Apparently Firefox 57 when it is installed tries to switch the users default search engine to Google.
Whether it asks for user permission to do so, I am not sure.
Do the terms of the deal actually require them to do this?
The decision tree is roughly:
1. If the custom engine is one of our default options, keep it.
2. If the custom engine was set by an add-on, keep it.
3. If the custom engine uses HTTPS, prompt the user to actively choose by opening about:searchreset, and do not prompt again after the user has made a choice.
4. If the custom engine uses insecure HTTP, silently reset to the default.
You can open about:searchreset yourself to see what the prompt looks like.
Code at https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/a928be5dacc3b544...
Firefox sometimes asks me if I want to do a factory reset, clear all my settings and add-ons, "to make the browser faster".
I believe most users will find this question absurd. And Mozilla give it a pretty baity name, too. "Refresh Firefox". What if someone clicks Yes by mistake?
Re 4.: Why silently, why not a prompt here?
The story at the time was that Google walked away from the deal when Mozilla wanted more than they thought their traffic was worth, and now Google is back 2 years before the contract expires makes me wonder if Mozilla was more accurate in the relative value of their ability to generate search traffic. So now I'm curious to see how much Google's traffic acquisition costs have gone up (TAC) with this switch.
[1] https://www.digitalreachagency.com/blog/firefox-deal-boosts-...
[2] https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases...
How do you disable the auto update? For now I've manually installed an older compatible version.
It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living.
...so long as a "don't be evil" mega-corp continues paying for it
Still whatever: I think we can all agree that the world is better with an alternative to Chrome.
Mozilla is happy to posture and trade on public goodwill and cave in to Google at every opportunity. This is a very convenient arrangement for both of them.
Now browsers have become so complex that only another well resourced corp can develop one, forgot about the typical open source project developing one. This is not an accident, gratuitous complexity is happening in other areas too. Guess who this benefits.
Each time I've been denied from mozilla it was justified by the fact that I was part of a niche segment of the user base and as such was not as good as a member of the large segment of the user base, in other words not really an actual user.
I may need help to see how it is a "do good" company, it does not seem very different from another company, it takes hundred millions of dollars out of advertising money coming from surveillance capitalism and one of the worst offender on privacy issues, tries to push their own agenda devised in a vacuum, deprives its users of freedom of choice, make its success on the work of volunteers but does not give them credit or respect, has marketing saying something but does not deliver. This is hardly "doing good" and seems quite in line with what to expect from a regular company.
Firefox is open source, so you could always put your money where your mouth is and write your own fork with the features you want if neither ff nor any of the other forks work for you.
I have a lot of criticism about how they approach problems, and about how they treat their users. But I also think they are at least trying. They aren't doing the best, and they slip up a lot, but I get the feeling that they genuinely do want what is best for their users. Even if they sometimes don't execute that properly...
Are there really no experienced managers willing to run this potentially great organization for $300k/year? Why would we want people who are willing to take so much money from an open source project?
Why are there 1200 people at Mozilla and so little product to show? Why do they constantly spend all of their revenue? Why is it continuing to lose marketshare? Why is there no oversight or improvement after years?
It appears a lot like Mozilla is a corrupt organization taking bribes from its competitor (Google) to not actually compete. There may even be a need for government intervention.
Mozilla spends all of its money, so it's in a perpetual state of needing more. Google probably makes it known that any serious competition would result in the money faucet being shut off.
A competent and uncorrupt Mozilla could have built a Google Search competitor by now and even better browser. It's disappointing.
And no, there are no experienced managers who want to work in the Bay Area for $300K. You can fairly easily make more than double that if you're able to run a 50-person group.
As for "spend all their revenue", I suggest actually reading the financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Au...
"A competent and uncorrupt Mozilla could have built a Google Search competitor by now"
That... is funny. From launch to two years in (that's all I can find), Bing cost $5.5B[1] - or 11 years of Mozilla's revenue.
[1] https://www.geek.com/news/bing-has-cost-microsoft-5-5-billio...
2. Mozilla has blown almost every dollar it has ever earned. Hundreds of millions wasted on failed projects and useless activities. No one disputes this.
3. Mozilla revenues should be growing every year and not never reliant on a competitor's goodwill. And just because Microsoft wastes billions on something (or claims to for tax reasons) does not mean that is the fundamental cost. See: SpaceX.
Yes, clearly I only pretend to work nights and weekends as cover for shadowy secret Google payments.
I hope you find Mozilla better run that it appears, and I hope you can do more great work there, despite its flaws, but it seems to me like you don't have the leadership or organization you deserve.
Do mozilla not have 1200 employees and top people being paid 1M $ ?
Reading the reason for dropping alsa support or refusing to have better linux integration it seems mozilla is short on dev time and resources which they clearly are not.
