By the way, consider donating to Mozilla if you want them to (be able to) listen to you.
As a consumer of the web and a developer on the web, Mozilla is one of the few "big" players in the web ecosystem that I see who are really fighting for keeping the web open.
We were just having this discussion with a friend the other day, on the topic of the anti-trust hearings. What if the web didn't evolve to be open like it was today, but instead had followed the evolution of the mobile space, dominated and fully controlled by only two players? What if it was impossible to run a website from a server in your bedroom but instead had to submit your website to some corporation and wait a couple of days before some semi-human reviewer approved it (or not)? The transformative power of the web on global society would never have been as big as it has been if it had evolved in that model.
For that reason alone, I applaud Mozilla and I decided to start donating today. I would hate for the web to be under the tyranny of some corporation because that would be such a loss for humanity. And we need people and organizations that put up the fight against the Googles of this world.
The org inside is.. like many old orgs, half rotten, half fine. There's a lot of good engineering and even good leaders, thought the ones that are genuine tend to be pushed aside over time for ... more evil reasons, friendship, money, wrong color, you name it. You like you said when you try to do good you put yourself in a vulnerable position and its valid externally just as well as internally as I'm sure you're aware (all companies have this problem to some extent and Mozilla is in my opinion on the "worse side" of the slider atm)
Note also that Mozilla Corp is not Mozilla Foundation. Pretty much none of your donations go to the web browser itself.
Any proof for that? Mozilla Corp is owned by Mozilla Foundation.
No one knows what would happen if things changed. Sometimes we have to take risks, experiment. The portrayal of Mozilla as being like a little boy with his (Firefox) finger in the dike saving us all from being flooded over by the (Google) sea is an oft-told fairy tale.
It is arguable that Mozilla is already "dead" and has been for quite some time.
Google already has a "monopoly in the web", and they in fact control Mozilla by being its essential source of revenue.
The "non-profit" bit is also getting old. Is it supposed to mean something by implied comparison to other non-profit organisations? Mozilla is a corporation, it has employees doing the same work as Google as it tries to maintain faeature parity, including gathering data on users through telemetry. It is dependent on Google, it relies on the sale of web advertising in order to be able to pay those employees. Web advertising is the very thing that Firefox users want to be protected against.
How is that preventing Google from enjoying a "monopoly in the web"? Google could pull the plug on Mozilla at any time. As others point out, it probably prefers to prop Mozilla up instead.
My suggestion is to release a different sort of browser, smaller. In fact, release multiple browsers, each with a different focus. These specialised browsers could use pieces of Firefox code but would be small enough any user could compile in a short time on an underpoweered computer. Of course they could also be more secure what with reduced complexity and attack surface.
There are so many annoyances with the web that could easily be solved by going in a different direction, away from advertising and the idea of a web browser as an "all-in-one" program.
I believe there are markets for this, although no one knows the size of them, because users are coerced to use the same handful of overgrown, corporate-sponsored web browsers, forever increasing in complexity, insecure and in need of a patch.
At this point in web history, trying to achieve 100% feature parity with a corporate-sponsored web browser funded by advertising is a waste of time, IMO. What is worth the time are features that those corporations will never pursue. These are the most interesting things Mozilla has been doing with Firefox.
I am typing this using a text-only browser that I can edit and re-compile in minutes. Much faster than Firefox; no ads, tracking or telemetry. I certainly do not need a major web browser to read HN or the sites posted to it. Using the same program to read HN as I use for, e.g., internet banking, is silly, IMO. I actually have better ability to read sites posted to HN than some readers who consistently get thwarted by crazy web designs, phoney paywalls, etc. There should be many browsers in between linemode and "modern" browser. There should be a spectrum of choice of user-agents, each with different feature sets, not always the same ones.
This is exactly why we need to use the "non-profit" part of the deal. Donations is the future. Please donate and your voice in the future of Mozilla will be heard (and not the voice of Google).
> My suggestion is to release a different sort of browser, smaller. In fact, release multiple browsers, each with a different focus. These specialised browsers could use pieces of Firefox code but would be small enough any user could compile
This is ridiculous. Firefox is not just for programmers who routinely compile things. It is for everyone. I am not compiling anything. You suggestion will make Chrome 99.9% monopoly.
Are you saying that user donations are going to match or exceed the revenue Mozilla gets from their deal with Google?
