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Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

One takeaway of the Mozilla debacle is that software as a non-service is dying if not dead.

What I mean is the concept that software could be a thing that someone just obtains, like a pencil. The things you write with a pencil belong to you. The pencil belongs to you. You don't have an ongoing contractual licensing agreement with the pencil manufacturer that gives them a worldwide non-commercial right to reflect light off the graphite in order to display words.

In 2008, Google had already begun to forget that software could be like a pencil. It seems that in 2025, even the concept is alien to lawyers and perhaps developers at Mozilla, and many other places. The do not understand how one could use a software tool without granting the company behind it a license to everything you do with the tool, because they do not understand the concept of software usage except as a business relationship between the user and the company who developed it.

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Oh they understand the concept. Its just that the recurring revenue and data are more important and without competition or alternatives then why not take everything you can take from the user. What are they going to do? Stop using the internet?

What are they going to do? Stop using the internet?

Stop using newer versions of the software. Firefox is open-source, so forking and fixing the older versions before these hostile changes is not impossible.

I hope this is true. I don't know how to maintain a web browser, hopefully those that do are willing to do the work to keep it running.

Does a web browser need maintenance beyond security fixes?

To display increasingly prevalent chrome-only web apps, they need new features. Static html style websites should work with old browsers.

I tried viewing Notion and self-hosted Mattermost using SeaMonkey last week. Nothing was displayed at all. Trac pages still worked though. So yeah, a web browser needs more than security fixes.

Start blaming the sites for using new Chrome(ium)-exclusive features when they're not otherwise necessary. The fact that many sites which decide to update and then offer zero or often negative value to the user, while requiring a newer browser, should be proof that Google is doing an embrace-extend-extinguish on web standards, and web developers who get sucked into their propaganda are making it harder for alternative browsers.

There are new web features being adopted by browsers other than Chrome all the time.

They're essentially being forced to by Google.

They may be adopted by browsers other than Chrome, but were they invented by other browsers?

I wonder how much of that is user agent related?

I mean, security fixes are still maintenance on their own, and on an attack surface as wide as “the entire Internet”, it’s a non-trivial one.

But also… what people want to do on their devices evolves. Web developers want to be able to support that. So they rely on browser developers to constantly support new features. One can bemoan this state of the world as much as they’d like(*), but at a certain point it’s just sticking one’s head in the sand.

(*) I style myself mostly a native platforms developer, and I’d love it if the web wasn’t the de-facto cross-platform architecture of choice. But alas.

They can either spend their efforts at trying to catch up with Google and their constant anticompetitive churn, or propaganda (for lack of a better term) against web developers trendchasing that churn.

People want the service-y features, though. Immediately getting access to all your passwords, bookmarks, history, and extensions when you log in is a major selling point of both Firefox and Chrome, and people want features like that more than they want local-only software that’s fully under their control.

I feel like Apple is to some extent the last bastion of this idea, at least as far as big tech companies go. (You could probably lump HP and Dell in there too, but to a lesser extent in my opinion).

Since they produce hardware, they have are in a fairly unique place to push on device computing. Since their products are expensive, they don’t need to chase down every bit of extra “as a service” revenue at the long term expense of the product.

Oh please

Apple is extremely user-hostile, going to great lengths to strip users of control of their devices, gaslighting them into staying in the walled garden (with great success), while simultaneously siphoning as much user data as it can get away with, and employing as many dark patterns as it can to prevent the users from exercising their rights (it's worse than Meta in this regard).

Truly, Apple always amazes me with its ability to put expensive rose tinted glasses on its users's noses.

If AI makes the cost of development low enough then some individuals or small teams will still sell software like a pencil

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