I just wanted to pen quickly that I found Chris Beard’s open letter to Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) to be a bit hypocritical. In the letter he said:
“I am writing to you about a very disturbing aspect of Windows 10. Specifically, that the update experience appears to have been designed to throw away the choice your customers have made about the Internet experience they want, and replace it with the Internet experience Microsoft wants them to have.”
Right, but what about the experiences that Mozilla chooses to default for users like switching to Yahoo and making that the default upon upgrade and not respecting their previous settings ?What about baking Pocket and Tiles into the experience? Did users want these features? All I have seen is opposition to them.
“When we first saw the Windows 10 upgrade experience that strips users of their choice by effectively overriding existing user preferences for the Web browser and other apps, we reached out to your team to discuss this issue. Unfortunately, it didn’t result in any meaningful progress, hence this letter.”
Again see above and think about the past year or two where Mozilla has overridden existing user preferences in Firefox. The big difference here is Mozilla calls it acting on behalf of the user as its agent, but when Microsoft does the same it is taking away choice?
Clearly not that difficultAnyways, I can go on but the gist is the letter is hypocritical and really unnecessarily finger pointing. Let’s focus on making great products for our users and technical changes like this to Windows won’t be a barrier to users picking Firefox. Sorry, that I cannot be a Mozillian that will blindly retweet you and support a misguided social media campaign to point fingers at Microsoft.
Read the entire letter here: