To disable this, users need to set browser.vpn_promo.enabled to false on the about:config page.
Edit: as noted in the linked ticket, there are some discussions going on about this in https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/ .
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 1 minute ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
Screenshot https://web.archive.org/web/20220308222503/https://www.mozil...
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608022
If you want to advertise, have a newsletter that people can opt into.
If you need money, allow people to pay for just Firefox.
They marked it Resolved but the popup will still happen after 20 mins of idle time after the fix, if I read the Bug details correctly.
> Thank you for reaching out with your concern. Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first, as such we quickly stopped running the ad experience, and are reviewing internally.
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/n...
"Messaging System"
"Vision"
"Firefox must be an opinionated user agent that keeps folks safe, informed and effective while browsing the Web. In order to have an opinion, Firefox must have a voice."
"That voice will respect the user’s attention while surfacing contextually relevant and timely information tailored to their individual needs and choices."
Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** who orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product. And then cajole/order/encourage another subordinate to write a florid virtuous editorial justifying their belligerent idea.
I haven’t seen a single ad since the moment I installed Firefox and clicked “don’t suggest stuff”.
Related: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/mozilla-now-only-...
I love you Mozilla, but you've gotta do better. Please.
How the fuck are you supposed to know about this in advance and prevent this from happening‽
I was on reddit, and couldn't be sure that it wasn't reddit doing it. Though I half-suspected Firefox. Imagine my surprise when I saw this post.
Nothing about this seems "quickly stopped". The timestamp on your link says nearly 7 hours ago.
That said, if you don't want to use Chrome, a fairly good alternative would be Vivaldi [0] - a surprisingly neat browser created by the ex-founder of Opera. It's based on the Chromium engine, so no weird rendering shenanigans, but at the same time is quite technically capable, with ad blocking, mouse gestures, email client, etc.
I guess I have to go back to ungoogled chromium as my main browser again and start working again on RetroKit.
Good bye Mozilla, thanks for now being the corporation hell hole that you initially fought against.
I guess that's what happens if you fire the people that actually cared for the project.
it's becoming more and more user hostile with every upgrade
pocket everywhere, telemetry, vpn ads, disney ads, amazon ads etc
(and despite the constant UI changes it still feels like something out of 1997)
Everyone gets angry and has an opinion of how this sucks. There's no way for this to work out for Mozilla. Nothing they do will work or make everyone happy.
Google won.
This phrase is approaching a Betteridge's law level tell for who’s at the wheel - nobody needs to insist they’re putting people first unless it’s really obvious they’re not.
“My corporate doublespeak has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my corporate doublespeak.”
Google has enough control over the internet as is, thank you.
I'd really wish there were other gecko browsers now. Epiphany was good but they switched to Webkit.
Edit: Just learned of LibreWolf. Might be looking into migrating over.
The VPN pop-up isn't an effort to provide funding for a dying browser. This is greed, pure and simple.
(disclaimer: i agree to security issues and stuff due to not updating, i manage my firwalls and adblocks to prevent getting hacked, and take full responsibility in case i get hacked, thank you).
It's actually pretty simple for this to work out for Mozilla. Remove the ad system.
I think many people overestimate how many people would pay for Firefox.
The top article on the homepage was this one, visible through the dark-ish tint behind the ad.
Lol.
Safari practically never does that shit, which is one of the reasons I prefer it on platforms where it's available. IDK why modern Firefox is so damn eager to interrupt me. Just open a window with my last session or my default tab and shut up. I don't care if you just updated. I don't care if you're weirdly-enthusiastic about introducing me to a feature that hasn't been novel in a browser in at least a couple decades (color themes—LOL, that was just embarrassing). I certainly don't want an actual advertisement. And for god's sake, no, I still don't care about Pocket, and I never will.
For less-technical users, this stuff isn't just annoying, it can disrupt their entire browsing session. "Wait... where's my email? Is it gone? Is this the right program?" Firefox (and other teams that do crap like this, in their products) should knock it off. It is not OK.
Even if there were a setting to opt out of everything it would be unacceptable. Might as well use Chromium if they are going to pull this shit. I'm just done with this, Mozilla deserves to fail.
Any browser who constantly reminds you how private and user-empowering it is, is probably neither.
Add to that a vaguely liberal-sounding rethoric that could be right out of Ron Desantis' worst "woke lib" stereotypes - without even actually being liberal.
Like, not that I'd see the browser an appropriate location for that, but if they actually wanted to commit to a liberal political view, I'd at least have expected "diverse voices" somewhere. But I have no clue what "independent voices" is supposed to mean.
A single revenue source is incredibly risky and they're foolish if they aim to rely on search sponsorship revenue alone.
Since when is it greedy to want to raise capital for the expensive thing you're building? I think it's lazy to waste momentum and let it peter out into nothingness. At least this is an attempt to stand on their own legs.
Why does Mozilla draw this ire when literally every entity out there is hustling against the gradient of entropy? We single out Mozilla to lambaste.
The thing I'm angry about is that Mozilla isn't trying hard enough, and that when they do try, they're not playing smart. They're making bets that I perceive to be foolish - "ethical AI", "VR/metaverse", etc. These are not good synergies or paths to profitability. They're wasting their limited resources on things outside of their scope, that do not matter to their core mission, and that won't turn a profit.
