[bsaul]

Mismanagement : could you give some details ? I was under the impression that mozilla was doing quite amazing things on the contrary : keeping firefox the only really usable alternative to chrome (when even microsoft didn't manage to do it), and even innovating in PL space with Rust.

What do you think they should have done differently ?

[ktjfi]

They made the same mistake IE made: around Firefox 3, they allowed their browser to become terribly slow, and so Chrome ate their lunch. Because let's be honest, Chrome was and still is so much faster than Firefox, and that's why they won. You could argue that Chrome has infinite ad budget, and that obviously helps, but I'm a Google hater and I'd gladly use Firefox if it was better or at least on par with Chrome, but it's not.

I understand fixing something like that takes a lot of effort, but they lost a lot of time and money in projects that had no chance of working out, such as FirefoxOS (really? making an entire OS using the slowest browser engine that there is on the cheapest ARM hardware they could find?), Hello, Persona, etc. They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive, the same way I will never forgive Google for abandoning Reader. Servo is a nice project but the chances it will be abandoned after years in development are over the roof.

So now they are focused on their privacy improvements, but they can't stop shooting themselves in the foot (sending your browsing history to the advertisement company Cliqz, remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show, installing Pocket by default...)

Then, if it is slower, and they don't seem to be able to take my privacy seriously despite their claims to the contrary, why in hell should I use Firefox?

[alex_duf]

I don't think it's fair to point how mozilla didn't succeed on their projects such as Firefox OS, Hello and Persona.

Every tech company has failed projects, you can't blame them for trying.

Look at Google: google wave, google plus, google buzz, their clusterfuck of IM / phone calls.

I mean knock yourself out, there's a whole list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...

My point being, Mozilla has to try to innovate, and they have to try these projects. They're being reproached that some failed, but no one is questioning Rust now that it's taking off...

[Vinnl]

They're also one of the founders of LetsEncrypt, maintain MDN, etc.

Furthermore, one time long ago, Mozilla might have thought they didn't need to build a mobile browser, and focus on their main product: Firefox for Desktop.

Next thing you know, Firefox is completely irrelevant on what's becoming the dominant computing platform.

I don't know whether VR/AR or IoT will be a thing, and I'm sure that they will be criticised for their projects there when they don't, but I'm certainly glad they're at least trying to make those open platforms - just in case they do become mainstream.

[TheRealDunkirk]

Good grief. I use Chrome, Firefox, and Safari across Mac, Windows, and Linux. None of them make me think, "Oh wow, this is so 'slow' that I'm going to switch." Is there some objective rating which compares this, and shows Chrome is faster than all competition in every situation? I've just Googled this (ha!) and it would seem that different rendering engines optimize for different things, and there's no clear winner. But plenty of sites want to tell me that Chrome is "the best," so I got that going for me.

[pythux]

Hey, Cliqz employee here. I'd like to clarify a few things since I don't think your comment is accurate.

1. Cliqz is not an advertising company, it's a search company and we push hard for privacy protection in everything we do (private search, antitracking, adblocking, etc.) 2. Privacy policies are legally binding, and in ours we state that no personal data is collected. We designed our features and products to not require collection of any private data (that includes our search engine). 3. I'd like to point out that in Firefox, by default, your queries are sent to advertising company Google. So I don't understand all the heat when Mozilla tries to find more privacy-friendly alternatives to Google. In this case, they replaced Google by Cliqz (again, an independent German search company focusing on privacy, building its own index: no Bing results involved) in Germany, for 1% of the users. That seems to perfectly fit in Mozilla's mission of protecting users' privacy.

[ktjfl]

1st, Cliqz is majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media, an advertising and media company. You don't set the fox to guard the henhouse.

2nd, sending the user's complete browsing history to a 3rd party which is owned by an advertising and media company without telling the user was a terrible idea. It's simply mismanagement by the Mozilla Corporation.

https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

>This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build its recommendation engine. Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit.

[pythux]

Fortunately for our users, the way our technology was communicated by Mozilla is not accurate. Cliqz has never collected the "complete browser history" of any of our users (and it's the last thing we want to do). We have some data collection in place and it is limited to collected anonymous information about search results found on SERP page. If you want to know more about how we do it without putting user privacy at risk, feel free to read this document: https://gist.github.com/solso/423a1104a9e3c1e3b8d7c9ca14e885...

[jammygit]

Is there something a person could do to objectively settle the disagreeing statements about what Cliqz was sent? Your document there is impressive, but Firefox was fairly explicit in its statement. We're in a case of he said she said

I enjoyed the read BTW, somebody put some real time into that sort of system

[pbhjpbhj]

How does Cliqz make money?

FWIW it sounds [#] exactly like a scummy advertising company - I'd address that if the company is not getting revenue through placements or advertising at all.

I notice you said your products are designed to not require private data collection; presumably that means they do it, but could in theory work without doing it. That comes across as weasel words.

# Edit: I mean the name, I don't know the company.

[pythux]

> How does Cliqz make money?

We're currently proposing a mix of client-side private offers (not unlike Brave) and paid products (e.g.: Ghostery premium, and more are being worked on as we speak). Users should have a choice.

> I notice you said your products are designed to not require private data collection; presumably that means they do it, but could in theory work without doing it. That comes across as weasel words.

No. That means that we do not collect personal data. And being able to do so took (and still takes) a lot of research and careful design.

[pbhjpbhj]

>client-side private offers

What's that mean, it sounds like you mean "advertising with discounts in?", not sure what "offers" means if that's not it?

