A 'Premium' Firefox Is Coming This Fall (i-programmer.info) 269
An anonymous reader quotes I Programmer:
In an interview by Jan Vollmer for the German online magazine site t3n, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard has confirmed plans to launch Firefox Premium later this year. Answering Vollmer's questions about how Mozilla is currently monetized Beard answered:
We are working on three sources of income and we want to rebalance them: We have Search, but we also make content. We have a company called Pocket that discovers and curates content. There is also sponsored content. This is the content business. And the third one we are working on and developing as we think about products and services are premium levels for some of these offerings. You can imagine something like a secure storage solution.
Prompted to say more about a premium offer, he continued:
We also tested VPN. We can tell if you're on a public Wi-Fi network and want to do online banking and say, "Wow, you really should use VPN." You can imagine we'll offer a solution that gives us all a certain amount of free VPN Bandwidth and then offer a premium level over a monthly subscription. We want to add more subscription services to our mix and focus more on the relationship with the user to become more resilient in business issues.
Later in the interview, when asked when the subscription services might start Beard tries to be reassuring, saying:
So, what we want to clarify is that there is no plan to charge money for things that are now free. So we will roll out a subscription service and offer a premium level. And the plan is to introduce the first one this year, towards fall. We aim for October.
We are working on three sources of income and we want to rebalance them: We have Search, but we also make content. We have a company called Pocket that discovers and curates content. There is also sponsored content. This is the content business. And the third one we are working on and developing as we think about products and services are premium levels for some of these offerings. You can imagine something like a secure storage solution.
Prompted to say more about a premium offer, he continued:
We also tested VPN. We can tell if you're on a public Wi-Fi network and want to do online banking and say, "Wow, you really should use VPN." You can imagine we'll offer a solution that gives us all a certain amount of free VPN Bandwidth and then offer a premium level over a monthly subscription. We want to add more subscription services to our mix and focus more on the relationship with the user to become more resilient in business issues.
Later in the interview, when asked when the subscription services might start Beard tries to be reassuring, saying:
So, what we want to clarify is that there is no plan to charge money for things that are now free. So we will roll out a subscription service and offer a premium level. And the plan is to introduce the first one this year, towards fall. We aim for October.
One or the other (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I mean, they can either offer premium services, or start selling user privacy data to the highest bidder. Still less evil than Google!
Re:One or the other (Score:5, Insightful)
They could simply live within their means and develop a browser, instead of chasing perpetual revenue growth as if they were a public company trying to pump the stock price.
Or listening to their fucking bug tracker. (Score:2, Interesting)
And just 'feature completing' all the broken shit that has been stagnating for up to 20 years.
You know they STILL don't throw an error when saving a file on a full filesystem on either Windows or Linux? That has been broken since just after the takeover by Mozilla of Phoenix (FF 1.5 at latest) from the original developer and never fixed since. Do you have any idea how much of a pain it is to laborously save a bunch of websites or files only to find a directory full of filenames with 0 byte sizes because the
Re:Or listening to their fucking bug tracker. (Score:4, Insightful)
And just 'feature completing' all the broken shit that has been stagnating for up to 20 years.
You know they STILL don't throw an error when saving a file on a full filesystem on either Windows or Linux? That has been broken since just after the takeover by Mozilla of Phoenix (FF 1.5 at latest) from the original developer and never fixed since. Do you have any idea how much of a pain it is to laborously save a bunch of websites or files only to find a directory full of filenames with 0 byte sizes because they didn't have any space to allocate and the browser silently saved the name and truncated the file?
WTF? What the actual fuck?
Hard drives have been cheap and huge for more than a decade. Yes, they *SHOULD* fix that bug, but, if you are low on disk space, *YOU* are the problem, not Firefox.
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Hard drives have been cheap and huge for more than a decade.
Big, fast, and cheap: pick two.
- HDDs are big and cheap
- Small SSDs are fast and cheap
- Large SSDs are big and fast
If your laptop is big enough to make only an HDD or an SSD internal, not both, which should you choose?
