Fair point. I have no empirical data, of course. But I do read widely about Firefox updates. (I’ve grown apprehensive about applying them before I know what Mozilla has changed.) What I see from comments everywhere is mostly great frustration directed at the UI changes, on Reddit, on tech review sites, and especially in Mozilla’s own support forum.
It’s a given that people who are very displeased post negative comments more than people who are very pleased post positive comments, sure. That leaves only people in the middle, who don’t comment, and who are either OK with abrupt change or slightly annoyed by it, and those are probably not the best demographics to rely on for preserving your user base.
But yeah, no one can say for sure what the main reason is.
Mozilla organization is not really a friendly open source organization any more. As I understand it, most of their funding comes from Google. We need a better alternative project, that is not chromium based.
Mozilla organization is not really a friendly open source organization any more.
I think this requires more comment. Mozilla code is open source. Mozilla funds open source. Why do you say that Mozilla is not a friendly open source organization?
As I understand it, most of their funding comes from Google.
This is true, but I don’t see a problem with this. Google pays them so that Mozilla uses google as the default search engine. That default can easily be changed ( put this in the search bar “about:preferences#search” ). Before switching back to google as the default search, they had “yahoo” as the default search engine (for which yahoo paid $370M per year).
The problem is not related to what users can do – most never change the defaults, that’s why defaults are so important – but about what the funded entity feels it’s allowed to do. If you’re getting money from X (Google), then you’re going to think twice before creating something that threatens X’s business (advertising and tracking done via Chrome).
The problem is the fear that Mozilla will stop itself from seriously trying to undermine the market share of their near-monopolist competitor.
Yahoo doesn’t have a browser, which would be a much less concerning source of funding.
The problem is that you literally need a budget of about $300 million per year just to maintain a web browser engine, because it is one of the most complex pieces of code ever created, and it has to support a mountain of standards that keeps growing and be backward compatible with the last 25 years of standards, and it has to be constantly improving its performance to deal with the increasing processing demands of JavaScript and CSS, and plug all the security holes. Maintaining 25 million lines of code is incredibly expensive and rewriting its pieces in Rust to have better performance with parallel processing and fewer security holes requires paying for high quality programmers.
At this point, there are only 3 entities even attempting to maintain a performant web engine, which are Google, Apple, and Mozilla. If we all abandon Firefox, then we are left with just Google and Apple in the W3C committees that can implement the web standards and we won’t have a single voice of sanity in the room with any power to push for users’ rights and privacy. Mozilla is far from perfect, but using the alternative browsers means giving more power to Google to control the web standards, because almost all the web browsers that claim to respect user rights are based on Google’s code, so you are giving Google more market share.
Mozilla does a lot of things that I dislike, and it is far too dependent upon Google for its funding, which makes it hard to oppose Google. However, Apple isn’t very active in the W3C committees, and they are increasingly dominated by Google (and Microsoft to a lesser extent). This is why I keep using Firefox, and why I encourage people to buy their services such as VPN, because Mozilla is far better than the alternative.
The problem is not related to what users can do – most never change the defaults, that’s why defaults are so important – but about what the funded entity feels it’s allowed to do. …
I do get your points.
There’s a difference between “fear about how Mozilla will act” and “how Mozilla has acted”. We should judge Mozilla on the latter. We certainly shouldn’t judge Mozilla based on vague innuendo of association, we should only base it on action and that’s not what the previous poster was doing.
Is it delusional to think that Brave could pick up the slack and maintain their own engine (forked from chromium) if necessary? Personally, I have been far more impressed with Brave lately, with Mozilla apparently completely abandoning any concern of what the community wants.
I get your arguments for why we will miss Mozilla if they stop, but the organization is just too bad for me to support them.
Another point along this line of thinking, the founder of brave literally was the long-time leader of mozilla and helped to start it originally, so if anyone would know what it would take to replace mozilla, it would be him.
While you have a point, I think majority of funding is a bit more than “vague innuendo of association.”
You’re right. I should have said “… based on Google paying Mozilla for default search and a vague innuendo that this relationship will affect Mozilla’s policies/actions.” Remember that Mozilla could always go back to Yahoo Search or even Bing Search if Google wanted to use that relationship to strong arm Mozilla.
I think it’s more subtle than that. Before it comes to strong-arming, there needs to be an open conflict. And I think receiving funding is a pretty strong incentive not to start one.
I think it’s more subtle than that. Before it comes to strong-arming, there needs to be an open conflict. And I think receiving funding is a pretty strong incentive not to start one.
Mozilla is free to go back to Yahoo Search or talk with Microsoft about making Bing Search the default. There is more than one option.
To put the shoe on the other foot, let’s consider this hypothetical: Suppose the NSA started buying Librem 5’s, should we all assume that Purism is tainted???
It’s not free to change your supplier, the cost of getting one is a lot of work. Especially when the current one pays well.
In this case it is. It’s really one update of a default setting. And they’ve done it before: Remember that Mozilla has changed from Google Search to Yahoo Search … and back.
If NSA provided the majority of Purism’s income, I would start asking questions.
First: Would you ask questions or already be making conclusions?
Second: Hmm. How do we know they haven’t??? The investors in the $9M of convertible bonds is not public, so I guess we don’t know whether or not it was the NSA. But, think about it, the NSA would want to keep that private, right??? /s