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Comment by thepiratesailor | Hacker News Reader

This is total BS. If anything that needs a fix is Mozilla. They have been taking money in 100s of Millions of dollars from the same company that tried to kill their flagship product. Nothing is wrong with Internet. But a lot wrong with Web. Mozilla cannot fix Web until they start attacking FAANG, which I very much doubt they will.

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That would be nice but without that money they are dead in the water. Mozilla is currently the only thing standing against a total browser monoculture.

There's Apple as well, and with the continued decline of Firefox market shares (both absolute and relative), their importance increases. Everywhere where Firefox runs, Chrome can also be installed, so you can just tell users to install Chrome, while it's not possible to do so with iOS devices.

The rendering engine of Safari is similar to blink but not the same. And more importantly, Apple has the money to finance WebKit coming forward, as well as the willpower as they love to implement things themselves. I'm not so sure about how well Mozilla will do in the future compared to Apple.

Apple doesn't care about the open web. They've repeatedly tried to push encumbered media formats and not supported open ones, and they've held back implementing standards that pose any threat to the App Store. The fact that iOS doesn't allow other browsers at all is detrimental to the web.

They do care about the open web, but in their own way. Of course their own profits are most important. Same goes for Google. I still hold the kicking out of flash to Apple's credit. Google followed them on mobile devices and this was the start of the end of flash on the web (the end of the end is soon to come!).

As for the encumbered media formats point, it's been mainly a Mozilla and Google thing, as both distribute their browsers gratis. Apple already pays lots of money for patents on other aspects of their devices, like the wireless connectivity parts. But Apple has been warming up to open formats slowly. They've implemented opus support in Safari (although sadly no ogg/opus). They've joined AOM and maybe one day they'll implement AV1 in Safari as well.

In general, there is a ton of momentum behind H.264 and its successors which is hard to direct towards open alternatives. Outside of browsers, media formats like VP9 are practically dead. Most video cameras use H264 or H265. DVB-S2 uses H264.

> They do care about the open web, but in their own way

Apple's own way is to cripple it to force people to use the App Store. Google's and Mozilla's incentives at least mostly align with those who want an open web.

> As for the encumbered media formats point, it's been mainly a Mozilla and Google thing, as both distribute their browsers gratis.

No, an open web means anybody can contribute and consume without worrying about licensing gatekeepers. By pushing for encumbered formats in web standards, Apple explicitly took a stand against this idea.

> In general, there is a ton of momentum behind H.264 and its successors which is hard to direct towards open alternatives.

All the other browsers supported VP8/9. Apple stuck with H.264 and H.265 until licensing issues forced its hand.

> Most video cameras use H264 or H265. DVB-S2 uses H264.

Most videos created by people are on phones, which save them in the formats that their phones support. It was up to Apple to make its phones support an open format for use on the web, and it refused.

"They do care about the open web, but in their own way"

They do care so much about the "open web" that they embed a patented H264 decoder.

> Mozilla cannot fix Web until they start attacking FAANG

They already attack Facebook (they put Facebook in Facebook purgatory by default, don't they?) and I'm not sure what they need to go after Apple, Amazon or Netflix over, I think you are really just mean Google here.

In which ways has Mozilla attacked Facebook? One way I'm aware of is their "Facebook Container" extension, which is basically the same as their Multi-Containers extension, with the key difference of being preconfigured for Facebook. Last I checked there is a similarly preconfigured extension for Google, but that one is from a 3rd party extension developer, not Mozilla (I have a very hard time recommending 3rd party extensions to other people since I do not know if those extensions will remain trustworthy...)

This suggests to me that improving the UX of the generic Multi-Container extension should be a higher priority. As it stands, doing something as simple as creating a new container for a site and then having that site always open in that container takes numerous less-than intuitive user actions.

1) Click "+" (tooltip: create new container)

2) Fill out a name for the container, and choose from a very limited choice of colors and icons (only 8 colors and 12 icons; 96 total combinations)

3) Open a new tab with that container, and navigate back to the website

4) Select "Always open in [container name]"

5) Open a new tab, nagivate back to the website

6) Select "Remember my decision"

7) Select "Open in [container name]"

Step 2 should not have such inane artificial restrictions. Step 3 should happen automatically. Step 6 and 7 should not happen at all because my choice in Step 4 should be respected.

They have a list of domains to exclude from their so-called tracking "protection" and that list contains Google and Facebook. I wouldn't call that attacking by any means.

The Facebook Container is absolutely pointless when you account for fingerprinting and IP address tracking.

>The Facebook Container is absolutely pointless when you account for fingerprinting and IP address tracking.

The former being something they actively support defending against with privacy.resistFingerprinting?

And despite being a non-profit company they have been putting millions of dollars in the pockets of their executives. There have been quite a few threads here on HN about that.

Only tiny part of Mozilla is non-profit. It’s called Mozilla Foundation. The rest, called Mozilla Corporation (I.e. the maker of Firefox) is very for-profit, including all the usual things like profit-driven layoffs and insane bonuses for executives, etc.

I was under the impression that the Mozilla Corporation was owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Would that not mean that the profit from the corporation would go to the foundation? Or is this a legal trick to allow them to profit from the foundation?

They need to keep them financially and legally separated, but Corporation is still allowed to make some money transfes to Foundation (but not the other way around).

I’m actually surprised they are now allowed to have the same CEO for Corporation and Foundation. They might be inviting an IRS audit this way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#IRS_audit

> I’m actually surprised they are now allowed to have the same CEO for Corporation and Foundation.

You're spreading misinformation. AFAIK Mitchell Baker is still the chair of the Foundation, but the Foundation's equivalent of a CEO is Executive Director Mark Surman.

It’s not so black—and-white

FAANG got their monopoly by having tech stacks able to do basic Web 2.0 features better than open source alternatives.

Once upon a time AOL was the FB of the day and Steve Case was the Mark Z. What happened? The Web Browser happened. HTTP was an open protocol and people could run their own domain foo.com instead of “keyword Foo”

Do you think FAANG could have gotten their start on top of AOL, MSN, Compuserve? The previous FAANG?

What we need is simply to create an open source alternative to FAANG that is permissionless and built on top of the open Web.

I’m doing it, as are many other projects: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-...

I think thepiratesailor's point is that mozilla ISNT doing it.

Right. But hopefully they will invest in companies like ours that do!

Also: Matrix, Inrupt, etc.

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