To me, using Firefox on desktop is easy. It is at least on par with competitors, if not better.
Firefox on Android on the other hand (the one the author worked on), IMHO, is simply an inferior product.
This is kinda understandable due to their small team size (and it looks like they're overworking too), but what I didn't get is why they kept revamping it. I don't have a clear timeline, but in my recent memory they at least did it twice.
Also, plenty of "great features" for some reason stay in beta/alpha/nightly forever. This is particularly obvious if you visit /r/Firefox on Reddit frequently; you see "oh for that, just use beta/nightly version!" as answers for help/feature request threads too often. It's like they never finish these features to push into release channel.
Anyway, it's getting harder and harder to stay using Firefox on Android. Especially after they essentially killed the extension ecosystem in Fenix.
The old version of Firefox for Android (Fennec) had several important features that never made it into the rewrite. I understand they wanted to address architectural issues and improve performance, but the net result was that one day you opened up an app you'd been using happily for years only to be presented with a buggy, more limited alternative that was barely recognizable.
Things are a little better now, but you still can't print, install arbitrary extensions, save offline in reader mode, and more.
Brave is excellent at blocking ads by default (and based off Chrome). Its tracking prevention is a double edged sword: lots of sites with reCAPTCHA make me prove I'm human, because Google can't leverage any browsing footprint to guess that I am credibly human. It's inconvenient but a welcome reminder of how profiled normal web users are.
I was with you up until a couple of months ago. But IMO the latest versions have caught up with Chrome. They've sorted the performance (scroll performance and UI) issues with the new "fenix" version. The tab switching works great now. And the latest (stable) version even supports pull-to-refresh. Add extension support to that (notably ublock) and I've made it my default browser (and that's on merit, not for ideological reasons).
Is Fenix even officially released? It's still called "Firefox Nightly" on Play Store AFAIK. This is kinda one of my point: when would they actually use it as Firefox proper if it's already mature?
Performance on Fenix is possibly even worse than Fennec for me. Every time I switch to a different app and back to Firefox it has cleared the page out of memory and needs to reload it (and my phone has 4 GB of RAM). Fun times if you need to copy a 2FA code and then go back to the browser.
Then there's the other weird issues. The bottom 5% of the page or so usually doesn't really render correctly (especially if it's a pop-up like a cookie consent box), but scrolling up and down a bit fixes it, usually, if you're fast enough to press whatever button you wanted to press there before it glitches out again.
I care about the open web, and ad blocking is still a killer feature to me, but if I were an average user there is no way I would accept a browser with so many major issues.
The need to reload thing is probably not Firefox's problem. I was annoyed by that too on android. But then I disabled battery optimizations for the android app. It's kinda a hassle because I have to disable it in 2 or 3 places. The 'don't kill my app' website helps [1]. Now it's working fine. I could keep many 10s of tabs open even for a day without reload.
I think that bottom 5% issue is fixed now, not sure.
One annoying problem is that sometimes it jumps around the page when collapsing comments in sites like HN.
Another problem is occasional random crashes when private browsing. Only on android. Anyone else here have the same problem? 99% of times, I send crash report. Hope they fix it. Or maybe it's a problem with my phone?
One of the features I think is unmatched in other browsers is Firefox's ability to search open tabs on your other devices, and also to almost instantly send a tab to another device. I mainly use it from mobile to desktop (when I stumble on a site that I feel may be risky to let it run all scripts on a mobile phone).
That is a very useful feature! FYI both Chrome and Safari have their own implementation of that, though it requires using the vendor's login system (Gmail; iCloud).
I wanted to make Firefox my default Android browser, out of principle. After 6 weeks, I uninstalled it and am back in Brave.
The Firefox address/omni bar seemed designed to lean 90% toward a search engine search, even if I had completely typed in the hostname of a previously visited page and hit "Enter". The cynic in me guessed this was deliberate to reap referral commissions from Big Search Engine. Pissed off, uninstall
I agree with you that the defaults are annoying. With the latest Firefox on Android they simplified almost everything, but the address bar still has a staggering 9 options in settings! Personally I turned off all options except autocomplete urls, search history and search bookmarks. Now it works like I expect, again.
I was all in for Firefox but I had to stop sucking it. Browser it's just inferior compared to Chrome or other Chromium browsers. As a web developer I can't have my browser crashing, slowing my work down and having an inferior developer mode which only feature I find useful are the rulers.
This, specially after I found out that the directors at the company kept getting their wages increased was the nail in the coffin.
I just can't stand knowing these people are getting rewarded for such a shitty job, even worse now knowing that they have small teams (obviously not able to deliver the products we expect them to) and worse of all forcing these people to overwork.
Google is not a saint, but neither is Mozilla. I'll just stick to the browser that better fullfil my needs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Me too, at least it's still possible to drill down into the settings and use user.js to stop all the telemetry which verges on spyware. Chromium doesn't afford you that option.
It's not true, at least until the only allowed engine on iOS is Safari. And it's the Safari, not Firefox, who sets the lowest bar feature-wise and in dev experience for several years already.
> The window into the internet shouldn’t be controlled by big companies. It’s a principle thing for me.
That's exactly why I stopped with Mozilla. They are just a proxy for corporate controlled interests. And it is heartbreaking.
Every single battle, they have folded. Nearly every decision they have made has aligned with corporate interests. And then they issue a paternalistic statement saying that selling out is in our best interest.
- They embraced EME web DRM. They didn't have to. They could have taken the position that if someone wants DRM they should do it via Flash or Silverlight, or some other external means. They could have just done nothing. They didn't have to legitimize it as a concept. It would have been so powerful if they had just done nothing.
