[dblohm7]

(Former Mozilla developer here, who worked on GeckoView[1], the modern way to embed Gecko into Android apps, including all currently shipped Mozilla browsers on Android)

From an engineering perspective, the sad thing about this is that the work to finish extensions in GeckoView was essentially completed in the months after the initial Fenix release.

When GeckoView was still being rolled out into release, we understandably wanted to restrict the selection of addons only to those that exercised APIs that we knew were ready for production. Since that time, however, the WebExtensions work was essentially completed -- since that time it has entirely been a business decision to continue restricting the selection of addons available.

I didn't personally work on the WebExtensions bits, but I know that those who did were frustrated that their work to finish fleshing out full extension support was being held back for seemingly arbitrary reasons (that were never explained to engineering).

[1] https://geckoview.dev

[grigory]

(Also a former Mozilla developer, worked Fennec and Fenix)

I think a more nuanced perspective here is that roughly 80% of the work was done, and the remaining 20% require significant effort and organizational energy.

Not all of the WebExtension API surface is currently supported; there's a long tail of infrequently used extensions that require non-trivial engineering effort and often cross-team coordination to implement. However, the actual usage of these APIs in Fennec was very, very low, so the actual bet and the organization sales pitch for this work must be on building a platform, and evidently that's not happening. You can argue that this type of platform work and extensibility is why people use Firefox for Android. You can also look back at the actual usage telemetry (current whitelist is basically what vast majority of people used) and wonder if that additional investment will move the needle.

There's also front-end/back-end engineering required to fully expand existing UIs into a proper "store" experience.

Personally, I think as a matter of principle Firefox for Android should be fully open in terms of what extensions it allows installing.

I believe that will eventually happen - it's where the prevailing winds are blowing inside the org, too! but it may take time for the stars to align, people to have energy to fight through the internal malaise, to pitch work that may not immediately help with any OKRs and is mostly about building community goodwill and sending a message, etc.

As always, it basically comes down to lack of strong leadership.

[iggldiggl]

> Not all of the WebExtension API surface is currently supported; there's a long tail of infrequently used extensions that require non-trivial engineering effort and often cross-team coordination to implement.

While API support in GeckoView/Fenix might be incomplete as compared with Fennec, then again the API support in Fennec was equally incomplete when compared to Desktop, and yet with Fennec there were no restrictions in installing addons.

> There's also front-end/back-end engineering required to fully expand existing UIs into a proper "store" experience.

I suppose you could always try polishing thins up even more, but given that addons.mozilla.org already had (actually still has) a mobile view/responsive layout that seemed perfectly adequate, this still seems somewhat strange.

[dblohm7]

That's fair, I think in GV at the time we were more thinking about Fennec parity, so that's where my thoughts originate.

[grigory]

Right, I think it's pretty close to parity! I vaguely recall seeing some odd API that wasn't supported in Fenix that was in Fennec, but they're pretty rare. Fairly sure you could access history in Fennec via a webextension, and I think that's not supported in Fenix.

I think what's generally missing in these discussions is that the whole project to bring extensions into Fenix was extremely user-driven - whatever people actually use in any significant volume on Fennec, Fenix supports. And the actual UX of installing extensions is just so much more streamlined and nicer in Fenix.

If you purely look at it from the "most value for most users" perspective, Fenix extensions are a great success. And, it's also a success in purely engineering terms - code that's not bringing a lot of value but yet creates an overall maintenance drag is omitted.

What may have been missing from it is the ideological bit - for a platform to be truly open - and to be a viable platform!, it can't have a restricted "whitelist". And I agree with this. But it's not clear that "mobile-browser-as-a-developer-platform" is a sustainable long-term pitch for an organization as small and as resource constrained as Mozilla.

So, there's a tension between these two perspectives. In purely "rational" terms, what's there is good, and there are a ton of other much more pressing issues to work on for the small teams - bugs, performance, missing functionality that can actually "move a needle", etc.

You can make an argument that in this case, the rational, data-driven engineers won. Which is the opposite of what HN seems to think of Mozilla! What's probably needed for full webextension support is a strong, perhaps not purely rational leader that will rally folks and actually push the teams to do the work that may be useless, or useful to a tiny percentage of the user base, in a belief that it'll produce a better future. Which may or may not pan out!

[Dylan16807]

> If you purely look at it from the "most value for most users" perspective, Fenix extensions are a great success.

Except for the part where so many extensions that already have the needed APIs implemented still can't be installed.

Changing that setting would move the needle with minimal developer effort.

> But it's not clear that "mobile-browser-as-a-developer-platform" is a sustainable long-term pitch for an organization as small and as resource constrained as Mozilla.

They were trying to make an entire OS, and now they can't keep the browser shell updated?

There's correction and then there's overcorrection.

Also I want my desktop and phone browser to work together well, so failure to make the phone work pushes me away from everything.

[commoner]

> What may have been missing from it is the ideological bit - for a platform to be truly open - and to be a viable platform!, it can't have a restricted "whitelist".

