Update was from 3 days ago, I’m really hopeful ladybird could be a future browser option to help break the stranglehold chrome has over the market, while Mozilla is struggling to find meaningful direction.
It seems like an exciting project with monthly progress updates :) they keep chipping away at compatibility.
I definitely agree. They feel deeply confused about their audience and like they perpetually flounder trying to find a sustainable direction or future :/
Ootl, what happened with Mozilla ? I use Firefox and very happy with it so this sounds surprising
They recently announced terms of service that they (I think?) Partially walked back. But honestly it’s a longer term issue-
Mozilla is dependent on Google giving them lots of money to be the default Firefox search engine, and anti-monopoly rulings in Europe may mean Google has to stop doing that, which would really jeopardize Mozilla’s financial sustainability
The gecko engine is way behind on web standards, and while it generally gets the job done for average users, I’ve learned recently lots of devs don’t test their sites with it or support it not just because it’s a minority browser, but because it doesn’t support a lot of stuff and is hard to work with.
Mozilla seems to believe their path forward financially is AI features. Which are very unpopular with a lot of the folks who follow Mozilla, even if implemented thoughtful, and seems like a dubious financial future given even huge companies like openai are struggling to make ai financially self sustaining.
Add to it the privacy preserving ad tracking stuff they wanted as an alternative to cookies a while back, and the picture doesn’t really get better
All of these are small things. The compatibility with web standards isn’t the end of the world for most users. A big bug was/is that firefox rendered gradients horrendously for like 12 years or something with the bug reports just sitting there, but most Foss nerds who use firefox don’t super care if a website’s gradient looks crappy. The features that chrome has but Firefox doesn’t aren’t dealbreakers for most users. The privacy preserving trackers or whatever they were called seemed at least relatively thoughtfully implemented from a privacy standpoint. AI could hypothetically be done in a way that isn’t totally shitty, and maybe possibly they could build a financial future out of it. The terms of service debacle could stop here and not devolve into actual enshitification.
But it all culminates together in feeling like mozilla is out of touch with their core audience and has no real viable plan for staying afloat, sans google paying them shitloads of money to be the default browser engine. :/
In short, they’re trying to make much more money to pay the executives’ 7 figure salaries, and are giving up browser privacy to do so.
7 figure salary ? for an oss project ? that doesn’t sound good or sustainable at all
And remember that Mozilla is supposed to be a non-profit.
I don’t understand how it makes sense for a nonprofit to make it so profitable to their executives to manage it… why is that not regulated?
https://tilvids.com/w/fAvzwwK2abKCGUea6FT9va
There’s also bs like this:
https://www.maketecheasier.com/firefox-testing-new-privacy-feature-with-meta/
The browser is cool but Mozilla as a company is an absolute trainwreck of borked public communication (again and again and again) and bullshit products that noone asked for (Pocket, AI etc).