Firefox is fine. The people running it are not
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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.
Refusal to make a "political" statement is very much political when the politics in question is about acknowledging non-men exist. There is no politically neutral choice when there are two options who are both political.
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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.
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Brendan Eich
I honestly don't understand the hate here. I get that he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that's terrible, but I've also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla. I honestly think he would've been a better CEO at Mozilla because he's interested in the tech. His largest problem was making a personal contribution with his own money to an unpopular cause, and someone dug it up looking for dirt.
Isn't that exactly how people should act? Leave your politics at home and work well with others. I work in a diverse group with a mix of immigrants, likely gay people, atheists and religious types, Trump supporters and critics, and even a couple furries. None of that matters and we work well together. In fact, most of the turnover we've had has been over compensation because our company has been stingy recently, and they all say they wouldn't have considered leaving otherwise.
You can disagree on very important things and still work well together, it's called professionalism. I dislike Eich's views, but I believe he had way more professionalism than his loudest critics.
he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that’s terrible,
but I’ve also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla
How on earth can you reconcile these two statements? "I respect you so much I'll pass a law to make you illegal"?
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The fact that it's aiming to be stable doesn't mean it is. It's still a work in progress unlike other browsers.
Currently, it's pretty shit. It starts up in fullscreen with a non managed window, well, fuck that noise.
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I just moved back to ff in November, because of ubo. I have to move again? Where to?
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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.
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This article appears to be pretty even-handed.
My assessment? Get fucked, Ladybird. I don't want to trust my web security to people who think like this, especially since web security is very political and will only become more so as the Trump administration continues.
TL;DR;
A few days later, someone pointed out an issue in SerenityOS where a new contributor offered to update the documentation to include gender-neutral language instead of always assuming the person building the project was a man. Kling rejected it with the statement: “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
…Kling and the Ladybird project doubled down on rejecting active inclusion in the name of being “apolitical.” Others tried to explain that rejecting inclusivity is inherently a political decision.
If you’ve watched enough of these things play out, it’s usually the doubling down that causes a lasting split, more than the original disagreement.
So not some kind of JK Rowling transphobia or even stock republiQan misogyny as much as a fairly tone-deaf executive position on documentation that became a thing.
Making documentation gender-neutral is not radical or ‘political’ other than it’s trying to reflect the reality that more than just men use and create code. It seems like Kling thought his project was under threat of takeover by some radical pansexual furry anarcho-collective (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and said something stupid like “documentation isn’t a place for political debate” which, is sort of true and also not relevant to the change requested.
As the article states, the real issue is the doubling down. That’s not good.
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he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that’s terrible,
but I’ve also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla
How on earth can you reconcile these two statements? "I respect you so much I'll pass a law to make you illegal"?
I don't understand how you can't.
In a business setting, it's called "professionalism", and in a personal setting it's called being a nice person. 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. Why? Believing those things doesn't mean you hate LGBT people, it just means you disagree about policy. They love my sister in law and her kids, so they'll do what they can to help them feel comfortable around them and want to participate in family gatherings.
I personally believe strongly that marriage should be available to all consenting adults, but I also believe gay marriage goes against God's plan. Why? I believe everyone has the right to make their own choices and whether that's acceptable to God isn't my business. Maybe I'm misreading things, IDK, but my personal religious beliefs only guide my personal decisions and I believe I am supposed to love everyone regardless of their lifestyle. Whether someone else is sinning isn't really my business, nor should it impact my love for them. And maybe they're not sinning, again, IDK, it's not my business.
I support same sex marriage (my church doesn't) because I believe in freedom of choice, and that policy merely increases options for others and doesn't decrease mine. Likewise for most LGBT policies, like bathroom use or gender change on IDs, you do you. We had an LGBT candidate at work (pretty obviously trans), and I was happily surprised that wasn't an issue for my very conservative coworker during the interview (they're an observant Muslim with conservative social views), and I went out of my way to make sure we both corrected for any subconscious bias we might have.
I don't know Brendan Eich, maybe he's actually a terrible person, idk. What I do know is he had a long career at Mozilla (nearly 20 years), and there were no public complaints about him until he was chosen as CEO. From all accounts, people were only mad about his $1k donation to prop 8, not about his conduct at work or anything of that nature. The board even asked him to stay in another capacity, but he left because he loved Mozilla and obviously he wasn't able to be an effective leader if his presence encouraged people to recommend against using Firefox and other Mozilla products.
