Firefox Fail: Layoffs Kill Mozilla's Push Beyond the Browser (cnet.com)

So much for Mozilla's quest to bring Firefox to new and different places. From a report on CNET: The nonprofit organization told employees Thursday that it is eliminating the team tasked with bringing Firefox to connected devices. The cuts affect about 50 people. Ari Jaaksi, the senior vice president in charge of the effort, is leaving, and Bertrand Neveux, director of the group's software, has told coworkers he will depart too. Mozilla had about 1,000 employees at the end of 2016. The layoffs greatly curtail the nonprofit organization's ability to make Firefox relevant again. Once a dominant choice for internet browsing, it has long been overshadowed by Google's Chrome. Mozilla tried to take the web technology powering Firefox to other devices, but struggled to get acceptance. Its shrinking influence comes at a time when more people are browsing the internet on their phones -- an area where Firefox is particularly weak.

Comments

The death spiral was evident when they rebranded

[Anonymous Coward]

moz://a

Garbage.

Firefox Focus

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope Firefox Focus support continues; I love this browser on iOS.

Re: Firefox Focus

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. Disregard that, I suck cocks!!!

Probably should have focused more

[DarkOx]

Mozilla probably should have focused on writing software and staying out politics rather than screw up their fund raising potential by going full on SJW.

Let this be a lesson to companies and non profits a like, its really better to stay out of politics which are beyond your area of direct interest. You will only get hurt.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[JohnFen]

I don't think that Mozilla's political stances had anything to do with this. I think that it's more deeply connection to decisions that have been made about their product line.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[OhPlz]

Yep. I wonder how much of this can be attributed to Mozilla forcing Brendan Eich out of the CEO position.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Captain Splendid]

Shhhh! Let the alt-right retards rejoice in their fake victory. Helps keep 'em docile...

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

While I profoundly disagree with many of Eich's views and values, I have been wondering the same thing. I'm not suggesting they should have held on to him at all costs, but I am suggesting his departure may have left a hole that is yet to be filled.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. I wonder how much of this can be attributed to Mozilla forcing Brendan Eich out of the CEO position.

Only in some metaphysics hubris-nemesis way.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[orasio]

Mozilla's raison d'être is political. The project had tthe mission of keeping the web open.
Software is the tool to push the politics forward.
It did succeed for a few years, and now it's over.

It's no surprise that now that Firefox is becoming irrelevant, Chrome is becoming more closed, forcing DRM down your throat and all.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? This is the man who invented Javascript we're talking about. He shouldn't be allowed within twenty miles of a computer again.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Your employees are within your area of direct interest. Campaigning to divest them 5% of them of rights that everyone else has isn't a good way to do that.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[OhPlz]

It creates a trust problem too. If they're willing to do unsavory things to people based on their beliefs, your web browser knows a lot about you. Who is to say that they wouldn't use your browser history against you at some point?

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't all of SV SJW? I just heard that story from peter thiel who almost was kicked from the facebook board (even though he was an early investor) just because he endorsed an anti SJW presidential candidate and went to RNC [1] [2] [3]. He was the first openly gay man to speak at the RNC! Apparently thats not SJW enough for SV. Or github which nukes entire repositories just for using certain words [2]. So Mozilla isn't the only SJW company in SV, its part of their style.

[1] : http://www.forbes.com/sites/ka...
[2] : https://www.theguardian.com/te...
[3] : http://time.com/4417679/republ...
[3] : https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Re: Probably should have focused more

[jonnyj]

I personally know several people who switched from Firefox as their main browser as a result of the 'sacking'. It's interesting that a long- term inflection occurred at that point in the Firefox adoption curve. I'm sure that'a not the only factor in Mozilla's decline, but it surely can't have helped.

Unsurprisingly, when I posted that observation on a few sites, I was downvoted into oblivion. It's hard to hear properly when your fingers are in your ears!

Re:Probably should have focused more

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Mozilla probably should have focused on writing software

They're writing Servo all right. Which is a step in the right direction no matter where you want the browser to run.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Approximately zero point nothing.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

He was the CEO, how could he expect to lead effectively when he opposed equality for the workers? You guys can imply otherwise all you want, but his views weren't the issue, the fact that he was acting on them was the issue.

When you're an executive, everything you do reflects on the company you're running. People working there have to deal with the consequences of any bigotry that you might have as well as any positive values you have.

This wasn't a case of somebody being ousted for having unpopular ideas, this was somebody ousted because he couldn't effectively lead because of his actions.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[TodPunk]

I don't think the original poster is correct in why he's saying what he's saying, but his point might have some merit to consider. Not nearly as much merit as he thinks, but some.

Decisions about the product line and their decisions in politics could easily be branches of the same root. Corporate culture is really important, and we have several pieces of data that would lend some credibility to the idea that their culture is sacrificing some very important technical decisions for the sake of something else (and I don't know what, I don't dive into this sort of thing.)

For instance, they could have had a lot of the vision that the Brave browser is developing with in both technical and privacy based wins. Having people with the right politics was more important. That may or may not have been the right decision, I don't weigh in either way. I'm simply saying their choice obviously and measurably has affects, whether we feel they are good or bad, and this could easily contribute to their decline as an organization.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that many people started or stopped using Fx over this issue. Most of the hemorrhaging happened as they started down the path of becoming a Chrome also ran. Why bother with Fx if it's just aping Chrome?

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not wrong. It shows their focus is not on software/tech but on feelings. Running a business is not about feelings. It is about getting shit done and showing responsibility for your promises to your customers. Once you decided to go down that route you have immediately alienated at least 50% of your potential. Your customers are thinking 'hey what about the 50 things you promised me and you just chased of one of your best talent?'

They showed they are willing to go after one of the founders of the company just to make a point over something that looked rather petty from the outside. Lets just say it is not on the top of my list of places to try to go and work. I can get that sort of abuse from somewhere else and no in a public forum. You are not going to attract anyone who has even an inkling that you may go after them for something else petty. Think back on everything you have ever put on the net, worked for, or people you have associated with. Consider it fair game to these people. They will and do take things out of context. They can even leave it in context if they do not like what you are doing. You will attract other people who want to fight social causes. That can work at a job like this. However, getting software written rarely has anything to do with social justice.

I have written many thousands of lines of code. At *no* point in my career did I think 'how will this affect the LBGTQ community?'. It just does not come up. Yet mozilla as a business decided it needed to come up. It was a distraction and a detriment to anyone who has been bullied before in life. They see the people doing that to the top guys and they are little peons they are not going to opt in for that sort of abuse. Also any that are in the company, those who feel they are next will leave. They may not even speak up. But they are afraid to. You, in the end game, will end up with an echo chamber of people making grandiose promises and no way to execute because they are too distracted by petty things and have chased off anyone who decents to your opinion.

You think the 'alt-right' is something to be mocked. Maybe it is. I see it as a bunch of people who are tired of their opinions being silenced and with no other way to get things done than to shut up and vote. They are enjoying the hell out of the epic meltdown going on. Why? Because for the past few years they have been gaslighted and told they are irrelevant by a bunch of whiny narcissists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Let this be a lesson to companies and non profits a like, its really better to stay out of politics which are beyond your area of direct interest. You will only get hurt.

Case in point: Apple

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Dagger2]

Who did what now? Eich resigned because of massive public outcry, when it became obvious that him staying around wasn't going to work. Mozilla didn't fire him.

The bigger issue is that Eich was a tech guy. Beard is a marketing guy. Having a marketing guy in charge of my browser is not really my ideal preference.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[OhPlz]

I believe that people have a right to a private life in addition to their work life. I don't want my work to be judged on what I do when I'm not at work. Think about what you're saying. You don't want to be inclusive of someone with certain conservative views, but yet you'd be outraged if someone tried to exclude you based on certain liberal views, right? So long as it doesn't interfere with your work, it shouldn't matter. And no, I don't buy the argument that it's different because he was CEO versus a low-level button pusher.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Nemyst]

Mozilla's problems date back from well before any of this political bullshit. It all started when they lost track of what made Firefox popular and decided to ape Chrome more and more (and to cock up when they didn't ape Chrome). Guess what? When your browser just clones another one, people will have a tendency to migrate to that other one.

Oh, and Mozilla being unable to anticipate and properly react to the mobile market has crippled them hard. Having a unified experience across platforms with bookmark/history/preference syncing is a big deal, and since Firefox for Android is pretty mediocre, people have moved to Chrome on desktop rather than suffering with Firefox on mobile.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem really invested in being alt-white.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Let the alt-right retards rejoice in their fake victory

Yeah, all them "alt-right" retards moaning and wailing because the CEO supported some anti-gay proposition or something. Retard.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[clonehappy]

There's no explaining this to someone who has been indoctrinated into believing they always have the "moral high ground", whether or not they actually do.

Most smart businesses will shit bricks if their CEOs, employees, representatives or anyone associated with their brand does ANYTHING, even in the slightest, to offend or otherwise piss off even small groups of their customers.

Even if a group of people only represent small portions of your customer base, a 1-3% drop in your market share can equate to a tanking stock price, boards replacing executives, layoffs/downsizing, etc. But if you piss off roughly half of the country? Well that's OK because they're deplorable and you don't want such unwashed Nazi KKK member redneck backwoods uneducated stump-jumping hillbillies giving you money anyway.

Then wonder why your customer base is steadily dropping, because those deplorable people are only a fringe minority of nutcases, right? Right?? Again, a smart business stays the fuck out of politics and tells their representatives to do the same. Notice you don't see the largest blue chip corporations playing this identity politics bullshit, at least out in the public view where everyone can see it. Do you see Verizon posting BLM nonsense? Do you see IBM letting their employees off to march against Trump? Even if those megacorps are the ones behind the scenes pulling the strings, they're smart enough to keep their fucking name off of it!

Point being, it doesn't make sense from a business perspective to get involved in this kind of public virtue signalling or identity politics. The blue chip companies understand this, the new money trash think they're invincible. Any company that does (looking at you Silly Valley), should expect their stock price to drop and people to slowly migrate away from their products. You see, most people who stop using Mozilla aren't going on Twitter or Facebook to broadcast how wonderful of a person they are because they're boycotting a product. They just silently note to themselves that this company isn't worthy of their business and they move on. When you've got large portions of the population keeping track of these things in their heads and making conscious efforts to actually use products that support their beliefs (or at the bare minimum, keep their mouth shut about what they think), you'll see the death of these companies that only cater to the virtue signalling trendy hoards on social media while paying customers look the other way.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[93 Escort Wagon]

Yep. I wonder how much of this can be attributed to Mozilla forcing Brendan Eich out of the CEO position.

I don't think that was the cause of anything; rather, it seems to me that forcing Eich out was a symptom of a larger problem.

For the past several years, Mozilla has seemed to let broad ideology drive its decisions. In addition to the Eich debacle, Mozilla refused to support h.264 for years - even after it was clear that standard had won the web streaming format war. Basically, the company's leadership seems to make decisions based not on what the customer wants or needs, but rather according to the philosophy of those leaders. Certainly they're free to do that; but customers are also free to not use their product when it becomes clear the customer isn't the company's priority.

On a side note... am I the only one who can't figure out why the heck a web browser company needs 1000 employees?

Re:Probably should have focused more

[OhPlz]

He was forced out. For all the public outcry against him, there was plenty in support of him. Liberals want their beliefs to win, conservatives want their's as well. That's why this shouldn't factor into the workplace. The only way to succeed is to have a company of only like-minded people which is a scary thought, or you have to shed any beliefs and become a non-person, or we can says nuts to this and let people believe what they want so long as they don't bring it into the workplace.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhhh! Let the alt-right retards rejoice in their fake victory. Helps keep 'em docile...

So, let me get this straight. People donate their money to promote and improve software. It is then turned around and dumped into the pet political projects of whoever is in charge there. This is effectively fraud. And you approve of it because it happens to fit your ideology and hits the right buzz words?

Do you approve of Nigerian prince scams that you consider "punching up," too?

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem really invested in being alt-white.

And yet you do nothing to refute the point, just fling insults. I'm not the poster of that comment, but that certainly seems to be an omission on your part, and does little to nothing to provide any kind of substance to your argument, other than point to the lack of backing to your argument. In fact, you don't even have an argument, just an implicit position considering the insult.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

For inventing JavaScript he should be tried at The Hague for crimes against humanity.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

..and you seem really invested in being radical-left

Re:Probably should have focused more

[networkBoy]

*same* thing caused massive issues at Intel.
CEO historically had been an engineer.
When Craig Barret left and was succeeded by the marketing dept via Paul Otellini shit went seriously sideways.
Paul started this "Yes" campaign where engineering was basically told:
"Marketing will have final say on what goes into product and what will be committed to customers, Engineering just has to do it"
Marketing was told:
"Give the customers everything they ask for"

End result: Product slipping, buggy devices, overall shitty performance, devastated morale in engineering ranks when the blowback was directed at them for underdelivering.

Lesson I took away from that? NEVER put marketing in charge.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[gary_johnson_53]

I think Mozilla should have stood behind Mr Eich. His contributions to Free and Open Source software are enormous. I think it would have been better for all if a man who understood the technology, was the CEO.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

They forced Brendan Eich out because other higher ups at Mozilla wanted to focus on making money with services like Pocket, ad integration and selling user information. They did it under the guise of social justice but that was always just a cover.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

For all the alpha male talk the alt-right engage in, they sure do whine a lot.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

>based not on what the customer wants or needs

Nonsense. They did that because they were concerned about licensing issues, and wanted an open codec. Which Google dangled before their eyes, and then renegged on, leaving Firefox behind. Had Google simply stuck to their YouTube guns and not made grandiose promises with VP* and WebM, Firefox would have h264 far sooner.

Remember: not everyone has the same wants or needs you assume they do. Some of them are there to try harder than just placating their shareholders and codec masters.

>a web browser company needs 1000 employees?

You clearly don't know much about Mozilla if you think that 1000 people are making Firefox. Please read up on them, and the issues you're presuming to speaking with authority on, before making an ass of yourself again like this.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

am I the only one who can't figure out why the heck a web browser company needs 1000 employees?

It's simple. They get funds. They need to spend them.
You're right. It's bananas.
50 person team to bring Firefox to connected devices? What does that even mean?

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

..and you seem really invested in being radical-left

And stupid. But that's redundant with radical-left.

