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Thank you, Chris
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kurthr 7y agoNitpick- Should this be, "leaving his role"? How about: Chris Beard will be leaving his role as Mozilla CEO
- xparco 7y agoLeaving has a negative connotation
- CydeWeys 7y agoDoes it? What alternative accurate wording would you suggest? Everything else I can think of is euphemism. Leaving a job is ... leaving a job. It doesn't say why.
- entropicdrifter 7y agoHanding-off (to XYZ), stepping down from his role, retiring as CEO, etc. I would say none of those are euphemisms, they just put the emphasis on the reason why as opposed to the act of leaving itself
- rwc 7y agoWhen you leave, one has to be "left behind". It doesn't speak to an amicable outcome.
- jonathankoren 7y agoDo you only leave the grocery store after a fight? I think you’re reading much more into this.
- rwc 7y agoI think you're being naive to the way corporate communications work.
- jonathankoren 7y agoGo home and spend time with your family.
- bronson 7y agoYou don't see a difference between leaving a leadership position and leaving a grocery store?
- lucb1e 7y agoWell, either they are, or the PR department is reading too much into it and s/he's just explaining the reason why PR departments avoid it.
- spiderfarmer 7y agoChris was great from what I have seen, but I think Mozilla needs a CEO that knows how to increase market share.
- TheCraiggers 7y agoThe hard part will be doing it while not running afoul of the ethical standard that they have set for themselves, and so many of us hold them to. It's easy to increase market share if you're willing to play dirty and have lots of money to throw around. When you have neither... well, I'd hate to be the new CEO.
- RandomBacon 7y agoThey need a killer feature. Firefox used to be the only better alternative to IE. Then Chrome came along and it used to be the best at tabs and resources. Then Brave came along with automatic ad-blocking. Firefox needs to match the competition and surpass it. What would the next killer feature be?
- giancarlostoro 7y ago> Then Brave came along with automatic ad-blocking. I don't think I will ever use Brave due to how it "blocks ads" I think the industry should be doing the job of Brave which is to ensure ads aren't infested with bad code. No ad server should serve arbitrary JS that hasn't been tested and secured. If it costs money to ensure this then they should charge more for ads. If an ad infests machines, the ad company should be liable, and they should really go after the person who paid for the ad too.
- RandomBacon 7y agoI will never use Brave because they're replacing ads with their own and making money doing it. uBlock Origin on FF is better and not scummy like Brave. People shouldn't break the law, but until that never happens, I will do what I can to protect myself.
- The_rationalist 7y agoIs he jumping out of the ship before it sinks? I made a proposal for making mozilla sustainable: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026 https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026 BTW does anyone know why 2018 is the first year from Mozilla where finance results were not published? Is there anyway to know how much less money they make than in 2017 (500 millions$)
- The_rationalist 7y agoDownvoting is nice, explaining why is better. I guess you have made more effort than me and thus have better proposals for making mozilla sustainable? Where can I read them? Oh or you actually downvoted only because of the first sentence Is he jumping out of the ship before it sinks? Because it made you feel bad despite being statistically factual and not an opinion?
- The_rationalist 7y agoAgain no explanation, this is childish.
- tomhoward 7y agoHN's guidelines have been developed over 10+ years and give good guidance as to what kinds of comments are well-received here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- The_rationalist 7y agoI really like those guidelines! Could you please enlighten me on which one did I break?
- tomhoward 7y agoSome possibilities below. FWIW, I didn't downvote you, I'm just suggesting reasons why others might have. > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. > Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
- dandellion 7y agoI hope whoever replaces him will inspire the Firefox team to stop dropping support for features I use. Probably not, but one can dream.
- jsty 7y agoFirefox is an open source project. I'm sure if you pitched in with time and / or money to maintain said features, they'd be much less likely to disappear.
- stonogo 7y agoAssuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead... Firefox is an open source project, but here is no openness in the product management. The decisions regarding features to keep or discard are determined by politics internal to Mozilla.
- jsty 7y ago> Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead I sincerely hope it's neither. I'm well aware that a third party can't direct Mozilla as to how to channel its resources. They can however ensure there are sufficient contributors external to Mozilla to maintain the features they wish to keep. Even if the end decision is still made by Mozilla internals, the decision to keep functionality is much easier if they don't have to battle for resources to maintain it thanks to external contributors being willing to do so. At the end of the day, being an open project does not require the maintainers to do work simply because a subset of users wishes it.
