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1602 points rebelwebmaster | 10 comments | | HN request time: 4.879s | source | bottom
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dblohm7 ◴[] No.24122017[source]
[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.]

One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards.

OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome."

Really? That's what's got you bent out of shape?

Sure, Mozilla has made mistakes. Did we apologize? Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?

People want to continue flogging us for these things while giving other companies (who have made their own mistakes, often much more consequential than ours, would never be as open about it, and often learn nothing) a relatively free pass.

I'm certainly not the first person on the planet whose employer has been on the receiving end of vitriol. And if Mozilla doesn't make it through this next phase, I can always find another job. But what concerns me about this is that Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet. To see it wither away because of people angry with what are, in the grand scheme of things, minor mistakes, is a shame.

EDIT: And lest you think I am embellishing about trivial complaints, there was a rant last week on r/Firefox that Mozilla was allegedly conspiring to hide Gecko's source code because we self-host our primary repo and bug tracking instead of using GitHub, despite the fact that the Mozilla project predates GitHub by a decade.

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mrweasel ◴[] No.24125773[source]
I'd grant you that Mozilla is being held to a higher standard, to high perhaps. That's not really my complaint about Mozilla. The thing is, I freaking love Firefox. Developer can't speak highly enough about MDN, and with good reason. Yet, the thing we see as users and donors to Mozilla is Pocket, FirefoxOS, an idiotic VPN and other pointless project. Thunderbird can apparently just roll over and die for all the Mozilla Corp. cares.

What annoys me with Mozilla, again as much as I love Firefox and the spirit of Mozilla, is that the corporate leadership seems to ignore the project that works. New focus my ass, Mozilla needs to refocus on Firefox. Maybe you do, but it certainly doesn't seem like it from the outside.

Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close, yet corporate Mozilla seems to have forgotten about it, it's never a highlight in Mozilla Corp. communications, but it should be.

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1. Hackbraten ◴[] No.24126036[source]
> Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close

In what sense? Feature set, user experience, security, stability, performance, developer experience?

Genuinely curious. I switched from Chrome last year and have yet to find a single aspect in which I’d say Firefox would lead, with the exception of privacy.

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2. criddell ◴[] No.24126124[source]
As a user it feels like all of the major browsers have been good enough for quite a while now. Is there anything other than bug fixes and performance improvements happening in that space these days?
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3. Sebb767 ◴[] No.24126333[source]
Crash safety. If Chrome crashes, you get one single, short lived pop up to restore your tabs. If you miss it or can't click it for some reason, though luck.

Firefox, on the other hand, will simply always reopen your tabs and prompt you, in case the crash was its fault. In fact, losing ~50 open tabs in Chrome was what made me switch.

replies(1): >>24126904 #
4. joshuaellinger ◴[] No.24126738[source]
Render consistency.

I was doing automated image capture of some data sites and diffing them to see if they changed. Chrome would jitter. Firefox drew the same bits every time.

5. tuankiet65 ◴[] No.24126904[source]
The tabs are still there even if you miss the prompt. Either press Ctrl-Shift-T, or select the three dots => History and the tabs are there, under the "Recently closed" section. The caveat is that you have to restore the tabs before you've browsed enough pages that the tabs are pushed out of the recently closed tabs. Also, I simulate Chrome crashing by sending SIGSEGV signal to it, but I'm pretty sure this applies even if Chrome crashes for real.
replies(2): >>24127521 #>>24128270 #
6. stjohnswarts ◴[] No.24127145[source]
web standards are always evolving and updating. A lot of users don't appreciate that it's happening but it is. Firefox and Chrome do a pretty good job of keeping up. Chrome also adds a lot of proprietary additions to push the envelope as well as differentiate Chrome as well.
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7. Sebb767 ◴[] No.24127521{3}[source]
For a lot of crashes (mostly due to X bugs - I have an "interesting" setup) I couldn't find those tabs in recently closed. I'll try to simulate it and maybe open a bug report; if it's only in my case this might be less of a general issue than I thought.
8. kps ◴[] No.24128270{3}[source]
There are several URLs to crash Chrome in various ways, listed at the bottom of chrome://chrome-urls
9. asdff ◴[] No.24128687[source]
Well we are seeing major browsers limit control in recent updates, so that's the new major browser race it seems. Safari and Chrome are locking down what you can do with extensions, which limits what you can do to protect your privacy online.
10. criddell ◴[] No.24132979{3}[source]
> A lot of users don't appreciate that it's happening but it is.

That kind of backs up what I was saying, doesn't it? The browsers are good enough for most of the users most of the time and the new features matter to fewer and fewer people.