I feel it for the post's author - few things are as demoralizing as finding out that your heroes are flawed, which Mozilla definitely is.
Having said that, the points he lists against Firefox are also perfectly valid criticisms of Chrome, so I fail to see how is switching to Chromium any better - if they got fed up with Firefox because they "shut down communication", just wait until they try to communicate with Google of all companies.
Yeah, I didn't understand what the author was trying to get at. Every point made against Firefox, Chrome itself offends to an exponential degree.
Their conclusion of using ungoogled-chromium makes no sense, as it still suffers from at least three of the five issues outlined. At least with Firefox, you have ESR to keep using the version you're accustomed to for a few years. Or you can jump over to TOR if you really distrust Mozilla that much with their opt-out user metrics.
I agree that individual browser choices won't make any changes. But this is where we're at. At least there _is_ a choice. Legislation to break up the browser monopoly is likely our only hope.
I think the difference between the criticism of Chrome and the criticism of Firefox lies in the marketing. Firefox is constantly telling me that they are the good guys. The last bastion of privacy and user-first on the web. But in reality they are doing a lot of questionable and shady stuff that that they need to be called out for.
But don't then finish that callout by saying that nothing matters and that trying to fight against browser monoculture is pointless.
The "final thoughts" section of this article is depressing to read. There is absolutely still a difference between Mozilla and Google, and it is absolutely still worth fighting to avoid a browser monoculture, even if there's only a small chance of success.
I definitely agree that Mozilla has problems, but that's not the thrust of this article. The thrust of the article is that Mozilla has problems, and therefore everyone's efforts to improve the web are meaningless.
Yes, I think so. Firefox ships with a ton of anti-fingerprinting features that can be enabled in about:config (many of them lifted directly from Tor), containers are an intuitive way for people to isolate sites from each other, Encrypted DNS is turned on by default (Chrome only upgrades to encrypted DNS by default if the current resolver supports it), and Firefox's addon API for adblocking is already slightly more capable than Chromium's, and will be much more capable once Manifest V3 ships.
> Interesting idea, but I don't see how you can solve a technical issue by legal means.
Why do you think that Chrome's dominance is a technical issue rather than an issue of default bundling on Google devices, advertising on Google properties, and other anti-competitive practices?
From a technical perspective, Firefox already keeps up pretty well with Chrome. It's better in some areas, and worse in others, but it's definitely competitive.
Even if you want to throw Firefox out the window and start a new browser from scratch, the existence of Web DRM is one of the biggest issues that's keeping you from building a new browser on top of V8 or Servo. If you want to license Widevine from Google, they're not going to approve it for a highly experimental browser. There isn't a technical solution to that problem at all -- it's entirely a legal problem.
Let's put it this way: A technical issue is at the core of the problem (the practical inability to "just create" a new browser), that is then exploited by companies such as Google for their own interest. I wasn't familiar with the legal issue of Web DRM, but that just represents an additonal problem.
> From a technical perspective, Firefox already keeps up pretty well with Chrome.
Yes, but Firefox has to follow Chrome at whatever they decide, because the "regular consumer" just wants a working browser. So Google ends up making all the decisions, either way.
> A technical issue is at the core of the problem (the practical inability to "just create" a new browser)
What I'm saying is that the technical difficulty in creating a new browser is less of a concern than the legal and monopolistic barriers to creating a new browser.
See your next point:
> Yes, but Firefox has to follow Chrome at whatever they decide, because the "regular consumer" just wants a working browser.
Which is a legal/monopoly problem, not a technical problem. Firefox has passed the technical hurdles it needs to pass to be competitive with Chrome. The monopolistic barriers (default bundling in Android, hobbling Google properties like Youtube on Firefox, etc) are some of the biggest things holding Mozilla back.
You can make it as easy to build a new browser as you want. But if Chrome is bundled in Android by default, and if Youtube works better on Chrome than your browser, and if your browser can't play Netflix videos because Google won't license Widevine, than all of the technical solutions you've come up with stop mattering.
The practical inability to "just create" a new browser exists, but you're not going to be able to solve that problem purely with technology.
Microsoft made a competing browser engine, from scratch, and in terms of pure performance and support for web standards it was doing really well in matchups against V8. They gave that engine up not because they didn't have the engineering chops to compete with Chrome, but because they couldn't break into the market. That's not a technical problem.
Minor gripe, but especially in a time when people should know about exponential growth and stuff it kind of bothers me when it's used like this.
'Exponentially' refers specifically to a change in rate of growth. You could say 'profits are growing exponentially' or 'things are getting exponentially worse', but it doesn't quite make sense for this case. I would say 'Chrome is orders of magnitude worse' or something.
I do not think this is a relevant stance. Privacy issues people have with Firefox are not some imperfections that has to be fixed, they are due to misfeatures that were intentionally implemented to Firefox.
I hate that Firefox's privacy is held to a standard so high that's almost at a level of a conspiracy theory. As if Mozilla had some nefarious business in selling your captive portal DNS queries (so much private data in that IP address that isn't even yours!), but don't mind that trillion-dollar tracking-based ad network of the competitor.
