Just another data point, but I reached out on behalf of LQ (LinuxQuestions.org) unrelated to Bad Voltage on this and the results have not been much different. People who were happy to do an interview previously (and when we were a much smaller organization) have not responded at all and others have declined. Would be happy to discuss that offline if you’d like.
–jeremy
I obviously don’t speak for Bryan, but if you feel something was factually misrepresented on the show please do let us know so we can correct it. Having someone come on the show to refute would be ideal, but a point by point breakdown here in the forum is also welcome.
–jeremy
Wow. It really does. Nice! I am now looking forward to that quite a lot!
As an update, someone has agreed to do an interview with LQ. Will hopefully have it posted in a couple days.
–jeremy
@jeremy: I’m slightly surprised by this since I would have thought you were just as well known for Bad Voltage as LQ. But hey they are both excellent sites – I guess Mozilla think that LQ will be slightly less confrontational than the full BV team would be. Not that we want to come across as confrontational at all: Mozilla has done an excellent job in trying to keep the internet open source and making it possible to be cross platform.
Personally I hate the idea of individual browsers having propriety extensions. We should be able to design a web site with the confidence it will look good on any browser irrespective of whether I’m using my Ubuntu phone, my daughters Nexus4, my Nexus 7, My ex wife’s iPhone, Firefox on my Ubuntu desktop, IE on my daughters Win7 machine or any other platform without needing to test them all.
Mozilla have done excellent work in bringing this closer to being a reality than it would have been otherwise. We need to congratulate them on what they have achieved so far, but they are also at a cross-roads and we need to know in what direction they are planning to turn.
I trust your interview with Mozilla will be seen in this light: concerned users looking to keep the internet open to all and helping to ensure we keep the right to privacy. I look forward to reading the results of this interview. Don’t forget to post a link in this thread to the full report on your website.
That’s an interesting perception. LQ will have been around for 15 years next Thursday and gets hundreds of thousands of visitors each and every day. We are, to my knowledge, the largest distribution independent Linux community on the web. Bad Voltage, while rapidly growing, just recently turned 1.
–jeremy
Hi @jeremy I am well arware that LQ has been around for several years. I did not realize its nearly 15 and would have guessed it was around 10 but congratulations are definitely owed to you for running such a good site. However, LQ is not a site I personally need to check several times a day, Bad Voltage is: Not only for the thoughts of your self @jonobacon, @sil and @bryanlunduke but for lots of other people too who are not presenters but are proud to be fans of the show.
I trust you understand that as an Ubuntu user if I have problems I am more likely to search Ask Ubuntu, the Ubuntu Forums or Launchpad than LQ. This does not take away anything from LQ or you just reflects how much, to me, Bad Voltage plays a more significant part in my life.
Indeed I do understand… although keep in mind that Ubuntu does officially participate at LQ, as do over 30 other distributions that have dedicated LQ distro forums. We’re not just a technical forum, but a community where you can discuss anything Linux or Open Source related. Enough about LQ though; back to Bad Voltage and Mozilla.
–jeremy
Before I respond to this, I want to jump on the “Praise @benfrancis bandwagon”. Very cool of you to hop in the forum and add in your two pennies. I have found it to be incredibly interesting – I’m still digesting some of it.
Feel free to toss me an email. I don’t feel that I misrepresented Mozilla at all… but, hey! I’ve been wrong before! If you think I’ve overlooked something – or, worse, said something that’s not true – definitely let me know.
I sincerely meant what I said in the show: I want to love Mozilla. I want to heap praise upon them (in podcasts, in articles, in videos… hell, from the very roof of my home). The ball is in Mozilla’s court to show me that they’re worth it.
Now this is interesting. Very curious how this turns out. And even more curious to see if this is a bit of a change for Mozilla to be a bit more open with the media.
As an update to this, the first Mozillian to do an interview with LQ back in 2002 has responded. He was on medical leave and is now back. Once he catches up he indicated he’d be happy to discuss or do another interview with LQ.
–jeremy
Is that someone from their PR, marketing or executive teams… Or one of the other functions?
I guess given those options, I’d say: one of the other functions. I believe his current title is “Participation Director for Firefox OS, Mozilla Corp”. He’s been with the company for a long time and has had a variety of titles/positions in the interim.
–jeremy
The interview has been posted: Interview with Gervase Markham of Mozilla http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interview-with-gervase-markham-of-mozilla-4175545838/
–jeremy
Great interview!
