8 ms·

The trouble is, it costs money (or a lot of time from talented people) to support a project the size of a browser. I would imagine getting some funding helps ke

The trouble is, it costs money (or a lot of time from talented people) to support a project the size of a browser. I would imagine getting some funding helps keep things afloat. You even say, "maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation's backing behind it (or a government's)". I suppose we should expect the goodwill of corporate sponsorship, but this relationship can quickly turn into the "sponsor" asking for things in exchange for donations. This situation exposes a weakness and requires the recognition of the fragility of the open source model (at least for larger-scale projects). We've seen weird corporate-backed things in NPM projects before. It happens, but what is the better alternative? How do we prevent it? Most corporations only support open source projects out of self-interest: that is, they have a stake in seeing a particular project succeed because their stack may depend on the software.

pmlnr 9y ago
Everyone keeps coming with the money problem. But... how about they maintain a browser, with browser functions only? No PDF-JS, no Pocket, no Hello, etc. Just core browser functions and features. Yes, it might mean scaling back, which is one of the swear words in a growth-oriented belief, but that way, the money should be enough - it was enough for a decade, what changed?
- baq 9y ago
  With all due respect, rendering PDFs is something I consider core browser functionality. Pocket, most certainly not, though it's nice I suppose. Hello was... I don't know what it was. Checking if the market is there at all? Not something I expected to be in a browser.
  - crankylinuxuser 9y ago
    pdf.js seems to work quite nicely. Seems that's no different than opening with external program, or using a plugin, or using an extension. After all,those things can be updated, whereas the browser should have more core functionality that enable new document types to being opened.
    - garaetjjte 9y ago
      pdf.js performance is horrible, and now without NPAPI it is impossible to view PDF in firefox tab.
      - amluto 9y ago
        PDF.js performs quite well for me and works fine in tabs. It has always been a better experience for me than PDFium, for example.
  - hedora 9y ago
    I never understood why anyone wanted their browser to render pdfs. PDF.js is slow, buggy, and can’t edit documents. Every major OS ships with a better PDF reader, and there are still better open source PDF readers available on all major platforms.
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      > PDF.js is slow, buggy, and can’t edit documents. That is leagues ahead of native PDF plugins which are slow, buggy, full of vulnerabilities, closed source, require a deprecated plugin infrastructure and usually can't edit documents either. PDF.js is one of the better things to come out of Mozilla.
      - throwaway2048 9y ago
        PDF.js has had a huge amount of its own vulnerabilities.
      - superkuh 9y ago
        Okay. But the solution is to not involve the browser at all. It's there to browse. Once you find and download the file have it open in a real application designed for reading pdf.
        geraltofrivia 9y ago
        Ideally, yeah. But often PDFs are integrated with the web experience as another web page. Or atleast that's how I treat them. I have 2-5 research papers open in my tabs at all times, and I browse through them like I would with any other article. Sure if it piques my interest I would download it, organize it but I wouldn't go through the pains of doing that for every pdf I lay my eyes upon.
        superkuh 9y ago
        >download it, organize it but I wouldn't go through the pains of doing that for every pdf I lay my eyes upon. You don't have to do that. Just set your browser to open the file in a real application. It'll automagically download to some temp dir (ie, /tmp) and you won't have to care about file paths or organization at all (unless you want to). I have tens of research papers open in my tabs at all times. But for a good experience reading I open the full text in my pdf reader.
  - paulryanrogers 9y ago
    This gets to the heart of the matter: what is the core functionality? For some saving bookmarks isn't effective while a solution like Pocket fits them better. Hello was an experiment to see if making video communication more accessible would connect people. Consider the saying about how no one uses every part of Microsoft Word, yet everyone uses a different ~10%. Anyway, I think it's great that Mozilla experiment and try pushing the web forward. If only they were more transparent and consistently made these things opt in.
- rdiddly 9y ago
  ESPECIALLY since there exists a whole "add-ons" infrastructure to handle extras.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  This is not interesting to the people involved. They hijacked Mozilla to have a private playground for fun projects paid for by the search engine integration.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  Building a secure, fast, usable web browser is a near-impossible task on its own. Anything else they do involves a couple of orders of magnitude less effort. Mozilla would still need the vast majority of funding they currently get to do that. The problem isn't that they're doing too much - it's that they have nearly no business model, and any attempt to create a business model appears to be selling out to users.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    No. It is actually pretty easy. Just fork chromium, strip out the spyware, and add your own layer of features on top. There are a lot of companies doing this now and Mozilla would be far more successful if they followed this model instead of trying to copy chrome's user experience on top of their inferior browser engine.
    - paulryanrogers 9y ago
      Yet we also need variety in our engines. Otherwise it's IE6 all over again. Diversity makes us stronger.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      Then we get one company deciding which features should and should not be available to a web page.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Are those things really taking up much employee time? Frankly, they don't seem like it. And some side projects are nice - like Rust and Servo. Persona too, even if it didn't caught on.