Brave browser has advertising, so it sounds like you're saying your income _will_ come from ads?

That's not an awful thing, so it's weird you're not up front about it??

[pythux]

Since it was literally the first thing I said in my answer, I consider it pretty up-front. I'm happy to give you more details about it since you seem interested. The basic idea is this:

1. All clients download a database of offers locally (they are basically vouchers, we call them offers because they have the potential to make users save money).

2. While browsing with this feature enabled, URLs of pages as well as some other information accessible locally are processed by the extension which tries to detect the intent of buying something online.

3. When an intent corresponding to one of the items in the local database is found, an offer is shown with a coupon that can be used to save money.

What sets it apart from ads in my opinion is that everything happens client-side and that the offer is only shown when there is a clear intent to buy something (instead of all pages with traditional ads). This means that users will actually see very few of them, but that they should be very relevant and useful (you save money).

[pmoriarty]

"Privacy policies are legally binding, and in ours we state that no personal data is collected."

Are you audited by any independent, respected privacy watchdog organizations to make sure that you're adhering to your published policies?

If not, how can I be sure that you're doing what you say you are?

Also, even ostensibly non-personally-identifying data can be de-anonymized.[1]

The only way to be sure that your data can't be used against you is for it not to be collected in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deanonymization

[Vinnl]

Wow, someone from Cliqz! I always wondered: hasn't your company name been tainted too much? It might be because of the circles I'm in, but Cliqz has become synonymous with "privacy invasion", and though I know it's often misrepresented, that's some bad branding for a company focused on selling privacy tools. Is this seen as a problem internally?

[pythux]

Hi, due to few factually incorrect posts, Cliqz is often seen as a privacy invasive tool (at least in some circles), on the contrary we care a lot about users' privacy and continuously develop technologies to help users and other developers adopt privacy by design. Yes, this is sometimes seen as a problem internally and it's very disheartening when people label the products without actually taking a look at what it's doing. There are a lot of people at Cliqz who care very deeply about privacy and we put a lot of hard work into what we do, to make sure it's done right. But as long as we get a chance to explain and discuss what we are doing and why, it is not "too tainted".

[Vinnl]

Thanks for sharing your experience. I hope you do actually manage to improve our privacy :)

[jerryzh]

Actually there is no proof showing Chrome works more efficiently than Firefox, especially provided with same computer resources. BTW, Thunderbird is restarted.

[Nursie]

Proof? I don't know, but anecdotally... My late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina is still my work machine, I attach it to two screens, one of which is a 4K screen. Firefox struggles to play embedded video on that screen. Chrome does not. FF also seems to have a lot of weird copy/paste issues with the Slack web client and Jira.

I really don't want to use chrome but FF ended up annoying me so much I went back to it.

(Safari almost worked... but the outlook webmail we use didn't play well, and with safari I had to refresh and re-login every hour or so, rather than daily on other browsers)

If this sort of experience is true for most users, then it's bad.

[tapoxi]

If it did I'd still be using it. I've always seen this UI lag with Firefox (on macOS) so while I'd love to support them to prevent a monoculture, I get worse performance and no obvious benefits out of the switch.

(Sure, "not Google" but I can also just use Safari.)

[dgzl]

I really think Firefox's performance is better than what you're alluding.

[sergiosgc]

On Google properties Chrome is noticeably faster. Everywhere else, I'd wager Firefox is faster and less resource hungry.

[lucasverra]

on my rMBP 13 late 2013, im on safari > ff > chr.

Safari works pretty OK with G properties, except offline editing of docs

[newsgremlin]

I switched about a month ago and I honestly couldn't tell a difference. The only thing people have to get over with Firefox is the browser controls and settings.

[gnomewascool]

> Hello

That was an experimental, lightweight Skype alternative, that didn't take too much effort to build beyond introducing WebRTC into Gecko (which they had to do anyway) and which probably helped them iron out bugs in Gecko's WebRTC implementation. Also, for the record, when I used it, it worked mostly fine.

> Persona

It worked, but almost nobody used it (you could argue that that is "not working out" from a social, if not technical point of view).

> They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive

They didn't abandon it. They transferred it into other people's caring hands. They still provide some support for it under the Mozilla umbrella and they still coordinate (to some extent) with Thunderbird's current developers when modifying the common base Firefox and Thunderbird depend on.

> Cliqz

Partially true, if rather overblown. It affected a tiny number of people (~ 1 % of new users, in only one country), the data was anonymised and the code running on the server to which the data was sent was FOSS, though obviously there's no definitive proof that Cliqz didn't substitute it with malicious code. It was an order of magnitude less bad than what Google always does and considering that the point was to build an alternative to Google search, if it had worked out, it would have been a massive privacy gain. The most disappointing part was it being opt-out, not opt-in, for the randomly selected users.

> remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show

That was a very silly (and stupid) gimmick, but it didn't invade your privacy.

> installing Pocket by default

Having Pocket installed by default is not a privacy violation, even if it is slight bloat-ware.

[ycombinete]

When was the last time you checked/researched whether or not chrome is faster?

[ed_balls]

FF is good on my mobile. I use it as well as Brave. On my laptop I use mostly Chrome and sometimes FF.

I'd imagine Apple will team up with Mozilla, so we would have two major browser engines.

[stingraycharles]

They have made some weird decisions to include some marketing campaigns into Firefox once, and I believe the whole Pocket thing didn’t land well with many of their users.