Technology

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?

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

Exactly. I'm not running to chrome with it's defanged ad blockers and Google stink.

LibreWolf? Its just firefox minus the crap?

i use Waterfox. its great. its a fork of firefox that still respects privacy.

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.

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

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.

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

It's the Register, ranty articles written like a teenager is kind of their brand.

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.

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.