- They killed off RSS support for no good reason. The cost to maintain it would have been less than their office carpet cleaning budget. They don't see RSS as an integral part of the web. They see it as a toy, not worth including by default. And thanks to their attitude, RSS is actually becoming that way.
- They killed off XUL based extensions, and embraced a much more limited extension system (but at least it is more compatible and less differentiated with Google!). The functionality that was lost has not been restored.
The job of Mozilla was to be an EXAMPLE, more than to be popular. And they have accomplished neither.
I was with them since the start. Firefox was amazing when it was NOT compatible with Internet Explorer 6, and not trying to be! I'm so glad that they had enough faith in their own vision of the web to risk turning off less technical users. And we were all better for it.
Mozilla has failed us, and the best outcome is for the Mozilla foundation to go bankrupt, so that maybe we can pick up the pieces.
They did not. They fought against it until it was clear they weren't going to win the fight.
> They didn't have to. They could have taken the position that if someone wants DRM they should do it via Flash or Silverlight, or some other external means.
That is not a reasonable position. Adobe was already in the process of killing Flash and Microsoft is the developer of Silverlight, and they were pro-EME. That's setting aside the multi-decade history of security disasters those plugins caused.
> They didn't have to legitimize it as a concept. It would have been so powerful if they had just done nothing.
It would not, it would have killed them overnight. 99% of the population doesn't give a shit, they just want to watch Netflix (etc.), and they'd stop using Firefox the day Netflix (etc.) stopped working. That's true even of most Linux users which is the only population that might would care whatsoever.
> They killed off XUL based extensions, and embraced a much more limited extension system (but at least it is more compatible and less differentiated with Google!). The functionality that was lost has not been restored.
XUL extensions were horrifically insecure and often caused terrible memory leaks that got blamed on Firefox - they also prevented proper sandboxing and multiprocess functionality from being implemented.
Although your defense of Flash and Silverlight leads me to believe you don't care much about security.
>the best outcome is for the Mozilla foundation to go bankrupt, so that maybe we can pick up the pieces.
You're delusional if you think that anything good would come of that. If that's how you feel, why wait? Go build something now.
> They did not. They fought against it until it was clear they weren't going to win the fight.
What a losing attitude. Nobody forced them to do anything. They chose it.
I would argue that Firefox is what held back DRM from becoming more common. Even if 20% of users were not supported, that was significant. Even if it was inevitable, they should have done the right thing and refused to directly support DRM at all. It's not like there was any economic pressure on them. The whole point of non profit organizations is that they can afford to be principled. That was their one job. And instead they stabbed us in the back, over some hypothetical userbase that didn't exist.
> It would not, it would have killed them overnight. 99% of the population doesn't give a shit, they just want to watch Netflix (etc.), and they'd stop using Firefox the day Netflix (etc.) stopped working. That's true even of most Linux users which is the only population that might would care whatsoever.
That is your problem. You are hyperfocused on people who don't care what browser they use, and just want to watch TV. That is a terrible strategy.
You will never ever win those people over. Ever.
I don't think it is worth ruining everything that makes you special just to be popular.
I'm so glad they didn't try to out Microsoft Microsoft in 2006.
They are completely ceding to these corporations and letting them make the rules. How can any headway be made like that?
> XUL extensions were horrifically insecure and often caused terrible memory leaks that got blamed on Firefox - they also prevented proper sandboxing and multiprocess functionality from being implemented.
The lost functionality from removing XUL has not been restored. Firefox remains less useful than it was.
Blamed? Why are you so concerned about branding?? What world are you living in?
And again, on a macro level, the UX is worse now because it is less functional. Am I supposed to care that Tree Style Tabs is gone, but at least it performs better? That's not an upgrade. Instead, effort should have been diverted to improving the existing model.
There was a lot of room for compromise that they didn't use.
> Although your defense of Flash and Silverlight leads me to believe you don't care much about security.
No, I have using sandboxing in one form or another for over a decade. Are you? Maybe Mozilla should have focused on making sandboxing more accessible.
It isn't exactly hard on Linux.
> You're delusional if you think that anything good would come of that. If that's how you feel, why wait? Go build something now.
> Working too much during the week for the last 2 years was normal for me
We need to stop normalizing working beyond a 40 hour work week. I can accomplish far more and with greater clarity of purpose, mental acuity and motivation in an actual 40 hours, than I could if I attempt to push myself to 10-12 hours a day.
In France white collars usually don't work 35h/week.
We usually sign 'day contracts' with almost no time limits. On the plus side it is true we have additional days off, usually around 12/per year and if we don't have enough work we can even work less than 7h/day. I don't know any company that leaves you out of work though.
In 2014/2015 I worked on an insane project where the estimated delivery date was far far too optimistic. I worked around 9~10h/day all week long sometimes on the weekend too.
If I didn't have a 2 months break because I broke my ankle in the mountains I would have gone nuts. After this experience I told myself 'never again'.
Just to complete the story at some point we were referring to this project as the 'cursed project'.
The project manager (who made the original estimates) went 2 months to the hospital with a serious depression at the beginning (he had priors). The surrogate acting project manager was at some point on the verge of psychological breakdown and became a heavy smoker. I (lead dev) broke my foot on my first day of summer vacation. One business analyst was hit by a car (survived but multiple fractures). Another dev had an unexplained swollen feet problem (2 weeks off, probably stress). Another dev, external contractor, was terminated because 'he lost the sparkles in his eyes'. And due to the insade delivery rate, sometimes 2 delivery in production per day, one of the ops got burnt out and eventually resigned.
