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Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

theguardian.com

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Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#141

Post by cthor »

oefrha wrote: post #125
neiman wrote: post #104

I see a problem, though I have no alternative to offer, with the current model of organizations. It seems you are either for-profit, and then you have no ethics and do everything you can to centralize the world around you with no concern for users or their benefits. Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor". Are there are any "shades" between…

> Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor". Not necessarily. Wikipedia is actually pretty damn rich with a large war chest.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

Wikipedia is the single greatest website on the Internet. That's what it takes for donations to keep you afloat. $100MM revenue? Google makes that in a day.

That aside, it's not entirely clear that Wikipedia can live off donations forever.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#142

Post by thekingofh »

sebazzz wrote: post #119
johnsea wrote: post #7

The article once more reiterates the fact that Apple doesn't allow other browser engines. You cannot even fight, there is no future ;-) on iOS.

Technically I think you are free to build have other browser engines on iOS. However, JIT or other dynamically compiled code is not allowed because that's a security risk. You can't have a browser in 2019 with interpreted javascript.

I think you mean that you can have interpreted javascript, just not JIT compilers. They don't allow you to mark memory as executable. That syscall is completely disabled on their systems.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#143

Post by carapace »

neiman wrote: post #104

I see a problem, though I have no alternative to offer, with the current model of organizations. It seems you are either for-profit, and then you have no ethics and do everything you can to centralize the world around you with no concern for users or their benefits. Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor". Are there are any "shades" between…

Well, crack open your history books and recall that the entire point of corporations is the relatively-risk-free exploitation of other people's resources (or even they themselves, as slaves.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

- - - -

By contrast, most religions are not poor and do a lot of good works.

- - - -

Some people, like Bill Gates, make a lot of money the exploitative way... (what if Windows was FOSS from the start and Gates only had $100,000,000 instead of $100,000,000,000 or whatever. You'll never convince me that that isn't a better alternate reality.) ...and then turn around and spend it on good works.

As for making money vs. doing good, I think there is a fundamental tension, but I find it hard to articulate.

What about Elon Musk? He's making money, and arguably do good by humanity overall, eh?

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#144

Post by zozbot234 »

cthor wrote: post #141
oefrha wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor". Not necessarily. Wikipedia is actually pretty damn rich with a large war chest.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

Wikipedia is the single greatest website on the Internet. That's what it takes for donations to keep you afloat . $100MM revenue? Google makes that in a day . That aside, it's not entirely clear that Wikipedia can live off donations forever.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

The article you link to points out that only a small part of what Wikipedia spends is directly used to keep the website up. Spending in 2008 was less than 5% of today, and the website was just fine.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#146

Post by mscasts »

Firefox is unfortunately becoming unrelevant. They have pretty much less than 5% global usage and it's not exactly increasing.

Mozilla needs to sharpen up in my view. I use Brave because I like Brendan Eich and I am not exactly a fan of Mozilla as an org. There is no way to fund Firefox development as a user and it seems like they have focused more on side products / services lately.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#147

Post by oefrha »

cthor wrote: post #141
oefrha wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor". Not necessarily. Wikipedia is actually pretty damn rich with a large war chest.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

Wikipedia is the single greatest website on the Internet. That's what it takes for donations to keep you afloat . $100MM revenue? Google makes that in a day . That aside, it's not entirely clear that Wikipedia can live off donations forever.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Interestingly I was thinking about that article when I posted my comment. One takeaway is that Wikipedia shouldn't even be spending as much as they are.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#148

Post by Barrin92 »

zimbatm wrote: post #111
oefrha wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very easy to build a new browser on top of Chromium/Blink, which is why there are hundreds of Chromium-based browsers out there. In contrast, building on top of Firefox/Gecko, pretty damn hard. Even Firefox devs have admitted this. All too often I hear sentiments like “too bad they built... on Chromium instead of Firefox”, as if it’s a moral choice. It’s not. It’s an informed technical choice. If you want to cha…

This is one aspect that is not often talked about. If Gecko was easier to build on top of, it would get more adoption in other markets and promote the variety of engines that we sorely need. Mozilla doesn't only win by getting more Firefox market share. Also not everything is lost. Chromium has a bunch of weird and custom build tooling that also makes it a pain to build on top. Anyone who has tried to package v8 can…

>it would get more adoption in other markets and promote the variety of engines that we sorely need.

we don't need variety of engines, we need a non-pofit alternative to google that can throw a punch, which firefox is.

An engine is a technical undertaking (of enormous proportion), and there's essentially no need to have even more of them. If anything it'd just make building websites harder. The issue isn't with blink or gecko it's with Google's control over the browser space. If Firefox was built on blink and had 50% market share I'd be happier than having a hundred engines with 2%.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#149

Post by mthoms »

freediver wrote: post #145

Perhaps the fight should start with: - Not sending data to Google - Finding a different business model that does not almost entirely rely on Google - Not collecting user data Source: https://firefoxvschrome.com

Wow. This is so misleading that it borders on outright lying. What's your agenda?

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#150

Post by lioeters »

steveklabnik wrote: post #113
saagarjha wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the work they are doing rewriting Firefox component by component in Rust, Google will have their work cut out keeping up in terms of performance using their C++ implementation. I would expect Blink’s C++ implementation to perform comparably; wouldn’t the main benefits would be security-related?

Mozilla tried to parallelize their CSS engine multiple times in C++, and failed. Rust’s guarantees made it possible to do so. There was a talk about it at a Rust conference called “The Story of Stylo”; I’m on my phone or I’d link you.

Following my curiosity, I found:

The Story of Stylo: Replacing Firefox's CSS engine with Rust

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6SSTRr2mFU

Woo, 9M lines of C/C++ to 85K lines of Rust..

Author's slides: https://www.joshmatthews.net/rbr17/

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