A quarter century of Mozilla [LWN.net]

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 17:50 UTC (Fri) by hDF (subscriber, #121224) [Link] (6 responses)

I use Firefox (not because it's better), but at this point Mozilla's existence might be more useful to Google and to Mozilla's management than anyone else. Perhaps that explains why the majority of their revenue comes from a direct "competitor".

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 5:16 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Their VPN service is nice. I pay for both Mozilla and ProtonVPN.

For my PopOS desktop, the Mozilla one was far more reliable, as the proton one kept borking the network interfaces and routes when DNS hiccuped - even with the kill switch off - which inevitably lead to me needing to futz around with nm on the cli to fix.

Haven't used thunderbird for a bit, but there's not much else in terms of a full-featured thick GUI mail client that comes close, afaik.

And firefox works fine.. so they're quite useful to me ;)

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 6, 2023 11:07 UTC (Thu) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link] (4 responses)

Google messed up Chromium enough that Firefox actually feels better to me, these days. No multi-device sync, Linux user interface bugs (wrong corner shape when you tile the window).

I wouldn't use Chromium at all if I wasn't forced to for work reasons (because Slack refuses to support any browser that is not Chrome).

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 10, 2023 18:55 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

Slack (the website app, not the Electron thing) works fine in Firefox here…

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 13, 2023 11:01 UTC (Thu) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link] (1 responses)

Until your co-workers want you to join their Huddle.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 17, 2023 1:00 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Ah. I haven't used that. We use Google stuff generally so such things go to Meet instead. Many use Slack because Google Chat is…subpar in so many ways.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 18:03 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Chromium's fallen a long way. I remember in the early 2010s being amused at the silly attention to detail they put into making it feel not just passable on Linux, but _good_: the non-rectangular overlapping tabs had accurate pointer hit detection, they had special casing in the code to ensure all three mouse buttons did the appropriate action on the tab bar depending on the desktop in use. Small details like that that FOSS had, and has, an unshakable reputation for not giving a damn about. Gtk4's CSD is bad bordering on criminal in comparison.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 18:46 UTC (Fri) by Shiba (guest, #151620) [Link] (35 responses)

> But if a Mozillian from 1998 stepped into a Mozilla office
> (or joined a Mozilla video call) in 2023, I think they’d quickly feel
> something recognizable. A familiar spirit, and a familiar set of values.

Press X to doubt.

Nevertheless, I'll be a Firefox user 'till the end of Firefox' days.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 19:35 UTC (Fri) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (34 responses)

I remain a Firefox user but under protest. The corporation has chased the corporate teat for years. Mitchell Baker laid off 250 employees in 2020 and increased her salary to over $3 million. Linux builds don't enable GPS functionality because they don't want to injure the relationship with Google, that benefits from wifi and ip geolocation they get to monetize. Their new walled garden app store and the default builds that prohibit running addons outside of their approval has made them de facto defenders of corporate interests, suppressing tools like "Bypass Paywalls Clean" and threatening to join Google in the long attack on ad-blocking. The "two-tier" Hawaii corporate retreats may be no more but the legacy remains, of programmers in steerage and cocktail-guzzling VPs in first class. I'd flush the lot at the top and return it to a project whose emphasis first and foremost was a quality browser that serves *user* interests.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 20:12 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (33 responses)

And don't forget multiple UI redesigns, each of which resulted in a measurable decrease in the market share.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 20:56 UTC (Fri) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (19 responses)

The UI redesigns are annoying but ultimately secondary to functionality and privacy. And from a browser that at one time was radio silent on the internet save for what you commanded it to visit, it's now well up the telemetry treadmill, Mozilla having learned nothing from some of its disastrous "experiments" of the past feeding users changes they did not want or ask for.

When you get to the point where you have to say Firefox's primary advantage is that "it's not Google's Chrome," there's a real problem. And that's because in a certain way it is, just one step removed, because Google remains far and above Mozilla's primary sugar daddy.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 21:28 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (8 responses)

> When you get to the point where you have to say Firefox's primary advantage is that "it's not Google's Chrome," there's a real problem. And that's because in a certain way it is, just one step removed, because Google remains far and above Mozilla's primary sugar daddy.

Eh.

Firefox never had the advantage of being the default browser on most platforms. Everyone installing it had to make an explicit choice to do so. Back in the day, that was an easy choice to make, as its competition (mainly MSIE) was so awful that Firefox was objectively better in every respect, even for non-technically-inclined "to use the internet click on the E icon" folks.

Today however, the default platform browsers (Chrome, MS Chrome, and Safari) are more or less equivalent feature-wise, and Firefox continues to lack not only a default browser advantage, but also doesn't control any common www destinations, unlike its competition who continues to push "this site best experienced on Chrome / Edge / Safari". Meanwhile, the corporate market never embraced Firefox, instead switching from IE to Chrome.

So yes. from an end-user's perspective, all Firefox really has going for it is "better privacy". Unfortunately there aren't that many folks who genuinely care about that stuff -- And even among those who do, when you spend all day logged into Facebook, Google/Gmail, O365/MS/Github, Facebook, and so forth, what privacy are you protecting any more?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 8:23 UTC (Mon) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link] (4 responses)

> So yes. from an end-user's perspective, all Firefox really has going for it is "better privacy". Unfortunately there aren't that many folks who genuinely care about that stuff -- And even among those who do, when you spend all day logged into Facebook, Google/Gmail, O365/MS/Github, Facebook, and so forth, what privacy are you protecting any more?

Firefox has containers, something that AFAIK no other browser offers. I too need to be logged into a few of these for work (and some others I choose voluntarily, like this fine site), but only in the respective container. They don't see each other, and every other random site I visit gets a pristine session that's deleted when I leave (courtesy of the Temporary Containers extension).

This is one of the main reason I won't even consider switching to any other browser for regular use, despite all the screw-ups and questionable decisions Mozilla has made over the years.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 2:40 UTC (Fri) by rjones (subscriber, #159862) [Link] (3 responses)

Chrome has the ability to juggle multiple profiles, which amounts to the same thing in practice. I don't know how they compare on a technical level besides there is no problems having multiple logins in the same sites at the same time in different profiles.

By default the quick change UI is hidden. Once you make more then one profile it pops up.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 11:54 UTC (Fri) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link]

Interesting, thanks. So the basic ability to separate sessions is there. I quickly tried and failed to find something equivalent to the "Temporary Containers" Firefox extension, so it seems manual action is required to switch profiles.

