Live data from Hacker News

Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

251–260 of 840 posts

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It is exactly that.

Hmm. Maybe I should try uBlock. I usually don't like adblockers -- both on principle, because I believe in paying for what I consume, and because they tend to subtly break a website and cause hours of headaches at least once a year -- but I don't like feeding the beast either. I'll look into this.

Adblockers are highly configurable, you can simply disable them selectively in cases where you want to “support” those that sell your data to the highest bidder, if that’s your jam..

Your former comment indicates that you care about page load times, in which case an adblocker will typically reduce both UI yank and certainly network usage, in case you’re constrained.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#252
post #73
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a pretty reasonable question when the salary is so incredibly out of line with what developers make. Is the CEO singlehandedly responsible for productivity equal to that of sixty or so developers?

Did I need to append a /s for people to get my comment?

on the internet, ALWAYS

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#253

what the hell happened? Firefox was the chosen one.

A bunch of smart idiots fell into Google's convenient embrace, just like everybody falling into Microsoft's arms 15-20 years ago, because this industry learns absolutely nothing, perhaps because we age out most of our competent engineers after 10 years or less.

What's sad about this time around is that Firefox was fine this whole time. It has been my daily driver for 8+ hours per day since like 2001.

I have spent many thousands of hours with Chrome as well for various jobs. I literally never felt a perceivable overall performance gap. I've always had pretty well-specced machines; maybe there were points when Chrome was noticeably better on low-spec machines.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we sold out.

But just sad that our price was so f'ing cheap.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#254
post #60

Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down. https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market…

[flagged]

Suddenly things make more sense about Firefox...

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#255
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine that the CEO, or maybe a few other top officers, may say: "This is me who is bringing in all the search deals, which means all the money. Come on and try to oust me." Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea. This happened several times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 / X…

The EU could have a privacy-friendly browser if it funded Mozilla or a Mozilla fork.

That would be a no from me. Considering the recent headlines from the EU wanting to scan every private message on the phones of it's citizens in order to "protect the children".

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google finally beat my hands with a stick firmly enough to get me off Firefox. It was youtube. Not the ads -- I pay for premium -- but the fact that on FF they added an artificial 5s page load delay on firefox plus a bug has lingered for months where it always loads the last video, so you have to load every video twice. 12s/video is too much delay. Ah well, it was good while it lasted.

12s of your time is the cost of compromised morals? That seems p cheap and unfortunately indicative.

Even besides the compromised morals, just the fact that they know and understand that Google is intentionally doing nefarious shit to make us switch to Chrome and they just went along with it.

I must just be a naturally defiant person, but in that situation, I would go far, FAR, out of my way to make sure I never let them "win" with that kind of bullshit tactic.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#257
post #214
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine that the CEO, or maybe a few other top officers, may say: "This is me who is bringing in all the search deals, which means all the money. Come on and try to oust me." Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea. This happened several times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 / X…

> When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox

> Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox

That's not entirely accurate (or at least, while accurate, is missing a lot of significant context) Mozilla was creating within Netscape, not in opposition to it, as a steward org for the open-sourcing of Navigator & Communicator. Even when Netscape was acquired by AOL, AOL continued to fund[0] Mozilla for years after the acquisition.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050324025052/http://www.wired....

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#258
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine that the CEO, or maybe a few other top officers, may say: "This is me who is bringing in all the search deals, which means all the money. Come on and try to oust me." Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea. This happened several times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 / X…

It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but when I do the math (33M x 5 x 12) I get $1.98B. Maybe you meant $1/month?

If you pay yearly, you usually get a discount so you cant multiply by 12.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#259
post #3

I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.

Google finally beat my hands with a stick firmly enough to get me off Firefox. It was youtube. Not the ads -- I pay for premium -- but the fact that on FF they added an artificial 5s page load delay on firefox plus a bug has lingered for months where it always loads the last video, so you have to load every video twice. 12s/video is too much delay. Ah well, it was good while it lasted.

FYI there is Invidious.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#260
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine that the CEO, or maybe a few other top officers, may say: "This is me who is bringing in all the search deals, which means all the money. Come on and try to oust me." Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea. This happened several times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 / X…

It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but when I do the math (33M x 5 x 12) I get $1.98B. Maybe you meant $1/month?

Yep, you're right. At 5$/month they'd need 6.66M subscribed users. Still a lot, but more acheivable.
Post reply on HN