You, as a software engineer, work 35h / week? I thought it was mostly less qualified jobs. I don't know the law exactly, but none of my friends working in Paris work 35h / week.
I work 37.5h/week as a software engineer in London. Actually my current role is a lead role and I do end up working a little more than that, but it absolutely isn't required by my company.
Most white collars in France work more than the theoretical 35h/week, usually around 40h instead, although there's no clocking so it's not really measured.
However the difference is compensated by extra holidays (RTT).
> Working too much during the week for the last 2 years was normal for me [...] it would have been impossible to hit our deadlines and ship something I was proud of without it.
Seems like a good indication to push back the "deadlines" [1]. If the release is a month/quarter/semester/year later, literally no-one actually cares. If the release ends up being totally unsupported after v1 because all the developers got burnt out and left, people care.
[1] A term I hate - no-one dies if the software is late. Management just gets "upset", while continuing to take $$$$ bonuses.
>We need to stop normalizing working beyond a 40 hour work week. I can accomplish far more and with greater clarity of purpose, mental acuity and motivation in an actual 40 hours, than I could if I attempt to push myself to 10-12 hours a day.
But normalizing any number is problematic. It depends on the job, and the specific individual. A warehouse packer or a burger flipper are unlikely to accomplish more by working less. So lets say each person can be productive for X hours per week. This number might be the same throughout the year, or it might go up/down, etc. It might be co-related to other things (pandemic, life events, etc). And then you have some people that can be productive for 80 hours / week. (I want to explicitly make a distinction between warming a chair for 80 hours versus actually producing something valuable.)
The tricky question is, what is the threshold below which you are considered a poor performer? And the corollary - If you are one of those outliers who can be productive 80hrs/week - Should you be compensated more than your peers? I know that if I was one of those outliers (I'm not), I would expect to get rewarded for being more productive.
> So lets say each person can be productive for X hours per week.
I don't think productivity is the right way to frame things. This makes it sound like a human is nothing more than a tool. The reason people should work fewer hours is so that they can enjoy life outside of work, remain healthy, spend time with family and friends, etc. Not to maximize productivity for the stockholders.
Even if some person is capable of being productive working 80 hours a week, it's not clear that this is good for the person, either in the short run or the long run. Workaholism can be a bad habit.
Well, I cannot judge what is good for you, and neither can you for me. Its an individual choice, not something that is forced upon. The point is, 40 hours/week is a completely arbitrary number. I enjoy working extra hours, it allows me to work on multiple projects simultaneously that I otherwise couldn't do in an 8 hour day.
If Michael Jordan wasn't such a workaholic would he still have become 'The' Michael Jordan. No data, but I find it unlikely. (No, I'm not comparing myself to Jordan)
> If Michael Jordan wasn't such a workaholic would he still have become 'The' Michael Jordan.
1) Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls (for the second time) at age 36. I suppose in tech with rampant age discrimination, that's also when you're expected to retire after burning yourself out...
2) Michael Jordan made enough money that he could have retired even earlier. No employer was forcing him to work. He did it "for the love of the game".
3) None of us here are or ever will be Michael Jordan. Either in talent — arguably the greatest of all time — or in financial security — one of the highest compensated athletes ever.
You say you're not comparing yourself to Jordan, but why even bring him up? He's not only the world's greatest basketball player but also the world's worst analogy for comparing with normal people working at a job.
If you're in control of your own destiny, then by all means, do whatever you like. But a lot of people are busting their butts just for their current employer, and eventually you're going to find out that you actually mean very little to your employer, who will drop you at the drop of a hat and not give a damn about your fate. Your family and friends are the only ones who will stick with you and care for you in the long run.
We're on a tangent with Jordan, so I'll just let it go. I don't fundamentally disagree with you, I'm just having a discussion. If you work more and produce more, you should be entitled to benefits from that extra work. If as you said, things are just transactional and nobody cares about you, then you should want to extract as much monetary value as you can for your work.
This is missing the broader context: workers are competing with each other for jobs and promotions.
If one worker finds that they can achieve a competitive advantage by working more hours, then other workers will copy that strategy. They may have to copy that strategy whether they want to or not, just to get jobs. Suddenly, working overtime is no longer the exception, it's now the norm, expected. And in that situation, the workers don't benefit, only the employers benefit from the expected overtime work. And then you have a culture of overwork and burnout in the industry. Employers may not care, because they can exploit you for a few years, until you burn out and are incapable of working any more, at which point you quit or get fired, and the employer moves on to the next employee. This situation is not to your long-term benefit at all, because you have to take a lot of time post-burnout making no money.
This is why all workers need to take a stand and not allow employers to exploit them, not to agree to work unreasonable hours. Your career — indeed your whole life — is a marathon, not a sprint. Trying to run a marathon in a series of sprints is not an effective strategy.
I agree, but a lot of what you fear is already happening. People are putting in a lot of time for advancing their career in various ways - learning new skills, taking extra classes, attending conferences, lectures, networking, etc. All of that is time they don't get paid for and don't spend with their family/friends, etc, etc.
>This is why all workers need to take a stand and not allow employers to exploit them, not to agree to work unreasonable hours.
As with anything leverage will change based on the situation. To get to this point of leverage a lot of things need to change. Not just locally, but globally.
> This makes it sound like a human is nothing more than a tool.
Yes, from your employer's perspective, you are. In fact they will replace you with a literal tool as soon as possible. That might be a burger flipping robot, or a CRUD app producing bot one day, whatever. Tools
Yes, Please! Burnout culture is horrible and we need to respect our work/life balance. If you work for a company where you can't say "I'll get to that first thing tomorrow" then you should be working somewhere else.
