591–600 of 761 posts
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How’s the stability on Orion lately? I want to use it be plugin compatible was too dicey.
Orion crashed way too often for me. I used Orion for a month or two and switched back to Firefox in early July.
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Occasionally pushing a bad update is a symptom of having 10x as many Devs pushing 10x as many features each month. Even if Googles QA process was triple as good as Mozilla's, the users would still see more breakage.
I don't think you can scale or compare like that numerically. Every commit isn't a chance for it to break for users because they bundle however many commits into a release and resources required to test the release don't scale per commit.
Risks like that scale closer to the number of features/number of Devs, since Devs can be fiddling with server side config outside the release process.
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No, there are non-US competitors. Qwant, Mojeek, Seznam... You might reply, "but they're small" or "I haven't heard of them". Well, how do you think that came to be? Besides, I'm replying to a comment about the wider trust case against google. It's not just about search engines.
Seznam took over 10 seconds for me to load start to finish and I'm on gigabit fiber. It has no English language option. Maybe that's why I haven't heard of them? Although Qwant looks kind of nice and obviously localized. I also think it's interesting that I know about Kagi already but don't know about Mojeek despite Kagi using their results. I fully agree that Google is a monopolist that has been oppressing the searc…
It may have a lot to do with them not having to develop a search engine from scratch though, since they use the Bing API for their results. Mojeek predates them by some years but does their own crawling/indexing/ranking.
Even Ecosia who are essentially identical on the back-end (Bing results) market themselves on planting trees for every search and I see them mentioned a bunch. Interestingly they don't seem to factor in the energy consumed on Bing's side of the search - where the heavy lifting of data is done.
Also that US investors have a much bigger risk appetite means the likes of Neeva (who IIRC were also using other's results) can spring into existence and seemingly get a love in from the press because of their big tech connection.
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They've been trying to make a car for the past decade, arguably an easier task than making a search engine.
A car is definitely not easier than a search engine. Also they canceled the car.
It’s called out that Google pays Mozilla to have Google be the default search engine in Firefox. I worry this ruling will lead to Google ceasing those payments, effectively killing Mozilla as a going concern.
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Or maybe Mozilla will focus more on Firefox again.
No we won’t. We all knew this gravy train was coming to an end. In terms of revenue it’s ~500M per year/~80-something %. Once this stops, there’s no way for us to keep funding operations at the level they’re at.
Good, hopefuilly Mozilla uses this as a chance to strip down all extraneous activities and focus on the core product again.
if $500m is 80% of operating costs, $100m per year sounds fine enough to continue to develop a decent browser.
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No body is forced to do anything. Google can just not pay that money and lose that share of the market. They're not doing that because they want to preserve their monopoly status.
This is silly. People are forced to do all kinds of things. They are forced at gunpoint, they are forced via laws, they are forced via incentives that are so strong they may as well be a gun. As are companies. So, in theory, you are wrong. In practice, even more wrong. If management decided to not pay this money, and gave up that positioning to a competitor, they would be fired. If the board allowed it to continue, t…
I guarantee they are thinking both, but both are pretty much the same statment anyway.
At the very least, I hope the Apple-Google ~~exclusivity~~ default agreement is revoked. I suppose it’ll take another year to figure out the actual remedies though.
I think a year for the remedies is optimistic - could drag on for a while. Also worth mentioning that it is not an exclusivity agreement - it is a default agreement.
But it kind of is an exclusivity agreement. Have you ever tried to change the default search on an iPhone? There is only a very small list of curated searches you are allowed to pick from, and you cant add your own.
I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds. Why? Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal). So what's going to happen? Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid an…
"They simply have a better product" I disagree. 100% they had a better product, but they have absolutely mangled it over the last few updates. Honestly, if I wanted the opinion of randomnumbers45123 on Reddit, I'd just search Reddit. Google achieved dominance ~25 years ago by being better than the alternatives, and the other search engines pretty much withered away rapidly. They (Google) are in a very precarious posi…
And when we talk about walled garden, fans always said customer chose it. No, customer is dictated. For walled garden owner billion reasons.