11 ms·

In another alternative dimension, the Firefox guys 10 years ago would have capitalized on what their users wanted which is mostly around privacy and not being G

In another alternative dimension, the Firefox guys 10 years ago would have capitalized on what their users wanted which is mostly around privacy and not being Google. Instead we got pocket, a re-hashed VPN and a bunch of privacy-degrading changes which slowly erode trust.

mananaysiempre 2y ago
For what it’s worth, as a Pocket user from before it got bought by Mozilla, it’s only gotten worse since then. First the mobile apps lost the ability to show full web pages (“Web View”) while offline, which was basically the whole point for me originally. Now the Share Link button has stopped sharing the actual link and instead uses a redirection service (pocket.co) presumably so that Pocket/Mozilla can track you.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke Mozilla to remove this feature. I agree with you was the entire reason I used Pocket (literally replacing AvantGo for me). Now Pocket is basically yet another ... web portal? advertisement platform? social network? I do not know how to describe what it is now, other than useless.
  - michaelcampbell 2y ago
    > I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke nice... thanks, Mr. Babbage.
  - glenstein 2y ago
    Pocket still saves articles offline. It just saves them in article view. Which is the same as what Instaaper does. I just checked my phone and it has 1.07 gigabytes of articles saved for offline reading. I don't recall it ever saving web pages in web view (though maybe you used to be able to see them offline when you used the premium plan, but now the premium plan doesn't save the WebView offline? I'm not interested enough in paying for it to find out so all I have is guestimation.). So they do save, but they save as article view and not the webpage itself. Which is the same as the other services.
    - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
      You definitely were able to save the web view at some point during the "Pocket" timeframe. I explicitly remember even the "notification with progress" that showed up when it was doing that (since I would have to wait for it to finish before turning off the radios). Heck, the Mozilla docs still mention Pocket as downloading the web view, e.g. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/getting-started-pocket-mac https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/getting-started-pocket-... > Offline Downloading: Pocket will decide the best view to download by default. If you want to specify whether to download Article View, Web View, or both, uncheck Download Best View. The article view was a nice novelty 10 years ago, but as it is completely based on heuristics (readerJS-like, in fact I think it _is_ readerJS ) and they have not really bothered upgrading it, it is no longer a reliable way to capture web sites for offline reading . Frankly, I want this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plucker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plucker https://web.archive.org/web/20080903165121/http://plkr.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080903165121/http://plkr.org/ back :)
      - glenstein 2y ago
        I stand corrected! I will note that at least from my use case a saved copy of web view is a rather idiosyncratic user need not catered to by I think any of the other apps. As you do get article view and article view is what I actually want. But you have reminded me, because I do recall that phrasing that you quoted about pocket deciding whether to choose Article or Web View. I don't it's a particularly huge loss, and the exasperation from the commenter I was replying to seemed to suggest that they thought saving of any articles had been removed, which would be an appropriate cause for exasperation. But I don't think that reaction is warranted at all, just from not saving web view. I also think it's not quite right to suggest that saved article view "doesn't work" or is a mere novelty. I just went through a bunch of my articles and randomly spot-checked them, and all of the ones saved to article view are without problems. Although I do recognize there's an occasional issue, but those are the exception rather than the rule. It remains a critical antidote to the unviewable overloaded with ads viewing experience that is the default experience for most people with most web pages. There's also an open secret that it bypasses login screens and pay walls, fir which it continues to be one of the best solutions. But alas, I was not correct to suggest this had never previously been available.
- glenstein 2y ago
  >First the mobile apps lost the ability to show full web pages (“Web View”) while offline, I've used Pocket on and off since back when it was called Read It Later and I don't recall it ever offering this feature (offline access to saved web page versions of articles), at least not outside of the premium service. So I tried my best Googling skills, which seems to have increasingly diminishing returns with every passing day, but I did find a LinkedIn article from 2017 noting that this archive of web page feature was premium even then. (Edit: It's worth noting that InstaPaper doesn't offer this either. Nor does Raindrop, nor did Omnivore (RIP) although you could print to PDF and upload it to Omnivore. The only article saver service I'm aware of that does is Wallabag, which is self-hosted.) >10. Premium options >So far, every feature has been free. If you upgrade to a premium plan, you'll get other features, such as permanent copies of your articles in case they're removed from the web, suggested tags to make bookmarking even easier, and the removal of sponsored posts from Your List. >This post was originally published on Proof Is In the Writing on July 20, 2017. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complete-guide-pocket-ultimate-read-it-later-app-writers-swanda https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complete-guide-pocket-ultimat...
