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.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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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.
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 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.
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.
https://www.germnetwork.com/blog/germ-announces-pre-seed-funding
I can understand and relate to the complaints in this article but there's not really another alternative that I would prefer to use either
Exactly. I'm not running to chrome with it's defanged ad blockers and Google stink.
LibreWolf? Its just firefox minus the crap?
But where does libre wolf go if Mozilla vanishes?
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.
Its open source no? I dont imagine the fork would just up and disappear either
It won’t disappear, but the version number will be frozen. I kinda prefer to have security updates on a regular basis.
The development of Firefox would vanish and Firefox would slowly become outdated, insecure and unusable.
Unless the LibreWolf team has the resources to do all the maintenance of Firefox plus the LibreWolf specific work they already do, LibreWolf will be just as bad off as FireFox.
Firefox and all their derivatives like LibreWolf will deteriorate and become unusable unless someone magically swoops in and picks up Mozillas' slack.
Probably not but it would probably fall behind chromium based projects without corporate sponsorship of its core rendering engine and javascript runtime.
i use Waterfox. its great. its a fork of firefox that still respects privacy.
The forks won't last long without firefox.
Scoot over and make room for me in that boat.
We're gonna need a bigger boat.
ominous music plays in the background
Servo?
I'm not happy with how Mozilla leadership has navigated the ship, but what is the alternative? If Mozilla dies, there isn't enough funding for one of the forks to take over the browser.
They had many years to develop alternative sources of income instead of relying solely on Google. But instead, they’ve been chasing every trend set by big corporations for no clear reason. I really dislike their CEO and the entire leadership team — they’re destroying Mozilla from the inside. Rather than implementing a recovery plan, which they could’ve done years ago, they allowed the company to remain dependent on Google. From what I know, internal relationships among coworkers are poor. People either do whatever they want or nothing at all. If you try to bring new ideas to the CEO and you're not close to them, you're basically fucked up With an organization being managed like this, there’s no path forward other than continued decline. Sadly, Mozilla is likely to die for all the reasons mentioned above
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.
I for one would love to throw money at Mozilla, or any alternative, that has experienced developers behind it, doesn't have conflicts of interest and acts on behalf of its users. This is why I donate to Servo, Ladybird and Dillo too (I know one of these is not like the others 😄).
I don't think they'd reach their current levels of funding through donations, but it might be possible to get enough together to keep it on life support.
I know this wouldn't be perfect, but surely better than losing it completely.
ladybird
No planned windows support though 🫤
That's a feature, not a bug.
It's not gonna get very far then lol
Actually they say in 2028 they will have ladybird production version on windows
Nice
Yeah it's bad. Most of the points made in that article are valid.
And once Firefox is gone, all the LibreWolfs and IronFoxs are gone too.
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.
Regardless of opinions, this ~~article~~ opinion piece is written like by an angry teenage nerd.
I don't understand what these angry anti FF people want that keep on having weekly rants on the topic. You are free to not use the software if you don't like it or the company or whatever. Just move on and be happy.
I'm getting tired of these haters any time Mozilla does literally anything and there is not a single constructive idea ever but the demand that Mozilla must operate like a benefactor for nerds that do not have to pay for anything ever.
Damn, I almost wish Mozilla went commercial with FF to fund the development of it just because.
It's the Register, ranty articles written like a teenager is kind of their brand.
I've been using Zen which is nice and has some stuff removed that we don't want.
But it'll only be around as long as Firefox is around.
I’m in the same boat using Zen. Eagerly waiting on Ladybird to come out. They are writing it from the ground up not even a package being used according to them. Oh and this isn’t some rando this is a guy who done decades of coding(mostly browser) so my hopes are high as Snoop
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.
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
people who never donated or contributed getting made at mozilla cancelling services like pocket and fakespot is amusing.
I don't want to donate to Mozilla, I want to donate to Firefox. I can donate to Mozilla, but little if any money would go to firefox, instead it goes to various causes unrelated to web browsers.
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.
There are reasons I went to Seamonkey for a couple of years, then to Pale Moon (which is divergent enough now that I expect it to keep chugging along even if Firefox folds—most of Mozilla's patches are no longer relevant to its codebase). I'm interested to see what Ladybird will bring to the table, though.
Isn't it technically possible to split browser functions so we can recombine as we like? - i.e. separating the rendering / js engine from everything around the side - managing all the tabs, bookmarks, cookies and passwords, workspaces and sessions, mail, notes etc.
In my case, I like the workspace structure provided by Vivaldi, but don't see why it has to be built on chromium browser.
Anyway as a developer I need to test against blink, webkit and gecko, so would be nice to swap them within the same user interface structure.
By the way, I develop a "javascript-heavy" web-app (interactive climate model) and it seems to be working fine, and fast, in firefox, so I'm not convinced by complaints in the article.
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.
Ok, don't use it but when all the pages work only in Chrome with disabled AdBlock don't come back crying.
Orion browser is also good. Coming to Linux soon.
isn't onion b. just tor browser adapted to the limitations of ios?
I think they meant Orion, not onion.
Thanks for the correction 😅
No, it’s a different project that runs on WebKit. The iOS version is fully open source, but as for desktop development, they mentioned that it will be open sourced in the future. It’s Safari, but with enhanced features. You can install both Chrome and Firefox extensions. It’s one of the fastest browsers I’ve used.
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