The Mozilla Manifesto
mozilla.orgSigh. Looks like Mozilla management hasn’t been able to sense the zeitgeist, after their latest downsizing, so let me spell it out for them:
Dear Moz://a management: Everyone is already on board with your ideals of open Internet. What you need to do is get your house in order and focus on your core competency i.e. the web browser and related tooling. You won’t get a seat at the table of Internet biggies if you’re a has been entity.
> Everyone is already on board with your ideals of open Internet.
I don't think that's the case. Increasingly content is being placed in walled gardens which you don't get full access to that content unless you have an account. Google is still pushing AMP. Chrome is becoming the new IE, and sites that 'work best' or only work with Chrome are not uncommon. Those (and many other) factors don't indicate to me that everyone is on board with the ideal of an open Internet.
I think most people can (and do) agree with these ideals stated in the abstract, but still do things that violate them in their jobs / real life because of practical considerations such as pursuing a profit.
Not unlike how most people understand the dangers of climate change, but continue to drive cars, fly, use air conditioning etc.
Or, stated another way, we are all hypocrites to some extent.
Or, stated yet another way, we all suck at coordinating. It's a problem with our species. If something that requires self-sacrifice starts yielding value only after everyone (or majority) does it, it simply doesn't happen, not spontaneously.
The history of human civilization - of governments, religions and movements, of gangs and corporations and worker unions - can be seen as attempts to surmount our inability to coordinate at scale. Laws, shared beliefs and ideologies, shunning, taboos, money - they're all tools for creating and maintaining coordination in large groups.
A classic essay on that topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
Or, stated another way, it's the tragedy of the commons.
> Chrome is becoming the new IE, and sites that 'work best' or only work with Chrome are not uncommon.
I think this has a lot to do with the amazing devtools in Chrome.
moz management is how they got here in the first place. They hire through nepotism and pay themselves lavish salaries. No incentive but to just coast and keep calling themselves fighters of systemic racism and freedom saviors of the internet.
Does Mozilla even follow their own Manifesto?
> Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy?
> Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource.
We are still waiting for Pocket's server source code...
> Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.
What does that even mean? They stopped at 9 and had no idea how to make it to 10 and ended up with wrapping buzz words into one sentence?
> So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy?
That's not their entire approach to privacy.
How would you have them exist? There aren't enough people willing to pay for a web browser in 2020. There aren't enough unpaid volunteers to work for free and outcompete Chrome.
What would you have Mozilla do? They're trying to develop other services that can actually make them money so they don't need Google's money to exist, and people here are shitting on them left and right for this.
Could Mozilla be managed better? Yes of course. Is there some obvious grand strategy that would save them if only they didn't miss it? No, I don't think so. "Just focus on the browser", say people who haven't paid for a browser since Opera, if ever. Ha.
Mozilla are not in a good strategic position. Public trust and technical expertise are the only major assets they have, and those are not directly monetizable to the tune of $100M. I do hope very much that they figure out how to leverage these assets into more neutral, more grassroots profit streams before the next renewal of google's deal. But let's not demonize them unnecessarily, they have it hard enough as it is.
In web technologies they're the last ones on "our side", pretty much.
It is may look like the reasonable compromise on the surface but it really isn't.
Manifestos are about principles not pragmatic approaches, taking a stance is not free or easy, look at the stance RMS takes on open source and GPL for example. Had RMS and other pioneers in the open source movement did not take such ideologically driven stance at the expense of pragmatism , we may have parts of BSD maybe today but not the GPL driven open source ecosystem that all of us benefit from, even now it costs open source a lot look at linux and zFS .
You can apply the same argument with Google early on, they were hugely influential in reducing the amount and type of ads we were forced to see. They have developed great open source projects and provided a lot of good quality free services all funded by ad revenue, how is it really different from Mozilla then ? so should I see only those contributions and ignore what Google really does on privacy ?
Being uncompromising in the face of great difficulty is the only way of real, sustainable change and revolutionize how things work, had Google stuck to "Do no Evil"(whatever that meant to them) no one would worry about using Chrome, if organizations loose focus they only really exist to make money for employees/ shareholders/ management.
Also this is not sustainable model, that search revenue is going to keep dropping as they keep loosing market share, inevitably they are either going to drop Firefox altogether or going to base it of Chrome and shelve most of the team. If Microsoft cannot afford to develop Edge as separate browser, how long Firefox will last in this structure ?
We are better off forking off in a community funded model before the inevitable happens and try to build a sustainable project around that. There are enough companies who can donate few million dollars a year each to make sure Google is not the only player in town. Wikipedia raises more than $120 M / year, it is not inconceivable, that Moz foundation can raise a reasonable amount to fund the development of the key projects.