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Already seen 1TB SSD's under $400 here in Canada and for $280 in the US, they were hovering around $1k back in January of this year. In reality for a lot of people 1TB is still more than enough, in a couple of years it won't surprise me if we see the traditional HDD makers start moving away from consumer end products and focus explicitly on business. Especially since the warranty period for most SSD's already exceeds the 1 or 2yr given for consumer HDD's.
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For an entry-level laptop, $280 for a 1 TB SSD might equal the cost of the entire rest of the hardware put together.
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An entry level laptop is most likely already using some form of SSD or flash card. Check it out sometime, there's a lot of entry level machines that have a 128GB or smaller option already in there. You can already pick up 20GB SSD's for about $4 and those were a favorite last year on the entry level.
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The user of a computer with such a 128 GB SSD is far more likely to run into the "You know they STILL don't throw an error when saving a file on a full filesystem on either Windows or Linux?" problem that is the subject of this thread in the first place.
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WTF? What the actual fuck? Hard drives have been cheap and huge for more than a decade. Yes, they *SHOULD* fix that bug, but, if you are low on disk space, *YOU* are the problem, not Firefox.
Not even sure it counts as a bug, when you try to save a web page it becomes a download running in the background. If the download fails it'll be listed as failed there, but in most cases you wouldn't want to have a broken download pop up a window as it's usually not something you can fix on-the-fly. I've managed to do it with concurrent downloads, run out of space and all the downloads failed silently. It was a "doh" moment but I'm not sure what the alternative was. Try to let it buffer up in memory and ge
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Yes, they *SHOULD* fix that bug, but, if you are low on disk space, *YOU* are the problem, not Firefox.
Beat me harder, daddy!
You are the problem. People like you are the reason developers can get away with squandering resources.
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if you are low on disk space, *YOU* are the problem, not Firefox.
Oh, just fuck right off.
Re:One or the other (Score:5, Insightful)
They could simply live within their means and develop a browser
I know, such an easy feat right! I mean developing a browser and maintaining the underlying engine is so simple that every company does it. It's not like any major players pulled out and just decided to just Blink or base their code on Chromium right? And with good reason too. We all know that developers time is completely free and an economy based on money doesn't exist.
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Bullshit. They worked on a dozen extra features that no one even asked for. The screenshot tool? The pocket thing? The video chat? No one gives a fuck about any of that. They could have put all those hours into a better product.
Re:One or the other (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be nice if they had features people really wanted, like disabling autoplay of videos, built in uBlock Origin, Tampermonkey, better privacy to deter Web browser fingerprinting (no canvas/WebGL unique IDs), its own hosts file because it uses its own DNS servers, encrypted storage of cached data, better containerization to ensure some websites have no access to anything outside, and other things.
Stick to honing a good web browser, and don't add needless stuff. Otherwise, might as well drop Firefox and revive Seamonkey as the be all and end all of browsers.
Re:One or the other (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. They worked on a dozen extra features that no one even asked for.
Oh I didn't realise software development was a direct democracy. As for the pocket thing, it's quite useful, and video chat is part of the core W3C standard so yes people most definitely "asked for it".
They could have put all those hours into a better product.
With grateful people such as yourself I can't imagine why they wouldn't.
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and video chat is part of the core W3C standard so yes people most definitely "asked for it".
That doesn't mean people "asked for it," that means "Google asked for it."
Re: One or the other (Score:2)
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You know after all the pissing and moaning about pocket on slashdot, I decided to try it purely out of spite. Turns out I really like it. It's a really nice feature of the browser, and I use it a lot now.
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They could simply live within their means and develop a browser
I know, such an easy feat right!
The Mozilla foundation collected tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per year before they even bought Pocket (for US$20M) and stuck it into the browser to show us shit we don't want to see, and collect information about us in the process. It's not like they're being asked to run on fumes.
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Yeah, so instead of doing all that, let's just flog some subscriptions and crap.
Wow are you someone only capable (stop reading and breathe in) of doing one thing at a time (stop reading and breathe out)? Not all people in the world are (stop reading and breathe in) as incapable as that. Some of us (stop reading and breathe out) can do more than one thing at a time.
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Yeah, so instead of doing all that, let's just flog some subscriptions and crap.
