Mozilla chose to waste most of it.
Right? I don’t need AI BS. I just want a solid browser.
What do you mean, you don’t want an opt-out ad tracker?
But, but but, it’s AI!! It’ll solve
noneall of your problems!I hate to see AI (I suppose we mean specifically GPTs in this instance) trashed all the time, just because companies use it incorrectly. They shove it in every hole they can to hike the stock price. But it’s a great tool, that arguably needs more time in the oven, which has legitimate helpful uses. Especially in the context of a browser.
For example, in Arc Browser I can semantically search the page/article for anything and it will show me the location of the information I need (ever tried to find the recipe itself in an article about the recipe?). I can also do some obvious stuff, like summarize and translate sections, which I could do by copying it into a dedicated service, but it’s definitely much more convenient being built-in.
Would be much better if it ran locally off the NPU, but we are not there yet.I kinda get why they (and other companies) have to try AI at the moment though.
It’s not what people claim it is, but it could end up being an essential tool for the modern world, and if they don’t invest in it early their business might end up getting left behind.
We’ve certainly seen companies fall because they’ve not tried to stay on the cutting edge before.
But is a bullshit generator even cutting edge in terms of web browsing? Feels like solutions without a problem.
We’ve certainly seen companies fall because they’ve not tried to stay on the cutting edge before
Best example I can think of is Kodak and digital cameras. They invented it then sat on it until it was too late because they didn’t want to cut into their film scam.
Nokia. They were at the top before iPhone. They couldn’t catch up with smart phones at all.
I believe Intel will be another potential example, but we’ll see about that.
What AI bullshit? I didn’t get the memo.
There’s no mention of adding AI to the browser. It’s just an AI platform or ecosystem for development.
Mozilla has a finite amount of money. If they’re (as far as I’m concerned) wasting it on AI nonsense, that’s less development funds that can go toward Firefox.
…compensating their CEO of all people doing good work in there
Maybe they can stop paying their CEO 7 million per year
That CEO quit earlier this year.
Maybe they can stop paying the next CEO 7 million
Maybe that CEO will also quit, because other companies offer them a higher salary.
It’s so easy to say they should just pay their CEO less. I mean, I get it, it’s a ridiculous amount of money that no one needs. But few people, who are qualified for that job, will just do it out of the goodness of their hearts for a salary far below industry standards.
what the fuck could the CEO possibly do for a company that seems to just fucking zombie its way along, it does literally nothing and hasnt died, what could the CEO possibly be qualified for, it’s not like they’re gaining more market share from having a good product
They are the face of the company. If they are shit at communicating it will affect share prices which could end a company. They have to say the right things at the right times or they could potentially break laws by saying the wrong things.
There’s a lot of stuff they need to know and it’s not cheap to get that knowledge.
I love all the vague, ambiguous examples that say nothing.
I mean, the Intel CEO just literally quote the Bible… I guess you need a lot of education for that
Look, I understand you can’t get a high school dropout to do this job, but can they really justify earning 10000x more than other people in their companies? Are they 10000x more valuable??
If that’s all there is, it sounds like you just need good legal and marketing department and someone who is attractive to deliver their script.
If they are shit at communicating it will affect share prices which could end a company. They have to say the right things at the right times or they could potentially break laws by saying the wrong things.
I notice, very glaringly, you didn’t mention a SINGLE thing about the company running efficiently, being profitable, producing something of value…
It’s not that the company could end if it doesn’t do well at what it does. It’s that the company could end if fickle, short-term focused asshats aren’t happy, and to keep them happy, you need a head fickle, short-term focused asshat at the helm.
God, I wish every company could just be private.
i dont even fucking know who C suites at mozilla, i havent even googled their company in years to see if they even still exist. The only sign of life from this company is when i update my system and firefox also gets updated.
Also, it’s pretty cheap to get that knowledge, just don’t ever say anything that might lose you money.
This is predicated on the assumption that a CEOs skill is directly related to their salary.
This may or may not be the case.
