A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
Posted Apr 1, 2023 11:02 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46)In reply to: A quarter century of Mozilla by flussence
Parent article: A quarter century of Mozilla
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?
Posted Apr 2, 2023 11:57 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (5 responses)
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.
Posted Apr 2, 2023 13:30 UTC (Sun)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (2 responses)
Amen.
(And of course I wish they could be/do better, even as I continue to be grateful for their efforts and results)
Posted Apr 3, 2023 5:47 UTC (Mon)
by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404)
[Link] (1 responses)
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.
Posted Apr 3, 2023 8:51 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
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.
Posted Apr 5, 2023 20:53 UTC (Wed)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link] (1 responses)
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.
Posted Apr 5, 2023 22:35 UTC (Wed)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
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.
> In the end, Mozilla's enduring legacy will probably be as the original creators of Rust.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
> Plenty of open-source projects that build complicated stuff get by with fewer users and less money.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla