Comment by thoroughburro 3 days ago
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.
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...
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.