Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xpgm | Hacker News Reader

If only they had continued on their trajectory of the early 2010s.

When Brendan Eich was still there they seemed to have a clear purpose and identity. A lot of interesting stuff was happening: the birth of what would become Rust, PDF.js which is now ubiquitous back when downloading PDFs was the norm, Firefox OS, which somehow found success after they abandoned it, asm.js, the predecessor of web assembly which killed the alternative that Google was championing called NaCl (very few remember it now).

Then they just seemed to lose their way I can't tell how

View on HN

And people can shit on Brave (Eich's next browser venture) but the reality is that they're doing a pretty incredible job. TOR integration alone is a pretty radical privacy control, and you can say "oh but crypto" but they're at least trying to figure out how to make money independent of Google, unlike Mozilla. Brave actually tries to create a monetizable web without ads, Mozilla literally relies on the status quo for all of its revenue.

>they're at least trying to figure out how to make money independent of Google, unlike Mozilla. Brave actually tries to create a monetizable web without ads, Mozilla literally relies on the status quo for all of its revenue.

1) Mozilla does have alternate sources of revenue, like Pocket and Mozilla VPN.

2) Mozilla had a partnership with Scroll, which was precisely that (a way of funding websites without advertising and taking a slice of that) before it got acquired by Twitter and subsequently dismantled.

None of those strategies involve changing how the internet works. Website owners generally need to pay for their sites. Currently their payments are subsidized (sometimes to oblivion) by advertising. Mozilla is doing nothing to change that, Brave is.

You're right that they perhaps don't want to be reliable on Google themselves, although they are and all other ventures have failed, but that's different from wanting a web that is not driven by advertising.

> None of those strategies involve changing how the internet works. Website owners generally need to pay for their sites. Currently their payments are subsidized (sometimes to oblivion) by advertising. Mozilla is doing nothing to change that, Brave is.

But that's exactly what it was...

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring...

If you want to argue that they should have done it themselves rather than in partnership, or bought out Scroll, then sure, I agree. Especially given how it turned out after Twitter bought Scroll.

Ah thanks, I had never heard of Scroll. I guess it's nice that as of very recently they thought about this problem and then immediately failed.

> 1) Mozilla does have alternate sources of revenue, like Pocket and Mozilla VPN.

Not really though. All alternate sources are usually less then 5%. [1] As of 2021, they made 73% of total revenue from Google. [2] Mozilla VPN? You mean the one that refuses to fix CVEs? [3] Yikes. No thanks.

1:https://frankhecker.com/2020/08/15/how-mozilla-makes-money-a...

2:https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

3:https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/08/03/1

Sorry for the offtopicness (I'm a mod here) - I'm afraid I only just saw these posts of yours from a few weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37376466 (Sept 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37372118 (Sept 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37367785 (Sept 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37357369 (Sept 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37345115 (Aug 2023)

Those comments broke the site guidelines so badly that I need to let you know that we ban accounts that post like that, and ask you not to do it again—no matter how badly someone else's comments are or you feel they are. We're really trying to avoid having this site burn itself to a crisp, which is what unchecked flamewar leads to.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Fair enough.

Couldn't have emailed me though?

I prefer to post on the site—not to shame anybody, but because it's important for the community to see how HN is moderated and even to be aware that it is moderated. (It's surprising how many regular users don't know that.)

Understood.

I agree, I can get snarky. Although I don't quite agree with the strictness of the rules, this site is one of the most unique I have found, so something must be going right.

I'll respect the rules.

Appreciated!

> And people can shit on Brave (Eich's next browser venture) but the reality is that they're doing a pretty incredible job.

It depends on how you look at it. https://www.w3counter.com/trends

Brave has the same user agent as Chrome to avoid being treated differently or blocked outright because of the built-in adblocker and anti-tracking features. It counts towards Chrome in web analytics.

We hide in Chrome's user-agent (too many sites break if you vary it but otherwise are Chromium-based). We're detectable by many means but that site and the other ones such as statcounter do not count us. I post our monthly user counts on "X", I just did September's stats. Here is living thread of threads:

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1711480079094837273

Firefox's fall has more to do with expiring browser ballot regulation and Google's increasingly aggressive advertising of Chrome than leadership at Mozilla. No one can compete against the billions Google pumped into Chrome development and marketing. Google is a gatekeeper to the modern web. Even Apple struggles to stay relevant.

These are very important factors, of course. But Mozilla could’ve at least mitigated the disaster. Even amongst engineers Firefox was a hard sell for many years. It took me a long time but even I jumped ship eventually, despite being a die-hard fan with a couple of contributions to Firefox. For a veeeeery long time Firefox was just atrocious to use. And once you’ve moved browsers, there’s not a lot of incentive to go back.

> Firefox OS, which somehow found success after they abandoned it

Really can you give some links ?

They're talking about KaiOS [0], which is a moderately popular mobile OS (bigger than iOS) in many non-western countries. It's been adopted for super budget phones by Jio, for example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS

I did. I gave multiple links, including linking back to my previous discussion of this issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com