491–500 of 1001 posts
Are we now stuck with this vacuous corporate virtue signalling forever, or just until the globalist/leftist/whatever-ists finally achieve the absolute tyranny they seem to be seeking?
It's wild to live in a world where a guiding philosophy of maybe we as a society should make best efforts to treat people with maximum kindness is mistaken for "absolute tyranny".
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> Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. This is short term thinking. A slightly better Firefox tomorrow is nice I guess, buy I care way more about being able to use Firefox in 2030, or 2040. Making a browser is not looking like a business model that is going to make you last forever - not when Google is your competition. Their business model already depends on…
There is a large gap between "focus on the browser" and "make Firefox slightly better." People forget that Firefox gave the world tabbed browsing. Sure, it was around before, but Firefox was the drive and impetus that moved it from a niche idea to the default option across every browser . That was over a decade ago. Firefox has the opportunity to execute a vision of modern web-browsing again. And, frankly, we really…
Opera was the source of browser interface innovation and I wish we could replicate that process. They also invented popup blocking, speed dial (the default blank tab UI now on every browser), actual page zoom (before it was just font size increasing/decreasing), and a bunch of things that failed a like mouse gestures and built-in torrent/feedreader.
One big thing Opera didn't invent was the use of the address bar for more than URLs, so you could search and autocomplete on it. I think some combination of Chrome+Firefox iterated on that concept.
[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…
I would not be surprised if it was the same for other users. It results in implicitly giving less benefit of the doubt when another potential controversy comes up.
Other application developers are held to a lower standard because they have already come out the other side - people already simply assume the worst about them. The paradoxical anger comes from the fact that they don't want to do the same with Mozilla, but feel more and more that they'll have to.
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Counterpoint: Apple when Jobs came back. Sometimes the answer to a company which is trying too many things at random is to drastically reduce the dispersion of effort, and focus ruthlessly. It's very hard to do psychologically, though. IMO Mozilla would probably be better served, business-wise, as being "the customizable Chrome". It would be a much smaller business (i.e. less IP under development), but it could be pr…
Your counterpoint is a little confusing to me. Apple reversed their sinking fortunes when they released the iPhone. That seems to make the exact opposite of your point.
Mozilla management has me puzzled. They have a position that is incredibly strong, lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to Chrome or Edge. "But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests" Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There a…
Every day I wake up to work on my own business and promise myself to do the opposite of this.
Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't h…
I don't use Firefox anymore and I don't love Mozilla, but I appreciate the efforts they do make in favor of privacy and interoperability and especially the fact that still make the best fairly drop-in alternative to the engine with 80% domination of the browser market. I still would recommend Firefox to any nontechnical person who uses Chrome or Edge now (it's at least as fast, uses maybe 40% less RAM, and just happens to be less evil). (And I personally still use a browser that benefits from their work, Palemoon, which is also flawed (corrupted to a much smaller degree than FF by a much less evil search engine than Google — DuckDuckGo — but I'd use any browser —even the old Edge, if someone maintained a version for my OS— that's not based on Chromium, if it slowed down the growth of Google's evil empire/monopoly)).
Mozilla 2010: "join us, don't work for the man, work for mankind!" (this was their actual slogan) Mozilla 2020: "well actually, work for the man" (or woman in this case) Sadly, even with Mozilla Foundation getting 40M in donations they need the Corporation to pay the bills (including Mitchell Baker's 2.5M/y salary) The fact that this makes it less likely Firefox continues to be competition for Chrome is bad news for…
The "new focus" isn't that new, it's been the same since Baker became CEO, and it's a focus on making Mitchell Baker really, really rich. Mozilla's privacy branding is in direct conflict with Baker's vision of some kind of corporate entity that can pay her a lot of money. Apple can do this because they are filthy rich themselves, Mozilla's puny market share means that increasing their revenue will require them to use…
A potential new non-profit would need backing from some very large companies, donations from privite people would likely get no where near enough.
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The "new focus" isn't that new, it's been the same since Baker became CEO, and it's a focus on making Mitchell Baker really, really rich. Mozilla's privacy branding is in direct conflict with Baker's vision of some kind of corporate entity that can pay her a lot of money. Apple can do this because they are filthy rich themselves, Mozilla's puny market share means that increasing their revenue will require them to use…
> I think a LibreOffice-style hard fork will be necessary at some point with a nonprofit carrying Firefox forward. https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/