I think a fundamental lack of understanding/humility is the core of this conflict along with Mozilla's long and storied history of creating controversies/problems out of thin air.

The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too.

Firefox is a good browser but is prevented from capitalizing on the skepticism the consumers feel toward the tech sector by Mozilla using the exact same language and dark UI pattern to promote things like pocket that the user-base never asked for, and jump on to the lets enforce the use of AI everywhere that's driving discontent within the proprietary ecosystems, and this is yet another example of this class of behavior from the Mozilla leadership.

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Aerolfos a few seconds ago | parent | next [-]

>The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too.

But of course, they need "competitive" salaries so they can hire "great talent" from the tech sector so that the company doesn't fall behind or something.

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lopis 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's the mismstch of expectations that causes good communities to create drama. If this was Google, no one would care, as one expects Google to just do what is best for the business. But with companies like Mozilla we expect a bit better. But the truth is they are barely better and the leadership plays by the same rulebook.

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small_scombrus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People did used to have decent expectations for Google back when they at least pretended to care about the "Do no evil" tagline

	▲	matt89 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Indeed but it feels like a lifetime ago. I miss those days where I would look up to google and their products, as something new, cool and "not-evil".
	▲	hinkley an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's pretty clear they've been full evil for a while. It's documented at least back to 2011 but the rest of us didn't clue in for a while after.

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Stranger43 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

But why does it have to be the case that the leadership of an opensource project have to emulate the desperation and authoritarianism of a potentially stagnant tech sector.

I don't think it's malevolence from the mozilla leadership team but more that if you hang around people who have bet their lifesaving on the success of cloud based LLMs, being cautious and making their use "optional" might begin to sound like a really controversial position even if that's actually what the users/community want from Mozilla.

Firefox market share have been declining and it's not easy to point to any obvious technical problem, so the reason for the decline is likely that the Mozilla corporation keep messing up the narrative by acting like just another Silicon Valley tech firm.

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small_scombrus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm always surprised that stuff like the AI integration isn't done as a pre-installed extension.

If it's Mozilla signed then you could give it extra permissions so it still works the same, but then people who it offends can remove it.

Like how their tab containers system is a (not pre-installed) extension

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a13n 2 hours ago | parent [-]

ehh this reads a bit like the hn comments complaining about sites that don’t work with js disabled

like what percent of firefox users do you think actually care about this?

	▲	lancebeet 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Given the abysmal market share of Firefox today I think a large percentage of the remaining users do actually care.

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myaccountonhn 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it's in the organization as well. They had really good outreach programs and educational content (though I think that's now gutted) that talked about tech ethics, but their product just follows the same bad behavior.

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badgersnake 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Firefox is a good browser

Increasingly it isn’t. It’s crashing 2 or 3 times a day for me now, and video conferencing is barely usable.

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ngruhn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hasn't crashed for me once and I use it daily.

	▲	trenchpilgrim an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Been crashing for me and friends for about a week now, mostly on youtube

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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