As I see it, the web may not even have another 15 years left if AI takes over question answering, content generation, etc. Maybe it's foolish to even try to prop up Mozilla at this point. The world has moved on and left them in the dust.
Mozilla is simply an antitrust defense strategy for tech giants. Not a good place to be in as the gravity starts to move away from websites.
It lets you focus on creating the best browser possible instead of wasting time working on the parts of the browser engine which aren't relevant to your product.
That says to me that Firefox is aware the ad experience did not put people first, and that Firefox broke their commitment. They are discussing internally how this was allowed to happen.
As I pointed out, they have other avenues for revenue. If Google decided to not renew their contract there's other search engines they can turn to.
Additionally, there's nothing wrong with Mozilla securing other revenue sources. There is something wrong with how they're advertising it to their users.
> Why does Mozilla draw this ire when literally every entity out there is hustling against the gradient of entropy
This ire does exist for every company that pulls this nonsense. What are you on about? Why should Mozilla be exempt?
> As I see it, the web may not even have another 15 years left if AI takes over...
This is a Nostradamus level of nonsense. It doesn't belong in this conversation. Regardless of what AI does or doesn't do, trying to project 15 years out into the future to dismiss today's bad behaviours is ridiculous.
I certainly would never pay them if they keep doing that kind of shit
Now to find another browser... Maybe some Firefox fork or something? Like WTF every other browser is Chromium... Man this sucks, I'm about ready to quit the internet.
Because Mozilla and its execs were asleep at the wheel while Google started to eat its share. This is what you get when you stop competing.
Basically, what they wanted to do was to build a background process that detects when you're away from the PC and then pops up the message, so it's the first thing you see what you get back.
Unfortunately (or maybe not) the detection logic had a bug, which caused the message to pop up right away sometimes, spoiling the whole thing.
It’s ironic (and extremely sad) how they say that but staunchly refuse to add ad-blocking to iOS Firefox. And the code is already right there, in Firefox Focus.
I’ve pushed everyone in my circle to Brave and told them to disable / ignore the crypto bits.
Safety first, and unfortunately Mozilla does not care about iOS users their safety.
Should read as:
> Oops, we got caught again doing stuff that our core users don't like. Let us remove this until we find a better way to make you angry
Compare "war crimes are bad for multiple reasons" and "lets torture, murder and loot and that is fine because they are subhumans".
Universal bothsideism is not a good idea.
What are you on about? We've all got to eat. Making money is good and essential for survival.
> This is a Nostradamus level of nonsense. [...] trying to project 15 years out into the future [...]
This is what every investor, innovator, or leader does. If you're not thinking about the future, you're flying without guidance.
> It doesn't belong in this conversation.
Absolutely it does. Mozilla painted themselves into a dark corner and the walls are closing in.
I'm not the only one predicting that the web may dry up. It was already happening with increased centralization and platforms before AI even entered into the conversation.
If, hypothetically, AI can answer all of your questions, why do you need to search for websites? Why do you even need websites?
ChatGPT is already trying to get companies to build themselves as plugins within their walled fiefdom. Don't you see that as a distinct possibility? A terrifying one? It's already happened on our phones and app stores, and it can happen again.
I think he has missed the current year jargon which is a mix of corporate BS words and Buzzfeed diversity and inclusion crap. It usually means nothing other than:
"We are doing this because of profit or because we want to further censor discussion about something because the right view is X and that's what you're allowed to think and say.
Any dissent will be responded with a negative label on your person and, if possible, deplatforming, which is good, because we know what the one true way is"
They will phrase it as "in order to improve things for consumers, everyone" while literally screwing over a myriad of those people.
Firefox is still a great browser but Mozilla has long been a company that we can barely trust, in the way that it actively is telling us that we need to subscribe to its very US centric partisan politics and view of the world, which has shifted from actual fairness and openness for all vi virtue of being a customizable browser.
It's fine for them to create Mozilla VPN. It's never, ever fine to use the same old dark bullshit patterns, and interrupt me on all my computers, same as all these other dirtbag tech companies. They are supposed to be different, and give a shit about the user. Sorry if this is their only way to advertise, but it's not okay.
I still love you though, Firefox. Your heart is in the right place. You're now a lone wolf in a ocean of Chromium and wonky WebKits.
Yes, I am willing to pay say 100$/year for web browser if money would entirely go to development. Maybe something to support staff like CEO. But not over 5 000 000 per year ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary... )
And if such browser would be actually user-first, without ads for VPN and Disney movies (especially without ads pretending to not be ads).
It's a shame because I pay for Mozilla features, including Mozilla VPN. But I find this behavior (1) kind of gross, and (2) a clear signal of either desperation or indifference to their mission.
Yeah. The Mozilla foundation is struggling to keep food on the table with the hundreds of millions paid to them from Google. Totally.
> This is what every investor, innovator, or leader does. If you're not thinking about the future, what are you doing?
Again, you're attempting to justify current bad behaviour by what might happen the future. That's what ridiculous. I never said no one should plan for the future.
