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Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

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Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#101

Post by [deleted] »

jeroenhd wrote: post #69
jdwithit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated gnome-keyring.

Firefox is behind on general web support compared to any other browser. That's not just weird APIs like WebUSB and WebSerial and WebGPU, but also CSS things. It's almost as bad as Safari, except it's broken in very different areas. There's plenty to improve. On Android there's the whole extension mess (and tons of other quality of life improvements), on desktop Firefox could use some proper PWA support (even Safari h…

[deleted]

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#102

Post by woodruffw »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #94
bcx wrote: post #15

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over , and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mo…

>This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. >The browser wars are basically over and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome. Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they could do" shrug . They built their tech in such an obtuse and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate…

> Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they could do" shrug. They built their tech in such an obtuse and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate anywhere else, milked their millions selling off customer data to Google via the default search interface, burned the money on private jets and shockingly overpaid low-talent low-vision executives. Burned engineering talent on a VPN service no one asked for just because it's a good money making scam if you advertize it on the right podcasts, made huge parts of their deep engineering teams redundant.

Is any of this actually evidenced somewhere? I'm not aware of Mozilla ever using private jets, and the last time I checked their executive compensation it was on the lower side of average for corporations with their footprint and financials.

Maybe there are facts or sources that you aren't presenting, but this as-is just comes off as a screed.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#103

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #42
cma wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic keyboard shortcuts that worked in the 90s don't work on Firefox Android.

Android is a touch-first OS, keyboard shortcut support is woeful in general in most apps. '90s desktop browsers didn't work well with touchscreens.

Android was a keyboard-only Blackberry clone before it gained touch support. This is why soft keyboards have always been modular since they are a bolted on substitute for physical keys.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#104

Post by Arainach »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #94
bcx wrote: post #15

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over , and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mo…

>This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. >The browser wars are basically over and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome. Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they could do" shrug . They built their tech in such an obtuse and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate…

Bias disclaimer: I've worked on Chrome and Edge, opinions strictly my own

>and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.

Could and should Mozilla have done better? Yes. "Any energy?" is uncalled for, however.

There was the entire Quantum rewrite for significant performance boosts (around the time Chrome started getting called out for bad perf). There's containers, anti-tracker tech, and a big privacy push.

There is much more they could have done, and my outsider opinion is that Mozilla the organization lost its way and focused too much money and effort on things that don't matter, but it's not like they pulled an IE6 and abandoned Firefox.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#105

Post by capitainenemo »

fafzv wrote: post #91
bcx wrote: post #15

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over , and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mo…

The browser wars are over because Firefox lost them by spending all the time patting themselves on the back about how much better they were than the competition, wasting their money on stupid stuff like this instead of improving their browser. Getting themselves into a deeper hole is unlikely to help, imo.

I mean, they did a lot of improvements over time. ASM.js which became WASM, with fast bindings, Webrender, new JS engine, the memshrink project are ones that jump out at me. From the wpt.fyi interop stats year over yearit's pretty clear they are constantly working on implementing new specs.

But IMO everyone is chasing Chrome or just using their engine now. Their engineering team is apparently 10x that of Mozilla.

And, back when Chrome was rolling out they used their dominant position online very aggressively. Google sites worked best in Chrome, period. Chrome was pushed on google. Google tech demos, similar to Microsoft ones, worked best in or only in Chrome. Android was a big Chrome advantage too. Chrome was heavily advertised, pushed as an install bundle in things like Adobe.. I'm not disagreeing Mozilla made some poor decisions but I don't think they had much of a chance regardless.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#106

Post by JohnBooty »

jeroenhd wrote: post #69
jdwithit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated gnome-keyring.

Firefox is behind on general web support compared to any other browser. That's not just weird APIs like WebUSB and WebSerial and WebGPU, but also CSS things. It's almost as bad as Safari, except it's broken in very different areas. There's plenty to improve. On Android there's the whole extension mess (and tons of other quality of life improvements), on desktop Firefox could use some proper PWA support (even Safari h…

    "Firefox is slower than all the other browsers"
Wow, absolutely not my experience.

I use both Chrome and FF regularly on Mac and PC desktops and laptops with vintages ranging from 2011-2023. There is no perceptible difference to me. Admittedly all of my machines are relatively comfortably specced. Desktop-class CPUs, 16GB+ of RAM, SSDs. Perhaps the difference is more pronounced when the computing environment is more constrained.

Moving from my subjective opinion to hard benchmarks, Firefox wins some and loses others. Overall they're close.

I don't use Android so I don't know the FF situation there. It certainly sounds like a mess. I will take your word for it.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#107

Post by RoyGBivCap »

applecrazy wrote: post #82

Cool product, but I'm actually concerned about privacy using a tool like FakeSpot. Their privacy policy is extremely broad and includes handing over purchase history and search history on shopping websites to the extension authors: > Browser Extensions: We collect the following data when you use Fakespot’s Browser Extensions and may link it to your personal identity in order to effectively market our products and ser…

Yeah you don't want to install their extension as it stands. Which is why they try so hard to push it, instead of just putting the analyzer on the front page.

See if you can even find it: https://www.fakespot.com/

Meanhwhile there are 3 links to the chrome extension, and two to the app.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#108

Post by nortonham »

Barrin92 wrote: post #17
purpleidea wrote: post #14

I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.

If your first step as PM of a browser that desperately needs to win back market share is to work on gnome-keyring, a feature only relevant on an operating system that less than 1% of people use your tenure is going to be very short-lived. This is engineering virtue-signaling, for lack of a better phrase.

working on gnome-keyrting might be important to them considering that the biggest commercial linux distros ship with gnome ootb

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#109

Post by timtom39 »

jzb wrote: post #88
bcx wrote: post #15

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over , and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mo…

Leaning hard into delivering content that you can "trust" would be an interesting direction for Mozilla. I suspect that will put some crosshairs on Mozilla as an organization, though. While that would be good for users, there will be folks who don't like the idea of spotting fake content or doing any labeling of content...

Given their complete reliance on google for funding and biased political stance. I don't think they are in a great position to deliver content you can "trust".

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#110

Post by leidenfrost »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #99
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. >The browser wars are basically over and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome. Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they could do" shrug . They built their tech in such an obtuse and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate…

To me - as a long term FF user and Mozilla critic - it looks like: Spend money on everything except browser development (>$5 billions!). Market share down the drain. Use the market share as an argument for a lost cause and spend money on everything except Browser development. Ladybird - a browser spearheaded by one person - will expose Mozilla of what it is.

I haven't actually looked at it, but I have the feeling that the Firefox code base is godawful and nobody who isn't being paid for a 40 hour weekday actually wants to get involved in it.
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