Comment by freedomben
1 year ago
I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions, unlike the locked-down and hobbled Chromium ecosystem. I suspect they do realize this because they've been really leaning into extensions recently, but over the years I've worried that Mozilla's committment to Firefox isn't as serious as I would like.
Regardless, I'd love to see this give FF a big bounce in the stats. Something to reinforce that there are people out here that really want manifest v2, badly enough to switch!
> I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions,
The problem is that Mozilla's customers are not Firefox's users. Mozilla's customer is Google. They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.
I think it's pretty clear that the TOS change basically coincided with the removal of manifest v2 change in chrome.
My understanding is Mozilla contracted its footprint substantially to remain sustainable in a future without Google's monetary contribution.
To little, too late. They underwent massive scope creep, throwing money at anything and everything, while neglecting the core task of maintaining a standards-compliant, user-friendly/non-hostile, privacy-respecting browser ... resulting in such incidents as Mr. Robot ad tie-in and the global add-on outage.
Oh ... and I still can't customize my controls fully. (Add-ons only take effect after a page load.)
Had they actually kept their scope small and focused, they could have put the difference into an endowment that would let them give the middle finger to the Chromes of the world forever. Yet here we are.
Then they wouldn't be throwing money into open firepits on trash like a VPN service or how to comply with Google's advertising decisions.
Then they would let people contribute money to the browser (instead of to Mozilla Foundation which goes to enabling aforementioned trash fires) and to the salary of a multi-million dollar CEO after laying off developer staff and hiring more C-suite assistants.
Mozilla is a bad organization in every sense, a bad steward of Firefox, and the best thing that could happen is they do have their funding cut, they go out of business forever, and Firefox finds a good home chosen by the community.
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https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-o...
Yup. Firefox Relay, their own VPN, MDN Plus, and many more.
The funny thing is that the same people on here that crow on about Mozilla needing to "just focus on Firefox" are the same ones who complains about its reliance on Google for income.
Based on their interop performances Mozilla seems to be doing the best they can to do both. Firefox interop has improved significantly in the past 4 years (surprisingly, so has Safari's) and they've also rolled out more new Mozilla offerings that could some day replace Google revenue
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> They pay Mozilla to exist
Do they? I thought Google significantly reduced their payments to Mozilla a few years back, which started Mozilla current random-walk.
Edit: As of 2023, they were as high as ever at 85% of Mozilla's finances coming from Google [1] . However the DoJ antitrust case against Google targets Google's payments to various entities (Mozilla, Apple) to make themselves the default search engine, thus threatening Mozilla's income. I did not immediately find sources for Mozilla's 2024 finances, but I can imagine they see the existential threat.
> and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.
That's just conspiracy-thinking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
> They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.
I am trying to understand how this works? If they pay Mozilla to exist, yet their intention is to destroy their competitor, why even pay for them to begin with?
I think it's partially Goodwill, partially business. Google does get some benefit out of being the default search engine for those additional users. It's not substantial, and Cromes is the dominant browser in the market, so I think Google is more just happy to keep Mozilla existing. Also, the existence of Mozilla makes chrome seem like less of a monopoly.
Source: pure speculation on my part
> They pay Mozilla to exist and they are paying Mozilla to intentionally drive Firefox into the ground.
Come on, that is just crazy talk. I get that Mozilla has made some boneheaded decisions but this is baseless conjecture.
Part of what the DOJ is seeking against Google would severely impact Mozilla financially however, as they want to ban them from paying to be the default search engine.
Indeed. Kagi proves users are willing to pay for search (me included, recently).
At the moment it has only proven that 0.00000000001% of users are willing to pay for search.
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Someone in an infosec podcast recently summed up the whole situation far better than I've been able to:
The vast majority of people won't pay for privacy.
Some people will pay for search. Some people will pay for content. It's really not many, though. Can you imagine if effectively everything on the internet was paywalled? I sure as hell don't know what the solution is, but we wouldn't've gotten to this spot right now, with all of the good and the bad of the internet, if the vast majority of sites and services on the internet charged for use.
(My best guess is that we can have the good that we have now with ads that aren't individually targeted. I literally have no guesses other than that.)
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Which is why Mozilla are getting desperate to diversify their revenue.
Mozilla diversifies by increasing the CEO's salary for nothing.
Wiki: In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million. In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5 million, and again to nearly $7 million in 2022.
The new CEO brings computing for AI money bleed that almost no one wants.
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If only their goal would be to provide an excellent privacy browser, instead of getting revenue :)
All they need is to accept donations that go strictly to the browser and not to the latest blockchain/AI hysteria.
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This to me is the ultimate sign that Mozilla has zero values or principles.
They've long advocated that Big Tech is a problem, but as soon as somebody tries to actually address it and this coincidentally impacting Mozilla, they abandon any and all principles.
That would be a good thing. If Firefox is funded by donations, rather than by Google, it ensures there is no enshittification in the future. And yes, donations can fund a big project, as evidenced by Thunderbird and Ladybird.
