391–400 of 469 posts
Something that this petition does not mention at all are possible alternatives to Google search as the default search engine. If Google isn’t the default, who should be the default?
Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Startpage, etc. Plenty of privacy-respecting and non-profit search engines
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He's right though. The way to get clients long term is to have a better product. Competing in marketing against Google is a terrible idea considering their main business. Firefox should just be a better, more user friendly product because that's the weakness of Chrome, especially now that they're actively messing with adblocking and they're focusing on everything but developing the actual product.
To use the car analogy, if you want to buy a car, and you can choose between 2 models (and from all the features and prices and luxury and build quality they're equal), and it's a choice between a Tesla and a Ford, which would you choose, at this moment? What if the Tesla is slightly better?
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How much did Mozilla spend on this conference? They sell badges to attendees, who must also pay for their own accommodations and airfare. Were there other sponsors? I'm not sure this is the smoking gun you think it is.
It's unfortunately vogue to mention DEI-efforts to cast bad light on something.
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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)…
Again not diminishing Firefox's efforts but it's difficult not to compare with other _leaner_ open-source projects. As an example the Linux foundation [0] had 270M in expenses in 2023. Of which even we aggregate international operations and corporate operations the expenditure is less than 21M in G&A equivalent activities. [0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/hubfs/Reports/lf_annualrepor...
It wouldn't need hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve, and if it took off it'd hurt Google and their ilk massively.
At the moment the Faustian pact is that they act as a competition fig leaf in the browser space: Google can point to a nearly-as-good browser and say "look, we don't control everything" while they steam ahead setting standards that largely benefit themselves. The reason they can do this is the sheer capital intensity of the exercise: nobody can keep up or catch up. So a captive competitor makes perfect sense.
Shedding that capital intensity - by means of devising a simpler to implement, slower moving standard - is the only real escape hatch. Mozilla won't get anywhere by begging forever, and it'll lose its character if it doesn't keep it's nonprofit status.
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> The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial products that flop, monetization schemes that fail, etc. Mozilla already solicits donations, but I wonder if people who donate to them know tha…
> like feminist AI conferences in Africa. According to their 2023 form 990 (the 2024 one isn't published yet) those sort of donations are usually on the order of 15k. You don't get much browser for that money.
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I don't want my browser to be dependent on Marc Andreessen. And he doesn't want to do things useful to humanity anyway.
Right. The money would be a gift to a foundation where he couldn’t control it. A no strings attached 100% tax deductible gift to the foundation with the only strings that they focus on the browser and survive on the interest, and lay off unnecessary management (10-20 dedicated web engineers and a PM and an HR person what else do you need). But do you also want the browser beholden to the parent company of its direct…
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This is a good idea. I don’t think I should change the petition now that it’s signed by a significant number of people, but I agree targeted donations could help somewhat (although mainly I think we need to urge Mozilla to direct its other income into Firefox development, too).
This is a good idea on paper. But it turns out that having a for-profit corporation (as Mozilla Corporation is) accept donations, especially donations earmarked for certain purposes, is understandably tricky from a regulatory and tax standpoint. You can do it, but it comes with lots of rules and restrictions, and constrains the company in weird ways that kind of make sense, since it's kind of similar to money launder…
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I'm missing your point at the moment but likely Ford due to parts/service center access if they're equal. Depending on how slightly better it is and whether I plan to keep it long term to where I might need to get things on it repaired I might hop over to the Tesla. Can you elaborate a bit on where we're going with this?
I was trying to say, Tesla is now a toxic brand not because of their product quality, but because of what their CEO is doing... at least for a lot of people the behavior of the corporation and people in it plays a role in buying products. So it's a question of if Firefox and Chrome are just competing in quality. I can see people swearing off Chrome because of Google, as well as the same with Firefox because of its ac…
Most people don't even know who the CEO of Google is so even if he were to be found with 17 mutilated kids in a moldy basement it won't have the effect Musk's 'tism has had.
Most people don't realize how they're being fucked over. My parents use adblockers because I set them up and they're not even that old, a lot of people believe surveillance is good and even on HN where privacy is a big thing many use less private products because the alternative is mildly inconvenient. The best way to convert them IMO is to offer them a more intuitive and snappier experience, especially on cheap older machines where it's really noticeable and nice integrations into things like email, pdf, etc. Just make their life as easy as possible with as little setup as possible.