Mozilla is dragged for using Google Safe Browsing service and a limited version of Google Analytics, but the browser by maker of these services is the author's choice.
When Firefox checks for updates that's Spyware Phoning Home, while the author of this complaint is probably logged in to Chrome with their real name and a verified phone number.
>Patronizing, Dismissiveness and Shutting down communication
This is why Free Software exists. If someone makes a software change you don't like, you (or someone else) are free to revert that change. Forking Firefox to remove the Megabar is certainly possible. Hell, there's forks of Firefox that revert process separation so that XUL Addons or NPAPI plugins still work!
(Also, I never noticed this Megabar thing or understand why people would hate it.)
>Threats and Using guilt
Maybe, but the way this is described is wide enough to describe basically all political advocacy. Merely advocating for your cause by stating that the option of no action is worse is not in and of itself abusive. Did Mozilla act in such a way as to bring about the situation where Gecko is the only practical Blink alternative?
>Digital spying and Denying something you know is true
I'm not going to complain about people wanting to not have telemetry involved with their computing experience, but I am going to complain about the abuse of the word "spyware". No information is given as to what features of Firefox are being objected to in particular; just a link to another website with a "spyware removal guide" that, among other things, considers OCSP to be spyware.
What brand of alternative facts are you high on to think that certificate revocation is an inherent privacy risk?
>Financial control
Oh hey, an actual problem with Mozilla as an organization!
However, this does not directly affect people who just use Firefox. If you donate money to Mozilla, then this is a far more valid concern, but people who use Firefox need to be concerned with if their software is going to continue to be supported rather than if their money has been absconded with.
>Unpredictability
This is the first thing all over again. I'm starting to think the author of this post really just hates the Megabar and wrote the rest of the article around that.
Honestly, having Chrome purposefully cripple uBlock origin protections "for my safety", feels a lot more like gaslighting, than anything Mozilla is being accused of here.
That “Firefox is Spyware” article which this one uses as evidence is total BS. Firefox is spyware because it makes a single GET request to an empty page on Mozilla’s site to detect public WiFi login portals? How else do they envision that working? Even if you’re technically adept, getting that login page to show up in the age of HTTPS is a hassle.
I came to the comments specifically curious about this. I'm currently running Firefox with multi-container, and a couple of the about:config tweaks from https://www.privacytools.io/browsers/#about_config
Obviously it's all relative (e.g. compared to Tor), but is the general consensus that this is good enough?
"Good enough" depends entirely on your threat model and what you're trying to prevent. I don't know that anyone here can answer that question for you.
That being said, the changes you made will make you more private than an unaltered Ungoogled Chromium build, and substantially more private than an unaltered Chrome install. I'm assuming you also have an adblocker installed (uBlock Origin recommended). If not, do that. Installing an adblocker is the easiest, most effective way to improve your privacy in terms of effort-to-payout, pretty much everyone everywhere even if they're non-technical should be running an adblocker; it should be the first step you take to improving your privacy.
If you're comfortable with the annoyances that come from enabling more advanced Firefox features, I personally also use the uMatrix addon (discontinued, I'm still trying to figure out how to replace it) to disable Javascript by default. Depending on your privacy goals, that can be either a substantial gain in privacy, or a ton of overkill.
And that conversation could go longer, we could talk about both the benefits and downsides of VPNs, canvas blocking, etc... again, I don't know what you mean by "good enough", privacy is a very wide spectrum.
But if you're just looking to pick a browser, and you've followed the steps on that page to configure Firefox settings, I would say you've done pretty well for yourself compared to the average person browsing the web.
Typically, if I'm setting up a computer for someone else, I'll just install Firefox, flip a few settings, and give them an adblocker. It's not unless I know someone's technical and they want stronger protections that I'll start talking about `resistFingerprinting` or disabling WebGL.
> Mozilla seems to disagree, as the Megabar change has shown. Not only have they introduced a meaningless but annoying change, but they actively want to prevent people from disabling it.
The reason they rewrote the URL bar code was that the previous version was written using XUL / XBL, and they are in the process of removing XUL / XBL from the browser.
Writing a new version while leaving the old version around would defeat the entire purpose, which was deleting the old code to reduce technical debt.
Now, my personal preference would have been that they rewrite it without re-designing it - but "actively prevent people from disabling it" is a very inaccurate description of what happened.
This sounds like a bunch of ”but her emails” to me.
Mozilla and Apple are the only two companies that can realistically oppose Google’s egocentric vision of the web and prevent the web from effectively becoming Google’s platform. Simple as that.
Excuse my language, but I don’t give a flying fuck about Mozilla’s “issues” and the “abuse” I’m supposedly enduring. I want Mozilla to oppose Google, and as far as I can see, Mozilla is doing that.
They're really not opposing google. By default, they send google every keypress in the address bar. They've also integrated google analytics to a degree that I'm quite uncomfortable with. So I kinda agree with you in principal, but in practice, they get a ton of money from Google; their CEO in particular gets a ton of money from Google, and it shows in the decisions that they've made.
> “If you stop using Firefox,”, Mozilla advocates will tell you, “Chrome will become the only real web browser”.
> Yes, but isn’t it a bit too late to worry about that? And what change do individual choices make here?
