8 ms·

It is time for Mozilla to stop messing around. They are losing user trust extremely fast. A silent FireFox update that cripples the browser? No active update wa

It is time for Mozilla to stop messing around. They are losing user trust extremely fast. A silent FireFox update that cripples the browser? No active update was done since yesterday and this morning: a broken browser. Please stop non-browser development and let me pay a monthly fee for a decent browser! I don’t want a VPN service, bookmark readers or other crap. I want Mozilla to defend the open web and create an open source browser. That’s it. The past few years have been a big disappointment in Mozilla leadership and (lack off) vision. If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web! This isn't just a rant, it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support.

throwaway2048 5y ago
It was not an update, started happening to me on arch linux, where Firefox does not automatically update. Seems like some kind of timed enabling of https3 support.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Which wasn't present in previous versions. So this is still a consequence of updates. But now, to make it extra hard to troubleshoot we put in timebombs in your automatic updates that will go off some fine Thursday morning without any warning or indication that something has just changed. Idiots.
  - 00deadbeef 5y ago
    > Which wasn't present in previous versions. So this is still a consequence of updates. Looks like HTTP/3 has been in Firefox for around a year
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Yes, but if it wasn't active then it might as well not have been. This is a great way to bypass continuity testing, I really pity all those people working the desks in hospitals right now using FireFox who are typically less savvy than your average HN'er in trying to get their work done. If you ship a browser with a time-bomb you are utterly irresponsible.
      - Vinnl 5y ago
        At this time it doesn't appear to be a surreptitious update, but a load balancer issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c17 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c17
        jacquesm 5y ago
        Sorry, but my traffic isn't supposed to go through anybody's centralized load balancer, least of all one operated by parties with whom I do not have a relationship on the basis of the delivery of some service. That's not how this works. HTTP/3 support is optional as far as I'm concerned and plenty of websites that I tested with do not support it and still failed due to this issue. Absolutely unacceptable.
        Vinnl 5y ago
        I'd wait a bit for the postmortem; I don't think there's reason to conclude at this time that your traffic is going through someone's centralised load balancer. Another update says that the load balancer issue triggered a bug in Firefox, so presumably fixing the load balancer issue will prevent that bug from being triggered, and then the bug can be fixed separately after: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21 But mostly: I have no real idea what's going on, so I'm awaiting the postmortem.
        jacquesm 5y ago
        That part seems to be related to the telemetry issue, which, surprise has been re-enabled during one of the updates.
      - kevingadd 5y ago
        This isn't a time bomb, it's a symptom of the way modern browsers tend to have centralized I/O which means disk and network traffic goes through a single chokepoint. HTTP3 traffic appears to be able to cause one of Firefox's socket threads to hang, and since everything goes through it, all your network traffic is now dead. Chromium uses a similar model of routing all I/O through specific places, so it's vulnerable to similar sorts of problems (though AFAIK it has never failed this badly in production). Basically, this could have happened at any point if a production service run by someone like Google, Facebook, Cloudflare etc managed to trigger a sufficiently bad bug in a modern browser's network stack. If not for the centralized I/O this would just hang a single browser process, which isn't as impactful since Firefox and Chrome both split content out into many processes. It would also make it more obvious which server(s) are responsible since only certain tabs would be dying. FWIW, as far as I know this centralized I/O model was popularized by Google, not Mozilla.
- michaelanckaert 5y ago
  That concurs with what I'm seeing. Also on Arch and while I updated yesterday, FF performed perfectly until this morning.
alexb_ 5y ago
It seems like it has nothing to do with the version, so it's not an update from Mozilla's end. Still bad though.
- michaelanckaert 5y ago
  If that's the case then I might be wrong. But I remember updating somewhere yesterday and using FF for a couple of hours before stopping for the day. This morning no pages loaded anymore. Hope I didn't jump to conclusions, but still.
  - stef25 5y ago
    It just stopped working this morning after 3 hours of no problems. Both developer edition and the normal version, same problem with an older version. Chrome and Safari worked fine. Someone really fucked up. There must be millions of non techies completely lost right now.
  - alexb_ 5y ago
