens/beneficiaries. It will be available at: https://stateofutopia.com or https://stofut.com when ready. Citizenship is free (compare Form N-400 to become a U.S. citizen which costs $640 plus an $85 biometric services fee, totaling $725). The difference between a company and a country is that companies exist to maximize the value of their shareholders whereas countries exist to maximize the welfare of their citizens.
Man, Waterfox huh. I used to use that, but knowing it's owned by a marketing company and seeing development kind of lack behind Librewolf, there didn't seem to be much reason to use it anymore. However, being able to open a new private or tor tab in the same window as a normal tab is pretty nice.
Waterfox is independent again. Also some comments on System1: https://phanpy.social/#/mastodon.social/s/114080867102764721
https://www.waterfox.net/blog/a-new-chapter-for-waterfox/
Does the stink of association every truly wear off though?
> Waterfox is independent again.
Oh, nice! I might check it out again at some point.
Also, are you the author per chance? If so, really nice work!
Someone needs to write a book on the how and why Mozilla became whatever the hell it is now, and why they would drop the ball so hard on Firefox while jumping from one unsustainable idea nobody wants to another. Why is there no adult in the room to say no to the nonsense and direct resources towards the one thing people actually do want?
Not so much a 'why' but it does have a good history of the user-hostile moves Mozilla has made. https://digdeeper.club/articles/mozilla.xhtml
Thanks for that.
Off-topic; it’s great to see a good old-fashioned XHTML web page – with a Strict doctype to boot! I remember hand-crafting websites using XHTML (at first Transitional, then Strict) using Server Side Includes as the only backend technology and being proud at how semantic and human-readable the source code was. The markup on this page is elegant, clear and readable while the rendered XHTML is both accessible and responsive.
Not every "user-hostile" change listed was a net negative for users. For example, the page strongly opposes XUL deprecation, but that was a necessary change for e10s, which benefitted users in both performance and security.
Getting rid of Brendan Eich was a bad idea in hindsight. Yes he supported Prop 8 and people didn't like his political views but given the current US climate that seems all very tame in comparison and I'm not sure exactly how that conflicts with running a Web Browser development agency.
> Getting rid of Brendan Eich was a bad idea in hindsight.
You mean the guy who then did the Brave browser, which inserted referral codes and installed VPN services without users' consent, and wants you to earn monopoly money for watching ads? Yeah, he surely would've been the savior of Firefox.
These are all true but the browser is open source. When they say "we don't do that" (even if the stuff is in the gui) I don't have to take their word for it. I can check it.
And yet the closed-source Safari is less scummy than open-source Brave. "I can check myself" is, for the vast majority of people, a purely theoretical option. Even if you happen to be a C++ wizard, diving into a 65k+ files code base is not done over a weekend.
Under Eich Mozilla mostly abandoned Firefox development to focus on his big bet that failed: Firefox OS. It took Mozilla many years to recover from that technically after it finally killed FirefoxOS.
It was a good bet. But it did not work out. No leader is infallible.
While the FirefoxOS brand didn't survive, the technology itself took off as KaiOS and is more popular that iOS in many markets. It just took a Chinese company with some TCL money to manage distribution successfully.
https://www.kaiostech.com
KaiOS is actually dead now; and the market share is now irrelevant - even WhatsApp has shut down their app on the platform, and the App Store is no longer working. Completely cannibalized by cheap Android.
Wow, you're right, last update was in 2022. I still see a lot of devices in use though. I guess the OS updates don't matter too much. Didn't know about the app store. I guess most people I've seen using them just use the preinstalled apps anyway. The last time I used one someone asked me to sideload something, and adb worked fine for it. The website was at least updated recently.
Didn't Firefox OS actually bring various new APIs to Firefox browser itself?
That's what I understood from their postmortem post:
"Engineering — Have a clear separation between “chrome” and web content rather than try to force the web to do things it isn’t suited to. Create device APIs using REST & WebSockets on the server side of the web stack rather than privileged JavaScript DOM APIs on the client side. Create a community curated directory of web apps on the web rather than an app store of submitted packaged apps."
https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-story-of-firefox-os-cb5bf79...
It's always a difficult situation. Employees want leaders that represent their values and are halfway competent at being data-driven. I don't know much about his political views or whether internally there was anything other than the Prop 8 stuff going around. However some of his later comments regarding COVID suggest biases in basic interpretation of data.
