11 ms·

To defend the free web, save Mozilla

163 points by Rondom 11y ago

krapp 11y ago
If the web can only remain free as long as Mozilla gets paid, then it's not really free, is it? I understand that people hate Microsoft and don't trust Google since their logo appeared on a PRISM slide, but the premise of this article seems a bit extortive. "Nice freedoms you have there... be a real shame if anything happened to them..." Nah.
mehrdada 11y ago
Please note that Mozilla did not resist DRM in Web standards but they spent money on things like FirefoxOS that clearly wouldn't get anywhere. I am quite unsure if they are aligned enough with the free web ideals. I do not think more donations will change anything. At this point, the purpose of Mozilla is unclear to me. They basically make a substandard browser and follow industry hypes doing random things.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Please note that Mozilla did not resist DRM in Web standards While they eventually gave up, they did resist it, and where the last of the major browsers to implement EME. They also provide an EME-free version of Firefox.
  - mehrdada 11y ago
    "You had one job"
sam_lowry_ 11y ago
I heared from several Mozilla volunteers that it's not anymore the geek-friendly organisation it once was, but a corporate behemoth run by men in suits. After they pushed out Brendan Eich, there's no hope for change. Rest in peace, Mozilla.
- striking 11y ago
  Check out their GlassDoor reviews if you need any further proof. [1] Lack of focus is the biggest concern. It's a shame, really. 1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm (access with Google referrer to get all the reviews)
  - e15ctr0n 11y ago
    The most interesting part about the Glassdoor reviews is the trend over time.[1] Overall Ratings Trend 4.0 Dec 2013 3.7 Jun 2014 2.9 Dec 2014 3.3 Jun 2015 3.2 Overall Ratings 2.7 Senior Management 3.2 Career Opportunities 3.5 Culture & Values 3.9 Comp & Benefits 3.9 Work/Life Balance 43% Positive Business Outlook 55% Recommend to a friend 62% CEO Approval The other part of the story is reflected in the number of jobs open: 39 (not counting the 16 internships).[2] [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm#trends-overallRating https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm... [2] https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/ https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/
    - magicalist 11y ago
      It shouldn't be totally dismissed, but GlassDoor suffers from the same disease of all review systems: a pissed off engineer is far more likely to write a negative review to warn others and/or stick it to their former employer than a happy one would think to go and write a positive review. (For a sample size of one: I'm happy at my current employer and couldn't possibly be bothered to go put a rating for them on glassdoor. Moreover I find sites like that are often more in the parasitic class of the internet anyways, so not sure I want to donate my time and information to help them prosper in the first place.) You're slightly better off than with a random internet poll in that the pollee is at least claiming to have first hand information on the subject they're answering questions about, but it's still hopelessly biased and you shouldn't even try to reason about trends or comparisons from that data. Better to take individual statements from the testimonies on there (with a huge grain of salt) and leave it at that.
tshtf 11y ago
> I think it’s a good idea to donate money to Mozilla to reduce the dependence on Yahoo This is a fool's errand. Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... The sum total of the proposed public donations to Mozilla will be off by an order of magnitude or two. And there's no reason to believe that public donations will change Mozilla's bizarre course of actions such as forced Pocket integration, or lack of any U2F support.
- brandon272 11y ago
  Thanks for the link. It would have never occurred to me than Mozilla spends $320M a year.
  - jms703 11y ago
    Salaries.
    - riffraff 11y ago
      That appears to account for 210k of the 320k[0]. I wonder how it compares with similarly sized enterprises (~1000 employees). [0] I'm interpreting "software development" as "salaries".
      - bzbarsky 11y ago
        Note that "salaries" would include some of the marketing budget too, right? On the other hand, "software development" probably includes non-salary costs like offices, hardware, payroll taxes, and whatnot. Anyway, in terms of comparisons to other companies the usual estimates I've seen put the cost of an employee to the employer at somewhere around 2x salary. So employing 500 good software developers will probably run you at least $100 million. If they're mostly in the Bay Area, probably a good bit more; even starting salaries there are over $100k for strong just-out-of-college hires last I checked.
  - 11y ago
Sephr 11y ago
> Google will be a dominator and gatekeeper to the browser extension market [...] for Vivaldi and other browsers that implement the Chrome extension system and use the Chrome extension repository exclusively. This means Google alone decides which extensions get published. This is completely untrue. Vivaldi is deciding what extensions get published by intentionally limiting themselves to Google's extension repository. There is literally nothing stopping Vivaldi from hosting their own extension repository for extensions that don't make it to Google's Chrome Web Store. They can also choose to support both repositories, so users can have access to extensions they already use in CWS, in addition to any extensions from Vivaldi's repository. The article also states that V8 "has a real community behind it, with less control from Google" as if Blink is more strictly controlled by Google. This is false. V8 and Blink governance are exactly the same. If you want to participate in the community, both projects have public mailing lists where anyone is allowed to put forward rational feedback and ideas regarding functionality and policy. Yes, the final word comes from Google, but there is no governance imbalance between the two projects as implied by this article.
- icebraining 11y ago
  I don't think it's untrue, maybe we're just reading it differently. The author isn't saying that Vivaldi is forced to limit themselves to Google's repository, only that because they chose to do so, Google does effectively have that control, and so Vivaldi et all aren't real alternatives.
necessity 11y ago
We must "fight browser monoculture" by making Firefox the dominant browser instead of Chrome? Firefox would become "independent" if it became dependent on donations? This guy later on stresses that we must have free software engines, that we can't have Google owning most of the market. But Blink is licensed under GPL and BSD... So is Chromium IIRC. >Currently Mozilla Firefox is a genuinely free browser, but it might not exist for long if main sponsor Yahoo! pulls the plug on their sponsorship and Mozilla can’t find a way to finance its development There will always be a search company interested in being the default of the browser with the second largest market share.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >This guy later on stresses that we must have free software engines, that we can't have Google owning most of the market. But Blink is licensed under GPL and BSD... So is Chromium IIRC. This doesn't mean much. Being open source is just the first required step. What teams/community contributes to a project matters too regarding it not being controlled by a single company. If Google engineers stopped working on Blink tomorrow it wouldn't turn into some magically organic open source community project. That would take hard work, and tons of volunteers, and might not even happen.
r3bl 11y ago
