Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I love Mozilla's Firefox, but they've got a bad track record of funding things that matter over time. See Thunderbird having to become independent and roll up their own foundation. Mozilla could have had something like OpenAI long ago, but they didn't bother. Instead they bought out Pocket which a lot of loyal users didn't care for. They also stopped maintaining their password manager on iOS (and I'm guessing Android?) which is rather annoying to me, I've been using Firefox's built-in for years, and it was nice to have a PM on iOS. I would have gladly paid money to have it on iOS if it meant it would get funded. There's also their VPN, which is just Mullvad with a skin on it iirc.

Mozilla: It's okay to make products that you sell in order to actually fund your projects properly.

Whoever is managing Firefox (the open source org / corporation, I don't care which) is mismanaging Firefox, and they have been for too long. Mozilla has a lot of potential being burned away. I fear for the day MDN shuts down, since its an invaluable resource when doing front-end web development.

I love and use Firefox every day also, and this is too true.

Bryan Lunduke has a decent skim of some of Mozilla's finances which seems relevant enough to link here: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

I wonder what we as a community can do to help preserve the independent browser and web. Mozilla does not seem at all focused to me on this goal. Theoretically it can be changed from the inside?

> Theoretically it can be changed from the inside?

Eich woulda never let this happen.. At least we got Brave.

That's never going to happen. The Mozilla Foundation is a parasite subsisting off of Firefox's name and reputation. The end state is that they eventually kill the host. Google is postponing this to keep their anti-trust shield alive, but it's only a matter of time.

Remember when that was Apple and Microsoft? How times have changed!

Kind of reminds me of the sentiment HNers and others have about how Wikipedia spends its funding.

Pretty blackpilled, but this is all rhetoric and opinion, if you’ll forgive me saying so. Do you know anything specific about Mozilla to add?

I don’t know the people in the Mozilla Foundation or its current affairs at all, but I’m hoping others might.

Even if there is no one there who could help change course, could the project in its entirety be “forked” if a new managing body were created and funded?

I also wonder if even MS or Apple, Meta, or even an Opera or other smaller third party with a strong interest in a free web might find reason to join this hypothetical project. Advertisers other than Alphabet?

We need to be able to fund firefox directly. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money...

I'll bite, what's the use case for thunderbird these days now that every email service has its own web and mobile apps?

Because I prefer a seperate client instead of every messaging protocol to rely on a browser or Electron.

Because it's faster to have it auto-open on desktop than to log in (with 2FA) via a browser every time I reboot.

Because I like having a local copy of my email.

Because it's more pleasant to use multiple accounts with a single, consistant UI.

Because I have money for more RAM and compute, but Thunderbird (or other clients) are typically lighter in my experience, so I'll use my RAM or cash for something else.

Aside from people with a single Gmail account (and perhaps 1 work email where they have to use Outlook anyway), who can deal with logging in to multiple webmail apps, all different to each other?

An email client keeps the experience consistent across all accounts. It integrates with whatever workflow and desktop you have. It's cheaper to run. It's easier to use. It's faster. Probably uses less CPU and RAM.

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