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It’s no longer the fault of long-term CEO Mitchell Baker, she of the six-million-bucks salary. She took the cash and left in February 2024. After the February 2024 layoffs that went with the “open source AI” announcement, in November, new boss Laura Chambers laid off another third of the staff, but somehow found the money to hire new executives.
Money is the problem. Not too little, but too much. Where there’s wealth, there’s a natural human desire to make more wealth. Ever since Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Firefox has never had to compete. It’s been attached like a mosquito to an artery to the Google cash firehose. The Reg noted it in 2007, and it made more the next year. We were dubious when Firefox turned five.
…
Mozilla’s leadership is directionless and flailing because it’s never had to do, or be, anything else. It’s never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit. It’s no wonder it has no real direction or vision or clue: it never needed them. It’s role-playing being a business.
I dunno, Firefox of 3.0 times was the shit. It itself was the browser that should be, more welcoming to customization than Windows of the time was to porn winlockers. They also had XULRunner for alternative ideas. Gecko was the FOSS browser engine that various alternative “nice” MacOS and Linux browsers used.
Though between 2004 and 2008 only four years passed. Less than between Windows 2000 and Vista (let’s ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000).
let’s ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000
That feels like a dangerous argument;
- 2000 = NT 5.0
- XP = NT 5.1
- XP x64 = NT 5.2
- Vista = NT 6.0
- 7 = NT 6.1
- 8 = NT 6.2
- 8.1 = NT 6.3
- 10 = NT 6.4 (Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)
Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.
Hot take. Under semantic versioning everything after vista has been in essence a new version of vista.
Going from NT 5.x to 6.x was a major jump.
The reason why Vista had no/terrible drivers was because they went from an insecure one driver bug crashed the whole system model to more secure isolated drivers that don’t crash the whole system model. Developers had to learn how to write new drivers and none of the XP drivers worked.
They went from a single user OS with a multi user skin on top, to a full role based access control user system.
They went from global admin/non-admin permissions to scoped UAC permissions for apps.
Remember on Vista when apps constantly had that “asking for permissions” popup? That was the apps not using the 6.x UAC APIs.
Given the underlying architectural situation everything since Vista has been vista with polish added (or removed depending on how you look at it)
Things will go beyond vista when a new major release with new mandatory APIs shows up.
Under semantic versioning everything after vista has been in essence a new version of vista.
okay but using that logic everything running linux kernel v5 is the same… fedora, ubuntu, rhel are in essence just a reskin of slackware
an OS is not semantically versioned as a whole because an OS is more than just the kernel
I mean they are all literally the same operating system yah! They all use the same kernel APIs.
The logical conclusion is that from an operating system they are all basicly the same.
The main difference is the user space. The package management and defaults.
Look at Debian GNU/kFreeBSD it’s a whole different operating system with the Debian user space. It’s cool stuff and really highlights the difference between operating system and user space.
an operating system is far more than just the kernel
there are few people who would say that android is the same operating system as ubuntu
But it literally is the same. The only difference is the user space. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD shows this. Different operating system same user space.
Take a look at Wikipedia for more info.
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of processor time, mass storage, peripherals, and other resources.
What might be a valid argument in 5.x might not be an argument for 6.x.
But IMO, Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11 have more in common with vista than vista has with XP.
It’s just a versions list. And I’m mostly joking. Rather that the “feel” of using Windows between 2000 and XP didn’t seem to change much. (I prefer 2000)
Ok but XP was literally 2000 with a prettier default theme
All firefox really needed to be once google took over everything, was to be a viable alternative and find a way to metabolize all this cash in a way that doesn’t damage google’s own cash machine or threaten it’s actual dominance.
For google the pitance they give firefox is a very cheap insurance policy against against anti-trust legislation. Just like Intel with AMD, this shows how toothless the liberal anti-trust legislation are, even if they were really being enforced, they cannot handle a token 2nd player. It cannot handle controlled opposition if it’s credible and believable. So an actual thriving ecosystem doesn’t need to exist, we just get duopolies instead of monopolies but in practices we get ducked up the cloaca just the same.
This is the exact block I came to quote.
The rest of the article is good too, though.
mozilla and firefox need to learn more away from ai and more towards ethical not for profit governance. be the opposite of big tech and stand for the internet as a public utility and force or good and decency. instead of going ai bro, y’all need to stand up against racism and discrimination while pushing internet for everybody, free of profits.
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i was talking about both mozilla and firefox… and the internet has plenty to do with that as a communication device for good.
instead of using the internet for war and hate, use it for unity and openness.
