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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#351

Post by jrnichols »

baby wrote: post #316
littlestymaar wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. I don't know who you are, but having watched “hundreds of people” installing a web browser sounds a bit dubious… Personally, I have discussed with a few dozens of websites users and most of them would answer the question “what web browser do you use” with “Google” no matter if they were using Chro…

I remember seeing non-technical people back in the days making the switch to chrome because it was faster indeed. Firefox had to do some catch up, and words of mouth didn't work in Firefox's best interest for quite some time.

back in the early days I remember people switching over to it because it had a built-in Flash plugin. In more recent years, I've seen people installing it because they were sick of the pop-ups advertising it on Google sites, or they just assumed that it worked better with Google products because Google made it. Having learned that Google kind of made things that way, I'm not surprised.

Gmail was bait to lure millions into the Googleverse, where they usually don't leave.

Personally I'm kind of happy to see Microsoft Edge gaining some marketshare at Chrome's expense. (even if it's mostly just Chrome)

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#352

Post by detaro »

dralley wrote: post #331
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.

> that it's impossible for Mozilla Foundation to channel funds to Mozilla Corporation for other legal reasons

Do you know details about that? I can imagine that there'd be tax complications, but would have expected a foundation could buy things/services from an entity it owns.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#353

Post by marcinzm »

tomc1985 wrote: post #273
marcinzm wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The WebExtension API even years later is afaik still less capable than XUL. XUL extensions were an ungodly mess and arguably hurt Firefox more than they helped. Stability, performance, etc. issues were common to be caused by them. Which when everything is in a single execution context is not fun. Most of the popular extensions simply hijacked random internal Firefox functions which is why they couldn't just be insta…

I also wrote extensions and I did not find them to be an "ungodly mess". XUL was rather pleasant to work with compared to some of the other technologies I was programming with at the time

They were an ungodly mess, in my view, compared to modern approaches which is what matters in the context of this discussion. The issue also wasn't XUL but everything else related to how extensions functioned (same JS context as literally everything else, no processes, internal FF methods were being patched by extensions, etc.). Their power came at a great cost and their approach is inherently infeasible in today's security conscious world (even if you ignore the stability and performance issues).

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#354

Post by neverminder »

alcoholic_byte wrote: post #233
neverminder wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had an untechnical family member say unprompted last week they want to move away from Chrome but couldn’t use Firefox Mobile because it’s too slow. At the same moment Mozilla leadership was sacking its staff working on parallelising the browser engine. That's because Firefox is slow. I'm saying this as someone who's been using it as the main browser for at least a decade. My latest personal anecdote. Firefox trac…

Cannot verify and I am on Linux for a couple of years and on different hardware during those years. Arch-distribution, so maybe the defaults are what is different here?? Browsing, scrolling(with trackpad and without) startup time, etc. all fine. One thing that I find interesting to always ask: Performance under what circumstances? There are users who have literally 200 tabs+ open and then they complain that everythin…

I've been using Linux for a lot longer and on variety of hardware. I don't have this problem on my desktop, but the laptop and the trackpad are rather fresh, so maybe somewhere there's a bug or something. For some reason whenever there's a problem it's always Firefox, and rarely if ever Chrome. Example of another problem I had recently - websites like whathifi, tomsguide and a bunch of others were using 100% of one CPU core on Firefox, no problem on Chrome.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#355

Post by dzink »

Mozilla can take government grants or even subscription money to become a Cloudflare for consumers. Enable uses to content rate any content including youtube videos and protect each other at massive scale. As a parent I would pay for a safer browser experience for my kids. The Disney of browsers if you will. Provide a leader board of sorts for top contributors who have given time to rate content, money to the foundation, code contributions, etc. They don’t have to sink down the advertising hole either. This is just the tip of the iceberg of ideas I saw in 5 minutes. A corporation paired down to focus on consumer problems or government contracts related to internet security can be nimble and beat the FAANG model precisely because they don’t have to bend to the will of advertisers.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#356

Post by csande17 »

pikelet wrote: post #349
csande17 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be like saying that, if voting involved putting a machine in my house to report information about my daily activities to the government, and they used that data to attempt to determine which candidates and policies I would prefer without actually consulting me.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#357

Post by baby »

jrnichols wrote: post #351
baby wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing non-technical people back in the days making the switch to chrome because it was faster indeed. Firefox had to do some catch up, and words of mouth didn't work in Firefox's best interest for quite some time.

back in the early days I remember people switching over to it because it had a built-in Flash plugin. In more recent years, I've seen people installing it because they were sick of the pop-ups advertising it on Google sites, or they just assumed that it worked better with Google products because Google made it. Having learned that Google kind of made things that way, I'm not surprised. Gmail was bait to lure millions…

> because they were sick of the pop-ups advertising it on Google sites

for the longest time chrome advertising on google.com were actually malware : (

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#358

Post by mwcampbell »

hu3 wrote: post #345
mwcampbell wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question for me is not who's to blame, but what I can do, since I can only control my own actions.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#359

Post by GNOMES »

I have been forcing myself to use Firefox the last two months. Ignoring some performance issues on Google branded sites, I have yet to experience any incompatibilities.

The reason I am going back to Chrome is bookmark usability and Chromecast support.

Posts on the r/Firefox subreddit and official Firefox support pages mention that Chromecast uses proprietary API's, and can/will not be reverse engineered or implemented. I never noticed how often I use the ones at home or work until the ability to cast wasn't available.

As per bookmarks, I love not having my bookmarks visible in my main while browsing, and having them on the new tab page in Chrome is wonderful. I tried to pin my bookmarks to my Firefox top sites, but felt clunky using a hotkey or the menus to view all bookmarks.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#360

Post by hu3 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #358
hu3 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question for me is not who's to blame, but what I can do, since I can only control my own actions.

I don't think lack of funding is the problem but rather a lack of management.

More money is just going to incentivize their current malpractices.

I think what we could do is support a Firefox Foundation if/when it eventually exists.

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