I have been using the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase and heritage, since the release of NCSA Mosaic.
That was 32 years ago. And holy f**ck, that dates me.
Sure, I dabbled around with others. There was the original Opera, back when Netscape cratered and the only other real option was IE. Opera’s tab behaviours made me install Tab Mix Plus for FF, and I still find that extension to be the second-most critically important extension FF has, right after UBlock Origin.
And lately I took a shine to Vivaldi, but I have been weaning myself off of it once I realized that the Manifest v2 shutdown was unavoidable for it as well.
And the only reason why I even have Chromium is as a sandbox for any Google services I access and as a “naked” web browser for those websites who implement malware and spyware in the name of “website security”. Which, of course, also means a majority of websites that are “protected” by CloudFlare’s incredibly hostile anti-user practices.
And of course, I also run forks, such as Librewolf and others, also with the appropriate anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ins. It can be useful having multiple web browsers up at once.
But my main will always be Firefox.
You know you fucked up when even a traditionally hardcore Mozilla fan since the early 2000s like myself has had enuff and recently switched to Librewolf.
I’m with you. I was using Netscape way back and loved Firefox from its inception, and tried to convince everyone I knew to use it. Earlier this year I finally switched to Waterfox, and I haven’t looked back. I tried Librewolf first, and it was great, but they don’t have an app and that was a dealbreaker for me. Waterfox feels a lot like older Firefox UI-wise, and I love the tab containers.
Is it good so far?
Yes! A bit annoying with no built in pw manager but I manage. It did show me how much of the problems which I thought were Gecko related were actually Firefox related, tho.
Basically it’s a faster, bluer, and less buggy Firefox. 🐺>🦊
You should use a third party password manager. You can still add extensions to librewolf.
Wdym Librewolf has no built in password manager? It has
about:loginsjust like Firefox
Yeah, this is part of the new Reaganomics I like to call AIconomics. The goal isn’t to produce a good product, the goal to make something flashy that tech billionaires want to throw cash at. It’s not unlike crypto. Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big. Meanwhile tech billionaires keep minting new ones to entice new suckers every other week. The tech billionaires want you hooked on AI so you’ll give up your private info that they can sell to each other so they can cash in, the software companies are investing their time and resources into making AI LLMs in order to get tech billionaires to give them money. It’s a viscous capitalist circle. Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation. But with Republicans in charge that will absolutely never happen. Trump practically made his entire cabinet out of billionaires and corporate shills. And too many Democrats gave them the thumb up, so don’t count of Dems doing a whole lot to stall the big tech chokehold on everything either.
Check out enshittification and the rot economy. I feel like those two terms encompass pretty much what we are seeing these days
There’s been investment bubbles, overshooting and disingenuous rent seeking in many economies before. It was temporarily reduced in many western economies by various FDR type policies in the '30s-'60s. The '70s and '80s were just the banks wresting back their freedom to implement market “rationality”. And we get the benefits ever since.
People do keep voting for it though so it is hard to argue they’re not satisfied. Even the ones who protest vote don’t seem to see the “investment” markets as any part of the problem; or as important at all. That’s either some pretty effective demagoguery, or some dumb fucking electorate.
The amount of power shareholders hold over every major (American) enterprise isn’t talked about in a way that presents a clear problem between increasingly expensive and shitty services, layoffs, anti-worker practices, political corruption and these shareholder groups. C-suite are part of this group but they’re also afraid of removal via hostile board takeovers and so easily justify acquiescing to shareholder demands. Perhaps it’s because the same investors hold the same sway over (American) media with the added benefit of using it to brand themselves as exceptional leaders. Lots to untangle there…
How viscous is the cycle
Very. It’s like molasses.
I’ld like to vote Cryptonimics as term, because it encompasses both the cryptic nature of the product, and the clear example of cryptocurrency.
Where do you think you are?
Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big.
That’s not entirely correct. Black and white stones used in voting in someplace antique also have no actual value, but they substitute a vote.
BTC is used as a mechanism of exchange, like a decentralized bank.
Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.
Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?
Or would you doubt that the person talking has good idea of the problem and the solutions, offering the bluntest one?
“Regulation” of the “property rights protection” kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn’t work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it’s theft. Providing a “communication platform” augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that’s not heavy regulation, that’s an update to pretty light regulation.
Maybe also obligation for every big service on the Internet to have global identifiers and provide a global API exposing all its inner entities, be that posts or users or comments or reactions, with those global identifiers. So that you could export all of Facebook to a decentralized cache, for example. That’s heavy regulation, but also pretty reasonable, in line with old approaches to libraries, press and freedom of speech.
Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.
Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?
Well, if everything else failed…
“Regulation” of the “property rights protection” kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn’t work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it’s theft. Providing a “communication platform” augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that’s not heavy regulation, that’s an update to pretty light regulation.
The problem with light regulation is that it would probably be too easy to workaround, not that a heavy regulation do not have the same problem btw, but more than the regulation itself is the punishment (and the certainty and timeliness of it) that is important.
Well, if you’ve noticed, the punishments have been becoming less and less over many years, unless you are a small-to-medium business or an individual, in that case you have more rules and more punishments.
I noted it. That is why I said that the problem is the punishment.
They didn’t stop handing out harsh punishments. Just in a highly unpredictable, unequal and arbitrary pattern.
I’ve read someplace that the main difference between modernity and middle ages in legal practice was that in modernity punishments were relatively small, but unavoidable, while in middle ages most criminals avoided punishments, but here and there some poor idiot would be made an example of in a highly disproportionate way, like being quartered for stealing some shit and being rude to a priest.
One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi
…
Zawinski has repeatedly said:
Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
This makes sense to me. I initially thought everything that Proton does, that should have been Mozilla. They should have been a collection of services to compete with like O365 and Google One. So I didn’t see a problem with Mozilla selling a VPN, even though if I remember right it being just a Mullvad rebrand.
Right now to me it looks like Proton is the closest mostly missing a web browser and a more cloud office offering.
Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.
Linux kernel devs do Linux kernel development and distros small and large do the integration with everything else needed for an operating system, branding, support, etc. Sounds like Mozilla should have been the core devs for a number of reference software projects. Firefox browser engine. Maybe an equivalent to Electron based on Servo. Shouldn’t have dropped Rust and been the steward for the reference Rust compiler. Could have been the steward for FirefoxOS/KaiOS/etc. Support PostmarketOS maybe.
Linux foundation stewards or contributes to all sorts of software projects not just the kernel but they’re all pretty much things that are relevant for users of Linux operating systems. Mozilla could have found some software centric focus that in some way came together thematically. I would guess privacy focused browser and software services
Markup pro tip: to have multiple separate lines appear as a single large block quote, insert the quote signifier (>) into the blank newlines between them as well.
so this
is one giant
block quote
despite the newlines.
That assumes though that the definition of web browser and its needed stack stays static.
What happens if we all browse the net primarily via VR then? The line is blurry, so is Mozilla org.
Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.
Unfortunately others are deciding on web standards mostly. Which makes it hard for it to keep up even if it were trying to be such.
Also Mozilla was kinda that, until it wasn’t - because they decided to go the other way and because apparently they lacked money (doesn’t look like that from their spending, but).
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Sadly I am running into more and more things that don’t work on firefox. Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently. They don’t say it is the browser. I don’t know how they are doing it, but google is winning the fight.
Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently.
I recall how South Korea literally painted itself into a corner for becoming too dependent on Internet Explorer after years of using it with a security implementation based entirely on ActiveX.
I’m currently using a user-agent switcher plugin. Allows me to spoof servers into believing I’m running a different browser.
I tried the spoofer on a few, and they still failed. I thought it was supposed to be all chromium under the hood, but somehow it’s different. And companies don’t test firefox, nor care.
If a site I have to use doesn’t work for no apparent reason, I e-mail the company’s Support. Let them sort it out, or provide another way I can do what I’m trying to do. Personally, I think a lot of the problems are from more and more websites integrating privacy-invading “features”, and FF interfering with their operation.
I talked to tech support once, they said it won’t get fixed, and there was no workaround. It was a platform type site. So I’m not their direct custom. A small business is. And the people at the small business have never heard of firefox. So they don’t even understand the problem.
Yeah support either doesn’t know or care. They just say, weird the website doesn’t work with your device. Do you have another computer?
As someone who’s worked in IT, in corporate and not so corporate companies, it’s often not that the support techs don’t care. It’s that management doesn’t. In most companies, I was explicitly told to not care about certain things. If I cared too much and spent too much time on one single problem, to fix it for good, I was told off. As long as users could work in some way, it didn’t matter. Even if that included ineffective or costly workarounds. That kind of thinking has and will always rub me the wrong way.
This exactly. Which is why when the tech support didn’t want to file a ticket, I pushed for it to be filed. The product managers make the decision, and if they don’t see tickets it doesn’t exist.
