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Mozilla’s Fix-the-Internet Incubator

205 points by SQL2219 6y ago

ryuukk_ 6y ago
just like a sect
kps 6y ago
> Fix-the-Internet — Join us on Slack Doubt.
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  Mozilla has been part of the problem for ages now. Even their language Rust has been using Discord. Not to mention that their browser has been the pioneer on telemetry.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    So strange they chose Slack and Discord when they had a perfectly fine IRC server (that now is deprecated). Instead of trying to improve IRC (either the protocol or any clients), they chose to go with closed-source hosted platforms. Damn shame.
    - SmallPeePeeMan 6y ago
      > that now is deprecated It is not deprecated. It is completely dead. Try connecting to irc.mozilla.org — you can’t because it’s permanently offline.
      - capableweb 6y ago
        Thanks for the correction! Sad to hear. Last time I checked, it was just "advisable" to not use it...
    - steveklabnik 6y ago
      Mozilla chose Matrix, not Slack or Discord.
      - catalogia 6y ago
        On the Mozilla branded website that this discussion is about: "Join us on Slack"
        steveklabnik 6y ago
        I missed that! That is very strange, given their very public move to Matrix.
        freeopinion 6y ago
        From any Matrix client try searching for Rust. It pops right up for me with #/room/#rust:matrix.org at the top of the list. Now try searching for Firefox. There's a Russian Firefox community on Page 2 of the search results. There are beta and nightly groups on page 3. There's various other noise. But the maintainers have hidden the real Matrix room for Firefox so well, it doesn't even seem to be in the search index. The choice was public. The move has not been public at all.
    - cadence- 6y ago
      IRC was not bringing any money.
  - cadence- 6y ago
    It’s hard for Mozilla to fight for privacy on the internet since their main customer is Google. Firefox needs to have enough tracking in it, in order to send data to Google. Otherwise Mozilla would earn no money. And there are no other major customers willing to pay Mozilla. Pretty much the only other options are Yahoo/Verizon (they are currently in a legal fight With Mozilla about a breach of contract that happened in 2017), and Bing (but Microsoft is currently on a mission to promote new Edge, and even included various pop-ups in Windows 10 to discourage people from using Firefox, so I don’t think they are interested in being Mozilla’s customer at the moment). Mozilla has to stay in bed with google, and this is going to muddle any kind of privacy-related initiatives and communication from them.
    - syshum 6y ago
      I thought the Mozilla Google partnership ended several years ago when they changed to Yahoo for Default search and signed a MASSIVE mutiyear deal with Yahoo. I know they terminated it (and kept the money) when Yahoo was sold to Verizon but I had not heard they signed a new deal with Google, I assume they were surviving off the Yahoo Money still
      - cadence- 6y ago
        They currently have search deal with google. This was disclosed in their yearly financial statements. ~90% of their revenue comes from google. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3487825/mozilla-in-trouble-2018-revenue-fell-20-expenses-exceed-income-for-first-time.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3487825/mozilla-in-tro...
      - drapred7 6y ago
        Cadence's point is very valid. Mozilla gets funding by charging search engines to be the default in Firefox and that isn't changing anytime soon. I wish people didn't instinctively downvote when someone is wrong on a technicality, but this is a site filled with nerds after all lol EDIT: i guess he isnt even technically wrong.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    Rust's decisions about chat platforms has nothing to do with Mozilla. Mozilla chose Matrix, not Discord, for example. (Also, while the popular version is "Rust chose Discord," it's actually more complex than that: each team decides what they want. Many chose Discord. A bunch chose Zulip. The embedded working group is on Matrix.)
    - dependenttypes 6y ago
      Mozilla chose Matrix but they advertise Slack on the linked page. > Rust's decisions about chat platforms has nothing to do with Mozilla. Is Rust not a project of mozilla?
      - kasane 6y ago
        Rust is not a Mozilla project, but it is sponsored by Mozilla. https://research.mozilla.org/rust/ https://research.mozilla.org/rust/
        dependenttypes 6y ago
        Interesting, I thought that Rust was a Mozilla project because the Wikipedia page listed it as its developer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)
        dralley 6y ago
        Mozilla was heavily involved in the early development of Rust (and since there is no Rust Foundation, is the holder of the Rust trademarks etc.). But at this point however you can't really call it a Mozilla project as active development is no longer dominated by Mozilla employees. Holding the trademark is just a formality owing to there not being a better way to do that without starting up a new Foundation.
      - steveklabnik 6y ago
        > Mozilla chose Matrix but they advertise Slack on the linked page. Gotcha, I missed this. Very odd. > Is Rust not a project of mozilla? Mozilla was the first sponsor of the project, and still sponsors a bunch of stuff to this day. But they don't own the project, and cannot make decisions on its behalf.
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    > Not to mention that their browser has been the pioneer on telemetry. That's patently false. It pales in comparison to the telemetry sent by Edge: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/study-ranks-edges-default-privacy-settings-the-lowest-of-all-major-browsers/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/study...
    - dependenttypes 6y ago
      https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165858896176660480 https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604... Regardless, I said that it was the pioneer, not that it has the most telemetry.
  - nunja 6y ago
    How's Rust "their" language ? It just started as a side project from one of their dev.
- worble 6y ago
  I don't know why they're not also advertising their Matrix server: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix
  - sfink 6y ago
    There are quite a few different groups within Mozilla that are accustomed to and comfortable with different communication platforms. For chat, it's mostly Slack vs Matrix. Everyone around me will roll their eyes and grumble if you suggest using Slack for anything but very very clearly company-internal stuff. But other groups "just use Slack" and don't think twice about it, so are a bit confused when we demand to know why they're only on Slack. I guess few large-ish companies have managed to keep their communication platforms rationalized and consistent. It's more important for Mozilla to stay open than it is for most places, though.
SmallPeePeeMan 6y ago
Mozilla needs to look in the mirror to fix the internet. Maybe someone else besides Mitchell Baker at the helm can do that. It used to be a company with great engineering. Now it’s a company with excellent cultural and diversity management.
thepiratesailor 6y ago
This is total BS. If anything that needs a fix is Mozilla. They have been taking money in 100s of Millions of dollars from the same company that tried to kill their flagship product. Nothing is wrong with Internet. But a lot wrong with Web. Mozilla cannot fix Web until they start attacking FAANG, which I very much doubt they will.
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  That would be nice but without that money they are dead in the water. Mozilla is currently the only thing standing against a total browser monoculture.
  - est31 6y ago
    There's Apple as well, and with the continued decline of Firefox market shares (both absolute and relative), their importance increases. Everywhere where Firefox runs, Chrome can also be installed, so you can just tell users to install Chrome, while it's not possible to do so with iOS devices. The rendering engine of Safari is similar to blink but not the same. And more importantly, Apple has the money to finance WebKit coming forward, as well as the willpower as they love to implement things themselves. I'm not so sure about how well Mozilla will do in the future compared to Apple.
    - lern_too_spel 6y ago
      Apple doesn't care about the open web. They've repeatedly tried to push encumbered media formats and not supported open ones, and they've held back implementing standards that pose any threat to the App Store. The fact that iOS doesn't allow other browsers at all is detrimental to the web.