So current employees want a leader that basically only thinks about said leader's salary, I guess? That is a shared value among many, can't argue with that.
Is this a veiled comment about the interim CEO Laura Chambers? I don't know much about her but some brief googling suggests a worldview quite aligned with the majority of tech workers in the West:
* Focus on employee wellness, including mental wellbeing
* Support for making the internet free, open and accessible to all
* History of working for non-profits and traditionally neglected sectors
* Stated opposition to current influence of money and big tech in politics
I think that's a symptom and not the cause of the current situation.
Without getting into the politics of Eich's firing, It simply looked like people there just didn't care about the browser there anymore.
If they did, the people who were vocal enough to get a CEO fired would obviously have raised a voice against the dropping marketshare (aka their own bottomline), money squandered on various non browser projects (pocket), all these PR nightmares (mr robot, recent layoffs ) etc ...
Needless to say when i say people, i mean at least the vocal ones in power and obviously not everyone.
Lots of companies have political silliness going on inside them but are still able to produce good products. For example - the CCP stuff at Bytedance, the Cheobol stuff at Samsung and the various stuff at Google.
Those companies aren't propped up by substantial quantities of volunteer labor. The volunteers rebelled against Eich when he made it clear he would not apologize for trying to take away the human rights of the people volunteering to support the project. It was a complete failure of leadership on his part.
Seán, how do you feel about the sign "No Irish Need Apply"? Would you be happy working for a company where the boss pays campaigners who want to discriminate against you?
If not, you can perhaps see why people didn't want Eich's bigotry around their project.
Can you confirm if that was the case at Mozilla? They actively discriminated against hiring gay people? From what I've heard that's not true at all.
I think a closer analogy is no boss or CEO will likely have political views that match my own and I tolerate that and will work for such people.
What is "active" discrimination?
When the CEO is donating to causes which directly discriminate against you - would you apply to work there?
At this point I find it very hard to chalk it up to mere incompetence.
not just drop the ball, but willfully kick it to the other goal
I do wonder how much of it was really in their control.
Firefox had its rise when Microsoft had basically slowed IE development to a crawl, which allowed them to build a lead of how much better they were than IE that no browser developer would be dumb enough to allow to reoccur. Tabs, Adblock, Firebug, performance for youtube and google maps that wasn't appalling at a time when these apps were themselves new and exciting.
Like you could show a normal person who was using IE6 tabs and adblock, and that's a clear use case to switch browsers. The only feature anywhere near that compelling in the recent or not-so-recent past is sync, which is why every browser manufacturer has their own version of it. And sync still isn't tabs or adblock.
And they had a clear revenue model with Google (and not yet irrelevant competitors) paying for search and not yet starting to squeeze them. I'm sure that revenue model was partly undermined when they moved to yahoo in the US and everyone just went and switched back to Google, which caused Google to question how valuable that really was.
At the same time, Google developed Chrome because it let them push features that were useful for their revenue generating products. And google pushed hard. Some of its early market share was to wooing us with performance and tab isolation, for sure. But a lot of it was bundling with new laptops, flash player, anti-virus programs etc. to automatically set it as the default for non-tech users who may not recognise what a browser is really.
And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop.
One of the big misses from Firefox was being so late to Android. They couldn't have Firefox on iOS, and it took ages for government regulation to meaningfully change that, but they could have been on Android much sooner, and used some of their desktop network effects and sync to build market share, but instead they left it so late and missed the mobile market such that their poor mobile market share turned browser sync into something that harmed their desktop market share, as people wanted a desktop browser to sync their mobile Chrome tabs etc.
Firefox's headcount (and the pace of web platform development) had ballooned over this period, and this was fine when the Google money was still a given, but now that's looked to be decreasing or entirely at risk, Mozilla has needed to make Firefox pay for Firefox (unlike Chrome, which doesn't really need to pay for Chrome as long as it's a channel for Google's revenue generating products). This has put them in pretty direct conflict with their users, as ways to monetise the browser goes against a lot of why their remaining users are their users to begin with.
> And I mean, even the tech influencer effect was weakened a bit by the fact that your hypothetical grandma recognised the name Google, unlike Mozilla or Firefox, even if she had been actively using Firefox on her last laptop.
The tech influencer effect also switched to pushing Chrome at the time, especially outside of Linux/FLOSS communities.
