[robshep]

We need to get behind Mozilla and Firefox for the simple reason it is the last bastion on the path to omni-chrome

Those who care very deeply about very tight privacy have enough niche options.

But I want there to be browser that has enough privacy to be sustainable so there’s a reliable option for me to recommend to family members etc which is holds enough market share for websites to test against.

If Firefox’s market share dips any lower website makers won’t support it - testing only against the homogeneity of chrome/edge/safari and then it will become a death spiral and humanity will have taken a step backwards.

It’s a case of use it lose it.

[thomassmith65]

If we need to do anything, it's get behind Ladybird, and put up with a Firefox fork for the next 12-24 months as a 'daily driver'.

Mozilla has little enthusiasm for developing its actual web browser, and doesn't seem to like its users very much.

For the past decade, Mozilla has made one bad choice after another, and every time it blows up in their faces, their takeaway is that they failed to properly 'educate the customer'.

Mozilla should just get out of the way. If Google Legal didn't need them, they already would be out of the way.

[nopcode]

Why is Ladybird going to be more successful than all the other failed browsers?

[LightHugger]

I've been optimistic on ladybird after watching the speed of progress with tests in their monthly youtube updates, they are quite well presented.

Ladybird is also not ideologically captured by anti freedom extremists with self contradictory beliefs. Mozilla refuses to allow anyone to donate to firefox development because they demand the right to redirect funds you give them towards discriminating against people they don't like.

[from-nibly]

> Ladybird is also not ideologically captured by anti freedom extremists with self contradictory beliefs. Mozilla refuses to allow anyone to donate to firefox development because they demand the right to redirect funds you give them towards discriminating against people they don't like.

Can you expand on this? This feels wildly editorialized.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

So there are 2 Mozillas: There's the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. The corporation develops Firefox. The foundation takes donations. For reasons I don't claim to understand (IANAL, and I gather there's tax law stuff involved), the foundation apparently can't give the corporation money to work on the browser. This leads to a regular point of confusion and a complaint because people would very much like to financially support the browser, but there is literally no way to donate to it. Now I believe (again, IANAL) that there are ways they could arrange things so that people could give money to the corporation for the browser, but they have not done those things. A person could plausibly argue that that's because Mozilla Foundation wants people to donate to the foundation and not the browser, though I'm not sure if they've ever publicly said anything explicitly. (If they have, I would very much appreciate links.)

[cholantesh]

Where does this come into play?

>they demand the right to redirect funds you give them towards discriminating against people they don't like.

It sounds _incredibly_ suspect, frankly.

[thomassmith65]

The makers of other browser had either worse incentives, or were bad at getting attention, or couldn't execute, or offered just a reskinned Chrome/Firefox, or included too many avant-garde features that nobody asked for, or existed back when Firefox was liked enough to make them irrelevant.

[xtanx]

> If we need to do anything, it's get behind Ladybird

and servo please ...

[spinningslate]

> Those who care very deeply about very tight privacy

> that has enough privacy to be sustainable

These are the key phrases. Mozilla has hitched its wagon to advertising. Behind all the bluster over last week, the underlying direction is clear. They bought Anonym [0] and Ajit Varma, the new VP of Product for Firefox and source of the updates, is ex-Meta. It's reasonable to assume that he's there, in part, because of advertising expertise.

Some will see Anonym's "privacy-powered advertising" as "enough privacy" and the only viable way to sustain Firefox without Google's annual cash injection.

Others won't buy that, believing that a browser can be built without relying on advertising. Ladybird is taking this approach - so we'll find out.

> If Firefox’s market share dips any lower website makers won’t support it

This is the risk the exec team must know they've taken. Specifically: what proportion of the current Firefox user base exists because of the historic pro-privacy stance, and what percentage of that will leave because of the advertising-based future?

[0] https://www.anonymco.com/

--

EDIT: addedd missing reference

[seba_dos1]

> Others won't buy that, believing that a browser can be built without relying on advertising. Ladybird is taking this approach - so we'll find out.

I'm afraid that we'll find out indeed and end up with no Ladybird and no Firefox either.

[godelski]

I'm with you, I really am. I've been on Firefox for nearly two decades, even the shitty years. But I still think this was a foreseeable issue and even the claim that "there was confusion" only shows a disconnect.

If you make a move like this you need to announce it in advance. You announce it loudly! You need you recognize that users concerned with privacy are looking for canaries. So when you have to put a canary down you fucking tell people before and don't just wait for them to find a dead canary. Of course people are going to freak out, that's what canaries are for.

[bjord]

I agree completely that something needs to change procedurally—this can't be allowed to happen again

[BSDobelix]

>We need to get behind Mozilla and Firefox

No we need to get rid of Mozilla (the org and the company), transform/fork Firefox and Thunderbird to a community project with (maybe?) a Foundation behind like FreeBSD or Blender.

Mozilla's CEO's and Manifesto writers did nothing to support Firefox but fill their own pockets and hype the AI train, I really wonder how much money goes directly into the development of Firefox, if we compare it to the Linux Foundation supporting Linux (the Kernel) it's about 3%, it's probably even less for Mozilla.