This is only one part of the setup I currently have in Firefox. I've got it set up to create temporary containers with an empty session whenever I follow a link to a different domain (besides a few sites that automatically get assigned to their own permanent containers), which seems impossible with Chrome currently. That way, even if I click a link on a site where I'm logged in, the target gets a new session and any cross-site tracking will have a harder time linking the two visits.

Now, I'm sure my setup isn't for everyone, since now it matters how you arrived at a particular site, which is probably confusing if you don't expect it (there can be any number of sessions for any particular domain). But I find that property useful, since it trivially enables multiple different logins to the same site without any setup (just manually open a new tab and open the site, and you've got a new session).

I'm (usually) happy with Firefox, so I won't invest a lot of time to recreate this setup with Chrome for now. But it's good to know that this workflow could probably be implemented there with some effort, in case Firefox for some reason ceases to be a viable browser (which I hope it won't).

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 18:52 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Chrome has the ability to juggle multiple profiles, which amounts to the same thing in practice.

Not quite. Chrome can't run two parallel profiles in the same window. For example, I use containers in Firefox to log into multiple AWS accounts (with color-coding for prod/non-prod accounts) using a small plugin: https://imgur.com/a/S9uhNTv

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 10, 2023 18:59 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

My understanding (which may very well be out-of-date) is that this is more like Firefox profiles with a completely separate `.mozilla` subdirectory with some helpful selection UI (whereas Firefox profiles are more or less completely oblivious of each other). Firefox containers are allowed to co-exist within a single window and can be for as little as a single website rather than an entire "browser session"

I suspect it works just fine if you use OAuth to separate your accounts, but I try to avoid cross-linking accounts whenever possible.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:18 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

Mozilla never understood that their success was linked to the success of the FLOSS desktop, because that’s the only established platform where they are not in competition with the platform owner, who has many ways to make sure they never succeed over his own corporate projects.

With web offerings replacing traditional local apps they had a golden chance to make the FLOSS desktop shine, growing with it (and the multiplicity of distributions is a protection against someone taking over their success via a fork).

Instead, they blew it first by chasing proprietary platforms that were all too happy to get their features first while limiting their platform share, second by trying to corner this opportunity with their own Firefox OS, and third getting distracted from their core competencies favouring the startups of their buddies.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 20, 2023 16:07 UTC (Thu) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think that Mozilla could have ever been successful and not evil. That's just not a possible outcome within the socio-economic power structures we find ourselves in. A successful version of Mozilla looks like Google - using their technical prowess to form a monopoly in one market and expand to adjacent markets and form monopolies there. Suppose Firefox was the best web browser - Firefox OS might have taken off and we'd all use Firefox Phones and pay for things with Firefox Pay. Pretty much the same position Google is in. We might have Firefox Home voice assistants spying on us instead of Google Home. And I assure you, a detachment of sweaty nerds on LWN would be celebrating 25 years of Google Chrome bravely competing against the evil Firefox monopoly.

Power corrupts.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 14:44 UTC (Sun) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

> Power corrupts.

Let's not forget that the flipside is also true: "Corruption Empowers". I.e. those who play fair and eschew evilness miss out on successful (shitty, but undeniably successful) strategies to gain market share / revenue / control...

That's why "enshittification" is so endemic, why legal tools like anti-trust legislation, monopoly commissions etc. exist (with somewhat limited success) and so on.

Sadly, we live in a world where those with the influence (obviously this involves money, but not *just* money) to do so are so richly rewarded for using that influence primarily as a tool to get more influence that inevitably the top of the pile is utterly dominated by those whose priorities heavily lean that way. Any influence spent elsewhere means getting behind on the race to own The World.

Those with enough influence can outspend governments on finding bugs in the legal code, and even influence the drafting of that legal code in the first place through political "donations" etc.

We've reached the point where a handful of people have gained such an egregiously disproportionate share of "The World" that the phrase "The World is Not Enough" starts feeling literally true for them and they start working on projects like "leaving the planet", and "owning lumps of space"

Yay.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 21:37 UTC (Fri) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (9 responses)

There are still a bunch of mystifyingly bad decisions in Chrome, e.g. when you restart Chrome pinned tabs don't necessarily get loaded eagerly. Chrome has horrific bugs under Wayland on Linux. Also, Chrome doesn't support extensions on mobile --- this is huge.

I'm a die-hard Firefox user for sentimental reasons but I have to use Chrome at work, and honestly I'd rather not.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 21:38 UTC (Fri) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

Actually "sentimental reasons" isn't quite right --- using Firefox is a vote for the open Web, which I still care about a lot.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 23:35 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (7 responses)

I went through a phase of flipping between Firefox and Chrome in the early 2010s. Finding out that the latter would start loading pages and running scripts before the window was loaded, let alone content filtering extensions, was one of the things that drove me off it forever. That, and the build time of chromium inexplicably spiking to 72 hours at one point, and the tarball size mushroom-clouding by about 4× in one release cycle with no explanation, and its equivalent of the Places window being nigh &^*$ing useless…

And this was all before they started doing the _overtly_ evil stuff like evercookie logins (and rolling out dark patterns to punish anyone trying to use their services any other way).

I do not particularly like Mozilla's software, I absolutely loathe their corporate antics… but when the alternative is this hateful shiny thing and everything that it implies around it, the choice is a no-brainer. I expect to still be complaining about it 10 years from now.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 11:02 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (6 responses)

> And this was all before they started doing the _overtly_ evil stuff like evercookie logins (and rolling out dark patterns to punish anyone trying to use their services any other way).

Yeah. What I don't get are the folks who say stuff like "I don't like/use Firefox for <reason>" but instead use Chrome, which is objectively worse at <reason> [1]

> I do not particularly like Mozilla's software, I absolutely loathe their corporate antics… but when the alternative is this hateful shiny thing and everything that it implies around it, the choice is a no-brainer. I expect to still be complaining about it 10 years from now.

Mozilla's corporate antics barely register on the scale, especially when compared to their competition.

I hope that we have a meaningful/practical option to keep using Firefox in another decade. If some of the antitrust stuff against Google goes through (EU and US) then the sorts of search engine deals that fund nearly all of Mozilla's work will probably go away. That said, Google probably only continues to fund Firefox as an antitrust hedge anyway. I have a hard time seeing how that miniscule market share is otherwise worth the money. Most of Mozilla's "antics" over the last decade and a half have been trying to find alternative (sustainable) revenue streams.