When I asked a couple of developers who work on websites/webapps with a lot of moving parts, they said it was easiest to just test for chrome, since that’s what most people use.
It’s turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox at work recently once they added tab groups. A few parts of one of the web apps my team maintains straight up don’t work. I mentioned it in a meeting, received a full 10 seconds of silence before someone said “Well customers aren’t complaining…”
Yeah, I’m not a dev, but I work with dev teams. They all don’t test with firefox anymore. Not enough ROI according to the product managers.
It’s so damn stupid. If your site works meaningfully differently in Firefox vs Chromium, you’re already doing something very, very wrong.
Yep, this is why at least for me when I develop websites I use Firefox first for development to make sure that the website runs on Firefox.
Chromium does a lot of heavy lifting to fix problems with websites which enables certain web developers to be lazy.
Smae thing that Nvidia does with OpenGL. Their driver handles a lot erroneous out of spec behaviour so developers think their game works fine but the moment you run it on AMD or Intel GPUs, you get all sorts of issues because they actually implement the spec accurately.
This is like telling people that they are doing something wrong when they don’t “buy low and sell high” when they’re trading. Obviously. Issues with browser parity are born from a difficulty of the how and the when, not the what.
The how is testing on one other browser.
What a novel idea.
It’s ironic that I use Firefox personally but unfortunately we prioritized Chrome when I did more front end work too. Firefox would often render views differently compared to Chrome (Safari was also a shetshow) and we had to prioritize work ofc, especially for legacy stuff.
The thing is, as a pure guess, I would bet that it’s Chrome that’s not adhering to the web standards.
Firefox still hasn’t fixed Bug 1938998 despite me reporting it multiple times. There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile. I’ve been using the internet for 26 years, and have used Mozilla based browsers since 2001, I want them to survive to the next era of the internet, but they are struggling to keep up. Opera and Edge already gave up their engines, Webkit and Blink are basically the same engine with different standards enabled, and Firefox is under 2% on some days on Statcounter. I feel that soon AI based browsers using their own AI-engine will probably take over the internet soon anyway.
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There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile.
And the reason is monopoly abuse by the big tech companies. Apple is banning other browser engines from the app store and does not allow Firefox onto iPhones. Google is shipping its own Chrome with every Android device and they are breaking their own sites like YouTube or Gmail on purpose for Firefox users and push them to install Chrome. Microsoft is bundling Edge with Windows as a default browser and will aggressively enable it as a default browser during updates.
I use Firefox on mobile all the time. Works fine for me. The fact that I get adblock on mobile makes it a no-brainer to use over chrome.
Ad block *
uBlock Origin *
Lol yeah the comment was previously “I like the fact that I get a on mobile” or something that didn’t make sense. All good.
I have never encountered that bug, seems like an issue with the duck duck go not doing proper url encoding. I daily Firefox on mobile and its the best option by far with all the available extensions and of course working adblock
It’s got nothing to do with the specific search engine, it’s Firefox thinking the URL itself is a search query and sending it as-is to the search engine.
I just tested it and it sent the URL to both DDG and to Google.
I use it on mobile. It’s mostly OK tbh, and the addition of a working ad blocker means it’s far better than Chrome for me.
In fairness that is an invalid URL in my book, but it should at least be consistent across desktop and mobile, or at least tucked behind an option.
Web standards don’t care about “your book”, spaces in URLs are valid.
You could always use a WebKit-based browser. They’re still out there, and as they aren’t owned by a company that also sells web ads they are significantly more privacy focussed.
& they are ?<br> BTW, Who disliked your non-controversial comment ?
I used basilisk for a short while. Very minimal browser, indeed.
But it’s chromium, so you do you. I personally favour anything that doesn’t bloat me. Early on I used opera back on a j2me device, there was also a browser with a nice data saving feature, I had access to all cricket news and cricket sport teams because it was heaviliy featured there, there was a squirrel as a logo but it’s all I remember.
Edit it was ucbrowser
It’s no longer the fault of long-term CEO Mitchell Baker, she of the six-million-bucks salary. She took the cash and left in February 2024. After the February 2024 layoffs that went with the “open source AI” announcement, in November, new boss Laura Chambers laid off another third of the staff, but somehow found the money to hire new executives.
Money is the problem. Not too little, but too much. Where there’s wealth, there’s a natural human desire to make more wealth. Ever since Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Firefox has never had to compete. It’s been attached like a mosquito to an artery to the Google cash firehose. The Reg noted it in 2007, and it made more the next year. We were dubious when Firefox turned five.