Wow are you someone only capable (stop reading and breathe in) of doing one thing at a time (stop reading and breathe out)? Not all people in the world are (stop reading and breathe in) as incapable as that. Some of us (stop reading and breathe out) can do more than one thing at a time.
As opposed to someone who tries to copy everything they see the cool, popular kids doing? Yep, gotta get some of that sweet, sweet VPN cash instead of just being a browser. Subscriptions is what all the cool kids want these days.
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this is mozilla corporation speaking.. the taxable, for-profit subsidiary of mozilla foundation (the 501c3 charitable non-profit organization).
making a little cash to help fund its parent, the development of its projects, and the promotion of its goals and ideals, is absolutely within the scope of mozilla, the corporation.
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Yeah, Mozilla got plenty [wikipedia.org] money it doesn't take $500 million a year to maintain a browser. They're doing a lot of miscellaneous projects that are mostly total duds. They have their one cash cow in Firefox and they won that because Microsoft was throwing the fight, delaying the move off IE6 as long as possible. They got near zero presence on mobile because almost everybody uses the browser it ships with and with IE now becoming more or less a Chrome skin they're probably worried the users will go back to not
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That's insane. I didn't realize Mozilla had managed to get up to half a billion a year.
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They got near zero presence on mobile because almost everybody uses the browser it ships with
And also because mobile firefox is shit. It's super hard to tap on links that are no trouble in Brave. Unlike Brave, there's no option to always request desktop sites. It waits until it's made a connection to a site before updating the progress bar, so there's no feedback that you've actually clicked on items like buttons until the page actually starts loading. You can only tell you've clicked even on a link because it gets selected... the third or fourth time you try.
I dropped Brave when they started addin
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I've never had that problem with mobile Firefox. It's my primary mobile browser and j always run with no script because holy shit how do people ever browse without no script. It's like being visually assaulted all the time.
Re:One or the other (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad Mozilla does more than just the browser, e.g. participating in developing web standards and doing R&D that leads to privacy enhancements.
pdf.js is a very handy plug-in for Chrome, much better than the built-in PDF viewer.
Nothing wrong with selling stuff like VPN subscriptions either, as long as they are transparent about it. Lots of people want a VPN now, and Mozilla is somewhat trustworthy in a sea of dodgy VPN services, although being based in the US legal jurisdiction could be a problem.
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Nothing wrong with selling stuff like VPN subscriptions either, as long as they are transparent about it.
Yes, there is. They had two jobs and they were doing them (build browser, help build standards) and then they decided that they wanted more money, so they took on more jobs. They had plenty of money to do the jobs they were doing. They don't need to be involved in all this other BS.
At this point, the lure of money is probably going to pull the whole thing so far out of shape that we're going to have to do it all over again, and it will set the web back half a decade dealing with the logistics. We'll need a
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I don't think a non-profit browser, or rather a layout engine, Javascript engine and network stack, is viable.
The Linux kernel is something like 90% contributions from people being paid to contribute now. Companies that want specific features and fixes. A few who do more general improvement work like Google, because their products benefit from it.
Where is the widespread investment for a new browser going to come from?
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I don't think a non-profit browser, or rather a layout engine, Javascript engine and network stack, is viable.
That's a valid point.
Where is the widespread investment for a new browser going to come from?
Great question. But if Firefox keeps going down this road, it's still going to be necessary to start maintaining a fork separate from the Mozilla foundation.
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They have one job, not two and that is to maintain the open web. The browser and standards fit well within that. And given the amount of bullshit going on so does the VPN.
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We want to ... focus more on the relationship with the user to become more resilient in business issues.
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Why is that so difficult to understand?
Or offer only features people want to pay for (Score:2)
My bizarre theory is that they should focus on cost recovery and therefore offer features based on the willingness of sufficient numbers of donors to fund each feature. Break things down on a project level, and if too few people are willing to fund a particular project, then it doesn't happen.
Various categories of projects. Of course the flashy ones are projects to develop new features, but maintenance, support, ongoing costs, and various other things can be divided up the same way.
Oh well. Enough with the
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Well, I mean, they can either offer premium services, or start selling user privacy data to the highest bidder. Still less evil than Google!