How would a web browser achieve that? The only thing I can think of is for the browser to choose what sort of web content should be filtered out and what should actually be displayed to the user, which I think we all agree is not what you would want your browser to choose.
the web browser isn’t a sentient entity; the web browser is developed by people who are part of an organisation with an ethos.
I think the question was:
List the steps to be taken by the people at Mozilla to achieve this. Then think if those can reasonably be accomplished.
Can we use it for godot and openness instead?
Only if you want to be left waiting
I dont want to unify with you.
stand up against racism and discrimination
What does this mean for a browser company? I understand this being an important company value, but I don’t want them filtering the internet or anything. Their primary goal should be to foster a privacy respecting web and a high performance, standards based browser.
I don’t think eliminating profit from the web should be a goal. I don’t care if websites make money, I just care they don’t profit from my data without me agreeing to it explicitly.
I think Firefox needs to become financially independent, and that means finding a privacy respecting business model. My personal preference is a micro payment system where I can pay websites for content in exchange for no ads. That provides value to me and websites that I’d otherwise block ads on.
If AI is part of that, sure, just make it opt-in and very obvious when it’s working.
I personally think it’s not about Mozilla. It’s about the Web.
You need to see the bigger picture always.
The Web as an application for global system of hypertext documents served from different computers is fine.
The Web wasn’t intended as a platform for platforms for global applications.
It’s used as one, because that allows a certain kind of people to gather power. Networked personal computers made the civil society too powerful. Needed a solution.
Why the Web and not just “Facebook native application” and “Google native application”? Well, it’s hard to maintain a hypertext document system made application platform. It limits competition. It also allows Facebook and Google popularity to affect web browser and web techologies popularity. If these don’t work in a browser, that browser is doomed.
While the verticals and monopolies themselves allow thieves and murderers in governments to control the Internet.
So - there weren’t that many websites, if you think about it, requiring any particular web technology when it came into existence. Those mostly started specifically for Google, Facebook etc services and/or policies. Say, HTML5 to phase out Netscape plugin API, which was presented as phasing out Flash (everybody hated Flash).
Mozilla followed those policies and appeared neutral, yes.
But in general the moment using Dillo or Netsurf or Links became plainly, completely not an option for the Web, it was decided. A world standard that has only a handful of compliant realizations is not a standard. It’s an oligopoly.
So, getting back to hypertext - Flash was hated by some because it didn’t allow to turn the whole webpage into an application, but that wasn’t its purpose. JS was a mistake, I think. Any interpreted content should have been embedded in its clear place separate from the rest of the page with its own plugin, similar to Flash applets. But - one can accept that in year 1996 they didn’t think of such consequences.
And remote big services not being standardized were also a mistake. I wrote a bit on that from time to time here, gets tiring to repeat - a lot of what the server side of many applications does is just routing to another client, computation and storage. One can devise a standard for remote services. So that local applications would be different, but would use the same pooled infrastructure, found and announced via trackers similar to torrents. With global identifiers of entities to allow interoperability, so that “post #12435324646dasgtshdryh” would be the same text on any of such storage services (having it) and at any point in time.
That, of course, is a bit late. In our current world things like Briar and other mesh are probably a better direction. One can have what I described over them too, but it will also require management of bandwidth and bottlenecks and stuff not reachable directly.
y’all need to stand up against racism and discrimination
I concur, I think they should push towards a more positive internet. Though I think they are a bit wary of doing it ever since the toxic backlash to this blog post
https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
which is exactly why they need a strong positive leadership that doesn’t bend the knee to bigots.
Companies should be allowed to make a profit, you need that to cover bad years, invest in the future of the company, etc. A company without profit (unless it is a non-profit) will not survive.
And what share of the profit should go right in executives pockets? How many employees should be laid off to increase this profit? Is 6 million $/yr enough for a CEO to feed their fucking family?
Its already law that the director/cea etc should earn at least 56k or the same aa the most earning employee.
But if companies wheren’t allowed to exist your job wouldn’t and the internet won’t exist, etc
That’s a weird way of saying firefox is not fine.
I can’t keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don’t get worse!
forks cant survive without firefox unfortunately
Firefox is open source, it’s not going anywhere.
Building a browser engine is expensive. That’s why almost all other browser engined other than Apple’s have joined the Chromium Borg and gone extinct.
Remember when Cyanogenmod died and no one thought that anyone would take the reigns?