- dang 7y ago> Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead Can you please edit out gratuitous swipes like that from your HN posts? It breaks a number of the site guidelines and your comment would be fine (with higher signal/noise) without it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- thefrog 7y agoAfter what happened to BE, I'll never use or support Mozilla again.
- The_rationalist 7y agoI made a proposal for making mozilla sustainable: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026 https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026 I would like to hear feedback.
- jcranmer 7y agoHow about not duplicating your post simply because the first one got downvoted?
- The_rationalist 7y agoWell to my defense, people seemed trigerred by my first sentence and then overlooked the proposal, that was my understanding. Thus I reposted without the sentence to gather a more useful feedback than dislikes.
- jsgo 7y agoin your first one, you didn't ask for feedback on it but stating you had presented it. As far as the proposal, you basically say Mozilla is petering out/an also-ran and that they should essentially leverage what can be leveraged from Chromium and focus on their custom functionality to differentiate and allowing them to focus in such a way that they don't need as many resources. You also invoke Not Invented Here, yet pretty sure Firefox predates Chromium by a pretty fair margin, but I would imagine that WebKit/Chromium/Blink all exist because the stakeholders of the time didn't feel Firefox was moving in the direction they wanted to go. If that's the case, what likelihood is there that Firefox is going to import more than necessary from Chromium effectively allowing Google et al to steer Firefox's direction? You bring up modules they do use, but those are essentially standards that they have in place because everyone should have them. Your "third way" is more or less what they're doing already, you even acknowledge this, but you advocate for a vague "more" for them to bake into Firefox. What more are you specifically wanting them to bring in from Chromium?
- eropple 7y agoNobody was "triggered", which is a profoundly disrespectful co-opting of a term of art used with regard to mental illness. You should not use it as such. I downvoted you because I think what you're saying is crank stuff. I flagged you because you were whining about all the haters--err, sorry, downvoters--in contravention of HN standards, and because you spammed about it. Surely a "rationalist" can understand this, yes?
- cweto 7y agoFarewell Chris, thanks for your hard work killing Thunderbird and sinking Firefox into complete irrelevance while alienating all power users, the only ones you had left. I mean I know how little hn likes negative comments but there's literally nothing positive I can think of what this CEO has done to Mozilla. May Mozilla find the CEO they deserve.
- tuyguntn 7y agoUsing chance to comment, even though I like Firefox a lot and writing this comment from Firefox, I am switching to Chrome in Android. Every time when I need to pay something web sites redirect me to my bank site, which has good mobile app, Firefox doesn't open necessary app, which forces me to log in again and again from browser, Chrome opens banking app, where I already have all things set up. This is one example of how Firefox Android is annoying, please fix, or keep losing 90% of your market share, because people on mobile want this simple feature by default.
- nautilus12 7y agoBeen using firefox ever since chrome became unusuable from a memory perspective to use without the great suspender a few years back. Been happy with the change ever since. Hope the company continues to thrive.
- bdcravens 7y agoI use Chrome with TGS, and I haven't really seen a disadvantage.
- nautilus12 7y agoWell for one I can have many tabs open in firefox without having to suspend the page everytime I leave it and my computer won't catch on fire.
- cloudytoday 7y agoJust downloaded Firefox again for the first time in ages...what's lame is that some G Suite / Apps / Mail features are only available in Chrome forcing me to use Chrome for work..
- rosybox 7y agoWhat Google app features are not available in Firefox? I use Firefox and my work uses Google's products and I never run into any issues with gmail, calendar, docs...
- cloudytoday 7y agoThe "send later" feature in Gmail doesn't work outside of chrome and offline mode for drive.
- lucb1e 7y agoYou can use Firefox privately though. And for work, if you want to get out of the vendor lock in, you can use a browser just for Google stuff. I do that at work as well because Chromium works better with my GPU for video calling, so I run Wire in kiosk mode. Everything else I do in a nicely configured and customized Firefox.
- cpow85 7y agoHey Chris, You were our only friend. And I know this is belated: We love you back
- mirimir 7y agoI mostly use DDG and Startpage. But sometimes Google, when I'm not having much luck. But not via Tor, obviously. And even VPNs can trigger Google's "you look like a bot". I used to love Metacrawler. And I see that it's back, but just drawing on Google and Yahoo!. Also by InfoSpace, Dogpile, which draws from more sources. But I haven't used either enough to say much.
- nvrspyx 7y agoStartpage already uses Google results. I guess Google's "personalized results" must have a significant impact if you've noticed differences.
