Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

mozillapetition.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 469 posts

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#101

Post by notpushkin »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #97
Sander_Marechal wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromium is also stripping manifest v2. Firefox isn't. Chromium is open source, but it's not an open source project. It's a Google project.

Firefox is open source, but it's not an open source project. It's a Mozilla project --- effectively totally funded by Google. *When* Google asks them to remove manifest v2, what do you think they'll do?

> When Google asks them to remove manifest v2, what do you think they'll do?

It’s even more pointless than removing it from Chromium though: Firefox users would just switch to a fork that still supports it, or to a fork that supports blockingWebRequest APIs on v3 extensions, or to a fork that implements some other ad blocking method. With Chromium, they at least have Chrome users, many of whow wouldn’t want to even bother. (Those who do have migrated to forks already)

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#102

Post by hagbard_c »

t43562 wrote: post #83
hagbard_c wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is not the issue here - this is not about which sites I frequent but about whether the browser I use to do so tries to keep me from going there. The content of those sites can be influenced by advertising (which I rigorously block, no exceptions) but the browser as of yet does not attempt to keep me from visiting site A nor does it change its contents (other than by means of the content blocker which I have…

It could but a national government is more likely to block sites at the ISP level. Also ... private companies can block things they don't like, such as competitors...or alter their search rankings.

Currently Firefox does not do any of those things out of the .deb/.tar.gz. I'd like to keep it that way, hence my resistance against involvement by parties which have shown to be either susceptible to or directly calling for censorship. This is also one of the many reasons why I wanted to see Mitchell Baker disappear from the organisation as she clearly was calling for active censorship.

I frankly do not understand all the resistance against a call for a politically neutral tech infrastructure. To all those people frantically pressing that down-vote button, do you really desire for your tech infrastructure to be ideologically driven? Do you even understand what such a thing means and what it will lead to?

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#103

Post by porridgeraisin »

qwerpy wrote: post #92
iteratethis wrote: post #79

We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left. Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox. Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced…

I use Brave and am satisfied with it. The occasional hassle involved in turning things off when a new unwanted feature shows up or when I have to install it on a new machine is worth it for uBlock Origin and the Chromium performance and compatibility. However the theoretical downside of Brave is that as Google continues changing Chromium's codebase, there's incentive for them to make it harder and harder to maintain…

Brave does not need manifest v2 for it's ad blocker to work. It is not implemented as an extension. It is built into the browser itself.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#104

Post by 7speter »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #54
homebrewer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's precisely the problem people have been talking about for a decade now. If it was just the browser, maybe it wouldn't have lost 90% of its former market share.

Firefox lost market share because of factors outside their control. They'd have to have owned a popular OS or conglomerate of dominant web services.

And now things are kind of going full circle, because part of the reason why Mozilla/Firefox increased their scope was to create services that would capture marketshare from a specific audience; which seems to be those who care about their privacy, though executive pay isn’t apart of that, and I don’t know if theres a viable defense for that.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#105

Post by tlb »

pseudalopex wrote: post #84
iteratethis wrote: post #82

This polls suggests that there's some decision holding back Mozilla from ditching Google, and that with enough pressure, they'll finally do it. They're long aware that they should. They made the strategic announcement some 7-8 years back if I remember correctly. Since then they tried to diversify and failed miserably. Sure enough incompetence is involved but we should also consider how very hard it is. Making hundred…

> Since then they tried to diversify and failed miserably. I wish my miserable failures brought in $65 million annually.

Yes, $65M revenue is a decent success. The miserable failure is bloating their expenses to 5x that.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#106

Post by bugtodiffer »

dismalaf wrote: post #96

Mozilla will never do so willingly. Organizations always grow, since the entire point of an organization is to exist for the sake of its stakeholders. The bigger it is, the better for stakeholders. Willingly burning 85% of your revenue and downsizing isn't something that stakeholders want. Odds are Mozilla will simply die and their browser with it, since the Chromium based ecosystem is much more robust.

I think you are confusing organizations and companies. Yes, under capitalism, companies only exist to reek in profits, but from a non-profit organization you'd expect something else...

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#107

Post by sidewndr46 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #50
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #27

Not looking to grind an axe but facts matter in this case. Let's look at Mozilla's financial statement for 2007 and 2023 [0][1]: > Expenses 1. Program 'Software Development' 2007: 20.7M | 2023: 260M 2. Management 'General and Administrative' : 2007: 5.1M | 2023: 123M I am purposefully excluding marketing and fundraising costs. Because arguably you can't get away from those expenses. Let's ignore inflation and COL and…

The good news is that development could easily be funded by donations. It's only a few million. Enough to keep a few dozen people employed. The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial produ…

My understanding is that donating to Mozilla doesn't actually fund anything explicitly. You donate to the foundation and then they spend it on whatever. So there exists no actual mechanism to do what you state "could easily be funded"

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#108

Post by nativeit »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #85
jillesvangurp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good news is that development could easily be funded by donations. It's only a few million. Enough to keep a few dozen people employed. The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial produ…

> The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial products that flop, monetization schemes that fail, etc. Mozilla already solicits donations, but I wonder if people who donate to them know tha…

[flagged]

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#109

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #50
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #27

Not looking to grind an axe but facts matter in this case. Let's look at Mozilla's financial statement for 2007 and 2023 [0][1]: > Expenses 1. Program 'Software Development' 2007: 20.7M | 2023: 260M 2. Management 'General and Administrative' : 2007: 5.1M | 2023: 123M I am purposefully excluding marketing and fundraising costs. Because arguably you can't get away from those expenses. Let's ignore inflation and COL and…

The good news is that development could easily be funded by donations. It's only a few million. Enough to keep a few dozen people employed. The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial produ…

> good news is that development could easily be funded by donations

Mozilla’s donations are roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2].

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023

[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7

Post reply on HN