Please be courteous to other drivers on the road, we all share it. Just make sure you’re the one in charge, not the software.
This isn’t to put your argument down, but to offer the perspective of people involved in accidents. Loss of life is bad, but surviving accidents is also equally bad.
This reminds me of a story from India’s space program that I think about whenever I see orgs blame engineers for systemic failures.
In 1979, India’s first satellite launch vehicle (SLV-3) failed on its maiden flight. The project director was a young A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (who later became India’s President). He was devastated and ready to face the media. But ISRO chairman Prof. Satish Dhawan stepped in front of the press himself and took full responsibility for the failure, shielding Kalam and the entire team.
A year later, SLV-3 launched successfully. This time, Dhawan didn’t show up at the press conference. He sent Kalam instead, letting the team take all the credit.
Kalam said this was the greatest leadership lesson he ever received.
Now contrast that with Amazon pointing fingers at engineers for AI agent mistakes. These are tools the org chose to adopt, workflows the org designed and guardrails (or lack thereof) the org is responsible for. If your AI coding agent is producing errors that make it to production, that’s a process failure, not an individual engineer failure.
Good leaders absorb blame downward and reflect credit upward. What we’re seeing here is the exact opposite. That’s not engineering culture. That’s cover.
At this point, I just operate under the assumption that every bad actor out there already has my data. Six months of exposure is an eternity. It really makes you question the entire trade off: we hand over our personal information in exchange for ‘free’ or convenient services and this is what we get in return. The product-is-you model only works if the company holding your data actually bothers to protect it.
Newton’s gravity vs Relativity is a matter of precision. Newtonian mechanics is a limiting case of general relativity that works excellently within known bounds. PRNGs, by contrast, can fail categorically, not just in precision. A PRNG with subtle correlations doesn’t just give you a slightly less accurate answer, it can produce systematically biased results that look perfectly fine until they don’t. The failure modes are qualitatively different.
HN doesn't want firefox to go away. HN wants firefox to be better, more privacy/security focused, and to stop trying to copy chrome out of the misguided hope that being a poor imitation will somehow make it more popular.
Sadly, mozilla is now an adtech company (https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...) and by default firefox now collects your data to sell to advertisers. We can expect less and less privacy for firefox users as Mozilla is now fully committed to trying to profit from the sale of firefox users personal data to advertisers.
As a 25 year Firefox user this is spot on. I held out for 5 years hoping they would figure something out, but all they did was release weird stuff like VPNs and half baked services with a layer of "privacy" nail polish.
Brave is an example of a company doing some of the same things, but actually succeeding it appears. They have some kind of VPN thing, but also have Tor tabs for some other use cases.
They have some kind of integration with crypto wallets I have used a few times, but I'm sure Firefox has a reason they can't do that or would mess it up.
You can only watch Mozilla make so many mistakes while you suffer a worse Internet experience. The sad part is that we are paying the price now. All of the companies that can benefit from the Chrome lock in are doing so. The web extensions are neutered - and more is coming - and the reasons are exactly what you would expect: more ads and weird user hostile features like "you must keep this window in the foreground" that attempt to extract a "premium" experience from basic usage.
Mozilla failed and now the best we have is Brave. Soon the fingerprinting will be good enough Firefox will be akin to running a Tor browser with a CAPTCHA verification can for every page load.
What would be an acceptable revenue model? Google Chrome has the same privacy profile with the exception that Google retains the data for their own ad platforms.
Selling preferential search access is legally precarious due to FTC's lawsuit against Mozilla.
They could start with the one they've refused for ages even though many have asked for it. Let people directly donate to fund the development of firefox (as opposed to just giving mozilla money to funnel into any number of their other projects). They could even make money selling merch if they didn't tank the brand. Firefox could have a very nice niche to fill as a privacy focused browser for power users who desire customization and security, but sadly they don't seem interested in being that. For whatever reason they'd rather spend a fortune buying adtech from facebook employees and be a chrome clone that pushes ads and sells user data, and that isn't going to inspire support from users.
That said, I'm not convinced that every open source project needs to be profit generating. Many projects are hugely successful without resorting to ads. What makes it possible for VLC or even Arch Linux to thrive without advertising that couldn't work just as well for firefox? The solution is certainly not to turn Firefox into a project that their users no longer want to support or use at all, but that seems to be where they are headed by selling out their userbase.
Well said. Do you know of any recent reports or if anyone has actually gone through the funding calculations regarding the funding model you described (let’s call it “FF-direct”) versus Mozilla’s status quo funding model?
Primary questions are: How much does FF cost to sustain? How much is spent on new performance, functionality and feature development? What number does Firefox need to compete directly with Chrome? If you asked an experienced FF project contributor what is the delta between the previous two questions?
- a 20+ year Firefox power user very familiar with the FF project, web browsers, and how they compete
I haven't seen those kinds of numbers, but I agree they'd be good to have.
I know that firefox makes a massive amount of money from Google (last I heard they made something like 400 million a year) and firefox was bringing in 90% of Mozilla's total income which means that the money firefox beings in isn't just going into firefox, but is holding up everything mozilla does. Even if a donation model was sufficient to support the browser, mozilla may not be happy about losing almost everything else they have going.
As for competing with chrome, I don't think they need to. Most people's only computer these days is an android phone and chrome is always going to be a first class citizen there. We saw the same thing with IE when windows was the operating system most people used.
