Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla
fakespot.com
fakespot.com
And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content.
I can't help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no way improves Mozilla's browser.
Advertising is not about the Seller of the product and the Publisher of the content. Oh no.
The money in advertisement is the hundreds of companies that prey on each other all the way connecting seller and publisher. Because nobody trust anybody in advertisement. There's traffic validate. Click validation. Sales attribution. Sales attribution validation. MRC Accreditation for the sales attribution validation. etc. etc. etc.
Interesting, did not know this happened.
I'm not sure that the money Mozilla spends on other things would be better spent on the browser... would it realistically close any existing gaps between their competition? Arguably they might even be better off spending it on marketing the browser than any technical metric. I'd rather this kind of thing than marketing.
Now, if I can find how to make it stop opening a new tab every time I enter an URL in the address bar instead of reusing the current tab, the experience would be blissful.
Is this what you're after?
I like Mozilla as a company and I still use Firefox over Chrome knowing that it is objectively a worse browser and experience because I dislike Google and their business practices and i support businesses that I believe in. I am very much against the monopoly Google has over the web space and their positioning to dictate future web standards that will probably benefit their ad revenue over user experience.
With regards to APIs, I'm very happy with Firefox's commitment to telling Google to go fuck itself when it comes to Manifest V3 neutering of adblocking.
> I am very much against the monopoly Google has over the web space and their positioning to dictate future web standards
Then, to the extent you can, stop using Google-controlled browser engines. Google can only dictate future web "standards" if they're the de-facto standard browser engine… so just refuse to acknowledge them.
If you make websites, use stuff that only works in Firefox (and the indie browsers), like Content MathML, or stick to stuff that works in every browser – and by that, I mean clean, semantic HTML. Force Google to play catch-up for once, or make the whole "catch-up" game irrelevant.
My favourite such feature is alternate stylesheets. Supported by Firefox, and by basically every CSS-supporting indie browser, but by almost none of the Chromiums.
Chrome also deliberately broke CSS2 years after it was supposedly completely implemented to simplify their rendering, breaking existing websites. (this was showcased on their "html5 rocks" website at one point to quite a lot of protest from other browsers). Everyone ended having to follow Chrome's lead at that point, but for a while who was "fully compliant" would be up in the air. Amusingly it seems to me anchor positioning Chrome just added to CSS3 allows doing those things they considered un-performant, a decade later.
Google has also implemented rather dubious specs, like WebUSB where it is understandable no one else has implemented yet due to security concerns - but that would also drag down scores further.
So yeah I have a wifi card, technically, but also technically don't from the point of view of firefox or any other program on my computer.
Instead your computer operating system sends the BSSIDs to another service, get the location back and then your browser uses this location service to send a lat,long to the requesting website.
See https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mh35873/mac and https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-location...
Edit: s/100ft/10ft after I remembered better
I do suspect that most websites that ask for location information could do fine with GeoIP, but that doesn't mean there isn't any use for more reliable, fine-grained location data.
for explicit it is using device GPS and/or cell tower
either you are not actually connected to the VPN or the website is storing your consent to access GPS coordinates. I'm not sure which is scarier
to test the former go to a few different websites that tell you your IP address
for the latter, fully clear your browser's cookies and cache and retry. does it ask to access fine location?
another reason could be that you are logged in to e.g. google who already knows where you are based on historic searches, nearby wifi and bluetooth devices, etc.
A primary software at work is $1,500 to $10,000 a seat (depending on extensions) plus 10% annual maintenance. Our department annual fee is ~$70,000. I have a long list of "vote up this enhancement request or bug to get it fixed" that goes back almost two decades. (It's hard to identify the oldest because the vendor has switched tracking platforms twice.)
As a user, Firefox feels like hobby project, but at least it's not a Google product.
That's exactly what they're doing with the biggest ad trackers and browser vendors. A lot of Mozilla's "side-projects" are stupid and I also agree they should focus more on Firefox, but this one is pretty in line with their general mission of "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".
Heck, maybe investing hundreds of millions in Apple today would, in X years, be worth more money than spending marketing money / development budgets for new features for their own products; or worth more than investing in OpenAI and related products - but it's not exactly something anyone would suggest Microsoft should do (in terms of just becoming a shareholder, of course there could be collaborations without changing this point).
Technically yes, but not really. It’s specifically valid to observe with regards to Microsoft because Microsoft did in actual fact hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Apple stock for a decent stretch of time. Most companies did not.
Microsoft chose to sell their Apple stock in 2003. This was entirely their choice. They didn't have to. They could have sold it in 2005 and made an additional billion dollars. They could have sold it in 2007 and made another ten billion dollars. They could have sold it today and made a hundred billion dollars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...
"the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million."
"Intel gave this code to Microsoft as part of a joint development program called Display Control Interface."
"Canyon admitted that it had copied to Intel code developed for and assigned to Apple. In September 1994, Apple's software was distributed by Microsoft in its developer kits, and in Microsoft's Video for Windows version 1.1d."
[0]https://infostory.com/2013/08/18/steve-jobs-thank-you-bill-g...
At the time and subsequently it was absolutely seen as a lifeline.
For example:
> Providing the biggest sign of hope yet for ailing Apple Computer, Microsoft today announced it was forging a new era of cooperation with its longtime rival that includes an investment of $150 million. [snip] News of the alliance sent Apple's stock up $7 a share, or 35 percent
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19970806&slug...
> Recognizing the importance of Mac Office to Apple's survival, Microsoft threatened to cancel the product unless Apple compromised on a number of outstanding issues between the companies. One of these issues was the extent to which Apple distributed and promoted Internet Explorer, as opposed to Navigator, with the Mac OS.
> At the end of June 1997, the Microsoft executive in charge of Mac Office, Ben Waldman, sent a message to Gates and Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer, Greg Maffei. The message reflected Waldman's understanding that Microsoft was threatening to cancel Mac Office:
> The pace of our discussions with Apple as well as their recent unsatisfactory response have certainly frustrated a lot of people at Microsoft. The threat to cancel Mac Office 97 is certainly the strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately. I also believe that Apple is taking this threat pretty seriously
[snip]
> Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office . . . ."
from https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f... paragraph 345 onwards.
Jobs' deal with MS fixed this problem.
I think you're misremembering or mistyping the numbers, unless Wikipedia is wrong?
Word 2.0 shipped on a lot of Windows NT computers with Office 3.0 and these were the days when there weren't forced updates and you had to pay so it hung around for ages.
When Microsoft invested a paltry $250M in Apple, Apple had already secured a line of credit of $4 Billion.
On top of that, Apple turned around a spent $100 million the same quarter to buy out PowerComputing’s Mac license. Apple lost way more than $150 million before they became profitable.
