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Comment by callahad | Hacker News Reader

> Firefox gets hundreds of millions from Google alone in royalties, that is not enough to build a web browser?

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.

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Microsoft gave up developing their own engine, because that aspect doesn't make them money, and their engines were too far behind to bother investing into catching up. They're still making a browser, because it's useful even if it doesn't make them money.

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.

FirefoxOS has been dead for at least seven years. That horse is quite dead. The VPN product probably pays for itself. I'm not an insider anymore but aside from FirefoxOS the vast majority of the money has always gone into browser development and I have no reason to believe that has changed.

(Actually FirefoxOS is not quite dead; KaiOS lives on. But Mozilla's not funding that.)

> Empirically, it is not.

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.

We're talking about hundreds of millions, not millions. And spending cash reserves is not sustainable

But the Web we have is not a monolith. If freedom/ethics/privacy/etc. are important to a browser user, they should realize that there's a subset of the Web that they need, and one they can do without. "I need to be able to discover and consume every work in every medium from everyone immediately and have it be secure and efficient" is the unspoken mindset that enables this kind of decay in the browser world. Essential services like banks, government are the one subset that you need but will be extremely hard to change, if even possible. For everything else, people need to realize that there's a Web that doesn't need their browsers to participate in this arms race, and that Web needs support from users and from producers.

EDIT: I guess I forgot shopping in essential services, which is another huge source of fuel in the arms race.

There is no need to "do without". Firefox should adversarially interoperate with the web.

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.

We agree in that we wish Firefox prioritized each user's privacy and agency more. But what I'm saying is that users' demand for ubiquitous and frictionless media consumption is something that will always be abused, and to try to satisfy that need and also not become corrupt or destroyed by your competitors seems pretty impossible at the moment. I want there to be a space for a browser that doesn't need millions or billions to maintain.

Yeah. The only true fix for that is the end of copyright.

> simpler alternative (Gemini?)

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?

>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).

Gemini throws out way way too much. Inline links and image support for one. It feels like someone wants to have everything exactly as it was in the 80s.

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.

I'd be surprised if the most popular Gemini clients didn't support Markdown.

I would be. The Gemini devs would insist that nothing should be supported that doesn't work on an 80 char terminal with only the ascii charset.

> What's to stop feature creep of Gemini, though?

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.

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