I like the comparison to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Like those organizations, Mozilla was being kept alive by corporate money (primarily Google's) and never developed the ability to be a sustainable business on its own.
Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
341–350 of 405 posts
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#342On the graph at 2014 on the x-axis, is this the "real" reason why Brendan Eich had to resign as CEO of Mozilla Corp?
No, it was due to him donating to Prop 8
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#343Personally 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…
I don't know if that was really Mozilla's fault or that Google was always in a position where they could force Mozilla's hand. When Firefox was at its absolute maximum market-share, Google was already the "start page of the internet" thanks to its search page. They used this and other marketing/bundling strategies (which were possible thanks to Google's resources) to aggressively grow Chrome's market share at an unpr…
I don't remember Google throwing any marketing at being the start page of the internet. That was a Reddit campaign trying to get users to switch from Digg.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#344Five 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 id…
> 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 Is there a maintained OSS browser based on Webkit? Do you think it's viable for a new Webkit-based OSS browser to become sustainable by user donations, assuming initial sponsorship by other non-profits or EU?
qutebrowser
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
That won't help: donations to Mozilla don't go to the development of Firefox.
They could though. If enough of us start donating, maybe the leadership will make the necessary organizational changes to make donations go toward Firefox development. It definitely won't happen if we don't do our part.
Why are we to blame?
We can't just start donating massive amounts of money and hope that management funnels it to Firefox.
The same management that receives almost half a billion dollars per year from Google is the management that just fired Servo, MDN and Dev Tools staff.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Chromium isn't privacy focussed? It was my understanding that all of Google's grubby code isn't present.
Chromium still depends on Google for certain features. https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#feature-overvi...
Those are easily removed and can also be disabled using their policy engine.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
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;
> will break sometime in the future
To be fair, with Mozilla, it would break sometime in the future even if it was documented.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#348Hey author of the posted blog, as a Baltimore resident (and librarian!), I love the shout out to the Howard County library's "choose civility" campaign![0] Nice site.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
You believe developers don't understand telemetry and leave it enabled because it helps development of the tools they use? This whole anti-telemetry outrage is so manufactured and boring.
I'm a developer, and I disable telemetry whenever possible, including in Firefox. I do this because I value my privacy (the same reason I use Firefox), and I don't want my system to make network requests unnecessarily. The way I see it, there are two possibilities: (1) A significant portion of Firefox users think like me. In this case, Mozilla should not rely on telemetry because it excludes a sizeable portion of the…
That's like saying your vote doesn't matter so there's no point in voting.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#350I 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? Rust, Wasm (although a joint project, inspired by asm.js which was purely Mozilla) come to mind. Also, I consider keeping the focus on privacy in an age when huge behemoths of companies are determined to steal every aspect of our lives for profit to be truly important work, much more important than any tech innovation.
Mozilla employs (or employed) 2 "Rust devs". If that.
steve could chime in to be more precise. But I'd say Rust is a merit of the people involved much more than Mozilla.
If anything Mozilla just fired servo folks who contributed to Rust so it's not like they even pretend to support it.
I hope Rust gets a foundation and I hope that Mozilla transfers the "Rust" trademark to them.