>"Evil Empire" entered the Billboard charts at No. 1, which reflects the broad audience the band has built. "I personally never thought that we'd ever sell a single record," Morello recalls, but it looks as if signing with Epic has worked. "True, we are a major-label band," he concedes. "But we're using the mechanism of the record label to spread revolutionary propaganda." [1]
[1] RAGE: CO-OPTING THE MACHINE (1996)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1996/08/16/...
I'd be more convinced of this if they weren't actively collaborating with the big guys.
This is the rich philanthropists debate all over again. Yea, sure, they got rich from participating in the system, but they're using a big chunk of that wealth to fight its consequences. Sure as hell beats the alternative, where the only people willing to fight are the ones without the resources to do it.
I'd honestly rather see Firefox development be funded by selling NFTs and mining crypto, than not funded at all. Volunteer/donation-driven FOSS is great, but it has never been able to compete with for-profit products and it sure as hell couldn't compete with Google here.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)
It was a Mozilla side project, but with Servo, totally in line with its mission of making a good web browser. I'd even say it was a necessary long term plan. Chrome was the better, more modern browser, and Firefox needed fundamental improvements like these to compete. If anything, I think they should have spent more energy on Rust and Servo, not less.
Smoke and mirrors more like it. They collaborate with Facebook and Google all the time. 80%-90% of their revenue comes from Google. Fighting the 'big guys' for real would mean shutting shop and never to be seen again.
Has Google ever mentioned anything about privacy? (privacy from hackers doesn't count, that's security) Do you think Apple, with the joke of a browser that is Safari and basically zero stake in the web, would be able to keep Google from turning the web into its own closed little sandbox?
Who would say "if Chrome kills adblockers, switch to our browser" and be able to actually sustain it, not just keep their Chromium fork slightly out of date for as long as they can get away with?
The only reason Firefox has been able to survive this long after Chrome's launch is Mozilla's historic importance. A new player could never dream to compete with Google - even Microsoft failed! If Mozilla folds, who else do you think will be able to compete with Google? Stallman himself?? This is the real world and compromises must be made.
What makes you think they're not doing that now and Mozilla's existence even matters in this case? Funny enough, they're only keeping Mozilla alive to avoid any antitrust cases.
> would be able to keep Google from turning the web into its own closed little sandbox?
Flawed argument. If Google all of a sudden stops funding Mozilla, do you think that they're going to continue development of the browser? Firefox has steadily been losing market share for years, the writing is on the walls.
The fact that Mozilla's existence itself depends on Big-Tech is one huge irony. It's like saying, “I'm against meat eating... Oh hey, my hamburger is here!”.
> Who would say "if Chrome kills adblockers, switch to our browser" and be able to actually sustain it, not just keep their Chromium fork slightly out of date for as long as they can get away with?
Literally Brave.
Firefox developers are still in the standards organisations and their position on new proposals does have some weight on the way they're written. Google is funding Mozilla for good PR, it's not like they're in any real danger from antitrust legislation. I say take the money if they're offering and do as much good for the web as you can until it runs out. It's not like you're sacrificing anything for it, it's basically free money.
> If Google all of a sudden stops funding Mozilla, do you think that they're going to continue development of the browser?
I don't know, but even if they immediately drop Firefox when that happens, we still have it until then. If Firefox disappears now, we're fucked. But who knows what might change until then - maybe someone figures out a business model for browsers, or some other tech or policy makes it easier to compete. When/if that happens, starting from a near-monopoly is way better than a complete monopoly.
> Literally Brave
What was that about ethics again? Also, it's just a closely following Chromium fork, so they don't really have a say in how Blink develops.
We should not be talking about ethics if we're talking about Mozilla either. From shameless extension backdoors to not blocking trackers from Google on purpose, it's all over the place when it comes to ethics and privacy. At least Brave directly challenges Big Tech by making bolder decisions to block them instead of being afraid like Firefox, enabling trackers and not providing any privacy against Google.
What Brave has done with respect to privacy features, Firefox couldn't even do it in decades:
https://brave.com/privacy-updates/
I do understand that Brave is a chromium fork and that they depend on Chromium for patches but this is still a FOSS browser that is independently funded and has better statistical chances of survival than Firefox. Brave's MAU is very good, almost doubling every year since its first release. On top of that, they're the only existing company that challenges Big Tech search engine monopoly by actually providing a great privacy focused search engine that is also independently indexed.
Firefox is a series of unfulfilled promises and failures. An untapped potential ruined by management.
You mean the Brave that collected rewards revenue for websites that weren't enrolled in their program? Or the brave that literally changed the url that the users typed in the url bar?
Also, do you have any source for Mozilla not blocking googles trackers? AFAIK they do, and did, block their trackers thou they had to do it differently for google analytics as to not break some webpages. Because of that you did not see those being blocked in the UI but they were blocked.
> What Brave has done with respect to privacy features, Firefox couldn't even do it in decades:
Well, unlike Brave, Mozilla is making a whole browser.
> I do understand that Brave is a chromium fork and that they depend on Chromium for patches but this is still a FOSS browser that is independently funded
You asked earlier how long would Mozilla exist if google cut their founding. How long do you think would Brave exist if google decided to go closed source with chrome?
I had been using Firefox since 2002, when it was called Phoenix.
I switched to a Chromium-based browser because the performance difference was noticable enough, and I am in the browser often enough, to finally throw in the towel and switch.
They have a huge amount of money coming in from Google. Why is this going to acquisitions like this and not towards strengthening the development so that it remains competitive? Or are they, and I am not aware?
If it doesn't remain competitive on things like performance, standards compliance, etc. there are very few reasons for the average user to choose Firefox over any other browser at the moment. The privacy-focus is good, but there are other browsers that do the same on Chromium.
So firefox now is.. a worse chrome reskin. I use both daily and firefox is just not that good.
Mozilla foundation is completely not interested in getting firefox fixed to have its competetive advantage back - and to be the customizable browser.
I guess they are just happy to spend money on travel and side projects -> they just boost their CV to jump ship somewhere else.
You may be thinking about Microsoft Edge, which switched from EdgeHTML to Chromium in 2020.
You've addressed some of the assets well: the tech, product, etc.
Mozilla isn't just paying for that, they are paying for the audience. I.e. the millions of people monthly who search for authentic product information.
Mozilla may be interested in selling them another product , or revising the fakespot product – who knows?
I'm just calling attention to the assets that the business paid for and that they are worth the money paid.
I use FakeSpot a lot, and it's less about finding AI written reviews and more about finding any fake reviews, human written or not. They don't need to try and tell if reviews are actually written by a human, just if they are authentic. A reviewer with only 1 review on their whole account will be flagged as suspicious. A reviewer with only reviews for the same company will be marked as definitely fake. It also does things like look for repeated sentiments across all reviews for a product. Sometimes it gets false positives, like a review for a chair might legitimately have 30% of users saying the phrase "super/very/really comfy" at some point in their review. But because it's repeated so much it's flagged as indicating fake reviews.
