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Hang on to Your Firefox

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Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#441

Post by em-bee »

HaloZero wrote: post #304
em-bee wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

completely independent development. not based on any existing browser. we need more browser variety.

Most people don't care about that though. My wife doesn't care about browser independence. If Ladybird wants to more than just a pet project for some tech companies it needs a sell. Something that makes it better than Chrome.

ladybird is way to early in development to sell itself to anyone except developers who might want to contribute to it. they need to get it working first before they can think about interesting features that might make it attractive. it's not the time for that yet

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#443

Post by glenstein »

aragilar wrote: post #400
glenstein wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no precedent for donations on the scale of what Mozilla gets from search licensing. The best online fundraising drive on the planet is Wikipedia with orders of magnitude more users and they don't raise half of what Mozilla spends on keeping up with Google. It's not the panacea people keep assuming it is, it's just one of many accusations that gets flung at the wall.

Except Thunderbird now does run on donations (though is looking a relevant additional funding sources, e.g. providing hosted email: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/ ). This is not to say Mozilla can't seek out other sources of money, or develop appropriate ancillary services, but the absence of an option to just give money for Firefox (and Firefox only) is noticeable.

I really want you to stop and think about what you're saying for a second. I just made the point that the strongest online fundraising operation in the world, Wikipedia, gets less than half of what it takes to fund Firefox. Your counterpoint to that is to point to Thunderbird, which raises significantly less money than Wikipedia, which is already not enough to fun Firefox, in order to prove that it's plausible that the full operations of Firefox could be funded.

This would be the point where Logan Roy says you're not serious people.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#444

Post by kiney »

andai wrote: post #315
mhitza wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave's adblocker does a good job. As far as I know Firefox started using some of the Rust written components of that engine. Interestingly on fingerprinting test websites, Brave also did significantly better than Firefox + PrivacyBadger + ublock Origin + one or two more which I forgot. When I ran some tests a couple months back.

Firefox was slow on my computer (old Thinkpad). I tried using Degoogled Chromium but it kept crashing. So the closest thing for me (Chrome minus Google) was Brave. Vivaldi is cool (I loved Opera 20 years ago) but very laggy on my machine. (They did the UI in JavaScript or something.) I use both now (Brave and Firefox), when I want to use a second account. And Firefox scrolls PDFs more smoothly. (But Chrome-based brow…

firefox container tabs are great for multiple accounts with the same webpage

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#445

Post by joey5403 »

jkahrs595 wrote: post #127

I use Zen (firefox under the hood) and I just don't understand all of the bitching people do about Firefox. Once I learned all about manifest v2 deprecation it was such an easy decision to move away from Chromium based browsers. The transition was one of the most painless things I've ever done in the software world. Literally what is the issue?

+1 for Zen

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#446

Post by em-bee »

asadotzler wrote: post #395
em-bee wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ladybird is passing more than 90% of the browser test suite. that's not science fiction.

the acid test is surfing the web. it doesn't matter how many tests it passes if users can't get to the sites they want and use them the way they want because their browser doesn't support some feature properly or because gets rejected by the sites for not being Chrome/Safari/Firefox.

if sites break despite passing all tests then the tests would be incomplete.

as for detecting that the browser is not chrome/safari/firefox, the days where you could trust the user agent value to reliably identify a browser are long gone. ladybird will just have a value that will make it pass any checks.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#447

Post by themaninthedark »

glenstein wrote: post #352
themaninthedark wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it that we can have a plethora of different Linux distributions, the Linux kernel, the FreeBSD kernel, the OpenBSD kernel, GIMP, LibreOffice and several other large projects that are run and maintained by donations and volunteers. Yet somehow Firefox is different? It needs to make money! It needs to make money so much that they keep spinning up all sorts of new projects so that they can make more money, or at…

We've got a live one. Most of their expenses are developing the core browser, the side bets (with a few exceptions, notably FirefoxOS, which I think was a GOOD side bet and worth the effort) were not that expensive. They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat. >At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they s…

>They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat.

To get pedantic about it, they aren't developing that much code, they are maintaining that much code.

Not that I think LOC is the best metric but here are the figures for 2 of the project I brought up. Linux kernel is ~40M LOC FreeBSD kernel 7.8~9M LOC

I would argue that the OS's that run the internet are much more cutthroat than a browser, not just in terms of attack risk but in business terms as well.

>Microsoft aggressively tried to destroy Linux in the late 1990s and 2000s. This era included the internal "Halloween Documents" mapping out strategies to fight open source, former CEO Steve Ballmer calling Linux "a cancer," and Microsoft covertly funding SCO Group's proxy lawsuits against Linux users.

The larger your codebase is, the greater the attack surface. One of the arguments about the way that Firefox is progressing is that they keep adding more stuff into the codebase. If it's getting too complex, maybe they shouldn't be adding those features...

>Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users.

Mozilla received 16.9 million from contributions in 2024.

Wikipedia took in ~170 million in the same time period.

Not sure where you got that Mozilla was bringing in more than Wikipedia through donations?

In going through the Mozilla Financials, I don't see where they have a huge endowment set aside, 73% of their revenue is royalties. I did however see that they spent 31 million to buy Acronym(an ad company) and 21 million to buy Fakespot. So that's neat.

https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#449

Post by account42 »

mmooss wrote: post #337
_dark_matter_ wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Mozilla for quite a long time. I can tell you that MANY employees will be reading every comment in this thread. Hello mozillians! Don't forget to do something good for the web tomorrow!

[flagged]

Are you seriously suggesting that developers isolating themselves into a yes-man bubble ever gets good results?

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#450

Post by account42 »

s3p wrote: post #302
stephen_g wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox and I like it (especially being able to use uBlock Origin), but I really dislike what Mozilla has become over the last ten years or so. I think that's the key distinction, I can mostly manage Mozilla's crap by turning off a bunch of stuff in my Firefox settings, but I think it's really important for the web to not use a Chromium based browser.

But they have to make money. Else they go away. I don't understand how people think Mozilla can just exist and be permanently solvent forever

They need funds but they don't have to make money in the same way as a for profit corporation.
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