      - est31 6y ago
        They do care about the open web, but in their own way. Of course their own profits are most important. Same goes for Google. I still hold the kicking out of flash to Apple's credit. Google followed them on mobile devices and this was the start of the end of flash on the web (the end of the end is soon to come!). As for the encumbered media formats point, it's been mainly a Mozilla and Google thing, as both distribute their browsers gratis. Apple already pays lots of money for patents on other aspects of their devices, like the wireless connectivity parts. But Apple has been warming up to open formats slowly. They've implemented opus support in Safari (although sadly no ogg/opus). They've joined AOM and maybe one day they'll implement AV1 in Safari as well. In general, there is a ton of momentum behind H.264 and its successors which is hard to direct towards open alternatives. Outside of browsers, media formats like VP9 are practically dead. Most video cameras use H264 or H265. DVB-S2 uses H264.
RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
Standards-compliant web browsers are impossibly complex to build and maintain, which is why the handful which exist are all under powerful commercial influence. If you want to "fix" the internet, spend some time enriching open, federated protocols that are designed to be human-scale. The internet is here to stay, but we can do better than the web as it presently exists. Gemini is worth looking into: https://gemini.circumlunar.space https://gemini.circumlunar.space
- catalogia 6y ago
  Drew DeVault has a good blog article about this problem. Choice quote: > I used wget to download all 1,217 of the W3C specifications which have been published at the time of writing, of which web browsers need to implement a substantial subset in order to provide a modern web experience. I ran a word count on all of these specifications. How complex would you guess the web is? > The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing. If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications. https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
  - captn3m0 6y ago
    Wow. Who would like a w1c specification set, with everything trimmed down like how k3s.
  - gsnedders 6y ago
    This seems exceptionally misleading. Playing with the filters on https://www.w3.org/TR/ https://www.w3.org/TR/, we find out filtering to latest documents (to exclude cases where there are multiple versions of a single document) brings us down to 953, excluding non-normative notes brings us down to 573, we can likely exclude all semweb-related specs to bring us down to 480 specs. And that's still including 199 working drafts, not all of which have any implementation (and some are unlikely to ever have any at this point, essentially long-abandoned). The web platform arguably has problems with scale, but it's nowhere near that extreme.
chillydawg 6y ago
Genuinely, if they want to help fix the internet, they should sack everyone not doing core browser work and spend every penny they have spare on marketing to increase their market share. Busses, billboards, TV, radio, Google ads, whatever. Spend it all. Millions a month, internationally. With balance in the browser market comes accountability for Google, which is sorely lacking. Everything else is just mucking about, imo.
- emilsedgh 6y ago
  Mozilla is in a infinite game. An all-in approach like that could be fatal. They are in this for the long term. Specially because they can be out-spent massively. If Google, Microsoft, Apple, any of the competitors want, they can outspend Mozilla during their "burn all money" campaign and drown them. Also, Mozilla doesn't exist to "make Google accountable". Mozilla is there to ensure the web stays open, and it's been doing a damn-fine job at that. Not perfect; but damn good. Update: Also, how does balance in browser market make Google accountable? Google is far bigger than Chrome.
- snazz 6y ago
  I find it very hard to believe that Mozilla would have any luck with any amount of advertising. Firefox offers no features that are useful to non-technical people that Chrome doesn't have. If anything, it's worse for the average person, since there are quite a few sites that don't work well in Firefox. It's not crazy fast like Chrome was compared to Firefox when Chrome came out. Privacy is difficult to quantify or feel, so it's not really an effective marketing technique to market to a large number of people.
  - asdff 6y ago
    FF does strain your overall system a lot more than chrome. If they kept track of this, users will see better battery life. I save hours, personally.
hu3 6y ago
Mozilla is largely a for-profit corporation. Their end goal is profit. Same for their execs: maximize their own profit individually. Once this is understood it's easier digest PR bulshit.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Can you expand? I did a little research and found on Wikipedia: > The Mozilla Foundation is an American not-for-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project... Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a tax-paying entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue. [1] > The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation... Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary. [2] So seems like the for-profit part is just to give it more flexibility in achieving the non-profit aims? I'd love to know why you think "their end goal is profit". There's nothing in the Wikipedia pages about any substantiated criticism there. So just curious if there are real reasons for thinking this, or not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
  - hu3 6y ago
    You're right. I meant corporation. Fixed.
Nextgrid 6y ago
You want to fix the Internet? Easy. Start by releasing a browser with built-in uBlock Origin and a bunch of other extensions that make the internet better (strip utm_* crap from URLs, etc). You know, actually do something instead of merely pretending like they currently do. Their current "tracking protection" is an absolute fraud when you look at the list of domains it whitelists explicitly, and both Google and Facebook are in there. The opt-out telemetry (illegal under the GDPR, should be opt-in instead) as well as the telemetry for those who opt-out of telemetry (yeah you heard that right) is just the icing on the cake.
- dralley 6y ago
  >(illegal under the GDPR, should be opt-in instead) Anonymized telemetry that cannot be correlated to an individual user, and which contains no sensitive information, is perfectly legal under the GDPR. Mozilla telemetry isn't tracking your movements across the web, it's measuring things like "how many crashes are being experienced per 1000 hours on Nvidia graphics cards" and "what percentage of users have addons installed".
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Anonymized datasets have been deanonymized in the past so there's no telling how anonymous the telemetry actually is and when in doubt I'd err on the side of caution. The IP address is also being transmitted as part of the telemetry request, and while they can claim they don't log it there is nothing technically preventing them (or an attacker) from logging it which could be a privacy violation especially if you correlate it with the telemetry data.
jorangreef 6y ago
Following Conway's Law, the problem with the internet is not so much the internet but the destruction of IRC and the centralization of email. The stagnation in open-source email software and security, the embrace-extend-extinguish of AMP for email, and the decline in quality independent email providers. Fix email (and revive IRC) and we can start fixing the internet.
- zanny 6y ago
  Probably less than 1% of browser users have any idea what IRC or SMTP are. For your average user chat is whatever FAANG puts on their device / screen and email is whatever address one of the several services you signed up for when getting Internet gave you. The Internet is considered broken by Mozilla because corporate centralization has turned the web experience into at most a dozen websites per user down from the potential infinity of domains possible.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> Join us on Slack to be a part of the Builders community. I know it's a bit petty, but I find it quite odd that Mozilla is promoting (or at least using) Slack, when Slack has a large feature—video conferencing—which only works in Chrome due to using non-standards-compliant WebRTC. And when asked by Mozilla, Slack reportedly stated they weren't interested in fixing it.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  And Mozilla recently stated they are moving comms to Matrix. Talking about fixing the internet while using slack is an oxymoron.