There are lots of companies working on making convincing language models. ChatGPT is pretty much already at that level for something simple like Amazon reviews. But there aren't any large AI companies working on AI that can fake looking like an authentic group of reviewers. Those are all more shady businesses without billion dollar budgets.
Sure the problem of writing a single convincing review is now solved for those shady businesses. But the really sophisticated ones were already paying humans to write the reviews before good LLM's came along. There's also the issue of sellers themselves including a card or followup email promising a small gift card in exchange for a 5 star review.
I think that's an advantage that something like this has because basically you just have to function as a critic
The browser wars are basically over, and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet.
With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge.
Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mozilla 3.9% - Safari
Desktop is a better market to compare anyway, if including Edge. Is Microsoft even trying anymore on mobile?
Safari has 34.6% share in the US: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/united-s...
I didn't realise Macs were a quarter of the desktop market.
I think MacOS feels a bit old at this point, but the hardware is pretty nice for what's on offer in the mobile space. I may well go framework for my next laptop in a few years though.
It's also just blazingly fast compared to the similarly priced ~3yo Dell that it replaced.
You're just not going to compete well for market share.
Getting themselves into a deeper hole is unlikely to help, imo.
After being abandoned by Mozilla, FirefoxOS was resurrected as KaiOS. For a while, it was the second most popular mobile operating system in India, mostly because Reliance decided to use it for some of their low-end Jio phones[1]. Where would FirefoxOS be today if Mozilla had stuck with it? If hundreds of millions of people had their first taste of the Internet via FirefoxOS and not Android?
I've been a Firefox user since 2004, but I don't think Mozilla understands how to conduct business. They're an ideological organization first and foremost. It's not a bad thing -- we need somebody to stand up to Big Tech -- but it means that they probably won't be taking a big share of any market except by complete accident.
I think that FirefoxOS could have been great if they'd kept up the development a few more years. Much like XULRunner was a bit ahead of it's time... The hardware got better enough over a few generations, that if it ran on current phones or even last gen it could be pretty good.
I'm running a Pixel 4a, and current Android runs like hot garbage at times, I've got an older Pixel 2XL that needs a new battery... I'd like to take both and put something more open on them to at least play with.
Unfortunately, Mozilla doesn't understand how Firefox even got to be where it was at its' height. They seem to think it's just about marketing buzz. They got to #1 on organic growth alone. By creating something better than the alternatives at a technical level. They need to do that again, but also need some creative types to steer the ship as well. I'm still mad about how they let Thunderbird die on the vine, and if any related tech could have been their ongoing revenue stream it could have been in that space.
But IMO everyone is chasing Chrome or just using their engine now. Their engineering team is apparently 10x that of Mozilla.
And, back when Chrome was rolling out they used their dominant position online very aggressively. Google sites worked best in Chrome, period. Chrome was pushed on google. Google tech demos, similar to Microsoft ones, worked best in or only in Chrome. Android was a big Chrome advantage too. Chrome was heavily advertised, pushed as an install bundle in things like Adobe.. I'm not disagreeing Mozilla made some poor decisions but I don't think they had much of a chance regardless.
People thought Google was gonna maintain that position forever. It turned out that the "cool nerds doing open source and making money meanwhile" stance was just a sham, and Google abruptly became another faceless corporation.
A lot of people fell for it. Even the Mozilla developers. When Firefox started having compatibility issues with Gmail, they considered it as bugs in the Gmail software, and Google developers were all like "oh haha sorry I'll fix that in no time", but over time the compatibility issues piled up and the anti competitive stance slowly unveiled by itself.
>The browser wars are basically over
and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.
Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they could do" shrug. They built their tech in such an obtuse and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate anywhere else, milked their millions selling off customer data to Google via the default search interface, burned the money on private jets and shockingly overpaid low-talent low-vision executives. Burned engineering talent on a VPN service no one asked for just because it's a good money making scam if you advertize it on the right podcasts, made huge parts of their deep engineering teams redundant.
To be perfectly honest the only good long term vision for Mozilla is an empty office or a landfill. Their existence under the current management doomed the internet back to the IE6 era of browser variety. Firefox the browser would be way better off if Mozilla the company didn't exist.
Baffles me they have any good will left at all from people who care about the internet. This company will literally do anything else than work hard on their browser.
Spend money on everything except browser development (>$5 billions!).
Market share down the drain.
Use the market share as an argument for a lost cause and spend money on everything except Browser development.
Ladybird - a browser spearheaded by one person - will expose Mozilla of what it is.
Either outright commits by at-google email addresses, or things like summer of code. All to play catch up with the features they shove on chrome.
Damn, didn't know that one can develop skills to evaluate the quality of a code-base by just "feeling" it and not looking at it at all - quite impressive!
Do you think any other company / organization would be able to take over it / fork it and develop it adequately? If so, where would they get the money? Many high-profile open-source projects (e.g. Python, Blender, well, Linux itself) managed to secure corporate sponsorships or donations in a much less toxic way than the Mozilla-Google deal.
It's an entirely different rendering engine, and an entirely different JS engine.
You must be mixing it up with MS Edge.
What’s the deal with serenityOS? Can it be run on bare metal yet, last I checked they only have a way to run it in a vm.
Is any of this actually evidenced somewhere? I'm not aware of Mozilla ever using private jets, and the last time I checked their executive compensation it was on the lower side of average for corporations with their footprint and financials.
Maybe there are facts or sources that you aren't presenting, but this as-is just comes off as a screed.
>and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.
Could and should Mozilla have done better? Yes. "Any energy?" is uncalled for, however.
There was the entire Quantum rewrite for significant performance boosts (around the time Chrome started getting called out for bad perf). There's containers, anti-tracker tech, and a big privacy push.
There is much more they could have done, and my outsider opinion is that Mozilla the organization lost its way and focused too much money and effort on things that don't matter, but it's not like they pulled an IE6 and abandoned Firefox.
I just wished they could rebalance their allocation and focus on simple daily usability things. Just a bit more.
ps: for instance, the screenshot tool is brilliant
Meanwhile they have had consistently growing revenues and consistently declining number of developers.
Citation needed? And no, the 2020 layoffs don't count: It's 2023.
What's important is the number of developers they put on the project.
They fired Brendan Eich, who invented JS, led Netscape past IE, and then headed Mozilla. Who, when fired, started Brave and turned it into a bigger system than FF (including the only relatively new free search engine with its own index), from scratch, in a world already dominated by Chrome, and Safari.
I know, I know, Eich donated personal money to some cause that some people on the internet didn't like. But from a business perspective, it was the stupidest thing they could have done, and is the point at which FF went from growth to (fast) loss.
(And the cause itself was not justified, especially considering it was a private donation, it was a legal org (not like KK or whatever), and he apologized afterwards. Even if it was a mistake, that should not have been justification for firing him.)
