7 ms·

One of the interesting aspects about the recent Firefox Quantum launch, apart from the amazing product itself, is the marketing. It's been incredible to read th

One of the interesting aspects about the recent Firefox Quantum launch, apart from the amazing product itself, is the marketing. It's been incredible to read the well written blog posts that appeal to a variety of audiences. Though most are focused on the tech behind Firefox, a few, like the linked post, appeal to a wider audience. Anecdotal, but the blog posts leading up to the launch got me excited enough to download and use the beta version of Firefox for the first time and it lived up to the marketing. I've tried switching to Firefox multiple times over the past few years, but I always ended up switching back to Chrome for the speed. It might be different this time. What happened to the controversial cliqz program that they were testing? Last I checked, Mozilla did not respond to the privacy concerns of the integration.

mtgx 9y ago
Indeed. I actually mentioned this before they ever mentioned "Project Quamtum" (last year), that if they ever plan on releasing a major overhaul of Firefox based on components written in Rust, it also needs to come with a new look as well as new branding. Otherwise, most people wouldn't perceive what's really new about the new release, even if it's indeed faster, more secure, etc. This is what Microsoft also did with Edge and at least from a branding point of view, it worked quite well for them, because people do believe it's a new start from Internet Explorer. It's just that many didn't think that this new fresh start was better than Chrome for the most part (the fact that even now it only works with 70 extensions is a big reason for that belief, too). I think Project Quantum hit the right spots for the most part. Headlines didn't just mention "Firefox 57" but "Firefox Quantum edition." Hopefully the Mozilla team is writing down all of the things that worked well for them this time around (as a tactic checklist) so that they can repeat them for future major releases, too.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Was having a shower thought the other day that frankly v57 broke so sharply with legacy Firefox that they should have just given it a new name and version number.
lloyd-christmas 9y ago
> It's been incredible to read the well written blog posts that appeal to a variety of audiences. I enjoyed the read, but this is somewhat irrelevant unless a variety of people actually read it. I'm reasonably confident none of my friends read Mozilla's blog.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  > I'm reasonably confident none of my friends read Mozilla's blog People find it through social media channels anyway. I'm only aware of it because of HN/reddit
  - lloyd-christmas 9y ago
    I realize how they get there, and I went the same path. However, it's also well established most people don't get past the headlines (or the first paragraph). I'm venturing a guess that most people that read HN currently work or have previously worked in tech. Same with the people that managed to get to it through reddit. I think it's also a somewhat safe guess that only people interested in the topic to begin with would be reading the article. It's the top bar ad on reddit for me right now (the topic, not this blog post). All the commentary is how people dislike it and are reverting to a prior version. Many are simply because it looks different. There is one person who talked tech, and in typical reddit fashion, he was called a corporate shill. In no way am I saying the content is bad, I just struggle to view it as any significant or meaningful marketing strategy.
- sampl 9y ago
  They probably don’t read it regularly, but they might get annoyed at browser slowness one day and Google “chrome firefox which is faster”.
  - dyukqu 9y ago
    Should they "Google" it? How about "DuckDuckGo"ing it? Edit: Not trolling, pretty serious. Would Google allow the webpages favouring Firefox over Chrome to show up on the top search results (or even the first page)? I'm not sure about it.
toyg 9y ago