    It definitely stopped in the middle of the night - I saw it happen in real time - what's more likely is that some third party is to "blame". Although the blame still rests squarely on the shoulders of Mozilla, since Chromium browsers all worked fine. Apparently the going explanation is that something involving HTTP3 runs into an infinite loop and never resolves (explaining why it also sends a core to 100%), and Cloudflare/Google/Some Other Thing updated to using HTTP3.
    - DelightOne 5y ago
      > Our current suspicion is that Google Cloud Load Balancer (or a similar CloudFlare service) that fronts one of our own servers got an update that triggers an existing HTTP3 bug. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    It's not from Mozilla. My two computers stopped at different times, and both were on 95.0.x. I didn't restart Firefox to make it happen. It just froze in the middle of the video.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
skywal_l 5y ago
I don't think Mozilla's income is a problem. They are making money. The problem is how they spend that money. My impression is that they lost the original spirit. Mozilla lacked a BDFL that would embody that spirit. What's going on at Mozilla is probably what's going to happen for Linux once Linus is out. Both these pieces of open source software are way too big to be replicated now by a dude or a bunch of dudes and also way too big to be maintained by people on their free time. They require resources and organization which itself corrupt the original spirit. Or maybe that whole firefox debacle made me a little gloomy today...
- michaelanckaert 5y ago
  Agreed, income isn't a problem. It's vision. But I don't want to support Mozilla in a financial way if their vision doesn't match my own. This may sound presumptuous but we really need an open web and Mozilla is one of the last defenders (and failing). I don't want my monetary donations to go to side projects, I want a great open source browser as the focus.
  - hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    Maybe, just maybe, once Mozilla fails people and organizations will finally understand what terrible mistake they made by giving total control over the web to Google. Maybe this could be the beginning of a new project, managed by an institution with clear aims and no Mozilla-Foundation-style bullshit. Remember the early days of Firefox? It crashed often, it was slow, but we had great expectations ad supported it. It wasn't easy to use it at all. At some point it made a breakthrough and installing Firefox was the first thing to do on a fresh install of any machine. People don't remember or know these times and take the web browser for granted. But now that Google has long left their original "Don't be evil" mantra and all tech is focused around the web, having an open, neutral browser is more important than ever. I wish people - including the ones at Mozilla - appreciated this fact more.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      It's super important. And that's why it is also important that they focus on the browser instead of on all of their hobby horses.
a5aAqU 5y ago
I don't understand the anger about the VPN. I think it's a good idea. Reader mode is useful, especially if you block a lot of CSS and JavaScript by default with uMatrix. I don't know why people use DOH anyway. It bypasses your hosts file, so you can't block things as easily.
- michaelanckaert 5y ago
  Fully agree with reader mode, it's an integral part of the browser. VPN not so much IMO.
  - a5aAqU 5y ago
    Many people wouldn't otherwise sign up for a VPN, and there are a lot of shady VPNs out there. Mozilla can use the feature to help reduce dependence on a company that has been trying to destroy them for years (Google), and help non-tech people get set up with a VPN.
    - asteroidbelt 5y ago
      Google is the largest financial supporters in Firefox, they buy Firefox search bar. If they wanted to destroy Firefox, they’d already do it by simply cutting that revenue stream.
      - boomboomsubban 5y ago
        Or some other search engine would become their revenue stream, like when Yahoo was the default search. Without Google bidding their revenue would likely drop, but it wouldn't disappear.
        asteroidbelt 5y ago
        True. But revenue would be significantly smaller (other engines cannot afford pay high per click, and lack of competition drives the price per click down), and revenue is already barely enough to cover Mozilla needs (see recent staff cuts).
ya_throw 5y ago
>If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web! Have you any idea how complex a browser needs to be? I hope this team of plucky, idealistic coders can keep up with all the latest and greatest web developments devised by the thousands of engineers at Google et al. The web as an open, human-sized system is dead.
- captainmuon 5y ago
  If you keep the browser ultra modular, I think it can work. You need to have one component for layout, one for css, one for the DOM, and you can use external libraries for media playback, javascript, networking, and so on. I think a decent layout or CSS library would be useful outside of a web browser, too. Then I would also only focus on the subset of websites that are "documents", not "apps". If I could decide, HTML6 would have two profiles: one ultra restricted (maybe no legacy stuff and no cross site scripting) for "documents", and one where you can do all kinds of crazy stuff like "web USB" for "apps". That's not going to happen because Google and Apple like the "open" web as complex and messy as it is, because it gives them total control as you know. But it doesn't stop a browser vendor from building a browser with two engines - your own engine for the majority of documents and chromium for webapps.
