Dear Moz://a management: Everyone is already on board with your ideals of open Internet. What you need to do is get your house in order and focus on your core competency i.e. the web browser and related tooling. You won’t get a seat at the table of Internet biggies if you’re a has been entity.
I don't think that's the case. Increasingly content is being placed in walled gardens which you don't get full access to that content unless you have an account. Google is still pushing AMP. Chrome is becoming the new IE, and sites that 'work best' or only work with Chrome are not uncommon. Those (and many other) factors don't indicate to me that everyone is on board with the ideal of an open Internet.
Not unlike how most people understand the dangers of climate change, but continue to drive cars, fly, use air conditioning etc.
Or, stated another way, we are all hypocrites to some extent.
I think this has a lot to do with the amazing devtools in Chrome.
> Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy?
> Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource.
We are still waiting for Pocket's server source code...
> Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.
What does that even mean? They stopped at 9 and had no idea how to make it to 10 and ended up with wrapping buzz words into one sentence?
That's not their entire approach to privacy.
How would you have them exist? There aren't enough people willing to pay for a web browser in 2020. There aren't enough unpaid volunteers to work for free and outcompete Chrome.
What would you have Mozilla do? They're trying to develop other services that can actually make them money so they don't need Google's money to exist, and people here are shitting on them left and right for this.
Could Mozilla be managed better? Yes of course. Is there some obvious grand strategy that would save them if only they didn't miss it? No, I don't think so. "Just focus on the browser", say people who haven't paid for a browser since Opera, if ever. Ha.
Mozilla are not in a good strategic position. Public trust and technical expertise are the only major assets they have, and those are not directly monetizable to the tune of $100M. I do hope very much that they figure out how to leverage these assets into more neutral, more grassroots profit streams before the next renewal of google's deal. But let's not demonize them unnecessarily, they have it hard enough as it is.
In web technologies they're the last ones on "our side", pretty much.
Manifestos are about principles not pragmatic approaches, taking a stance is not free or easy, look at the stance RMS takes on open source and GPL for example. Had RMS and other pioneers in the open source movement did not take such ideologically driven stance at the expense of pragmatism , we may have parts of BSD maybe today but not the GPL driven open source ecosystem that all of us benefit from, even now it costs open source a lot look at linux and zFS .
You can apply the same argument with Google early on, they were hugely influential in reducing the amount and type of ads we were forced to see. They have developed great open source projects and provided a lot of good quality free services all funded by ad revenue, how is it really different from Mozilla then ? so should I see only those contributions and ignore what Google really does on privacy ?
Being uncompromising in the face of great difficulty is the only way of real, sustainable change and revolutionize how things work, had Google stuck to "Do no Evil"(whatever that meant to them) no one would worry about using Chrome, if organizations loose focus they only really exist to make money for employees/ shareholders/ management.
Also this is not sustainable model, that search revenue is going to keep dropping as they keep loosing market share, inevitably they are either going to drop Firefox altogether or going to base it of Chrome and shelve most of the team. If Microsoft cannot afford to develop Edge as separate browser, how long Firefox will last in this structure ?
We are better off forking off in a community funded model before the inevitable happens and try to build a sustainable project around that. There are enough companies who can donate few million dollars a year each to make sure Google is not the only player in town. Wikipedia raises more than $120 M / year, it is not inconceivable, that Moz foundation can raise a reasonable amount to fund the development of the key projects.
As one said, their problems didn't start in 2020. Honestly, Firefox should have fought tooth and nail to be THE embeddable browser. We should not be embedding Blink/WebKit but Gecko or Servo.
It should have fought Google in EU, but kinda hard to do that when you depend on them.
The reason they got checkmated weren't made now, but several years before.
There's no grand strategy one can come up with instantly, but their corporate leadership stifled any chance Mozilla could discover the right angles to innovate. With $500M a year, they could've had a sea of strike teams clawing its way towards the right answer. But alas, any such group would suffocate under a top-heavy culture more interested in their image.
Interesting claim, since no browser out there was ever made available for payment in recent history. So if I follow you correctly, there are people willing to support projects on Patreon and shell money on software they find important and worth supporting, but for some reason for a much more sophisticated piece of software like a browser suddenly no such market would exist?
I'd like to see Mozilla seriously try instead of accepting a check from Google every single year while pretending they care about their users' privacy.
charge businesses for Firefox Enterprise Edition, that way businesses are paying for support and funds development towards Firefox.
This and the fact that they signed the deal with Google again makes me lose faith in Mozilla, caring about privacy yet making deals with the devil that is killing them.
Basically "promoting good things is good."
What if Mozilla had used the internet and hadn't spent their billions on bay-area engineers but on hiring young third-world talents and offered them a job that educated them in web- and browser development?
There could be thousands of engineers working on Firefox and servo with the benefit that they would develop content that would be guaranteed to work on Firefox.
I had not thought about donating until these recent layoffs, but have now set a monthly 5$ donation up, as Mozilla's tools and work mean enough to my own interests, as well as being important enough for the internet as a whole, for me to donate.
Sadly the public donations will never be enough to cover their whole operational expenses, but every little bit helps.
Not sure if that’s in one of the 10 or not there because it conflicts with their ad revenue (ie, open expression doesn’t mesh with ads), or conflicts with authoritarian regimes (eg, Great Firewall of China), or conflicts with “language is violence” or conflicts with “nudity offends me” or something else.
It seems like one of the big things at risk now is the ability of the internet to allow direct connections between people without intermediaries. I feel like standards bodies kind of help with this (ie, protocols over platforms).
Mozilla use to live and breath the open web, now they are just empty platitudes like Facebook and Google's commitment to privacy.
You mean Mr Robot, right?
It's a shame but I don't see it being any better the next time I inevitably try.
They did what? frantically clicks Hamburger -> Options, which opened about:preferences, "Find in Options" is top and center. Firefox 79, Windows 10.
Why don't you talk about software development instead? About building FireFox? About disrupting tech?
It seems Mozilla is now run by people more interested into communism than actually building a fucking software and bringing value to the world. RIP Mozilla.
Not to mention that this document is pretty old.
I think the main difference is it feels a lot less authentic now. Less grassroots and more a corporate-ish attempt to appeal to the masses.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
(probably means learn more)
Look, I’m saddened by the layoffs too. And I’m very sad the dev tools and servo teams teams in particular have been hit. And I would like to know why.
Yet there are still 750 mozilla employees. The servo stuff was merged into ff already. I’m not saying it’s good that they’ve scaled down their R&D but the narrative that the C-suite have laid everyone off so they can drink more champagne on one more yacht gets tiring and obscures reasoned discussion about the lay offs.
Really? The project was done? That is at odds to what nearly every person I follow involved with the project has had to say recently.
https://github.com/servo/servo
What Mozilla did was move few stable components to FireFox and shitcanned the rest.
+ We support privacy
- Yet get millions from Google to keep their search engine default.
+ We believe in transparent community based decisions
- Which is why we gutted several community darlings (Devtools, Servo, Wasmtime, MDN)
And in that case why should I use a knock-off, if I can have the real thing for free? Google controls the code, whatever tracking/control they build in is going to be hard to remove without a fork. A Fork Mozilla won't be able to afford.
No amount of writing manifestos is going to change that fact.
That's likely not too far behind. There might be a runway of a couple of years before that, though. I don't think they'd get rid of quite so many people at that point.