The article says you should stick with Firefox. If you have time, I’d recommend reading the entire article!
Qutebrowser is my main and Lynx is my “feed” browser. Qutebrowser you don’t need anything else. it just works and you can script the thing to your hearts content.
For a long time I was using Floorp, and while I like floorp and the dev team behind it, I just stopped using it as my main. Sure it’s a fork of firefox and they’re at the whims of mozilla which lately has been clearly evident with the slow updates to floorp.
Qutebrowser just works. The dev for it is a nice dude who is easily accessible for help. the community for it is also very helpful. the integration with things like greasemonkey make scripting and customizing anything so painfully easy. I mean there’s a great script for it right now that completely 100% circumvents youtube ads and it’s been working for months straight without any need to update. It also meshes extremely well with my Bitwarden.
I’ll never use a different browser again.
I’ve been very happy with Waterfox so far. Made with the Gecko Engine but not maintained by Mozilla.
For clarity, Mozilla isn’t one thing. There’s Mozilla Corporation (profit) and the Mozilla Foundation (nonprofit). Firefox is a product of Mozilla Corporation. And yes, the need to make a profit is a bug not a feature.
and it’s incredibly shit that you can’t donate to firefox… people donate to mozilla assuming they’re donating to firefox but none of the donations go towards firefox development
i emailed them about this a while ago… i can’t remember exactly what i said, but basically that i didn’t want to donate to adtech and ai slop but wanted to support firefox development… this is their reply
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback with us. We genuinely value hearing from our supporters, as your insights help us understand what matters most to the Mozilla community.
It’s important to note that the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation are two separate entities within the Mozilla umbrella - Mozilla Corporation is responsible for developing and maintaining Firefox and other software products, and they are continuously working on improving the user experience, including addressing compatibility issues and promoting the browser to a wider audience.
The Mozilla Foundation, on the other hand, focuses on broader internet health and advocacy work. Our mission is to ensure the internet remains open and accessible for everyone, and this includes issues related to privacy, digital rights, and equity. To confirm, the survey that you had received was from the Mozilla Foundation.
With that being said, Firefox is funded by revenue generated through the product rather than donations. At the moment, there is no way for supporters to make a donation that will be designated to the development of Firefox. Have no fear, things are looking good for Firefox’s future and they plan to be around a long time, supporting folks with the most secure browser experience! Continuing to use Firefox, and recommending it to others, is the best way to support this project.
We truly appreciate your concerns about Firefox and their top priorities - We on the Mozilla Foundation strongly believe that issues such as privacy, online safety, and data security are connected to the products and services we all use every day. The work we do in these areas complements Mozilla Corporation’s focus on building better, more secure software like Firefox, and w encourage you to participate in our survey!
If you would like to input some of your thoughts and ideas into our Ideas discussion forum regarding Firefox and other Mozilla products, please visit: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas
We thank you again for reaching out to our Mozilla Foundation Donor Care team, and please let us know if we can support your further!
All the best,
<redacted their name>
Donor Care TeamMozilla Foundation https://foundation.mozilla.org/
Unfortunately Firefox is a product whose job is to show ads for profit, so the only way to “donate” to it is to click ads.
Yeah, this is part of the new Reaganomics I like to call AIconomics. The goal isn’t to produce a good product, the goal to make something flashy that tech billionaires want to throw cash at. It’s not unlike crypto. Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big. Meanwhile tech billionaires keep minting new ones to entice new suckers every other week. The tech billionaires want you hooked on AI so you’ll give up your private info that they can sell to each other so they can cash in, the software companies are investing their time and resources into making AI LLMs in order to get tech billionaires to give them money. It’s a viscous capitalist circle. Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation. But with Republicans in charge that will absolutely never happen. Trump practically made his entire cabinet out of billionaires and corporate shills. And too many Democrats gave them the thumb up, so don’t count of Dems doing a whole lot to stall the big tech chokehold on everything either.
How viscous is the cycle
Very. It’s like molasses.
There’s been investment bubbles, overshooting and disingenuous rent seeking in many economies before. It was temporarily reduced in many western economies by various FDR type policies in the '30s-'60s. The '70s and '80s were just the banks wresting back their freedom to implement market “rationality”. And we get the benefits ever since.
People do keep voting for it though so it is hard to argue they’re not satisfied. Even the ones who protest vote don’t seem to see the “investment” markets as any part of the problem; or as important at all. That’s either some pretty effective demagoguery, or some dumb fucking electorate.
