It is time for Mozilla to stop messing around. They are losing user trust extremely fast. A silent FireFox update that cripples the browser? No active update was done since yesterday and this morning: a broken browser.
Please stop non-browser development and let me pay a monthly fee for a decent browser!
I don’t want a VPN service, bookmark readers or other crap. I want Mozilla to defend the open web and create an open source browser. That’s it. The past few years have been a big disappointment in Mozilla leadership and (lack off) vision.
If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web!
This isn't just a rant, it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support.
I don't think Mozilla's income is a problem. They are making money. The problem is how they spend that money. My impression is that they lost the original spirit. Mozilla lacked a BDFL that would embody that spirit.
What's going on at Mozilla is probably what's going to happen for Linux once Linus is out.
Both these pieces of open source software are way too big to be replicated now by a dude or a bunch of dudes and also way too big to be maintained by people on their free time. They require resources and organization which itself corrupt the original spirit.
Or maybe that whole firefox debacle made me a little gloomy today...
Agreed, income isn't a problem. It's vision. But I don't want to support Mozilla in a financial way if their vision doesn't match my own. This may sound presumptuous but we really need an open web and Mozilla is one of the last defenders (and failing). I don't want my monetary donations to go to side projects, I want a great open source browser as the focus.
Maybe, just maybe, once Mozilla fails people and organizations will finally understand what terrible mistake they made by giving total control over the web to Google. Maybe this could be the beginning of a new project, managed by an institution with clear aims and no Mozilla-Foundation-style bullshit.
Remember the early days of Firefox? It crashed often, it was slow, but we had great expectations ad supported it. It wasn't easy to use it at all. At some point it made a breakthrough and installing Firefox was the first thing to do on a fresh install of any machine. People don't remember or know these times and take the web browser for granted. But now that Google has long left their original "Don't be evil" mantra and all tech is focused around the web, having an open, neutral browser is more important than ever. I wish people - including the ones at Mozilla - appreciated this fact more.
It crashed often, it was slow - but still faster and far more usable than the horror of IE6. As we're headed for a web that's built for Google (...Chrome), challenging the status quo may be far harder.
As long as the most Mozilla's money comes from Google (86% of revenue! [1]) income is a problem. Why is Mozilla and Firefox portrayed as the last bastion of free web technology if they depend on wealth of their biggest and evil-est competitor?
> My impression is that they lost the original spirit. Mozilla lacked a BDFL that would embody that spirit.
Since we are sharing our impressions, mine is that the Mozilla Foundation's current CEO doesn't believe in Firefox. Instead, I think, they are leveraging Firefox' popularity to try and position the Mozilla Foundation as a defender of internet freedom, at which point they won't need Firefox anymore.
What happens to Firefox once they achieve that? No idea. The cynic in me believes they will keep doing whatever Chrome is doing until the project is virtually dead, but I honestly hope I'm wrong.
> I don't think Mozilla's income is a problem. They are making money. The problem is ...
... from whom they get the money. Its primarily Google who keeps Firefox alive to prevent lawsuits against their market dominance due to missing alternatives.
A clear indication that they are in that area a de-facto a monopoly.
> What's going on at Mozilla is probably what's going to happen for Linux once Linus is out.
> Both these pieces of open source software are way too big to be replicated now by a dude or a bunch of dudes and also way too big to be maintained by people on their free time. They require resources and organization which itself corrupt the original spirit.
I doubt that one. There are a lot of big companies who employ the core developers as well as the Linux Foundation which employs Greg K-H [1]. Unlike Firefox where there isn't much corporate interest behind it, there is an absurd amount of corporate interest behind Linux so in the worst case the Kernel will become a corporate committee joint effort, but definitely it won't go down the hell that Firefox currently is.
Having lots of corporations involved in something doesn't protect the direction it goes in. Corporate interests could easily, for example, try to start adding in closed source blobs or providing support for people doing so. In fact, when Linus is gone, they probably will.
Software projects do seem to benefit from having firm voices empowered to say "no". Committees are incapable of doing that. Sooner or later they end up stuffed with friendly people who compromise their way to yes. That isn't an unacceptable outcome, but it'll be a different and probably worse project when that happens.
I suppose there are counterexamples - like Debian. But they have some very interesting social traditions and they don't let just anyone in to the club.
Commitees will be formed, instead of linux for the people, there will be corporate committees, then of course the diversity and quota ones, and in the end, "the one that pleases the sponsors"... The end results? Instead of Linus showing the middle finger to Nvidia (again), they will issue a statement, that "without contributers nvidia, we're unable to... yada yada", and binary blobs (or worse) will become part of the kernel.