Nobody uses Ladybird, at this point it's vaporware. And Thunderbird is still based on Firefox.
The development of Firefox costs around $200 million per year. That's more than what Wikimedia can get from donations, and Wikipedia is a website that everyone uses. And you want to rely on donations from people that ad-block YouTube instead of paying for Premium.
And let's say that it manages to bring those costs down to $100 million per year or less and manages to get it from donations (when pigs will fly) … it still has to compete with a Chrome whose estimated cost goes over $1 billion per year.
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Mozilla thus far have been very reluctant to take donations to Firefox specifically. AFAIK you can still only donate to the Foundation, not the Corp, which means that most if not all of the cash will get spent on random non-Firefox-related things that you probably couldn't care less about.
And Servo, and Linux, both non-profit. Firefox could also be donated by companies.
I mostly agree, but I am slightly worried that it would lead to slower progress in Firefox. As it stands, Google's funding of Firefox is enough to hire a bunch of engineers to make Firefox a pretty competitive browser.
I don't see how donations ensures that there is no enshittification.
I hope Mozilla realizes (and still cares) that they have a huge opportunity here to be the power-browser where you can get awesome extensions
Don't worry, they won't. They have more important endeavors like funding some new bullshit virtue signalling campaign and paying huge CEO bonuses.
It's like a never-ending horde of zombies that comes in and makes this cheap shot over and over. My understanding is the CEO makes slightly more than 1% of their revenues. And it's actually low compared to the typical tech CEO.
But what's the story of cause and effect here such that if they'd invested 1% of their revenue differently, they would jump from 3% market share back to 30% or wherever they were previously? Once you ask these questions out loud, it's clear that people aren't thinking through the steps of the argument.
It's weird to me how this salary is being normalized. A "typical tech CEO" is incompatible with the mission of Mozilla.
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My problem with extensions is it's another development team to trust and monitor. I need to know if the extension has been sold, taken over by a new lead, etc.
Yep while this manifest v3 ugly thing is putting me on the brink of jumping ship (I compromise by having two browsers), as for your concern I found that Chrome is going to allow blacklisting extensions for sites, so now I can turn them off for the few sites that I really worry to grant extension read access.
chrome://flags, "Extensions Menu Access Control" flag. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/new-extensions-menu-testin...
If you are fine with two browsers, maybe you could instead look into separate Firefox profiles with different sets of extensions. I have added "-p" to my Firefox shortcut so it always starts with the profile picker thing.
Yeah that's definitely fair, I have the same concern. Currently I've reduced my extensions to just a few that I either trust (like gorhill's) or that I wrote myself. But I think it would be huge if Mozilla built out the tooling needed to keep a better monitor on them. It's an extremely hard problem to be sure though.
They already did? The have a list pf extension that are monitored by them as well authoring a few ones
Luckily there's an extension for that: [Under New Management | Chrome Web Store](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/under-new-managemen...)
This is why I prefer Safari's content blockers. As far as I understand, there is no risk of content blockers sending out information.
After the Great Suspender debacle, I feel the same. I try to limit plugins/extensions to as many minimal use cases as possible.
Can you install your own personal extensions without getting permission from Mozilla yet? Or are they still banning that? Because that change drove me away from Firefox.
You mean inatalling from local files? This isn't ever going away, we have to test what we develop somehow
It already went away, you need a special Firefox version to do that (that's the somehow part)
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Firefox has some weird slowness with DNS that I have troubleshot to death. I still use it for almost everything, but sometimes I'll have an entire day of 30s page loading times.
Apologies if this is elementary, but have you tried turning off DoH?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/dns-over-https#w_off
I put this setting in ages ago on my FF profile and haven't seen DNS lag.
My biggest DNS lag was before I used PiHole and was relying on my router, which upstream to 8.8.8.8. I've just assumed that little thing was overloaded or that Comcast was just having a "hiccup".
I see glacial DNS resolution regularly when hitting the AWS authorization page with DoH disabled on my company's VPN. Resolves instantly in Chrome.
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Same here. Tends to be pretty inconsistent. DNS-over-HTTP(s) definitely disabled. 30s is a lot more than I've experienced, but there are times where it clearly struggles to look things up.
Disable DNS over HTTPS I guess.
I wonder how much time not experiencing advertising on the internet saves?
Whenever someone says how fast Chrome is I think about this.
Google will just slip in a few more “improvements” to Gmeet, Gmail and YouTube that happen to not work or perform very poorly on Firefox.
FF is supporting V2 and V3 on purpose, so they are doing what you want
Truly the best angle Firefox could take would be to be stronger pro user: block ads, resist fingerprinting, hide annoyances, etc.
It would be enough if Apple realized the same thing. They're in a position to have the best browser, and coast along ignoring the opportunity.
Unfortunately this would only be helpful to Apple customers, which itself comes with significant downsides IMHO. I'd much prefer a cross-platform solution
If this doesn't give FF a noticeable bounce, FF really is a lost cause.