I really try my best to stick with Mozilla, but their changes in the last year or two have been more then dissatisfying. Like the author said, they have added completely unnecessary things and reduced the customization ability in a several occurrences. I have written a rant about Mozilla a couple of months ago that I still think is relevant: https://blog.r3bl.me/en/mozilla-dissatisfaction/ https://blog.r3bl.me/en/mozilla-dissatisfaction/ Although I'm all up for supporting free and open source software, the situation with Mozilla has became shady enough that I just want to move away from it. Unfortunately, I have nowhere to go. Midori is still not completely usable, I just can't convince myself to switch to Chrome or Chromium because I genuinely feel uncomfortable using them, IE/Edge are only available on Windows so they're practically useless to me, Firefox forks are really nothing groundbreaking, Vivaldi is not open source...
- heinrich5991 11y ago
  From your rant: Mozilla doesn't actually make money from integrating Pocket with Firefox.
  - listic 11y ago
    This is the most unbelievable and I heard it before: when an open source software starts including proprietary bloatware like that, one might think there is money involved...
    - chimeracoder 11y ago
      > including proprietary bloatware like that No matter how many times it's disproven, this meme just never ends, does it? The Pocket client code is free and open source, just like Firefox itself[0]. If the user uses the Pocket feature, that code makes HTTP requests to another server, which runs a mixture of FOSS and proprietary code. If the user does not use the Pocket feature, it does not. Remember that we are talking about a web browser, the primary function of which is to do exactly that: make HTTP requests to another server that may be running proprietary code[1]. [0] Pocket's client is arguably more free than Firefox is, if we look at the fact that Iceweasel is distributed with the Pocket logo included whereas Debian cannot include the Firefox logo for its patched builds. [1] Unless you only use your browser for accessing http://fsf.org http://fsf.org, but at that point you're probably using Lynx or Seamonkey anyway.
vjvj 11y ago
> "...with pages that only work properly in Google Chrome or its derivatives." This is already well underway. Facebook's advertiser power tools will only work with Chrome.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
johncolanduoni 11y ago
I'm not a fan of another monopoly in the browser space, but the situation is quite different this time around. The largest being that Chrome is a branded version of Chromium, an open source project. The author is right that creating a browser from scratch is a often prohibitive amount of work at this point, but if Google stops allowing innovation or directs it in selfish ways in Chrome/Chromium, all that work is not suddenly lost to competitors. If pages only work in Chromium derivatives, then build your competing browser by refactoring Chromium. If all of the web rendering engines worked off branches of the same open source code base, I don't think you'd see many people working on the frontend crying, and nobody would be locked into a particular platform like we were with IE. That said, I'm more interested in Mozilla's work on Servo (and Rust in general) than Firefox/Gecko. Looking at their roadmap[1], I was surprised at how soon its milestones are. If they hold to that timetable we may be seeing Firefox or a totally new browser steal first place before long, especially on mobile. [1]: https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap
- pcwalton 11y ago
  > If all of the web rendering engines worked off branches of the same open source code base, I don't think you'd see many people working on the frontend crying, and nobody would be locked into a particular platform like we were with IE. > That said, I'm more interested in Mozilla's work on Servo (and Rust in general) than Firefox/Gecko. These statements are contradictory. If you get what you want in your first paragraph, Servo won't be possible, ever.
  - johncolanduoni 11y ago
    The first not what I want, it's the future I think this article is actually predicting (as opposed to IE round two), and I'm saying it won't be such a crying shame. Also not "possible ever" is pretty hyperbolic, considering the lock-in when IE had a monopoly was far stronger than it would be if Chrome/Blink got a monopoly. At the worst we'd have a permissively licensed reference implementation, which is a lot better than trying to be compatible with a closed source blob like IE.
kryptiskt 11y ago
They still haven't released a 64-bit Firefox for Windows. Compound that with all tabs running in the same process and the demands of modern web and it's easy to run out of memory in Firefox on Windows these days. Their neglect of the vast majority of their users is baffling.
- detaro 11y ago
  > neglect of the vast majority of their users You are aware that both issues are being worked on? Beta versions are available as 64-bit. Release 64bit builds are available on ftp.mozilla.org, but not offered on the main download page yet because of unresolved bugs. > Compound that with all tabs running in the same process That's something a lot of development effort is going into right now. Available in the nightlies if you want to help test.
  - spooningtamarin 11y ago
    There's definitely something wrong if it's so hard to go to 64-bit. This has been their problem for almost a decade.
    - pcwalton 11y ago
      It's not hard to go to 64 bit. It's hard to go to 64 bit without any performance regressions. (This holds for most performance-critical, memory-access-bound software.)
      - cwzwarich 11y ago
        Hasn't it been 64-bit on OS X and Linux for a while? Presumedly those releases had acceptable performance, so what are the Windows-specific problems?
        bzbarsky 11y ago
        A few relevant notes: 1) The OS X and Linux versions of Firefox have generally been slower than the Windows version all along, even before switching to 64-bit. Largely because gcc (and later clang/llvm on Mac) generated slower code at least for this particular codebase than MSVC did. This is also why the Windows release versions of Firefox are in fact compiled with MSVC, not gcc. 2) Most benchmarking done by the press is done on Windows, and most of the users are on Windows. Performance regressions on Windows do in fact matter more, both in terms of actual user experience and marketing/perception than performance regressions on other platforms. I wish that were not so, but it is.
chris_wot 11y ago
Really? We're talking about the folks who capitulated on EME and brought DRM into their codebase. Very free!
- hguant 11y ago
  It's hard to be a relevant web browser if your users can't watch Netflix.
  - vetinari 11y ago
    Most internet users cannot watch Netflix, whether their browsers support DRM or not. They see message like this: Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country yet.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      There's that promotion of freedom against discrimination due to the country you live in. Thanks, Mozilla!
  - sangnoir 11y ago
    The road to hell is paved with good intentions. They should either focus on their core mission, or change it (to being relevant). Lack of focus/compromizing core values is a shortcut to failure. Saying "it's 1hard to be a relevant web browser if you can't X" is an excuse that can be used to undo each and every point on Mozilla's Manifesto[1] 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      It does seem that Mozilla can only be true to their stated values when it is convenient to do so.
AsyncAwait 11y ago
Firefox is not the only thing that Mozilla does that is worth supporting. Their Mozilla Research projects, like Daala, Rust and Servo, are really neat and I believe deserve support, so I don't want Mozilla to go away. It is however true that some strange decisions were made in the past year, like the forced pocket integration as well as stopping the development of Persona before it was even ready etc., but they do work on interesting stuff nonetheless and are often the only major player in W3C to be on the right side of many issues, so I still think that they deserve my donations and hopefully yours too - nothing good would come from Mozilla failing.
