When Google paid websites to promote Firefox
leonidasv.com
leonidasv.com
Anyone remember that?
Bonzi Buddy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
The web today, without an ad blocker, is just as land-mined as it’s always been. And getting your spam code installed is super easy, barely an inconvenience.
No dude. From this comment I would say that you're either too young to have living the toolbars that parents is mentioning, or too in your own bubble to know the kind of people who would fall for it.
Back in those days, nothing (except java) in the browser is sandboxed.
I made a good chunk of money in my small town being the computer repair guy (well, kid).
Just you referring to that blight brought up memories of my entire digital youth. Having my parents shepherd my and my PC to friends so we could LAN, Hamachi (virtual LAN), Kazaa, Limewire / Frostwire, Azareus / uTorrent, uHARC compressed games, jailbreaking iPhones, writing my own hooks for d3dx9.dll for cheating on games.. good times.
Specifically with Azareus vs. uTorrent I remember being amazed how a program that was a few hundred kilobytes could principally do the same thing as one that was a few hundred megabytes big, and with 1/10th of the RAM consumption to boot. It’s given me a lifelong impression of Java being a sluggish crappy language, which isn’t factually correct.. but first impressions last.
Strangely enough I have a feeling we (‘90s kids) were the last generation where every kid had to learn at least some digital nimbleness. These days even the cracks and jailbreaks are one-click and work without a fault.
true hardmode
I knew a guy that had a free trial of AOL for 5 plus years because he's call and threaten to cancel his service - which eventually turned into "listen, Ive been with you folks for 3 plus years now, and I'd really hate to cancel my service now but..."
Bam, another free 6 month window. I still find it hilarious.
Who else rocked qlink ? We're getting there now...
I'm going to guess you're in your early- to mid-30's.
If I look at just the experience I've had these last 20 years I'd say nothing has changed overall.
Because my mom got her Samsung phone infected from official Google ads. And who do you report that to? They don't care. If she didn't have someone who could identify she had a malicious program and reset her phone she'd just live her life with constant ads popping up randomly.
Flashy != dangerous.
Heck today viruses don’t even limit themselves to restarting your computer, they encrypt your files and blackmail entire hospitals.
So yeah no, things did not get better at all.
Wow wow wow wow wow wow. I see we have another Ryan George fan here.
the other thing to note is just how spoiled we are with monitors these days. $400 for a giant fat pile of screen real estate, on something the thickness of a book (adjust the kind of book for the kind of monitor you have). Back in days of yore, monitors were CRTs. Deep and heavy, and with poor resolution. it's only recently we've been able to get exquisite 4k (or higher!) monitors, which meant that losing any screen real estate hurt plenty.
Its interesting to see new era of browser wars playing out with Chrome firmly in the lead, but Microsoft attacking with Edge where ChatGPT on bing only available on edge browser and no where else. Would be interesting to see how Google would respond.
And once they destroyed Netscape, Sun created Java with the same goal.
Speaking more broadly, the browser war is all but decided until the Chromes fail of their own accords.
The only non-Chrome browsers still in existence today are Safari and the Firefoxes (Firefox and its various forks). Safari is only relevant in iOS by way of Apple gatekeeping, and Firefox hasn't been relevant for well over the past decade thanks to Mozilla's utter mismanagement and malice.
They aren't both Chrome; they're both Chromium-based and use Blink and V8 under the hood. And Blink is just a fork of WebKit, which is Safari, so by your logic it's all Safari (it's not).
These companies don't care about the rendering engine under the hood, they care about literally one thing: the default search. The war isn't over how CSS is rendered; it's over how many opportunities they have for surfacing their other products (search, email, identity and payments).
If anything, Chrome/Firefox are more aligned than Chrome/Edge, because every 3 years Google pulls up with a dump truck of money to stay the default search engine.
Also, not for nothing, but there's not a single iota of malice inside Mozilla. Extreme mismanagement, yes, but it's genuinely guided by good people trying to do good for the world.
(Source: I'm ex Mozilla)
(Whether the companies themselves care about this seems immaterial.)
So they're both Chrome. You can't have a war with just one participant.
>These companies don't care about the rendering engine under the hood, they care about literally one thing: the default search.
They absolutely care about the rendering engine, because that's how you secure a monopoly and subsequently get to foist your default search engine and whatever other monetization schemes on more customers. Did you not learn anything from Internet Explorer and its victory over Netscape? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
There are many sites that only function properly in Chrome today, and that is to Google's (and now also Microsoft's) commercial interests. You can't have a browser war with just one participant.
>If anything, Chrome/Firefox are more aligned than Chrome/Edge, because every 3 years Google pulls up with a dump truck of money to stay the default search engine.
As far as Google is concerned, it's cheaper to pay Firefox to stay irrelevant than to compete on the market. Mozilla's flush with cash thanks to Google, but that also means they have no incentives to develop or not mismanage their products.
>Also, not for nothing, but there's not a single iota of malice inside Mozilla. Extreme mismanagement, yes, but it's genuinely guided by good people trying to do good for the world.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
History also shows Mozilla today are more concerned about checking the right political checkboxes than delivering a good product that users want.
>(Source: I'm ex Mozilla)
I'm not surprised that (ex-)Mozilla would play the "Am I out of touch? No, it's the people who are wrong." meme almost to the letter, but that is probably neither here nor there.
As a trans person, I am happy that my browser developers are on my side and not the side of the people who'd rather see me be harassed or bullied into suicide.
As usual, we tech workers prioritize group identity over personal integrity.
Ironic you're bothered Eich's name was "ran through the mud", but had no problem going out of your way to dig up and use my full name.
