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1602 points rebelwebmaster | 1 comments | | HN request time: 1.859s | 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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1. dependenttypes ◴[] No.24126473[source]
Mozilla seems to continue a self-destructive path. Chrome/Edge already got the casual users, now Mozilla risks loosing its main userbase just so that they can take a taste of being popular again.

While I find the corporate speech slightly annoying this is not even close to being my main issue with Mozilla. I am more concerned with the complete disregard for privacy that Mozilla has (even if we ignore telemetry and the normandy backdoor that you need to fiddle in about:config to disable and you make sure to check for new about:config options in every update [some of them are even hidden by default!], there have been privacy issues reported on bugzilla for years that have gone ignored), along with limiting the options that the user has (no option to ignore hsts, userChrome.css being killed, webextensions being limited, etc), making rushed decisions (such as the move to webextensions before the api was mature enough for the extensions to move over), the lack of openness (despite being promised years earlier the pocket server code is still closed), the general disregard about their main project (some bugzilla issues in firefox are old enough to vote), wasting money on designers (the ui is fine and it has been fine for quite a while, it is as if they want to find ways to mess it up just so that they can justify their wages), and the lack of care given to less popular platforms (such as linux).

> Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?

It does not seem that way after the mr robot and pocket scandals. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23947681