What Marxist causes are the people at Firefox supporting? Maybe stop using the money for these causes to support your product.
Without money from Google or a suitable alternative they're going to burn through whatever savings they have pretty fast.
The current leadership is running the foundation as if it were an overhyped AI startup swimming in VC money. You know, the kind that tends to disappear overnight when said VC money runs out. Not something I'd expect of an organization that claims to be a protector of anything valuable.
The question is why the hell are we still having to develop web browsers after 30 or so years. When on earth is this development going to stop? When is the browser project going to be finished?
A web browser is just an interface to the web, and it's been overdeveloped to the point of absurdity.
We all know that almost every web development/API in recent decades has been at the instigation of Big Tech for its benefit, not users. When we now have single web pages of 10, 20MB and upward of 'junk' JavaScript and links by the hundred doing nothing but acting as spyware we don't have to be told who's exploiting whom. (When you get rid of all that junk existing web browsers suddenly become blazingly fast.)
What we have now is an almighty mess of disparate standards and we ought to stop and take stock. If we did Mozilla wouldn't need to be continually tweaking Gecko, it works perfectly well now and has done so for years.
BTW, I do over 90% of my web browsing with JavaScript turned off and have so since JS's inception, and I've no difficulty—and I do a damn lot of web browsing.
A quick scan of the author's post suggest they're pretty agenda driven, hence the weird "Marxist" name calling which in addition to the above admission that the post is clickbait kinda puts the author's judgement and credibility in question
Respectfully to the OP, I don't see the point in posting substack/like content like this that's designed to drive a completely different and quite frankly unhelpful kind of discussion
But they pushed the open web forward. Good on them.
However, I don’t think Firefox is important anymore (I’m a loyal user). And I don’t think Mozilla can create something different. We need a movement more than a well funded organization for this next phase.
Wikipedia is in a very similar predicament. Or soon will be.
I cannot stand Chromium/Chrome, even less after the latest changes to extensions, fuck that; don't like Safari's UX and extensions ecosystem; will never install Edge. The other browsers are mostly re-skins of Chromium, or some stupid AI bullshit.
It will be a very sad day if/when Mozilla goes and takes Firefox with it.
This sounds defeatist. What is the alternative then? Vendor specific browsers? For me that's not happening because I don't and won't buy MS or Apple products so no safari or edge.
Honestly, web complexity is out of control and browsers are beyond comprehension for mere mortals being. The fact that you need billion dollar companies to prop them up is a telling sign.
It would continue to lose market share and skip new features (cough AI cough). But it could enjoy a smaller steady niche there supported by the community.
As I already wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44659025 (and write often on Hacker News), Firefox is used very actively in Germany; among the desktop browsers it is the 2nd most used one (and German Firefox users are often very vocal about it and love to proselytise users who use Chrome.
Here the relevant statistics:
- USA: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/unit... (Firefox 4th place, 7.45 %)
- Germany: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germ... (Firefox 2nd place, 15.41 %)
I think a slimmer Firefox that’s just community supported would be fine. Forgo monetization and AI and enjoy the niche it can survive in. I’d go for that!
It's important to me.
For all its warts, there is no other browser than I've seen that comes as close to being acceptable to me as FF.
I look forward to when mozilla can compete fairly without google money to make a good browser again.
>Rebrand (and re-focus) on political activism in the hopes of securing new funding sources. (They are now a “global crew of activists” focused on Marxist causes.)
I thought they were already this? No?
It does seem an effective way to ruin their organization.
I'm using FF right now so I am not just saying this as some empty plea but an honest call for Mozilla to stop fucking around and make a solid portable browser that respects the user. Give us all the control we want. It's our computer so give us an "our browser" not a FAANG or whatever browser.
(Sell itself to Tencent, perhaps?)
I kind of wonder if they simply tried to hard to pivot into being a big tech company. It felt like at one point there was a new product announcement every few weeks. Very few of those exist today.
> They are now a “global crew of activists” focused on Marxist causes.
cebert•11h ago
dotcoma•11h ago
tgv•11h ago
the_third_wave•11h ago
bryanlarsen•10h ago
aleph_minus_one•10h ago
I often mention that in Germany, Firefox has a much higher market share of the browsers than in most other countries:
See for example the statistic of browser market shares among desktop users:
- USA: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/unit... (Firefox 4th place, 7.45 %)
- Germany: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germ... (Firefox 2nd place, 15.41 %)
Of course, because Firefox does not have this large market share in many other countries, there exist some (rare) websites that don't work so well in Firefox. But since the Firefox users (at least in Germany) often are very vocal about their browser
- If the website is "not important": ignore it; who would want to visit a website where the developer/company does not care about Firefox?! :-) Additionally, use this as a great opportunity for venting anger, and write some furious e-mail to the webmaster of the website why they dare to ignore Firefox users. :-)
- If the website is "important": use, say, Chrome for this single website - and then write some furious e-mail to the webmaster of the website why they dare to ignore Firefox users. :-)
TLDR: It is much more important that the users of the web browser are very vocal about using it than about getting the last 0.1 % of websites to work.
JohnFen•10h ago
kijin•11h ago
plemer•11h ago
Bluestein•11h ago
I mean, options?