If Mozilla is going to pull moves like this then they deserve to get called out for it. Defending bad behaviour like this only helps things become worse.
This unnecessary bullshit is how you introduce security bugs into software. Mozilla can preach all they want about security and privacy but this shows that it's all rotten to the core.
Mozilla brand managers should be the first jobs replaced by AI.
This will lead to subtle issues over time, making Firefox usage shrink even faster.
At least in Google’s case it makes good business sense - as in, it already works for them and their target audience already has been using the OS with all that, and doesn’t care about it, ads and tracking; besides there aren’t too many phone OS options.
But in the case of Mozilla? Heck the target audience cares very much about these things and not liking shit like this was a reason they were in Firefox for. Now a lot have already dumped it for Safari, Brave etc. Then they keep doing such tricks.
Someone at Mozilla has to be especially dumb to have done this.
... what kind of logic is this?
>There's no way for this to work out for Mozilla.
Sure there is - give people an option to pay for Firefox itself.
On one hand, I largely agree with everything that blog posts says.
BUT!
it presents it as some universal, self-evident truth, and I think it's not. Just because the blog author and I and some others think so, doesn't mean it's the only perspective or that everybody feels that way.
I think there exist people who will enjoy that language, who will understand that language, and to whom that language speaks. My wife, possibly. My sister, almost certainly. Many others in my circle of friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.
And, it's Mozilla. I don't think it's 100% accurate to say "you're a tech company" or that FireFox is "just a browser". Mozilla foundation is non-profit, and it does have goals and vision. It is, I think inherently "political", though not necessarily in the current American sense of "political" which seems to mean "partisan" or "bad". It has a goal and perspective and a point of view. It's trying to do something beyond generate profit for shareholders, so I don't think it's accurate to brand it as "just a tech company" (whether one agrees with its goals, methods and progress is orthogonal).
Ultimately, some people DO choose Firefox as a political statement (that statement perhaps being as simple as "I support independent choice of technology" or "I want my browser to work for me" or even "I don't want Google to COMPLETELY own my life" :). Some people DO see it as a way to vote, or impart a change.
Unfortunately they hired a bunch of incompetent executives who would much rather starve Firefox development while spending all of the money on realizing their big business vision where they acquire useless startups then ruin the browser by turning it into a marketing platform for the aforementioned. Besides bonuses and big salary bumps, of course.
No "stop showing me ads", "disable recommendations", "show privacy settings", instead, just "not now". This illusion of choice is a very common dark pattern that helps people feel like postponing ads was their choice (and their idea) rather than making them feel upset that ads have snuck into their browser in the first place. Websites run by trash marketeers like Reddit and Twitter do the same thing.
I wonder how long it'll take before I will just switch to some Chrome fork. This whole "privacy first" shtick is nice but if I need to turn off as many settings in Firefox to make my browser pleasant to use as I do privacy settings in Chrome, I don't see the advantage.
Last time I checked brave they were still pushing their shady crypto stuff and the UI was kind of meh. I wonder if I should reevaluate it with the ongoing erosion of Firefox as a browser.
Instead the current pitch is "buy this $5/m VPN, of which we'll get a small cut of from reselling Mullvad, and still get all of the ads you were complaining about in the browser anyways".
When they start popping it up all over the place is when I draw the line.
Listen to some prominent politicians today. Politicians have always had to speak in convoluted and stupid ways to conceal or deflect the truth, but generally they were coherent, the sequence of words had some meaning you could understand even if it was wrong or they were lying. Now it's just complete gibberish with feel-good words sprinkled in.
Ironically, Firefox could make the world a slightly better place (in a very specific aspect of the world) if they focused simply in making a great web browser, without unnecessary bells and whistles and without any politic posturing, but that aimed at denting the Chrome monopoly.
So playing by the reskinned rules, blockers are not allowed in the way someone using Firefox would expect. Not just blockers, but any extension. It's such a totally not-Firefox experience, that it is even hard to type that it is Firefox.
Normally my opinions are clearly superior. Other people's opinions are shit.
I expect the same to be true for everyone.
If there were a viable non-chromium alternative to Firefox I’d already have switched.
I still remember when the slogan was something like "putting users in control of their online experience", got silently changed to "individuals" instead of "users" at some point, and apparently it's just "people" now.
I know of JRR Tolkien, and GRR Martin, but...
As Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll wrote, "If your thoughts incline ever so little towards fuming,” you will say “fuming-furious;” if they turn, by even a hair's breadth, towards “furious,” you will say “furious-fuming;” but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious.”"
...to add something of more topical substance, I generally agree with the perfectly-balanced opinion above, in that it's a surprisingly mealy-mouthed justification for what is pretty clearly awful behaviour. I'd respect the hustle a lot more if the response hadn't been so verbally Corporate Memphis.
I defended them with Pocket, with promotions in the new tab screen, with dumb wastes of time like Colorways. I've continued to evangelize Firefox in spite of the fact that I knew the company had lost touch with reality because I want there to be an alternative to chromium-based browsers.
