The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.
In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.
Mozilla’s job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:
- Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
- Senior Director of Product, Firefox Growth
- Principal Product Manager, Generative AI
- Senior Software Engineer - Layout (CSS and ICU4X Support)
- Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
- Staff Full-stack Engineer - Generative AI
- Senior Front End Engineer, Gen AI
- Senior Front-End Engineer, Firefox
- Front-End Engineer, Firefox
- Staff Software Engineer - Credential Management
- Staff Software Engineer - Release Engineering
- Senior Front-End Software Engineer, New Tab
For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I’m not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don’t think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.
There’s also some former empolyees voicing valid concerns.
In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:
- Buying into the AI hype
- Flirting with “more ethical” ads and tracking, rather than being unquestionably on the user’s side of just blocking it all
- Doing too many things nobody asked for, arguably while not paying enough attention to FireFox
- Appearing distant from the community and unresponsive to its preferences
- Paying company leadership too much
I don’t really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it’s by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that’s pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.
Their current userbase is not their target userbase. They are trying to reach a more mainstream audience but all of their attempts to monetize are seen as useless by their current userbase.
- They want to increase revenue w/ ads - A loud swath of FF users are tech savvy and have adblocking enabled
- They want to pivot towards AI - A loud swath of FF users see AI as gimmicky
Repeat ad-nauseum
It really is strange. They really should be copying the success of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia.
Especially right now as Google is truly finally breaking a lot of adblocking and pushing a fight with adblockers in the YouTube space.
It’s a perfect storm of opportunity to stand out as a solid, differing offer, but they’re going to blow it as usual.
I’m willing to bet that the people who switch to Firefox for ad-blockers and ad-free YouTube aren’t the kinds of people who are donating much to Mozilla. People in online forums talk a big game about wanting to pay for products and not be the product. But it seems like people don’t really want to pay any meaningful amount of money for a browser.
the people who switch to Firefox for ad-blockers and ad-free YouTube aren’t the kinds of people who are donating much to Mozilla
I went to donate to Mozilla when I switched back to it from chrome early last year. It said on their website by the donate link, which was very difficult to find, that the proceeds from those donations did not go towards firefox but towards their other projects.
I don’t know if that’s the case today, but there was no way to contribute to firefox directly when I sought it out, or at least not in a way I could find. Maybe it was a stipulation of the Googlegeld, idk.
They really should be copying the success of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia
Step 1: Be hilariously wealthy from prior investments and businesses Step 2: Do a thing nobody has ever done before at a time when interest rates mean money is free Step 3: Blind luck
I’m not sure how they’re supposed to reproduce those at this point.
Yeah, the amount of money they get from donations is so tiny compared to what they need for developing Firefox, that they don’t even divert it for Firefox.
They use it for activism, community work and in the past, they’ve also passed it on to other open-source projects, which are also important for the web but don’t have the infrastructure or public awareness to get donations directly.They also used that money to pay one of their C-suite employees a $7m dollar salary.
That’s unnecessary. Everything upwards of like 300k is not salary, it’s business money. That person is a natural business.