Chrome was released back when Google was still viewed favorably. People were high on gmail, google docs, and they still had "don't be evil." It took pretty much no time at all to start seeing Chrome everywhere Firefox used to be.
So yeah, I agree with you - no doubt some of it is Mozilla's doing, but I think more or less it was out of their control and I think "we" (the tech crowd) are just as much at fault for Chrome's dominance and the downfall of Firefox. It only took 5 years from release for Chrome to surpass Firefox, and the tech crowd were very much the early adopters and drivers of that.
Yeah, Firefox made a lot of sense when the problem was Microsoft’s incompetence and inability to make any real progress or support standards.
In the modern era, Google is the opposite problem. They DDoS the community by developing standards fast enough that nobody can keep up with them. Actually, it seems impossible to compete with them on their turf. We need an alternative that somehow avoids that competition.
Unfortunately Google is quite good, they managed to embrace-extend the whole internet. Not sure what the options are. Somewhere a filter needs to be applied to reject more proposals.
It’s a bit obvious. Happens to everyone with an achievable goal. They set out to create an open source web browser and web standards and now every browser is OSS and the web is on standards. Now they have no reason to exist and so the org is trying to sustain itself while finding another purpose.
[dead]
Angry crowd: “Mozilla should do things to diverse revenue!”
Also angry crowd: “No! No! Not that thing! How dare you explore alternative revenue streams! You are Mozilla, just pick and the execute a successful 100 million dollar idea!”
Angry crowd: focus on your browser!
Mozilla: what? acquire a bookmarking service?
Angry crowd: no! develop your browser!
Mozilla: ok, got it! I'll make a VPN service!
Angry crowd: WORK ON YOUR FUCKING BROWSER
Mozilla: AI? Did I hear AI from someone over there?
Fundamentally I think having people pay for a browser is a hard sell. I do think complementary services being sold to fund the browser are a good idea though.
E.g. VPN, search, bookmarking service - great. Charge for them, have the money go into browser dev, focus on privacy and be done with it.
I don't know if you know this, but browsers don't generate revenue (with the exception of Google paying you hush money to pretend they aren't a browser monopoly)
Nobody in the crowd ever said the first thing.
I sure have. Mozillas main and perhaps only real mistake was that they didn't meaningfully attempt to become independent from Google the second Google started building Chrome (with Mozillas help, no less!). A truly independent Mozilla would not have needed to implement DRM, and would be shipping with adblock by default - which incidentally is exactly what made people switch from IE to FF in the first place, popup ads.
Now the ship has beached itself and the crew is frantically trying something - anything - to plug the leaks, prevent her from capsizing and trying to get her back afloat. I don't know if they'll manage, or if ladybird is the alternative to the new IE that is Chrome
Angry crowd all over my tech bubble: "Mozilla should make a subscription that directly funds the development of Firefox, and not the salary of the CEO that does nothing."
Also angry crowd: "No, not ads or AI, it's stupid."
What was your point anyway?
The correct word for all of the recent changes is a result of the fundamental misunderstanding of exactly what constitutes acceptable use is censorship.
In the United States of America, freedom of speech is a fundamental right guaranteed by our constitution. That means you can use language or show content that I may find offensive. I may do the same for you. My choice is whether or not I wish to view it or permit my non-adult children to view it. This is not the vendor's prerogative; it is my responsibility as a parent.
Mozilla's "terms and conditions" mean that fear has taken hold.
Freedom is hard. Allowing a vendor to restrict use that infringes on a basic right is unacceptable. In the final analysis, their terms of use are probably unenforceable. Think about it. What are they going to do? Stop me and everyone else from sharing cute baby pictures? Ones in our grandparents' scrapbooks?
The Constitution only protects you from the government, it doesn't bind individuals or companies. The government cannot make laws that take away your freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean other people or companies are legally obligated to let you say whatever you want on their turf.
It does though. I get where you're coming from but thats a naive interpretation of a partial set of facts.
Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Ctr does establish that free speech protection can be used against other private citizens
Yes, but a browser is like a wirephoto. The recipient gets an exact copy of the original -- not retouched. Spelling errors, bad grammar, "warts and all."
The browser is supposed to be transparent -- what you send is what I see. How I react is up to me. It is not up to the intervening service to add or remove content.
This is what the internet was intended to be.
FF users might want to take look at KDE's Falkon. It's come a long way - fast and solid.
