Comment by avtar
9 years ago
I've been using Firefox for 90% of my browsing for a few years now and really want to continue to do so but I really wish Mozilla would stop shooting themselves in the foot already. This once again gives the impression that they have some teams that aren't in touch with the reality on the ground, that these types of initiatives hurt their chances of gaining more users.
Let me suggest you a browser aptly named waterfox, that could be described as firefox without mozilla nonsense.
[1]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/
Waterfox is nonsense, no offense to the people behind it. Removing some stuff from Firefox and calling it a day does not make a better Firefox, it just makes for a preconfigured one. You might as well just run Chromium.
The problem is that Mozilla is a good company, that has had a true net positive effect on the world, especially in tech, and continues to do so today with wonderful projects like Rust etc.
If Mozilla were a shitty company, we could all simply dismiss Firefox and get on with our day. But Mozilla is not a shitty company and the fact they keep shooting themselves in the foot like GP said, the fact they are completely out of touch with their userbase, that they cannot see the OBVIOUS problems with this addon even after the Pocket debacle, is ridiculous.
Heaven forbid the decisions about what features an application gives and takes away are decided by lowly users. The free in free software means libre still, right? So if someone forks over 1 change or 10 they are still libre to do it, or is that passe? Its free as in liberty, as in freedom of thought, or is that also passe?
Forking a project, and adding features and removing pulls that you don't want and/or need is kinda the idea behind the whole 'open source' thing.. cause what else would you do with the source code, but compile it.
Speaking of Firefox, a build or two ago, without warning, Firefox deprecated (broke) every add-on. Because [insert-old-architecture-security-justification]. It's not like anybody was doing anything real with a browser anyway.
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Is there any reason to believe that one guy has sufficient resources to maintain a fork of firefox? Its not like he can keep backporting all fixes from what will increasingly be an incompatible browser.
It also wont get any of the improvements mozilla is in the process of making so it will ultimately be slower and with fewer features.