I've never heard any person outside of tech forums complain about Firefox's default search engine being Google. Even those people who are privacy conscious who complain about google and facebook privacy all the time. Not once in so many years have they complained about Firefox privacy, in fact the opposite sentiment is prevailing among those people.
I don't think Firefox is failing to retain market share because their values are compromised. I think it's because Google is outspending them in technical work. And doing all they can to promote Chrome. And optimizing their own products for Chrome only.
I really do not think that refusing $400M/year, and trying to raise a fraction of that from companies and people that so far have not contributed significant funding will somehow improve Firefox's appeal to end users.
Firefox is a consumer product, unlike BSD. I know this is disagreeable on this forum, but RMS' values although certainly commendable are not super useful in building popular consumer products. As evidenced by absolutely negligible proportion of consumer software created with values as uncompromising as RMS (measured by the number of users who actually choose the software, not people who use it without knowing, because that has nothing to do with consumer products or values).
> We are better off forking off in a community funded model before the inevitable happens and try to build a sustainable project around that.
By all means, go ahead, see how much momentum you can get. I will be positively surprised if such an initiative takes off, although I would still not expect that to improve the fate of Firefox or its new fork. Google needs antitrust action at this point.
> Firefox is a consumer product, unlike BSD. I know this is disagreeable on this forum, but RMS' values although certainly commendable are not super useful in building popular consumer products. As evidenced by absolutely negligible proportion of consumer software created with values as uncompromising as RMS (measured by the number of users who actually choose the software, not people who use it without knowing, because that has nothing to do with consumer products or values).
Have you ever heard of Krita (GPL3)? VLC (GPL2)? Inkscape (GPL)? They are far from being negligible and they have a huge consumer following across the world. So I find the claim that Free Software principles are not super useful to build successful consumer products largely false. And such software is actually chosen by end users for the examples I provided (and there's more), because of their intrinsic qualities.
Ever heard of Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Figma and other apps that the vast majority of people use over GPL alternatives? Outside of the tech bubble I mean, out in the real world.
VLC is one of the few exceptions that prove the rule standing out like that. For every GPL success story in consumer products there are 10,000 proprietary consumer product success stories.
I really don't think Chrome has a better product because of the outspending for technical work . Firefox post quantum is on par and in some features actually better browser than Chrome.
If it all took was money to spend build , Microsoft would still be doing building Edge , they have deep enough pockets and it was technically really good product, scored most in standards compliance etc.
Google makes sure it apps work very well with Chrome, apps that is used by a lot of people daily. Youtube on Firefox is/was a good example of this bias. When most of the time you spend on the web is on google sites, if they don't perform well on Firefox you will switch to Chrome.
Google uses its dominating market share in Chrome to implement features way before it becomes standard or is agreed, this forces web developers to adopt these non standard features to compete in the market. AMP is typical example of this kind of abuse. You don't really have a choice but to make your site work very well which google products and Chrome.
Firefox and other players are forced to redo their work. A recent example of this is Edge redoing their ORTC implementation to kind WebRTC implemented in Firefox/Chrome, ORTC was a simpler better implementation but Edge had no choice to switch directions for compat reasons) or they have play catch up to Chrome, it is always moving target. This kind of market abuse is not new, Microsoft did it when IE was at its peak, it is way to keep your dominating market share by ensuring competition keeps following you not lead you.
Firefox is always going to lag in some areas unless they can get large enough market share to pull their own way like before. They need to find areas where they can shine, real privacy and trust is one reason for the 9% share they still have, Servo/rust was a route to really out perform the bloat Chrome is today and truly leverage multi-threaded concurrent performance . MDN was great way to build brand with developers who can make sure their apps work in their browser. These were couple of the projects killed.
GNU utils are building blocks for so many commonly used products today. GNU and GPL found support where it mattered with developers. OS X or Chrome OS or Android or iOS or of course Linux directly runn code written in GNU projects many times code written in 80's by Stallman.
Firefox should be focusing on being developer friendly, projects like positron the electron competitor should have been funded and invested far more and led the way. Had firefox developed a better electron than electron perhaps they would be gaining new kinds of market from having saying Slack developed on top it instead of chrome based electron.
There are people who use Firefox on mobile because it is the only browser to support ad-blocking on mobile , building a unique value proposition and carving a large enough user base for that usecase will allow them to survive.
> There are people who use Firefox on mobile because it is the only browser to support ad-blocking on mobile , building a unique value proposition and carving a large enough user base for that usecase will allow them to survive.
Yup, but Mozilla apparently does not even care about their Mobile Firefox, they don't advertise that it's one of the only browsers which accepts extensions, and the UI to actually get to add-ons on Mobile is miserable at best. There's so much lack of focus instead of improving what they already have.
> There aren't enough people willing to pay for a web browser in 2020.
As one said, their problems didn't start in 2020. Honestly, Firefox should have fought tooth and nail to be THE embeddable browser. We should not be embedding Blink/WebKit but Gecko or Servo.