>can be installed on Windows 7 or newer as well as Linux from the repositories, as a flatpak and as a snap. https://userbase.kde.org/Falkon
》This situation reveals a recurring issue in how Mozilla communicates with its user base
Mozilla is very clear at its communication! They even got new leadership and rebranded recently! Their updated Privacy Policy is also very clear! Maybe they had not implement everything yet, but they are heading in clear direction. And real hammer will come in a few months, if they lose deal with Google!
At this point Mozilla is a toxic organization when it comes to privacy, something like Google with Chrome. Dismissing it as a "communication issue" is not sufficient! Waterfox needs clear separation from Mozilla!
Their last message says it all:
> We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses
The text is confusing on purpose and mixes Firefox, the Mozilla Services (Sync maybe? That's it?), AI, and their new AD-platform (without mentioning the last two). And why are they talking about a license when it's a ToS? Everything is confusing about it, even their answers.
> to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible
The very same thing they did for more than 20 year without such a ToS? Why now? I think it's about AI and ads but I'm sure they are smarter than me and will explain everything in precise details to clear up such a "big confusion."
> we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches
That's a fucking lie of course. They did that last year without any issue. You can get the text from the search box (like mSearchBox->getText() in C++, wow I'm a Mozilla engineer), and put that in the URL of my favorite search engine as part of the query.
> or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice
I don't care about the ownership, I want to know why, why now, and I want them to explain all the details that definitely do NOT appear in their Privacy Notice.
My conclusion is that they are moving away from Firefox for some reason, they pretended to fire the last CEO which keeps on working on the AI, and they want a lot of information like everyone else which is difficult when you're supposed to be the open-source knight of privacy.
But I'm only typing that because I am bitter and have already moved on. They fucked with us too many times, I don't care anymore even if the only alternative left was Links.
I hate it when companies say “there’s been some confusion about…”
There hasn’t been confusion. There’s almost never confusion. Making an announcement requires clear communication. If reasonable people are interpreting their communication in a way they didn’t intend, it isn’t confusion, they just miscommunicated at best.
Mozilla acts like a corporation and not a non-profit. There is no humility or grace in their communication.
I think it goes further than just bad communication though. This policy is the typical cover-your-ass method of giving yourself as broad of a license to user data as legally possible.
An organization like Mozilla should take a stance and do the opposite by making their policy as narrow as possible.
This costs more in legal costs, but for an organization that defines itself as a champion of user privacy and control this should be the natural choice.
Mozilla is both a non-profit foundation and also a corporation. You aren't legally allowed to use charitable donations to fund web browser development, so the corporation has to handle that.
> You aren't legally allowed to use charitable donations to fund web browser development, so the corporation has to handle that.
If the charity is a non-profit specifically for development of a non-profit web browser, what's the problem?
That's not how charities work as a legal construct.
The point of incorporating as a charity is that it makes you exempt from taxes. Obviously the government that collects taxes wants to make sure that every corporation doesn't incorporate as a charity solely to avoid taxes, so it places strict limits on what you're allowed to do with charitable donations.
The Mozilla Foundation (as distinct from the Mozilla Corporation) is specifically a 501(c)(3) charity under US law. That means it can use its funds for the following:
"The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency."
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
Notably, developing a free web browser is not one of the charitable activities that the IRS recognizes.
> Notably, developing a free web browser is not one of the charitable activities that the IRS recognizes.
I find your argument uninsightful. If I were on a jury, I would find developing a free web browser to be charitable under multiple statements:
- preventing cruelty to children
Childrens' browsing habits should not should not be available for sale.
- relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged
A free browser will help the poor, and the distressed, and the underprivileged. There are poor people who are poor because they are data-mined by advertisers. There are people who are distressed about their privacy. There are underprivileged people whose livelihoods are abused by corporations.
- advancement of education or science
A free browser is both educational (handy for learning how to write software or build websites) and scientific (generating studies and reports on internet capabilities and safety).
> defending human and civil rights secured by law
Do you really want to argue that a free browser does not defend freedom and privacy in the US (since you cite US definition of charity) as heavily implied by the US Bill of Rights and as supported by US Courts [0]?
[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/privacy
I'm not arguing my opinion, I'm quoting the laws that Congress passed to govern the IRS. We could pass a law to make web browser development an explicitly legally charitable act. But that's not how the law has been interpreted up to this point. You want to take it up with your senator. Until then, Mozilla's legal counsel isn't going to play games like this with a judge.
