Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A look at Firefox forks

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 390 posts

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#271

Post by prox »

lolinder wrote: post #246
ta8645 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was. How could anyone justify donating to Firefox knowing that so much of their money would be going to this one person?

You can't donate to Firefox anyway—you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which isn't alowed to work on Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation owns Firefox, and money can only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation. So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.

This structure sounds completely broken. So the people who work on it answer only to the people who hold the purse, but not the people (the Foundation). Do I get that right?

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#272

Post by prox »

dblohm7 wrote: post #125
matheist wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted. I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their prioriti…

> This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities. I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole... > They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution. I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contribu…

This is really telling of the current vibe I get from Firefox, and why I feel resistant to support them beyond “It’s a bit more private than default Chrome”

Companies gonna company and expand in the wrong direction if they forget were they come frome.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#273

Post by layer8 »

kasabali wrote: post #227
layer8 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wanted a browser they have full control over. And you can move much faster when you don’t have to negotiate every change with third parties. Also, Firefox 1.0 and Chrome 1.0 were released within months of each other (though Firefox 0.x had existed for a little while), so Firefox wasn’t that established yet. The main competition at the time was Microsoft Internet Explorer with over 90% market share.

Firefox 1.0: 2004 Chrome 1.0: 2008

Whoops, you are right, I misread one source.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#274

Post by intelVISA »

slindsey wrote: post #50

For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox. The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational struc…

Surely to avoid the org dysfunction that sunk Firefox the person 'creating' this fork would also be actively building it?

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#275

Post by sieabahlpark »

zamalek wrote: post #267
PufPufPuf wrote: post #188

Zen looks like Arc Browser, but Firefox-based and open-source. Exactly what I'm looking for! The UX pattern for tabs in Arc is amazing. No, it's not just "vertical tabs". It's an innovative blend of the concepts of bookmarks and open tabs. Sort of like files: they can be open or closed, and live in a folder hierarchy. But the development of Arc stopped half a year ago (except security Chromium updates), with a well-w…

Honestly, Zen should be upstreamed. It would be a great way to introduce FOMO.

[dead]

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#276

Post by lolinder »

prox wrote: post #271
lolinder wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't donate to Firefox anyway—you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which isn't alowed to work on Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation owns Firefox, and money can only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation. So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.

This structure sounds completely broken. So the people who work on it answer only to the people who hold the purse, but not the people (the Foundation). Do I get that right?

The Foundation owns the Corporation, so technically the Corporation answers to the Foundation, but because the Foundation is a non-profit it can't actually transfer resources to its for-profit arm, only the other way around.

Usually the theory with this kind of setup is that the Corporation is profitable and forwards funds to the Foundation so that the foundation can accomplish its work. But putting Firefox in the Foundation implies that someone somewhere thought that Firefox would be profitable rather than being the core mission that needs subsidization. I believe this was someone related to the Google deal, but it's definitely been a major problem ever since.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#277

Post by j1elo »

Dwedit wrote: post #8

I read in a few places that LibreWolf's anti-fingerprinting features are breaking websites. One person complained that their meeting got scheduled incorrectly because the browser was messing with the user's time zone (for privacy reasons).

That is, as so many things with tech, a matter of giving proper UI for humans as much priority as the feature itself.

It would be solved with something as simple as a "Privacy Blocks" drop-down menu that was prominently shown in the browser, that could visually warn about which feature is being accessed by a website (WebGL, UTC time, scripting...), and that let the user enable/disable that feature in that specific website with just 1 click.

