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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Just when I thought Firefox was going to emerge as the most pro-consumer browser...

Why can't there be a browser that is just... a browser?

Because developers need to be paid for their time and there isn’t enough charity in the world to pay them without advertising, nor is the general public willing to pay $10 for an ad-free Firefox. I probably prefer this compared to Mozilla’s deal with Google to be the default search engine- sponsored tiles can go to a variety of sites, but the search engine deal pushed even more market share to a single player.

Mozilla is getting hundreds of millions of dollars to set Google as the default search engine. You can change that in 10 seconds.

How are these stupid additions better for anyone? Consumers find them more annoying and they probably don't result in any significant month for Mozilla.

Anyway, we need another open source browser, one that is controlled by the community and not some SV company.

You can also turn off sponsored tiles, so this isn’t different in that respect.

Plus, while Mozilla the corporation is technically a for profit entity, they operate under the direction of the not for profit Mozilla Foundation. They are already the best choice for a browser that is free from an SV company’s influence. But they do have to pay their employees and keep the lights on. How are they supposed to pay for things if they don’t do stuff like this? At least they are honest about which things they are making money from.

> You can also turn off sponsored tiles, so this isn’t different in that respect.

The point is, I should not need to keep a close eye on Mozilla and disable stuff regularly. I should not need to fight my browser.

There are a lot of "should"s in the world. People should not feel entitled to something they use extensively but do not pay for, yet here we are.

> I should not need to keep a close eye on Mozilla

That is a bit hyperbolic. You see a feature in the browser you don't like, you can turn it off. Not really a 'close eye' issue to me.

> I should not need to fight my browser.

This also is hyperbolic, switching a single option is fighting with a browser?

On a FF install...

Turn off telemetry. Set search to DDG. Set "Do Not Track" always on. Get rid of the Mozilla start page. Disable any suggestions for Top Sites or other junk like "Snippets".

That's just as I type, with no thought. There are myriad tweaks in about:config that I've promised myself I'll remember over the years since Phoenix.

My favourite browser is adversarial because they need millions of dollars to write a piece of software which shows text and pictures from a network connection in the intended place on a screen.

Why is this so complicated and expensive? What has the Internet become?

Turn it off and start over. This one is broken.

> Turn off telemetry. Set search to DDG. Set "Do Not Track" always on. Get rid of the Mozilla start page. Disable any suggestions for Top Sites or other junk like "Snippets".

I just login to my Mozilla account, and move buttons on the UI around (for some reason that's the one thing that isn't synced).

> Why is this so complicated and expensive?

In the older days, people were willing to give up more for their faiths, their drives. You could make this choice and essentially live a life of service if you wanted.

> What has the Internet become?

It's still an open network and there is nothing stopping you really from doing your own thing on it.

The only one of those that's plausibly "adversarial" is telemetry (and I strongly disagree about that). The rest are just settings for which you don't want the defaults

Mozilla is directly competing with Google - probably the most powerful tech company in the world. Google could kill them in a heartbeat, but they keep them around to avoid antitrust issues. If that ever changes and Mozilla doesn't have any other sources of income to fall back on, they can't possibly survive that.

Mozilla's deal with Google gets them a lot of funding for setting as default the search engine most users would have selected anyway.

> and there isn’t enough charity in the world to pay them without advertising

And yet the KDE team was able to build the best browser in the world (Konqueror) while being funded only by charity and charity-like governmental development grants.

Except they don't build the engine. They used to, many many years ago, when the web was much simpler and everyone and their dog could build their own engine. These days, that is no longer the case.

So even if Konqueror is still "the best browser in the world", that is meaningless to this discussion. Building the chrome around an existing engine is almost trivial compared to developing a 100% independent browser engine.

They built the engine originally. Others have contributed to it since which is exactly how open source is supposed to work.

As I acknowledged. But what they did originally is only a fraction of what's required for a browser these days. Saying "KDE did it" today is like saying "look, the Wright brothers built a plane! You can, too!".

Back then, the web was simpler and so we had many different engines. Today, we really only have two. All other attempts have failed - even Microsoft couldn't compete. The only reason Mozilla is still going is because of their head start and Google money. If Apple hadn't picked up KHTML and turned it into WebKit and Google developed their own thing, KHTML would be even more dead than Gecko is today.

> the web was simpler and so we had many different engines

I would argue it was more complex, trying to get something moderately advanced to render the same between many browsers became a massive chore compared to today.

It was harder to code for, sure, but looking at the standards, there were far fewer things a browser vendor needed to implement, so the complexity of the technology involved was lower.

It's the same situation as RISC vs CISC - for a programer, CISC is "easier" to write for (== it does more work for you), but for a chip designer, RISC is much simpler to design and implement.

Apple contributing to webkit is largely what drove the web to its current place as a complex application runtime. That's how we got the canvas element for example.

Because it quite literally takes hundreds of millions of dollars to make a browser. So, you can either:

* Eat the costs because you're so wealthy you don't care (Apple, Google)

* Use the work of those who ate the costs (Waterfox, Icecat, Edge, Firefox-Fork-Of-The-Month-Whose-Only-Purpose-Is-To-Shit-On-Firefox-Lol-Palemoon)

* Find a way to actually make money (Firefox, Brave)

Needless to say, you entire lifeline being depending on Google when you're Firefox is horribly bad.

Here is a crazy idea:

Maybe web technologies have gotten too complicated. Maybe they need to be replaced with something that does not cost hundreds of millions to support?

Lynx was always the best browser.

What is so different about browsers?

Why can we have the whole galaxy of free software with the various distributions and desktop environments and entire kernel ecosystems and device drivers free of this kind of monetization yet somehow this is impossible with browsers?

I don't think twice about using Debian, Freebsd, Openbsd, or Openwrt.

What the hell is going on with Mozilla and Firefox?

The consumer marketshare of desktop Linux/BSD and its ecosystem is tiny, something like 2% AFAIK. Mozilla is probably not happy for Firefox to occupy a similar browser marketshare, that would likely mean the end of Mozilla's influence on web standards.

A lot of the remaining OSS ecosystem benefits corporate software development and is already supported by corporate backers.

Browsers scope is so huge(and none of them is sufficiently modular). FOSS Software of that size and scope is usually require at the minimum donation from companies use it.

> Waterfox, Icecat, Edge, Firefox-Fork-Of-The-Month-Whose-Only-Purpose-Is-To-Shit-On-Firefox-Lol-Palemoon

Many of these ‘forks’ emerged because of the Firefox trademark policy which prevented distributions from packaging Firefox under that name.

Pro-consumer? Only weeks ago the CEO came out in favor of censorship and deplatforming.

I don't type "somesite.com" into the CEO's address bar. I type it into my browser's.

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