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I'm going to treat this like a product engineering discussion User Story: As a Private Citizen and Engineer, I want a graphical multi-input interface to load,

I'm going to treat this like a product engineering discussion User Story: As a Private Citizen and Engineer, I want a graphical multi-input interface to load, view, interact with and post documents to remote and local HTTP servers ("web-browsing") on any personal computing device. I want web-browsing to have out of the box default security and privacy guardrails that are well documented can be disabled or modified by me the user and only me the user. I want this software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible (aka FOSS). I want this capability to be free at the time of use with no restrictions on amount scope or scale of use. I think the above describes the product that everyone wants It sure sounds a lot like Firefox to me Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever? edit: Oh I didn't realize that Brave totally abandoned their model and started taking Venture from RGA and Page One in 2019. Game has been over since then at least: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brave-software/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brave-software/compa...

BrendanEich 3y ago
That seed stage investment is a tiny slice of the cap table and has no control, just ride-along preferred shares. Your aversion to VC is something I share, but not to this IQ-lowering degree.
ushakov 3y ago
There is SerenityOS and their Ladybird browser
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  God bless Andreas Kling but I don't think they have the community support to stand up to the Chromes and IE/Edge of the world unfortunately
sirwhinesalot 3y ago
> Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever? Because the leadership is hellbent on copying Chrome but worse and investing in utterly pointless endeavors instead of making a good browser. It's a shame. Giving money to the Mozilla Foundation is the same as throwing it to a black hole. I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  >Because the leadership is hellbent on copying Chrome but worse and investing in utterly pointless endeavors instead of making a good browser. Is this a hypothesis that we can specify and test? Is this how we would approach this problem? It sounds more like a cynical write-off, not a actual strategy >I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches Cool, but that strategy clearly isn't working. I'm suggesting, instead of writing off Firefox, we (you specifically, and me and whomever else wants to) start engaging with Mozilla to help figure this stuff out Nothing is perfect, but at least it's got some of the hardest parts right: Organizational momentum and distribution. Technical stuff is easy to change compared to that. The challenge now is finding competent people who can actually put the effort in, with no compensation, to make it work and that might take convincing the Mozilla folks to do something differently. Having done this kind of thing a few times, that sounds way easier than trying to totally start over from scratch though.
  - sirwhinesalot 3y ago
    > Is this a hypothesis that we can specify and test? Is this how we would approach this problem? It sounds more like a cynical write-off, not a actual strategy There is nothing to test, it's why I stopped using Firefox. Check the Mozilla foundation page for all the crap they fund instead of the browser. Look how much the UI looks like Chrome, even little things like clicking the searchbar expanding it outside its bounds. > I'm suggesting, instead of writing off Firefox, we (you specifically, and me and whomever else wants to) start engaging with Mozilla to help figure this stuff out They don't listen to feedback. When Apple (the company known for telling people they were holding their phones wrong) introduced the safari tab-redesign that merged tabs with the searchbar, it was nearly universally disliked and they backtracked on the change. Apple of all companies backtracked on a bad design. Mozilla? They just keep on going. When Nintendo was struggling due to the failure of the Wii U, Satoru Iwata took on a massive pay cut to avoid firing people. Mozilla? Fired the Servo team and raised executive compensation. > In 2020 Mozilla announced it would cut 25% of its worldwide staff of nearly 1,000 to reduce costs. Firefox has fallen from 30% market share to 4% in 10 years. Despite this, executive pay increased 400%, with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s top executive, receiving $2.4m in 2018.
jacooper 3y ago
Brave is fully open source, and actually defends its users privacy by default. While firefox still uses google, allows google ads and tracking, and just talks about doing something but does nothing Also chromium is just a superior engine, in security and speed, using firefox won't change Chromium dominance at all.
- izacus 3y ago
  That's the same Brave that replaced links with their own profit bringing ad links? Riight.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    This never happened as far as I can tell.
    - mthoms 3y ago
      It didn’t. They did append their affiliate id to type-ins for a single crypto exchange once. They quickly retracted and apologized. That’s bad, but not nearly as bad as what the parent commenter described.
      - charcircuit 3y ago
