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Comment by Am4TIfIsER0ppos | Hacker News Reader

So is this the latest scheme to embezzle the money? I am ashamed I used to donate to you useless people. I am ashamed I ever promoted firefox.

> To fuel an ecosystem of products and technology that respect users

Bring back the XUL extensions!

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Something similar. I was a pretty regular doner to Mozilla for many years. I stopped because Mozilla spends money on lots of stuff I don’t care about and not on the browser.

I hope this works out for them. But I’m not sure the elevator pitch for Mozilla as a charity. Why do people donate to them?

To play devil's advocate: If Mozilla were purely focused on doing good for the internet, and had a funding problem that threatened their ability to do that, it's possible that carefully investing money in places that do some good and gives them returns is a good way to try and solve both problems at once.

Not that I have any faith in them. But this could be a good thing.

It definitely could be a good thing.

But it’s like if Doctors Without Borders/MSF started a soup kitchen in DC. Soup kitchens are good things, but if I donate to MSF I want my money to go towards a specific cause, not domestic soup kitchens.

There are already charity index funds for people who want to donate.

They gave grants to change master/slave terminology in documentation. After that, I can't donate and assume the won't wizz away my money on some stupid endeavor.

I remember when BLM was becoming a thing. I was working with a rapidly scaling concurrent system.

We had already gone through every variation of “master” and “slave” and had code using it to describe the various relationships.

“Slave” was a worker whose behavior was exclusively and directly defined by the “master”, “minions” had more autonomy, etc.

Eventually the terminology expanded and lost all sense and reason. Just our own in-house jargon.

If we could do it over we would have chosen something different, but we were fighting for solvency at that point.

COVID really messed stuff up.

Bringing back XUL extensions won't rescue Firefox, because removing XUL extensions is not what caused Firefox to lose marketshare in the first place.

https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/108/556/56...

Source for the "XUL Deprecated in August 2015" date: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

Source for the browser stats over time: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BrowserUsageShare.pn...

So what? XUL was a "technology that respect users" but was replaced because firefox needed to copy chrome.

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