This Mozilla fiasco has convinced me that being a nonprofit isn't enough. We need a web browser that is actively hostile towards corporations and surveillance capitalism.
Starting with a strong copyleft license helps a lot. See Blender being GPL.
Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
231–240 of 851 posts
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.
Yep, and that's how he arrived at the $number. If a small number of people were using ad blockers, the cited sum would approach $0 since disabling ad blockers would affect very few page views, right?
Is that true? What if Google just pays them $150m to disable ad blockers?
Not sure if that's legal or whatever but killing ad blockers is probably worth it for Google.
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
In which country are you seeing that? For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and t…
I live in Australia and I can't log into government services using my myGov account on Firefox. Works fine on Chromium.
I have no issues with mygov in firefox (on linux of all platforms). I don't even whitelist ublock origin on that domain. Check your other extensions.
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#234So what browsers will be left if Firefox kills ad blockers. This seems to be happening to all the major browsers.
Brave has decent ad-blocking but has a shady history ...
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It feels off-mission. That's supposedly The Verge paraphrasing the CEO (Unfortunately I can't verify because the full article requires subscription.) I would like to know what the CEO actually said because "it feels off-mission" is a strange thing for the leader of the mission to say. I would hope that they know the mission inside out. No need to go by feels.
Here's that part of the article: > In our conversation, Enzor-DeMeo returns often to two things: that Mozilla cares about and wants to preserve the open web, and that the open web needs new business models. Mozilla’s ad business is important and growing, he says, and he worries “about things going behind paywalls, becoming more closed off.” He says the internet’s content business isn’t exactly his fight, but that Moz…
I don't like how he assumes that a free internet must be ad-supported. The ad-supported web is hideous, even with their ads removed. A long, convoluted, inane mess of content.
On the other hand, the clean web feels more direct, to the point, and passionate. I prefer to read content written by passion, not by money seeking purposes.
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#236Earlier 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.
3% market share is 150 million active users give or take. That's no death by any count in the software world.
Gosh, I really wish Mozilla would just dig into their user-base and find a way to adequately become sustainable... or find a way to make it work better as a foundation that is NOT maintained by Google, ie like the Wiki Foundation. I do spend a LOT of time in FF, can't anyone see there's a value beyond selling ads and personal info that could make Mozilla more sustainable, dependable and resilient?
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#237They are but as with everything else in last 10 years they are insanely incompetent at it so it will take a while
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#238Sincerely, I'm just using Firefox ATM because of Sidebery. If I could use something similar on Brave, I would go back in an instant. My main issues with FF are that it is a battery hog on MacOS, doesn't have AV1 playing capabilities (or it has, but I would need to go through some configuring that I don't need to do in other browsers) and sometimes it stalls in certain pages (that's probably not FF fault, but that the…
I used Sidebery which had niggles. I switched to native vertical tabs with collapsible groups, which Brave also has.
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#239>> 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…
"feels off mission" exposes how little conviction there is behind this position. That is a flimsy tissue paper statement about a concept that should be a bedrock principle. It's irrationally charitable to give it any credit at all. Especially in context where anyone who's awake should understand they need to be delivering an unquestionably clear message about unquestionably clear goals and core values, because this a…
yeah, it reads to me like "we probably shouldn't do it"
Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
#240Earlier 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.
> 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 s…
Are you sure they're all lazy?
Another pretty common experience for developers is wanting to do things "the right way", but being overridden by management.