[robmsmt]

In another alternative dimension, the Firefox guys 10 years ago would have capitalized on what their users wanted which is mostly around privacy and not being Google. Instead we got pocket, a re-hashed VPN and a bunch of privacy-degrading changes which slowly erode trust.

[mananaysiempre]

For what it’s worth, as a Pocket user from before it got bought by Mozilla, it’s only gotten worse since then. First the mobile apps lost the ability to show full web pages (“Web View”) while offline, which was basically the whole point for me originally. Now the Share Link button has stopped sharing the actual link and instead uses a redirection service (pocket.co) presumably so that Pocket/Mozilla can track you.

[mtillman]

They acquired Anonym and hired a series of ad tech execs over the past ten years with a commitment to becoming an ad network.

[mmooss]

The commitment is to develop privacy-preserving advertising. If successful, it would revolutionize privacy because, as we know, ads and their surveillance are everywhere.

Instead, maybe nobody will work in that project if you succeed in slandering Mozilla.

[aragilar]

You can't have "privacy-preserving advertising". Either you track users to ensure ads get displayed (because the places you'd serve the ads wouldn't serve them if they could/claim more ad views than happened), or you have no clients (because their ads aren't displayed). Broadcast works for ads because the clients can verify that you are broadcasting (and it means you can disconnect the group serving the ads from those who verify "views").

[mmooss]

> You can't have "privacy-preserving advertising".

If you would look at their work and talk about it, it might be valid. This is just someone's hot take they posted on the Internet.

[thoroughburro]

Maybe you missed the part after that statement, where they presented an actual argument. Yours is the hot take.

[AshamedCaptain]

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke Mozilla to remove this feature. I agree with you was the entire reason I used Pocket (literally replacing AvantGo for me).

Now Pocket is basically yet another ... web portal? advertisement platform? social network? I do not know how to describe what it is now, other than useless.

[michaelcampbell]

> I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke

nice... thanks, Mr. Babbage.

[glenstein]

Pocket still saves articles offline. It just saves them in article view. Which is the same as what Instaaper does. I just checked my phone and it has 1.07 gigabytes of articles saved for offline reading.

I don't recall it ever saving web pages in web view (though maybe you used to be able to see them offline when you used the premium plan, but now the premium plan doesn't save the WebView offline? I'm not interested enough in paying for it to find out so all I have is guestimation.).

So they do save, but they save as article view and not the webpage itself. Which is the same as the other services.

[AshamedCaptain]

You definitely were able to save the web view at some point during the "Pocket" timeframe. I explicitly remember even the "notification with progress" that showed up when it was doing that (since I would have to wait for it to finish before turning off the radios). Heck, the Mozilla docs still mention Pocket as downloading the web view, e.g. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/getting-started-pocket-...

> Offline Downloading: Pocket will decide the best view to download by default. If you want to specify whether to download Article View, Web View, or both, uncheck Download Best View.

The article view was a nice novelty 10 years ago, but as it is completely based on heuristics (readerJS-like, in fact I think it _is_ readerJS ) and they have not really bothered upgrading it, it is no longer a reliable way to capture web sites for offline reading .

Frankly, I want this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plucker https://web.archive.org/web/20080903165121/http://plkr.org/ back :)

[glenstein]

I stand corrected! I will note that at least from my use case a saved copy of web view is a rather idiosyncratic user need not catered to by I think any of the other apps. As you do get article view and article view is what I actually want.

But you have reminded me, because I do recall that phrasing that you quoted about pocket deciding whether to choose Article or Web View.

I don't it's a particularly huge loss, and the exasperation from the commenter I was replying to seemed to suggest that they thought saving of any articles had been removed, which would be an appropriate cause for exasperation. But I don't think that reaction is warranted at all, just from not saving web view.

I also think it's not quite right to suggest that saved article view "doesn't work" or is a mere novelty. I just went through a bunch of my articles and randomly spot-checked them, and all of the ones saved to article view are without problems. Although I do recognize there's an occasional issue, but those are the exception rather than the rule. It remains a critical antidote to the unviewable overloaded with ads viewing experience that is the default experience for most people with most web pages. There's also an open secret that it bypasses login screens and pay walls, fir which it continues to be one of the best solutions.

