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Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

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Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#281

Post by pseudalopex »

tristor wrote: post #230
mohamedattahri wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can question the qualifications of a person as it relates to a specific position (e.g. CEO), but that doesn't mean I don't respect their past contributions. I find the accusations of sexism towards anyone who dares question her as excessive as some of the comments that were made towards her.

> I can question the qualifications of a person as it relates to a specific position Sure, but do people generally question the qualifications of founders that successfully grew something from inception? Or is it only for people who are women? Because I definitely see a trend in the comment threads in HN over the last many years.

Zuckerberg's founder status is known because he was Facebook's most visible person always. Baker's founder status is less known because she was not Mozilla's most visible person most years.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#282

Post by username223 »

glenstein wrote: post #176
suprjami wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ostensibly nerds. Linux users and maybe Mac users. Technical people who understand more about the software industry than all Mozilla Corp management since Brendan. It's difficult to monetize us when the product is a zero dollar intangible, especially when trust has been eroded such that we've all fled to Librewolf like you said. It's difficult to monetize normies when they don't use the software due to years of conti…

Right and to your point, there's not a whole lot of precedent for browsers successfully funding themselves when the browser itself is the primary product. Opera was the lightweight high performance extension rich, diversely funded, portable, adapted to niche hardware, early to mobile browser practically built from the dreams of niche users who want customization and privacy. They're a perfect natural experiment for w…

> Browsers are practically full scale operating systems these days with tens of millions of lines of code, distributed for free.

Well there's your problem! Google owns the server, the client, and the standards body, so ever-increasing complexity is inevitable if you play by their rules. Tens of thousands of lines of code could render the useful parts of the web.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#283

Post by kbelder »

DoctorOW wrote: post #78
ecshafer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people don't have to all agree on the same things. People can get together to work towards cause X and then individually believe in mutually exclusive causes alpha, beta, gamma.

Queer people aren't causes, they're people. Imagine I worked on the Brave browser, and in my personal time maintained a website aimed at discouraging personal relationships with him. This would probably make me difficult to work with, despite my personal views not impacting the quality of my work. You might say these examples aren't one-to-one, and you're right. My example doesn't actually push any legislation forbid…

If you were on a hiring committee, and your otherwise-qualified-candidate had a political opinion you objected to in this way, perhaps with a similar donation, would you refuse to hire them?

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#284

Post by wackget »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #249

> people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it. > Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value. > Third: Firef…

> "a modern AI browser"

No thanks. Absolutely not.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#285

Post by jorvi »

jsheard wrote: post #43
abcd_f wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had one. Until he made a fatal mistake of giving a tenner to the wrong people.

But then he went on to make Yet Another Chromium Fork, so it doesn't seem like he was particularly attached to Gecko or what it stands for in the browser engine market anyway. What's to say that Mozilla wouldn't have given up the fight and pivoted to Chromium, like Opera and Edge did, if he was still in charge?

It isn't really Yet Another Chromium Fork, they're the company that does most anti-ad research / development. Stuff like Project Sugarcoat[0]. Their adblocking engine is also native and does not depend on Manifest V2, making it work better than any blocker that has to switch to MV3 when Google removes MV2.

And they're the only browser that has a functional alternative for webpage-based ads. Active right now. And you can instead fund pages / creators by buying BAT directly instead of watching private ads.

On top of that, Brave's defaults are much more privacy-protecting than Firefox's, you only get good protection on Firefox if you harden the config by mucking about in about:config.

People love to hate on Brave because they made some weird grey area missteps in the past (injecting affiliate links on crypto sites and pre-installing a deactivated VPN) and they're involved in crypto. But its not like Firefox hasn't made some serious missteps in the past, but somehow Firefox stans have decided to forget about the surreptitiously installed extension for Mr. Robot injected ads (yes really).

If people could be objective for a second they'd see that Brave took over the torch from Firefox and has been carrying it for a long time now.

[0] https://brave.com/research/sugarcoat-programmatically-genera...

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#286

Post by lelanthran »

Fiveplus wrote: 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…

> Technically, Chrome is faster on JS benchmarks.

I'm not browsing benchmarks :-/

When I do then chrome will have an advantage.

Meanwhile, in the real world, a JS engine can be half the speed of the Chrome one and the browser can still be faster, because blocking ads is what gives you the biggest speed up.

All the performance advantages in the world fail to matter if you're still loading ads.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#287

Post by reinar »

rolph wrote: post #236
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I understand your position but what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running? Apple funds Safari's development but it's basically a side project for them, Google funds Ch…

>what is the alternative funding source that could keep a company making a free browser running? i wonder how linux does it? linus and anthony should have a head to head.

> i wonder how linux does it?

they don't? There's no company, or rather - a lot of them, Linux kernel moves forward like 80% by corporate contributors. For some of them it's critical part of their infrastructure, some of them need to get their device drivers mainlined, for some of them it's gpl magic at work. Linux desktop experience, however, leaves a lot to be desired.

Companies aren't interested to contribute to a browser when they can just reskin chromium or build on blink directly and community cannot match the pace.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#288

Post by glenstein »

skywal_l wrote: post #213
glenstein wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be organizational suicide to spend down their endowment just because they can. Right now it exists as a firewall to buy them some time in the event that search licensing goes away, which I think is exactly what they should have done with it. And it's been talked to death before but the idea that the browser side bets are at some prohibitive cost is an unsubstantiated myth, conjured into existence by vibes in…

Do you realize what 1.300.000.000$ is? Say you invest most of it in a safe way to get you inflation + 2%. That gives you 26.000.000$ every year. You can pay 100 engineers with this. Firefox is a browser. Sure a browser is complicated but 100 motivated and talented engineers is more than enough to make a good product if you focus on what matters. There is no excuse to what is going on.

How do you think they got that money in the first place? They've been growing this fund from $100MM in the 2010s to where it is now, by carefully managing and investing it.

Hilariously, you're here presenting something Mozilla has already been doing for nearly two decades like it's a new idea that only you have thought of. Yes, I realize how much that is: enough to cover their operating costs for like 2.5 years.

And sure, it's amazing how much an endowment can do if you give up and wipe out most of their staff and embrace magical thinking.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#289

Post by lkbm »

thesuitonym wrote: post #277
mikkupikku wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you opt-in to that misfeature, last I checked. It's opt-in, not opt-out.

I don't know, Brave says it's every third new tab. https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/

Looks like I'm getting a ProtonMail ad every few new tabs. I never noticed because I've never looked at the new tab page. Doesn't noticeably slow it down to have the ad there, luckily.

Re: Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

#290

Post by smaudet »

esafak wrote: post #253
dotancohen wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Translation? Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in my PDF viewer and Office viewer as well. > Image search? Sounds like a web site, not a browser feature. > Live captions? Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in VLC as well. > Dubbing? Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this in VLC as well. > Summary? Sounds like a great OS feature. I might want to use this…

So you're not going to get it until your OS decides to, and if its implementation is poor you're SOL?

Not at all. If you want or need a feature it's not some "my browser has to support it or my OS does" dichotomy.

As a couple parents up stated, there's no technical reason a browser has to have a transformer embedded into it. There might be a business reason like "we made a dumb choice and don't have the manpower to fix it", but I doubt this is something they will accept, at least with a mission statement like they have.

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