        >They did append their affiliate id to type-ins for a single crypto exchange once They didn't do this either. There was an omnibox site suggestion that included an affiliate id. Nothing got appended and people were able to see the affiliate id before hitting enter to visit the site. These site suggestions could also be disabled in the settings.
        mthoms 3y ago
        Thats nearly exactly what I said? - If you typed the domain into the address bar, and pressed enter (obviously) the affiliate id got appended. I'm not clear what distinction you're making here.
Etheryte 3y ago
I think for a lot of people Firefox does tick those boxes, but the way Mozilla has been run is... less than ideal. I'm sure many commenters here will have strong opinions about it, personally I'm not convinced that modern Mozilla is the right organization to pour this time and effort into.
cwzwarich 3y ago
> Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever? [disclaimer: former Servo team member] Mozilla had a chance to advance browser tech with Servo and fumbled it.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Is that sufficient reason to abandon the entire project?
- izacus 3y ago
  Not to be negative, but what value would Servo exactly bring to users and the web after all the engineering effort? I'm sure it was technically impressive. Chrome, when it came, was stupidly faster than any other competitor, including Mozilla Firefox. What would Servo bring to make web a big jump forward for us users, beyond ideology and fun work for its developers? (Ideology doesn't sell software, as opensource efforts have proven repeatedly over last 3 decades).
  - chromakode 3y ago
    Same selling points as Chromium originally: faster and safer. The premise of Servo is that it'd make better use of multicore and would be safer because it was written in a memory-safe language. For modern users the big one is probably battery usage, though, which Safari excels at but would be harder for an open source player that has to support every device.
  - cwzwarich 3y ago
    > What would Servo bring to make web a big jump forward for us users The biggest advantage would be having a memory-safe browser engine.
    - zo1 3y ago
      As someone with almost no knowledge of Servo, and personally not having a good opinion of the Mozilla foundation, your comment tells me all I need to know why they stopped support of Servo development. Only social initiatives get feel good money to waste on nice to haves. This "Servo" thing does not sound like it.
rileymat2 3y ago
From a user story perspective you skipped the most important “so that” part that describes your needs separate from the functional spec masquerading as a user story. Although I think I agree with you, if your “so that” is so you can visit a particular website, those features you are specifying may demonetize and eliminate the website you want to go to causing it not to exist.
yashasolutions 3y ago
Firefox is getting many things right, but maybe we need something like some community fork with a leadership that's able to create a constructive effort to bring back the focus on what was once the spirit of this browser. There are many non-aligned efforts with various directions, some focused on privacy, some on UI config, etc. maybe getting these people together to create something common where something can be integrated into one. Just to keep rambling, I'd add that maybe a online conference independently run to get some important conversion going in the community, with the various firefox-fork maintainers and other important contributor, and try to layout some common roadmap, outline the main issues and get people exited again about the product would be a relatively low-hanging fruit to this started.
bigstrat2003 3y ago
[flagged]
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  As much as dislike the major idea behind it that push ( build a system to get Trump out -- mildly ridiculous to focus entire company around that ), there was one idea in there that did make sense: - Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted. I think that would change internet landscape a fair bit.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    How? The big players will create a layer inbetween to handle ad payment. Might create additional businesses.
- cpeterso 3y ago
  If you read more than that post’s title, you will see that it’s calling for alternatives to deplatforming.
  - soundnote 3y ago
    The alternatives aren't exactly benign, though: Mozilla seems completely fine with others deciding what I should see on the Internet (those others being politically aligned with Mozilla, of course), which is what their "amplify factual voices" point really means. The list is just left-leaning mainstream outlets whose quality has taken a nosedive, and if it comes to fact checking, we all know ostensible fact checking outlets police narrative adherence more than factuality.
zee234 3y ago
Firefox browser and engine is technical obsolete joke. Their sand-boxing security model, multi-threading, graphical libraries... Remember cancelled Servo rewrite, or the whole "multi-threaded" saga? Try to actually compile that bloody thing, before you write "software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible" Even Ubuntu team gave up on compiling their software, and are serving mainstream binaries from Mozilla! Brave has some shady stuff, but that is easy to disable in configuration. And under-hood they follow security patches pretty well, have good security and stuff like 3D acceleration just works! And you do not need 10 browser extension from some shady authors, that has full access to your browsing data!!!