- reddotX 11y ago
  i like mozilla but they are more concerned about bringing firefox to black boxes like iphone than open platforms like Ubuntu Phone
  - drakenot 11y ago
    If I were in charge of project priorities at Mozilla I would make that same decision all day long. The potential user impact for capturing even a small percentage of iOS users would dwarf the total number of Ubuntu Phone users. I'm not saying I would be against working on an app for Ubuntu Phone, but if resources were constrained and I had to make a choice, it would be an easy decision for me.
  - toyg 11y ago
    It's an old diatribe. Pre-Firefox Mozilla poured a lot of effort in the (complex and temperamental) Linux market, with little to show for it. Firefox was very much a Windows-first project and it paid off immensely. Mozilla walk a tight rope.
  - manigandham 11y ago
    You say that like it's a bad thing?
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  It's also worth remembering that Firefox WAS a research project. At the time, general consensus was that web browsers would be just a part of a suite of content-specific internet browsers: email, news, calendar, etc... The fact that you could ditch all of that and just render web pages better and gain market share was a surprise.
codingdave 11y ago
Didn't Mozilla just drop their contract with Google, saying they no longer needed that revenue? So their dependence on Yahoo was a deliberate and recent choice. While I'm not arguing the ideal of an non-corporate support model, I am curious how it only took a few days to go from "We don't need the revenue" to "Save Mozilla."
- detaro 11y ago
  Before the arguments were "Save Mozilla from Google" instead of "Save Mozilla from Yahoo". Spreading the reliance over multiple search vendors is at least a step in the right direction.
- nnethercote 11y ago
  Firefox's deal with Yahoo (or any other search engine) is only valuable so long as Firefox has lots of users. And Firefox's market share has been dropping for years now. That's what the author is worried about.
  - e15ctr0n 11y ago
    If the global desktop share of Firefox fell from 31.64% in January 2010 to 16.53% in February 2015,[1] it represents a loss of 3.7% per year (15.11% / 49 months * 12 months / year). In theory, Firefox should reach zero market share in 3.7 years from now, just before the Yahoo deal runs out.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#StatCounter_.28July_2008_to_present.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#St... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/11/yahoo-and-mozilla-form-strategic-partnership/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/11/yahoo-and-mozilla-for...
    - ehsanu1 11y ago
      A linear rate is not very realistic here. Exponential decay would be better, but still probably completely useless as a predictive tool.
- grayrest 11y ago
hitlin37 11y ago
i will admit i'm not expert on this, but i often see Google pretty much more than ok with another browser as implementing new technolgies. It makes things standardized if another broswer is implements newer technologies and not just one implementation from major browser vendor.
pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
this is the same mozilla that bundles the closed source "Pocket" tool into firefox, right? to defend the free web, boycott mozilla
patrickfl 11y ago
I agree we all most stick together and support Mozilla, even if it is as something as simple as using it as our default browser. I've been a Mozilla (Netscape, etc) user since 1998 or whenever the first version came out, and I've always been a fan of what they stand for. Yes they've made a few mistakes, but nothing that can't be easily forgivable.
datashovel 11y ago
I think it's problematic to frame the question as whether or not someone can "compete" with Google. I think the entire browser ecosystem could change for the better if we built a "Meta browser". So the developer of the web page chooses which engine they prefer for rendering their site. The user only installs a single meta-browser, and if they don't currently have the preferred engine (as noted by developer in HTTP Headers) the user is notified and has the option to download and install that engine. Here is a short blog post I wrote about this: https://medium.com/@datashovel/why-isn-t-there-a-meta-browser-204997473c61#.85citda0j https://medium.com/@datashovel/why-isn-t-there-a-meta-browse... With a meta-browser developers don't have to worry about building a site for all major browsers. They could write for a relatively unknown engine and as long as the user has that engine installed it will work seamlessly when the user navigates to that web page.
- jdc 11y ago
  What if the web page's developer specifies an engine not available on your platform (OS/hardware)?
  - datashovel 11y ago
    It would definitely need to be more elaborate than how I described it in my original comment. But I imagine, for example, that could be solved with a list of "preferred engines", which of course would probably fallback to a default "user or system preferred" engine if none were available. It's true it would become a small problem of its own (to try to figure out how to build for just enough engines to make it possible to render correctly on all computers) but I think that makes it possible for the entire ecosystem to have many more browsers and for a lot more experimentation to take place. Because the browser developer no longer has to worry about "Well, if I can't get enough market share to matter to developers, then there's no real point for me to build a rendering engine, since it will probably never be used". Instead if there is even a small number of people interested in their work, there can be a small community of developers who build for that engine, and it will be used (or at least recommended) when a user visits their websites.
filmgirlcw 11y ago
Unpopular opinion, but why should it be the community's burden to save a company that takes in over $300m in revenue (and apparently spends every bit of it) each year and, let's be real, hasn't managed to keep up or evolve along with the web? Why is it up to us to save them if they haven't really tried to save themselves? I love Mozilla -- as a concept -- and I want to live in a world where Mozilla and its products still exist. But I can't remember the last time I used Firefox. And yes, it's partially because I'm a Mac user, but it's also because I can't choose ideals over a superior product. That Mozilla languished on the desktop is sad, but almost understandable. IE languished too. (Microsoft was smart enough to replace it, even if the replacement did come years after it should have), but to languish on mobile is just inexcusable. Firefox Phone was a project that could have worked for certain markets for a very brief period of time, but they had to know they started too late and were going after an ever-shrinking market when they started. Sure, it would have been great for HTML5 to win over apps. It didn't happen. It's likely never going to happen (not until the next mobile paradigm shift happens anyway). But instead of focusing on building the ultimate browser -- desktop or mobile -- I don't know what Mozilla did. I really don't. But now they are struggling. And it puts the good work they do in jeopardy. And that's sad. But since when is it my responsibility (or yours) to subsidize a company with a $300m annual run rate who can't help itself. A company with very opaque goals and no roadmap. I'm all for saving Mozilla but it needs to show me it wants to be saved.
- rewqfdsa 11y ago