I don't think it's too late. Firefox exists because the same situation was happening in the late 90s/early 2000s - replace Chrome with Internet Explorer and I could believe this was written in 2002.
It's a different landscape today[1], but I maintain it wasn't too late then and it isn't now - the fact that we're talking about FF almost 20 years after its first release is a testament to that.
I'm not a daily FF user, but I am part of the install base. I think that diversity in the browser ecosystem is extremely important and I'm not a "Mozilla advocate".
[1] I'm guessing part of the early success of FF was its support for OSX/Linux where IE had no reach and it gained them a lot of early traction/users so it isn't an apples to apples comparison with Chrome today. But, I remember the times, and many (even non-techie) people would adamantly install and switch to FF as the first action when they got a new PC/fresh Windows install - those individual choices added up to a very large user base.
I’m kind of tired of the $2mm CEO pay that people have been complaining about.
Ok, maybe you think that the current CEO hasn’t lived up to their responsibility so the pay is unearned. That may be a reasonable argument but has nothing to do with the amount the CEO is paid.
The reality is that the leader of a not for profit organization competes in the same job market as those for for profit organizations. So if you want someone decent to do a good job then you need to pay them the market price.
Now one thing some may point to is that occasionally the not for profit CEO is paid too much even relative to the for profit CEO. But this is misleading because for profit CEOs get paid in many other ways. Stock options, bonuses, promises of future profits, buying them a place to stay, an airplane, etc.
Now, there is a different argument that CEOs in the US overall are paid too much. But that’s a wholly different issue that needs to be resolved at a macro level and cannot be resolved at an individual organization level.
> The reality is that the leader of a not for profit organization competes in the same job market as those for for profit organizations. So if you want someone decent to do a good job then you need to pay them the market price.
I'm not sure how true this is. people that work at non-profits often don't view jobs at for-profits as acceptable substitutes unless they really need the money. the belief that they are making the world a better place (or at least the image of doing so) is part of the compensation package. the real bidding war is among other non-profits.
A good example of what your saying is Jimmy Whales. He claims to have taken no salary from Wikimedia [1], despite running one of the top internet sites by traffic. Wikipedia makes a fair chunk in donations, but none of their execs make more than about $200k or $300k, IIRC.
If anything, a top exec making $2 million at a tech non-profit might be actively attracting the wrong leadership to run Mozilla. Same with the other top execs. If Firefox share was increasing, perhaps you'd have a case otherwise. I kinda hope someone creates a viable Firefox fork and backing org, with better stewardship as I've long been a Firefox fan.
I think things would be a lot better in the non-profit world if they actually did compete for talent with profit-earning companies.
But the truth is, they don't. With a few rare exceptions (like Harvard's foundation, which has come under a lot of scrutiny over just how successful it's been), NGOs by and large end up with the leftovers. The folks who weren't really able to get jobs anywhere else.
For employees of NGOs, they end up with bottom-barrel, barely subsisting wages. For administration, they're ususally cronies of someone in charge of appointments. A handout to some other, successful executive's spouse, or sibling, or college buddy.
CEOs and directors talking about "competitive salaries" are just part of the ever growing problem of NGOs being siphons of money from donors to these "elite adjacent" individuals.
The problems that he describes as "abusive" are structural to the "non-government organization" or "non-profit organization".
People have similar concerns with Oxfam and the United Way, just to name a few. (e.g. I can think about the local chairperson of the United Way as a 'good person' but decide to give the the community in other ways)
As Mozilla goes specifically, they have a nice headquarters which is separated by the longest 30 miles of Interstate Highway in America from their chief competitor. They get to share "expert networks" with Google, but they will inevitably be out of touch with the rest of the world in the exact same way Google is out of touch with the rest of the world. The trouble is Google has the profit motive to give it some clarity but Mozilla doesn't. Without deep roots in the rest of the world, Mozilla can't exploit markets that are defensible from Google.
One could spin some scenarios where they were based in (say) Dublin, or Frankfurt, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, or some combination of tier-2 cities worldwide however and still face the problem that the consumer voice is hard for a non-profit to hear.
> I implore everyone to think about this, and make a concious decision. Continue using Firefox if you want to, but don’t fool yourself that it means anything.
Cool. Cool. Cool. Whatever floats your boat, right?
I’ll continue using Firefox, thank you. I know about the issues and about Mozilla, but I’d feel really dirty, as if I’ve sold my soul, if I use Chrome or Chromium.
There’s space for criticism, and there’s space for resignation. I’m not yet in the latter camp. Firefox, for all the issues over the past few years, is nowhere close to being dead or to be given up on, IMO.
I've been using Firefox for a looooong time -- since before it was "Firefox", actually! My name's in that full-page ad that was placed in the New York Times to commemorate the 1.0 release and, of course, I used Netscape before that.
Over this time, Mozilla has certainly made some "goofs" (to put it nicely). They've done several things I wasn't real thrilled about -- especially in the last couple of years. The default settings should absolutely be tightened up.
There are some valid criticisms in this article and I can't -- won't -- try to defend them. My own "preferences file" is several hundred lines long and gets installed on my machines before I launch Firefox for the first time because, yes, it makes an absurd number of outbound connections on startup.
