I disagree. A good framework makes code more maintainable, and makes it so you can focus on what’s important or unique to your product. It certainly makes you faster.
That depends on what you are comparing against. If a given developer is incapable of writing an application without a framework then they will certainly be more productive with a framework.
It’s like a bulldozer is certainly faster than a wheelchair, but somebody else might find them both slow.
Eh. I’ve written plenty of applications by hand before there were good frameworks— win32 apps, old school web applications, “modern” SPA-like apps before there was a React. I’m more productive with React + Tailwind than I was with anything (other than maybe VB6). Being able to reason about your UI as a (mostly) pure function of state is powerful. It reminds me of the simplicity of game development— with a proper rendering layer, your developers can focus mostly on modeling their problem rather than UI complexities.
I run a documentation product, ReadMe. There's a lot of reasons to roll your own, but I'd recommend you also look into a third-party tool like us. One of the biggest reasons to use a product is that the building v1 is easy, but keeping it up to date over time is a lot tougher... you're stuck remembering how to deploy, figuring out a workflow, dealing with multiple versions, etc.
You also just don't get a ton of really great features for your developers... fast typeahead search, AI tools (which your developers increasingly really want), navigation, accessibility and more. ReadMe also lets your developers play around with you API locally and get copy-and-paste code snippets.
(If you're deciding between your own and ReadMe, email me! greg@readme.io; would love to talk)
There's also a free version, and a $79/mo tier. We're also free for open source projects on our higher tiers.
If it's not for you, that's okay! But an increasing number of documentation teams are cross-functional (marketing, sales, engineering, product), and not everyone is comfortable editing content directly in Git and dealing with a release.
Docs are the heart and soul of most devtools, so I think it makes sense a lot of companies want a good product.
I love Tailwind, and I am really sorry Adam and co are going through this. They've built a great product, and it's brought joy back building again for me.
It's really hard to run a company, especially when your product is mostly OSS... Tailwind has helped thousands of companies save (or make) millions of dollars, and AI almost by default uses it to generate beautiful websites. This is such a hard position to be in... to watch your product take off, but your financials plummet. It really sucks how affected the team is after all the good work they've done.
As a former contractor and current hirer of contractors, I wish I understood this more when I was on the other side.
This story is an outlier (10x!) and probably should have involved more communication, but the ultimate lesson checks out.
I used to be so embarrassed to send my invoice or charge more as scope increased. If something went unpaid, I'd rather eat the cost than reach out with a reminder. Turns out it's more likely someone didn't think about it or forgot than any sort of malice.
As a contractor, you think of money in terms of actual dollars – rent, food, etc. When you're paying the invoice, you think of it as a resource used to get either get results or get your own time back.
It's not that companies don't care about money (they do, a lot), but the math is much different on their end. Money can feel like an equalizer (it's how we serialize time, resources, etc into a common way to transact), but if you're a contractor, you can make way more if you understand the perspective of the person paying you.
For example, proactive communication and hitting deadlines is much more important than saving costs.
I've had few contracts where I've made very nice money like $20K for what in average was 3 days. They were all urgent jobs from some very big companies whose managers knew about me (In their particular environment I was famous for doing "impossible" tasks in very short time). When they asked me to do the job I knew that they're big and can pay handsomely so instead of giving them my hourly rate I would just simply tell that I would take up to let's say 5 days and would charge them this total sum disregarding of how long it would take in reality. They were totally fine with it.
I've had one job like this where they were desperate for a solution and after months of searching couldn't find anybody to do the work. I just happened to have the intersection of several skills they needed and be available. It also helped that they were losing a lot of money every day they didn't have a solution.
On the other hand I've grown to be wary of customers who push for a fixed price. They are usually doing that because they know something that you don't.
> On the other hand I've grown to be wary of customers who push for a fixed price.
fixed price projects are like handling dynamite. A sophisticated client can use a fixed price contract to extract a huge amount of work/value from an ingorant consultant and a sophisticated consultant can use it to extract a huge amount of cash from an ignorant client.
My advice to both sides of the fence is clearly, _very_ clearly, define the scope, schedule, and a rock solid change order process for changes.
I second this. I see inexperienced business folks (including CEOs) think they are going to take advantage of an IT vendor by signing a fixed price contract and then demand constant additions to scope couched as something else. What ends up being delivered is a hot steaming pile that is dead on arrival. Act like shit; be treated like shit.
I've found that it's generally SMEs that tend to be stingy when they ask for a fixed price. Large corps ask for a fixed price just so that they can internally talk about money and budget the thing once and be done.
SMEs in my experience generally are able to handle change in scope and billing easier than larger ones.
When you have enough experience and the project fits, this is the way to go.
They don't pay for your time.
They pay for your output and you can bill them on the output.
This is the equation. When you quote on the input - that's the time you need to do the job, you multiply your rate for the weeks/days/hours, plus maybe some other expenses. This is the so-called "Hours and materials".
When you quote on the output, you take in consideration the overall value/gains you client will make by your work. This is called "value-based" pricing.
This equation is unbreakable, if your input is grater than the client output (ROI), something is very wrong, or completely illegal.
Some says value-based pricing is the holy grail for pricing anything, but if you're smart enough, you already understood that, based on circumstances, sometimes it makes more sense to quote on the input, other times on the output. Just do the math.
This may be a classic example of "value-based" pricing. It doesn't matter how long you take to make a static HTML page (input), the client overall project budget is probably over $100K (as stated by op), it's totally ok for them to invest ~20% of it to make sure it delivers on time and by specs.
As a contractor hourly work is often relationship suicide every 2-3 years when your value is questioned no matter how great the baseline.
To move towards value based pricing, and not splitting hairs on time and hours, by billing minimum half or full days with the understanding not much gets done less.
Of course value based pricing, at a weekly or monthly retainer is the next step.
I’ve done all of the above.
The client doesn’t care if it’s an html page it’s the value it creates or enables.
Rarely do most businesses wake up wanting to buy more tech and software dev, they have business problems or outcomes to solve.
If the solution was a single html page I wouldn’t even talk to the client in terms of an html page or not.
Depending on your confidence in yourself and your ability to execute sometimes also: Total Project Cost > Weekly rates > Day rates > Hourly rates.
Charging someone £10k for a solution can be better if you know you can do it quickly and changes the math for the buisness. They are more likely to pay a higher amount for a solution rather than an hourly rate.
I save my clients 20-30% across the board on their digital transformation projects, the solution price or rate doesn’t matter compared to the 6-7-8 figures I lace in their pocket.
Solution pricing can be further extended into contingency based pricing. Have the clients gather pricing for you and then hammer home a better deal and have a cheque cut for the portion of the savings.
I'm interested in working as an independent contractor when I finish college. Do you have any advice for how to become known as "that guy you call in when you need the impossble done tomorrow"?
It's a simple way to add more to your "made up" HTML tags. So you could have a tag called <my-code>, for example, that automatically has a copy button and syntax highlights the code.
This is cool, but it will almost definitely never end up in a park, outside of some promotional situations.
Disney's been doing awesome work with "Living Characters", like a Mickey that moves his mouth or a BB-8 that can roll around. But for various reasons, they never tend to make it into regular usage.
If you have a few hours over Christmas break and want to watch a 4 hour YouTube video (I promise if you're on HN on a Sunday, you'll be delighted by it), I highly highly recommend this video:
I watched a bit of this with my 8 year old and he kept asking to come back to it over the week. We watched the entire thing and he kept bringing up interesting thoughts and had good questions. Felt like it was his first “wow this lecture is actually super interesting” experience.
Why... not? Hardly adult-only content, and kids famously like everything Disney until a certain age, seems like a good thing to instill into kids, rather than "Top 3 reasons Disneyland might kidnap Donald Duck" or whatever the alternative would be.
I expected it to be far too lengthy and a bit dry for a kid. But nope, he was captivated. He absolutely loves the combination of engineering and illusion.
That’s so great! My dad exposed me to computers at a very young age. That lead to a career in software engineering. You never know what a kid will find interesting and what it may lead to later in life.
It’s not as technically impressive, but my toddler was very impressed by the R2D2 that was making its rounds in the park. Not part of a show; you could go right up to it. Probably the only character where the theme park robot is really indistinguishable from the real thing.
A lot of it just seems to be marketing. Present the shiny new toy, get the news headlines, people book their stays, and then it doesn't really matter if they ever actually make it into the parks.
Similar to concept car demoed at trade shows, we get an idea of Disney's technical engagement, and some of it will perhaps in some way or form get applied into future products/attractions.
The only thing worse than not getting the concept car, is getting the concept card after it’s been through the development cycle. Pontiac Aztek comes to mind as an example
I thought that, aside from being among the least visually appealing mass-produced cars in history, the Aztek was pretty well received -- basically an early version of the "the American lusts for some combination of a Gremlin and a Wagoneer" idea
I thought it was cool especially with the cool camping tent but it was mostly ridiculed and even became the butt of the joke as Walter White's car in breaking bad (Of course this loser would drive an Aztek)
I wish more SUVs had a test for, "can a couple adults actually sleep in the back of it?" I mean, it's relatively easy with most pickup trucks if you're willing to put the tailgate down, and your feet may go off the end a bit, but that happens in some beds for taller guys anyway.
A friend of mine usually does a camping trip with friends and family for his birthday... unlike some, I'm not investing in a camper as I wouldn't use it more than this once a year and I the first year I didn't want to drive to/from the nearest hotel... Trying to sleep in the back of a Buick Enclave was such a horrible experience, even by myself, I now just drive back and forth the 8 miles or so to the hotel, which is way overpriced that time of year. The irony is it wouldn't take much to have some kind of metal supported sheet that levels the surface over the middle row seats when in the "down" position.. but it's not even an afterthought.
So, I do think it's a feature that could be useful... I just don't think the Aztec executed well.
Eh, maybe. I have a less myopic view... I think their Imagineers just like pushing the envelope, and there's a difference between awesome tech vs things that can withstand the wear-and-tear of millions of guests.
Nothing about all that tech makes me think Olaf could withstand a hug from an excited kid.
Disney does a ton of R&D that doesn't directly make it into the parks, such as smokeless fireworks (they donated the patent for this) and their holotile floor (basically an endless VR room you can walk around). I imagine they don't know the practicality at the start, like any good R&D.
Each time they trot out one of these new robots they strongly imply, if not outright promise, that they will become part of the parks[1], that's the problem. Things like HoloTile are accurately marketed which makes me believe it's a choice they're making with the character robots.
1. The article states "he’s soon making his debut at Disney parks," which is misleading to a casual reader who may not realize that Olaf will only appear on the day of his debut.
It seems like an expectations mismatch to me? At what point did "soon to be making his debut at Disney Parks" switch from "as a background character in a ride somewhere" or "seen in the distance surrounded by handlers" versus "hanging out in the middle of crowds to get directly pushed/touched?"
There definitely are some marketing mistakes that have led to that, and certainly a lot of these projects seem to be in the direction of "one day, maybe, these will be crowd pleasers", but it still seems to me a bit funny how often casual intepretation seem to be "I can't wait to touch and play with the new Lincoln animatronic at the Hall of Presidents". It's not an R&D failure for Imagineering to keep building cooler animatronics even if most guests will only ever see them behind glass or rope or in other areas just out of touch. That's always been Disney's way of using robots for magic. The dream of "one day I can touch them and play with them" certainly lives on, of course, and these projects seem walking a few steps at a time towards that dream, but it seems weird to dismiss them as failures when they turn out to be just "normal" Disney tools for magic that try to create an illusion of being right next to you but don't allow for touching.
