Comment by gr4vityWall 3 days ago
I used to want to donate to Mozilla Foundation, but I've long lost any hope that the corporation would spend that money in a way that makes sense to me. The pessimist on me would expect donated money to be spent on more built-in "campaigns", "studies" or ads. Or maybe a bonus for their executives.
I just want Firefox to be faster. I'm donating to Floorp (a Firefox fork), at least they seem focused on making the browser better.
Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much just works, supports a rich collection of (vetted!) extensions, and performs exceptionally well with sometimes hundreds of tabs.
Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.
Firefox works, but it’s got thousands of annoying issues (many of them just paper cuts, but still).
The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs. Imagine how many of those issues could have been ironed out over the years.
The issue with the salary is not that it costs the same as 30 developers – good leadership can make a difference worth >30 developers over the same timespan (especially in an organisation with 1000s of staff). The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend. It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
I've had this conversation at least three times on HN. I'm convinced anyone who says that Firefox has a thousand issues simply doesn't use Firefox. But, I'm always open to being wrong. Can you point out the specific issues Firefox has that make it a second rate experience?
> The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs
I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places. Just like you want to pay more for highly skilled developers, you want executive pay to be competitive to hire someone capable of the job.
Put it this way, you could pay me $1m in annual compensation to be Mozilla's CEO (sounds like a good deal?), but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company and cannot even run the company properly at a daily basis.
It is strange because the hate on Firefox does not fall in sync with the quality of Firefox. As if the product itself dont matter. Had it been Pre 2020 it may have made more sense.
Apart from a few years between IE 7 and Chrome, the past few years is the only time where I would rate Firefox as the best browser, especially for Multi Tab usage. Chrome back on top since 2024 after spending years working on memory efficiency as well as multi tab ( meaning tens to hundreds ) optimisation.
So while Mozilla in terms of management and their strategy ( or lack of ) has been the same, they get much of the hate because people now dislike Google and Chrome and needs a competitor. It is as if they dislike Google so they also dislike the Google sponsored Mozilla Firefox.
For all the site I visit, I have never had problem with Chrome, mostly because I guess everyone tested their website with it, much like old IE days. Where I used to have problems with Safari pre version 18, Firefox has always worked. I remember I have only encounter rendering issues once or twice in the past 3-4 years on Firefox.
There are lots of Webkit fixes landing in Safari 26. So 2025 may finally be the year where browser rendering difference is now at an acceptable minimum. Partly thanks to Interop. At least for the past 6 months I have yet to ran into issues on any of the three major browser. And this is progress.
I don't hate Firefox. It is my daily driver. I hate that Firefox went from the dominant browser by market share, to the minor, insignificant player it is today.
I hate that Firefox is so irrelevant that most web devs don't test on it. For many sites that's fine, because web standards are web standards, and Firefox supports them quite well. But whenever I run across a broken site, or even one that mostly works, but gives me papercuts, and then fire up Chrome and see that it works fine there, a little bit of me cries inside.
Mozilla should be focusing a lot more on user acquisition, and on figuring out why so many of their users have left.
> As if the product itself dont matter.
That's sort of the point. Firefox is an excellent, even amazing browser. But because of the way Mozilla has handled it, it's become largely an also-ran, and its continued existence seems highly dependent on its primary competitor in the browser space. That's just incompetent given the quality of Firefox.
Chrome's marketing budget is nearly as large as Mozilla's entire budget. They spent a couple of years actively targeting Firefox users with Chrome ads on the frontpage of google.com, and got Adobe Flash and Java and most of the free antivirus solutions to auto-install Chrome and make it the default browser.
I have yet to hear anyone on HN present an argument for how Mozilla could effectively counter that onslaught. Certainly not without using methods that they would also have complained about. (Though nobody seems to hold Chrome's bloatware tactics against them for some reason).
The thing is that in 2020 it was too late. Firefox have been lagging behind Chrome for so long, that the headstart they had when Chrome was launched didn't matter.
For example, Chrome had process in tabs when it was released in 2008. Firefox had a ticket in bugzilla open by the community that had been ignored by Mozilla for years, before Chrome was released. Even when it was released, Mozilla's first reaction was "meh, we don't need that".
