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Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

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Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#631

Post by broken-kebab »

eloisant wrote: post #571
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?

Brave is just one of the dozen Chromium-based browsers. It's still Chromium.

It's Chromium-based, sure. But it blocks ads and does it well

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#632

Post by the_af »

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…

> Incorrect, Raymond Hill authored both extensions, both being forks of HTTP Switchboard.

You're right, let me try to amend my statement: at the point uBlock Origin was forked, Raymond disowned the earlier uBlock, and it had become unrelated to him, hence "not the same author" (even if it was started by him). My point was that Raymond didn't want to become involved in the pay-per-ads-let-through scheme the commenter I was replying to mentioned.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#633

Post by BeFlatXIII »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #547
PaulHoule wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing as much to keep Firefox alive as anybody. Wherever I've worked as a dev in a decade I've always developed Firefox-first and let the testers turn up Chrome issues. So the products that I am involved with just work with Firefox all the time. I know there are a lot of people like me, people who are passionate and engaged with technology but have problems with "big tech" and if they turn people like me away tha…

I developed and tested my personal site on Firefox. If I were a professional web developer, I'd work just like you do. But let's not kid ourselves. We're an absolute minority. For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts. Actually they're likely to write Firefox off as some irrelevant niche market the company can afford…

> For every one of us, there are hundreds, thousands of developers who literally do not give a shit so long as their paychecks hit their accounts

May our new AI co-workers put those thousands into the poorhouse for shoddy worksmanship.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#635

Post by tune-nova »

DonHopkins wrote: post #565
nephihaha wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your opinion on Brave?

[flagged]

You can't even imagine how little the rest of the world cares about this.

Do people in California care that slightly under 50% of my state's population are at or below poverty level? Do they care that most of the rest spend 55-60% of our income on food? Do they care that our life expectancy is 15 years lower than that in California, mostly because of terrible pollution caused by extraction and processing of minerals which our beloved government then sells to the US and several European countries, and pockets the money?

Do they care about conflict minerals in general, used to build electronics for their enjoyment? Have they done anything about this?

This American political bickering does not even register on our radars when choosing a web browser.

"Europe's problems are the world's problems but the world's problems are not Europe's problems.", as India's Mr. Jaishankar is fond of saying.

The same can be said about the US.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#636

Post by someNameIG »

rbits wrote: post #200
darkwater wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which country are you seeing that? For me the biggest offender are usually Google products and sometimes the lazy-coded website written by incompetents and whose audience is the tech illiterate (i.e. some websites involving schools/teaching) that just tell you "use latest Chrome just to be sure, download here" to, well, just be sure. Notable mentions for government websites that are like 10 years in the past and t…

I live in Australia and I can't log into government services using my myGov account on Firefox. Works fine on Chromium.

Just to test I just logged into myGov then through Firefox and it worked fine.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#637

Post by doubled112 »

throwaway613745 wrote: post #607
samgranieri wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you tried using pi-hole or adblock plus running on a raspberry pi on your network? whenever i'm off my home wifi network, i have wireguard configured to connect home and get me that ad blocking. it's so nice. yes, i prefer to use brave for personal stuff and i use edge for work stuff (reasons,,, don't ask)

I ran AdGuard Home for a while but it was causing too many problems for everyone else at home so I stopped. These days I’m using AdGuard on iOS and ublock origin with Firefox on everything else.

It took me a long time to get the allow lists dialed in, but I think it was still worth it. My wife may disagree since she was the most common victim.

It amazes me that every link the kid's school sends is a tracking link, and not always the same tracker.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#638

Post by toss1 »

glenstein wrote: post #558
toss1 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

>>you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails

It is exactly the opposite — it is reading the actual language used for its intended meaning.

Every CEO is expected to not only understand the issues he faces and is managing, but to ALSO carefully choose the words to describe the situation and the intentions of the organization he leads.

When a CEO makes a statement about what should be a core fundamental principle of an organization, we can certainly expect that CEO to choose their words carefully.

Those words are, or at least should be, the exact opposite of "tea leaves and chicken entrails".

If the CEO is sloppy and the chosen words should actually be considered "tea leaves and chicken entrails", that is a different problem of a less-than-competent CEO.

If those words were actually chosen carefully, consider these two statements:

The actual statement: "[I don't] want to do that. It feels off-mission"

A different statement: "This is a core fundamental principle of Mozilla and I will not lead the company in that direction — not on my watch".

One could technically say "they both say 'Not today'".

But that would be absurd, and stupidly throwing out significant meaning in what the CEO chose to say and how he chose to say it.

He made the first vague statement with weasel words instead of something resembling the bold and unambiguous statement resembling the second statement.

The statement he did make is "I don't want to", which type of statement has often preceded an eventual "sorry, we had to".

There is a lot to make Firefox users nervous, and his choice of statement here did not help matters.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#639

Post by chankstein38 »

lolc wrote: post #514
mplewis wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do there have to be AI features in Firefox? No one wants them. They make the browser less secure. They distract from the mission.

I found the local translation feature nice on a few occasions.

I liked it the few times it worked but so many times it's chosen to do things like translate Japanese into Spanish when I speak English natively and never would've chosen Spanish as the target language. It just feels convoluted and poorly implemented, like most AI features in most software.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#640

Post by pseudalopex »

graeme wrote: post #599
pavel_lishin wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.

Where this analogy breaks is that at the time (2008), Eich's position had majority support in the US. The proposition he wad funding passed with majority support. Mixed marriages by contrast had overwhelming support in 2008. Eich didn't suddenly come out against anything in 2014. People dug up his prior funding. Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic. You can be…

> Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic.

This was an utterly unreasonable description of being judged unqualified for 1 job.

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