Today I'm done. I can shrug off promos in the new tab page, in the settings, whatever. But there are no second chances for full-page pop-up ads, especially when the "oops" is in the timing code. "Oops, you were supposed to see that after 20 minutes inactivity" doesn't cut it.
Mozilla has lost it, and I'm done defending them and evangelizing for them.
A browser doesn't need popups, a "messaging system", "telemetry", or anything other than to show me the content of URLs that I tell it to visit.
Edit: this is not completely true - I enabled Private Relay (Safari only) and installed uMatrix and uBlock Origin on Chromium, but that's about it.
Wasn't there a campaign that "no means no", and explicitly not "no means keep asking until you get the answer you were hoping for out of fatigue"?
Oh right. #metoo
They pull this crap all the time and never learn their lessons.
In what significant ways could Firefox be improved, such that it would help most users, over Chrome?
There is no ethical advertisement. At the root of advertisements are intentional psychological engineering used to manipulate people.
Alternatives to Firefox are free. If this software has to survive than enough people will have to pay either directly or indirectly as in case of ads.
What are other ways that an open source software can survive that cannot have "Open core" or "On premise" options available to it?
Ask for money? Hell there's still not actually any way to pay for Firefox. Even this ad doesn't actually allow you to pay for Firefox, but instead for a service that's useless to the vast majority of people and relies on fear-mongering to sell itself.
A complete new fast browser in rust - ah wait they also fired these engineers.
Not being multiples years late on some browsers features: you can't import es modules in a webworker yet.
https://youtu.be/QWCINJ8uvIc?t=1m8s
(cut out some of background to focus on where he gets to similar patter)
In any case, fully agree. There are always these environmental pressures and "agents" (to evoke / use a sort of game theory modeling context) that lead to this sort of nonsense. Depending on the incentives, scope of power of people making decisions, training (esp., MBAs - simply being trained to look at "numbers in spreadsheets", essentially), etc., it's all too easy, these days, to end up with this kind of B$.
What irks me about these comment threads is that people hold Mozilla to a standard that nobody holds Google to. The negativity spiral, deserved as it may be, seems to then tip a lot of people (self-proclaimed) towards going with Chrome when that is still the worse option. Looking at Firefox' market share, I feel bad for the shit it gets and what it has to pull to try and stay relevant (.: to pay the devs). At the same time, I would also not mind an unmozillad firefox, perhaps in exchange for a certain donation amount per year.
I currently don't donate much to Mozilla because they keep making the experience worse time and again (I'm still salty on a daily basis because the new mouse gestures "extension" is crap compared to the "add-on"-based one from before Firefox 57), because donating adds your email address to their spam list, and because I can't tell them to spend it on useful things like Thunderbird and Firefox rather than developing yet another VPN frontend or buying Pocket. Having a Firefox subscription that gets rid of their ads would not limit what they can spend it on, but it would send a clear message of what it is that I'm wanting to pay for. Wouldn't solve all problems but I wonder if this might help.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=Firefox&que...
The execs are still competing, they're winning, and getting exactly what they aim for, personal wealth.
Frankly, it's much less problematic than Google writing a blog post bragging to it's advertising customers that it has started buying a copy of everyone's credit/debit card transaction data so they can spy on potential customers more than ever.
> as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
So, if you buy stuff with a card, there’s a less than one-in-three chance that Google doesn’t know about it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...
If Mozilla becomes as bad as Google, then there's no reason to choose them over the larger and more stable platform. That's why we hold them to a higher standard—if they can't meet that standard they have no reason to exist at all.
Chrome is the product of a company whose mandate is extracting as much data as possible from its users to feed their ad business. Firefox can and should be better, as they could be 100% user focused.
A Chrome monopoly in the browser space has the potential to be more damaging to the web than the Microsoft monopoly in days gone by. They want to make the world a better place? Well, they could have made the web a better place, if they could meaningfully take some share away from Chrome.
I do actually would like the non profit Mozilla to make the world a better place: by focussing again on building a 100% open source and user controlled browser, that has no ads or tracking (studies) enabled by default.
For example, how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker-Miller_pink is used in prisons to foster a less violent culture among the prisoners.
"voices making the world a better place" is referring to Martin Luther King, Jr.
It's like landing at Normandy, but from the comfort of your living room.
Thunderbird, for example, gained a new life because of donations: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
Why does this resolution even exist as an option? There’s no way the big filer will find that satisfactory.
The current CEO, Mitchell Baker, is clearly in it for the money. She got a salary increase while cutting 250 employees last year, and still had the audacity to say it wasn't enough. Brendan Eich had a bit of political controversy, but being a technical person I think he would've been better as far as focusing on the actual browser.
I recently switched from Edge to Firefox (on both Desktop and phone) specifically because Edge was showing me irrelevant "news" articles (which I assume are just ads in disguise) [1].
I guess on phone I can move back to Safari (which I abandoned due to a bug where scroll position is frequently lost when navigating backwards), since it is apparently the only major browser that hasn't tried to show me ads.
Not sure what to do about desktop...
Unrelated mini rants.
1. They fill the default new tab page with garbage content. They have amazing reach with viewers. It’s a shame they can’t fill it with quality stuff. I understand you have to pay the bills, but at least find some balance.