I don’t think companies care. If you’re the CEO of Mozilla for a year without it imploding, you’re looking very experienced compared to some of the applicants that medium-sized Silicon Valley companies, like Dropbox, Evernote and such, will get.
And if Mozilla is only paying you $200k, they’ll consider it an absolute bargain to give you tenfold that.
This may or may not be the case.
This is predicated on the assumption that people just give money away easily.
I mean, they do… the higher my pay goes the less actual work I do (thinking is not actual work). And I keep getting promoted.
It’s dumb as hell but the only answer I’ve come up with is maybe not everyone can do the “stupid monkey shit” (i.e. “Someone get this herd of retarded cats to do literally anything”).
I’m still waiting for evidence these CEOs do anything special… They get paid millions whether the companies they lead succeed or flounder
But few people, who are qualified for that job
CEOs do nothing. They rake in millions, and hire advisors to tell them what to do
Then go be a CEO
Need to be a nepo baby for that
So if there are CEOs who aren’t related to the board of directors, would that overturn your theory?
When did I say I want to be a parasite? I want to abolish CEOs, not become one of them
Maybe they can stop fiddling around with A I.
Maybe that’s not bad for firefox.
Maybe less money means less ridiculous side projects and just focus on delivering a good browser.
Algo the lack of google as financial support means they’ll rely more on donations, which would mean that they really need to focus on offering a good browser.
I’ll gladly donate to firefox if I would see they are really focusing on it.
I have donated in the past while still living in a third world country. I stopped when I realized how my donation was squandered.
The moment that it’s possible to donate directly towards the development of firefox, there’s roughly 10€/yr with their name on it. As it stands however, Mozilla is not funding FF at all, but rather extracting money from the project.
If I had the money, an extra $5 or so would definitely be something I’d spend monthly on donating to Mozilla/Firefox.
I donate around 5 dollars to Wikipedia every month. Another 5 to Mozilla isn’t an issue for me.
… will you though?
I just signed up for monthly donations of 5 USD per month. 5.60 USD technically since I also opted to pay the transaction fees.
Suck it.
Present it. 😮
I have nothing to prove to you. Besides, even if I did present it, you wouldn’t believe it. Even if I presented it with doxxing information you would note it for future harassment campaigns and also claim you don’t believe it.
So… as I said previously… suck it.
5.60 USD to mozilla every month. Not much, but if everyone did it, they would be bigger than google and tell them to eat shit livestream.
Your dick dumbass. Not a copy of your fucking bank statement lmfao. Were my lips on my dick sucking emoji face not clear enough?
Ya’ll take yourselves way too seriously lol. I’m glad you contributed. I haven’t, besides hopefully spurring you on to, in which I’ll take some of the credit for it. So you’re welcome.
I donate to lemmy and mastodon instances. As I do believe they are using my money for good things.
I think in the future I will try to donate like 10 dollars a month for free software that I use, including Firefox, KDE, Thunderbird, Wikipedia, Lemmy, etc.
I think it’s very important to support open source financially, because without it we would all be fucked by huge corporations. And I might sound overly anti-capitalist, but I think that most of them should be broken up.
Mozilla (not Google) got rid of the side projects, increased the CEO’s salary, and laid off a bunch of employees during the pandemic. It basically got rid of the innovation that could have made Firefox a faster, more secure, and pleasant experience. Rust and Rust-based Servo, as a replacement for Gecko, were two of those side projects. These are the things Mozilla needs to invest in.
Also, I think Mozilla needs to ask the user upon install what the default search engine should be from a list of search engines including Google, Duck Duck Go, Bing, and Yahoo. Maybe the order of those could be arranged based on how much they’re able to finagle from the search engines.
The real monopoly is their control over Chrome. That’s what they should be forced to split from the company that owns the search engine. Development and design of Chrome should not and cannot be done by the company that runs the search engine and gets its revenue from ads.
Google got rid of the side projects, increased the CEO’s salary, and laid off a bunch of employees during the pandemic.
