Comment by the_third_wave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_third_wave | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Here's an idea on how to turn this ship in the right direction: get Musk interested in funding a project which will fork the code base, clean up the cruft - pocket etc. - and relaunch Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. That is what a Phoenix is supposed to do after all, when the time has come to die it will burn to ashes from which it arises all new and fresh.

Why Musk? The choice seems clear as are the tangents to his other activities. He is one of the few "tech zillionaires" who does not kowtow to the demands of the censorious identity politics crowd which has instantly turned him from one of the darlings of "progressives" to "undesired person #1". He seems to have the drive to keep that crowd from dominating the 'net. Having all major browsers - Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox - under the control of that same crowd in one way or another is not conducive to the diversity of opinion on the 'net, the only type of diversity which really matters and yet the one type of diversity which is shunned by the aforementioned I.P. crowd.

What is needed is developers ("developers, developers, developers!" [1]), funding and mindshare. The latter is probably fairly easy to get given that there are many who are more than tired of all that identity politicking. Funding should not be that hard to arrange either given the way money is being thrown around. Developers who are versed in the Gecko code base and are willing to work for a project which explicitly states to be politically neutral - as in 'does not push any narrative' - is more of a question. If there is anyone here who works/worked at Mozilla who can shine a light on that it would be helpful. Do those who work/worked there actually support Baker's push towards politicising the Mozilla project while the flagship product - Firefox - is heading towards oblivion?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33grif58qO8

To the downvoters: tell us what you think instead of trying to get an opinion contrary to your own greyed out. Is it just that I mention undesirable person #1 which caught your ire, is it that you do not think a fork would be a good idea, is it because you do not agree that Mozilla has been abused by Baker? Discuss, do not just click that down-vote button.

People are probably turned off to the comment because of all the complaining about “identity politics”.

There also exists several forks of Firefox already. Suggesting the nth idealogical fork that will be funded out of the kindness of a billionaire’s heart doesn’t sound productive. Why not donate to Librewolf? Why must Musk actually have any involvement besides funding?

The "complaining about identity politics" is part of the core reason for creating a non-politicised fork which can take over where Firefox left at a ~32% market share, i.e. it can attempt to regain part of the market lost to Chrome and its many descendants. The reason for Musk to get involved (apart from funding) is to make sure the project remains politically neutral as that would be one of selling points when compared to the rest of the field. It would mean that this fork - let's call it Techiya, Hebrew for 'resurrection' and thus a fitting name for this project - explicitly stays out of the political quagmire which has swallowed Mozilla and deeply affects the way companies like Google (Chrome), Microsoft (Edge) and Apple (Safari) (re)act. It would focus on creating a competitive browser which can host a fully functional content blocker, which does not send oodles of tracking information to some mothership, which does not waste time promoting things like "racial justice" [1] but focuses on its core task of developing a solid alternative to the current Blink/Webkit-based almost-monoculture. Leave the politicking to others, not everything needs to be politicised.

Librewolf and Palemoon and Waterfox and the Tor Browser and the other Firefox forks do not have enough impact to survive by themselves without Firefox itself. They are projects focused on specific aspects - privacy, XPCOM/XUL extensions, plugins etc. If Firefox goes down so do these projects - maybe apart from Palemoon but that is only because that project already depends on a lot of older code which is no longer supported by Mozilla to enable it to run pre-Quantum extensions and plugins. What I'm philosophising about is a project which can take over where Mozilla left off, focused on creating and maintaining a viable alternative to the current Blink/WebKit hegemony and intent on gaining a sizeable market share.

[1 https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-racia...

No offense but nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox. Perhaps the Trillion dollar companies behind the phone duopoly, the Desktop OS with 80+% market share, and the search engine the world uses, leveraged their positions to advertise and promote their browsers to squeeze Firefox out of their 32% market share.

Like Linux, so what if Firefox only has a 5% market share? It does what I need to without having to deal with the nonsense of Google and Microsoft.

And frankly being “politically neutral” is itself a political stance. And Musk is far from impartial too. He too kowtows to dictators and bad faith politicians all the time. He takes strong explicit political positions that are not neutral. He doesn’t do the things that you would want him to do with this Firefox fork.

> nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox

It does, though. It may not be directly (apart from a few annoyances with their 'colours of change' propaganda) but the fact that Mozilla now spends a large fraction of its lavish funds on CEO remuneration and activism while the main product languishes on the back burner certainly has an effect.

With the funding Mozilla gets through mostly search engine deals - more than $600 million in 2021 [1], about $1.1 billion in assets - it has the financial wherewithal to push development much harder than it does. Instead of using these funds where it matters they have divested themselves off a large fraction of the development base and are still reducing their development budget while earnings are going up.

[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

And despite that Firefox remains far and away the best browser experience. It’s almost like none of that actually matters because Chrome and Blink based browsers have taken over the world and both Google and Microsoft engage in similar activism and have 1,000 times the resources.

I can’t argue against a counterfactual. We might as well play what if games about Firefox having doubled market share instead and what that would look like with everyone complaining about browser engine monoculture with Brave and Edge using Gecko instead of Blink.

Complaining that diversity and inclusion initiatives and other political activism is holding Firefox back when Apple, Google, and Microsoft all do the same and have significantly higher market share and several orders of magnitude more money is silly. Firefox is the least bad browser and there is no evidence that promoting diversity and inclusion is harmful to its development. We can make a case that Firefox isn’t spending enough resources on political activism and that’s why it’s falling behind. Otherwise the reason Chrome is popular and Firefox isn’t is that sticking to the principles of privacy and security on the Internet holds back performance. And users have overwhelmingly voted that slightly better performance in loading websites is more important than any notion of browsing the web privately and securely.

> And despite that Firefox remains far and away the best browser experience

In many ways I agree and this is also why I use FF on both Linux as well as Android as my main browser.

As to the problem related to the low market share I suspect you already know the answer, no what-if games needed. Many developers no longer test their creations with Firefox because they deem its market share to be insignificant. I do not know if you were around in the dark days of yore when Internet Explorer was the main development target but that is where we're going. As it stands Blink is a capable and relatively flexible browser engine but that can change, e.g. with the introduction of Manifest 3 and later incarnations.

> Complaining that diversity and inclusion initiatives and other political activism is holding Firefox back when Apple, Google, and Microsoft all do the same and have significantly higher market share and several orders of magnitude more money is silly

It is exactly for this reason that a non-activist project is needed as I also referred to in my initial posting:

Having all major browsers - Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox - under the control of that same crowd in one way or another is not conducive to the diversity of opinion on the 'net

and

mindshare [...] is probably fairly easy to get given that there are many who are more than tired of all that identity politicking

> users have overwhelmingly voted that slightly better performance in loading websites is more important than any notion of browsing the web privately and securely

This sets a target for this hypothetical Techiya project: make the thing at least as fast as the competition while remaining at least as secure and privacy-respecting as current FF.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com