[NazakiAid]

I see 0 problems with this. Disney gets their exposure. Mozilla gets some money (I hope) and exposure. The users don't really get negatively affected. I hope this helps increase Firefox's market share to make it more competitive to Chrome.

The fact that Disney use DRM means that Mozilla should not have done this is a weak point at best. DRM is used by most media companies.

I feel like people just get angry at Mozilla for the hell of it without understanding that they have to pay their employees somehow. Also Mozilla could "team up" with any org and someone would find a way to get angry over it.

[ZeroGravitas]

Mozilla is like Barack Obama for certain people, it's a symbol of everything they politically hate.

Teaming up with Disney is like Wearing a Tan suit or a bicycle helmet, it's only the worst thing ever when your politcal enemy is doing it and you have nothing better to complain about.

[fartcannon]

Disney is one of the worlds worst companies. Mozilla teaming up with them is bad because Disney is bad. It's straight forward.

Disliking the choices Mozilla has been making doesn't mean you instantly love Google/Chrome. We're fighting for a better web, not a less worse web.

[dralley]

Google literally works (or worked) on robots and AI for the military and participated in mass surveillance.

But Mozilla has a marketing deal with a Pixar movie with a Red Panda, and everyone loses their minds. Typical HN.

[fartcannon]

Yes, Google and Disney are bad companies.

[threatofrain]

Disney is one of the worst companies in the world? The rest of the world certainly doesn't think so. The rest of the world thinks of Disney as a company that pursues family content like Star Wars. Then we have mercenaries, weapons manufacturers, energy titans, big tobacco, or mega conglomerates like Nestle.

[Nextgrid]

The context matters - when it comes to technology, the web and the Internet, Disney is pretty hostile as a media company that has an interest in restricting user's freedom when consuming media - going totally opposite of what Mozilla stands for (or rather, pretends to).

Nestle or oil companies have their own problems but at least those are completely unrelated to Mozilla's purported mission.

[fartcannon]

Yes, Nestle is a bad company. Disney is a bad company.

Do you guys all work for the same bot farm or something? Just because another company is bad, doesn't mean Disney isn't also bad.

[threatofrain]

If a news report placed Disney in the same conversation as the worst or most morally offensive companies, it would also be appropriate to accuse that outlet of engaging in intellectual shrieking.

[fartcannon]

So you should stop doing that if you believe they aren't related.

[adamrezich]

sure, especially if they owned said outlet

[akmittal]

Really the worst company? Worse than Facebook or all this crypto companies.

I don't think Pixar/Disney have done any damages to web/tech. Only that should matter to mozilla

[fartcannon]

Yes Disney and Facebook are bad companies. Mozilla should strive to be better than Disney and Facebook.

[apostacy]

This is like seeing Obama do a charity event with Halliburton and Dick Cheney.

Disney is probably the company most directly aligned against the values that Mozilla purportedly holds. They spent decades funding projects to kill the modern web.

Has Disney indicated that they have stopped being the bad guys? As far as I can tell, Disney is still pushing their dystopian nightmare world. The least that Mozilla can do is not normalize them.

[AceJohnny2]

> I hope this helps increase Firefox's market share to make it more competitive to Chrome.

It's got a long way to go :(

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

As of posting, it's at 4.18%, similar to MS Edge, and basically in the bottom-rung of the also-rans. For comparison, the real contenders are Chrome at 63% and Safari at 19.84%.

[mintplant]

I'm always skeptical of these reports because they rely on tracking data collection that Firefox has been stricter and stricter about blocking. Inside Mozilla we had different numbers which didn't line up with the public marketshare figures. StatCounter in particular was infamous for under-reporting.

[AceJohnny2]

> Inside Mozilla we had different numbers which didn't line up with the public marketshare figures

How did they obtain those numbers?

[1123581321]

How much higher would the internal numbers tend to be vs StatCounter?

[chrisseaton]

> Inside Mozilla we had different numbers which didn't line up with the public marketshare figures

People inside Mozilla are more likely to use Firefox - big surprise?

[brimble]

They'll push it as an ad pop-up, is the problem.

Modern Firefox borders on being adware, like Opera was back when Phoenix was first released. And it's more aggressive about pushing ads than that ever was. At least those were constant and stayed in a little banner area, rather than interrupting you while you're trying to do stuff.

[jdlshore]

I use Firefox as a daily driver and I've never seen a pop-up ad from Mozilla. Are you fantasizing about what you imagine might happen, or what has actually happened? If the latter, please provide some evidence.

[brimble]

They use pop-up ads for Pocket, or their recent "color ways" thing, or whatever, pretty often. They also like to pop in new tabs and move focus to them, which is at least as bad.