  - mananaysiempre 2y ago
    Those are two different features. The premium one saved (saves?) things on Pocket’s servers. The one I was talking about saved full web pages on your device. It wasn’t “permanent” in that, for example, if you reinstalled the app and the page had disappeared from the web, you’d lose it, but otherwise it worked well enough that at some point Pocket was the main consumer of storage on my phone. The setting was “Always fetch Web View”, next to the still-extant “Always fetch Article View”, and searching for that phrase will give you some contemporary discussions[1,2]; alternatively, Pocket’s own docs on the Wayback Machine[3] will tell you that, as recently as 2022 (and at least as early as 2012[4]), > Pocket will download the “Best View” by default. To override this decision, you can configure Pocket to always download Article View, Web View, or both. > It’s possible to control whether Pocket downloads Article or Web View: > [...] > 4. Enable Always fetch Article View, Always fetch Web View, or both [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/405pyu/is_there_a_place_to_download_i_shall_seal_the/cyrpquc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/405pyu/i... [2] https://mfreidge.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/how-to-set-ios-pocket-to-open-in-web-view/ https://mfreidge.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/how-to-set-ios-poc... (disclaimer: I’ve never used the iOS version) [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20220801202820/https://help.getpocket.com/article/1136-using-pocket-offline https://web.archive.org/web/20220801202820/https://help.getp... (I’m not sure it still worked at this point) [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20120712102128/http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/483981-offline-access-in-pocket-for-android https://web.archive.org/web/20120712102128/http://help.getpo...
- mtillman 2y ago
  They acquired Anonym and hired a series of ad tech execs over the past ten years with a commitment to becoming an ad network.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    The commitment is to develop privacy-preserving advertising. If successful, it would revolutionize privacy because, as we know, ads and their surveillance are everywhere. Instead, maybe nobody will work in that project if you succeed in slandering Mozilla.
    - aragilar 2y ago
      You can't have "privacy-preserving advertising". Either you track users to ensure ads get displayed (because the places you'd serve the ads wouldn't serve them if they could/claim more ad views than happened), or you have no clients (because their ads aren't displayed). Broadcast works for ads because the clients can verify that you are broadcasting (and it means you can disconnect the group serving the ads from those who verify "views").
      - mmooss 2y ago
        > You can't have "privacy-preserving advertising". If you would look at their work and talk about it, it might be valid. This is just someone's hot take they posted on the Internet.
        thoroughburro 2y ago
        Maybe you missed the part after that statement, where they presented an actual argument. Yours is the hot take.
- epiecs 2y ago
  I can recommend Zotero. You also don’t have to pay for storage if you have a server/device that is webdav capable. I connected it to my Synology nas and the setup was trivial.
atoav 2y ago
How would Mozilla have acted differently if it was captured by its commercial competitors?
Ygg2 2y ago
A VPN could work iff they made it actually usable. To this day I can't pay because VPN is partially rolled out.
zx8080 2y ago
Slowliness of the user base trust erosion means annual bonuses for the C-levels. Every year. That's by design. I'm sure they are pro's in burning frogs (or users) slowly. (Until one morning we realize that FF has become Chrome).
ajdude 2y ago
I don't understand how they could be pulling in half a billion a year for a decade and still have financial problems... even if they just put that money in a low risk money market investment account the whole company could have just ran off interest by this point.
- martin_a 2y ago
  Well, they took over things like Pocket, build that VPN service and Firefox Send and probably founded other projects that are not important to the core of their "business". If Mozilla would have solely focused on Firefox and Thunderbird we could be in a better place right now.
  - walrus01 2y ago
    They didn't build a VPN service, they built a wrapper around mullvad, an existing VPN service provider. At least they chose a fairly decent one.
    - glenstein 2y ago
      Right, and that seems a relatively modest commitment of resources in the grand scheme of things. And it seems like the implication is supposed to be that those resources came at the expense of sustaining other parts of the browser experience.
    - whamlastxmas 2y ago
      This whole comment section is full of weird not-true accusations against Firefox in a way that feels really weird to me. Why would anyone want to lie to attack Firefox? Just use genuine facts to express concern, there’s plenty of legitimate concern without hyperbole.