I wonder if you'd say that developing a free web browser is a "public work".
Unfortunately it doesn't matter what I say, it matters what the US government says.
Counterpoints:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/845...
https://ladybird.org/posts/announcement/
Mozilla has been around for 25 years at this point, they'd be as thrilled as anyone if this were the case. What they have is the structure that their legal counsel recommended. Anyone can play fast and loose with tax law up until the point that the IRS comes knocking.
A non-profit foundation is allowed to earn revenue from a product. It just can't transfer that revenue to the owners of the foundation or spend it on dividends.
> You aren't legally allowed to use charitable donations to fund web browser development
Why not?
People who have never worked for a non-profit always think they're better. People who have worked for a non-profit know they're just as dysfunctional as corporations.
What about someone who consults for non-profits and runs one himself?
Yeah they act like everything they make will be praised, or that people who criticize them can never be pleased. Be ethical.
Does Waterfox sell your data like Firefox?
I hate the Mozilla 'clarification' because they gave no example. The only information I type into Firefox is using websites. Them being 100% vague makes it feel even worse.
They sell only the data you use via their search partners. If you go direct to the search website they don't sell that data.
How is that not phishing? They made the URL bar a search bar so they can steal and sell everyone's Google search history?
Can anyone comment on the difference between Waterfox and Librewolf?
I was going to comment that one of them (WaterFox) has a shady sponsor (System1, an advertising company) but it seems WaterFox has been an independent project again since 2023 [0]
[0] https://avoidthehack.com/review-waterfox-browser
While branding System1 an adtech company is correct, its bread and butter [at the time] was search aggregation and in effect contextual advertising (System1 didn't want to deal with PII). The ownership made a lot of sense, and of course having a view inside the company, I could see how everything worked.
It was impossible to get that point across, especially as S1 wanted to have the final say on what was said. A lot of heartache all across the board could've been saved by just being able to say things as a matter of fact.
But unfortunately people jump to conclusions, don't have good faith discussions and loved just get involved in internet drama.
I never used Waterfox but Librewolf seems to have more stricts settings, whereas people describe Waterfox as being closer to Firefox.
Librewolf has sensible but annoying default settings that you have to change. For example, cookies are deleted when quitting, or you can't have night mode out of the box since it could be a privacy issue. IMHO it's a cleaner Firefox and I enjoy it so far.
I contributed UX for a 'save cookies for this site' dropdown feature in the navbar, a poc was made which looked good, but it got lost in other work and eventually didn't land in a release that I'm aware of. Shame because that one feature would make it practical to use the recommended clear cookies behavior by default except for particular sites and overall boost everyone's privacy and security because I'm pretty sure most people turn it off after getting sick of logging in. After a couple of months I went back to Firefox and hardened it making it basically the same as LF but not being a month behind in updates. I guess I'll revisit the project now
Are you aware of any browser / extension that enables this behavior? It sounds like the privacy grail for some of us.
I created a post[0] on /r/LibreWolf to discuss usability tweaks for new LibreWolf users who might not know all the ins and outs of the more strict settings.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/LibreWolf/comments/1j0ckr9/recent_f...
Whats the best casual (non Tor) browser these days? Brave? Opera?
Firefox of course. It has the most add-ons, most compatibility/support with other sites, services, software. And it has fewer bugs than newer browsers. If you just want a general purpose browser, Firefox is it. Chrome is always an option too, and they certainly have some useful extra features, but they'll also remove support for things if it conflicts with Daddy Alphabet.
Librewolf or Ungoogled Chromium with uBlock.
Ungoogled Chromium removes those pesky manifestv3 changes as well? The ones which make uBlock basically non-functional.
I don't think so, but in practice when running uBlock on Chrome I still don't see ads. It's less efficient under the surface but the user experience hasn't changed significantly.
Firefox, Vivaldi
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Why do we always have to blame the people who want to make things better? Why can’t we blame Eich for it based on his political activism trying to hurt his employees and users? Or the church for teaching Eich that their sexual hangups are more important than being good to people?
> Why do we always have to blame the people who want to make things better?
Because they are not necessarily making things better, they are making things worse (and "good intentions" are no excuse here).