2. Firefox 47.x was the greatest release. I’ve never been able to keep hundreds of tabs open with Firefox. Eventually Firefox eats up so much RAM and eventually crashes. Chromium based browsers can have multiple windows with hundreds of tabs each and not crash even after being open for days/weeks.
Also, experience tells us that being fast and light is incompatible with excellent plugin support, as the more hooks you provide for plugins, the less you can change without breaking those plugins -- that was Firefox's previous problem.
Money donated to Mozilla isn't used to develop Firefox: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/
I'd be fine paying or donating to help Firefox development, but I can't.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what Mozilla's underlying strategy is, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
-- with apologies to Douglas Adams
Yes, because FF’s only advantage left is that they’ll actually respect your privacy and control of your machine. They have nothing else! If you want a browser that’s the fastest, or has full featured addons, or is mostly like to work on sites where you need it, sorry, Chrome has them hopelessly, irrevocably beaten.
Privacy is the one area where they could actually claim to be better and yet every so often they’ve shown willingness to abandon that advantage for the slimmest of upsides.
Imagine if google injected random stuff without permission in a site like ycombinator, people would go absolutely nuts and google would be considered diabolic, yet for some reason all other browsers have done similar stuff and they somehow get a pass?
Have you seen the competition?
It may be disturbingly similar to trying to vote for a decent politician, but there are absolutely degrees of badness.
Plus there are still forks.
Correct, but there’s a better way to reduce that dependence:
- Stop bleeding money on bullshit unrelated to the core mission.
- Build up an endowment with that sponsorship money to the point that the income it generates is sufficient for their needs.
As an aside, I’ve started adding Lewis Carrol, mainly Alice, quotes to the bottom of my weekly status reports and gotten some weirdly positive feedback on this.
I'd still rather patch the binary (which is actually largely a zipped collection of JS that implements most of the UI) than figure out how to compile Firefox from scratch.
Android (at least the AOSP part) and Linux is a similar situation.
I really don't want to use Chrome. Please stop with the enshittification, Firefox.
I joined Replay as a senior front-end dev a year ago. It's real, it works, we're building it, and it's genuinely life-changing as a developer :)
Not sure how well this would have fit into Firefox as a specific feature, given both the browser C++ runtime customizations and cloud wizardry needed to make this work. But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.
Obligatory sales pitch while I'm writing this:
The basic idea of Replay: Use our special browser to make a recording of your app, load the recording in our debugger, and you can pause at any point in the recording. In fact, you can add print statements to any line of code, and it will show you what it would have printed _every time that line of code ran_!
From there, you can jump to any of those print statement hits, and do typical step debugging and inspection of variables. So, it's the best of both worlds - you can use print statements and step debugging, together, at any point in time in the recording.
See https://replay.io/record-bugs for the getting started steps to use Replay, or drop by our Discord at https://replay.io/discord and ask questions.
> I subscribe to their relay service, so it pitches a couple bucks a month to them. I vote with my wallet.
I would love to vote with my wallet. I want to donate to Firefox directly. If they'd given me an option to donate and have the money go to Firefox and not Mozilla's other pet projects, I'd happily have set up a recurring monthly donation for it.
At the end of the day firefox is a last refuge of a browser that allows me to block tracking and ads. As long as ublock origin works here and nowhere else this is the browser that I will be using. It's that simple, the internet is just too unusable without ad blocking.
Look in about:config if you haven't already, and take a grep through the source for the full list of settings that you can adjust. It is indeed disturbingly large and the majority of them aren't officially documented either.
1. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Not a fantastic situation, but at least it seems to work.
these people (which are also the majority of posters in this thread) are a vanishingly thin slice of the cake. They're trying to corner a totally different market by using that kind of language and design, if that annoys the HN crowd, so be it; they're not the target for this kind of copy.
We have already accepted Google as the “bad guy”. “Good guys” are held to a different standard. If Mozilla want to be a “bad guy” too, they will lose to Google who has the better product.
Finish making gecko reusable so people can use it instead of blink whenever someone wants to make a custom skin, or instead of electron for "desktop" apps. I grant that it's not immediately user-facing, but it would help give them the actual market share so that web devs have a reason to care about gecko.
I would absolutely expect them to pull the whole thing out.
I want a way to instal things on my system without a third party graciously allowing me to, that's what I'd consider freedom and why I try to avoid the playstore like the plague. Seeing Mozilla to not be better either is just sad :(
I mean... it was probably that too, but Google abusing its search monopoly to market Chrome probably played a major role as well. Or if you like - Mozilla's mistakes are such that Google probably could have won fair, but that's not what actually happened.
They literally do not allow donations to Firefox. It is not, and never has been, possible.
" Opened 8 hours ago Closed 6 hours ago "
Mozilla is still targeting the mainstream user that uses Chrome. Spending a lot of time on gloss and removing 'power' features.
Yet they don't understand they already lost the chrome user years ago so badly that they don't even remember the name. And they're now alienating their remaining userbase.
I did not wish to contribute to a political organization. I wished to contribute to a browser. It’s not possible to do one without the other at Mozilla, although it used to be.