- mjw1007 7y agoHas there been any news from the Mozilla-Yahoo/Oath lawsuit? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_and_Yahoo_Holdings_Oath_Court_Case https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_and_Yahoo_Holdings_Oath_Cou... hasn't been updated since January 2018.
- staticassertion 7y agoOath doesn't even exist anymore, and is now Verizon Media, right? I imagine that may delay things.
- swyx 7y agojust want to give a shoutout to Firefox Focus and whoever is at Mozilla that made it happen. absolutely fantastic no tracking one tab experience that has made a dent in my browser tab management and privacy defaults like nothing else has. thank you!
- jpangs88 7y agoYeah it's a shame they have significantly slowed down updates to it. To me it sort of felt half done since you could sort of have tabs if you opened links. But it's a solid browser hope to see it continue. Recently I've been using Firefox preview for Android and really enjoying it. Looking forward to it replacing Firefox for Android https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios
- dhimes 7y agoI tried, but I can't do it. I need tabs.
- JeremyNT 7y agoIt's worth noting that Firefox Focus is just another chromium-based browser. If things keep moving in the direction they currently are, this may be the sad fate of Firefox proper :(
- gregknicholson 7y ago
- pablo-massa 7y agoI understand why this spark conversations about the current Firefox market share situation. But I also believe that Firefox's dominant past plays against when it comes to analyzing the product right now. Firefox is amazing, it works wonderfully, it continues to improve, respects privacy, adopts Mozilla's ethical values. Yes, not many people use it, but criticizing this point so aggressively I think it is also influenced by the culture aiming at hypergrouth, dominance, monopoly, "Move fast and break things". I am very happy with what Firefox does for me right now. Imagine a situation in which Firefox does not exist and today the product comes to light, it would be a great celebration, and the market share would be zero. Thanks Firefox, I love you very much, although there are few of us who use you and maybe that doesn't change.
- cbsmith 7y ago> Yes, not many people use it It's a good 300 million people. Might be small in the grand scheme of things, but it's that's bigger than all but a handful of countries.
- fabrice_d 7y agoMajor issue is that the trend is going down: see https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
- est31 7y agoTo be precise, it was 289 million on July 1st 2018, and 248 million on July 9th 2019. It was 239 million on August 24. Yes, the numbers are huge. Any product that has this many users would be considered a major success, but the trend is still troubling.
- stebann 7y agoAnybody has some idea why that trend? Firefox is wonderful. I don't understand why more people aren't adopting this amazing browser.
- EastSmith 7y agoMozilla needs to fork Chromium, build a super good privacy shield on top of it and thats it.
- mathnmusic 7y agoWhat would be the difference over Brave then?
- gkoberger 7y agoGood point... if only Mozilla could have gotten the founder of Brave as their CEO!
- bdcravens 7y agoI think the question most would ask is what does Brave offer? Outside of tech, I don't think most people are willing to experiment with new(ish) software unless there's a very compelling advantage (and for most, I don't think BAT is a feature)
- EastSmith 7y agoIt will be handled by a well respected non profit foundation, rather than a for profit company?
- BrendanEich 7y agoProfit motive does not go away in a "non-profit" (FYI, Firefox is produced by the Mozilla Corporation, which is the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation; top salary last seen [2017] was $2.3M+). Mozilla depends for its profits (to pay such salaries and bonuses) mainly on the Google search deal. In my opinion, this conflict of interest between users and Mozilla's search revenue share held back tracking protection in Firefox over the years. We (I was there, this is all in public bugs and news now) rejected third-party cookie blocking three times. Meanwhile Brave has a transparent rate card, where we pay the user 70% of the gross revenue for user-private ads, and 15% for publisher ads (not yet deployed; the publisher makes 70% and we take same as the user). So we get <= what users get, and we will fail if our users don't like the private/anonymous ads+donation model enough to opt in at sufficient scale that we can cover our costs.
- tinza123 7y agoon a side note, that's a really nice looking font
- meerita 7y agoI wish the best for him. I returned to Firefox this year and it felt a good product, one that goes in the right direction after so many years of Chrome dependency.
- macspoofing 7y agoFirefox has been losing market share throughout Chris' entire tenure as CEO. I think this blog post is a bit too congratulatory given that reality.
- scoobyyabbadoo 7y agoThe CEO that founded and grew Mozilla was kicked out of Mozilla for his religious views and the awesome and forward thinking Brave browser.
- rescue_dont_buy 7y agoAll good things must come to an end.
- getlawgdon 7y agoI've used both products for as long as they've existed. Google's search quality has become absolutely terrible and only reflects their ad strategy. DDG has become superior in many important ways.