[bjord]

if that were truly (sustainably) possible, I'd support it, but imo that'd just be signing ff's death warrant

side note, thunderbird is already independent and democratically-managed by the community (as of a few years ago). the way I understand it is that they effectively just use mozilla's resources for legal, logistical stuff

[BSDobelix]

>if that were truly (sustainably) possible, I'd support it, but imo that'd just be signing ff's death warrant

I really don't think so, have a look at the ladybird browser:

https://ladybird.org/#sponsors

Or even Servo:

https://servo.org/

[chownie]

Neither of these represent the cost and support footprint to maintain and develop a fully featured browser because as it stands neither of them are fully featured, complete browsers.

[BSDobelix]

>cost and support footprint to maintain and develop a fully featured browser

True because the real cost to support a "a fully featured browser" is at least a 1/4 billion dollars....because OpenSource needs to make money, not for the Dev's but the MBA's ;)

[Zealotux]

I just wish I could get enthusiastically behind Mozilla, right now I stand behind them in spite of their leadership.

[Timshel]

For the share issue we are already there, with Firefox+Linux so many websites started to just block, usually with chrome at least a captcha is still offered.

With the current board and directors and focus I don't see any ways Firefox will gain share in the future (or not any that I really care about), and I certainly have no interest to support the current goals ...

For the privacy part Mozilla has been sitting on features like containers for years with no improvements. At this point I believe Mozilla ending might be better since it would shake things up ...

[TwoNineFive]

> We need to get behind Mozilla and Firefox

That's some bizarre upside-down-world Stockholm Syndrome thinking on display here. That or you are a paid PR influencer working on behalf of Mozilla. Just absolutely astonishingly weird psychological behavior.

Mozilla is violating user privacy. They are the bad guy. You don't ask the bad guy for help. You punch them in the face. These guys are making it worse, not better, and helping them will only make privacy worse, not better.

There are already multiple forks for Firefox and destroying Mozilla as an organization would greatly help one or more of them take off and carry the banner of true enabling privacy for the user, which Mozilla is not doing.

[robshep]

No it's realism.

ALMOST EVERYONE is voilating user privacy to some extent. That's the price to pay for free software. It sucks, but how do we climb out of that reality?

Punch the bad guy in the face if you like, YOU have options, but once FF is sunk, the the only provider most people can turn to for the stuff they need is Chrome.

If Mozilla/FF is the bad guy in your analogy then Chrome must be an atroticy-committing omni-cidal megalomaniac, which correct me if i'm wrong, is not better.

If you understand the privacy landscape and don't want to get involved you don't have to. I'm on a multi-container, multi-privacy extension, private-search setup because I roughly understand the environment. But I'm certainly not recommending that setup to my parents.

In my view MZ/FF is the least worst of the VIABLE alternatives and has the best chance of success. Sinking Mozilla's firefox in favour of ladybird or brave but none of these will ever have the marketing collaterall that mozilla has/had to be anything other than niche, until they are bought by Meta or Amazon or (you get me)

Most banking websites that most people need to use don't give a fuck about niche browsers and actively agent-sniff to reduce their support and security footprint. Whining down the phone to megacorp's customer support that "you don't want to use Chrome on privacy grounds" and "they really should support ladybird" will not be the mighty hammer of resistance you think it is.

I don't have a better suggestion and so I'm willing make a deal with a bad guy it means I don't have to install Chrome on my mother's PC.

[JohnFen]

> once FF is sunk, the the only provider most people can turn to for the stuff they need is Chrome.

There are a number of FF forks available as well.

[cholantesh]

Pretty much all of those forks are small volunteer projects that rely on upstream work by Mozilla, who are already struggling to keep up with MS, Google, and Apple. We were already at a point where Mozilla was laying off technical staff a few years ago. We're now seeing sites just outright block Firefox because it's not worth the effort when most users are reaching for something built atop Cr. How would any of these forks survive?

[JohnFen]

The worst that would happen is that the forks don't stay updated. They won't stop working. It's pretty easy to evade the blocks on sites that are poorly designed/managed enough that they feel it's necessary to block certain browsers.

[cholantesh]

>The worst that would happen is that the forks don't stay updated.

Which is hardly trivial, there are hundreds of open issues on Bugzilla for XUL alone. Some of the gaps include accessibility issues, which is down more to Cr better supporting APIs provided by vendors like NVDA. This is first of all, not something that is 'easy to evade' for the affected demographic, and secondly something Mozilla was an industry leader in for a long time. Obviously, Google didn't invest in this out of any sense of altruism, but it speaks to the sustainability of browser development, and what approaches thereof actually work.

[robshep]

So your advice to my parents is...

(a) Ignore browser security updates

and

(b) Install some extensions to fettle with user-agent strings to match popular browsers.

Streuth.

[chownie]

> Mozilla is violating user privacy.

They have changed literally nothing except the FAQ. The "selling" is describing behaviour they already do and have been doing for years. They set the default search engine to Google, this is now considered selling user data.

> There are already multiple forks for Firefox and destroying Mozilla as an organization would greatly help one or more of them take off and carry the banner of true enabling privacy for the user, which Mozilla is not doing.

You do realize that if Mozilla dies then every single one of these forks dies with it? Surely?

None of the teams working on these forks actually do any core browser engine work. Without Mozilla you are an ECMAScript update or a new web standard away from your fork of choice becoming a brick.

[nickthegreek]

I have yet to see where Mozilla confirmed that is the only thing they are doing with data. The ToS gives them more power than that. They could limit that by updating the ToS. But they are not doing that.

[112233]

Huh? You do understand that Firefox is just a single executive decision away from becoming a chromium skin? In order to forward-think, proper-size and upward-achieve , so that limited funds can be utilized with most impact etc.?