Mozilla is in a much worse position than Apple was in '97. The only way they can continue to exist is to be on the take from Google's handout.
The corpse of Mozilla as a puppet to perform for regulators at Google's command is probably a net negative for the world.
Maybe Mozilla has run its course.
Google would deprecate APIs for other APIs that seemingly have the same purpose but are missing a single crucial feature.
They would build websites on Chrome private builds that include features that make these apps possible and conveniently release them at nearly the same time so nobody can contest them at launch.
Add-ons would be deleted because of arbitrary "ToS violations" like Apple already does. Although they are already planning to cripple add-ons like ad blockers with manifest v3.
And much more.
In this way, Mozilla is actually helping Google dominate the internet by providing very useful regulatory cover.
Google has free reign to do all of what you listed. They tread lightly only due to fears of regulation.
Anti-trust cases take at least 10 years. This is plenty of time for Google to make the internet theirs and the then defunct Gecko engine to be too old to use. Blink and WebKit will be the only engines left.
Even if you then pry Blink and Chrome away from Google, there will never be another browser engine and it's naïve to think that just because Blink isn't legally part of Alphabet anymore that they will be instantly independent.
I have two that seem particularly egregious in this context: one that removes utm tracking, and another that redirects amp to html.
It's not really fair to pretend that they deliberately broke your addons out of malfeasance or something.
It seems that most of the APIs are now implemented but are buggy, so they added a flag to the nightly version that allows you to install any addon from AMO at risk of it maybe not working. Once it stabilizes you'll be able to use your addons again.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
When I go to open a tab, by default, the ability to close the bottom tab is obscured. And collections? Useless when I already had bookmarks in folders.
But hey, they managed to break important privacy-protecting addons in the process.
I'm not sure why I still use this browser.
The rewrite saved me from having to switch to Chrome on Android. It's not perfect, but it's definitely a big improvement.
I use it because the alternative is Chrome. But I'm also very annoyed about the update (forced, like every one is on mobile) and I'm avoiding to use a browser at all on my phone because the experience is so bad.
I think if the new version had just one killer feature it would have been received much more kindly but for many it's a straight downgrade in terms of experience. Personally I think it's crazy that they still don't have working chromecast support.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
There's more to the internet than what is accessed via browsers, but as far as browsers are concerned, well, Apple is not spelled M-O-Z-I-L-L-A.
The vast majority of all browser use that isn't Google's Blink is WebKit; Mozilla was significant, but not so much today.
Google has their own DNS they default to on Android. Who knows when google will "block harmful domains".
Google is pushing alternatives to HTTP that are vastly more complicated and improve speed, thus increasing search/page rank.
Yes, you will be able to run things yourself. Just don't expect them to be discoverable.
Also, Firefox being free software, we can expect forks to appear the very day Mozilla falls. I even wonder if having a swarm of small implementers wouldn't be better for the standards than having three big ones who discuss among themselves, then decide what the standards should be. Maybe browsers would stop getting more complicated than OSes and go back to essential, that way. I would really love seeing web engines getting simple again so that third party developers can contribute to them - and that's certainly a direction many small implementations would push toward.
Of course, this is only speculation. At least, it's not guaranteed doom.
Eh, forks can legally appear, because it's free software. But maintaining them? Improving the product security, let alone adding new features? That's hella expensive. Hobbyists aren't going to write a competitive a web browser.
So, it's important to have a strong Mozilla with a good revenue stream.
Yes, I don't see either small teams keeping up with the amount of features we currently have (and security is a direct factor of the amount of features), but I would rather see them scaling down browsers than making sure we can keep adding to them.
Also, beware to not discard "hobbyists" too easily. Hobbyists did create GNU (and still are maintaining it) and early linux. And Blink comes from Webkit, which comes from khtml, made by hobbyists.
There’s no way they could revert to hobbyist projects and survive. Either they would die off or the money would fork them.
