141–150 of 213 posts
> Small models have gotten remarkably good. 1 to 8 billion parameters, tuned for specific tasks What models is Mozilla talking about?
I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security. I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is ri…
I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security. I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is ri…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security. I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is ri…
I never worked on Firefox, and am often critical of Mozilla, but I can second this sentiment. It's seemed like everything Mozilla does makes everyone mad, all the time. It's frustrating.
I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.
There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on…
People know it is wrong to stay on Chrome and empower Google to the extent that it is, but they're stuck on that workflow and don't want to change, so they find nits to pick about firefox and get very LOUD about that. Then it becomes Mozill's fault that they're still using Chrome, and you can't blame them for anything.
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It's a really hard line to walk. If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable. On the other hand, if you return spoofed values, it means that Firefox developers cannot debug platform/hardware-specific crashes. If you disable Telemetry, improving performance becomes impossible, because you're suddenly unable to determine where your users suffer. If you remove WebGL, plenty of…
> If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable. It's not only what gets send to Mozilla as telemetry or crash reports that is a problem. That can be turned off (many Linux distros do), or firewalled. The main issue is that websites can more or less accurately identify users uniquely by extracting information that they should not have access to if the browser was designed wit…
Please let me pay for Firefox and have the proceed fund Firefox directly. This is not 1999 anymore. We are all wealthy grown ups now.
Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude. I googled this https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w... Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100 pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or a puny amount, it depends.
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I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one d…
> I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than…
Proton Mail, Google Workspace, iCloud, Dropbox are all viable money-making products that line up well with Mozilla's core mission if they made their own alternatives. Persona could've been really good, if one of these products existed and had enough traction to build a user base that made third parties want to depend on Persona.
There is a world where Mozilla built services people actually want instead of focusing on trust-eroding gimmicks like Pocket, and they'd be thriving right now.
I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc. That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.
I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding! I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one d…
Unfortunately the side bets are disproportionately visible relative to the vast majority of what they actually do, which is ship millions of lines of code in browser improvements every quarter, keeping pace with Google despite a fraction of Google's resources.
I certainly think a better strategic partner than Google would be ideal. Yahoo had a strategically promising moment that slipped through its fingers that I think will always be a what-if. Cloudflare is interesting because they're very much a create-a-blue-ocean kind of company, and the problem with browsers has always been that the browser space simply isn't a revenue driver, it's something you subsidize from other businesses.
Firefox is, remarkably, the most successful self funded browser engine in the history of the world, but many great companies have come and gone in this space (e.g. Opera) and still fell behind. They invest more in the browser now than they ever have, they have shipped more production Rust code than anybody. But that's not louder than the noise in the modern internet.
I think you're right that someone like Cloudflare would be an interesting partner and I can't think of a better one off the top of my head. And if AI is eclipsing search, that threatens search licensing they're currently relying on. I don't know what AI in the browser is, what new norms, what new expectations, what core concepts are going to matter the most. But something is going to change and you have to get out ahead of that now, to be relevant tomorrow.
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> There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas. I know nothing about Ladybird or their founder, so I'm taking your word for it that they are "at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and ot…
The art-vs-artist hand-wringing seems to be a particular affliction for Americans and particularly US progressives. I suspect it's something to do with America's protestant puritan heritage. There's a metaphysics of contamination at work that's hard to explain without religion. As a liberal European atheist I have no problem using software written by edgy young fascists (assuming it's good software). Just as I have n…
I bristle at taking an action which would support (morally, financially, etc) currently living fascists and/or Nazis, whose ideologies and in certain cases the people themselves (e.g. Musk) are actively working to dismantle and destabilize the government of my country.
In that respect, using software written by someone like Andreas Kling (Ladybird creator) or Musk, DHH, etc is much more reprehensible to me than admiring the art of Picasso, who was a horrible person but who is dead and cannot hurt anyone else.