But alas, I was not correct to suggest this had never previously been available.

[mananaysiempre]

Here are the ten most recent pages on my list, with [A] for article view working correctly, [B] for article view being broken, [W] for article view (and thus offline access) being completely unavailable:

- [B] https://spotbugs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/running.html (just completely mangled, starts with “-sortByClass=filepath:”, that is, skipping around half of the actual page)

- [W] https://web.itu.edu.tr/~dalyanda/mssecrets/hotmail.html

- [A] https://web.itu.edu.tr/~dalyanda/mssecrets/

- [B] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/types... (the “Note” inserts with important caveats are gone)

- [B] https://jimbojones.livejournal.com/23143.html (table at the end is gone so the sarcasm in the last sentence does not come through)

- [B] https://advgamer.blogspot.com/2018/07/kings-quest-vi-cliffs-... (screenshot after “At one point in this section it says...” is gone, leaving only the joke in the caption)

- [B] https://mtnphil.wordpress.com/2016/04/09/decompiling-sci-byt... (“Here are links to the rest [of the blogpost series]: [empty space]”.)

- [W] https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ucdigm/taken_me_yea... (I guess this one’s fair, I only saved it so I could later copy it to my quotes stash)

- [B] https://josephmate.github.io/2025-02-26-3200p-cpu-util/ (“and it looked like this: [code snippet missing]”)

- [B] https://docs.rs/crossbeam/0.8.0/crossbeam/epoch/index.html (the actual reference, “Structs” / “Traits” / “Functions”, is cut off)

[glenstein]

>First the mobile apps lost the ability to show full web pages (“Web View”) while offline,

I've used Pocket on and off since back when it was called Read It Later and I don't recall it ever offering this feature (offline access to saved web page versions of articles), at least not outside of the premium service.

So I tried my best Googling skills, which seems to have increasingly diminishing returns with every passing day, but I did find a LinkedIn article from 2017 noting that this archive of web page feature was premium even then.

(Edit: It's worth noting that InstaPaper doesn't offer this either. Nor does Raindrop, nor did Omnivore (RIP) although you could print to PDF and upload it to Omnivore. The only article saver service I'm aware of that does is Wallabag, which is self-hosted.)

>10. Premium options

>So far, every feature has been free. If you upgrade to a premium plan, you'll get other features, such as permanent copies of your articles in case they're removed from the web, suggested tags to make bookmarking even easier, and the removal of sponsored posts from Your List.

>This post was originally published on Proof Is In the Writing on July 20, 2017.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complete-guide-pocket-ultimat...

[mananaysiempre]

Those are two different features. The premium one saved (saves?) things on Pocket’s servers. The one I was talking about saved full web pages on your device. It wasn’t “permanent” in that, for example, if you reinstalled the app and the page had disappeared from the web, you’d lose it, but otherwise it worked well enough that at some point Pocket was the main consumer of storage on my phone.

The setting was “Always fetch Web View”, next to the still-extant “Always fetch Article View”, and searching for that phrase will give you some contemporary discussions[1,2]; alternatively, Pocket’s own docs on the Wayback Machine[3] will tell you that, as recently as 2022 (and at least as early as 2012[4]),

> Pocket will download the “Best View” by default. To override this decision, you can configure Pocket to always download Article View, Web View, or both.

> It’s possible to control whether Pocket downloads Article or Web View:

> [...]

> 4. Enable Always fetch Article View, Always fetch Web View, or both

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/405pyu/i...

[2] https://mfreidge.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/how-to-set-ios-poc... (disclaimer: I’ve never used the iOS version)

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20220801202820/https://help.getp... (I’m not sure it still worked at this point)

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20120712102128/http://help.getpo...

[epiecs]

I can recommend Zotero. You also don’t have to pay for storage if you have a server/device that is webdav capable. I connected it to my Synology nas and the setup was trivial.

