If you knew the amount of project changes, reorgs, CEOs, products, executives, etc we’ve went through you’d realize Googles behavior had little do with it. In fact, if it weren’t for their corporate generosity we’d be finished by now.
We’re basically run by a bunch of lawyers and ex-McKinsey people now (and have been for some time). We’re not victims of Google, we’re victims of our own hiring practices.
You should actually read the link you posted. That had nothing to do with Firefox and has everything to do with ad blockers. Looks like YouTubes goal was to bring parity between those using ad blockers and those not, as to not incentivize ad blocker usage, not to cripple Firefox.
And ? It is part of the anti-adblocker code which is clearly targeted at Firefox. What sort of extra-ordinary bar are you keeping for malice if not this ?
It’s not monopolistic to not support shitty browsers with little user base. This isn’t even the basis for the current antitrust ruling against Google, for what it’s worth.
As the parent comment points out, if YouTube isn’t buggy for most of their users, why do they have to worry about it? We don’t expect either Microsoft or game devs to ensure their stuff works well with wine on Linux.
Web standards are open but that doesn’t mean you can’t build on top of them. YouTube is not an open standard. If Google wanted to end web support for YouTube and force everyone to use some sort of YouTube app even on desktop, they could do that. They’re not obligated to make sure YouTube works on EVERY browser especially when an insignificant amount of their users come from there.
A game running on windows isn’t a false equivalence either. A lot of games are built on open standards and open source (e.g. OpenGL, various game engines, etc) and still won’t work on wine/linux. If a bunch of people are using windows in order to play their games, that’s not too different from a lot of people using chromium browsers to use YouTube.
The perception of corruption is not without merit. Mozilla is pretty corrupt at this point. (Source: I work here).
I really don’t get where this whole “the EU should fund it” idea came from and why it’s repeated so often. Why would the EU throw their tax payer money at another corrupt American corporation? Mozilla has been in bed with Google for several years, has horrible web compatibility, and is only barely still in the privacy lane.
Besides, Europe isn’t the land of open source software and privacy. Look at the laws in the UK, France, and Germany; they’re not exactly privacy friendly. Look at the tech stacks at companies in the UK and Germany, they lean very heavily into the Microsoft/.NET world.
Then they should fork it and start a new organization.
The EU and the world could have a privacy focused browser if they paid for it. If they don't they're going to always be waiting for the market to do it and it won't. Given that Mozilla wastes a lot of resources on things that are thoroughly pizzled (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac) a browser could be maintained for much less than the current Mozilla budget. This is why "fully funded" as opposed to "funded" is key. So long as the organization feels the need to go around with its hat out it is going to be corrupt.
… and there are many Chromium forks out there. For web standards to really be standards and not “Chromium” there has to be a viable non-Chromium browser.
I wonder what your thoughts are on Firefox's absence of an AdBlocker on iOS? Edge has one, Brave has one, but Firefox still doesn't have one. I know that on iOS they can't run plugins, but since the other browsers can, it feels like a lost opportunity.
To keep nonprofit/tax benefits, the work has to be done for some sort of public benefit. That work never gets done, instead it’s constant reorganizations, hiring/firing, and shuffling money around. We’re always profitable, and every few years there seems to be decent to huge layoffs even though we’re beating revenue estimates and behind on our hiring goals.
Money keeps going up from Google, usage keeps going down, start new projects, never staff them to what is budgeted, cut project, fire people, and the money disappears into the foundation. Foundation sends money out to various levels of ghost and shell corporations.
The rendering engine portion of the whole Firefox vs Chrome debate gets way more attention than it should. It’s really not that important. Someone could fork any piece of the chromium project and have an “independent rendering engine/browser” without all the problems gecko has from a decade of little market share and under investment. Google nor Mozilla make money from their rendering engines as is evidenced by their ability to make money on iOS.
Also, the rendering engine isn’t the way Google is being anticompetitive or violating users privacy, just like no one is really that worried that Google, Facebook, and MS are some of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel. People use a chromium based browser because chromium is better. Google gets people to use Chrome, and gets their data through the code they add on top. Overall though, Google has not been a bad steward of Blink.
