251–260 of 721 posts
I've observed windowserver on macOS constantly eat 30+% of my CPU whenever Firefox is running for a few versions now, and more and more web apps effectively require Chrome nowadays. Plus now this sort of change coming up ... maybe it's a good time to try out something new. Brave perhaps?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, Once enabled, Firefox Suggest sends what I type in the address bar to Mozilla. There it gets augmented with my location and makes its way to their "preferred partners", limited, for the moment, to a lovely establishment called "adMarketplace". You don't see a slightest problem with that, no? Reading through their "how Mozilla handles data" page [1] reveals absolutely nothing specific. What's collected, what's bei…
> You don't see a slightest problem with that, no? If adMarketplace is just receiving from Mozilla a stream of (search text, city, clicked yes/no) then no, I don't see a problem with it. If Mozilla sends a unique user ID as well then I would see a problem with it, but as far as I can tell, they don't.
Because this is on by default in FF93, be it a new install or an upgrade.
For now limited to the US, but it's safe to assume they are just testing waters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s wrong with paying market rates for a CEO? Do you think they should find a CEO below market rates? Have you donated money to Mozilla or Wikipedia?
They had an extremely competent CEO who was more than happy to work for a price below market rates, but he was a conservative, so they sacked him. Now Mozilla has what it deserves.
It's a common wish here at HN that one would like to donate directly to Firefox development. Is there a legal reason that Mozilla can't do this considering their setup having the Mozilla Corporation run Firefox development? What else could their reasons be for at least not experimenting with the option?
Because alot of people who otherwise donate to Mozilla would then donate to Firefox directly and that is not what the execs really want to happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is so much wishful thinking around this... "me and five other people want to pay, if you just cater to my specific tastes, than the me and these 5 people will happily bankroll your massive engineering effort!" Maybe people would be happier if they had to pay to switch off the ads instead of it just being a setting (/switching default search engine)??
If you get 5000 people paying $5/month for every person working on a truly private browser, you have $25,000/month per teammate. I'm sure you could find 50,000 people in the world willing to pay this. I'm one of them. The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This just makes me worry a little bit that Firefox will take a similar route to Brave and introduce multiple streams of revenue into the browser, disguised as features that the user would want. E.g. Brave Rewards, Brave VPN, Sponsored Wallpapers. These just clog up the interface and make it feel sketchy. I just want a normal FOSS browser, but I also understand the whole financing issue.
I’ve used Brave as my daily driver for years, and not once have I ever been even mildly inconvenienced by the optional BAT token feature. If it helps fund the browser, I’m glad- that’s better for me. I understand why people dislike it, but the outrage seems superfluous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
maybe go the other direction and try to cut expenses rather than trying to make more money? Firefox gets hundreds of millions from Google alone in royalties, that is not enough to build a web browser? Firefox has lost almost half of its users since 2010, yet it keeps burning more money every year. Run the company in a lean way, cut the fat, do one thing well. It's like Wikipedia, every year they seemingly find new in…
> Firefox gets hundreds of millions from Google alone in royalties, that is not enough to build a web browser? Empirically, it is not. Even Microsoft gave up that chase. Browsers are staggeringly complex and expensive to build. Which may be an indictment of the Web itself, but in the absence of a simpler alternative (Gemini?), the Web we have is the Web we've got, and browsers have to meet it where it is.
EDIT: I guess I forgot shopping in essential services, which is another huge source of fuel in the arms race.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're not talking about modern Linux though. Modern Linux isn't "coordinated by a (admittably singlularly competent) sole finnish guy in a bathrobe from home," , there's now a team of people involved. Sure there is a hierarchy with someone taking the lead but isn't that true for most operations? Even the Mozilla foundation has a Chair (Mitchell Baker) and Executive Director (Mark Surman). Linux hasn't been a single p…
The "guy in a bathrobe" is still the lead and has the final say. Is he compensated anywhere near what Mozilla's CEO is? In fact is the total comp of all the people significantly involved in Linux kernel development anywhere near the total comp of Mozilla's C-suite? I doubt it.
Most of us developers, devops and sysadmins are paid an obscene wage compared to many critical services like nursing. Is it fair? Probably not. But that doesn't have any baring on the complexity of Linux vs Firefox.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gemini throws out way way too much. Inline links and image support for one. It feels like someone wants to have everything exactly as it was in the 80s. They claim to stop feature creep by not including any kind of optional data support like headers and the spec team will reject any feature additions. While I would be happy to have HTML/CSS exactly as it is and replace JS with a minimal WASM implementation that lets…
I'd be surprised if the most popular Gemini clients didn't support Markdown.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A browser is expensive. Currently Firefox is funded (though not controlled) by Google's Ad business. I am all for them reducing their reliance on Google's Ad business. In this sense this is a step _towards_ what you want. I really really dislike them double speaking about this though.
I'd love to be able to pay some monthly subscription to support Firefox. But every time this comes up, someone tells me that there's no way to directly support Firefox itself. I wish they'd do something like Wikipedia does, to ask their users to donate or contribute.