Nevermind "Totally unable to handle free speech". Ask Milo.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Let the alt-right retards rejoice in their fake victory

Yeah, all them "alt-right" retards moaning and wailing because the CEO supported some anti-gay proposition or something. Retard.

Yeah, that Barack Obama was such a homophobe for support that position, wasn't he?

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it had much of anything to do with the kind of politics you're talking about. Firefox rose to prominence by being the better alternative to Internet Explorer. Then along come Chrome, and it's not long before Firefox is just copying everything Google does with Chrome, probably leading a lot of people to ask themselves why they are using Firefox instead of Chrome, and not having a good answer. They've reduced the interface to looking almost exactly like a Chrome clone, they have dropped a number of features people liked, and some things I've seen suggests they may be planning to drop their single biggest selling point in extensions. If Firefox loses NoScript, and some of the other extensions that simply aren't possible on any other browser, what is left as a compelling reason to continue using it?

Re:Probably should have focused more

[pezezin]

Most IT people, let alone normal people, don't have a clue who Brendan Eich is or what he did, nor care. The real reason Chrome is number one is because it's bundled with a lot of software nowadays, and Firefox isn't.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[NaCh0]

I wish I had points to mod you up. It's rare to hear that point of view without name calling.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Invent something better then! Oh wait, you can't, you just go around shitting on people who do invent things.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[jonnyj]

But the two things - Eich's departure and aping Chrome - are likely related and it's probably no coincidence that their market share fell away at the same time.

When the entire executive of a business is focussed on internal politics, the business quickly becomes rudderless. When the outcome is the loss of an inspirational leader, the period of naval gazing is even more damaging. Combine that with serious annoying a proportion of your previously loyal customer base and your doom is sealed.

Politics and business rarely mix very well.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[rudy_wayne]

Who did what now? Eich resigned because of massive public outcry, when it became obvious that him staying around wasn't going to work. Mozilla didn't fire him.

Technically, that's true. But everyone knows what REALLY happened. Mozilla COULDN'T fire him because it's illegal to fire someone simply because they donated to a political campaign that you don't like. So, behind the scenes, they put as much pressure on him as they could to convince him that he needed to "resign".

As far as I'm concerned, that's even worse and more heinous than firing him.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Dagger2]

Yes, he was, by some individual Mozilla employees being unwilling to work under him, and some members of the Mozilla community kicking up a shitstorm. So what did Mozilla do, besides give him the job in the first place and accept his resignation afterwards? Neither of those things strike me as being very unsavory.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

He was the CEO, how could he expect to lead effectively when he opposed equality for the workers?

BULLSHIT.

He contributed money to a political campaign, which is something that everyone is allowed to do. Believing that the mentally ill shouldn't be allowed to get married has nothing to do with "equality". You want to suck cock and get fucked in the ass? That's your business. I don't care. But don't tell me it's normal and OK and should be endorsed as a matter of law.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[blackest_k]

Thats a fair point, he says typing into chrome. I still have firefox i actually have firefox nightly builds too.

Somethings do work better in firefox than chrome and thats when i swop. Somehow Mozilla needs to make Firefox my default, the reason for nightly is because of new CSS features If I can get the latest CSS features and develop in firefox. I would probably switch. Currently its works in chrome also works in firefox. If web developers can deploy sites with the latest CSS standards and have them work in firefox and mostly work in chrome. Then mozilla becomes king again.

I don't write for internet explorer, I don't want to do work arounds and fall backs currently chrome is slightly better than firefox it seems. get the new standards out in the wild first and firefox will take the lead.

     

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not mad at him for the insult. I am white. So what if I am white? Does that somehow magically make me a bigot? There is only one person who has made those sorts of comments so far.

I have been however following Scott Adams. He has had an awesome series in the last year on cognitive dissonance, persuasion, and manipulation. People when presented with an idea that does not fit into their mold of the world react with anger. It is stages 1 and 2 in the 'Kübler-Ross model'. We as humans use these things to make sure our world view does not change. Mr. Adams has shown for the past year how people use these things to manipulate people using persuasion.

I could have couched my rant in a persuasion. I personally do not like doing that as I feel it is manipulative. I instead went with a more 'fact' sort of thing. Scott Adams rightly points out I am not going to change anybody's opinion anything that way. At best I may reinforce someone's else belief. But even my facts are just my opinions. There is a great bit in the Pixar movie from a couple of years ago inside out. 'all these facts and opinions look the same oh happens all the time don't worry about it'. It is very true. It is why many 'news' stations do not really have anything of substance to say (I have been saying this for 20+ years). They have opinion pieces disguised as news. It is many times reporters interviewing other reporters.

So I am not mad at the guy for call me names. I feel sorry for him that he is closed minded enough that a different idea will never enter his world unless he is manipulated into hearing it. It is a narcissistic attitude that disallows him from hearing other views. His view is the 'good view' anything else is not worth the shit on the bottom of his shoes. In a narcissistic world view for them to succeed you must fail. Not only fail, you must be destitute. But if you only follow their way and let them guide you will have gold and riches spread upon you from heaven. In his world only he can guide us to salvation and truth. What he does not realize is for that to work correctly someone must be the victim of his abuse. He does not see it as abuse. He would probably say it is 'saying it how it is'. But it is just that, abuse. I personally want everyone to be a success. Even the guy who called me names.

At this point I will make a prediction. One of 4 things happens. I will rank them from likely to least likely
1) another name calling event
2) he decides 'not worth it', we never hear from him again on this thread
3) a rant that picks apart the details of my argument, or picks upon some weak portion of my argument. But no real change in attitude but one that tries to manipulate me into his power and nothing new added.
3) 'yeah your right' probably not going to happen as he needs to turn his world upside down to view himself as the bad guy. None of us are the bad guy in our brain movies.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Dagger2]

That's not the impression I got. The impression I got was that his being CEO was causing a massive shitstorm, that he wasn't going to get anything done when that was the only thing people could talk about, and that he was likely to leave a lot of the Mozilla community pissed off by staying on. None of that happened behind the scenes in the slightest, it happened on Reddit and in blog posts. If I was in that position, I think I would've reached the conclusion, from just the public response alone, that I'd be doing more harm than good by staying around.

It's entirely possible they said something to him behind the scenes (obviously neither of us have any way to prove anything either way here), but I think there was enough stuff going on in public that his resignation can be explained without needing to invoke any extra private pressure.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[JohnFen]

But the two things - Eich's departure and aping Chrome - are likely related and it's probably no coincidence that their market share fell away at the same time.

But they didn't.

FF started its precipitous drop in market share around the second quarter of 2009. The Eich stuff happened in 2014.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[JohnFen]

"FF started its precipitous drop in market share started around the second quarter of 2009"

FTFM

Re:Probably should have focused more

[JohnFen]

For the past several years, Mozilla has seemed to let broad ideology drive its decisions.

You do understand that this has been the express purpose and intention of Mozilla from day 1, right? It's not some kind of trap they fell into.

I also commend them for fighting the good fight against h.264. It's too bad we lost, but that's the shakes sometimes.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Well their political stance caused them to cast away their new leadership, i.e. Brendan Eich (the creator of Javascript). He could have put the company back on the right path but they never gave him a chance because of politics.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Then don't become the CEO of a company with corporate goals that conflict with your personal views.
Go ahead and be as fascist as you want in your private life, just don't take a job that makes you the figurehead of a company that is officially anti-fascist and you will be fine.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally know several people who switched from Firefox as their main browser as a result of the 'sacking'

Birds of a feather flock together.
Unless you want to tell us that you were in favor of Eich leaving, your observation just tells us who you are, not how the world is.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Hognoxious]

For the past several years, Mozilla has seemed to let broad ideology drive its decisions.

I thought they closed their eyes & threw darts.

On a side note... am I the only one who can't figure out why the heck a web browser company needs 1000 employees?

UIs don't fuck themselves up.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[thegarbz]

They way people act in private is often a good indicator of the way they would act when not being watched or when they think they aren't being watched. People's views aren't a problem providing those views are not incompatible with the desired approach they should be taking.

Now I'm not sure of the details here, but a company culture is the responsibility of the CEO, the CEO therefore reflects the company and if they behave in ways that you don't want associated with a company then they aren't the right "fit".

If your private life is not compatible with your work life, why are you putting on a fake face in the morning?

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. Disregard that, I suck cocks!!

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

You can blame it on Mitchell Baker, Chair of MoFo and MoCo. She thinks her values are coextensive with all of Mozilla and the grand truth of the universe. She may be half genius, but the other half is pure loon.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

#1 then. fair enough.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[OhPlz]

Everyone at Mozilla should have stood with him in order to illustrate their commitment for a free and open Internet. Instead, Mozilla is laying people off as they become more and more irrelevant.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you though?

Re:Probably should have focused more

[evilviper]

Mozilla refused to support h.264 for years - even after it was clear that standard had won the web streaming format war.

H.264 won because Apple belligerently refuse to even ALLOW WebM add-ons in its products. Having Firefox as a stubborn opponent, rather than pragmatically giving-in every time there's the slightest pressure to do so, is immensely useful, and simply the right thing for the public, even if users are briefly inconvenienced.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like such an Eich....mann

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

I donated $500 to Mozilla annually until this happened. So yes it did have a big impact.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

who's "suffering" with firefox on Android?
What is the issue? What makes it mediocre?

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

It's internet for people. As long as you aren't white.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla pushed for a long term solution. The result? VP8 became a legitimate option, VP9 is more and more widely used, and they opened up for what has become the Alliance for Open Media.

Mozilla successfully supports Xiph and their quest for open Internet media technology. It is a ongoing and important process.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

He was but he learned. I'm a big fan of Brandon Eich, but you know, he could have just said "sorry, I was wrong, heterosexuals should not be privileged". Or he could have said "I might have my opinions but they have nothing to do with a web browser, so I'll just keep then to myself". Instead he decided to value his bigotry higher than his job. Sorry to see him go, but it had to be.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything, Mozilla earned respect by ditching folks with a mindset of a medieval witch hunter.
Mozilla's fault is that they have a few lead developers who write software to satisfy their egotistic needs. Once that totally flopped they removed anything that differentiated FF from other browsers by coping Chrome.
There are plenty of people who want a fully standards compliant browser with a real UI and well structured menu system that has plenty of extensions and does not leak memory like a sieve. FF used to be that ...except for the memory leaks, they are as bad as in v1.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

I expect your friends are like you, too.

I think gay marriage is a good thing. I always have done, despite being a mainstream evangelical Christian.

I also believe that forcing someone from their job because they have donated funds to a political campaign is a shocking violation of our shared Western valies of tolerance and political freedom. When the forbidden campaign is supported by a wide cross section of the population and seeks to uphold a legal status quo that has applied to most societies for most of recorded history, the behaviour is, frankly, bizarre and self destructive. Remember - even Obama opposed gay marriage once.

I stopped using Firefox that day as an act of silent political protest. As I have said, I know several other people who, quite independently, did the same thing.

Maybe I personally know the entire world population of people who deserted Mozilla over Eich. The statistics would suggest otherwise.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[locketine]

Firefox on Android is awesome, what are you talking about? I switched to Chrome on desktop due to performance issues but kind of want to switch back for the synchronization features. Firefox mobile has a button for loading a native app when one is available or you can continue using the browser. There aren't performance issues like on desktop. It's super easy to create launcher links to your favorite sites. You can push a site to desktop with a button press. Really, Chrome on mobile is not close to Firefox, feature wise.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Correlation is not causation. Probably both events (Eich and FF decline) are caused by a 3rd factor: more assholes, er I mean marketing, lawyers, artists, and MBAs, taking over.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

This is part of the life cycle of companies. They are started by tech people or visionaries. In time, those people either retire or are forced out by more politically savvy people. Then marketing people or bean counters take over. They just tell the goose to lay more and more golden eggs. More. More. Damn, cut that goose open. Apple is the next victim of this life cycle.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Kielistic]

I've written a few shitty languages that have been less destructive than javascript. But I don't have to write something better than javascript since it's already been done many times.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[ChatHuant]

the creator of Javascript

He could have put the company back on the right path

Somehow this doesn't sound right...

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Lakitu]

FF started its precipitous drop in market share around the second quarter of 2009.

So you mean Firefox started losing marketshare to Chrome not until after Chrome was released? Thanks for clarifying that.

It's not like there's a single cause but people who are pretending that getting a guy fired because of his private political views didn't matter are insane. Of course it did. Firefox had been mostly stagnant until then, undergoing a slow but sure decline.

http://infographic.statista.co...

As you can see most of Chrome's growth was at the expense of IE. Not only that, but it didn't seem to start a decline until almost Q2 2011.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, the offense (as a private citizen, mind you) for which he was deemed unworthy was precisely the only good thing I think he did. Agree with that position or not, if we pillory him it should be on account of giving us Javascript, not his donation to a cause.

He lost his job and created so much turmoil simply because of a $1000 contribution. The punishment was incredibly out of proportion to the act.

Back to his actual work product: just as he made a screwy language, he made a screwy company with screwy goals.

Re: Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said. Spot on about apple, too. They are the next HP.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it shouldn't be endorsed as a matter of law, but it shouldn't be banned as a matter of law either. This is something the law should just be blind on. If a church marries two people, then that should be the end of it, and if some other church would've refused to marry them for some reason then that should be an issue that you need to take up with the church in question. The state shouldn't care about any particular church's opinion of whether you should be married or not.

And I should point out that the campaign we're talking about here was about recognizing same-sex marriages, and mentioned nothing at all about the mentally ill.

Re:Probably should have focused more

[Dagger2]

Perhaps, but we were talking about what Mozilla did, not what individual employees or other members of the community did. And "what Mozilla did" was to give him the CEO job, despite knowing about the donation (aka exactly what you said: "believe what you want so long as you don't bring it into the workplace").

Note that even if all of Mozilla's employees had stood with him, there was still a massive public outcry. I had forgotten, but another post elsewhere in the comments mentioned that some site owners were blocking Firefox user-agents over this. That would probably have been enough to put him into "more harm than good by not resigning" territory before you even consider the actions of any Mozilla employees.

Firefox is strong on my phone...

[Anonymous Coward]

Along with uBlock Origin that is.

Re: Firefox is strong on my phone...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason I use it. Only browser on android that allows ad blocking. Chrome obviously disallows this.

mozilla == joke

[Anonymous Coward]

They are on version 50+ and still can't play flash out of the box

Re:mozilla == joke

[buswolley]

The joke is someone that wants to use flash.

