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.
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Firefox on the brink?
431–440 of 840 posts
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#432With Google trying to cripple adblocker extensions, I hope users will find their way back to Firefox.
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Re: Firefox on the brink?
#433Mozilla 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…
I feel like it's not that high for a CEO salary at a mature compnay. Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M these days (yay inflation). 6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable. If these numbers sound high ... $1M today was $500K in 1996.
I'll agree with you that the CEO salary is fine. What isn't fine is the CEO's performance. They should be replaced.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#434It’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...
Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which it is getting close to, will trigger a chain-reaction of consequences that will dramatically hurt Firefox, and it's not clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that. It doesn't particularly matter whether or not the figure is accurate in that context. Maybe that can be fixed easily by h…
Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which it is getting close to
So, the default position of the government is, "If we can't surveil you, we can't help you?" (Or taken the other way, you want us to help you? Let us surveil you!) This seems to be how it works out in practice, just because of favorable economics in mass surveillance. Example: RFID and license plate readers for toll collection. Various registrations with government agencies are another example.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.…
But after that, IIRC Mozilla Suite was big, clunky and stagnating. And Phoenix, I mean, Firebird, I mean, Firefox was a lean spin-off.
It was a spin-off within Mozilla though - not a rival fork.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
While not recommended, and I would run firefox developer edition for that, you can disable (make the value false) `security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling` in `about:config`. You will be able to view sites with invalid certs/config. But will still prompt you that that something is invalid, and you have the choice to proceed forward. Again, I would not recommend doing that on vanilla Firefox, they have Firefox developer edi…
That's exactly the problem though. I know it's somehow possible, but the fact that I have to search for what's the internal boolean name for whatever feature I want to disable is simply a bad dev UX. If there's a Firefox developer edition (I had no idea), they should enable all "I want to continue anyways" buttons by default. I mean, it's a developer edition!
> That's exactly the problem though.
Is it? The default options are for default users. Default users are dumb. It sounds like you have a non-standard case and the capacity to know the difference between misconfiguration and actual threats. It also makes sense that you are able to turn off certain features for default users when you want to do non-standard (default) tasks.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#437Mozilla 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…
> What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? The same thing that is justifying obscene salaries in general. A circle of greed where obscenely paid people decide what obscenely paid people should be paid.
I will say in their defense, they have a legitimate argument.
Offering a low-paying CEO role means you'll attract lower quality CEOs. The best CEOs have personal incentive to take the highest paying jobs. This element of competition does exist.
However, this ignores a few factors.
1. Mozilla don't seem to have a great CEO despite the pay.
2. Self-interest and CEO skills are not necessarily tightly coupled. They could be orthogonal. So a great CEO might be willing to take lower pay, especially a CEO that might be great for a company that is itself forgoing disgusting amounts of (ad) revenue in the interest of ethics.
3. (Not Mozilla specific but it's important to mention when this comes up) Decent regulations capping CEO pay would in fact remove this entire element of competition, freeing up companies from having to decide how much profit to sacrifice on the altar of business gods.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#438This 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.
One feature which is stopping me from switching is Google account sync between devices.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#439Why 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…
At least these days there are shim libraries, rather than having to explicitly rely on things like the box-model hack.
Are people actually now using the older term, "shim," and not the newer "polyfill?" I was a grumpy old man when people started to tout the new terminology, when there were perfectly good terms already.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#440What could get people to move to firefox? Is the only way really to have have your browser be popular is to have it either be installed by default, or being advertised on a page that people use daily? Would be crazy if facebook had a banner stating "switch to firefox now" suddenly
Firefox would need to win mobile. This is where action takes place.
As someone who uses Firefox on Android the major attraction would be complete extension ecosystem and cross sync.