[sleepless]

”Lost its way“ is non-actionable and unsubstantiated criticism that reflects poorly on the person making such statement.

What specifically do you disagree with? I actually feel the opposite way. Finally after years of ignoring macOS Firefox feels more at home and the UI changes make it much more pleasant to use.

[ravenstine]

This is a discussion forum, not an academic debate. The core of my statement is that Firefox has qualities that make me want to continue using it despite how I disagree with how Mozilla operates. I don't owe anyone actionable criticism or evidence to backup my sentiment.

> What specifically do you disagree with? I actually feel the opposite way. Finally after years of ignoring macOS Firefox feels more at home and the UI changes make it much more pleasant to use.

Mozilla owns Firefox, but Mozilla is not Firefox. Firefox, for the most part, is fine. The text input I'm typing this in is being rendered by Firefox.

As far as specifics go, Mozilla can hardly be considered well managed by any objective sense. The market share of Firefox has been declining rapidly for years, and Firefox is the product everyone knows Mozilla for. Why then has Mozilla not done anything meaningful to course correct? Why do their executives of a non-profit foundation still get raises when their core product is losing? (to be fair they don't make much compared to for-profit salaries) Why are they more interested in selling other products in a space where there's already massive competition, and using Udemy's pricing trickery to convince you that you're getting a good deal? Why did they abandon Servo? Why did they integrate a commercial service, Pocket, into Firefox and make it opt-out? Did they really need to make Brendon Eich leave because he committed the deadly sin of... being against gay marriage? Do they really need to be blogging about political activism that has nothing to do with the web?

These are all facts you can look up easily.

Yeah, I don't like them. They're not well managed, and they pretty much only exist in their current form because Google needs them to exist. If Google stopped giving money to the Mozilla foundation, lots of people would be laid off, Firefox would go into a tailspin, and they'd be left with a VPN service nobody really wanted. Maybe if money spent on Mozilla VPN clearly went to making Firefox better, more developer friendly, and more prolific, then it would be a somewhat different story, but whether that is actually the case isn't obvious. Even then, it's debatable to what extent any VPN service isn't snake oil.

[account42]

> to be fair they don't make much compared to for-profit salaries

Not much compared to for-profit executive sallaries, but still way more than is needed to live a comfortable life.

[PopAlongKid]

"reflects poorly on the person making such statement" is non-actionable and unsubstantiated criticism.

[unethical_ban]

No, it isn't. The implication is "To hold oneself to a better standard, make actionable and/or substantiated statements, especially when making critical statements."

People seem to shit on Mozilla/Firefox often, and often without any evidence or useful data to work with. And they often say they use Chrome instead, run by an organization that those same people would probably say is user-hostile.

It's like seeing people criticize corruption in Western democratic governments and declaring they're avoiding that mess by moving to Moscow.