←back to thread

1602 points rebelwebmaster | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(49): >>24122207 #>>24122515 #>>24123409 #>>24123463 #>>24123818 #>>24124348 #>>24125007 #>>24125088 #>>24125320 #>>24125514 #>>24125773 #>>24125821 #>>24126133 #>>24126145 #>>24126438 #>>24126473 #>>24126826 #>>24126868 #>>24127039 #>>24127289 #>>24127324 #>>24127417 #>>24127727 #>>24127795 #>>24127850 #>>24127935 #>>24127974 #>>24128022 #>>24128067 #>>24128168 #>>24128400 #>>24128605 #>>24128708 #>>24128913 #>>24129190 #>>24129234 #>>24129821 #>>24130155 #>>24130218 #>>24130519 #>>24130938 #>>24130967 #>>24131699 #>>24131761 #>>24132064 #>>24133337 #>>24140947 #>>24145537 #>>24168638 #
renewiltord ◴[] No.24123463[source]
Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them.

People in this business always discover this stuff and then they're always like "Why do they hate me?". The answer is "they never wanted to love you. They want to watch you fall". Like DDG with their favicon service (which HN billed as some sort of nefarious tracker).

Vanta bypassed all this by not playing to the Security Puffery crowd. Usually a quick way to do that is to require money because the Security/Privacy Puffery crowd doesn't have any.

I'm a happy Firefox and Chrome user. Honestly, it's been working fine for me.

replies(13): >>24125193 #>>24125928 #>>24125957 #>>24125989 #>>24126204 #>>24126613 #>>24126792 #>>24126825 #>>24127325 #>>24129320 #>>24129459 #>>24130733 #>>24132534 #
kibwen ◴[] No.24125193[source]
> Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them.

Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users; casual users are more numerous and less demanding. Chrome won the war a decade ago when it decided to focus aggressively on casual users, leaving Mozilla to deal with the fractious dregs of the power user market.

replies(8): >>24125666 #>>24126018 #>>24126351 #>>24126518 #>>24128767 #>>24129166 #>>24129241 #>>24129685 #
qzw ◴[] No.24126018[source]
Sure, power users can be a pain in the ass, but if everything were up to casual users, we'd all still be on IE 1x, i.e., whatever that wraps the same broken, insecure, non-standard-compliant MSHTML engine in the shiny Windows UI toolkit-du-jour. Power users were the first to pick up Firefox when it was split off from the old Mozilla suite, and power users were the ones who began using and recommending Chrome when it was the upstart browser. If Firefox survives and (hopefully) returns to a reasonable market share, it'll probably be thanks to power users who stuck with it or gave it another chance.
replies(4): >>24126214 #>>24126419 #>>24126899 #>>24127455 #
themacguffinman ◴[] No.24126899[source]
Except Chrome was significantly better in ways that even casual users could see and be sold on: simplicity and speed, which initially turned away a significant number of power users who heavily rely on and prefer a wide variety of addons and settings to customize Firefox.

Power users are certainly valuable for spreading the word but it's only one way, you can also actually advertise and market the thing like Google did. And even though power users can spread the word, you still need a superior product for casuals to actually win them over. How long has HN and other forums been beating the drum for Firefox now? Has it actually made a difference in their declining marketshare (at least for desktop, not sure about mobile)?

I don't think it has, and I don't think it ever will. If Firefox survives and resurges in popularity, it will be for a better, more polished, more optimized, slicker product for casuals. And many power users will hate them for it. Well, that's just my prediction.

replies(2): >>24128003 #>>24128035 #
ocdtrekkie ◴[] No.24128035{3}[source]
This is a very revisionist explanation of how Chrome succeeded: Simply put they paid to be injected into Adobe Reader and Flash Player installs. When Android came around, every manufacturer was required to include Chrome as default.

None of this had to do with product quality.

replies(5): >>24128140 #>>24128208 #>>24128531 #>>24129704 #>>24130764 #
untog ◴[] No.24128531{4}[source]
That doesn’t match my memory at all. I recall a lot of word of mouth between non tech friends about “this new fast browser Google made”. At the time it really was eye-poppingly fast by comparison to the competition.
replies(2): >>24128812 #>>24133105 #
bronson ◴[] No.24128812{5}[source]
Plus Google‘s browser cared deeply about developer tools. They were a generation better than anyone else at the time and had great support/evangelism. That alone converted my team of 15 in a year.
replies(1): >>24129539 #
1. andrewflnr ◴[] No.24129539{6}[source]
Were they not already using Firebug? I remember seeing Chrome's devtools and thinking "oh, like Firebug but built in."
replies(1): >>24134807 #
2. bronson ◴[] No.24134807[source]
Firebug was pretty buggy, especially the JS debugger. Lot of upgrade-and-break and downloading different versions. Dev Tools just worked.