281–290 of 352 posts
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Would AWS ever consider hiring someone full-time to work on the compiler itself?
Get in touch with me. (@amazon.com email is in my profile.) I know the right people to get you in touch with to figure out if this could work. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me.
Will this change at Mozilla mean that evolving features in WASM, WebGL and other "advanced but it works on all evergreen browsers" features becomes a less interesting target as Firefox starts to fall behind the leading edge due to lack of developers, but still has enough users to make the "lowest common denominator" fall behind as well?
Or will Firefox keep up somehow?
Or will it stop keeping up, and site/webapp developers working with leading-edge web platform features like evolving WASM just drop FF from concern at the cost of a few percent more users?
I know plenty of developers already don't test or know much about Firefox, and many sites don't work properly on it. I've had a number of commercial sites where I couldn't even login or couldn't pay except by switching to a different browser. But I have the impression people that folks working on leading-edge tech stuff are a bit more likely to include FF in their matrix, and the assumption is FF is quite up to date (more than Safari) so it's worth bothering with as an alternative target.
Does Mozilla not make enough money to sustain long term investments?
Mozilla Corp currently doesn't make much money at all, hence their problems. The majority of their funds come from a recurring Google donation, which has to be renewed every few years.
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There's no technical reason for iOS to not support alternative browsers from the start. It's not about technical reasons.
There's no technical reason for iOS to not support alternative browsers from the start. Why would Apple allow other browser engines that are slower, less power efficient and don't respect user’s privacy at least as much as Webkit to run natively on iOS? Apple continues to add features to block ads from tracking users across the web and to lessen the impact of fingerprinting by trackers. Certainly Google has no intere…
There's your problem. Apple doesn't own the device.. I do.
Apple can "recommend" I use Safari all they want (not unlike MS does with Edge) but if I own the device I should have the right to run any software I want. Full stop.
I always wondered how Rust at Mozilla was sustainable. Maintaining an ecosystem like that and bringing it into an already complex project like a browser is a huge undertaking that probably has eaten up significant amount of manhours. At a Microsoft sized company I'd get it because they can basically blow billions on that sort of thing but I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other…
> I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other products. > I can't imagine that from a standpoint of time investment and technical improvement Rust ever made sense for Firefox to be honest. To put it bluntly: without Rust, Firefox would have very likely not existed anymore. It was severely behind in terms of performance, and no good tooling was available to fix that without incurrin…
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They need to find a build new products to actually make a decent income. Firefox alone doesn't do that. They are still committed to the core browser.
When their other products sell, they would probably just use a chromium fork with FF branding and some tweaks to make it resemble FF to sell nostalgia like Ubuntu.
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Microsoft and Google allow alternative browser engines. Apple does not.
Can you use alternative browsers on Chromebooks (sans rooting)?
Practically speaking though, this is all command-line heavy and developer centric. Your typical Chromebook user can't/won't.
I'm actually grappling with this issue right now.. I'm a long time Firefox user and picked up a Lenovo Duet ChromeOS device to serve as a replacement for my cheap Android tablet.
Turns out.. I really like the form factor and am using it a lot (typing on it right now!). But the Firefox Android apps are a pretty terrible experience and since I don't plan on using this for dev, I don't want to jump through all the crostini hoops. So here I am, using Chrome..
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Money is fungible.
Not when conditions are attached to the payment or donation.
Group A gets $Z in donation with conditions attached so it only gets used by Group A.
Then the organization assigns $X - $Z funding to Group A and assigns $Y + $Z funding to Group B. Group A is happy because it still has $X from the donation and doesn't complain. Group B is happy because it can now spend $2.5 million on the CEO.
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> invented the concept of open source software or that software doesn't exist outside the context of a "profit model." To be fair, the existence of open source software that is very expensive to develop has always dependend on big companies paying for it. Firefox could be funded by several companies in collaboration, but as of right now, do you know any collection of companies with deep pockets that aren't happy enou…
> To be fair, the existence of open source software that is very expensive to develop has always dependend on big companies paying for it. I think you're getting the causality wrong there. A lot of the "open-source" (often barely) software built and funded by large corporations has a tendency of accumulating endless technical debt and complexity, and being inaccessible to outside developers. Not dissimilar to much pr…
But even taking into account removing unnecessary complexity, a web browser that users will choose is still complex, and has a very high compatibility bar, which is also a moving target.
You might say, does the browser need to much in it? Well, for users to choose it as a daily driver, it needs to work with web standards, formal and informal, and with nearly all sites. The web standards accrue complexity due to commercial development too. So do expectations, e.g. for smooth rendering, running games, etc.
An open source "small" browser which avoids that complexity is certainly possible to write, but few people would, or could, use it as their daily driver.
(Case in point. I used an open source-ish phone for a few years, a Nokia N900. It was great fun. But ultimately I had to stop using it because the browser increasingly couldn't handle ordinary sites.)
Do you know of any "serious open-source software" of comparable scale, which does not require big companies paying for it, even taking into account the argument around unnecessary complexity?
Not much comes to mind. Linux kernel, GCC, RISC-V, things like that are predominantly developed by paid workers, whether from companies or by government & academic grants.
Debian comes to mind as a possible exception but I'm not sure, because so much of it is on the back of big projects which are themselves funded.