Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla(blog.mozilla.org) |
Reflections on One Year as the CEO of Mozilla(blog.mozilla.org) |
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/01/09/eric-rescorla-wins-...
(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but only ever tangentially on this)
But Firefox stopped caring about that once they threw out their addon ecosystem a few years back. Obviously they've been in decline even before then, but it surely didn't help.
It's a real shame that the browser that once spearheaded the fight against IE's monopoly position has now almost faded into irrelevance.
This reinforces my view that Mozilla doesn't really see itself as an actual product company. It seems to see itself as some sort of quasi NGO focussed on the internet. Which is sort of fine, but I feel they would influence much more of the web with better more popular products rather than policy discussions.
Firefox is so unpopular these days it seems that I am genuinely surprised when I see someone using it. it's sort of like when Firefox first came out and you'd spot someone else using it, but in reverse.
Nowadays running a browser without an ad blocker is as irresponsible as running a Windows XP machine without antivirus nor firewall a decade ago.
Any browser that doesn't implement countermeasures that have been proven to be effective and are available free of charge under a permissive license should be considered defective or having ulterior motives.
Firefox is merely a cow to be milked to fund the social agenda of the CEO.
That said a browser is such a large undertaking, becoming the modern day operating system. It would be nice if they made clear their commitment to carrying it forward.
She'd either be undercutting her own marketing department, or tying her personal popularity to products/projects. Neither would be a very good idea.
It feels like it's just the top brass getting as much money they can before the ship sinks at this point.
Yeah, like firing your researchers. What good was that Servo thing anyways? Don't need no PhDs when you can write endless self-aggrandizing blog posts while increasing your own pay.
I'm sorry, but to them it was a experimental toy that didn't make them any money and they saw it as a cost center.
Yes. Servo represented a major technological differentiation from Chromium-based browsers while remaining competitive if not superior. A triumph in any real sense, not just for Mozilla but for everyone who cared about the future of the web.
>I'm sorry, but to them it was a experimental toy that didn't make them any money and they saw it as a cost center.
WebRender was part of that experimental toy, and it shipped to production years ago.
Cutting costs via way of sacking R&D is a type of short-term thinking that's so devoid of foresight it boggles the mind.
Anyway, I get the sense that they're focusing on UX related to browser privacy. Any reason they shouldn't just switch to Chromium and provide a compelling application around it (a la Brave and all those browsers) at this point?
Rust and Servo were a kind of "swing for the fences" attempt at meaningful technological innovation in the browser, but these days post layoff I can't see their rendering engine doing anything but falling behind.
The most likely reason that Google continues to pay them for being the default engine, is that Google wants to be able to point at Firefox like "see, we're not a monopoly, there's this other browser as well". If Firefox were just a Chromium frontend, that argument would be weaker, so I could imagine Google tying their payments to Firefox being technologically separate from Chrome.
And what does Mozilla of today have to show for it?
A self aggrandising, navel-gazing, tone deaf, hollow templated puff piece which will cause the unfortunate inevitable sad downfall of Mozilla.
There is almost nothing left of this once innovative company, resorting to present a facade as a cover while ignoring the real issue:
Not focusing on making a revenue generating product for over 10 years.
Also, repeat extremely tone deaf in Mozilla laying off their top engineers on Rust, Servo and Firefox and not a single mention of it in this post.
Looks like all those free years of Google money caught up with them.
Not surprising, given she got a pay raise after sacking much of Mozilla's engineers amid continued declining relevance.
But this is indeed completely empty PR fluff.
Vague rambling about data.
Lot's of justification for how awesome she is.
No mention of of an event that shook the company to it's core - laying off a quarter of employees.
Not even a hint of any vision, prospects for a future direction or how to save Mozilla from impending doom.
Why even write a post like this if you have nothing to say?
I do believe Mozilla will be fine for while. Google will keep paying well as a hedge against further anti trust concerns.
To be fair, Mozilla is in a tough position that can't be easily fixed. But this doesn't inspire confidence that they have the right leadership to get there.
Can’t use chrome or edge as Google and Microsoft showed again and again that they don’t value the end users.
Safari (especially mobile safari) is holding back the web technology adaption.
Firefox (since they incorporated some rust code) is fast and awesome and Mozilla is the least evil of the bunch. The accessibility and privacy features are the best out there …
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755252
If you have other browser recommendations. Happy to hear them. Currently I use Firefox for most of my browsing, sometimes brave, opera in case I need to check social media websites (as a container). Huge fan of qutebrowser and nyxt (keyboardbased).
Thanks to Mozilla folks for keeping up the great work.
As far as fun tech things Flow looks like it could be interesting but they aren't interested in being your day to day browser (yet at least) and it's still early in it's life.
For "chromium browsers that aren't a megacorp" Brave and Vivaldi are oft talked about. I don't really see all the appeal of Brave myself but it does have some decent customization options while still being able to be typical Chromium. Vivaldi is the old Opera spirit of "your browser can be a pane window with a web page in it or modern emacs" but the way it is implemented causes it to become a bit slower than other Chromium browsers. Ungoogled chromium is also a popular thing, basically Chromium minus some stuff.