  Google wasn't fighting fair. To allow the Chrome team to run free advertisements on the world's most popular website and to allow them to install their browser by default on the world's most popular mobile operating system, well, it's jus dirty. You could advertise IE6 that way and get significant adoption.
  - artifaxx 11y ago
    I agree that being the default is an unfair advantage, but there is a grey zone for sure. Most applications we use have defaults of some sort, so what cutoff should we use to determine the unfair ones consistently?
lazyjones 11y ago
I may be getting old, but why and how did we let web standards inflate to such an extent that only large corporations or organizations are able to build a competitive browser from scratch? There's so much money funneled into browser development these days and the results aren't entirely satisfactory for end users (DRM, security issues) and website developers alike, perhaps it's time to start over with something less bloated.
- FooBarWidget 11y ago
  Because of momentum and backward compatibility. What you say may make sense from a purely technical point of view, but you are not considering that 99.999% of Internet users are average users. Without backward compatibility you have no way of winning. And with backward compatibility you have... the current mess of patches upon patches.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  For better or worse, the answer to your question is clear if you consider the range of functionality that users now expect to be provided by any serious browser. Browsers a few years ago had to render a page using HTML and CSS, supported some light scripting with JavaScript, allowed the inclusion of a small number of different image formats (primarily JPEG, PNG, GIF), and delegated any more serious interaction using plug-in technologies like Flash, Java, and ActiveX. Browsers today have to render a page using somewhat larger versions of HTML and CSS, provide a professional quality language runtime for a much larger version of JS, implement a much wider selection of features and the APIs for that JS to use them, render graphical and multimedia content in various formats and allow that content to be generated or controlled in real time in addition to rendering the earlier basic images, potentially support a much wider range of functionality to adapt to different devices and interaction methods, and do all of this orders of magnitude faster to keep up with modern software architectures where a lot of the work is done client-side, and with a much greater attack surface to protect from a security perspective. Some of these changes are "only" quantitative. For example, although the specs have evolved, the basic rules for rendering simple HTML and CSS haven't really changed that much for a long time. Some of the changes are still substantial. For example, introducing tools like flexbox has significant implications for your layout algorithms that simply weren't there before. Some of the changes are qualitative, like introducing entire new areas of functionality to support off-line use or real-time client-server communications, or providing production quality support for graphical presentation via canvas/SVG/WebGL and multimedia audio/video players, which is essential if you are trying to kill off any external plug-ins that would have been used for such things before.
Silhouette 11y ago
I am all for supporting an alternative browser to the corporation-driven Chrome, Safari, and IE/Edge. Sadly, Firefox is no longer it. I believe Mozilla has now become so totally disconnected from the values and principles that made Firefox and the like attractive to a certain set of users that it is beyond redemption. I also believe Firefox is now so totally off the rails that it is probably beyond saving. It appears to have fundamental architectural issues that have limited development in some important areas, but instead of addressing those in recent years, there has been a string of not-entirely-popular UI changes, some high profile new features that it seems hardly anyone actually wants, and a bad and worsening loss of both flexibility and stability particularly around add-ons. This is not the browser I used to recommend, and it makes me sad. I am now hoping that one of the forks, perhaps Pale Moon, will take over the community-driven, open-culture mantle that Mozilla once wore. I am also hoping that with Safari still running WebKit, Chrome now on Blink, and IE11 and Edge doing their own thing, there will remain sufficient need for co-operation in the browser community that we get back to something sensible in terms of standardisation and portability within the next couple of years.
- wila 11y ago
  Switched my main browser just last week from Firefox to Pale Moon and I couldn't be happier. It is like before firefox got off the rails. Certainly recommended.
rewqfdsa 11y ago
Mozilla died the day Eich left. That's the day it became clear that the organized cared more about posturing than results.
schmichael 11y ago
> prevent another decade of browser monoculture Mobile is our protection against browser monoculture. Even if Chrome/WebKit/Blink/whatever browsers make up the vast majority of mobile, there's such huge variation between them and customizations added by OEMs that - much to web developers chagrin - a monoculture seems like a blessing by comparison. There's also browsers in tons of devices like TVs, consoles, car dashboards, etc that add a staggering amount of variability. (Not to mention embedded browsers in other apps like Steam, anything based on Electron, etc) The author misses the fact that desktop browsers aren't the most relevant web browsers anymore, and there's tons of variability and competing stakeholders even if Mozilla disappeared tomorrow. Edit: Now if the assertion is that we need a nonprofit competitor in the web market, that's a compelling reason for Mozilla to exist (if it can stay sufficiently independent from its commercial benefactors).
- pcwalton 11y ago
  There's nowhere near as much variation among WebKits as between WebKit and Gecko, or WebKit and Trident, or Trident and Gecko.
  - schmichael 11y ago
    That's a pro. Variation sucks. What you want is competing contributors and stakeholders to ensure a single entity's interests don't win. I would argue the massive WebKit/Chromium ecosystem has lots of competing contributors.
    - pcwalton 11y ago
      > That's a pro. Variation sucks. No, it doesn't. A browser engine monoculture means that a single engine's bugs and quirks become the standard. As a result the Web platform gets worse, and it becomes harder for new browser engines to enter the market. For example: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/02/a-small-example-of-value-of-browser.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/02/a-small-example-of-value... > What you want is competing contributors and stakeholders to ensure a single entity's interests don't win. That is not the case in practice with either WebKit or Blink. > I would argue the massive WebKit/Chromium ecosystem has lots of competing contributors. Not really. There are two primary ones: Apple and Google. Both organizations have essentially as close to absolute sway over their respective projects as to what Web platform features they implement and how they choose to implement them as to make no difference.
RightWingRabble 11y ago
Mozilla deserves to die. That's how things work in the free marketplace. Sometimes, organizations don't age well and they have to go away. They're replaced by orgs that are more flexible and better able to address the gaps in the current market. Mozilla's decline is by no means the herald of a Google monoculture anymore than embedding IE in Windows was.
- cwyers 11y ago
  I, uh, Yahoo is paying them enough to stay afloat right now. In what sense has the market spoken here?
  - RightWingRabble 11y ago
    > In what sense has the market spoken here? The fact the original article is a call to "save mozilla" isn't enough? Then look at Firefox's market share.