How did Google do any of that? Wasn’t that all Mozilla Corp?
Maybe less money means less ridiculous side projects
Like Firefox?
It really seemed like it’s been a bit of a side project those last few years…
They are throwing things at the wall hoping something sticks.
For some reason people don’t want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.
For some reason people don’t want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.
By their own account, it’s not meant to be lucrative.
"Corporation. Foundation. Not-for-profit.
Mozilla puts people over profit in everything we say, build and do. In fact, there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise."
Straight from Mozilla’s About Us page for you. Maybe they ought to live up to their words and start focusing on making a solid browser that respects users’ privacy with the majority of their time, funding and energy, rather than squandering these assets on current tech hype nonsense that people don’t actually want.
You’re right of course, but you’re also wasting your breath.
In 2024 the business sociopaths have so many people so twisted and screwed up in the head that they can’t even CONCEIVE of the idea of a person or organization focused on delivering a product sustainably rather than “MONEY MONEY MONEY, NOM NOM NOM!” for eternity.
Maybe less money means less ridiculous side projects
Like Rust?
For userland code that basically fingerbangs every server on the web, some forced memory-safety might not be a bad idea
Revenue of Mozilla Corporation. Not Mozilla Foundation.
Firefox; being open source as it is; is not in danger.
- Mozilla will take money from Microsoft
- Firefox gets Office 365, Exchange, and Azure AD integration
- Netflix partners with Microsoft for advanced HD and DRM
- Microsoft and Mozilla partner to deliver Microsoft-enhanced Firefox for Windows
- ActiveX 2.0
- Firefox requires an account to use
I threw up in my mouth a little
On what planet?
I had a good chuckle at how well that all came together.
Microsoft is declared a monopoly (again). Firefox has to find new funding (again)
If tech giants such as Google cannot be broken up, then their services should be required to be compatible and all data exportable to competitors. See the EFFʼs “Competitive Compatibility” concept. Buy a movie off Google’s YouTube but Google misbehaves? It must be exportable to a market competitor that you do support. Don’t like how Google handles your email? You should be able to switch your email address to a competitor just like you can change phone companies without losing your phone number.
Basically, if the US Federal government cannot discipline monopolies by breaking them up directly, they should break up the moats and walled gardens the monopolies built to keep customers locked in to maintain their monopolies. See Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.
Penalize Google many much monies and use some of those to endow a trust that gives yearly funding distributions.
Simple.
In my utopia, Google would be forced to continue to pay out the current annual contract sum, at a decreasing percentage every year, for some number of years, to all affected companies, giving them the opportunity to divest and pivot.
The root problem doesn’t get fixed if the company with enough money to be a monopolist still has the money when this is “resolved.”
Tbh I like Gecko but I hate the Mozilla company’s recent statements.
Please elaborate or point me in the direction
Mass Layoffs
AI Focus
End of Support status for FireFox on windows older than Windows 10
Removal of many settings such as browser.privateWindowSeparation.enabled
It’s a company. Mozilla Foundation has nonprofit status but the Subsidiary Mozilla Corporation is for-profit.
TBH I’m biased af because I just liked it better before all the recent updates.
I don’t understand why you are about layoffs. They are cutting useless bloat. (VR didn’t pan out go figure) Also Windows 7 isn’t supported by Microsoft so it doesn’t make sense to support it. It isn’t even receiving security patches.
From a profitability perspective I think there is lots of potential in privacy tech. The problem is that they keep creating and then discontinuing random stuff.
I don’t like Mozilla but the stuff you listed doesn’t seem like the problem to me.
laying off the servo staff at least was a mistake
Servo has been integrated into Firefox. The old engine has been partially replaced that’s why Firefox is fast now. Servo is now the old term for Gecko.