> What happened to the controversial cliqz program that they were testing? They are probably proceeding, sadly. I have not seen anything indicating the opposite.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  Given the amount of outcry, I would take your assumption with a giant grain of salt. If they were to proceed with that, we'd surely hear about it again. I'm following the Bugzilla issue and no progress has been reported there yet. The reasonable thing to expect at this point is that it is still at the phase of being an experiment for 1% of German users.
  - toyg 9y ago
    Yeah, I meant "proceeding with what they have announced", which was that they would push it to some German users. The outcry was on that push, and as far as I know the decision was not reversed. What comes after that was never officially announced.
    - Vinnl 9y ago
      Ah, yes, that's what I would expect as well. (And it'd be nice if there were some more public response to this from whoever is working on it.)
Vinnl 9y ago
I found it really interesting to observe as well, and I think they've done a great job in appealing to technically-minded people with their posts. Well, apart from their Firefox Frontier blog [1], with its awful hip-ish language. I guess that is targeted at a different type of person than I am. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/
Sylos 9y ago
> What happened to the controversial cliqz program that they were testing? Last I checked, Mozilla did not respond to the privacy concerns of the integration. Mozilla owns parts of Cliqz, so they have insight into the business process, and they have a contract with Cliqz/Burda that says that no personal data is allowed to be stored. So, even if Burda decided to violate the contract/law, Mozilla would notice that and could pull out by simply shutting the sending of data off in Firefox. Mozilla also has made an official statement that no personal data will be collected, so if they did anyways, it would be misleading of consumers, so Mozilla themselves would then violate the law. Meaning that, unless you have no faith at all into the legal system, I don't think there's a reason to be concerned. It's just controversial, because you can easily spin a wholly different story by leaving out some facts, which is of course extremely convenient for Google/Microsoft/Apple, anyone who's for whatever reason salty about Mozilla, and last but definitely not least, clickbait journalists.
- pseudalopex 9y ago
  It's controversial because some people believe, reasonably, that opt-in is the only ethical model for collecting potentially sensitive information like browsing history, "anonymized" or not. Mozilla stated "Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox"[1], which is very different from "no personal data will be collected". Even just a list of domains can be enough to reveal someone's identity. [1]https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
  - Sylos 9y ago
    > It's controversial because some people believe, reasonably, that opt-in is the only ethical model for collecting potentially sensitive information like browsing history, "anonymized" or not. You presuppose that it's reasonable, but is it? If you can prove that you're doing everything right to protect the user, should you not be allowed to collect the data? If we just call every non-opt-in data collection unethical, no matter if it can actually negatively affect users or not, then you're levelling the playing field in favor of those that actually collect and use data unethically. Because you're essentially saying that it's all the same, unless you're not collecting data at all. And for some services, you simply do need to collect data, and sometimes you even do need it to be non-opt-in, because otherwise your data sample will have a severe bias. > Mozilla stated "Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox"[1], which is very different from "no personal data will be collected". Even just a list of domains can be enough to reveal someone's identity. If you just so happen to read one sentence further than that, it says "Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user’s IP address once the data is collected.". That says exactly that no personal data is collected. And yes, a list of visited domains can be used to identify a person, but it's not necessary to store the visited domains aggregated by each individual user for this. They'll just intermix the domain lists from all users.
tyteen4a03 9y ago
Try turning WebM off in about:config. Otherwise it's a known bug. Apparently not enough people complained about it so it is perceived to not be a blocking bug for 57.