Re:mozilla == joke

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like a plus to me. Without the subject line, you wouldn't be able to tell if it was a pro or con post.

Re:mozilla == joke

[Anonymous Coward]

As a current FF user, I view this as a feature, not a deficiency. I wish Chrome didn't.

Re:mozilla == joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! Don't bitch at him. Most of the Pr0n sites are still completely flash. Tell those fuckers to get with the times.

Let's be honest here

[JohnFen]

The layoffs greatly curtail the nonprofit organization's ability to make Firefox relevant again.

I'm pretty sure that Mozilla has spent the last few years demonstrating that they lost that ability long before these layoffs.

Re:Let's be honest here

[serviscope_minor]

I'm pretty sure that Mozilla has spent the last few years demonstrating that they lost that ability long before these layoffs.

Turns out Mozilla can't compete against the world's largest advertiser who push chrome at very opportunity. And they're double fucked on Android because while technically you can install a second browser, now the google search bar always opens links in Chrome (with a well hidden option to then open in firefox) even with Firefox set to the default browser.

They're locked out of Apple and they're completely marginalised by Google on Android and massively out advertised and Microsoft is pushing their own browsers on Windows. The fact they have any market share at all is a testament to how great a browser it is.

Re:Let's be honest here

[AvitarX]

My biggest frustration in android is the Google search bar (and now email links not opening in a browser either).

Who thought that if I search and follow a weblink to a site, what I really wanted was to not be logged in?

And there's absolutely no way I may want to use the fond in page option either, right?

They really need to make the whatever they call limited chrome that adds minor frustration to my life with every home page search, and every email link, and every facebook link, a permission, so I can disable it.

Anyway, long rant, but my question is where do I turn that off for the search? I've looked and failed.

Re:Let's be honest here

[serviscope_minor]

You have to uninstall chrome. That worked last time I tried. Main problem is one wifi network I use won't sign in with firefox for some reason, so I had to reinstall it. Well more like enable: I can't actually remove it, just deactivate it.

Re:Let's be honest here

[JohnFen]

By "demonstrate" I don't mean "lost market share". I mean that what they've done with FF demonstrates that they don't have the chops necessary to keep the browser relevant.

Re:Let's be honest here

[HiThere]

That they didn't understand what was important was made blatantly obvious when they axed Thunderbird.

Re:Let's be honest here

[Trogre]

Marginalised?

I use several Android devices daily, and never use a browser other than Firefox, except occasionally for testing purposes.

People use the Google Search Bar? I always just remove it (or, in the case where it can't be removed, ignore it) and keep a Firefox icon persistent across all screens.

It's never been a problem.

Re:Let's be honest here

[Anonymous Coward]

The marketshare they have is people that haven't moved on yet. Firefox has become a bloated piece of shit. they are losing share primarily because they are a substandard browser compared to just about everyone.

Re:Let's be honest here

[serviscope_minor]

I use several Android devices daily, and never use a browser other than Firefox, except occasionally for testing purposes.

That means most likely you've uninstalled Chrome.

People use the Google Search Bar?

And if it had been 2000, you'd be saying "really? people use IE?"

It's never been a problem.

Yeah it is. Most people use the default. Google are using the dominant position in operating systems to push their browser. Sound familiar?

Re:Let's be honest here

[strikethree]

Turns out Mozilla can't compete against the world's largest advertiser who push chrome at very opportunity.

I helped make Firefox popular. I no longer do so, because they have given no reason for Firefox to be popular anymore.

The only advantage Firefox has anymore is that it can run NoScript. People need and want control over their software. Firefox with NoScript allows me to tightly control my web browsing experience. Gnome, anything from Microsoft (operating system or browser), Chrome, anything from Apple (operating system or browser), etc all do not let you control what happens, which is why everyone gets "infected" with ransomware and other nasty shit.

Mozilla has been steadily stripping away the ability for you to control the software. Interface changes, outright removal of controls, etc. Mozilla should ask themselves this question: Would you use software that did things regardless of whether or not you wanted those things?

Re:Let's be honest here

[AvitarX]

Now I remember why I don't use Firefox mobile.

pop-over adds are impossible to close (ever) on some sites, and it doesn't work as well with fat fingers (Chrome will zoom to an area I click if there are multiple links).

cest la vie. it did solve the everything opens in the app with the link problem.

Re:Let's be honest here

[Trogre]

That means most likely you've uninstalled Chrome.

No, it's right there, right beside Firefox. Unused, except for testing the odd page.

Most people use the default. Google are using the dominant position in operating systems to push their browser. Sound familiar?

Perhaps, perhaps not. But that changes nothing for us tech-savvy people who don't have a problem with tapping an icon on the home screen to launch a web browser.

Kind of a hard market...

[Anonymous Coward]

When every android devices come with Chrome pre-loaded, people use Google search engine which in turn tells them to switch over to chrome... lots of software coming with chrome as a bundle...
Google is pushing Chrome HARD and people are taking the bait. Firefox did similar long ago pushing their ads everywhere, before chrome was a thing, which is why it's even relevant today.

Chrome and Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

are nothing but spyware IMHO.
I've been a FF user for a very long time and don't see any reason to even think about switching.
but to what? Oh, Pale Moon is one option.

Re: Chrome and Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Pale moon is not an option, it's spyware and ad injection ware

Re: Chrome and Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

I found that Lynx works well. It has all the needed features. Sometimes I just fetch the page with wget and use no browser at all.

Re:Chrome and Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Palemoon recently shat in its own well by dropping jetpack add-on support early. With it's already somewhat crippled add-on support from earlier major update, that makes it largely unusable for many people including myself.

Great browser otherwise, but it seems to have stumbled on the same "we're popular enough now to start dictating to our users how they should do their browsing" rake that Mozilla stumbled on back in the day.

garbage article

[buswolley]

I use Firefox almost exclusively and I am very happy with it.
I don't see how this article is relevant to Firefox anyway. Who was going to use firefox on a TV, or toaster IoT anyway?
THis is Mozilla being smart so they can put more resources into the projects that matte more, including firefox for mobile and desktop.

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, I wouldn't want Firefox on my toaster. It might turn the heating elements on correctly, but then it would peg the CPU, consume 3GB of memory and either crash, or just hang, leaving the heating elements on until the the collapse of the house from the inferno rips the wiring from the service connection and finally shuts off the power.

Re:garbage article

[Nunya666]

I use Firefox almost exclusively and I am very happy with it. I don't see how this article is relevant to Firefox anyway. Who was going to use firefox on a TV, or toaster IoT anyway? THis is Mozilla being smart so they can put more resources into the projects that matte more, including firefox for mobile and desktop.

Good for you, but you are in the minority.

Mozilla signed Firefox's death certificate when they decided to abandon their developers and their users by turning FF into a clone of Chrome. Announcing the intentional breaking of add-ons that have millions of users was downright ignorant. Completely redesigning FF so that longtime developers essentially have to learn a new programming language was also ignorant.

Mozilla will die because of their stupid decisions. Unfortunately, only the users will suffer from it. Ignorant management has already been paid, and they'll just move on to another company.

Re:garbage article

[thinkwaitfast]

I'm not sure why you would want to use anything beyond a $0.04 PIC on a toaster. It's not like I need to check my toast's status while I'm on vacation in Bali.

This really goes for anything in my house, and since I'm a nerd and an engineer, I've had the ability for two decades to almost trivially do it if I wanted. In fact I was really into doing stuff like this in the 1990's, but beyond the 'wow, look what I can do' factor it was always cumbersome even when it might have been handy which honestly was never.

Re:garbage article

[JohnFen]

Sadly, I agree with you.

I still use Firefox, as I have done for over a decade now, primarily because -- despite its flaws -- it lets me do things that no other browser does, and it's the one I trust the most in terms of privacy (although that trust is not absolute). The extension changes sure look like they will kill features important to me, either by making them technically impossible or by making things painful enough for developers that they won't develop for the platform. If that turn out to be the case, then I'll have to get off the FF train, probably to Pale Moon or some such earlier fork.

I don't use Firefox on my mobile devices, though, because it just plain works poorly for me.

Re:garbage article

[JohnFen]

To be honest, I'm not sure why you'd even need a $0.04 PIC. None of them fancy computerized toasters seem to toast bread any better than the $10 electromechanical ones.

Re:garbage article

[serviscope_minor]

Mozilla signed Firefox's death certificate when they decided to abandon their developers and their users by turning FF into a clone of Chrome. Announcing the intentional breaking of add-ons that have millions of users was downright ignorant.

You;d have as many if not more saying exactly the same if they didn't break the extensions though. The old extension model was heavily tied to a browser architecture that has no future. It was either break extensions (and people get mad) or get completely left behind technologically.

Re:garbage article

[thegarbz]

I use Firefox almost exclusively and I am very happy with it.

Have an internet cookie. I for one think that there is zero reasons to stick with it now. Every reason most people switch to Firefox is gone. They shat on their core, they shat on their users, and the idea that to expand marketshare by taking something that by-n-large people have shown they aren't happy with to new platforms is just the pinnacle of stupidity.

Re:garbage article

[steveg]

Exactly. All this talk of politics is a red herring. Firefox is becoming irrelevant because they have abandoned the features that make them valuable and embraced features that really don't matter. Or are annoying.

Firefox is still my browser of choice, *despite* all the "improvements" they've made over the last few years. To borrow a phrase from long ago, "It sucks less." At least compared to all the rest.

There are no good browsers anymore. Firefox used to be one, but they're driving the "It sucks" bandwagon as hard as they can, and by the time they finally vanish, there will be nothing left to mourn. For now, they're the best of a bad lot.

Their politics is fine. Good, even. It's their software choices that are the root of their downfall.

Re:garbage article

[Dagger2]

It's actually not very tied to anything. Bootstrapped (restartless) extensions are just a Javascript file with two functions, "startup" and "shutdown", that have a reference to an object that allows access to the rest of the code in Firefox. Firefox's Javascript support certainly isn't going anywhere.

(Extensions that require a restart are loaded via XUL overlays, and so are somewhat tied to that particular XUL feature, but it's not like you couldn't port that to HTML.)

Of course, it's true that much of the existing extension code is dependent on current implementation details, but the fix for "extensions break when we change stuff" is not "let's break all extensions and then make it impossible to fix them". That just makes the breakage problem worse, not better.

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is free software. That's the reason I switched to it (from Netscape 7.1 or something) when it first came out.
Chrome is not free software. The source to the spyware and the secret sauce that makes Netflix work is not available.
Netflix is the only site I visit in Chrome, the only reason I've ever installed it on anything.
For everything else I use Konqueror or Firefox.

Re:garbage article

[93 Escort Wagon]

A Firefox toaster would probably decide to toast or not to toast based on what the user intended to spread on the toast, bagel, or waffle.

It might also choose to override your darkness settings.

Re:garbage article

[gnunick]

I don't use Firefox on my mobile devices, though, because it just plain works poorly for me.

I also use FF (almost) exclusively for browsing on the desktop, but unlike you I do use Firefox on my Android phone. For me it definitely looks and works better than Chrome. But I never use FF for UI development anymore. The dev tools suck, and even just using them slows the whole browser down to the point it's unusable, unless you only have one or two tabs open.

Chrome definitely wins the contest for the best developer's browser. But all the better... I use superfast Chrome for development, and when it crashes or something goes wrong with my code, I can kill the browser without having to kill the browser I actually use for browsing. And of course, unlike some devs I know, I eventually test all my code with Firefox, my browser of choice.

I do mourn Firefox's ever-increasing irrelevance, but I don't mourn the passing of this dumb "Firefox everywhere" initiative. But we've been headed this direction before... remember Mozilla? Not the company, but the bloatware that Firefox replaced? Firefox still hasn't gotten anywhere near that bad (and in fact, it continues to get better, even as it continues to lose market share... thanks in no small part, I'm sure, to Mozilla's lack of focus on its core products). So maybe there's hope that something awesome will get pulled out of what's left of Mozilla before Chrome's growing dominance turns it into the next IE.

Speaking of Mozilla (the company), I also use Thunderbird exclusively as an email client. Though it's not very actively developed, it doesn't need to be. It's a solid email client, and email isn't exactly a moving target like the web.

Re:garbage article

[jemmyw]

Funnily enough I just switched from using Chrome to Firefox dev edition for development because Chrome kept being slow and doing weird things with my console logs.

Re:garbage article

[gnunick]

Interesting. Well, that's all the more reason we can't afford to let Chrome become the only browser left standing. Monopolies kill innovation and progress.

Personally, I just don't see why anyone would prefer Chrome over Firefox for everyday browsing. I'm not saying it's bad. It works great in my experience. Each browser has its pluses for developers and/or power users. But I'd say that neither browser is markedly better for the average user.

If not for the fact that Google keeps trying to shove it down everyone's throats, Microsoft-style, I doubt it'd have taken over the market. Sure helps to have a company with deep pockets behind you, doesn't it?

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

Do any alternatives run uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere, and Disconnect?
Honest question, but if not, there are nonzero reasons to stick with Firefox.

Re:garbage article

[JohnFen]

For me it definitely looks and works better than Chrome.

I've never used the mobile version of Chrome, so I can't compare to that. But FF on my phone is borderline unusable -- it's incredibly slow, and absorbs an untoward amount of system resources. I get the impression that my experience isn't typical, but honestly, the browser I do use (Boat) works well enough that I can't be bothered to try to get FF to work better.

I also use Thunderbird exclusively as an email client.

As do I. I am continually amazed that there isn't any desktop email client that even comes close to the venerable old T-Bird.

Re:garbage article

[omfglearntoplay]

100% agree. I pretty much love Firefox... it's been the best Browser for a long time in my opinion. And I use them all to some extent every day for various reasons. Firefox is my favorite still. I can't ever trust microsoft or google with my info anyway, so that is a big consideration.

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually not very tied to anything. Bootstrapped (restartless) extensions are just a Javascript file with two functions, "startup" and "shutdown", that have a reference to an object that allows access to the rest of the code in Firefox.

If the extensions have access to all the code in Firefox, it's impossible to sandbox... which is a big deal nowadays.

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox till death. I won't be using Chrome until they can find a way to update their ancient browser to A. Clean everything at exit, and B. an option to run cache to ram, something that firefox can do. Get with the program, this isn't 1995, nobody needs "disk cache", and nobody uses dial-up either.