Unreasonable expectations usually starts with management though. I had a "boss" who was very much my senior as far as age but had zero management experience and his benchmark for value was Lines of Code and Cards Completed instead of better value metrics like features delivered, velocity, bugs reported, etc. Needless to say, I didn't stay very long.
In her case it was probably not the working hours, but the working hours rewarded with hate. That kills your morale and energy more than anything else. When you put in effort for others - achieve your goals, but still get kicked.
That as well, and the part immediately next to it quoted:
> but the release just felt like a blip in our planned schedule before jumping into more sprints and fires and thinking about the next iteration.
and this
> On the negative side, it has become increasingly hard for me to separate work from not work. I found myself “contributing” (read - working) at all hours of the day. Replying to issues, emails, and public chats when I was in bed at midnight, when I just woke up at 7am, in the car on the way to go hiking on the weekend, and then while ON the hike.
At my old job i switched to 4 days a week. I'm pretty sure I got more work done overall and only got paid 80% for it. It should be a no brainer for employers
If it's just a few companies doing it the 20% cut means you will probably lose many of the top performers, especially the younger ones who are more willing and able to put in more effort for more money. If it's most companies doing it then you'll probably see an overall drop in morale and those top performers or people who'd rather have the 100% might actually deliver even less than the 80%. Keep in mind that the costs of living don't go down proportionally, if anything some bills might even go up after spending that extra day in your own home.
I agree, but I think part of the issue as well is that many times there's just very little direction on a weekly basis so much of the work is wasted in the sense that it didn't need to be done that week. Overworking yourself (sprinting) to do work that didn't need to be done that moment is one of the most discouraging and demotivating things IMHO.
There have been times where I've worked and it was extremely clear what needed to be done at every stage and I worked 80 hours and wasn't burnt out at all.
TLDR: Spinning the wheel mindlessly is bad and I think accelerates burnout, in general it's not necessary to work more than 40 hours a week.
>For someone who thought of themselves as an empathetic dev overworking myself FOR the end users and product, this hurt and I’m not sure I ever really recovered.
I think everyone remembers the time when they learned it's not worth it to work insane hours to make some sort of launch just so you get to do it all over again in 6 months.
I worked 22 straight days to meet an insane deadline. I delivered my stuff 4am the morning of only to be told that every other team was late and the inflexible due date that couldn't be changed, got pushed back 6 months.
Confusion, mainly. Part of me didn't understand why everyone else didn't commit to the team effort. Ah, to be young and have no responsibilities. Another part of me was genuinely confused how an immovable date got moved. It wasn't until later that I understood that there's no such thing as an immovable date.
What keeps me from being jaded (I think anyways) is being able to recognize when an extra push is all that the project needs and when a project is so doomed that not even a heroic effort of a small team will cause it to hit the target.
I also worked with a CEO who purposely gave tight deadlines just to get engineering to finish the work. He said if he gave us more time, we'd just ask him for more. Counterintuitively, I enjoyed that. It was certainly a lot more honest, and you knew the expectation wasn't perfection, it was to release something.
> The cherry on top was being specifically targeted for harassment that same week after the release by unhappy users of Firefox looking for someone to direct their frustrations at.
I remember seeing her tweet as I was struggling to migrate away from Firefox for Android since I also got surprised by the half-baked release, and closing the Twitter tab in disappointment.
Despite maintaining two of the handful of extensions currently available for Firefox for Android and developing for the beta versions of Fenix leading up the release, I had a very hard time finding my footing as a user in the new browser, and I ended up switching to Samsung Internet.
I'm not familiar with the harassment she has suffered, and it's saddening if people have singled her out, though I can see how people might have overreacted to her nonchalant attitude about the workflows of millions of users being thrown belly up.
The team was understaffed so the OP took up the slack by working massive overtime to push out a half baked release. Users complained about the half baked release, the OP gives the users the finger, and neither party seemed happy with the outcome.
I'm glad to see that the OP has identified that work-life balance is important; it isn't worth burning yourself out for a job.
I work on an open source project which is popular, but definitely a lot less used than Firefox. I often feel pretty lucky that I grew up with the early internet, back when you hid your real identity and trusted no one. While I don't do that anymore, it does still give me with a strong sense of maintaining a "firewall" with the public. I don't put myself out there as a public face more than necessary. I don't have work email or any of that on my phone. If it's not work hours, I'm not dealing with it. The Internet is an incredibly harsh and toxic place, always has been, and these days I find the less time I spend around technology, the happier I am.
But before anonymity was allowed, so all this toxicity & harassment didn't hurt too much because you could just create a new identity, start again, and it would go away.
Today most people are on FB & social medias under their real name & with their real face and everything is stored & will hunt you for the rest of your life. With fingerprinting, facial recognition, surveillance, etc. there is now no way to speech freely without having your identity tied to it.
Some people claim this is great because you say less crap when they're forced to put their name on it, I think this is a very poor argumentation when we look at what we're losing in exchange. There is a reason why in most democracies voting is anonymous.
You can say some things anonymously, but I'm not sure how far does it extend. Anonymity is tested not by posting under an alias, but when somebody tries to break it. If you get into the middle of real controversy - how far would HN willing to go before they wipe your account and possibly give the details they have (IPs, email, etc.) to the law enforcement, from where they'd immediately be leaked to the press? Was this ever tested in practice - i.e. somebody anonymous on HN was attacked and kept their anonymity?
I'm not talking about a court-mandated warrant. I'm talking about a friendly chat with a fellow law enforcement person who cordially asks for help - who needs warrants between friends? And you do want to be friends with the law enforcement, because it's a bad enemy to have, aren't they?