On what metric is Brave bigger than Firefox?
Mozilla's mistake was not in firing Brendan Eich (and Brendan Eich was not fired).
Mozilla's mistake was in promoting Brendan Eich to CEO.
Mozilla employees said ~"we were not totally comfortable with Brendan as a leader in the Technology role, but we recognized his long history with the Org and his Technical excellence, so we kept mostly quiet. But we strongly object to his promotion to CEO and primary representative of Mozilla to the world, because we do not feel that he represents the Org's values and do not believe he will be an effective leader of us."
Brendan probably could have returned to his CTO role with little fuss. But he may have had larger aspirations, he may have been sick of working under existing leadership, and he may have been personally disappointed by the Org's vote of no confidence in him. All are 100% reasonable! So he resigned. He was not fired. Yes the board might have "recommended" that he resign, but he would have been crazy (and display poor leadership abilities!) to try to stay in the CEO role after that drama.
> and he apologized afterwards
Has he? Not really. At least not contemporaneously with the events at Mozilla, and likely not since then. To be clear -- I don't think he should feel the need to apologize for personally-held beliefs. But I don't think it's possible to be a leader of people in any Org while simultaneously holding beliefs that are so offensive to the same people.
...
We do agree that Brendan's resignation was a net loss for Mozilla. But he might have not been able to succeed in the Mozilla Org anyway. Even as CEO, he'd have the board to contend with. As CTO, he had the CEO and the board to contend with. If there are effective people in that group, they are not making themselves known.
Not from scratch. Brave is modified Chromium.
It's not about the overall company its about browser team. I'd love to see a comparison of the actual sizes of the teams creating browsers, isn't Safari only a handful of (admittedly extremely talented) people?
Mozilla org has completely lost sight of their base. A good 70-80% of their budget should be on their core product development and adjacent products only. The fact that only recently have they discovered, hey, we had this pretty good email client that we let all but die off.
They should separate their core rendering and script engine teams to focus on better embed-ability and security structures. Another team(s) focused on the integration for Firefox as a browser. Another for Thunderbird. The fact that they killed off their Rust efforts, XULRunner and so many other things that could be really useful today is just painful.
Yeah, XUL didn't run great on 1998 hardware, but what are so many apps targeting today, Electron. And now there's a resurgence towards lighter options (Tauri and others) because it kind of makes sense to (re)use a browser rendering engine for general UI development. It's extremely flexible, has a flushed out (if somewhat complex) styling and theming system, multiple language support, complete font rendering, svg rendering, and accessibility support and runs on/under everything under the sun.
Maybe hire on some of the types that have tried and failed to remake email and browsers that have some creative vision on how users actually use these applications, and let them work with the engineering teams to make quality software again. Spend less time on branding, and more time on the core tech. They still have enough brand reach and clout that people will try the new stuff and if it's good, then organic growth can and would work (again).
Hell, if they want to branch out... make a REALLY great email and communications platform that is open-source with a hosted model. How big of a pain is it to self-host many of these things today? If they want to acquire someone, bring in Caddy, Fastmail and/or Zimbra for adjacent tech development.
I only harp on the email and Thunderbird side because two decades ago, they were in a better spot than anyone to offer a competing product to Outlook+Exchange and they just didn't even try. And now even Outlook kind of sucks because the cloud integration is what it is at scale. Leaving a gaping hole where that entire market used to live. A great open-source core product, with a good extensibility model and some commercially licensed integration points could have been insanely popular.
... You think Mozilla don't focus enough on Firefox, so you think they should spend more money on Thunderbird, which is an app in an almost-nonexistent market (desktop email)?
Some folks are just never happy with Mozilla.
Firefox has massively improved in recent years. WebExtensions being async prevented horrific freezes that used to happen. Rewriting components in Rust, and using web assembly for native libs, are both good for security. And WebRender was revolutionary.
Two decades ago, Thunderbird was in the single best position to provide an alternative to Outlook. Now, not so much. If they'd had the foresight to do that two+ decades ago, they could be in a similar position to Google Docs or O365 today in terms of revenue generation.
They're a bit behind at this point on what people even like in a browser. They should focus on the core technology. I think dropping Servo and the Rust efforts was probably a misstep and burning cash on marketing and buying out unrelated companies altogether doesn't help.
edit: Also, Thunderbird doesn't HAVE to be just a desktop email client. If blackberry had developed email clients for iOS and Android early on, they would still be relevant today.
Firefox was "the" customizable browser with great ad-block.
Not that it matters, because FF performance has become so terrible for me that it was no longer really usable anyway.
Google has and had major distribution advantages for Chrome; same with Apple/MS and their browsers.
I've gone back and forth between FF and Chrome a few times and since the big FF perf improvements several years ago, I don't understand why Chrome is still seen as a wildly better product except for residual Google goodwill among the tech crowd. FF has had much much much more reliable session management / sync for me for years now.
Since forever I have a test that firefox always fails at: on first load, or if you haven't right clicked in a while, the context menu takes a perceptible amount of time to show up fully, and within this very short amount of time, you can visually see the menu options cascade out as the CSS engine finishes laying out and rendering the context menu.
This kind of jank still happens on latest firefox. It's little things like this that make it feel unpolished.
I never observe this behaviour on Chrome.
This demonstrates that you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
OK, I'm not a fan of Firefox anymore but this isn't the case. They undeniably worked very, very hard and poured a lot of money into the revamp of Firefox.
Google Chrome 66%
Safari 12%
Edge 11%
Firefox 6%
https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage shows distribution of requests to Cloudflare by user agent:
Chrome 29.1%
Chrome Mobile 27.1%
Mobile Safari 11.4%
Chrome Mobile Webview 6.5%
Firefox 5.7%
Edge 4.4%
Facebook 3.5%
Safari 3.3%
That's silly. More than once, browsers have had more marketshare than chrome. IE's highest marketshare makes chrome look silly in comparison.
Now, is not the same as "what will happen".
[1] Pizzle is a Middle English word for penis, derived from Low German pesel or Flemish Dutch pezel, diminutive of pees, meaning 'sinew'. The word is used today to signify the penis of an animal, chiefly in Australia and New Zealand.
[2] Interestingly, it is used in medical slang (Dictionary of medical slang -Jacob Edward) and it is defined as exhausted, or to its point:
~ Pizzle chewer ... A female who relieves a male of his phallic tension by fondling the instrument in her mouth.
~ Pizzle-grinder ... 1. A butcher. 2. A prostitute.
~ Pizzle honker ... A prostitute who satisfies her patrons by manual friction.
~ Pizzle warmer . . . The pudendum muliebre, esp. the vagina.
~ Pizzled . . . Exhausted physically or mentally.