[ajdude]

I don't understand how they could be pulling in half a billion a year for a decade and still have financial problems... even if they just put that money in a low risk money market investment account the whole company could have just ran off interest by this point.

[martin_a]

Well, they took over things like Pocket, build that VPN service and Firefox Send and probably founded other projects that are not important to the core of their "business".

If Mozilla would have solely focused on Firefox and Thunderbird we could be in a better place right now.

[II2II]

> If Mozilla would have solely focused on Firefox and Thunderbird we could be in a better place right now.

I have no idea what the motivations of Mozilla are, but it is important to remember that many players in the industry faded away simply because the industry changes fast and those players failed to anticipate those changes. It is entirely possible that Mozilla was trying to anticipate those changes and ended up making a string of very bad bets.

[mystified5016]

Instead they're losing all the advantage they once had by failing to focus on their core.

Being one half of a duopoly is a pretty stable position. Just about the only way to lose it is to fuck around and quit playing the game. There's really no external force that could have destroyed Mozilla if they had just stayed focused.

Mozilla needed to be a browser company, trying to be an "everything" company was a really stupid move.

[wtallis]

The "industry change" that would make Firefox fade away would be the death of web browsers in general, replaced by site-specific apps that leave users with no freedom to control how they interact with a site aside from a complete boycott of the site and its app. Resisting that industry change is exactly what Mozilla should have been prioritizing. Nobody wants Mozilla to support or follow that trend.

[mmooss]

What bad bets? Rust?

[walrus01]

They didn't build a VPN service, they built a wrapper around mullvad, an existing VPN service provider. At least they chose a fairly decent one.

[glenstein]

Right, and that seems a relatively modest commitment of resources in the grand scheme of things. And it seems like the implication is supposed to be that those resources came at the expense of sustaining other parts of the browser experience.

[whamlastxmas]

This whole comment section is full of weird not-true accusations against Firefox in a way that feels really weird to me. Why would anyone want to lie to attack Firefox? Just use genuine facts to express concern, there’s plenty of legitimate concern without hyperbole.

[glenstein]

People repeat this ad nauseum, but assume away all the critical details that would actually make the argument work.

Do we have any assessment, other than people in comment sections randomly just saying so, that any of these actually came at the cost of developer resources on the core browser?

I feel like people have heard this repeated so many times that they keep saying it now. All of these issues were real, in 2016. And Firefox did the thing: they rebuilt the browser from the ground up under Quantum, achieving breakthrough performance and stability that everybody was asking for. And in the present day, the differences are real but subtle, and I don't think they have anything to do with the actual drivers of browser market share, which is about Google leveraging its unparalleled position in search and on Android.

Is the argument supposed to be that if the VPN wasn't there then like the tab snapping would work more smoothly and there would still be 35% market share? Once you start saying these things out loud, it becomes clear how nonsensical and vibes-based the whole argument is.

It's not to say that there's no concern with the pivot into erosions of privacy commitments. But it doesn't excuse the kind of tulip mania that seems to have spread across hn comment sections in reaction to every mention of Mozilla.

I keep pleading with people who perpetuate these narratives to try and make real arguments accountable to our usual standards of causation and substantiation, and they never do.

[wtallis]

> Is the argument supposed to be that if the VPN wasn't there then like the tab snapping would work more smoothly and there would still be 35% market share?

No, the argument is that if Mozilla didn't spend so much money on side projects, they wouldn't now be in such a precarious financial situation that they're making a drastic, controversial change with the stated purpose of ensuring their financial future. They might still have been poor stewards of the core browser project's technical development, but at least they'd have enough accumulated savings to continue without selling user data.

[glenstein]

>No, the argument is that if Mozilla didn't spend so much money on side projects, they wouldn't now be in such a precarious financial situation that they're making a drastic, controversial change with the stated purpose of ensuring their financial future

A couple of problems here. First, despite your protestations to the contrary, the argument for many is about market share. Secondly they're sitting on $1.2 billion in assets, so it's not that they're underwater, but that they're trying to diversify their income away from just Google.