  - ya_throw 5y ago
    Sounds like a lot of work for moving lightly-formatted text files around. Also, essentially no-one wants it. What people want (whether they know it or not) is the latest shiny to keep themselves distracted.
    - MichaelBurge 5y ago
      You could start off targeting developers, who mainly use web browsers to read documentation, HN, bug trackers, code repositories, and other plain documents. Something for regular people would be many more years of work.
    - captainmuon 5y ago
      I don't know a single non-technical person who doesn't complain about web browsers being slow. Part of the problem is that they don't understand the differences between computers and go for the cheapest PC or tablet, but most of it is bloat. We tried to introduce office 365 company wide for collaboration, but we had a whole plant of 150 employees "mutiny" because they refused to use any of the office web apps because they were too slow. This slowness is not a fundamental problem, but incidental. The layout calculations of even the most complex websites could be solved by a 10 years old computer instantly. The rendering can be done by a GPU without sweat. Look at how many polygons and shaders games had 10 years ago. And note I'm not talking about "lightly formatted text files", but 90% of all web sites. News sites, Youtube, Reddit, .... What I'm excluding is Gmail, Office365, anything that uses Vibration, NFC, WebMidi, and other boutiqe features (you could probably add those back as libraries if you need them later). I'd argue that not supporting "apps" is a feature - you'd have to explicity allow them and they'd run in a sandboxed tab.
spauka 5y ago
While your point stands - it's worth pointing out that this bug was NOT caused by an update [1], but seems to have been a long-standing bug in the HTTP3 stack that was triggered due to some external site (including apparently Mozilla's telemetry provider) that changed their stack. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908
0xfaded 5y ago
What would be the rough numbers required to support firefox development in terms of #devs and $? What would be the model to get started? Can we start by funding a fork (similar to iceweasel) with the eventual goal of hard forking once the needed resources are available? I like you would be more than happy to pay $10/month. I pay $20/month for a bike! (relatively cheap in Denmark where taking my good bike to the shop costs me ~$500 every time I fall off). The problem is that there isn't a box on the internet for my CC.
rvz 5y ago
> I want Mozilla to defend the open web and create an open source browser. That’s it. The 'open web' died when Chrome overtook Firefox and are still paying for more than >85% of all their revenues just to be on life support in return for ruining the 'open web'. > If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web! The web has been reclaimed by Google from Microsoft - exchanging from one behemoth to another. Firefox is always behind Chrome's features and many web developers still continue to place banners on users to 'Switch to Chrome'. So it is already over before it has started. > it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support. One more thing, even if one was to support via 'donations', they are not funding Firefox, it is funding something totally irrelevant in Mozilla and Google is once again keeping them on life support. What a magnificent disaster.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alimbada 5y ago
> I don’t want a VPN service, bookmark readers or other crap. Fortunately, you're just one person voicing your opinion in an unrelated corner of the Internet and you seem to be in the minority otherwise Mozilla would have made the changes you want already. Most other people either find those features useful or are indifferent about them. I, personally have no qualms with Mozilla doing what they do even if I might not use those features. If you really want change, start contributing and bring it about yourself.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
patrec 5y ago
> Please stop non-browser development and let me pay a monthly fee for a decent browser! Unless you are a billionaire, you can't afford to. Developing a decent browser takes enormous amounts of money, good luck funding that of voluntary donations or monthly fees if in most technical aspects superior free alternatives exist. Firefox is failing badly on a few hundred millions a year; I'm sure you could do better with a CEO who isn't just a parasitical non-entity, but I doubt better enough to make that idea viable. > This isn't just a rant, it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support. A pipe dream -- the web is a dead end. If you want something that can live off donation support (as opposed to selling off its users as cattle), you need a new set of protocols. The whole web stack is such a clusterfuck of layers upon layers of crap with one dominant player who can always add more of it when it suits them to slow down competitors (including bugs you need to replicate for compatibility purposes) that there is not the slightest chance of some grassroots alternative emerging.