> What's probably needed for full webextension support is a strong, perhaps not purely rational leader that will rally folks and actually push the teams to do the work that may be useless, or useful to a tiny percentage of the user base, in a belief that it'll produce a better future. Which may or may not pan out!

While I appreciate the development work you and other Mozilla engineers have done on Firefox, this kind of attitude is causing Firefox to bleed users. This argument dismisses honest feedback from users as "ideological" and "not purely rational" because it doesn't align with Mozilla's product decisions. Desiring access to more add-ons is a utilitarian position to take, not an irrational one. On the other hand, continuously ignoring your users is a surefire way to lose them as soon as they find a viable alternative to your product, and that's what I would call irrational.

Allowing users to opt out of the extension whitelist on the stable channel of Firefox for Android is a low-effort, high-impact change that would greatly benefit users who use add-ons other than the 18 whitelisted ones, while not harming the users who choose to stay with the whitelist (enabled by default) in any way. By refusing to make the whitelist optional, Mozilla is making Firefox for Android significantly less useful to users who want to use non-whitelisted add-ons, while not improving the experience for the users who choose not to opt out.

[athrowaway3z]

I'm on Firefox nightly on Android and it annoys me to no end that I can't at least try to enable the add-ons i use on my desktop

[jonkoops]

This pretty much feels to me what is happening to Mozilla as an organization from an outsider perspective. Engineering is no longer as important as the evangelism and management is making strange decisions that lack focus on what the target audience really is.

[dblohm7]

My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit whining and just do what they're told.

[tristor]

> My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit whining and just do what they're told.

Ex-Mozilla PM here, I completely understand what you mean by this and I generally agree. I'll go a step further and say that as a PM I often didn't have a choice, either, decisions were being made above me and I often found out from the engineers that they'd been told to do something different than what I'd just expended significant effort on documentation to support doing. A primary reason why I left is that I felt like my wings were clipped as PM, and that I was unable to effectively build symbiosis with engineering. I'm more technical than most PMs at Mozilla were and had a better relationship (I think) with engineering than most of the PMs did, but it was a fundamentally untenable situation to be in, where I ended up just being a middle-man, which is not what a PM is supposed to be, and it doesn't create good products or user experiences.

Somewhat ironically, I think that Mozilla needs a stronger Product organization to succeed, but that wasn't happening. If PMs are doing their job right, they are there to advocate for the users/customers and ensure that the direction of the product aligns with how people are using it. At Mozilla, it felt to me like there was a very heavy top-down approach and with some exceptions, most product features or projects were focused on enabling alternative revenue pathways without regard to how this alienates existing users. Very little of what I was asked to work on had any chance of moving the needle on market share, which was and is the fundamental issue for Mozilla existentially.

[dblohm7]

> A primary reason why I left is that I felt like my wings were clipped as PM, and that I was unable to effectively build symbiosis with engineering.

I feel this hard. On the occasions that I tried to reach out to product management about things that, for important technical reasons, weren't going to work, I was more or less blocked by director-level management and told that I was being mean to my colleagues for wanting to provide that kind of feedback.

[allendoerfer]

Can anyone defend product management to me? Shouldn't this basically be UX/UI designers working together with developers based on user input acquired in some scientific way (either quantitative or qualitative)? How do product managers provide additional value?

[dblohm7]

IMHO: Product managers are super important: it's their job to understand the market (where it was, where it is, and where it is going), the competitive landscape, and work with leadership on strategic planning.

However, all three groups (UX, PM, Eng) need to work symbiotically. Everybody needs to be sharing information and acting as partners in the work they're doing.

[zamalek]

Mozilla PMs seem hell bent on dictating where the market goes, and it's not working.

[TedDoesntTalk]

> it's their job to understand the market

It’s their job to understand and copy chrome. Fixed that for you.

[sph]

If they're copying Chrome, I'm not seeing it.

Chrome has more or less had the same interface while Firefox rewrites it completely every few years, dropping features along the way each time.

[5e92cb50239222b]

Most of that evangelism doesn't even make any sense to me as a non-USian. I understand the US has its own share of internal problems, but feeding that to the whole world when I just want to download the damn browser seems weird. I won't post any links here to avoid offending anyone, but they should be pretty obvious.

[soundnote]

Not only does it not make sense, they presume they know better than their poor users what their users should see and what opinion on web content they should have. If I want activist browser developers, give me teams like Brave and Vivaldi, thankyouverymuch. Both actually do things that serve the end user in their own way. Insofar as the browsers have politics, they are politics about the browser itself like antitracking, privacy and user control.

Also not American and yeah, if California would stay in California, that would be great.

[wolverine876]

> if California would stay in California, that would be great

Then you wouldn't have most of the IT industry and especially FOSS.

[yeetsfromhellL2]

>especially FOSS.

I just wanted to log in and point out that Free Software got started at MIT.

[wolverine876]

That did cross my mind as I wrote the GP, but the center of it has been and is CA.

[theandrewbailey]

As a resident of a flyover state, I re-read that with California instead of US, and it still made sense.

[pessimizer]

The evangelism is even bad. It was more coherent and convincing back when the browser was better.