Firefox is the "mutt" of web browsers. They all suck, Firefox just sucks less. Even with all of the legitimate criticisms and screw-ups on Mozilla's part, Firefox is still a tremendous improvement over Google Chrome, which isn't allowed on my machines. The closest I come is having Chromium installed (from the Debian package repositories!) and that's reserved for the rare case when I need to use a different browser for a few minutes.
Mozilla Firefox certainly isn't perfect, but it could be sooooo much worse!
Exactly. What's the point in giving up on Firefox? It's putting up a hell of a fight (except for some performance and a very occasional broken site I don't miss Chrome at all) and it's our only realistic hope. Why don't we try to fix Mozilla instead?
> Digital spying and Denying something you know is true
This is very interesting, and the linked page too[1]. As a long-time Firefox user I find this kind of shocking. I trusted no traffic (or no such traffic) was generated from Firefox. I need now to open a session with Wireshark and check it for myself.
I wonder how the TOR browser handles all these requests.
Prepare to be astonished, seriously! I'm a die-hard Firefox user (see my other comment here) but it's outrageous -- and (part of) the reason why my preferences file is so huge.
Not everyone is forcing themselves to use Firefox for ideological reasons that make the relationship abusive. I just use it because I think it's a better browser. The idea that its only worth is political or idelogical is strange to me.
As an end user of Firefox, I find it very frustrating that every update I allow to the browser wrests more control from me, and now I am being constantly annoyed to keep my browser up to date as well.
> I am being constantly annoyed to keep my browser up to date as well.
Imagine how annoyed you’d find it to have all of your accounts compromised and your personal data out in public or held for ransom. We know that most people don’t install updates in a timely manner because we have 3 decades of evidence from billions of devices.
That's fine. But there should still be options available for:
- Notify me that an update is available (and the download size), and let me decide whether to download it now or not. I know better than you do what the download will cost me, or I might have a specific reason you don't know about not to install this update (yet, or ever).
- Go ahead and download an update, and ask me whether to install it now and restart the browser, or wait to install until next browser startup. Because I know better than you do whether forcing me to Stop Right Now is too disruptive.
How would having those options available for people who choose to control their own computer cause any harm for the majority who leave the default setting? And what on earth makes you think that forcing an update right now, in the middle of what I'm doing, will keep me from being compromised by the site I'm already using??
I go to about:preferences, and scroll down to Firefox Updates. Below that, it says "Keep Firefox up to date for the best performance, stability, and security." And then there's the version and a "What's new" link. No actual settings of any kind.
Based on tips found online, I've set app.update.auto=false, but that has had no effect.
On a standard Firefox install the preferences dialog has a radio button to choose between automatic installs and checking but not downloading until you choose.
The question is not when I will install my updates, but if. Generally the answer is that I won't apply any patches at all.
If you refuse to acknowledge that updates a) also introduce bugs, and b) consistently have negative impacts on the software, then I don't see how we can possibly have an honest conversation about this.
I certainly do not consider the security of my browsing experience to be such an important factor that I am willing to sacrifice all of my autonomy to obtain marginally more of it. This is the same argument that has been applied countless times to all sorts of monetization and surveillance disguised as security. I simply accept the risks.
This is like trying to argue that cars shouldn't have safety equipment because you don't want to pay for something you don't [yet] agree you need. A web browser is extremely complex and usually the most security-sensitive software most people use. You don't have the resources to maintain a fork so if you really dislike the decisions made by the Mozilla developer team, switch to a different browser rather than making your browser experience worse and putting yourself at risk.
I understand why people don't want to use Google Chrome, and I agree with them completely. But I don't get why people want to use Firefox. Not today, at least.
Firefox came out in 2002, when Internet Explorer had 90% of the market share. It would take 8 years for Firefox's popularity to peak, capturing about 1/3rd of the market, still leaving about 50% to IE.
2010 was also about a year after the first release of Google Chrome. It's been a downward slide ever since then. Chrome passed it within 2 years. In another 2 years, Chrome passed IE. Now, Firefox currently sits at 4%.
4% of the market, and yet the bug reports I get on my open source projects are almost all from Firefox users. They are issues of Firefox not implementing the full spec of one Web standard or another. (Oh, and the reporters are usually not particularly nice about it, either). One might argue the particular parts that aren't implemented haven't completed the standardization process. That is true, for many APIs. But it's a ridiculous state of affairs. A lot of these APIs have been locked up in the standardization process for years. For example, WebRTC took nearly 8 years to get a finalized standard.
The reason for this foot-dragging? "Lack of consensus on implementations". It has been Mozilla's inability to compete that has held the Web back. I run headlong into issues with Firefox nearly every day that have a BugZilla ticket attached that dates back 5, sometimes 10 years. Often, the answer to why it's not been fixed: "this is really hard". Well, if you had started, maybe you'd be done by now.
As a long-time web developer, having lived through the death of Netscape, the dominance of IE, the rise of Chromium, I understand the importance of having multiple, competing browser vendors. We need diversity. We need competition. Standards are supposed to make that possible. Mozilla is not giving it to us.