The amount of power shareholders hold over every major (American) enterprise isn’t talked about in a way that presents a clear problem between increasingly expensive and shitty services, layoffs, anti-worker practices, political corruption and these shareholder groups. C-suite are part of this group but they’re also afraid of removal via hostile board takeovers and so easily justify acquiescing to shareholder demands. Perhaps it’s because the same investors hold the same sway over (American) media with the added benefit of using it to brand themselves as exceptional leaders. Lots to untangle there…
Sounds like some deliberately obscure concentrations of power.
The fear bit is really problematic though as scared people are not ideal decision makers.
I’ld like to vote Cryptonimics as term, because it encompasses both the cryptic nature of the product, and the clear example of cryptocurrency.
Where do you think you are?
Check out enshittification and the rot economy. I feel like those two terms encompass pretty much what we are seeing these days
I’m quite aware of enshittifacation. And, though the word is new, the concept is not. It was most recently called “planned obsolescence” and I think older folks just called it “trashy new stuff” or something folksy like that. But that’s harder to apply to the amorphous entity that is the Internet and the economy that’s been built around it. Don’t fall for the doomsday cult of “it’s all just going to shit anyway so let’s only care about ourselves”. That’s how we got Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, and Mormons (among so many others).
Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big.
That’s not entirely correct. Black and white stones used in voting in someplace antique also have no actual value, but they substitute a vote.
BTC is used as a mechanism of exchange, like a decentralized bank.
Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.
Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?
Or would you doubt that the person talking has good idea of the problem and the solutions, offering the bluntest one?
“Regulation” of the “property rights protection” kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn’t work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it’s theft. Providing a “communication platform” augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that’s not heavy regulation, that’s an update to pretty light regulation.
Maybe also obligation for every big service on the Internet to have global identifiers and provide a global API exposing all its inner entities, be that posts or users or comments or reactions, with those global identifiers. So that you could export all of Facebook to a decentralized cache, for example. That’s heavy regulation, but also pretty reasonable, in line with old approaches to libraries, press and freedom of speech.
Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.
Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?
Well, if everything else failed…
“Regulation” of the “property rights protection” kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn’t work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it’s theft. Providing a “communication platform” augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that’s not heavy regulation, that’s an update to pretty light regulation.
The problem with light regulation is that it would probably be too easy to workaround, not that a heavy regulation do not have the same problem btw, but more than the regulation itself is the punishment (and the certainty and timeliness of it) that is important.
Well, if you’ve noticed, the punishments have been becoming less and less over many years, unless you are a small-to-medium business or an individual, in that case you have more rules and more punishments.
I noted it. That is why I said that the problem is the punishment.
They didn’t stop handing out harsh punishments. Just in a highly unpredictable, unequal and arbitrary pattern.
I’ve read someplace that the main difference between modernity and middle ages in legal practice was that in modernity punishments were relatively small, but unavoidable, while in middle ages most criminals avoided punishments, but here and there some poor idiot would be made an example of in a highly disproportionate way, like being quartered for stealing some shit and being rude to a priest.
One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi
…
Zawinski has repeatedly said:
Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
This makes sense to me. I initially thought everything that Proton does, that should have been Mozilla. They should have been a collection of services to compete with like O365 and Google One. So I didn’t see a problem with Mozilla selling a VPN, even though if I remember right it being just a Mullvad rebrand.
Right now to me it looks like Proton is the closest mostly missing a web browser and a more cloud office offering.
Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.
Linux kernel devs do Linux kernel development and distros small and large do the integration with everything else needed for an operating system, branding, support, etc. Sounds like Mozilla should have been the core devs for a number of reference software projects. Firefox browser engine. Maybe an equivalent to Electron based on Servo. Shouldn’t have dropped Rust and been the steward for the reference Rust compiler. Could have been the steward for FirefoxOS/KaiOS/etc. Support PostmarketOS maybe.
Linux foundation stewards or contributes to all sorts of software projects not just the kernel but they’re all pretty much things that are relevant for users of Linux operating systems. Mozilla could have found some software centric focus that in some way came together thematically. I would guess privacy focused browser and software services
Markup pro tip: to have multiple separate lines appear as a single large block quote, insert the quote signifier (>) into the blank newlines between them as well.
so this
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despite the newlines.
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Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.
Unfortunately others are deciding on web standards mostly. Which makes it hard for it to keep up even if it were trying to be such.
Also Mozilla was kinda that, until it wasn’t - because they decided to go the other way and because apparently they lacked money (doesn’t look like that from their spending, but).