Re:garbage article

[jopsen]

The extension changes sure look like they will kill features important to me

On this point Firefox has been stuck between a rock and a hard place, keep legacy around to maintain extension ecosystem. Or break the ecosystem and go multi-process as needed for stability in a world where most apps are webapps.

Re:garbage article

[colfer]

Enduring mystery why there is almost no desktop alternative to Outlook or Apple Mail. I guess it's hard to monetize? Sure Gmail shows ads, but would peeps freak out if Thunderbird did that? Eudora did it .

When Mozilla made TB a volunteer project without paid developers in 2012*, in order to concentrate on the OS product, it was a sad day. TB and Seamonkey are still releasing, but I don't think they are addressing longstanding architectural choices such as the data files blobbing in the attachments like Outlook does. Just keeping up with the Mozilla core engine is tough enough. The Seamonkey "team" (more like a a couple of people) did get Windows builds and releases working again last autumn. Thanks to them! The messenger/calendar codebase benefits form having more than one end product: TB and SM.

* Then at the end of 2015 Mozilla said TB would have to find a new home at some point and decouple from the Firefox codebase. This could be quite dire, but TB has millions of users, and some smart people guiding it, and another do-gooder foundation on the horizon. http://forums.mozillazine.org/...

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is going down, but your analysis of why that is is completely wrong.
The UI changes are what has been keeping Firefox at least a bit alive. Users were migrating to Chrome in droves because its UI was so much better.
No, the reason that Firefox is still having trouble is because it's an unstable resource hog. It uses too much memory and CPU time and it just freezes and crashes way too often. Maybe some users will endure that for the open web or software freedom or whatever, but the average user won't.

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

take FF's slow and borderline unusability and step over the border with sites that don't work and a browser that IS completely unusable and you have chrome on a phone. I recently installed FF because of how bad chrome was and while FF is also bloody aweful it is a thing of beauty compared to Chrome.

Re:garbage article

[thinkwaitfast]

True that. But I do have a toaster that I got at a yard sale that was given to me for free that has a countdown led display. Not necessary, but probably easier with a PIC (analog would require too high of a tolerance to get it right to the second).

Yeah, it's a gimmick, but (very) marginally useful. I certainly wouldn't pay extra for it.

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no good browsers anymore.

Ever used SeaMonkey?

Re:garbage article

[hairyfeet]

If you want FF the way it used to be? Use Pale Moon, want FF with a newer UI and some whiz bang features added? Use Comodo Icedragon. That is the nice thing about today, we have real choices and aren't stuck in the old "Netscape VS IE" duopoly where you had to choose the least sucky of 2 sucky choices.

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, so what open source alternative that is at least as good as Firefox would you recommend?

Re:garbage article

[JohnFen]

The problem isn't really changing the API itself so much. That's painful, but I understand it. The problem is that it looks like the new API will not allow as much control, making certain essential extensions technically impossible (or nearly so). This is, admittedly, supposition based on rumor, and could very well be incorrect. That's why I'm including so many weasel words. Only time will tell.

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold on, quick question ...

So when the summary says ">bringing Firefox to connected devices." they're talking about IoT right? Because they would have used the term Mobile for cell phones & tablets. So all this fuss is about Mozilla not wanting to develop for domestic gadgets? Or am I missing something... did summary really mean cell phones & tablets.

Re:garbage article

[Dagger2]

And that's a good reason to put that access behind a permission. It's not good reason to remove it altogether with no alternative that can possibly replace it.

Re:garbage article

[JohnFen]

would peeps freak out if Thunderbird did that?

I wouldn't freak out, but I would certainly wouldn't "upgrade" to a version that used ads.

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

I rarely use Firefox, but I agree.

Firefox used to be "the" alternative browser, but that space is crowded now and Chrome is a real competitor. Meanwhile I hear all the time complaints about how bloated Firefox has become, and browser plug-in problems, and unwanted interface changes.

I've mostly used IE over the years and you know what? Even IE "sucks less" now. Laugh if you want to, but IE has gotten on board the HTML 5 bandwagon, dropped ActiveX extensions, and achieved numerous speed-ups. If that's not appealing but you want to stick with Microsoft you can experiment with Edge now too.

I think Mozilla got complacent. They thought their future was as the pre-eminent browser, but instead they may have a future more like Opera. A nice idea that nobody uses.

Re:garbage article

[Anonymous Coward]

Go with palemoon. Firefox without the 'improvements'.

Just converted to Firefox

[jfdavis668]

All our business computers were just converted to Firefox.

Re:Just converted to Firefox

[Nunya666]

All our business computers were just converted to Firefox.

I'm sorry. Hopefully, your computers are not locked down so tightly that you cannot install an alternate browser.

Re:Just converted to Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you also convert your TVs and toasters to firefox?
Because that's the only kind of 'computers' that this re-org applies to.
So, you don't really have anything to worry about.
If anything, you should be happy that they are dropping a distraction and focusing on their core products.

Re:Just converted to Firefox

[jfdavis668]

Thanks for the update. BTW, my toaster still runs on DOS, so I am stuck using the Lynx browser.

Re:Just converted to Firefox

[Thelasko]

All our business computers were just converted to Firefox.

I'm quite surprised by this since Firefox doesn't support group policy certificates. A lot of companies avoid it for that reason. Especially companies that run IronPort.

Re:Just converted to Firefox

[robmv]

I have not tested this yet but they are working in making Firefox read Windows certificate trust store for certificate authorities

Re:Just converted to Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be very useful if one of the 'alternate' (sic) browsers were better. Firefox may have loads of flaws, but there is still no alternative that comes close.

Mobile Firefox

[Thelasko]

I use Firefox on my mobile devices because it allows much better ad blocking than Chrome. However, even with the ads, Chrome is much faster. Fix the speed problem, and it's still an excellent browser. However, it seems like Mozilla is focused on everything but speed.

Re:Mobile Firefox

[aitan]

I also used to use Firefox on my phone, but it was really slow. Since some months ago I'm using Brave which uses the Chrome engine, but it includes privacy protection against ads and trackers and I haven't missed Firefox not even one moment.

Re:Mobile Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

turn off disk cache, and its faster. Chrome is sill soooo 1995.

This is a Catastrophe

[Anonymous Coward]

[Mozilla] is eliminating the team tasked with bringing Firefox to connected devices.

Well then, what browser is my thermostat supposed to use for watching porn? Opera?

Firefox needs to go back to basics

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back to the Pre Australis UI, Stop hiding things like status bar and http:// display, and fix the memory leaks. Get the Slashdot users happy again and they will spread it back to IE/Chrome users.

captcha: unstable

Re:Firefox needs to go back to basics

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I am not the author, I think it's okay to post that here - I am using Classic Theme Restorer that does all those wonders alongside ABP+ABP Popup Blocker or UBlock on different versions of Firefox on Win10, Win7, Kubuntu and Fedora on my main computers and they're all very stable

IMO, the only browser that might replace Firefox on my computers one day is Vivaldi

Re:Firefox needs to go back to basics

[Anonymous Coward]

Get the Slashdot users happy again and they will spread it back to IE/Chrome users.

captcha: unstable

no we won't. sorry I don't forgive so easy, especially when their are good alternatives. Firefox is dead to me, even IE and Edge are better.

It's astonishing that

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

high ranking Mozilla employees don't understand one very important thing about Firefox: it was this popular because it was powerful with its add-ons/extensions.

Throughout its history Mozilla has made changes to Firefox which rendered thousands of add-ons broken, they changed its look and feel without giving an option to go back, and limited the user's freedom in other ways.

You don't fuck with your user if you want the user to keep using your product. Yet Mozilla is frightening us with the complete abandonment of XUL which will kill Firefox's most powerful add-ons which are able to do the things which WebExtensions API are unsuitable for. Even recently introduced e10s rendered four of my add-ons dead - they are marked "enabled" yet don't work at all.

It's a sad story really. Once a powerful web browser, now a weak shadow of itself.

Re:It's astonishing that

[bogaboga]

I abandoned Mozilla/Firefox lost me when they lay in bed with Microsoft. To me, that was it, and I have never gone back. I also don't regret it one bit!

Re:It's astonishing that

[tender-matser]

And even if you convert your add-ons to e10s (or designed from scratch with clear framescript/chrome separation) they'll still break it -- since 2017 they will only accept WebExtensions (aka glorified greasemonkey scripts) in their addons.mozilla.org walled garden.

As a user, I "migrated" to manually patching omni.ja -- and for the time being, I could keep doing things my way. I'm not going to troll/beg/implore them for features to include in their shitty webextensions shim garbage.

But if you're a programmer who has invested a part of your life in polishing, publishing, etc and being part of their 'ecosystem', you're pretty much SOL.

Re:It's astonishing that

[Anonymous Coward]

e10s is a much better solution to the problem of tabs taking each other out than the per tab process. Unfortunately, until at least 52, the change is going to be a bit bumpy, hence why some extensions are broken. Chances are those two extensions were interfering with the same parts that e10s changed.

For me, I've found that nearly all my extensions don't yet support e10s, so I don't have that yet. Once this is over, any new plugins shouldn't need the kind of drastic rewrites they needed in the past. It's kind of a shame that it was necessary.

Re:It's astonishing that

[Dagger2]

Just to be clear, abandoning XUL wouldn't kill Firefox's current extension model. Mozilla killing Firefox's current extension model is what's killing it. The current extension model does not depend fundamentally on XUL, and would work fine in a world where the browser UI had been migrated from XUL to HTML.

Re:It's astonishing that

[Anonymous Coward]

Moral of the story: the peanut gallery thinks they know what they're talking about, and presume that just because THEY keep using Firefox, that will be enough to keep things going. If you guys who share this opinion weren't trying to spin this so hard, you'd realize that Firefox was doomed BECAUSE of these awesome addons. The rest of the world was able to pass them by while you demanded that Firefox maintain compatibility with addons (which nobody could do). And now that they're finally cleaning up house, you're upset that "the users" aren't being catered to anymore. You guys want to blame everything on Mozilla, while being the harbingers of its near demise. "Boo hoo, we'll have to use a sensible addon model or an unstable version of Firefox! Woe are we, and shame on Mozilla!". It's pathetic.

Re:It's astonishing that

[CrashNBrn]

Same thing happened to Opera, when it switched to Blink, and they released a browser that couldn't even create or manage bookmarks - until 18 months later.
[Usage Share Data from Wikimedia visitor log analysis report]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
           Opera
          Desktop/  TOTAL
2011/07   3.32%     4.22%
2012/07   3.00%     4.50%
2013/07   2.06%     3.24%     - 4 months after Blink
2014/01   1.51%     2.83%     - 9 months after Blink
2015/03   0.65%     2.06%     - 24 months after Blink

Re:It's astonishing that

[tender-matser]

The rest of the world was able to pass them by while you demanded that Firefox maintain compatibility with addons

Passed them by towards which end? Neither chrome or an addon-free firefox allow me to even stop/restart animations/timers, rebind keys or inhibit events from reaching the page's javascript.

They even lack features that were standard in ed(1) or more(1) since 30 years ago, like search in page using regular expressions.

At least on linux, chrome won't even let me stop the fucking blinking caret in the address box.

Besides, when will they finish their memory safe rust browser? I just looked at the source code of the 'nightly' branch, and it's still the same XUL/XPCOM garbage all the way down.

Re:It's astonishing that

[Anonymous Coward]

high ranking Mozilla employees don't understand one very important thing about Firefox: it was this popular because it was powerful with its add-ons/extensions.

Throughout its history Mozilla has made changes to Firefox which rendered thousands of add-ons broken, they changed its look and feel without giving an option to go back, and limited the user's freedom in other ways.

You don't fuck with your user if you want the user to keep using your product. Yet Mozilla is frightening us with the complete abandonment of XUL which will kill Firefox's most powerful add-ons which are able to do the things which WebExtensions API are unsuitable for. Even recently introduced e10s rendered four of my add-ons dead - they are marked "enabled" yet don't work at all.

It's a sad story really. Once a powerful web browser, now a weak shadow of itself.

The problem is that Firefox extensions model makes it impossible to catch up with Chrome.

Re:It's astonishing that

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you mad? Microsoft was the largest platform for them, and in fact they actually get donations where tehy wouldn't on the other platforms. This is the same for LibreOffice.

Re:It's astonishing that

[jopsen]

Besides, when will they finish their memory safe rust browser? I just looked at the source code of the 'nightly' branch, and it's still the same XUL/XPCOM garbage all the way down.

afaik pieces are already being integrated: https://groups.google.com/foru...

Completely unfocused

[orev]

This was obviously a mistake from the beginning, and everyone knew it. Mozilla has been acting like a fat and happy company rolling in cash instead of a company in a competitive marketplace. Firefox is slow and crashy and I'm almost at the end of my rope with it, and it's very frustrating for them to be constantly distracting themselves with stupid projects. Firefox OS? Rust? Some IoT thing? Come on Mozilla. You actually thought you could make a dent in mobile OSes when even Microsoft couldn't? Do you really think you *need* to invent a new programming language just to write a better browser? Do you really think you have any relevance /at/ /all/ in the z-wave motion sensor in my house? Wake up or die.

Re: Completely unfocused

[fubarrr]

FYI Mozilla C-levels issue themselves ~$500k salaries. It is this kind of "non-profit". All they do is not to get more users, but more funding and sponsors.

Re: Completely unfocused

[fubarrr]

Lenin called this pattern of behaviour a political prostitution

Re:Completely unfocused

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think you *need* to invent a new programming language just to write a better browser?

It would be interesting to see the number of bugs averted or discovered from the media components compared to the time before the Rust conversion. It would be beneficial to the community at large if they would systematically collect the evidence as they go along.

Re:Completely unfocused

[serviscope_minor]

Rust?

If you think Rust is a stupid project, then you haven't been paying attention. I'm a huge fan of C++ and yet browser exploits are still huge, because they're not written in a memory safe language. More and more cores are coming every year still and yet no browser offers parallelism finer grained than per tab.

Rust is the only thing with a shadow of a promise to tackle either of those two problems. So the only reason for thinking rust is a "stupid" project is if you don't actually believe they are problems, or think there's a better solution. They are problems and I've yet to see a better solution.

Re:Completely unfocused

[Anonymous Coward]

You want multiple threads per tab?!! To render frickin' web pages?!!

Re:Completely unfocused

[serviscope_minor]

You want multiple threads per tab?!! To render frickin' web pages?!!