It should have fought Google in EU, but kinda hard to do that when you depend on them.
The reason they got checkmated weren't made now, but several years before.
People are willing to pay for antivirus, which promises to protect you from the dangers of the open internet, just like what a good web browser can do. I would pay $5 a month for a browser where I'm in control.
I mean my company also pays a lot every year just to upgrade us to Windows Enterprise. And to me, going from Chrome to an unpleasant-surprise-free alternative would be similar.
They are more concerned with their public image than innovating. Hence why there are so many defenders of them because their marketing works so well to the tech crowd (just spam "privacy", "freedom", "open source").
There's no grand strategy one can come up with instantly, but their corporate leadership stifled any chance Mozilla could discover the right angles to innovate. With $500M a year, they could've had a sea of strike teams clawing its way towards the right answer. But alas, any such group would suffocate under a top-heavy culture more interested in their image.
> There aren't enough people willing to pay for a web browser in 2020.
Interesting claim, since no browser out there was ever made available for payment in recent history. So if I follow you correctly, there are people willing to support projects on Patreon and shell money on software they find important and worth supporting, but for some reason for a much more sophisticated piece of software like a browser suddenly no such market would exist?
I'd like to see Mozilla seriously try instead of accepting a check from Google every single year while pretending they care about their users' privacy.
> What would you have Mozilla do? They're trying to develop other services that can actually make them money so they don't need Google's money to exist, and people here are shitting on them left and right for this.
charge businesses for Firefox Enterprise Edition, that way businesses are paying for support and funds development towards Firefox.
Fully agree. Charge for compatibility with Windows Enterprise because you know that those people already are willing to pay for privacy improvements.
Do entreprises get charged more for edge or chrome similar business options? Competing with free is hard.
Google Chrome Enterprise exists for this purpose [0].
> So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy?
This and the fact that they signed the deal with Google again makes me lose faith in Mozilla, caring about privacy yet making deals with the devil that is killing them.
I don't like it. I'd rather they moved to DDG. But if I let myself be an optimist for a short while, I can understand the compromise in order to establish a runway while they build up more ethical sources of income.
Id rather they just automatically replace ad units on websites with their own adnetwork making money that way.
Before you have a whinge about that idea, realise that google effectively does this already.
All it would take is for Firefox to say fuck it, you want to serve ads to our users? Fine, but you sell adunits through our network that is focused on privacy, not the network through Google or Facebook.
> I can understand the compromise in order to establish a runway while they build up more ethical sources of income.
When? It's not pragmatism anymore, it has become pure laziness on the part of Mozilla. They have been accepting this business model (being fed by the hand of Google) forever now, instead of seriously trying to achieve financial autonomy. They have lost all credibility if they compromise on that front - it's such a huge conflict of interest.
> Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal
Basically "promoting good things is good."
>The Internet is an integral part of modern life—a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.
What if Mozilla had used the internet and hadn't spent their billions on bay-area engineers but on hiring young third-world talents and offered them a job that educated them in web- and browser development?
There could be thousands of engineers working on Firefox and servo with the benefit that they would develop content that would be guaranteed to work on Firefox.
Theres also literally a world between bay area and third world.
A thread from 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5770461
I think it deserves mentioning that if any individual here believes that what Mozilla does is valuable, either to them selves or to others, and would like to "put money where their mouth is" as it were, then they can do so here: https://donate.mozilla.org
I had not thought about donating until these recent layoffs, but have now set a monthly 5$ donation up, as Mozilla's tools and work mean enough to my own interests, as well as being important enough for the internet as a whole, for me to donate.
Sadly the public donations will never be enough to cover their whole operational expenses, but every little bit helps.
I really don’t think feeding more money to their flagrantly incompetent and greedy management right now is at all the best course of action if you want to see them do well. The absolute best thing you can hope for that the public backlash to their recent decisions is strong enough to manifest a financial incentive for those in charge at moz to reconsider their business strategy. By encouraging others to donate, you’re essentially rewarding this behavior and reaffirming that this strategy is financially lucrative for them.
As someone who has been running my own personal fork off ff for the past half decade because no way the things i want in (and left out) would get adopted due to the conflict of interests at Mozilla, I see these times a great opportunity for more performant adversive additions (and removals of cruft) into browsers directly vs third party addons or custom hacks people may have to do personally now (spoofing data browsers make available to servers/js, noscript, null routing on the fly, etc).
What changes did you make? I've always wanted to nuke the keybindings and change them to Emacs ones, but never mustered the will.
Spoofing browser data sampled from existing browsers and past versions that is usually sent in http headers for every request in the nsHttpHandler, removing the home page stuff, compiling out telemetry stuff, disableing stuff in CanvasRenderingContext2D, removed some css url stuff in servo url.rs.
Seems like open expression is an important requirement of an open internet.
