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Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

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Re: Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

#61

Post by bryanlarsen »

irishcoffee wrote: post #31
freedomben wrote: post #25

Like many here, I think Mozilla has done a terrible job managing their money and they are largely to blame for the pickle they are in. However, I don't see who picks up the reigns if Mozilla dies. Like it or not, Firefox is essential for a somewhat (increasingly less) open web, and (at least for now) Mozilla is essential to Firefox. For those who want to see Mozilla die but Firefox live on, what are the more likely o…

How is firefox essential to the open web?

Without pressure from Firefox Chrome would have removed the hooks extensions need for effective ad blocking a long time ago.

Re: Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

#62

Post by dralley »

hn_submit wrote: post #12

I love Firefox but feel little pity for Mozilla which receives $400+ million a year on search placement in their browser but spends only a tiny fraction on its development. The rest is wasted on greedy management and frivolous projects to give that same management an excuse to give themselves multi-million dollar payouts. Everyone's only in it for the money. There are no good or bad people anymore, only...unfortunate…

Everyone complains about the CEO pay but it's not that significant compared to the overall budget. The actual $$ historically goes to spending on high end office space in San Francisco, Paris, and other expensive cities and paying salaries to match the CoL in those areas. Kind of rich for a nonprofit.

But I'm sure people would complain if they moved operations to Brno and Warsaw too.

Re: Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

#63

Post by amelius »

EbNar wrote: post #18
amelius wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU should heavily subsidize Mozilla, so that this is not necessary.

Nope. Why should my money (taxes) fund a US corporation?

Why not if they are working in your interest and produce open source code.

Re: Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

#64

Post by hn_submit »

freedomben wrote: post #25

Like many here, I think Mozilla has done a terrible job managing their money and they are largely to blame for the pickle they are in. However, I don't see who picks up the reigns if Mozilla dies. Like it or not, Firefox is essential for a somewhat (increasingly less) open web, and (at least for now) Mozilla is essential to Firefox. For those who want to see Mozilla die but Firefox live on, what are the more likely o…

Despite the oodles of money Mozilla receives it manages Firefox poorly. Because of that its market share has been slipping for years. Soon it may become so insignificant that Google will cut back funding to say, tens of millions a year.

And Mozilla keeps attempting to diversify its income stream by coming up with commercial services for which there are loads of alternatives, such as VPN. Why don't they just give up on that and spend all their money on Firefox? Hire someone with a deep technical background and a vision to take Firefox forward. As long as it doesn't involve A.I. I think it's worth a shot.

Re: Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

#65

Post by dralley »

hn_submit wrote: post #59
dralley wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is incredibly inconsistent and two-faced about which Mozilla side projects are "frivolous" and which ought to be defended to the death. Rust was a side project, asm.js was a side project that turned into WASM, IIRC LetsEncrypt was a side project (or at least a side project of Mozilla engineers, if not official), significant parts of the initial R&D for AV1 and Opus came out of Mozilla, Servo was largely a side pro…

Mozilla should've finished rewriting Firefox completely in Rust to give them an Unique Selling Point. They didn't because of management's hubris to build their own mobile operating system to take on Google (its largest financier). Google probably warned them that it would pull back its money if FirefoxOS managed to grab any significant market share. So it was destined to fail from day one. I'm surprised they didn't i…

>Mozilla should've finished rewriting Firefox completely in Rust to give them an Unique Selling Point. They didn't because of management's hubris to build their own mobile operating system to take on Google (its largest financier).

Firefox is like 25 million lines of code. Incredibly complex code, much of it decades old and wrapped in layers of legacy architectural patterns (see XUL, XBL), with severe backwards compatibility considerations (if you break existing websites or people's extensions, they might switch and not come back).

You suggest that NOT rewriting all of that in a couple of years is "hubris"?!? Rust 1.0 didn't happen until 2015 mind you, and Firefox OS was canceled in 2016. The timeline doesn't even make sense.

This kind of nonsense is why I can't take HN seriously when it comes to discussions about Mozilla. Criticisms are perfectly fine (and there are plenty of legitimate criticism to make) but people just abandon all logic when it comes to them for some reason and upvote mindless drivel because Mozilla Bad.

FYI, there are more than 6 million lines of Rust in Firefox, so it's not like it hasn't been happening.

Re: Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

#66

Post by TheCoelacanth »

concinds wrote: post #53
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they should be forced to split Chrome into a separate business and stay out of the browser business permanently. Anything short of that either won't help or will further strengthen their monopoly.

> split Chrome into a separate business Bought by whom? Another monopolist bigcorp that surely won't care to monetize it? That is not how you reason about antitrust issues.

Not sell it. Split it into a separate business. Every share of Google turns into one share of Google and one share of Chrome.

Re: Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

#67

Post by stackskipton »

concinds wrote: post #48
stackskipton wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree. These payments are clearly massive tent pole of maintaining the monopoly and I think it was right for competition authorities to appeal them. In fact, IMO, Metha ruling was way to favorable for Google. Basically like, well, they did the crime but it's too much to disrupt so I guess we will nibble at the edges accomplishing little.

The Firefox-Bing experiment proved that the amount of search engines the "free market" can sustain is one (1). You won't get more without proactive government interference and proper legislation. Meanwhile Firefox loses funding. "Nibbling at the edges" is what the competition authorities are proposing.

"Nibbling at the edges" is all they can do since that was original proposed method. So they are appealing this particular nibbling at the edges but whole scale, break up Google was not in original remedy so authorities are kind of stuck.

Re: Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

#68

Post by TheCoelacanth »

pydry wrote: post #45
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they should be forced to split Chrome into a separate business and stay out of the browser business permanently. Anything short of that either won't help or will further strengthen their monopoly.

Chrome isnt viable as a separate business. Its entire function is to be a loss leader / feeder for search. Google should still be split, but along lines which are cohesive, financially viable and would level the playing field for competition, e.g. - google workspaces / gmail / maps / search / chrome / youtube - search index / cloud / datacenters - youtube - android

Browsers would work as a separate business if we stopped the anti-competitive practice of giving them away for free as a way to prevent competition in your other lines of business.

Re: Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

#69

Post by ImJamal »

ranger_danger wrote: post #60
ForHackernews wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gecko is the only semi-mainstream browser engine that isn't controlled by Google.

Webkit is not controlled by Google and powers Safari as well as some smaller browsers and many other applications.

Safari doesn't run on Windows or Linux. WebKit does run outside of Apple's environment but no major browser uses it which means you are left Firefox, a Blink based browser or a WebKit browser that 5 people use.

Re: Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

#70

Post by theraido »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #20
dartharva wrote: post #8

It may kill Mozilla, no reason to say it will kill Firefox itself. Perhaps Firefox would flourish a lot more if it is finally released from Mozilla's clutches.

Who would possibly take it over? Redhat maybe? I don’t think Firefox survives as a community based project.

I would love to see it be funded by the EU, but it shouldn't be owned or developed by the EU.
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