  - clarry 6y ago
    I came to say the exact same thing.. using and endorsing slack makes them a part of the problem.
gambler 6y ago
How about investing into their own browser in ways that actually improve the internet? Like adding IPFS support? Or PGP encryption?
- zanny 6y ago
  IPFS isn't http. Web browsers as software are meant to access and render html obtained via http. Content addressing on IPFS is entirely different to how dns resolution works and as such you shouldn't just glue on an entirely different name resolution system to existing software. You want an ipfs browser that is UX optimized for actually browsing ipfs content. Back in the day browsers supported alternative protocols like ftp but in practice those are largely abandoned to single function as an http browser. And what in the world would adding PGP to Firefox do? Its not an email client. Its not an IM client. A website that wanted to can already use PGP via wasm. Firefox is not an SMTP client, its an HTTP one.
  - zoobab 6y ago
    "Web browsers as software are meant to access and render html obtained via http" HTTP is a slave protocol, where you need a master. It's time to retire it, and design the web with an uncensorable protocol that does not loose memory. The slave design of a web server need to go.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Can you unpack this, because there's much that may or may not be in what you said.
      - 6510 6y ago
        The goal should be to render HTML documents not control where they come from. The server/client model or the master/slave model is only interesting if the clients are mediocre computers with limited bandwidth. Think of it like managing a bunch of children. It's a great formula until they are old and mature enough. If you continue to control them as if children they effectively become your slaves. I have tons of bandwidth and disk space. This is all that is required. If you unreasonably insist I should also be the one to serve every request it's game over for me. Not by technical limitation but by force. Oh, I can rent my own web space? I haven't money for this and it has been tried before. Those sites are all gone. Everything is gone. I have tens of thousands of blog postings talking about stuff that doesn't exist anymore.
detaro 6y ago
previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182232 (AmA) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23194178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23194178 (TC article)
GuB-42 6y ago
The internet is not broken. It is certainly not perfect, for example IPv4 has a scaling problem, but it still works damn well. It can be improved so that it can fit the needs it didn't have originally (ex: with IPv6), but it is not fixing, it is an adaptation. None of the points in the "fix-the-internet" are things that are broken. They are new needs. Everything privacy-related for instance. The base internet protocol are all clear text, then we started encrypting secrets like passwords, then personal data, then full end-to-end encryption. Decentralization went from providing a reliable link between two computers, to services that are fully accessible even when part of it is offline, to services that simply can't be shut down. There is no fix here, it is just building stuff on top of an internet that works better than I ever hoped for. Good, but calling it "fixing" is a bit pretentious.
camdenlock 6y ago
“Female Founders Pitch Practice” When is this nonsense going to end? How about just “Founders Pitch Practice”? If you want to fix something, Mozilla, maybe start by fixing your bigotry.
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  > When is this nonsense going to end? When a critical mass of people start treating women (as a group) with the same respect and dignity as men are treated (as a group) would be a good start, no? Or are we post-sexism now?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
101404 6y ago
Mozilla? I guess the most important step for them to fix the internet is to fire people when they dare to have a "wrong opinion" ten years ago. An organization that uses that kind of violence against political opponents will never "fix" the internet.
lightninglu10 6y ago
Hey everyone, cool to see this being shared again. I'm Patrick, one of the mentors for this Incubator. Lots of chatter in this thread already, but just want to reiterate what we're offering / looking for in this Incubator: We have 3 different offerings for this Summer. All incubator style, meaning you meet weekly or biweekly with mentors and we really try to help drive you from point A to point C. 1. $75k investment in a startup. MUST be serious about wanting to build something awesome and put in the hard work it takes to do so. 2. $16k funding in a much earlier stage project (idea stage / MVP stage). MUST be serious about commitment it takes to get to launch. 3. OPEN LABS: these are open to the entire community and you have access to the mentors. 10 min checkins each week & peer sessions. We've had TONS of amazing projects for our Open Labs in the Spring and we hope to see TONS more for the Summer. In terms of MISSION and what we're looking for: We started this new incubator out of Mozilla in order to work with & invest in developers, startups, and technology enthusiasts who are building things that will shape the internet and have a positive impact without needing to hyper focus on the bottom line. Projects, apps, & technologies that will be huge and a big part of the internet ecosystem while also being in line with Mozilla's mission of an open web & ethos of "Privacy over Profit". Comment below if you have any questions about the programs and we'll be happy to answer them.
admin_account 6y ago
This probably won't be popular but, does anyone take Mozilla seriously? For me they've always seemed well intentioned, but completely oblivious to reality. For example, does a browser with 5% marketshare really need its own engine? Can a browser with 5% marketshare even change anything if they wanted too? Personally I don't think so, & also why I don't take them seriously. They seem to be more concerned with waving their "For The People" flag, than actually trying to change anything. If they were serious about "fixing the internet" they'd swallow their pride, transition FF to Chromium, & essentially become something akin to an activist shareholder within Chromium.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  They did not always have 5% market share. iOS and Android pushed WebKit/Blink hard, and Mozilla did not quickly respond; the ecosystem has suffered as a result.
  - admin_account 6y ago
    That's all true, but overall they've been steadily falling since 2010. However I disagree with your view of the ecosystem. The web needs stability and consistency more than anything else. FF switching to Chromium would help with that. So many people have this knee jerk reaction of Chromium = Chrome = Google having total control. But don't understand the only reason Google has had this much control over Chromium is because no other major vendor used it. They were the biggest kid on the street. But now that MS moved in a few doors down, that's no longer true. Google has to acknowledge MS in a way they never did with Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.. And the same thing would happen if FF switched to Chromium. Idk about you, but having 3 of the 4 biggest vendors all being forced to collaborate and implement solutions supported by at least 1 of the others, is 1000000x better than having each do their own thing. You effectively go from a monarchy to some form of democracy.
  - 101404 6y ago
    Then there was FfOS and firing people for "wrong" opinions and other dumb decisions. Mozilla destroyed itself due to terrible and politicized leadership. I just hope that a Rust foundation is created soon, before the language goes down together with Mozilla.
zackmorris 6y ago
