On Feb 12, 2014, at 9:40 AM, Ken Saunders wrote: > I personally (as a user and Mozillian), have no problems with this being done > because I understand the need and I know and trust Mozilla. The problem is, > the greater majority of users and the public in general do not. > > Clearing up internal concerns about why more people aren't aware of this, the > transparency process and so on are valid, but the greatest immediate need > right now (in my opinion of course), is providing us (or is it we) Mozillians > with some precise details so that we can accurately and with confidence, > respond to the concerns of users, diffuse the hype, and if need be, defend > this.
I was going to start my reply with something like "Let's all pause for a second, here and take a breath" but as I re-read the thread, almost everyone is already doing that and the discussion has been really thoughtful and measured. Thank you all for that. Headline writers get paid to inflame, it's nice to know that we have an ample supply of anti-inflammatories. Headlines aside, let's get really specific. The thing we're talking about today is the experience of a new Firefox user with an empty profile. We give them a new tab page with a bunch of blank tiles. That's a crappy first experience and we should make it better. Darren's team looked at that, and realized that we could make this better for users and generate income for Mozilla if we were smart about it. Pre-populating those tiles, like we already pre-populate search providers, is just a better experience. As with search, we should make the choices that make the most sense for our users, we should make them localizable even if we have certain global defaults, and we should give users choice over whether to use them at all. Of course the implementation has to be done in ways that respect our users and serve our values as a project. I think that is all self-evident to people who read these groups, but I know that surprise and confusion is an uncomfortable place, and makes it hard er to reason from trust. Like any other feature, this will land in m-c, be scrutinized, have bugs, fix bugs, get tested in pre-release, get redesigned, &c. Just like with search, we'll need to figure out which entries make sense, which ones are commercial and should have a revenue sharing piece, and which ones are non-commercial (like our inclusion of wikipedia search) and how we manage that list. This is early days, so if there aren't answers to some of those things yet, it's mostly because we're figuring them out together, not because they're devious answers that we haven't figured out how to "message". Again, I think this is self-evident to most people on the list, but reminders help. J PS - Cross posting since the thread is in both places. Contrary to Pascal, I think this does belong in dev.planning so I'd recommend follow ups go there. I hear Pascal's argument that this goes to values, but our values impact our products and development across the board. Values should be part of every discussion, not just the remit of governance, imo. --- Johnathan Nightingale VP Firefox @johnath _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