That assumes though that the definition of web browser and its needed stack stays static.
What happens if we all browse the net primarily via VR then? The line is blurry, so is Mozilla org.
Sadly I am running into more and more things that don’t work on firefox. Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently. They don’t say it is the browser. I don’t know how they are doing it, but google is winning the fight.
When I asked a couple of developers who work on websites/webapps with a lot of moving parts, they said it was easiest to just test for chrome, since that’s what most people use.
It’s turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s so damn stupid. If your site works meaningfully differently in Firefox vs Chromium, you’re already doing something very, very wrong.
Yep, this is why at least for me when I develop websites I use Firefox first for development to make sure that the website runs on Firefox.
Chromium does a lot of heavy lifting to fix problems with websites which enables certain web developers to be lazy.
Smae thing that Nvidia does with OpenGL. Their driver handles a lot erroneous out of spec behaviour so developers think their game works fine but the moment you run it on AMD or Intel GPUs, you get all sorts of issues because they actually implement the spec accurately.
This is like telling people that they are doing something wrong when they don’t “buy low and sell high” when they’re trading. Obviously. Issues with browser parity are born from a difficulty of the how and the when, not the what.
The how is testing on one other browser.
What a novel idea.
It’s ironic that I use Firefox personally but unfortunately we prioritized Chrome when I did more front end work too. Firefox would often render views differently compared to Chrome (Safari was also a shetshow) and we had to prioritize work ofc, especially for legacy stuff.
The thing is, as a pure guess, I would bet that it’s Chrome that’s not adhering to the web standards.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox at work recently once they added tab groups. A few parts of one of the web apps my team maintains straight up don’t work. I mentioned it in a meeting, received a full 10 seconds of silence before someone said “Well customers aren’t complaining…”
Yeah, I’m not a dev, but I work with dev teams. They all don’t test with firefox anymore. Not enough ROI according to the product managers.
If a site I have to use doesn’t work for no apparent reason, I e-mail the company’s Support. Let them sort it out, or provide another way I can do what I’m trying to do. Personally, I think a lot of the problems are from more and more websites integrating privacy-invading “features”, and FF interfering with their operation.
I talked to tech support once, they said it won’t get fixed, and there was no workaround. It was a platform type site. So I’m not their direct custom. A small business is. And the people at the small business have never heard of firefox. So they don’t even understand the problem.
Yeah support either doesn’t know or care. They just say, weird the website doesn’t work with your device. Do you have another computer?
As someone who’s worked in IT, in corporate and not so corporate companies, it’s often not that the support techs don’t care. It’s that management doesn’t. In most companies, I was explicitly told to not care about certain things. If I cared too much and spent too much time on one single problem, to fix it for good, I was told off. As long as users could work in some way, it didn’t matter. Even if that included ineffective or costly workarounds. That kind of thinking has and will always rub me the wrong way.
This exactly. Which is why when the tech support didn’t want to file a ticket, I pushed for it to be filed. The product managers make the decision, and if they don’t see tickets it doesn’t exist.
Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently.
I recall how South Korea literally painted itself into a corner for becoming too dependent on Internet Explorer after years of using it with a security implementation based entirely on ActiveX.
I’m currently using a user-agent switcher plugin. Allows me to spoof servers into believing I’m running a different browser.
I tried the spoofer on a few, and they still failed. I thought it was supposed to be all chromium under the hood, but somehow it’s different. And companies don’t test firefox, nor care.
You know you fucked up when even a traditionally hardcore Mozilla fan since the early 2000s like myself has had enuff and recently switched to Librewolf.
I’m with you. I was using Netscape way back and loved Firefox from its inception, and tried to convince everyone I knew to use it. Earlier this year I finally switched to Waterfox, and I haven’t looked back. I tried Librewolf first, and it was great, but they don’t have an app and that was a dealbreaker for me. Waterfox feels a lot like older Firefox UI-wise, and I love the tab containers.
Librewolf has tab containers as well. So does Firefox. Unless Waterfox works differently somehow?
Oh… so they do. I guess Waterfox just enabled it by default and I never noticed
Haha, that’s ok. I had the same thing with my claim about pw manager in Librewolf.
Is it good so far?
Yes! A bit annoying with no built in pw manager but I manage. It did show me how much of the problems which I thought were Gecko related were actually Firefox related, tho.
Basically it’s a faster, bluer, and less buggy Firefox. 🐺>🦊
You should use a third party password manager. You can still add extensions to librewolf.
I know. Been a bit paralysed by the amount to choose from, tho.