Servo is not the old name for Gecko. Gecko existed long before Servo was started and Servo continues to be developed independently of Mozilla. It was a research project to develop a web rendering engine in Rust taking advantage of parallelization. The parallelization stuff mostly made it through the Quantum project several years ago, which did indeed help performance. That’s about it. As of right now, Gecko’s code base 55.4% C++, 22.6% JavaScript, 4.5% C, 4.3% Kotlin and a mere 3.8% Rust. If Servo had indeed been integrated into Firefox, over half of this would be Rust. 53.2%, if the current Servo repository is anything to go by.
I personally think it is silly to try to keep alive. If it was good Mozilla would’ve used it more. You can have your own take though
Oh no, they will have to stop paying their CEO a ridiculous amount of money. TRAGIC.
CEO will still get their pay, just have to lay off bunch of devs to “balance the losses”
librewolf, brave, mullvad browser.
librewolf
Downstream of Firefox that relies on Firefox being developed by Mozilla
brave
Sketchy downstream of Google Chromium
mullvad browser
Downstream of Tor Browser which in turn is downstream of Firefox that relies on Firefox being developed by Mozilla
Which would ironically give even more monopoly over how the web is viewed to Google. Chrome and Firefox are just about the only two players in that space right now.
No they’re not, there’s safari and Edge. Don’t forget about opera.
:|
Sorry. I’m having a hard time keeping a straight face while I say that…
Edge is a Chrome clone. Safari exists purely because of Apple. It is designed to not work well so you get trapped in the Apple app store.
Opera and Edge are Chromium based. Even most of the alternatives are still Google controlled.
There are still versions of Opera with their own original engine going around.
Damn, Presto should return. That thing could load like 300 tabs in like 30, maybe 60 MB RAM tops.
I’d pay for a browser if it wouldn’t sell my data.
I wouldn’t mind paying for a browser, but I’m not thrilled with the idea of subscribing to a browser.
If a product requires constant maintaining and updates through out its lifetime (like a browser) then it’s make sense for a subscription model.
If a product is released in a defective or malfunctioning state, it makes sense to assign liability to the manufacturer.
if it’s a single player game or a mp3 converter software, then what you’re saying is true.
But the internet is ever changing, new exploits and security vulnerabilities are discovered almost every day. New standards, new formats, new features released so often, even after the full release it still requires a full development team instead of just a few core maintenance staff.
Unless you want to pay for every major version upgrade or risk using an outdated browser, a browser subscription model doesn’t sound so bad.
the internet is ever changing
We have standard protocols for communication that are system agnostic and simple to implement.
Claiming you need a subscription to your browser to use the Internet is akin to claiming you need a subscription to your radio to listen to music.
Radio gets revenue from advertisers, just like Firefox gets money from Google. If you cut off that revenue and move the cost to the consumer, then there’s no “one time payment” that could support a radio station indefinitely, so does Firefox.
Radio gets revenue from advertisers, just like Firefox gets money from Google.
Private For-Profit Radio Stations get revenue from advertisement. But Sony and JBP and Bose aren’t advertisement based. Mozilla isn’t a content provider, its an application developer.
there’s no “one time payment” that could support a radio station indefinitely
There’s no “one time payment” that supports radio manufacturers indefinitely, either. So the companies develop new models and improved features, then retail them as replacements to the old device. But I’ve got an old machine from the 1980s that picks up AM/FM just fine. Sony isn’t out of business because it continues to exist.
Mozilla chose a stupid business model. 🤷
They’ve undoubtedly been preparing for this day in some capacity. If they didn’t and collapse then yes they chose a stupid business model. But until that happens I think this is a premature statement.
It is shocking to me how many people on Lemmy hate Firefox, which is basically the only real non-chromium alternative that most people can use with minimal compromises. So many people hate Google here yet y’all seem to hate the only viable competitor even more. It’s bizarre to me.
It is shocking to me how many people on Lemmy hate Firefox
Although some people are Google fanbois or reactionary dumbasses, I think most of what you’re misinterpreting as “Firefox hate” is actually love for Firefox and hate for what Mozilla has done to it.
Most Firefox-critics’ feelings towards it are more like this:
Love the browser, hate the corpos desperately trying to fuck it up because that’s the cool thing to do to your software now days.
