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I completely buy that argument - BigTech (in particular Google) have a huge influence today on Firefox development. Moreover, Mozilla's Firefox is deliberately

I completely buy that argument - BigTech (in particular Google) have a huge influence today on Firefox development. Moreover, Mozilla's Firefox is deliberately hostile to the open source movement too - their code is a convulated mess by design, to discourage others from developing competing products with it. (Remember, that Firefox has provided Mozilla with 100's of millions of dollars - so the excuse of legacy code and all is just bullshit). It's no wonder that both Webkit (Safari) and Blink (Chrome / Opera) are more popular than Gecko (the browser engine of Firefox), with developers. (All that money is just wasted on them ... ).

dralley 5y ago
>Moreover, Mozilla's Firefox is deliberately hostile to the open source movement too - their code is a convulated mess by design, to discourage others from developing competing products with it. This is total nonsense. It's a mess because it has 25 years of legacy behind it, and because until a few years ago all of that legacy was considered a "feature" by half of the userbase, who was screaming at them not to remove the "mess" because it would break their addons. Even in this very thread you see people whining about removing XUL addon support. And ironically, most of the "competing projects" are based around preserving that mess. It's only since 2017 that they've really been able to clean up the architecture at all. And saying that they're "hostile to open source" is practically defamatory. Mozilla has contributed more to open source across a broad swath of organizations than 99.9% of companies that are 100x their size.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  I stand by what I said - their code is a convulated mess by design. It's 25 years and they still haven't modularised their code that anyone can use the Gecko engine on the desktop and creating competing browsers. All anyone can do is create a clone of Firefox, which ofcourse, cannot really compete with Firefox or other desktop browser as it will still have all the flaws of Firefox. And this is what Mozilla wants. They may have started with altruistic reasons, but after tasting Google's money, their greed corrupted them. Mobile is a good example. Mozilla realised it was in a precarious position on the mobile platform, which is dominated by Chrome, Opera and Safari. And so they have now been forced to release the Gecko rendering engine for mobile ( https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview ) and are encouraging others to create mobile browsers, in the hopes that this may provide a fillip to Mobile Firefox. Desperation drove them to this move as the money is now in mobile platform (Google paying 15 billion dollars to Apple / Safari highlights this). If they can do this for the mobile platform, why can't they do it for the Desktop platform too? This kind of deliberate convulated code mess is like a "dark pattern" where in you know the developer isn't really interested in supporting the open source movement. Yes, there are many other open source projects that have poor code or lack documentation, but unlike the Firefox project, none of them has 100's of millions of dollars at their disposal - it's a travesty how they have wasted all that money!

dralley 5y ago

>Moreover, Mozilla's Firefox is deliberately hostile to the open source movement too - their code is a convulated mess by design, to discourage others from developing competing products with it. This is total nonsense. It's a mess because it has 25 years of legacy behind it, and because until a few years ago all of that legacy was considered a "feature" by half of the userbase, who was screaming at them not to remove the "mess" because it would break their addons. Even in this very thread you see people whining about removing XUL addon support. And ironically, most of the "competing projects" are based around preserving that mess. It's only since 2017 that they've really been able to clean up the architecture at all. And saying that they're "hostile to open source" is practically defamatory. Mozilla has contributed more to open source across a broad swath of organizations than 99.9% of companies that are 100x their size.

webmobdev 5y ago
I stand by what I said - their code is a convulated mess by design. It's 25 years and they still haven't modularised their code that anyone can use the Gecko engine on the desktop and creating competing browsers. All anyone can do is create a clone of Firefox, which ofcourse, cannot really compete with Firefox or other desktop browser as it will still have all the flaws of Firefox. And this is what Mozilla wants. They may have started with altruistic reasons, but after tasting Google's money, their greed corrupted them. Mobile is a good example. Mozilla realised it was in a precarious position on the mobile platform, which is dominated by Chrome, Opera and Safari. And so they have now been forced to release the Gecko rendering engine for mobile ( https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview ) and are encouraging others to create mobile browsers, in the hopes that this may provide a fillip to Mobile Firefox. Desperation drove them to this move as the money is now in mobile platform (Google paying 15 billion dollars to Apple / Safari highlights this). If they can do this for the mobile platform, why can't they do it for the Desktop platform too? This kind of deliberate convulated code mess is like a "dark pattern" where in you know the developer isn't really interested in supporting the open source movement. Yes, there are many other open source projects that have poor code or lack documentation, but unlike the Firefox project, none of them has 100's of millions of dollars at their disposal - it's a travesty how they have wasted all that money!