  - II2II 2y ago
    > If Mozilla would have solely focused on Firefox and Thunderbird we could be in a better place right now. I have no idea what the motivations of Mozilla are, but it is important to remember that many players in the industry faded away simply because the industry changes fast and those players failed to anticipate those changes. It is entirely possible that Mozilla was trying to anticipate those changes and ended up making a string of very bad bets.
glenstein 2y ago
>which is mostly around privacy and not being Google. I don't understand why you're framing this as though those were mutually exclusive. They did the privacy stuff, and they did the side bets at the same time. The side bets didn't come at the expense of privacy despite repeated breathless attempts to imply otherwise, mostly here in the backwaters of hn comment sections. That whole argument has been vibes all the way down and it's depressing to see so many people repeating it.
- michaelcampbell 2y ago
  > > which is mostly around privacy and not being Google. > I don't understand why you're framing this as though those were mutually exclusive. They... didn't? If you frame it "mostly around (privacy and not being Google)" and not "(mostly around privacy) and (not being Google)". But even the "and" doesn't seem exclusive to me.
  - glenstein 2y ago
    That's not the thing I'm referring to as mutually exclusive. I'm talking about (1) side bets and (2) commitments to privacy and not being Google. I'm juxtaposing one and two, but you seem to think I'm juxtaposing the two elements within two.
- do_not_redeem 2y ago
  What about their side bet of buying an adtech company? https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-a-privacy-tech-startup-founded-by-two-top-former-meta-execs/ https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...
  - glenstein 2y ago
    A much more valid argument! But also a change of subject. The previously mentioned side bets, e.g. VPNs, Pocket, Relay, Fakespot -- there's been a narrative attempting to imply that those involved a trade-off from, well, sometimes the argument was quality of the core browser experience, but in this particular variation it's suggesting that these side bets were a reason they couldn't maintain commitments to privacy. The adtech purchases absolutely do raise an eyebrow, but they have nothing to do with this narrative that attempted to tie the side bets to compromises on privacy. If anything, I want to encourage them to do more of these, precisely because they don't involve any of those compromises and everyone seems to want them to diversify their sources of revenue in non-adtech directions.
underseacables 2y ago
As soon as they got Pocket I cancel my subscription. I love it, but I will not support Mozilla.
_the_inflator 2y ago
What do you mean by that "mostly around privacy and not being Google"? Can you elaborate further? It is a not-feature ("X without Y and Z"), and it is hard to capitalize on. Also, what purpose can be served today with even the die-hard Linux guys I know are willing to succumb to binge-watch on TikTok or any other popular app so that there appears to be some double standard and/or lost battle since you cannot prevent data gathering in the public service or transportation, carriers, hotels that combined more than compensate for any measures taken by a "privacy first" browser, security leaks not to mention. Just curious about clarification.
TZubiri 2y ago
Part of the problem is that the users don't pay, so foss devs often get creative to find revenue. Another issue is that when you get donations, they are usually more than needed, so FOSS devs get to work adding new features which make the product worse. Consider Whatsapp, after 15 years we can count the added features in 1 or 2 hands. They manage to find great restraint, possibly related to a low engineer-personnel ratio. FOSS engineer orgs have no chance at staying the course. It reminds me of the sex mantra, if they likes it just keep doing it don't do it harder. Exact same thing happens with Wikipedia. But the community puts a halt to most initiatives and they have to keep doing spinoffs like wikidata and wikiuniversity and such
- xandrius 2y ago
  Both Firefox/Mozilla and Wikipedia are actually exceptions in this world as they do get quite a large substantial amount of donations. So I don't really see this being true. Also foundations shouldn't seek to grow but to keep doing why they do. See how Wikipedia/Wikimedia, while both getting more money and providing almost the same service, still haven't updated how people can actually parse their content but, at least, didn't start selling data.
  - glenstein 2y ago
    My understanding is that the Mozilla Foundation is insulated from the development work on Firefox. I think it's good to have the voice alongside EFF and others advocating for good web standards. And that's definitely not a bad thing. Especially if the reason for supporting Firefox is the diversification away from Google's dominance in the browser space. But I think it's the paid subscriptions that are the main channel of personally contributing revenue towards the part of the organization that develops the browser.
    - aragilar 2y ago
      The paid subscriptions would be great if you could get them, I keep checking if they're available here, still not :-( Does EFF do anything in the standards process? They're not an implementer, and they don't employ devs which work on browsers (as far as I know).
npteljes 2y ago
I doubt that these "users" are actually a viable market for a browser.