From TFA:
"We can tell if you're on a public Wi-Fi network..."
They offer zero reassurance that they won't do both. Chose the lesser of two evils, but don't be ignorant about it.
Re:One or the other (Score:5, Insightful)
Browsers have been checking what connection you are on for years already, in order to optimize things like downloading updates. You don't want lists of known malware URLs and ad-blocking data downloaded over a metered connection.
More worrying is that they use the example of banking. Banking should be using HTTPS, so it doesn't matter if you are on open wifi or not. A VPN does nothing - you can't trust any part of the link between you and the bank. In other word's Mozilla is just fear-mongering.
I'm happy for them to have revenue streams, but they have to be honest and transparent too.
Re:One or the other (Score:5, Insightful)
^^^
This.
You either trust the SSL certificate or you don't. Routing it through yet another third party network doesn't make it more secure.
Re: One or the other (Score:5, Informative)
In Firefox ESR 60 for Linux, I was able to perform the following:
1. Click the lock at the left side of the URL bar
2. Click the right-pointing arrow whose tooltip is "Show Connection Details"
3. Click "More Information" at the bottom
4. Click the "View Certificate" button
5. Optionally click the "Details" tab
What is missing from the view of the certificate that Firefox shows when I follow this procedure?
Meaning of URL bar indicators (Score:2)
at the very least they need to tell the user what the house has decided is legitimate in a plain and easy to see form.
The green lock means "The hostname in the URL matches the hostname in the certificate, and the browser publisher trusts the auditing company that evaluated the CA's practices for verifying that the certificate was issued to the owner of this domain."
The green lock, company name, and country code mean "The hostname in the URL matches the hostname in the certificate, and the browser publisher trusts the auditing company that evaluated the CA's practices for verifying that the certificate was issued to the own
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Imagine you host a website through origin caches distributed throughout the Internet. Each server has generated its own private key that never leaves the server. Because each server has a different private key, it has a different corresponding public key and thus needs a different certificate. Or has it since become a good practice for the operator of these origin servers to export the private key from one server to another?
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Banking should be using HTTPS, so it doesn't matter if you are on open wifi or not.
This is misleading. Here's a non-exhaustive list as to why:
* HTTPS uses TLS to protect the HTTP layer, but it doesn't do anything to for the TCP/IP and data link layers, allowing others to know which server IPs you connect to.
* DNS queries are still mostly performed in the clear, allowing evildoers pretending to be the wireless access point to inspect which sites you visit and forge responses pointing to their evil proxies, which by controlling your traffic broadens the attack vector through more types of
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Premium Firefox (Score:2, Insightful)
The beginning of the end....
No charging money for things that are currently fr (Score:3, Interesting)
.... yeah, but I bet you'll be upselling that premium bullshit at every opportunity. People aren't spending their free time to contribute to an open- source project so that it may be a direct avenue for ads for premium services. The default New Tab page is already a monument to whoring yourself out. (Fuck the premium content, fuck Pocket, and fuck all that other garbage).
Also support? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
What distribution are you using? I just booted up both the Xubuntu 19.04 live cd and Ubuntu 19.04 live cd, and it's letting me remove Pulseaudio, no questions asked. It is also not required on Arch Linux, and Gentoo as the anon confirmed.
If you want to try it, open the terminal and if you are a Debian/Ubuntu based distro, sudo apt-get autoremove pulseaudio
and then reboot when it's done. I did notice that it would remove ubuntu-desktop and ubuntu-desktop-minimal if you are on the base Ubuntu distro, but y
Re:Also support? (Score:5, Informative)
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Try Pale Moon http://linux.palemoon.org/ [palemoon.org] It's like Firefox before the Atrocious^W Australis fiasco. It runs fine with either Alsa or Pulseaudio. It autodetects which sound libs you have.
Definition Of Insanity (Score:4, Funny)
Mozilla Exec #1: "Hey, do you remember how Netscape Navigator became a huge bloated hog of features nobody used, while slowing down to a crawl and falling behind on web browsing, which led to its demise?"
Mozilla Exec #2: "Kinda, yes... I guess? It was quite a while back."