There are making mistakes as an organization, and there is taking exorbitant sums of money from advertising partners and having your costs inflate to match these donations, rather than something, anything to help the sustainability of Mozilla.
Imagine if at any point in the last 2 decades leadership in Mozilla had started an endowment[0] instead of them spending many billions of dollars on ineffective programs, harebrained acquisitions, and executive salaries. They could have had a sustainable, long-lasting model that would have kept Mozilla relevant and strong for decades to come.
Instead, Mozilla sold itself out to become a shield for Google while being grossly mismanaged to the point that it is entirely reliant on a deal that at any point could be rugged from them. At no point in the last two decades has resolving this ever been a meaningful focus beyond panhandling for donations that barely cover executive compensation.
I still try to use Firefox and I desperately want to be proven wrong in my opinion that Mozilla's leadership is incompetent, or malicious, or both, but I've been hoping for this since Chrome was released.
I want them to succeed and be who they were before, but Mozilla leadership does not.
[0] Wikimedia did this nearly a decade ago and it's been a huge success and makes Wikimedia more resilient! There's a model for this!
Mozilla is making my cost inflate? That's weird. I started using Firefox a decade ago paying 0 and I'm still paying 0. I guess 10x0 is still 0.
>Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day
Completely agree, Mozilla and Chrom is a lot like a president election, they both suck hard, you're kinda stuck choosing the lesser of two evils. I mean Kamala isn't great, but me, as a dainty woman who happens to have a penis and does not happen to have documentation surrounding my residency in the US, Kamala isn't so bad in comparison! Kamala is firefox.
I’m more of a full-stack but I develop “Firefox first” on my projects if I can and leave it to my tester to see that it works on Chrome. X-browser issues turn up rarely, I wind up having more trouble with Safari than anything.
I know Mozilla does worse on benchmarks, but I never complain about performance. Recently I tried some sites from one of the spammiest sectors on the web and found I couldn’t move the mouse without my Chrome lighting up like a Christmas tree and navigating me to crap sites, but the Firefox experience was that I had to click on something for all hell break loose.
We have an internal app that has screen with a JavaScript table thingie with 40,000 rows loaded locally. Crazy? Yeah. It performs great on Chrome and lags pretty bad on the fox. That’s the only bad screen, and we have a lot of screens.
Personally I don’t like it that they have an office in San Francisco. Emotionally I think, “the only thing anybody should be building in San Francisco is a homeless shelter.” Practically though, I think a browser company can’t “think different” if is steeped in the Bay Area culture, not least if they can get in a car and go visit people at Google and Facebook. If they were someplace else they might have a little more empathy for users.
Just my two pennies. Firefox is the best vendor for adhering to spec. In contrast, Webkit drags its feet while Chromium releases and deprecates experimental API willy nilly.
There has been one debugging niche where I've found Chromium preferable: Chrome sometimes gives better WebRTC signaling error messages than Firefox.
I'm in the same boat as you. Even if there's slight issues with Firefox, being able to synchronize my profile with my phone using the Firefox app outweighs all of that. AFAIK, Chrome doesn't have that.
lol of course it does? Every day at every scale of every category of every product or service.
Many people on HN hold Mozilla to impossible and conflicting standards. It is simultaneously a compromised propaganda arm of Google for taking the Google bribe, while also being compromised money-grabbing wankers diluting their mission when they try to generate alternative revenues of income. I realise that HN has different people posting different arguments, but I've seen many people post both over the years.
All of that is frequently married with an the amount of vitriol that seems out of place and downright bizarre. There is typically a lack of constructive discourse or suggestions, beyond vague hand-waving about how they should "just do better", or "just do this or that". Well, if it's that easy then why don't you start a browser?
In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox.
These threads bring out the absolute worst of the site and many people with more nuanced views probably make a habit of staying out of them. When I've commented on this before I've been accosted with highly aggressive personal attacks. So now I often just hide them.
It’s not about getting overly vitriolic. It’s simply that they said this:
“The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers”
And then, they changed it:
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/03/02/mozilla_introduce...
Google also had an unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil” and said:
“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating”
https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/
And they changed it.
So- sure, sometimes people change their minds.
But, Google never promised it wouldn’t sell your data.
