81–90 of 187 posts
The old CEO brought nothing to Mozilla and was just milking it for money, will this change with this interim CEO? Maybe, but I doubt it.
They need to gain market share immediately, if they want to survive and not stay Googles pet browser.
They have millions of dollar, use them.
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Genuine question: why is it bad for the web?
Because Google completely controls its development.
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And then convince ~200 million people to use your browser so you can get the same bare bones level of funding via search deals Mozilla is having trouble sustaining on. Things do get in a progressively easier feedback loop after that though. I almost wonder if the Edge/Brave approach is the smarter approach. Build something on top of Chromium, trading full independence for the ability to focus on differentiation, and…
Firefox's future was written when they abandoned the rich add-on ecosystem and tried to compete with Chrome by being user-friendly to normies. In the end, they lost both the power users and the regular crowd (which will use Chrome or Edge, because those come bundled or are advertised on front page of Google).
And, of course, "being user-friendly to normies" has always been among Firefox's chief goals.
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Because Google completely controls its development.
I'm having trouble seeing what you mean. Microsoft doesn't employ at least a few hundred developers working on its fork? Ditto Brave? These developers and their managers have no influence?
Brave pushed back as hard as possible against Manifest v3, Google refused to budge, and ultimately Google got its way, because Google, the corporate entity, completely controls Chromium's development.
Backing off of VPN, Relay and Monitor sounds like bad news. They are the Mozilla's only source of income if the Google search deal goes away. Mozilla's financial statements never detailed how much money they were spending on their different segments, so perhaps those projects weren't generating profit, and thus weren't worth keeping even though they brought in revenue. I can certainly see how it would be hard to comp…
It fluctuates a little bit but 80-85% of revenue comes from search deals with Google being the dominant one. Everything else has a lot of overhead because nothing is developed in house; it’s just white labeled. VPN is Mullvad, Monitor is OneRep, etc. So even that 15% of revenue doesn’t/barely covers all the product/marketing/etc personnel that work on those teams. Every quarter that segment is behind forecasts - pock…
How does doing less result in more overhead?
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And the ability to turn off whatever guardrails they put on it in an attempt to make it trustworthy.
Aren't those generally burned into the model itself so not really configurable?
"AI" Well, the company is fucked. I wonder who will pick up the pieces of the browser tech. There are two pieces of tech that AI might apply to: 1) Semantic ad-blocking (this will fuck up their only source of reliable revenue so it won't happen) 2) content filtering for a child-friendly mode. This actually is a good idea, but it won't happen because it'll be easily repurposed to perform bullet point #1.
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It fluctuates a little bit but 80-85% of revenue comes from search deals with Google being the dominant one. Everything else has a lot of overhead because nothing is developed in house; it’s just white labeled. VPN is Mullvad, Monitor is OneRep, etc. So even that 15% of revenue doesn’t/barely covers all the product/marketing/etc personnel that work on those teams. Every quarter that segment is behind forecasts - pock…
“Everything else has a lot of overhead because nothing is developed in house“ How does doing less result in more overhead?
What an euphemism. Carlin would be proud.
I guess us moving to a smaller place needs a new word. How about "getting cozier"?
Is there any sort of corporate structure around one of the forks? There's no doubt in my mind that if it were organized somehow the community would be able to fund a few developers to work on Firefox alongside Mozilla. I don't want an aggressive split, but I'd like to be able to support the project. I've donated to Mozilla in the past but it apparently was not going to Firefox directly.
Yes, I have one for Waterfox. I have had one since 2012, first as Waterfox Limited and now as BrowserWorks Ltd (registered in the UK).
When people ask for comparison between forks, as often happens in the community, I’ve actually found it interesting that none of them actually have anyone to hold accountable in a legal sense, and I’ve started to lean into that as a benefit of Waterfox.
A browser is an incredibly privileged piece of software; it’s used to access very sensitive information, but it doesn’t seem to be a consideration a lot of the time about “who” is behind these forks.
I’ve got a few product launches that I hope will get me out under the thumb of middlemen and the murky world of search engine partnerships, and with that, hopefully build up a small team to have sustainable growth and a viable mainstream alternative.
Waterfox will be 13 in March, and one pie in the sky dream was to eventually be able to have a completely detached front end with frequent improvements submitted upstream to the browser engine. So somewhat similar to what you seem to be asking for.