163 points by Rondom 11y ago

krapp 11y ago

If the web can only remain free as long as Mozilla gets paid, then it's not really free, is it? I understand that people hate Microsoft and don't trust Google since their logo appeared on a PRISM slide, but the premise of this article seems a bit extortive. "Nice freedoms you have there... be a real shame if anything happened to them..." Nah.

mehrdada 11y ago

Please note that Mozilla did not resist DRM in Web standards but they spent money on things like FirefoxOS that clearly wouldn't get anywhere. I am quite unsure if they are aligned enough with the free web ideals. I do not think more donations will change anything. At this point, the purpose of Mozilla is unclear to me. They basically make a substandard browser and follow industry hypes doing random things.

icebraining 11y ago
Please note that Mozilla did not resist DRM in Web standards While they eventually gave up, they did resist it, and where the last of the major browsers to implement EME. They also provide an EME-free version of Firefox.
- mehrdada 11y ago
  "You had one job"

sam_lowry_ 11y ago

I heared from several Mozilla volunteers that it's not anymore the geek-friendly organisation it once was, but a corporate behemoth run by men in suits. After they pushed out Brendan Eich, there's no hope for change. Rest in peace, Mozilla.

striking 11y ago
Check out their GlassDoor reviews if you need any further proof. [1] Lack of focus is the biggest concern. It's a shame, really. 1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm (access with Google referrer to get all the reviews)
- e15ctr0n 11y ago
  The most interesting part about the Glassdoor reviews is the trend over time.[1] Overall Ratings Trend 4.0 Dec 2013 3.7 Jun 2014 2.9 Dec 2014 3.3 Jun 2015 3.2 Overall Ratings 2.7 Senior Management 3.2 Career Opportunities 3.5 Culture & Values 3.9 Comp & Benefits 3.9 Work/Life Balance 43% Positive Business Outlook 55% Recommend to a friend 62% CEO Approval The other part of the story is reflected in the number of jobs open: 39 (not counting the 16 internships).[2] [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm#trends-overallRating https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm... [2] https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/ https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/
  - magicalist 11y ago
    It shouldn't be totally dismissed, but GlassDoor suffers from the same disease of all review systems: a pissed off engineer is far more likely to write a negative review to warn others and/or stick it to their former employer than a happy one would think to go and write a positive review. (For a sample size of one: I'm happy at my current employer and couldn't possibly be bothered to go put a rating for them on glassdoor. Moreover I find sites like that are often more in the parasitic class of the internet anyways, so not sure I want to donate my time and information to help them prosper in the first place.) You're slightly better off than with a random internet poll in that the pollee is at least claiming to have first hand information on the subject they're answering questions about, but it's still hopelessly biased and you shouldn't even try to reason about trends or comparisons from that data. Better to take individual statements from the testimonies on there (with a huge grain of salt) and leave it at that.

tshtf 11y ago

> I think it’s a good idea to donate money to Mozilla to reduce the dependence on Yahoo This is a fool's errand. Mozilla's revenue in 2014 was $323 million: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... The sum total of the proposed public donations to Mozilla will be off by an order of magnitude or two. And there's no reason to believe that public donations will change Mozilla's bizarre course of actions such as forced Pocket integration, or lack of any U2F support.

brandon272 11y ago
Thanks for the link. It would have never occurred to me than Mozilla spends $320M a year.
- jms703 11y ago
  Salaries.
  - riffraff 11y ago
    That appears to account for 210k of the 320k[0]. I wonder how it compares with similarly sized enterprises (~1000 employees). [0] I'm interpreting "software development" as "salaries".
    - bzbarsky 11y ago
      Note that "salaries" would include some of the marketing budget too, right? On the other hand, "software development" probably includes non-salary costs like offices, hardware, payroll taxes, and whatnot. Anyway, in terms of comparisons to other companies the usual estimates I've seen put the cost of an employee to the employer at somewhere around 2x salary. So employing 500 good software developers will probably run you at least $100 million. If they're mostly in the Bay Area, probably a good bit more; even starting salaries there are over $100k for strong just-out-of-college hires last I checked.
- 11y ago

Sephr 11y ago

> Google will be a dominator and gatekeeper to the browser extension market [...] for Vivaldi and other browsers that implement the Chrome extension system and use the Chrome extension repository exclusively. This means Google alone decides which extensions get published. This is completely untrue. Vivaldi is deciding what extensions get published by intentionally limiting themselves to Google's extension repository. There is literally nothing stopping Vivaldi from hosting their own extension repository for extensions that don't make it to Google's Chrome Web Store. They can also choose to support both repositories, so users can have access to extensions they already use in CWS, in addition to any extensions from Vivaldi's repository. The article also states that V8 "has a real community behind it, with less control from Google" as if Blink is more strictly controlled by Google. This is false. V8 and Blink governance are exactly the same. If you want to participate in the community, both projects have public mailing lists where anyone is allowed to put forward rational feedback and ideas regarding functionality and policy. Yes, the final word comes from Google, but there is no governance imbalance between the two projects as implied by this article.

icebraining 11y ago
I don't think it's untrue, maybe we're just reading it differently. The author isn't saying that Vivaldi is forced to limit themselves to Google's repository, only that because they chose to do so, Google does effectively have that control, and so Vivaldi et all aren't real alternatives.

necessity 11y ago

We must "fight browser monoculture" by making Firefox the dominant browser instead of Chrome? Firefox would become "independent" if it became dependent on donations? This guy later on stresses that we must have free software engines, that we can't have Google owning most of the market. But Blink is licensed under GPL and BSD... So is Chromium IIRC. >Currently Mozilla Firefox is a genuinely free browser, but it might not exist for long if main sponsor Yahoo! pulls the plug on their sponsorship and Mozilla can’t find a way to finance its development There will always be a search company interested in being the default of the browser with the second largest market share.

coldtea 11y ago
>This guy later on stresses that we must have free software engines, that we can't have Google owning most of the market. But Blink is licensed under GPL and BSD... So is Chromium IIRC. This doesn't mean much. Being open source is just the first required step. What teams/community contributes to a project matters too regarding it not being controlled by a single company. If Google engineers stopped working on Blink tomorrow it wouldn't turn into some magically organic open source community project. That would take hard work, and tons of volunteers, and might not even happen.