Well done, Jeremy.
My primary take-aways:
Q: Why didn’t you appear on BV?
A: Someone might disagree with me and I fear that person’s power.
Q: Concerned about Firefox’s dropping marketshare?
A: YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WE DON’T EVEN LIKE MARKETSHARE WE DON’T EVEN CARE IF PEOPLE USE OUR STUFF STOP LOOKING AT ME.
Q: What about Mozilla’s financials?
A: Whatever, we have more money now than ever. It’s a secret though. Because we’re a non-profit focused on being “Open”.
I’m paraphrasing, of course. 
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that Gerv decided to do this interview. I’m just disappointed in most of his answers. And equally (if not more) disappointed that Mozilla PR is still refusing to engage.
While I would be surprised that his reason for not doing an interview on BV would be realized, I can understand his reluctance.
Didn’t get that impression at all.
Eh, maybe.
Maybe they, after the blow out over Brendan Eich, are afraid of it all being rehashed. Or, maybe they are a bunch of snobs!
Personally, I think that following Chrome is not the right route for Firefox. There are (beyond myself, that is) a certain percentage of users out there, probably many of the ones still on firefox, who think that Google is out to steal your soul and remember all of the comments of the Google CEOs have uttered (“if you aren’t doing anything wrong, it doesn’t matter if we collect it all” and “we want to know more about you than you know about yourself”). Personally, I am down to one google app (gmail) and will get off of that when a suitable replacement comes along for it.
Thus, it was quite a sad day when Firefox changed it’s interface to match that of Chrome. Personally, I liked the old interface, and Moz abandoning it in favor of a more Chrome-like feel made me sad.
It feels like the whole “convergence” movement that is coming down the pike. I personally am old enough to think that convergence is a silly idea. I don’t want my the browser on my 6" phone to behave like the one that lives on my 17" desktop or my dual 24" monitor, any more than I want my pocket knife to behave in the same way as my table saw, or my steak knife to react in the same way as my chainsaw. Yes, they are all cutting devices, but they are designed to cut different things, and making them fit into the same mold just seems silly. By the same token, I want browsers to behave differently. I don’t want Moz to make Firefox behave the same way as Google makes Chrome behave.
Er why.
Google are evil and don’t care about your privacy so we should ignore their innovations in interface design? How is that related to anything. Microsoft are/were evil and no one complained about the slavish copying of MS office by OpenOffice. Apple arguably take the crown on pure evil but it doesn’t stop all the freedesktop theme sites being filled with ways to make various desktops look like the Mac OS.
The main selling point for chrome for me is just the slick interface that feels responsive, while Firefox’s has always felt sluggish and blocky in comparison, though it’s getting better for sure - chrome still wins on that front.
One of the great things about firefox I’ve found since I committed to using it is the amount of UI options through addons. Here below is an example of firefox with just two extensions, which has made me prefer Firefox immensely over the vanilla UI.
I also really like the customise feature in newer versions of firefox, I just hope they make it more comprehensive and powerful. I just don’t think firefox is heading in the wrong direction here at all, I just hope for more work on extending the customise feature. It would be great if it reached the point where you could just drag and drop various modular addon components onto panels, create your own menus etc, like you can with say, Plasma or XFCE.
Convergence I agree I’ve never had any interest in having my mobile work like my desktop or vice versa. I use a mouse for one, something with great accuracy, so I don’t need giant buttons everywhere. Likewise on my phone I don’t have the luxury of precision input so I need a UI designed for that, nor do I have the screen space for verbose information and excessive options.
Having an approximately similar layout has some benefits but I just treat them as completely different tools, as long as I can move data between them and both devices have good UI designs for their own needs I don’t really see the problem. I’m not really sold on the usability benefits at all really, I think convergence is more useful for marketing/branding than anything.
Wall of text crits for 25000. You died.
EB
More Mozilla…
I’m holding out hope for Mozilla, this all seems like steps in the right direction for me: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/15/the_problem_with_firefox/
NB The author mentions one of the major privacy issues with Chrom(e/ium), but unfortunately Firefox also has a great deal. First of all, pocket http://dustri.org/b/firefox-youre-supposed-to-be-in-my-pocket-not-the-other-way-around.html. And then all of this: https://github.com/amq/firefox-debloat
PS and everything Gervase Markham mentioned about Rust is also true for Go 
