Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web, severely cramped by their complete economic dependency on Google and their inability to allocate their funds intelligently
Either more users start donating $5-10 a month (seems worth it to me given the time I spend with their product) or they take the Google money and deal with the conflict of interest best they can.
A Shuttelworth style billionaire benefactor would work as well, but I doubt one will come from the tech community as Firefox is working against the anti-privacy data collection model that made them (or their friends) rich.
Also, if you follow the discourse on anything published by Mozilla in the past 2-3 years—there's been a shift when it comes to how they speak about Googe. It's a marketing move, of course, but I think it's also a sign of the direction they are following.
I believe something will change here, for better, in the next couple of years. I'd sign for a Mozilla subscription if it included services such as better VPN, supporting those who cannot afford to pay directly, but pay with they data instead.
The move towards paid vs. non-paid services creates a risk that we'd end up with two types of internet users, with privacy being the currency of those who cannot afford an expensive mobile phone or a browser not trying to sell you things whether you want it or not.
The history of Guardian (in the past 5 years or so) shows that people are happy to pay for a valuable service just to allow the others to have access to it. Maybe I'm just being overly optimistic here, but I shudder every time I think about the alternatives.
Their coverage is practically non-existent.
I used to buy The Guardian every day, then I subscribed digitally. And then when their reporting slid downhill, I stopped subscribing. I still read it - but block their data scraping scripts and all ads. They are not worth supporting IMO.
Same as the Telegraph will feed its readers "the glory of Boris", "forwards unto brexit" and "Good lord look what Corbyn said today, he's a dreadful little man isn't he?"
News organisations are slaves to their audiences and will just produce what their audiences want.
Brought up again earlier this month: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1191681248453943296
That piece of fake news from the Guardian has been shared more than 25,000 times on Facebook.
I don't agree that honest reporting on Assange simply won't get clicks. But sensational fake news certainly does.
No-one really knows for sure whether or not that meeting took place.
Almost nobody complains about the them taking money from Yahoo and Google for higher placement in the search engine list. And if their other revenue streams had been as transparent I think people had been fine.
Another aspect of the Mozilla Foundation is that they're basically acting as a fig leaf for the monopolist web Google has created in this decade, with Google financing them to prevent anti-trust investigations, and Mozilla also playing along with Google-financed WHATWG to white-wash "web standards" and prevent real and obvious innovations such as third-party script blocking, serving only Google's interests.
FF indeed does work against anti-privacy, and I'm applauding them for that, but OTOH FF also enables ad blockers. I've used uBlock just like most of you here, but ad blocking is also a factor turning the web into a privacy minefield. Eg. if you're indiscriminately block all ads whether targetted or not, there is no possible way to finance web content production; yet people also don't want to pay for content. So what people get is polarizing click-bait, propaganda, and low-quality content while content creators (other than some high-profile YouTubers maybe) can't earn a living.
We really should stop with "fighting for the future of the web" articles when the reality is that the web locks people into addictive behaviour, fake social interaction, and crap web frontends for oligopolist cloud-hosted services (completely antithetical to personal computing and site autonomy principles), and results into cultural loss due to the expectation that everything must always be available for free, all the time, a model only creating monopolies.
I just want to add, part of the problem is that it now takes millions of dollars to make/maintain a web browser.
Oh, and also, how relevant is the "future of the web" in a world where 1/3 of humanity thinks Facebook is the web?
If the ad industry got together to design the most benign ad technology they can come up with (isolate from host site, no cookies, no js, no video, enforced by iframe security directives) then perhaps adblocking extensions could add an exception for this kind of ad, based on technological criteria, not a manually managed whitelist.
But such a thing does not exist and ads are so intransparent and deeply integrated into pages that one cannot tell, thus blunt hammers need to be applied until no ad is left standing.
Mozilla don't just fund the development of their own products they also fund research [1] and other projects [2].
[1] https://research.mozilla.org/research-grants/ [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/grants/
In a perfect world Mozilla would be funded by donations. I donate to Mozilla but it's a pittance compared to what they get from Google.
> Mozilla has launched Monitor, a data-breach reporting service; Lockwise, a password manager; and Send, a privacy-focused alternative to services such as WeSendit. It’s also beta-testing a VPN (virtual private network) service, which it hopes to market to privacy-conscious users.
Once these web apps mature a bit, I expect to see them in a free tier + a premium behind the subscription (with the core browser of course remaining free). My hunch tells me that's why you'll see this front-and-centered if you open mozilla.org:
> Firefox is more than a browser. Meet our family of privacy-first products
They're not forks. Firefox's is a separate implementation. The equivalent would be asking BSD to merge with Linux.
I would like to see Firefox move faster in implementing good web APIs, like the lazy loading of images, push for HTML and CSS improvements(like let me customize the numeric text input arrows with css instead of forcing me to use a JS library) .
