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Mozilla Thunderbolt

thunderbolt.io

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Re: Mozilla Thunderbolt

#231

Post by glenstein »

patmorgan23 wrote: post #220
manfredz wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty ways to fund digital commons, including people volunteering their time.

A leading web browser can not be built and maintained by volunteers.

Right. Firefox stands alone as the most successful self financed full stack browser that's ever been made without being subsidized by outside revenue streams. I like to use the example of Opera. If "make a better browser" won market share and business creativity won stable revenue, we'd all be using Opera right now because (sorry Mozilla), no browser company was ever better than Opera in my opinion.

In 2026 the rules to making a good browser are (1) already be a trillion dollar company, (2) use Chromium, (3) have some form of distribution lock-in over billions of devices. Otherwise you're cooked. Mozilla swims against the stream better than anyone.

Re: Mozilla Thunderbolt

#232

Post by nashashmi »

shmoil wrote: post #222

Mozilla Thunderbolt? Why not "Phyrefox"? They are so incompetent, they could not even come up with a name sufficiently different from their own product.

Think of it as a product similar to Thunderbird, emailing/chatting with a computer instead of a person. But I agree the name should have been sufficiently different. Thunderbolt would have been a great name for an email server.

Re: Mozilla Thunderbolt

#233

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

realusername wrote: post #173
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just puts them behind for some stuff. Yeah, it really undermines their ability to compromise user security and privacy.

There's a lot of good use-cases of Web usb, you can't just cut everything which might have privacy aspects otherwise the browsers wouldn't have canvas or even gpu rendering.

There's a reason that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/canvasblocker... exists, though; a reasonable person could argue that firefox should be restricting canvas/gpu more than it does.

Re: Mozilla Thunderbolt

#234

Post by philipallstar »

ryanleesipes wrote: post #92
LandoCalrissian wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird was literally asking for donations just a few days ago?

This was built with money from an grant from Mozilla. See the bottom of this page: https://www.thunderbolt.io/announcing-thunderbolt

Mozilla gave Mozilla a grant, so that's all there is to it I suppose.

Re: Mozilla Thunderbolt

#235

Post by PaulHoule »

patmorgan23 wrote: post #220
manfredz wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty ways to fund digital commons, including people volunteering their time.

A leading web browser can not be built and maintained by volunteers.

The EU says it cares about privacy. although it's actions have normalized enshittification; the EU could fully fund Firefox or a Firefox fork or another browser in a second and stop all the trackers right in their tracks.

Re: Mozilla Thunderbolt

#236

Post by PaulHoule »

sylos wrote: post #209
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very cool! I'd go as far to say it's a great browser in fact. I simply want it to exist and be such in perpetuity and lead by example like it has in the past. I see it as a follower instead of a leader these days, largely to Google, but also Safari and to some degree Edge (by simply stealing the blink renderer) The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a s…

What are the other competing browsers? There's chrome(and the derivatives), safari, firefox? safari exists only because of ios lockin. Aren't most other browsers an increasingly smaller share? Genuine question.

It's a problem. I use Firefox as my daily driver -- it used to be I ran into incompatible sites once a month or less except for YouTube which intermittently punishes users for browsing with Firefox. Now I have a serious problem every week like an online vendor or bank or something that doesn't work with Firefox.

Firefox is a little slow for an internal application we have that loads 40,000 rows of data into a grid but otherwise all our stuff works with it because I develop Firefox first and I think a few of us are all that really stands between Firefox and oblivion and probably are doing more work than a lot of the people they have on the payroll.

Re: Mozilla Thunderbolt

#237

Post by debugnik »

ryanleesipes wrote: post #88
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird currently runs entirely on donations, even though they have paid products in the pipeline. I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group. You can read how they spent money in 2024 [1]. [1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...

No, this was built with money from an grant from Mozilla.

No what? That doesn't contradict their comment about Thunderbird.

Re: Mozilla Thunderbolt

#239

Post by rothific »

anildash wrote: post #217
rothific wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that wasn't phrased well- it's "revenue" positive meaning donation money covers more than the expenses

That’s literally what the phrase means. Can’t help if people don’t know what words mean. It was phrased fine, it wasn’t _read_ well.

Fair point :)

Re: Mozilla Thunderbolt

#240

Post by PaulHoule »

maxloh wrote: post #202
time4tea wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is pretty cool. Use it every day. Blocks ads Multi account containers Dev tools very good I never notice that it is in any way slow, except for those sites that need infinity cpu on any browser, like jira. What specifically is the issue? To my mind it quietly just gets on with things.

In contrast, the Multi-Account Containers system is the primary reason I avoid Firefox. While it is meant to be an alternative to Chrome's profile switching, it is more a workaround than a complete replacement. I need entirely different sets of extensions for personal, work, and school environments, something containers can't do. Firefox's actual profile support is beyond terrible. To launch a separate instance, Fire…

Myself the profile support is the absolute worst thing about Chrome. I just want to log into some web site, I don't want to fight with the profiles to get things done.

For those few applications where I really would need profiles I will just open a different browser, so I still keep Edge/Chrome/Opera around for that rare situation. I don't need something that complicates my life every single click but it is the whole ideology of the Google Economy that they want you to spend 1% of attention on things that matter to you and 99% on things that don't.

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