I also have to note that you said no, but then proceeded to make an argument that bears the very form that I was criticizing.

You are saying that side bets (like the VPN) are what compromise their financial position. That's at least a coherent statement, but now comes the substantiating it and tracing out the cause and effect, articulating the actual scale of those investments, where it has the effect that you're claiming it does.

It takes more than just going ahead and saying it and it's weird that I have to keep pointing this out.

[mmooss]

Which side projects and how much money?

One person in this discussion claims they could live off the interest of $500 million invested in money markets. That's the level of seriousness and credibility so far.

Do you have something more substantive, with evidence, or are you just piling on an open source project and the people who work hard at it.

[aragilar]

Here's some back of the envelope maths:

* Anything that goes to the Mozilla Foundation is not spent on Firefox or Thunderbird (by definition). * Mozilla Corporation (which spends money to maintain Firefox, and used to spend money on Thunderbird and is now separate and hence not considered in these numbers) sends some proportion of its income to the Mozilla Foundation. * We have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances which lists total revenue, total expenses and software development expenses (I did find https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/ that wikipedia page, but some of the links are broken, so I'm going to stick with wikipedia's numbers).

I assume (which could totally be wrong) that "total expenses" minus "software development expenses" goes to the Mozilla Foundation or is otherwise not available (note that "software development expenses" would have likely included things like FirefoxOS, Pocket, MozillaVPN etc. but I suspect it's all going to come out in the wash anyway).

Since 2010, that pot that wasn't spent of software dev is $1.89 billion (which assuming $300 million a year on software dev which is above what Mozilla Corp spent every year bar 2019, is more than 6 years worth of funding). That doesn't include donations (as they all go to Mozilla Foundation).

The numbers are somewhat rubbery, but let me leave this note: why is it NOYB that is ensuring that the GDPR is being followed, rather than Mozilla?

[nicce]

CEO salary alone was 6.9 million in 2022. I wonder what else is overpaid…

[gruez]

How much do executives at similarly sized organizations make? Moreover, if you want to cut executive salaries, how do you avoid the "pay peanuts, get monkeys" problem? Mozilla has nearly 1.5B in assets. A cheaper CEO might save you a few million, but cause far more than that in damage to the organization.

[fauigerzigerk]

Perhaps linking a greater share of pay to success would be a good idea. How about $200,000 + $1 million per percentage of Firefox market share? In recent years, CEO pay has doubled while Firefox appears to be in terminal decline.

[nicce]

Excellent post about this: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5053290/mozilla-2023-annual-...

Apparently the rewarding is opposite, to get Mozilla away from Firefox…

[delfinom]

It wasn't just doubling (and more) of CEO pay for Mozilla.

They also layed off tons of engineers. While giving the CEO the pay increase the same year.

Absolute trash of a human being and org.

[ycombinatrix]

A CEO running a non-profit into the ground does not deserve that kind of compensation

[blinding-streak]

They spent a lot of time and effort building a mobile OS for some reason. I'm sure that didn't help.

[Qem]

IMHO it was a worth bet. Had it succeeded we could have one extra mobile OS with much more freedom today. It lost steam, but it would be a shame if not even attempted. It lives through FireOS, despite negligible market share. And I still have my Alcatel One Touch Fire as a keepsake.

[tdeck]

It was bound to fail because they had no way to make it popular. They were in a race for third with Windows Phone

[mmooss]

Every tech company makes many bets that don't work out. If you only invest in sure bets, you invest in nothing.

The rest is hindsight. Unless, of course, you can tell us some sure bets right now?

[glenstein]

Huge missed opportunity for the Mozilla-Yahoo partnership in my opinion. I was intrigued by it at the time, but I think I recall opinionated bloggers on the subject that what it needed was the bare bones, features like maps and an email client and so on. And Yahoo was still at a point where it was relevant enough that it could have pitched in on this front, although that would have required strategic vision that Yahoo never had. A big risk, but the right kind of idea.