> "as a background character in a ride somewhere" or "seen in the distance surrounded by handlers"
I can see why you're confused. Either of those possibilities would be acceptable and exciting, neither are going to happen.
Olaf (like the walking droids, flying x-wings, etc. before it) has so far made one single appearance in the parks on an off day, which was treated like a photoshoot. The photos from that shoot will be used in park promotional materials for years, incorrectly giving casual observers the impression that this is something that happens regularly.
If Walt Disney had advertised the Lincoln animatronic as being a part of the 1964 worlds fair, but only exhibited it for a few hours one time, he would have been ridiculed too.
I suppose I'm just a little bit more tolerant of "a photoshoot on an off day" as a variant of "seen in the distance surrounded by handlers". I get where the disappointment is coming from, though.
Everything about this chassis strongly suggests no guest touching will be allowed.
In addition to the points you've highlighted, the examples in the video and the images of the character strongly suggest it'll be a soft outer shell. I'd be more worried about a kid shoving it finding themselves caught by an internal pinch-point than damage to the robot.
> things that can withstand the wear-and-tear of millions of guests.
In the video, one of the presenters removes and reattaches Olaf's nose. The robot laughs and loves it. I thought to myself, how many kids tearing at that wear item will this survive? I think the answer is significantly less than the thousands of kids who are expected to see this attraction every day.
The removable nose is a power move from the engineers who built the thing. You cannot possibly believe that the animatronic contribution here is 100% contingent on a carrot?
"There is no point in research, because I do not see anything useful being mass-produced immediately after". It's like saying Gaussian elimination is wasteful because it is just doing some cool magic with numbers that don't mean anything. That could not possible be used for anything real, right?
Seriously, this is just one (but impressive) step along in a million towards not only better animatronics for entertainment. They make a very real and valuable contribution towards improving any robotic motion.
There's nothing wrong with research that doesn't make it to the public. There is definitely something wrong with making false promises to the public, who buy tickets to your park based on what you advertised could be an attractions there, which never materialized.
4 hours is an awfully big investment... Especially for those of us with multiple young kids and who no longer own their own free time. Care to give the gist?
Defunctland is genuinely amazing and always a fun watch, and I never regret the time spent on their videos, they're kind of like a special occasion... though they're getting incredibly long... :)
There are a few older shorter videos in the half hour range, I highly recommend checking them out if you find some quiet time! (It's awfully hard for me too in recent times, I haven't gotten around to watch the Living Characters one myself, so I can't give the gist... I'm just glad I got the holidays off to finally catch up!)
and for anyone with 4 hours to kill... here's as an incredible documentary covering the misaligned incentives and poor guest experience at the now-shuttered Disney Star Wars hotel.
She covers everything - the line getting in to the hotel, the size + cost of the rooms in comparison with the same size/cost on a Disney cruise ship, and theories on why the experience was so poor.
Just from your description, I know this is Jenny Nicholson. I agree it is an incredibly insightful breakdown and analysis of why it failed, all while being funny and engaging.
One of the key reasons is that it would be really, really easy to accidentally injure parkgoers with any design big enough to interact with and engineered well enough to be reliable in a full day of appearances.
For example, the working WALL-E robot that's made a handful of PR appearances weighs seven hundred pounds. They absolutely can't risk that ever running across some kid's foot.
This is one of those situations where that's legitimately difficult. Kevin Perjurer is quite a good documentarian, and there's very little trimmable fat on the four-hour product if you want to keep in all the points he made.
gkoberger's peer comment is a pretty good summary. Another interesting point is that these technologies can benefit the brand bottom-line even when they don't make it into the park, because part of Disney's brand is "tomorrow today." Even when things are one-offs, they become one-offs that people stitch into the legend of the parks (in both the retelling and in their own memories), which gives them a larger-than-life feel; your visit might not include one of the "living characters," and statistically it probably won't.
... but it might. And if it does, you'll never forget it.
Personal anecdote / example: I stopped in at the "droid factory" in the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge area of Disney World a few years back. They had several bits of merch for sale including one life-size R2-D2, inert. I took a close look at the R2 because it was an impressive bit of work. Turned around to look at a rack of t-shirts. And was, therefore, startled as hell to hear a bwoop behind me, turn around, and see that it had followed me out of its charging receptacle and was staring at me. It was not at all inert; it was a very impressive operational remote-control replica.
The cast member behind the counter was doing his best to hold down his grin and not give me a "GOTCHA" look. He has to, because you never know what kids might be watching and he doesn't want to break the magic. And... Yeah, he got me good. "That time I was at Disney World and R2-D2 followed me around the t-shirt shop" is gonna stick with me.
I saw a video of someone who bought one of these (iirc from Home Depot limited sale)... and it definitely looks impressive, though a few minor flaws. I've seen a handful of R2D2s at conventions over the years, and they're always pretty cool... while a BB8 might be technically more impressive, I just don't care for the character nearly as much.
The basic gist is that while the tech is cool, it just ends up being impractical for regular use in the parks. (But like the other poster mentioned, with Defunctland it's less about the tldr and more about the journey and fascinating segues he takes)
Totally get it's difficult to make time with kids, but depending on your kids ages... the video shows a LOT of Disney characters talking and doing things and the videos are colorful, so it could work as something you can listen to and they won't mind having play in the background!
I could see it being used in parks while also being protected by ushers, kind of like how some of the characters that require larger costumes have minders and protectors.
It also seems inevitable that there will likely be an odd period where certain types of events like assaults on robots will introduce laws to protect robots more than just property, even if less than humans… for the time being.
Eventually I’m expecting that we will see human rights, robot emancipation, equality, voting rights (if the democracy con is still ongoing), and even forced intergration of robots and then total replacement of humans similar to how the underdeveloped world was/is used to replace the indigenous people of the developed world today.
I don’t see any reasons why that would not be the clear order of operations for the same people who brought us slavery and mass migration. What is this AI robotics revolution if not just slavery, the redux? Treated as property? Check. Bought and sold? Check. Deemed inferior? Check. Hated for the abuse and exploitation by the rich, to serve them and their decadent lifestyle and undermine labor? Check. Rationalized about how it’s justifiable? Check. Etc.
I've been somewhat close to fun animatronic robots in my jobs, and it always seems like the design and build phase has everyone excited to participate and spend money, and then the long-term maintenance phase is entirely tacked on to some lower engineers already full schedule and gets basically no budget. When you stop seeing them appearing at events and conferences, it means they're in a storage warehouse broken in a crate. The ones where they make a few duplicates last a bit longer since you have organ donors.
They literally sell BB-8 toys that can roll around and say on the blog that the Olaf robot is coming to Disneyland Paris and special appearances at Disneyland Hong Kong.
Much like Olaf (and many before him… dinosaurs, WALL-E, talking characters, etc), it was implied he’d wander around the parks. But it tends to happen for a short amount of time, mostly for events, and fade away quickly. (The blog post even says that: Olaf will be part of a 15 minute temporary show, and then will visit Hong Kong).
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve seen this exact thing happen a dozen times over the past 20+ years. (And watch the video I posted if you want to see more!)
> But it tends to happen for a short amount of time, mostly for events
I expect you're correct. While it's fantastic tech, it's also very expensive to keep highly-precise, carefully calibrated micro-machinery like this aligned and operating 12+ hours a day outdoors where temps vary from 50-110 degrees. Disney thinks in total cost of operation per hour and per customer-served.
While there's probably little that's more magical for a kid than coming across an expressively alive-seeming automaton operating in a free-form, uncontrolled environment, the cost is really high per audience member. Once there are 25 people crowded around, no new kid can see what all the commotion is about. That's why these kind of high-operating cost things tend to be found in stage and ride contexts, where the audience-served per peak hour can be in the hundreds or thousands. For outdoor free-form environments, the reality is it's still more economically viable to put humans in costumes. Especially when every high-end animatronic needs to always be accompanied by several human minders anyway.
Disney has problems with that. Their Galactic Starcruiser themed hotel experience cost more to the customer than a cruise on a real cruise ship, and Disney was still losing money on it. The cost merely to visit their parks is now too high for most Americans.
It's really hard to make money in mass market location-based entertainment. There have been many attempts, from flight simulators to escape rooms. Throughput is just too low, so cost per customer is too high.
A little mobile robot connected to an LLM chatbot, though - that's not too hard today. Probably coming to a mall near you soon. Many stores already have inventory bots cruising around. They're mobile bases with a tall column of cameras which scan the shelves.[2]
There's no reason they can't also answer questions about what's where in the store. They do know the inventory.
Similarly, I was talking with my then wife, who is a Star Trek fan about the Star Trek Experience in LV, she wasn't aware of it... we looked it up and discovered it was literally going to be the last day of it the next day... so we got up at 4:30am and drove from Prescott, AZ to LV, spent the day there and drove back that night... I don't recommend doing this in a single day... Was definitely fun.
I'm not sure that a Disney experience needs to be much more/different than this... and even maybe having smaller experiences that are similar... 1-2 rides and a restaurant, exhibit and shop as a single instance... spreading the destinations around instead of all in a single large park. This would mean much lower operational costs per location, being able to negotiate deals at a smaller level with more cities, and testing locations/themes beyond a large theme park expense.
Just a thought. Of course, I did also go to a "Marvel Experience" that seemed to be a mobile experience closer to a carnival that setup and moved to different locations. That was kind of an over-priced garbage experience that I wouldn't have done had I known ahead what it was like.
“ The cost merely to visit their parks is now too high for most Americans.”
I always wonder why people say things like this. It’s as if we’re just regurgitating stuff that feels right. Humans and LLMs behave the same sometimes.
Disneyworld alone gets 50 million visits a year. Magic Kingdom tickets are like $150. That’s approximately the average American’s monthly cell phone bill.
I don't think that's an incorrect statement to say it's too expensive for most Americans, even if there's still high traffic at the parks.
Disney has become significantly less accessible for the average family of 4. Aside from ticket costs, there's almost nothing free in the parks anymore... you have to pay for lightning lane passes for all the cool rides, there's minimal live entertainment, etc.
The demographics have significantly shifted. Only 1/3 visitors now come from households with children under 18, and millennials and gen z have started taking frequent trips (friend groups, couples, etc).
So while they still get the same number of "attendance", the demographics have started to shift toward older, more affluent repeat visitors.
The article you linked to indicates anything but how you’re portraying it.
First it talks about young adult who goes there several times a year, sometimes with her parents, because it’s cheaper than traveling overseas.
Then it says childless people have more discretionary income than parents (duh).
The general population, also, has drifted toward older people without kids. 20 years ago nearly 50% of Americans had a child under 18. Now it’s under 40%. So this whole article just indicates that the population is shifting and Disney is adapting to it by making the parks more palatable to single adults.
“In the last year, 93% of respondents in a consumer survey agreed that the cost of a Disney World vacation had become untenable for ‘average families’”. And yet the statistics indicate that more than 7% of families actually likely did go to a Disney park. (Presumably even more could afford it but just went somewhere else.)
Which illustrates my point, this is a thing that feels correct but likely isn’t, and part of the reason it feels correct is that people regurgitate it factlessly.
What's the cost to travel there? To sleep? To eat? What's the actual experience like with that $150 ticket vs the options that are more expensive? Will you spend your entire day there waiting in line?