Mozilla did, and users continued to use it, many without knowledge of it; it should be a banner over all the pages: “Hey, we sell your data. Click here to acknowledge.”
I cant buy your firefox data.
I can buy a huge block of aggregate data that has some things of yours in it.
Not every front, they gave us MDN and Rust, both of which will probably outlive them. KaiOS (the continuation of Firefox OS) is very popular in less developed areas of the world. Not that they managed to make anything off that.
>Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed competition and is now awaiting sentencing
>Google's illegal monopoly
>Google's criminality is the one mitigating favor
As someone who switched from Firefox to Chrome a while ago, these remarks made me curious enough to research the case.
The judge ruled based on "billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets".
The crime of the century laid bare before our eyes. A search engine company caught red-handed paying companies to set its search engine as the default search engine as everyone everywhere knew and saw for decades. Utterly reprehensible.
> hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier
I respectfully disagree. It's one of the conclusions one can reach upon following Firefox development over the last decade. I'm not going to imply it's the "correct" one. It is a common one in hacker communities.
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”
Unfortunately, I can't say much besides that this isn't my intention at all, and that I don't sense anything like that from the comments. I can't know for sure the intent behind other poster.
You imply it’s the hackers or Hacker News that has changed to create a negative atmosphere. From my perspective, however, it’s the direct result of a very long series of hostile-to-hackers decisions made by Mozilla.
To quote myself:
> I get why people are pissed at Mozilla
My issue is that when you try to have discourse but everyone’s on the same side, it can easily devolve into a circlejerk where everyone is trying to see who can most dramatically burn the strawman. These kinds of feedback loops are just bad—it doesn’t really matter who the target is or how malicious they are—because they cause the participants to drift further and further from the reality of the conflict.
In the best case, if the target really is bad, the participants may just look foolish when they later deploy their anti-strawman ballistic missile against someone who actually has a slightly good pro-target argument they hadn’t thought of. In the worst case, this is how mobs work themselves up to eventually justify violence against a target that’s totally harmless.
One thing’s for sure though, once a circlejerk like this starts, rational thought ends.
You seem to be really keen on whining about how people here hate on Mozilla, but seem not to be interested in arguing the merits of Mozilla and its actions over the years, and whether or not they deserve that hate.
So basically, you're a part of the problem you're complaining about. You're just being the contrarian looking down on the rest of us for having an opinion.
Tell me, why shouldn't we criticize Mozilla? What wonderful things have they done over the past several years? How does their behavior and performance make Firefox's cratered market share understandable and ok and reasonable? How is their failure to find alternative revenue streams, over and over again, ok and reasonable?
Many people in these threads are listing concrete evidence of Mozilla's poor behavior and performance, and you're just continuing, over and over, to whine about some sort of circlejerk you've imagined up. Either actually argue a useful point about Mozilla itself, or just stop posting about this.
I don't see how you're responding to the parent's comment. You seem to be exemplifying it tbh.
The parent isn't saying Firefox and Mozilla are without problems. In fact, they actively recognized them! So I'm not sure why you respond as if they don't.
The parent is saying that the complaints are often used as social signaling. The fact that this happens makes it harder to address legitimate issues. Which Mozilla, without a doubt, has issues.
The result of all this is very apparent: it helps Google. You can even think Mozilla is evil, but you have to ask: is Mozilla more evil than Google? It's hard to argue yes. Frankly, they don't even have the capacity to do as much harm
This was probably the day that Firefox jumped the shark for me:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115346/https://www.theve...
I still use it, but I lost all respect for the management. This level of tone deafness should cause everyone on the board and c suite to personally write an open letter of apology to the users, but instead we got a half-hearted victim-blaming non-apology:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-looking-glass-add... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115352/https://blog.mozi...
This is really rather telling. Here is how Mozilla articulates what they think users have a problem with:
> We’re sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community. While there was no intention or mechanism to collect or share your data or private information and The Looking Glass was an opt-in and user activated promotion, we should have given users the choice to install this add-on.
Mozilla is willfully inept. They think that pre-loading third-party non-free code and ads without my knowledge or consent is not an issue! Moreover, Mozilla thinks that this doesn't conflict with Mozilla's interpretation of what opt-in means and the values it embodies.