r3bl 11y ago

I really try my best to stick with Mozilla, but their changes in the last year or two have been more then dissatisfying. Like the author said, they have added completely unnecessary things and reduced the customization ability in a several occurrences. I have written a rant about Mozilla a couple of months ago that I still think is relevant: https://blog.r3bl.me/en/mozilla-dissatisfaction/ https://blog.r3bl.me/en/mozilla-dissatisfaction/ Although I'm all up for supporting free and open source software, the situation with Mozilla has became shady enough that I just want to move away from it. Unfortunately, I have nowhere to go. Midori is still not completely usable, I just can't convince myself to switch to Chrome or Chromium because I genuinely feel uncomfortable using them, IE/Edge are only available on Windows so they're practically useless to me, Firefox forks are really nothing groundbreaking, Vivaldi is not open source...

heinrich5991 11y ago
From your rant: Mozilla doesn't actually make money from integrating Pocket with Firefox.
- listic 11y ago
  This is the most unbelievable and I heard it before: when an open source software starts including proprietary bloatware like that, one might think there is money involved...
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > including proprietary bloatware like that No matter how many times it's disproven, this meme just never ends, does it? The Pocket client code is free and open source, just like Firefox itself[0]. If the user uses the Pocket feature, that code makes HTTP requests to another server, which runs a mixture of FOSS and proprietary code. If the user does not use the Pocket feature, it does not. Remember that we are talking about a web browser, the primary function of which is to do exactly that: make HTTP requests to another server that may be running proprietary code[1]. [0] Pocket's client is arguably more free than Firefox is, if we look at the fact that Iceweasel is distributed with the Pocket logo included whereas Debian cannot include the Firefox logo for its patched builds. [1] Unless you only use your browser for accessing http://fsf.org http://fsf.org, but at that point you're probably using Lynx or Seamonkey anyway.

vjvj 11y ago

> "...with pages that only work properly in Google Chrome or its derivatives." This is already well underway. Facebook's advertiser power tools will only work with Chrome.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

johncolanduoni 11y ago

I'm not a fan of another monopoly in the browser space, but the situation is quite different this time around. The largest being that Chrome is a branded version of Chromium, an open source project. The author is right that creating a browser from scratch is a often prohibitive amount of work at this point, but if Google stops allowing innovation or directs it in selfish ways in Chrome/Chromium, all that work is not suddenly lost to competitors. If pages only work in Chromium derivatives, then build your competing browser by refactoring Chromium. If all of the web rendering engines worked off branches of the same open source code base, I don't think you'd see many people working on the frontend crying, and nobody would be locked into a particular platform like we were with IE. That said, I'm more interested in Mozilla's work on Servo (and Rust in general) than Firefox/Gecko. Looking at their roadmap[1], I was surprised at how soon its milestones are. If they hold to that timetable we may be seeing Firefox or a totally new browser steal first place before long, especially on mobile. [1]: https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap

pcwalton 11y ago
> If all of the web rendering engines worked off branches of the same open source code base, I don't think you'd see many people working on the frontend crying, and nobody would be locked into a particular platform like we were with IE. > That said, I'm more interested in Mozilla's work on Servo (and Rust in general) than Firefox/Gecko. These statements are contradictory. If you get what you want in your first paragraph, Servo won't be possible, ever.
- johncolanduoni 11y ago
  The first not what I want, it's the future I think this article is actually predicting (as opposed to IE round two), and I'm saying it won't be such a crying shame. Also not "possible ever" is pretty hyperbolic, considering the lock-in when IE had a monopoly was far stronger than it would be if Chrome/Blink got a monopoly. At the worst we'd have a permissively licensed reference implementation, which is a lot better than trying to be compatible with a closed source blob like IE.

kryptiskt 11y ago

They still haven't released a 64-bit Firefox for Windows. Compound that with all tabs running in the same process and the demands of modern web and it's easy to run out of memory in Firefox on Windows these days. Their neglect of the vast majority of their users is baffling.

detaro 11y ago
> neglect of the vast majority of their users You are aware that both issues are being worked on? Beta versions are available as 64-bit. Release 64bit builds are available on ftp.mozilla.org, but not offered on the main download page yet because of unresolved bugs. > Compound that with all tabs running in the same process That's something a lot of development effort is going into right now. Available in the nightlies if you want to help test.
- spooningtamarin 11y ago
  There's definitely something wrong if it's so hard to go to 64-bit. This has been their problem for almost a decade.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    It's not hard to go to 64 bit. It's hard to go to 64 bit without any performance regressions. (This holds for most performance-critical, memory-access-bound software.)
    - cwzwarich 11y ago
      Hasn't it been 64-bit on OS X and Linux for a while? Presumedly those releases had acceptable performance, so what are the Windows-specific problems?
      - bzbarsky 11y ago
        A few relevant notes: 1) The OS X and Linux versions of Firefox have generally been slower than the Windows version all along, even before switching to 64-bit. Largely because gcc (and later clang/llvm on Mac) generated slower code at least for this particular codebase than MSVC did. This is also why the Windows release versions of Firefox are in fact compiled with MSVC, not gcc. 2) Most benchmarking done by the press is done on Windows, and most of the users are on Windows. Performance regressions on Windows do in fact matter more, both in terms of actual user experience and marketing/perception than performance regressions on other platforms. I wish that were not so, but it is.

chris_wot 11y ago

Really? We're talking about the folks who capitulated on EME and brought DRM into their codebase. Very free!

hguant 11y ago
It's hard to be a relevant web browser if your users can't watch Netflix.
- vetinari 11y ago
  Most internet users cannot watch Netflix, whether their browsers support DRM or not. They see message like this: Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country yet.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    There's that promotion of freedom against discrimination due to the country you live in. Thanks, Mozilla!
- sangnoir 11y ago
  The road to hell is paved with good intentions. They should either focus on their core mission, or change it (to being relevant). Lack of focus/compromizing core values is a shortcut to failure. Saying "it's 1hard to be a relevant web browser if you can't X" is an excuse that can be used to undo each and every point on Mozilla's Manifesto[1] 1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    It does seem that Mozilla can only be true to their stated values when it is convenient to do so.

