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Leaving Mozilla

blog.unitedheroes.net

201–210 of 346 posts

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#201
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I lost interest in matrix in 2017 ish when I tried to use my existing matrix log in when trying to sign into the Mozilla matrix and I simply couldn't. At the end I ended up creating a new account on Mozilla side just so I could use it for a few days. I've never thought of matrix as a mature technology ever since. even mastodon figured out federation.

Mastodon does not have persistence of data though. Your instance shuts down? All your posts are gone. I naively assumed I could just move them to a new instance and found out the hard way. I have felt disillusioned with Mastodon ever since.

Ultimately all things are ephemeral.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#202
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With almost no exceptions, movies are never made by small teams beyond the student film level. Even then, dozens of people are usually involved in some way. Writing, acting, score, foley, editing, distribution, graphic design, color grading, wardrobe, effects, lighting, cinematography, scheduling, props, location scouting, set decoration, casting, mixing… the list goes on. Any one of those things sucking badly enough…

Not to mention smaller (successful) production teams are often comprised of veterans of the industry who have worked on large scale productions and bring that knowledge set with them. Same with many indie games. You have to play with the big dogs to understand what is and isn’t necessary for a product. You can’t just walk in with a plucky attitude and a dream unless you want to waste a lot of time and money.

The part that is also usually glossed over is how exploitative the production is (low pay/awful hours), even if it’s sometimes self-inflicted.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#203

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.

IP addresses aren't linked to a complete street address, and many times don't even show the right town, especially those on CG-NAT or a plain ol' direct public dynamic address. I have seen some IPs, like on AT&T and Comcast home Internet, showing a different state.

So in many cases, you don't need a VPN to prevent revealing your actual geographic location.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#204
post #7

Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corpora…

> But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.

Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#205
post #7

Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corpora…

Last I heard the ads were introduced to be less dependent on Google money - they actually cover the costs/salaries of the internal MDN team and thus secure the existence of MDN within the organisation. Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla. So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am…

I support MDN by disabling UBO. This is not (much) of a burden: there is no animation, and the advertised products are always technical and possibly of interest. Only complaint is the occasional large light areas, which do not play well with dark mode.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#206
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Librewolf, like all the forks, free-rides on the upstream work of paid Mozilla staff in order to be secure. It's a band-aid, not a solution.

But perhaps the existence of the forks tells the Mozilla management something?

WebKit (as used by Safari) was a fork of kHTML (written by the KDE team). And Google forked WebKit. Now we have dozens of Blink forks including Microsoft’s own browser: Blink.

I think it’s pretty safe to assume that forking the code is a low incentive for change

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#208

> 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…

You might be able to get Firefox to work with apulse (pa emulation for alsa), i dont know if it still works.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1387154/using-alsa-on-firefo...

https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

SeaMonkey may be an alternative. It's closer to what I want than Firefox.

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#209
post #93

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 not like you couldn't create an IRC-client with better UI than discord. Not as many features, but whatever strength discord has it is not UI. Email really could have been great, but html and bad actors have made it so much worse than it needs to be.

indeed, there is https://www.irccloud.com which is quite excellent!

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

American here. We'd bitch, piss, and moan about the EU buying US companies. We wouldn't fund Firefox though, we'd be more likely to give a huge government contract to facebook to reskin chrome or some other stupid shit.
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