throwaway2048 5y ago

It was not an update, started happening to me on arch linux, where Firefox does not automatically update. Seems like some kind of timed enabling of https3 support.

jacquesm 5y ago
Which wasn't present in previous versions. So this is still a consequence of updates. But now, to make it extra hard to troubleshoot we put in timebombs in your automatic updates that will go off some fine Thursday morning without any warning or indication that something has just changed. Idiots.
- 00deadbeef 5y ago
  > Which wasn't present in previous versions. So this is still a consequence of updates. Looks like HTTP/3 has been in Firefox for around a year
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Yes, but if it wasn't active then it might as well not have been. This is a great way to bypass continuity testing, I really pity all those people working the desks in hospitals right now using FireFox who are typically less savvy than your average HN'er in trying to get their work done. If you ship a browser with a time-bomb you are utterly irresponsible.
    - Vinnl 5y ago
      At this time it doesn't appear to be a surreptitious update, but a load balancer issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c17 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c17
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        Sorry, but my traffic isn't supposed to go through anybody's centralized load balancer, least of all one operated by parties with whom I do not have a relationship on the basis of the delivery of some service. That's not how this works. HTTP/3 support is optional as far as I'm concerned and plenty of websites that I tested with do not support it and still failed due to this issue. Absolutely unacceptable.
        Vinnl 5y ago
        I'd wait a bit for the postmortem; I don't think there's reason to conclude at this time that your traffic is going through someone's centralised load balancer. Another update says that the load balancer issue triggered a bug in Firefox, so presumably fixing the load balancer issue will prevent that bug from being triggered, and then the bug can be fixed separately after: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21 But mostly: I have no real idea what's going on, so I'm awaiting the postmortem.
        jacquesm 5y ago
        That part seems to be related to the telemetry issue, which, surprise has been re-enabled during one of the updates.
    - kevingadd 5y ago
      This isn't a time bomb, it's a symptom of the way modern browsers tend to have centralized I/O which means disk and network traffic goes through a single chokepoint. HTTP3 traffic appears to be able to cause one of Firefox's socket threads to hang, and since everything goes through it, all your network traffic is now dead. Chromium uses a similar model of routing all I/O through specific places, so it's vulnerable to similar sorts of problems (though AFAIK it has never failed this badly in production). Basically, this could have happened at any point if a production service run by someone like Google, Facebook, Cloudflare etc managed to trigger a sufficiently bad bug in a modern browser's network stack. If not for the centralized I/O this would just hang a single browser process, which isn't as impactful since Firefox and Chrome both split content out into many processes. It would also make it more obvious which server(s) are responsible since only certain tabs would be dying. FWIW, as far as I know this centralized I/O model was popularized by Google, not Mozilla.
michaelanckaert 5y ago
That concurs with what I'm seeing. Also on Arch and while I updated yesterday, FF performed perfectly until this morning.

alexb_ 5y ago

It seems like it has nothing to do with the version, so it's not an update from Mozilla's end. Still bad though.

michaelanckaert 5y ago
If that's the case then I might be wrong. But I remember updating somewhere yesterday and using FF for a couple of hours before stopping for the day. This morning no pages loaded anymore. Hope I didn't jump to conclusions, but still.
- stef25 5y ago
  It just stopped working this morning after 3 hours of no problems. Both developer edition and the normal version, same problem with an older version. Chrome and Safari worked fine. Someone really fucked up. There must be millions of non techies completely lost right now.
- alexb_ 5y ago
  It definitely stopped in the middle of the night - I saw it happen in real time - what's more likely is that some third party is to "blame". Although the blame still rests squarely on the shoulders of Mozilla, since Chromium browsers all worked fine. Apparently the going explanation is that something involving HTTP3 runs into an infinite loop and never resolves (explaining why it also sends a core to 100%), and Cloudflare/Google/Some Other Thing updated to using HTTP3.
  - DelightOne 5y ago
    > Our current suspicion is that Google Cloud Load Balancer (or a similar CloudFlare service) that fronts one of our own servers got an update that triggers an existing HTTP3 bug. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21
- bayindirh 5y ago
  It's not from Mozilla. My two computers stopped at different times, and both were on 95.0.x. I didn't restart Firefox to make it happen. It just froze in the middle of the video.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