…
Mozilla’s leadership is directionless and flailing because it’s never had to do, or be, anything else. It’s never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit. It’s no wonder it has no real direction or vision or clue: it never needed them. It’s role-playing being a business.
This is the exact block I came to quote.
The rest of the article is good too, though.
I dunno, Firefox of 3.0 times was the shit. It itself was the browser that should be, more welcoming to customization than Windows of the time was to porn winlockers. They also had XULRunner for alternative ideas. Gecko was the FOSS browser engine that various alternative “nice” MacOS and Linux browsers used.
Though between 2004 and 2008 only four years passed. Less than between Windows 2000 and Vista (let’s ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000).
let’s ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000
That feels like a dangerous argument;
- 2000 = NT 5.0
- XP = NT 5.1
- XP x64 = NT 5.2
- Vista = NT 6.0
- 7 = NT 6.1
- 8 = NT 6.2
- 8.1 = NT 6.3
- 10 = NT 6.4 (Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)
Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.
Hot take. Under semantic versioning everything after vista has been in essence a new version of vista.
Going from NT 5.x to 6.x was a major jump.
The reason why Vista had no/terrible drivers was because they went from an insecure one driver bug crashed the whole system model to more secure isolated drivers that don’t crash the whole system model. Developers had to learn how to write new drivers and none of the XP drivers worked.
They went from a single user OS with a multi user skin on top, to a full role based access control user system.
They went from global admin/non-admin permissions to scoped UAC permissions for apps.
Remember on Vista when apps constantly had that “asking for permissions” popup? That was the apps not using the 6.x UAC APIs.
Given the underlying architectural situation everything since Vista has been vista with polish added (or removed depending on how you look at it)
Things will go beyond vista when a new major release with new mandatory APIs shows up.
Under semantic versioning everything after vista has been in essence a new version of vista.
okay but using that logic everything running linux kernel v5 is the same… fedora, ubuntu, rhel are in essence just a reskin of slackware
an OS is not semantically versioned as a whole because an OS is more than just the kernel
I mean they are all literally the same operating system yah! They all use the same kernel APIs.
The logical conclusion is that from an operating system they are all basicly the same.
The main difference is the user space. The package management and defaults.
Look at Debian GNU/kFreeBSD it’s a whole different operating system with the Debian user space. It’s cool stuff and really highlights the difference between operating system and user space.
an operating system is far more than just the kernel
there are few people who would say that android is the same operating system as ubuntu
But it literally is the same. The only difference is the user space. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD shows this. Different operating system same user space.
Take a look at Wikipedia for more info.
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of processor time, mass storage, peripherals, and other resources.
What might be a valid argument in 5.x might not be an argument for 6.x.
But IMO, Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11 have more in common with vista than vista has with XP.
It’s just a versions list. And I’m mostly joking. Rather that the “feel” of using Windows between 2000 and XP didn’t seem to change much. (I prefer 2000)
Ok but XP was literally 2000 with a prettier default theme
All firefox really needed to be once google took over everything, was to be a viable alternative and find a way to metabolize all this cash in a way that doesn’t damage google’s own cash machine or threaten it’s actual dominance.
For google the pitance they give firefox is a very cheap insurance policy against against anti-trust legislation. Just like Intel with AMD, this shows how toothless the liberal anti-trust legislation are, even if they were really being enforced, they cannot handle a token 2nd player. It cannot handle controlled opposition if it’s credible and believable. So an actual thriving ecosystem doesn’t need to exist, we just get duopolies instead of monopolies but in practices we get ducked up the cloaca just the same.
I can’t keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don’t get worse!
The article says you should stick with Firefox. If you have time, I’d recommend reading the entire article!
forks cant survive without firefox unfortunately
Firefox is open source, it’s not going anywhere.
Building a browser engine is expensive. That’s why almost all other browser engined other than Apple’s have joined the Chromium Borg and gone extinct.
Remember when Cyanogenmod died and no one thought that anyone would take the reigns?
Qutebrowser is my main and Lynx is my “feed” browser. Qutebrowser you don’t need anything else. it just works and you can script the thing to your hearts content.
For a long time I was using Floorp, and while I like floorp and the dev team behind it, I just stopped using it as my main. Sure it’s a fork of firefox and they’re at the whims of mozilla which lately has been clearly evident with the slow updates to floorp.