mananaysiempre 2y ago

For what it’s worth, as a Pocket user from before it got bought by Mozilla, it’s only gotten worse since then. First the mobile apps lost the ability to show full web pages (“Web View”) while offline, which was basically the whole point for me originally. Now the Share Link button has stopped sharing the actual link and instead uses a redirection service (pocket.co) presumably so that Pocket/Mozilla can track you.

AshamedCaptain 2y ago
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke Mozilla to remove this feature. I agree with you was the entire reason I used Pocket (literally replacing AvantGo for me). Now Pocket is basically yet another ... web portal? advertisement platform? social network? I do not know how to describe what it is now, other than useless.
- michaelcampbell 2y ago
  > I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke nice... thanks, Mr. Babbage.
- glenstein 2y ago
  Pocket still saves articles offline. It just saves them in article view. Which is the same as what Instaaper does. I just checked my phone and it has 1.07 gigabytes of articles saved for offline reading. I don't recall it ever saving web pages in web view (though maybe you used to be able to see them offline when you used the premium plan, but now the premium plan doesn't save the WebView offline? I'm not interested enough in paying for it to find out so all I have is guestimation.). So they do save, but they save as article view and not the webpage itself. Which is the same as the other services.
  - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
    You definitely were able to save the web view at some point during the "Pocket" timeframe. I explicitly remember even the "notification with progress" that showed up when it was doing that (since I would have to wait for it to finish before turning off the radios). Heck, the Mozilla docs still mention Pocket as downloading the web view, e.g. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/getting-started-pocket-mac https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/getting-started-pocket-... > Offline Downloading: Pocket will decide the best view to download by default. If you want to specify whether to download Article View, Web View, or both, uncheck Download Best View. The article view was a nice novelty 10 years ago, but as it is completely based on heuristics (readerJS-like, in fact I think it _is_ readerJS ) and they have not really bothered upgrading it, it is no longer a reliable way to capture web sites for offline reading . Frankly, I want this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plucker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plucker https://web.archive.org/web/20080903165121/http://plkr.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080903165121/http://plkr.org/ back :)
    - glenstein 2y ago
      I stand corrected! I will note that at least from my use case a saved copy of web view is a rather idiosyncratic user need not catered to by I think any of the other apps. As you do get article view and article view is what I actually want. But you have reminded me, because I do recall that phrasing that you quoted about pocket deciding whether to choose Article or Web View. I don't it's a particularly huge loss, and the exasperation from the commenter I was replying to seemed to suggest that they thought saving of any articles had been removed, which would be an appropriate cause for exasperation. But I don't think that reaction is warranted at all, just from not saving web view. I also think it's not quite right to suggest that saved article view "doesn't work" or is a mere novelty. I just went through a bunch of my articles and randomly spot-checked them, and all of the ones saved to article view are without problems. Although I do recognize there's an occasional issue, but those are the exception rather than the rule. It remains a critical antidote to the unviewable overloaded with ads viewing experience that is the default experience for most people with most web pages. There's also an open secret that it bypasses login screens and pay walls, fir which it continues to be one of the best solutions. But alas, I was not correct to suggest this had never previously been available.
glenstein 2y ago
>First the mobile apps lost the ability to show full web pages (“Web View”) while offline, I've used Pocket on and off since back when it was called Read It Later and I don't recall it ever offering this feature (offline access to saved web page versions of articles), at least not outside of the premium service. So I tried my best Googling skills, which seems to have increasingly diminishing returns with every passing day, but I did find a LinkedIn article from 2017 noting that this archive of web page feature was premium even then. (Edit: It's worth noting that InstaPaper doesn't offer this either. Nor does Raindrop, nor did Omnivore (RIP) although you could print to PDF and upload it to Omnivore. The only article saver service I'm aware of that does is Wallabag, which is self-hosted.) >10. Premium options >So far, every feature has been free. If you upgrade to a premium plan, you'll get other features, such as permanent copies of your articles in case they're removed from the web, suggested tags to make bookmarking even easier, and the removal of sponsored posts from Your List. >This post was originally published on Proof Is In the Writing on July 20, 2017. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complete-guide-pocket-ultimate-read-it-later-app-writers-swanda https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complete-guide-pocket-ultimat...
- mananaysiempre 2y ago
  Those are two different features. The premium one saved (saves?) things on Pocket’s servers. The one I was talking about saved full web pages on your device. It wasn’t “permanent” in that, for example, if you reinstalled the app and the page had disappeared from the web, you’d lose it, but otherwise it worked well enough that at some point Pocket was the main consumer of storage on my phone. The setting was “Always fetch Web View”, next to the still-extant “Always fetch Article View”, and searching for that phrase will give you some contemporary discussions[1,2]; alternatively, Pocket’s own docs on the Wayback Machine[3] will tell you that, as recently as 2022 (and at least as early as 2012[4]), > Pocket will download the “Best View” by default. To override this decision, you can configure Pocket to always download Article View, Web View, or both. > It’s possible to control whether Pocket downloads Article or Web View: > [...] > 4. Enable Always fetch Article View, Always fetch Web View, or both [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/405pyu/is_there_a_place_to_download_i_shall_seal_the/cyrpquc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/405pyu/i... [2] https://mfreidge.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/how-to-set-ios-pocket-to-open-in-web-view/ https://mfreidge.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/how-to-set-ios-poc... (disclaimer: I’ve never used the iOS version) [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20220801202820/https://help.getpocket.com/article/1136-using-pocket-offline https://web.archive.org/web/20220801202820/https://help.getp... (I’m not sure it still worked at this point) [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20120712102128/http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/483981-offline-access-in-pocket-for-android https://web.archive.org/web/20120712102128/http://help.getpo...
mtillman 2y ago
They acquired Anonym and hired a series of ad tech execs over the past ten years with a commitment to becoming an ad network.
- mmooss 2y ago
  The commitment is to develop privacy-preserving advertising. If successful, it would revolutionize privacy because, as we know, ads and their surveillance are everywhere. Instead, maybe nobody will work in that project if you succeed in slandering Mozilla.
  - aragilar 2y ago
    You can't have "privacy-preserving advertising". Either you track users to ensure ads get displayed (because the places you'd serve the ads wouldn't serve them if they could/claim more ad views than happened), or you have no clients (because their ads aren't displayed). Broadcast works for ads because the clients can verify that you are broadcasting (and it means you can disconnect the group serving the ads from those who verify "views").
    - mmooss 2y ago
      > You can't have "privacy-preserving advertising". If you would look at their work and talk about it, it might be valid. This is just someone's hot take they posted on the Internet.
      - thoroughburro 2y ago
        Maybe you missed the part after that statement, where they presented an actual argument. Yours is the hot take.
epiecs 2y ago
I can recommend Zotero. You also don’t have to pay for storage if you have a server/device that is webdav capable. I connected it to my Synology nas and the setup was trivial.