So I guess you could say that Pocket is a Fizzled[3] Pizzle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzle [2] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/166295/etymology... [3] Fizzle: To finish slowly in a way that is disappointing or has become less interesting & There is often an initial indication of interest, but then it fizzles out and no cash materialises. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fizzle
https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/thoroughly-pizzled-...
A group of people who are receiving manufactured products of an automatic factory that they don't want get a chance to fill out a feedback form and write "the product was thoroughly pizzled" as a deliberate neologism to confuse the computer. The factory sent a representative who asked what this meant and they defined it as "unwanted".
A phrase in the story caught my attention: "all hell is bursting [instead of breaking] loose" - it's nearly a googlewhack, only two other unrelated hits.
If it had been branded as a new "reading list" feature native to Mozilla I don't think it would have caused a stir.
I use Vivaldi now for two reasons: One, it is better than Firefox Mobile, and two, I like the ergonomics of its bookmarks and reading list sync.
Having the ability for the browser to be a suite isn't crazy.
I imagine Mozilla's thinking there was that they should position the feature so that people who already use Pocket will realize that Firefox isn't adding a separate reading list (like the Safari one nobody uses), but rather that you can just sign into your existing Pocket account in Firefox, and see your existing Pocket reading-list.
But yeah, in the end that probably wasn't nearly as important as getting people who didn't already use Pocket to see the reading list as "Firefox's reading list" rather than some channel-partner bloatware encroachment.
A happy medium would probably have been if the Firefox reading list was its own skin of Pocket, and synced using your Firefox Sync account, without needing to create a separate Pocket account; but when you first went to use it, it would ask if you want to sign into your Pocket account; and if you do, then your Pocket account would be merged with your Firefox Sync account, because "Pocket Sync is now part of Firefox Sync."
I remember how Microsoft killed OneNote (a rather good note taking application) by (1) trying to shove it up your fingernails, into your armpits, etc. (I remember there being three onenote icons pinned to the task bar) and (2) going 100% cloud as opposed to the XML files OneNote used to leave on your computer that were very easy to parse and build tools to process.
People are automatically going to assume a bundled product is crap because we're so used to drive-by downloads and other dark patterns.
That was pretty much how it was viewed at the time (I worked at Mozilla during the Pocket acquisition). It was seen as, "we were going to build our own reading list, but let's just buy this instead and integrate it as /the/ reading list for Firefox."
I agree that the external perception was different, and remains so to this day.
If it had just been a reading list I'd have been much more interested.
The objective of AI like LLMs is to create output indistinguishable from human output, should it reach that stage - generated text have no telltale signs of being AI output - then it would be impossible to tell from human output.
Right now, if Mozilla doesn't think Firefox is central to its mission and if they're giving up the fight in browser wars (as many in this thread suggest) ..
... I don't see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that's it?
I'd like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (the rest of it) do whatever they want.
Except Firefox is the golden goose.
(Ffx user here, I'm using it for dev, browsing and mobile (ffocus), ie. everything that doesn't require chrome).
> Browser Extensions: We collect the following data when you use Fakespot’s Browser Extensions and may link it to your personal identity in order to effectively market our products and services to you and others:
Contact Info
Identifiers
Usage Data
Application Search History (e.g. not your Google/Bing/other search engine history)
Purchases
Diagnostics
See if you can even find it: https://www.fakespot.com/
Meanhwhile there are 3 links to the chrome extension, and two to the app.
There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to...
Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.
I expect better from Mozilla.
They may not lean into it as much as I'd like, but they still do better than Google or Microsoft in this regard.
Will Microsoft do it just because the potential exists? No.
Mozilla CEO takes a $3m salary and their biggest earner by many magnitudes is a search partnership with Google. Nothing is going to change with how they treat Firefox at a consumer-level until they need to man the battle stations with a rugpull on losing that partnership.
"Why would they lose it?" AI happened and the current economic climate means Google is reducing spending by killing things that don't bring tangible value.
Technically true, but I've become convinced that Microsoft is genuinely incapable of actually accomplishing that.
If I remember correctly the Mozilla foundation is more than Firefox. You also have Thunderbird for example.
The things I suspect could make a difference to Firefox marketshare are performance and transformative features.
For performance, UI latency needs to be near-zero to make it feel snappier than Chrome, and JS- and CSS-heavy pages noticeably faster than in Chrome. (Yes, pages shouldn't be so JS- and CSS-heavy, but they are, and users don't care that it's the web developers' fault. The browser that solves that problem wins.)
For features, tabs are one clear example, as were blocking popups, and session restore. Containers, adblock, Pocket integration, and Reader Mode all seem like they could have been this, but they weren't. Big features will be hit-or-miss, and will quickly be copied, but possibly a big deal for a short while.
Perf, of course, is a lot of hard engineering work, and features may be as well, in addition to being potential duds. Things like gnome-keyring feels like a relatively simple quick-win, despite being very low value compared to various other possibilities.
Personally, I thing I switched back to Firefox when they made restarting it when you have a hundred tabs retain the tabs, but not load them until you switch to them. That moved restarting the browser from a big deal to something I can just do whenever. (It was also when Quantum/Servo stuff was happening, but I think it was the tab thing that got me.)
Android has native support for keyboards since API 1.
An iPad can support a keyboard too. It's a touch-first device.
A Mac can support a touchscreen with a third-party driver, but it's a KBM-first UX and support of the touchscreen is horrible in most apps that only accept one input at a time.
Will it drive worthwhile value? No.
Are there more pressing matters? Yes.
With that said, it's open source. Why don't you implement it yourself? Meanwhile the rest of us have long since moved on from Firefox.
Even the fully local translation is really usable now <3. I don't use chrome for anything and it's not even installed on my daily driver anymore.
Ironically, the only time I have had issues, overriding the user agent to look like chrome or edge fixed it. So those websites were deliberately broken with Firefox, not Mozilla's fault but pure malice and dark patterns. Office 365 is one of these sites by the way.
The issue here is that this wasn't always the case, or at least wasn't always this bad. While Firefox has always been far from perfect, there was a time when mozillazine consisted mostly of praise and evangelism, and not all of it naive fandom. Also, as a former Opera user, there was also a time when the landscape as a whole contained a higher quality set of options in general. There were numerous browsers then better than the current least worst.
Even recently, Firefox has inspired hope & interest with Servo, Quantum, and even things like the amazing webextension migration effort: controversial and unpopular with many it was nonetheless a greatly successful engineering effort, and has borne fruit in the recent furore over v3 manifests, with Firefox coming out ahead. It's also got cool added APIs that makes sense for the traditional Firefox community but are still standards compliant and interoperable. But all that progress is now already waning with Servo dev cut, progressive popular distinguishing features like MAC being relegated to APIs & UI removed from core.
There's precious little left to distinguish Firefox from Chrome, and nothing new on the horizon.