AsyncAwait 11y ago

Firefox is not the only thing that Mozilla does that is worth supporting. Their Mozilla Research projects, like Daala, Rust and Servo, are really neat and I believe deserve support, so I don't want Mozilla to go away. It is however true that some strange decisions were made in the past year, like the forced pocket integration as well as stopping the development of Persona before it was even ready etc., but they do work on interesting stuff nonetheless and are often the only major player in W3C to be on the right side of many issues, so I still think that they deserve my donations and hopefully yours too - nothing good would come from Mozilla failing.

reddotX 11y ago
i like mozilla but they are more concerned about bringing firefox to black boxes like iphone than open platforms like Ubuntu Phone
- drakenot 11y ago
  If I were in charge of project priorities at Mozilla I would make that same decision all day long. The potential user impact for capturing even a small percentage of iOS users would dwarf the total number of Ubuntu Phone users. I'm not saying I would be against working on an app for Ubuntu Phone, but if resources were constrained and I had to make a choice, it would be an easy decision for me.
- toyg 11y ago
  It's an old diatribe. Pre-Firefox Mozilla poured a lot of effort in the (complex and temperamental) Linux market, with little to show for it. Firefox was very much a Windows-first project and it paid off immensely. Mozilla walk a tight rope.
- manigandham 11y ago
  You say that like it's a bad thing?
erikpukinskis 11y ago
It's also worth remembering that Firefox WAS a research project. At the time, general consensus was that web browsers would be just a part of a suite of content-specific internet browsers: email, news, calendar, etc... The fact that you could ditch all of that and just render web pages better and gain market share was a surprise.

codingdave 11y ago

Didn't Mozilla just drop their contract with Google, saying they no longer needed that revenue? So their dependence on Yahoo was a deliberate and recent choice. While I'm not arguing the ideal of an non-corporate support model, I am curious how it only took a few days to go from "We don't need the revenue" to "Save Mozilla."

detaro 11y ago
Before the arguments were "Save Mozilla from Google" instead of "Save Mozilla from Yahoo". Spreading the reliance over multiple search vendors is at least a step in the right direction.
nnethercote 11y ago
Firefox's deal with Yahoo (or any other search engine) is only valuable so long as Firefox has lots of users. And Firefox's market share has been dropping for years now. That's what the author is worried about.
- e15ctr0n 11y ago
  If the global desktop share of Firefox fell from 31.64% in January 2010 to 16.53% in February 2015,[1] it represents a loss of 3.7% per year (15.11% / 49 months * 12 months / year). In theory, Firefox should reach zero market share in 3.7 years from now, just before the Yahoo deal runs out.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#StatCounter_.28July_2008_to_present.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#St... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/11/yahoo-and-mozilla-form-strategic-partnership/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/11/yahoo-and-mozilla-for...
  - ehsanu1 11y ago
    A linear rate is not very realistic here. Exponential decay would be better, but still probably completely useless as a predictive tool.
grayrest 11y ago

hitlin37 11y ago

i will admit i'm not expert on this, but i often see Google pretty much more than ok with another browser as implementing new technolgies. It makes things standardized if another broswer is implements newer technologies and not just one implementation from major browser vendor.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

this is the same mozilla that bundles the closed source "Pocket" tool into firefox, right? to defend the free web, boycott mozilla

patrickfl 11y ago

I agree we all most stick together and support Mozilla, even if it is as something as simple as using it as our default browser. I've been a Mozilla (Netscape, etc) user since 1998 or whenever the first version came out, and I've always been a fan of what they stand for. Yes they've made a few mistakes, but nothing that can't be easily forgivable.

datashovel 11y ago

I think it's problematic to frame the question as whether or not someone can "compete" with Google. I think the entire browser ecosystem could change for the better if we built a "Meta browser". So the developer of the web page chooses which engine they prefer for rendering their site. The user only installs a single meta-browser, and if they don't currently have the preferred engine (as noted by developer in HTTP Headers) the user is notified and has the option to download and install that engine. Here is a short blog post I wrote about this: https://medium.com/@datashovel/why-isn-t-there-a-meta-browser-204997473c61#.85citda0j https://medium.com/@datashovel/why-isn-t-there-a-meta-browse... With a meta-browser developers don't have to worry about building a site for all major browsers. They could write for a relatively unknown engine and as long as the user has that engine installed it will work seamlessly when the user navigates to that web page.

jdc 11y ago
What if the web page's developer specifies an engine not available on your platform (OS/hardware)?
- datashovel 11y ago
  It would definitely need to be more elaborate than how I described it in my original comment. But I imagine, for example, that could be solved with a list of "preferred engines", which of course would probably fallback to a default "user or system preferred" engine if none were available. It's true it would become a small problem of its own (to try to figure out how to build for just enough engines to make it possible to render correctly on all computers) but I think that makes it possible for the entire ecosystem to have many more browsers and for a lot more experimentation to take place. Because the browser developer no longer has to worry about "Well, if I can't get enough market share to matter to developers, then there's no real point for me to build a rendering engine, since it will probably never be used". Instead if there is even a small number of people interested in their work, there can be a small community of developers who build for that engine, and it will be used (or at least recommended) when a user visits their websites.

filmgirlcw 11y ago

Unpopular opinion, but why should it be the community's burden to save a company that takes in over $300m in revenue (and apparently spends every bit of it) each year and, let's be real, hasn't managed to keep up or evolve along with the web? Why is it up to us to save them if they haven't really tried to save themselves? I love Mozilla -- as a concept -- and I want to live in a world where Mozilla and its products still exist. But I can't remember the last time I used Firefox. And yes, it's partially because I'm a Mac user, but it's also because I can't choose ideals over a superior product. That Mozilla languished on the desktop is sad, but almost understandable. IE languished too. (Microsoft was smart enough to replace it, even if the replacement did come years after it should have), but to languish on mobile is just inexcusable. Firefox Phone was a project that could have worked for certain markets for a very brief period of time, but they had to know they started too late and were going after an ever-shrinking market when they started. Sure, it would have been great for HTML5 to win over apps. It didn't happen. It's likely never going to happen (not until the next mobile paradigm shift happens anyway). But instead of focusing on building the ultimate browser -- desktop or mobile -- I don't know what Mozilla did. I really don't. But now they are struggling. And it puts the good work they do in jeopardy. And that's sad. But since when is it my responsibility (or yours) to subsidize a company with a $300m annual run rate who can't help itself. A company with very opaque goals and no roadmap. I'm all for saving Mozilla but it needs to show me it wants to be saved.

rewqfdsa 11y ago
Google wasn't fighting fair. To allow the Chrome team to run free advertisements on the world's most popular website and to allow them to install their browser by default on the world's most popular mobile operating system, well, it's jus dirty. You could advertise IE6 that way and get significant adoption.
- artifaxx 11y ago
  I agree that being the default is an unfair advantage, but there is a grey zone for sure. Most applications we use have defaults of some sort, so what cutoff should we use to determine the unfair ones consistently?

lazyjones 11y ago

I may be getting old, but why and how did we let web standards inflate to such an extent that only large corporations or organizations are able to build a competitive browser from scratch? There's so much money funneled into browser development these days and the results aren't entirely satisfactory for end users (DRM, security issues) and website developers alike, perhaps it's time to start over with something less bloated.