In my view, discriminating against someone professionally (and publicly dragging their convictions through the mud) because of privately held political/religious opinions is not acceptable behavior, full stop.
I would have some understanding if Eich had been nasty with coworkers, or if his convictions had affected his work. But there were no accusations of this.
Lets just flip the thing a bit to make my point clearer:
If Eich had been discovered to be (secretly) a stout, godless atheist (sponsoring anti-religious campaigns)-- do you think the same kind of smear campaign/discrimination/career-killing would have been adequate?
And why don't we blame Eich for making things worse with his "good intentions"?
Why don't we consider trying to pass laws that hurt your coworkers to qualify as "being nasty with coworkers"?
> Why don't we consider trying to pass laws that hurt your coworkers to qualify as "being nasty with coworkers"?
Because "advocating for laws that potentially negatively affect coworkers" and "actually being nasty with coworkers" is a difference in proportion of at least 100000 (maybe slightly less if your advocacy effects a lot of votes).
By cancel-campaigning against Eich you basically
1) Discriminate against someone for a political view they held (5 years ago!)
2) Suffocate honest discussion/debate about any affected topic
3) Directly promote creation of cultural echo chambers
You also make the workplace an observably more hostile place for anyone that leans more on Eichs side on the topic.
On the other hand, what does the whole thing actually achieve? I don't even see accusations of anyone actually being affected, in the workplace, by Eichs views (and that would be the bare minimum to demonstrate actual harm).
And helping to pass Prop 8 does those same things but worse. What's your argument, that it shouldn't count because it probably didn't affect the outcome very much? "You put non-trivial personal resources into denying basic rights to people, but it's pretty small in the grand scheme of things so let's just ignore it" doesn't make much sense to me.
You don't think it creates a hostile place for workers when their CEO is trying to deny them basic right?
Eich's view was totally private and pulled up by reporters. The USA is a democracy, it's completely unnecessary to cancel Eich. Just advocate for the opposing view if that's your wish.
His name was on a published list of donors. It's not like reporters went digging through his trash. Making a donation where there's a legal requirement to publish your contribution is not "totally private."
Why is it OK for Eich to try to prevent certain people from getting married, but it's not OK for Eich's employees to try to prevent him from having a certain job? Please explain using small words so I can understand the difference.
I don't know any small words for this, but the right word is "disproportionate."
Is a wealthy person losing their job worse than the state making it illegal to marry the person you love because they don't like the way your genitals match?
Making a political donation is not a private activity.
No one can pass silly purity tests. There are people who unironically believe that if you believe in money you are a bad person and are oppressing them.
Just like it would be silly for someone to blame you for being on this website founded by someone who has some questionable views, if you go looking. Or, for using this very much American website, an America that's becoming increasingly hostile. Is your participation here an implicit agreement with the current administration?
Perhaps not before, but now that you've read this comment one could argue your continued participation makes you complicit.
You show me someone's views and associations and I can make them a devil.
Thinking that you should treat people well regardless of which genitals they prefer is not a “silly purity test,” it’s basic decency, at least in this millennium.
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Trying to get laws passed and posting pseudonymous comments on a web site are not equivalent activities.
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And the moment I contribute to DOGE is the moment you'll have a point here.
You are helping enrich someone who is sympathetic towards it. It's funny how you are immediately trying to disassociate yourself from the simple fact that you -> hacker news -> pg -> musk.
There are people who don't use Twitter for the simple reason that Musk owns it. You can do the same with HN, no?
So first of all, no I'm not. And second of all, "helping enrich someone who is sympathetic towards it" and "helping to get a law passed" are not the same thing.
> And second of all, "helping enrich someone who is sympathetic towards it" and "helping to get a law passed" are not the same thing.
I have never made this claim.
And yes, Hacker News is literally a marketing site for Y Combinator, of which pg has a stake.
In any case I've already ascertained your level of conviction so we can let it go. At least redditors had enough to leave reddit over simple API changes.
You're telling me that I'm inconsistent in my views because I think Eich deserves blame for what happened when he helped enact a bad law, but I don't stop posting to HN. That implies these two activities are comparable. If you never made that claim then what the hell is the point of your comments? You're just making shit up and holding me to a standard I never expressed. It's completely pointless and stupid.
You said:
"Thinking that you should treat people well..."
I am saying that this site's cofounder is sympathetic to DOGE, which is not treating people well.