The evidence is using Firefox for any length of time, with default settings (maybe there's a way to turn this off, I dunno, I use Safari most of the time these days so it hasn't been worth figuring out, but happens enough to be pretty annoying even in my limited use of FF on my Windows gaming PC)

[jdlshore]

Pocket only appears on the new tab screen. That's not a pop-up.

Colorways did have a pop-up, but it was an announcement of a new feature, not an ad, and didn't repeat.

I haven't seen the pop in new tab behavior you're talking about. That's so far out of left field I have to wonder if you have some sort of extension installed that's causing your problems.

Maybe it's a matter of configuration—I've been using Firefox since it was named Phoenix and I could have turned off the behavior you're upset about. But a quick web search for "firefox pop-ups" and "firefox advertisements" doesn't show anybody else complaining about this. Given that people hold Mozilla/Firefox to a much higher standard than other browsers, I'm inclined to believe it doesn't exist.

And all that aside, you've still provided no evidence that Mozilla plans to make this Disney ad a pop-up. It's just a fantasy you've concocted.

[brimble]

> Pocket only appears on the new tab screen. That's not a pop-up.

I've seen nag "notification"-type pop-ups advertising Pocket and other things, that I have to dismiss.

> I haven't seen the pop in new tab behavior you're talking about. That's so far out of left field I have to wonder if you have some sort of extension installed that's causing your problems.

It's every single time it updates even if there's nothing any normal user needs to know about in it. Just today I remoted in to a work machine with FF on it, and already open, and sure enough, there one of these was, staring right at me. Somehow I get by OK in Safari and every browser before FF started doing this, without having changelogs pushed at me as an excuse to raise my "brand awareness", which I assume is why they do this.

> And all that aside, you've still provided no evidence that Mozilla plans to make this Disney ad a pop-up. It's just a fantasy you've concocted.

You don't expect them to do what they did with the Colorways announcement? Maybe they won't, but I'd be surprised. I don't know why they'd do this and not push it out over their favorite (and, if counted by audience size and effectiveness, practically only) advertising channel, which is to push it at people using their browser.

[EDIT] Oh man, it just occurred to me that they probably did the obnoxious Colorways announcement in the first place to measure its "engagement" precisely in order to sell this kind of stuff. Otherwise there was no reason to make such a big splash and interrupt people's workflows over putting some UI theming back in a browser that already had it, years ago. I'd wondered why they made such a big deal out of that and pushed it out in such a strange way, but that makes all the pieces fit together.

[yoasif_]

> I've seen nag "notification"-type pop-ups advertising Pocket and other things, that I have to dismiss.

Any chance you have a screenshot of this? I see those kinds of notifications for Safari and Edge (on macOS and Windows), but not Firefox.

[FinalBriefing]

If people using Disney+ get an ad for Firefox, that would be great. Firefox needs more exposure to combat Chrome's ads in all of Google's apps.

[brimble]

Now that might be an interesting arrangement.

I'm still skeptical that more focus-stealing advertising in a browser that saw early success in no small part precisely because it eliminated focus-stealing advertising from the Web, is a promising direction to be heading. But this take is at least interesting.

[Nextgrid]

> they have to pay their employees somehow

What are their employees doing though? If they're churning out BS like this, are they even necessary?

Most Firefox features that gave it marketshare long ago have been left to rot if not outright deprecated. What remains is a terrible Chrome knockoff.

---

Edit: this comment is rage/venting so I'll elaborate: my problem with Mozilla's recent (~5 years?) evolution is that Firefox's power-user features that not only gave it its original marketshare but are the last line of defense in an increasingly user-hostile web are being left to rot if not outright killed off while being replaced by useless garbage like this and while their marketshare continues to dwindle (no surprise there considering any differentiating features are on the back-burner), their CEO increased their compensation to ridiculous levels.

Firefox is the most user-hostile FOSS software I know of - on-par if not worse than a lot of paid, proprietary software. Upon first run it'll load several tabs with Google Analytics spyware, has Pocket, ads/sponsored links and telemetry enabled by default (the latter is in breach of the GDPR) and makes bold claims about privacy while it doesn't even come with a built-in adblocker (even its strongest tracking protection is inferior to uBlock Origin and not even enabled by default). Every update will interrupt your flow with a useless "what's new" tab (and I think the recent "Colorways" update had its own tab/modal in addition to the usual update). I'm worried this new development will also have its own annoying notification next time I start the browser.

[lancesells]

I'm always confused by the Mozilla hate here on HN. I mean Firefox works quite well as far as a browser goes, it's infinitely less evil than Google who is molding the web to their advantage and it's way more customizable than Safari.

[ChrisSD]

It's truly weird and I don't understand it. I mean not to defend Firefox but the HN reaction is almost comically extreme.

---

Chrome: ...and so our company's puppy kicking campaign was a total success. In other news, we're updating our terms of service so that you agree to hand over your first born child.

HN: Meh, I'll still use Chrome though.

