5 ms·

What is the "content discovery" thing they are refocusing on? This doesn't sound like something that belongs in a browser any more than those damn tiles.

greglindahl 11y ago
A browser, since it can observe all of your activity locally without sending it to the cloud, can be a great place for some kinds of content discovery. I, personally, like privacy-preserving discovery mechanisms.
- epoch1970 11y ago
  I'd prefer to not have these "discovery mechanisms" exist in my browser at all. If I want said functionality, I should be able to install it using a browser extension. Unless I opt in like that, my computer's resources should not be wasted on something I don't even want in the first place.
  - tyre 11y ago
    How do you suggest Mozilla makes money?
    - stonogo 11y ago
      Charge?
      - krapp 11y ago
        Why would users start paying money for a browser which is surrounded by free competitors (including forks of Firefox?)
        rickycook 11y ago
        because if they made it less bloated, perform well, and focused on real UX then they might produce the only browser that doesn't suck in some way and that's worth paying for considering how long many of us spend in browsers every day
        krapp 11y ago
        And then someone forks it under another name and offers it for free, because it's open source and you can do that.
        tedunangst 11y ago
        But I was promised users will pay for support for open source!
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - greglindahl 11y ago
      The "discovery mechanisms" we're talking about aren't the search deals that currently make all of Mozilla's money.
    - Khaine 11y ago
      Why do they have to make money? Mozilla is a not for profit, collect donations like most other OSS entities. Its clear they have no idea how to monetise anything to support the not-for-profit, so why bother and go back to the tried and true donations model.
      - Ygg2 11y ago
        Because people need to eat and money buys food. Would donations model work? There is a difference making Wikipedia work, and making Mozilla work.
        Khaine 11y ago
        The people who make FreeBSD, OpenBSD and many other open source products need to eat and buy food. They do it without all of this bullshit, why can't mozilla?
        Ygg2 11y ago
        They also seem way smaller than Mozilla. You're essentially saying, Firefox can't keep up with Chrome lets hack its limbs and see whether that will work.
        Khaine 11y ago
        No, most of the money in Mozilla goes for stuff that is outside of making Firefox, e.g. Firefox OS and community engagement. Firefox was made great without all of this monetising, it can be made great again without it as well.
- yeukhon 11y ago
  They will need to do some work to make that safe. There has been a number of famous attacks able to determine some people's browsing history entirely on the client side. I think most of them have mitigations in place, but we can't dismiss the fact browser itself still contains history. Anyway, what kind of content delivery are you thinking about?
Amezarak 11y ago
> What is the "content discovery" thing they are refocusing on? Perhaps it includes things like the changes to the AwesomeBar they're making? It now (in beta) appears to prefer doing searches and visiting the root of a domain over your bookmarks and history. For example, instead of visiting the local Transmission instance hosted on my NAS when I type "transmission" into the location bar, it wants to "transmission - search with {your default search engine}. (It also gives much weirder suggestions presumably based on the domain name - if I only type "trans" it suggests I visit "translate.google.com", a site I have visited twice in two years, vice the previous behavior, my transmission local instance. So no matter what I do, I have to hit tab twice instead of once.) For me, this behavior is extremely annoying and disrupts my entire location-bar-typing-experience, but by suggesting web searches, perhaps it's meant to encourage content discovery.

greglindahl 11y ago

A browser, since it can observe all of your activity locally without sending it to the cloud, can be a great place for some kinds of content discovery. I, personally, like privacy-preserving discovery mechanisms.

epoch1970 11y ago
I'd prefer to not have these "discovery mechanisms" exist in my browser at all. If I want said functionality, I should be able to install it using a browser extension. Unless I opt in like that, my computer's resources should not be wasted on something I don't even want in the first place.
- tyre 11y ago
  How do you suggest Mozilla makes money?
  - stonogo 11y ago
    Charge?
    - krapp 11y ago
      Why would users start paying money for a browser which is surrounded by free competitors (including forks of Firefox?)
      - rickycook 11y ago
        because if they made it less bloated, perform well, and focused on real UX then they might produce the only browser that doesn't suck in some way and that's worth paying for considering how long many of us spend in browsers every day
        krapp 11y ago
        And then someone forks it under another name and offers it for free, because it's open source and you can do that.
        tedunangst 11y ago
        But I was promised users will pay for support for open source!
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - greglindahl 11y ago
    The "discovery mechanisms" we're talking about aren't the search deals that currently make all of Mozilla's money.
  - Khaine 11y ago
    Why do they have to make money? Mozilla is a not for profit, collect donations like most other OSS entities. Its clear they have no idea how to monetise anything to support the not-for-profit, so why bother and go back to the tried and true donations model.
    - Ygg2 11y ago
      Because people need to eat and money buys food. Would donations model work? There is a difference making Wikipedia work, and making Mozilla work.
      - Khaine 11y ago
        The people who make FreeBSD, OpenBSD and many other open source products need to eat and buy food. They do it without all of this bullshit, why can't mozilla?
        Ygg2 11y ago
        They also seem way smaller than Mozilla. You're essentially saying, Firefox can't keep up with Chrome lets hack its limbs and see whether that will work.
        Khaine 11y ago
        No, most of the money in Mozilla goes for stuff that is outside of making Firefox, e.g. Firefox OS and community engagement. Firefox was made great without all of this monetising, it can be made great again without it as well.
yeukhon 11y ago
They will need to do some work to make that safe. There has been a number of famous attacks able to determine some people's browsing history entirely on the client side. I think most of them have mitigations in place, but we can't dismiss the fact browser itself still contains history. Anyway, what kind of content delivery are you thinking about?

Amezarak 11y ago

> What is the "content discovery" thing they are refocusing on? Perhaps it includes things like the changes to the AwesomeBar they're making? It now (in beta) appears to prefer doing searches and visiting the root of a domain over your bookmarks and history. For example, instead of visiting the local Transmission instance hosted on my NAS when I type "transmission" into the location bar, it wants to "transmission - search with {your default search engine}. (It also gives much weirder suggestions presumably based on the domain name - if I only type "trans" it suggests I visit "translate.google.com", a site I have visited twice in two years, vice the previous behavior, my transmission local instance. So no matter what I do, I have to hit tab twice instead of once.) For me, this behavior is extremely annoying and disrupts my entire location-bar-typing-experience, but by suggesting web searches, perhaps it's meant to encourage content discovery.