> It is not their duty to ensure that you can say anything here.
I'm not saying it's their duty. I am saying you can't at the same time claim anonymity is alive and well and say nobody actually will protect your anonymity once push comes to shove. If that's the case, then anonymity essentially does not exist where it counts. Nobody cares that you can anonymously praise the Dear Leader. Anonymity is only important when somebody has real reasons to want to break it. It's like with free speech - nobody worries about speech that everybody likes being free. You only need free speech protections when somebody actually wants to censor, otherwise it's just vacuous.
Maybe yes, maybe not, but who cares if nobody ever finds out? And cops are pretty much immune from most illegal acts on the job, once they are sure they are doing the right thing, or can convincingly pretend they were, and once there's no law on the books explicitly, in minute details, prohibiting exactly this particular behavior. That's "qualified immunity". As for the other side, who's going to prosecute them if the law loves them? Private users, who probably can barely afford one hour of lawyer time?
People say "there should be a law against it". Well, politicians pass a law against it. And then arrange things in a way that makes the law useless since police unions' support brings in sweet money and votes. And then frame the discussion about police misconduct in a way that you either ok with anything and everything the police does, or you support abolishing the police altogether and violent mobs trashing your town daily for sports. That is good for brining in votes too. So I guess that's the point for them. What's the point for people to tolerate such system? Please tell me if you ever find out.
Before twitter, it was. I mean, there still were flame wars, toxicity and negativity, but they weren't amplified and influential as they are now. I don't remember a case where a toxic mob on Usenet ruined somebody's life. Maybe there were such cases, but I can't think of one. But I can readily name cases almost daily where the same happens with toxic mobs on Twitter. Toxicity existed before, but now there are amplification and focus mechanisms that turn it especially vile and hurtful, and twitter is one of them. And no amount of censorship will ever change any of it.
> I often feel pretty lucky that I grew up with the early internet, back when you hid your real identity and trusted no one.
That's funny, because going through old usenet posts from the 90s I got precisely the opposite impression – noticeably more people posting under their full names than you'd find a decade or two later in comparable forums.
I've also made the same observation for the online community of a long running simulation game I frequent: A lot of the old-time members dating back to twenty years ago or so are posting under their full names, whereas with newer members abbreviated (last) names or outright pseudonyms are clearly predominating.
No, that's her reaction _after_ a bunch of non-contributors whined that the project team was making different decisions than they wanted. This is a common hazard of visibly working in open source and it's caused a lot of people to decide it's not worth being involved in a project.
It's an eye-opener for me that people would do that. I can't even name a single developer for any software I use, let alone find and harass them on social media.
It’s not a given but when it happens it can be relentless. GitHub added the block feature after some outbursts where some crank just wouldn’t give up.
It also happens more when people decide someone doesn’t belong in the field: if you’re visibly a white male your odds are pretty low. I’ve heard more a few accounts of how the tone changes from “I found a bug” or “I don’t like this change” to “who told you that you were good enough to be a developer”.
These people probably didn't know her either. The tweet probably got picked up by someone and retweeted in the tone of "look at this Nero playing fiddle in the bath while our browser is burning" or similar outrage, and became viral from that. Twitter is a weird medium because of things like this - it's meant to be a personal stream-of-consciousness medium which is commonly used for honest venting from a vulnerable position, but is also a public medium which makes it inherently not a safe space for such vulnerability.
> that's her reaction _after_ a bunch of non-contributors whined that the project team was making different decisions than they wanted
Context for those who don't use Firefox on Android: the "whining" was people complaining that Mozilla had replaced a stable working product with what was clearly an inferior version, with less functionality (no addons) and less stability (this is the first version of Firefox to repeatedly crash on Android, in about a decade). Framing it as "different decisions than they wanted" is disingenuous and misleading. (I'd been a regular Firefox user for about a decade on Android, but have had to mostly switch to Brave because of this update. That's how bad it is.)
I described it as whining because it was coming from people who were ranting a lot but weren't contributing to the design or development. You’re painting a somewhat dramatic depiction but even if was true there’s nothing showing that the team wasn’t genuinely trying to deal with some technical debt and make a better browser.
We still see the same dynamic on most desktop Firefox release threads here where someone will be very angry that Mozilla doesn’t let them direct development and will go strangely silent when asked how they’d deal with that problems which lead to those decisions in the first place.
As somebody who participated in an open-source project, I know the feeling. Whatever you decide at any decision point, there would be people that would loudly claim only an idiot could do something so obviously stupid. It's tough and sometimes exhausting and discouraging. But I never seen a single case where publicly flipping off people and calling them "haters" and proclaiming you do not care for their concerns (however badly expressed) helped anything. Even as a joke, it's not a kind of joke that usually plays out well.
Why is it her job to make a mob happy? She was targeted for nasty treatment and doesn’t owe them anything. It would be nice if there was a way to get those people to start contributing positively to the world but their decision not to do so is their responsibility alone. If this made her feel better after having to put up with that, I’m not going to fault her for it.
It's not her job to make a mob happy. It's also not her job to make users and contributors sad because it looks like she is callously dismissing their concerns and calling them "haters". There are other, better ways to make oneself feel better than making other people feel worse.
Hi! Emily here! Added some more context in a footnote in the blog post about this "obscene gesture" and the harassment after the fact. TLDR: The amount of disgusting harassment I received was unbelievable and could never be justified as a reasonable reaction to an "obscene gesture"
Hi Emily! Thanks for your reply. I’m sorry to hear of your being the victim of harassment and I appreciate your post here clarifying the circumstances.
