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> 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

> 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.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  > And despite that Firefox remains far and away the best browser experience In many ways I agree and this is also why I use FF on both Linux as well as Android as my main browser. As to the problem related to the low market share I suspect you already know the answer, no what-if games needed. Many developers no longer test their creations with Firefox because they deem its market share to be insignificant. I do not know if you were around in the dark days of yore when Internet Explorer was the main development target but that is where we're going. As it stands Blink is a capable and relatively flexible browser engine but that can change, e.g. with the introduction of Manifest 3 and later incarnations. > 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 It is exactly for this reason that a non-activist project is needed as I also referred to in my initial posting: Having all major browsers - Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox - under the control of that same crowd in one way or another is not conducive to the diversity of opinion on the 'net and mindshare [...] is probably fairly easy to get given that there are many who are more than tired of all that identity politicking > users have overwhelmingly voted that slightly better performance in loading websites is more important than any notion of browsing the web privately and securely This sets a target for this hypothetical Techiya project: make the thing at least as fast as the competition while remaining at least as secure and privacy-respecting as current FF.

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.

the_third_wave 3y ago
> And despite that Firefox remains far and away the best browser experience In many ways I agree and this is also why I use FF on both Linux as well as Android as my main browser. As to the problem related to the low market share I suspect you already know the answer, no what-if games needed. Many developers no longer test their creations with Firefox because they deem its market share to be insignificant. I do not know if you were around in the dark days of yore when Internet Explorer was the main development target but that is where we're going. As it stands Blink is a capable and relatively flexible browser engine but that can change, e.g. with the introduction of Manifest 3 and later incarnations. > 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 It is exactly for this reason that a non-activist project is needed as I also referred to in my initial posting: Having all major browsers - Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox - under the control of that same crowd in one way or another is not conducive to the diversity of opinion on the 'net and mindshare [...] is probably fairly easy to get given that there are many who are more than tired of all that identity politicking > users have overwhelmingly voted that slightly better performance in loading websites is more important than any notion of browsing the web privately and securely This sets a target for this hypothetical Techiya project: make the thing at least as fast as the competition while remaining at least as secure and privacy-respecting as current FF.