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Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#551

Post by HanClinto »

izzylan wrote: post #465
miroljub wrote: post #457

The day Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for political reasons, Firefox died. It just took a while for everyone to realise that. That was when they collectively decided that other things are more important to them than the quality and usability of Firefox. The new CEO is just the final nail in their coffin.

Firing someone for being opposed to same-sex marriage is political in the same way firing someone for robbing a bank is.

This is dangerous, faulty thinking.

Equivocating speech and crime as both being "violence" (of similar class, deserving similar response) is a fallacy that lets people justify murder in response to disagreement as long as it's deemed serious enough.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#552

Post by shaky-carrousel »

SoftTalker wrote: post #532
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those companies pay the improvements they want for their usage case, which is usually far removed from what normal users want. I don't really need support for thousands of CPUs and terabytes of RAM.

Do you remember what Linux was like before the big corporations started contributing/supporting it? Just getting X11 working with your video card and monitor could take hours or days. Setting up a single server could easily be a "project" taking weeks. And god forbid you ever had to update it.

That in particular was thanks to the X.Org foundation. And while it made things easier, it didn't take "days" setting up a graphics, it took hours at most. And setting up a server didn't take weeks, it was an 1-2 day task at worst.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#553

Post by agumonkey »

immibis wrote: post #264
agumonkey wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and funnily enough uBO author didn't want any money even though he's making our lives a lot better

Most adblocker developers throughout history have routinely taken millions of dollars to weaken their adblockers, though. That's why we're all using uBO instead of uB.

Must be hard to resist letting some ads through for life changing money...

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#554

Post by agumonkey »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #529
agumonkey wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and funnily enough uBO author didn't want any money even though he's making our lives a lot better

I want to take this opportunity to thank Raymond Hill for his enormous gift to humanity. I've done this many times over the years, and it's always worth the time to do it again. Thank you, gorhill! And thanks to all the people maintaining it and all the filter lists!

seconded

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#555

Post by glenstein »

tziki wrote: post #370
lxgr wrote: post #41

>> 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. > It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”. Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M US…

"Uncharitable interpretation" is putting it mildly. I don't know the context for the quote but imagine being the CEO. You might give one hour interview outlining the tradeoffs you need to do to keep things running, and a random blogger takes a 5 second clip, makes an absurd interpretation and ends up on hackernews.

Right, I was ready for the headline to be this like deep dive into the history of letting go of several engineers, or assessing the costs of purchasing pocket, or a deep dive into source code changes related to dabbling in ad tech or something.

You know, actual reporting sourcing something new. But in truth, it was just extrapolating a bunch of sweet nothings from the freezing of a quote already published in The Verge. It reminds me of Boston media market sports reporting. You're a sports writer, you have a deadline, and you have to take Curt Schilling's press conference and try and turn it into a story. So take something he said and squeeze it dry, trying to extract some implication of clubhouse drama, to drive the next new cycle and survive to your next paycheck as a reporter. That's the grift, that's the grind.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#556

Post by gorjusborg »

throwfaraway135 wrote: post #253

Mozilla CEO compensations 2018: $2,458,350 2020: Over $3 million 2021: $5,591,406. 2022: $6,903,089. 2023: ~$7m Mozilla declined to detail the CEO's salaries for 2024+

... and most of that money comes in the form of sponsored browser/search integration w/ their competitors.

In that set of circumstances, the main qualification for CEO is likely 'plays nice with Google'. Given that, I'm not surprised that Mozilla underperforms.

Beating Google in the browser market might be considered hostile to their sponsors.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#557

Post by glenstein »

rchaud wrote: post #481
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d happily pay $100 a year for Firefox WITH an adblocker as long as part of the money is put towards ongoing internet freedom and preventing attestation

As with all the comments about "I'd pay X dollars to not be the product", it's been shown over and over again that paying money is not going to void corporate desire to simply double dip by raising prices while also showing ads.

Or for a similar point, it's been shown over and over that attempting to crowdsource the revenue is a staggeringly unrealistic response with no real world precedent in the history either of browsers or online crowdsourced funding. You would think that would matter to people who point to that as a possible panacea.

Actual attempts to get users to pay for the browser itself, like what Opera did, simply didn't work and led to the insolvency of the browser and having to sell it off to someone harvesting its users as data.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#558

Post by glenstein »

toss1 wrote: post #433
staticassertion wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are absolutely somersaulting through hoops to try to make "I don't want to do that" into "I'm going to do it" in the comments lol

No, they are accurately observing that the "I don't want to do it" and "feels off mission" statements are FAR weaker than they can be and should be. Such weak statements are either a real mistake or show movement away from those principles which should be bedrock for Mozilla and towards some justification to abandon those principles. It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto…

Instead of criticizing an actual contract to engage with a third party or a code push or an affirmative statement, you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails to indict Mozilla for a hypothetical thing that they explicitly said they're not doing. If that's not scraping the bottom of the barrel, it's only because you're able to imagine an even lower bottom than that that you're willing to reach for.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#559

Post by subsection1h »

prmph wrote: post #528
csdreamer7 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few reasons: I haven't compared it in years, but Firefox's bookmark sync is better than Google's, it is a reason why I have stuck with it. I think Firefox manages hundreds of tabs better than Chrome does as far as memory usage goes. I haven't used Chrome seriously in years, but people continue to complain about how RAM hungry Chrome is so I assume it is still an issue. But Mozilla has been doing odd thing…

It's only Firefox that is never satiated with however much memory I throw at it. Any time my machine slows, the solution is to kill Firefox. Not sure what exactly they are doing wrong.

Do you use Auto Tab Discard?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#560

Post by HanClinto »

phito wrote: post #22
iLoveOncall wrote: post #11

Unfortunately Firefox is basically already dead, it has an incredibly small market share and it will never grow again because their leadership is affected by the corporate mind virus. I know most HN users are on Firefox, but they should get used to an alternative now, not when its inevitable death happens.

What's a good, non-chromium alternative?

I've been hearing good things about Orion browser. My wife has switched to it, but I'm still on Firefox.

Our family is already super happy with Kagi as a web search engine, and it sounds like they're doing good things on the browser side too.

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