A few ideas off the top of my head. Note that I mostly work on the backend, so my frontend knowledge is at least 5 years out of date. My terms might be wrong, but I think the concepts align closely with how I projected the web would work back in 1995 when I first saw it. Pretty much everything has gone the opposite direction though, and we’ve recreated all of the pitfalls of desktop programming on the web. - A one-shot, partially Turing complete scripting language would be nice. We should be able to include external scripts, position elements, perform basic computation, and then have a guarantee that the script has finished and will no longer run and use resources. Javascript is fine, but the user would have to give permission for it to run setTimeout(), setInterval() and similar ongoing operations. Discussion needed about scripts running post-load, like for clicks are keeping elements positioned (possibly a user-settable instruction, memory or time limit). - I'd vote to largely retire frontend model-view-control (MVC) patterns. The browser is already the view, so I find most of the approaches introduced by frameworks like Angular.js to be at the very least superfluous, but potentially misguided or even hazardous. See Intercooler.js for declarative alternatives to what we have now. - Instead of hand-rolled scripted pages, browsers need a basic component or window metaphor, in which all GUI elements descend from a base element, can be nested, and have a full life cycle that can be customized at each step. The user would have to give permission to override builtin elements like <body>, <input>, etc, but elements could descend from them with overrides. Discussion is needed about security. For what it's worth, I just don't think that the various approaches to building components have panned out. I feel like there is a common abstraction here behind things like React that could be generalized. - On that note, the way we include remote resources on the web is broken. We need a way to choose whether the HTML for a component is written in-place, or as a URL (or other address) that includes the remote definition. Similar to if inline data: base64 images correspond to our current markup, then we could replace a block of text with an href to allow reuse. Like <div href=“example.com/mydiv.html”>, and mydiv.html would hold <div>something<span>something</span></div> or whatever. See server side includes (SSI) for an early failed example of this. - Individual requests need to go away and be replaced by a content-addressable caching system where the hash is the address, so we can go back to including individual global sources of truth for things like jQuery or Bootstrap files, rather than maintaining copies of those includes on our own server. See subresource integrity (SRI) as a starting point. - It may be time to scrap build systems. I'd like to see the world take a step back, and consider architecting a web where more protocols and formats like UDP or Markdown "just work" and don't need to be transpiled to whatever brittle/proprietary-infested conventions are available. Think of this as how compilers can provide generators by altering the code to work in runtimes that don’t have generators. That concept could be extended to everything, so that the server/browser is able to provide features that aren’t yet mainstream, by perhaps running portions of our build pipelines directly under the hood. Basically a turing complete language should be able to run anything, but right now we have wide swaths of computer science blocked to us for security and other reasons, but usually because a proprietary player like Microsoft doesn’t want to implement something. We should be able to run Firefox within Edge, conceptually. And figure out what fundamental capabilities must be provided to allow for something so general. It could be as basic as a general-purpose sandbox where the user decides which system calls and data to allow the executables running inside to access. - Let's talk about how to remove undefined and optional rules from the major RFCs and specifications. As an analogy, much of the optional functionality in OpenGL caused the renderer to fall off the fast path back to the software renderer. But since performance is a feature in OpenGL, dancing around optionals caused an explosion in implementation complexity. Today many thousands of developers reinvent the wheel countless times because someone decided way back when to limit video card programming to SIMD (thus barring conceptually simple techniques like ray tracing). A better way would be to have general-purpose computing so we could go back to some kind of cluster programming in languages like Erlang and Go, but I digress. A similar thing needs to happen with the web, where the underlying implementation would be general-purpose and open source (to virtually guarantee that all options are implemented) then we could pick and choose which ones to disable due to security concerns or whatnot. - The semantic web is unlikely to ever happen, but, resource description framework (RDF) triples and concepts like hyperlinks pointing back to the caller could/should happen first. This needs to be done by the server or browser in an automated way 100% if possible. Content-addressable links might partially fix this. Basically the gap between raw HTML and the metadata that search engines and advertisers store needs to be formalized. Think of this as taking HEAD requests, REST API descriptions in things like Swagger, and any other information gleaned by spiders or AIs, and making that readily accessible for any page. So when we go on something like eBay, we could look at the page outline and detect any tabular date, contact information, form actions, etc etc and be able to manipulate that page metadata the way we currently examine things like an element's styling. - A prerequisite to the above is to be able to download portions of websites or the entire web as a directed graph, and to do that, we need to be able to query the web in something like SQL, only without a search engine. So to use the eBay example, if I had this then I could find my dream car by searching and cross referencing against things like performance, fuel economy, warranty, and so on. The way we might manipulate such data in Excel or a SQL database. Another way to say this is that most sites would lose their search field, and the browser would see the site as a gist or index describing the graph, with common actions suggested, provided by the community of previous searchers. See Neo4j for how something like this might look in practice. - It’s time to talk about retiring the app as a separate concept from a website. No single metric like performance, device accessibility or ease of use exists as a hard limitation, or justifies developers having to maintain 2+ sets of code and get mired in cross-platform development. A path forward here is to provide funding for game developers and other performance-oriented developers to revamp browser rendering engines to run at many thousands of frames per second instead of the glacial pace they crawl now. For example, the DOM diffing of React should have already existed as a feature of early HTML renderers. We need to be looking at things like forking and copy-on-write to enhance the performance of web pages that share the vast majority of their content. There are also streaming techniques that would let browsers access media as memory-mapped data rather than loading files into memory. Browsers could be as powerful as they are now, but run in something like 16 MB of ram rather than GBs, and always react instantly rather than having multi-second delays when many tabs are open. Well that’s 10. I know there are many, many more things I would like to see but maybe this isn’t the best forum for this. I’m temporarily retired from programming after going through the worst burnout of my life last year. All I see around me are these disjunctions between what the world is and what it could be, so it feels like in order to work anymore, I would have to go back to basics and rewrite most stuff from the ground up. That’s with all of tech, not any one area. So I just concentrate on the things I can control, like making rent, getting my car fixed, staying in touch with relatives, etc. Tech is just too much of a time suck for me to justify anymore, when all of the capital has been vacuumed up by a handful of large players that don’t care about this stuff, to the point where winning the internet lottery with a startup is about as likely as being in the NBA.
komali2 6y ago
Is there a way to see people that have won / applied to this grant, and are looking for help? I suspect many of the projects in this space are ones I'd be interested in working on.
whydoyoucare 6y ago
"Fix-the-internet" and "shape the internet" have different meanings, and you have used both... so I am not sure what you are offering! Where are the problems to be fixed? I can see glossy bios' of mentors and their song-and-dance about how great this is, but it seems a PR gimmick from Mozilla.
mikorym 6y ago
Why not make webpages that are not accessible by any of x in x = {Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge, Opera, ...} and only accessible via simplistic web interfaces? (Yes, IRC is like that.) The cool factor can be as much "everyone is doing it" as "the cool kids are doing it".