Not sure if that’s in one of the 10 or not there because it conflicts with their ad revenue (ie, open expression doesn’t mesh with ads), or conflicts with authoritarian regimes (eg, Great Firewall of China), or conflicts with “language is violence” or conflicts with “nudity offends me” or something else.
It seems like one of the big things at risk now is the ability of the internet to allow direct connections between people without intermediaries. I feel like standards bodies kind of help with this (ie, protocols over platforms).
How does partnering with Pocket promote the open web? How does the iRobot stunt align with the manifesto?
Mozilla use to live and breath the open web, now they are just empty platitudes like Facebook and Google's commitment to privacy.
> iRobot stunt
You mean Mr Robot, right?
I do, thanks for correcting me.
I _want_ to use Firefox, and Mozilla's kit but every single time I've come onboard after watching improvements etc I get shafted by updates which change major things every few weeks, this is mostly around Firefox having constantly had a different URL bar every update and them removing the ability to search for preferences in my preference list. It feels like they are fighting my ability to make Firefox exactly how I want it and that results in me going to a better take-it-how-you-get-it browser: Chromium.
It's a shame but I don't see it being any better the next time I inevitably try.
>removing the ability to search for preferences in my preference list
They did what? frantically clicks Hamburger -> Options, which opened about:preferences, "Find in Options" is top and center. Firefox 79, Windows 10.
I meant `about:config` but regardless I stand corrected, it's back! Yes!
If you want less frequent updates but a very stable build I'd suggest tying Firefox ESR.
If there are any Mozillians here, I'm curious about how the organization balances its technology development and advocacy functions. Do you think it has been shifting one way or another? Do you think that both roles are represented equally in leadership?
I don't get it. Is Mozilla a Neo-Marxist organization now?
Why don't you talk about software development instead? About building FireFox? About disrupting tech?
It seems Mozilla is now run by people more interested into communism than actually building a fucking software and bringing value to the world. RIP Mozilla.
Were you under the impression that mozilla wasn't ideologically driven previously? Hell look at the imagery of some of their early logos. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...
Not to mention that this document is pretty old.
I think the main difference is it feels a lot less authentic now. Less grassroots and more a corporate-ish attempt to appeal to the masses.
What is "Fræðast meira"?
This is the Icelandic page. English version here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
Check out the english version of the page:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
(probably means learn more)
"learn more" in Icelandic since this page seems to be linked to that language version
I wonder if #8 is the issue here
English language version: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
Ok, we'll change to that from https://www.mozilla.org/is/about/manifesto/. Thanks! Strange!
Why is the Icelandic version missing the top part of the page though?
is it time to jump ship from mozilla????????????
The Mozilla Manifesto is very weird when you consider the context. Mozilla as we know it exists solely because Google needs a shield against antitrust investigations, and having a "competitor" browser that only takes 5% of the browser market is why Google pays Mozilla the majority of its revenue. Firefox is literally sponsored by Chrome.
I don’t know if you heard the news but they just stopped. Also Mozilla existed quite a while before Chrome.
Collect the $500M ad money and then turn around and claim Google is evil and they are the only company fighting for internet freedom and world peace.
Has the op posted the Icelandic version to get it here as a new post and to make a point?
Look, I’m saddened by the layoffs too. And I’m very sad the dev tools and servo teams teams in particular have been hit. And I would like to know why.
Yet there are still 750 mozilla employees. The servo stuff was merged into ff already. I’m not saying it’s good that they’ve scaled down their R&D but the narrative that the C-suite have laid everyone off so they can drink more champagne on one more yacht gets tiring and obscures reasoned discussion about the lay offs.
> The servo stuff was merged into ff already.
Really? The project was done? That is at odds to what nearly every person I follow involved with the project has had to say recently.
It's not. Just look at outstanding issues in Servo.
https://github.com/servo/servo
What Mozilla did was move few stable components to FireFox and shitcanned the rest.
On another post one of the dev teams said, although it’s not “finished”, a lot of the code has been merged into ff. It has already been useful. He even used the term “winding down”.
To me, this manifesto is just empty platitudes.
Without Servo, Firefox is doomed to become a cheap Chrome knock-off. Why not fire like 650/750 and just base FireFox on Chromium?+ We support privacy - Yet get millions from Google to keep their search engine default. + We believe in transparent community based decisions - Which is why we gutted several community darlings (Devtools, Servo, Wasmtime, MDN)And in that case why should I use a knock-off, if I can have the real thing for free? Google controls the code, whatever tracking/control they build in is going to be hard to remove without a fork. A Fork Mozilla won't be able to afford.
No amount of writing manifestos is going to change that fact.
> Why not fire like 650/750 and just base FireFox on Chromium?
That's likely not too far behind. There might be a runway of a couple of years before that, though. I don't think they'd get rid of quite so many people at that point.