People say that the Chromium hegemony is going to hold the Web back. I think it's Mozilla, failing to be good stewards of their products, that is holding the Web back.
The Megabar is such a surprisingly trivial hill for Mozilla to die on.
I made a few posts on the subreddit about it, I saw numerous others with the same complaint - the motion is unnecessary and distracting. It's a common enough opinion that surely an about:config preference could warrant being tossed in.
I ended up moving browsers, and as a consequence, all web projects I build will have first-class support for my browser of choice, with Firefox/Gecko testing later on when time allows. As a consequence of that, the web performs worse in Firefox.
I'll be back, as soon as the next UI revolution happens, but until then competitors have free-reign to attempt to permanently win me over.
It's an amazing echo chamber. 7 pixels in the address bar were the end of Mozilla. In reality, most people who browse the Web barely know what address bar is, and couldn't care less how much padding it has.
I use Nightly and haven't even noticed when it changed. I've only learned about the "controversy" after the fact. But then again, I must be a lunatic, because I think Pocket is useful.
If the megabar is enough to get you to switch browser you'd likely be better of where you are now anyway. It's such a tiny totally unimportant thing. I didn't even notice it untill I read complaints about it.
I'd go so far as to say "I like it." Might be disliked by some, fine, but plenty have been shouting against it as if it had been designed by Satan himself.
It's just a textbox that expands when focused. Is it really so irritating to want to switch browsers?
- Mozilla moved my cheese one time and I’m still upset about it
- Mozilla also has a marketing department
- Mozilla also collects usage data in the same way that every other application with crash reporting does
Using Firefox even with the defaults unchanged is still way less of a piece of spyware than Chrome with the defaults unchanged. By default Chrome integrates with your Google login tying together a stupidly huge amount of data collection across a vast network of sites including two monopolies (YouTube and Google Search).
And yet somehow this non-profit organization that doesn’t own a search engine or social media service is a bad alternative.
> As already mentioned with the Megabar example, we can only guess what the Firefox developers will want to change in the next releases. Other examples might be FTP or RSS support.
FTP predates the Web and is terrible. It should be dropped.
This article is fatalistic and harmful, and I have zero patience for it.
I understand that it's become fashionable to say that there's really no difference between Mozilla and Google, and that Mozilla has fallen from its ideals and become an awful, abusive company. And I'm not going to debate over whether or not Mozilla is a great company, people can indulge in whatever hot takes they want.
But even if I agreed that Mozilla was completely unfixable, this article would still be terrible. It's not offering any solutions, it's not adding anything to the conversation, it's not serving any purpose other than to put down people who are trying to make the web better.
----
A quick TLDR of the article's main points:
- Firefox makes design decisions I don't like, which is emotional abuse, and therefore I've decided to switch to a Chromium fork, because Google will definitely make fewer design decisions I don't like without consulting me.
- Firefox includes Google Analytics, so there's no practical difference between it and Chrome, a browser that links Google sign-in to your browser account and doesn't respect settings to automatically clear cookies for Google domains.
- Do you remember web extensions vs XUL? We're still having this conversation, and we will always have this conversation until the end of time, even though pretty much every serious security researcher at this point agrees that extension sandboxing is necessary to protect end users.
- Also, telling people to try to solve problems as individuals or to collectively take control of their computing experience is also emotional abuse. This comparison has no problematic implications at all. It was definitely the right analogy for me to use.
- Sure we can try to fix this stuff, but would losing adblockers really be that bad? I mean, yes, but... think about it. Let's pretend for a second that adblockers are losing the battle, and that they aren't growing in usage every single day, and that browser crackdowns and increased DRM aren't a direct response to one of the largest modern success stories in the battle against pervasive advertising. Let's pretend there aren't any additional gains to be had in this area, and that actually it's headed for an inevitable decline.
- The web is headed in a bad direction right now, to the point where a complete rework might be necessary to change things, and I've decided that accelerationism is an appropriate response. Normal users don't care about any of this, and I haven't thought about what that might imply about the feasibility of a community-run, radical restructure of how the web works. Google is going to do whatever it wants to do, even if people try to oppose them, and I haven't thought about what that might imply about the feasibility of convincing Google to rebuild their own vision of the web that isn't a trash pile.
- A neocities website told me that UnGoogled Chromium is the safe option now, and I haven't looked into the addon/privacy features of Firefox past that to figure out if the website actually understands what it's talking about. The only thing that matters here for privacy is what requests the browser makes when it starts up -- not container isolation, anti-fingerprinting, or better adblocking APIs. I also see no irony in recommending people compile their own fork to avoid reading a small config guide that shows how to disable anti-privacy features in Firefox.
- "the future doesn't look bright, but we are past the point of no return".
----
There's a more reasoned, less sarcastic response possible about how most of the people who say the web is irredeemably bad aren't really paying much attention, and aren't involved enough in web conversations to realize how bad the world could be and what the web currently enables. But someone else will need to write it and dig up the examples.
I'm being kind of mean here, maybe too mean, but that's because I feel very angry reading this. If the author wants to go sulk off someplace and talk about how nothing matters because individuals and communities can't change the direction of the world, then go do that. But stop dragging other people down to that level.