Thank you for your contributions to open source software. Many web users, myself included, rely on free and open source projects for our work and recreation and these products would not exist without the generous contributions of kind and skilled persons such as yourself.
I hope you recover from your burnout and find a fulfilling role somewhere that respects your mental health and values your contributions.
I don't know really understand why users hate on ordinary devs.
But as someone who is still using Firefox despite Mozilla management (not the devs) ignoring us, belittling us when we voice our concerns and destroy the software we fell in love with more than a decade ago over "ux" I can understand why people are frustrated:
Firefox was in another league.
Someone wrote about Pale Moon the other day, I can sadly not recommend using it as the main browser, I'm not in a position to vouch for the security, but if anyone wonders they could try to create a few ugly modern apps or open a few known safe websites and have a look :
it feels snappy, even years after Firefox diverged! And it looks so good with all the old extensions.
A real shame even I don't really dare to use it, but the web is a harsh environment.
From someone who only uses the basics that a browser has to offer (simple is better), I just wanna say, I don't mind the update. I rather like it. Thanks for the hard work.
FireFox is my main driver and I still use it on Android... but I have to say the android refresh wasn't great. It's full on random usability errors, it crashes, and they started curating extensions for mobile.
That said, I do appreciate all the work FireFox devs put in to give us a Chrome alternative. Misfires happen. I hope FF for Android keeps getting better with time.
I've never seen a crash, and personally I can attest that the new version is much snappier and more responsive. I don't like every aspect of the UI but it was a worthwhile upgrade IMO.
re: addons, a lot of people were understandably upset about this, myself included for a while. With that said, in the months after release every extension which had been disabled by the upgrade started coming back online as the extension API was slowly added back after the rewrite. I can certainly sympathize with the maintenaince headache of trying to maintain one old decrepit piece of software while simultaneously trying to get the one one out the door, since that's exactly what I've spent the last 4 years of my life doing.
For some context: Firefox for Android, which shipped a few months back, was a rewrite from scratch, with new browsing engine (development of "old Firefox" was halted and there were no releases for >1 year).
Due to this, it initially shipped with no support for extensions except uBlock Origin, (which was a deal breaker for many long-time users; it now supports a handful of manually vetted extensions, but still not all AFAICT), plus of course when you rewrite from scratch, there will be some rough edges. Shipping without extensions was a sure way to enrage users, but having an app in development for 2+ years to ship "perfect v1" had its drawbacks too, so it was a tough call for Mozilla.
Despite that, and some edge-case UX polish need, I find new Firefox Android pretty ok and as a 2021 "degooglify myself" resolution, I've been using it for a few weeks now. So far so good, even if some aspects of it work differently that Chrome (for example, it's more aggressive in garbage collecting inactive tabs). When the small issues are resolved, it will be a very good browser.
The amount of abuse she got on Twitter after the FF Android launch was hard to believe. I don't understand how somebody thinks that disliking an update to a piece of free software justifies shouting abuse at an engineer who worked on it.
She says in here that she "cared deeply about the product." Honest question, it is better to not care about the product?
As I've grown as a developer, I've become less personally attached to the products I work on. I still care that it's a quality product, and that it's stable, tested, etc. But I don't attach it to my personality or my self-worth. Ultimately what happens to it is out of your control, (assuming it's not a 100% solo project) so it's dangerous to have that attachment. I'm not sure that caring deeply about a project actually improves it in a meaningful way.
Also, this is a nice post. Sharing real stories about burnout and helping others understand it is great.
It's been one of the most important lessons I've had to learn in my career and am still learning: not to care so much about everything.
That said, working on something that I care about is also one of the aspects of my job I love the most. I think the trick is to carefully pick a few things that you care about and focus on that, but then also to have a far more hands-off approach for pretty much everything else, and let others shape those things to their visions.
The Firefox mobile rewrite (Fenix) is just fantastic, and for me it is a huge improvement over the previous version. Many thanks to Emily and the whole team that shipped it, it's much appreciated :)
If you read these comments, Emily, just want to say thank you for having the courage to share this in public. Burnout is tough but it gets better. Helpful for others to know they're not alone.
If you really love your work or want to make an impact it’s possible to work “all the time”. This can be so rewarding but since most startups fail and the next big feature can flop it can take a huge toll on your life.
My dad always said it’s good to have at least 3 or 4 legs on your stool instead of 1. Family, friends, health, hobbies, faith, etc. That way if one of the legs fails the others can still support it.
I hope Emily can learn to separate work from not-work, and set those boundaries early in any new role. It's not healthy to work all the time, and we all need our own time.
I'm sure you didn't intend it but your comment comes off as a bit condescending (a good litmus test for that is checking how a comment like this would read if the author was an older, more experienced man). Setting appropriate work-life boundaries is a common issue now in the covid WFH era and something people at all levels are struggling with. I've found uninstalling Slack on my phone to be helpful in enforcing this.
I'm actually very happy with the Firefox Android rewrite and I strongly prefer it over Chrome. It sounds like some people had problems, but I'd expect teething issues with any significant software changes. With such a big undertaking and how many people responded to the rollout (not to mention everything else that has happened in the last year), I'd be surprised if most devs on the project didn't find themselves burnt out at this point.
> the constant stream of negative comments from unhappy and rude users during the work week and outside of it was extremely draining
This is because mozilla is an open source aberration. The actual developers are super humans, but they are being led by people with the wrong incentives. This is what cause "rude emails from users". the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude patches/reports from contributors.
Open source organizations should focus on fostering the community and educating users. Not trying to champion new versions and rewrites themselves.