skywal_l 5y ago

I don't think Mozilla's income is a problem. They are making money. The problem is how they spend that money. My impression is that they lost the original spirit. Mozilla lacked a BDFL that would embody that spirit. What's going on at Mozilla is probably what's going to happen for Linux once Linus is out. Both these pieces of open source software are way too big to be replicated now by a dude or a bunch of dudes and also way too big to be maintained by people on their free time. They require resources and organization which itself corrupt the original spirit. Or maybe that whole firefox debacle made me a little gloomy today...

michaelanckaert 5y ago
Agreed, income isn't a problem. It's vision. But I don't want to support Mozilla in a financial way if their vision doesn't match my own. This may sound presumptuous but we really need an open web and Mozilla is one of the last defenders (and failing). I don't want my monetary donations to go to side projects, I want a great open source browser as the focus.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  Maybe, just maybe, once Mozilla fails people and organizations will finally understand what terrible mistake they made by giving total control over the web to Google. Maybe this could be the beginning of a new project, managed by an institution with clear aims and no Mozilla-Foundation-style bullshit. Remember the early days of Firefox? It crashed often, it was slow, but we had great expectations ad supported it. It wasn't easy to use it at all. At some point it made a breakthrough and installing Firefox was the first thing to do on a fresh install of any machine. People don't remember or know these times and take the web browser for granted. But now that Google has long left their original "Don't be evil" mantra and all tech is focused around the web, having an open, neutral browser is more important than ever. I wish people - including the ones at Mozilla - appreciated this fact more.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    It's super important. And that's why it is also important that they focus on the browser instead of on all of their hobby horses.

a5aAqU 5y ago

I don't understand the anger about the VPN. I think it's a good idea. Reader mode is useful, especially if you block a lot of CSS and JavaScript by default with uMatrix. I don't know why people use DOH anyway. It bypasses your hosts file, so you can't block things as easily.

michaelanckaert 5y ago
Fully agree with reader mode, it's an integral part of the browser. VPN not so much IMO.
- a5aAqU 5y ago
  Many people wouldn't otherwise sign up for a VPN, and there are a lot of shady VPNs out there. Mozilla can use the feature to help reduce dependence on a company that has been trying to destroy them for years (Google), and help non-tech people get set up with a VPN.
  - asteroidbelt 5y ago
    Google is the largest financial supporters in Firefox, they buy Firefox search bar. If they wanted to destroy Firefox, they’d already do it by simply cutting that revenue stream.
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      Or some other search engine would become their revenue stream, like when Yahoo was the default search. Without Google bidding their revenue would likely drop, but it wouldn't disappear.
      - asteroidbelt 5y ago
        True. But revenue would be significantly smaller (other engines cannot afford pay high per click, and lack of competition drives the price per click down), and revenue is already barely enough to cover Mozilla needs (see recent staff cuts).

ya_throw 5y ago

>If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web! Have you any idea how complex a browser needs to be? I hope this team of plucky, idealistic coders can keep up with all the latest and greatest web developments devised by the thousands of engineers at Google et al. The web as an open, human-sized system is dead.

