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Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#621

Post by redundantly »

ajdude wrote: post #255

I'm going to repost/merge a few comments I made about this a while ago: I dropped firefox 9 months so after they updated their privacy policy and removed "we don't sell your data" from their FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612 Mozilla has hired a lot of execs from Meta and bought an ad company, looking through a lot of their privacy policy at the time, a lot of it involves rewriting it to say that they…

> this time they actuality sold out their own customers.

The end users are not their customers. They haven't been for a long, long time.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#622

Post by rsync »

array_key_first wrote: post #615
saithir wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people like to imagine it's not viable because the most commonly known adblocker refuses to release the version for it. Negative news somehow stick better. Fortunately it's not the only one and for example Adguard works perfectly fine.

Safari is even further behind chrome in feature set than Firefox.

… which is a positive, right?

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#623

Post by kevinrineer »

bambax wrote: post #362
austhrow743 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their Google dependency is their existential problem. They're limited by what they can do with "making Firefox better" while effectively being a client state. An off the books Google department. Doomed to forever being a worse funded Chrome because they can't do too much to anger their patron. By selling browser UI real estate to AI companies[0] they reduce the power Google has over them. If they get to the point whe…

Yeah but is this entirely true though? It seems Google pays FF just for existing, to protect them from antitrust litigation (or what's left of it); so Google can't really stop paying FF and can't try to kill it, as its death would be extremely counter productive. FF may be freer than it thinks.

Its not impossible that someday a new non-chromium browser reaches feature parity (or close enough) with the chromium browsers. At that point, Google could stop worrying about funding Firefox's development.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#624

Post by wrxd »

mrtksn wrote: post #305
MindDraft wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while i may agree with the first line, rest are little skewed perspective. > People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. hate subscription?? may be. if it's anything like Adobe then yes, people will hate. that constant update, is something planted by these corporates, and their behavior manipulation tactics. People were happily paying for perpetual software, which they can "…

People weren't happily paying, there was huge pirate business that was run on porn, gambling ads and spyware revenue. Then there were organizations with lots of lawyers paid by the "pay once use forever" companies to enforce the pay part because people didn't want to pay. One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free. That's why t…

It wasn’t one time fee though. The one time fee bought a copy of the software and its patches. A couple of years later a new version would come out and people had the choice between keeping using the old version or buying the new one.

To convince people to buy they had to add genuinely useful features. I would have bought a new version with new features and better performance. I wouldn’t have bought a new version same as the previous one with AI crammmed in it

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#625

Post by LtWorf »

glenstein wrote: post #563
matthewkayin wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relax, man. It's perfectly reasonable to say that you would stop using a browser if they killed adblock support. Saying so is not "tough guy" syndrome because switching which browser you use is not a tough thing to do.

It is tough guy syndrome, because it's projecting a hypothetical scenario to performatively declare what you would do in that hypothetical, attempting to hold a third party accountable for something they're not actually doing. Try to follow the ball instead of lecturing me to relax ;)

Did you read the post? They are clearly considering doing it.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#626

Post by neltnerb »

soulofmischief wrote: post #567
the_af wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the same author.

Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard. Raymond got overwhelmed with managing an open source project of uBlock's size and let Chris Aljoudi take over. Adblock later purchased it from Chris. Meanwhile, Raymond had forked uBlock, creating uBO, and continued to improve it on his own terms. After seeing what happened with Adblock, he has no intention of selling either uMatr…

I love uMatrix, but all evidence is that they stopped developing it in 2021.

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

I don't know the implications of that, it's the only tool I've ever found that lets me feel in control of what programs my browser is executing.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#627

Post by array_key_first »

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.

There are zero alternatives to Firefox that aren't 99% Firefox.

Firefox is a unique browser that is, in many ways, positioned to be the best browser. It's fast, fairly privacy preserving, and not built on chromium.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#628

Post by array_key_first »

rsync wrote: post #622
array_key_first wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is even further behind chrome in feature set than Firefox.

… which is a positive, right?

Maybe, maybe not. It's getting dangerously close to the modern day IE, where some websites just don't work right and everyone has to do arcane shit to make their websites cross platform.

It's also a closed source browser developed by Apple. It's not competing with Firefox. Everyone contemplating switching to safari over Firefox are not being honest - they're not even on the same playing field.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#629

Post by drfolgers »

9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #353
throwaway613745 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades. If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB. The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.

> The web is unusable without a proper Adblock. It's a privacy nightmare as well. Few people reason how much data they give away to a host of shady companies just by letting ads display.

Ads and page level analytics aren’t the only thing gathering data.

There is server-side now (and previously) hosted by the site owner.

It’s a lost cause to fight this. I admire you all for using FF because uBO just for the experience, but it’s only a partial data block. Serverside and thumbprinting- you can’t be anonymous even with Tor, VPN, etc.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#630

Post by broken-kebab »

eqvinox wrote: post #566
mancerayder wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Brave so persona-non-grata? I find that it's a 'don't ask don't tell' because of some ancient politics. If Firefox is becoming suspect, WHAT is left? I found Chrome+adblockers NOT good enough. I like (and hate) Brave's shield, as I never figured out how to use wildcards to whitelist a whole domain / subdomain, it seems per-host. But that Brave shield WORKS. Now people are going back to Chrome? Really?

The crypto bullshit Brave was (and somehow still is) pulling is way worse than Firefox's enshittificAItion.

Not really. You can use Brave completely ignoring crypto side, and it won't complain.
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