Past Few years? I assume you mean from something like 2020? We are now in 2023 they are close to have been doing it for a decade.
I am still surprised to see how the acknowledgement curve plays out in real time. It takes 5 - 8 years before it even hit mainstream.
What I'd actually pay for is something more elaborate like icloud private relay. Unfortunately Mozilla just cancelled that and it was only in beta in the US.
I'd also pay for Firefox itself if I could (I already donate to the other projects I use a lot like KDE) but I feel a bit disenfranchised with Mozilla still aiming very hard at the mainstream user they have long lost.
It's massively helpful for testing interactions between users.
I really feel they shouldn't go all in on it right now. Winds are changing and they'll end up alienating the new youth that I see hints of starting to push back at the feel good activism for the sake of activism.
I frequently use this to log into websites with different user accounts for testing purposes.
I'm not a fan Mitchell Baker or many of the ways Mozilla works these days. But in the pulling crap department, Google and Microsoft have given Mozilla a very low bar to clear.
It should be a noble goal that acts as a beacon for others to follow. It'll lose money at first, but they'll keep their core privacy and power user base, until people come around.
Oh and stop following google and privacy advocates supposed efforts to make the web "safer". Those are all mostly propaganda and feel good initiatives whilst the tracking still happens. But that's a long side rant from a pet peeve of mine.
One day, maybe, someone might finally understand that web browsers have become utilities, and regulate them.
But the desire to achieve self-expression through consumer choice is a fucking soul sickness. It's an empty simulation of meaningful self-expression. It's a (often deliberately!) useless substitute for actual political activity. Just because that kind of bullshit is pervasive and, in our society, widely effective for marketing purposes, doesn't mean it should be further propagated.
Free software is largely a refuge from that kind of bullshit, or at least the most cynical, cliche, shiny forms of it. Infesting Firefox with appeals of that kind is not the end of the world, I guess. But it is polluting the clean air I come to Firefox for in the first place with the same smog that's suffocating me everywhere else.
I guess with a hard fork they couldn't keep up with upstream.
But honestly, I would totally be okay with a browser that doesn't have modern Web APIs because literally all of them from the last 10 years were just integrated to allow "appifying websites".
If I wanna see a fancy WebGL demo I can also use a temporary chrome, but my main browser should not have that amount of (unmaintained) attack surfaces.
All "forks" of Firefox usually aren't forks but just profiles with user.js configs. The only real fork of the engine itself is Pale Moon, and that project is a political shitshow and super outdated (which would be okay if it focussed on stability instead).
A browser could theoretically be politically engaged by ensuring open web standards and accessibility etc. but this is not that, me thinks.
Sometimes it's a person, sure, but I think often it's the broad system of reviews and promotions. Above a certain size, it's impossible for higher-ups in an organization to know what everyone below them is doing, and the organization has to rely on metrics. Things that are easy to measure get prioritized.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/paid-firefox-to-get-rid...
we need to make those the most popular ideas on mozilla connect
Google's main focus is in extracting rent from their dominance, not in making the browser faster, lighter or whatever.
As for plugin support, that's the challenge no? Make it so the contract for third party plugins can be maintained without breaking them every 6 months as the browser improves.
Firefox has excellent developers. The fact that it still has some relevance despite many years of mismanagement is testament to that. I bet if the company behind the browser was laser focused in making it as good as possible, with no compromise, they could challenge Chrome dominant position.
But "all opinions are equal" does not work.
Mozilla seems to use a different strategy that is even worse.
Among nerds with privacy concerns you can at least plausibly get money/code contributions with significant worth.
Two years later and they're still doing it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ppludl/since_when_...
I said based on reason. It's quite possible to reason about feelings.
Anyway, what's this "discourse on feelings" that was related nationalism/imperialism and authoritarianism you're talking about? I've never heard of it, it sounds interesting.
I really like Firefox. I want it to succeed. I really came to dislike the company behind it over the years though. It almost feels like they purposefully worsen Firefox over time in order to serve the desires of their benefactors at Google.
Saying that, I haven't personally experienced any pop-ups or ads like this.
If you have a broader understanding of what politics is in the first place you're not going to object to an organisation having "politics" because of course it does, it's composed of people, it exists to further somebody's goals or else it wouldn't exist, it's not like organisations can spontaneously wish themselves into existence.
Well it worked on firefox before, but only on macOS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDq1AN1kSn4
https://web.archive.org/web/20210331133857/https://developer...
> But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.
It could has been a feature that make firefox the browsers for developers, instead it's a new paid subscription dev product.
My understanding to people opposing politics in certain things, is typically about opposing unrelated political messaging in said thing.
For a free open source web browser, obviously there is will be politics somewhere. FOSS is political in nature. Web standards involve politics, with multiple parties wanting to influence them for their own reasons. Hell, challenging a multi-billion corporation monopoly is inherently political.
Having political messaging about "celebrating voices making the world a better place" is odd and misplaced political messaging, orthogonal to the politics of a free open source web browser, and will alienate part of the people that are not interested in something this unrelated, irrespective to their agreement to said messaging.
I am personally in favor of universal health care. I wouldn't like to see messaging about it in a web browser, just to give a silly example.
