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1602 points rebelwebmaster | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.774s | source
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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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behnamoh ◴[] No.24125943[source]
> Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close...

Source? Based on which criteria? If you have even the slightest belief in the wisdom of the crowds, you'll realize that there must be something really appealing in Chrome which has resulted in its 68% market share. Compare that to Firefox's 7%.[0]

[0]: https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx

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1. f1refly ◴[] No.24126390[source]
There's no secret sauce to chrome. It's single super power which made it the standard for non-tech users is googles ability to slap a bar on every single one of their sites telling users to use chrome. Google told them, so that's what they did. End of story.
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2. behnamoh ◴[] No.24126559[source]
I don't think that's the whole story. Chrome was more user friendly from the beginning. It took FF years to drop the rigid, Windows XP style UI and become more user friendly. At the same time, FF doesn't offer the same level of syncing your data across all your devices like Chrome does. And when it comes to system resources, say what you want about Chrome's tab memory management, but FF on macOS is not a pleasant experience either (extensive CPU usage and heating problems).

I have tried to switch back to FF (and even to Edge), but every time I realize Chrome - despite all its problems - is a much smoother experience. YMMV.

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3. kome ◴[] No.24129060[source]
Chrome also used A LOT to shady patters to get installed as a default browser on windows, mostly using third-party installers of unrelated software.

it's a shame, really.

4. belorn ◴[] No.24129595[source]
In the early day every driver CD and a large portion of online installers had chrome bundled and pushed. Pretty sure almost every preinstalled system also had chrome. If I don't miss remember, even game installers occasionally pushed chrome. It was very noticeable and I remember quite well the annoyance of having to go to advanced setting and unselect chrome several times during reinstalls of windows 7.

They did have a different memory profile (might still have one in macos, I wouldn't know since I don't use mac), and the UI is each to ones own, but I few programs outside of AOL installers has been as pushy as chrome during the beginning.

5. gsich ◴[] No.24130906[source]
User friendliness was not the problem. Neither was the XP style.