captainmuon 5y ago
If you keep the browser ultra modular, I think it can work. You need to have one component for layout, one for css, one for the DOM, and you can use external libraries for media playback, javascript, networking, and so on. I think a decent layout or CSS library would be useful outside of a web browser, too. Then I would also only focus on the subset of websites that are "documents", not "apps". If I could decide, HTML6 would have two profiles: one ultra restricted (maybe no legacy stuff and no cross site scripting) for "documents", and one where you can do all kinds of crazy stuff like "web USB" for "apps". That's not going to happen because Google and Apple like the "open" web as complex and messy as it is, because it gives them total control as you know. But it doesn't stop a browser vendor from building a browser with two engines - your own engine for the majority of documents and chromium for webapps.
- ya_throw 5y ago
  Sounds like a lot of work for moving lightly-formatted text files around. Also, essentially no-one wants it. What people want (whether they know it or not) is the latest shiny to keep themselves distracted.
  - MichaelBurge 5y ago
    You could start off targeting developers, who mainly use web browsers to read documentation, HN, bug trackers, code repositories, and other plain documents. Something for regular people would be many more years of work.
  - captainmuon 5y ago
    I don't know a single non-technical person who doesn't complain about web browsers being slow. Part of the problem is that they don't understand the differences between computers and go for the cheapest PC or tablet, but most of it is bloat. We tried to introduce office 365 company wide for collaboration, but we had a whole plant of 150 employees "mutiny" because they refused to use any of the office web apps because they were too slow. This slowness is not a fundamental problem, but incidental. The layout calculations of even the most complex websites could be solved by a 10 years old computer instantly. The rendering can be done by a GPU without sweat. Look at how many polygons and shaders games had 10 years ago. And note I'm not talking about "lightly formatted text files", but 90% of all web sites. News sites, Youtube, Reddit, .... What I'm excluding is Gmail, Office365, anything that uses Vibration, NFC, WebMidi, and other boutiqe features (you could probably add those back as libraries if you need them later). I'd argue that not supporting "apps" is a feature - you'd have to explicity allow them and they'd run in a sandboxed tab.

spauka 5y ago

While your point stands - it's worth pointing out that this bug was NOT caused by an update [1], but seems to have been a long-standing bug in the HTTP3 stack that was triggered due to some external site (including apparently Mozilla's telemetry provider) that changed their stack. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908

0xfaded 5y ago

What would be the rough numbers required to support firefox development in terms of #devs and $? What would be the model to get started? Can we start by funding a fork (similar to iceweasel) with the eventual goal of hard forking once the needed resources are available? I like you would be more than happy to pay $10/month. I pay $20/month for a bike! (relatively cheap in Denmark where taking my good bike to the shop costs me ~$500 every time I fall off). The problem is that there isn't a box on the internet for my CC.

rvz 5y ago

> I want Mozilla to defend the open web and create an open source browser. That’s it. The 'open web' died when Chrome overtook Firefox and are still paying for more than >85% of all their revenues just to be on life support in return for ruining the 'open web'. > If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web! The web has been reclaimed by Google from Microsoft - exchanging from one behemoth to another. Firefox is always behind Chrome's features and many web developers still continue to place banners on users to 'Switch to Chrome'. So it is already over before it has started. > it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support. One more thing, even if one was to support via 'donations', they are not funding Firefox, it is funding something totally irrelevant in Mozilla and Google is once again keeping them on life support. What a magnificent disaster.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

alimbada 5y ago

> I don’t want a VPN service, bookmark readers or other crap. Fortunately, you're just one person voicing your opinion in an unrelated corner of the Internet and you seem to be in the minority otherwise Mozilla would have made the changes you want already. Most other people either find those features useful or are indifferent about them. I, personally have no qualms with Mozilla doing what they do even if I might not use those features. If you really want change, start contributing and bring it about yourself.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

patrec 5y ago

> Please stop non-browser development and let me pay a monthly fee for a decent browser! Unless you are a billionaire, you can't afford to. Developing a decent browser takes enormous amounts of money, good luck funding that of voluntary donations or monthly fees if in most technical aspects superior free alternatives exist. Firefox is failing badly on a few hundred millions a year; I'm sure you could do better with a CEO who isn't just a parasitical non-entity, but I doubt better enough to make that idea viable. > This isn't just a rant, it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support. A pipe dream -- the web is a dead end. If you want something that can live off donation support (as opposed to selling off its users as cattle), you need a new set of protocols. The whole web stack is such a clusterfuck of layers upon layers of crap with one dominant player who can always add more of it when it suits them to slow down competitors (including bugs you need to replicate for compatibility purposes) that there is not the slightest chance of some grassroots alternative emerging.