I've got news for you, gramps. They're not just web pages any more, they're entire programs now.

Re:Completely unfocused

[Anonymous Coward]

CPUs aren't getting substantially faster anymore, but the core count will continue to grow. Parallelism is the only way forward.

Re:Completely unfocused

[Anonymous Coward]

Language plug-ins have been tried many times, sonny. They always failed: Java applets, VB DLLs, Flash, now Rust.

Javascript sucks, but it's on every browser and it generally works.

Re:Completely unfocused

[serviscope_minor]

You are mistaken about Rust: it's not a language plugin. It's designed to be the implementation language for the browser, as an alternative to C++. The plan is that the browser will eventually be written in Rust and will run your JavaScript stuff, just as before.

Re:Completely unfocused

[Anonymous Coward]

"This was obviously a mistake from the beginning, and everyone knew it. Mozilla has been acting like a fat and happy company rolling in cash instead of a company in a competitive marketplace."

Like google.

"irefox is slow and crashy and I'm almost at the end of my rope with it,"

I can say the thing about that joke called "chrome" that tries to access the disk to cache to instead of ram.... soooo 1995.

" and it's very frustrating for them to be constantly distracting themselves with stupid projects"

I've actually never met anyone who used google docs.

" Firefox OS? Rust? Some IoT thing? Come on Mozilla. "

ChromeOS is a failure. Nobody uses it.

"Wake up or die."

Get rid of the 1995 disk cache or die.

Re:Completely unfocused

[sl3xd]

Rust is the only thing with a shadow of a promise to tackle either of those two problems.

The idea that Rust is the only thing with promise to address either is pure bullplop, and a lousy pretense to justify their NIH asshattery.

* Rust is not the only memory safe language. Seriously, they've been around for decades now.
* Rust is not the only concurrent language. Again, concurrency isn't a new problem, and solutions have existed for decades.
* Rust sure as hell isn't the first concurrent and memory safe language.

It reminds me of the first chapter of Mozilla's history: Back between 1998 and 2002, Mozilla shipped nothing. The only thing to come from them were promises and platitudes.

Instead of shipping a browser for users, and promoting an open web in the now (when it mattered), Mozilla implemented an entire cross-platform userspace, and after that, they started working on a browser. Mozilla was perpetually late, and was perpetually delayed.

By the Mozilla shipped anything, you couldn't log into most banks without IE running on Windows.

KDE's developers also know of the "promise" of Mozilla, except they saw it for the lie it was. KDE did in one year what Mozilla couldn't do in four: write a clean, lightweight W3C compliant web browser from the ground up.

The rest is history...

History, it seems, is repeating itself. Instead of promoting an open web and shipping a modern product, Mozilla is (yet again) leaving us with a stagnant turd while it wastes time it doesn't have re-implementing the wheel again.

Re:Completely unfocused

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason to not have all your programs managing a thread pool in the background and having all tasks submitted to that pool is poor software designers. The books, theory, and language ability to do that existed before multi-core processors existed (there were and still are multi-processor motherboards). Programming languages aren't a barrier, it's poor education or experience that's holding everything back. People/Managers can't take the time to step back from the existing architectures and improve them. Instead it's spend a day here, spend a day there fixing bugs and putting out fires instead of taking a step back and asking the gas company to turn off the fuel line. Programs don't have to be buggy pieces of shit, but sadly most are designed that way.

Re:Completely unfocused

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look what has been going on with two recent CppCons. Memory safe C++ is emerging.

Re:Completely unfocused

[bill_mcgonigle]

You actually thought you could make a dent in mobile OSes when even Microsoft couldn't?

Right. Microsoft will tenaciously support something for a decade even if it's a flop. They need to do this to attract any developers in the first place.

Five years ago, I thought that the idea sounded interesting, but Mozilla's lack of being able to commit to anything was a red flag for me. I suppose this was true for most hardware vendors, and they never pledged any kind of long-term support, so it was doomed from the beginning.

The bigger problem is that MoFo is paying people half a million dollars a year for "leadership" and they don't even get such basic concepts. Good luck convincing smart people to go work in a corporate culture of intolerance, though. Maybe they can get some smart consultants though, if caring about the original MoFo vision and cash-on-the-barrel are the only requirements.

Re:Completely unfocused

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck convincing smart people to go work in a corporate culture of intolerance, though.

I'm aware of some brouhaha with the Mozilla's executives having opinions that were not popular although I cannot remember exactly what the issues were. However, if it's the same stupid garbage that's driving the riots at Berkeley, then I disagree with your statement.

If anything, Mozilla needs a *less* tolerant corporate culture to get things done. They need leadership that won't tolerate the kind of nonsense that results in a boat where everybody rows only when he wants and only in the direction he wants.

Firefox now very much reminds me of the state of the original Mozilla browser of the late 1990s or very early 2000s was. Rather reducing memory footprint and fixing some very annoying crashing issues, the development team focused on allowing the user interface to be skinned. Evidently, writing code that allowed the browser to be skinned was cooler and more interesting and addressing usability issues that were nigh showstoppers.

And so we have Firefox today. It uses a tremendous amount of memory that is worsened by what apparently are memory leaks yet it continuously adds peculiar features such as Pocket, a video chat program, and other features that no one is really clamoring for in a web browser.

Furthermore, while perhaps it is not a valid use case, Firefox uses a tremendous amount of CPU even when there is only one window, one tab opened to the about:blank page. If you are using older hardware such as a Pentium III or Pentium 4 based system without any other memory/CPU hogs such as anti-virus programs, the CPU usage goes over 50%. With modern hardware, you don't notice the hit but such behavior is totally unacceptable and is a marker of a terribly flawed code base.

Re:Completely unfocused

[OneoFamillion]

Maybe their new logo cost them so much, that they can't now afford to actually pursue the goal which the new logo represents.

Re:Completely unfocused

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's why the web now resembles nothing more than digital TV. At the rate the hipsters are going it'll be unusable within a decade.

The CEO gets paid too much

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not donating money because it looks really bad when a CEO who gets paid an excessive amount starts begging for money. If they reduced their pay to reasonable amounts there would be money for more staff and more donations

Diversity

[itamihn]

I use Firefox on my laptop and my phone because diversity is good. If everyone used Chrome, we would have a monopoly again (anyone remembers IE?).

Re:Diversity

[The-Ixian]

I have found no compelling reason to switch off of FF for my daily driver. It works fine.

Re:Diversity

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I hope that doesn't change. I'm genuinely concerned about the Web Extensions deal coming up.

Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is run by the most retarded people I have ever seen.

1.Why do they even have a thousand employees? What the hell are they doing? They are supposed to be making a web browser, not engaging in political advocacy. You don't need a thousand people to maintain a web browser.

2.Every few years, Mozilla completely changes the interface and dumbs it down for no particular reason other than to be hip because their software designers are a bunch of yuppies. And it usually involves removing functionality in the process.

3.Driving away Brendan Eich was asinine and once again demonstrates the lack of tolerance of the left and the fact that SJWs have infested Mozilla. Brendan Eich is a technical genius and he is responsible for many of the core technologies of the web (e.g. Javascript) and you are going to drive him away over some insignificant issue because, god forbid, someone has a political opinion different than your own?

3.Later this year, Firefox will remove support for extensions. In their place will be a WebExtensions API which is only marginally more powerful than what Chrome can do. Many existing addons will never work under the restrictions that system places because WebExtensions offers no way to do low level customization. Several developers of prominent addons have already announced that they will stop development as a result.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the last #3 - did not know this. At that point I may as well switch to Chrome and enjoy the speed up.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

3.Driving away Brendan Eich was asinine and once again demonstrates the lack of tolerance of the left and the fact that SJWs have infested Mozilla. Brendan Eich is a technical genius and he is responsible for many of the core technologies of the web (e.g. Javascript) and you are going to drive him away over some insignificant issue because, god forbid, someone has a political opinion different than your own?

Mozilla knew full well his political opinions and where he chose to donate his money. They didn't know what the reaction of the web community at large would be, such as when websites started blocking Firefox users because the *website owners* disagreed with Eich's political views. Mozilla didn't force him out, lefty SJWs did.

And of course when he left Mozilla, the conservative right got upset because they misinterpreted it as Mozilla kicking out someone for their traditional marriage beliefs. But that's not what happened, so quit being upset about it.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I have seen up close what happens when you've got a Brendan Eich in your company and you cannot fire them. Other developers, you know, all those people doing most of the actual work, simply refuse to work with him. Most leave, some stick around for a bit while projects fail due to poor teamwork. Developers by and large hate the Brendan Eichs of this world, partially because they remind them of the bullying they had to face at school and partially for moral reasons. No amount of ‘technical genius’ can compensate for not being able to fit in the team, and whether Brendan Eich is a genius is highly debatable.
And in the case of Firefox there's also the image aspect to consider. With Firefox already being a crumbling brand, the damage Brendan Eich was doing to the brand was simply bigger than any technical contribution he could make. And I really don't see why people flock to defend this guy. I know someone who considers himself a friend of his and even he doesn't consider Brendan Eich a nice person. Whatever his technical merits may be, he's a bit of a rotten apple. And he's only got himself to blame for the entire situation. He could have apologised, made a donation to a gay rights group, whatever. But of course he didn't, because he's a bully and was only going to get more corrosive as time went on.

Re:Stupid

[strikethree]

Many existing addons will never work under the restrictions that system places because WebExtensions offers no way to do low level customization.

If NoScript no longer functions the way it does now, Firefox will be fully and completely dead for me then. There will be no web browsers worth using.

Re:Stupid

[JohnFen]

This. NoScript and the Classic Theme Restorer are not optional for me. If those don't work and there is nothing that has the same functionality, I have to move on.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

1, 2, 3, 3

STOP USING CHROME!

[Anonymous Coward]

For the love of God, people, stop using Chrome, Chromium, and all other Chrome derivatives! Google, erm, "Alphabet", has too much influence so as it is. Chrome is nothing but their way of leveraging influence on web standards. We let a company get a monopoly on the web browser before and it was a unmitigated disaster. We cannot let it happen again. Google might be Microsoft but it would be just as bad for the web in its own way. And all talk about "but but but Chromium is free... blah blah blah" is non-sense. Without the backing of Google, Chromium development would freeze up and the browser would die a slow security hole death.

Re:STOP USING CHROME!

[DontBeAMoran]

I don't use Google because I don't want to use a browser made by a company with nearly unlimited funds that thinks they can dictate whatever interface they want on their users.

That's why I'm sticking with Safari.

Re:STOP USING CHROME!

[Anonymous Coward]

I see what you did there.

Re:STOP USING CHROME!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use Google because I don't want to use a browser made by a company with nearly unlimited funds that thinks they can dictate whatever interface they want on their users.

I don't use Apple because I don't want to use a browser made by a company with nearly unlimited funds that thinks they can dictate whatever interface they want on their users.

I don't use Microsoft because I don't want to use a browser made by a company with nearly unlimited funds that thinks they can dictate whatever interface they want on their users.

The internet has turned to shit

Re:STOP USING CHROME!

[bluegutang]

That's the main reason why I'm still using Firefox. But the more Mozilla shits on its users, the harder it gets.

Re:STOP USING CHROME!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pale Moon. Pale. Moon. Pale Moon!

Hmmmmm

[JWW]

One has to wonder if Mozilla is lacking for leadership at the CEO level, and that maybe better leadership could have averted this crisis....

Re:Hmmmmm

[JohnFen]

I think it's absolutely a leadership problem, but I'm not so sure it's at the CEO level. The problems I see has been in terms of technical leadership.

Of course, a CEO in peak form would recognize a technical leadership issue and take steps to fix it, but still...

Re:Hmmmmm

[Desler]

Firefox was losing marketshare long before the Eich thing if that is what you are referring to. It had lost 40% of its share before Eich was even named CEO. Firefox has been a zombie browser since mid 2010 as it has lost marketshare basically every single year.

I thought this was suppose to be Micro$$$$oft?

[Anonymous Coward]

How the mighty have fallen. I remember when ever would-be neckbeard was patting themselves on the back for thinking they had effectively fired a shot at the Redmond Colossus by switching to FireFox. They were cheering and chanting about open source even though they couldn't code a line to save their lives. Now they're all back to their XBoxs and hoping that Mythbusters gets picked back up again.

LOLzzz! According to them (and likely you if you have a UID under 1000000) it was suppose to be MS who was going to tumble because they were all 0p3n s0urz3!!! Once again, the average Slashtard gimp doesn't know anything.

Oops..

[Netdoctor]

Well, that was embarrassing...

FireFox... the best browser

[cb88]

At blocking ads on my phone. No other mobile browser allows this. In fact many firefox extensions run in the mobile version...

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not use AdAway? It disables adds system-wide. But needs root to modify the hosts file.

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[Tintivilus]

At blocking ads on my phone. No other mobile browser allows this.

Ghostery would like a word.

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[adam.voss]

At blocking ads on my phone. No other mobile browser allows this.

Opera and Opera Mini have built-in ad blockers.

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[cb88]

Ghostery is effectively a wrapper around the default browser as far as I can tell... which means you'll be browsing with an old out of date browser on most phones.

I certainly doubt they built a browser that doesn't use the built in webkit in under 2.5Mb.

So in that sense no... it isn't a "real browser" in the same sense that Opera Current/Vivaldi aren't real browsers... they're just skins on the built in or bundled webkit... if it bundled a recent webkit ala Chrome it wouldn't be so bad but it doesn't look like that is what they do.

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[cb88]

Because I don't have root... good tip though. I'm looking to get a rootable phone next time.

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[cb88]

If that is the case perhaps I should have said ... the only browser that lets me run extensions on android.

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[aitan]

No?
I would bet that my instance of Brave takes care quite well of the ads. And Brendan Eich is one of the persons behind it, so I'm happy if this is the way to show Firefox that they committed suicide by supporting the justice warriors instead of its CEO.

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[thegarbz]

No other mobile browser allows this.

Except for Samsung's built in browser with a free app that you can download on the app store which works without root.
And the Dolphin Browser.
And the many browsers in the Play Store that are essentially builds of other browsers with adblocking.

Or if you have a rooted phone, any browser since you can Adblock at the OS level with a myriad of apps.

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[Anonymous Coward]

At blocking ads on my phone. No other mobile browser allows this. In fact many firefox extensions run in the mobile version...

Umm... Several mobile browsers offer ad blocking, Dolphin for one.

