3 ms·

To the downvoters: tell us what you think instead of trying to get an opinion contrary to your own greyed out. Is it just that I mention undesirable person #1 w

To the downvoters: tell us what you think instead of trying to get an opinion contrary to your own greyed out. Is it just that I mention undesirable person #1 which caught your ire, is it that you do not think a fork would be a good idea, is it because you do not agree that Mozilla has been abused by Baker? Discuss, do not just click that down-vote button.

kemotep 3y ago
People are probably turned off to the comment because of all the complaining about “identity politics”. There also exists several forks of Firefox already. Suggesting the nth idealogical fork that will be funded out of the kindness of a billionaire’s heart doesn’t sound productive. Why not donate to Librewolf? Why must Musk actually have any involvement besides funding?
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  The "complaining about identity politics" is part of the core reason for creating a non-politicised fork which can take over where Firefox left at a ~32% market share, i.e. it can attempt to regain part of the market lost to Chrome and its many descendants. The reason for Musk to get involved (apart from funding) is to make sure the project remains politically neutral as that would be one of selling points when compared to the rest of the field. It would mean that this fork - let's call it Techiya, Hebrew for 'resurrection' and thus a fitting name for this project - explicitly stays out of the political quagmire which has swallowed Mozilla and deeply affects the way companies like Google (Chrome), Microsoft (Edge) and Apple (Safari) (re)act. It would focus on creating a competitive browser which can host a fully functional content blocker, which does not send oodles of tracking information to some mothership, which does not waste time promoting things like "racial justice" [1] but focuses on its core task of developing a solid alternative to the current Blink/Webkit-based almost-monoculture. Leave the politicking to others, not everything needs to be politicised. Librewolf and Palemoon and Waterfox and the Tor Browser and the other Firefox forks do not have enough impact to survive by themselves without Firefox itself. They are projects focused on specific aspects - privacy, XPCOM/XUL extensions, plugins etc. If Firefox goes down so do these projects - maybe apart from Palemoon but that is only because that project already depends on a lot of older code which is no longer supported by Mozilla to enable it to run pre-Quantum extensions and plugins. What I'm philosophising about is a project which can take over where Mozilla left off, focused on creating and maintaining a viable alternative to the current Blink/WebKit hegemony and intent on gaining a sizeable market share. [1 https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-racial-justice-commitments-one-year-in/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-racia...
  - kemotep 3y ago
    No offense but nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox. Perhaps the Trillion dollar companies behind the phone duopoly, the Desktop OS with 80+% market share, and the search engine the world uses, leveraged their positions to advertise and promote their browsers to squeeze Firefox out of their 32% market share. Like Linux, so what if Firefox only has a 5% market share? It does what I need to without having to deal with the nonsense of Google and Microsoft. And frankly being “politically neutral” is itself a political stance. And Musk is far from impartial too. He too kowtows to dictators and bad faith politicians all the time. He takes strong explicit political positions that are not neutral. He doesn’t do the things that you would want him to do with this Firefox fork.
    - the_third_wave 3y ago
      > nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox It does, though. It may not be directly (apart from a few annoyances with their 'colours of change' propaganda) but the fact that Mozilla now spends a large fraction of its lavish funds on CEO remuneration and activism while the main product languishes on the back burner certainly has an effect. With the funding Mozilla gets through mostly search engine deals - more than $600 million in 2021 [1], about $1.1 billion in assets - it has the financial wherewithal to push development much harder than it does. Instead of using these funds where it matters they have divested themselves off a large fraction of the development base and are still reducing their development budget while earnings are going up. [1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-2021-fs-final-1010.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
      - kemotep 3y ago
        And despite that Firefox remains far and away the best browser experience. It’s almost like none of that actually matters because Chrome and Blink based browsers have taken over the world and both Google and Microsoft engage in similar activism and have 1,000 times the resources. I can’t argue against a counterfactual. We might as well play what if games about Firefox having doubled market share instead and what that would look like with everyone complaining about browser engine monoculture with Brave and Edge using Gecko instead of Blink. Complaining that diversity and inclusion initiatives and other political activism is holding Firefox back when Apple, Google, and Microsoft all do the same and have significantly higher market share and several orders of magnitude more money is silly. Firefox is the least bad browser and there is no evidence that promoting diversity and inclusion is harmful to its development. We can make a case that Firefox isn’t spending enough resources on political activism and that’s why it’s falling behind. Otherwise the reason Chrome is popular and Firefox isn’t is that sticking to the principles of privacy and security on the Internet holds back performance. And users have overwhelmingly voted that slightly better performance in loading websites is more important than any notion of browsing the web privately and securely.