- webstrand 3y ago
  That's due to trademark restrictions. The Gentoo community regularly builds Firefox from scratch, it's not the slowest package to build.
- blinkingled 3y ago
  As someone who has built and lightly studied Firefox codebase out of pure curiosity this technical joke doesn't really ring remotely true. Sure it's an older codebase and Mozilla doesn't have enough funding manpower to do big rewrites but I don't remember Firefox crashing on me in recent times and I use it exclusively on Mac/Linux and Windows. No site compat issues either. So stop blowing smoke I guess and provide actual details on how it is a joke?
  - zee2345 3y ago
    It is not about crashing, but security. Chromium based browsers have multiple layers of sandboxing and hardening. Webpage rendered basically runs in several virtual machines that are very hard to breach. Mozilla had process based isolation (mainly due old code base). That is far less effective. Some things like GPU access are not sandboxed at all! >Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 for an estimated $400 million to $450 million per year. Mozilla is a multibilion corporation. They DO have resources for proper rewrite in Rust. How they spend their money is another thing! Old code base was good excuse in 2016! Brave Software Inc is much smaller company, and they do advanced stuff like their own search engine!
iteratethis 3y ago
What is the difference between Brave taking Venture and Mozilla being subsidized by the ultimate enemy of privacy, Google? Mozilla has defunded Firefox, allows for no way to directly donate to Firefox development, and now writes activist blogs.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  History We know what Mozilla will do with it - not ideal but it's the devil we know We have no idea what Brave will do with it My personal heuristics around VC backed companies (Having been a CEO with venture backing, an LP in a venture fund, a director in a publicly traded company etc...) is the following: There do not exist PE backed companies that will take actions that conflict with an even theoretical reduction in potential ROI. Leaders lose long term control of their companies to VC the moment they sign the term sheet So I have zero faith that anyone who aligns themselves to profit making, will not harm either the customers or the employees that are involved in favor for the people providing the capital.
psadri 3y ago
How much are you willing to pay for such a product?
- ipaddr 3y ago
  I'm willing to give 100% of Mozilla's CEO salary and move money from unrelated project over.
  - kyleee 3y ago
    Fire Baker for cause and claw back any bonuses / extra compensation. That would indeed be a good start for freeing up some budget
throwaway9870 3y ago
Because the product engineering isn't as important as the community and organization. I got excited about Firefox when it forked from Netscape, but since then I have been unimpressed.
Georgelemental 3y ago
Brave's CEO (Brendan Eich) used to be co-founder and CEO of Mozilla. They kicked him out because in 2008 he donated $1000 of his money to an unapproved political cause. Can't put time/effort into something that is more interested in virtue signalling than improving.
- kbelder 3y ago
  Shouldn't be a dead comment; this is exactly what happened.
- init2null 3y ago
  CTO would've been appropriate, but not CEO. Mozilla could not keep a CEO donating to ban gay marriage. I rather doubt even Microsoft would've kept him. It's divisive and distracting, especially for a public benefit organization. They made the right call.
  - Georgelemental 3y ago
    7 million people voted in favor of Proposition 8. Would you ban all 7 million from any position of authority? What of the 6.4 million who voted against, are they "divisive"?
    - init2null 3y ago
      It's fine if he voted against it. But a donation disqualifies him from that position if for no other reason than it's distracting from Mozilla's purpose. Whether good or bad, the foundation has a strong human rights focus. Gervase Markham was a dedicated outspoken fundamentalist at Mozilla until his death and was very influential, but he wasn't in a leadership position. Big difference.
      - Georgelemental 3y ago
        Would you have the same opinion if he had donated to the other camp? Does the timing of the donation also matter, in your view?
mch82 3y ago
You’re in the right mindset. I’d recommend a pivot from the “private citizen” persona to the “CTO persona”. As a CTO, I want a web browser based on open standards so that my company’s portfolio of products and internal business apps are protected from monopoly behavior by browser vendors. Mozilla may have forgotten the CTO persona. CTOs can donate engineering hours to Mozilla. Companies can donate money. If companies in the Fortune 500 aren’t using Firefox internally and companies like Netflix aren’t recommending Firefox to users, then Mozilla will continue to struggle to get market share and sustain funding. One key use case: Firefox used to make it easy to create corporate intranet apps (the apps teams at companies use to do work). However, Firefox security changes started breaking intranet apps by returning the “your connection is not secure” error and giving workers no way to override. This hurts CTOs so CTOs switch their companies to Edge & Chrome.
- kyleee 3y ago
  Ugh, the self signed cert “error” scare page is such a dark spot in general purpose computing history