205 points by SQL2219 6y ago

ryuukk_ 6y ago

just like a sect

kps 6y ago

> Fix-the-Internet — Join us on Slack Doubt.

dependenttypes 6y ago
Mozilla has been part of the problem for ages now. Even their language Rust has been using Discord. Not to mention that their browser has been the pioneer on telemetry.
- capableweb 6y ago
  So strange they chose Slack and Discord when they had a perfectly fine IRC server (that now is deprecated). Instead of trying to improve IRC (either the protocol or any clients), they chose to go with closed-source hosted platforms. Damn shame.
  - SmallPeePeeMan 6y ago
    > that now is deprecated It is not deprecated. It is completely dead. Try connecting to irc.mozilla.org — you can’t because it’s permanently offline.
    - capableweb 6y ago
      Thanks for the correction! Sad to hear. Last time I checked, it was just "advisable" to not use it...
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    Mozilla chose Matrix, not Slack or Discord.
    - catalogia 6y ago
      On the Mozilla branded website that this discussion is about: "Join us on Slack"
      - steveklabnik 6y ago
        I missed that! That is very strange, given their very public move to Matrix.
        freeopinion 6y ago
        From any Matrix client try searching for Rust. It pops right up for me with #/room/#rust:matrix.org at the top of the list. Now try searching for Firefox. There's a Russian Firefox community on Page 2 of the search results. There are beta and nightly groups on page 3. There's various other noise. But the maintainers have hidden the real Matrix room for Firefox so well, it doesn't even seem to be in the search index. The choice was public. The move has not been public at all.
  - cadence- 6y ago
    IRC was not bringing any money.
- cadence- 6y ago
  It’s hard for Mozilla to fight for privacy on the internet since their main customer is Google. Firefox needs to have enough tracking in it, in order to send data to Google. Otherwise Mozilla would earn no money. And there are no other major customers willing to pay Mozilla. Pretty much the only other options are Yahoo/Verizon (they are currently in a legal fight With Mozilla about a breach of contract that happened in 2017), and Bing (but Microsoft is currently on a mission to promote new Edge, and even included various pop-ups in Windows 10 to discourage people from using Firefox, so I don’t think they are interested in being Mozilla’s customer at the moment). Mozilla has to stay in bed with google, and this is going to muddle any kind of privacy-related initiatives and communication from them.
  - syshum 6y ago
    I thought the Mozilla Google partnership ended several years ago when they changed to Yahoo for Default search and signed a MASSIVE mutiyear deal with Yahoo. I know they terminated it (and kept the money) when Yahoo was sold to Verizon but I had not heard they signed a new deal with Google, I assume they were surviving off the Yahoo Money still
    - cadence- 6y ago
      They currently have search deal with google. This was disclosed in their yearly financial statements. ~90% of their revenue comes from google. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3487825/mozilla-in-trouble-2018-revenue-fell-20-expenses-exceed-income-for-first-time.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3487825/mozilla-in-tro...
    - drapred7 6y ago
      Cadence's point is very valid. Mozilla gets funding by charging search engines to be the default in Firefox and that isn't changing anytime soon. I wish people didn't instinctively downvote when someone is wrong on a technicality, but this is a site filled with nerds after all lol EDIT: i guess he isnt even technically wrong.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  Rust's decisions about chat platforms has nothing to do with Mozilla. Mozilla chose Matrix, not Discord, for example. (Also, while the popular version is "Rust chose Discord," it's actually more complex than that: each team decides what they want. Many chose Discord. A bunch chose Zulip. The embedded working group is on Matrix.)
  - dependenttypes 6y ago
    Mozilla chose Matrix but they advertise Slack on the linked page. > Rust's decisions about chat platforms has nothing to do with Mozilla. Is Rust not a project of mozilla?
    - kasane 6y ago
      Rust is not a Mozilla project, but it is sponsored by Mozilla. https://research.mozilla.org/rust/ https://research.mozilla.org/rust/
      - dependenttypes 6y ago
        Interesting, I thought that Rust was a Mozilla project because the Wikipedia page listed it as its developer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)
        dralley 6y ago
        Mozilla was heavily involved in the early development of Rust (and since there is no Rust Foundation, is the holder of the Rust trademarks etc.). But at this point however you can't really call it a Mozilla project as active development is no longer dominated by Mozilla employees. Holding the trademark is just a formality owing to there not being a better way to do that without starting up a new Foundation.
    - steveklabnik 6y ago
      > Mozilla chose Matrix but they advertise Slack on the linked page. Gotcha, I missed this. Very odd. > Is Rust not a project of mozilla? Mozilla was the first sponsor of the project, and still sponsors a bunch of stuff to this day. But they don't own the project, and cannot make decisions on its behalf.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  > Not to mention that their browser has been the pioneer on telemetry. That's patently false. It pales in comparison to the telemetry sent by Edge: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/study-ranks-edges-default-privacy-settings-the-lowest-of-all-major-browsers/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/study...
  - dependenttypes 6y ago
    https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165858896176660480 https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604... Regardless, I said that it was the pioneer, not that it has the most telemetry.
- nunja 6y ago
  How's Rust "their" language ? It just started as a side project from one of their dev.
worble 6y ago
I don't know why they're not also advertising their Matrix server: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix
- sfink 6y ago
  There are quite a few different groups within Mozilla that are accustomed to and comfortable with different communication platforms. For chat, it's mostly Slack vs Matrix. Everyone around me will roll their eyes and grumble if you suggest using Slack for anything but very very clearly company-internal stuff. But other groups "just use Slack" and don't think twice about it, so are a bit confused when we demand to know why they're only on Slack. I guess few large-ish companies have managed to keep their communication platforms rationalized and consistent. It's more important for Mozilla to stay open than it is for most places, though.

