Are we witnessing the final days of Mozilla? | Hacker News Reader

Are we witnessing the final days of Mozilla?

lunduke.locals.com

27 pointsdotcoma39 comments

This could be a benefit to Firefox. Mozilla has wasted millions on frivolous projects not related to Firefox. I’d much rather support Firefox directly.

or Ladybird.

Ladybird is at least 5 years, but probably a decade away from being able to compete with Firefox, Chrome and Safari, if it ever gets there. You cannot just reach the same level of completeness, resilience, and performance without a lot of effort. It took large, dedicated teams many years to get performance where it is now.

A lot of that time was spent chasing the ever-changing "standards" which describe what a browser is supposed to do. It is easier for a new project to implement the distilled essence of those "standards" than it was to try to keep up with the house-of-cards-built-on-quicksand while its "architects" kept on changing and expanding its "design". This means Ladybird should be able to reach parity in a much shorter timeframe, it is the slog which comes after which decides whether they can keep up with whatever Blink does (which more or less is what those "standards" end up describing).

Getting to 99% of websites will be straightforward, but the last 1% will be tough. Everybody has an obscure website they rely on regularly. Every one of those warts grown during the torturous evolution of the web is depended on by some web site somewhere. https://xkcd.com/1172/

> Getting to 99% of websites will be straightforward, but the last 1% will be tough. Everybody has an obscure website they rely on regularly. Every one of those warts grown during the torturous evolution of the web is depended on by some web site somewhere. https://xkcd.com/1172/

I often mention that in Germany, Firefox has a much higher market share of the browsers than in most other countries:

See for example the statistic of browser market shares among desktop users:

- USA: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/unit... (Firefox 4th place, 7.45 %)

- Germany: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germ... (Firefox 2nd place, 15.41 %)

Of course, because Firefox does not have this large market share in many other countries, there exist some (rare) websites that don't work so well in Firefox. But since the Firefox users (at least in Germany) often are very vocal about their browser

- If the website is "not important": ignore it; who would want to visit a website where the developer/company does not care about Firefox?! :-) Additionally, use this as a great opportunity for venting anger, and write some furious e-mail to the webmaster of the website why they dare to ignore Firefox users. :-)

- If the website is "important": use, say, Chrome for this single website - and then write some furious e-mail to the webmaster of the website why they dare to ignore Firefox users. :-)

TLDR: It is much more important that the users of the web browser are very vocal about using it than about getting the last 0.1 % of websites to work.

I certainly don't need anywhere near the same level of completeness, personally. Performance is also not a huge deal to me. Ladybird may, in fact, become more than sufficient for my needs in the near future.

"Scale back operations", hell yeah. Fire those overpaid executives, and shut down or spin off everything except Firefox and MDN.

Thunderbird is also great

Yes. Please.-

I mean, options?

Really no direct replacements for me if funding collapses such that both Firefox and Thunderbird go. Firefox's multi-account containers are unparalleled in their ease of separation. This was really the feature that lured me back from Chrome, which is all too happy to merge your "identities" into a single "profile." Yes, you can do multiple profiles, but not on a per tab basis. Thunderbird would also be a great loss as it's always been my go-to for HTML email management and it actually had decent GPG support. Sigh...

I kind of wonder if they simply tried to hard to pivot into being a big tech company. It felt like at one point there was a new product announcement every few weeks. Very few of those exist today.

Why would thunderbird go? It has its own fund and it's fully funded AFAIK.

Despite any missteps it took, Mozilla fought a good fight. In hindsight, the mistakes seem obvious. And leadership poor.

But they pushed the open web forward. Good on them.

However, I don’t think Firefox is important anymore (I’m a loyal user). And I don’t think Mozilla can create something different. We need a movement more than a well funded organization for this next phase.

Wikipedia is in a very similar predicament. Or soon will be.

I don't see myself using another browser than Firefox in the present time, it would be extremely sad to see it go if nothing else better/similar shows up to replace it.

I cannot stand Chromium/Chrome, even less after the latest changes to extensions, fuck that; don't like Safari's UX and extensions ecosystem; will never install Edge. The other browsers are mostly re-skins of Chromium, or some stupid AI bullshit.

It will be a very sad day if/when Mozilla goes and takes Firefox with it.

> However, I don’t think Firefox is important anymore (I’m a loyal user).

This sounds defeatist. What is the alternative then? Vendor specific browsers? For me that's not happening because I don't and won't buy MS or Apple products so no safari or edge.

Honestly, web complexity is out of control and browsers are beyond comprehension for mere mortals being. The fact that you need billion dollar companies to prop them up is a telling sign.

I think a different model which does not require the size and complexity of the Mozilla org is a viable option.

It would continue to lose market share and skip new features (cough AI cough). But it could enjoy a smaller steady niche there supported by the community.

> However, I don’t think Firefox is important anymore (I’m a loyal user).

As I already wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44659025 (and write often on Hacker News), Firefox is used very actively in Germany; among the desktop browsers it is the 2nd most used one (and German Firefox users are often very vocal about it and love to proselytise users who use Chrome.