"Firefox VPN Spotlight modal test content" [0]
We are running a/b tests on a VPN spotlight modal in Firefox. Here's a link to the project info: Google doc
There are two versions of content, identical except for the inclusion of a promotional code in one of them. Where the tests also differ is in the imagery used, which you can see in the Figma file linked in this ticket.
Also,
"Add vpn spotlight targeting" [1]
Targeting to support https://mozilla-hub.atlassian.net/browse/OMC-419 - Existing users with a profile >28 days old, at least 1 day of use in the last 28 days, on Windows 10+, no VPN or Enterprise policy
also, what is up with the employees there? arent people in tech privileged enough to be able to find jobs? how can they live with themselves participating in crap like that? How do they stand in front of the mirror?
I want the foundation of my house to be rock solid, whether the winds are calm, stormy, tornado.
I want my browser like my foundation, I want it to be rock solid, and not busy catering to whatever is the current thing
He didn't have a political controversy. He was pushed out because he didn't subscribe to the US democrat partisan allowed views, but quite the opposite, which is a fireable offense, apparently.
I don't agree with him on that stance but it shouldn't matter to run a tech company.
I absolutely know that those who censor and fire for political differences definitely don't have my best interests at heart and, while claiming to represent me and my "diversity", they'll brush me aside with a label as soon as I'm not convenient to them or go against their power hungry messaging.
Brendan Eich was a sign of the authoritarian and censorious movement which also tried to bring down the likes of Linus Torvalds or RMS but ultimately failed because it doesn't really produce value and they do, far too much.
Just because someone says they're doing good while claiming you're evil if you don't agree with their non debatable measures doesn't mean they're right, consistent and/or honest.
Really hate Firefox doing this kind of thing. It's supposed to be a browser that cares about the user.
LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) is essentially this: Firefox, with the telemetry and Mozilla adware disabled. And you can use homebrew or other package managers to handle updates (instead of getting spammed by update dialogs every day or two in the browser itself).
True, but "cornering the market" is such an outlandish goal at this point, they shouldn't be holding themselves to that standard. It's enough to capture a respectable 3rd place, rather than the sub-3% afterthought they are now.
And they originally got the respectable showing in the early days by being the "one your geek friend recommends", not by pretending they can out-market the big players with unlimited budgets.
No affiliation, just a happy user for the last year or so. After being a long, long time FF supporter, even through all this tragic disintegration.
Then it appears they recently added an additional sponsored option, and defaulted it to enabled, in an update, even for users like myself who had every other sponsored option disabled.
They're hardly the only organization that does this, but it is extremely disappointing. Were Firefox not the only major browser with very useful extensions, I'd certainly switch to something else.
The KdF movement might be considered an example (Kraft durch Freude, Strength through Joy). Rearming Germany after WWI required the Nazis to rally the population by means ranging from technical to emotional to spiritual. From Wikipedia:
>Hitler's architect and Minister for Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, said in his final speech at the Nuremberg trials: "Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man..." [11]
If you can read that without feeling a chill at the base of your spine, well, maybe it's just me.
And of course, any appeal to religion is ultimately an appeal to feelings, since there's nothing objective behind it. A Wehrmacht soldier who started to question his role in the war needed only to look down at his belt buckle to remind himself that God was on his side.
It's all very interesting to consider, but it doesn't have much to do with Mozilla (I hope).
It's disingenuous in the extreme for you to cite Eich's victimhood at the hands of a mythical "cancel culture" when the real cancel culture is powered by government-backed forces that he helped to nurture and guide.
In short, if you want to leverage your celebrity and influence to make the world a worse place rather than a better one, you can't expect people to ignore it. There's a fellow named Musk who is likely to learn the same lesson if he doesn't step off the path he's on now.
Given that there has been a context previously where it was welcome, there may well be contemporaneous contexts where ads could exist in harmony with independently motivated user objectives. Basically all of what I see today, though, ain't it.
Yes, I suspect I could find another job. I interview well—don't tell any of my potential future employers, but honestly I interview better than I do actual work. (I will say that the massive layoffs introduce some doubt. I haven't had to look seriously in a tough market, and just having recruiters still pinging me regularly doesn't mean much. Hopefully it still helps to be on the list of people who have turned down offers at $big_places?)
I'm not really feeling it hard to live with myself. Quite the opposite, really; one thing that keeps me here is the mission. It would be hard to switch to a place where I had to work to convince myself that I was net contributing to humanity. I'm not curing cancer or eliminating poverty, but I would probably be crap at those.
But I think you're specifically referring to working at a place where Marketing occasionally makes some boneheaded moves, ones that are sometimes counter to the things that keep me here? Yeah, it's hard when that happens. But (1) I still think that it's largely better here than most other places, and (2) we have this teeny little existential problem that absolutely requires marketing to do Stuff. Despite what a vocal contingent on HN thinks, Firefox's market share is not going to turn around based only on engineering work or pouring effort into improved addons and making nice with the community. Those are things that are near and dear to my heart, and I wish we lived in a world where those mattered more, but sadly I have to live in reality. And if you want marketing people to do marketing, you can't exactly tell them what to do and what not to do. Without the ability to screw things up they won't be able to find the things that will make a dent.