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[Anonymous Coward]

opera allows you to run addins as well. why not just say firefox is the only alternative you have checked and it does what you need.

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[cb88]

Sure whatever... maybe I've just mentally blocked Opera as an option.. old Opera was great and ridiculously fast/efficient. New opera is merely what chrome should be...

Re:FireFox... the best browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox on Android is really the only sane choice.

Connected Devices...

[leafares]

"...that it is eliminating the team tasked with bringing Firefox to connected devices..."
Aren't PCs, Macs and Unixen connected devices too?
They also have rights you know...

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Desler]

Yep. Nothing of value is being lost.

You're right, I made that mistake with my company

[raymorris]

> Let this be a lesson to companies and non profits a like, its really better to stay out of politics which are beyond your area of direct interest.

In my experience, this is true. I damaged my business by talking about politics on message boards where my customers gather.

On the other hand, I'm a member of a non-profit which has as one of their core principles that they stay out of politics and advance no particular opinion on controversial issues. The organization focuses on their purpose, not getting distracted by the controversy of the month. This has served them well over almost a hundred years.

But then why...

[Anonymous Coward]

...do you need 1000 people working on a browser?

Re:But then why...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are 499 UI gods whose job is to randomize the UI element location and 500 UI designers who are removing features. And one developer.

Now if they could get some browser talent...

[Chas]

Well, this is what dicking around, going every which way instead of concentrating on their core product(s) has got them.
Worse still are their plans to neuter their own browser to make it more Chrome-like.

Let's hope they can attract people who actually know what the fuck they're doing and want to rescue Firefox from the smoking ruin it's threatening to become.

Recurring theme with software

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox stopped being good, and started having security issues... I went to Chrome... Checked back in a few times, to see if they got their heads out of their asses... nope. Its kinda sad.
Why can't groups like this just focus on squishing bugs and addressing security problems, and maybe optimizing here and there.
Really, that is all they needed to do. Instead you just annoyed users with unneeded UI changes and broke plugins.

*shrug*

For me "Electrocution" was the death knell.

[toonces33]

Something they did - I am not sure what absolutely killed performance. Turning off "Electrocution" seemed to help somewhat, but I am gradually migrating to Chrome as I just can't stand things the way they are now.

Spyware

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to post some packet logs of this spyware behavior? Put up or shut up.

I Called This Back In 2012

[slacka]

"Trying to power a low end device with Firefox, is more like trying to modify submarine to fly.

HTML and JavaScript were never designed for this purpose and it shows. After the browser wars, JavaScript has proven to be bloated and resource intensive. 100x slower then native apps. This is a stupid idea and doomed to fail."

-Me on Slashdot Sept 15, 2012

https://slashdot.org/users2.pl...

Why is this so obvious to outsiders, yet so hard for Execs to see with 6 figure salaries?

Re:I Called This Back In 2012

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this so obvious to outsiders, yet so hard for Execs to see with 6 figure salaries?

I think you have seven figure salaries involved here. $1M isn't really unheard of for executives at a large corp

Mozilla nonprofit vs. the Mozilla for-profit

[billrp]

There's a nonprofit Mozilla foundation that takes in about $20,000,000 and there's a Mozilla for-profit company that takes in about $350 million each year (it seems mostly from Google paying to set the default Firefox search engine.) And the nonprofit owns the for-profit company, which makes IRS tax accounting interesting. And that income should be enough to keep 1,000 employees paid, even in Mountain View, and even with the top three execs at the company getting paid about $1M each.

Re:Mozilla nonprofit vs. the Mozilla for-profit

[CrashNBrn]

Google hasn't paid Mozilla since 2014. Firefox's default search was switched to Yahoo. In 2015, default search was switched to Bing.

Oh. No. Uhhh... darn.

[Anonymous Coward]

If only they had fired the people responsible for dozens of bad design decisions.

Rust next?

[Anonymous Coward]

SJW crap is definitely dragging it down.

nothing new...

[higuita]

If they reported that they would drop the "connected devices" firefoxOS, the team would be lay off or relocated to other projects... probably downsize is the best options for the team technical skills (probably more embedded/HW related)

no way to do low level customization

[bjamesv]

3. ... In their place will be a WebExtensions API which is only marginally more powerful than what Chrome can do. Many existing addons will never work under the restrictions that system places because WebExtensions offers no way to do low level customization. Several developers of prominent addons have already announced that they will stop development as a result.

Discouraging developers is unfortunate. But Mozilla does not win by freezing old code in place/ensuring 15 years of old tweaks apply to current browser model. What's an old-guard dev to do? They can't move to Chrome.. as you stated it has even less capability.

Fortunately, FF is open source so another browser can resurrect whatever capabilities Mozilla discards. Honestly I think they should shrink dramatically smaller than 9050 employees, light additional fires to further develop & modularize their core technologies. I do use Chromium mostly on the desktop but mobile-Firefox is my go-to, everyday, browser of choice on Android. It is capable, and i'm honestly more curious to see what benefits come from changing APIs then I care what happens to obscure addons like "OmniSidebar".

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Anonymous Coward]

> Nothing of value is being lost.

The sad thing is that something of value *is* being lost: all browsers except Mozilla depend now on ad companies. This is bad.

9050

[bjamesv]

heh, oops.
's/9050/950/'

1000 People?!

[b1ng0]

WTF are 1000 people doing working on a browser?!
Mozilla needs a quick kick in the ass to get back to their core product, focus on their actual users and dump the bloat that no one wanted or even asked for.

Re:1000 People?!

[Desler]

They're not all working on a browser.

Re:1000 People?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is developing the web and related technology. They are actively developing the future standards that all the browsers implement. They also spend a lot of resources on influencing and steering the future technology choices of the world.

Mozilla supports Xiph, WC3, IETF, and others that works on open standards. Examples are AV1, Daala, Opus, WebRTC, accessibility research, security research, cryptography research, and so on. The list becomes long when you look into what technologies are needed to make the modern interactive Web work.

Think before your next post

[Anonymous Coward]

You typed "how could he expect to lead effectively when he opposed equality for the workers?" and "People working there have to deal with the consequences of any bigotry that you might have as well as any positive values you have." and you apparently lacked the introspection to relize the irony dripping here.

Let me ask you: If a person cannot lead if he offends a subset of the population and if you wrap yourself in all that other "tolerant" SJW crap, then what about the opposite perspective? hmmmm? How can a pro-gay person lead while he/she pushes positions which are an abomination to a large number of people? How can a person bigoted against people with traditional values be in such a position? Your entire world view seems tainted by the supremely arrogant idea that YOU are the definition of normal and that those who disagree with you are bigots. What if you are the one who is wrong and you are the one advocating for evil? You are so intolerant and closed-minded that this is unthinkable?

We were all better off in the days before the insanely intolerant left arose and threw politics into everything. People used to be able to have careers and work with each other without concern for politics. If my boss or my employee or my shareholders or my board members had different views/beleifs from mine it did not matter - we were all able to come together doing work hours to get a job done. Now, with everything political, progressives insist that THEIR perspective is the only one that is valid and they will not TOLERATE any opposing view.... because they are so very tolerant, of course.

tolerance (noun) the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with.

Learn it, love it, live it.... or admit that you are not really "tolerant" at all, but just another violent fascist brownshirt who breaks windows,lights fires, and beats up people who think/are different.

Re:Think before your next post

[Anonymous Coward]

The hypocrisy I've always laughed at was the LGBT battle cry of "what I do in my own free time, outside of the office, should have no bearing on my employment".
Yet when Eich did stuff in his own free time, outside the office...

Re:Think before your next post

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference being that what Eich did in his free time was to contribute towards introducing a law that restricted who you could marry, which does have a bearing on your employment (and in general on your ability to live your life without people, and the law itself, telling you that you're evil for existing). Meanwhile, you don't see anyone in the LGBT community pushing for laws that require people to marry someone of the same sex. Do you see the difference between the two cases?

Trying to control other people's private lives, and preventing someone from controlling other people's private lives, are two very different things.

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is an ad company?

Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Or a Chrome wannabe? The lack of innovation and independent thinking exhibited by Firefox is astonishing. This is a field that supposedly should be filled with highly innovative people looking to break new ground. But instead we get the same trend chasing, bandwagon riding group thinkers who cannot think outside of the box for one inch. Oh, google did this? We'll do it too, just to show that we're also cool! As a long time firefox user I feel sorry for the once great browser.

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Wasn't the death spiral evident when they tried to turn Firefox into Chrome, but there was already Chrome?

It's a shame, because I've always been a fan of Firefox in general, just not of the numerous missteps Mozilla has made in recent years. They seem obsessed with rebranding, and moving the UI around, and adding clutter with half-related features a lot of people didn't want or need, and making everything work the same way across 73 different platforms. (Their strategy has been similar to another once-great giant of the PC world that is now struggling in spaces it used to dominate, now that I think about it.) Sadly, none of those things matter very much to someone running traditional FF on a desktop or a mobile app equivalent.

I wish they had instead put all of that effort into defending their position as the open/free browser that was customisation-friendly, while implementing solid support for the important new features in the fundamental web technologies. All of the evergreen browsers are awful when it comes to quality of implementation and stability/regressions, but Firefox has suffered from not ticking the new features boxes either, so what is its USP in 2017?

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[exomondo]

> Nothing of value is being lost.

The sad thing is that something of value *is* being lost: all browsers except Mozilla depend now on ad companies. This is bad.

Where does Mozilla get its income from?

starting around version 47?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is doomed if the surrent hot mess is not fixed soon.

Clean firefox install, on clean 64-bit Fedora install, after opening perhaps 8 tabs to various news sites will hammer the hard drive so relentlessly that the system bogs down to complete paralysis and gigabytes of data ends up cached on the local drive. Opening a console (can take 5 minutes) to kill Firefox and that damnable "Web Content" can take another 5 minutes and shutting the system down afterwards can take 20 minutes with more hard drive hammering. Exact same system with earlier Firefox performs flawlessly and quick. I do not know if this is related to the pre-caching "feature" or what but some very manistream and common websites seem to be able to trigger this dive down thee rabbit hole, which to re-iterate, was NOT an issue pre version 47.

Versions 47 and later suck rather supremely. Dunno if maybe they're only now being tested on really new machines with new features now required by some new code in Firefox? Somewhere somebody has really dropped the ball.

only place I use it is mobile

[gravewax]

Its shrinking influence comes at a time when more people are browsing the internet on their phones -- an area where Firefox is particularly weak.

interestingly the phone is now the ONLY place I use firefox, the desktop version is a waddling bloated security nightmare. The mobile version at least doesn't suck as much as Chrome.

Re:only place I use it is mobile

[CrashNBrn]

And you think the mobile version isn't a security nightmare...because it has a different GUI?

Re:only place I use it is mobile

[gravewax]

nope, I just don't care about the security on my phone, especially for the infrequent times I use a browser on it. I have nothing of value on it.

+1 funny!

[higuita]

Very good! :D

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Desler]

The death spiral was already happening before Austrailus. It had lost around 35% of its share before Australus was even in nightly builds.

Firefox is pretty good on Android

[rklrkl]

I actually prefer Firefox on Android to other browsers on that platform, but its "weakness" is that Chrome comes pre-installed with virtually every Android device now, so - like Linux vs. Windows on the desktop - Mozilla is fighting a lost cause really. It's quite shocking that after all these years, Android Chrome *still* doesn't have extensions, whereas Android Firefox has had them for a very long time now. Apart from the obvious ad blocker extensions, I like "Phony" to force all sites to their desktop version - handy on a tablet where I *never ever* want to see a mobile site.

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Anonymous Coward]

> Nothing of value is being lost.

The sad thing is that something of value *is* being lost: all browsers except Mozilla depend now on ad companies. This is bad.

What?

Where does Mozilla get all of its money? Hundreds of millions of dollars a year, first from Google, now from Bing. Hello! Those are ad companies. Mozilla may not be in the ad business directly but all of their revenue comes from ad companies. And its all that ad money that has ruined Mozilla.

Hundreds of millions of dollars flowing in every year. Free money that requires Mozilla to do absolutely nothing other than put a Google or Bing search bar in their browser. (WTF? You're too lazy and/or stupid to just bookmark google.com?)

And now we see the result of a decade of free money. Too many employees, by a factor of 20, and a product that is crap with steadily declining market share.

No fail

[allo]

Make firefox and thunderbird great again.
And ignore stuff like IoT or Firefox OS (they ignore it since some time now), etc.

The fail is to lay off people and then remove the additional projects.
Keep the people, make them fix the thousands of bugs in the bugtracker. Firefox will finally be the best browser again.

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't the death spiral evident when they tried to turn Firefox into Chrome, but there was already Chrome?

I wish they had instead put all of that effort into defending their position as the open/free browser that was customisation-friendly,

That's the saddest and most frustrating part of all. The thing that made Firefox so great in the first place was customizability. The default UI of Firefox has always been shit, but it didn't matter because there were a gazillion themes and extensions you could use, combined with lots of built-in customizing options.

Now, most of the built-in customizability has been removed (the Chromification of Firefox) and they are going full speed ahead toward killing off even more by making changes that will render most current extensions unusable.

Firefox is great, I don't want to use chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

I really like privacy

FF for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's the default browser on all our machines at work, but if people prefer to use Chrome, I allow it. (No IE/Edge, pleeese..) Personally, I can't stand Chrome for a number of reasons, and I have very few (and minor) issues with FF. Not sure what all the boat-rocking is about.

For instance, right now I have FF open with 13 tabs, 8 of which are highly dense "dashboard" UIs for various parts of my infrastructure. I have a lot of extensions/plugins (which may not be loaded/in use atm), and FF is using ~800MB of RAM. Is that too much? It isn't when you've got 16GB.

Re:FF for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

The "oo-er it uses memory" whine about firefox never made sense to me. Memory is there to be used. Otherwise, what's the point of having it? If firefox's memory usage is genuinely putting a cramp on other programs perhaps you should be re-thinking the way that you're using firefox/the other programs.

Re:FF for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

or perhaps do the sane thing and ditch the shitfest that is firefox and use just about any other browser, unlike the OP FF is now the only mainstream browser we don't allow users to use in our enterprise as of mid last year, too many security issues, too many complaints about performance of other stuff caused by firefox. IE/Chrome/Opera, hell even edge is a step up.

Re:FF for me.

[JohnFen]

Or use a browser that isn't as memory hungry.

A great browser.