To me, it's a crazy overreaction, he donated a pretty modest amount one time, six years prior, and had no complaints during his position as CTO. He absolutely got brigaded because someone decided to dig up donation records. If they didn't, he probably would've been a successful CEO and refocused on the tech, instead of whatever nonsense the follow-up CEOs have been doing.
I disagree with Eich's political views, but also think he was the best person for the CEO role. He seemed like a competent professional, and he was certainly technically competent given his long technical career at Mozilla.
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I just moved back to ff in November, because of ubo. I have to move again? Where to?
I run IronFox for Android and Librewolf on Desktop.
Since they are both Firefox forks, migrating is not that bad. -
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.
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I just moved back to ff in November, because of ubo. I have to move again? Where to?
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
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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
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Currently, it's pretty shit. It starts up in fullscreen with a non managed window, well, fuck that noise.
well that’s because it’s kinda not trying to be a browser first; it’s trying to be an engine… let others make the UI, and ladybird can be the best damn thing to wrap that UI around… from what i understand, they have a web browser as more of a tech demo right now
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well that’s because it’s kinda not trying to be a browser first; it’s trying to be an engine… let others make the UI, and ladybird can be the best damn thing to wrap that UI around… from what i understand, they have a web browser as more of a tech demo right now
Yes, but I still don't know why they seem to think it's so important to write a new browser engine instead of improving Gecko or Servo. To me it just seems like people like it because they don't know other things aside from the Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browser engines exist and just chase something new and shiny.
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I don't understand how you can't.
In a business setting, it's called "professionalism", and in a personal setting it's called being a nice person. 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. Why? Believing those things doesn't mean you hate LGBT people, it just means you disagree about policy. They love my sister in law and her kids, so they'll do what they can to help them feel comfortable around them and want to participate in family gatherings.
I personally believe strongly that marriage should be available to all consenting adults, but I also believe gay marriage goes against God's plan. Why? I believe everyone has the right to make their own choices and whether that's acceptable to God isn't my business. Maybe I'm misreading things, IDK, but my personal religious beliefs only guide my personal decisions and I believe I am supposed to love everyone regardless of their lifestyle. Whether someone else is sinning isn't really my business, nor should it impact my love for them. And maybe they're not sinning, again, IDK, it's not my business.
I support same sex marriage (my church doesn't) because I believe in freedom of choice, and that policy merely increases options for others and doesn't decrease mine. Likewise for most LGBT policies, like bathroom use or gender change on IDs, you do you. We had an LGBT candidate at work (pretty obviously trans), and I was happily surprised that wasn't an issue for my very conservative coworker during the interview (they're an observant Muslim with conservative social views), and I went out of my way to make sure we both corrected for any subconscious bias we might have.
I don't know Brendan Eich, maybe he's actually a terrible person, idk. What I do know is he had a long career at Mozilla (nearly 20 years), and there were no public complaints about him until he was chosen as CEO. From all accounts, people were only mad about his $1k donation to prop 8, not about his conduct at work or anything of that nature. The board even asked him to stay in another capacity, but he left because he loved Mozilla and obviously he wasn't able to be an effective leader if his presence encouraged people to recommend against using Firefox and other Mozilla products.
To me, it's a crazy overreaction, he donated a pretty modest amount one time, six years prior, and had no complaints during his position as CTO. He absolutely got brigaded because someone decided to dig up donation records. If they didn't, he probably would've been a successful CEO and refocused on the tech, instead of whatever nonsense the follow-up CEOs have been doing.
I disagree with Eich's political views, but also think he was the best person for the CEO role. He seemed like a competent professional, and he was certainly technically competent given his long technical career at Mozilla.
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
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Yes, but I still don't know why they seem to think it's so important to write a new browser engine instead of improving Gecko or Servo. To me it just seems like people like it because they don't know other things aside from the Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browser engines exist and just chase something new and shiny.
that’s fair, but i think there’s space for multiple to compete… servo and ladybird have different ethos from what i can tell.. ladybird is trying to build everything from scratch, as well as being completely independent (whilst servo was mozilla and is now the linux foundation)
personally, i prefer servo just because its rust and i don't think that independence from the linux foundation is really that important
but that’s not to say that what ladybird is trying to achieve, or their reasons are wrong
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If that's true, shame on them. But it doesn't mean their browser isn't good.
it’s not at all true… it was misunderstanding that people seemed to have blown way out of proportion without understanding context, and now they have A+ policies in place
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I just moved back to ff in November, because of ubo. I have to move again? Where to?
Librewolf
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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/
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