The sad truth is that Firefox/Mozilla's last real shot at remaining relevant in the long term ended well over a decade ago when FirefoxOS failed to make a dent in the Android/iOS duopoly. I can't blame Mozilla for that; even Microsoft (with its significant advantages and far deeper pockets) failed. They're effectively locked out of the corporate market, and completely locked out of the mobile and "chromebook" type markets. And that's _before_ the "we changed default browser" update shenanigans that Windows and so forth _still_ keep pulling. Firefox's only real selling feature these days to the ever-dwindling desktop user base is "with a couple of plugins we're much better at blocking ads and tracking than the competition [2]" which only partially mitigates the ever-growing enshittification of doing anything online. [3]

And let's not pretend that all Linux firefox users ever mattered that much; for all our sense of self-importance, even in Firefox's heydey numerically we were a rounding error of Mozilla's userbase, the overwhelming majority of which was, and continues to be, running Windows. Even amongst the "power user" crowd.

In the end, Mozilla's enduring legacy will probably be as the original creators of Rust.

[1] UI style/paradigm. Plugin architecture, telemetry, A/B UI experiments, stability, performance, ties to Google (!!), "corporate/executive wokeness/antics"... and the list goes on.
[2] They can't actually say this, much less go full-on down this path because then they'd lose pretty much _all_ of their ongoing funding, which basically depends on the Firefox being useful for delivering ads and otherwise tracking users. And then it won't be long at all before we're all stuck with Chrome or one of its siblings if we want to do interact with the rest of the world.
[3] "doing anyhing online" is such an archaic phrase now, eh?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 2, 2023 11:57 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

> In the end, Mozilla's enduring legacy will probably be as the original creators of Rust.

Carmack was saying that years ago.

But that obvious no-brainer.

Rust is something which benefits both industry and the end-user thus it's easy to keep it going. There are lots of technical challenges, but no unavoidable conflicts.

Firefox, on the other hand, it something funded by the industry, but which tries to work for the user… that one is very hard to sustain.

The fact that Mozilla still continues to do that, even if not perfectly… it's a miracle.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 2, 2023 13:30 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> The fact that Mozilla still continues to do that, even if not perfectly… it's a miracle.

Amen.

(And of course I wish they could be/do better, even as I continue to be grateful for their efforts and results)

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 5:47 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (1 responses)

Yup. They're relevant to this user, at least, from back when "firefox" was this new, snazzy thing that was the faster, more broken version of the Mozilla browser (back when it was just "Mozilla"), until now.

They earn they're $25 a month from me!

Sometimes I wonder if the race for "relevance" is really... relevant.

Mastodon did fine before it was "relevant", and has resisted ex-Twitter engineers jumping on the platform, pushing them to add features they "knew" users "wanted", because they couldn't get the equivalence of "want" and "engagement" out of their heads.

Maybe they make less money, maybe they have fewer users, but that's fine. Plenty of open-source projects that build complicated stuff get by with fewer users and less money.

Maybe it will even be better when it's not trying to find money any screwball way it can.

And, yes, Rust. Agreed.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 8:51 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Plenty of open-source projects that build complicated stuff get by with fewer users and less money.

Yet none of them produce viable brower. They either produce sorta-kinda-browsers that are not usable on many (most?) web sites or they just wrap browser developed elsewhere with their own bells and whistles.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 5, 2023 20:53 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

I wonder if this sort of "heavy" open project can be crowdsourced. I mean, I know Mozilla isn't about to go down that route, but I'm pondering if it's plausible really at all.

I give Libre Office a bit of money every few years when I use it, and periodically donate a bit to Debian, but I suspect the former has a primary funding model from other sources, and the latter would probably work with almost no funding.

The browser is really the heaviest project I rely on besides programming languages, and the OS, both of which seem to work okay on the sort of crowd-labor model.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 5, 2023 22:35 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> I wonder if this sort of "heavy" open project can be crowdsourced. I mean, I know Mozilla isn't about to go down that route, but I'm pondering if it's plausible really at all.

I don't think so. Instead if you want to fund it, you could get things like Mozilla VPN + Firefox Relay and if you are using these features anyway, getting it this way might also be a way to support browser development.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 4:00 UTC (Sat) by notriddle (subscriber, #130608) [Link] (12 responses)

Measurable?

As near as I can tell, Firefox has been on a basically unaltered downward trend, leveling off around 1-5% (depending on whether you count mobile?)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/StatC...

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 5:55 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Yeah, but harder to gather, and more interesting to me, is the raw totals over the years. They're are likely a lot more people on the web than in the early 2000s.. particularly if you count mobile.

Because if they have *enough users, and *enough contributors - we'll be fine. Web standards don't change like they used to, so the waning influence they have over that probably won't impact usability like it used to (e.g. "please download this ActiveX plugin.." ;) )

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 7:24 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (10 responses)

Yeah, it's measurable. The pattern is:
(1). Everything's fine.
(2). New redesign goes live in the main channel.
(3). The marketshare spikes for a couple of months.
(4). The marketshare falls _below_ the initial marketshare in point (1) by a significant margin.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 13:44 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (9 responses)

> (1). Everything's fine.

Point of correction -- Unless you consider "steady loss of market share" fine, everything wasn't "fine".

> (4). The marketshare falls _below_ the initial marketshare in point (1) by a significant margin.

...This completely ignores what the competition was up to, and its effects on Firefox.

For example, the corporate world shifting en-masse from IE to Chrome (and better locking down desktops to make FF non-installable), the rise of Mobile (and Chrome-first), and so forth. And unlike MSIE, Chrome was perfectly usable on a day-to-day basis, so why not use the same thing at home as well as at work, with all your bookmarks etc synchronized with the gmail account you're already signed into anyway?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 15:51 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (8 responses)

> ...This completely ignores what the competition was up to, and its effects on Firefox.

This has happened multiple times, including the fairly recent UI changes that happened long after the rise of Chrome.

Also, mobile is a case in point. Firefox was a pretty good browser on Android, with plugin support and a better UI than mobile Chrome. Guess what Mozilla did to address this oversight?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:03 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (2 responses)

I've used Firefox Android every day for years. And, I very much disagree with your comment. Firefox Android is a LOT better now than it was in the past.

It's faster, and it has stopped crashing periodically. And the UI has been progressively improving as well (imo). I feel like Firefox/Gecko is an actually viable alternative browser for Android, in a way it was not when I was first using it.

I am occasionally disappointed that about:config doesn't exist in the stable branch (which is what I use), but not bothered enough to switch to the beta or nightly releases.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:15 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> It's faster, and it has stopped crashing periodically. And the UI has been progressively improving as well (imo). I feel like Firefox/Gecko is an actually viable alternative browser for Android, in a way it was not when I was first using it.

This mirrors my experience, and I've been using Android Firefox since before it was called Firefox.

