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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'

#71
post #18
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?

Here come the downvotes. People, donate your own money to Mozilla, if you're so concerned about its fate. Let me decide what to do with my own money.

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

#72
post #63
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

It's not in my interest. I couldn't care less about Mozilla. It's entirely their fault what is happening to them and to FF.

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

#73
Sounds like poor prior proper planning enabling piss poor performance (the 7 Ps) on Mozilla's part.

They need to figure out how to break away from Google. It's clearly an abusive relationship.

Mozilla also manages itself horribly. They need to do things differently. For one, stop paying the CEO an inappropriate amount of money. Second, stop loading up the browser with garbage features, hyperfocusing on side quests nobody cares about (VPNs, Pocket, AI garbage, etc), and get back to basics. What they were doing in the 2000s was glorious and they need to return to that.

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

#74
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Safari runs on many, many millions of various Apple devices though, and I think that more than qualifies it as a major/mainstream browser, and the same for Webkit as a mainstream engine... especially considering Safari's market share is ~5x higher than Firefox. You may disagree though, and that's ok.

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

#75
post #62

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.

The head of a non-profit shouldn't be raking in millions. Not even in the Valley!

Instead they dreamed up the idea of being a multi-billion corporation next to the non-profit so they could give management commensurate compensation.

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

#76
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compa…

Porting code from one language to another is much faster than writing it from scratch. I'm currently porting my own code from Python to C++ and it's a snap.

Mozilla could've chosen to port the C++ code to Rust, but they didn't because they had other "frivolous" priorities.

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

#77
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox provides one of two browser engines. If there's only one browser engine the Web immediately closes up like a giant impenetrable clam. All of humanity will be left outside, doomed to scrape forlornly on the shell with our nails and dream of the pearls within.

Blink and WebKit have diverged enough that there are minimum 3 engines now, not 2.

Don't forget Ladybird. It's coming along nicely too and it's currently being rewritten in Rust, which should give it a leg up on the rest of the bunch.

There are a few others, mostly A.I. slop like NorthStar.

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

#78

for all the PR that mozilla floats about them being the guardian of free internet, i would wager that, today, most non-tech folks will have hard time configuring firefox properly. it used to be simple back in the days, now they have made it so complex to tie all of them together. also, previously on android, when apps were cleared from desktop, the browser used to quit. now you need to go to menu->quit. otherwise it…

I've given up on technical solutions to internet spying and tracking. Even with NoScript, uBlock Origin and "Enhanced Protection" in Firefox turned on I always have the feeling Google and Facebook still know everything about me and sell it to the entire internet.

I believe we need to get legislation in place to ban the selling of customer information to third-parties.

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

#79
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 compa…

Porting code from one language to another is much faster than writing it from scratch. I'm currently porting my own code from Python to C++ and it's a snap. Mozilla could've chosen to port the C++ code to Rust, but they didn't because they had other "frivolous" priorities.

LOL, I love how people love to say what Mozilla _should_ do but clearly have no fuckin clue what goes on in that place.

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

#80
post #41

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…

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…

> But you don't see people complaining about those things, which largely didn't make Mozilla any money, you see them complaining about things that do make Mozilla money

Yeah, for 2 reasons.

1. Mozilla is a non-profit that takes donations.

2. These "money makers" make their money by tricking Mozilla users into selling their private data to advertisers.

And if you pay attention, you'll notice that people don't generally complain because Facebook gave us React or Llama. They complain about the facebook moneymaker of selling private data and advertising. But even then, they don't complain as much about facebook because facebook doesn't take donations.

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