atoav 2y ago

How would Mozilla have acted differently if it was captured by its commercial competitors?

Ygg2 2y ago

A VPN could work iff they made it actually usable. To this day I can't pay because VPN is partially rolled out.

zx8080 2y ago

Slowliness of the user base trust erosion means annual bonuses for the C-levels. Every year. That's by design. I'm sure they are pro's in burning frogs (or users) slowly. (Until one morning we realize that FF has become Chrome).

ajdude 2y ago

I don't understand how they could be pulling in half a billion a year for a decade and still have financial problems... even if they just put that money in a low risk money market investment account the whole company could have just ran off interest by this point.

martin_a 2y ago
Well, they took over things like Pocket, build that VPN service and Firefox Send and probably founded other projects that are not important to the core of their "business". If Mozilla would have solely focused on Firefox and Thunderbird we could be in a better place right now.
- walrus01 2y ago
  They didn't build a VPN service, they built a wrapper around mullvad, an existing VPN service provider. At least they chose a fairly decent one.
  - glenstein 2y ago
    Right, and that seems a relatively modest commitment of resources in the grand scheme of things. And it seems like the implication is supposed to be that those resources came at the expense of sustaining other parts of the browser experience.
  - whamlastxmas 2y ago
    This whole comment section is full of weird not-true accusations against Firefox in a way that feels really weird to me. Why would anyone want to lie to attack Firefox? Just use genuine facts to express concern, there’s plenty of legitimate concern without hyperbole.
- II2II 2y ago
  > If Mozilla would have solely focused on Firefox and Thunderbird we could be in a better place right now. I have no idea what the motivations of Mozilla are, but it is important to remember that many players in the industry faded away simply because the industry changes fast and those players failed to anticipate those changes. It is entirely possible that Mozilla was trying to anticipate those changes and ended up making a string of very bad bets.