It's the kind of paradox of all of these Mozilla criticisms. "Do something to diversify your revenue. No, not that... Not that either."

[nurettin]

Maybe some of the money props up rust

[lrem]

Haven’t they abandoned that and laid off the team half a decade ago?

[nurettin]

They are on the Silver list of Rust Foundation members. I don't know if that's a good thing.

https://rustfoundation.org/members/#silver

[glenstein]

>which is mostly around privacy and not being Google.

I don't understand why you're framing this as though those were mutually exclusive. They did the privacy stuff, and they did the side bets at the same time.

The side bets didn't come at the expense of privacy despite repeated breathless attempts to imply otherwise, mostly here in the backwaters of hn comment sections. That whole argument has been vibes all the way down and it's depressing to see so many people repeating it.

[michaelcampbell]

> > which is mostly around privacy and not being Google.

> I don't understand why you're framing this as though those were mutually exclusive.

They... didn't? If you frame it "mostly around (privacy and not being Google)" and not "(mostly around privacy) and (not being Google)". But even the "and" doesn't seem exclusive to me.

[glenstein]

That's not the thing I'm referring to as mutually exclusive. I'm talking about (1) side bets and (2) commitments to privacy and not being Google.

I'm juxtaposing one and two, but you seem to think I'm juxtaposing the two elements within two.

[do_not_redeem]

What about their side bet of buying an adtech company?

https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...

[glenstein]

A much more valid argument! But also a change of subject.

The previously mentioned side bets, e.g. VPNs, Pocket, Relay, Fakespot -- there's been a narrative attempting to imply that those involved a trade-off from, well, sometimes the argument was quality of the core browser experience, but in this particular variation it's suggesting that these side bets were a reason they couldn't maintain commitments to privacy.

The adtech purchases absolutely do raise an eyebrow, but they have nothing to do with this narrative that attempted to tie the side bets to compromises on privacy. If anything, I want to encourage them to do more of these, precisely because they don't involve any of those compromises and everyone seems to want them to diversify their sources of revenue in non-adtech directions.

[eadmund]

All those distractions cost money, and wanting more money is the reason that they are not maintaining their commitment to privacy.

If they had instead invested that money sensibly, they could have used it over time to do the only thing that the world wants from Mozilla: pay for developers to work on Firefox.

[glenstein]

>All those distractions cost money

It's like a never-ending horde of zombies that keep coming and repeating the same argument. So as ever, my reply is going to be the same. Sure, they cost money, but they cost more or less, and they either do or don't cost engineering resources, and they cost more or less of those as well. Nobody can articulate what the missing browser feature is, that's not there because of this bet on side bets. No one can articulate the relative scale of the investment on side bets and what the impact is on engineering resources and no one can draw a connection between that and market share (if anything, it's the relatively inexpensive resource demand that probably made them attractive strategic options to begin with). And none of this is responsive to actual macro-level forces that drive market share, which is Google leveraging its footprint in the search space, in Android, and over Chromebooks to drive up its own market share.

And those are the things you would have to think through in order for any of that argument to work, not just hand-wave toward their possibility. The ability to trace cause and effect, the ability to assess the relative scale of different investments, these are all like the 101 level things that would sanity check the argument.

[laweijfmvo]

  > Nobody can articulate what the missing browser feature is, that's not there because of this bet on side bets.

The promise to never sell our data.

[ImPostingOnHN]

The option I don't see listed in your post is for the developers to do nothing except for maintain, fix bugs, fix CVEs, maybe comply with new standards, maybe find ways to make it faster.

[mmooss]

> A much more valid argument!

No it's not. Read the article linked: The adtech company is developing advertising solutions that preserve privacy, with the goal of changing the ad industry. It fits directly with Mozilla's core mission and also a long-time project they've pursued internally.

[glenstein]

I want to stress that "more" is relatively speaking. I think squaring the circle on "privacy preserving" ads involves sliding definitions of privacy that I'm not super comfortable with. Certainly a move in the right direction, but, unlike with all the other side bets, if someone is pointing to the adtech stuff I feel less comfortable dismissing them as uninformed.