Here the relevant statistics:

- USA: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/unit... (Firefox 4th place, 7.45 %)

- Germany: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germ... (Firefox 2nd place, 15.41 %)

That doesn’t warrant the size of the organization and costs to run it in its current form. The trends are not in Firefox’s favor. I say this as someone who uses Firefox on both iPhone and OSX.

I think a slimmer Firefox that’s just community supported would be fine. Forgo monetization and AI and enjoy the niche it can survive in. I’d go for that!

> However, I don’t think Firefox is important anymore (I’m a loyal user).

It's important to me.

For all its warts, there is no other browser than I've seen that comes as close to being acceptable to me as FF.

It's tough to see a project with so much potential struggling. It feels like they've spread themselves too thin. Focusing solely on Firefox and core web initiatives like MDN seems like the most logical path forward. Imagine what they could achieve if all that effort was poured back into what made them great in the first place, rather than some of the other ventures that don't seem to be gaining much traction.

It's too bad that Mozilla hasn't saved up enough money that allows them to fund Firefox development in perpetuity at current expenditure rates through passive income from the interest generated from their investments.

Without money from Google or a suitable alternative they're going to burn through whatever savings they have pretty fast.

Only if they maintain their current burn rate, which is ridiculous.

The current leadership is running the foundation as if it were an overhyped AI startup swimming in VC money. You know, the kind that tends to disappear overnight when said VC money runs out. Not something I'd expect of an organization that claims to be a protector of anything valuable.

"…that allows them to fund Firefox development in perpetuity… ".

The question is why the hell are we still having to develop web browsers after 30 or so years. When on earth is this development going to stop? When is the browser project going to be finished?

A web browser is just an interface to the web, and it's been overdeveloped to the point of absurdity.

We all know that almost every web development/API in recent decades has been at the instigation of Big Tech for its benefit, not users. When we now have single web pages of 10, 20MB and upward of 'junk' JavaScript and links by the hundred doing nothing but acting as spyware we don't have to be told who's exploiting whom. (When you get rid of all that junk existing web browsers suddenly become blazingly fast.)

What we have now is an almighty mess of disparate standards and we ought to stop and take stock. If we did Mozilla wouldn't need to be continually tweaking Gecko, it works perfectly well now and has done so for years.

BTW, I do over 90% of my web browsing with JavaScript turned off and have so since JS's inception, and I've no difficulty—and I do a damn lot of web browsing.

Mozilla: Focus on FF FFS.

I'm using FF right now so I am not just saying this as some empty plea but an honest call for Mozilla to stop fucking around and make a solid portable browser that respects the user. Give us all the control we want. It's our computer so give us an "our browser" not a FAANG or whatever browser.

Did you read the article? FF = Google

Yes I did read it. Nowhere does it say Firefox is made by Google. It does however state that Google pays Mozilla a large sum of money to keep Google as the default search engine which accounts for 80% of Mozilla's revenue. That revenue is seemingly not spent making FF better which is the major complaint shared here. To me this is corruption of Mozilla by Google which needs to be fixed, not burnt down without a plan for whats next.

Without the Mozilla corporation, forks can and will flourish. Firefox's seemingly anti-userbase(search, AI, adsense compliance) decisions scream corporate cancer.

Author mentions the cash Mozilla has on hand and that it's enough to keep them afloat "for a little while"

A quick scan of the author's post suggest they're pretty agenda driven, hence the weird "Marxist" name calling which in addition to the above admission that the post is clickbait kinda puts the author's judgement and credibility in question

Respectfully to the OP, I don't see the point in posting substack/like content like this that's designed to drive a completely different and quite frankly unhelpful kind of discussion

Yeah, it's Lunduke. Their "content" can be summarily ignored, it's rage-y clickbait nonsense with a side of "them liebrulz!!~"

They should, of course, pivot to cryptocurrency and/or putting their own ads (with tracking of course) in the browser. Easy money.

(Sell itself to Tencent, perhaps?)

I'm going to just leave this here for those of you who use Macs.

https://kagi.com/orion/

keeping the internet free and open is marxist? I'm so sick of this american political witch hunt against anything that appears slightly good for the working class, you people are obsessed with self destruction

The very mention of the word "marxist" in a text is a very valid bullshit trigger nowadays. It shows very clearly the person has no idea what they are talking about and also doesn't care, preferring to wallow in buzzwords for image and clicks.

this post seems pretty disingenuous, and in particular it's a pretty useful rule to ignore people who say things like:

> They are now a “global crew of activists” focused on Marxist causes.

“They are now a “global crew of activists” focused on Marxist causes.”

What Marxist causes are the people at Firefox supporting? Maybe stop using the money for these causes to support your product.

Yeah OP kind of gives his plot away with "Marxist".

This is Lunduke. He exaggerate stuff but they are not without some truth.

I very much hope the judge blocks google from paying mozilla. Google is paying mozilla to make firefox not compete against them.

I look forward to when mozilla can compete fairly without google money to make a good browser again.

>Rebrand (and re-focus) on political activism in the hopes of securing new funding sources. (They are now a “global crew of activists” focused on Marxist causes.)

I thought they were already this? No?

It does seem an effective way to ruin their organization.

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