I'm pleased to see others have good experience with FF performance, but for me, the performance simply became unacceptable.
with their continued slide in marketshare to what is essentially an irrelevant portion of the market, i'm guessing this isn't just me.
However, I did do a lot of frontend back in the old IE6/IE7/IE8 days when you essentially had to code a whole separate front end for Microsoft's standards-flaunting mess. So this is definitely an issue I care about.
but behind the curtains it took additional effort from
the developers of websites you visit to make it so
So yes, you often can't run your Chrome-specific shit elsewhere without workarounds and polyfills, but this doesn't automatically mean everybody except Google is screwing up. In some cases, complaints such as yours sound like folks in 2004 complaining that their ActiveX controls work in IE but not Firefox.
And not to forget that Google has even shipped several early-days standards track features to production of which the API was still in flux. In a few cases the API later changed in - for Chrome, at least - breaking ways. Fun times.
okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not supporting that stuff other than "we have limited resources to implement these things"?
a lot of that chrome-specific shit is really really nice. like CSS nesting - that would be amazing. firefox has a bug for tracking the implementation, and supported the standardization of it. but there's no sign of any progress towards an implementation. meanwhile safari and chrome have both shipped it.
That depends on what you are referring to. No there is not a one size fits all answer. For example, Chrome has implemented Filesystem API that Mozilla is still debating on because they see it as a security issue. You can agree or disagree but there reason is still something other than "we don't have the resources to do it"
For example, Chrome has implemented Filesystem API
that Mozilla is still debating on
Google explicitly wants two major things from Chrome.
One, they obviously want to track as much personal information as they possibly can, because they are an ad company.
Two, they want "the web" to essentially be a full OS replacement, with filesystem access etc. Because Microsoft is one of their primary rivals (or frenemies, if you will) and they can't leave themselves to the whims of others' platforms. They need their own platform.
These goals are... well, let's say divergent (to put it mildly) from what "the web" means to others. HTTP was originally supposed to be a human-readable way to publish and link information, not an OS replacement, and certainly not a PII-siphoning tool.
And yet, some folks still default to simply assuming whatever Google decides for the web is right, simply because they seem to be moving the fastest.
Yeah, they're usually moving the fastest, but people should think about where they're heading and why.
If FF is lagging behind Safari on a particular CSS feature that certainly points to FF being behind the curve.
Sometimes it's FF or Safari simply being slower than Google. Sometimes it's a matter of the Chrome team creating an implementation of feature XYZ and getting it minted into the standard so of course they have the only implementation for a while.
Sometimes the FF and Safari teams have specific objections to a feature, often because unlike Google they actually consider user privacy a core part of their mission. Although, of course, with CSS features... that's not gonna be a privacy thing.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+market+share&oq=fire...
IMHO there is a room for innovation in this space, long term but you can see if this happenning observing the project. Currently browser engines are one of the most complex pieces of software. There are new ways to attack these mammoths.
The amount of Rust code in Firefox is pretty substantial, and growing. Did you expect an instant rewrite?
Man, I wish that were my experience. I'd love to keep using Firefox. My experience is the opposite of that, though.
Maybe that's the problem. Why Mozilla should be large enough to do those things? I'd rather have one good browser than 20 mediocre side projects.
If Apple allows third party browsers and Chrome is adopted by enough iOS / iPadOS users, everything other than Blink will be non-standard in a de facto sense.
This is a fairly new opinion for me. On Windows I've started using Edge alongside Firefox and I find myself using Firefox less and less often. On my machine doing the things I need to do, Edge is significantly faster.
> Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me.
And that's exactly why we need a strong independent org to do this. Because it is hard and it doesn't make sense for most people. Anyone can get an idea of a chrome improvement, get a VC to sign up and start yet another "same browser as 50 others but with this little twist" thing. This is not a huge breakthrough that has any fundamental importance. Having the whole web rendering infrastructure not owned by a single entity sounds kinda important though. Yes, it's hard to pull off - that's exactly why it is valuable, as opposed to make another quick buck by doing a quick tweak over somebody else's work. Quick buck things are valuable too - but they are not fundamental. It's like developing a new theme for Windows as opposed to developing Linux. I think having Linux is much more important than having one more Windows theme.
Yep. Browsers in general are meh at this point. Mozilla is looking for things like Fakespot because all of the big browsers have been good enough for quite a while now. There really isn't anything they can do with the core of Firefox make a difference. Users don't care.
That comment placed in a thread filled to the brim with "Firefox is slow" and (at least on macOS) "Firefox eats my battery"
That's not even getting into the horrors of their dev-tools impl, or the missing CSS items cited in this same discussion, both of which I grant not _every_ user cares about but there are for sure users who care about all 4 of those things
There's plenty to improve. On Android there's the whole extension mess (and tons of other quality of life improvements), on desktop Firefox could use some proper PWA support (even Safari has that implemented well now), Spidermonkey is still the slowest mainstream Javascript engine out there, and Chrome's process sandboxing has some features that Firefox is yet to implement if at all. Firefox users on Gnome on Linux are a subset of a subset of a subset, that's hardly important, but "Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" is.
Mozilla cares more about their charity programs than they do about their browser (that's why you can't directly donate to Firefox, only to Mozilla). Maybe this acquisition is a way to add a new revenue stream, though I doubt it'll matter much because I've never seen AI detection that actually works. I hope this was a smart move, but I fear this will end up as one of those buttons everyone disables in the default toolbar, like Pocket has become.
Mozilla has also fired 250 people during the pandemic, so somehow coming up with the money to buy a company feels a little jarring when dev capacity still hasn't recovered.
"Firefox is slower than all the other browsers"
I use both Chrome and FF regularly on Mac and PC desktops and laptops with vintages ranging from 2011-2023. There is no perceptible difference to me. Admittedly all of my machines are relatively comfortably specced. Desktop-class CPUs, 16GB+ of RAM, SSDs. Perhaps the difference is more pronounced when the computing environment is more constrained.
Moving from my subjective opinion to hard benchmarks, Firefox wins some and loses others. Overall they're close.
I don't use Android so I don't know the FF situation there. It certainly sounds like a mess. I will take your word for it.
Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB. Than Firefox unleashes its ability to work just fine even with a lot of extensions.
Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB
FF absolutely smooth on there.
Typical usage on that machine is usual recreational web crap. It's my game/relaxing machine. Running 1-2 windows with some mix of Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, Amazon, whatever.
Zooming out, I have been running a mix of FF and Chrome for dev work ever since their respective debuts. We're talking easily 2000+ hours a year of browser usage for 20+ years. I have never seen the FF performance issues others get into a fuss about.
I honestly have no explanation for this. I'm sure that other people are telling the truth but I find it mystifying. I've never had monster high-end CPUs but I've always run AdBlock/uBlock, I generally have as much RAM as feasible, and was an early SSD adopter. Maybe I dodged some FF issues that way. I also never have massive numbers of tabs/windows... usually a max of 10-15 tabs over 1-3 windows. I'm also not running "big" browser-native apps like Figma or whatever in FF.