[Anonymous Coward]

A great browser. A difficult job to produce.
Some really hard decisions.
Most people have no chance of comprehending.
I'm one of them btw.
We need it. And it's influence.
Will possibly need it even more in the future.
Thankyou Mozilla. Stay with it.

Have been using Firefox since

[waspleg]

it was called Netscape. Typing it this on 51.0.3 right now. Add-ons are what make it great and always my first choice.

"Normal" people I show the adblocking to including playing youtube videos without commercials are usually amazed.

Fuck Chrome. It hasn't even been a week since the last bullshit Google-lets-you-know-who-is-really-in-charge change to their spyware

Re:Have been using Firefox since

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here. When I watch other people using $OTHER_BROWSER and waiting for ever for all of the ads to load/play/appear THEN for the content...I wonder how and why they do it. Chrome users also amaze me. I mean how does the idea of using a browser written by an ad company pass even the most rudimentary the sanity check?

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Anonymous Coward]

• The death spiral was evident when they cancelled their project to make Firefox multi-threaded. They did finally start the project back up and have only just now started to push out those changes to the public, but the problem is it is too little too late. When I stopped using FF it was because of performance, one tab could constantly freeze the rest of the browser. Out of the choices I had, Microsoft or Google, I opted for Chrome.
• The consistently force features on their user base (like pocket) while removing other features with the reasoning being the feature could be implemented as a add-on and shouldn't be in the main code base... well the same thing goes for pocket and the other pet projects they came up with.
• Change in release model - They changed the release model so they no longer have a major/minor release. The problem with this is for add-on developers. Previous you could polish a add-on push it out to the public and not worry about it until a major release was scheduled. You could look at the API changes, make changes accordingly to your code base and you were done. With the current release model, they constantly change/break and add-on API so you have to update your add-on for almost every new release. They are now going to push out a completely new API for add-ons, so the fact that they constantly changed the previous API and broke it constantly all for the reason or "this will make things better, we have to make these changes to the add-on API constantly" it just a spit in the face to those who constantly had to update their add-ons just to keep up with the changes they made, now they have to start their add-ons from scratch.

Why's that company so big?

[Sits]

Here's a blog post from Dan Luu on the topic of "Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend". Turns out there's a lot to do in a lot of places...

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Anonymous Coward]

How about fixing high-vote bugs over 10 years old? I know it's revolutionary, but a firm who depends on attractiing customers to stay in business might try delivering what the customers want as a business strategy. Who knows how that could turn out?

A good browser

[AHuxley]

Study the limits of todays average cpu, gpu, ram, open and closed OS's and what bandwidth will support.
Project the trend of more cores, more ram, better OS code, more 64 bit users, more bandwidth, VR and social media.
Protect users from ads, malware, code that allows ads to push malware, governments breaking encryption. Or malware that hides as ads.
Ensure encryption is understood by a larger team and is updated a lot as governments and other groups break all existing encryption standards.
When web cams, mic use, social media, VR becomes interesting be ready with quality optional plug in support.
If a trend fails, the plug in exists but did not break the browser.
Given more open standards work with CPU, GPU makers to really get the most out of hardware and any OS.
Even most GPU brands are starting to be a bit more open in what they will support.
Also have a good marketing team that can help users understand what using other brands browser will do to their searches, privacy and data.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that didn't work with their code-base that has evolved since netscape, it just has caused their company to waste money and time. They appear to think Rust will improve the situation as they rewrite all their source code, and hopefully that will work (perhaps it will take a decade and after that time, mozilla will still exist).

About time. FirefoxOS over Thunderbird was madness

[Anonymous Coward]

Prioritizing FirefoxOS over Thunderbird was absolute madness. I'm glad they're axing this parasitic part of their company. I hope the upcoming improvements to Firefox (e.g., e10s, parity with Chrome extensions -- I'm hoping FF's become a superset) are enough to save it. Maybe they can give Thunderbird another look. Clients are making a comeback what with smartphones and all that. People would be more receptive. Anything that requires a log-in is now mostly OAuth or something on a dedicated app. No one likes typing long logins on tiny screens. Even using KeePassDroid can be cumbersome (I only use it to visually see passwords that I'm typing into a public computer, for example). It's easy, convenient and way safer than Chrome to use the Mozilla password managers -- easy typing just once on startup to decrypt the key wallet.

But that may be wishful thinking. Thunderbird may need to find a new host. Anyhow, at least focusing on the browser, even if just the browser, is great. They need to focus and not go belly up. There is no non-commercial, non-proprietary alternative. Even Chromium/Chrome is aggravating in its dumbing down of controls, etc. Firefox has all that info on the TLS connection type you can click on. Firefox has about:config. But the default interface keeps them from the front view. They're only there if you want them. Safari is not strong enough on its own, even with all the iphones, to stop a Google-Blink monoculture. It's going to take having Edge, Safari and Firefox being viable to stop it. Safari is hopelessly falling behind and I think iphones will have to accede to more third-party browser components allowed after all of their customers are unable to use Google sites, for example. Apple was in a position to make changes: its popularity helped it win the Flash standoff. Times have changed. Now Google's services are so commonplace as to force Apple to adapt.

I'm letting Google have Android for mobile. But if it becomes all Chrome on the browser end, it'd be perhaps worse than the IE6 stranglehold. IE6 was objectively worse than Chrome could ever be, but at least Microsoft didn't control a large portion of the Web.

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[chipschap]

All of the evergreen browsers are awful when it comes to quality of implementation and stability/regressions

I can't speak to this in general, but I'm surprised at how good Vivaldi is. I'm using it now (Linux 64 bit version) and once properly set up handles multimedia better than Chrome and certainly better than Firefox. It feels fast and has been stable for me so far.

Re:About time. FirefoxOS over Thunderbird was madn

[DontBeAMoran]

Would a Chrome monoculture really be worst than IE6? Microsoft tried to stop the Web so people would keep using Windows applications. Google on the other hand use the Web for nearly everything so they need to keep their browser up-to-date.

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[rtb61]

No death spiral, a google scam. Basically google used insider information to steal as much market share as possible from mozzila, no ifs buts or maybes. Mozzila targeted the wrong market. People do not really browse the internet with mobile phones, they only get want they want at the time. It generates a lot of hits because of numbers of people but per person, outside of filling an immediate need, the browsing does not really happen, simply a very bad reading format, too small. Browsing - "to access and view (website content) with a Web browser, usually without looking for something specific" http://www.dictionary.com/brow..., only really occurs on a bigger screen formats.

So Mozilla needs to focus on browsing information (not targeted information retrieval, in and out and done), that leisurely trawl through the internet on the big screen, whether that be a desktop, an all in one big screen computer (55" and up) or next gen virtual reality glasses.

The mobile phone and tablet, are internet search devices not internet browsing devices. Also they need to ignore google's bullshit, goggle is not their friend, goggle is a disingenuous predator and should not be trusted (proof of this, the purposeful attempt to surreptitiously corrupt elections in their corporate favour, really, really, dangerous anti-democratic stuff because it was done in secret and specifically targeted the subconscious of people, sick stuff indeed, as evil as it gets).

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla Corporation gets its money from search referrals. It actually sells them to search engines well below their market value.

Before the original Google deal, which Google initiated, that was never the intention. Mozilla invented the search bar and polled its users on their favorite search engines. Google was #1, so they put it there by default.

Before the 2nd contract with Google in 2011 or so, Google was getting several billion dollars worth of annual search referrals in exchange for a about 200M a year.

The corporation was created (within the Foundation), when the initial Google deal was struck.

Mozilla Foundation gets its money from donations and funds that the corporation kicks up.

Like face-to-face sex

[Anonymous Coward]

old out-of-date ad-on heavy browsers have their virtue. So let-go the camel, Moo'hamud and find a babe ... er non-GOOGLE browser.

Difference is that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Private donations of a size considered acceptable for an average citizen and contributions large enough to require public disclosure due to the number of average citizens they are equivalent to.

Eich didn't just donate a reasonable sum to these causes, he donated thousands of dollars, even that by government regulation he had to disclose it.

If he'd cared about keeping his private life private he could have always donated one dollar less than the disclosure amount, or used subsidiaries and other ticks to make it less easily traceable back to him. But he chose to stand by his convictions publicly, and as a result lost a job. No different than me voicing anti-war sentiments and finding my job or promotion in the military-industrial complex sidelined or shuttered.

Don't pretend it doesn't happen on both sides of the fence.

Having said that, Mozilla's problem was far deeper than just a liberal or conservative bias, and existed since it was still Netscape. They let their team get fat. They became complacent. Mozilla has been essentially a social work experiment funded by google then yahoo for almost 20 years. Much like wikipedia they didn't need all that money, and rather than finding judicious uses they squandered it meaninglessly, mostly on management and publicity stunts. Netscape/Mozillas technical failings were obvious before AOL's divestiture, but most telling was their choice to move to C++ back when it was crap (2.95/2.96 era, and as I remember it, requiring 2.96/3.0 because of c++98-only features, similiar to all the people forcing C++11/17 on us today, even if code could be factored to either support both, or run with a limited subset on the older compilers/systems too slow to benefit from the new features.) Mozilla/Netscapes marketshare continued to decline during the netscape/mozilla gecko browser suite days because it ran like a buggy interpreted piece of crap. Everybody forgets that what saved Mozilla was an independent project called Phoenix (or rising from the ashes!) which involved running a stripped down frontend (maybe I am wrong, but wasn't it originally gtk-2 WITHOUT xul support?) and limited browser-only subset of features which made it FLY compared to the suit, and helped showcase the performance/lack of performance in the browser engine itself while Mozilla/Netscape were running their gecko distribution into the ground. The handoff of Phoenix to Mozilla is the only thing that saved them, but in the process they slowly ruined each thing that made Phoenix, then Firefox great compared to their own browser suite, finally leading to proof that Mozilla's focus ruins things rather than enhances them when Firefox became more bloated than the now-neglected Seamonkey (Original Gecko browser suite with a 'legacy' pre-Gecko inspired UI) with the full browser suite support and most addons.

While I am sad to see Mozilla crumble, since their codebase is the only really standards compliant and feature complete alternative to the proprietary/pseudo-open source codebases of Microsoft, Google, and others, I feel strongly that this was a long time coming, and if Mozilla dies, it is only because they took none of the wakeup calls given to them seriously, and this is Darwin's Corporate/Non-Profit evolution at work.)

Broken browser

[BrookHarty]

Firefox doesnt work on current squid servers with domain authentication. A browser most offices cant even use, pretty much took them out of IT shops.
I keep an old squid 2.x proxy just for the few handful of firefox users, but soon, I'll shut that down, and like that, firefox no more.

firefox used to be a browser

[FudRucker]

the mozilla team keeps adding stuff to it that normal browsers dont need in order to surf websites, why didnt they fork it off and make a separete browser for phones & tablets, there is a boatload of stuff in the x86 PC browser that i dont need, plus when they screwed up the menus & addressbar & tool bar that was the last straw, i dont want to relearn the interface every time someone gets a wild hair to rearrange everything, fuck em, i use chromium mostly, and occasionally Palemoon (fork of the old good firefox) for some websites that are simple, and keeping an eye on Vivaldi which looks fairly decent. this pic is what firefox is now, it is not a sleek slender fox anymore, it has become a fat bloated old dog http://i.imgur.com/F0qAJrC.jpg

If only they had made a 6 inch linux tablet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Title says it all

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[FrankHaynes]

As soon as NoScript stops working I will stop using Firefox. There's little else to keep me using this slug.

Re:You're right, I made that mistake with my compa

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like somebody needed a -1 safespace

Re:About time. FirefoxOS over Thunderbird was madn

[Anonymous Coward]

yes it really would be worse. google are focused on using their browser for harvesting your information and shoving ads down your throat, a Chrome monoculture would give them free reign without competition to abuse us far worse than they already do.

Re:About time. FirefoxOS over Thunderbird was madn

[Anonymous Coward]

OP of this thread, here.

I think it would be worse and not just for the privacy reasons, but because Google can leverage so much more. IE with ActiveX had dominance in enterprise applications and in official govt and banking stuff (which still persists in East Asia to varying degrees).

However, Google leverages pretty much everything. The only people with non-GMail accounts are those with company accounts, those who bought iphones, the few who pay for great email services (esp. Tor-friendly and VPN-friendly ones that aren't locking your account out every other day) and of course the Chinese. China is a whole topic unto itself, but outside China, especially in the English-speaking countries, Google is everything. Everyone: amateurs, professionals, corporations, journalists all use Youtube.

The IE6 monoculture lead to lazy and bad web-page design and the lack of nice alternatives (tabs!) was infuriating. However, if IE6 had died one day and all source code was lost, most people could get by on an alternative like Firefox if it were released the same day. With Google, the situation is different. You can't just use a replacement easily. Google could just say one day that you need to run Chrome to view Youtube. Where would that hurt them? Iphones? Not really. They could add some special thing into Chrome, keep it closed source, and when using Safari to view something, the web server redirects you to a page telling you to download Chrome, with a link to the App Store download. A lot of people just want to buy iphones and have things work without installing extra software. Albeit many like Candy Crush, a good number also never set foot in the App Store.

Realistically, if in a couple years, Google did just this, I imagine enough people would just follow directions and install Chrome to make such a coercion worth it to Google. Google would justify it by saying they offer so many services for free and as part of the user agreement you need to subject yourself to Chrome which helps track you and get data to make more effective advertisements. Already Google writes that if you encrypt all you mail on your (free) GMail account and keep them from having their computers read through all your advertisements to insert adverts in the Webmail interface, then you can get locked out of your account, lose it, etc. They've already taken steps to make it harder to use clients. OAuth has its perks and more clients have support, but not all. Notice that using non-OAuth logins through mail clients are opt-in. The default is a lockout. You have to log in through the web interface and click a dishonest option that say to allow "insecure" apps to read your e-mail. They haven't completely locked out, for example, K-9 Mail, but they have made it hard and steered people towards the web interface and the GMail official app on Android. Thunderbird, despite its lack of proper support, miraculously got OAuth working. Unfortunately, telling people how to "allow insecure apps" and to click "yes" to supposedly "insecure" apps to access their Google account is not much more feasible than telling them to use GnuPG through the command line.

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[exomondo]

Mozilla Foundation gets its money from donations and funds that the corporation kicks up.

Right, and that corporation is Google, an ad company. By and large that's where their funding comes from, they depend on Google.