Maybe the Rust rewrite will make Firefox better achitected so you could have a node version based on Mozilla technologies or you could easily use the web assembly VM in your application without having to load the full Chrome code.
The unfortunate truth is that writing a browser is almost impossible because of the complexity, IMO we need a new version of the web that breaks compatibility, make everything strict(no longer ignore errors and guess a fix for them) no more 12 ways to center an element , for the legacy web we can use the existing engines
Here's an example of website written with Rust and rendering all UI to canvas: https://makepad.github.io/makepad/ it works right now and it's very fast and smooth.
IMO tech for next generation web apps is already here and it's great.
There was also an article earlier this month or previous month from a Firefox developer about font/text rendering, in case you missed it rendering text in a way that works with all writing system is super hard.
Well, I'm joking, of course, it's not that simple. But it should be possible in the end.
Some ebook publishing platforms will perform checks and reject your epub(mobi or similar format) if is not respecting some strict rules, this makes it a pain if you have random html that works on web but you want to package it as epub because now you need to find all the bugs(or similar stupid DOM elements) and fix them as best you can.
Some of these grants surprised me. For example, $270,000 for the translation and accessibility of the USA presidential election of 2012.
A lack of focus generally hurts an organizations legitimacy in the eyes of it's donors.
Increasing the quality of a countries national elections isn't a goal I'd immediately assume to be part of Mozillas mission, so I'd be disappointed about such a project.
They could go the more transparent route and create a second organization for funding things their management likes.
... but I assume that such an organization would probably have some funding problems.
Maybe Mozilla should allow donors to specify the project they'd like to contribute to?
That would give them additional feedback on how the community evaluates their programmatic direction.
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-m...
Mozilla should sell two products:
1) Storage a la iCloud
2) Payment processing a la Paypal
And for marketing purposes they should get into discovery of free/open web services, a la old school Yahoo.
As a web site builder, I don't want to have to manage credit cards. As a user, I don't want to have to trust random web sites with my credit card info. I also don't want to be redirected to Paypal, I just want a secure wallet that can be used on web sites with a drop in <paymentframe recipient="foo@bar.com" usd="8999" description="BonsaiThing Pro 1 year subscription" /> or similar.
As a web user, I want to be able to store my photos, downloads, music, documents, etc conveniently in a little cloud-synced folder. I want to be able to quickly give fine-grained access to different web apps to different parts of that space. Photo app wants to access my photos? Great. Github wants to access my repos? Fine. Photo app wants to access my repos? No.
And the discovery thing... There's a ton of free software out there. Mozilla basically has shut the door behind it. "Thanks for the install. Good luck finding other Free tools to use with it." They should be building a directory of other free software that can be used with Firefox. I should be able to use my Mozilla account to post reviews, to discuss new apps that are voted up, etc. That will allow enthusiasts to start engaging socially with the brand in a way that Mozilla (not Twitter or Apple or Facebook) can control the identities.
From there maybe there is some social identity service, but if it's just a way to engage the community—great. Like Hacker News is to YCombinator, Mozilla should provide a place for us to discuss and share web services.
If they want to get into search, that's great. Write a new shitty open source search engine that any web site can federate with. Use Google for now, but use that money to dig us out of the hole Google put us in.
i could see firefox providing hooks for 3rd parties to make those services easier to integrate however (and maybe charging a fee, e.g., to certify the 3rd party). that would fall squarely in their wheelhouse.
Netscape was trying way back when. Mozilla probably has some PTSD from those days so I don’t have high hopes.
Someone else will eventually come in and be Mozilla on the services side. Might as well be Mozilla.
But they can readily "become a PayPal" by bundling a digital ethereum wallet like metamask in the browser by default. Even if it's limited to max $50 / month, it could revolutionize the way we consume web content. And it also acts as an anonymous digital identity. Both ethereum and firefox enjoy trust by the community, that helps. But, we re more likely to see these from another browser like brave.
1) would be competing with google drive, onedrive and icloud, which are all funded by very big pockets and have other revenue sources. Furthermore, even dropbox has trouble competing with this.
2) Again competition by paypal, apple pay, google pay, ... . Also, banking business is quite far removed from what they are doing and hard to do while being a non-profit.
No idea if that pie can realistically grown. But unlike their current strategy, it would be in line with their mission statement.
Something like 75% or more of their revenue comes from AdWords - ads run against search. This is one of the most attractive streams for advertisers ever built. You have a prospect ready to buy (often) who is literally telling you in written software processable words what they want.
AdWords dwarfs all of Facebook in revenue, for context. It is the very foundation of Google. In a way, everything else they do is either support for AdWords or a side project.
The money they give to Firefox is not charity. It is to feed this cash cow. They have a similar arrangement with Apple for iPhone default search engine in mobile Safari. I would argue it is far far more valuable for Google to support Firefox in order to ensure search dominance than to waste that money to advance Chrome. Chrome exists to support AdWords not the other way around.