Weirdly enough, Blink is the first time we have the equivalent of a shared "OS API", that's due to the browser becoming the main way to run apps (desktop at least) and that is supported by most consumer computing devices
Without that deal, there wouldn’t be a Firefox. If/when it’s gone, there’s no one capable/willing to fund Mozilla to that amount.
Really there’s only 1 other company who can throw that level of money at us and it’s Microsoft. Without Google bidding up the price, doubtful they would pay as much for Bing to be the default search and it’s not like Firefox users would welcome that change.
Free software doesn’t work for long without some sort of corporate sponsorship at some point, and it’s not in anyone’s interest to fund it at this point. (And don’t say “the EU should” most Europeans are not clamoring for their governments to spend money on an American browser company with web compatibility issues that no one tests against)
The problem with Mozzilla is that they don’t just fund development, they have control of it and they receive almost all funding from a direct competitor with a horrible privacy record.
I trust FSF, Debian, Linux Foundation, etc. not to violate my privacy. Clearly the same cannot be said for Mozilla.
And I'm more than willing to believe the legal difficulties of the foundation would be a nightmare, but would an EU sponsored fork of some kind be such a terrible idea? A move of headquarters to a suitable city and so on.
Remove the tracking, maybe even a few mandates to offer it up in certain settings that receive EU funding already.
> Without that deal, there wouldn’t be a Firefox. If/when it’s gone, there’s no one capable/willing to fund Mozilla to that amount.
There's some irony when I read that while my laptop is running Linux Mint, which in my perception is much superior in many ways to the competition.
I agree that Free software needs sponsorship, especially when it is such a fundamental part of interacting with a computer (which a web browser certainly is).
I am not certain that this sponsorship coming from a company that wants to undermine it is a good thing.
Just so you know, the money users donate goes towards political causes not towards Firefox.
When you are donating, you are donating to the Mozilla Foundation (which is a non-profit). All Firefox development is done through Mozilla Corporation (which is a for profit entity). There is no way to donate to Firefox.
You don’t need $500M per year, by far, to continue developing a web browser. Mozilla is conducting all sorts of operations that have little to do with that core task.
Wikimedia is often criticized for asking for donations, while having millions in the bank, but this is exactly why. Mozilla should have taken all the money they could from Google and others, focused on Firefox and MDN (and perhaps Thunderbird) and just continuously saved and invested whatever was left. If/when donation dry up, Wikimedia will hopefully have saved up enough to fund Wikipedia for decades. Once Mozillas income is gone, there's no backup.
Mozilla spend all the money they could each fiscal year (I don't actually know, I didn't check their budgets), trying to build products that would fund the project into the future. It's just that none of those projects made much sense, nor where they ever going to bring the the amount of money required, which really seems obvious from the outside. I can see the VPN maybe bringing in a bit of money, but no where near enough.
> Wikimedia is often criticized for asking for donations, while having millions in the bank, but this is exactly why.
You are omitting the part where Wikimedia spends large parts of that donation money on things barely related to Wikipedia. Not to mention inflated salaries throughout the organization.
No one (and I mean that in the sense of a significant number) is switching to Firefox over this. Our user numbers are consistently heading downwards.
Besides Google does other things to slow YouTube down on Firefox so this isn’t really a compelling reason to switch browsers for most people. They’ll likely just disable their ad blocker. For the person who values privacy that much, they’re likely staying off Google properties anyway, and for the average user, their YouTube experience is more important.
I seriously find it hard to believe that most people who are computer-savvy enough to use adblockers would choose to live with ads again rather than switch to a virtually identical product that doesn't allow companies to disturb users in the same way (at least for now).
The bar for how savvy you have to be to use an ad blocker is a lot lower than it used to be.
There’s 2 different issues here: privacy and user experience. A lot of YT users are probably signed in to YT through their gmail/google account, in which case the ad blocker is not providing them privacy. If you don’t care about privacy and only care about user experience (e.g. not seeing any ads) there will not be an alternative to YT for long that can operate free to the user without showing ads.
Most people will opt for a better content catalog, load times, and device battery life over leaving YT, even the computer savvy.
We’re basically run by a bunch of lawyers and ex-McKinsey people now (and have been for some time). We’re not victims of Google, we’re victims of our own hiring practices.