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Leaving Mozilla

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131–140 of 346 posts

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#131

Post by lostmsu »

noir_lord wrote: post #47
franga2000 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control" ... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible! What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!? What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours a…

You either missed the point or deliberately missed the point. The issue was they shipped AI features built into everything and the only way to switch them off was to "about:config" a bunch of settings, they shouldn't have shipped it without the off switch and "Open about:settings and then disable things manually" isn't control for the average user .

And you missed the question about a GPU composition toggle.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#132

Post by Gud »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #76
nntwozz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC. Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads. What a wonderful thing we've created.

IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it. (Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)

What’s wrong with IRCs UI?

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#133

Post by hoppyhoppy2 »

deanc wrote: post #108

I really wish Mozilla would focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. I don’t want extensions (attack vector), vpns, fancy bookmarking services that are deprecated later on etc. I want to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.

If I couldn't use the ublock origin extension with Firefox, I'd leave for another browser. I consider it essential for privacy reasons as well as for adblocking, and I can't imagine it hurts battery life compared to all the ads and other crap it blocks.

Firefox's VPN service also has its privacy-related uses (yes, I'm aware of the limitations), but I think it mostly serves as a possible source of non-google revenue for Mozilla.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#134

Post by zelphirkalt »

red_admiral wrote: post #12
shevy-java wrote: post #3

> We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded. Now - we really need a viable alternative to the Evil Google Empire. For a while I had hope that ladybird would be that competitor, but that died after I was banned from github, as well as Kling making some really strange decisions in the last year or so, with weird explanations; most recent one the "we don't need external contributors so we close that…

Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative. Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes. Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.

What if the EU bought some big chunk of Mozilla, something like Mozilla EU, and then ran it? Would the US then cry out against EU buying US companies and start to fund Mozilla?

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#135

Post by bitbasher »

AlienRobot wrote: post #94
aboardRat4 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it. (Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)

It's been a while since I last used IRC, but afaik one of the issues with it was that servers revealed the IP address of users to every other user by default. Since the IP is geographic that's one piece of information you could use to doxx someone.

Libera gives all registered users a cloak to hide their ip.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#136

Post by nicoburns »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #130
nntwozz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC. Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads. What a wonderful thing we've created.

Is there a widely-used open modern chat network? Specifically, I'm fine with the feature set of IRC, but I want durable messages and a mobile client. Speaking as someone who hasn't run their own bouncer in 10+ years.

Yes, Matrix. It all seems a bit overengineered, but it's open and has good clients, and all the modern features you'd expect.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#137

Post by duffydotsvg »

xmprt wrote: post #104
duffydotsvg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is new to me. Not sure I totally agree but it's a useful heuristic. Despite being easy targets, orgs do in fact need coordinators, middle managers, administrators, etc. Especially as they scale. (And no AI won't render them obsolete.) Finding the balance between productivity and bureaucracy is the hard part.

It's true that large orgs need all that bureaucracy. But is it still true that productivity needs large orgs? We see a lot of massive hits coming from small teams - whether it's startups, movies, indie games, etc.

Totally agree the hits are coming. But from the POV of someone at a large and still growing org that's fully embraced AI, it's so obvious to me where the limitations are (and might always be). The nuances/complexities of leadership, decision-making, strategy, creative marketing, sales, comms, etc., feel too abstract to be replaceable. As the hard skill means of production are commodified, whatever alpha is left will lie in the soft skills. In other words, the models would be A+ STEM students, but they don't have the sauce for liberal arts.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#138

Post by pseudalopex »

RobotToaster wrote: post #35
matsemann wrote: post #5

Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a d…

It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.

Firefox's market share peaked in 2009. Eich was CEO for 2 weeks in 2014. He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position. The same lawyer lady Mitchell Baker had every top job from 1999 to 2008.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#139

Post by ricardobeat »

De-prioritizing Servo is something I will never understand. Aside from making Firefox attractive again, desktop software has migrated almost entirely to web-based stacks. They could have owned the foundation layer of almost every hardware device if they managed to make Servo faster and slimmer than the options we currently have. What a blunder.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#140

Post by AnthonyMouse »

simtel20 wrote: post #89
Angostura wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this. It basically takes as axiomatic that anyone in an administrative position in an organisation has zero interest in the goals of the organisation -and that those at the coal-face have no interest in the organisation and that there is little or no overlap in interest. Its reductionist, divisive and stupid.

I see it as a pointed observation that the people who focus on a goal will accomplish that goal. There are organizations with administrative-focused people who work in alignment with the mission-focused people, and that also follows this law as well. It's just that the same dynamic can cause organisations to spiral into an extractive, stale, ossifying, change-resistent focus instead.

The premise of the rule is that the second one is the end state.

The essential problem is that if one person spends their time e.g. fixing bugs in the code and another person spends their time weaseling their way onto the budget committee because they want to divert resources to their cronies, it's the second person who ends up on the budget committee. Then the first person gets laid off so their salary can be redirected to the cronies.

There are various ways to try to inhibit this with varying levels of effectiveness, essentially checks and balances. But the kleptocrats will be constantly trying to circumvent, weaken and vilify the things designed to constrain them. It's the sort of thing in the same nature as "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance".

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