Mozilla Exec #1: "Well, I've had a great idea. We'll do exactly the same thing again, only this time things will work out different!"
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I also remember an internet where the browser was just a browser. Reminiscing about the past won't help you solve the problems of the future.
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If you actually remembered, then you'd understand that the problems of the past have also become the problems of the present. We had just-a-browser, then Netscape came along and ruined that, then Firefox came along and fixed that. Now Firefox has broken itself, and the only credible just-a-browser left is Chromium. (Actual Chrome contains all kinds of horse shit including a virus scanner.)
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People use browsers for more stuff now. What you call "just a browser" is basically 0.01% market share, and since the "just a browser" people always list additional features that the think should be built in (probably never agreeing on *which* specific features that should be) that's why there's no "just a browser" in common use.
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Umm, aren't all you people also saying Quantum was shit, the Firefox that removed a lot of bloat?
"Sure, but i liked *some* of that bloat. If only they left *specific thing* that i liked and removed every other feature" kind of logic is the reason Mozilla can't win here.
Good Time for a Fork (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good Time for a Fork (Score:5, Informative)
Topsites, Pocket, and now this?
There have been numerous forks, pick one and enjoy.
Seldom a day goes by without it (Score:2)
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Opera has been around for a few decades now.
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Opera has been around for a few decades now.
Funny thing is, when I read the announcement my first thought was about Opera. It seems Firefox means to try and do all the things Opera has already attempted... without much long-term success.
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Yep, stopped using Opera after they became Chrome skin. Shame as I really liked their integrated email client.
OK Intetersting! (Score:2)
Just my 2 cents
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Yeah another form of "embrace and extend" (Score:2)
Now that browsers have gotten so hugely complex that there's not even a handfull of browser engines, all of which are controlled by some form of larger corporation, they can now use that oligopoly to impose their interests on others.
If the web was simpler there would be more browser engines and therefore more browsers making it easier for people to choose the one they like.
For me this indicates that it is now the time to think about alternatives for the web. How can we create new standards which solve the t
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If the Web were simpler, you'd be stuck downloading desktop apps for everything instead and be tied to the vendor of your specific platform, and totally miss out if your platform is not one of the big ones. No more banking on desktop Linux, for example.
Feel free to create a new "simpler" Web from scratch. All you have to do is implement it everywhere (including iOS where Apple won't let you), and get everyone to port all their content to it (except when they can't because it's "simpler").
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you'd be stuck downloading desktop apps for everything instead and be tied to the vendor of your specific platform, and totally miss out if your platform is not one of the big ones. No more banking on desktop Linux, for example.
You would close your accounts at a bank that does not support desktop Linux and open accounts at a competing credit union or bank that supports desktop Linux.
Or you could choose a credit union or bank whose website uses HTTPS, HTML, and CSS, with no JavaScript. Two-factor authentication could have the smart card store a TLS client certificate's key pair and generate ephemeral connection keys instead of requiring a JavaScript API to access it.
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You would close your accounts at a bank that does not support desktop Linux and open accounts at a competing credit union or bank that supports desktop Linux.
Assuming you could find one, and that they wanted you as a customer.
Or you could choose a credit union or bank whose website uses HTTPS, HTML, and CSS, with no JavaScript.
No such thing. Maybe there would be, but there isn't now, and you'd have a hard time convincing one to give up on development for the real web, and to come to your junior web.
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Assuming you could find one, and that they wanted you as a customer.
That's why I mentioned credit unions, which are smaller and owned by their customers.
Or you could choose a credit union or bank whose website uses HTTPS, HTML, and CSS
No such thing. Maybe there would be
There used to be online banks with noscript-compatible websites back in the early 2000s, before AJAX became common. What prevents a credit union or bank from doing the same in 2019?
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There used to be online banks with noscript-compatible websites back in the early 2000s, before AJAX became common. What prevents a credit union or bank from doing the same in 2019?
They're using it for security features. You've got to convince them to write/buy their platform, or at least parts of it, twice. They've got to support the existing web during the transition.
Not really (Score:2)
We'd just have a better "graphical terminal" standard than the mess we call web these days.
Besides it doesn't matter if we are forced to run proprietary code as Javascript or as native binary.