mtgx 9y ago

Indeed. I actually mentioned this before they ever mentioned "Project Quamtum" (last year), that if they ever plan on releasing a major overhaul of Firefox based on components written in Rust, it also needs to come with a new look as well as new branding. Otherwise, most people wouldn't perceive what's really new about the new release, even if it's indeed faster, more secure, etc. This is what Microsoft also did with Edge and at least from a branding point of view, it worked quite well for them, because people do believe it's a new start from Internet Explorer. It's just that many didn't think that this new fresh start was better than Chrome for the most part (the fact that even now it only works with 70 extensions is a big reason for that belief, too). I think Project Quantum hit the right spots for the most part. Headlines didn't just mention "Firefox 57" but "Firefox Quantum edition." Hopefully the Mozilla team is writing down all of the things that worked well for them this time around (as a tactic checklist) so that they can repeat them for future major releases, too.

digi_owl 9y ago
Was having a shower thought the other day that frankly v57 broke so sharply with legacy Firefox that they should have just given it a new name and version number.

lloyd-christmas 9y ago

> It's been incredible to read the well written blog posts that appeal to a variety of audiences. I enjoyed the read, but this is somewhat irrelevant unless a variety of people actually read it. I'm reasonably confident none of my friends read Mozilla's blog.

bpicolo 9y ago
> I'm reasonably confident none of my friends read Mozilla's blog People find it through social media channels anyway. I'm only aware of it because of HN/reddit
- lloyd-christmas 9y ago
  I realize how they get there, and I went the same path. However, it's also well established most people don't get past the headlines (or the first paragraph). I'm venturing a guess that most people that read HN currently work or have previously worked in tech. Same with the people that managed to get to it through reddit. I think it's also a somewhat safe guess that only people interested in the topic to begin with would be reading the article. It's the top bar ad on reddit for me right now (the topic, not this blog post). All the commentary is how people dislike it and are reverting to a prior version. Many are simply because it looks different. There is one person who talked tech, and in typical reddit fashion, he was called a corporate shill. In no way am I saying the content is bad, I just struggle to view it as any significant or meaningful marketing strategy.
sampl 9y ago
They probably don’t read it regularly, but they might get annoyed at browser slowness one day and Google “chrome firefox which is faster”.
- dyukqu 9y ago
  Should they "Google" it? How about "DuckDuckGo"ing it? Edit: Not trolling, pretty serious. Would Google allow the webpages favouring Firefox over Chrome to show up on the top search results (or even the first page)? I'm not sure about it.

toyg 9y ago

> What happened to the controversial cliqz program that they were testing? They are probably proceeding, sadly. I have not seen anything indicating the opposite.

Vinnl 9y ago
Given the amount of outcry, I would take your assumption with a giant grain of salt. If they were to proceed with that, we'd surely hear about it again. I'm following the Bugzilla issue and no progress has been reported there yet. The reasonable thing to expect at this point is that it is still at the phase of being an experiment for 1% of German users.
- toyg 9y ago
  Yeah, I meant "proceeding with what they have announced", which was that they would push it to some German users. The outcry was on that push, and as far as I know the decision was not reversed. What comes after that was never officially announced.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    Ah, yes, that's what I would expect as well. (And it'd be nice if there were some more public response to this from whoever is working on it.)

Vinnl 9y ago

I found it really interesting to observe as well, and I think they've done a great job in appealing to technically-minded people with their posts. Well, apart from their Firefox Frontier blog [1], with its awful hip-ish language. I guess that is targeted at a different type of person than I am. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/

Sylos 9y ago

> What happened to the controversial cliqz program that they were testing? Last I checked, Mozilla did not respond to the privacy concerns of the integration. Mozilla owns parts of Cliqz, so they have insight into the business process, and they have a contract with Cliqz/Burda that says that no personal data is allowed to be stored. So, even if Burda decided to violate the contract/law, Mozilla would notice that and could pull out by simply shutting the sending of data off in Firefox. Mozilla also has made an official statement that no personal data will be collected, so if they did anyways, it would be misleading of consumers, so Mozilla themselves would then violate the law. Meaning that, unless you have no faith at all into the legal system, I don't think there's a reason to be concerned. It's just controversial, because you can easily spin a wholly different story by leaving out some facts, which is of course extremely convenient for Google/Microsoft/Apple, anyone who's for whatever reason salty about Mozilla, and last but definitely not least, clickbait journalists.

pseudalopex 9y ago
It's controversial because some people believe, reasonably, that opt-in is the only ethical model for collecting potentially sensitive information like browsing history, "anonymized" or not. Mozilla stated "Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox"[1], which is very different from "no personal data will be collected". Even just a list of domains can be enough to reveal someone's identity. [1]https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
- Sylos 9y ago
  > It's controversial because some people believe, reasonably, that opt-in is the only ethical model for collecting potentially sensitive information like browsing history, "anonymized" or not. You presuppose that it's reasonable, but is it? If you can prove that you're doing everything right to protect the user, should you not be allowed to collect the data? If we just call every non-opt-in data collection unethical, no matter if it can actually negatively affect users or not, then you're levelling the playing field in favor of those that actually collect and use data unethically. Because you're essentially saying that it's all the same, unless you're not collecting data at all. And for some services, you simply do need to collect data, and sometimes you even do need it to be non-opt-in, because otherwise your data sample will have a severe bias. > Mozilla stated "Cliqz uses several techniques to attempt to remove sensitive information from this browsing data before it is sent from Firefox"[1], which is very different from "no personal data will be collected". Even just a list of domains can be enough to reveal someone's identity. If you just so happen to read one sentence further than that, it says "Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user’s IP address once the data is collected.". That says exactly that no personal data is collected. And yes, a list of visited domains can be used to identify a person, but it's not necessary to store the visited domains aggregated by each individual user for this. They'll just intermix the domain lists from all users.

tyteen4a03 9y ago

Try turning WebM off in about:config. Otherwise it's a known bug. Apparently not enough people complained about it so it is perceived to not be a blocking bug for 57.