None of the core lieutenants would be doing that work if their interests wasn't aligned with Linus'.
The culture around kernel development is strong, at the risk of scaring away newcomers. But a tight knit community also means it probably wouldn't change much even without Linus.
I don't understand the anger about the VPN. I think it's a good idea. Reader mode is useful, especially if you block a lot of CSS and JavaScript by default with uMatrix.
I don't know why people use DOH anyway. It bypasses your hosts file, so you can't block things as easily.
Many people wouldn't otherwise sign up for a VPN, and there are a lot of shady VPNs out there. Mozilla can use the feature to help reduce dependence on a company that has been trying to destroy them for years (Google), and help non-tech people get set up with a VPN.
Google is the largest financial supporters in Firefox, they buy Firefox search bar. If they wanted to destroy Firefox, they’d already do it by simply cutting that revenue stream.
They can't do it like that directly, but they have been undercutting Firefox for years. For a long time when you searched Google from Firefox it would tell you to download Chrome.
Or some other search engine would become their revenue stream, like when Yahoo was the default search. Without Google bidding their revenue would likely drop, but it wouldn't disappear.
True. But revenue would be significantly smaller (other engines cannot afford pay high per click, and lack of competition drives the price per click down), and revenue is already barely enough to cover Mozilla needs (see recent staff cuts).
Pocket lacks some important features I want it to have so I decided negative when considering a paid subscription. Nevertheless I still like it and am glad it exists. It (pocket-based home page) also is my secondary major source of news about the world and curious facts (HN being the primary).
I’m sure it is useful to some people, heck I used it for a year or two before Mozilla had anything to do with it. That said I fail to see any reason Firefox should acquire it and make it first party. Might as well acquire a webmail, a feed aggregator and a video host while they were at it.
> I fail to see any reason Firefox should acquire it
Because it was profitable perhaps? Why not acquire a relevant profitable business (many already like) just for sake of profits? And pre-installing it by default seems the next obvious step to make it even more profitable.
> Might as well acquire a webmail, a feed aggregator and a video host while they were at it.
It's way harder to make these profitable without too much investment and without using severe user-annoying techniques.
Nevertheless it's already been suggested here a number of times that Mozilla should perhaps also re-invent e-mail.
It nags me all the time when opening a new container. I couldn't care less if it was a feature that I had to click away once, but it is really pushing and in your face.
So people should push Mozilla to add an about:config flag to turn it off, if it doesn't already exist. The solution is much simpler than demanding that Mozilla completely stop trying to find a way to reduce dependence on Google.
One thing though, most of these new features are mitigations of annoyances (popups, crazy formatting, too much js, lack of privacy). It's odd how devs are spending time to fight against something rather than the opposite.
It doesn't bypass my hosts file... I have a couple of locally hosted websites that I have rules in /etc/hosts for, and Firefox resolves them correctly even with DOH enabled.
It's not, Firefox will still check your hosts file to see if it can resolve that way. DoH is used only if using a local-only resolver doesn't work to my knowledge. Otherwise stuff like SMBIOS, Avahi/ZC or mDNS would break too.
That's what the VPN is for. People keep saying that they want to donate money to Mozilla. You can sign up for Firefox Private Network or Mozilla VPN for much better results than DOH, and give them a little money at the same time.
While your point stands - it's worth pointing out that this bug was NOT caused by an update [1], but seems to have been a long-standing bug in the HTTP3 stack that was triggered due to some external site (including apparently Mozilla's telemetry provider) that changed their stack.
> I want Mozilla to defend the open web and create an open source browser. That’s it.
The 'open web' died when Chrome overtook Firefox and are still paying for more than >85% of all their revenues just to be on life support in return for ruining the 'open web'.
> If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web!
The web has been reclaimed by Google from Microsoft - exchanging from one behemoth to another. Firefox is always behind Chrome's features and many web developers still continue to place banners on users to 'Switch to Chrome'. So it is already over before it has started.
> it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support.
One more thing, even if one was to support via 'donations', they are not funding Firefox, it is funding something totally irrelevant in Mozilla and Google is once again keeping them on life support.
If that's the case then I might be wrong. But I remember updating somewhere yesterday and using FF for a couple of hours before stopping for the day. This morning no pages loaded anymore. Hope I didn't jump to conclusions, but still.
It definitely stopped in the middle of the night - I saw it happen in real time - what's more likely is that some third party is to "blame". Although the blame still rests squarely on the shoulders of Mozilla, since Chromium browsers all worked fine. Apparently the going explanation is that something involving HTTP3 runs into an infinite loop and never resolves (explaining why it also sends a core to 100%), and Cloudflare/Google/Some Other Thing updated to using HTTP3.