Mozilla at first focused on selling the default search spot (and spent that money on exec salary and moonshot projects not related to the browser at all). Now they are focusing on getting mobile users in order to sell their attached products.
When you pay for developers, and make your projects even more closed, you call that on yourself. You are now a company competing on the freemium market.
Case in point, i was an early contributor to Gaia (the mozilla phone OS). I could build and change the browser with ease. I would send in detailed bug reports. Now on android, I can barely get a decent build with the google libraries baked in, let alone make meaningful changes. I just hold off updates and hope somebody else do the work for me (for a while f-droid folks did :)
And I will not even get into my worse petty peeve which is the recent android addons non-techcnical-totally-political-whitelist. sigh. or the changes on every revision to the bookmarks. keywords, folders, etc. can't keep my data consistent for a while now :(
But to close in a good note: mozilla is not representative of opensource! it is much better elsewhere. thank you!
No. Abusers are responsible for their abuse. This is non-negotiable. The people on the Internet chose to be abusive. That's their fault. That is never anyone else's fault, period.
> the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude
You are transferring some or all of the responsibility of "choose not to be rude to strangers on the Internet" onto the recipient, who received rudeness only once others had already made that choice. How dare you say that we can blame the recipient of abuse for the choices of others to be abusive. You have no right.
If you choose to be rude to someone else on the Internet, you alone are fully responsible, without regard for any extenuating circumstances whatsoever. If you are having a medical event, seek in-reality medical attention and prepare an apology when your medical treatment has progressed far enough. If you didn't mean to be abusive, apologize, and then demonstrate over time that you're becoming less accidentally abusive. If you thought that the shield of anonymity on Twitter would protect you from being caught, you're no different than someone who throws bricks into people's windshields on the highway. No circumstance whatsoever sets aside your personal responsibility for the words you produced on the Internet.
It doesn't matter what they did, what their employer did, what their software did. It doesn't matter if they could be perceived as being abusive to you. None of that matters at all. There is absolutely no room for blame-sharing or blame-transfer here. There are no excuses for choosing to be abusive in this way. You simply cannot transfer one iota of responsibility here. That decision terminates at you, and you alone.
ps. I don't know if you're abusive or not, and I honestly don't care. This isn't about you, whoever you are. This is about your attempt to transfer the responsibility for abuse in part or in full from the abusers to the recipient of their abuse. That attempt, and my detailed refutal, is the sole focus of my comment. The English word "generic individual target within a plural set" is, unhappily, "you". Some confusion may occur, and I don't have the English skills to mitigate that at this time. No doubt someone will chime in with a better way to phrase this. I endorse whatever corrections are necessary to resolve the tense difficulty here.
I did not read the article as people actively calling the maintainers names. But just showing dissatisfaction that their day-to-day work was disrupted without warning by a browser feature changing.
And arguing about actively offensive people, i agree is moot and not the point of my comment. But those will exist regardless if your project is big enough, unfortunatelly.
My comment is about people disliking (in a sociably manner) the work made by open source corporation like mozilla, and that demotivating the paid coders. That is totaly on mozilla.
Speaking just from my own experience, maintaining open-source software can be unhealthily engrossing. The combination of wanting to please random internet strangers and everyone being in different time zones has, at times, overcome the flimsy work-life barriers I’ve tried to erect.
I just quit my job of 10 years too. One of the big reasons it burning out. Working myself to death by doing 8 hours at work and also doing leetcoding, interview prep to get into FAANG.
Emily seems to have the gift of being able to be noticed wherever she goes - I almost never go on software development twitter (or any other area of twitter for that matter) but whenever I do she seems to have some recommended tweet listed alongside whatever I'm looking at - and now a top post on HN about leaving because she wants something different - impressive
Thank you! I really like the new Firefox for Android, it made me switch back and I'm using it since the early beta versions.
I really can't understand the hate against people putting so much effort in creating nice user experiences. If you're not happy with Firefox, just use something else, but don't threaten the developers!
> I first joined Mozilla as an intern during my change-career journey mainly because I had taken one Android class, knew some Java, and applied on a whim at the right time to hit the recruiter’s inbox.
It's clear from the other person's responses that they don't mean it as a jab (which you seem to have taken it to be). Many people have a mythical idea of needing to be a superhuman developer to get any position at a big name tech company. Reading this seems to have made this person realize that such positions might be not as out of reach as they assumed, and they were expressing surprise about that.
If I offered internships I think I'd be lucky to get a few applicants, but I thought internships at top tech companies like Mozilla were very competitive.
And why are you assuming that I wasn't qualified or a competitive candidate? I said I applied on a whim and wasn't drawn to Mozilla for any particular reason, not that I didn't deserve the job?
I'm only reading what you wrote: "I had taken one Android class, knew some Java". I guess I would have expected them to want some related open source work, or a lot of related coursework, things like that.
So what and who cares? Just because you see one team that doesn't have a 'black face' in a photo means they should be criticised for not having such a person in the team? Are you going to look for every black face in Mozilla's all hands meeting?
I just want Firefox for Android to work better and whoever is qualified to make this happen regardless of the colour of their face, I don't care; neither do the users care either.
Maybe it's only the racists that care so much about the colour of someone's face is on the team.
That's the usual defensive line. Its not about color as long as the work gets done. Never mind imbalance or systematic exclusion, that can't be real.
Its ever so easy to dismiss bias when we have an emotional connection. It's worth being careful about, noticing and even sometimes bringing up. And not helpful to get trolled and mocked for bringing it up.
Is this picture really disproportion in makeup? Lets see, 40 people, black faces make up 14% of America. What's the probability that's by chance? Its about 1 in 1000.