Qutebrowser just works. The dev for it is a nice dude who is easily accessible for help. the community for it is also very helpful. the integration with things like greasemonkey make scripting and customizing anything so painfully easy. I mean there’s a great script for it right now that completely 100% circumvents youtube ads and it’s been working for months straight without any need to update. It also meshes extremely well with my Bitwarden.
I’ll never use a different browser again.
I’ve been very happy with Waterfox so far. Made with the Gecko Engine but not maintained by Mozilla.
That’s a weird way of saying firefox is not fine.
I just moved back to ff in November, because of ubo. I have to move again? Where to?
Did you read the article? It says Firefox is the best choice you have, and all of the criticism is directed at the organization’s leadership.
… leadership impacts the product. Ff might be the best choice rn, but leadership will fuck it up.
If you have a chance to read the article, I’d highly recommend it. It directly addresses that point.
The forks are Firefox with their own leadership. I have had pretty good experience with Librewolf.
How’s that on mobile? Oh, right. It isn’t.
We need real solutions.
Firefox forks are real. They are also on mobile.
IronFox is really good on mobile.
i’m running waterfox… it’s firefox, but with junk stripped out, and performance optimisations
there’s no real alternatives between chromium and firefox based engines, and chromium includes pretty much everything you’ve heard of except firefox
I run IronFox for Android and Librewolf on Desktop. Since they are both Firefox forks, migrating is not that bad.
I don’t mean to disagree with you, but isn’t IronFox pretty slow? I was using it for like one to two weeks after I got an Android, but I switched to Bromite because of the horrible performance. Maybe it’s because of my devuce though (I’m running an 2018 second-hand Pixel 3a with EvoX)
I don’t feel it is particularly slow, but I have a Pixel 7. It may be slow on 7 years old HW unfortunately :( Chromium is probably better optimized.
I got used to bottom bar on Firefox and since then, I am unable to use Chromium based browsers on mobile. It is just so bad to have the bar at the top. So Bromite is not an option for me.
Oh so it’s my device issue. My apologies.
You get the option to move the tab bar to the bottom in Cromite (it was cromite not bromite), btw.
Oh so it’s my device issue. My apologies.
Well, I would say it is a combination on both. Your device reveals it is slower. No need to apologize. :)
If I test it on my phone, Vanadium is also a lot faster, it’s just that IronFox is not so slow I would care.
Librewolf
mozilla sucks
For clarity, Mozilla isn’t one thing. There’s Mozilla Corporation (profit) and the Mozilla Foundation (nonprofit). Firefox is a product of Mozilla Corporation. And yes, the need to make a profit is a bug not a feature.
and it’s incredibly shit that you can’t donate to firefox… people donate to mozilla assuming they’re donating to firefox but none of the donations go towards firefox development
i emailed them about this a while ago… i can’t remember exactly what i said, but basically that i didn’t want to donate to adtech and ai slop but wanted to support firefox development… this is their reply
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback with us. We genuinely value hearing from our supporters, as your insights help us understand what matters most to the Mozilla community.
It’s important to note that the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation are two separate entities within the Mozilla umbrella - Mozilla Corporation is responsible for developing and maintaining Firefox and other software products, and they are continuously working on improving the user experience, including addressing compatibility issues and promoting the browser to a wider audience.
The Mozilla Foundation, on the other hand, focuses on broader internet health and advocacy work. Our mission is to ensure the internet remains open and accessible for everyone, and this includes issues related to privacy, digital rights, and equity. To confirm, the survey that you had received was from the Mozilla Foundation.
With that being said, Firefox is funded by revenue generated through the product rather than donations. At the moment, there is no way for supporters to make a donation that will be designated to the development of Firefox. Have no fear, things are looking good for Firefox’s future and they plan to be around a long time, supporting folks with the most secure browser experience! Continuing to use Firefox, and recommending it to others, is the best way to support this project.
We truly appreciate your concerns about Firefox and their top priorities - We on the Mozilla Foundation strongly believe that issues such as privacy, online safety, and data security are connected to the products and services we all use every day. The work we do in these areas complements Mozilla Corporation’s focus on building better, more secure software like Firefox, and w encourage you to participate in our survey!
If you would like to input some of your thoughts and ideas into our Ideas discussion forum regarding Firefox and other Mozilla products, please visit: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas
We thank you again for reaching out to our Mozilla Foundation Donor Care team, and please let us know if we can support your further!
All the best,
<redacted their name>
Donor Care TeamMozilla Foundation https://foundation.mozilla.org/
Unfortunately Firefox is a product whose job is to show ads for profit, so the only way to “donate” to it is to click ads.
mozilla and firefox need to learn more away from ai and more towards ethical not for profit governance. be the opposite of big tech and stand for the internet as a public utility and force or good and decency. instead of going ai bro, y’all need to stand up against racism and discrimination while pushing internet for everybody, free of profits.