Mozilla is looking more and more like controlled opposition. Mozilla undermined their own users' faith in Mozilla's add-on/extension capabilities and act like releasing the source after the fact resolves any issue at all regarding doing this without consulting users or receiving prior affirmative consent.
This comment is getting long enough as it is. I'll just leave this here.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-firefox-data-col...
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.
On a site that gives people attention and points for saying strident things that emotionally resonate with people? How surprising!
That aside, Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness. It was the browser of choice for a lot of people here for a long time. Watching its continuing flailing and ongoing failure has been excruciating. I still use it, but more out of stubbornness than anything. So whether or not it's fashionable to hate on Firefox, I think there's a lot of legitimate energy there.
> … Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness
It literally was not.
The Mozilla project and foundation (which led to the MPL) was a dying corporation's attempt to ensure that its source code would outlive its destruction by a monopolist. There was some push from hacker idealists inside said corporation to make this happen, but it still took the corporation's positive action in order for this to happen and not result in everything being sold to the highest bidder in a firesale.
Firefox was an independent hacker's reimagining of what just Mozilla the Browser might be if it didn't have all the other parts which made Mozilla the Suite. After it picked up steam and development stalled on the excessively complex suite, it was adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation and has become what people have used for a couple of decades.
Pure speculation on my part, but I think reasonably well informed: if Firefox hadn't been adopted back into the Mozilla Foundation, it's highly unlikely that the Foundation would have remained relevant but it's also highly unlikely that Firefox would have survived even as long as it has. There simply wasn't enough momentum for it to become a Linux-like project, and Firefox would have disappeared from desktop even faster.
> Firefox's origin is in a hacker rebellion against corporatist awfulness.
There sure is good reason to criticize Firefox but what's crazy to me is that this generally leads to using Chrome. You're not a rebel if you turn to the enemy, you're a saboteur
Using Firefox is also ingroup signaling. I have been using Firefox since quite some time before they had even fully settled on the name Firefox— the days of "Firebird" and the "Firesomething" extension making fun of the rename. I used to wear a Firefox T-shirt to school when I was a kid. I remember reading jwz's blog with wonder and admiration when I was in high school, and reading all the secret lore pages like about:mozilla. Firefox is dear to me and it has been for a very long time now.
Perhaps these feelings are "tribal" in some metaphorical sense, but that's because the fate of Firefox has already long felt personal to me, not because it seems like something people on this website (which I care much less about than Firefox!) seem to think I should care about.
(That said, I do think Firefox still works very well, and it's fast and capable. From a technical point of view these are far from the darkest days in Firefox's history.)
I don't really agree. By sitting at the big tech table you give up a lot of ethics.
I think it's similar to NGOs like Greenpeace. I respected them when they were using rubber boats to blockade toxic waste dumping. Now they have a millions earning CEO rubbing shoulders with the pollutors and ostensibly "changing the system from within". Which creates watered down measures and too much dependency on the industry. Just like Reagan's "trickle down" fallacy this doesn't work. Money and power corrupts.
Also yes a lot of us use Firefox but not because we still love it so much. But because it's the least worst option. Kinda the only option if you want to run the real Ublock Origin now.
As someone who spends a lot of time on HN, I fully agree with you. I am beyond bored of seeing the same things just continually reposted and take over some good threads. I actually got to a point where I would not click on comment threads that had anything to do with anything that Elon touches, because it just got ridiculous.
On the flip side though, I know there are a ton of readers who only occasionally Read the interesting story, who are part of today's lucky thousand who haven't heard yet. For that reason, my position has become somewhat moderate in that I think the hyperbolic hate posts are still ridiculous, including some informative and reasonable comments is probably good. To be clear though, The majority of this thread is not that :-D
It’s not just Mozilla. HN in general has become quite a hostile and unpleasant place to hang out digitally.
It's not so black and white. Firefox is my daily driver, this doesn't mean that I can't have concerns about the direction of the Mozilla Foundation or express them online with others who share those concerns.
I think the reason for that is that we are still using the Firefox that was made 5 years ago. Then the whole team that was working on making the browser more modern and speedier was fired (as I understand it anyway).