It's not that I'm insensitive to performance. I run 144hz monitors for gaming and that's a big difference to my eyes. There are also some UI things that are noticeably faster in Chrome like dragging a tab to a new window but that's not a big part of my browsing experience.
(FWIW, Safari has always felt significantly faster to me during my infrequent usage. IIRC they do some latency reduction tricks on MacOS. So even though typical web benchmarks show it as slower, it "feels" faster to me)
Using https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ this is quantified not only by some arbitrary number but also through the visibly slower update speed during the DOM tests.
I use Firefox on every device, but Chrome is just faster. I can live with the impact on speed for all the privacy features, but if Mozilla ever wants to get their market share above 5% again they'll need to provide the common user a reason to switch and that'll be hard when the browser is noticeably slower.
But benchmarks are fun too...
this is quantified not only by some arbitrary
number but also through the visibly slower
update speed during the DOM tests.
My opinion is that while benchmarks are vital, I don't believe that a benchmark such as that necessarily correlates with user experience. There are benchmarks where FF is faster and certainly they can't all be right. (At first glance, the one you linked appears to be a mix of modern UI frameworks, which seems pretty reasonable to me)
A look at a browser's dev tools during my "normal" usage certainly aligns with what I'm saying -- network bandwidth/latency really dominates perceived performance in nearly every use case; blasting out DOM updates as fast as possible via a synthetic benchmark does not resemble my browsing sessions.
That is of course just my subjective opinion. You may have other use cases in which your browser is truly the bottleneck. Or you can just have another set of preferences.
I rarely encounter loading times that are caused by network traffic. Some servers are slow to reach, but most pages load almost instantaneously. Perhaps that's why things that I see Firefox lose to Chrome at are noticeable to me but not to many others.
The benchmark itself is not an indicator of what the average user will do in their browser, but it does show that Firefox is objectively slower in certain areas. Whether those areas bother you is another question, of course.
Firefox becoming completely unresponsive happens to me more than I like. This is due to a difference in architecture; Firefox spawns a process for every CPU thread and divides the work whereas Chrome spawns a new thread for every page. When a badly written page slows down to a crawl (i.e. leaving Reddit open for more than two minutes), the tabs sharing that process become unresponsive. On multiple occasions I've had to kill tabs that were shown as "loading" because other tabs stopped functioning if they lost the render process lottery. It's not as extreme as people claim and it's certainly not as bad as it was five years ago, but Firefox does have weird freezes and bugs that Chrome seemingly just doesn't have.
On the other hand, I'm convinced part of the reason for slowdowns and problems is that Firefox tries to strip away a lot of the privacy invasions that have become the norm on the modern web. I'll gladly keep taking those slowdowns, but even outside those there's still a lot of work that can be done to bring Firefox on par with Chrome.
No other browser I've used performs this poorly. Even the old, pre-reworked, FF performs much better than that.
But on every machine I've put the new FF on, the
startup time for it ranges from 2-5 minutes
I've never seen that on any machine and again, this is many dozens of computers over the years, including one company where FF was the standard browser for the company enterprise/intranet app so thousands of people were using it all day long.
and the initial load time for web pages is
achingly slow (sometimes up to a minute or so).
It's not a typo. It's also not a particular machine. It's all of my machines.
It's why I stopped using Firefox. It wasn't always like that -- pre-quantum, Firefox was reasonably performant. And post-quantum it was as well (although I never saw the performance gains others reported). I don't remember which release this started happening in, but it was a couple of years ago.
Just to forestall advice -- every time I've mentioned this, people have engaged with me to make sure it's not the usual issues (have I completely erased FF and installed it fresh, am I using extensions, etc.). And many think I'm lying.
But this is my actual experience with Firefox. I was willing to stick with using it on principle despite the fact that post-quantum firefox does a poor job if meeting my browser needs, but I couldn't. It's essentially unusable for me.
Does the issue persist on other networks? I wonder if it's a DNS/proxy/something issue.
I don't know the particulars, but Firefox does some talking over the network at startup. It checks for browser updates, blocklist updates, captive portal detection, etc. I am not certain which if any of these happen at startup, and AFAIK none of these are blocking (but I admittedly have only the vaguest knowledge here)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...
Also just out of curiosity, what OS?
I've not tried with those machines on a different network. I assume it's related to networking in some way. My network is more complex than most. All of these machines are Linux (Debian). I haven't experienced this on Windows machines at work (although I also haven't noticed that Firefox had become any faster on them).
On MacOS and Windows (I can try this on PopOS as well if you like) FF launches instantly with no complaints if the network is down. Which tells me that FF seems to properly handle situations where things are merely unreachable.
The fact that it's hanging for you implies to me that perhaps FF is getting some kind of malformed response from... something on your network. A firewall, a proxy, I don't know.
I've not tried with those machines on a different
network. I assume it's related to networking in some
way. My network is more complex than most.
I don't think it's disingenuous because it's only Firefox that has this issue. Every other browser is fine.
I think there's an edge-condition bug in Firefox that I'm triggering that causes this. I've spent quite a while trying to work this out before giving up entirely. However -- since it's really not at all hard to find people who have performance problems with Firefox generally, there is something going on with it. And it's something that (based on interactions with the dev team) Mozilla seems not willing to worry much about.
All that said, I try very hard to be fair to Mozilla and Firefox, in part because I've been a huge backer of Firefox since the very beginning, and still care.
The idea would be a gambit that you could improve the software sufficiently that it accidentally became actually competitive with chrome.
Right now, it feels like some weird hobby project that falls short of the engineering chops that went into Chrome, and I suspect people can feel this too.
Is Firefox-centric Mozilla still relevant in 2023? No, not really.
People also assume that x is a distraction to the goal of y, but why would it be? If it hasn't happened yet, it probably isn't going to.
At this point, they arguably lost the browser war, even if they made a great browser, it is going to struggle to win meaningful marketshare, and even then, how many people are going to subscribe to Pocket or a VPN? Nowhere near as much as what their search royalties make them, which likely isn't going to last forever in this climate.
What about if Google pulls the plug on their search partnership due to declining Firefox numbers? They're largely dependent on Google. They probably can't pay their CEO $3m salary if that goes South.
Wouldn't they get more royalties if they could attract more users to their web browser?
The browser war isn't going to be won by Mozilla at this point. It's been and gone. Most consumers live in non-browser apps most of the time.
"Techies" have or are moving on because Mozilla's pace of development is woeful, and compatibility is poor. Killing the RSS reader was the final straw for many. Disney advertising in-browser was another major moment.
I haven't tried to build Firefox for Android in a really long time but I wonder what the level of effort would be to just track the release tags with such a patch applied (i.e. the world's shallowest fork)
That's basically Fennec. Download it from F-Droid. It's basically a clone of Firefox with extensions turned back on.
