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Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

fakespot.com

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Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#131
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 were also over 20 years ago. Until the next ones.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#132
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At that time, Google was seen as "the good guys" when it went against Microsoft, pushing for open web standards against the monopoly of IE6. Both Chrome (initially) adhering to open standards and open source protocols like Google Talk. It looked like the David vs Goliath biblical tale.

People thought Google was gonna maintain that position forever. It turned out that the "cool nerds doing open source and making money meanwhile" stance was just a sham, and Google abruptly became another faceless corporation.

A lot of people fell for it. Even the Mozilla developers. When Firefox started having compatibility issues with Gmail, they considered it as bugs in the Gmail software, and Google developers were all like "oh haha sorry I'll fix that in no time", but over time the compatibility issues piled up and the anti competitive stance slowly unveiled by itself.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The only reason I use FF on android is for the extensions (especially ad / tracking blockers). Whatever mess it might be, it still is far better than the alternatives and not really noticeable to me during daily use.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#134

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…

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 sta…

That's how it felt to me too. Stretched too thin. Yet as a small company compared to MS or Google, I can imagine how hard it is to try to thrive or just survive and maintaining a stable path when you're fighting big pockets.

I just wished they could rebalance their allocation and focus on simple daily usability things. Just a bit more.

ps: for instance, the screenshot tool is brilliant

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#135

You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mo…

Not to mention, improving the browser in the space of adblockers installed by default ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... ftw! ) would remove most incentives for AI generated content in the first place. /inserts shrugging emoji

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#136
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What state is that? I’ve been very satisfied with FF over the past 5 years.

Not sure how much of this is living in a bubble or selection bias of negative experiences in common but my own impression of the firefox userbase is that a significant portion of it are using firefox as a "least worst" browser, rather than one they are actually very happy with.

That nails me. But that is also the impetus behind my use of almost every single product I use, from my house, to my car, to my food, to my computers, to the os and other software on them. I don't think that is indicative of anything very specific to FF.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#137
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its great that everything just magically seems to work so well for you, but behind the curtains it took additional effort from the developers of websites you visit to make it so. Same goes for Safari and some of the less popular browsers.

I mean, this is a broad topic and I am more of a backend engineer than frontend these days. However, I did do a lot of frontend back in the old IE6/IE7/IE8 days when you essentially had to code a whole separate front end for Microsoft's standards-flaunting mess. So this is definitely an issue I care about. but behind the curtains it took additional effort from the developers of websites you visit to make it so This i…

Yes absolutely! Also why I tagged on that call-out of Safari and other browsers.

And not to forget that Google has even shipped several early-days standards track features to production of which the API was still in flux. In a few cases the API later changed in - for Chrome, at least - breaking ways. Fun times.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

oh google pay a LOT of people to do it.

Either outright commits by at-google email addresses, or things like summer of code. All to play catch up with the features they shove on chrome.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#139
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…

Firefox has certainly improved a lot since 2008.

Google has and had major distribution advantages for Chrome; same with Apple/MS and their browsers.

I've gone back and forth between FF and Chrome a few times and since the big FF perf improvements several years ago, I don't understand why Chrome is still seen as a wildly better product except for residual Google goodwill among the tech crowd. FF has had much much much more reliable session management / sync for me for years now.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#140

You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mo…

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/amazon-convinced-apple-to-r...

Interesting, did not know this happened.

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