Agreed, this just looks really tone deaf and amateurish. And it's avoiding the bigger issues. There are plenty and they actually need dealing with. Even just acknowledging some of those issues would be progress.
There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at Mozilla.
More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to work on the product not people that do busywork like this and just get in the way.
I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and Webkit in terms of standards support.
It does not, and that is fine. That ship sailed a decade ago.
What they could do is something the other guys are institutionally unable or unwilling to do: build a proper user agent for power users. Radically transparent, trustworthy and extendable up the wazoo. With footguns and everything.
That gives you a comfortable moat, a raison d'Γͺtre and a stock of rabid, technically inclined fans which spread the word for you to their friends, family and coworkers the next time Google tightens the thumbscrews again.
Basically: repeat what happened the last time when it was Firefox vs. IE, twenty years ago.
uBlock Origin is a selling point for everyone now that it's been kicked out of Chrome.
I recently got an M4 Mac Mini to replace a failing Windows laptop that my wife was using to access the network. Previously she was using Firefox with uBlock Origin, but she was absolutely livid after browsing the web with Safari and being harassed by horrible ads which got me to install Firefox right away.
There must be internal discussion on this. I imagine more than a few shouty meetings might have happened. This indicates to me that management doesn't know how to deal with that and clearly isn't dealing with anything effectively. If anything this makes me more worried, not less worried about how things are going at Mozilla.
More rust/C++ writing, less cuddly animals please. Firefox needs more people that work on the product and are allowed to work on the product not people that do busywork like this and just get in the way.
I'm an actual user BTW. The product is fine for me. Performance is great and steadily improving. My main concern is that the developers are allowed to stay on mission and empowered to do that. Which means doubling down on making sure I never get confronted with shitty ads, popups, and other advertising abuse. And that it keeps up technically with Chromium and Webkit in terms of standards support.