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Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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And this is one of the many reasons I don't donate to Firefox. Firefox employees should really fork that project and make it better than what it is now instead of just being Google's dog + an excuse to pay millions to a single person and hundreds of thousands to random individuals, who have nothing to do with Firefox.
400M in cash could go to a lot of development efforts. They could rewrite Firefox entirely in Rust, make it run on any platform, move the needle on web technologies in a big way, hell, they could make their own damn phone with that kind of money, or even write their own competitor to ChromeOS.
But instead...
And what do you do after three years? Then the cash will be used up.
Mozilla isn't just developing the Firefox browser. Technology is inherently political - and educating people and influencing actors politically on the free and open web is very important. Firefox is much less likely to mis-align away from their browser users than chrome simply because they don't have the misaligned incentives like the chrome Browser which is equally made by the largest internet advertising firm of the world.
They even has created FirefoxOS for phone at some point in the past 10 years. But I don't remember what happened with that.
They tried making a phone already and it failed to gain steam.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS
It's worth noting that KaiOS, a fork of Firefox OS, has been successful - particularly in developing markets.
This is reassuring, I’ve been debating installing Ubuntu’s phone OS on my old Sony Xperia. It’s great that it’s not a complete bust to have a nice FOSS OS on phones. Mozilla just didn’t have the resources or wherewithal to follow through with Firefox OS and that’s just how it goes.
What are you on about? This is super confusing to me. Mozilla does a lot of great work. It's insanely hard to make and develop a web browser... Are you aware of that? Apple probably spends a large fraction of the amount Mozilla does and yet safari benefits more from open source than Mozilla and is still one of the biggest shit piles on the planet.
It is worth mentioning that the WebKit port for GTK does not support WebRTC and that it is not supported at all by Apple. It's an effort by Igalia, one person from Red Hat and volunteers.
There's also essentially no WebKit browser for windows. WebKit is often slow at adopting new web technologies as well.
All that to say - WebKit is not the example of a success outside of helping big corporations to make their own big proprietary browsers.
All I know is that as a frontend Dev, features in safari are about 5-10 years late to the party. the world's first trillion dollar company is years behind a non profit..
This is something I deal with daily. Safari has awful support for new-ish features. Combine that with a requirement to support a couple versions back like my company does and you're basically limited to what the web was 10 years ago. Safari is the new IE.
From a feature perspective, yes. But with the dominance of Google's Chrome and them pushing awful web API's I'd say the title of "the new IE" goes to Chrome.
Google's business practices are God awful, yes. Apple's are too, in a different way. In the end, Google's probably are worse but from a technology standpoint at least they are not seeking to ignore web standards. They're trying to create them. In the case of the authentication API it's a shit ass standard, but that's not what they have done historically. Google has mostly embraced and helped push standards through which made the web better. Apple has actively despised and resisted standards.
But I'm not sure why we are comparing these two evil tech companies. Firefox and other browser makers have also supported modern web standards while apple hates the idea of them. The result is a shitty ass browser that behaves like 7 years old Firefox or something. That was my only point.
This explains why you don't think safari is that bad. Lol, you don't test in it. It's fucking bad. Every time I think I'm doing some safe that safari can't botch and don't test for a few days in safari, I'm shown what a foolish thought that is. The types of sites I work on have some less common features admittedly, but every other browser, even silk browser on ancient Kindle devices, works flawlessly most times while safari has a problem with SO much. Even back when we supported IE 11 (trident) the weird issues were worse on safari.
Apple's big selling point has never been their software.
What has it been then? I think hundreds of millions of people would say their software "just works" and that's why they love it.
Hardware and the fact that their products became bourgie status symbols. Their aesthetic game is on point and UI is fairly polished, but their software can be super limited in annoying ways.
Agreed, but I think the general population thinks that their products are great in general. They're not too concerned about hardware vs software. "It just works"
Use LibreWolf. I've switched to it from Brave because it's counted as firefox market share but it gets rid of all the non-browser features (Pocket, Telemetry, etc.) and enables some interesting flags in the config (ResistFingerprinting for example).