Those 50 million visits are the sum of daily visits across four parks, so it’s probably at most 30 million people. Even if they were all American (they aren’t), that’s like 9% of the population.
The average cell phone bill you cite is for more than one person.
I think it’s entirely fair to say that “most” Americans would find it too expensive to visit Disneyworld.
Estimates put the percent of Americans who actually HAVE been to Disney north of 75%. So it would seem unfair to say most find it too expensive, most have done it.
30 million uniques at one Disney location (there are two in the country, I think the other one increases that to at least 40 million, or roughly 12% of the entire population) per year is pretty high so that stat isn’t unbelievable. I’m sure not everybody can afford to go there every year.
That’s also a drastic misstatement that illustrates what I’m talking about. A poll showed that the average persons specifically designated “emergency savings fund” is $600. Many people have lots of money but don’t specifically refer to some as an emergency fund.
Also thanks to credit one does not need to have $600 to spend $600. That’s why we’ve got so many people with no savings.
Somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of Americans have actually been to a Disney park. Does the fact that the vast majority of people have done something not prove that most people can afford it?
I’m not sure why the burden of proof falls not on the original comment (most Americans can’t afford to go to Disney) but rather the person asking for proof, but here you have it anyway.
Doing something once in a lifetime is far different than being able to regularly or even every few years. Also, $150 ea is just for the ticket into the park... you still need quite a bit more for food and drinks for the day and souvenirs. That also doesn't cover travel and hotel arrangements... For a family of 4, I'd be surprised if it didn't cost closer to $2500 for a Disney trip, if your family only earns the average national family income, that's a significant expense after housing, car(s), food and other bills.
So a family might have gone once, but that dpesn't mean they can do it anything resembling regularly. I went to Disneyland once as a kid (around 8yo)... th eonly time my family went growing up, and I haven't ever been back... My sister went as a young adult every year until she had kids, then it's been every few years... but she and her husband are doing much better than the typical American family.
But that’s the point. I didn’t make an unprovable assertion, I called someone out for doing so. I haven’t made a single point based on my own experience or anecdotes either.
People say things that “feel right”. This is a left leaning community, when the right is in power everything is a dumpster fire. Over on the right wing communities, the opposite is true.
None of it means anything. Data is the guide post.
See the link you just sent me which is people at Disney World who cannot afford to be at Disney!
while I haven't seen them at parks (I just don't make it to any), I have seen them at Star Wars events at my local MiLB team - BB-8 in the size of your video, somewhat interactive and autonomous, same with R2D2. there's usually a human nearby to monitor it, but they're definitely around.
R2D2 is an example of one that you can buy in the gift shop (for $20k!) that was promised to make it into the park but just comes out highly supervised, occasionally.
They have walking droids in Galaxys Edge right now. No ones kicking them over. Olaf is coming to the parks and they will have handlers next to them. It wont be just free-roaming.
And if you'd like an entertaining a history of early AI and robotics, half as long, check out the prequel "Disney Animatronics: A Living History" https://youtu.be/jjNca1L6CUk
I actually found it more relevant to our current tech bubble than the Living Characters doc.
I worked with someone who had previously worked on park robotics, and apparently they had to guarantee that the character could not injure a child to be able to put them in parks - a particularly high barrier to actually doing so.
One look at Olaf's hands alone make that an impossible thing to guarantee. Those stick fingers will eventually poke a kid in the eye if kids are allowed to get close to the character. If they gave him a small intimate stage, or roped off area, to do some act or crowd work that would be more ideal/less risky.
Then they will break and wear off quite fast I imagine.
Take a look at industrial cobots (not a typo). They feature rounded corners, have very little to no "finger pinchy areas" and lots of force feedback sensors.
Despite that they still require trained (adult) personal and move very slowly when actually interacting with humans.
That's the price for them being sturdy and precise.
Basically that the multiple departments involved have different objectives.
Imagineering is trying to build the coolest things possible, and many times the things seen in parks are play-tests.
Operations has to find the money and resources to keep things going, and these things take a lot of people to run.
Marketing sometimes will often provide the budget to make things happen (to promote a movie, etc) but it's not sustainable. They'll often sometimes use impractical inventions for marketing reasons, since they exist and might as well be used for something.
That's the main gist, although there's some interesting points about the risk to the brand (especially with camera phones) if Mickey ever slightly malfunctions in a public setting.
We've made different product decisions than them. We don't support this, nor do we request access to codebases for Git sync. Both are security issues waiting to happen, no matter how much customers want them.
The reason people want it, though, is for SEO: whether it's true or outdated voodoo, almost everyone believes having their documentation on a subdomain hurts the parent domain. Google says it's not true, SEO experts say it is.
I wish Mintlify the best here – it's stressful to let customers down like this.
What makes you say that Google claims it's not true? Google claims subdomains are completely two different domains and you'll lose all the linking/page rank stuff according to their own docs regarding SEO. Some SEO gurus claim it's not so black and white but no one knows for sure. The data does show having docs on subdomain is more harmful to your SEO if you get linked to then a lot.
To my knowledge it's not as much hurting the parent domain as having two separate "worlds". Your docs which are likely to receive higher traffic will stop contributing any SEO juice to your main website.
Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.
I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few years, Mozilla's business model has been to just meekly "us-too!" trends... IoT, Firefox OS, and more recently AI.
What Mozilla is good at, though, is taking complex things the average user doesn't really understand, and making it palpable and safe. They did this with web standards... nobody cared about web standards, but Mozilla focused on usability.
(Slide aside, it's not a coincidence the best CEO Mozilla ever had was a designer.)
I'm not an AI hater, but I don't think Mozilla can compete here. There's just too much good stuff already, and it's not the type of thing Mozilla will shine with.
Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on privacy. Not AI privacy, but privacy in general. Buy a really great email provider, and start to own "identity on the internet". As there's more bots and less privacy, identity is going to be incredibly important over the years.. and right now, Google defacto owns identity. Make it free, but also give people a way to pay.
Would this work? I don't know. But like I said, it's not a job I envy.
> - Mozilla Search - metasearch that isn't based on Bing/DDG/Google
As much hate as Brave gets overall, I think Mozilla should take a page from Brave's book if they're going to make a search engine. I think they should have their own index, possibly supplemented by Bing or Google. Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does. Then add in some power-user features like goggles and custom ranking, and they'd have a pretty compelling search engine. They should even be able to subsidize it somewhat with advertising: DDG and Brave Search are the only two websites I allow ads on, because they're usually relevant and they're never intrusive.
They could partner with Kagi. Pretty much everyone trusts Kagi, so if Mozilla convinces them to get on board, Mozilla must be actually serious about being trustworthy.
I wouldn't partner with them, but if they do make a search engine they should take a page out of their book and focus on giving quality results. They can start by blacklisting any seo blogspammy site and instead try and direct you to the best results for any search first (for example, a wikipedia article or relevant docs)
...on a forum run by its investors whose goal is to push Kagi, sure. Outside of this forum, nobody knows about a fringe little search engine that is paywalled and only has 62k users.
For a brand like Mozilla, even something as dumb as Ecosia would be a better fit, as they have about 250x the number of users of Kagi.
They are not VC funded afaik, and esp not YC funded.
> 250x the number of users
If you offer the service for free and serve ads in "privacy respecting way" sure you get more users. But anyway this is a mozilla's states goal too, so it would fit.
Third paragraph. They didn't go down the official YC route, they just let their initial users invest in it. How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it at every opportunity because it's in their (undisclosed) financial interest to do so? Even when it makes no sense to do so like here?
> How many of those investors do you think are among us here pushing it
Probably a bunch are users here, but
1. the amount of money (~2.5m) gathered in a 2-year period from 93 people seem peanuts in VC terms, if we are talking about YC itself rather than random users
2. their whole approach and strategy seems to aim towards a sustainable, long term development rather than quick profit (so far)
3. there does not seem to be any obvious link between them and YC itself in general
4. even if some of the 93 people are "pushing it" here, quite a few other users do the same without being investors (I have done/do it), and the former would probably do it without being investors anyway. There are bigger problems than some random people who invested in some company write once in a while supporting comments in some forum online.
I guess "forum run by its investors" can be interpreted as either the users of the forum are investors or the admins/owners are, so I tried to address both.
I think it is more like that users here are more prone to like kagi and want to pay for search (they spend more time online on a computer, they have jobs where web search is important to them etc), so you have people saying how great kagi is, but their experience does not necessarily extend to the general population as much because most people do not care as much about these things to think they are worth paying. Rather than most of them being actually kagi investors and trying to get people subscribe to kagi for their investment to grow. People can also just be satisfied with a product/service and talk about it.
Why is Brave getting hate? Their browsers are treating me very well on mobile and desktop. I am always horrified when I see how the web looks for other people with all ads.
This was in 2020. Brendan Eich addressed this in a blogpost iirc, with a perfectly plausible explanation. It seemed like a bad/unfortunate design decision, which happens all the time in software development and not the conspiracy theory people claimed it to be. It was fixed in a matter of days.
If this is the main reason to not use Brave then I'm genuinly interested in hearing about the other reasons. I might learn something I wasn't aware of.
I don't understand all the hate Brave gets either. It passes pretty much all privacy tests ootb and I see 0 ads, on desktop and mobile. This is what actually matters to me.
I don't think the past controversies were just unfortunate, "mistakes" or conspiracy theories, but products of their business model + opportunistic execution. I just don't trust brave and think I have better options for a browser. If I had to choose between brave and chrome, I would use brave. If you like/prefer using brave, honestly good for you.
> Let people opt-in to using their browsers to help crawl for the search engine index, like Brave does.
This is really cool.
I'd be happy with a re-branded SearX/SearXNG, with a paid cloud hosted instance from Mozilla that uses a shared base index plus your own crawled pages or optionally contribute your crawls back to the shared index.
As a US corporation, Mozilla cannot compete on privacy focused services. If they want to focus on privacy (which I think is great), they should ship software that improves privacy, not offer services.
They can compete where the alternatives are also US based services.
They can compete in the US.
There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments. There are also people who are more concerned about privacy from their own government than a foreign government.
Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.
> There are also many people who are more concerned about privacy from businesses than from governments.
We're living in an interesting time that may (or may well not!) turn out to be a pivot point in this question. People being ICE'd based on data traces they leave in commercial products may well make this kind of question more tangible to non-technical folks.
> Although the Cloud Act and similar issues with the US are much discussed here, I see no sign it loses American big tech much business.
If that is true (which it may or may not be) then it would also mean competing on privacy isn't a winning move, whether within or outside the US.
It's not all or nothing. Depending on your threat model, Apple's services might be fine. But I guess most people don't think enough about the implications of storing many years worth of data at a US company like Apple.
Apple has actually proven itself over a long period of time on this issue. Maybe Mozilla has as well (do they encrypt telemetry logs etc for people with a Mozilla login?) but I haven't heard so much about that.
Did you really forgot about Snowden's Apple slide? Also their phones are routinely mirrored at the border. Just to support the unconstitutional government agenda of policing thoughts and speech.
How about: Mozilla HTTPS To My Router (or printer or any other physically present local object) in a way that does not utterly suck?
Seriously, there’s a major security and usability problem, it affects individual users and corporations, and neither Google nor Apple nor Microsoft shows the slightest inclination to do anything about it, and Mozilla controls a browser that could add a nice solution. I bet one could even find a creative solution that encourages vendors, inoffensively, to pay Mozilla a bit of money to solve this problem for them.
Also:
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
Indeed. Apple’s mail app is so amazingly bad that there’s plenty of opportunity here.