I am not willing to give up on one of the only remaining mass-market Open computing platforms. I will go kicking and screaming into that night. And I will work with any company to pragmatically make the web better, even if they don't fit anyone else's ideals of what a perfect company is. Even if they have structural problems like Mozilla.
I apologize for bringing up politics, but I truly believe it's a useful analogy: These takes remind me of the people who voted for Jill Stein in 2016. Like, cool, I can agree it would be great if there was a viable third option—but there's not, and there won't be until we change how we count votes, and your choice of protest is effectively taking what power you do have and throwing it away.
If you want to call that an abusive relationship, I can understand where you're coming from—but it is the state of the world. You either work within the system you've been given, or you get crushed. There are more effective ways to advocate for change—you could focus on primary elections, or you could become more involved on Bugzilla.
And just like in politics, I think if you actually do a tad of research into the web standards space, you'll see there are a ton of differences between what Mozilla and Google advocate for. I don't agree with all of Mozilla's positions, but I certainly agree with them more often than Google's.
Edit: Yikes, I really didn't intend to completely derail the discussion! I'm sorry! :(
You’re only throwing your vote away if you vote for a candidate you don’t believe in. You’re then sending a clear message that it doesn’t matter what they do or who they put forward as long as they aren’t the other guys.
Voting for a third party tells the parties that if they don’t course correct at least a little they risk losing elections to the other guys.
That’s only a problem for the individual voter if he holds the view that this election is the last election. “We have to beat the other guy or the world is going to end.”
Contrary to the marketing, you’re not helping the other side win if you vote third party. The candidates/parties are doing that by not offering you a decent candidate.
>That’s only a problem for the individual voter if he holds the view that this election is the last election. “We have to beat the other guy or the world is going to end.”
That seems like a strawman. I for one do not think a trump presidency was a worthwhile trade for sending a vague signal to the democrats that they should "course correct".
> I for one do not think a trump presidency was a worthwhile trade for sending a vague signal to the democrats that they should "course correct".
How diverse is the set of people you speak to? In the last 4 years, I've heard the following sentiment often: "I don't like the guy and his rhetoric, but at least Trump has caused fewer deaths in international conflicts than Obama did" (and with a belief that Hilary would have been worse on this metric). I do not know how true this claim is, and it's hard to get concrete numbers, but a concern over foreign policy is usually much greater amongst 3rd party voters than for Democrats and Republicans.
Don't assume everyone who didn't vote for Hilary shares your perspective, and rhetoric like yours continues to alienate independent voters.
>> I for one do not think a trump presidency was a worthwhile trade for sending a vague signal to the democrats that they should "course correct".
>In the last 4 years, I've heard the following sentiment often: "I don't like the guy and his rhetoric, but at least Trump has caused fewer deaths in international conflicts than Obama did"
That sentiment doesn't really say anything about whether it was a worthwhile trade or not. Kind of like a restaurant review that says "the food was shit and the service times were slow, but at least the waiters were nice" doesn't really mean that the restaurant is good overall, or whether they would choose the restaurant next time over a competitor.
The… what? Course correct how, stop being sometimes-milquetoast-competent and start being malevolently incompetent instead? Stop considering facts or people, just make shit up it works fine? Stop fighting, you can't win against gaslighting?
> and your choice of protest is effectively taking what power you do have and throwing it away.
Voting for people you don't like and whose platform you don't agree with seems to be the very definition of throwing your vote away.
It's also funny how people tend to assume that if they hadn't voted for Stein/Johnson then those people would have voted for Democrats/Republicans. Kind of like saying "Well, if beef isn't on the menu, you'll go for milk."
But politics aside, given Firefox's market share (under 5%), using your analogy, going for Firefox is kind of futile.
>Voting for people you don't like and whose platform you don't agree with seems to be the very definition of throwing your vote away.
Why? If the other option is a party that you hate even more, your vote isn't "wasted", it's going towards making the government less bad. That has concrete benefits, as opposed to the vague signaling effect that you get by voting for a third party.
> Why? If the other option is a party that you hate even more, your vote isn't "wasted", it's going towards making the government less bad.
Except they picked an option that is a party they like. They have multiple other options.
As has been pointed out by plenty of people: If you subscribe to the "vote was wasted" mentality, at least be consistent. Your vote is wasted any time you don't live in a swing state. I've lived in extreme blue and extreme red states, and who I voted for really had no consequence at all.
>Except they picked an option that is a party they like. They have multiple other options.
What's the point in picking your favorite party if the outcome would be worse? If I think that being an astronaut will bring me the most happiness in life, I went down that career path, and end up failing (because the odds of actually being an astronaut is slim), then arguably that would be a waste of time (ignoring any additional happiness you get along the way). I'd be much better off with a career path that provides less happiness, but is more achievable.
>As has been pointed out by plenty of people: If you subscribe to the "vote was wasted" mentality, at least be consistent. Your vote is wasted any time you don't live in a swing state. I've lived in extreme blue and extreme red states, and who I voted for really had no consequence at all.
I never made the claim that voting for third party in a swing state is bad. But yes, if the state is sufficiently "safe", the disadvantage of voting third party is marginal.