Re: The death spiral was evident when they rebrand

[Anonymous Coward]

Already have

Re: The death spiral was evident when they rebrand

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree. People, as much a they don't like lik to admit, don't care about free. They care about profit. Doesn't matter to me. I'm just glad chrome finally optimized their mobile browser. Chrome all the way. Sorry, my ex, Firefox. I have moved on.

Why I like Firefox: Extensions (Add-ons)

[Futurepower(R)]

Extensions are the reason Firefox is popular with me. I'm happy to have any suggestions for improvements of the list.

1. Classic Theme Restorer
   "This add-on will stop working when Firefox 57 arrives in November 2017."
   https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/latest/classicthemerestorer/addon-472577-latest.xpi?src=dp-btn-primary
2. Cookies Manager+
   https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/latest/cookies-manager-plus/addon-92079-latest.xpi?src=dp-btn-primary
3. Ghostery DON'T UPDATE. New versions don't allow sufficient user control.
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/
   USE THIS: y-5.4.10-sm+an+fx.xpi Link: Version 5.4.10
4. Mozilla Archive Format
   http://maf.mozdev.org/
5. NoScript
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
6. Nuke Anything Enhanced
   https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/latest/nuke-anything-enhanced/addon-951-latest.xpi?src=dp-btn-primary
   
7. Open link in...
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-link-in/
8. Print Edit
   https://addons.mozilla.org/fir...
9. Session Manager
   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manager/
10. Snap Links Plus DON'T UPDATE. New versions don't have as many features.
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
    USE THIS: snap_links_plus-2.4.3-sm+fx.xpi Link: Version 2.4.3
    Explanation:
    http://cpriest.github.io/SnapL...
11. uBlock Origin
    https://addons.mozilla.org/fir...
12. Video DownloadHelper
    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/latest/video-downloadhelper/addon-3006-latest.xpi?src=dp-btn-primary

Re:Why I like Firefox: Extensions (Add-ons)

[oji-sama]

Extensions are the reason Firefox is popular with me. I'm happy to have any suggestions for improvements of the list.

My favorite: Tree Style Tab ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... ).

Re:Why I like Firefox: Extensions (Add-ons)

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Classic Theme Restorer page:

This add-on will stop working when Firefox 57 arrives in November 2017 and Mozilla drops support for XUL / XPCOM / legacy add-ons. It should still work on Firefox 52 ESR until ESR moves to Firefox 59 ESR in 2018 (~Q2). There is no "please port it" or "please add support for it" this time, because the entire add-on eco system changes and the technology behind this kind of add-on gets dropped without replacement.

So I now know what my last version of FF will be. Looks like the FF devs are actively developing themselves out of a job.

Re:Why I like Firefox: Extensions (Add-ons)

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that FF will be dead on my machines too. The Classic theme restorer is the only reason why I am still using Firefox, as it still allows use of a sane UI. Why use a clone of Chrome when the original one is also available?

Re:Why I like Firefox: Extensions (Add-ons)

[Indigo]

Nooooooooooooo!!!!! Classic Theme Restorer is the only that keeps Firefox usable. Dammit!

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[UltraZelda64]

Too bad the other products are crap too. Firefox has become crap because Mozilla has turned it into Chrome (which in my opinion is crap) with a new name. They're shitting upon all that once made it great and Chromifying the living fuck out of it. If I wanted to use Chrome, I would use it. Unfortunately, by using modern day Firefox, I am *still* effectively being forced into using Chrome, just rebranded.

What??

[execthis]

Reading the summary and I'm like "What??" Firefox is the best browser by far. More customizable, better looking, better features. There's no comparison with any other browsers. Chrome's extensions suck. Opera and Vivaldi are ok but somewhat rough on the edges and also their extensions suck. You can use Chrome extensions (which suck anyhow) with Opera and Vivalidi but it's a cludge and they might not work well and are not stable.

As for mobile, it's basically the same thing although Firefox stands out even farther than any other browser, except perhaps Dolphin which is not nearly as trustworthy an organization as Mozilla. One thing that really sickens me about mobile Chrome is the baked-in Big Search search engines and inability to add DuckDuckGo. That alone was enough for me to immediately abandon using it and to not take it seriously as a browser. Google is not nearly as trustworthy/honest as Mozilla.

Yes Chrome's performance can be better but when you start using a lot of extensions and put it under resource load it is just as unstable/crappy as anything else. No browser is absolutely perfect.

Yes Firefox seems to have gone through a period of performance issues when under resource load (yes I often have 100+ tabs open) but seems to be improving as of the very latest releases.

I don't know what the summary is about but it really doesn't seem objective. Firefox is clearly the best browser.

Re:What??

[Anonymous Coward]

If you typically have 100+ tabs open at once, I recommend the extension onetab.
It lets to collapse your 100 tabs into 1, and selectively open what you want.
It really changed my browsing habits for the better, and greatly reduced my system load

Re:What??

[nullgreen]

You can use DuckDuckGo on the mobile Brave browser, which is based on Chome.

Re:What??

[JohnFen]

Firefox is the best browser by far.

True, but that's damning it with faint praise. The state of the browser industry these days is simply shameful.

Re:What??

[exomondo]

Firefox is clearly the best browser.

By what metric? I know they try to take the moral high ground but ultimately the cave on things like DRM and they are almost exclusively funded by ad revenue from Google anyway, they certainly aren't doing it out of charity.

Re:What??

[execthis]

Another browser I'm hoping to see improve is Konqueror. It looks like it has the potential to be really great but it looks like not a lot of development is being invested in it yet. Still if it would improve it would really round out the KDE applications suite.

Firefox from v. 50

[Anonymous Coward]

is perhaps the best browser around. Both on pc and mobile. Its speed is at least on par with Chrome, which however I don't like for many other reasons. Imho a good browser will guarantee their survival so focusing on it is the right thing.

Why I like Firefox: Extensions (Add-ons) FIXED.

[Futurepower(R)]

FIXED: Extensions are the reason Firefox is popular with me. I'm happy to have any suggestions for improvements of the list.

1. Classic Theme Restorer
2. Cookies Manager+
3. Ghostery DON'T UPDATE. New versions don't allow sufficient user control.
   USE THIS: ghostery-5.4.10-sm+an+fx.xpi Link: Version 5.4.10
4. Mozilla Archive Format
5. NoScript
6. Nuke Anything Enhanced
7. Open link in...
8. Print Edit
9. Session Manager
10. Snap Links Plus DON'T UPDATE. New versions don't have as many features.
    USE THIS: snap_links_plus-2.4.3-sm+fx.xpi Link: Version 2.4.3
11. uBlock Origin
12. Video DownloadHelper

FFfcd = firefox mobile?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is FF for connected devices whats leftover from the collosal firefox mobile disaster?

Where they asked you to buy developer phones that were abandoned (did not get any updates) a short time later, essentially fucking over the very developers that spent money and time to help the cause?

Yeah, i currently use firefox, but i don't expect FF to survive after WEAPI.

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[arglebargle_xiv]

It is, sort of. They fired the wrong people, these guys aren't really affecting Mo//:http::a//'s market share. If they'd instead fired Asa Dotzler it would constitute a quite significant gain.

Re: The death spiral was evident when they rebrand

[Anonymous Coward]

I browse the web when I'm bored and waiting/commuting and have nothing else to do. Typically these are situations where I don't have a computer handy or it would be impractical to use it. If I had a computer I could do something useful (work or research) instead of just browsing. So yes, when I browse I typically do it on a phone.

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect? Vivaldi is from the Opera 12 guys.

But not even Vivaldi is Opera 12.

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[Desler]

So losing 80+% of your marketshare in 5 years is not a death spiral? Can you pass around what you're smoking?

modded you up.. and posting anon to agree

[Anonymous Coward]

I second Pale Moon. I switched to it several months ago because for the 6 months prior to that, FF would simply freeze after launching for about 30 seconds. It started one fine day, and continued no matter what I did - reinstalling, updating, removing profile, etc. CPU and memory was fine, I only had a couple of benign add-ons. I have no idea what it was doing, but I finally had enough.

Save a year of using Opera, and trying out Chromium for a month, I have been using FF on Linux since the late 90s. There have been ups and downs, but I do still think it's the best browser out there. I don't like Chrome/ium. That's why I switched to Pale Moon. For mobile I use Dolphin, but do as little on mobile as I can.

posting as anon to preserve my moderation, but...

[gosand]

CEOs don't get paid for what they do. They get paid for what they promise to do. They get paid more if they actually do it.
That is just the reality of it.

They set the direction of a company, and make sure that they follow it. There are lots of factors there, and everyone seems to think it's an easy job. I don't, I think it would be extremely difficult. I think FF set out to grow, and become a bigger and more well-known brand. It was ambitious, but they were going up against a juggernaut in Google. They took some risks, it hasn't worked out that great, and they are regrouping. I hope they learn and come back better for it.

Everyone thinks that CEOs get paid too much, but what if they are successful? They can turn a company around or make them even more valuable. Just as they can break a company, they can make one as well. If they do that, then they are usually rewarded for it, and everyone wins.

Just trying to inject a little reality into this.

Work on Firefox and Thunderbird Instead

[BrendaEM]

We want a good browser and email application.

So many reasons to stay with Firefox

[fluffynuts]

Ok, so the WIndows memory management can blow a little, but...

* warning about submitting login details over a non-secure connection: FF is actually taking user security seriously.
* smaller code == less chance of bugs and security holes. FF comes in at 194mb compressed and Chrom(e|ium) comes in at just under 500mb. Most is third-party stuff, which won't have the same eyes put onto it.
* smaller code == quicker compile. Not an issue for most, but on a source-based distro, I'll take 25 min over 2 hours any day.
* extensions that I want, that always work the same across platforms; this includes Firegestures and DTA. I can't find Chrome extensions to match them -- and I've really tried. The Chrome download managers are not really an improvement over the inbuilt stuff and the Chrome-based gesture extensions work differently across OSes. I like one tool that works at work (windows) and home (linux)
* a decent download manager extension (DTA). Since I grab files from a friend's seedbox, this is a bit of a must. Downloading several hundred rar parts without DTA is a real PITA

I could go on. I'm sure no-one cares. Still, FF will have users as long as I can breathe enough to tell other people to use it. I don't hate Chrom(e|ium) -- I use them for debugging (sorry, I *do* like the dev tools), but for a daily-driver browser? FF all the way. Or at least a derivative like PaleMoon, but I want the newer rendering engine and a JS engine which knows what a Promise is :/ It's 2017: Promises are not exactly "the new thing" -- ES2015 was, well 2 years ago -- and, whilst I applaud the PM devs (and truly wish I could continue using it), sites like GitHub don't do ES shims (I asked) and do rely on current JS features.

(ps: I know PM 27 (currently beta) does Promises; it fails elsewhere, unfortunately)

When they changed the version number like mad

[Anonymous Coward]

Was bad enough that they were trying to turn FF into Chrome, when I was trying to avoid Chrome.
I dunno if it is just getting older and senile, but moving the buttons all over pisses me off, I have to hunt for them.
Third party crap like "Pocket" has no business being in it. Optional extension, sure fine. Baked in, no.
Took awhile but finally dropped it. Don't want IE or Chrome. Trying Pale Moon at the moment.

CAPTCHA: tainted
Haha!

Re:The death spiral was evident when they rebrande

[chipschap]

I'll have to take a look at Opera for Linux. It's what I use on my Android phone and it's good there.

Look in a mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You folks in the SJW crowd never seem to stop and have any deep thoughts about yourselves and your exteme bigotries.

"I have seen up close what happens when you've got a Brendan Eich in your company..." - REALLY?!?!? "a Brendan Eich"????? There's now a category of people you hate and judge as a group that you tag with this guy's name????

"And I really don't see why people flock to defend this guy" - REALLY???? How about because the man was driven from his job by a shrieking group of brown-shirt fascist pigs who are out to destroy anybody who holds different opinions. He was opposed to gay marriage. OK, so you think he deserved to be driven from his job because you disagree. Well guess what, snowflake? plenty of people disagree with YOUR position so by your own reckoning perhaps YOU should be driven from YOUR job. You SJW types always assume you can bully and that bullying is OK because you are in a permanent political majority, but that ain't always so. It's generally best to not support such political bullying, for many reasons, including it's being downright un-American, but even simply because it could come back to bite you.

"And he's only got himself to blame for the entire situation. He could have apologised, made a donation to a gay rights group..." - ahhhh and there's your totalitarian piggishness on full display. Everybody must agree with YOU and people may only have careers if they support YOUR causes. A person can get back into your good graces by doing pennance and paying reparations to YOUR causes. Who the hell declared YOU king? How would YOU feel if you were driven from your job because you disagree with "gay-to-straight conversion therapy" and some snarky arrogant evil bastards were telling you that you were an evil dirtbag who could only get back into society by donating to a gay-to-straight conversion outfit??????

You leftists have spent the years since Bill Clinton got into the White House completely up-ending the traditional American culture of people getting along and working together regardless of their politics. You have made EVERYTHING political and hyper-partisan and you have made the culture venemous. Now you are all whiny and freaked-out that Trump got elected. Look in a damned mirror and figure out that YOU are the people largely responsible for his rise. You pumped so much viscous odious bile into the body politic that half of America was so eager to puke you out that they watched to see who you hated the most and who outraged you the most and they voted for that guy. They're not only going to re-elect him in four years but they're probably gonna go for guys like him at the state level too if you keep it up. You lefties have become like three year olds having temper tantrums; you are so busy satisfying yourselves with your emotional outbursts, so pleased with the attention you are getting, and so sure you will get everyone to back-down in order to shut you up that you do not notice your actions are hardening the resolve of the very voters you hope to influence.

... ROLL BACK FIREFOX ...

[TheRealHocusLocus]

ROLL BACK FIREFOX

Until the ESC key once again interrupts ALL network activity without exception and without delay. Including damned DNS lookups in progress. While we're at it, how about tracking registered JS timer callback events and upon pressing of ESC (pending reload) completely cancel or stub out the fuckers. Leaving you with a static scrollable page with content you can actually READ even though someone's endless JIT crap keeps failing.

Fuck people who write JSON whose fragile servers melt down when net lookups or connections are broken because of bad engineering. Fuck cloud immediate expiry DNS games. And fuck Mozilla's decision to prevent end users from being able to abort page loads.

Add your own 'roll back Firefox' comments!