When you tap one of those fields it bounces you to a contact card. If it is an existing contact (for example, yourself), you just get the full contact card. If that contact card has multiple addresses (my contact card lists ten), you get no indication of which one it was sent to.
At some point in time the actual email address used was flagged with a little “recent” badge - by itself a confusingly-worded tag - but even that doesn’t show up consistently.
It’s stupid because there’s really no reason to play hide and seek with the email address - that’s an identifier that people should generally be familiar with (since you have to use it reasonably often), and lots of people have multiple addresses that they can receive mail at.
> We’ve also seen the overwhelming demand to build a version of Thunderbird for the iOS community. Unlike the Android app, the iOS app is being built from the ground up.
> All seemingly low-hanging fruit with brand alignment.
Genuinely interested: are you a developer? Doesn't sound like low-hanging fruit to me.
There are already many alternatives to Gmail, I don't think Mozilla would make a lot of money there. And I don't know if they are making a lot of money with their Mozilla VPN (which I understand is a wrapper around Mullvad): why would I pay Mozilla instead of Mullvad?
There are alternative search engines, like Kagi in the US and Qwant/Ecosia in Europe (though only Qwant seems to keep the servers in Europe).
What I want from Mozilla, really, is a browser. And I would love to donate to that specifically, but I don't think I can.
A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).
Literally everybody is fu*king fed up with M$ arrogance. But you can't get rid of Active Directory and Exchange. Make comparable alternative (with say 80% of most used use cases, no need to die on some corner case hill) and many many corporations will come.
This won't come from some startup, it has to be a company like Mozilla.
Are you sure of that? There have been alternatives to Microsoft Office for decades. Yet most businesses use and pay for Microsoft Office, even though their employees most likely don't need anything that doesn't exist in those alternatives.
I don't think you understand what I was writing about - none of that is MS Office. Thats another topic, but without this (and say some sort of domain propagation rules) bigger corporations will never move out of MS.
My understanding is that you say "someone could make an alternative to X and that would kill Microsoft because everybody hates Microsoft".
My answer is "there have been examples of alternatives to Microsoft products for decades, and it hasn't killed Microsoft at all, so I don't see why it would be different for another service (in your case, email)".
> A reliable, corporate-friendly, with advanced support model alternative of Exchange + AD is something that could sink a titan like Microsoft in 2 decades, at least its non-cloud business (but then for cloud alone they are just one of many, nothing special there).
Ooh, imagine if they also threw in some kind of Teams alternative, maybe based on XMPP or Matrix! That might get a lot of attention.
It is certainly not low hanging fruit in the development effort space, but they can utilise open source projects in ways that MS cannot due to licensing, and therefore have much more resources overall in terms of community dev contributions.
> Thunderbird for iOS - why is this not a thing yet?
They are building Thunderbird Android over K9 Mail, which is an Android app. They would have to start from scratch on iOS, which of course is feasible but it takes more time.
Re-launch FirefoxOS -- not for smartphones, but as a privacy-focused ChromeOS competitor. Give students Mozilla/Firefox brand awareness while prying them out of Google's clutches.
I'm thinking more at an SMB level, not necessarily for secure mail, PGP and the like.
IMAP + CalDev + CardDev sat on-top of cPanel is getting a bit long in the tooth for companies that want exchange-like mail solutions outside of the big two. Unfortunately MS and Google run the "spam" filters as well, so you really need an established company that they can't afford to irritate to enter the space - see Mozilla - to reliably force acceptance of enterprise mail outside the Duopoly they have.
Zoho is trying their best also in this space - not sure how successful they have been on the trusted email provider and integration front.
> That's like saying, "Nobody wants Adwords; people want Chrome."
Bad comparison, but I understand your point.
> Salaries have to be paid somehow.
I would be interested in knowing how much of what Mozilla does brings money. Isn't it almost exclusively the Google contract with Firefox?
As a non-profit, Mozilla does not seem to be succeeding with Firefox. Mozilla does a lot of other things (I think?) but I can't name one off the top of my head. Is Google paying for all of that, or are the non-Firefox projects succeeding? Like would they survive if Firefox was branched off of Mozilla?
And then would enough people ever contribute to Firefox if it stopped getting life support from Google? Not clear either.
It's a difficult situation: I use Firefox but I regularly have to visit a website on Chrom(ium) because it only works there. It doesn't sound right that Google owns the web and Firefox runs behind, but if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
I'm not sure why you think so; it seems pretty close to me. Chrome and Firefox are exact competitors; both require a large amount of development investment. Neither one are being charged for, which means their development needs to be supported some other way.
The people using Chrome don't want Adwords, but it's Adwords that is paying for Chrome's development. People using Firefox don't want email or Mozilla certificates or what-not, but something needs to fund Firefox's development.
> ...if Chrome was split from Google, would it be profitable?
They'd have to figure out a different business model, wouldn't they?
I predict the next gen search engines will be a return to form of the early web-directory style of known good pages and having to be vetted to appear in results
I'm still sad they shelved Mozilla Persona due to low adoption. There is a hole in the market around privacy and identity, and Mozilla would be a natural choice to fill it, but it's going to be an uphill battle to get major sites and end users on board. Not a job to be envious about indeed.
And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS. We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown. It would have been a great time for an alternative mobile OS 10+ years in the making, to welcome all the energy that has gone into beautiful projects like F-Droid.
If I could time travel into the past, in addition to preventing all the bad things (e.g. Young Sheldon), I might have told Yahoo they should flex some financial muscle while they still had relevance and worked to mobilize (no pun intended) developer time, energy, etc and perhaps even provide a baseline ecosystem of stock apps to support FirefoxOS.
> We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown.
We did guess it. Google were already past their “don’t be evil” days in 2013. They were possibly better than other companies of similar scale, but the decline was already clearly beginning. People had long warned that Google could not be trusted to keep Android open in the long term, that eventually their benevolence would fade. A good chunk of the enthusiasm around Firefox OS was in breaking the duopoly and the idea of a platform that would be much harder to lock down.
Fair point, I think I have to concede that you're right that it was perhaps perceivable at that time. In my defense, I will say that we are seeing some pretty concrete actions out in the wild in 2025 that we were only speculating on in 2013 heightening the urgency of the issue.
The main problem with Firefox OS was that it was really slow. At the same time it was targeting budget phones.
But on the other hand progress was quite good. Back in the days I was maintaining unofficial images for Alcatel Fire. Each version was a little bit faster, but you really can't do much when the whole OS is a browser running on a device with with 256MB of RAM and a single core CPU.
Wasn't webOS effectively an OS built on web standards and effectively just a browser engine?
The Pre had 256MB and something like a 600mHZ processor. While it was no speed demon, I was always impressed with the animations and multitasking they pulled off with it.
I use it as my primary phone for 2 years, first with the Flame, then with a Z3C.
For me Firefox OS was the finale move of Mozilla, either it successes and Mozilla becomes a major actor again or it fails and they slowly die. And thebmy decided to kill it right when it was becoming stable enough.
It's another damned if you do, damned if you don't. FirefoxOS is regularly listed by commenters as an example of a wasteful side bet, whereas my feeling is more along the lines of yours, that it was striding greatly, as the saying goes, and attempting to be a major actor.
A big part of the market share loss was due to monopoly and distribution lockdown of a controlled platform tightly tied to hardware, so I can certainly see the strategic wisdom of the attempt. I suspect they didn't have the resources to press forward, they had a lot less money then than they do now. Which makes it all the more maddening that Yahoo's role as a partner was so muted; it could have made the difference for both of them.
As with most new operating systems, its biggest problem was lack of apps. Mozilla seemed to abandon Firefox OS right as Progressive Web Apps were starting to take off, which would have done a lot to fix that problem.
If I want to interact with modern society, I have to use banking apps, the NHS app, WhatsApp, numerous IoT apps... The list is endless. Many of these will refuse to run on rooted phones.
Google and Apple won. We can learn from this and hope the next big thing to come along has some competition from the truly open source side of computing.
They didn't 'win' - use a laptop. Phones are decent for certain things but no, you don't need to use WhatsApp, IoT apps -- most have bluetooth, and you don't have to 'interact with modern society'
Interact with good circles of people and stuff. I mean, it's cool that my pixel is some mini high powered TPU computer that can run apps, F-Droid etc, but I only really care about the 5g data link within it.
If any app refuses to run due to rooted phone -> open a browser go to the web version.
I know that you know these things and I'm not trying to make any point other than: no, you don't have to use those things. but if you want to, you can.
the next big thing to come is already here, Linux with its infinite mix of desktop environments, user environments, distros with pre-set up things. You can have a device use your SIM/e-SIMS.
Google and Apple's push notification system being locked for what they deem allowed and control the push tokens, browsers have push notifications too.
All I'm saying is: Google and Apple didn't win anything and there's great things like GrapheneOS, plus Google's TPU chips are awesome.
But, they most certainly didn't 'Win' and 'modern society' is crazy.
When feasible, this sounds like a great reason to switch banks. If enough people did this, banks would all offer web apps instead of forcing native apps.
Well that's a fantastic point, and interesting in this context because the whole gambit of FirefoxOS was to use progressive web apps. The browser rather than the Linux ecosystem becomes the trusted execution environment and PWAs actually ask less of your bank or (insert security agency) than even Android or iOS development.
Too late for what? Librem 5 is my daily driver. Would you also say that in the 90s Windows "won" and "it was too late"? Please stop with the security/privacy nihilism, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975
The two places it's mind boggling that Mozilla doesn't have a product are (1) identity (especially as a provider to 3rd parties) and (2) instant messaging (especially on mobile).
They were important 10 years ago, they're more important today, and the existing providers all have huge privacy concerns.
Signal is already ostensibly private, available, and popular enough, and doesn't have ads... why compete?
IMO Mozilla should just double down on the browser and do everything they can to keep it as a lifeline for Free Software devices to be able to participate on the internet as first class citizens.
Signal intentionally made their messaging rely on a single, central point of failure, perfect for targeting by all sorts of criminals and governments. If Mozilla provides a Matrix server, I will seriously consider it.
It does, but it's mostly for coordinating development rather than a consumer facing product. Personally I'm not convinced Mozilla IM would make sense though. It's a crowded msrket with lots of other options.
There are not many options for a secure, e2e messaging not relying on a single point of failure (including Signal), with a good UX and a possibility of video calls. I only know of Matrix. A AFAIK there are not so many trusted servers.
You don't really seem to be trying to fairly describe the problem.
With Pocket, Mozilla forced it on everyone, then two years later they bought the service, then many years later they eventually killed it for everyone. They didn't even try the approach of making it an opt-in extension that users could install if they desired. The unoffensive strategy was obvious all along, and they just didn't choose that route. The concerns of Mozilla partnering with and promoting a proprietary service were easily anticipated, and the solution (buying Pocket) was clearly an option since they did that step eventually.
Yes, Mozilla may be in a hard place trying to diversify and find success with their other ventures. But they're clearly making plenty of unforced errors along the way.
That unforced error was particularly egregious considering that tab containers and Facebook containers are optional addons that are well integrated into the browser.
They literally forced every user to either accept the invasion of the proprietary service, or have to take extra steps to disable it on each of their devices. Neither of those is actually a reasonable, respectful way to treat your users.
Sure, living with the nuisance of the advertising and UI clutter is an option, as I said. But the fact that they were relatively minor nuisances compared to eg. Windows 11's BS doesn't change the fact that they were still unwelcome and unnecessary and disrespectful.
