from Hacker News

The Mozilla Manifesto

by flippant on 8/15/20, 2:04 AM with 66 comments

  • by FlyingSnake on 8/15/20, 5:35 AM

    Sigh. 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.

  • by ekianjo on 8/15/20, 5:34 AM

    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?

  • by mvn9 on 8/15/20, 6:27 AM

    >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.

  • by dang on 8/15/20, 6:51 AM

  • by MrDresden on 8/15/20, 10:18 AM

    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.

  • by cinquemb on 8/15/20, 6:26 AM

    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).

  • by prepend on 8/15/20, 6:11 PM

    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).

  • by Khaine on 8/15/20, 6:39 AM

    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.

  • by tsujp on 8/15/20, 8:01 AM

    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.

  • by aravindet on 8/15/20, 6:19 AM

    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?

  • by sunseb on 8/15/20, 7:12 AM

    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.

  • by kyleee on 8/15/20, 5:19 AM

    What is "Fræðast meira"?

  • by emerged on 8/15/20, 6:29 AM

    I wonder if #8 is the issue here

  • by plibither8 on 8/15/20, 5:24 AM

  • by alwahi on 8/15/20, 7:11 AM

    is it time to jump ship from mozilla????????????

  • by causality0 on 8/15/20, 7:03 AM

    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.

  • by tarkin2 on 8/15/20, 6:00 AM

    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.