Hacker News

Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC.

Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads.

What a wonderful thing we've created.

I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years as my default browser. Thank you for your work!

> But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol).

IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.

Do Mozilla really still need volunteers in this day and age? Tbh even in 2015. They are established enough to not need to exploit goodwill.

>Last I heard MDN introduced ads

holy fuck, hahahaha! the only thing worth a damn they own other than Firefox, and they're enshittifying it. perfect timing too, now when LLMs probably halved the traffic it gets.

whatever happened to their Google money? they were so dummy rich they could afford spending millions on the three letter thing "advocacy" not so long ago. did that dry up or what?

Libtewolf is hopefully there. Ublock origin is pre-installed

"The bureaucracy will expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." -- paraphrase of C. Northcote Parkinson [0]

[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

damn! then what's happens at the EU where the "goals of the organization" are themselves to increase and champion bureaucracy?

This is new to me. Not sure I totally agree but it's a useful heuristic. Despite being easy targets, orgs do in fact need coordinators, middle managers, administrators, etc. Especially as they scale. (And no AI won't render them obsolete.) Finding the balance between productivity and bureaucracy is the hard part.

Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone

>In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself.

>History

>The phrase appeared to have been first used in 1991–1992, in a book about Gulf War weapons systems by Norman Friedman, and On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA's bureaucracy, to describe the relationship between the Space Shuttle and Space Station.

[...]

There are also:

* People who understand that the existence of the organization is necessary for the goals of the organization

> in any bureaucratic organization

So are there any exceptions?

I hate this. It basically takes as axiomatic that anyone in an administrative position in an organisation has zero interest in the goals of the organisation -and that those at the coal-face have no interest in the organisation and that there is little or no overlap in interest. Its reductionist, divisive and stupid.

Look, I absolutely agree it sucks they didn't deliver the opt-out/in interface day one, it was obvious people would want it, and yes, it's not the first time they've blundered.

At the same time, they did listen to the feedback and deliver. It now has a genuinely good interface for it where you don't have to opt out of everything, but can opt-in where you want it. It's not just a big off button, it's a general out-out including new features, but that then exposes individual opt-ins if you want for each feature. Most other browsers won't respond at all. Firefox is still by far the best browser out there for people who care about their privacy.

Especially on HN, Firefox just gets so much more hate than software that is way more user hostile for much less bad behaviour. I'm not saying we shouldn't hold it to a higher standard when that is what it's selling itself on: clearly we can't allow "not as bad" to let it slip into worse and worse, but at the same time, I don't understand how the narrative seems to trend towards "they are essentially the same as google" when that is so clearly not true (to be clear, not saying you are saying that in this post, just that's the vibe of HN's commentary as a whole).

They KEEP adding utter cancerous garbage to the homepage/new tab page. I recently installed Firefox from scratch for a coworker who was having chrome-only issues(yes, they do exist!) and was blown away by how insanely gross the default settings are now. It’s straight up adware junk bullshit

And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible

Maybe I just love downvotes, but the Firefox AI sidebar is incredibly useful and I make use of it nearly every day.

You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control" ... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible!

What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!?

What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours and then...hiding them behind a setting by default?

I need "AI" in my browser, so I don't use the AI features. No data was sent anywhere. No 4 GB model was downloaded. Nothing happened, except for a popup saying "hey, by the way, if you want to do X, just press this button here". It's just UI elements. No AI-related code runs, no data is sent to AI companies unless you directly tell the browser to do that.

Imagine if Firefox shipped a brand new GPU-accelerated compositor, improved hardware video decoding and WebGL/WebGPU. You people cry about why they didn't add a big "disable GPU features" button? And that they dared to enable this by default?

> if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference?

It's obviously impossible to say, but when we look at things that did happen due to Mozilla's financial decisions we have some major disruptions. Besides the already-mentioned Rust and Thunderbird examples we also have the years-long rebuild of the extension system where Firefox, once known as the leader in customization, offered less than 20 extensions for its mobile version and deprecated who-knows how many. I find it hard to believe that these actions didn't affect their market share, goodwill, or both.

I am in favor of Mozilla launching initiatives to support the browser, but right now I think they are using the browser to support their initiatives.

The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.

I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.

The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as:

* Wanting niche features that don't benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.

* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).

* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)

* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.

These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.

Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1172/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18

> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?

A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)

I used Firefox and made sure everybody in my circle family and social used it. I had donated 5$ to Mozilla when I was making 360$ per month. I believed in mozilla, I was naive. Soon after I learned the money didn't go to Firefox. They soon after launched a political campaign in my country. I realized this and every other fancy they had, was where my money was going. Stopped using it and stopped caring a long while back. Can't wait for Servo/Ladybird to replace it.

It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.

Extensions were why Firefox was so popular among those considered 'abnormal.' Chrome just copied the idea. VPNs, Pocket, and sync services are all great features; it's their implementation and execution that is so poor.

All Mozilla (and Firefox) needs is to be run by developers, not the fucking MBAs.

If I couldn't use the ublock origin extension with Firefox, I'd leave for another browser. I consider it essential for privacy reasons as well as for adblocking, and I can't imagine it hurts battery life compared to all the ads and other crap it blocks.