It's perfectly fine for Chrome to be the default browser for the common people leaving firefox to be the preferred choice of the computer savvy. Firefox could slowly gain an audience as people start to become more aware of how chrome violates their privacy or as they seek relief from the worsening cesspool of ads chrome is encouraging the internet to become, but firefox never has to be number 1 or anywhere close to that in order to be successful and valued.
HN wants Firefox but with better stewardship and fewer misdirected funds.
Mozilla - wrongly - believes that the majority of FF users believe in Mozilla's hobby projects rather than that they care about their browser.
That's why - as far as I know - to this day it is impossible to directly fund Firefox. They'd rather take money from google than to be focusing on the one thing that matters.
HN, and firefox users, can never decide where the money should go or what the goals should be. The problem with producing the better product is the amount of in-fighting increases exponentially. Google produces a "fuck you got mine" type browser and everyone knows it, so nobody really cares when they make god awful privacy decisions or intentionally produce worst standards to try to fuck their customers up the ass in new and exciting ways.
When Firefox introduces a new feature, half the people complain it's stupid and worthless while the other half complain it's not enough. And, when it inevitably gets axed, it magically turns out actually it was beloved the whole time and oh no my Grandma used Pocket as life support and now she can't breath.
When Firefox implements new web standards half the people complain that they're bending to Google's whim and that these standards are stupid. We don't want them, just focus on performance and what people really care about! ... While the other half complains that it took so long, and in the meantime they switched to a real browser, like Chrome.
Of course, Safari is even further behind Firefox in standards and frankly it's not even close, but does anyone care? Of course not. Apple is another "fuck you got mine" type company. People love that.
And it doesn't just end at Firefox. Oh, no. Firefox OS? Depending on who you ask it's either the biggest missed opportunity ever or one of Mozilla's worst money burning schemes. It's Schrödinger's software - in a parallel universe where it took it off everyone would've always wanted it, and in the current universe nobody ever wanted it.
The biggest mistake Mozilla made was extending any kind of goodwill to their customer base. Clearly, that doesn't work and people do not like it. Let's all stop fucking around and be real for a second - nobody, and I do mean nobody, is switching to Google Chrome because Mozilla made some mistake. They're not, because the reality is that Firefox is truly irreplaceable and ahead of Chrome in so many aspects. They're switching to Chrome because they just don't care about being fucked up the ass, or worse, they secretly want to be.
> HN, and firefox users, can never decide where the money should go or what the goals should be.
Without ever having dealt with this problem, it sounds like an embarrassingly solved problem, in the sense of: He who gives the money, decides where it goes.
The other half is to provide features that are actually detrimental if you don't want them as plug-ins / extensions / whatever. Pocket is an example for this. Firefox OS is not because it's not force-bundled with Firefox to begin with.
> They're switching to Chrome because they just don't care about being fucked up the ass, or worse, they secretly want to be.
The point where you stop trying to understand your users is the point where you start losing them.
I don't think that Mozilla believes that their pet projects are what the use community wants. I think they just don't care. Google's check will clear next year anyways.
We have no idea what is in that contract with Google. They get to be the default search engine, but what else? Does it prevent Firefox from accepting some sources of funding, like donations?
yes, I do mean Firefox specifically. Mozilla fundation is not Mozilla corporation. The money you give to the fundation is for their charity work, none of that goes to the development of Firefox.
I am pretty sure that the issue is that they either admit to being so l stuck as a vassal beholden to Google, or they pretend to be enterprising and forward looking with many promising projects
I just want Firefox's search box to be on the top of the window so I don't have to bend my neck when I'm surfing in bed... I don't use it just for that.
If you're talking about url/search bar at the bottom on mobile, that's customisable - actually they ask you which you prefer when you install it, but you can change it at any time in settings.
(personally I prefer all that stuff at the bottom since it's more conveniently where all my other phone nav is, and visibility fits in well with how I scroll)
Alright, now I'm doubly confused, since the search bar is typically on the address bar which is at the top of the screen. You might want to test a clean profile. Perhaps some customisation along the way changed things on your setup.
It's unlikely, but it does actually happen. I've seen more than one complete rewrite of something important that had exactly the same bug. And I'm very sure that those sources were not related somehow.
That came to my mind as well. CSS was one of the earliest major applications of Rust in FireFox. I believe that work was when the "Fearless Concurrency" slogan was popularized.
Yup. To this day, Firefox remains the only browser with a *parallel* CSS engine. Chromium and WebKit teams have considered this and decided not to pursue since it's really easy to get concurrency wrong.
If I recall correctly, the CSS engine was originally developed for Servo and later embedded into Firefox.
So basically he says: Even with scary-high odds of disaster, building superintelligence fast is worth it because the alternative, everyone slowly dying of aging and disease, is worse. Get to AGI quickly, then pause briefly to safety-test before deploying.
I enjoyed the post. Sometimes small hacks go a long way. I still feel like the game changer will be models outputting just enough code for replacement and harness replacing it efficiently rather than whole code with find and replace hacks.
Oh man, I was composing my own opinion, and I can see that Hacker News is brimming with opinions. But that’s perfectly fine, I believe. All the diverse perspectives that we engage in this intellectual sparring match is a positive thing, isn’t it? :)
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