Technology
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I've been on Firefox since way back. I understand they've made a lot of missteps and I'm not going to defend some of their worst decisions, but they're at the very least not an advertising company that wants to remove adblocks from how the web works.
I'm out of the loop here, what would you say are the missteps and bad decisions from Firefox?
A few things come to mind:
The "Mr. Robot" promotion was pretty bad - they force installed an extension without user interaction. This is IMHO still the worst thing they've done.
Their finances could be seen as a little sketchy, at times, like executive pay vs. layoffs at the start of COVID. The fact that they're hanging off the teat of Google (or maybe Microsoft, which ever search engine has the higher bid at the moment) could also be seen as a conflict of interest.
Some might criticise Mozilla for a lack of focus. While Firefox was getting stale they invested in Pocket, and VPNs and stuff.
It's a thing of the past, but there was this whole thing about Brendan Eich …
Honestly most of these things seem pretty par for the course under capitalism.
At least those products could have given Mozille a source of income in the long term if they became popular enough. Money that could have gone towards keeping Firefox going.
I’m not OP, but a big one was breaking a fair number of extensions/add-ons with a major browser update. I forget the exact details, and am not privy to the technical arguments within Mozilla, but I can see how it is a huge turn off for users.
FireFox was also extremely resource intensive at one point.
And their mobile apps are stubbornly bad. There’s no reason not to implement a real tab bar, for example. Card view is terrible on tablet devices.
It just seems like there are a lot of little things they do with FireFox.
Still, it isn’t FireFox trying to end adblocking and start blacklisting people from using services with no actual alternative.
Alphabet needs to be broken up, as does Microsoft and Apple.