Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#701

Post by b112 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 9:40 PM UTC

Iolaum wrote: post #114

The web without ublock origin is a hellscape. Whenever I try another browser, I immediately go back to firefox. Do these people even know their users? For example: Fedora Silverblue default Firefox install had an issue with some Youtube videos due to codecs. So I tried watching youtube on Chromium. Ads were so annoying I stopped watching by the second time I tried to watch a video. Stopped watching youtube until I un…

It's amusing how much ads hurt, once you're weaned off of them.

Even with traditional TV, growing up, I didn't really mind ads. Then I setup MythTV years ago, and had commercial skip... and of course just downloaded things without commercials too.

When I'd visit my parents back then, any commercial felt like intense agony. So this isn't just about the web, it's really about useless annoying juke being fed to you, when you're used to not having it.

The closest I can compare it to, is once I rented an airb&b which was under a freeway, beside a bridge, and adjacent to another freeway. Yet after a while I just sort of got used to most of the noise.

I wonder if the CEO of Mozilla doesn't use adblock, and just doesn't, literally, understand.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#702

Post by Dwedit » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 9:41 PM UTC

invaliduser wrote: post #685

blubber wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When I use a text-only browser then no "adblock" is necessary" So you browser as if it were 1999? Yup, no ads back then.

The first ad blocker was released in 1996 [1] and in 1999 we had a lot of shiny, blinking and very colorful ads already [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking#History [2] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/web-banners-in-t...

1996 is a surprise, I thought WebWasher (http local proxy ad remover) was first.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#703

Post by sedatk » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 9:42 PM UTC

II2II wrote: post #467

mattacular wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, Categorically untrue and weird revisionism. Basically the opposite of what actually happened.

I agree with the untrue and revisionism bit, but I disagree with it being the opposite of what happened. People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. W…

> People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible

People were doing that even in ARPANET days. The commercial aspect was seen as a strong incentive to make ARPANET accessible by the masses.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#704

Post by seanhunter » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #128

nialv7 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money. No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.

Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries. Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.

This is completely untrue in my experience. I use firfox exclusively on my personal laptop and have done exclusively for years. I don’t even have chromium installed.

I can’t remember the last time a website was unusable on firefox. It’s certainly not common.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#705

Post by Dwedit » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #612

mghackerlady wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an extension that limits JS to things that actually improve websites (like the bare minimum needed to render a page usable under most metrics)

uMatrix, from the same author of uBO. It's been officially unsupported for years but it still works and it's UI is better then the UI of NoScript and of course much better than the incomprehensible subsystem of uBO that should have replaced uMatrix.

It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox. uMatrix has bugs that cause it to randomly delete your cookies, or occasionally fail to block a request (race condition? Looking at logger shows an incorrect domain on some requests)

There are community-made forks which fix the cookies problem, like nuTensor.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#706

Post by seanhunter » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

2b3a51 wrote: post #562

glenstein wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I mean, I'm sure there have been cases where I've switched to Chrome for certain things. I just got a custom viewfinder for my partner for Christmas, is showing a bunch of photos of the cruise that we went on. And they have an online editor for it, but the editor seemed to be glitching when using Firefox. So I moved to Chrome. Later I realized I was just misunderstanding and it actually just worked fine in Fire…

Most of the service sites I use are fine in Firefox running on Linux. The only thing I use that is problematic is the Microsoft 365 with Teams portal an employer uses. So I have Chromium just for that one.

Teams is straight up broken on web and in its native client. Not sure it’s fair to blame firefox for that.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#707

Post by pseudalopex » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #686

pavel_lishin wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product. He doesn't have to share all of them, but we have to have enough overlap for him to consider me & my friends enough of a human being to share the same rights that he does. As another commenter pointed out, there are beliefs heinous enough that will override the quality of optional…

Marriage is a right?

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.[1]

[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/1/

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#708

Post by iso1631 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 9:48 PM UTC

nephihaha wrote: post #327

KAMSPioneer wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already said "Chromium-based browsers."

I was meaning specifically.

I have no opinion on Chrome skins and forks as they are still chromium

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#709

Post by weare138 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 9:54 PM UTC

For fuck sake, for-profit side of Mozilla, get a damn grip!
Update, since this is getting traction on Reddit

I'm not against Mozilla making money. Like a regular citizen needs to make money, companies and even nonprofits need it too.

Don't second guess yourself OP. Firefox is not a product. It's an open-source project countless people have contributed their time and dime to over the years. The Mozilla corporation didn't create Firefox, the open-source community did. Mozilla was entrusted to be the stewards of the project and have repeatedly violated that trust. Mozilla is commoditizing other people's hard work while enriching themselves in the process at the expense of the community and abused the trust we placed in them to get away with it.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#710

Post by selectodude » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 9:59 PM UTC

legacynl wrote: post #694

jrflowers wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On iOS, Safari is simple and sufficient, but I would prefer UBO there, however we all know Apple will never allow extensions for Safari. fwiw Safari on iOS does allow some extensions and uBlock Origin Lite is free in the iOS App Store.

ublock origin lite is the knee-capped version that is also available in chrome. I haven't tried it, but it is technically not able to block all ads.

I’ve found Wipr 2.0 has been able to block all ads (even YouTube) but it’s unable to hide itself so there are sites that block my ability to read them.