Firefox has lost almost half of its users since 2010, yet it keeps burning more money every year. Run the company in a lean way, cut the fat, do one thing well. It's like Wikipedia, every year they seemingly find new ingenious ways to burn more cash.
Empirically, it is not. Even Microsoft gave up that chase. Browsers are staggeringly complex and expensive to build. Which may be an indictment of the Web itself, but in the absence of a simpler alternative (Gemini?), the Web we have is the Web we've got, and browsers have to meet it where it is.
Mozilla's engine is modern and they have a clear revenue stream to subsidize its development with their browser revenue.
But instead the browser revenue goes to dumb shit like mobile OSes (that definitely is too expensive), VPNs, executive bonuses, and basically anything but their browser or engine.
This is just not true. Mozilla spends millions on exec salaries and useless side projects, yet they still have hundreds of millions in cash reserves.
I never heard of that before. I'm off to investigate.
I've often thought we need to rewind the clock on the internet, as the whole thing has gotten way out of hand.
What's to stop feature creep of Gemini, though?
Gemini is deisgned to be non-extensible, for precisely that reason (if it becomes mainstream though, I'm sure the monetisers will find a way).
They claim to stop feature creep by not including any kind of optional data support like headers and the spec team will reject any feature additions.
While I would be happy to have HTML/CSS exactly as it is and replace JS with a minimal WASM implementation that lets the website bring whatever tools it wants rather than relying on 1 billion JS apis.
The culture. A portion of Gemini users use it as a way to escape from the complexity of the modern web, including some small "browser" writers who want to target a small and easy to understand spec for their efforts.
EDIT: I guess I forgot shopping in essential services, which is another huge source of fuel in the arms race.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
Today that means it should actively subvert the business interests of the web. Advertisers want to show ads? Block them and make no exceptions. Surveillance capitalists want data? Give them fake data or no data at all whenever possible. Sites start detecting Firefox? Start pretending to be Chrome.
It doesn't matter what these companies want or need. Firefox needs to take the user's side every single time. This arms race is absolutely necessary. Firefox needs to be a true user agent. If it ever stops being one, it's over for Mozilla.