I don't think there's anything radical about my stance that a new toolbar button showing up—with advertising calling attention to it—integrating a proprietary service into my open-source browser is inappropriate behavior on Mozilla's part.
Anything requiring messing with about:config is an unreasonable way to treat non-technical users. And the point I've already made that you're ignoring is that the complexity of the workaround is not the problem—the necessity of taking action to disable Pocket is what was most concerning about what Mozilla did.
I simply removed it from the toolbar, same as I did with the Firefox sync icon. Out of sight, out of mind. Granted, they were much more pushy about other features and services. Much less pushy than other vendors and it was, in some respects, understandable. (How do you convince people your product is relevant if they think it does less than the competition because they aren't aware of what's there?)
I found no value in Pocket and it was annoying to have to disable it once per machine but you didn't have to "live with it" as claimed. That's just ridiculously overdramatic.
The broader discussion but especially this little exchange reminds me of a similar situation with Ubuntu.
At one point they were the darling of the desktop Linux space and much beloved by an online community of highly principled people who didn't pay them anything.
Those same people then utterly blasted them when they tried a few monetization/promotion features that fell flat, like the Amazon lens in Unity. I had no love for that lens but it was easy to remove.
Shuttleworth gave a fairly telling interview afterwards which basically amounted to "Fuck these guys, you can never make them happy."
Canonical proceeded to focus on the server side where there's more money, fewer loud freeloaders, and now they're somewhat more evil.
There is also a whole strain of thought in SaaS which says don't ever have a free version because those guys always end up being the biggest complainers.
I think you have to accept that no company is going to get it 100% perfect and if you're too loud, annoying, and you're not giving them anything in return, they may just take their ball and go home.
Being the company that does the right thing is arguably not worth it, the devil's advocate argument is, some guy online is going to ride you even harder because you said you were trying to do the right thing, so better to stay quiet, or even cultivate an air of vague evil instead, then they won't bother.
Perhaps also related: the idea that riots are stupid, because rioters are inevitably protesting someone/something that's far away, even as they set fire to local businesses owned by members of their own community.
Ubuntu freeloaded on Debian so its fairly reasonable to consider the ubuntu skin to not be worth having if the result is advertisements being pushed onto users.
Companies that want to freeload on a free software community will always have a hard time. They may be praised in the beginning if they bring fresh and new energy, but trust is only going to work for so long until the "monetization features" starts being pushed. Historically that only works if the company reforms the original in such a way that it essentially is a completely different thing. Ubuntu today is still just a skin over Debian that users can easily replace.
Accidentally the best thing Ubuntu brought to Debian was the release schedule, which the Debian community adapted. Without that advantage there isn't much point to Ubuntu unless Canonical continuously pour a lot of money and developer time for free into the ecosystem. A lot of people commented at the time that such a thing wasn't sustainable.
If no company can make a fully free and user respecting browser then Mozilla the foundation should dissolve Mozilla the corporation because it doesn't fit into the state goals of the foundation.
> There is also a whole strain of thought in SaaS which says don't ever have a free version because those guys always end up being the biggest complainers.
Not just free, but also cheap. I have found the less someone pays the higher the likelihood they are a problem customer.
Look at them all downvoting us for saying it. It's like a force of nature, the reaction to comments about it proves that it's true - the complainers sure enough come onto the free forum and blast down comments about it :)
I like free stuff as much as the next guy but I think this is just some fundamental aspect of psychology, like you don't value something as much if you didn't pay for it. Within our business we see this all the time, customers who pay a lot tend to be satisfied and limit their criticism to the things that really matter, customers who pay a little or are just proposal shopping will take up a huge amount of time and have a lot of minor complaints. I have heard about this at many other businesses
> It's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.
You have any evidence for this - that is, that the same subsets of users are being hard on Mozilla and soft on Google? Because that's pretty easy to quantify if you have evidence, which I notice you haven't presented.
Right now all you have is a gut feeling disguised as an factual claim about reality - which is worse than worthless because it's biased by your feelings, as opposed to being a wild guess.
Of course it's probably not the same user base. But the point imo is that users did use it and get value out of it, even if die hard users cried hard their browser was invaded and that Mozilla lost the plot.
We even have commenters here saying Pocket lost Firefox some market share (without any evidence or argument in favor, so a gut feeling too), but nobody to say that maybe the feature was used by some? And maybe that was a pull for Firefox vs Chrome. (I'm not saying it was, I'm just saying we don't know)
I believe that this is just the typical pattern of groupies being more toxic than band-members or crew. If you go to /r/rust, every announcement of a donation to the Rust Software Foundation is met with derision for the donor. In fact, if you go there today, you'll see it's got some extraordinary drama going on - primarily from non-programmers. If you look at the latest Arduino developments, it's the same story with non-users enacting some purity ritual and users being more sedate.
The reality of the thing is that community-oriented projects have the problem that the groupie-layer of the community are a group that are so marginally attached to the organization that the death of the organization won't affect them but are sufficiently attached to the organization that they can affect the org.
A population like that will naturally tend towards extraction of all surplus from the organization - if the org dies as a result, it doesn't matter, but if they don't do this they're "leaving money on the table" so to speak. With the rise of social media, the groupie layer of people can be extraordinarily large since forums with centralized sign-on allow for a variety of subjects to be posted and consequently being in the fandom is cheap - you don't have to seek news, it'll be there for you to have an opinion on. Hacker News, Reddit, etc. lead to a grouping point for people to have opinions on things they care so little about they would never seek it without it being thrust upon them by The Feed.
So I agree with you. It's challenging. I don't think it's because the community is special, though. I think it's just the structure of communities today because of the dynamics of social media.
I must have seen other sides of the community, since all I seen has been a consistent criticism that Mozilla neglects the two main products Firefox and Thunderbird, while focusing community money and focus on new products that does nothing to improve Firefox and Thunderbird. When new products get released it is indeed met with extreme scorn, and when they eventually fail, they will anew get criticized for wasting money.
There is a market share costs that pocket had on Firefox. Lost developer time, money and community trust mean that product pushed Firefox just that bit further into marginalization. Basically every product Mozilla releases is the same story when they fail to make their core product better.
It is not damned if you do, damned if you don't. Google could abandon Chrome, gmail or any other product like that and they would still be Google (and be profitable). Mozilla would not exist without Firefox, and the trust the community has with Mozilla is directly tied with Firefox.
> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt
Literally nobody skeptical of Mozilla is giving MS and Google the benefit of the doubt. Mozilla gets skepticism from people exactly because they don't want Mozilla to become like those companies.
Pocket in particular was a breech of trust. It brought ads and surveillance to firefox, when many users had turned to firefox in the first place to avoid those same things. Of course that was going to draw criticism.
Google and MS are never going to do anything other than sell out their users for profit. Firefox users are more fiercely critical of the introduction of anti-features and enshittification because they don't really have anywhere else to turn to. Every other browser is just openly collecting your personal data, pushing ads in your face and shoving AI down your throat. The best alternatives we have to Firefox as a browser that respects its users at all are forks of Firefox. If firefox fails because it becomes a chrome clone that's also bad for privacy people will stop using Firefox and if Firefox dies off there are real questions about how many of the forks will continue to be actively maintained.
The browser ecosystem needs an alternative to chrome. Users want a browser that doesn't push ads, collect data, and allows customization. People complain about Firefox because the stakes are high.
In all of these cases, 95% of the comments are by <1% of the users and are probably less relevant goals to Mozilla than us power users would like them to be. Someone is always going to be angry, that doesn't really decide whether you're damned if you do/don't though. I honestly wonder if "internet privacy" is even something the average user is truly interested in either.
I wouldn't be surprised if 'lame' things like "videos look a lot more vivid in Chrome" (due to the years of lag getting HDR support in Mac/Windows) lost Firefox more users than they gained for maintaining support for MV3 uBO. I.e. fewer than 10% of FF installs have uBO installed, even after Chrome dropped it, but the volume of comments about MV3 would have led you to believe this is all browser makers need to consider to be successful.
I am sorry sir. Somebody who says they want to put back control to people using Internet and someone saying humans over profit cant NOT expect pushback for their actions. They are going against the entire community. You cant go for the saviour of the open internet, BS the community and not get push back.
I would argue mozilla doesnt have general audience like google chrome. They have OSS enthusiasts, privacy enthusiasts, power users kind of crowd. Buying a behavioural ads company which will do data surveillance or shoving ai is not what we want.
Not to mention, I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.
It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget that.
Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want to be with them.
I'm not saying whether they should/shouldn't get pushback about these things - just that 95% of this pushback in places like this comes from <1% of their userbase and isn't as relevant to Mozilla as those making the feedback would like to believe. Meanwhile, the main portion of the userbase is leaving for completely different reasons and doesn't even know what this kind of stuff like MV3 is, let alone care about it.
Firefox definitely has a general audience much larger than any measure of power users. More than half of the users don't have a single extension installed, and that counts language pack extensions. Half have <= 4 cores, <= 16 GB of RAM, or a 1080p screen. The most common OS is Windows 11 at 44% - with Windows 10 at 34.5% and Windows 7 still above Linux. Over 1/3 of their ~200 million userbase is in the US, and even if every tech-literate power user or privacy fiend in the US used Firefox (they don't) it still wouldn't amount to that many people.
The average Firefox user is nothing like you or I, nor will they find their community in catering to privacy. The community over IE was that IE wa plain awful to use and Firefox just did everything better. It didn't matter if you cared about privacy, performance, standards, community, customizability, compatibility, or whatever - it just mopped the floor with the popular option. That's not going to be the situation with Chrom*, it's actually active and well funded, nor is focusing on a single minority which demands to exclude things other groups care about (even if you and I would prefer not to have them) going to bring them back to the forefront.
Most people who has Firefox installed is either installing because that's what they have always used or is using because someone recommended it. They have to be explicitly installed. Keep that in mind. Don't you remember firefox installation fest and stuff? That 1% pushes Firefox to non-users at home, in their companies and where not. That 1% is responsible for a lot of the rest of the 99%.
The folks Mozilla is trying to attract don't care for all of these. Their biggest selling point is privacy and being community friendly. If it's getting deteriorated, why should the general folks who don't know what Manifest V3 is install it?
Especially when tech enthusiasts are talking bad about it. What impression does it make to a non-tech guy who woke up one day drinking filter coffee and thought... Huh! From today onwards, I want privacy!!??
I agree most either have used it for a long time or because someone recommended it. It's nearly tautological. I disagree the recommendations for the average user only/primarily come from <1% of the user base or that's what makes the installs stick when they do. Power users desperately want to feel key to the success, but the reality is people stick with a browser based on what it does for them not how much it does for their power user friend who recommended it 20 years ago. The same is true in reverse: power users can comment here all they want about privacy nits or what Mozilla should do blah blah but it doesn't matter to the average user because they aren't reading tech forums for opinions on browsers. Most Firefox users probably couldn't tell you what Mozilla even is in relation to Firefox.
The 200 million normal users can also recommend trying to use Firefox all the time to their friends again, they just don't have a reason to do so because often, for their cares, Chrome and others are the ones with better target to them. Pre-installs is definitely a problem, as it always has been, but it never stopped Firefox before.
If the non-tech person wakes up one day and decides privacy is a key concern for the browser then they join the few that learn about each in this detail and pick from there and the niche has a new member. When things like 1,000,000,000 people wake up and decided mobile performance and battery life were important for years it resulted in Firefox having next to no presence on mobile more than any other reason.