[Filligree]

The evangelism is mostly about stuff that nobody outside the USA cares about.

It just looks like the browser is made by crazy people.

[smachiz]

It would seem not many people inside the USA care about it either given their market share...

[pessimizer]

The evangelism was about web standards, web privacy, and user control. They deferred on standards to Google, and became positively hostile to the latter two subjects.

I neither care about woke messaging, nor notice them doing very much of it because I'm not the kind of guy who thinks an interracial couple in a tv commercial is commie globalist mind control. My problem is that:

1) their messages on standards are incoherent and not backed by taking firm stands. The only reason I'm confident that they won't break uBlock (i.e. will hold the line on a portion of manifest v3) any time soon is because they would drop from 4% market share to 0.5% market share in a month. This is not a good reason to be confident, because they lost a similar proportion of market share to get to where they're at now, and they didn't seem bothered.

2) Other than uBlock, they've taken away or left to languish things like javascript enable/disable whitelist/blacklists etc. and fine cookie control, and murdered their extension ecosystem that was filled with privacy protecting extensions, and 4/5ths of the ones that are there now look scary and I wouldn't install them. Too bad they lost the community that would have vetted those extensions in moments in favor of the technical solutions of nerfed webextension APIs formulated by a company whose entire business model is exfiltrating data from unsuspecting users. So much for user privacy.

3) Firefox started putting things into the browser that couldn't be turned off, removing configuration options, and pushing a "wrecker" or "overly-vocal minority" narrative at their users who objected to that. So much for user control.

Also, and I have no inside knowledge, it always seems like the people that write the website copy for whatever their latest PR effort is weren't even at the company for their last PR effort, and don't know anyone who was. I'm getting the impression that firefox is a place you go to burnish your resume/portfolio before getting a real job, which is the reason for the constant stupid tiny UI changes. Do people stay there for more than a year or two?

[TedDoesntTalk]

> I neither care about woke messaging, nor notice them doing very much of it

A lot of it is at Mozilla.org, the non profit parent of Mozilla.com

[2Gkashmiri]

why should mozilla continue to pay for a CEO and "managerial staff"? i don't mean accountants and all, but bosses and "managers" who are not paid by the work done but instead based on "market rates" as i read in some mozilla report sometime ago?

what benefit does having a CEO to mozilla do when insiders and outsiders like me see no tangible benefit? its not like apple which has to pay their CEO top dollar to show they are so good. can the mozilla org not hire X number of developers who would be doing the actual work instead of a single CEO whose job, according to me at least seems to be doing everything in their power to ruin the good name of mozilla? its as if they are paid to take all the bad decisions. strange

[schroeding]

That explains why all add-ons I tested in Nightly with the custom add-on list workaround[1] worked fine (ignoring the jank here and there due to missing optimization for small touch screens).

It's quite irritating, as AMO even asks whether or not an add-on is compatible with Android when uploading.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

[nyanpasu64]

There's one addon that doesn't work fine: Stylus Dropbox login fails due to "can't access property "getRedirectURL", chrome.identity is undefined".

[throwaway0x7E6]

>since that time it has entirely been a business decision to continue restricting the selection of addons available.

yep. a product superior to Chrome would be detrimental to Mozilla's de-facto parent company.

same story with the desktop version.

it's all so tiresome.

[freemint]

Can you elaborate how engineering on an open source product is prevented from doing the right thing™ by management?

[gaius_baltar]

> Can you elaborate how engineering on an open source product is prevented from doing the right thing™ by management?

I have a purely speculative and very pessimistic opinion that is to not compete too much with Chrome and Google, so Mozilla does not antagonize with the source of their money while still providing Google with a "but we have competition!" card that they can use to prevent governments from treating them as a monopoly.

This is almost a conspiracy theory but, hell, that's the only explanation I have for so many management failures and aversion to their userbase.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Google used the same pressure tactics to force LineageOS to remove their permission spoofing.

[Santosh83]

Because the vast majority of engineers working on the code base are employed by the management. They can't just do their own thing & remain employees. Plus the FF code is controlled by Mozilla corp. You have full freedom (as an outside contributor) only in the sense you can always fork, not that you can somehow force Mozilla to accept your patches. Same as Android and all other major OSS controlled de facto by corporations. True community led OSS is quite rare, especially among the market leading software among their category.

[dblohm7]

This is correct. Full-time devs are going to spend their work time on what the people who pay them tell them they should be working on.

[lucb1e]

Because the person in charge of the repository said so?

Just because something is open source (like most of my projects are open source), that doesn't mean the project owner must now accept any changes anyone in the world wants to make. Particularly when this 'anyone' is being paid by a company to implement what this company wants in a repository owned by said company.

That's not to say that open source is useless: if it were closed source, you wouldn't have been able to tell that the code is in the repo, just not activated, and you wouldn't have the option to fork it and enable it yourself and make your own custom build (freedom to study, modify, redistribute, and run), or pay someone else to make this change for you. Try that with Microsoft Windows source code, you can't study or modify that or even run it without permission.

[oynqr]

Getting fired.

[kekebo]

That's sad to hear, thanks for the perspective.