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Comment by nullspace | Hacker News Reader

I am typing this from Firefox, which I switched back to right after Quantum.

I don't want to give an impression that I'm a shill, but I'm getting more and more intrigued by Brave every day. I think they made the right call by focusing on crypto, their search indexing technique is very unique (and it works!), as is their BAT attention token. They are _trying_ to doing something different, Firefox is not.

What I instead get from Firefox for trying to support their monetization, is seductive-looking spammy ads on their New Tab page that come back even after I dismiss them. Brave ads vs Firefox ads would be a tough comparison - the former is more annoying and intrusive, but I definitely think I prefer them. And long term, I think I would bet on Brave _over_ Firefox, unless something changes.

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I donate every month instead of dealing with the ads. $20 per month is a lot more money than they'd get by me looking at ads, and I can afford to pay that towards something that makes a big difference for the long-term health of the web!

Just remember that Mozilla gets over 90% of its revenue from Google.

https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

In 2018 Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO) received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

By 2020 her salary had risen to over $3 million, while in the same year the Mozilla Corporation had to lay off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.

Donations go to the foundation, not moz corp which builds Firefox.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/

EDIT: At this point either pocket or their vpn seem to be the only way to get money to the corporation, even then may not be a lot.

Click the gear icon on the New Tab page and turn off Sponsored Shortcuts.

That has never worked for me at least back when i used firefox - the only thing that did work was entirely new tab pages with addons

I think it works now. I did it last week and haven’t seen the sponsored shortcuts reappear.

> more intrigued by Brave every day

My long term question is - will there end up being one browser implementation of the virtual machine? Browser rendering engines are basically that these days, a big virtual machine for web apps. Is there value having a separate implementation? Some languages that run inside a virtual machine only have a single implementation. Is that bad?

Would it be bad if Mozilla used the internet-vm (why even call it Blink at this point?)

Others may disagree on philosophical grounds, but I don't think it's inherently bad to have only one implementation of the core web browser technologies. That's similar to what we have with Linux, where the kernel has one canonical implementation, and OSes based on Linux use that, modify it, switch configurations, and build the OS that they need on that core.

The problem here and the difficulty, is that upstream Linux is coordinated and controlled by a non-profit consortium and community, and the implementation is developed and controlled by community efforts and the joined efforts of hundreds of companies and thousands of hobbyists. The upstream Blink browser implementation is coordinated, develped, and controlled by one giant advertising corporation, and no control or input is ever in the hands of anybody else.

I don't believe that there's harm in having "one implementation", but there is harm in that implementation being completely centralized by a single for-profit entity.

And the entity has massive incentive to be user hostile because that's how they make their money.

If Mozilla switched to Blink, they'd be maintaining their own version, and it could diverge from Google's. That would be the "trustworthy, community Blink". But they'd also be able to much more easily benefit from Blink's security (already had site isolation for years, apparently a better sandbox, etc) and the contributions thousands of other companies make to Blink (Intel, Samsung, etc), companies that don't contribute to Gecko and Webkit as much if at all. They'd also have better webcompat, and take away one reason to switch to Chrome (i.e., sites that break in Firefox that render fine in Chrome; and sites that rely on cutting edge draft standards that Firefox won't implement for a few months/years).

I argued this before[0], and I still stand by it:

> I can see that being an issue if the web is centralising around one proprietary engine, but why does that apply to Blink? If Google turns completely evil that won't take away from all the webcompat, optimisations, and security in Blink, and any bad feature (ManifestV3) can be patched out easily. Mozilla could switch to Blink (and I think they should, and Apple too, they clearly don't have the manpower to maintain a whole engine and keep it modern and secure, see my other comment in this thread; there are many more 0days with Safari and Firefox than Chrome) and it wouldn't harm the web in any way, because they can just swap out bad components with their own, and still reduce their dev time requirements by orders of magnitude compared to today. You have Intel, Samsung, tons of companies contributing to Blink, to a much, much greater extent than Gecko or WebKit.

> If every browser switched to Blink, that would actually benefit consumers, because right now Chrome basically has the enterprise market on lock, since nobody cares to test internal webpages on other browsers, and Chrome has better enterprise features (though I don't know how much of that is to do with the engine); and many consumers also just switch to Chrome as the first thing they do, because they've run into compatibility issues with Firefox or Safari and they just want to access the web without issues. If every browser used Blink, you'd have a lot more people using Safari and Firefox, just because most people don't want to keep two browsers around (Firefox + Chrome or Safari + Chrome) when websites break (which is not often, but often enough, trust me). I really hope we see this.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941866

Every time this discussion appears on HN, the argument is that Gecko needs to exist because otherwise Blink will dominate, and Blink is overwhelmingly controlled by Google.

But I think that's the wrong solution, it just means that we need to decouple Blink from Google and put it in the hands of a neutral, nonprofit third-party. This is arguably what the Mozilla Foundation should have been.

Both Gecko and KHTML were already in the hands of neutral, nonprofit third parties from the start. But Apple wanted control to be entirely in their hands, so they forked WebKit from KHTML, and Google wanted control in their hands, so they forked Blink from WebKit.

If someone wants to make this argument, it is actually WebKit, not Gecko, that is currently the balancing act on the web. WebKit is about 18% and Gecko around 3% browser share (mostly thanks to iOS). Also WebKit is currently trending up (thanks to success of M1) and Gecko is trending lower.

FWIW you are absolutely free to change your new tab page to something else

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