Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

blog.mozilla.org

151–160 of 970 posts

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#152
post #15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have them program and let a product person handle big picture ideas

The track record of MBA's destroying companies says otherwise. What Mozilla needs is a change in leadership direction, not another MBA.

I very much doubt that the track record of companies fronted by an hands-on engineer is much better. If anything they probably fail faster on average so we never hear about them.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#153
post #7

Does anyone else feel like the "Trust" angle is the only card they have left to play? Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks. Edge has better OS integration on Windows and comes by default. Safari wins on battery life on Mac. Firefox's only unique selling point is "We aren't a massive data vampire." If they clutter the browser with AI which inherently requires data processing, often in the cloud, they dilute…

Fitefox has faster WASM and WebGPU at least. Kind of doesn't matter since Chrome has bloated the standard so much that many websites only work in chrome

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#154

I love Mozilla but this feels like marketing imo. From the article: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off" and "Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser". I highly doubt you will be able to turn of the transformer tech features in an AI browser imo. And they won't make a separate browser for this. This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla…

> This really feels like the beginning of the end for Mozilla, sadly.

The moment Mozilla failed to stop being dependent on Google's money whilst being true to their own mission in being a 'privacy first browser' it already was the end and the damage in trust was done.

In 2007, the CEO at the time said they could live without Google's money - Now, their entire survival was tied to Google funding them [0] and got rewarded for failure whilst laying off hundreds of engineers working on Firefox.

Other than the change in leadership after 17 years of mis-direction, the financial situation has still not changed.

Do you still trust them now?

> Are there any true alternatives (not dependent on financing or any engines from third parties) to Google, if you wish to use the web in 2025?

After thinking about it, the only viable browser that is not funded by Google (Firefox 75%, Safari (>20%) and Chrome) is Ladybird. [1]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

[1] https://ladybird.org/

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, manifest v2 support alone is a killer feature that will keep me on FF as long as they support it. It definitely helps that it's also a great (though imperfect) browser.

The wider point here is that you can only use FF as long as Mozilla can fund it and Mozilla can only fund it as long as Google funds them. At some point, it will be cheaper for Google to pay monopoly fines than funding Mozilla.

Fines aren't a way to just buy your way out of obeying the law. At some point if they persist in monopolistic activities then they will get broken up.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#156
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand on Firefox mobile: if you haven’t tried it, give it a shot. uBlock Origin works just like on desktop. I have seen maybe five ads on my phone browser (including Youtube!) since buying it in 2019.

Yes! I can confirm it works just like on desktop. I'm shocked when I have to use other people's phones. How do they put up with all these ads?

This! So many times!

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#158
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have the "extensions that can do real ad blocking" angle.

I've been using Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite and not even once I found a case when this version of uBlock was behaving differently (as less efficient) than the "full" uBlock Origin Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh

There are a lot more Manifest V2 only extensions than only Adblockers.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#159
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt the browsers are constantly leapfrogging each other, so this isn't always the case. But, anecdotally: switching from Chrome to Safari actually felt like I got a new computer. The difference was that apparent.

Safari is fast and performant but once you load a heavy web app that uses a lot of memory safari will kill the tab. It’s incredibly frustrating to have a page reload with a banner simply saying the site was using too much memory and was reloaded. Especially when you’re on a maxed out MacBook with plenty of resources.

I agree, in practice I see this occasionally on gigantic GitHub pull requests with 1000+ files, or very clunky Atlassian/Confluence pages. I'd say both sides need to work on their resource management!

(On that note, many complaints about Safari I hear from developers fall on my ears as "I don't care about web compatibility!" as it has never NOT been the case on the web that you need to care about feature support and resource management.)

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#160
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years. I mean, observably, this is still the case. Now, luckily the M-series laptops have such insane battery life that it barely matters compared to before... but I can still observe about an hour of battery life difference between Safari and Chrome on an M2 Macbook Air (running Se…

I suspect that the people making these claims that Safari is no longer the most battery efficient are not Apple users. It's quite easy to empirically validate which browsers are most efficient by looking at the average energy impact in Activity Monitor. Safari is the winner, Chrome/Brave are not far behind, and Firefox is the clear loser.

I think the difference is fundamental to the engine and the gap will be hard to close, too (I mean, how long has it been and the gap remains?). WebKit-based ultralight browsers remain usable after you’ve cranked hardware specs down far enough that nothing based on Chrome or Firefox’s engines do. Resource use among the three engines seems to differ at some kind of low, basic architecture level.
Post reply on HN