Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barbing | Hacker News Reader

>advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists

>marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain

The only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model. Every single normal person, when presented with a "translate" button either know it's going online, or don't care about it.

Begging the purists to run away from Firefox at this point so they can stop wasting everyone's time. Your demands for examplarity and whining about money not going ONLY to firefox and jerking yourselves on Servo was not enough, now you want to restrict the browser to owners of an RTX5080 if they want to use it?

You realize that people that don't care won't even know what Firefox is? Being a niche player and scaring away niche people is the most stupid strategy possible.

Being a small player and throwing away any hope of expanding your user base by building for people who will complain no matter what you do is, well, something!

neglecting existing customers in an attempt to gain larger market share is certainly a play

Ah yes, the customers of Mozilla, who are certainly paying users and not just people whining and saying BACK IN MY DAYS IN THE LAST MILLENIUM IT WAS DIFFERENT.

Get over it gramps, things are changing. Mozilla spent ten years trying to mostly appeal to these people by staying very conservative, and it got them nothing but abuse and harassment from people not realising that staying stuck in the past is a death sentence for Mozilla.

You want to save Mozilla, burn down Google first. The ecosystem in which they are evolving isn't driven by them.

> You want to save Mozilla, burn down Google first.

Uhhh... 85% of mozilla's revenue comes from Google via the search deal. In a theoretical scenario where a genie waved a magic wand tomorrow and google went "poof", disappearing, mozilla would be in a dire emergency for lack of revenue.

It would. But Mozilla has zero long term survival chance in the current ecosystem. The economics are just not there, there cannot be more than one big browser in the way this system works.

like I said, neglecting existing customers in an attempt to gain larger market share is certainly a play

the rest of your post seems to hinge on some judgement you think I made about that

I solemnly proclaim I would pay reasonable money for a browser (Mozilla or otherwise) if their maker would truly try to make the best browser possible and succeed at least partially at it, instead of serving a thousand of agendas none of which is making the best browser possible. The sole reason why I am not Mozilla's customer is exactly that - because they do not see me as their potential customer and don't care about my needs. Of course, they are free to do that but the result is people like me aren't giving them their money. So they have to go to Google.

> only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model

This is an untested assumption in Silicon Valley. I suspect Apple is going to eat a lot of folks’ lunches.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com