[mmooss]

> I think squaring the circle on "privacy preserving" ads involves sliding definitions of privacy that I'm not super comfortable with.

What is the definition they use?

I suspect you might be, paradoxically, doing the same as everyone else; piling on based on rumor or impression.

[mmooss]

They bought an adtech company that is developing privacy-preserving advertising, a long-time - and very valuable - goal of Mozilla.

Why don't you (and others) bother to read the link and find out the story. Why go out of your way to say stuff you don't know to bring down Mozilla?

[TZubiri]

Part of the problem is that the users don't pay, so foss devs often get creative to find revenue.

Another issue is that when you get donations, they are usually more than needed, so FOSS devs get to work adding new features which make the product worse.

Consider Whatsapp, after 15 years we can count the added features in 1 or 2 hands. They manage to find great restraint, possibly related to a low engineer-personnel ratio.

FOSS engineer orgs have no chance at staying the course. It reminds me of the sex mantra, if they likes it just keep doing it don't do it harder.

Exact same thing happens with Wikipedia. But the community puts a halt to most initiatives and they have to keep doing spinoffs like wikidata and wikiuniversity and such

[xandrius]

Both Firefox/Mozilla and Wikipedia are actually exceptions in this world as they do get quite a large substantial amount of donations.

So I don't really see this being true. Also foundations shouldn't seek to grow but to keep doing why they do.

See how Wikipedia/Wikimedia, while both getting more money and providing almost the same service, still haven't updated how people can actually parse their content but, at least, didn't start selling data.

[glenstein]

My understanding is that the Mozilla Foundation is insulated from the development work on Firefox. I think it's good to have the voice alongside EFF and others advocating for good web standards. And that's definitely not a bad thing. Especially if the reason for supporting Firefox is the diversification away from Google's dominance in the browser space.

But I think it's the paid subscriptions that are the main channel of personally contributing revenue towards the part of the organization that develops the browser.

[aragilar]

The paid subscriptions would be great if you could get them, I keep checking if they're available here, still not :-(

Does EFF do anything in the standards process? They're not an implementer, and they don't employ devs which work on browsers (as far as I know).

[glenstein]

I wasn't super clear, but I was thinking of their subscription based products such as Pocket and I believe the VPN.

EFF does a number of things such as advocate for web standards that don't benefit Google at the expense of other browsers. They get involved in legal action and legislating and they publish privacy badger, an extension that blocks tracking. My understanding is they also worked with Mozilla to stand up Le's Encrypt as a broadly accessible way to access HTTPS.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Part of the problem is that the users don't pay, so foss devs often get creative to find revenue.

The users can't pay; there is no way to give Mozilla money for Firefox.

[TZubiri]

Donations

[atvcatole]

Donations don't go to Firefox. As the comment you replied to indicated, they've set up their organization in a way so that users can't pay/donate to Firefox.

[zx8080]

Slowliness of the user base trust erosion means annual bonuses for the C-levels. Every year. That's by design. I'm sure they are pro's in burning frogs (or users) slowly. (Until one morning we realize that FF has become Chrome).

[Ygg2]

A VPN could work iff they made it actually usable. To this day I can't pay because VPN is partially rolled out.

[underseacables]

As soon as they got Pocket I cancel my subscription. I love it, but I will not support Mozilla.

[npteljes]

I doubt that these "users" are actually a viable market for a browser.

[atoav]

How would Mozilla have acted differently if it was captured by its commercial competitors?

[_the_inflator]

What do you mean by that "mostly around privacy and not being Google"?

Can you elaborate further?

It is a not-feature ("X without Y and Z"), and it is hard to capitalize on. Also, what purpose can be served today with even the die-hard Linux guys I know are willing to succumb to binge-watch on TikTok or any other popular app so that there appears to be some double standard and/or lost battle since you cannot prevent data gathering in the public service or transportation, carriers, hotels that combined more than compensate for any measures taken by a "privacy first" browser, security leaks not to mention.

Just curious about clarification.