User Story:
As a Private Citizen and Engineer, I want a graphical multi-input interface to load, view, interact with and post documents to remote and local HTTP servers ("web-browsing") on any personal computing device. I want web-browsing to have out of the box default security and privacy guardrails that are well documented can be disabled or modified by me the user and only me the user. I want this software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible (aka FOSS). I want this capability to be free at the time of use with no restrictions on amount scope or scale of use.
I think the above describes the product that everyone wants
It sure sounds a lot like Firefox to me
Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever?
edit: Oh I didn't realize that Brave totally abandoned their model and started taking Venture from RGA and Page One in 2019. Game has been over since then at least: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brave-software/compa...
Because the leadership is hellbent on copying Chrome but worse and investing in utterly pointless endeavors instead of making a good browser. It's a shame. Giving money to the Mozilla Foundation is the same as throwing it to a black hole.
I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches.
Is this a hypothesis that we can specify and test? Is this how we would approach this problem?
It sounds more like a cynical write-off, not a actual strategy
>I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches
Cool, but that strategy clearly isn't working.
I'm suggesting, instead of writing off Firefox, we (you specifically, and me and whomever else wants to) start engaging with Mozilla to help figure this stuff out
Nothing is perfect, but at least it's got some of the hardest parts right: Organizational momentum and distribution. Technical stuff is easy to change compared to that.
The challenge now is finding competent people who can actually put the effort in, with no compensation, to make it work and that might take convincing the Mozilla folks to do something differently.
Having done this kind of thing a few times, that sounds way easier than trying to totally start over from scratch though.
Any suggestion that Firefox do support Tab Groups will be met with ridicule. It just doesn't.
[disclaimer: former Servo team member]
Mozilla had a chance to advance browser tech with Servo and fumbled it.
Chrome, when it came, was stupidly faster than any other competitor, including Mozilla Firefox.
What would Servo bring to make web a big jump forward for us users, beyond ideology and fun work for its developers? (Ideology doesn't sell software, as opensource efforts have proven repeatedly over last 3 decades).
There are many non-aligned efforts with various directions, some focused on privacy, some on UI config, etc. maybe getting these people together to create something common where something can be integrated into one.
Just to keep rambling, I'd add that maybe a online conference independently run to get some important conversion going in the community, with the various firefox-fork maintainers and other important contributor, and try to layout some common roadmap, outline the main issues and get people exited again about the product would be a relatively low-hanging fruit to this started.
Mozilla may have forgotten the CTO persona. CTOs can donate engineering hours to Mozilla. Companies can donate money. If companies in the Fortune 500 aren’t using Firefox internally and companies like Netflix aren’t recommending Firefox to users, then Mozilla will continue to struggle to get market share and sustain funding.
One key use case: Firefox used to make it easy to create corporate intranet apps (the apps teams at companies use to do work). However, Firefox security changes started breaking intranet apps by returning the “your connection is not secure” error and giving workers no way to override. This hurts CTOs so CTOs switch their companies to Edge & Chrome.
Mozilla has defunded Firefox, allows for no way to directly donate to Firefox development, and now writes activist blogs.
We know what Mozilla will do with it - not ideal but it's the devil we know
We have no idea what Brave will do with it
My personal heuristics around VC backed companies (Having been a CEO with venture backing, an LP in a venture fund, a director in a publicly traded company etc...) is the following:
There do not exist PE backed companies that will take actions that conflict with an even theoretical reduction in potential ROI.
Leaders lose long term control of their companies to VC the moment they sign the term sheet
So I have zero faith that anyone who aligns themselves to profit making, will not harm either the customers or the employees that are involved in favor for the people providing the capital.
While firefox still uses google, allows google ads and tracking, and just talks about doing something but does nothing
Also chromium is just a superior engine, in security and speed, using firefox won't change Chromium dominance at all.
Although I think I agree with you, if your “so that” is so you can visit a particular website, those features you are specifying may demonetize and eliminate the website you want to go to causing it not to exist.
ah yes my favorite important improvements that I totally use daily like adding crypto tokens to chrome and crypto spam notifications on android
Try to actually compile that bloody thing, before you write "software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible"
Even Ubuntu team gave up on compiling their software, and are serving mainstream binaries from Mozilla!
Brave has some shady stuff, but that is easy to disable in configuration. And under-hood they follow security patches pretty well, have good security and stuff like 3D acceleration just works!
And you do not need 10 browser extension from some shady authors, that has full access to your browsing data!!!
Which extension authors are shady? I am mostly sticking to ublock origin, but this is the first time I hear that accusation.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-job-growth-beats-expec...
Full time jobs not only didn’t decrease, they increased more than part time jobs in actual terms.
Part time jobs for economic reasons decreased while part time jobs for non economic reasons went up slightly.
The IT sector has a slightly higher unemployment rate 4.3 than the headline rate 3.9. And there is a special note about the IT rate being specifically impacted by the tv industry strikes as the sector covering sound and film engineers makes up most of the IT unemployment number.