> Our current suspicion is that Google Cloud Load Balancer (or a similar CloudFlare service) that fronts one of our own servers got an update that triggers an existing HTTP3 bug.
It just stopped working this morning after 3 hours of no problems. Both developer edition and the normal version, same problem with an older version. Chrome and Safari worked fine.
Someone really fucked up. There must be millions of non techies completely lost right now.
It's not from Mozilla. My two computers stopped at different times, and both were on 95.0.x. I didn't restart Firefox to make it happen. It just froze in the middle of the video.
>If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web!
Have you any idea how complex a browser needs to be? I hope this team of plucky, idealistic coders can keep up with all the latest and greatest web developments devised by the thousands of engineers at Google et al.
If you keep the browser ultra modular, I think it can work. You need to have one component for layout, one for css, one for the DOM, and you can use external libraries for media playback, javascript, networking, and so on.
I think a decent layout or CSS library would be useful outside of a web browser, too.
Then I would also only focus on the subset of websites that are "documents", not "apps". If I could decide, HTML6 would have two profiles: one ultra restricted (maybe no legacy stuff and no cross site scripting) for "documents", and one where you can do all kinds of crazy stuff like "web USB" for "apps". That's not going to happen because Google and Apple like the "open" web as complex and messy as it is, because it gives them total control as you know. But it doesn't stop a browser vendor from building a browser with two engines - your own engine for the majority of documents and chromium for webapps.
Sounds like a lot of work for moving lightly-formatted text files around. Also, essentially no-one wants it. What people want (whether they know it or not) is the latest shiny to keep themselves distracted.
I don't know a single non-technical person who doesn't complain about web browsers being slow. Part of the problem is that they don't understand the differences between computers and go for the cheapest PC or tablet, but most of it is bloat.
We tried to introduce office 365 company wide for collaboration, but we had a whole plant of 150 employees "mutiny" because they refused to use any of the office web apps because they were too slow.
This slowness is not a fundamental problem, but incidental. The layout calculations of even the most complex websites could be solved by a 10 years old computer instantly. The rendering can be done by a GPU without sweat. Look at how many polygons and shaders games had 10 years ago.
And note I'm not talking about "lightly formatted text files", but 90% of all web sites. News sites, Youtube, Reddit, .... What I'm excluding is Gmail, Office365, anything that uses Vibration, NFC, WebMidi, and other boutiqe features (you could probably add those back as libraries if you need them later). I'd argue that not supporting "apps" is a feature - you'd have to explicity allow them and they'd run in a sandboxed tab.
You could start off targeting developers, who mainly use web browsers to read documentation, HN, bug trackers, code repositories, and other plain documents.
Something for regular people would be many more years of work.
There's a reason why those components aren't modular: it has become impossible for all these components to not be tangled together, unless you're willing to bear the cost of dreadful performance.
Apple hates web apps. These are pain in their ass on the way to forcing every app to go through their app store with all the dystopian control it implements.
It was not an update, started happening to me on arch linux, where Firefox does not automatically update. Seems like some kind of timed enabling of https3 support.
Which wasn't present in previous versions. So this is still a consequence of updates. But now, to make it extra hard to troubleshoot we put in timebombs in your automatic updates that will go off some fine Thursday morning without any warning or indication that something has just changed. Idiots.
Yes, but if it wasn't active then it might as well not have been.
This is a great way to bypass continuity testing, I really pity all those people working the desks in hospitals right now using FireFox who are typically less savvy than your average HN'er in trying to get their work done.
If you ship a browser with a time-bomb you are utterly irresponsible.
This isn't a time bomb, it's a symptom of the way modern browsers tend to have centralized I/O which means disk and network traffic goes through a single chokepoint. HTTP3 traffic appears to be able to cause one of Firefox's socket threads to hang, and since everything goes through it, all your network traffic is now dead. Chromium uses a similar model of routing all I/O through specific places, so it's vulnerable to similar sorts of problems (though AFAIK it has never failed this badly in production).
Basically, this could have happened at any point if a production service run by someone like Google, Facebook, Cloudflare etc managed to trigger a sufficiently bad bug in a modern browser's network stack.
If not for the centralized I/O this would just hang a single browser process, which isn't as impactful since Firefox and Chrome both split content out into many processes. It would also make it more obvious which server(s) are responsible since only certain tabs would be dying. FWIW, as far as I know this centralized I/O model was popularized by Google, not Mozilla.