Unfortunately Chrome is deeply embedded into Android (==System Webview) so Firefox doesn't get used as much as I'd prefer.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 14, 2023 18:14 UTC (Fri) by asammoud (guest, #151640) [Link]

I have to agree with this .. I only use Firefox on Android CalyxOS. I have zero issues with it.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 23:56 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

The android firefox ui churn is tedious, and their constraining of addons to a tiny set is infuriating, but the bar is so low that it's still much better than the default. But I won't be surprised if the limited set of addons die off for various reasons of churn in the APIs, firefox, and the addon ecosystem.

Because of the sheer amount of work put in addon support to mobile chromium, it's not going to happen in any of the chromium -alikes, sadly.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 8:45 UTC (Tue) by gabrielesvelto (guest, #83884) [Link] (3 responses)

> Also, mobile is a case in point. Firefox was a pretty good browser on Android, with plugin support and a better UI than mobile Chrome. Guess what Mozilla did to address this oversight?

Fenix (aka new Firefox for Android) has picked up a lot more market share than Fennec (aka old Firefox for Android) ever had. So mobile shows the opposite trend you're claiming, with constant growth over the years. In addition to this the modules Fenix is built from (GeckoView & friends) are now used by several other mobile applications outside of Mozilla's perimeter: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/geckovie...

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla though I haven't always worked on Firefox

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 23:55 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Sure. And do you know what would have been even better? Not neutering mobile Firefox in the first place. I understand not porting certain features to mobile, but Mozilla went ahead and _removed_ functionality for no discernible reason.

Also, I've just tried Fenix and there's nothing in my Play Store that remotely looks like Firefox with that name. I've re-installed FireFox and it's the same old: no about:config, limited plugin selection.

I really don't understand WTF is Mozilla doing.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 16:58 UTC (Sun) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link] (1 responses)

If I've not got the wrong end of some stick or other, "Firefox" in the Android store *is* Fenix (and previously was Fennec) - "Fenix" and "Fennec" are just code names for the Android variant, and are "marketed" as Firefox just like the desktop variant.

Fennec apparently struggled with stability & performance and Fenix replaced it in 2020 to be less demanding (in development work and CPU/RAM) but got that in part by omitting some add-on APIs and support for dead mobile platforms.

According to a bit of googling, there's wider support for add-ons coming. The curated list of add-ons seems to be expanding incrementally, but more interestingly, the "Firefox Beta for Testers" and "Firefox Nightly for Developers" streams have support for your own "extension collections" and there's work apparently going on to support more of the add-on API. Time will tell how far/quickly this goes, how well it works, how much of it reaches the stable stream and how easy it'll be UI-wise to install arbitrary add-ons...

Access to add-ons that give *me* control of *my* browsing experience is a "killer feature" for a web browser, IMNSHO (and the #1 reason Firefox is the only contender at the moment) so I hope this work bears bounteous fruit quickly!

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 20:51 UTC (Sun) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link]

As a user of both Fennec and Fenix, I will dispute that Fenix is less resource intensive or less buggy.

Fennec runs well on my old Nexus 9, Fenix is painfully slow.

Unfortunately Cloudflare has started blocking Fennec because of its age, I suppose I'll just have to give up on that tablet.

Fenix runs mostly fine on my current phone, but still has not implemented the tab queue feature.
it also has an annoying bug where a tab will hang, not making progress. I can unblock by killing another tab.

While Fenix Nightly finally after an interminable wait allows me to develop extensions I find it quite annoying that the extensions only work while the USB cable is plugged in. To have it available untethered I have to sign and upload.

I haven't found any websites which work in Fenix but not in Fennec, various features that I would like to use, ServiceWorkers, WebAudio do not work properly in either.

Most featureful Android browser is Kiwi browser, it used to have some stability issues, but has been fine lately.

A quarter century of bugs

Posted Mar 31, 2023 20:55 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

I think they could have given a top ten list of bugs on Bugzilla, some nearly a quarter century old, which are still open.

A quarter century of bugs

Posted Mar 31, 2023 23:03 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

18574! An eye-opener to the internal office politics at the time and today too.

A quarter century of bugs

Posted Apr 1, 2023 16:02 UTC (Sat) by rillian (subscriber, #11344) [Link]

Wow. I'd forgotten the sniffing vs. content-type argument went back that far!

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 1:52 UTC (Sat) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link]

Mozilla has a long history of press releases filled with corporate speak that has varying levels of disconnection and contradiction from reality. I stopped paying close attention a long time ago.

Reminder: they promised the release of pocket source code as free software in 2017, and since then they've been pretending they never said that:
https://siliconangle.com/2017/02/27/mozilla-buys-read-lat...

I heard Mitchell Baker speak in a panel a few years ago and she said roughly: "I'm not the kind of person who thinks everything should be open source."

Most free software activists rely on the browser code they maintain, and I don't want that to stop. I'm writing this from https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/abrowser-help .

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 2:04 UTC (Sat) by pawel44 (guest, #162008) [Link] (1 responses)

After indirectly removing flashgot they lost my respect.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 9:06 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

But there's still no other mainstream, feature-complete browser-maker that does better.

Mozilla have made a half-dozen mistakes or decisions that I haven't liked, but I think they get disproportionately punished for these.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 6:02 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (3 responses)

Wow. A _LOT_ of people are posting here to complain about Firefox but then also saying they still use it because the only alternative is Chrome.

You've got other options, guys. You've got GNOME Web and Konqueror. If you're willing to go obscure, you've got Fifth Browser. If you're willing to go proprietary, you've got Brave and Vivaldi.

And, if you want the very last project seriously trying to maintain its own rendering engine rather than just cribbing the latest Blink, WebKit, or Gecko, you've got Pale Moon, which is originally based on Firefox but is a hard fork of a the pre-Quantum codebase. I use Pale Moon and have for many, many years. The project has run into a rough patch, and a lot of websites aren't working right now, but things are getting better and getting better quickly.

You don't need to stick to one of the big three browsers. If you don't want to use Pale Moon, you do need to stick to one of the big three browser ENGINES, but even browsers sharing the same engine can have vastly different UIs.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 8:59 UTC (Sat) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

Three browser engines are much better for the Web than two.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 22:48 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

> You've got other options, guys. You've got GNOME Web
Every version of Epiphany has handled CSS units wildly inconsistently on hidpi to the point of rendering some sites unusable, and GNOME's attitude to bugs at a boundary between their code and the rest of the universe is to leave their software losing hard and demand the rest of the universe adjust to them - c.f. the recent glib fallout. I'm not waiting around for it to become a usable browser.