Either you disagree with that view, in which case you should stop supporting this site with your participation, or you agree, and you can continue to post.
Of course you can make whatever excuse you'd like to explain how just because you're here doesn't mean you're aligned with pg.
> I am saying that this site's cofounder is sympathetic to DOGE, which is not treating people well.
I agree. And guess what: I don't approve of pg's views on this either. If he ran the company where I worked, I'd support removing him too.
But he doesn't, so what's your point? How do you make the leap from "I'd want to remove him if he were my boss" to "I should stop commenting on HN"?
If anything, consistency would require that I demand that he be removed from his leadership role in HN, not that I should be the one to leave.
Honestly, one man's "silly purity test" is another's non-negotiable moral principle. Would you work for someone who publicly endorsed racism, cannibalism, slavery, <insert your personal red-line here>?
IMHO the issue is the collapse of any broadly-shared moral and ethical framework. I don't know how you resolve that, except perhaps by trying to peacefully partition society.
I’ve heard this before and I keep hearing it. Maybe I don’t understand it fully but I just can’t see how what we have now is different from the days of old. Do you have any material about the collapse of the shared moral and ethical framework?
It's definitely true for certain things. To consider a relevant example, it wasn't too long ago that homosexuality was broadly considered to be immoral. Now there's strong disagreement over this.
Of course, for this particular example this is actually a good thing. It would be even better if there was broad agreement that homosexuality wasn't immoral, but having a substantial number of people on that side is better than having almost none.
I think the other comment misattributes the problem. The problem isn't the loss of the old broadly shared morality, the problem is that we haven't yet managed to coalesce around a new and better one.
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"Leaking"? My bias against homophobes and for treating people the same regardless of sexual preference is being loudly advertised, it's not "leaking."
Yeah, no shit that plenty of countries have horrible views here. Why are you acting like you think I'm unaware of this?
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I think you're misapplying "irony". The comment you're responding to doesn't argue for some kind of wishy-washy moral equivalence: they're explicitly advocating for the superiority of their preferred values. Nothing you've offered is an effective rebuttal to their assertion that having 50% "good people" is preferable to 0% "good people" (in the interest of unity).
> on his political activism
Are you referring to the private one time donation of a thousand dollars as activism?
The bill also won the popular election. So it wasn’t a fringe view.
Meanwhile work chats in big tech in 2014 were open season for literal political organizing and activism.
How much do you think someone has to support “a decent fraction of my employees and users should be legally considered lesser” before it counts?
It’s a ridiculous purity test that many of your coworkers probably fail and you are unaware of, especially minorities. I would invite you to look at the demographic breakdown of support for this bill.
People around the world have very different views on social issues - tech workers just know they aren’t supposed to voice them publicly in the US, or that the law can be more open than their personal views. And this isn’t just 2012, check in on blind.
Tolerance is a good policy on this topic, but compromise doesn’t work if you are then going to sniff out private mental states of your coworkers.
I'm not talking about private mental states. I'm talking about concrete activities attempting to formally change how the state treats certain people.
And yeah, you're not supposed to voice them. That's not some sort of gotcha, that's common sense. If you think some of your coworkers are lesser, then you'd better keep that shit under your hat, or leave. You cannot expect to make those views public and then stick around like everything's still fine.
> You cannot expect to make those views public
Once again, Brendan Eich did not publicly advocate - journalists searched through small donations.
> If you think some of your coworkers are lesser,
Im sure all of my coworkers hold religious, ethnic, cultural, and gender biases of many kinds. Because they are people. I hope we can minimize these and treat each other with care and respect, and I would not tolerate mistreatment.
He didn't announce his views. He did make them public by making donations that were publicly visible.
Does helping to pass laws to formalize certain people as legally less-than qualify as "mistreatment"? If not, why not?
Help me understand which position you’re still advocating for:
1) if you knew a coworker supported this bill you would want them fired,
(I’ve said all I can here.)
2) the harm was when he gave $1000 which is when a bias because mistreatment
I don’t know what to say to that one.
You're missing a critical part.
Eich's donation was well-known. The lists are public. Lots of Mozilla folks were aware and unimpressed, but they tolerated it because Eich (CTO) was a respected member of the corp with a long history of technical excellence. As well as no workplace hostility etc.
Then Eich was to be promoted to CEO, which is a nontechnical job that involves being the public face of the corporation and speaking on behalf of all employees.
