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Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#161

Post by walrus01 »

p-e-w wrote: post #128
nialv7 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money. No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.

Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.

> Many banks and government websites don’t even support it

Because their web developers are too lazy to write anything to proper standards. They're doing some kind of lazy "Check for Chrome, because everyone must be running that, if not, redirect to an Unsupported page".

I've yet to find a website that "refuses" to work in Firefox which doesn't work just fine when I use a user agent switching extension to present a standard Chrome on MacOS or Chrome on Windows useragent.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#162

Post by tokai »

lxgr wrote: post #41

>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission. > It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”. Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M US…

Oh no, we're not supposed to actually parse the words a CEO spew forth. Get out of here.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#164

Post by kunley »

roenxi wrote: post #65
lxgr wrote: post #41

>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission. > It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”. Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M US…

Yeah, the article's quoting didn't help its case. It doesn't seem fair to quote someone saying [I don't think X is a good idea] as evidence they are about to do X. That being said, in the original context [0] it does sound a lot more like an option on the table. That original article presents it as the weakest of a list of things they're about to explore - but who knows, maybe the journalist has butchered what was sa…

Except that expressing loud doubts about something ethically dubious is often a sign that an opposite action will be taken. So many business people want this moral excuse "but I had doubts" while being totally cynical

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#165

Post by saubeidl »

ghusto wrote: post #68
herobird wrote: post #17

It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.

Which alternatives though? On Mac at least, I'm not aware of any viable non-Chromium alternatives.

Zen is basically Firefox with Arc's UX. It's by far my favorite browser.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#166

Post by p-e-w »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #155
p-e-w wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.

When they say "don't support it anymore", does that mean they're back to the IE era of using Chrome specific technologies so it doesn't work in any browser, do they use user-agent sniffing and show a big popup, or is it just that they're not testing it in FF anymore? The latter shouldn't be an issue as long as they use standards, the only thing they would run into in this day and age is browser specific bugs - but Sa…

No, they mostly just show a popup telling you to use Chrome. Websites work fine if you switch the user agent.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#167

Post by saubeidl »

arealaccount wrote: post #152
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d happily pay $100 a year for Firefox WITH an adblocker as long as part of the money is put towards ongoing internet freedom and preventing attestation

Orion browser is a thing

A closed source thing.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#168

Post by Silhouette »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #34

CEO > He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission. LOL the day that Firefox stops me from running what I want is the day I'll get rid of it.

I still think it was a mistake for Firefox to dump its old plugin model. The customisation was a USP for Firefox and many useful tweaks and minor features have never been replaced.

Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the biggest browser nerfing ad blocking because it's owned by one of the biggest ad companies?)

Other than customisation the only real advantage I see for Firefox today is the privacy angle. But again that would obviously be compromised if they started breaking tools like content blockers that help to provide that protection.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#169

Post by iso1631 »

p-e-w wrote: post #128
nialv7 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money. No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.

Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.

Wikimedia stats from last year put it at 15% of desktop browsers, ahead of Safari and Edge.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#170

Post by sysguest »

tda wrote: post #138
p-e-w wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.

I use Firefox as my daily browser. If i have a website that fails to work, I might try chrome maybe once every two months. And then it usually also doesn't work. So for all browsing I do on the internet, Firefox works like a charm

well I use it because it can handle 2000 tabs on my m1 macbook air (16gb ram)

... damn do I have adhd?????

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