Mozilla is a relatively small company, but big enough that my day to day work really doesn't feel a whole lot like "...participating in crap like that". I don't feel that involved in marketing whether it's good or bad, not even when I'm complaining about or brainstorming marketing-related ideas on internal message boards (and yes, it bothers me that those conversations happen on internal boards). I'm in a different corner of the organization, writing code and doing things to hopefully make Firefox more secure, faster, and less memory-hungry. I don't feel personally responsible for what marketing or legal or HR or whoever is doing.
As for how I stand in front of the mirror... well, sometimes I do it naked, thanks for asking. I don't think either of us wants me to give you a picture.
also,
> It would be hard to switch to a place where I had to work to convince myself that I was net contributing to humanity.
Not sure you are now, but okay. a halfassed solution like what firefox is now, is allowed to live forever without addressing it properly. If it wasnt there anymore, perhaps a real solution would emerge
Figuring out what they do is a different story, but at least that's one way to get a list of all of the possible ones.
Authoritarians who feel right to censor, attack and deplatform are a problem no matter if they're Religious conservatives or identity politics fanatics.
Both are rabid and don't make the world a better place.
You seem to be one of them and your threats are tired at this point.
It's all fun and games until the guns come out. At that point, the person who initiates force, or who supports those who do, is the bad guy. That would be Eich.
Not to claim it's worse, of course. Chrome practically has the whole card filled in, and has to add extensions for the new terrible things they've invented. They're playing multi-dimensional 7x9x3i bingo.
You can try it with an imgur link: https://imgur.com/gallery/gom01RZ (sfw, vid/loop of a boa constrictor drinking water from a glass).
It really is an insane situation. What is up with Firefox's stealth anti-privacy and spammy marketing features controlled by hidden, undocumented settings that are set to (violate privacy and spam me) by default?
What's obnoxious is when the stupid infects the code itself.
As GP said:
> Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** who orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product.
I'm annoyed whenever I find a new pro-tracking, anti-privacy, or pro-spam setting which is ON by default and usually with a poorly documented setting hidden in about:config rather than a logical place in Settings.
I am sure that pocket and mozilla VPN are perfectly good things for some people, but abusing Firefox itself to push ads (especially when such ads are hard to turn off) is a dark pattern.
I'm sure that analytics can be helpful in some cases, but it's tracking and should be off and opt-in by default.
Marketing seems to corrupt the open source aspect as well, as pro-user changes that marketing disagrees with are rejected; when users submit issue reports complaining about the obnoxiousness and suggesting changes, they are closed because the dark pattern or obnoxiousness is an intentional feature that marketing wanted and refuses to give up on.
I don't think there was any notable "discourse on feelings" related to those things.
And how has this marketing worked out for FF market share exactly? FF grew when it focused on tech. It's in freefall now.
> And if you want marketing people to do marketing, you can't exactly tell them what to do and what not to do.
Why not? There are there to help not dictate the course of the company. Or at least they shouldn't be.
That's why Google keeps paying for it. Or at least part of it.
You mean like the 5 mil per year CEO salary? Not sure if theat is really a need and not a want.
We need an open source browser that's not operated like a paypig for a for profit company. Funding should be handled via seeking grants and donations, not by selling out the users.
Google won indeed. They won by making Mozilla into their little bitch insted of real competition.
Since you seem to be pretty knowledgeable in this space, are you aware of any competitive FOSS engines and/or browsers built around those engines?
The problem is using without trying to triage the bug at all.
That is semantic bullshit. Anyone who is paying a modicum of attention knows that a mixture of woke/US democrat pushed causes have a very specific narrative that, when you oppose them, your person, job, funding, etc might be attacked no matter how many people agree with you. It's not about democracy or diversity but power. BLM or trans issues are the most obvious ones at the moment.
I don't agree with Eich on that particular point but that doesn't matter. Most of the woke mob didn't think those things either until suddenly "they had to".
A very apt man for the job was set aside because he had dared contributed politically to a cause that US democrat narrative decided in "current year" that was bad (funny how current year - N, they might be held those positions).
> It's all fun and games until the guns come out. At that point, the person who initiates force, or who supports those who do, is the bad guy. That would be Eich
No. That would be you and the woke mob, camper bob. Because you posit that words or political opinions are guns or force, which is insane. You call speech violence in order to justify using violence or censorship yourself. But you're the very type of thing you claim to be against, the bully that attacks pretending they're the victim and simply responding in kind.
You're the problem because you think your moral superiority should allow you to exert violence whenever you want for you have the "righteousness" on your side.
In any case, people are wising up to it. If all ethnicities, country of origin, creeds, etc. They don't want to be attacked (themselves or their livelihoods) because they don't hold the right opinion TM: Identity Politics, the current year war (Iraq, Libya, Ukraine) or whatever else US centric thing people push down our throats.
No it's not. It follows directly from the dictionary definition of what "censorship" means. Which unfortunately is widely misunderstood.
You think your moral superiority should allow you to exert violence whenever you want for you
They don't, and the conversation is starting to go way off the rails here.