Do you remember when they got 10 000 people donating money to pay to place an ad for firefox 1.0 in NY Times while at the same time they had revenue in tens of millions of dollars ?
Mozilla had a strong stance against a content blocker in firefox for what ? 15 years ? Whatever they said to justify this position it is obvious that the actual reason is conflict of interest with their main source or revenue.
Isn't it strange that while their user base has been divided by 5 their revenue has been up by more than a hundred millions ? Even more so when this revenue is based on number of users being sent to search engine of this commercial partner.
Has anyone on HN and explanation for this ?
They are paid for the number of eyeballs they send to their search partners, and it's still a few hundred millions users. Also, it seems that they were underpaid compared to other companies like Opera and Apple were getting per user.
I don't think anyone can really blame the decision, but they should be more straightforward where their loyalties ultimately lie. The fact that one of the best known alternatives to chrome and so called independent browser is in cahoots with Google is a sad state of things.
Besides that, they don't separate between desktop and mobile. Marketshare on mobile hardly reflects user opinions, if this is what you were trying to imply.
Other sources, like NetMarketshare, show rising numbers on the desktop.
That said, keeping things the same would obviously only sustain that trend. Hopefully Firefox 57 and above will help them reverse it. I'm hopeful though, if it doesn't, I don't think there's much else they could've done.
This is one major gripe I have with mozilla and firefox: depriving the user of the freedom to choose and forcing change upon them.
This constant interface change is affecting many of the older people for whom I provide technical support. They all relied on classic theme restorer extension to be able to use their browser and dropping support for the "legacy" extension gave them a hard time and the solution has been to drop firefox for waterfox or to drop the computer to get one of those tablets.
You think in a major internal overhaul that the old interface is just a matter of building a quick "[ ] Old, [X] New" radio button dialog.
And then you make a major, disproportional stink like how you've written 20 comments in this submission. Zero awareness through and through, and it's just not worth engaging with you beyond saying "well, I don't think the product is for you." -- A conclusion you seem uninterested in figuring out yourself.
I don't think you have the slightest clue about how hard it is to just keep old crap around when you're trying to evolve software. Else you'd know that either (A) it's not worth it or (B) the ship is simply sailing in a direction that you don't care about, so there's no point whining on the internet.
At some point you need to leave the movie theater so that others can enjoy the show. Leaving 20 comments in this submission just shows that it's an emotional thing for you. Time to move on. It's just a web browser.
Looking at this page, you seem to have more than one ...
That said, there are times when UIs must change to accommodate new interface devices like touch screens. And maintaining both old and new forever is impractical.
But 57, is likely the end. Yah, they fixed it. Its a little faster, but it still seems to consume RAM/CPU until my whole machine grinds to a halt. Previously, when it did this I could be assured that it likely wasn't consuming more than ~2GB and a little more than 100% of a core.
So, unless they fix this decade long RAM/CPU consumption problem they have, i'm getting rid of it. I don't mind having to kill it every couple days, I just can't stand having to wait 30+ seconds for the task manager to swap in so that I can kill it. At least on linux I can constrain its resources, but i'm not going to run it in a VM (like I do java) just to have some control when it goes all piggy.
(some of this is likely my own fault, and happens with other browsers too, since I haven't managed to cure my tabitus habit of failing to close tabs i still have interest in).
I have the same affliction as you, but extensions have helped a ton. I use The Great Suspender and Session Buddy on Chrome: I can use the former to "close" an entire window of tabs and then dive right into that group of tabs with a couple of clicks. The only downside has been that I must have an Internet connection to restore the tabs.
Furthermore, they increased net assets by about a third in one year, and they cleared $160mm in profit from their $520mm in revenue.
They are in a very good financial position.
Tab Mix Plus made Firefox my default browser yet it’s not supported and or there’s new substitute :-(
I reverted back to the previous release but then it seemed After a week to start displaying hacked behavior. Started opening tons of windows with each click.
As you probably know, no other browser (other than ones based on older Firefox versions) supports anything like Tab Mix Plus. And there's a reason for that.
Firefox as we knew it is dead, mutilated by parents that wanted something else than what they ended up with.
Your best option right now is waterfox (yup the name says it all), it has no plan of dropping support for "legacy" extensions and even has plan to offer its own add-on store to save the legacy extensions.
Given Mozilla’s revenue and market share, it means Chrome is a multi billion dollar product.
I would expect a company like Facebook to worry about this near-monopoly and help out the competition, or possibly add to the competition by making its own browser. That's a browser I'd never trust.
Facebook does have their apps though, which are independent from Chrome. But most people use Android, and Google controls that too.
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent-... discussed just a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836027
Or is this line item from subjective valuations, like owning equity in private unicorns?
That would seem to make a big difference in financial health.