scrollaway 9y ago
There are plenty of open source companies. The company I founded is built on open source principles many of them inspired by Mozilla. It's a bigger challenge, because it restricts your freedoms as a company in favour of the user's freedoms. However Mozilla's mistakes are not due to the open source nature of the company at all, they are due to mismanagement. They are due to poor understanding of your own userbase. Poor communication with users and employees. Complete lack of judgement. These are sticks Mozilla puts in its own wheels. It's hard to make money, but it's easy to know what not to do. Simply asking your employees: "Is this a good idea?" would have yielded a clear "Fuck no". That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not.
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 exemplifies the poor misunderstanding of the userbase: > Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs To call advertisements "user-enhancing" is an affront and betrays values like privacy that Mozilla claims to espouse
  - dleslie 9y ago
    Time to do away with whoever led the charge on this one.
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    betrays values like privacy I do not (now -- at the time that person made that tweet, I did, but not on the browser) work at Mozilla. However. The "tiles" concept was literally an experiment in whether it's possible to construct an ad system that does respect privacy. The basic idea was: * Advertisers submit their ads to Mozilla. Mozilla wraps them up into "bundles", made up of a bunch of different ads along with metadata to use in determining which to show. * The browser downloads the "bundles" from Mozilla, and caches them locally. * The browser, based on local data only it has access to, and the metadata in the bundles, decides which ads to show. In other words, unlike a Google-style model where the ads are stored remote, loaded on demand, and the decision of what to show is made on the server side, this stored all ad content locally and the decision of what to show was also made entirely locally. So neither the advertiser nor the distributor could know whether a particular person saw an ad or (if they happened to) why the decision was made to show them that ad rather than a different one. You may not like that, and you're free not to like it. But to argue that it "betrays" privacy is simply factually false. And Mozilla's mission is, in large part, to find ways to advance and sustain the web in ways that respect the users. Trying to develop a privacy-respecting way to deliver ads -- since so much of the web is dependent on ads -- is entirely within that mission.
craigsmansion 9y ago
> The trouble is, it costs money [..] I would imagine getting some funding helps keep things afloat. Mozilla has accrued a lot of money over the years. So much money that they could have funded--just on interest--a comfortable loft somewhere filled with hackers on a decent salary who are fanatical about the open web, and maybe a single guy with a tie to "call google", in perpetuity. That should have been the base case for Mozilla: open web, modern browser, users first. Unfortunately, brass doesn't vote itself out for the greater good. A modern browser is a delivery platform. The "open web" is a marketing tool. And users are not as important as advertisers. The rationale is that without clout, they'll be unable to prevent worse things from happening, so they have to allow for these compromises on the open web to maintain that clout, and every setback is relegated to "not our hill to die on," with every next hill becoming "not our hill." It seems like an unavoidable tragedy, but if we look at similar organisations, can we imagine the FSF or the EFF making compromises on their respective missions, even if they lose popularity or even run out of funding? I feel they would rather cease to exist than allow for corruption of their stated mission.
- bradleyjg 9y ago
  I noticed a similar thing with Wikipedia and the ACLU. Too much money seems to in some ways be a curse. Organizations seem unable to Instead of just put a bunch of money away for a rainy day and then stop fundraising for a while when there's enough money to carry out the core mission. Instead they find more and more missions to expand into in order to spend whatever level of money is coming in. The problem with this is that the people working on this peripheral expansion missions don't think of themselves as peripheral. When there's a money crunch or a values conflict they will fight hard for theirs even at the expense of what the organization was always supposed to be about.
  - newfoundglory 9y ago
    What is the Aclu doing that isn't part of its mission?
jstewartmobile 9y ago
I think the trouble is that the "web" is an overcomplicated BS clusterf___ for exploiting the plebes. Some guy posted here a week ago in wonderment over how Mozilla can maintain a browser for a mere $400M+ a year. $400M+ a year!!! If it takes that much engineering to deliver something which is not substantially different than what we were using 17 years ago, I'd count that as an engineering failure.
- paulryanrogers 9y ago
  At a high level the needle hasn't moved much. But even little movements do add up. I'd rather not go back to a web before fuzz testing, fewer accessibility standards, and password managers. Not to mention AOL and its kind dividing the world into disconnected, walled gardens.
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    I don't know how your year 2000 was, but in my year 2000, I had broadband, no AOL, and a functioning web browser (which was not IE or Netscape), that could: * Display web pages * Show images * Play songs and videos * Deliver applications (via Java instead of Javascript, granted) * Download files, and more! Almost anywhere outside of NYC and SoCal, $400M is still an epic shitload of money.
y_u_no_rust 9y ago
What about a kernel though? Mozilla waste some much money on their EFF-lite activism bullshit.
Feniks 9y ago
This. I like my niche obscure anti marketing parasite browsers. But I am well aware there's a lot of Mozilla code in Waterfox and Pale Moon. And ultimately its MS, Mozilla and Google who run this show. And out of those Mozilla is still the least bad.