I love Firefox, and I’m happy that there’s a foundation working on it that magically gets funded, but I see that money going to things I don’t care about far too often to be comfortable with it. It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.
> It always seems Firefox is an afterthought.
I'll bet if Mozilla thought they could get away with canceling Firefox, they would.
It feels like Firefox is treated as lead generation for whatever new boat Mozilla builds to sell Firefox users down the river on next time. It's "finished" in that regard; it is a widget that passes network traffic to Mozilla and third parties, and in exchange, Mozilla gets a pittance from Google. How any of this is supposed to be accepted with a straight face is beyond me.
Or maybe we are genuinely upset that a browser we've supported and watch grow for decades at this point has fallen so low. Market share matters a ton, and Mozilla has been a very poor steward of Firefox's market share.
Maybe stop ascribing incorrect motivations to those of us who are angry but also care very deeply. I'm so tired of others assuming some sort of ill intent or virtue signaling or whatever, and using that as a way to derail a conversation.
I've got a petty reason for hating Mozilla but it's not from a developer perspective, it's from a user perspective. For years all i've wanted is to use my my Google chrome state over to Firefox. I don't want to do an import, I want to type in my gmail credentials and just have all my tabs and passwords to use. If they gave that feature to me i'd have switched years ago.
Unfortunately, I strongly believe these posts often get scraped by social media aggregators or sentiment analysis platforms. So, when public sentiment appears to have "dropped by X%" because we all chilled out, it becomes a justification for decisions by non-technical program or product leaders even though users actually disliked what was being done. I see the only way forward through continued expression, so I'm assuming our happy compromise would be to have constructive negative feedback and try to hold our peer commenters accountable to quality over "upboat" mentality.
Honestly, the result of it is highly beneficial to Google.
Like it or not, that's the end result. Hacking on a chromium browser doesn't de-googleify the internet, it deepens the moat.
Did we forget the old joke?
There's two types of programs:
- Those with bugs
- Those that nobody uses
Do we really want to hate on Mozilla so much that we'd lick the big boot just out of spite? I have plenty of problems with how Mozilla has handled many issues, but it's laughable to compare these to Google or Microsoft. Seriously, WTF
He wasn't fired. He stepped down because of the uproar not in Mozilla itself but in the user communities. Because that's what the shareholders care about, disgruntled employees don't affect the share value but a dark shadow over the brand does.
I was personally also happy to see him go. You can't be inclusive when you try to deny people you have nothing to do with their equality.
I don't agree I'm not inclusive. I don't mind if other people have other opinions. I'm totally fine if they go to church, want to stay in the closet if they're gay etc. They're not doing themselves any favours but that's fine. I'm not trying to stop them from marrying.
Where it gets exclusive is trying to prevent other people from being what they are by campaigning for laws. The figurehead (not just any employee!) of an organisation that purports to be inclusive shouldn't be doing that. It's not opinions but limiting other people's rights that I have a problem with. It's the same reason I won't buy things from Musk.
When I said I was glad he left I was a bit harsh though, true. I would have been fine if he had stayed and disavowed his actions.
The sheer volume of sidequest projects they've put resources into that were clearly self-indulgence projects from internal staff, that had no obvious market need or target user-base put me off years ago.
They're kept in existence as a cost of doing business for the likes of Google, purely to ward off browser monopoly claims, and absolutely do not deserve to be taken seriously, or be given private funding.
I‘d argue you don‘t need a C-suite to develop firefox and that‘s the root of the problem.
So a foundation model instead, like discussed in: [Open Source Security] Open Source Foundations with Kelley Misata of Suricata #openSourceSecurity https://podcastaddict.com/open-source-security/episode/19338... via @PodcastAddict
I'm genuinely curious, no experience in any of that.
Yep.
Also worth reading: Reinventing Organisations by Laloux.
Incredible book - absolute book of the year for me. They talk about the history of organisations and how organisations can be run differently & better. And they research companies who are trying this stuff out today, and talk about what they do. The modern CEO idea is pretty silly on the face of it. We take the - ideally - smartest person at a company, divorce them from grounded reality, then burden them with all the hardest decisions your company has to face. All while disempowering the people on the ground who do all the actual work. In many ways it’s a pretty stupid way to run a company. There’s plenty of other options.
