We shouldn't hate on Mozilla, but we should definitely provide accurate and constructive criticism, even when it is biting. Mozilla has not been doing well lately, and they need to right the ship. I'm really rooting for them to succeed, but these criticisms need to be made.
Because that's a lie and that's their only marketing, resting on their goodwill from when they actually cared and did meaningful things about that stuff.
No, often on HN threads regarding Mozilla (including this one already), people are suggesting that things are already hopeless for Mozilla, and the organization should just disappear. That is no longer giving feedback with an aim to helping an organization improve.
I think it's just that Mozilla management has been determined not to give an inch on the ancient, repeated complaints the majority of their users have had about it. That they continue to plow ahead while users vote with their feet causes a lot of hopeless bitterness. The fact that the executives are paying themselves so much while marketshare is steadily dropping just adds insult to injury.
Every negative poster was a rabid Firefox partisan 10 years ago. Now they barely hold on because they don't want a blob on their system and they want uBlock to work. Sadly, I have no confidence that Firefox won't declare next year that shipping a blob is necessary to the health of the web, and that some API uBlock relies on could be confusing to users and will be removed.
tl;dr it's a coordinated campaign alright, but it's coordinated by Mozilla's behavior, not by communication between the 90% of users that have left (30% to 3%) or the large percentage of those remaining users who are only staying because of their disgust for Google, closed source and ads.
One of those incessant and negative voices here: If Mozilla really cared about their mission they would place Firefox under completely different management and separate the two entities entirely financially so that no money can flow between Firefox Inc. and Mozilla the org.
Then and only then will I donate - to Firefox Inc.
The coordination is provided by Mozilla, not by us, the people who helped promote Firefox (and Netscape before it) and who feel that if Firefox ends up by the wayside while Mozilla continues to exist that it was all for nothing.
Firefox has been slowly but surely getting behind Chrome in many ways while all kinds of distractions have eaten up time, money and human resources that could have been spent on keeping FF alive and relevant. The long term path is clear, and something needs to change to avoid that.
