[yoavm]

Sounds like you're not even aiming to create a web browser... All good wishes, but count me out and I sure hope Firefox doesn't take that route.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the hacker mentality (go Gemini!), but I thought we were discussing the need for an open web. Sure we can even add NNTP support to Firefox, but that ain't gonna get my grandma switching over.

[grumbel]

> I thought we were discussing the need for an open web.

What exactly is "open" about just being a Chrome-clone? If you want to keep the Web open, you really have to work on the "how-to-get-content-on-the-web" side of things, just another browser for pure consumption really doesn't add all that much. Stuff like containerizing Facebook isn't really doing anything worthwhile, giving people something to get away from Facebook would. And forcing HTTPS on everybody really didn't help either, that just killed what remained of the old Web.

It's not like Firefox didn't try, at one point they added Firefox Hello and that looked promising and than it got removed again. And at one point they had RSS support, but instead of improving and building up on that, that got removed again. And instead of improving the Firefox bookmarks, Tab Groups or the Save button they gave us Pocket, which is no different than any other cloud service.

> but that ain't gonna get my grandma switching over.

You don't improve the Web by giving grandma a Chrome-clone, she'll just be Facebook'ing around all the same as she did in Chrome. And when grandma is paying your bills by visiting Google Search, why even bother, cut out the middleman and just use Chrome. It makes no difference.

Now I don't necessarily want NNTP support in Firefox, as at that point we'll just be full circle and back at where Mozilla started 20 years ago, but I want something that allows communication and publishing of content without having to rely on Facebook and friends.

[yoavm]

It's those Web 3 enthusiasts that tried to convince us that we need new ways to put things on the internet. There's no problem with doing it today. You can `python3 -m http.server` and you're on the internet. There's no technical challenge waiting to be solved there.

Most people are consumers of data. That's why browsers are called Browsers and not Authors. Grandma isn't building a website for herself not because it's hard, but because she doesn't care. The risk with with Google being the only browser is that they define how we browse. They can decide that next year HTML is gone and Flutter is in. They can decide FLOC is mandatory to view a website. They can decide to only show AMP content. Then, my friend, then it's gets harder to put your own content on the internet. And this is why Firefox is important.

[grumbel]

> There's no technical challenge waiting to be solved there.

NAT is still a major issue when you try to self host anything. And most of the stuff you can hobble together in a shell one liner just ends up being broken or limited in one way or another, e.g. that `python3 -m http.server` fails with seeking in video files, just gives "Broke pipe" error. Also provides no way to encrypt or authenticate. And without any way to easily mirror the content it will be unreliable and slow anyway.

Trying to do almost any common task is a nightmare when you want to do it cloud-free. An open web run by users themselves is still an unsolved problem. There some projects working on it (libp2p, IPFS, etc.), but none of that is to the point where it works properly and often missing important features.

> They can decide that next year HTML is gone and Flutter is out.

That already happened years ago. Tons of popular Internet apps only exist as mobile apps with little or no Web interface. Worse yet, most of those apps are driven by user created content. Which is exactly why making publishing a first class citizen on the Web is so important, without that people are just leaving the Web and going to places that allow them to publish and those places will be controlled by your favorite mega-corp.