Just the other week the economist did an interview with the CEO of Supercell, a Nordic video game company. They have the same idea - the ceo in many ways doesn’t run the company, which frees him up to do actually useful work. And it lets the team leads take initiative and lead. Much better model in my opinion.
They're trying to diversify their revenue so it doesn't all come from Google. All these 'self-indulgent projects' are attempts to actually make enough money to compete with a multi-trillion dollar company's resources because they know they can't compete long-term.
The parent is referring to things like Coop (social media), SkyWriter (IDE), Persona, Solo (website builder), “data futures”, Servo [1], “big blue button”, most of them have little to no potential for revenue.
Meanwhile you can’t really have more than a few YouTube tabs open in FF otherwise it starts freezing, and it’s been behind Safari in adding new features for a while.
[1] including Servo here since it seems to have had no real roadmap to become integrated into FF, making it more of a vanity project - it’s already thirteen years old at this point
> including Servo here since it seems to have had no real roadmap to become integrated into FF
They integrated at least a couple of components from Servo into Firefox before they cancelled it, so I don't think that's fair.
> it’s already thirteen years old at this point
Mozilla only developed it for 8 years.
> The parent is referring to things like
> you can’t really have more than a few YouTube tabs open in FF otherwise it starts freezing
> it’s been behind Safari in adding new features for a while.
I think that would be believable if a massive portion wasn't spent in venture capitalism based gambling, where they put 90% of their eggs in the AI basket, of which, 70% are small unknown groups, 30% is just hugging face which really doesn't need their money, but at least that was a good bet.
Because they are a non-profit, they have to spend their money every year. That’s why Mozilla is/was over employed and following all these projects that die, because they need these engineers to work on something.
My friend worked at Mozilla 15 years ago, arguably during their golden years and he said it was a joke how much money they wasted because they had to spend it.
That’s not how NFPs work. I’m on the board of a NFP, we absolutely are able to save money year to year. The big difference between us and a regular corp is we don’t have shareholders or paid board members.
I wasn’t clear. Mozilla was making > 400M from the Google deal. They needed to spend most of the money otherwise why would they be a nonprofit. So they would spent the vast majority of it on boondoggles, lots of all-hands in expensive locations, $400k salaries etc.
There are many NFPs with multi-billion dollar endowments, I don’t really understand this line of reasoning…
Charitably, I'd like to believe that all these side quests were in search of actual, real, substantial, alternative revenue streams, in order to reduce dependency on Google.
The problem, of course, is that all of these side projects just flat out failed. Maybe they were self-indulgence projects or maybe they were pursued in earnest, but either way, they failed.
I maintain Waterfox, so I recognise this isn’t a great look criticising another fork. But there’s a contradiction in abandoning Mozilla over spending and leadership concerns whilst supporting Floorp, which initially used open source extensions to build up their USP, then switched to a non-open licence to prevent others from doing what they had done.
They only reverted after community backlash (or being “inspired” if I recall correctly). You’re comfortable supporting a project that actively betrayed open source principles, whilst writing off Mozilla for issues like executive compensation.
It doesn’t strike me as more morally consistent than supporting the organisation that actually develops the underlying engine?
It's kind of disheartening to see what happened to the Mozilla Foundation. And it makes me kind of afraid of what's going to happen to linux once Linus is out. It seems that a great project requires a great BDFL, otherwise it will be taken over by ghouls.
Isn't the Linux ecosystem much more healthy and decentralized than Mozilla? We're so so blessed with Linus and everyone is afraid of the moment the project has to stand without him. But I'm confident he's aware and working towards that point in time. I'm not too much into it though, so this is more or less assumptions.
Same with e.g. PostgreSQL.
But these are fundamentally different type of projects. Many businesses and products run on top of Linux and/or PostgreSQL. There is a very clear and obvious incentive to contribute, because that will help you run your business better.
With user-oriented software such as a browser, this is a lot less clear-cut. Organisations like Slack, or Etsy, or Dropbox: sure, they've contributed resources to stuff they use like Linux, PosgreSQL, PHP, Python, etc. But what do they get out of contributing to Firefox? Not so obvious.
I think this is one reason (among others) that Open Source has long been the norm in some fields oriented towards servers and programmers, and a lot less so in others.
