271–280 of 469 posts
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.
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I have never once had an issue with a website that was solved by opening it in Chrome instead. and I switched to firefox like three years ago. If firefox is so much less supported, I'm not seeing it at least
I've been bringing this up in every single thread about Chrome and Manifest V3 pops up. I'm been using Firefox, 100% of the time, on three different operating systems, for probably six years at this point. I can remember a single time I had to swap to Chrome for something, and it was three years ago, and involved some flavor of WebAssembly, I believe. If anyone can point out a current website that is acting up under…
Which has made a knock on effect that if I’m using Firefox and something doesn’t work - I very much wonder if it would work in Chrome.
It’s burned into my brain now.
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In this landscape I'm curious if any amount of money can overcome the oligopoly advantages of owning the OS (with no anti-trust enforcement) or owning the most popular web properties. Even if every cent for the past ten years went to browser dev alone, would that have made a difference? Do regular users even know the difference between one browser and another? Or is it only the icon they recognize, if even that?
Yeah, this is my takeaway as well. Folks in this discussion are saying “why can’t Mozilla just focus on making Firefox” and my response would be “because that’s the path to eventual death”. Firefox is, what, 3% of the browser market today? It isn’t because it’s a bad browser. It’s because people are using OSes with tightly integrated browsers they never think to change. Making Firefox faster or adding vertical tabs o…
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In this landscape I'm curious if any amount of money can overcome the oligopoly advantages of owning the OS (with no anti-trust enforcement) or owning the most popular web properties. Even if every cent for the past ten years went to browser dev alone, would that have made a difference? Do regular users even know the difference between one browser and another? Or is it only the icon they recognize, if even that?
Yeah, this is my takeaway as well. Folks in this discussion are saying “why can’t Mozilla just focus on making Firefox” and my response would be “because that’s the path to eventual death”. Firefox is, what, 3% of the browser market today? It isn’t because it’s a bad browser. It’s because people are using OSes with tightly integrated browsers they never think to change. Making Firefox faster or adding vertical tabs o…
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Firefox has way more than 20 developers. Looking at https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/mots/index.html , if I'm not mistaken in my count, there are currently 147 module owners and peers alone. Some of those might be volunteers, but I think the large majority of them are Mozilla staff. On top of that there are probably a number of further Mozilla staff developers who aren't owners or peers, QA staff, product mana…
I know they have way more than that but I'd argue that you don't need that many. Hypothetically, if I was given the money and asked to build a team to fork Firefox I'd be more focused. Way more! The current devs work on stuff I'd scrap like Pocket, telemetry, anything with AI, and so on. I bet there is a load of stuff in there that I'd want out! There's probably a bunch of things in Firefox Labs they're working on to…
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Isn't Mozilla a non-profit though? Why does mozilla.ai exist? Didn't we like a trust the product more in 2007 than we do now? I mean, yay for scale, but haven't we lost something here?
Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit but Mozilla Corporation which develop Firefox is a for-profit entity. There are other subsidiaries under the foundation umbrella like Mozilla.ai and MZLA/Thunderbird. This isn't something uncommon for large entity and there are many advantages. For example, it gives more freedom in term of decision making and spending to projects that aren't targeting the exact same consumer segment…
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…
> Firefox is no longer a developer default Web developer here, and Chrome dev tools suck balls. I exclusively use Firefox.
I donated a lot of time, code, and at least a little money to early Mozilla and Firefox. They were a lot more dynamic and engaging when they were a small nonprofit. Now it feels like thanks to Google money they have become fat and lazy. Unable to take risks because it might threaten their income stream or their relationship with Google. It makes me sad and angry to see what they have become. Maybe a diet will help, b…
I still won’t donate unless the money goes to Firefox and not their parties, activism, or side projects (that they inevitably shut down)
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I wouldn't call an underdog someone who takes their competitor's money. In sports, that might even be called throwing.
They went form 90%+ market share down to 9%- since taking Google money. The allegation of throwing is too light. They’re complicit in covering for Google’s obvious monopoly.