Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#211

Post by lordofgibbons » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 12:49 AM UTC

porridgeraisin wrote: post #103

qwerpy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Brave and am satisfied with it. The occasional hassle involved in turning things off when a new unwanted feature shows up or when I have to install it on a new machine is worth it for uBlock Origin and the Chromium performance and compatibility. However the theoretical downside of Brave is that as Google continues changing Chromium's codebase, there's incentive for them to make it harder and harder to maintain…

Brave does not need manifest v2 for it's ad blocker to work. It is not implemented as an extension. It is built into the browser itself.

Does the default Brave ad blocker block Youtube ads?

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#212

Post by hu3 » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 12:52 AM UTC

alberth wrote: post #156

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #27

Not looking to grind an axe but facts matter in this case. Let's look at Mozilla's financial statement for 2007 and 2023 [0][1]: > Expenses 1. Program 'Software Development' 2007: 20.7M | 2023: 260M 2. Management 'General and Administrative' : 2007: 5.1M | 2023: 123M I am purposefully excluding marketing and fundraising costs. Because arguably you can't get away from those expenses. Let's ignore inflation and COL and…

I know your intention is probably well placed but we do though need to factor in revenues: Year Revenue ---- ------- 2007 $75M 2023 $653M I bring this up because G&A of big companies (in general) always outpaces R&D once they hit scale ... and in an ideal situation - your revenues should outpace R&D expense because you're getting economies of scale (which further dilutes the R&D to Other Business Function comparison)…

    2023      $653M

That's almost all Google money.

CEO's largest accomplishment since 2007 was to put Mozilla on the brink of shutting down anytime Google's money stops flowing in.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#213

Post by rickandmortyy » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 1:00 AM UTC

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Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#214

Post by jmb99 » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 1:03 AM UTC

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #169

iteratethis wrote: post #79

We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left. Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox. Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced…

Neither Safari nor -B- are opensource. Brave is even chromium based. EDIT: Brave is opensource

While Safari is not open source, WebKit is[0].

[0] https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#215

Post by cantrecallmypwd » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 1:16 AM UTC

Mozilla needs to operate like NPR by having pledge drives and seeking charitable investment by organizations and nations because depending on for-profit arrangements means inevitable corruption just like any other corporation.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#216

Post by Lerc » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 1:17 AM UTC

whyever wrote: post #59

seqizz wrote: post #20

Nah, Firefox devs: It's time to ditch Mozilla and fork it.

Who is going to pay the devs?

That is precisely the question that should be asked, and not rhetorically.

Firefox is important, the peoples le who make Firefox are important. If someone can form a lean organisation that can fund the development they should do so. Open source allows the potential to abandon a bloated governing structure, but it has to be done with eyes wide open and fully committed to providing the resources to continue development.

It is a very hard problem, but not an intractable problem. It is certainly better than asking managers to decide against their own self interest.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#217

Post by maleldil » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 1:24 AM UTC

jqpabc123 wrote: post #58

seqizz wrote: post #20

Nah, Firefox devs: It's time to ditch Mozilla and fork it.

Yes. If you believe in the open source concept, the current situation calls for nothing less. Let's be real, Mozilla leadership is not going to slaughter their cash cow. They have no incentive to place anything above the needs of Google. It's already proven --- the user base and market share have been effectively abandoned for lack of impact to the bottom line. Plaintive demands from users now carry no real weight an…

How would the fork be funded? You can't expect a complex program like a browser to be developed exclusively by volunteers in their free time.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#218

Post by pipeline_peak » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 1:25 AM UTC

Firefox isn’t even going to usable around in 20 years and these people think they could drop their lifeline?

What’s a petition without a solution?

This idea is more detached than Mastodon.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#219

Post by jorvi » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 1:26 AM UTC

rpdillon wrote: post #143

jqpabc123 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is based on Chromium and it still supports manifest v2. Brave offers everything Firefox does and more --- like privacy by default (which Firefox could but won't do for obvious reasons) --- all without millions in direct Google payola. https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

Brave supports manifest V2 because the Chromium upstream hasn't removed it for enterprise use yet. As soon as that changes, Brave does not have a plan to continue maintaining V2. What you call Google payola is really the independence that allows Mozilla to develop a browser engine that isn't being actively crippled by Google's initiatives. That's the important piece. Brave is not a sustainable play because they have…

Safari's extensions had a similar change-over to a ManifestV3-like system, with the same arguments: increases performance (very important for mobile) and puts more safeguards on extensions doing funky privacy-hostile stuff.

Yes, ManifestV3 nerfs adblocking, and Google loves that side effect. It will hamper Brave' internal adblocking engine.

I think the big interesting question is: if Brave figures out how to add improvements to ManifestV3 that aid adblocking without sacrificing performance or privacy/security, will Google accept the PRs?

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#220

Post by autoexec » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 1:27 AM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #47

autoexec wrote: post #13

> Now is the time for Mozilla to take bold steps to reinforce its identity as a privacy-centric nonprofit Mozilla gave up that identity when it became an ad-tech company whose business model was to sell reports about the internet browsing habits of firefox users to advertisers. The problem was never Mozilla's dependence Google. The problem is their dependence on the surveillance of internet users. As far as I know Mo…

What kind of reports can they generate from the data they collect: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone... ?

They opted firefox users into a data collection scheme they call PPA which works kind of like FLOC and uses the browser to gather information about what you do online, then they sell that data to advertisers by first sending it to yet another a third party who will assemble that data into reports for the advertisers. Then they basically said firefox users were too stupid to be trusted to opt-in, and it would be too hard to explain to such dumb users how selling their data was a good thing, so Mozilla had no choice but to force it on everyone by default without telling them about it. (https://web.archive.org/web/20240715112635/https://mastodon....)

Naturally not everyone was happy about it:

https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-fea...