> Konqueror
I can't tell if this is blind optimism, out of touch, or being insultingly patronising. You should clarify whether you mean with the abandonware engine that even KDE apps don't use any more or with Qt's Blink fork that lags several years behind upstream.

> If you're willing to go obscure, you've got Fifth Browser.
But I *have* five different browsers already. Not even counting the ones that don't run JavaScript.

> If you're willing to go proprietary, you've got Brave and Vivaldi.
Don't like Chrome? Have you tried Chrome With Overt Ancap Dogwhistles? How about Chrome But The Entire Frontend Is A Bloatware Node/React Webapp?

> you've got Pale Moon
…Or how about Pre-CSS4 Firefox But Waving A Small Gadsden Flag? The only place I'd ever consider running something like this is on my phone, and then only because modern Firefox removed the workarounds for powervr GPUs to make room for about:robots or whatever. I can just as easily avoid browsers entirely there.

> even browsers sharing the same engine can have vastly different UIs.
That you (and several of the projects you list) think UI is the only other significant differentiator here demonstrates an irreconcilable misunderstanding of the problem space, and history. I'm using Firefox for the same reasons I did in 2003 — and the UI is a reason to *not* switch.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 2, 2023 3:25 UTC (Sun) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

Most of the alternatives to Chrome are just Chromium with different chrome ( ironically ). This includes stuff like Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, and Brave.

Even at the browser "engine" level, there are basically only three:

1. Blink ( everything Chrome derived -- almost everything )

2. Gecko ( Firefox )

3. WebKit ( basically just Safari at this point )

Opera stopped making Presto and went for Blink. Microsoft adopted Blink and stopped making Trident and even EdgeHTML.

Blink is actually a fork of WebKit which itself started as a fork of KHTML which was the KDE web browser engine ( for Konqueror ) browser. Ironically, Konqueror is really just an old version of Blink these days. Google used to use WebKit until they forked it to Blink in 2013 or so. People site things like GNOME Web ( Epiphany ) as independent browser projects but it is based on WebKit ( like Midori ) as is WebPositive ( Haiku ).

Gecko is the modern day descendent of the Netscape Navigator web engine which started life as NCSA Mosaic ( the first graphical browser ). So, Firefox is sort of the "original" web browser, really the only alternative implementation out there, and currently the best hope for the open web. Pretty sad given the market share that it has ( almost none ) and what it used to have ( more than half ).

What else is there? Even the likes of Dillo have not produced a release in close to a decade ( close enough to dead for me ).

It is a bit of a wild card but I personally have some hope that these guys will eventually succeed and provide us a true Open Source and non-corporate alternative:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird

Ladybird is a web browser based on LibWeb and LibJS which were created for the SerenityOS project. They have a long, long way to go but they have a real dedication to writing everything themselves from scratch and building all their own expertise in-house. The community they are building around LibWeb and SerenityOS just might get there someday. The founder of the SerenityOS project used to work on WebKit ( Safari ) at Apple and so he certainly knows what he is getting himself into by making a "browser from scratch" part of his OS project. The number two man in Serenity leads the LibWeb and LibJS effort while Ladybird ( the cross-platform expression of their web engine ) is a personal project of the SerenityOS founder. It has all the attributes of a project that will eventually succeed though, again, they certainly have a long, long way to go. In the meantime, the videos they release detailing their progress ( including live coding sessions to add specific features ) are very educational and entertaining.

A quarter century of Mozilla - my sincere gratitude

Posted Apr 1, 2023 11:15 UTC (Sat) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link] (5 responses)

As a user I am deeply grateful for Mozilla and the wider community around Firefox and Thunderbird. As a developer by trade I'm especially grateful for the browser developer tools, projects like MDN, their active involvement in establishing and promoting open web standards, and work on browser interoperability.

I think Mozilla, through Firefox, has inspired a healthy competition in other web browsers both on Linux and other operating systems. Chrome had a Linux version, but not from day one remember. And I believe the combined forces of Firefox and Chrome has driven Apple to make Safari more standards compliant. Microsoft tried several times to go their own way, but ultimately failed. Today they provide a Linux port of Edge, not only experimentally, but simply as one of several supported platforms. Would that have happened without Mozilla and Firefox? I'm not so sure.

I use Firefox on Linux and Android. Not because there are no alternatives, but because Firefox best supports me as a user. Support for add-ons are essential to me, some of which does not exist on other browsers.

Sure the Mozilla project and Firefox project has not been without failures and heavily criticised ventures, but I fail to name other long lived FLOSS projects that have had a 25 year streak of purely successful attemts to keep up whith the times and explore new territory. Not to mention maintaining such complex software as a modern browser engine.

A few years ago an entire new programming language, Rust, grew out of Mozilla's nest so to say. Today I'm exited about new ventures, like mozilla.ai and mozilla.social. I hope they work out and establish themselves as useful home for open systems and as leverage against to proprietary walled gardens.

So, Thank you all!

A quarter century of Mozilla - my sincere gratitude

Posted Apr 1, 2023 13:53 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

Ditto. I use Firefox on desktop and mobile, partly because I don't trust Google and partly because great plugins like FBP are available on mobile. It makes for a far superior browsing experience that Chrome.

A quarter century of Mozilla - my sincere gratitude

Posted Apr 1, 2023 13:58 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

Oops, I misremembered. FBP is not available for mobile, but Ghostery and other privacy-enhancing add-ons are. AFAIK, Chrome on mobile does not permit add-ons.

A quarter century of Mozilla - my sincere gratitude

Posted Apr 2, 2023 3:49 UTC (Sun) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

One must remember that until Firefox 68 the mobile ecosystem was the same as the desktop: same addons, etc. Then a Great Rewrite took place in which addons were to come "later." And this kept getting watered down: a small curated set would be permitted, all of course only to come from the great anointed repository in the sky.

That's one reason why I run Iceraven on mobile, it's one of a whole ecosystem of volunteer efforts that seek to make Firefox serve the user, rather than the overlords, by either stripping phoning in (e.g. Waterfox and others), or restoring functionality to mobile, as Iceraven does.

That such forks are even necessary says something pretty rude about Mozilla's attitude towards its users.

A quarter century of Mozilla - my sincere gratitude

Posted Apr 2, 2023 12:22 UTC (Sun) by liam (guest, #84133) [Link]

No, but Kiwi does, and it's pretty decent in other aspects.