With PostgreSQL my biggest concern is what happens when we no longer have Tom Lane, Petere, etc. Rather than the project dying I see the opposite happening; it gets feature crept by contributors adding in their own custom behaviour and it becoming too complex.
There's always a large overhead of adding something new and it's always the experienced devs on the project that know where the right balance is.
No project or development style is perfect and they all come with their own set of upsides and downsides. PostgreSQL is no exception. Maybe the PostgreSQL 20 years from now will be a different type of project with different types of trade-offs. That doesn't mean it will be worse. I'm not so worried about this.
The Linux Foundation also runs several other projects, none of which do I see being ran terribly poorly from a corporate meddling point. I can only hope that is a strong signal of things to come.
I did a quick search. Names were named by him here [1] in 2024 - but not as successors per se. More like candidates for important roles in the future. This [2] interview from 2020 touches the subject as well.
I interpret it in a way that he tries to cultivate an environment where a good leader/successor/main-whatever emerges somewhat naturally.
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/990534/ [2] https://itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/torvalds-say...
(Prime example of my personal behavior which I really don't like: Put a half-baked assumption/hearsay on the internet. Get 2 replies. Start actually researching the topic only afterwards.)
GHOULS doesn't even begin to describe the people who take over these foundations. They are parasites who seek out nonprofits to infiltrate, and once they gain a position of power they bring in their pals and set up shop. Suddenly the CoC is weaponized to crush dissent, the decisions are made behind closed doors, and the organization starts contributing to political organizations that help their class of parasites spread. And there are WAY more of them than there are good-hearted honest people starting foundations. When a new foundation is created, these parasites line up to see who can corrupt it first.
There is a sad parallel to Wikimedia Foundation, rooted in the same argument: We don't know the correct price. These entities are effectively monopolies with no competitors, and there is no public negotiation on what the annual budget of these entities should be.
So once they get away with nag screens on the world's biggest billboards, CEO pay is suddenly 'justified'.
But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.
> But that illusion only works when there is zero oversight.
Certainly when it comes to Wikipedia: there is oversight. I know people don't like the fact that Wikipedia spends money on things other than server racks, but spending money on developing the community is a pretty legitimate thing to do! How else can you maintain such an encylopedia? You need to attract knowledgeable people to write and review articles!
I don't think there are objections to Wikipedia developing the community.
The objections are primarily around the aggressive and deceptive fundraising.
Wikipedia collects donations by essentially saying (in some years more directly, otherwise more implying) "if you don't donate Wikipedia WILL DIE", rather than "Please give us some money so we can build an even bigger community to make Wikipedia even better".
They are also making the banners incredibly obnoxious. From "donate or ask later", full-screen interstitials, to delayed popups that interrupt you after you've started reading, and with increasing frequency. During their "yearly" fundraisers (I think it's actually 2-3x a year, masked behind "local" vs. "global" campaigns) they pop them up every few days on every device you use, and now they're introducing "experimental" banners every month (again per device) so several times per month, and more frequently if they delete cookies. [1]
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Proposed_ch...
At some level this is true, but I'm also 98% sure that if you do that, you get far fewer donations. Fewer donations = less money to do good work. This means you can't provide money to support foundation projects (these are quite valuable and promote exchange of knowledge amongst Wikipedia contributors, and also onboard new people to make a better encyclopedia). Eventually not doing this leads to the pool of contributors shrinking, which leads to burnout, and eventually to a slow death spiral.
I wish there were a way to donate to the devs who work on Firefox directly.
Like a pool where we donate and money goes to devs to work on user-centric features (eg: I’d also want to exclude those working on first party spyware and adware).
Agreed. Until I upgraded phones and just couldn't be bothered anymore, I kept around an old build of Firefox from before they messed up extensions. I have to run nightly now to get my extensions and just pause updates at relatively bug-free builds. It's absurd how they took the one selling point and lost it. I've even switched to edge canary because it gives me extensions and didn't have a few regressions (that eventually got fixed) that prevented smooth video watching
> It's absurd how they took the one selling point and lost it.
No, it's obvious. Google Pays for Firefox. Google doesn't want Adblock Extensions.