Everyone at Mozilla knew about his donation before he was promoted to CEO. Lots of people had opinions (and shouldn't they be allowed to?), but Mozilla officially supported him (this was his boss: https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/26/building-a-global...). He was not fired, he stepped down.
Donating money to prevent people from getting married feels more in line with "malice" to me than people reacting to his donation, but hey, that's just my opinion and I haven't worked at Mozilla for over a decade.
Most importantly, though, Eich just proves that a single person left the company. I'm not sure how that indicates web standards were hurt or Mozilla's mission of a free and open web was compromised – like I said before, you can both care about the people around you and also care about an open web.
This story has played out countless times, whether it's world hunger in the 1980s, third-wave feminism in the 1990s, global warming in the 2000s, or generic environmentalism (i.e. "greenwashing") in the 2010s. If they wanted to, corporations can be a force for good. The treadmill of causes du jour gives them a convenient excuse to not try.
For the sake of the trans community I'd like to think that this time they're being sincere. This time it's authentic. But I find it hard to believe. Maybe I'm too cynical.
It doesn't matter that they're not sincere. It doesn't matter that they're not authentic. It matters that they help normalize pro-trans messaging, rather than normalizing anti-trans messaging, or doing nothing. Yes, it'd be nice to live in a world where you get to choose between the company that sincerely supports trans people and the company that merely does so for optics but still fires those sincerely opposing them, but that's not the one we live in.
To be honest, I think most of the trans community would be perfectly happy to have companies simply not actively funnel money into politicians who want them to stop existing. Alas.
But really, I just can’t get past the idea of “it doesn’t matter if they’re not sincere” when in the same paragraph you spell out exactly why that’s an absurd thing to say.
But they're neither. They’re indifferent with some opportunist exploitation sprinkled on top.
Some of the rabble go quiet, the rest double-down. They try to convince themselves and everyone else they weren't fooled. They want to believe they're still a voice in a worthy social cause, and not a pawn in a game that they don't even know how to play.
Beyond a limited number of companies who go against popular opinion (possibly bcos their target customers are too), most are going to publicly support all the same socially acceptable stands. This doesn't mean there are some vile people employed in those positive companies or some decent, well meaning pepole working in the bad companies just for a paycheck. it's hard to judge with a simple look.
As a consumer you are free to support or boycott a product on any criteria that you like but question is how much of a realworld difference their placit support for your cause makes.
Seems best just to leave politics out of business.
You literally can't, though. Business is inherently political. And even if the corporation itself may attempt to remain neutral and refuse to participate in any donations or fundraisers, the C-level executives and the shareholders who derive most of the excess value produced by the company are still people with opinions who have a lot of disposable income they can throw one way or another.
If you truly think business can avoid politics you should ask yourself why all the companies priding themselves in not engaging in politics are run by people who lean right-libertarian. It's hard to see the water when you're a fish.
Further, only one side takes some ignorant position like 'doing nothing is taking sides!'
DuckDuckGo’s browser on macOS¹ is WebKit, as is Orion². They may not be very popular but neither are the Firefox forks. They’re both still in beta and under development.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#DuckDuckGo_Private_...
The "Worst Google" copies the business model they just un-fucked.
I'd say in 2023, we really need the "Best Google".
That was a lot of money for me as a poor kid from the TL.
The images of the old Google and the Google Toolbar (in the web.archive link) brought so many memories... Not only of internet, but what was happening with my life around it, the people I had, and more. Those were the happy times, weren't?
Web Design Museum: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/
Yesterweb community: https://yesterweb.org/
Back when it was clear that Google wanted users not to suffer from malware but they didn't want to draw the attention or ire of established antivirus companies.
https://security.googleblog.com/2023/03/thank-you-and-goodby...
I don't remember any of that and Chrome doesn't even support toolbars.
Or am I misunderstanding something?
Chrome on Windows had a malware checker built in. Which you can debate whether that belongs, but that's not really bundling, just a feature. Which arguably helps protect browser security.
If Google at the time could figure out how much their marketing assisted Firefox adoption, and saw that the marketing was a huge if not main driver, does it not make complete sense for them to just write their own browser and market that?
If I basically had a guarantee that some product would see huge adoption if it only existed, I would start working on that in a heartbeat.
> Mozilla Corporation, who are the developers
Mozilla Corporation is a corporation. If you want to send money to developers who work on Firefox, you can. Better if you do it for the ones who are not Mozilla Corporation employees—although this is more difficult than it would have been in the past, owing to Mozilla Corporation's successful play to accumulate most development and decisionmaking power while alienating volunteers.
And finding relevant individuals isn't easy either.
So for now I am happy Firefox is being worked on continuously for so many years for free. It's my default browser from back when the predecessor was Netscape Navigator 3 Gold via opensourcing and renaming.
No, as you acknowledge, you can also send money to another individual who already did or is currently working on something that you like and that you want to incentivize them to keep doing.
Alternatively, there's almost certainly some way to get Igalia (or someone in it) to accept your money and make sure they know exactly what it's for.
> And finding relevant individuals isn't easy either.
Since they're right out in the open, records of who contributed what is pretty easy to parse for a developer looking at a bugtracker or a commit log. GitHub Sponsors seems straightforward enough (or conspicuous enough, at least; I don't even really use GitHub and I'm well aware of its existence).
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend".
explorer is like some kind of evil Spanish conquistador
chrome is like some kind of terminator
and firefox is like a cute, cuddly, endangered fox
Sure you're not thinking of Konqueror? It was named in what was seen as a logical sequence from "explorer" and "navigator".