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Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

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111–120 of 187 posts

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#111
post #46

While I always marveled at how Hubs survived the 2020 layoffs (which included the people working on WebVR/WebXR at the time), seeing it shutting down is a shame. We used it to run monthly meetups for the WebXR Discord for just about the last 3 years. Very curious what's going to happen to it now, whether it gets handed off to another entity (i.e. Firefox Reality to Igalia) or left to the community somehow.

Is it open source? If so, could it be realistically hosted somewhere else?

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why does mobile Chromium still not have extensions? Why was Manifest v3 pushed so heavily? It's not for lack of resources: those are deliberate decisions made for business reasons. 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.

>Brave pushed back as hard as possible against Manifest v3, Google refused to budge, and ultimately Google got its way

OK, thanks for that, but Brave's decision might've been informed by the fact that Manifest v2 seems to make the user too vulnerable to purveyors of shady extensions, and is not really needed except for adblocking (or at least I'm unaware of any use cases except adblocking where Manifest v3 does not suffice). Brave comes bundled with an adblocker that can read the uBlock Origin lists, so whether Brave's aforementioned bundled adblocker uses Manifest v2 to communicate with the browser or some other (possibly private) API might not matter.

Also, just because the Edge team at Microsoft likes web advertising does not mean it has no influence on the evolution of the Chromium-based browser ecosystem.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#113
post #95
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop linux market share is below 2% yet people aren't talking about it being on its last legs like with Firefox. How does Firefox's 3.5% market share prevent people from using it ? Is the 180,000,000 number of monthly active users simply too low ?

wow you are right, they have 3,5%. I thought they had like 25-30%. Safari had 18% apparently, I know 0 people who use Safari

You don’t know anyone who uses an iPhone to browse the web?

Pretty sure that is where that Safari market share comes from.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#114

So many people I know don't switch to FF because of missing tab grouping (and no, not a single addon gives the similar fast and nice experience). It's like number one feature and yet they waste time on stuff like this

That and a lack of a tab bar for tablets have kept me away from switching to FF.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#117
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on a call this morning where a team had decided to break it to their leadership that genai was not the answer they thought it was going to be. I bet there's going to be a lot of that this year.

That certainly wasn't Microsoft, they're still full on the "CoPilot" hype train, launching a confusing spectrum of different services all under the same name and all before they're actually ready

> launching a confusing spectrum of different services all under the same name

.net all over again.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#118

AI in browser? Time to move on after all this time then. Is librewolf good? Or any other browser? I recently provisioned a Linux workstation and I'm very reluctant to install Chrome. The super insecure X11 will not help it stop practically scanning my every key stroke. Any good ideas for a browser on Linux XFCE?

IceCat is a usable replacement if you disable the add-ons that supposedly keep you safe but totally don't.

Thank you. How is IceCat better than Librewolf btw?

Also, any list of those add-ons?

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#119
post #58
post #30

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…

literally the only thing i've paid mozilla for lmao. let's see how this works out

Yeah this is insane. I pay for Mozilla VPN now and considered paying for Privacy Guard.

I guess they just don't want our money.

Re: Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI

#120
post #16

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.

I mean, the majority of work on Firefox is being done by Mozilla. If they stopped working on Gecko, I would be highly surprised if it would get security maintenance, let alone feature work.

Donating to the Tor Browser project could be an idea. The Tor Browser is a Firefox fork, and they are a legitimate org that is on friendly terms with Mozilla. Even to the extent that some Tor features are actually in the Firefox source code, and just disabled by default.

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