Why do people love to hate on Firefox? People have been harping on Pocket for years as a waste of resources that hardly anyone uses, but now that they are eliminating it, people are coming out of the woodwork to wax nostalgic?
It turns out that making a modern browser is a huge, complex task. It’s been said that it is more on par with maintaining an OS than another type of app. Mozilla is not perfect but why are we so quick to let the perfect be the enemy of the good?
It’s pretty tone-deaf to criticize layoffs on the same article that acknowledges their historic dependence on Google’s rapidly collapsing monopoly. Where is the money going to come from?
A poorly thought out blog post about the only major browser that isn’t built on Apple, Google, or Microsoft.
It’s pretty tone-deaf to criticize layoffs on the same article that acknowledges their historic dependence on Google’s rapidly collapsing monopoly. Where is the money going to come from?
If you scroll up, you’ll see the part of the article that mentions Mozilla wasting tens of millions of dollars on AI.
Where do you think that money comes from?
The author’s timeline is off. The AI investment was in 2023, before most of the Google antitrust activity. They are also scaling back their AI programs.
Today [October 28, 2024] Germ announces pre-seed funding from investors K5 Global via partner Daniel Marcotte, Mozilla Ventures, Gaingels, and angel investors including Nick Sullivan, Jessica Millstone of Copper Wire Ventures, and Adam Sah.
https://www.germnetwork.com/blog/germ-announces-pre-seed-funding
Looks like a step in the right direction. E2EE messaging is a worthy venture under the Mozilla umbrella.
Not sure why you are posting about it in this thread about AI.
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You seem to be really stuck on this. You posted about a grant program that Mozilla is involved in for a startup to work on developing a secure chat on a more open protocol. Now you dug up a LinkedIn post about the same startup attending an unrelated AI technology conference.
No one is saying that Mozilla isn’t involved in AI at all. The only thing I said is that the foundation is in trouble because Google antitrust actions are likely to harm their funding. As a result, they are cutting back in a lot of areas, including staffing, AI, and other side projects.
The original article ignorantly and irresponsibly overlooks the basic math of the situation.
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I’m not happy with how Mozilla leadership has navigated the ship, but what is the alternative? If Mozilla dies, there isn’t enough funding for one of the forks to take over the browser.
I for one would love to throw money at Mozilla, or any alternative, that has experienced developers behind it, doesn’t have conflicts of interest and acts on behalf of its users. This is why I donate to Servo, Ladybird and Dillo too (I know one of these is not like the others 😄).
I don’t think they’d reach their current levels of funding through donations, but it might be possible to get enough together to keep it on life support.
I know this wouldn’t be perfect, but surely better than losing it completely.
ladybird
No planned windows support though 🫤
That’s a feature, not a bug.
They had many years to develop alternative sources of income instead of relying solely on Google. But instead, they’ve been chasing every trend set by big corporations for no clear reason. I really dislike their CEO and the entire leadership team — they’re destroying Mozilla from the inside. Rather than implementing a recovery plan, which they could’ve done years ago, they allowed the company to remain dependent on Google. From what I know, internal relationships among coworkers are poor. People either do whatever they want or nothing at all. If you try to bring new ideas to the CEO and you’re not close to them, you’re basically fucked up With an organization being managed like this, there’s no path forward other than continued decline. Sadly, Mozilla is likely to die for all the reasons mentioned above
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I can understand and relate to the complaints in this article but there’s not really another alternative that I would prefer to use either
Exactly. I’m not running to chrome with it’s defanged ad blockers and Google stink.
LibreWolf? Its just firefox minus the crap?
But where does libre wolf go if Mozilla vanishes?
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people who never donated or contributed getting made at mozilla cancelling services like pocket and fakespot is amusing.
I don’t want to donate to Mozilla, I want to donate to Firefox. I can donate to Mozilla, but little if any money would go to firefox, instead it goes to various causes unrelated to web browsers.
Exactly. Mozilla needs to stay in their fucking lane and work on Firefox. That’s what they should exist for. Not all this other crap.
If firebox being bankrolled by Google didn’t raise red flags for you before, I have some NFTs I’d like to sell you that I think you’ll find interesting.
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Yeah it’s bad. Most of the points made in that article are valid.
And once Firefox is gone, all the LibreWolfs and IronFoxs are gone too.
At some point in time FF was a normal project. A good project even. It could be in theory forked as easily as INN, or LibreOffice, or Xorg (oops, never mind), or whatever else big and “classical”. It was open to contributors, open in leadership. It was kinda anarchist.
Like a good FOSS project, they considered all the tinkery\hobbyist use cases, having xulrunner and XUL in general. Like a good FOSS project, they didn’t treat what’s now normal there as normal.
They had a sane UI. They supported the SeaMonkey project, because why be a jerk when you need not.
But then at some point they made a deal with Google. So that’s a lesson - any deal works both ways.
For me dropping XUL was the first firm sign of FF’s death, because they didn’t replace it with anything as good. It almost felt as if the main technical merit of dropping XUL was inability to tinker with it, and XUL’s problems with security and parallelism were used as excuses. They could have made an incompatible, but just as functional replacement, not just for my convenience, but for their own too.
So, IMHO, if FF hadn’t died, they’d just split paths with the commercial web as far as a decade ago. Probably come up with something like what’s Gemini project is doing now, except much more.
BTW, FF was a big enough browser to even affect de facto web standards, were it a good thing to use while ignoring Google’s bullshit. Instead they decided to track the bullshit and make the FF itself crappier and “more like Chrome” to compete for Chrome users.
