One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi

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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:

1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and

2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.

3. 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

How's that on mobile? Oh, right. It isn't.

We need real solutions.

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.

I also believe gay marriage goes against God’s plan

I support same sex marriage (my church doesn’t) because I believe in freedom of choice

I applaud you for supporting same-sex marriage, but - apologies if this sounds like I'm picking on you, I'm really not - this is like someone who claims to be a young-earth creationist but agrees that radiocarbon dating is accurate. I don't understand how these mutually-exclusive thoughts can happily coexist in your mind. I wish we could discuss this over a drink because I'm very intrigued by whatever epistemic process led you there.

I'll try explaining with a different example that's less emotionally charged: gambling.

I think gambling is terrible and nobody should do it. It's addictive and has ruined tons of lives, and I absolutely refuse to do anything related to it for fear that I'll get hooked.

So I should be in favor of gambling bans, right? No, quite the opposite, and I genuinely get excited for my coworkers and friends that do gamble when they do well. They know my personal opinion on it, but still share their ups and downs with me because they know I won't judge or lecture them.

The same is true for a variety of policies, I generally believe in fewer restrictions on individuals. For example:

• I don't drink but support looser liquor laws
• I believe prostitution should be legal, and also that it's bad
• I don't use drugs, but believe that all recreational drugs should be legal if they can be used safety (i.e. under medical supervision)

As long as it doesn't restrict those who don't want to participate, I'm in favor of more options for people.

I believe everyone should be able to live the way they choose, and I can be happy for someone who makes different choices than me. I don't have to understand why someone values something to feel happy when they achieve it.

My view of homosexuality applies to me, not you. Me preventing you from doing something I consider to be a sin is worse than you doing the sin. You have every right to decide how to live your life, and I can feel happy for you finding happiness even if I believe it's the wrong choice.

I don't think that's at all comparable to your creationism example, which is about accepting two opposing views simultaneously. If you accept science that conflicts with your religious views, you need to adjust your religious views so they're compatible. Likewise, society and law don't need to match your religious views, they just need to be compatible (e.g. religious institutions shouldn't be forced to perform or accept same sex marriage for religious rites).

I hope this makes sense.

Most of my family is against gay marriage and don't believe in gender fluidity, yet when my sister in law said her child is non-binary and would like to be referred to with they/then, they complied.

no, that’s fucked up… less fucked up than making a big deal of it, but it shows a huge lack of empathy… people close to them that they know quite well are validating that non binary people exist - that it’s not just people “looking for attention” and all that other garbage that people throw out there and they still don’t think they should be treated with respect and as equals by society

that’s “i don’t respect you but i don’t want to make a scene”

this is why the rate of self harm in the queer scene is so fuck high… because families suddenly don’t respect people they’ve know and loved their entire lives

After reading this, in particular the "The Facts" section, my understanding is: he got pulled into making a political statement about gender and he didn't want to get involved with that.

Yet again, that "crowd" didn't like Ladybird's refusal to play, therefore that "crowd" does what they're known best doing: cry high and loud on the internet playing the victim.

In a sense, that "crowd" shoved their political agenda down his throat, and that's the only thing I personally find reprehensible here.

Chromium does a lot of heavy lifting to fix problems with websites which enables certain web developers to be lazy.

Thanks for taking the time to explain - that does make a lot of sense, if you coisider being trans or gay a learned/chosen behaviour. That hadn't crossed my mind, which is why the premise seemed impossible to me. The difference, of course, between being gay and being a gambler is that nobody is born a gambler, therefore the comparison doesn't really hold up. That's why I used the creationism example: Carbon-14 is what it is. LGBT people are who they are. They didn't choose to be that way any more that C-14 chose its decay rate. I suppose that doesn't matter all that much in practice - if more people thought like you rather than being homo- or transphobic, the world would undoubtedly be a better place than it is.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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:

1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and

2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.

3. 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

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.

Ad block *

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.

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.