Naturally - losing a few hundred million users is likely why they are trying to find a different strategy than focusing on privacy or what power users comment on in the following decade and expecting better results for some reason.
Mozilla's funding comes almost entirely from the Google search deal. They can't afford to let the user count continue to dwindle on a principled stance alone. They either need to find workable alternative income of the same scale (which they've tried at least a dozen things that didn't pan out) or try to focus on what the average user wants in a browser rather than what the GNU fan power user comments in tech forums. They don't need a few principled people to stick with it, they need to be popular with the average person again.
I am saying power users bring general audience. Thats alwas the case. Whether it is tesla/saas/browser or ur new notebook app... the power users pay/invest time initially. They talk, the promote they bring the initial general audience and from there, it becomes commonly used. Firefox is losing their power users and are not getting general audience.
Unless you can show increase in userbase with any of the BS Mozilla has done recently against their community, I'm not sure how I can agree with you.
They started this around 2015. One freaking decade with zero results. Apart from increase in Mitchell Baker's salary YoY, I dont see anything else increasing. In fact they sold Rust and MDN to their competition.
Most importantly, community unrest has only increased. Not decreased. And the userbase dwindling aligns with the same. So tell me, make me, a "GNU fanboi" understand how I am being unreasonable.
See this is kind of hitting the nail on the head here.
Mozilla is treated like a PhD holder and nobel prize winner, and Google is treated as a stupid baby.
When the stupid baby shits his pants, nobody cares. In fact, they expect it. But when the PhD student gets a tiny piece of information wrong about the French revolution, they're crucified and called an idiot.
Mozilla makes mistakes, but the objective reality is that even if you add up alllll the mistakes, they're MILES ahead of Google when it comes to how they treat their users.
Google Chrome users get fucked up the ass and then beg for more. Firefox users get sent flowers and chocolate and then complain the chocolate has nuts.
The stupid boy is working in bad faith. Everybody knows. And nobody has invested even quarter the time with the stupid boy like the community has with Mozilla.
Mozilla is also not making mistakes. They are changing direction.
They started this by taking privileges and power from community leaders around 2015/16? There was a huge exodus of community then if ypu remember. And one after the other it reached until they bought a behavioural ad company. Its directly in conflict of interest with the humans over profit BS they are whining in marketing.
They have been in bad faith for so long. I dont see mistakes, I see pivoting. So, they can't just piggy back good PR while talking giving power back to internet users BS. Come on dude, they can't have it both ways.
They are yet another bad faith company saying they are not evil. That is it. Bare minimum, they should at least stop virtue signalling.
> Basically every product Mozilla releases is immediately met with extreme scourn and scepticism. While everyone else seems to get the benefit of the doubt, including the likes of Google, Mozilla seems to get the exact opposite of that.
I've been thinking about this for a while, ever since The Framework DHH incident.
Basically, framework sent DHH a free laptop and funded his ruby conference and "arch distro." DHH meanwhile has some white supremacist musings on his blog. The Framework community flips out, talks about betrayal. There's people in the forums talking about how they were about to buy a fleet of machines but now will have to go back to Dell or whoever.
I was in the thread trying to understand - ok, we're doing ethical math here, right? We liked Framework because ostensibly buying from them reduced our e waste in the long run, and maybe is long run cheaper since we can do our own repairs on easily available parts. Meanwhile, Framework turns around and gives maybe 10k to someone who is prominently pulling a shitload of people into Linux world with Omarchy, who happens to have some disgusting opinions on his blog. I feel like switching to the main companies like Dell or HP or whoever, comes with way darker ethical implications. I mean one of these companies are the ones that provision the IDF, some of them have donated to Trump's ballroom wayyy more than the Ruby conf donation, they all have horrifying supply chains, and not to mention, don't come with any of the environmental benefits of a Framework machine.
So, why is Framework examined under a more critical lense?
My takeaway was twofold: first, people seem ok to dip their toes in activist progressivism to a degree, but are basically primed to throw their hands up and say, "I knew it, default capitalism really is insurmountable, oh well, back to the devil I know, no point in trying ANYTHING!" Second, people seem deeply focused on aesthetics rather than practical outcomes. Framework's far larger contributions to Linux space are instantly nullified by one relatively small donation to a guy who himself has massive contributions to FOSS but also a couple of really gross blog posts. It's not ok to cut away the gross bits: the entire thing is polluted.
I tried to point out the dangerous game being played since I can guarantee I can find a more ethically pure environmental anarchist than any supposed progressive on the forum - after all, the more environmental decision isn't to buy a Framework, it's to rescue a Thinkpad from a landfill, and by the way, anybody here still driving to work instead of taking the bus? And so on. People were, politely, shutting me down. "It's not the same, all framework has to do is apologize for the DHH thing and it'll all be ok." Sure, until it gets out that the CEO was at Trump's inauguration, or that the local Taiwanese office works with super shady parts suppliers, or... Seems to me the best thing to do is try to make a rough ethical calculation based on practicalities rather than purity testing, but nah.
So, if you're going to do something good in this society, you need to not just be much more ethical than the heteronormative capitalist participants, you need to be unimpeachable.
I'm by no means defending throwing the baby out with the bathwater - which is what's happening when someone abandons a less-aligned company for a completely unaligned one - but I have a somewhat different perspective on what, exactly, ticks these people off so much with Framework but not Dell, even though Dell is ostensibly worse (from their perspective), and it's not all that unreasonable emotionally, but it leads to bad outcomes, and it is very much not rational.
For them, it's a problem of (perceived) hypocrisy. You see, Dell never claimed to be good. Nor did HP. They're big corporations, they've got contracts with the military, IDF, what have you. Their appeal, as it were, is the product/service itself. Their only ideal is the Capital, and they never pretended otherwise.
In comes Framework; claiming to be sustainable, different from the others, caring about society/the world/etc., instead of just in it for the Capital, like all the others - regardless of whether they really claimed this or not, it is how they're perceived by these people - and then they go and "do something like that", so they go back to Dell/HP, because at least those didn't lie about who they were. This is exactly what happens with Mozilla vs Google/Microsoft.
This is very much a reflection of a fair few Leftist political spaces. Two people may agree on pretty much everything in how a society should be ran, but one of them believes that private property is inherently theft, and another one would like to maintain private property. That singular difference, one that could be set aside until all other goals are achieved - if ever - will cause endless debate, drama, and ultimately a schism which will leave both sides weaker.
Nice summation of the tech product world
And the political situation at the same time!
It is amazing that small schisms on the good side, are so highly beneficial to the dark side.
Tale as old as time. See: the fall of anarcho-syndicalist Spain, at the hand of their erstwhile allies, the Spanish Communists. And in the end the fascists won, most likely as a result.
It's because, I think, these people need moral plausible deniability.
I think maybe they truly, deep down, want to use dell - for their convenience, availability, sleekness, and mainstream appeal. But they can't just do that. They need to find the right place to jump from their moral high ground. So they basically search for any excuse at all to ditch.
I know people who were so upset, supposedly, with Mozilla that they switched to chrome. Fucking chrome, dude.
I don't care how much you think pocket is advertisement. Chrome is basically 3 ads in a trenchcoat. Can we please be for real?
I think it’s also related to bike shedding. No one wants to do the hard work of understanding the nuance of ethics and timing, and it’s easier to argue about this single event must equal evil.
See also how the left in American politics is known to eat its own. IMO, this led to the rise of MAGA and Trump.
But the issue is browsers don't make money. You can't charge for it, you can't add ads to it, etc. You're competing with the biggest companies in the world (Google, Apple), all of whom are happy to subsidize a browser for other reasons.
They could try. I just keep hearing people who would pay for no extra features as long as it paid for actual Firefox development and not the random unrelated Mozilla projects. I would pay a subscription. But they don't let me.
The problem I (and others that I see here) have is the lack of trust in mozilla's model, esp long term. Their economic reliance in google, their repeatedly stated goals of trying to engineer ad-delivery systems that "respect privacy", their very high CEO salaries, and their random ventures do not inspire much trust, confidence and alignment in their goals. And also the unclear relationships with their for and non-profit parts.
If they can convince me that some subscription for firefox will strictly go for firefox development, that firefox will not pivot to ads (privacy respecting or not), and all the other stuff they have, including executives' salaries and whatnot, are completely separated, I would be more than happy to subscribe.
You can't effectively paywall it because not only is it open source, but there are many nearly equivalent competitors all of which are free. Any subscribers would essentially be donors.
There are people like yourself who would be happy to donate, but not nearly enough. Replacing MoCo's current revenue with donors would require donations at the level of Doctors without Borders, American Cancer Society, or the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
Turning into one of the largest charities in America overnight simply isn't realistic. A drastic downsizing to subsist on donor revenue also isn't wise when Mozilla already has to compete with a smaller team. And "Ladybird does it" isn't a real argument until and unless it graduates from cool project to usable and competitive browser.
Oh no, it would be a donation and it's not going to completely replace all the funding of the parent entity of the project mentioned, therefore it's not realistic or worth trying. Right... That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote.
> That's a lot of arguments unrelated to what I wrote.
What I understand they are saying is that donations wouldn't be nearly enough. Which is related to what you wrote, which is that you would gladly donate to Firefox (not Mozilla, but Firefox).
They compared it to the largest non-profits in America, presumably because if we look at the money spent by Mozilla every year, that's similar. Right now Google pays for Mozilla, and if you wanted to replace that with donations, it would have to become one of the biggest charities in America. Which does not sound plausible.
I think the point is that if it was open source but free, it would require donations. And given the money that Mozilla spends every year, it would mean that the amount of donations they would need to receive would make them one of the biggest charities in America. Which sounds implausible.
What?! Browsers might as well be money printers! Have you heard how much money Google pays Apple to be the default search engine in Safari?
The higher Firefox’s user numbers, the more money Mozilla can make from search engine deals. Conversely, if Mozilla keeps trying to push a bunch of other initiatives while Firefox languishes and bleeds users, Mozilla will make less money.
If you don’t like this form of revenue… well, I don’t know what to tell you, because this is how web browsers make money. And trying other stuff doesn’t seem to be working.
You can and you should. There are people that are happy to pay for email, for search, for videos, for news, for music. I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser.
The idea that software is free is completely wrong and should be something that an organization like Mozilla should combat. If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that.
> The idea that software is free is completely wrong
> If software is free, there can be no privacy, it's as simple as that.
Strongly agreed. Free software, either $0 or through stronger licenses like the GPL, have their economics completely shifted as an unintended side effect. Those new economics tend to favor clandestine funding sources (eg ads or malicious supply chain code).
But sustainable funding honestly isn't Mozilla's strong suite (or tech's in general, for that matter).
> I don't see why there wouldn't be people happy to pay for a browser.
I admittedly didn't check the numbers, but a comment in a sibling thread says that if Mozilla was to replace their revenue with donations, they would have to become one of the biggest charities in America.
Is that even realistic? Like would they make that kind of money just from donations?
Based on comments in here and people willing to pay I wonder why they haven't got the Wikipedia route of getting donations, would that piss off a lot of users? I do think most people would understand a non-profit needs donations.
I've daily driven Thunderbird for over a decade. You have very few options for having a single program manage multiple email accounts outside of Outlook and Thunderbird anymore. Maybe Apple Mail on Mac (and whatever Microsoft is preloading on Windows these days), but that's it.
>Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on
I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Just this year they pushed 12 major releases, with thousands of patches, including WebGPU efficiency improvements, updated PDF engine, numerous security fixes, amounting to millions of lines of new code. They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.
> They maintain a codebase that rivals that of Chrome and of the Linux Kernel and push the equivalent of Rust's entire codebase on a monthly basis.
Is that comparison supposed to make their management of the code base seem better or worse? Chrome, Linux and Rust are arguably colossi in their niches (Rust having the weakest claim). Firefox's niche is Chrome's and it doesn't do that well. It used to be that at least Firefox had it's own little area with more interesting extensions but obviously that was too hard for them to handle - yes I'm still grumpy about ChatZilla.
You might be interested to know that there are still some legacy extensions that work on today's Firefox. Specifically, when Firefox breaks VimFX, I'm done with it. But while it works, I'm sticking with Firefox. It's like having the power of Qutebrowser but with the extensions and performance of Firefox.
Well I replied to a comment suggesting they weren't working on Firefox, by noting how much work is being done on Firefox. But you seem like you want to change the subject to a different one, which is the extent to which you can gauge "success" relative to competitors, or infer management efficiency, which is fine but orthogonal to my point.
The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on privacy as you mentioned.
They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now. Let that sink in. They're supposedly a non-profit, so this plan is the well-trodden playbook.
But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue Upton Sinclair quote.
If they were on a sustainable trajectory they wouldn't be selling their soul for advertising money and other ill-advised revenue projects that contradict their stated mission.
Okay, but now you're changing the subject. The claim was that they don't have an endowment or that they're not investing it. But they are.
The truth is the vast majority of organizations with an endowment are not able to rely on it in perpetuity, I think there's a small subset of organizations that basically amounts to a bunch of elite universities. So it's not the intended or functional or actual purpose of any endowment to be permanent firewall against any conceivable financial hazard for all eternity. Having at one point worked for a non-profit myself that had an endowment, generally, what you do is you calculate how long an organization's operations could be funded by that endowment, and is one of a portfolio of metrics for gauging the financial health of a non-profit. It's more properly understood as a firewall to create some breathing space in the face of financial uncertainty. Again, reaching back to my limited stint at a non-profit, they withdrew a little bit from their endowment during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, as well as during covid. It's rarely the case that an endowment can fund an organization in perpetuity.
And maybe I'm crazy but if someone falsely accuses Mozilla of not maintaining an endowment, it seems relevant to point out that they do actually have one.
No—they did not cut costs enough to build a sufficient endowment. Again, income of several billion dollars.
That is plenty for an endowment to build a browser+ in perpetuity... like an order of magnitude in excess. Ladybird/servo are successfully building on perhaps 1% of that?
I'm sure they have some money in the bank and it gets interest, but obviously not enough or handled well enough to avoid the temptation to start an advertising project due to their unsustainable spending rate.
You keep trying to make it sound like they "did everything they could." No, they did not by a long shot.
They could be on a sustainable trajectory and still sell their soul purely out of greed. I'm not suggesting that Mozilla is actually doing that, I just wanted to point out the possibility.
Yep. Mozilla is effectively just a tax dodge for Google anymore.
Heck, this AI first announcement was probably strongly influenced behind the scenes by Google to create an appearance of competition similar to Microsoft's and Apple's relationship in the 1990s.
Also, ironically, I just switched full time to Brave only yesterday.
The "other things" is what most people seem to have problem with.
Mozilla burns a batshit amount of money on feel good fancies.
If it were focused on its core mission -- building great software in key areas -- it would see it can't afford this, because that's the same money that if saved would make them financially independent of Google.
> In 2018, Baker received $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla.
> In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million.
> In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5.5 million,
> and again to over $6.9 million in 2022.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundation_and_Mozilla_Corporation
Mozilla took in the money from the distant past all the way into the present. They have leaned into privacy the whole time, while not being perfect.
At some point they ease off the google money or it goes away itself. And they move forward on privacy.
Google was less demanding in the past as well; they continue to give Apple billions each year.
There are a number of privacy-oriented business models, as listed here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html - while not as lucrative as some, combined with an endowment its a good living that many companies would envy.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I agree with the person you're responding to. Decades of funding and they have zero savings to show for it.
Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.
> Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.
Look at how much money Google gave to Apple (Safari) vs Mozilla (FireFox) per year.
The CEO has unarguable been doing a poor job. Losing market share has lost them more potential revenue than any of their pet projects raised.
Well, they have over a billion in the bank. Which is both a ton of money, but also goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries.
So if you have a billion in the bank, you can collect 5% return and never touch the money. So you get $50m a year to pay enough engineers to make a browser.
That's plenty of money if they recognize they need a super lean company with 0 bloat and a few highly paid experts who focus on correctness and not bullshit features.
There are about 800 unique weekly committers to the Chromium project, so that's a start at gauging the number for that project. A little harder to find that same figure for Firefox, but Wikipedia says Mozilla Corp had about 750 employees as of 2020.
Anyway, if you have $50M, you can afford 500 people at $100k, or 250 people at $200k. So you simply declare, this is how many people it takes to make a browser, and set your goals and timetables accordingly. I feel like the goals and direction might be more important than the number of bodies you throw at it, but maybe that's naïve. But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
You're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k salary is going to cost the company something like $300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads. And $200k is quite a bit less than your competitors are paying.
So you're looking at something more like 150 employees total of which <100 are going to be pure engineers, and that's stretching your budget and operations pretty aggressively while also fighting an uphill battle for recruiting skilled and experienced engineers. (And browser development definitely needs a core of experienced engineers with a relatively niche set of skills!)
Working at Mozilla should be more than money. $200k/year is more than enough to be happy in most of the world. You don't need to compete on rock stars that must live in San Francisco, and focus on people that are happy with a high paying job and have enough idealism to accept "only" $200k/year.
None of those figures are what the engineer makes, they're costs. And they're illustrative, not literal. You won't pay everyone at the same rate either for example, and not all will be engineers either, and I totally left both those facts out of it. Oh no! And also omitted the fact that a company whose vision and ideals people agree with can hire said people for less money, which again brings us back around to the point that the vision might be more important.
Maybe they should quit their presence in the Bay Area. The rent is insanely high. Not just of an office, also the workers. Besides, freedom of speech, liberty, DEI are each under pressure in USA. Mozilla is very much welcome here in Europe :-)
Another comment observed your cost estimates were low.
> But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
Google could reduce Chrome development to maintenance and remain dominant for years. It would be much like Internet Explorer 6. Firefox falling too far behind in performance or compatibility would be fatal.
> Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at Vivaldi doing?
The Ladybird developers have not produced a browser comparable to Firefox or Vivaldi. Vivaldi have not produced a browser engine comparable to Ladybird of course.
> I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number.
28 is a magic number was not a reasonable interpretation of my comment.
Exactly! With such an endowment they should be able to develop a browser and maybe some other stuff with a small team that’s focused on tech and not social justice.
I just want to note that this is what is sometimes called carouseling. Which is, instead of acknowledging the original accusation was not correct, which is what should be happening, this comment just proceeds right on to the next accusation.
What is happening, psychologically speaking, that is causing a mass of people to spew one confidently wrong accusation after another? They don't have an endowment (they do!). Well they're not investing it! (they are). Well they're not working on the browser! (they shipped 12 major releases with thousands of patches per release with everything from new tab grouping and stacking to improved gpu performance to security fixes)
There's nothing to acknowledge. You're asking everyone to accept the presumption embedded in the statement that a billion dollars "goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries", namely that Mozilla should be a large company and should rely on a steady stream of outside money instead of seeking sustainable financial independence. But Mozilla's lack of focus and excessive spending on side projects is a major part of the complaints against Mozilla, and you aren't even trying to make a reasonable case that Mozilla needs to be spending money like that.
That isn't really the best way to think about not-for-profit schemes like Mozilla. Every organisation eventually becomes corrupted (as in fact we see with Mozilla), so creating an eternal pot of money for something is not strategically sensible.
If good people are in charge, they'll just spend everything and rely on ongoing donations. If nobody thinks it is worth donating too then it is time to close up shop. Keep a bit of a buffer for the practical issue of bad years, sure, but the idea shouldn't be to set up an endowment.
On the Matrix side we would love for Mozilla (or MZLA) to become a paid Matrix hosting provider. Element has ended up focusing on digitally-sovereign govtech (https://element.io/en/sectors) in order to prevail, and it's left a hole in the market.
> Element has ended up focusing on digitally-sovereign govtech (https://element.io/en/sectors) in order to prevail, and it's left a hole in the market.
And unless they have verifiable testimonials, I'd take their reach with a grain of salt. Anyone can plaster a bunch of public domain government and defense logos all over their website.
You can trust your doctor much more about your knee and much less about their billing. Trust isn't binary and isn't per person/organization/object, but varies by person and (activity?).
And anything will be trusted more or less by different people. Is there evidence of who trusts Mozilla with what, and how much? The the fact that you don't trust them or that some on HN don't trust them isn't evidence.
Also, each of us is both commentator and agent. When we say 'I trust X' or 'I don't trust X', we both communicate our thoughts and change others' thoughts.
That's a great question, honestly, and I like your framing of trust.
I do not trust Mozilla to keep a product alive. I was frustrated by Firefox OS and more recently Pocket, but everything they've tried or acquired aside from the browser itself (and Thunderbird I guess?) has failed and been shut down. That has burned a lot of people along the way.
For this reason I can't see myself becoming a user of any future Mozilla projects.
That makes much more sense. I wonder what the non-HN public thinks - most of those products, like Firefox OS, were essentially unknown outside HN-like populations. Pocket was better known.
But yes, that is part of trust and I'd like to see them address it.
Firefox is still heavily used by Linux OSes as the default browser. But I think that's mostly momentum at this point. If more people knew about Mozilla's organizational challenges, then I think Firefox would get ditched.
Do they like the browser, or do they like the fact that it's not owned by Google?
When I use Firefox, either it's because I don't have a choice (my distro doesn't ship Chromium in a way I like, i.e. not Flatpak) or because I make an effort to "support" Firefox. But once in a while, I need to use Chrom(ium) because the website doesn't work on Firefox. Not that it is necessarily Firefox' fault, but the fact remains that if Chrome was an independent non-profit, I would most likely use Chrome and not Firefox.
I think a tangential interesting question is: how many monthly active users does Firefox have, that choose to use Firefox? Not people who "click the internet icon", etc.
Like you, I suspect the brand recognition and loyalty is much, much lower than many people in this thread believe it to be. Not talking about among the highly-technical HN audience; just at large.
That's a fair question. It's of course my opinion, not hard fact, but here goes:
- They have for years been trying to add stuff to Firefox that nobody wants, and were privacy violations. The "marketing studies" come to mind.
- They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox, and failing at literally all of it. You can't help but notice the stellar incompetence of Mozilla leadership.
- They have for a long time been raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Google, pissing it away on useless stuff, but mostly on enriching the management layer. How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero? This is a thoroughly corrupt organization.
> They have for decades been wasting their time and money on everything BUT Firefox
They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox. And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...
> How can somebody like Mitchell Baker be making millions of dollars a year while simultaneously seeing Firefox market share drop to damn near zero?
Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.
With Firefox market share plummeting, and little prospect for competing with Google on a free commodity product, Mozilla needed and needs to find other products and not just watch the ship go down.
What's your solution? Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome, despite Google's enormous marketing advantage?
> They invest the vast majority of their resources in Firefox.