A quarter century of Mozilla - my sincere gratitude

Posted Apr 3, 2023 19:01 UTC (Mon) by fmyhr (subscriber, #14803) [Link]

Help a non-FaceBooking geezer out: By "FBP" do you mean?
https://www.fbpurity.com/

Ring

Posted Apr 1, 2023 14:17 UTC (Sat) by Schroeder (subscriber, #128168) [Link]

I wish the words Mozilla or Firefox would still have a good ring in my ears, but they don't. Other than some of those who already commented here, with my move to Linux as my main personal computing platform a couple of years ago I also finally decided to try the most prominent browser alternatives and see whether one of them might be less annoying and alienating to me than what Firefox had become, with the threat of exchanging tabs with unconnected blobs that was waiting around the corner back then having been just the latest disimprovement in a long history. And I'm not even talking about the (until today) ridiculous load times on my day job Windows PC during which it is unresponding to anything. (I found one—Vivaldi—and I didn't look back. Yes, Mozilla's browser engine alternative is a good thing to have in the greater scheme of things, but.)

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 15:03 UTC (Sat) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link] (1 responses)

Twenty-five years, now I’m suddenly feeling very old and at the same time I’m trying to decide which one between Mozilla and GNOME is my greatest free software disappointment. Sigh.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 1, 2023 18:45 UTC (Sat) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

It's also "difficult to imagine" that Mozilla 25 years ago would have made such an announcement on a site that does not allow comments. Because, you know, back then they would have been highly praised, and today—justifiably—roasted.

Baker's frittering away hundreds of millions of dollars while establishing no endowment to focus on a central mission coupled actually to users, with none of the simultaneous corporate kowtowing, has earned her appraisal as something of a pariah. No, she's not nearly so bad, nor is Firefox so bad, as Google and its Chrome, but there's hardly any trust that she could not be in a moment if it served her interests. The comment above that "I'm not the kind of person who thinks everything should be open source" right there tells you first and foremost what she is: an opportunist who today finds that niche is best served with the prattle as in today's PR-drenched missive, and tomorrow could just as easily speak the opposite.

Marketshare and priorities dissonance

Posted Apr 2, 2023 12:53 UTC (Sun) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (2 responses)

After quarter of century I still have a dissonance when thinking about Mozilla's prioritization of different operating systems.
Mozilla Browser, and later Firefox, was always “a Linux browser” for me. Others (like Opera, Epiphany, Konqueror) were almost always a statistical curiosity.

Everytime Firefox people were talking about supporting MS Windows, I was appalled. Why do they even waste time on this niche platform?
Sometimes they delivered features first on Windows and only a couple releases later on Linux. I was double appalled.

Well, it turns out Linux is a niche platform for Firefox! Somehow most people running Firefox are on MS Windows. Maybe the ratio was different 20 years ago, but today Linux is not a most important platform for Firefox. I'm not sure if I will ever get over that.

Marketshare and priorities dissonance

Posted Apr 2, 2023 13:28 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Well, it turns out Linux is a niche platform for Firefox! Somehow most people running Firefox are on MS Windows. Maybe the ratio was different 20 years ago, but today Linux is not a most important platform for Firefox. I'm not sure if I will ever get over that.

Mozilla is primarily *developed* on Linux, but the overwhelming majority of its users have always been on Windows -- so 20 years ago, during Firefox's peak popularity, the user ratio was considerably more skewed towards Windows than it is today, simply because Linux-on-the-desktop was even more of a niche back then.

Marketshare and priorities dissonance

Posted Apr 2, 2023 15:55 UTC (Sun) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

20 years ago, most people had not even heard of Linux. The userbase was very small.

Firefox was always a Windows browser. After all, it is the Open Source version of Netscape Navigator ( first called Phoenix, then Firebird, and finally Firefox ). The "Windows Installer" was added in Firefox 0.8 and the "Linux Installer" was added in Firefox 0.9.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 2, 2023 15:01 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (26 responses)

I'd like to add my small voice to the small number of voices supporting Mozilla and am surprised at the negativity on this thread.

Firefox is not meant for niche users who care about free software purism. It is meant for the masses and tries to balance concerns about free software, privacy and tracking, security, with usability and functionality and as far as I am concerned it succeeds perfectly. The one remaining issue I had (gallery view on zoom calls; I prefer zoom on browser for various reasons) was fixed about a year ago.

I shuttled back and forth between chrome and firefox for a while, but about 2018 I settled on firefox as primary browser on desktop/laptop, simply because it felt faster and didn't bog down my laptop which had (at that time) 4GB RAM. In 2019 I found that disabling the preinstalled chrome on my new phone got rid of an annoying spam-ad problem. I have stuck with firefox on the phone since. I have no complaints whatever. What I have complaints about is sites like NYT and reddit that nag you to install their app because it's "so much better". No, thanks, I'll read it on firefox.

And of course Mozilla is responsible for rust which is responsible for the rapid development of linux GPU drivers on Apple M1/M2 hardware.

Firefox may have a minor market share but to keep it going so long as, not a "viable", but an almost 100% functional alternative to the Webkit/Blink duopoly is remarkable.

Lastly, maybe Mitchell Baker said she doesn't believe all software has to be open source. (I didn't see a link.) But even if so, I'm pretty sure many many free software developers share that view.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 2, 2023 15:27 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> Lastly, maybe Mitchell Baker said she doesn't believe all software has to be open source. (I didn't see a link.) But even if so, I'm pretty sure many many free software developers share that view.

No link here (on mobile), but the issue is that Pocket was announced for opening when acquired. That was walked back, apparently with such a reason.

See also this project: https://github.com/open-pocket/open-pocket

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 11:06 UTC (Mon) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link]

Mozilla Firefox works just fine on all my platforms: Linux (various distros), macOS and iOS.

Thank you!

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 22:46 UTC (Mon) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (23 responses)

> Lastly, maybe Mitchell Baker said she doesn't believe all software has to be open source. (I didn't see a link.) But even if so, I'm pretty sure many many free software developers share that view.

Correct.

Free software developers think that all published software should be free. They don't care about open source.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 1:52 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (22 responses)

> Free software developers think that all published software should be free

Some do. Some don’t. It’s not a religion.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 8:42 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (21 responses)

Some think the distinction between Free and Open Source is irrelevant.

Depends on the space you're working in, but eg if things are distributed as scripts there's precious little difference. If you're working on infra *because* you care about *user space*, you have to accept that taking a position will damage what you care about. Etc etc.

Some people are happy with either and will use whatever furthers their ends.

Cheers,
Wol

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 10:25 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (20 responses)

There isn't a meaningful distinction between the FSF's definition of "free software" and the OSI's definition of "open source".

Both terms are misleading. Free does not mean no cost. Open source does not mean just sharing source code (so even "scripts" would have a licence).

Perhaps "libre software" is best, it's a sufficiently non-intuitive term that one has to ask what exactly it means.

