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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

civilityandtruth.com

41–50 of 405 posts

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#41

Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior. That was a fundamental m…

> constant deprecation of power features and customizability

Can you be more specific?

Advanced customization is provided by extensions and they're as well supported as ever.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#42
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Firefox bug report for a websocket message inspector was opened 7 years ago. It took 6 years before it got implemented. Its no wonder they lost marketshare among developers.

I can find similar examples in Chrome, yet that doesn't detain some devs to worship it.

Yes, but Chrome is considered the default. If something doesn't work in Chrome, I will get in trouble with my boss for implementing it.

If something doesn't work with Firefox, we tell the users to use Chrome.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#43

I have to say this is one of the instances where I’m glad Apple’s hunger for profit and privacy engineering intersect. On Mac at least with Safari there is a privacy oriented browser left. Maybe Apple could revive Safari on Windows?

I also like apples stance on privacy.

Given that they are probably the only company that could pull it off, I'd really like to see apple become more open(i.e. Stallman-ism constrained by reality) philosophically - they love to tell their users right and wrong, but if they made a fairly open ARM MacBook that I could run anything other than MacOS (If it's not windows I want things like eBPF to play with) I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#44
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge with not competing with Chrome is that websites are now mostly developed with Chrome as the dev-tool. Even large companies are just optimizing for that one browser: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/11/28/please-build-websites-w... How many users are going to be willing to put up with stuff not working until they switch?

The anti-IE generation is mostly to blame for that, they ended up adopting the behaviours they criticized so much.

IE made life miserable for developers. I am not sure we would have cared if it were not moribund.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#45
post #40

Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior. That was a fundamental m…

> the constant deprecation of power features and customizability They made ONE switch to a superior and standard extension model, and HN loses its minds. Do you really think you're in the majority here? Making it a more secure, faster and just better browser is just the only way forward. Without that Firefox would just be slow as hell, wouldn't play YouTube or Netflix videos, and not have any extensions left because…

"Firefox would just be slow as hell"

Why is that?

The problem is they get into to web standards game which is driven by Google to create pressure everyone else to spend millions on the newest standards.

I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me (except HTTPs).

Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF)

They broke exetensions several times without any benefit to users, but losing extensions on the way. One of the core features for power users dropped for nothing - well for their own fun rewriting the browser and rendering engine several times, I guess it was fun at least doing "interesting things".

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#46
The mentioning of DoD contractors made we wonder: would the EU help fund the development of Firefox, in order to secure competition in the browser market?

Mozilla would need to restructure and move Firefox to the foundation, but MDN, Firefox and possibly Rust could be funded by donations, corporate sponsors and perhaps the EU, assuming the money could be directed correctly. It would require a management skilled in seeking out these funding options and a brutal focus on openess, but the latter IS something Mozilla knows how to do.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#47
post #26

I still don’t understand how they spend 500M a year with so little to show for it. What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world? Nothing. I still can’t copy urls From multiple selected tabs without an extension. What we need is a group to step up, create a new browser, capture the 500M/year payday and put the money to work.

Creating a "new browser" is monumental task, and it's not enough to make something that works. Browsers are extremely high risk pieces of software with an attack surface comparable to an operating system.

Building something competitive means being able to make reasonable assertions of security, and that takes tons of resources.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#48
Mozilla must put the advocacy bits aside and focus on the core product. Perhaps the problem with a non-technical CEO is that the advocacy and new shiny stuff is given as much importance as the invisible (and insanely complex) work that makes a browser fast and safe.

A total failure of strategy here - if the leadership couldn't find other revenue sources and partnerships in 5 years they have to fire themselves. Instead they axe the future of Firefox.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#49
Five years ago it was clear that possibly the best thing that could happened to the future of Firefox, Mozilla, and the Web would have been for Mozilla Corporation to have gone belly up. But we're past the point where that might do any good with respect to salvaging Firefox or Mozilla's name.

Mozilla Corporation's role today is to siphon away any attention or enthusiasm that might otherwise be directed towards the ideals that Mozilla was originally created to facilitate. The Mozilla Corporation was supposed to have been set up to further the ideals of the then already extant movement that had been operating on a shoestring budget. The imprimatur should have been to direct its paid staff towards doing the boring work that unpaid (but highly effective) volunteers weren't interested in—not to wrench control away and consolidate power within a (now-proven ineffectual) company making ill-conceived commercial plays while trying to fit in with the culture of the Valley and squandering billions.

In the early 2010s, I attended a conference—one sponsored by Mozilla—and brought in on their dime, having been a fairly involved contributor for a few years, but not someone on the corporate payroll. Another guest and I mentioned how poor a job the travel agency had done, essentially fleecing Mozilla and doing much worse than if we'd arranged for travel and accommodation ourselves and then forwarded the bill. "Mozilla has a lot of money" was the response. After the better part of a decade, Mozilla's revenue has only grown, and so has their propensity to squander money.

The best option we have now is for folks to wake the heck up, to realize that the Mozilla that exists is not the one portrayed in either its messaging or fixed in the minds of casual slacktivists, to start a grassroots effort (a la early Firefox) to work on an independent browser—where, unfortunately, the best bet at this point is probably in leveraging WebKit against Chrome and Blink, given what an untameable mess the modern Web has become (not helped by the FirefoxOS efforts; nor the mess that Gecko codebase has become)—and most importantly never allow that effort to be subverted in the way that the Corporation managed to cannibalize and take over Mozilla.

But that's not going to happen, because Mozilla continues to position itself as the organization where folks with a casual interest in the health of the Web are supposed to direct their good vibes, while thoroughly proving itself to be unworthy and incompetent at upholding the principles it's supposed to be fighting for, and while time and time again, the public have proven themselves to have short attention spans on the order of months—so, by the end of the year Firefox and Mozilla will be back to being perceived as your old chum that's fighting the good fight, instead of being steered by a bunch of clueless, well-salaried Bay Area devs LARPing as some motley crew with your best interests at heart, all while the term "non-profit" gets bandied about in public discussions, much to their delight.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#50

Revenue is secured. They have another deal with Google worth ~500M a year for the next few years. But for growing it and for the future of the browser that’s TBD imo

Definitely secured for the executives and directors. They have very little incentive to make things work and continue to hire their friends and pay themselves lavish salaries.
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