Says who? I have never seen figures that show this. It also doesn't excuse the gigantic amounts of money wasted on irrelevant things, or executive salaries.
> And they have had some incredible successes: Rust, Let's Encrypt ...
That's pretty charitable. LE was a wider industry initiative, and while Rust was incubated in Mozilla AFAIK, they also let it slip through their fingers.
> Maybe there was no realistic way to do better. Maybe thanks to Baker, Mozilla still exists.
How on earth are you defending her behavior? It was utterly shameless and indefensible. Do you work for Mozilla?
> Mozilla needed and needs to find other products
No, it doesn't. It needs to bank its giant wad of cash and learn to live off the interest plus whatever it can get in donations. Mozilla does not need to be a for-profit company, it needs to be a non-profit making a browser. That was always supposed to be the mission, from day one.
> Do you really think they could make Firefox so good that the non-technical public would go through the effort of dropping Chrome
They did when IE was shoved down people's throats, and Firefox was the better browser. They did when Chrome came around and started taking over. Most people even now get pushed to Edge or Safari, yet still end up using Chrome. People switching browsers is a thing.
Any other belief or possibility is "utterly shameless and indefensible", and therefore of suspect motivation. Doubt is difficult, but certainty is ridiculous (said someone).
A privacy play would be more successful from Mozilla if I were paying them for it. The incentives would be aligned. I cannot pay google for privacy, because they are incentivized against that.
Paying a company for something doesn't mean that the company isn't going to also sell every scrap of your data they can get their hands on. If the company is unethical you are always going to be the product. Mozilla is either going to be an ethical company or it isn't and how much money you give them won't make any difference. Mozilla has not always been an ethical company, but I don't think it's too late for them to turn that around, even if it will take time for trust to be rebuilt. I still want them to be the hero we need them to be.
Trust is relative and it is subjective meaning that I trust Mozilla more than I trust google but I also trust them in general, enough at least that they support most of my internet browsing. Unless you mean something else ?
I'd love to be able to modify JS at runtime on random websites. Too often there's a bug, or a "feature" that prevents me from using a service, that I could fix by removing an event or something in the JS code.
As far as I know neither Firefox nor Chrome allow you to modify the JS prior to execution without a plugin. You can run random JS, sure, but you can’t monkeypatch.
Firemail should be the name of a free and privacy oriented email client wholly owned by Mozilla with a web and mobile app. I would sign up instantly and gradually migrate from gmail, while being assured for its sustainability.
I've been perfectly willing to spend an hour making countless changes using about:config to beat Firefox (or its forks) into submission on every install, but that only works while they continue to give us the ability.
Adding my 2 cents worth to this: why is there not a Mozilla family internet suite of privacy browser, VPN, relay, tracker blocker, etc for one price? I already pay for family plans for other services, so this is a no brainer if it exists.
Right now, all of Mozilla's products are not even available in a standardised form in key countries. For example, I pay for Mozilla relay and VPN, and these are not available in the same countries!
Mind you, I'm lucky to have actual access to several countries, and so I can work around this. But really, why can't this team just put everything in one place for me?
Besides relay and Mozilla VPN, I am also paying for Bit warden password manager.
I'm also willing to pay for a privacy-first email(though I haven't done so yet), and please have a family plan that bundles all of this together!
If Norton can have an Internet Suite, why can't Mozilla?
Don't you have this already? Chrome and Firefox both have these. Devices have solid password manager integration, I use mine across 3 OSes and who knows how many devices.
I would love if there was some magic way I could share my passwords between my desktop and phone Firefox installs without a damn login or account, because I don't want a damn account.
Super well stated and interesting point regarding (general) privacy.
I miss the days where Mozilla (Firefox) was known to be the "fastest browser." It worked and such an easy transition for users (including myself) who were tired of the bloated browser experience.
> And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.
I don't keep close track of this, but as far as I remember they haven't tried donations that go only to Firefox/Thunderbird/etc of the person's choice, instead of Mozilla as a whole. That's what people always claim they want in these threads. I doubt donations would be enough, but I think doing it like that would at least be a step in a direction people like instead of are annoyed by, as long as they don't go nagging like Wikipedia.
Thunderbird is entirely funded by donations for some years now and is more than enough. In 2024, Thunderbird received $10.3M (19% increase over the previous year) in donations which was used to employ 43 people.
Merge Mozilla (including Firefox Relay, Mozilla VPN, etc ) with FastMail or Proton, price it reasonably and I’d be on board. If it worked well I’d recommend it to anyone I could.
I understand email isn’t easy but it difficult to imagine why Mozilla didn’t seize the opportunity.
> Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on privacy.
Where it comes to AI in that regard, I would also focus on direct human connection. Where AI encapsulates people in bubbles of tech isolation and social indirection.
I wouldn’t mind privacy-focused AI tools, either (as long as they don’t cram it in our faces). On its AI search assist, DDG has a button to open up a private session with GPT, which I use on occasion.
Privacy, identity, and more importantly, anonymity are one of those things I keep thinking about. A few months back I had this idea of comparing the need to that of credit reporting agencies. You have the big 3 - Equifax, Experian, TransUnion. They provide credit information to companies that want it. You request the info, they provide it. There's a fee for retrieving it. I think our personal identities should be treated similarly. We sign up for various online services and provide some PII, but not much. Why should the website be able to store that information? Maybe they shouldn't be able to. Instead, lets permit these identity brokers to control our private information. Name, address, email, etc. Then whenever a companies needs that info, for whatever reason, they query the identity broker, get select info they need and be done. Token based access could permit the site to certain data, for certain periods of time. You can review the tokens at a later date and make sure only the ones you care about get the info. Large companies that already participate in this space (Google, Microsoft, etc.) can separate out this business function and have it be isolated from their core products. I was thinking it'd require an act of congress to get implemented, and that may be possible. But instead of having that as a hard requirement, maybe just a branding/badge/logo on services. Say your product respects your privacy and uses data brokers for your privacy.
Going a step further, how do we encourage use? Aside from personal privacy, what if social media sites allowed us to use our identities to validate comments or attachments? Similar to the idea of a token, we upload a photo of our cat. We permit FB access to that cat pic, generate the token, say it's good until we revoke it. We revoke it, and now that picture will fail to load. We can also restrict access to our cat picture. By requesting access to the cat pic, another user provides their identity as well. If their identity is allowed to view it, then it can render. Similar to comments. It's just a string, but we can invalidate a token and make access to it no longer possible.
What about digital hoarding? Can't we screenshot everything or scrape the website and store it for later? Yes. But that's no longer a trusted source. Everything can be faked, especially as AI tools advance. Instead, by using the identity broker, you can verify if a statement was actually said. This will be a mindshift. Similar to how wikipedia isn't a credible source in a term paper, a screenshot is not proof of anything.
Identity brokers can also facilitate anonymous streams. Similar to a crypto wallet, separate personas can be generated by an identity. An anonymous comment can be produced and associated with that randomized persona. The identity broker can store the private key for the persona, possibly encrypted by the identity in some manner, or it can be stored elsewhere, free for the identity to resume using should they want to.
i work for a for-profit owned by a non-profit. This is a weird take. You can shape a product, sure you need to bring in a profit, but there are options of working with your owner (the non-profit) that you just don't have in a publicly traded company.
I am sure people would queue up for the job, fully aware of what it entails.
His point (which I agree with - softly) is that Mozilla could approach this from a more nuanced perspective that others cannot, like not anti-AI but anti "Big AI". Facilitate what people are already doing (and outside of the HN bubble everyone is using AI all the time, even if it's just what we think is "dumb" stuff) throught the FF lens. Like a local LLM that runs entirely in an extension or similar. THere's no shortage of hard, valuable things that big tech won't do because of $$$.
I guess I wonder what people think the AI bubble is.
Are you worried about the high valuations of the big AI companies (OpenAI, Nvidia, etc)? Then sure, that will correct over time. There will likely be 1-2 big winners.
But if you're talking about AI in general... right now is the least amount of money companies will be spending on AI ever. It will only go up. This isn't crypto.
But if the value add of AI fails to materialize like the current valuations are based on (as in the % of GDP impacted), then you’re going to see investors losing money on the investments.
...do you not see the parallel in the words you just wrote? That AI's value will continue increasing even as the buzzwords fall out of the public consciousness, just as crypto continued to gain value even as the buzzwords fell out of the public consciousness?
I think when most people talk about the "AI bubble bursting", they mean a dramatic end to this notion that AI is the "next big thing". Much like how we had Web3 and NFTs and all those other things that were going to change how we interacted with the internet.
Sure, my BTC is up, but I can go weeks or months without interacting with a blockchain in any way, directly or indirectly.
Valuations of individual AI companies might (and will) drop, but we are currently experiencing the least amount of AI in our everyday lives that we (or our children) ever will.
If Anthropic wants to own code development in the future, owning the full platform (including the runtime) makes sense.
Programming languages all are a balance between performance/etc and making it easy for a human to interact with. This balance is going to shit as AI writes more code (and I assume Anthropic wants a future where humans might not even see the code, but rather an abstraction of it... after all, all code we look at is an abstraction on some level).
Even outside of code development, Anthropic seems to be very strongly leaning into code interpreter over native tool calling for advancing agentic LLM abilities (e.g. their "skills" approach). Given that those necessitate a runtime of sorts, owning/having access to a runtime like Bun that could e.g. allow them to very seamlessly integrate that functionality into their products better, this acquisition doesn't seem like the worst idea.
It doesn't make sense, and you definitely didn't say why it'd make sense... but enough people are happy enough to see the Bun team reach an exit (especially one that doesn't kill Bun) that I think the narrative that it makes sense will win out.
I see it as two hairy things canceling out: the accelerating trend of the JS ecosystem being hostage to VCs and Rauch is nonsensical, but this time a nonsensical acquisition is closing the loop as neatly as possible.
(actually this reminds me of Harry giving Dobby a sock: on so many levels!)
They will own it, and then what? Will Claude Code end every response with "by the way, did you know that you can switch to bun for 21.37x faster builds?"
TypeScript is the most popular programming language on the most popular software hosting platform though, owning the best runtime for that seems like it would fit Pareto's rule well enough:
I think there's a potential argument to be made that Anthropic isn't trying to make it easier to write TS code, but rather that their goal is a level higher and the average person wouldn't even know what "language" is running it (in the same way most TS devs don't need to care the many layers their TS code is compiled via).
It's a JS runtime, not specifically servers though? They essentially can bundle Claude Code with this, instead of ever relying on someone installing NodeJS and then running npm install.
Claude will likely be bundled up nicely with Bun in the near future. I could see this being useful to let even a beginner use claude code.
Edit:
Lastly, what I meant originally is that most front-end work happens with tools like Node or Bun. At first I was thinking they could use it to speed up generating / pulling JS projects, but it seems more likely Claude Code and bun will have a separate project where they integrate both and make Claude Code take full advantage of Bun itself, and Bun will focus on tight coupling to ensure Claude Code is optimally running.
Sure, but Bun was funded by VCs and needed to figure out how to monetize, what Anthropic did is ensure it is maintained and now they have fresh talent to improve Claude Code.
Server here I used loosely - it obviously runs on any machine (eg if you wanted to deploy an application with it as a runtime). But it’s not useful for web dev itself which was my point.
Frontend work by definitions n doesn’t happen with either Node nor Bun. Some frontend tooling might be using a JS runtime but the value add of that is minimal and a lot of JS tooling is actually being rewritten in Rust for performance anyway.
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