----

Firefox: Today we fixed a bug that...

HN: OMG FIREFOX SUCKS. I'M USING CHROME NOW.

[dleslie]

You can use de-Googled variants of Chrome that serve less telemetry, by default, and are more private, by default, than Firefox. They're also faster. And they're open source.

[prometheon1]

Do these forks also undo the changes that google makes to chromium to push their agenda?

[opan]

If variants are on the table, there's also IceCat and LibreWolf for the Firefox side.

[Macha]

Behaviours that break expectations they've built up themselves hurt more than people just expecting Google to do Google things. I would posit that people that feel that way generally do not use Google's products, so it's viewed as not their problem, and also not surprising, when Google does something they don't like, but for Mozilla, it's felt as a betrayal of trust.

Google went through this a decade ago, when people stopped believing don't be evil was something Google cared about.

[Nextgrid]

With Google it's fairly clear there is no expectation of privacy - Google doesn't particularly boast about it, and the fact that there's a ToS and "privacy" policy link below the download button on the Chrome website's page reinforces that.

If you ignore the privacy aspect, Chrome is actually a very good browser and has a healthy ecosystem of extensions. A lot of productivity-enhancing tools are distributed as Chrome extensions.

Firefox on the other hand constantly boasts about privacy which just gives a false sense of security - actually obtaining privacy with Firefox requires not only opting out of Mozilla's own bullshit such as Pocket, sponsored tabs/links and telemetry (the latter should be opt-in as per the GDPR) but also install a third-party ad blocker such as uBlock Origin.

Browser-wise, Firefox isn't stellar - it's slower than Chrome, lacks certain features and the extensions ecosystem is boring with a lot of the extensions that used to make it great have been killed off with the switch to Web Extensions.

At least with Google the business model is very clear, while Mozilla pretends to be on your side and fight for a better web experience while in reality being as nasty (if not more) than the competition.

[yoasif_]

> At least with Google the business model is very clear, while Mozilla pretends to be on your side and fight for a better web experience while in reality being as nasty (if not more) than the competition.

Really? They are as nasty (or nastier) than Google.

> Firefox on the other hand constantly boasts about privacy which just gives a false sense of security - actually obtaining privacy with Firefox requires not only opting out of Mozilla's own bullshit such as Pocket, sponsored tabs/links and telemetry (the latter should be opt-in as per the GDPR) but also install a third-party ad blocker such as uBlock Origin.

Presumably, they are nastier than Google because they have relatively anonymous telemetry data that doesn't include anything remotely private (seriously, take a look at `about:telemetry` and let us know what you find that breaches your trust), or because their sync product is end to end encrypted by default (unlike Google) or because they allow you to run your own sync server if you wish. Or maybe it is because the entire package is open source and extensively configurable and includes legitimately useful features like containers and tracking protection (wait, Google doesn't include that?).

Someone needs to stop taking hyperbole pills.

[adamrezich]

this exactly plus also Mozilla used to be the "underdog" you rooted for when they were still small and weren't doing massive marketing campaigns and instead were innovating and doing cool stuff. somewhere I still have my Firefox logo shirt from when I was in high school. only a fool would maintain loyalty to a brand name despite massive personnel and mission statement changes over the years. I would like to like Firefox and Mozilla again but they haven't done anything to earn that from me in years.

[brimble]

Every other browser caught up on features, and some bad things FireFox didn't have originally, it now has (ads, spyware). I don't really know why I'd recommend it to anyone these days. Early on, I was installing it everywhere anyone would let me, because it was so great compared to the alternatives.

I think it gets emotional because a lot of us used to really like Firefox, and we've watched it wither and rot due to bad decisions and what sure looks like a bunch of parasites feeding on its cooling corpse (and, to be fair, some really tough competition from Google and their massive advertising push for Chrome).

Meanwhile, the organization did manage to spin off a couple really great or promising side-projects (Rust, Servo, MDN) but then pulled the rug out from under them.

[smolder]

I wonder how many of these people complaining have even used it lately. Firefox with ublock is indispensable for me. I can't do DNS blocking everywhere all the time. You can disable any BS experiment stuff they put out through the about:config page. Chrome OTOH is spyware trash with a google account forced login dark pattern built right into the browser. I could do degoogled chrome but I don't see the point. What do I get? Floc style experiments?

[Nextgrid]

I am using it lately (I have to use it, as on Windows and Linux there isn't anything better), which is why I'm so pissed off at it.

I agree with you that Firefox with uBlock Origin is a killer combo, however getting it to that stage takes a bit of effort (why should I have to do that in a browser that boasts about privacy all the time?) and it feels like you have to constantly fight Mozilla - whether it's opting-out of various built-in spyware such as telemetry, crapware such as Pocket or "features" such as sponsored sites/tabs (again, all in a browser that boasts about privacy), redesigns such as the new tab bar, or the constant nags after every update.