glenstein 2y ago

>which is mostly around privacy and not being Google. I don't understand why you're framing this as though those were mutually exclusive. They did the privacy stuff, and they did the side bets at the same time. The side bets didn't come at the expense of privacy despite repeated breathless attempts to imply otherwise, mostly here in the backwaters of hn comment sections. That whole argument has been vibes all the way down and it's depressing to see so many people repeating it.

michaelcampbell 2y ago
> > which is mostly around privacy and not being Google. > I don't understand why you're framing this as though those were mutually exclusive. They... didn't? If you frame it "mostly around (privacy and not being Google)" and not "(mostly around privacy) and (not being Google)". But even the "and" doesn't seem exclusive to me.
- glenstein 2y ago
  That's not the thing I'm referring to as mutually exclusive. I'm talking about (1) side bets and (2) commitments to privacy and not being Google. I'm juxtaposing one and two, but you seem to think I'm juxtaposing the two elements within two.
do_not_redeem 2y ago
What about their side bet of buying an adtech company? https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-a-privacy-tech-startup-founded-by-two-top-former-meta-execs/ https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...
- glenstein 2y ago
  A much more valid argument! But also a change of subject. The previously mentioned side bets, e.g. VPNs, Pocket, Relay, Fakespot -- there's been a narrative attempting to imply that those involved a trade-off from, well, sometimes the argument was quality of the core browser experience, but in this particular variation it's suggesting that these side bets were a reason they couldn't maintain commitments to privacy. The adtech purchases absolutely do raise an eyebrow, but they have nothing to do with this narrative that attempted to tie the side bets to compromises on privacy. If anything, I want to encourage them to do more of these, precisely because they don't involve any of those compromises and everyone seems to want them to diversify their sources of revenue in non-adtech directions.

underseacables 2y ago

As soon as they got Pocket I cancel my subscription. I love it, but I will not support Mozilla.

_the_inflator 2y ago

What do you mean by that "mostly around privacy and not being Google"? Can you elaborate further? It is a not-feature ("X without Y and Z"), and it is hard to capitalize on. Also, what purpose can be served today with even the die-hard Linux guys I know are willing to succumb to binge-watch on TikTok or any other popular app so that there appears to be some double standard and/or lost battle since you cannot prevent data gathering in the public service or transportation, carriers, hotels that combined more than compensate for any measures taken by a "privacy first" browser, security leaks not to mention. Just curious about clarification.

TZubiri 2y ago

Part of the problem is that the users don't pay, so foss devs often get creative to find revenue. Another issue is that when you get donations, they are usually more than needed, so FOSS devs get to work adding new features which make the product worse. Consider Whatsapp, after 15 years we can count the added features in 1 or 2 hands. They manage to find great restraint, possibly related to a low engineer-personnel ratio. FOSS engineer orgs have no chance at staying the course. It reminds me of the sex mantra, if they likes it just keep doing it don't do it harder. Exact same thing happens with Wikipedia. But the community puts a halt to most initiatives and they have to keep doing spinoffs like wikidata and wikiuniversity and such

xandrius 2y ago
Both Firefox/Mozilla and Wikipedia are actually exceptions in this world as they do get quite a large substantial amount of donations. So I don't really see this being true. Also foundations shouldn't seek to grow but to keep doing why they do. See how Wikipedia/Wikimedia, while both getting more money and providing almost the same service, still haven't updated how people can actually parse their content but, at least, didn't start selling data.
- glenstein 2y ago
  My understanding is that the Mozilla Foundation is insulated from the development work on Firefox. I think it's good to have the voice alongside EFF and others advocating for good web standards. And that's definitely not a bad thing. Especially if the reason for supporting Firefox is the diversification away from Google's dominance in the browser space. But I think it's the paid subscriptions that are the main channel of personally contributing revenue towards the part of the organization that develops the browser.
  - aragilar 2y ago
    The paid subscriptions would be great if you could get them, I keep checking if they're available here, still not :-( Does EFF do anything in the standards process? They're not an implementer, and they don't employ devs which work on browsers (as far as I know).

npteljes 2y ago

I doubt that these "users" are actually a viable market for a browser.