I wish they had been working on an endowment like Wikipedia, that would be a better model in terms of the importance of an independent, open source browser. Maybe Wiki and take them under their wing.
Firefox on the brink?
341–350 of 840 posts
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#342Why is the US government even supporting specific browsers? It should support a standard like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites simple to reduce the chance it doesn't work somewhere. They're not Spotify. They're not trying to growth hack. They don't need to look pretty and have fancy animations and match some designer's dream down to the pixel. They can add CSS etc.…
> It should support a standard like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites simple to reduce the chance it doesn't work somewhere. You're right of course. It's not really a case of 'supporting' browsers, it's a case of testing their sites against other browsers in case developers have accidentally written some non-portable Chrome only code. This was very much the case in t…
Exactly this -- it's about testing and ensuring something works.
And no matter how "standardized" things get, there are always going to be implementation differences (whether due to mistakes or underspecified specs or partial implementation) and also just straight-up bugs between browsers.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#343I'm just preparing to fully move over to Firefox.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Motherfuck! Mozilla's board and their funding projects almost makes me want to abandon Firefox and go to Chrome.
Despite all this nonsense about the board, Firefox remains the best browser in my experience. It isn’t cramming an AI chatbot and coupon codes during checkout into my browser experience or working to eliminate ad blocking.
They also don't ban and lie about anti-tracking extensions like AdNausium (a data poisoning adblocker[0]). Chrome banned it from their store. As well as other extensions like Bypass Paywalls Clean. Ultimately the Firefox addon ecosystem is simply freer
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I reading the documents you link right? Mozilla is wildly profitable. They made a profit of roughly 150 Million dollars last year. They have 1.2 Billion dollars in assets. They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third). Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this comment section about woke Mozilla, they spent only 5 Million on grants last year. The vast majority goes towar…
If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit. Their mission statement is: "Mozilla is a global nonprofit dedicated to keeping the Internet a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.". You could argue the importance of market share at some percentages but below ~5% has to be considered a priority one emergency, if your goal is to keep the internet accessible for all. If th…
It kinda is a for profit organization.
Basically all revenue is made through the Mozilla Corporation.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit. Their mission statement is: "Mozilla is a global nonprofit dedicated to keeping the Internet a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.". You could argue the importance of market share at some percentages but below ~5% has to be considered a priority one emergency, if your goal is to keep the internet accessible for all. If th…
> If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit. There are two parts to Mozilla: a for-profit company and a non-profit company. They are separate. You are reading the mission statement of mozilla.org, not mozilla.com. Mitchell Baker is the CEO of the for-profit company, not the non-profit.
Isn’t she chief lizard wrangler at both?
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but this is not the criteria for a company to be successful or not.
Since when do you get to define the criteria? I'm a happy user, I consider that a success in my book.
and what about their book?
inability to put yourself into someone else's shoes, is a very big flag. A red one in my book.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#348So all Google has to do is spam US government websites with scrapers reporting Chrome UA and Firefox is done for?
They want FF to be on life support, not end it. Their half a billion a year is buying exactly that.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#349Web Developers shouldn't need to "support" particular browsers at all, that's what standards are for. Nobody should be "supporting" any non-standard functionality at all.
> Web Developers shouldn't need to "support" particular browsers at all, that's what standards are for. I agree. But different standards get adopted by different browsers at different rates. Case in point: Firefox still has not released support for declarative shadow DOM. As a side note, although related to standards: I thought Firefox insisted several years ago that they were not going to support File System Access…
In this case, though, a government website should be aiming to support the lowest common denominator in web standards. They shouldn't be writing websites that require something like the shadow DOM or the File System Access API. Standards low enough that actually testing against different browsers is an afterthought.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#350It’s not on the brink, it’s that Firefox shims GA[1] with Enhanced Tracking Protection, which is on by default.[2] analytics.usa.gov uses GA. So you really can’t rely on usage figures that don’t represent the truth of your situation. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...
What stood out to me was that they didn't break out mobile from PC. The mobile landscape dominates usage these days and extremely few people make an active choice in browser there. The presented stats to me reads more like Android vs iPhone than it does Chrome vs everyone else.
on iOS all browsers are forced to use WebKit
And how could Firefox possibly complete against default browsers? Is it even worth the investment?