Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something (can't even remember what it was).
I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.
But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.
So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.
As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:
And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible
Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now? Mozilla is surviving on the mercy of Google money, it's not a viable strategy.
Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.
I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.
> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)
The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as:
* Wanting niche features that benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.
* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).
* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)
* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.
These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.
Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.
First of all thanks for posting what's on your mind and everything you did at Mozilla. Sorry to hear you are burnt out, hope you get better with time.
I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around.
I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional.
That would be JR Conlin, national treasure. Worked with him on YDN in 2007 and Netflix in 2009; veterans of the Netflix API team will never forget his hack day entry, which was "Mac and Me" playing on a toaster oven.
They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
> We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded.
Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this:
There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile.
This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already.
I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work.
The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.
Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.
Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something (can't even remember what it was).
I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.
But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.
So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.
Do Mozilla really still need volunteers in this day and age? Tbh even in 2015. They are established enough to not need to exploit goodwill.
As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
Respect. This is what Firefox could have been.
In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai:
browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled, browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled, browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled, pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload, pdfjs.enableGuessAltText
A bit of community feedback later, and we've got one big "off" button, and me wondering which footgun the executives will shoot themselves with next.
And those are some of the better named config options. Some are pretty opaque, as are their values (and often poorly documented). You can tell there isn't an edict to make config options highly accessible
Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a difference? Would more people use it, would they be a healthier organization now? Mozilla is surviving on the mercy of Google money, it's not a viable strategy.
Firefox usage has been declining for a decade. Doing nothing, or just doing the exact same as before, is popular with its fans (including me). But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback.
I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.
Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.
AI is not, and was not the reason why the average user moved away from Firefox.
AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.
Oh, I agree - firefox was losing market share long before AI was a thing.
I meant to use that as a recent example of the kind of decisions that Mozilla leadership repeatedly makes, that don't match up what their users want.
> But wouldn't it perhaps just have lead to an even more rapid decline?
A product like Firefox depends on word of mouth. There was not a *single* announcement or decision by the Mozilla leadership in the last 10 years or so which would make me recommend Firefox to others, instead every single time it pushed me away a little bit more. I have hardly ever seen such a fundamental alienation of their core audience, even for Silicon Valley standards ;)
The problem is what "enthusiasts" want is typically opposed to what is needed at the time to improve the product, such as:
* Wanting niche features that benefit other people than those in the enthusiast core, thus preventing the company from gaining market share and revenue.
* Ever-increasing expectations in terms of visible feature delivery (e.g. e10s was widely seen as a failure despite being foundational to move off a single thread model and increase browser responsiveness).
* General conservativeness in terms of anything that breaks workflows (famously [1], but also see the criticism of Firefox redesigns over the years, etc.)
* Most importantly, lack of proposals for monetization from said audience (donations do not cut it and smaller and more important projects such as OpenSSL, etc. have also been underfunded from time to time, so nvm funding a browser's development), while also opposing the typical monetization mechanisms, e.g. ads.
These things end up constraining a company from spending more resources to improve a growing product, as they don't have any. While more capital-intensive industries such as phone manufacturers often just choose to appeal to mass market at the cost of giving up their enthusiasts[2], Mozilla always wanted to hedge its bets, and has failed to go in either direction.
Therefore, it is not unexpected that Mozilla is failing, and only survives through whatever meager donations come through, and revshare from Google by placing them as the default search engine.
[1] https://xkcd.com/1172/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJgTKx-rg18
First of all thanks for posting what's on your mind and everything you did at Mozilla. Sorry to hear you are burnt out, hope you get better with time.
I've been a loyal Firefox user since forever - reading, writing, web dev I do is always in Firefox. It's a first app I always install. I'm grateful Firefox exists, and the world (at least mine) would be much worse if it wasn't around.
I don't like Mozilla is taking money from Google - I'd prefer if it was all community driven, to the point of a community owned co-operative, but I'm probably delusional.
Yet, I'm hopeful for the future.
I think Mozilla started getting nuts the day they ventured with Firefox OS. To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.
Who is this person?
That would be JR Conlin, national treasure. Worked with him on YDN in 2007 and Netflix in 2009; veterans of the Netflix API team will never forget his hack day entry, which was "Mac and Me" playing on a toaster oven.
What is he notable for in the context of Mozilla?
Some mozilla software developer I guess.
They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.
> They still have not fixed their build system.
FWIW the Firefox build instructions [1] look a lot saner to me than the Chromium build instructions [2].
[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.ht...
[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
> We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded.
Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that down" (in part also due to the rise of AI slop spam, which is indeed annoying, but Kling is a strange guy really). I gave up on Mozilla many years ago already, though. The key insight I had was when one mozilla dev explaind that all linux guys use systemd + pulseaudio. So, using youtube (which annoys me because the evil Google empire controls it as well), I had no audio on firefox. Chrome on the other hand played fine (I only used alsa). So, the same machine, almost the same software stack (excluding pulseaudio; I did use system back then though), means that one browser plays audio fine, the other does not. Now, I could recompile firefox and enable non-pulseaudio audio ... but look at this:
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...
mozconfig? In 2026? Seriously?
There is allegedly a python-only alternative. I tried it. It did not compile.
This is not the only issue I had. Many more problems existed with Mozilla and I also think that becoming addicted to Google money killed Mozilla. It is a dying shadow and has been for a long time. Yes, we need alternatives, but Mozilla failed us many years ago already.
I don't have a real solution against the evil Google empire. It's not even only Google; many companies are part of the evilness. I am almost beginning to sound like Richard Stallman, though I don't feed off of my feet - but the main point here is more to have real alternatives. Firefox is useable, no doubt, but it's not going to change the control Google has over the world wide web. We need something much more fundamental - control by the people. Everyone sees what Google and co are doing. Something has to change fundamentally, to stop Google parasitizing on the rest of the world. But for this you also need to have software alternatives that work.
The only thing I can come up with is to make all components of the browser/www stack as modular as possible and to also come up with alternatives. W3C also betrayed us when they demanded DRM into everything. I don't want that. Next in line will be mandatory age sniffing. This is currently ongoing. It will be extended. Systemd already added support for it; Poettering tried to do damage control but clearly failed: and reddit censoring like crazy - https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rzykul/the_system... as is typical.
Options have a maintenance cost. Pulseaudio is the current Linux audio stack, like plain ALSA was before when it replaced OSS.
Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative.
Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes.
Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.