The industry that actually has a significantly higher rate is leisure and hospitality at 5.4.
Really? Sounds bad. Is that official stats?
That part should raise serious questions about the validity of this metric.
Any taxpayer-funded or debt-funded government "job" is not a creator of real (in the economic sense) wealth.
Rather, such government "jobs" merely siphon off and consume real wealth generated by actually-productive market participants, and then permanently destroy that wealth.
Even worse, the process of destroying of that real wealth is often done in a way that then impedes the productivity of the real wealth creators, introducing a secondary and longer-lasting real economic loss.
Each government "job" added should be seen as a significant net loss to the overall economy.
Those government "jobs" are in effect just destroying the real output of some number of private sector jobs.
The specifications are simply too complex to foster any meaningful competition. There's too much ground to cover playing catchup and Google has such a large market share that, combined with their data and ad monopoly, allows them to create new specs and features that focus entirely on growing their business model.
Web sepcifications should be simple enough that it's pheasible for small teams to actually maintain a quality open source browser with modest funding. We've ended up falling into the same trap as many other big systems, we lost sight of what the goals and limitations for the web were and instead chased convenience and shiny new features above all else.
What is a better source of how to tutorials YouTube? What's a better venue of asking questions than Reddit and StackOverflow? What use is the Internet without those?
For example, the entire idea that we visit specific websites and manually compare prices when buying things is ridiculous and misses huge parts of the benefits of using computers in the first place.
AI, or more accurately machine learning, attempts to take us out of the process. It isn't separating content and presentation, it's separating content and understanding. The algorithm will read in data, compress it, and save only the patterns it learned. By the time the content is presented there is little connection to the original source and what I'm seeing isn't just a separated presentation layer, it's something entirely different like playing a game of telephone.
This model of starting with chromium really has nothing to do with building a web browser, it is just building a UI around Google's browser. There isn't much daylight between that and the often complained about limitation of Apple only allowing the use of WebKit on iOS.
Maintaining a Chrome fork is already difficult enough on its own, especially with the number of directions where Brave wants to diverge.
Effectively ever since IE broke Netscape's back, every single major web browser has been funded either off the back of other business units (IE, Chrome, Safari), or funded by search engine deals. No customer has actually had to really contemplate 'what is the value of a browser' in like 25 years. No one actually has a sense of how valuable a browser actually is (except through the perverse metric of how many ads can you serve to the user via default search...).
I think it's telling that all of Brave's new revenue streams aren't actually -from- their self-professed mission.
The only decent browser is Chrome, and the ad blockers don't work anymore.
They are oscillating between building their own search engine versus using Bing. And offering their own internal AI named Leo versus passing information to one of the many cloud provider APIs.
For Brave, difficult to claim privacy if they don't do all that in house. But it forces them out of their lane from building a browser to building all these services.
Kind of seems like they are becoming Google, which has always been the foil Brave has claimed to be fighting against.
That's in addition to some anti-Google and better privacy features.
I want a browser which actively fights the enshitification of the web. Brave is the best I've found so far. I'm hoping to find better.
This might sound crazy, but the primary purpose of a browser isn't to improve search results with a custom API (almost none of which compare to vanilla Google), but to actually improve the browsing experience. Haven't tried Arc, but from what I've seen it seems like they're actually focusing on UX, which is the kind of thing I'm looking for in a browser.
Jumping from Chromium to Chromium?
The "environment" problem isn't economic, but social. It's not new, and it's not about to change:
- Most users don't know that the browser that came with their device can be replaced by something else.
- Of those that know, many don't.
- Of those who do, they want it free; you cannot monetize it. You can't lock them in; they will switch to something else at the sign of any trouble.
The alternative browser user is pretty much the same person who doesn't want to see a single ad anywhere, or pay for anything.
You might as well wrap quartz pebbles in cloth and wait for whey to drip out.
A possible area for an alternative browser might be the corporate environment; employers who want to prescribe some kind of more locked down, security-fortified browser for use within their intranet. The challenge there is demonstrating value, compared to regular approaches: using regular browsers and securing things elsewhere.
Recently there was a HN submission to a story about how scalpers are able to get Ticketmaster tickets before everyone else, which mentioned custom browsers that the use. Someone makes money in that niche.
I suppose their advertising revenues could be impacted.
The job market, especially outside of the US, is dead for experienced product leads, and the culture and other factors outside the US can't be changed so easily. I know at least five people now, from the EU, who are struggling hard landing product leadership roles internationally.
With all these tech companies tightening budgets and laying off staff, hiring has slowed across the board. I mean I guess for sure there's still desire for senior PM talent, but the roles are 100% more scattered.
I only know a bunch of people in the EU and don't really have a global picture so how's the product job landscape globally? What regions or companies still have healthy hiring pipelines? Is it mainly US-based companies recruiting abroad or are there other non-US tech scenes continuing to grow? I mean, there must be, but nothing compared to the US.
Maybe the AI takeover should come as soon as possible after all.