The English language Internet maybe. Due to the great firewall and locally-hosted data laws, China is building a whole parallel world of software, search engines and cloud based stuff that people who don't read and write Chinese rarely see. For instance, here's "Chinese youtube":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youku
All centrally censored and monitored.
Russia also does something similar but on a much smaller scale.
Google represents the internet for everyone else. And "everyone else" is almost 200 countries and probably thousands of languages and about 6 billion people.
It's not just the "English language internet".
But I agree that serving "all the rest" is important: Even if Lesotho, Iceland and Trinidad, combined hardly make "a healthy online business model", they are there, and this diversity should be paramount to the internet. Silicon-valley giants are not helping here either, though.
[0]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28china+population+%2...
Even if they were:
1. India is (partly) English speaking, so it doesn't fit the split.
2. If you exclude the English speaking world (let's say 1 billion people) and China + India (3 billion people), you're still left with almost 4 billion people. Out of which about 1 billion live in developed countries or are middle/upper class in developing countries. So that's a big market. Japan, the EU, Latin America, etc.
English speaking =/= American values.
But a tiny part of your search-engine, social-network, app, or whatever is about the translations of the UI. The largest part is about how social constructs, ideals, workflows, and so forth fit. An Indian user might be able to read the screens on your app just fine, but might still be left out due to cultural issues.
In the EU this often becomes very clear when your startup "expands to Belgium" for example. It is not just about translating the app in Dutch and French; the way people interact, do business, communicate; the problems people have, the problems they dont have, and so forth are very different.
This is a pet-peeve of mine: we are all pushed in an American Template due to the prevalence of Silicon Valley "dictated" norms. When I was young, nudity on television in my country was normal. A local movie would have to have at least two naked tits. Today our media has become prude; no more tits on TV on prime-time; something that creeps onto us as "collatoral damage" of using primarily US media platforms.
Something like a paradise after apocalypse scenario. Or maybe it's just wishful thinking.
When not using Firefox I'm using an ungoogled version of Chromium (from the Woolys site) I didn't see much difference with the original Chrome.
Anyway as the recent news showed, Mozilla's management is extremely wasteful of their resources. If the project was just paying devs to work on Firefox, much less money would be needed and if needed the whole thing could probably be funded by donations.
So I'll probably be dumping them for firefox (or rather, reversing how I use them. Use firefox for my 'logged in' browser and edge as my 'noscript, no cookies, no history, default browser')
More and more I'm starting to agree with the people claiming Mozilla has already ceded on that front, and are just keeping the lights on as long as possible to keep getting paid.
Yes, but ultimately, it DID keep Apple alive at a critical juncture, and Apple ended up returning to relevance, at least in newer markets.
So maybe even such artificial life preservers sometimes have a competitive benefit.
Yes, Word for DOS existed before — I used it — but Word for Windows was much more like the Mac version.
Another HN post several weeks ago showed the bloated salaries of Mozilla executives. Mozilla as an organisation should be much smaller, sustainable and led by technicians not business executives.
> Mozilla is in a much worse position than Apple was in '97.
Indeed. In fact, Apple was in no short or medium term danger when they got the $150 million from Microsoft. They had at the time around $1.2 billion in cash reserves.
Getting Office on Mac was probably far more important to Apple than the cash. The deal guaranteed Microsoft would support Office on Mac for at least five years.
Microsoft got more out of it than just looking a little better to antitrust regulators. Part of the deal was that Apple would drop its lawsuit alleging that Microsoft had copied large parts of the look and feel of the Mac GUI. That had been going on for many years.
Unless they let their Steve Jobs back at the reins. Guess who.
most certainly not technically given for instance : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24817304
So, certainly yes technically.
A slow Firefox was an architectural problem not because of choosing the wrong tooling.
And Rust is plenty fast.
Two big reasons Rust was invented was to (1) easily parallelize the renderer without introducing many bugs (2) speed up the browser without introducing many exploits.
It’s common knowledge now in applications like Chrome (and even Windows) that memory errors are the largest source of CVEs and that type of exploit is almost impossibly difficult to cause in Rust