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Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

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Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#221

Post by mastazi »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #136
qwerpy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but in my non-scientific test I found uBlock to work better so I don’t use the Brave blocker. My prediction is that Brave will eventually say that it’s too costly to maintain v2 in their fork and that people should just use the Brave blocker.

Interesting. What are you noticing? I might run ublock on top as well if it's worth it.

Brave has built-in functionality that can replace uBO, but it doesn't replace all of the other Manifestv2-only extensions that are not necessarily adblockers. For example https://libredirect.github.io/faq.html#chrome_web_store

> We can't publish LibRedirect to the Chrome Web Store as it requires Manifest v3, which removed essential features that LibRedirect needs.

uBlock Origin is just the tip of the iceberg since it's the most popular one, there is an entire ecosystem of Mv2 extensions that can never be replaced by Brave's built in functionality

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#222

Post by fabrice_d »

Raed667 wrote: post #88
theandrewbailey wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bad news is that donations are unlikely to happen with the current massive misspending on overpaid people with no technical background that don't code that spend 95% of their budget on themselves, support staff that also doesn't code, offices they don't need, commercial products that flop, monetization schemes that fail, etc. Mozilla already solicits donations, but I wonder if people who donate to them know tha…

I'm not sure how common this sentiment is, but I had a discussions with colleges who will NOT donate unless they can guarantee that their money is going to the development of a chosen product or even more granularity to a chosen feature.

Then they should pool funds to pay consulting companies like Igalia to implement these features.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#223

Post by scarface_74 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #56
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #27

Not looking to grind an axe but facts matter in this case. Let's look at Mozilla's financial statement for 2007 and 2023 [0][1]: > Expenses 1. Program 'Software Development' 2007: 20.7M | 2023: 260M 2. Management 'General and Administrative' : 2007: 5.1M | 2023: 123M I am purposefully excluding marketing and fundraising costs. Because arguably you can't get away from those expenses. Let's ignore inflation and COL and…

In this landscape I'm curious if any amount of money can overcome the oligopoly advantages of owning the OS (with no anti-trust enforcement) or owning the most popular web properties. Even if every cent for the past ten years went to browser dev alone, would that have made a difference? Do regular users even know the difference between one browser and another? Or is it only the icon they recognize, if even that?

Android is only 30% of the market in the US. I don’t know how much browser usage comes from Chromebooks.

Every single Windows and Mac user who uses Chrome made an affirmative choice to download Chrome. Why didn’t they decide to download Firefox?

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#224

Post by bad_user »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #89
jqpabc123 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromium is not a good alternative: 95% of Chromium commits come from Google. Or ... Chromium is the perfect alternative ... as long as it remains open source and privacy invasion can be easily stripped out of it. Let Google fund most of the development of a privacy respecting browser (i.e. Brave). And if it doesn't remain open source? Then it's time for a fork --- just like it is now with Firefox. Bottom line: If yo…

Chromium is also stripping manifest v2. Firefox isn't. Chromium is open source, but it's not an open source project. It's a Google project.

That makes no sense. Define "open source project".

Do you think that in open source there's no ownership?

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#225

Post by bad_user »

jorvi wrote: post #219
rpdillon wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave supports manifest V2 because the Chromium upstream hasn't removed it for enterprise use yet. As soon as that changes, Brave does not have a plan to continue maintaining V2. What you call Google payola is really the independence that allows Mozilla to develop a browser engine that isn't being actively crippled by Google's initiatives. That's the important piece. Brave is not a sustainable play because they have…

Safari's extensions had a similar change-over to a ManifestV3-like system, with the same arguments: increases performance (very important for mobile) and puts more safeguards on extensions doing funky privacy-hostile stuff. Yes, ManifestV3 nerfs adblocking, and Google loves that side effect. It will hamper Brave' internal adblocking engine. I think the big interesting question is: if Brave figures out how to add impr…

Brave's internal ad-blocker is custom-made and doesn't depend on manifest v2.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#226

Post by dralley »

timewizard wrote: post #182
alberth wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know your intention is probably well placed but we do though need to factor in revenues: Year Revenue ---- ------- 2007 $75M 2023 $653M I bring this up because G&A of big companies (in general) always outpaces R&D once they hit scale ... and in an ideal situation - your revenues should outpace R&D expense because you're getting economies of scale (which further dilutes the R&D to Other Business Function comparison)…

Isn't Mozilla a non-profit though? Why does mozilla.ai exist? Didn't we like a trust the product more in 2007 than we do now? I mean, yay for scale, but haven't we lost something here?

> Why does mozilla.ai exist?

AI threatens both browsers and search engines, is why. Apple, Google and Microsoft all have their own efforts.

Mozilla working on local-first AI isn't a bad idea.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#227

Post by brooke2k »

iteratethis wrote: post #79

We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left. Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox. Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced…

I have never once had an issue with a website that was solved by opening it in Chrome instead. and I switched to firefox like three years ago. If firefox is so much less supported, I'm not seeing it at least

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#228

Post by hinkley »

brooke2k wrote: post #227
iteratethis wrote: post #79

We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left. Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox. Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced…

I have never once had an issue with a website that was solved by opening it in Chrome instead. and I switched to firefox like three years ago. If firefox is so much less supported, I'm not seeing it at least

I switched to firefox when Firebug came out. I haven't switched since, although I spend a lot of time on iOS so maybe half my browsing is FF.

I'm sure I've seen a few things not work on FF, but not many, and likely things that would break on Safari too (I've had govt stuff just not work on tablet safari for sure).

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#230

Post by loeg »

BearOso wrote: post #151
nativeit wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The question is more "Do these events and keynote speakers in Zambia have anything to do with browser development?" This isn't supposed to be a generic non-profit charity, it's a non-profit for supporting web browser development. If only 5% of the funds are going toward the browser or related technology, the organization is corrupt.

"Corrupt" is too strong. Just unfocused. You can say it is disqualifying for making donations personally, and I think that is a pretty reasonable take. Many people have exactly the same quibble with Wikimedia.
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