Why we need an uncorrupted Mozilla (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why we need an uncorrupted Mozilla (Score:5, Informative)
Removing XUL was the right decision. Firefox was slow, unstable and insecure because XUL was holding back critical improvements like per-tab processes and full isolation.
Pale Moon is basically dead now, because they can't fix the crippling performance issues. I haven't tried Waterfox.
Breaking up Google won't help. Chromium will still dominate because it's easy to build a browser around its core. Getting Firefox to the point where someone can just take the layout engine, JS engine and network code and build their own browser around them will be a huge amount of work and there isn't really any reason for Mozilla to do it.
It's not even Chromium that is the issue here, the same was true of WebKit and KHTML before that. If you were not going to throw a lot of engineering resources now and for the rest of time at your own core components, you used KHTML/WebKit, or even Microsoft's DLL until everyone realized how terrible that was.
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Pale Moon is basically dead now, because they can't fix the crippling performance issues.
Care to elaborate? I use Pale Moon all the time and haven't noticed performance issues.
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Compare it to Firefox with several heavy tabs open. The fact that it's single threaded makes it lag badly even on powerful machines.
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I still use pale moon because I'm obstinate, but it does choke badly, and often. My PC is by no means pissed off by modern standards, but an FX-8350 with 16GB and a tolerably fast SSD should be plenty for browsing. I have firefox, chrome, and chromium installed as well, for those times when I need them, but I try not to run them.
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Care to elaborate? I use Pale Moon all the time and haven't noticed performance issues.
I go jogging all the time and I didn't notice performance issues either until I was overtaken by a significantly faster runner.
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Pale Moon is basically dead now, because they can't fix the crippling performance issues. I haven't tried Waterfox.
I just installed Waterfox, and immediately ran into issues with an extension: 1Password doesn't work in Waterfox and Pale Moon.
Old-style extensions are the main reason I tried both, but between this and e.g. Youtube sanitizer extensions breaking and not being updated, they're becoming more hassle than it's worth.
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> Getting Firefox to the point where someone can just take the layout engine, JS engine and network code and build their own browser around them will be a huge amount of work and there isn't really any reason for Mozilla to do it.
Mozilla actually is doing this, it's called GeckoView. Firefox Focus is the most accessible implementation at the moment, but "Firefox Preview"/Fenix is apparently scheduled to replace Firefox on Android in 2020.
VPN for public Wi-Fi? (Score:2)
Isn't that what TLS is for?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Until TLS 1.3 host headers cannot be encrypted and even then, most servers won't support it for a long time. So even with TLS, an attacker still knows where you want to go and could tune their attack accordingly.
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Sorry, no thanks (Score:2)
I already have my own VPN, no limits, like every Firefox user who needs one.
The end is near (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds like Firefox is going the way of Netscape. VPN, Search, Pocket, and generating own content is NONE of Mozilla's business. Just give us the damn web browser, and please take this Pocket or VPN shit out of it. Nobody asked about it unless it's asking about how to remove it.
It's also going to be incredibly stupid and annoying when Firefox starts trying to take care of my security. Say what? My web browser now makes suggestions about WiFi and VPN? You gotta be kidding. At least, please build us a version without all of this built-in shit.
At the same time Firefox is failing more and more at its functions of being, well, a web browser. For the last few months I have been running into more and more web-sites that don't render correctly any more when I use Firefox. Of course, you can blame this on the emerging Chrome mono-culture and bad web coders, but that's NOT the answer.
rock and a hard place (Score:3)
Firefox are not "only" developing a web browser but also a web engine. Gecko is one of two remaining web engines. The other one is the Chrome one (which is what most other browsers are using nowadays). I believe it's very important that more than one web engine exists otherwise we'd be like in the heyday of IE where one implementation is a de facto standard and the actual standards don't matter.