> What's the point in picking your favorite party if the outcome would be worse?
If I'm in Wyoming, what's the point of voting for Biden? Should I not just go ahead and vote for Trump?
And as a I mentioned in my other comment, I have met quite a few third party voters who care greatly about things on which they believe Hilary would have been worse than Trump. Don't jump to conclusions on what is "better" for them.
> I never made the claim that voting for third party in a swing state is bad. But yes, if the state is sufficiently "safe", the disadvantage of voting third party is marginal.
My point wasn't about voting third party in a non-swing state, but about voting for the clearly losing party in said state. Why bother voting for Biden in Wyoming or Trump in Washington? That's wasting the vote. It's a bigger waste than what you are talking about. If you lean towards a third party, voting for Biden in Wyoming is the ultimate waste: You vote for someone who has no chance at winning, and he's not even aligned with your political perspective. When it comes to "wasted" votes, these vastly outnumber those voting for 3rd party candidates.
I guess growing up in a country where voting wasn't allowed does give me a different perspective than you. And people complaining incessantly about Nader/Stein voters is a pretty strong signal that their vote wasn't wasted.
> and there won't be until we change how we count votes, and your choice of protest is effectively taking what power you do have and throwing it away.
You think too highly of your 'pragmatism' (my word).
Last I checked, we have 20 different choices of fast food burger joints, in nearly every major city. 30+ different choices for cereal. Why not in politics?
Why not allow a society of 330,052,960 have more than two choices for someone whom isn't just the leader of our top-ranked nation but also the leader of the free-world.
I find it bizarre that people just accept this narrative that we must 'choose the lesser of two evils'. Last I checked, if I had a choice between rat poison or nuclear radiation poisoning, I wouldn't pick one of them.
This is called a false dichotomy. Your idea to 'change within' is bizarre.
What if we told consumers of McDonalds to 'get a high level status in McD and get that ice cream machine working 24/7'? That's impractical. That's why I quoted pragmatism because it's a false pragmatism.
Free agents need to make their choices. Fail at it then try again. But guess what, the politicians will be forced to changed too, when they realize they actually have to have a more substantive approach that meets the needs of it's constituents.
Competition is good. Duopolies aren't. Not in politics. Not in the market.
Even if you live in a swing state, it's not throwing your power away. It's signaling discontent with the popular party, and it incentivizes said party to support election reform (such as ranked voting.)
If you live in a state where one of the two parties consistently wins by double digits, and vote for the other of the two, do you consider that to be throwing your vote away?
> it incentivizes said party to support election reform (such as ranked voting.)
How? Why would either party support ranked voting, and make 3rd parties actually viable? Both major parties enjoy the power and influence they have. Making it more possible for a 3rd party to actually get a candidate elected would be against their best interest, so they won't do it.
> These takes remind me of the people who voted for Jill Stein in 2016. Like, cool, I can agree it would be great if there was a viable third option—but there's not, and your choice of protest is effectively taking what power you do have and throwing it away.
In a non-swing state, how is voting third party "throwing your vote away"? In California or Massachusetts, it doesn't matter who you vote for, the Democrat will win and the Republican will lose, so why not vote third party, if you like the third party better? Likewise, in Wyoming or West Virginia, it doesn't matter who you vote for, the Republican will win and the Democrat will lose, so again, why not third party if that's what you want?
Maybe if the third party is massively popular, then it might change the outcome, even in one of those states, but that didn't happen in 2016, and I'm pretty sure it isn't happening this year either.
If you want to simply take a utilitarian point of view, a single vote has never decided a presidential election before, and it's unlikely it ever will. An individual who votes for a third party is throwing away their vote in the same way that an individual voting for any presidential candidate is throwing away their time.
You can counter with "But if everyone did that...", but third party voters could make the same counter argument.
>You can counter with "But if everyone did that...", but third party voters could make the same counter argument.
Not really. The reason why third parties are third parties is that they don't enjoy widespread support. It's not like there's a third party out there in the US that enjoys support of > 30% of americans, but nobody wants to vote for them because they're not democrat/republican.
I looked into third parties this year, and even if you know the party you voted for won't win, it isn't necessarily throwing your vote away. It turns out that if a party gets at least 5% of the popular vote, they are eligible to receive millions of dollars from the government to assist their campaign during the next election.
Because most states (except Maine) use first-past-the post polling, this really only takes votes away from one of the major parties, and most likely from the more moderate one you might prefer. The GP is right, until RCV exists (or other plural voting option) it’s just throwing away your vote, or worse helping the more extreme candidate you don’t like.
Edit: to be clear, first work inside your state to pass some form of plural voting, then support 3rd party candidates.
> It turns out that if a party gets at least 5% of the popular vote, they are eligible to receive millions of dollars from the government to assist their campaign during the next election.
1. 5% is a very high bar in the US, going back to the 1900 election it happened to 6 people in 6 elections: Taft (as the incumbent!) and Debs in 1912, La Follette in 1932, Wallace in 1968, Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. It's basically a generational event. And even Perot couldn't convert two third-places into anything lasting, what's the point of getting matching funds for the next election if you're only going to waste the money again except worse?