BrendanEich 3y ago

That seed stage investment is a tiny slice of the cap table and has no control, just ride-along preferred shares. Your aversion to VC is something I share, but not to this IQ-lowering degree.

ushakov 3y ago

There is SerenityOS and their Ladybird browser

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
God bless Andreas Kling but I don't think they have the community support to stand up to the Chromes and IE/Edge of the world unfortunately

sirwhinesalot 3y ago

> Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever? Because the leadership is hellbent on copying Chrome but worse and investing in utterly pointless endeavors instead of making a good browser. It's a shame. Giving money to the Mozilla Foundation is the same as throwing it to a black hole. I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
>Because the leadership is hellbent on copying Chrome but worse and investing in utterly pointless endeavors instead of making a good browser. Is this a hypothesis that we can specify and test? Is this how we would approach this problem? It sounds more like a cynical write-off, not a actual strategy >I hope a new truly FOSS browser shows up and catches on that does not use Blink and isn't owned by a group of human-shaped leeches Cool, but that strategy clearly isn't working. I'm suggesting, instead of writing off Firefox, we (you specifically, and me and whomever else wants to) start engaging with Mozilla to help figure this stuff out Nothing is perfect, but at least it's got some of the hardest parts right: Organizational momentum and distribution. Technical stuff is easy to change compared to that. The challenge now is finding competent people who can actually put the effort in, with no compensation, to make it work and that might take convincing the Mozilla folks to do something differently. Having done this kind of thing a few times, that sounds way easier than trying to totally start over from scratch though.
- sirwhinesalot 3y ago
  > Is this a hypothesis that we can specify and test? Is this how we would approach this problem? It sounds more like a cynical write-off, not a actual strategy There is nothing to test, it's why I stopped using Firefox. Check the Mozilla foundation page for all the crap they fund instead of the browser. Look how much the UI looks like Chrome, even little things like clicking the searchbar expanding it outside its bounds. > I'm suggesting, instead of writing off Firefox, we (you specifically, and me and whomever else wants to) start engaging with Mozilla to help figure this stuff out They don't listen to feedback. When Apple (the company known for telling people they were holding their phones wrong) introduced the safari tab-redesign that merged tabs with the searchbar, it was nearly universally disliked and they backtracked on the change. Apple of all companies backtracked on a bad design. Mozilla? They just keep on going. When Nintendo was struggling due to the failure of the Wii U, Satoru Iwata took on a massive pay cut to avoid firing people. Mozilla? Fired the Servo team and raised executive compensation. > In 2020 Mozilla announced it would cut 25% of its worldwide staff of nearly 1,000 to reduce costs. Firefox has fallen from 30% market share to 4% in 10 years. Despite this, executive pay increased 400%, with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s top executive, receiving $2.4m in 2018.

jacooper 3y ago

Brave is fully open source, and actually defends its users privacy by default. While firefox still uses google, allows google ads and tracking, and just talks about doing something but does nothing Also chromium is just a superior engine, in security and speed, using firefox won't change Chromium dominance at all.

izacus 3y ago
That's the same Brave that replaced links with their own profit bringing ad links? Riight.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  This never happened as far as I can tell.
  - mthoms 3y ago
    It didn’t. They did append their affiliate id to type-ins for a single crypto exchange once. They quickly retracted and apologized. That’s bad, but not nearly as bad as what the parent commenter described.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      >They did append their affiliate id to type-ins for a single crypto exchange once They didn't do this either. There was an omnibox site suggestion that included an affiliate id. Nothing got appended and people were able to see the affiliate id before hitting enter to visit the site. These site suggestions could also be disabled in the settings.
      - mthoms 3y ago
        Thats nearly exactly what I said? - If you typed the domain into the address bar, and pressed enter (obviously) the affiliate id got appended. I'm not clear what distinction you're making here.