SmallPeePeeMan 6y ago

Mozilla needs to look in the mirror to fix the internet. Maybe someone else besides Mitchell Baker at the helm can do that. It used to be a company with great engineering. Now it’s a company with excellent cultural and diversity management.

thepiratesailor 6y ago

This is total BS. If anything that needs a fix is Mozilla. They have been taking money in 100s of Millions of dollars from the same company that tried to kill their flagship product. Nothing is wrong with Internet. But a lot wrong with Web. Mozilla cannot fix Web until they start attacking FAANG, which I very much doubt they will.

metalliqaz 6y ago
That would be nice but without that money they are dead in the water. Mozilla is currently the only thing standing against a total browser monoculture.
- est31 6y ago
  There's Apple as well, and with the continued decline of Firefox market shares (both absolute and relative), their importance increases. Everywhere where Firefox runs, Chrome can also be installed, so you can just tell users to install Chrome, while it's not possible to do so with iOS devices. The rendering engine of Safari is similar to blink but not the same. And more importantly, Apple has the money to finance WebKit coming forward, as well as the willpower as they love to implement things themselves. I'm not so sure about how well Mozilla will do in the future compared to Apple.
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    Apple doesn't care about the open web. They've repeatedly tried to push encumbered media formats and not supported open ones, and they've held back implementing standards that pose any threat to the App Store. The fact that iOS doesn't allow other browsers at all is detrimental to the web.
    - est31 6y ago
      They do care about the open web, but in their own way. Of course their own profits are most important. Same goes for Google. I still hold the kicking out of flash to Apple's credit. Google followed them on mobile devices and this was the start of the end of flash on the web (the end of the end is soon to come!). As for the encumbered media formats point, it's been mainly a Mozilla and Google thing, as both distribute their browsers gratis. Apple already pays lots of money for patents on other aspects of their devices, like the wireless connectivity parts. But Apple has been warming up to open formats slowly. They've implemented opus support in Safari (although sadly no ogg/opus). They've joined AOM and maybe one day they'll implement AV1 in Safari as well. In general, there is a ton of momentum behind H.264 and its successors which is hard to direct towards open alternatives. Outside of browsers, media formats like VP9 are practically dead. Most video cameras use H264 or H265. DVB-S2 uses H264.

RodgerTheGreat 6y ago

Standards-compliant web browsers are impossibly complex to build and maintain, which is why the handful which exist are all under powerful commercial influence. If you want to "fix" the internet, spend some time enriching open, federated protocols that are designed to be human-scale. The internet is here to stay, but we can do better than the web as it presently exists. Gemini is worth looking into: https://gemini.circumlunar.space https://gemini.circumlunar.space

catalogia 6y ago
Drew DeVault has a good blog article about this problem. Choice quote: > I used wget to download all 1,217 of the W3C specifications which have been published at the time of writing, of which web browsers need to implement a substantial subset in order to provide a modern web experience. I ran a word count on all of these specifications. How complex would you guess the web is? > The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing. If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications. https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
- captn3m0 6y ago
  Wow. Who would like a w1c specification set, with everything trimmed down like how k3s.
- gsnedders 6y ago
  This seems exceptionally misleading. Playing with the filters on https://www.w3.org/TR/ https://www.w3.org/TR/, we find out filtering to latest documents (to exclude cases where there are multiple versions of a single document) brings us down to 953, excluding non-normative notes brings us down to 573, we can likely exclude all semweb-related specs to bring us down to 480 specs. And that's still including 199 working drafts, not all of which have any implementation (and some are unlikely to ever have any at this point, essentially long-abandoned). The web platform arguably has problems with scale, but it's nowhere near that extreme.

chillydawg 6y ago

Genuinely, if they want to help fix the internet, they should sack everyone not doing core browser work and spend every penny they have spare on marketing to increase their market share. Busses, billboards, TV, radio, Google ads, whatever. Spend it all. Millions a month, internationally. With balance in the browser market comes accountability for Google, which is sorely lacking. Everything else is just mucking about, imo.

emilsedgh 6y ago
Mozilla is in a infinite game. An all-in approach like that could be fatal. They are in this for the long term. Specially because they can be out-spent massively. If Google, Microsoft, Apple, any of the competitors want, they can outspend Mozilla during their "burn all money" campaign and drown them. Also, Mozilla doesn't exist to "make Google accountable". Mozilla is there to ensure the web stays open, and it's been doing a damn-fine job at that. Not perfect; but damn good. Update: Also, how does balance in browser market make Google accountable? Google is far bigger than Chrome.
snazz 6y ago
I find it very hard to believe that Mozilla would have any luck with any amount of advertising. Firefox offers no features that are useful to non-technical people that Chrome doesn't have. If anything, it's worse for the average person, since there are quite a few sites that don't work well in Firefox. It's not crazy fast like Chrome was compared to Firefox when Chrome came out. Privacy is difficult to quantify or feel, so it's not really an effective marketing technique to market to a large number of people.
- asdff 6y ago
  FF does strain your overall system a lot more than chrome. If they kept track of this, users will see better battery life. I save hours, personally.

hu3 6y ago

Mozilla is largely a for-profit corporation. Their end goal is profit. Same for their execs: maximize their own profit individually. Once this is understood it's easier digest PR bulshit.

crazygringo 6y ago
Can you expand? I did a little research and found on Wikipedia: > The Mozilla Foundation is an American not-for-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project... Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a tax-paying entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue. [1] > The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation... Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary. [2] So seems like the for-profit part is just to give it more flexibility in achieving the non-profit aims? I'd love to know why you think "their end goal is profit". There's nothing in the Wikipedia pages about any substantiated criticism there. So just curious if there are real reasons for thinking this, or not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
- hu3 6y ago
  You're right. I meant corporation. Fixed.

Nextgrid 6y ago

You want to fix the Internet? Easy. Start by releasing a browser with built-in uBlock Origin and a bunch of other extensions that make the internet better (strip utm_* crap from URLs, etc). You know, actually do something instead of merely pretending like they currently do. Their current "tracking protection" is an absolute fraud when you look at the list of domains it whitelists explicitly, and both Google and Facebook are in there. The opt-out telemetry (illegal under the GDPR, should be opt-in instead) as well as the telemetry for those who opt-out of telemetry (yeah you heard that right) is just the icing on the cake.

dralley 6y ago
>(illegal under the GDPR, should be opt-in instead) Anonymized telemetry that cannot be correlated to an individual user, and which contains no sensitive information, is perfectly legal under the GDPR. Mozilla telemetry isn't tracking your movements across the web, it's measuring things like "how many crashes are being experienced per 1000 hours on Nvidia graphics cards" and "what percentage of users have addons installed".
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Anonymized datasets have been deanonymized in the past so there's no telling how anonymous the telemetry actually is and when in doubt I'd err on the side of caution. The IP address is also being transmitted as part of the telemetry request, and while they can claim they don't log it there is nothing technically preventing them (or an attacker) from logging it which could be a privacy violation especially if you correlate it with the telemetry data.

jorangreef 6y ago

Following Conway's Law, the problem with the internet is not so much the internet but the destruction of IRC and the centralization of email. The stagnation in open-source email software and security, the embrace-extend-extinguish of AMP for email, and the decline in quality independent email providers. Fix email (and revive IRC) and we can start fixing the internet.

zanny 6y ago
Probably less than 1% of browser users have any idea what IRC or SMTP are. For your average user chat is whatever FAANG puts on their device / screen and email is whatever address one of the several services you signed up for when getting Internet gave you. The Internet is considered broken by Mozilla because corporate centralization has turned the web experience into at most a dozen websites per user down from the potential infinity of domains possible.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

> Join us on Slack to be a part of the Builders community. I know it's a bit petty, but I find it quite odd that Mozilla is promoting (or at least using) Slack, when Slack has a large feature—video conferencing—which only works in Chrome due to using non-standards-compliant WebRTC. And when asked by Mozilla, Slack reportedly stated they weren't interested in fixing it.