If yes, then, to use your phrase, "This is ridiculous." It is not realistic.
Chrome cannot and will never be "99.9% monopoly" as that would make things too easy for the antitrust lawyers.
Sounds like you want your web browser software exclusively controlled by a small group of people at Mozilla. Well, they are not volunteers; they want to get paid and Google/web advertising is their meal ticket. They are not going to work for "donations". You think you are fighting Chrome, but by supporting the status quo, you are just feeding it. The Chromium project was initiated at Google by hiring developers from Mozilla. Mozilla relies on Google turning a profit. That is what allows Mozilla developers to get paid.
Projects that survive on donations, like the BSD projects, are usually supported by voluteers who have jobs or do consulting outside of the project. Mozilla developers are not volunteers. Mozilla is a corporation with millions in revenue.
Assuming it could be done, making web browser source code easier for more people to work with and compile does not exclude anyone. It has the opposite effect. It includes more people in the creation of user-agents. Firefox currently takes hours to compile. This is why you are not compiling anything, even if you wanted to. As such, the project is hardly "for everyone". Only a small number of people can actually make use of it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/01/22/so-why-i...
Which means as Mozilla dries up, its only support is "Google."
Meaning, soon to you, a chromium firefox based browser no different as to Edge, Brave or whatever else is out there.
tl;dr Mozilla is propped up by Google. Google is no bueno.
Doubtful. I think of lot of the reason Google helps fund Mozilla is so there's a better answer to the question "Does Google have a monopoly in web browsers?" It's better for both Google (because they can point at competition) and Mozilla (because Google will still want to hand them money) if Mozilla has their own engine.
† In practice, it's already true, given that Firefox is niche even on desktop.
Google is already under constant investigation from various governments at this point. Money spent keeping a competitor alive when it's low market share means it doesn't have the same power as Google is probably money well spent.
Imagine the market was for PNG decoders, and all the major players were using libpng (just like real life). There is no way to conclude that there is a monopoly on that.
Sure, but are they going to do a hard left and ignore Google commits, or if Google implements some new CSS features, are they going to pull those in because it's easy and the work is done then they haven't diverged as much, even if they might not have implemented them exactly that way if the incentives weren't aligned quite the same way?
> There can't be an honest way to construe that as a monopoly.
It doesn't really matter whether it is a monopoly, it matters whether governments see it as unfair. Antitrust laws didn't spring forth from the founders, they were passed by legislature, and then used shortly after to curtail what society perceived to be abuse of power. It also was not done in one go, the Sherman Act was passed in 1890, and then it was updated through both the Clayton Act and Federal Trade Commission Act in 1914.There's nothing to say that laws couldn't be passed to change how antitrust applies slightly (especially in Europe, where they seem to have for appetite for this recently than the US). That might sound a little preposterous, but we're talking about one of the largest companies in the world, which is traditionally when laws like this have been passed in the past.
While I doubt if an antitrust case was brought against Google it would be because of Chrome, reducing any example people can point to when justifying making a case is probably worthwhile when operating at Google's scale.
> Imagine the market was for PNG decoders, and all the major players were using libpng (just like real life).
PNG is a standard, that standard is not changing to any appreciable degree, and if there was a major push to extend PNG and many readers couldn't read PNG's correctly because they used proprietary extensions, we would definitely be having discussions about whether there's enough viable alternatives on the market, do they have enough market share.
Keep in mind, this is just a revised instance of Microsoft's strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish where they've learned to be more circumspect and more careful about the "extinguish" step to avoid too much unwanted attention, so it's more nuanced.
Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/06/august-6-1997----...
At the end of the 5-year agreement, Apple released Safari and the rest is history, as they say.
Google makes money from advertising, not browsers. Firefox doesn't hurt Google.
That is hard as long as there is both
- an independent browser engine on the market
- and politicians and judges that haven't succumbed to the pressure from Big Media
Firefox makes it harder to acquire data from users.
If market share for Firefox were to increase at the cost of Chrome users, it would hurt Google.
This is why we can expect just enough support to keep Firefox existing, with a minor user share.
Firefox hurting Google has nothing to do with the reasoning I supplied previously. In fact, Firefox not hurting Google is all the more reason to make sure they get funded and survive if it lets Google avoid or deflect government scrutiny.
You even have non-techies at wall street journal recommending people to switch from Google Chrome on YouTube.