For another fun tech thing "wexond" is a browser built in... Electron :). It used to have some whacky ideas but these days it's turning into more of a "chrome built out of chrome's guts". It has (and still is) been a work in progress and I'm not sure it has a fully reliable security policy for use day to day but it's still interesting to check out for fun if that's your thing https://github.com/wexond/browser-base/releases/tag/v5.2.0 notably it's the only browser I've seen with a built in single line tabs/url/extensions/menu/window-buttons gui option.
This is what happens when lawyers are in charge of tech.
Unless you’re busy day to day removing people from the company in order to synchronize it’s supposed purpose with reality.
The fault is with management that's afraid to disrupt the cash firehose. Not a mishandled CEO hire 7 years ago or the move from the increasingly untenable XUL.
What could they do by disrupting this cash flow? Or is it just nice to imagine a world where Mozilla found a way to become the next trillion dollar tech company that could spend tens of billions on its browser per year and we need something to blame other than it being hard to do so as the reason it hasn't?
Do we have benchmark on the CEO benefit from the same scale of company?
I'm just thinking whether it's a norm to pay that much to get good talent to lead the corp. (I'm not saying she is good or not)
It's a shame, really - Firefox is still the best alternative to Chrome IMO, Mozilla just has no idea how to grow or maintain themselves. My biggest worry is that they'll either get acquired by some shady company or just fade into irrelevance.
we are now in Mozilla's downfall.
I am actually glad that they came out and put that in black and white. Got me to move to another browser. (I do miss Firefox's multi-container tabs and account containers however but I will survive).
The article is specifically trying to criticize social media without sounding like Mozilla is siding with the Capitol rioters. If you want to argue that it's a bad headline, sure - people's continued misreading of it definitely is evidence of that. If you want to argue that it's Mozilla "showing their true colors" and calling for Facebook and Twitter to take over the government or whatever, then I will disagree with you all damned day.
They're not asking for deplatforming, they're asking for more transparency:
Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
From the outside it really is hard to not come to that conclusion.
I'm still a Firefox user and I'll continue to be as long as possible, but like others I feel immense frustration when I look at the dynamic between Firefox and Mozilla.
1. From the post: "Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms.
Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken: [...]"
My interpretation of the above is that they support deplatforming ("silencing or permanent removal") AND "additional actions".
2. They mention "white supremacy". I believe that is a false premise. I am not white/of European descent. I will leave it at that since this is going OT.
That's when I stopped using Firefox. It wasn't that Eich's opinion was mainstream. He kept it to himself and never imposed it on anyone at Mozilla. Free Software stands on Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Conscience, Freedom of Inquiry, and Freedom of Expression. Mozilla developers and outsiders conducted a propaganda campaign to justify a witch hunt, showing their disdain for honest discussion and respect for community members of different backgrounds. No one was allowed to question the premise that supporters of Prop 8 on religious grounds were automatically dishonest bigots and unworthy of associating with Mozilla.
Instead of persuasion, Prop 8 detractors preferred vitriol, revenge, and punishment. The silencing of dissent, the witch hunt to out prop 8 supporters for vilification - the things done in the name of social justice were far worse in social consequences than Prop 8 could have ever been, and we are the worse for it.
I don't know about democratic compensation, but I don't regularly hear about Brave making political statements or picking sides, which matters to me. I still get ads blocked, and I experience far fewer issues.
(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but not on this)
Furthermore, considering uBlock Origin and the underlying filter lists are available under a permissive license, what's the point behind developing & maintaining your own (inferior) implementation?
Even if you just blocked trackers (as does ETP Strict Mode), many ads get blocked because those ads bundle tracking code within them. This, again, would cause there to be little to no incentive for most website owners to support Firefox.
What Mozilla is currently doing makes sense. They are being lax on the standard setting so that websites can still make ad revenue and have an incentive to support the browser.
If Firefox had a lot more marketshare, it might have been possible that this could slide.
And Donald Trump isn't an ally of Internet freedom - if anything, he's been in favor of letting social media companies para-censor what they want. He called Net Neutrality "Obamacare for the Internet", so he clearly also doesn't care if Comcast censors things. Furthermore, the GOP has traditionally been in favor of "private companies can say what they want and you should have no legal recourse for that". As far as I'm concerned, him getting banned from Twitter was him getting hoist by his own petard.
There's also the related problem that any reasonable free speech protections that apply to private fora would almost certainly not have protected Trump here. Twitter had an explicit policy of letting Trump off the hook for things that would ordinarily get you banned, even things like copyright violations. (Yes, Donald Trump and Donald Trump alone had DMCA immunity.) If we had regulated Twitter like a common carrier, they wouldn't have been allowed to have this two-tiered world leaders policy. So Trump would have been banned in 2017 instead of 2021.
I really can't think of a way in which Trump stays on Twitter without some massive intrusion into the way the Internet runs. Either you...
