- Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic platforms like LangChain / LangGraph.
- Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your competitor, your model will be inferior.
- Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking on EU open source funding & co.
- Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open Source research.
- Newsletter
Of course what the world really needs is a browser company and so we try to pretend Mozilla is that, but they are not. Support an alternative browser (I'm not aware of any though. There are browser skin companies but nobody making the hard parts of a browser)
There’s Servo, which used to be from Mozilla, but then they abandoned it. Now I believe it’s independent after a long period of dormancy.
There is also Ladybird, whose founder is a prolific and technically brilliant person but who is also, at minimum, a fascist sympathizer, in addition to being a supporter of white replacement theory and other racist ideas.
Neither project, last I checked, is really close to being a “daily driver.” But they’re both in active development, so maybe in the future they’ll become legit alternatives to the Google/Apple duopoly.
There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome
VSCode gets a pass, because apparently it is the only programmer's editor that many only care about providing plugins nowadays.
"Project Ticino: Microsoft's Erich Gamma on Visual Studio Code past, present, and future"
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/28/erich_gamma_on_vs_cod...
Huh, never heard about this before, and took a look at emacs and vim/neovim as those are the two most popular editors I know of, neither can run VS code plugins, that'd be crazy if true.
I'm using 3+ year old hardware that was mid-range even when it was new and it seems to do everything I would want with reasonable performance.
- full uBlock support
- the ability to still be themed
- first-party isolation
...Okay, okay, I’m being too cheeky. The common wisdom is that overall Firefox can feel bottlenecked at draw time (“less snappy”). That could be a result of a slower JavaScript engine, or a result of poorer hardware acceleration, or a less optimized multiprocessing/multithreading model. I honestly can't see it in the real world, but synthetic benchmark are pretty clear on that front.Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop.
I don’t know if the 55% number for IE is 100% correct but it sounds like the right ballpark to me. The browser market was a lot more fragmented 15+ years ago, so saying that IE had 55% market share and Firefox had 32%, leaving 13% for other browsers, sounds completely right to me.
Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.
The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.
They've lost their way completely as an independent entity, and a post like this that doesn't reaaally seem to grasp that weight of that conundrum comes no closer to convincing me that they can find their way back to the light.
However, I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.
That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.
Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.
Nope! Very happy to be entirely out, thanks.
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