CameronNemo 6y ago
And Mozilla recently stated they are moving comms to Matrix. Talking about fixing the internet while using slack is an oxymoron.
- clarry 6y ago
  I came to say the exact same thing.. using and endorsing slack makes them a part of the problem.

gambler 6y ago

How about investing into their own browser in ways that actually improve the internet? Like adding IPFS support? Or PGP encryption?

zanny 6y ago
IPFS isn't http. Web browsers as software are meant to access and render html obtained via http. Content addressing on IPFS is entirely different to how dns resolution works and as such you shouldn't just glue on an entirely different name resolution system to existing software. You want an ipfs browser that is UX optimized for actually browsing ipfs content. Back in the day browsers supported alternative protocols like ftp but in practice those are largely abandoned to single function as an http browser. And what in the world would adding PGP to Firefox do? Its not an email client. Its not an IM client. A website that wanted to can already use PGP via wasm. Firefox is not an SMTP client, its an HTTP one.
- zoobab 6y ago
  "Web browsers as software are meant to access and render html obtained via http" HTTP is a slave protocol, where you need a master. It's time to retire it, and design the web with an uncensorable protocol that does not loose memory. The slave design of a web server need to go.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Can you unpack this, because there's much that may or may not be in what you said.
    - 6510 6y ago
      The goal should be to render HTML documents not control where they come from. The server/client model or the master/slave model is only interesting if the clients are mediocre computers with limited bandwidth. Think of it like managing a bunch of children. It's a great formula until they are old and mature enough. If you continue to control them as if children they effectively become your slaves. I have tons of bandwidth and disk space. This is all that is required. If you unreasonably insist I should also be the one to serve every request it's game over for me. Not by technical limitation but by force. Oh, I can rent my own web space? I haven't money for this and it has been tried before. Those sites are all gone. Everything is gone. I have tens of thousands of blog postings talking about stuff that doesn't exist anymore.

detaro 6y ago

previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182232 (AmA) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23194178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23194178 (TC article)

GuB-42 6y ago

The internet is not broken. It is certainly not perfect, for example IPv4 has a scaling problem, but it still works damn well. It can be improved so that it can fit the needs it didn't have originally (ex: with IPv6), but it is not fixing, it is an adaptation. None of the points in the "fix-the-internet" are things that are broken. They are new needs. Everything privacy-related for instance. The base internet protocol are all clear text, then we started encrypting secrets like passwords, then personal data, then full end-to-end encryption. Decentralization went from providing a reliable link between two computers, to services that are fully accessible even when part of it is offline, to services that simply can't be shut down. There is no fix here, it is just building stuff on top of an internet that works better than I ever hoped for. Good, but calling it "fixing" is a bit pretentious.

camdenlock 6y ago

“Female Founders Pitch Practice” When is this nonsense going to end? How about just “Founders Pitch Practice”? If you want to fix something, Mozilla, maybe start by fixing your bigotry.

orthecreedence 6y ago
> When is this nonsense going to end? When a critical mass of people start treating women (as a group) with the same respect and dignity as men are treated (as a group) would be a good start, no? Or are we post-sexism now?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

101404 6y ago

Mozilla? I guess the most important step for them to fix the internet is to fire people when they dare to have a "wrong opinion" ten years ago. An organization that uses that kind of violence against political opponents will never "fix" the internet.

lightninglu10 6y ago

Hey everyone, cool to see this being shared again. I'm Patrick, one of the mentors for this Incubator. Lots of chatter in this thread already, but just want to reiterate what we're offering / looking for in this Incubator: We have 3 different offerings for this Summer. All incubator style, meaning you meet weekly or biweekly with mentors and we really try to help drive you from point A to point C. 1. $75k investment in a startup. MUST be serious about wanting to build something awesome and put in the hard work it takes to do so. 2. $16k funding in a much earlier stage project (idea stage / MVP stage). MUST be serious about commitment it takes to get to launch. 3. OPEN LABS: these are open to the entire community and you have access to the mentors. 10 min checkins each week & peer sessions. We've had TONS of amazing projects for our Open Labs in the Spring and we hope to see TONS more for the Summer. In terms of MISSION and what we're looking for: We started this new incubator out of Mozilla in order to work with & invest in developers, startups, and technology enthusiasts who are building things that will shape the internet and have a positive impact without needing to hyper focus on the bottom line. Projects, apps, & technologies that will be huge and a big part of the internet ecosystem while also being in line with Mozilla's mission of an open web & ethos of "Privacy over Profit". Comment below if you have any questions about the programs and we'll be happy to answer them.

admin_account 6y ago

This probably won't be popular but, does anyone take Mozilla seriously? For me they've always seemed well intentioned, but completely oblivious to reality. For example, does a browser with 5% marketshare really need its own engine? Can a browser with 5% marketshare even change anything if they wanted too? Personally I don't think so, & also why I don't take them seriously. They seem to be more concerned with waving their "For The People" flag, than actually trying to change anything. If they were serious about "fixing the internet" they'd swallow their pride, transition FF to Chromium, & essentially become something akin to an activist shareholder within Chromium.

CameronNemo 6y ago
They did not always have 5% market share. iOS and Android pushed WebKit/Blink hard, and Mozilla did not quickly respond; the ecosystem has suffered as a result.
- admin_account 6y ago
  That's all true, but overall they've been steadily falling since 2010. However I disagree with your view of the ecosystem. The web needs stability and consistency more than anything else. FF switching to Chromium would help with that. So many people have this knee jerk reaction of Chromium = Chrome = Google having total control. But don't understand the only reason Google has had this much control over Chromium is because no other major vendor used it. They were the biggest kid on the street. But now that MS moved in a few doors down, that's no longer true. Google has to acknowledge MS in a way they never did with Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.. And the same thing would happen if FF switched to Chromium. Idk about you, but having 3 of the 4 biggest vendors all being forced to collaborate and implement solutions supported by at least 1 of the others, is 1000000x better than having each do their own thing. You effectively go from a monarchy to some form of democracy.
- 101404 6y ago
  Then there was FfOS and firing people for "wrong" opinions and other dumb decisions. Mozilla destroyed itself due to terrible and politicized leadership. I just hope that a Rust foundation is created soon, before the language goes down together with Mozilla.

