Why do people love to hate on Firefox? People have been harping on Pocket for years as a waste of resources that hardly anyone uses, but now that they are eliminating it, people are coming out of the woodwork to wax nostalgic?

It turns out that making a modern browser is a huge, complex task. It's been said that it is more on par with maintaining an OS than another type of app. Mozilla is not perfect but why are we so quick to let the perfect be the enemy of the good?

It's pretty tone-deaf to criticize layoffs on the same article that acknowledges their historic dependence on Google's rapidly collapsing monopoly. Where is the money going to come from?

A poorly thought out blog post about the only major browser that isn't built on Apple, Google, or Microsoft.

At some point in time FF was a normal project. A good project even. It could be in theory forked as easily as INN, or LibreOffice, or Xorg (oops, never mind), or whatever else big and "classical". It was open to contributors, open in leadership. It was kinda anarchist.

Like a good FOSS project, they considered all the tinkery\hobbyist use cases, having xulrunner and XUL in general. Like a good FOSS project, they didn't treat what's now normal there as normal.

They had a sane UI. They supported the SeaMonkey project, because why be a jerk when you need not.

But then at some point they made a deal with Google. So that's a lesson - any deal works both ways.

For me dropping XUL was the first firm sign of FF's death, because they didn't replace it with anything as good. It almost felt as if the main technical merit of dropping XUL was inability to tinker with it, and XUL's problems with security and parallelism were used as excuses. They could have made an incompatible, but just as functional replacement, not just for my convenience, but for their own too.

So, IMHO, if FF hadn't died, they'd just split paths with the commercial web as far as a decade ago. Probably come up with something like what's Gemini project is doing now, except much more.

BTW, FF was a big enough browser to even affect de facto web standards, were it a good thing to use while ignoring Google's bullshit. Instead they decided to track the bullshit and make the FF itself crappier and "more like Chrome" to compete for Chrome users.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Ladybird is nice, but has a long way to go.

I personally think just tracking today's Web is useless. It's dying. It's a system that went from conscious development to malicious growth of standards for the purpose of capturing the field.

There's a need of at least search, payments, hosting and CDN (and pooling in there, and paying for a resource and selling a resource) being integrated into the system for the new Web-like thing. So that siloed services solving these problems weren't needed. I'm thinking lately of a system with some kind of "resource market", where it's seamless to globally sell and buy storage and computing resources, and transparent routing to those resources, with the market itself reminiscent of MMORPG markets, like in EVE. With search and payments being uniform, so that your client would aggregate results of many automatically retrieved indexers from a pool, without dependence on a single search engine.

I dunno if this looks stupid. Just - paying for things with ads seems to have been a bad idea retrospectively.

Exactly. Mozilla needs to stay in their fucking lane and work on Firefox. That's what they should exist for. Not all this other crap.

That's what we had with xulrunner. Unfortunately Mozilla dropped XUL and didn't offer a good replacement.

You could make any kind of browser with xulrunner.

Thanks for the correction

It's pretty tone-deaf to criticize layoffs on the same article that acknowledges their historic dependence on Google's rapidly collapsing monopoly. Where is the money going to come from?

If you scroll up, you'll see the part of the article that mentions Mozilla wasting tens of millions of dollars on AI.

Where do you think that money comes from?

The forks won't last long without firefox.

We can cross that bridge when we get to it. In the mean time, we have alternatives. Even in a worst case scenario, Mozilla can coast for a while without more Google bucks.

The author's timeline is off. The AI investment was in 2023, before most of the Google antitrust activity. They are also scaling back their AI programs.

We're gonna need a bigger boat.

ominous music plays in the background

Hard agree on most of these.
Try searchxng regards the search bit. It’s a self hostable search proxy. It’ll use everything from bing to duckduck and the topics(eg map search images) are more relevant and specific (at least for me) it looks like the unshitified google era.

And ofc ladybird is far af but i think it’s something that we need right now

It's not gonna get very far then lol

Today [October 28, 2024] Germ announces pre-seed funding from investors K5 Global via partner Daniel Marcotte, Mozilla Ventures, Gaingels, and angel investors including Nick Sullivan, Jessica Millstone of Copper Wire Ventures, and Adam Sah.

Germ Network raises pre-seed funding from K5 Global, Mozilla Ventures — Germ Network

Former Apple privacy engineer Mark Xue teams up with ex-Stanford social media scholar Tessa Brown to put people in control of what they share online

Germ Network (www.germnetwork.com)

Actually they say in 2028 they will have ladybird production version on windows

If firebox being bankrolled by Google didn't raise red flags for you before, I have some NFTs I'd like to sell you that I think you'll find interesting.

Only after I make sure they're legit by running them through FakeSpot NFT Guard.

That Steve Teixeira guy seems all right. He successfully lead profitable division and fought against his employees getting laid off ....aaaand he's laid off too.