Maybe you're thinking of Firefox Nightly, which I do run from the Play store and is better than "normal people Firefox" but this for sure is not the good old days of "Let Me Install Violentmonkey not stupid Tapermonkey"
It took this massive effort 15 years ago to get Firefox onto people's computers back in the day. Mozilla kicked off the web standardization drive and transformed the Internet. That sort of thing is not feasible now because the commercial browsers are damned good.
They're either done or they have to find another way to use their resources to advance their mission. Unsurprisingly, they pick the latter.
Mozilla is a separate company, with separate employees, that does everything except building Firefox.
(This division was originally created to firewall off the corporate moneys donated to, and influence of corporate developers on, Firefox, from the rest of Mozilla. Back when Google was sponsoring Firefox to use Google as its search engine, their money went exclusively to Firefox Corporation, with none of that money ever going to Mozilla.)
Note that this doesn't mean that Mozilla doesn't build a web browser. Mozilla develop the engine (Gecko/Servo) that goes into Firefox; and they also co-develop some of the Gecko/Servo-based browsers used by various FOSS projects — Tor Browser, for example. This is roughly the same structure as how the open-source Chromium project (which produces its own "Chromium browser") is the basis for the closed-source Google Chrome.
Interestingly, this means that for Firefox Corporation to get features into Gecko, they have to submit PRs "upstream" to Mozilla, who might very well reject them as "only serving corporate interests at the expense of the user." This is quite unlike Chromium, where both Chromium and Chrome are ultimately steered by Google.
In 2005 they said a for profit subsidiary was for revenue flexibility. Where did you learn it was to limit corporate developers influencing Mozilla Foundation?
Google's sponsorship of Firefox continues. Most of Mozilla Foundation's revenue comes from Google through Mozilla Corporation.
Mozilla Corporation employees develop Gecko. They developed Servo until it was transferred to the Linux Foundation. They land code with no sign of Mozilla Foundation review routinely. Can you show a PR Mozilla Foundation rejected as "only serving corporate interests at the expense of the user."?
You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI models properly, there is no way to differentiate.
[1] https://www.mturk.com/worker
[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fakespot
[3] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:C2WWi4...
Of course, it would be much easier for Amazon to do this, because they could look at IP addresses, purchase history, mailing address, etc. - but it's in their best interest to let the spam continue, apparently.
As if the above is not already, there's one more complication: the interested small company needs to pitch their solution as a service to the platform because in general that's the only interested party of real business value. i.e. end users would not pay for such protection or won't pay enough.
Apply it to social media impersonation and scams, Adtech scams, etc etc.
Fun stuff.
And then maybe it can begin expanding for more general use... detecting likelihood of any content being artificial... hmm I'm scared again.
Both freedom of expression and automated decision-making are already quite heavily regulated in the EU today with even more and tighter rules currently the way[1]. These new regulations also happen to extensively cover the combating of fake and illegal content by online platforms.
Additionally this seems contrary to Mozilla's claim[2] of commitment to human dignity, individual expression, accountability, and most of all: trust.
Strange thing to be investing in for any other reason than to make it disappear, which I don't think is the plan. Money would have been better spent elsewhere... or anywhere else, really.
[1]: A Europe fit for the digital age https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
[2]: Mozilla Manifesto https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
Firefox market share has been tanking for 13 years(!) straight. Already 6 years ago the CTO of Mozilla concluded that Chrome had won:
https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/
There's nothing Mozilla can do to reverse Firefox's course. It's not an engineering problem, they have no reach to push anything and for ordinary people default-shipped browsers are just fine.
The real question indeed is what Mozilla really is with this reality check in mind. A type of do-good activist organization that does a lot of preaching yet fails to convert this into actual meaning or impact?
All of this made possible by "easy money". They literally do not have to do a damn thing to receive $0.5B from Google. Just keep things as-is.
As they are trying to find alternative income streams, for the first time in their history they're learning what hard money is. Generating $0.5B in the tech market by delivering an actual service/product people will pay you for...is fucking hard.
As such, it's odd that in their borrowed time they continue to give away money or do takeovers of products that do not add revenue. I guess they'll never learn.
"This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake...
None of the ones I reported have had their recommended status revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to publish new versions where the same violations are still present and even a few published updates that introduced additional violations.
To Mozilla: If you want to change the world, start with yourself.
To the rest: Whenever you install or update an extension, always go through its published source first. You can get to it by right-clicking the install/download button to "save as" and then simply unpacking the xpi file.
Could you publish these publicly anywhere, so that we can do for ourselves the job that Mozilla apparently is failing to do (while claiming to)?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/giphy-for-fir...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabliss/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subsc...
The official policies can be found here:
https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/add-on-p...
Some highlights of commonly "forgotten" rules:
> No Surprises
> Add-ons must be self-contained and not load remote code for execution.
> Add-ons must limit data collection to what is necessary for functionality [...] Data includes all information the add-on collects, regardless of the manner.
> Collecting, or facilitating the collection of ancillary information (e.g. any data not required for the add-on’s functionality as stated in the description) is prohibited.
> Modifying web content or facilitating redirects to include affiliate promotion tags is not permitted
Does the HN community still view it as a trusted source to make better buying decisions?
I think it'd be great to have this integrated into the browser and be able to get a sense for what's real or "likely fake" when browsing the web of tomorrow.
Instead of identifying fake content, I'm more interested in features that generate fake stats for analytics, effectively making them useless. However, not sure if the Google money would keep flowing for such efforts.
(Mullvad, if you weren't aware)
Proton VPN works wonders and I like their mail product too.
That service is what earns them non-Google revenue.
But what's really interesting is, can we not put ML to good use for generating a new browser for us, given a corpus of expected renderings? Or have we managed to make web standards so fscking complicated and out of hand so as to make that infeasible?
FF is like the only remaining browser without this feature.
A cookie consent on fakespot page states mainly Fakespot and Google cookies in a surprising manner. They give two options, but none to refuse any cookies:
- ok
- do not sell or share my personal information
How are they different? From reading details, I assume no difference.
There's no way to turn off any non-necessary cookies group (shared with Meta/Facebook (!) and Google).
It will be sad to stop using FF because of this integration.
If everyone starts using Fakespot, vendors will just optimize to fool Fakespot.
It'd be funny if it wasn't so frustrating.
I’ve asked ChatGPT for product recommendations and it’s a breath of fresh air to get suggestions that are not filtered for affiliate commission potential. Let’s hope this lasts but in the meantime I doubt I’m the only one noticing that this AI content is not steering you based on the potential for profit.
So, fakespot kind of had it backwards, in a way. What we need is Humanspot to warn us away from content, AI generated or not, that has been corrupted by a human profit motive.