(2) The telemetry setting seems to have re-enabled itself on some update
(3) I don't want any services from Mozilla, I want a browser
(4) It worked until it blew up revealing that in fact, I suddenly did have service dependencies
And finally, the reason I use FireFox is exactly your last sentence, so to see that they are slipping this in under the radar is a pretty good reason to drop FF altogether, it looks as if they fail to understand the difference between shipping software and getting me hooked on some service that I am not even aware of existing. And on top of that re-enabling their telemetry when it was explicitly disabled. That really takes the cake.
This is caused by HTTP3. The only way for you to have never experienced this issue would be if Mozilla never integrated HTTP3, which isn't going to happen because the major service providers like Google and Cloudflare are adopting it. Telemetry and updates happening to use HTTP3 merely pushed the issue to the foreground, it would have happened eventually and possibly in a way that got fixed more slowly because it was happening intermittently and only to visitors of obscure websites.
Switching to a browser without telemetry and automatic updates won't protect you from this kind of network stack bug.
I do not want a centralized service that my browser connects to for any reason, and HTTP3 sounds like a lot of trouble for very little gain.
You argue that it wasn't an automatic update: I am pretty sure that the first install on this machine did not have HTTP3 support and that automatic updates pulled it in, end of story right there.
As for the telemetry issue: that's even worse because telemetry and all other forms of communication with the mothership other than automatic updates have been disabled on this machine, and has been silently re-enabled without my consent. That's a pretty gross violation of trust, and if that in turn causes me to lose a morning then that makes it even worse. Fortunately, today is not an interview day, but if this had happened two days ago the consequences would be terrible.
Finally, automatic updates would ideally just fix security issues and not introduce new, possibly unwanted functionality. I carefully select my tools for their purpose and I absolutely hate this brave new world where critical stuff suddenly stops working because some company could not be bothered to take their end users' interests a bit more serious.
Google and Cloudflare were not implicated here, it was FireFox that stopped working, Chrome still functioned just fine.
Sorry, but my traffic isn't supposed to go through anybody's centralized load balancer, least of all one operated by parties with whom I do not have a relationship on the basis of the delivery of some service.
That's not how this works. HTTP/3 support is optional as far as I'm concerned and plenty of websites that I tested with do not support it and still failed due to this issue.
I'd wait a bit for the postmortem; I don't think there's reason to conclude at this time that your traffic is going through someone's centralised load balancer. Another update says that the load balancer issue triggered a bug in Firefox, so presumably fixing the load balancer issue will prevent that bug from being triggered, and then the bug can be fixed separately after: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21
But mostly: I have no real idea what's going on, so I'm awaiting the postmortem.
> Please stop non-browser development and let me pay a monthly fee for a decent browser!
Unless you are a billionaire, you can't afford to. Developing a decent browser takes enormous amounts of money, good luck funding that of voluntary donations or monthly fees if in most technical aspects superior free alternatives exist. Firefox is failing badly on a few hundred millions a year; I'm sure you could do better with a CEO who isn't just a parasitical non-entity, but I doubt better enough to make that idea viable.
> This isn't just a rant, it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support.
A pipe dream -- the web is a dead end. If you want something that can live off donation support (as opposed to selling off its users as cattle), you need a new set of protocols. The whole web stack is such a clusterfuck of layers upon layers of crap with one dominant player who can always add more of it when it suits them to slow down competitors (including bugs you need to replicate for compatibility purposes) that there is not the slightest chance of some grassroots alternative emerging.
What would be the rough numbers required to support firefox development in terms of #devs and $?
What would be the model to get started? Can we start by funding a fork (similar to iceweasel) with the eventual goal of hard forking once the needed resources are available?
I like you would be more than happy to pay $10/month. I pay $20/month for a bike! (relatively cheap in Denmark where taking my good bike to the shop costs me ~$500 every time I fall off). The problem is that there isn't a box on the internet for my CC.
> I don’t want a VPN service, bookmark readers or other crap.
Fortunately, you're just one person voicing your opinion in an unrelated corner of the Internet and you seem to be in the minority otherwise Mozilla would have made the changes you want already. Most other people either find those features useful or are indifferent about them. I, personally have no qualms with Mozilla doing what they do even if I might not use those features.
If you really want change, start contributing and bring it about yourself.
Please stop non-browser development and let me pay a monthly fee for a decent browser!
I don’t want a VPN service, bookmark readers or other crap. I want Mozilla to defend the open web and create an open source browser. That’s it. The past few years have been a big disappointment in Mozilla leadership and (lack off) vision.
If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web!
This isn't just a rant, it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support.