2. the candidate must agree to very strict spending limits, putting them at a large disadvantage for actually achieving their 5%; worse, while the federal limit is rather high it's really an expenditure limit per state based entirely on the state's population, no focusing on states where you have a chance to make an impact
3. it's only matching funds, it's not a magic purse of money
4. no matter how you slice it, the spoiler effect is, well, in effect
That 5% line would be way more useful and relevant if you guys fixed your presidential election system first, both the voting system, and everything that's around (the funding, the PACs, etc…).
Third-party candidates are not viable under FPTP, third-party candidates are even less viable when the main two candidate literally spend hundreds of millions.
> 5% is a very high bar in the US, going back to the 1900 election it happened to 6 people in 6 elections:
I don't disagree with what you have to say, but this statistic probably has the opposite effect of what you intended. It's telling me that it happened in 20% of elections since 1900. Most hard core third party voters would be pleasantly surprised to hear this ;-)
> It's telling me that it happened in 20% of elections since 1900. Most hard core third party voters would be pleasantly surprised to hear this ;-)
Then they would, objectively speaking, be complete idiots. It happens literally every major elections in other countries with better electoral systems.
For instance in NZ's 53rd General Election which just concluded, despite Labour functionally sweeping the election, four parties exceeded 5% of the vote. And while I'm not going to say that it happens every time, it's not an abnormal result at all for the country.
Furthermore, it misses the point I was underlying, which is that this only assists in funding the next election, which is only useful if you can transform this into a long-standing regular position, which has never happened. Getting 5% on an election doesn't in and of itself give you anything in the US.
> It turns out that if a party gets at least 5% of the popular vote, they are eligible to receive millions of dollars from the government to assist their campaign during the next election.
And yet, in 200+ years of elections, how many times has this happened? In my ~50 year lifetime there have only been 3 viable third party candidates for President. Of those, John Anderson got 6%, Ross Perot got ~19%, and Ralph Nader got 2.4%. If you're under 40, you've probably never heard of John Anderson. He was a Republican who turned independent to run against Reagan in 1980, so no party affiliation. Perot didn't have a party and dropped out of the race early, only to enter it again a few weeks before the election. Nader ran as a Green candidate. So at least on the Presidential stage, those rules don't seem like they help any party in reality. In very rare cases they help a particular candidate with 1 election, but even at Perot's almost 20%, there was no chance he could win.
It probably makes much more sense to vote 3rd party locally until such a time as your favored party becomes big enough to actually matter in Federal elections. But for races like President, we're stuck with our crappy system until we can get the political will to change to not be first past the post. I really wish we could do that.
> It probably makes much more sense to vote 3rd party locally until such a time as your favored party becomes big enough to actually matter in Federal elections.
In practice it often works the other way round: Left leaning Democrats or right leaning Republicans are easier to find at a local level, obviating the need for 3rd party candidates. It just gets rarer and rarer as you get to the president, and that's why at that level a lot of people vote 3rd party.
As an example, lots of people who support single-payer health care have been elected amongst the Democrats.
If Mozilla shut its doors for good and Firefox became abandonware, would not all the donations and volunteer labor look for another browser project, perhaps one with a more principled stance on user privacy? Would that not be a good thing? There are some small alternative projects out there. I don’t think a political analogy is a good one. Software is not a winner-take-all market (albeit it often is anti-competitive). You can install Nyxt even though Chrome is more popular.
The (small) gopher renaissance and Gemini are good examples of how excited some people are to change what the web IS (and consequently, make hobby-browsers an option). If you can’t view documents online without millions in software development, then maybe THAT is the real problem.
The funny thing about that is if the protest voters who voted for Jill Stein had voted for Gary Johnson instead, the Libertarian party would have reached the 5% threshold necessary to become fully funded across the entire next election cycle.
That’s the step necessary to truly validate another party.
I don't think hospitals or colleges are without criticism either. I think it's positively criminal for universities to charge outrageous tuition, saddle another generation with impossible debt, and then pay their execs multi-million dollar salaries. It's just as wrong for them to abuse the system too.
The non-profits I know do things like raise money for the poor or indigent. The principals get paid a very basic rate. How many programmers could that $2m employ? How many folks could be hired to bridge the digital divide? I can think of many, many ways to spend that $2m besides making some exec richer.
It seems like Mozilla is getting a huge check from Google, paying fancy salaries to some insiders, and then not paying taxes. In my mind, the word "non-profit" means an organization run with more than profit in mind. But maybe you just think it's a clever word for "lucky folks who don't pay taxes."
Only in name. To the exec bringing home $2m, it doesn't really matter whether it's called "salary" or "profit sharing." There might be a tax distinction, but the champagne will taste the same either way for the rich exec.
The "we made this decision based on user feedback" part reminds me of Microsoft.
Their drastic ui change made me stop using Firefox on android. It now requires a phd in computer science to figure out how to a website to the speed dial page.
Having said that, the points he lists against Firefox are also perfectly valid criticisms of Chrome, so I fail to see how is switching to Chromium any better - if they got fed up with Firefox because they "shut down communication", just wait until they try to communicate with Google of all companies.