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Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

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Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#161

Post by franga2000 »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #127

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…

> It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world.

That's exactly what they're doing with the biggest ad trackers and browser vendors. A lot of Mozilla's "side-projects" are stupid and I also agree they should focus more on Firefox, but this one is pretty in line with their general mission of "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#162

Post by pmontra »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #86
Aeolun wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Imo out of the box it needs extensions to get it to be worthwhile. Its generally worse on battery than say safari, only being comparable when you factor the savings not having to render ads with ublock origin. I catch firefox processes all the time using 15% cpu with no tabs left open, restart it and it drops back to 3% like safari, so something weird is certainly going on. Sometimes I use firefox over an x11 connect…

about:performance gives you a list of tabs with energy and memory usage. You can find which tab is misbehaving. It works on Android too.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#163

Post by lucideer »

sgc wrote: post #136
lucideer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get what you're saying: I'm the same for most products, though I do go out of my way to find and use things that are exceptional and in some cases I've actually kinda succeeded in finding that.

The issue here is that this wasn't always the case, or at least wasn't always this bad. While Firefox has always been far from perfect, there was a time when mozillazine consisted mostly of praise and evangelism, and not all of it naive fandom. Also, as a former Opera user, there was also a time when the landscape as a whole contained a higher quality set of options in general. There were numerous browsers then better than the current least worst.

Even recently, Firefox has inspired hope & interest with Servo, Quantum, and even things like the amazing webextension migration effort: controversial and unpopular with many it was nonetheless a greatly successful engineering effort, and has borne fruit in the recent furore over v3 manifests, with Firefox coming out ahead. It's also got cool added APIs that makes sense for the traditional Firefox community but are still standards compliant and interoperable. But all that progress is now already waning with Servo dev cut, progressive popular distinguishing features like MAC being relegated to APIs & UI removed from core.

There's precious little left to distinguish Firefox from Chrome, and nothing new on the horizon.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#164

Post by jrochkind1 »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #100
fafzv wrote: 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.

Remember "Firefox OS"?

An open source phone OS would have literally changed society. If it had succeeded. Alas it did not. I don't know why not. But it was not a wrong goal.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#165

Post by amelius »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #127

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…

I'm starting to wonder why the EU isn't Mozilla's biggest funder.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#166

Post by ncann »

user3939382 wrote: post #151
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #127

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…

I'm happy for them to branch out, but it is discouraging that once every 3-4 months I run into a bug or feature I need, google it, and am taken to a bug report in their tracker from 5-10 years ago that hasn't been touched.

Case in point: network ping spikes after using Geolocation that will persist until FF is closed:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1711854

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#167

Post by agilob »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #127

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…

Exactly the same feeling as when Mozilla acquired Pocket and promised to opensource it. I had the feeling that it doesn't make sense and it's not what their audience wants.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#168

Post by criddell »

smsm42 wrote: post #56
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.

> I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once Maybe that's the problem. Why Mozilla should be large enough to do those things? I'd rather have one good browser than 20 mediocre side projects.

I have the exact opposite opinion. They should get out of the rendering engine business and start using Blink like just about everybody else. Take Blink and make a better browser from it using those 20 side projects. Pour resources into them and move them from mediocre to great. Take what Google gives away and spend resources on what Google ignores. Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me.

If Apple allows third party browsers and Chrome is adopted by enough iOS / iPadOS users, everything other than Blink will be non-standard in a de facto sense.

This is a fairly new opinion for me. On Windows I've started using Edge alongside Firefox and I find myself using Firefox less and less often. On my machine doing the things I need to do, Edge is significantly faster.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#169

Post by wiseowise »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #57
wiseowise wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Android is a touch-first OS Android has native support for keyboards since API 1.

The word "first" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and has jackshit to do with it supporting it. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of Android users aren't using a keyboard and are using a touchscreen. You could even extrapolate the woeful state of Android tablet UX, because there's far more Android tablet users than there will be keyboard users because hey, most Android devices only ship with a touchscreen an…

While I understand your point, I disagree that just because majority is using touch, you shouldn’t care about minority using keyboard.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#170

Post by senko »

Mozilla is a company in search of relevance.

Right now, if Mozilla doesn't think Firefox is central to its mission and if they're giving up the fight in browser wars (as many in this thread suggest) ..

... I don't see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that's it?

I'd like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (the rest of it) do whatever they want.

Except Firefox is the golden goose.

(Ffx user here, I'm using it for dev, browsing and mobile (ffocus), ie. everything that doesn't require chrome).

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