1. Require private fora to not have any speech rules - in which case we turn the entire Internet into USENET/4chan and anyone not as spammy/toxic is para-censored by being talked over
2. Require private fora to not enforce speech rules against world leaders - in which case you've taken away the platform's right to free association without any of the benefits of common carrier regulation
I don't see how either of those improve freedom online. Given that Mozilla's non-profit arm has a stated goal of protecting user freedom, it's perfectly reasonable for them to not have any particular sympathies for Mr. "Obamacare for the Internet". The best Mozilla can do - and what they actually did - is argue for transparency and regulation on how social media companies use their power to shape public discourse.
Because big tech is controlled by liberals they can get away with this stuff without repercussion. But it’s quite obvious that if this happened in reverse...which there is plenty of precedent throughout history...you would see the left complaining.
The reasonable person would think: this is a bad precedent to set and it’s the reason we allow free speech because if the tables turn on the censors, they wouldn’t like it.
Liberals outside of the US find it troubling too.
Anyway, let’s hope the free market solves it in the end. I think tech ideological diversity is changing too for the better.
FF is still the "least bad" choice but I'm still not happy that I have to fix it by installing an add-on where that add-on (or at least the core parts of it such as filter lists) are licensed in a way that would allow the browser to have this fix out of the box.
If anything, I'd say the last decade or so has been right-wingers sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending the oncoming train liberals were warning them about didn't exist, right before getting hit by said oncoming train.
You are correct that "big tech is controlled by liberals" (I'd also include libertarians here as well), but in order to be anywhere close to consistent and get what you want you need to also embrace at least some left-wing or libertarian ideas about money and power. Any one of the following viewpoints are reasonable:
Left-wing: Ideological diversity should be allowed up to intersectionality and social media companies should be regulated like common carriers
That Mozilla blog post: Somewhere between the "left-wing" and "left-libertarian" viewpoints.
Left-libertarian: People should switch to federated Mastodon instances run on the basis of mutual aid (e.g. recurring donations or P2P technology) and centralized social media platforms should be recognized as harmful and shut down
Center-libertarian: Something like NearlyFreeSpeech's "Morons Funding the Fight Against Morons" policy, in which we sell server hosting to neo-Nazis and then donate all the profits we made off them to organizations that fight neo-Nazis.
Right-libertarian: People should outcompete monopolistic social media platforms with less paracensored versions and the government should take no action (This appears to be what you're advocating for, although in practice I've seen this tried and fail multiple times)
What isn't reasonable is the right-authoritarian approach, which is to just complain about "being censored" when it happens to only you, and then threaten to repeal CDA 230 if the platforms don't change their mind. (Don't get me started on left-authoritarians, or I'll be here all damned day.) That's not free speech by any definition - either the strict "Congress shall make no law" approach or the more general considerations of paracensorship that I'm trying to build a theory of speech rules around.
The conundrum that stands out for me though is when one group defends another group’s right to censor, and then that group uses that right, to censor the other. I think that’s where we are today. The legislative restraint of the Republicans to regulate seems they are living up to their principles to their own disadvantage. But this just leaves them to be taken advantage of by the other group to the point of severely damaging the next election prospects of Trump runs again.
Will defenders of freedom always be subjugated to those who want to use freedom to restrict others? Sustaining this freedom is the challenge of humanity and a very careful balance. We’ve seen so many free countries fall to left/right authoritarianism over the ages. It’s almost like we cycle back and forth between authoritarianism and freedom. This century will surely be a big test.
I think we are quickly heading into left authoritarianism which is ironic because the most vocal complaints are of right authoritarianism which I really didn’t see any evidence of the past 4 years. It was just a trendy thing to say. I don’t even know where the accusation of Trump authoritarianism began.
Over a decade ago, one of the best things that Firefox did to compete against IE6 was to include a built in popup blocker that was on by default. Exactly the same criticisms were made.
It was called irresponsible and disruptive, since so much revenue came from popups, and horrible flash-based full screen pop-under ads. But I am glad that Firefox didn't let the pleas of the established market prevent them from siding with users.
I don't think you can compare the web of a decade ago to the web of now.
And I don't think they will be able to make progress if they refuse to challenge existing web technologies. They could do it, but they won't.
In fact, Mozilla seems terrified of losing favor with any of the major platforms. Which means that they are beholden to them.
> many ads get blocked because those ads bundle tracking code within them
uBlock filter lists can provide fallback shims that would be loaded in place of ad scripts to deal with this exact problem. The shim implements a neutered version of the original script so that all the surrounding (non-malicious) code can continue to run without errors.
You'd be surprised. Apple Business Manager does not support Firefox, for example.
> uBlock filter lists can provide fallback shims that would be loaded in place of ad scripts to deal with this exact problem. The shim implements a neutered version of the original script so that all the surrounding (non-malicious) code can continue to run without errors.
My point was that ads were being accidentally blocked and that websites wouldn't get their ad revenue.
Blocking ads would be the point - ads are malware.