zackmorris 6y ago

A few ideas off the top of my head. Note that I mostly work on the backend, so my frontend knowledge is at least 5 years out of date. My terms might be wrong, but I think the concepts align closely with how I projected the web would work back in 1995 when I first saw it. Pretty much everything has gone the opposite direction though, and we’ve recreated all of the pitfalls of desktop programming on the web. - A one-shot, partially Turing complete scripting language would be nice. We should be able to include external scripts, position elements, perform basic computation, and then have a guarantee that the script has finished and will no longer run and use resources. Javascript is fine, but the user would have to give permission for it to run setTimeout(), setInterval() and similar ongoing operations. Discussion needed about scripts running post-load, like for clicks are keeping elements positioned (possibly a user-settable instruction, memory or time limit). - I'd vote to largely retire frontend model-view-control (MVC) patterns. The browser is already the view, so I find most of the approaches introduced by frameworks like Angular.js to be at the very least superfluous, but potentially misguided or even hazardous. See Intercooler.js for declarative alternatives to what we have now. - Instead of hand-rolled scripted pages, browsers need a basic component or window metaphor, in which all GUI elements descend from a base element, can be nested, and have a full life cycle that can be customized at each step. The user would have to give permission to override builtin elements like <body>, <input>, etc, but elements could descend from them with overrides. Discussion is needed about security. For what it's worth, I just don't think that the various approaches to building components have panned out. I feel like there is a common abstraction here behind things like React that could be generalized. - On that note, the way we include remote resources on the web is broken. We need a way to choose whether the HTML for a component is written in-place, or as a URL (or other address) that includes the remote definition. Similar to if inline data: base64 images correspond to our current markup, then we could replace a block of text with an href to allow reuse. Like <div href=“example.com/mydiv.html”>, and mydiv.html would hold <div>something<span>something</span></div> or whatever. See server side includes (SSI) for an early failed example of this. - Individual requests need to go away and be replaced by a content-addressable caching system where the hash is the address, so we can go back to including individual global sources of truth for things like jQuery or Bootstrap files, rather than maintaining copies of those includes on our own server. See subresource integrity (SRI) as a starting point. - It may be time to scrap build systems. I'd like to see the world take a step back, and consider architecting a web where more protocols and formats like UDP or Markdown "just work" and don't need to be transpiled to whatever brittle/proprietary-infested conventions are available. Think of this as how compilers can provide generators by altering the code to work in runtimes that don’t have generators. That concept could be extended to everything, so that the server/browser is able to provide features that aren’t yet mainstream, by perhaps running portions of our build pipelines directly under the hood. Basically a turing complete language should be able to run anything, but right now we have wide swaths of computer science blocked to us for security and other reasons, but usually because a proprietary player like Microsoft doesn’t want to implement something. We should be able to run Firefox within Edge, conceptually. And figure out what fundamental capabilities must be provided to allow for something so general. It could be as basic as a general-purpose sandbox where the user decides which system calls and data to allow the executables running inside to access. - Let's talk about how to remove undefined and optional rules from the major RFCs and specifications. As an analogy, much of the optional functionality in OpenGL caused the renderer to fall off the fast path back to the software renderer. But since performance is a feature in OpenGL, dancing around optionals caused an explosion in implementation complexity. Today many thousands of developers reinvent the wheel countless times because someone decided way back when to limit video card programming to SIMD (thus barring conceptually simple techniques like ray tracing). A better way would be to have general-purpose computing so we could go back to some kind of cluster programming in languages like Erlang and Go, but I digress. A similar thing needs to happen with the web, where the underlying implementation would be general-purpose and open source (to virtually guarantee that all options are implemented) then we could pick and choose which ones to disable due to security concerns or whatnot. - The semantic web is unlikely to ever happen, but, resource description framework (RDF) triples and concepts like hyperlinks pointing back to the caller could/should happen first. This needs to be done by the server or browser in an automated way 100% if possible. Content-addressable links might partially fix this. Basically the gap between raw HTML and the metadata that search engines and advertisers store needs to be formalized. Think of this as taking HEAD requests, REST API descriptions in things like Swagger, and any other information gleaned by spiders or AIs, and making that readily accessible for any page. So when we go on something like eBay, we could look at the page outline and detect any tabular date, contact information, form actions, etc etc and be able to manipulate that page metadata the way we currently examine things like an element's styling. - A prerequisite to the above is to be able to download portions of websites or the entire web as a directed graph, and to do that, we need to be able to query the web in something like SQL, only without a search engine. So to use the eBay example, if I had this then I could find my dream car by searching and cross referencing against things like performance, fuel economy, warranty, and so on. The way we might manipulate such data in Excel or a SQL database. Another way to say this is that most sites would lose their search field, and the browser would see the site as a gist or index describing the graph, with common actions suggested, provided by the community of previous searchers. See Neo4j for how something like this might look in practice. - It’s time to talk about retiring the app as a separate concept from a website. No single metric like performance, device accessibility or ease of use exists as a hard limitation, or justifies developers having to maintain 2+ sets of code and get mired in cross-platform development. A path forward here is to provide funding for game developers and other performance-oriented developers to revamp browser rendering engines to run at many thousands of frames per second instead of the glacial pace they crawl now. For example, the DOM diffing of React should have already existed as a feature of early HTML renderers. We need to be looking at things like forking and copy-on-write to enhance the performance of web pages that share the vast majority of their content. There are also streaming techniques that would let browsers access media as memory-mapped data rather than loading files into memory. Browsers could be as powerful as they are now, but run in something like 16 MB of ram rather than GBs, and always react instantly rather than having multi-second delays when many tabs are open. Well that’s 10. I know there are many, many more things I would like to see but maybe this isn’t the best forum for this. I’m temporarily retired from programming after going through the worst burnout of my life last year. All I see around me are these disjunctions between what the world is and what it could be, so it feels like in order to work anymore, I would have to go back to basics and rewrite most stuff from the ground up. That’s with all of tech, not any one area. So I just concentrate on the things I can control, like making rent, getting my car fixed, staying in touch with relatives, etc. Tech is just too much of a time suck for me to justify anymore, when all of the capital has been vacuumed up by a handful of large players that don’t care about this stuff, to the point where winning the internet lottery with a startup is about as likely as being in the NBA.

komali2 6y ago

Is there a way to see people that have won / applied to this grant, and are looking for help? I suspect many of the projects in this space are ones I'd be interested in working on.

whydoyoucare 6y ago

"Fix-the-internet" and "shape the internet" have different meanings, and you have used both... so I am not sure what you are offering! Where are the problems to be fixed? I can see glossy bios' of mentors and their song-and-dance about how great this is, but it seems a PR gimmick from Mozilla.

mikorym 6y ago

Why not make webpages that are not accessible by any of x in x = {Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge, Opera, ...} and only accessible via simplistic web interfaces? (Yes, IRC is like that.) The cool factor can be as much "everyone is doing it" as "the cool kids are doing it".