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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#331

Post by dralley »

whoisthemachine wrote: post #223

It's really interesting that Mozilla doesn't funnel donations to software development interests. There are successful open source projects that do so, such as Linux Mint [0]. Maybe what's really broken is the idea that a browser needs a backing corporation to fund it? Personally, I can see no better way to keep an open internet than through the development of meaningful software that serves that purpose. [0] "Donatio…

The problem is that Mozilla Corporation needs to exist for various legal reasons, and that it's impossible for Mozilla Foundation to channel funds to Mozilla Corporation for other legal reasons.

Whereas Linux Mint literally just operates a Patreon / Paypal / Bitcoin account and distributes the funds between a couple of people.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#332

Post by thro1 »

rndgermandude wrote: post #201
Brakenshire wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25% seems like much too high a number for the group you’re talking about. I’d be interested to see some data on level of technical engagement and knowledge, but in my experience a large percentage of users don’t even have a clear idea of what a browser is. The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: i) Chrome is pushed by Google.com, which has a near monopoly on search ii) Chrome was bundled an…

>It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable. No, they did not. Electrolysis was around before WebExtensions. Sure, Electrolysis wasn't backwards compatible and a lot of existing extensions had to re…

>I ran (and sometimes still run) a personal fork of 60esr (aka >57 ;) where I added back "old" extension support by git-reverting a few hundreds of lines of code that they removed..

Sir, I would really appreciate if you could share a patch for it.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#333

Post by sfink »

tomc1985 wrote: post #297
dralley wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's soo more than that. They'd destroyed all the old UI in favor of Chrome-style HTML+JS instead of platform-native XUL It's a browser, the entire purpose of a browser is rendering HTML+JS quickly and efficiently. XUL primitives are not, on average, faster or more "platform-native". >They added all sorts of weird commercial initiatives to someonething that was supposed to be ... nonprofit You understand the proble…

> XUL / XPCOM had significant, tangible problems. Significant problems that could have been fixed > XUL primitives are not, on average, faster or more "platform-native". At least on Windows they mapped to their native components. Sure spacing and a few other things were a little off (maybe because it mapped to GTK? I don't remember) but the look and feel then was vastly superior than the Electron-looking garbage that…

>> XUL / XPCOM had significant, tangible problems. > Significant problems that could have been fixed

Mozilla agreed with you for a long, long time. But we eventually realized that while yes, we could continue to keep fixing those problems, that the opportunity cost was large: fixing XUL issues was taking the place of improving stuff that web pages actually use, and it would be better to not be splitting the effort both ways.

(I work for Mozilla, though mostly not on the stuff being discussed here.)

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#334

Post by anonymousab »

alcoholic_byte wrote: post #298
sp332 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's .org and the donation does not fund Firefox development or any other activity of the Mozilla Corporation.

When you go to https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ and you click on "Donate" you are directed to https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ . The sidebar on the donation-page clearly states: "We are proudly non-profit, non-corporate and non-compromised. Thousands of people like ...." So I think donations are in good hands there.

If you want to support just Firefox, and not the other Mozilla initiatives, there's no way to do that. People reasonably do not agree with the other things Mozilla spends their money on.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#335

Post by rndgermandude »

thro1 wrote: post #332
rndgermandude wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable. No, they did not. Electrolysis was around before WebExtensions. Sure, Electrolysis wasn't backwards compatible and a lot of existing extensions had to re…

>I ran (and sometimes still run) a personal fork of 60esr (aka >57 ;) where I added back "old" extension support by git-reverting a few hundreds of lines of code that they removed.. Sir, I would really appreciate if you could share a patch for it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24170820 ;)

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#336

Post by infogulch »

jefftk wrote: post #226
LockAndLol wrote: post #99

I'm starting to sincerely hope there'll be a fork of Firefox or at least a separation from Mozilla, and for Quantum/Servo to be separated and made an easily embeddable. The inability to donate directly to projects has imo has had a direct result of requiring Google money. Firefox and Quantum don't need 100M to survive. That's that just absurd. Even if you had 250 people working on it for 100k each, you still wouldn't…

> 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary. The kind of people you're trying to hire have the option to earn 3-4x as much working for a FAANG. Being excited about working on something you believe in can get you a long way, but that's still a lot to ask. (See discussion above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157803 )

Also, when estimating total employee cost from salary, a good rule of thumb is to double it to cover indirect compensation and overhead such as healthcare, retirement matching, employer's share of income tax, office overhead, IT infrastructure, etc.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#337

Post by ihuman »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #90
outadoc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The WebExtension API even years later is afaik still less capable than XUL. They also deprecated plugins (NPAPI), a recent version has disabled userChrome.css and userContent.css by default and the pref is noted as legacy and the same is now considered for user.js if not removed. Also you cannot set a locally-hosted newtab page any longer.

> you cannot set a locally-hosted newtab page any longer

You can still set it with firefox.cfg, it's not not documented anywhere, and will break sometime in the future

  var {classes:Cc,interfaces:Ci,utils:Cu} = Components;
  var customNewTabURL = "file:///C:/File/Path/Here.html";
  Cu.import('resource:///modules/AboutNewTab.jsm');
  AboutNewTab.newTabURL = customNewTabURL;

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#338

Post by c-smile »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #277
c-smile wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's imagine a browser (UA) that supports basics of HTML (language portion of HTML5) and CSS (e.g. v 2.1). Yet it has WebVM instead of JS. WebVM is a virtual machine similar to JavaVM but with DOM, CSSOM and layout APIs exposed in it as a runtime. So if some site needs flexbox in its CSS then it can be included as: If JS then and so on. This would allow a) keep browser small and maintainable and b) open room for inn…

Not bad an idea at all! Hadn't considered bytecodes for layout algorithms, though I guess it would work with regular js as well, and I AFAICS Project Houdini is about providing the necessary core rendering API.

> would work with regular js as well

In principle JS may work but it is too slow for that. Function calls are too pricey, no integer arithmetic, etc.

At least in my Sciter (https://sciter.com) element's layout controller must have three methods:

    void calc_min_maxes() // calculates min-content and max-content
    int layout_width(int px_new_width);
    int layout_height(int px_new_height);
so it is quite easy to add new layout modes. This way I've added ()

    flow:grid(...); // a la display:grid
    flow:horizontal; // a la display:flexbox  
    flow:stack; // no alternatives in standard CSS
    etc.
Modern Java (and C# for that matter) are almost ideal for such things, especially considering modern effective JITs and VMs.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#339

Post by anonymousab »

brador wrote: 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.

>What’s the last innovation they dropped on the world?

They got a lot of great improvements and under-the-hood innovations out of Servo, and had more in the pipeline, and MDN served as a bedrock, reliable, gold standard documentation for modern web development.

Coincidentally, the two things they just completely scuttled.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#340

Post by sp332 »

alcoholic_byte wrote: post #298
sp332 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's .org and the donation does not fund Firefox development or any other activity of the Mozilla Corporation.

When you go to https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ and you click on "Donate" you are directed to https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ . The sidebar on the donation-page clearly states: "We are proudly non-profit, non-corporate and non-compromised. Thousands of people like ...." So I think donations are in good hands there.

That's the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit entity wholly owned by the Foundation and with separate funding. In fact millions of dollars are transferred from the Corporation to the Foundation in royalties every year. Donating to the Foundation does not fund Firefox development!
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