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Straight to under 0.5% usage no doubt. Making a mockery of all the unpaid people who have committed code over the years. The Mozilla foundation have shirked the

Straight to under 0.5% usage no doubt. Making a mockery of all the unpaid people who have committed code over the years. The Mozilla foundation have shirked their responsibility as a bastion against commercial interests.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
Their job was to rake in millions while keeping the benefactor happy with no real competition. Mission accomplished.
- dralley 1y ago
  The kneejerk Mozilla hate on HN gets so fucking tedious. Google's marketing budget for Chrome is greater than Mozilla's entire budget. They sponsor a Formula 1 team FFS. They spent a decade paying off Adobe, Java, AVG, Avast and all the other shitty free AV softwares to auto-install Chrome. They targeted Firefox users with Chrome ads on the homepages of Google and YouTube. That's literally billions of dollars worth of marketing alone that they don't even have to pay for. Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents combined (Africa, South America, Australia) with a couple trillion USD to spare. Each controls an operating system (or two) with more than a billion users each on which their browsers are pre-installed. No shit they struggle to compete on brand and marketshare. They're basically forced by the economics of the market to do search deals with Google, and whenever they try to develop independent sources of revenue people shit on them for that too. People shit on them for making deals with Google and make insinuations about them being "controlled opposition" because of that dependency, but also shit on them for pursuing any other independent sources of revenue, like the branded VPN service or the innocuous cross-promotion of that Disney movie with the Red Panda. People shat on them for trying to compete with Android via FirefoxOS because the bet didn't work out, even though it was probably the only way they could have avoided this outcome and gained real independence, had it worked out. "Just focus on Firefox", they say - unless that means laying off people that work on Rust, or AV1, or Opus, or WebAssembly, or Let's Encrypt, or experimental browser engines that wouldn't have been production-ready for a decade. According to HN, Mozilla should focus but also keep churning out and spinning off research projects, but only successful research projects, not ones that fail. Anything Mozilla does is always retroactively terrible if it fails but if it works out great they never get credit for it anyway.
  - leidenfrost 1y ago
    The idea behind the parent comment is not that they can't compete, but they are specifically made not to. Sort of a puppet browser made only for proving the court that the giants are not technically a monopoly, while ranking a bare minimum number of users for them to count. While that's not entirely unreasonable, I don't think that's the doom of Mozilla. Puppet or not, their tangled codebase makes it a pita to contribute anything if you're not being paid a salary for it. Despite having a high expectation for the "free browser", deep down we know that it's the same "Free in theory" software, not unlike Java or Vscode. Software that's made by a company and once they stop pouring money on corporate development and support the project will become a zombie in no time.
    - dralley 1y ago
      It is completely unreasonable and (willfully) ignores the long, long list of places where Mozilla has fought against the other vendors including (especially) Google on privacy grounds. It's the sort of thing people say mostly for their own self-satisfaction, without actually thinking about it or trying to figure out the answer. Like: "both parties are the same" or "what have the Romans ever done for us"
      - const_cast 1y ago
        Yes, I agree completely. You cannot even compare Chrome and Firefox because the sheer privacy violations of Chrome make it not a worthy competitor. The difference is, nobody cares. Google develops Chrome and Chrome relies entirely on Google's money. Google is the default search engine. They are much, much, MUCH more tightly coupled to Google than Firefox could ever be. But nobody says anything. And yet, Firefox makes Google the default search engine, and everyone has a think piece on it. Firefox is dead, they say, they're just Google's puppet. Then what is Chrome?
        aspenmayer 1y ago
        Chrome is Darth Vader. Firefox is Lando Calrissian. I’ll let you guess who Palpatine is.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

Their job was to rake in millions while keeping the benefactor happy with no real competition. Mission accomplished.

dralley 1y ago
The kneejerk Mozilla hate on HN gets so fucking tedious. Google's marketing budget for Chrome is greater than Mozilla's entire budget. They sponsor a Formula 1 team FFS. They spent a decade paying off Adobe, Java, AVG, Avast and all the other shitty free AV softwares to auto-install Chrome. They targeted Firefox users with Chrome ads on the homepages of Google and YouTube. That's literally billions of dollars worth of marketing alone that they don't even have to pay for. Mozilla's competitors (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are collectively worth the GDP of three entire continents combined (Africa, South America, Australia) with a couple trillion USD to spare. Each controls an operating system (or two) with more than a billion users each on which their browsers are pre-installed. No shit they struggle to compete on brand and marketshare. They're basically forced by the economics of the market to do search deals with Google, and whenever they try to develop independent sources of revenue people shit on them for that too. People shit on them for making deals with Google and make insinuations about them being "controlled opposition" because of that dependency, but also shit on them for pursuing any other independent sources of revenue, like the branded VPN service or the innocuous cross-promotion of that Disney movie with the Red Panda. People shat on them for trying to compete with Android via FirefoxOS because the bet didn't work out, even though it was probably the only way they could have avoided this outcome and gained real independence, had it worked out. "Just focus on Firefox", they say - unless that means laying off people that work on Rust, or AV1, or Opus, or WebAssembly, or Let's Encrypt, or experimental browser engines that wouldn't have been production-ready for a decade. According to HN, Mozilla should focus but also keep churning out and spinning off research projects, but only successful research projects, not ones that fail. Anything Mozilla does is always retroactively terrible if it fails but if it works out great they never get credit for it anyway.
- leidenfrost 1y ago
  The idea behind the parent comment is not that they can't compete, but they are specifically made not to. Sort of a puppet browser made only for proving the court that the giants are not technically a monopoly, while ranking a bare minimum number of users for them to count. While that's not entirely unreasonable, I don't think that's the doom of Mozilla. Puppet or not, their tangled codebase makes it a pita to contribute anything if you're not being paid a salary for it. Despite having a high expectation for the "free browser", deep down we know that it's the same "Free in theory" software, not unlike Java or Vscode. Software that's made by a company and once they stop pouring money on corporate development and support the project will become a zombie in no time.
  - dralley 1y ago
    It is completely unreasonable and (willfully) ignores the long, long list of places where Mozilla has fought against the other vendors including (especially) Google on privacy grounds. It's the sort of thing people say mostly for their own self-satisfaction, without actually thinking about it or trying to figure out the answer. Like: "both parties are the same" or "what have the Romans ever done for us"
    - const_cast 1y ago
      Yes, I agree completely. You cannot even compare Chrome and Firefox because the sheer privacy violations of Chrome make it not a worthy competitor. The difference is, nobody cares. Google develops Chrome and Chrome relies entirely on Google's money. Google is the default search engine. They are much, much, MUCH more tightly coupled to Google than Firefox could ever be. But nobody says anything. And yet, Firefox makes Google the default search engine, and everyone has a think piece on it. Firefox is dead, they say, they're just Google's puppet. Then what is Chrome?
      - aspenmayer 1y ago
        Chrome is Darth Vader. Firefox is Lando Calrissian. I’ll let you guess who Palpatine is.