Etheryte 3y ago

I think for a lot of people Firefox does tick those boxes, but the way Mozilla has been run is... less than ideal. I'm sure many commenters here will have strong opinions about it, personally I'm not convinced that modern Mozilla is the right organization to pour this time and effort into.

cwzwarich 3y ago

> Why aren't we collectively putting our time/effort etc.. into making Firefox the singular and best FOSS browser ever? [disclaimer: former Servo team member] Mozilla had a chance to advance browser tech with Servo and fumbled it.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Is that sufficient reason to abandon the entire project?
izacus 3y ago
Not to be negative, but what value would Servo exactly bring to users and the web after all the engineering effort? I'm sure it was technically impressive. Chrome, when it came, was stupidly faster than any other competitor, including Mozilla Firefox. What would Servo bring to make web a big jump forward for us users, beyond ideology and fun work for its developers? (Ideology doesn't sell software, as opensource efforts have proven repeatedly over last 3 decades).
- chromakode 3y ago
  Same selling points as Chromium originally: faster and safer. The premise of Servo is that it'd make better use of multicore and would be safer because it was written in a memory-safe language. For modern users the big one is probably battery usage, though, which Safari excels at but would be harder for an open source player that has to support every device.
- cwzwarich 3y ago
  > What would Servo bring to make web a big jump forward for us users The biggest advantage would be having a memory-safe browser engine.
  - zo1 3y ago
    As someone with almost no knowledge of Servo, and personally not having a good opinion of the Mozilla foundation, your comment tells me all I need to know why they stopped support of Servo development. Only social initiatives get feel good money to waste on nice to haves. This "Servo" thing does not sound like it.

rileymat2 3y ago

From a user story perspective you skipped the most important “so that” part that describes your needs separate from the functional spec masquerading as a user story. Although I think I agree with you, if your “so that” is so you can visit a particular website, those features you are specifying may demonetize and eliminate the website you want to go to causing it not to exist.

yashasolutions 3y ago

Firefox is getting many things right, but maybe we need something like some community fork with a leadership that's able to create a constructive effort to bring back the focus on what was once the spirit of this browser. There are many non-aligned efforts with various directions, some focused on privacy, some on UI config, etc. maybe getting these people together to create something common where something can be integrated into one. Just to keep rambling, I'd add that maybe a online conference independently run to get some important conversion going in the community, with the various firefox-fork maintainers and other important contributor, and try to layout some common roadmap, outline the main issues and get people exited again about the product would be a relatively low-hanging fruit to this started.

bigstrat2003 3y ago

[flagged]

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
As much as dislike the major idea behind it that push ( build a system to get Trump out -- mildly ridiculous to focus entire company around that ), there was one idea in there that did make sense: - Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted. I think that would change internet landscape a fair bit.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  How? The big players will create a layer inbetween to handle ad payment. Might create additional businesses.
cpeterso 3y ago
If you read more than that post’s title, you will see that it’s calling for alternatives to deplatforming.
- soundnote 3y ago
  The alternatives aren't exactly benign, though: Mozilla seems completely fine with others deciding what I should see on the Internet (those others being politically aligned with Mozilla, of course), which is what their "amplify factual voices" point really means. The list is just left-leaning mainstream outlets whose quality has taken a nosedive, and if it comes to fact checking, we all know ostensible fact checking outlets police narrative adherence more than factuality.

zee234 3y ago

Firefox browser and engine is technical obsolete joke. Their sand-boxing security model, multi-threading, graphical libraries... Remember cancelled Servo rewrite, or the whole "multi-threaded" saga? Try to actually compile that bloody thing, before you write "software to be fully modifiable by any person using tools that are easily, freely available and accessible" Even Ubuntu team gave up on compiling their software, and are serving mainstream binaries from Mozilla! Brave has some shady stuff, but that is easy to disable in configuration. And under-hood they follow security patches pretty well, have good security and stuff like 3D acceleration just works! And you do not need 10 browser extension from some shady authors, that has full access to your browsing data!!!