A substantial portion of Mozilla employees felt that this new expanded role would not be appropriate for Eich or anyone who had expressed hostility to a marginalized group, that Eich did not represent the values of Mozilla, and that they did not want to promote him or to be led by him.
So they created an internal stir which gathered a lot of internal support, bled into public forums, and led Eich to back out of the CEO role. He probably could have gone back to CTO, but he decided to resign from the organization instead.
A coworker might be questionable. We're talking about the CEO. I think a CEO who tries to take basic rights away from their employees and users should go.
> the harm was when he gave $1000 which is when a bias because mistreatment
Sorry, I'm having a lot of trouble understanding what the second half of this is supposed to mean. The harm is taking a position opposed to basic rights of people who work for you and who use your product, and backing that up with cash.
I really doubt all of you saying that this isn't a big deal would be so blase about it if the CEO of your company donated a thousand bucks to a cause that considers you to be sub-human. But you're probably not the target of this sort of thing so you don't care.
Yeah, they seem to be missing the plot. Eich has never been on record saying anything homophobic. It's cancel culture through and through. If you sift through the private views of anyone, there will always be something disagreeable.
> Are you referring to the private one time donation of a thousand dollars as activism?
Uh, yes? If activism does not include political donations, then nothing is activism.
"Did you know, the Catholic church is to blame for Firefox getting ready to sell user data?"
The theory has a certain chaotic pizzazz but I'm not sure I could convince anyone.
And yet there’s just as much connection to them as to the people who pushed to get Eich removed.
I see you're one of those people where 'compromise' is a dirty word.
The key is tolerance. Eich's views while distasteful and probably wrong could be tolerated.
And why is it always on us to be tolerant, never people like Eich?
Eich faced those consequences that you would have wanted -- so he wasn't tolerated -- and was forced to step down. Now we're faced with a Web were all Browsers come from large companies and people are wondering why his successors aren't up to the job. The world is made entirely of trade-offs. Your like that boss who doesn't get the Quality/Speed/Price triangle and says I want it all.
I’m talking about these comments. Why is blame put on the people who wanted Eich out, but not on Eich?
Eich was being the more tolerant party: he wasn't trying to get anyone at Mozilla fired for their political beliefs (or their sexual preferences).
Right, he was just trying to enshrine lesser status in state law. He wanted a bunch of people at Mozilla to be officially lesser in the eyes of the state. But that’s ok, he didn’t try to fire them!
They can be tolerated if the alternative is worse. Having a good browser captained by a homophobe can be better than not having the browser. That doesn't mean the homophobia is good.
At the time, no one thought that getting rid of the homophobe would mean there wouldn't be a browser at all. We (the world) got rid of the homophobe, because homophobes are rightfully quite bad, and we didn't think that would stop there from also being a browser.
not always, just when their attempts to improve things backfire out of incompetence
or like they say "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"
And, again, why does this not get applied to people like Eich?
This is flame war now, but there are > 1 person who can run a company successfully. No Eich != bad company. Blame current leadership not lack of specific leadership.
It's not about bad company, it's that Eich was the status quo. Obviously his removal represents a departure.
Cancel culture was assuredly the weapon used to silence Eich, but we should not be fooled into thinking that cancel culture was "at fault."
Remember, canceling is a tool. People who want to conceal their real goals use this tool to slander and eliminate their enemies, and that's why we need to end it. But these people don't actually care about whatever values cancel culture purports to uphold - they are just savvy sociopaths. Ultimately these sociopaths all try to do the same thing, which is promote some kind of deception, fraud or graft.
I think Eich was one of the last guys at Mozilla who was dedicated to building a compelling rival to Chrome and preserving a free and open web. And I think these things have not been the mission of Mozilla for a long time. I think that Mozilla is an arm of Google, to know that, all you need to do is follow the money.
Mozilla has been marching to the beat of Google's drum for many years, and when it made sense for Google to claim it wasn't a monopoly, they ordered Mozilla to behave a certain way. Now that President Trump has sued Google, President Biden has won the case, and it's back on Trump to determine the sentencing as Pichai kisses the ring, there is too much power arrayed against Google and they have stopped trying to maintain the lie that they are innocent.
So now Google is deploying new orders to their bootlickers. We will see a variety of changes at Mozilla now that the mask is off.
We should not forget that the prime evil here is the convicted criminal enterprise that is Google.