The grey area is web apps. If you are not explicitly downloading and running them (but your web browser is doing that), do licence rules apply?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 11:18 UTC (Tue) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (12 responses)

Free means free to modify etc. not cost. The whole Open Source thing has been disclaimed even by one of its founders, I think - if you ask Bruce Perens directly, he'll tell you that, in retrospect, it was a mistake.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 11:57 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (11 responses)

> Free means free to modify etc. not cost

Yes, everyone here understands what the word "free" means in the context of the phrase "free software", but the GP's point was that it's a misleading term, which really doesn't seem disputable.

I guarantee there isn't a single English-speaking person in the world who understood that meaning the first time they heard the phrase, without it having to be explained to them.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 16:23 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (10 responses)

The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.

(George Orwell, 1984, appendix)

Who would have thought that English has been replaced by (a different) Newspeak.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 17:18 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (9 responses)

This is not Newspeak at work.

The English word <free> /friː/ still has multiple meanings, including "without cost" and "without restriction".

However! When we use words that have two (or more) meanings, people will tend to assume the meaning that makes the most sense to them.

Software is lifeless and mindless in the same way as a freshly cooked lunch, a bottle of filtered pasteurized beer, or a housebrick.

Software is frequently an article of commerce.

"Software that costs zero dollars" is therefore the most plausible automatic disambiguation of the term "free software" for anyone who is not deeply immersed in the liberty-focused discourse of the Free Software movement.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 15:51 UTC (Tue) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (8 responses)

Four decades ago it was still intuitive that "free software" meant something other than "software without cost", as evidenced by the fact that RMS used the term and a significant number of people got it easily enough to support the cause.

If, as nye claims, these days not a single English-speaking person in the world understands "free software" as being related to freedom without extra explanation, and that, as many claim, the only intuitive meaning these days is "software without cost", then the meaning of "free" in English has changed indeed.

You point to the fact that software is frequently an article of commerce, and that may be the cause for the "without cost" meaning. But it seems to me that software is not more frequently an article of commerce than four decades ago, and we now have a free software ecosystem that should help with understanding what "free software" means.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 16:44 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (7 responses)

> our decades ago it was still intuitive that "free software" meant something other than "software without cost", as evidenced by the fact that RMS used the term and a significant number of people got it easily enough to support the cause.

....Intuitive?

That significant numbers of people (at the time) understood and bought into it doesn't make it "intuitive"; it just means that those folks had it explained to them "enough" for them to buy into it.

To the average person, software user, and even "developer", "free software" means "software without cost" -- the only ones who would ever think differently are those who had alternative meanings explained to them.

RMS still had to explain himself back then, and he's _still_ explaining himself to this day..

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 17:34 UTC (Tue) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (6 responses)

I don't think that the term would have been as successful as it was if it had not been intuitive for many people; maybe not the majority, but certainly a significant number.

It may be that non-developers these days will indeed think of software without cost when they hear "free software", after all they are not directly confronted with the freedom aspects of software, and in their contact with various commercial software (even if some of it is free software) the commercial interests run against making them aware of that.

Software developers have more interaction with software, and they do more thinking about software. For them the freedom aspect is closer to home, although maybe the powers that be have indeed managed to make it unintuitive to everyone. But that was not the case four decades ago.

Yes, even four decades ago there were people who needed the freedom aspect explained to them, and RMS has done that. But not everyone. I certainly never thought that "free software" means "software without cost".

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 18:04 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> I certainly never thought that "free software" means "software without cost".

I came of age during the BBS/"shareware" era. I didn't have access to, or even any awareness of, "Free Software" (of the RMS sense) until _after_ I had first been exposed to Linux in the mid 90s. To me and my peers, "free software" meant "zero-cost" -- along the lines of freeware or shareware, and to the rest who only had to use software as a tool (or entertainment) "free software" was a more charitable way of saying "warez".

These days, with Linux just being a hidden implementation detail [1], I'd postulate that the overwhelming majority of software folks (and software-adjacent) folks are very aware of "Open Source", and if they're aware of the term "Free Software" at all, most consider it to be synonymous with Open Source. When they think of it differently, it's along the lines of "those out of touch communist zealots who think we shouldn't even be allowed to charge for (or be forced to otherwise give away) our valuable software" [2]

[1] It's just another app you install from the windows store so you can run (predominantly) third-party black-box kubernetes/docker/etc containers locally when you're trying to develop "for the cloud".
[2] Which isn't accurate or fair, but as the saying goes, perception is reality.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 18:24 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

It's highly likely that the first time I encountered the phrase "free software" in its GNU(-adjacent) usage (in the mid-1990s), the explanation came attached to it in the context of someone making a big song and dance about "free as in speech, not free as in beer", making any potential need for explanation entirely moot.

But if I had encountered the term without the explanation attached, I hazard that I would likely have defaulted to the "as in beer" interpretation.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 12, 2023 12:16 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (3 responses)

> I certainly never thought that "free software" means "software without cost".

Is this because the term was immediately preceded or followed by some explanatory context? Most of us here probably first came across it in the context of something like this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. Here, the FSF starts off by defining what "free" means - because they correctly recognise that without that explanation, nobody will understand what they mean. This is the norm anywhere that the phrase is used unless it's intended specifically for an audience that's already familiar with the culture.

Or are you claiming that you first encountered it in a more general sentence like "we could use free software for this", or "we should release this as free software"? Because if that's the case, and you claim to have correctly understood the phrase, I would contend that either you are not a native English speaker, or your memory is in error.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 12, 2023 12:18 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

(I misspoke when I said "English-speaking" earlier - I should have qualified it with "native" because a person whose first language has two separate words for this may well be more likely to consider all the possible interpretations.)

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 12, 2023 17:57 UTC (Wed) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't remember where I encountered it, but I remember that I never had the need for a realignment of the meaning.

I am not a native speaker, but I don't think that plays a role: If I had encountered a lot of usage of "free" as meaning "no cost", that would be what I would (also) associate with that word, just like I learned that "terrific" has a positive meaning.

By the time I encountered "free software" I had read many thousands of pages of English books (including 1984) and other texts, and the proportion of "free" used as meaning "without cost" was vanishingly small (including in 1984). I did have some exposure to commercials through magazines like Byte, but certainly less than a native speaker, and I would have to dig up these old issues and see if there was much usage of "free" with that meaning there.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 12, 2023 18:42 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

> I am not a native speaker, but I don't think that plays a role:

In the very next paragraph, you make statements which make me think that it very much played a role; it sounds like the English-language material to which you were exposed was not representative of a native speaker's daily exposure to the English language.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 18:41 UTC (Tue) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (6 responses)

> There isn't a meaningful distinction between the FSF's definition of "free software" and the OSI's definition of "open source".

