[WhereIsTheTruth]

Mozilla did more harm than google, like killing Servo and embedding Pocket, and let's not forget how they siphoned the money they made with their Google contract, they chose to fund their other questionable endeavors instead

When you choose to sell your user base to google, you are part of the problem

[Yoric]

I'm not sure I follow. Mozilla killed Servo, much to my sorrow, because it didn't have enough money to fund it. Mozilla embedded Pocket because it was an attempt to not rely on Google's money to fund developments. The money they received from the Google contract was spent either developing Firefox or trying to find ways to make money without relying on Google.

So... pick one, but you can't both be angry at Mozilla because they use Google's money and be angry at Mozilla because they're trying to find a way to work without Google's money.

[yesco]

Mozilla has to kill the unimportant stuff like servo so it's CEO can get a more competitive wage to support her family with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_sala...

More seriously, if Mozilla really can't afford to do browser R&D, I really have to wonder why they keep dumping money into political & non-browser related causes.

[Yoric]

The political & non-browser related causes are Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is Mozilla Corporation. Related entities, but two different sources of funding.

[CivBase]

Mozilla has lots of problems and your complains are valid. But that does not excuse Google's behavior and it doesn't change the fact that Mozilla is the only viable alternative to Chrome and Chromium browsers for most people.

[PurpleRamen]

What again is the evil and harmful thing, Pocket is doing to the users?

[dralley]

>Mozilla did more harm than google, like killing Servo

Look, no offense, but to do "harm" by killing Servo, people would have had to have been using Servo, or there would need to be a clear path to people using Servo, which there wasn't, really. The parts of Servo which were technically viable in any reasonable timespan were already mainlined into Firefox.

>embedding Pocket

You genuinely think this is "more harm" than Google? Seriously? Not to mention that Pocket is a non-Google source of profit for Mozilla.

>and let's not forget how they siphoned the money they made with their Google contract, they chose to fund their other questionable endeavors instead

"questionable endeavors" like, um, Rust and Servo? You're ignoring the successes while only alluding to failures. I like both Rust and Servo, but say what you will about Firefox OS, at least it presented new market opportunities. Rust and Servo did not.

>When you choose to sell your user base to google, you are part of the problem

Please suggest a viable business model for Mozilla, then.

[plopz]

also killing old addons, i miss classic theme restorer, having to resort to keeping a git repo up to date in my appdata to style userchrome is so annoying

[rascul]

Mozilla didn't kill servo. It is alive.

[kzhe]

…use Librewolf, then?

[liquidpele]

This was my first thought too…

They didn’t even make Firefox, someone else did and they took it over, they had no foresight. They ignored people’s complaints about memory issues for years. They didnt keep one tab from crashing the whole thing for years, followed chrome to fix. Frankly Mozilla really is a dinosaur and seems to lack any real practical innovation.

[dralley]

>They didn’t even make Firefox, someone else did and they took it over, they had no foresight. They ignored people’s complaints about memory issues for years. They didnt keep one tab from crashing the whole thing for years, followed chrome to fix. Frankly Mozilla really is a dinosaur and seems to lack any real practical innovation.

HN has a serious revisionist history problem w/r/t Mozilla.

The memory problems, and the lack of multiprocessing, were both hamstrung by the Firefox extension model, which allowed nearly unlimited customization of the browser, at the expense of nearly unlimited ability to muck up the internals of the browser. It led to any poorly coded extension being able to cause all sorts of memory leaks, sluggishness, bugs and crashes.

And yet techie types were screaming bloody murder when they started talking about "innovation" via transitioning away from the XUL foundations. They didn't care about performance or security so long as their XUL extensions kept working, they said. I remember those threads well.

edit: oh look, there's one in this very thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349686

Certainly they could have made more progress and faster, had they not had a huge existing community to transition, unlike Chrome who had a completely fresh start and far more resources.

[zlg_codes]

Ah yes, 'practical innovation' like Manifest v3? Encrypted Media Extensions? Web Environment Integrity? Google couldn't innovate if it tried. Like any other big business, they care only for control in a market.

[Yoric]

Mozilla very much created Firefox, thank you very much.

Also, on all your other issues, see https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...

[asadotzler]

>They didn’t even make Firefox, someone else did and they took it over, they had no foresight.

this is bullshit. people working on Netcape's dime, myself included, under the Mozilla project umbrella, and with approval from the Mozilla leadership, myself included, created the browser that would come to be Firefox.