321–330 of 384 posts
I think it'd be great to have this integrated into the browser and be able to get a sense for what's real or "likely fake" when browsing the web of tomorrow.
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... one which they also made a nice little profit of. $150M in the non-voting stock they bought in 1997 turned into $550M in 2003 when they sold most of it.
Ouch. They must've wished that they kept that stock for a few more years.
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Remember "Firefox OS"?
It was a fantastic gamble IMO. Low chance of success, but enormous payoff if it had succeeded. Imagine a commercially viable alternative to iPhone and Android with multiple manufacturers and a completely open platform. Ultimately, I think they came to market too late and Android moved into the niche (low end market) they were targeting.
After being abandoned by Mozilla, FirefoxOS was resurrected as KaiOS. For a while, it was the second most popular mobile operating system in India, mostly because Reliance decided to use it for some of their low-end Jio phones[1]. Where would FirefoxOS be today if Mozilla had stuck with it? If hundreds of millions of people had their first taste of the Internet via FirefoxOS and not Android?
I've been a Firefox user since 2004, but I don't think Mozilla understands how to conduct business. They're an ideological organization first and foremost. It's not a bad thing -- we need somebody to stand up to Big Tech -- but it means that they probably won't be taking a big share of any market except by complete accident.
You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mo…
> It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. That's exactly what they're doing with the biggest ad trackers and browser vendors. A lot of Mozilla's "side-projects" are stupid and I also agree they should focus more on Firefox, but this one is pretty in line with their general mission of "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".
Smoke and mirrors more like it. They collaborate with Facebook and Google all the time. 80%-90% of their revenue comes from Google. Fighting the 'big guys' for real would mean shutting shop and never to be seen again.
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I'm happy for them to branch out, but it is discouraging that once every 3-4 months I run into a bug or feature I need, google it, and am taken to a bug report in their tracker from 5-10 years ago that hasn't been touched.
I don't know of any software projects of comparable size and complexity that doesn't have years-old bugs languishing in limbo. This is the normal state of affairs for a web browser, and it's the result of human-factor bottlenecks that aren't easy to solve even for well-capitalized projects. Large projects end up having subsystems that work reliably enough, such that their developers can afford to shift their attentio…
A primary software at work is $1,500 to $10,000 a seat (depending on extensions) plus 10% annual maintenance. Our department annual fee is ~$70,000. I have a long list of "vote up this enhancement request or bug to get it fixed" that goes back almost two decades. (It's hard to identify the oldest because the vendor has switched tracking platforms twice.)
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Remember "Firefox OS"?
Firefox OS was not that bad. It was sold on terrible phones. Anyway it led to tons of APIs that we use now, like passing phone camera and microphone input to the browser.
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Mozilla is almost entirely funded by half a billion dollars a year from Google. They are a vassal.
I can compare it in a way when Rage Against the Machine signed with a major label conscious that the tradeoff was worth it. >"Evil Empire" entered the Billboard charts at No. 1, which reflects the broad audience the band has built. "I personally never thought that we'd ever sell a single record," Morello recalls, but it looks as if signing with Epic has worked. "True, we are a major-label band," he concedes. "But we'…
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> It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. That's exactly what they're doing with the biggest ad trackers and browser vendors. A lot of Mozilla's "side-projects" are stupid and I also agree they should focus more on Firefox, but this one is pretty in line with their general mission of "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".
> "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will". Smoke and mirrors more like it. They collaborate with Facebook and Google all the time. 80%-90% of their revenue comes from Google. Fighting the 'big guys' for real would mean shutting shop and never to be seen again.
Has Google ever mentioned anything about privacy? (privacy from hackers doesn't count, that's security) Do you think Apple, with the joke of a browser that is Safari and basically zero stake in the web, would be able to keep Google from turning the web into its own closed little sandbox?
Who would say "if Chrome kills adblockers, switch to our browser" and be able to actually sustain it, not just keep their Chromium fork slightly out of date for as long as they can get away with?
The only reason Firefox has been able to survive this long after Chrome's launch is Mozilla's historic importance. A new player could never dream to compete with Google - even Microsoft failed! If Mozilla folds, who else do you think will be able to compete with Google? Stallman himself?? This is the real world and compromises must be made.