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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'

#81

Post by halJordan »

cogman10 wrote: post #80
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…

> 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 generall…

Any other non profit maintaining an open source project gets passes bc "volunteers don't owe you anything" and "submit your own patch" catechisms.

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

#82

Post by cogman10 »

halJordan wrote: post #81
cogman10 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 generall…

Any other non profit maintaining an open source project gets passes bc "volunteers don't owe you anything" and "submit your own patch" catechisms.

I'm not sure I'm aware of any other non-profit open source software maintainer who pays the bills by selling users' data.

Are there any you are thinking of who get a pass?

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

#83

Post by dralley »

cogman10 wrote: post #82
halJordan wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any other non profit maintaining an open source project gets passes bc "volunteers don't owe you anything" and "submit your own patch" catechisms.

I'm not sure I'm aware of any other non-profit open source software maintainer who pays the bills by selling users' data. Are there any you are thinking of who get a pass?

Mozilla doesn't sell user's data, they sell user's search traffic. Not the same, given that the latter requires a service rendered.

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

#84

Post by pkaye »

amelius wrote: post #6
spwa4 wrote: post #3

TLDR: Mozilla makes money from Google paying it to be the default search engine on Firefox. If that practice is outlawed, Mozilla will not have any income stream even close to replacing that.

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

They could fund Lady Bird browser. Less legacy code to worry about. Run it lean like Blender.

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

#85

Post by freedomben »

devsda wrote: post #58
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…

Lets flip the question, does it have to be at the break neck pace that nobody can catch up without spending huge money? How many of those features were really organic, driven by actual pressing need and not driven by Google's needs.

In that I fully agree, but the reason it has to be at a fast pace is because when Google adds things to chrome, developers will use them and don't have to care enough about market share. I think unless Firefox gains enough market share to matter, we'll be stuck in this race.

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

#86

Post by cogman10 »

dralley wrote: post #83
cogman10 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'm aware of any other non-profit open source software maintainer who pays the bills by selling users' data. Are there any you are thinking of who get a pass?

Mozilla doesn't sell user's data, they sell user's search traffic. Not the same, given that the latter requires a service rendered.

Mozilla does sell users' data. That's how the sponsored links and stories work

> Occasionally, sponsors may pay Mozilla to specifically boost the score of their site during frecency ranking. In these cases, the shortcut is based on your history, but shown in the sponsored section. This still happens entirely on your device; your copy of Firefox has a list of participating sites, which receive a higher score during local ranking. [1]

While the ranking happens on device, a smart sponsor will glean information from end users that click through because those links almost certainly track where the users come from. This is selling users' private data to advertisers.

And with firefox vpn, I'm sorry but that's a MITM. If you aren't paying a VPN provider, they are collecting and selling your data.

This is how every advert tracker works. They transparently and slowly gather data based on how you browse the internet. Just because firefox makes some efforts to slow it down, doesn't mean they aren't still participating in the market of selling user data.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy?utm_sou...

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

#87

Post by OkayPhysicist »

hn_submit wrote: post #75
dralley wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fundamental problem with non-profit executive pay is that they earn their keep. Even more directly than CEOs in a for-profit space. The CEO of a non-profit has approximately one job: convince rich people to give the non-profit large amounts of money. It turns out, rich people know other rich people. And rich people who know how to convince other rich people to give them large amounts of money are a scarce resource, that non-profits squabble over.

So you've got a scarce labor pool, with expensive lifestyles, and a very directly obvious ROI. That alone is a recipe for high salaries. Combine that with the inflation that comes from the fact that for-profit executives get to hide a huge portion of their compensation as stock, whereas non-profits pretty much exclusively offer salary, and you end up with apparently bloated non-profit executive salaries.

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

#88

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by bulbar »

2tx81z wrote: post #79
hn_submit wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People seem to underestimate what a (even somewhat) large codebase entails. Even switching the compiler version is serious effort. Replacing the compiler can already be unfeasible, but apparently, switching the whole language seems to be super simple from the outside.

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

#90

Post by maleldil »

dleslie wrote: post #34
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…

Firefox will continue to exist and be maintained by open source efforts. I often wonder if the current model has been driving away contributors, since it _feels like_ contributing effort to support someone else's paychecque.

Maintaining a Web browser is hard. I'm not convinced that an open source community would be able to continue the development.
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