pmlnr 9y ago

Everyone keeps coming with the money problem. But... how about they maintain a browser, with browser functions only? No PDF-JS, no Pocket, no Hello, etc. Just core browser functions and features. Yes, it might mean scaling back, which is one of the swear words in a growth-oriented belief, but that way, the money should be enough - it was enough for a decade, what changed?

baq 9y ago
With all due respect, rendering PDFs is something I consider core browser functionality. Pocket, most certainly not, though it's nice I suppose. Hello was... I don't know what it was. Checking if the market is there at all? Not something I expected to be in a browser.
- crankylinuxuser 9y ago
  pdf.js seems to work quite nicely. Seems that's no different than opening with external program, or using a plugin, or using an extension. After all,those things can be updated, whereas the browser should have more core functionality that enable new document types to being opened.
  - garaetjjte 9y ago
    pdf.js performance is horrible, and now without NPAPI it is impossible to view PDF in firefox tab.
    - amluto 9y ago
      PDF.js performs quite well for me and works fine in tabs. It has always been a better experience for me than PDFium, for example.
- hedora 9y ago
  I never understood why anyone wanted their browser to render pdfs. PDF.js is slow, buggy, and can’t edit documents. Every major OS ships with a better PDF reader, and there are still better open source PDF readers available on all major platforms.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    > PDF.js is slow, buggy, and can’t edit documents. That is leagues ahead of native PDF plugins which are slow, buggy, full of vulnerabilities, closed source, require a deprecated plugin infrastructure and usually can't edit documents either. PDF.js is one of the better things to come out of Mozilla.
    - throwaway2048 9y ago
      PDF.js has had a huge amount of its own vulnerabilities.
    - superkuh 9y ago
      Okay. But the solution is to not involve the browser at all. It's there to browse. Once you find and download the file have it open in a real application designed for reading pdf.
      - geraltofrivia 9y ago
        Ideally, yeah. But often PDFs are integrated with the web experience as another web page. Or atleast that's how I treat them. I have 2-5 research papers open in my tabs at all times, and I browse through them like I would with any other article. Sure if it piques my interest I would download it, organize it but I wouldn't go through the pains of doing that for every pdf I lay my eyes upon.
        superkuh 9y ago
        >download it, organize it but I wouldn't go through the pains of doing that for every pdf I lay my eyes upon. You don't have to do that. Just set your browser to open the file in a real application. It'll automagically download to some temp dir (ie, /tmp) and you won't have to care about file paths or organization at all (unless you want to). I have tens of research papers open in my tabs at all times. But for a good experience reading I open the full text in my pdf reader.
- paulryanrogers 9y ago
  This gets to the heart of the matter: what is the core functionality? For some saving bookmarks isn't effective while a solution like Pocket fits them better. Hello was an experiment to see if making video communication more accessible would connect people. Consider the saying about how no one uses every part of Microsoft Word, yet everyone uses a different ~10%. Anyway, I think it's great that Mozilla experiment and try pushing the web forward. If only they were more transparent and consistently made these things opt in.
rdiddly 9y ago
ESPECIALLY since there exists a whole "add-ons" infrastructure to handle extras.
_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
This is not interesting to the people involved. They hijacked Mozilla to have a private playground for fun projects paid for by the search engine integration.
vertex-four 9y ago
Building a secure, fast, usable web browser is a near-impossible task on its own. Anything else they do involves a couple of orders of magnitude less effort. Mozilla would still need the vast majority of funding they currently get to do that. The problem isn't that they're doing too much - it's that they have nearly no business model, and any attempt to create a business model appears to be selling out to users.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  No. It is actually pretty easy. Just fork chromium, strip out the spyware, and add your own layer of features on top. There are a lot of companies doing this now and Mozilla would be far more successful if they followed this model instead of trying to copy chrome's user experience on top of their inferior browser engine.
  - paulryanrogers 9y ago
    Yet we also need variety in our engines. Otherwise it's IE6 all over again. Diversity makes us stronger.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Then we get one company deciding which features should and should not be available to a web page.
icebraining 9y ago
Are those things really taking up much employee time? Frankly, they don't seem like it. And some side projects are nice - like Rust and Servo. Persona too, even if it didn't caught on.

scrollaway 9y ago

There are plenty of open source companies. The company I founded is built on open source principles many of them inspired by Mozilla. It's a bigger challenge, because it restricts your freedoms as a company in favour of the user's freedoms. However Mozilla's mistakes are not due to the open source nature of the company at all, they are due to mismanagement. They are due to poor understanding of your own userbase. Poor communication with users and employees. Complete lack of judgement. These are sticks Mozilla puts in its own wheels. It's hard to make money, but it's easy to know what not to do. Simply asking your employees: "Is this a good idea?" would have yielded a clear "Fuck no". That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not.

