You know what would be even healthier? Browser competition.
Maybe they want to own their instance and therefore control their identity? That kind of makes sense—we might see more of that from individual businesses in the future. But this announcement is not about that.
Mozilla isn't a browser company, and did you read the post? All the examples cited where decentralized/federalized alternatives. They specifically DON'T wanna own anything
You could argue that no one owns anything exclusively in today's federalized world but that is not true in practical terms. They will own the identities/social graphs/content created locally. "Own" meaning they have total control over that instance and can, for example, enforce Mozilla-friendly policies, remove content, ban users (without the ability to export one's identity and social graph).
If Mozilla does some weird shit with their instance, people can just... use a different instance. That's kinda the point. And Mozilla's instance will surely take the Mastodon Server Covenant which, among other things, requires users be notified at least 3 months ahead of time before a server gets shut down
Are you seriously asking why they would be interested in the Fediverse ??
Were you questioning Opera (now Vivaldi) when they were experimenting with all those weird browser features ?
Are you *seriously* asking why they would be interested in the Fediverse ??
Furthermore, given that Mozilla very recently had a round of layoffs, ostensibly to cut the fat and refocus on the browser, where are they going to get the developer resources to work on this new project?
We are rapidly regressing towards where the web was in 2002, only with Google Chrome taking the place of Internet Explorer. Could Mozilla have prevented this by focusing on Firefox? I don't know. What I do know is that they didn't even try.
This goes double for when Firefox OS was around : 7-9 years ago.
And those are just the outstanding bugs. In terms of performance, Firefox is still slower than Chrome. It still has more UI jank, even on Linux. The new plugin API still doesn't give extensions the same level of functionality that they had with the old API, despite years of promising otherwise. Its responses to interaction media queries are inconsistent, necessitating the creation of a test page [5] to determine what its actual responses are (W3C specifications? what are those?).
No, Firefox is not a top-tier browser. It's more privacy-preserving than Chrome, which is why I use it, but I will never claim that Firefox is a better browser.
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10212
[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317081
[3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=654072
[4]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1527334
[5]: https://demos.obormot.net/interaction-media-query-test
EDIT:
better dump Android at this point anyway
No, most people should be using a dumbphone these days, at least until we hackers get our shit together enough that alternatives Librem/Pinephone are good enough.
Last I checked, the average failure rate of software projects was 90 % (which is a good thing, other kinds of projects, like bridges, can't afford to, and have to be "over"engineered).
[reposting my earlier reply] Furthermore, I imagine the reason they are so keen to be a player in social media is because someone at Mozilla really promotes the idea that there is a community around Firefox (sure, Thunderbird, MDN, etc). There is no community. People who use a browser are not a community: we don't need a place to "hang out" because we all use Firefox. It's a ridiculous aspirational thinking that only moves Mozilla further into irrelevancy.
Also, ok, if not social media as a Mastodon instance, then what kind of project do you suggest they should start in order to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse ?
> in order to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse
What does that mean? What should Ableton Live or Pixelmator Pro do to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse?
This is nothing more than an open-source attempt at mastadon, and possible diversification for Mozilla.
We can expect more open source diversification attempts in the future.
BTW, where is an open source email service network? And open source identity service network? And open source password saver network?
> BTW, where is an open source email service network?
That's what most email that isnt run by Google and Microsoft has always been...
And I mean open source email server. Something like an alternative to an enhanced email server like ms exchange or even gmail.
Like I said, all of the other ones are open source.. There's dozens. This seems like you just don't know about them.
As for identity service, in its early years OAuth had many service providers. But then the providers don't bother to maintain the service so many sites also stopped using OAuth as login alternative due to unreliabiliy of the feature.
For password saver, KeePass + (sync service of your choice) also works? (Personally, I don't use it)
I had not heard of red mail or roundcube either. Mozilla stopped innovation on thunderbird and have now tried to go to thunderbird on mobile. What they sh/could be working on is “thunder nest” aka email server software.
So I assume the same people who would be paying for the social network.
Microsoft and Google are at total odds with each other - I can't imagine using Chromium as a base sent people skipping down the halls in Redmond.
I know that browsers on iOS are forced to use WebKit (although that might change soon[1]). But Safari is also using WebKit, and the lag that I get in Firefox when opening a new tab is testing my commitment to them.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/14/apple-considering-non-w...
this plea - that many people had made over the years - falls on deaf ears. mozilla is now ran by the kind of people who knows better than its users what we need, and we're wrong if we disagree.
Towards the end, Firefox was an easy sell.
And, as you write, today they don't care or even actively resist when we try to help.
Copying Chrome perfectly won't get any their users back.
Funding all kinds of weird side projects won't get users back.
Amazing, resource-efficient skinning might get some people back.
Tree Style Tags and other plugins working amazingly well might get some users back.
And when they start listen and fix the things we report things can improve very rapidly.
There are also probably a number of other improvements that can be done (I've advocated looking into doing the same as asm.js, but with html and css: something like a put meta-tag announcing html-lite or html/asm or something in the head, use a restricted set of css and html that is rendering friendly and only uses these well thought out js-libraries and we will pass your code down a much more efficient rendering branch!)
Now, that doesn't put Mozilla's decisions or operations beyond scrutiny, but set expectations reasonably. Firefox is already a competitive browser, and even dramatically leap-frogging Chrome would do nothing to market share.
I hope Firefox devs for the code and establish their own foundation, Id give Firefox money, but not Mozilla - I’m not interested in funding a bunch of wannabe tech bros weird exploration of projects destined to fail.
The only silver lining is that this might land Google in an antitrust lawsuit that forces them to spin Chromium and Blink off into a Mozilla-like nonprofit with wholly independent leadership, which is about the best outcome possible in a single-web-engine world.
so I see today as fairly diverse