As far as I know there are some (obscure) licenses that are open source but not free software. But that's beside the point. Free Software is a philosophy (or moral point of view, a social movement, etcetera) that stipulates that all (distributed) software ought to be free. Open Source is a software development method that basically claims that it will lead to better software. (Users of Microsoft Office, macOS, iOS and whatever else is amazingly popular and rather useful might disagree.)

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 20:57 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> that basically claims that it will lead to better software. (Users of Microsoft Office, macOS, iOS and whatever else is amazingly popular and rather useful might disagree.)

"Better" and "useful" are different words, with different meanings. Word may be *useful*, but imho there are much *better* word processors out there WordPerfect cough cough ... (sorry LO you're too much of a Word clone to be any better).

Cheers,
Wol

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 18:21 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (4 responses)

The basic problem with this argument is that there is precious little practical, day-to-day difference between a free software project and an open source project. They are de facto the same thing. The only difference I have ever heard anyone point to is, basically, "Free software developers are doing it for ideological reasons and open source developers are doing it because they think it's more efficient" - but if that is really the only distinction, then there is no such thing as a "free software project" or an "open source project." Projects are inanimate objects. They don't have intentions or beliefs. Their developers do, and in most cases, those developers are not a monolith. Just because a project calls itself "free software," it does not necessarily mean that all developers are 100% on board with Richard Stallman's definition of "free software." To my understanding, it is extremely unusual for projects (of either brand) to have ideological purity tests or to ask developers to explicitly affirm the FSF's or OSI's core beliefs (beyond the obvious "please actually license your contributions as specified in COPYING.txt" or whatever).

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 18:43 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> Their developers do, and in most cases, those developers are not a monolith. Just because a project calls itself "free software," it does not necessarily mean that all developers are 100% on board with Richard Stallman's definition of "free software."

Yes. It also goes further than that. It is entirely possible for people to use the term - free software and not buy into the notion that GNU FDL is a free documentation license or the strategy around firmware is the right one or that GPLv3 handling of Tivo or Novell patent clauses were the right ones and so forth. It may be indicative that they are more sympathetic to the RMS view on things but not conclusively so. Insisting that they do is likely going to end up with more people adopting a different term - open source or libre software or something else.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 20:53 UTC (Fri) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (2 responses)

> The only difference I have ever heard anyone point to is, basically, "Free software developers are doing it for ideological reasons and open source developers are doing it because they think it's more efficient" - but if that is really the only distinction, then there is no such thing as a "free software project" or an "open source project."

But the distinction between Free Software and Open Source is pretty fundamental. There actually are projects that consider themselves a "free software project" and those projects have certain boundaries they simply won't cross. So, yes, there are differences between Free Software and Open Source.

That projects are inanimate, that their developers are not a monolith, etc. are rather banal observations. (Your use of "ideological purity tests" is below the pretty high standard I'm used to see you use here, so I won't react to that.)

But, being in a sombre mood, I'm inclined to state state that Open Source has won. Most of the software I currently use is developed by people employed by extremely profitable corporations with ethics that I don't share. Yes, it's Open Source but it's seems to be written by people that noticed that money doesn't smell.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 22:18 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

> But the distinction between Free Software and Open Source is pretty fundamental. There actually are projects that consider themselves a "free software project" and those projects have certain boundaries they simply won't cross. So, yes, there are differences between Free Software and Open Source.

There are projects with things like the DFSG, it is true, but if I'm honest, the DFSG is the *only* example I can think of off the top of my head. The vast majority of FOSS projects are quite informal. Some of them do have codes of conduct or such, but this is typically more of a "be nice to each other" type of document than a "here's what we believe about the end user's freedoms" document.

> That projects are inanimate, that their developers are not a monolith, etc. are rather banal observations.

So what? This is not a refutation.

Either there is a difference between a "free software project" and an "open source project," or there isn't. I have yet to see any such difference put forward that I can seriously evaluate as an intrinsic property of the projects themselves. Instead, it is always an extrinsic property of the developers who happen to work on the project, and it is my opinion that such a definition is not particularly useful or informative. The actual projects do not materially differ in terms of the development processes, legal structures, or the rights and responsibilities of their developers and users. RMS likes to claim that "free software development" and "open source development" are entirely separate activities and movements (when he mentions "open source" at all), but I'm unconvinced that there is much truth to that. They are the same thing, just with different labels.

> Your use of "ideological purity tests" is below the pretty high standard I'm used to see you use here, so I won't react to that.

I'm not sure why this should be seen as inflammatory. My point is simply that neither brand of project makes any serious effort to keep out the developers who subscribe to the other brand, so while a project may choose to market itself as "free software" or "open source," there is no particular reason to believe that its developers actually subscribe to that belief. Sure, if a lot of developers were actively opposed to the label, they might change it, but it's my impression that most developers, frankly, do not care one way or the other, and so you end up with passive branding that means nothing and says nothing.

(Perhaps this is because people see the term "purity" as a snarl word? I did not intend it as such, but I suppose it could be read that way. I would like to reiterate that such testing is *not* something that the vast majority of projects do, and in fact I'm not aware of any project having done it. I only said "vast majority" because I did not want to make an absolute and unqualified claim, not because I think that some project out there is actually doing it.)

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 11, 2023 6:03 UTC (Tue) by viiru (subscriber, #53129) [Link]

> > Your use of "ideological purity tests" is below the pretty high standard I'm used to see you use here, so I won't react to that.

> I'm not sure why this should be seen as inflammatory. My point is simply that neither brand of project makes any serious
> effort to keep out the developers who subscribe to the other brand, so while a project may choose to market itself as "free
> software" or "open source," there is no particular reason to believe that its developers actually subscribe to that belief. Sure,
> if a lot of developers were actively opposed to the label, they might change it, but it's my impression that most developers,
> frankly, do not care one way or the other, and so you end up with passive branding that means nothing and says nothing.

> (Perhaps this is because people see the term "purity" as a snarl word? I did not intend it as such, but I suppose it could be
> read that way. I would like to reiterate that such testing is *not* something that the vast majority of projects do, and in fact
> I'm not aware of any project having done it. I only said "vast majority" because I did not want to make an absolute and
> unqualified claim, not because I think that some project out there is actually doing it.)

I'll note here that understanding and agreeing to uphold the DFSG is a required step in being accepted as a Debian Developer. Whether this qualifies as an ideological purity test or not I couldn't say.