I personally think it’s not about Mozilla. It’s about the Web.
You need to see the bigger picture always.
The Web as an application for global system of hypertext documents served from different computers is fine.
The Web wasn’t intended as a platform for platforms for global applications.
It’s used as one, because that allows a certain kind of people to gather power. Networked personal computers made the civil society too powerful. Needed a solution.
Why the Web and not just “Facebook native application” and “Google native application”? Well, it’s hard to maintain a hypertext document system made application platform. It limits competition. It also allows Facebook and Google popularity to affect web browser and web techologies popularity. If these don’t work in a browser, that browser is doomed.
While the verticals and monopolies themselves allow thieves and murderers in governments to control the Internet.
So - there weren’t that many websites, if you think about it, requiring any particular web technology when it came into existence. Those mostly started specifically for Google, Facebook etc services and/or policies. Say, HTML5 to phase out Netscape plugin API, which was presented as phasing out Flash (everybody hated Flash).
Mozilla followed those policies and appeared neutral, yes.
But in general the moment using Dillo or Netsurf or Links became plainly, completely not an option for the Web, it was decided. A world standard that has only a handful of compliant realizations is not a standard. It’s an oligopoly.
So, getting back to hypertext - Flash was hated by some because it didn’t allow to turn the whole webpage into an application, but that wasn’t its purpose. JS was a mistake, I think. Any interpreted content should have been embedded in its clear place separate from the rest of the page with its own plugin, similar to Flash applets. But - one can accept that in year 1996 they didn’t think of such consequences.
And remote big services not being standardized were also a mistake. I wrote a bit on that from time to time here, gets tiring to repeat - a lot of what the server side of many applications does is just routing to another client, computation and storage. One can devise a standard for remote services. So that local applications would be different, but would use the same pooled infrastructure, found and announced via trackers similar to torrents. With global identifiers of entities to allow interoperability, so that “post #12435324646dasgtshdryh” would be the same text on any of such storage services (having it) and at any point in time.
That, of course, is a bit late. In our current world things like Briar and other mesh are probably a better direction. One can have what I described over them too, but it will also require management of bandwidth and bottlenecks and stuff not reachable directly.
stand up against racism and discrimination
What does this mean for a browser company? I understand this being an important company value, but I don’t want them filtering the internet or anything. Their primary goal should be to foster a privacy respecting web and a high performance, standards based browser.
I don’t think eliminating profit from the web should be a goal. I don’t care if websites make money, I just care they don’t profit from my data without me agreeing to it explicitly.
I think Firefox needs to become financially independent, and that means finding a privacy respecting business model. My personal preference is a micro payment system where I can pay websites for content in exchange for no ads. That provides value to me and websites that I’d otherwise block ads on.
If AI is part of that, sure, just make it opt-in and very obvious when it’s working.
y’all need to stand up against racism and discrimination
Felt kind of out of nowhere. How does a web browser stand up to racism?
i was talking about both mozilla and firefox… and the internet has plenty to do with that as a communication device for good.
instead of using the internet for war and hate, use it for unity and openness.
I dont want to unify with you.
How would a web browser achieve that? The only thing I can think of is for the browser to choose what sort of web content should be filtered out and what should actually be displayed to the user, which I think we all agree is not what you would want your browser to choose.
the web browser isn’t a sentient entity; the web browser is developed by people who are part of an organisation with an ethos.
I think the question was:
List the steps to be taken by the people at Mozilla to achieve this. Then think if those can reasonably be accomplished.
Can we use it for godot and openness instead?
Only if you want to be left waiting
Companies should be allowed to make a profit, you need that to cover bad years, invest in the future of the company, etc. A company without profit (unless it is a non-profit) will not survive.
And what share of the profit should go right in executives pockets? How many employees should be laid off to increase this profit? Is 6 million $/yr enough for a CEO to feed their fucking family?
y’all need to stand up against racism and discrimination
I concur, I think they should push towards a more positive internet. Though I think they are a bit wary of doing it ever since the toxic backlash to this blog post
https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
which is exactly why they need a strong positive leadership that doesn’t bend the knee to bigots.
The fact that they are now selling our data seems like both a browser problem and a leadership problem. If the browser were fine, we wouldn’t be seeing a moderate exodus to choices like Librewolf and Zen.