But lets be real. Black engineers are rare, much less than 14%. From ^this site its about 6%. That comes out to maybe a 1 in 12 chance of happening by accident.
My comment is an attempt to frame exactly that discussion. The chances, in America, of the Mozilla result is 1 in 12. Please inform us all if there is better evidence, that Mozilla's result is more likely for some reason.
> That's the usual defensive line. Its not about color as long as the work gets done. Never mind imbalance or systematic exclusion, that can't be real.
You're either trolling or completely delusional.
> And not helpful to get trolled and mocked for bringing it up.
It's not helpful to bring agenda when it is not there.
> Is this picture really disproportion in makeup? Lets see, 40 people, black faces make up 14% of America. What's the probability that's by chance? Its about 1 in 1000.
Because population of America consists only of Software Engineers and there's for sure no immigrants in this picture.
Maybe it's largely out of their control? You can't hire people who don't apply, and in my 30 years in tech (albeit not in SV) I can probably count on one hand the number of black job applicants I encountered, and they were all non-US/immigrant blacks.
Emily has a name, and I don't see how you've come to that conclusion.
Her account of living resonates with a lot of my reflections when I left my previous job. Perhaps you haven't yet been lucky enough to have a job that has been similarly fulfilling.
> ...but the release just felt like a blip in our planned schedule before jumping into more sprints and fires and thinking about the next iteration.
Welcome to agile? I know the feeling, honestly, but in software engineering there's always more bugs to fix, more features to develop, more needs of the users that require your attention. Cutting a release should feel like letting go, and indeed at places it does, but ultimately once the release is out in the wild it's done. The only thing to do then is to move forward with the next iteration, the next sprint, the next release.
Sorry, but are there examples or cites for this harassment from the users? Was it fallout from the layoffs? I feel like I need a bit more context.
To put it bluntly: we don't need more context. The author has graciously shared a story about her private decision-making and intimate details about her emotional well-being. Even if some readers may want to probe further into her private life, she ultimately owes us nothing. We are reading her blog post out of passing curiosity, and not assessing the merit or evaluating the truth of any claims she is making.
Sorry to single out the parent comment. I don't know what the true intent was, but there's a trend on HN of commenters demanding to know private details they don't have an actual need to know. It's nice when the author answers questions but we should be happy with what we're given.
You're right, we don't need more context. I would have liked more context. This isn't the first time I've seen a first-timer write about a toxic work environment to the point where they quit. I'm not demanding anything, just wishing I had more context to be more empathetic to her situation.
I doubt HN would ever be that sympathetic to her situation [1] because this is a website of people who overwhelmingly find the tradeoffs of software development to be worth it.
[1] and that's probably OK. We don't need to feel empathy for everyone who feels dissatisfaction in the world. That would probably be debilitating, honestly, seeing as how so many people are dissatisfied.
LOL, why would "we" need more context? It's her own experience, she's making her own choices, and she's telling her story. If she feels she was harassed, then she was harassed. She's not suing people, she's not shaming anyone in particular. That's really the end of it.
I'd not have the gall to demand evidence and pass judgement on the life experience of others.
This person owes us nothing, and if anything, we should thank her for sharing her story, and no more.
Agile is not essential to software development. IMO Agile should be thrown in the trash heap of technology history ASAP. Does Firefox even need a "release schedule"? Why? There's rarely a good reason for fixed software schedules.
It's funny, Google had a pretty tight software schedule... until it came time to publish their App Store privacy details, and then they decided they didn't need a release schedule after all. Except it backfired because their software just assumed there would be frequent updates, and now the apps are showing warnings because they haven't been updated.
Death to schedules. Yes, there's always work to be done, but it doesn't have to be done by an arbitrary deadline.
100%. There are a multitude of ways to deliver software, agile being one of them. Mozilla is/was pretty strong on agile methodologies. I worked with a guy who came from Mozilla and was an Agile Coach essentially.
> I feel like we (the readers) need a bit more context.
Speak for yourself. They provided a candid perspective about their career at Mozilla. I wouldn't demand additional context if they didn't already feel it relevant to provide.
She was harassed pretty hard in a very sexist way on some 4chan-like discussion boards. If you're very interested in details, you can scroll through her Twitter few months back.
She personally got a lot of abuse on Twitter about the FF Android rewrite. Nothing to do with layoffs. She doesn't need to prove this to you, but it was all visible at the time so I'm sure you can find it if you don't believe her.
I have no particular data for her harassment, but I've read here and on other media outlets some pretty angry comments about that Android rewrite. I can totally imagine some people venting on Twitter, and even targeting parts of the team. Though I can't say I've seen that myself... just hypothesizing.
That's what I wanted to know. Was there targeted harassment like this from users? Was it just twitter flame? Did she get angry emails? I understand it has no bearing on the OP but I feel like it would add gravity to her experience if we had some context to empathize with.
Thank you. I’m not doubting it happened. I thank you for updating the post with the extent of the harassment. It’s something I think people don’t realize how bad it is. Or has become. I’m sorry you experienced that.
There's an inherent danger in catering to the privacy/security groupies: they don't want you to succeed. The reason for this isn't that they don't care about privacy or security. The reason is that their primary motivation here is ostentatious ideological purity. Absent a church at which they can profess piety and denounce impurity in others, they take to the Internet to do the same.
I'm sure they say that but they attack the people advocating their cause so often that I doubt it. You see, there's no range on their responses. DuckDuckGo using a favicon service without thinking about it would be as evil as Google intentionally using HTML5 Local Storage to bypass cookies.
The window into the internet shouldn’t be controlled by big companies. It’s a principle thing for me.
To the author, thanks for your efforts.