kemotep 3y ago

People are probably turned off to the comment because of all the complaining about “identity politics”. There also exists several forks of Firefox already. Suggesting the nth idealogical fork that will be funded out of the kindness of a billionaire’s heart doesn’t sound productive. Why not donate to Librewolf? Why must Musk actually have any involvement besides funding?

the_third_wave 3y ago
The "complaining about identity politics" is part of the core reason for creating a non-politicised fork which can take over where Firefox left at a ~32% market share, i.e. it can attempt to regain part of the market lost to Chrome and its many descendants. The reason for Musk to get involved (apart from funding) is to make sure the project remains politically neutral as that would be one of selling points when compared to the rest of the field. It would mean that this fork - let's call it Techiya, Hebrew for 'resurrection' and thus a fitting name for this project - explicitly stays out of the political quagmire which has swallowed Mozilla and deeply affects the way companies like Google (Chrome), Microsoft (Edge) and Apple (Safari) (re)act. It would focus on creating a competitive browser which can host a fully functional content blocker, which does not send oodles of tracking information to some mothership, which does not waste time promoting things like "racial justice" [1] but focuses on its core task of developing a solid alternative to the current Blink/Webkit-based almost-monoculture. Leave the politicking to others, not everything needs to be politicised. Librewolf and Palemoon and Waterfox and the Tor Browser and the other Firefox forks do not have enough impact to survive by themselves without Firefox itself. They are projects focused on specific aspects - privacy, XPCOM/XUL extensions, plugins etc. If Firefox goes down so do these projects - maybe apart from Palemoon but that is only because that project already depends on a lot of older code which is no longer supported by Mozilla to enable it to run pre-Quantum extensions and plugins. What I'm philosophising about is a project which can take over where Mozilla left off, focused on creating and maintaining a viable alternative to the current Blink/WebKit hegemony and intent on gaining a sizeable market share. [1 https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-racial-justice-commitments-one-year-in/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-racia...
- kemotep 3y ago
  No offense but nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox. Perhaps the Trillion dollar companies behind the phone duopoly, the Desktop OS with 80+% market share, and the search engine the world uses, leveraged their positions to advertise and promote their browsers to squeeze Firefox out of their 32% market share. Like Linux, so what if Firefox only has a 5% market share? It does what I need to without having to deal with the nonsense of Google and Microsoft. And frankly being “politically neutral” is itself a political stance. And Musk is far from impartial too. He too kowtows to dictators and bad faith politicians all the time. He takes strong explicit political positions that are not neutral. He doesn’t do the things that you would want him to do with this Firefox fork.
  - the_third_wave 3y ago
    > nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox It does, though. It may not be directly (apart from a few annoyances with their 'colours of change' propaganda) but the fact that Mozilla now spends a large fraction of its lavish funds on CEO remuneration and activism while the main product languishes on the back burner certainly has an effect. With the funding Mozilla gets through mostly search engine deals - more than $600 million in 2021 [1], about $1.1 billion in assets - it has the financial wherewithal to push development much harder than it does. Instead of using these funds where it matters they have divested themselves off a large fraction of the development base and are still reducing their development budget while earnings are going up. [1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-2021-fs-final-1010.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
    - kemotep 3y ago
      And despite that Firefox remains far and away the best browser experience. It’s almost like none of that actually matters because Chrome and Blink based browsers have taken over the world and both Google and Microsoft engage in similar activism and have 1,000 times the resources. I can’t argue against a counterfactual. We might as well play what if games about Firefox having doubled market share instead and what that would look like with everyone complaining about browser engine monoculture with Brave and Edge using Gecko instead of Blink. Complaining that diversity and inclusion initiatives and other political activism is holding Firefox back when Apple, Google, and Microsoft all do the same and have significantly higher market share and several orders of magnitude more money is silly. Firefox is the least bad browser and there is no evidence that promoting diversity and inclusion is harmful to its development. We can make a case that Firefox isn’t spending enough resources on political activism and that’s why it’s falling behind. Otherwise the reason Chrome is popular and Firefox isn’t is that sticking to the principles of privacy and security on the Internet holds back performance. And users have overwhelmingly voted that slightly better performance in loading websites is more important than any notion of browsing the web privately and securely.