Firefox's VPN service also has its privacy-related uses (yes, I'm aware of the limitations), but I think it mostly serves as a possible source of non-google revenue for Mozilla.

How do you expect Mozilla to make enough money from just Firefox to survive if Google ever decides to stop paying them for being the default search engine?

To some degree, yeah they did, by leaving space for a lean and mean competitor like Google Chrome to come around and eat their lunch. And when it was introduced, Google Chrome truly was the lean and mean browser, less bloated than both Firefox and IE.

But I'm not sure how much they could've done. Maybe they could've invested a ton of engineering resources into a project similar to Firefox Quantum earlier, so that Firefox didn't leave as much room for a leaner browser? But half the reason people complain about Firefox today is that they broke XUL extensions, which was an absolutely necessary step in making Firefox a competitive, fast browser. I can only imagine the backlash they would've seen if they did that before Chrome ate their lunch.

And I'm not sure how much it would've really helped, since 1) Chrome would've still been a less bloated browser simply through having been around for a shorter time and having fewer features, and 2) Google would've still had immense marketing opportunities by plastering Chrome ads all over Google Search etc.

Firefox was indeed blowing past all the other browsers and set to become the standard.

That's when Google realized they had to do something. The market could not be allowed to be dominated by a pro-freedom, pro-privacy product.

> To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.

I do not think that this was that confusing. People [1] looked around at the beginning of the 2010's and saw

1) Mobile usage was growing exponentially and desktop was... not [2].

2) Every mobile OS shipped their own browser by default, or even went so far as to prevent other browsers from being used at all (iOS) [3].

3) Because Android and iOS both had non-trivial marketshare, neither could be called a "monopoly" so there was no way to use anti-trust law to get Firefox on devices as was done with Windows (not that this would have been a compelling strategy even if it were possible).

People took that set of facts and concluded Mozilla needed its own mobile OS in order to stay relevant.

What they underestimated was the amount of investment needed to make such an OS and get it on devices and the amount of time it would have to exist in a state of not being very good before it could compete with the established players (who were not standing still... people forget how bad Android was in the beginning). But if you look at the actual world we ended up in, with no mobile OS from Mozilla and a total Firefox marketshare that is less than desktop Safari's, it is hard to say that initial conclusion was incorrect.

[1] Full disclosure: I was a Mozilla employee at the time, though not involved in any of these decisions.

[2] I would say "desktop was shrinking", but to everyone's surprise it actually remained fairly steady in absolute numbers, although it did become a smaller slice of a much larger pie. In 2010 everyone expected it to shrink, though.

[3] Mozilla did ship a re-skin around mobile Safari to try to get some brand presence, but was still at the mercy of what web standards Safari chose to implement, and you could hardly call it a first-class experience. Eventually iOS loosened their rules, but no one could have predicted that back then.

Firefox OS was amazing and, sadly, would STILL be amazing today.

Boot-to-Gecko is brilliant because honestly most apps today... are Web pages packaged in an "app". Most PWA with desktop shortcuts (and ideally offline responsive mode) show that. Very few "apps" genuinely need to be apps.

Consequently being "just" a phone with basic connectivity and delegating the rest to the browser made perfect sense.

I didn't work because it didn't make sense or wasn't technically feasible. It didn't work because anybody who made a mobile OS wanted THEIR own walled gardens. The fact that today we are stuck with Android an iOS shows how needed it was and still is.

I think Firefox OS was great, and too early for its time, combined with the mistake of "let's run on extremely terrible hardware" (rather than designing for the flagships of the time, which wouldn't be flagships by the time it shipped).

Firefox OS was a brilliant idea. Imagine cross platform and open apps based on HTML/JavaScript that feel native and polished. 2026 would have been amazing if Mozilla executed it right.

It was a brilliant idea and some day someone will repeat it to make a fuckton of money.

That would be JR Conlin, national treasure. Worked with him on YDN in 2007 and Netflix in 2009; veterans of the Netflix API team will never forget his hack day entry, which was "Mac and Me" playing on a toaster oven.

Some mozilla software developer I guess.

They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.

This. They learned nothing from Netscape.

They did rewrite a lof of important parts of Firefox in Rust so the value is a lot higher to Mozilla.

Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative.

Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.

Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.

Options have a maintenance cost. Pulseaudio is the current Linux audio stack, like plain ALSA was before when it replaced OSS.

I've been bitching about it for like a decade but I still won't use Firefox until it supports window based profiles. Safari has them now, ffs.

I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.

I can't speak for the author but I can say that I left companies or institutions on my own despite loving both the (idealized) mission and the team.

I wanted to stay but the strategy was wrong, to my own moral compass.

Consequently leaving in silence, without being able to express why, and maybe even what could possibly be fixed, feels like giving up.

Leaving while telling whomever might want to hear what problems were, and possibly how to fix them, helps to move on while being truthful.

Oh, the irony...

I would say about 99% of the population views software corporations as these monolithic inhuman cubes of pure shitanium. What these posts are important for is

1: reminding the average population that corporations are just abstract human pyramids and made up of normal people.

And

2: doing that through a very human, biased, and filtered perspective that can provide some genuine insight into the function of these opaque systems.

Now, does the average consumer of hacker news get all that? Probably not, but I do think insider perspective is still valuable.

"Why do people want to share their thoughts and feelings with others"