FooBarWidget 11y ago
Because of momentum and backward compatibility. What you say may make sense from a purely technical point of view, but you are not considering that 99.999% of Internet users are average users. Without backward compatibility you have no way of winning. And with backward compatibility you have... the current mess of patches upon patches.
Silhouette 11y ago
For better or worse, the answer to your question is clear if you consider the range of functionality that users now expect to be provided by any serious browser. Browsers a few years ago had to render a page using HTML and CSS, supported some light scripting with JavaScript, allowed the inclusion of a small number of different image formats (primarily JPEG, PNG, GIF), and delegated any more serious interaction using plug-in technologies like Flash, Java, and ActiveX. Browsers today have to render a page using somewhat larger versions of HTML and CSS, provide a professional quality language runtime for a much larger version of JS, implement a much wider selection of features and the APIs for that JS to use them, render graphical and multimedia content in various formats and allow that content to be generated or controlled in real time in addition to rendering the earlier basic images, potentially support a much wider range of functionality to adapt to different devices and interaction methods, and do all of this orders of magnitude faster to keep up with modern software architectures where a lot of the work is done client-side, and with a much greater attack surface to protect from a security perspective. Some of these changes are "only" quantitative. For example, although the specs have evolved, the basic rules for rendering simple HTML and CSS haven't really changed that much for a long time. Some of the changes are still substantial. For example, introducing tools like flexbox has significant implications for your layout algorithms that simply weren't there before. Some of the changes are qualitative, like introducing entire new areas of functionality to support off-line use or real-time client-server communications, or providing production quality support for graphical presentation via canvas/SVG/WebGL and multimedia audio/video players, which is essential if you are trying to kill off any external plug-ins that would have been used for such things before.

Silhouette 11y ago

I am all for supporting an alternative browser to the corporation-driven Chrome, Safari, and IE/Edge. Sadly, Firefox is no longer it. I believe Mozilla has now become so totally disconnected from the values and principles that made Firefox and the like attractive to a certain set of users that it is beyond redemption. I also believe Firefox is now so totally off the rails that it is probably beyond saving. It appears to have fundamental architectural issues that have limited development in some important areas, but instead of addressing those in recent years, there has been a string of not-entirely-popular UI changes, some high profile new features that it seems hardly anyone actually wants, and a bad and worsening loss of both flexibility and stability particularly around add-ons. This is not the browser I used to recommend, and it makes me sad. I am now hoping that one of the forks, perhaps Pale Moon, will take over the community-driven, open-culture mantle that Mozilla once wore. I am also hoping that with Safari still running WebKit, Chrome now on Blink, and IE11 and Edge doing their own thing, there will remain sufficient need for co-operation in the browser community that we get back to something sensible in terms of standardisation and portability within the next couple of years.

wila 11y ago
Switched my main browser just last week from Firefox to Pale Moon and I couldn't be happier. It is like before firefox got off the rails. Certainly recommended.

rewqfdsa 11y ago

Mozilla died the day Eich left. That's the day it became clear that the organized cared more about posturing than results.

schmichael 11y ago

> prevent another decade of browser monoculture Mobile is our protection against browser monoculture. Even if Chrome/WebKit/Blink/whatever browsers make up the vast majority of mobile, there's such huge variation between them and customizations added by OEMs that - much to web developers chagrin - a monoculture seems like a blessing by comparison. There's also browsers in tons of devices like TVs, consoles, car dashboards, etc that add a staggering amount of variability. (Not to mention embedded browsers in other apps like Steam, anything based on Electron, etc) The author misses the fact that desktop browsers aren't the most relevant web browsers anymore, and there's tons of variability and competing stakeholders even if Mozilla disappeared tomorrow. Edit: Now if the assertion is that we need a nonprofit competitor in the web market, that's a compelling reason for Mozilla to exist (if it can stay sufficiently independent from its commercial benefactors).

pcwalton 11y ago
There's nowhere near as much variation among WebKits as between WebKit and Gecko, or WebKit and Trident, or Trident and Gecko.
- schmichael 11y ago
  That's a pro. Variation sucks. What you want is competing contributors and stakeholders to ensure a single entity's interests don't win. I would argue the massive WebKit/Chromium ecosystem has lots of competing contributors.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    > That's a pro. Variation sucks. No, it doesn't. A browser engine monoculture means that a single engine's bugs and quirks become the standard. As a result the Web platform gets worse, and it becomes harder for new browser engines to enter the market. For example: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/02/a-small-example-of-value-of-browser.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/02/a-small-example-of-value... > What you want is competing contributors and stakeholders to ensure a single entity's interests don't win. That is not the case in practice with either WebKit or Blink. > I would argue the massive WebKit/Chromium ecosystem has lots of competing contributors. Not really. There are two primary ones: Apple and Google. Both organizations have essentially as close to absolute sway over their respective projects as to what Web platform features they implement and how they choose to implement them as to make no difference.

RightWingRabble 11y ago

Mozilla deserves to die. That's how things work in the free marketplace. Sometimes, organizations don't age well and they have to go away. They're replaced by orgs that are more flexible and better able to address the gaps in the current market. Mozilla's decline is by no means the herald of a Google monoculture anymore than embedding IE in Windows was.

cwyers 11y ago
I, uh, Yahoo is paying them enough to stay afloat right now. In what sense has the market spoken here?
- RightWingRabble 11y ago
  > In what sense has the market spoken here? The fact the original article is a call to "save mozilla" isn't enough? Then look at Firefox's market share.