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 exemplifies the poor misunderstanding of the userbase: > Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs To call advertisements "user-enhancing" is an affront and betrays values like privacy that Mozilla claims to espouse
- dleslie 9y ago
  Time to do away with whoever led the charge on this one.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  betrays values like privacy I do not (now -- at the time that person made that tweet, I did, but not on the browser) work at Mozilla. However. The "tiles" concept was literally an experiment in whether it's possible to construct an ad system that does respect privacy. The basic idea was: * Advertisers submit their ads to Mozilla. Mozilla wraps them up into "bundles", made up of a bunch of different ads along with metadata to use in determining which to show. * The browser downloads the "bundles" from Mozilla, and caches them locally. * The browser, based on local data only it has access to, and the metadata in the bundles, decides which ads to show. In other words, unlike a Google-style model where the ads are stored remote, loaded on demand, and the decision of what to show is made on the server side, this stored all ad content locally and the decision of what to show was also made entirely locally. So neither the advertiser nor the distributor could know whether a particular person saw an ad or (if they happened to) why the decision was made to show them that ad rather than a different one. You may not like that, and you're free not to like it. But to argue that it "betrays" privacy is simply factually false. And Mozilla's mission is, in large part, to find ways to advance and sustain the web in ways that respect the users. Trying to develop a privacy-respecting way to deliver ads -- since so much of the web is dependent on ads -- is entirely within that mission.

craigsmansion 9y ago

> The trouble is, it costs money [..] I would imagine getting some funding helps keep things afloat. Mozilla has accrued a lot of money over the years. So much money that they could have funded--just on interest--a comfortable loft somewhere filled with hackers on a decent salary who are fanatical about the open web, and maybe a single guy with a tie to "call google", in perpetuity. That should have been the base case for Mozilla: open web, modern browser, users first. Unfortunately, brass doesn't vote itself out for the greater good. A modern browser is a delivery platform. The "open web" is a marketing tool. And users are not as important as advertisers. The rationale is that without clout, they'll be unable to prevent worse things from happening, so they have to allow for these compromises on the open web to maintain that clout, and every setback is relegated to "not our hill to die on," with every next hill becoming "not our hill." It seems like an unavoidable tragedy, but if we look at similar organisations, can we imagine the FSF or the EFF making compromises on their respective missions, even if they lose popularity or even run out of funding? I feel they would rather cease to exist than allow for corruption of their stated mission.

bradleyjg 9y ago
I noticed a similar thing with Wikipedia and the ACLU. Too much money seems to in some ways be a curse. Organizations seem unable to Instead of just put a bunch of money away for a rainy day and then stop fundraising for a while when there's enough money to carry out the core mission. Instead they find more and more missions to expand into in order to spend whatever level of money is coming in. The problem with this is that the people working on this peripheral expansion missions don't think of themselves as peripheral. When there's a money crunch or a values conflict they will fight hard for theirs even at the expense of what the organization was always supposed to be about.
- newfoundglory 9y ago
  What is the Aclu doing that isn't part of its mission?

jstewartmobile 9y ago

I think the trouble is that the "web" is an overcomplicated BS clusterf___ for exploiting the plebes. Some guy posted here a week ago in wonderment over how Mozilla can maintain a browser for a mere $400M+ a year. $400M+ a year!!! If it takes that much engineering to deliver something which is not substantially different than what we were using 17 years ago, I'd count that as an engineering failure.

paulryanrogers 9y ago
At a high level the needle hasn't moved much. But even little movements do add up. I'd rather not go back to a web before fuzz testing, fewer accessibility standards, and password managers. Not to mention AOL and its kind dividing the world into disconnected, walled gardens.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  I don't know how your year 2000 was, but in my year 2000, I had broadband, no AOL, and a functioning web browser (which was not IE or Netscape), that could: * Display web pages * Show images * Play songs and videos * Deliver applications (via Java instead of Javascript, granted) * Download files, and more! Almost anywhere outside of NYC and SoCal, $400M is still an epic shitload of money.

y_u_no_rust 9y ago

What about a kernel though? Mozilla waste some much money on their EFF-lite activism bullshit.

Feniks 9y ago

This. I like my niche obscure anti marketing parasite browsers. But I am well aware there's a lot of Mozilla code in Waterfox and Pale Moon. And ultimately its MS, Mozilla and Google who run this show. And out of those Mozilla is still the least bad.