webstrand 3y ago
That's due to trademark restrictions. The Gentoo community regularly builds Firefox from scratch, it's not the slowest package to build.
blinkingled 3y ago
As someone who has built and lightly studied Firefox codebase out of pure curiosity this technical joke doesn't really ring remotely true. Sure it's an older codebase and Mozilla doesn't have enough funding manpower to do big rewrites but I don't remember Firefox crashing on me in recent times and I use it exclusively on Mac/Linux and Windows. No site compat issues either. So stop blowing smoke I guess and provide actual details on how it is a joke?
- zee2345 3y ago
  It is not about crashing, but security. Chromium based browsers have multiple layers of sandboxing and hardening. Webpage rendered basically runs in several virtual machines that are very hard to breach. Mozilla had process based isolation (mainly due old code base). That is far less effective. Some things like GPU access are not sandboxed at all! >Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 for an estimated $400 million to $450 million per year. Mozilla is a multibilion corporation. They DO have resources for proper rewrite in Rust. How they spend their money is another thing! Old code base was good excuse in 2016! Brave Software Inc is much smaller company, and they do advanced stuff like their own search engine!

iteratethis 3y ago

What is the difference between Brave taking Venture and Mozilla being subsidized by the ultimate enemy of privacy, Google? Mozilla has defunded Firefox, allows for no way to directly donate to Firefox development, and now writes activist blogs.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
History We know what Mozilla will do with it - not ideal but it's the devil we know We have no idea what Brave will do with it My personal heuristics around VC backed companies (Having been a CEO with venture backing, an LP in a venture fund, a director in a publicly traded company etc...) is the following: There do not exist PE backed companies that will take actions that conflict with an even theoretical reduction in potential ROI. Leaders lose long term control of their companies to VC the moment they sign the term sheet So I have zero faith that anyone who aligns themselves to profit making, will not harm either the customers or the employees that are involved in favor for the people providing the capital.

psadri 3y ago

How much are you willing to pay for such a product?

ipaddr 3y ago
I'm willing to give 100% of Mozilla's CEO salary and move money from unrelated project over.
- kyleee 3y ago
  Fire Baker for cause and claw back any bonuses / extra compensation. That would indeed be a good start for freeing up some budget

throwaway9870 3y ago

Because the product engineering isn't as important as the community and organization. I got excited about Firefox when it forked from Netscape, but since then I have been unimpressed.

Georgelemental 3y ago

Brave's CEO (Brendan Eich) used to be co-founder and CEO of Mozilla. They kicked him out because in 2008 he donated $1000 of his money to an unapproved political cause. Can't put time/effort into something that is more interested in virtue signalling than improving.

kbelder 3y ago
Shouldn't be a dead comment; this is exactly what happened.
init2null 3y ago
CTO would've been appropriate, but not CEO. Mozilla could not keep a CEO donating to ban gay marriage. I rather doubt even Microsoft would've kept him. It's divisive and distracting, especially for a public benefit organization. They made the right call.
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  7 million people voted in favor of Proposition 8. Would you ban all 7 million from any position of authority? What of the 6.4 million who voted against, are they "divisive"?
  - init2null 3y ago
    It's fine if he voted against it. But a donation disqualifies him from that position if for no other reason than it's distracting from Mozilla's purpose. Whether good or bad, the foundation has a strong human rights focus. Gervase Markham was a dedicated outspoken fundamentalist at Mozilla until his death and was very influential, but he wasn't in a leadership position. Big difference.
    - Georgelemental 3y ago
      Would you have the same opinion if he had donated to the other camp? Does the timing of the donation also matter, in your view?

mch82 3y ago

You’re in the right mindset. I’d recommend a pivot from the “private citizen” persona to the “CTO persona”. As a CTO, I want a web browser based on open standards so that my company’s portfolio of products and internal business apps are protected from monopoly behavior by browser vendors. Mozilla may have forgotten the CTO persona. CTOs can donate engineering hours to Mozilla. Companies can donate money. If companies in the Fortune 500 aren’t using Firefox internally and companies like Netflix aren’t recommending Firefox to users, then Mozilla will continue to struggle to get market share and sustain funding. One key use case: Firefox used to make it easy to create corporate intranet apps (the apps teams at companies use to do work). However, Firefox security changes started breaking intranet apps by returning the “your connection is not secure” error and giving workers no way to override. This hurts CTOs so CTOs switch their companies to Edge & Chrome.

kyleee 3y ago
Ugh, the self signed cert “error” scare page is such a dark spot in general purpose computing history