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Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#321
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox as my daily browser. If i have a website that fails to work, I might try chrome maybe once every two months. And then it usually also doesn't work. So for all browsing I do on the internet, Firefox works like a charm

well I use it because it can handle 2000 tabs on my m1 macbook air (16gb ram) ... damn do I have adhd?????

Amateur numbers... I've tested over 10000 (not right now)... It used to get really slow after 9000, but things seem to have improved.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#322

> Mozilla believes in the value of an open and free (and thus ad-supported) web. > and thus ad-supported What a sad view of the web. Advertisement is a net-negative for society.

Nothing wrong with an unobtrusive, not tracking, banner on a side of a page. Related to what the page is about.

While that would be miles better, there's still plenty wrong with it. Most advertising is designed to trick people into either buying something that they don't need at all (e.g. consuming more soda instead of drinking water, or getting some gadget, or more clothes than they need), or into buying the an objectively worse option (e.g. buying a more expensive fridge that will actually last less time). This is the goal of B2C advertising: tricking people to behave less rationally in their consumption behavior.

The only way to avoid this is to just block ads - even unobtrusive content-relevant ads. You may think ads can't trick you, but that has been shown time and time again to be false.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well I use it because it can handle 2000 tabs on my m1 macbook air (16gb ram) ... damn do I have adhd?????

Get the OneTab extension. It'll save and close all those tabs. That way you won't have Firefox crashing during startup once you exceed the number of tabs it can handle (a few thousand).

I've had it function just fine around 9000 tabs.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#324
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can install uBlock Origin on Firefox mobile; it's the only reason I use it.

Oh wow TIL. Thanks, that is amazing. I just looked it up. 2023 was when it started. I'm surprised Android even allows something like this.

Yeah at some point it wasn't possible. I think Mozilla did some workaround by having a bunch of wetted extensions?

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#325

CEO > 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. LOL the day that Firefox stops me from running what I want is the day I'll get rid of it.

I still think it was a mistake for Firefox to dump its old plugin model. The customisation was a USP for Firefox and many useful tweaks and minor features have never been replaced. Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the big…

It made me stop using FF on android.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#326
When someone working for A is doing something that would clearly harm A to the benefit of B, I usually start wondering if that someone really works for A or there's something fishy going on. Mozilla is wasting a huge load of money coming from the Google agreement (another conflict of interests) to pay huge salaries to their CEO over the years. If there's something they lack it's openness about goals, not money.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#328
There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?

The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them. Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture.

If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20GB of RAM to open 20 tabs ?

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible that people would pay Firefox that much yearly to keep their current user-base from using ad blockers. However, what is impossible is to imagine Firefox would have anything close to their current user base if people were prevented from using ad blockers. Most likely they would shrink to almost 0 users overnight if they did this. There are very few reasons to use Firefox over Chrome or Safari (or e…

That doesn't explain the apparent market share of 2--3%, which is still quite large if you think about. I believe most non-techie users are just lingering, using Firefox just because they used to. Since Firefox doesn't have a built-in ad blocking and the knowledge about adblocking is not universal (see my other comment), it is possible that there are a large portion of Firefox users who don't use adblockers and conve…

Of course, I don't know the actual percent of FF users that use ad block. But I think it's far more likely that it is a majority of current FF users, rather than it being a negligible minority. I think 2-3% of web users is not an implausible approximation of how many people use ad block overall on the web. It's not an obscure technology, it's quite well known, even if few people bother with it.

Edit: actually I'm way off - it seems estimates are typically around 30-40% of overall users on the web having some kind of ad blocker. So, the Firefox percentage being 60-80+% seems almost a given to me.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#330

Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left wi…

> Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. Who is Mozilla's core audience? From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon. > They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, To be fair, it's not entirely their own fault. Competition is strong, especially from Google and Apple. Even with perfect decisions, they likely would st…

> From what I remember, it's not addon-users, as most users never have used even just a single addon.

Source?

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