A bit of telemetry (albeit kinda contradictory in this case) would allow to collect data on which sites tend to require which permissions, and proactively warn the users, like "Hey it seems most users of Google Calendar .com tend to disable time clock privacy; would you like to do so too?", that'd remove a lot of worries from users upon accessing an important site and not knowing which privacy settings might be breaking it.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#278

Post by glenstein »

devit wrote: post #258
glenstein wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I continue to be puzzled by this idea of direct donations being a panacea. Firefox already has orders of magnitude more revenue than would come in from such a venture. And that already mobilizes development resources toward the core browser, which are already more substantial than what would be raised by direct donations. Just to use some back of the envelope math right now the revenue is something on the order of $5…

The use for donations could be for a single person whose job is to check the upstream code for any antifeatures (telemetry, ads, product placements, online service defaults, Google as paid default search engine, etc.) not in the user's interest and revert them, as well as bundling any useful extension like uBlock Origin and verifying them. That needs minimal effort compared to building a browser, because it doesn't i…

Do I understand correctly that you believe Mozilla doesn't currently have the resources necessary to do that from their $500MM in annual revenue? It sounds like you are talking about an ombudsman or something, which highlights my point here, which is that these are philosophical criticisms disguised as commentary on raising revenue.

Also the mission you are describing sounds like something that you might expect from a Chromium browser that has to regularly revert Google-driven changes. At Mozilla, they already own the browser and they could account for this in their ground-level philosophy.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#279

Post by glenstein »

maccard wrote: post #265
glenstein wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the scale you’re thinking of is unnecessary. Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million. So it sounds like you're saying an additional 1 million is a difference between 3% market share and 30% market share. We seem to be on the same page about what plausibly could come in from revenue…

> Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million. Lots of peoples "supposed" problem is giving money to Mozilla, not Firefox. If the goal is to give people a way to support FF development, then this does achieve that. But FF doesn't need _that_ (which I think you and I both agree on). > but I just…

I wholeheartedly agree with most or all of this and it's refreshing to see thoughtful commentary amidst a tidal wave of crazy speculation. I actually think it would be much more fair, in the event that FF raised $100MM from donations, to have to be accountable to user perceptions of where those resources are going. Although my experience from hn commentary is that people are extremely confused about this and vocal minorities create an illusion of consensus, and express their concerns in drive-by fashion that isn't super amenable to a focused conversation that could be tied to a credible strategy.

The best version of the argument I think one can make relates to Firefox OS. There, at long last, in contrast to spurious complaints about the VPN, Pocket, etc. etc., it seems like Mozilla really did invest serious resources in it at the expense of browser development, and it did happen during the critical period of time where they collapsed from 35ish percent to 3 percent. But it was on behalf of a major bet of the kind that I would like to think everyone welcomed, so, a real risk, but for a respectable strategy. And, they did produce Quantum, a rewrite from the ground up with spectacular improvements in speed and stability (which makes the present day arguments feel like they are at least vestigal echoes of an old argument that was, in its time, legitimate). But you never hear critics talk in a measured way like that.

I do agree that the vocal minority would claim the donations are not being used on $INSERT_THING, which is always a different thing every time you ask (I recently heard that it was all the VC fund's fault which was a new one), and they're already talking like that right now. But I suppose it wouldn't hurt to be open to that revenue. I think it's plausible they could pull something on the order of $10MM or multiple tens of millions which I have to imagine is as good as what they're getting from Pocket and the VPN etc.

I suppose the only disagreement, or frustration I have here is with the perception of "baggage" which has, in my opinion, largely been manufactured in hn comment sections, every bit as detached from a strategy to grow market share as Mozilla's actual strategy.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#280

Post by phatfish »

whitehexagon wrote: post #242

I switched to GNU IceCat about a week ago, following the ToS / privacy changes in FF. I have never used chrome, and never will on principle, in fact I now use zero google services, or best I can. Disabling webfonts / google fonts has been interesting. Anyway, IceCat is growing on me, once I figured out how to gradually enable bits of js for the sites I frequent (not many left at this point). I have a physical aversio…

Huff and puff i hope, considering it was a case of Firefox being nit-picked to death again by the privacy crowd that get a Chrome alternative for free.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...

I understand that a donation on the Mozilla Foundation is not a way to fund Firefox development, but i believe that the services that get sold through Firefox like Mozilla VPN do fund development. Maybe you could sign up for one (you don't have to use it) to ensure IceCat continues to exist?

Full disclosure, I have a 1 year sub to Mozilla VPN, I even used it once or twice.

Post reply on HN