Mozilla employs a lot of people full time that make Firefox the great browser it is. I'd prefer that Firefox didn't push content or VPNs, or whatever
The only important question (Score:4, Insightful)
this is where the money goes (Score:4, Insightful)
When you donate money to the Mozilla foundation, they spend it making the browser worse. Whether it's spending $20 million on a system to show you ads (sponsored content) when you open a new tab (Pocket) or just ignoring long-standing bugs in favor of developing new features, they have proven beyond any doubt that they do not spend donations respectfully. The whole point of Firefox was to have a fast and light browser that just browsed. They have shoved feature after feature that should be an add-on into the browser itself; in the case of Pocket, specifically to prevent you from removing it from your browser.
At minimum, it's time to stop donating to Mozilla. They are sitting on a big pile of money, and they can always sell that Pocket bullshit that they never should have spent donators' money on if they need more. Ideally, it's time for a new curator, who will rip things out of the browser and either junk them, or move them into add-ons as appropriate.
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Or maybe, software development isn't a democracy and just because *you* Mr Drinkypoo don't like something doesn't mean the company is on the wrong track.
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Or maybe, software development isn't a democracy and just because *you* Mr Drinkypoo don't like something doesn't mean the company is on the wrong track.
It's not a democracy, but if you don't listen to the users, you find yourself without them. It's not an accident that Firefox's market share has been dropping, even among nerds, and I'm quite certain that I know why it's happening. This discussion is chock-full of comments like mine, so it's obvious that it's not just *me*. Nice try though.
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He didn't say it was a democracy. He said that to stop donating to Mozilla. It makes sense. If you don't like what a corporation is doing, why give them money? It seems silly to donate money anyway to a corporation that literally has hundreds of millions of dollars.
Problems (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, any organization is going to do things you personally do not agree with and obviously some you do support since you are still involved with them.
Mozilla has made many stupid decisions on a management level over the last decade... basically since Brian was forced out by fake SJW.
Technology wise Mozilla continues to do a lot of good things despite poor management. They still provide the only decent freedom and privacy promoting browser. There are good people who stay at Mozilla despite the bad elements (which at times you wonder if they don't have a couple proper corporate spies...)
Mozilla is in a very risky position, there are no browsers that can keep up with mega corporations collaborating on the single chromium codebase. MS even gave up! It takes major $$$ to keep up with everybody else or even lead on some things. No, forking from chromium would mean a community relearning from scratch; long term, any diverging decision would result in more labor/$$$ maintaining replaced code; this would deter many things from being done and freedom would always come at a price.
Furthermore, a standard is NOT a standard without at least 2 implementations; the web greatly benefits by having quality standards that are not merely a description of a single implementation (becoming after the fact; it's not a definition anymore, it is just documentation.)
Finding HONEST methods to fund Mozilla so google doesn't kill them overnight is a good idea. They know about google's anti-competitive practices more than most and how google has become more evil over time. Their ideas will never fund well compared to selling our privacy; but I do not blame them for exploring greater security.
FYI: I used to donate and ran out of protest $; management never noticed loss of $ and having worked with/at non-profits I see some similar signs of dysfunctional behavior. I also see signs of workers who care enough to survive the office politics.
Re: (Score:2)
Ideally, it's time for a new curator, who will rip things out of the browser and either junk them, or move them into add-ons as appropriate.
The problem isn't doing that, the problem is getting anyone to care that you've done that.
Mozilla banned Gab's "Dissenter" from Firefox (Score:2)
Cannot support this kind of censorship.
Re: (Score:2)
Gab is a cesspool waste of computing resources
Just yesterday I installed Seamonkey (Score:2)
Then I see this the next morning. .mozilla directory from somewhere else.) That is not the way to keep me around.
What prompted the switch was that I had done a general update of my system, and suddenly firefox was telling me I had to log in to import or sync up old bookmarks. (I couldn't just tar and untar a
Full Circle (Score:2)
Who remembers when Netscape Navigator cost money?
Re: (Score:2)
Search money wasn't enough? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
More like they're copying what Google said a couple of weeks ago about Chrome, that you'd need to pay for their Enterprise (eg., Premium) version to have working adblockers.
More likely than not Mozilla are now doing the exact same thing.
Re:Prediction. (Score:4, Insightful)
More likely than not Mozilla are now doing the exact same thing.
People will simply move to the next browser that supports adblocking, it'll take a while but you can bet when the normies and their chrome stop blocking ads you'll see a pickup in the other direction.