No, contrary to you and GP, the stable version of Firefox for Android (on the Google Play Store) supports all Firefox extensions, including ad blockers.
There was a short period in the switch-over from Fennec (old FF for Android) to Fenix (new FF for Android) when the stable version didn’t support all extensions, but this hasn’t been the case anymore for years now.
> There was a short period in the switch-over from Fennec (old FF for Android) to Fenix (new FF for Android) when the stable version didn’t support all extensions, but this hasn’t been the case anymore for years now.
They got rid of extensions in August 2020 and brought them back in December 2023.[1] Fenix has lacked full extension support for more than half of its existence since release, and it has been less than two years since extensions were brought back.
1. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/new-extensions-youll-lov...
https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-core [a submodule of their main repo] is noticeably missing any licensing information
I went there to find out how they're tracking upstream releases, because that's my major heartburn about any fork of one of the biggest attack targets on a personal computer. Since 12.0.14 doesn't tell me anything about what version of Firefox it's built against, I guess https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp/blob/v12.0.14/brow... is the best one can do and since it says 128.anything and the current production release is 140.0.4 I got my answer
That's the latest ESR (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/notes/), which seems good enough for Tor Browser.
I don't feel that firefox is slow on anything I use it on other than Android. Its reasonably responsive on all the machines I have ever used it with including some pretty old laptops. It seems pretty smooth, its been a while since I used chrome.
I just want to see a pie chart with how they spend any donations. I also don't mind their forays into stuff like free speech and internet privacy, but beyond that they should stay out of politics. That said I have donated a few times since I use firefox as my primary browser. Their activities are far superior to anything that Brave and Google are up to
It is possible to create a new foundation that works on a new browser product based on Gecko indeed. You just can't call it Firefox because of trademark ownership.
It would be interesting to see how it collaborates / competes with the origin project, how fast and how far they diverge etc.
You can if you arrange with Foundation to license the trademark under non-profit terms. Not that this is likely to be done by anyone, but if anyone could do it, I’d like to think the Servo group could.
It might not be that hard to finance Firefox improvements. We should establish a Firefox improvement group. And then set a plan for bug improvements roadmap. Then publish that roadmap and set up a fund for the programmers.
I think what you are asking for is better steering of the Mozilla foundation. And maybe better steering for Firefox development. Possibly with less opinions. We might be better off supporting servo devs instead.
No worries, if you donate to "Mozilla", i.e. the Mozilla Foundation, you're unlikely to fund built-in "campaigns", "studies" or ads. You're more likely to fund sociology-style campaigns and studies that have absolutely nothing to do with Firefox (https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/what-we-fund/), because the development is done by the corporation.
Yet when you search for "donate to firefox" you will first find one of two Mozilla Foundation donation page... Just making it possible to actually donate "to Firefox" would probably help a lot...
I agree with your opinion of that corp which as of today exists solely to employ the highly paid CEO for doing less than nothing. Or something on those lines.
But Firefox (+ forks) is a lost cause. One simple non-statistical reason, I mean it seems so, is that whenever I see that “I donate to Firefox fork” mentioned somewhere, it’s almost always a different fork. So maybe now Firefox will die a 100 deaths.
Donate to Ladybird, Firefox and forks are unfortunately over.
Ladybird has a chance to become a new truly open source browser written from scratch.
next year the fire starts.
> Ladybird is currently in heavy development. We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.
I'll do my part and use it as soon as it's "released" alpha. This is very cool!
I'm regularly building and playing around with it and the progress is remarkable. I don't think they will need 5 years before it's a usable alternative.
Yeah, always thought this was incredibly short-sighted.
You have an orders-of-magnitude smaller non-profit-ish thing going toe to toe with THREE of the hugest and most powerful companies to ever exist -- and generally holding their own for freedom.
It's good to be critical and influence, they do make bad decisions sometimes.
But COME ON, given what they're up against, most of the time I want y'all to just shut up and keep giving them money.
I get why people are pissed at Mozilla, but I do feel like people on HN also underestimate how much hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier. It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.
Like, in general, I find that any HN thread where most of the comments are just agreeing, one-upping and yes-anding while invoking the same talking points and terminology (CEO ghouls, etc.) is probably a topic we might need to chill out on.