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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#411
post #380

What should Firefox do for you to select it as your default browser? (It’s my default browser, I’m pretty happy with it, also use the pocket functionality quite bit)

Come up with their own privacy-focused computer and mobile OS, and mobile devices, really. I don’t think that browsers can survive as standalone software anymore. We’ve come to a point where default browsers are so tightly integrated with smartphone or computer OSes that a browser by itself offers too little value without integration. It’s going to be expensive, but they can compete with Linux distros that try to do the same but which all cannot gain any traction, polish, and long-term support.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support, which is most software nowadays. It makes sure that people who continue to use continue to pay. Upfront charges are often either too low with long term users free-riding or too high, in case the project is abandoned. Subscription makes it much more likely to price products correctly.

> subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support I could not disagree more. Subscriptions for software are a deeply unfair approach. Great for the companies, of course, but not for users. A more fair approach is to charge for upgrades and support instead. At least that way, users only pay if/when they choose to obtain additional value.

This model gets implemented, and then the comments section is littered with "I prefer when I didn't need to pay for software upgrades and backward compatibility!"

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#413

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…

About Baker's salary, turns out there's a section about it on her Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Commun... .

The relevant quote is "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

In other words, there's an assumption every corporation is required to have a CEO/Lawyer from the Technorati class who acts as a drain on the finances of the corporation, why should Mozilla be any different? Since the Mozilla Foundation is not a widely held corporation (and is a 501c3) there are only a few institutional directors ( from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/#boards ): Baker (AOL), Chambers (McKinsey), Cooper (Walmart), Lakhani (MIT/Harvard), Lisbonne (Stanford GSB), Molotsi (Intuit) and Lund.

If you think Baker's pay should be cut, Lakhani is probably the person to talk to, he's chair of the compensation committee.

After watching VCs from the 70s to the current time (yes, I'm that old) I have a theory about tech startups. Their primary concern is to pump money from old school monied interests to old school monied interests' children. So if you have cash you want to give to your kids more or less tax free (or tax reduced), you send them to Stanford or MIT, then you arrange a meeting for them w/ your old school chum who's now a VC in San Jose or Palo Alto. You give the VC cash which is treated as an investment by the IRS, and then the VC gives the money to whatever bizarre tech startup is being run by their old school chum's kids. If you're lucky, you get a return on your investment and you pay whatever capital gains tax you need to pay (which is most often taxed at a rate considerably below that for earned income.) Your kids get a decent salary for a few years, and if they're lucky and smart, they git bought out by a big firm that makes them a VP or something. The VC should be lucky enough over time to make enough money on the 10% of deals that make it to acquisition to pay for the 90% that fail completely or get acquired on bad terms.

Mozilla always seemed to me to demonstrate this also works for non-profits.

Also... the story of "using money to transfer generational wealth in the upper class" is clearly not a universal. There are clearly startups that are innovative. They may be helmed by a handsome 20-something from Stanford, but that's just an historical accident. I am sure YOUR startup is in this category. But the "using VC investment as a money laundering scheme to evade generational tax" happens often enough my inner marxian shouts every time I drive down El Camino in Palo Alto.

And this part is purely opinion. I appreciate you probably have a different opinion and absolutely do not think less of you for having a unique perspective:

And besides, the goal of tech money is now just to keep the party going. The web is shit, intended to distribute content from major content producers or to be festooned with ads (twitch and youtube). iProducts are there to look sleek and provide just enough functionality to convince you to buy another iProduct. Though you're probably not in the target demographic anymore since China and India are at the beginning of the growth curve. Protocols and programs we used to use: SMTP/IMAP/eMail, (S)FTP/File Transfer, Veronica/Archie/WAIS/Search, etc. are pretty much dead or owned by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo's corpse.

I think the reason olds are nostalgic for Commodore 64's, Atari 800's and even TI 99/4A's (and that there are a few kids who like leenucks and BSD) is they're systems that could operate without being attached to the dystopian cyberspace Carmen Hermosillo described in Pandora's Vox. The only "infrastructure" I needed for my 99/4 was a power outlet and a factory somewhere cranking out cassette tapes, 5.25" floppies and ribbons for my MX-80.

But I have digressed. If the resolution is that Mozilla has lost it's way, I would argue for the affirmative. Or rather argue it was sort of set up to fail. And heck, I didn't even once mention the management fiasco that was Boot to Gecko.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#414
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Motherfuck! Mozilla's board and their funding projects almost makes me want to abandon Firefox and go to Chrome.

This sounds very much like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

The Mozilla board might be largely incompetent and/or corrupt, but they aren't actively trying to steal your data to profit from, and Firefox is still genuinely a less user-hostile product than Chrome.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#415
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is fast though.

It used to be slow, and many people who then switched, won't be looking back until Chrome stops working.

chrome by way of google is making sure it's the only thing that youtube still properly works in.

When MS tried this shit they got slapped with anti-trust. What google is doing is worse in every dimension.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#416
post #380

What should Firefox do for you to select it as your default browser? (It’s my default browser, I’m pretty happy with it, also use the pocket functionality quite bit)

Add this feature (Chosen Bookmark Shortcut Indicator):

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/feature-suggestion-fire...

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#417
This is really frustrating to hear!

It continues to boggle my mind how Chrome - partly closed source, questionable goals related to advertising - has almost 50% market share; while Firefox is declining.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#418
post #90

Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first . If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. Mozilla focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser related projects. Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent b…

I don't really get what you're on about. I switched from Chrome to Firefox a couple months ago and... it's great. I don't notice any differences in performance (if anything, snappier) and the only thing that's "missing" that I had in Chrome is that Chrome had all my credit-card and password data associated with my Google account, which, well, that's not something I want Firefox to have. TLDR: Firefox is a good web br…

The pig doesn't have any problem with the farmer until he shows up with the axe. Thus it is with chrome users.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#419
post #408

I can't be alone in my view that open source won. Just not the original Mozilla open source browser. Instead the re-invented one spear headed by Google - Chrome. Chrome is like the 2.0 of everything the IE6 team and Mozilla team learned the hard way. It was built by many of the original founding members of those teams. It's not a bad thing when Microsoft now uses the open source Blink rendering engine. It's not a bad…

We don't move on until Google lets us protect our privacy. Containers would be a good start.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#420
post #291
post #90

Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first . If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. Mozilla focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser related projects. Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent b…

In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their favorite feature removed, and every time, without fai…

> In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years.

citation fucking needed.

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