[Nextgrid]

It is - my comment is just pent up rage/venting in hindsight, I'll edit it.

Yes, I agree that it's still less evil, but it used to be so much better and clearly going downhill. Initiatives like this don't inspire confidence it's going to become any better.

[kyleee]

i think you are misunderstanding a lot of the negative sentiment towards mozilla, IMHO much of it is frustration rather than hate. people expect all the BS from an evil surveillance ad giant like google, but as someone else said below, all the dumb decisions feel like betrayal to those who have been and are still loyal firefox users

[yoasif_]

I'm seeing active misinformation/free floating hostility in this post. There are ways to express discontent that don't sound like Mozilla murdered your puppy, but that is somehow the tone of some of these posts.

[hartator]

> it's infinitely less evil than Google

The thing is Mozilla get more than 80% of its revenue from Google.

It’s fine to question if they are not just an extension of Google at that point. They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers; while pushing things like https everywhere that makes ads and trackers life easier.

[dralley]

>The thing is Mozilla get more than 80% of its revenue from Google.

Why criticize them for this in a thread _about_ Mozilla diversifying their revenue?

Half of HN seems to hate them for being so dependent on Google and the other half seems to hate them for having profitable (if small) ventures that reduce their dependence on Google, like the VPN or Pocket, or this.

>They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers

This is total garbage and I suspect you know that. If not, please do some more research.

https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi...

https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest...

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#native-file-s...

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

[Nextgrid]

Diversifying their revenue with equally-hostile sources is not really solving the problem, not to mention that if Mozilla needs money, maybe better management of their existing money would be a good start.

[dralley]

What other sources of money exist? Look around you, years of lax anti-trust enforcement has left a wasteland for any tech company that's not funded by Saudi Oil money (YC / Softbank / Venture Capital generally) or a top N tech company like Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft. And the situation outside of tech is way worse.

The gains in the average 401k are primarily due to the 40% of it that is Tesla / Facebook / Apple / Amazon / Alphabet.

Microsoft (Bing) has their own browser so why would they bother with Firefox, same for Apple. Yahoo is dead. Facebook is evil. Google probably only does it for antitrust reasons.

[hartator]

> This is total garbage and I suspect you know that. If not, please do some more research.

I take the bait.

> https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185

Firefox doesn't block Google Analytics. This is not true.

The rest is PR fluff. Can you cite one feature that provide better privacy than Brave that blocks ads and trackers natively?

[dralley]

Yes it does. It isn't enabled by default because it breaks some websites. Enhanced tracking protection is not marketing fluff.

[roblabla]

err, sorry, but what? HTTPS everywhere does not help ads/trackers at all. It _does_ prevent your ISP to inject ads in your webpages, something that was done by quite a few US ISPs. And more importantly, it prevents anyone not between you and the TLS termination from snooping on the contents of your communication, which is a definite upside.

There are a bunch of valid reason to dislike Mozilla, this is a really weird hill to die on...

[dralley]

Imagine thinking HTTPS is a bad thing, jesus... They'd probably be even madder if they found out how much involvement Mozilla had in getting LetsEncrypt off the ground.

[yoasif_]

> They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers

Really? Take a look at https://blog.mozilla.org/security/category/privacy/

[Nextgrid]

The vast majority of these have been doable for a decade with open-source, permissively-licensed add-ons such as uBlock Origin so they're quite late to the party (especially when they could literally bundle the aforementioned add-ons as built-ins), not to mention that a lot of these only work on the strictest level of tracking protection which isn't enabled by default - providing a false sense of security to less technically-savvy users.

[yoasif_]

That is a different argument than doing nothing.

[yoasif_]

> What are their employees doing though?

This really isn't hard to find: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/

[lucideer]

While the comment above is certainly hyperbolic, a Mercurial link listing non-hyperlinked usernames of committers that may or may not be direct employees is a somewhat simplistic & ultimately insufficient response.

Mozilla recently laid off a significant portion of Firefox developers, while announcing that they are "reducing investment in [...] platform feature development, and transitioning adjacent security/privacy products to our New Products and Operations team", all the while increasing upper management remuneration (management had already made up close to 50% of salary expenditure in recent foundation financial reports)

[yoasif_]

> While the comment above is certainly hyperbolic, a Mercurial link listing non-hyperlinked usernames of committers that may or may not be direct employees is a somewhat simplistic & ultimately insufficient response.

The diffs are linked and it is pretty easy to see if the authors have mozilla.com email addresses.

I don't really think it is all that simplistic - you can very easily see what at least a portion of their employees are doing. I think people can fairly easily judge based on that whether they think they are necessary.

Perhaps if the poster had asked a different question, a more "sufficient" response could have been provided.

[pelagicAustral]

whoa! Don't hold back...