I chose Bitwarden, no regrets so far.
Wdym Librewolf has no built in password manager? It has
about:loginsjust like FirefoxI guess it does. I heard it didn’t before switching, and it isn’t enabled by the default so I just assumed.
it’s enabled, what isn’t is offering to save your passwords
The fact that they are now selling our data seems like both a browser problem and a leadership problem. If the browser were fine, we wouldn’t be seeing a moderate exodus to choices like Librewolf and Zen.
I used basilisk for a short while. Very minimal browser, indeed.
But it’s chromium, so you do you. I personally favour anything that doesn’t bloat me. Early on I used opera back on a j2me device, there was also a browser with a nice data saving feature, I had access to all cricket news and cricket sport teams because it was heaviliy featured there, there was a squirrel as a logo but it’s all I remember.
Edit it was ucbrowser
You could always use a WebKit-based browser. They’re still out there, and as they aren’t owned by a company that also sells web ads they are significantly more privacy focussed.
& they are ?<br> BTW, Who disliked your non-controversial comment ?
The main browser to use WebKit these days is Safari. You’ll find that on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. I’m guessing that would be why someone downvoted me (some people have strong feelings about Apple, even though WebKit is Open Source and is very highly privacy focussed).
I had thought there were more options out there outside the Apple ecosystem, but it seems many of the browsers I once knew were using WebKit moved at some point to Blink (like Maxthon and Slepnir). The Gnome Epiphany browser for Linux however is built atop WebKit.
There are others, but you’re not likely (or able) to use them on desktop systems. PlayStation’s Orbis OS for the PS4 and PS5 uses WebKit as its underlying browser engine, for example. And there is WPE that is intended for use in embedded system environments (like for digital signage).
I did think there were more options out there (there once was!), but it seems a bunch of them moved to Blink when I wasn’t looking!
Firefox still hasn’t fixed Bug 1938998 despite me reporting it multiple times. There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile. I’ve been using the internet for 26 years, and have used Mozilla based browsers since 2001, I want them to survive to the next era of the internet, but they are struggling to keep up. Opera and Edge already gave up their engines, Webkit and Blink are basically the same engine with different standards enabled, and Firefox is under 2% on some days on Statcounter. I feel that soon AI based browsers using their own AI-engine will probably take over the internet soon anyway.
I use Firefox on mobile all the time. Works fine for me. The fact that I get adblock on mobile makes it a no-brainer to use over chrome.
Ad block *
uBlock Origin *
Lol yeah the comment was previously “I like the fact that I get a on mobile” or something that didn’t make sense. All good.
ped ant
I have never encountered that bug, seems like an issue with the duck duck go not doing proper url encoding. I daily Firefox on mobile and its the best option by far with all the available extensions and of course working adblock
It’s got nothing to do with the specific search engine, it’s Firefox thinking the URL itself is a search query and sending it as-is to the search engine.
I just tested it and it sent the URL to both DDG and to Google.
I use it on mobile. It’s mostly OK tbh, and the addition of a working ad blocker means it’s far better than Chrome for me.
In fairness that is an invalid URL in my book, but it should at least be consistent across desktop and mobile, or at least tucked behind an option.
Web standards don’t care about “your book”, spaces in URLs are valid.
There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile.
And the reason is monopoly abuse by the big tech companies. Apple is banning other browser engines from the app store and does not allow Firefox onto iPhones. Google is shipping its own Chrome with every Android device and they are breaking their own sites like YouTube or Gmail on purpose for Firefox users and push them to install Chrome. Microsoft is bundling Edge with Windows as a default browser and will aggressively enable it as a default browser during updates.
that’s bullshit. spaces are not valid in URLs. they always need to be URL encoded. I see you complaining about such manual work, but that does not make sense, as it just shouldn’t happen!
where are you getting that URL? ddg has been inserting a + sign in place of any spaces for a very, very long time. this is not even a solved problem, it’s not a problem at all!
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For those holding out for a hero: https://ladybird.org/
Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.
I’m not looking for a hero, I’m looking for stability.
Did you read the thing?
The fact that it’s aiming to be stable doesn’t mean it is. It’s still a work in progress unlike other browsers.
Currently, it’s pretty shit. It starts up in fullscreen with a non managed window, well, fuck that noise.
well that’s because it’s kinda not trying to be a browser first; it’s trying to be an engine… let others make the UI, and ladybird can be the best damn thing to wrap that UI around… from what i understand, they have a web browser as more of a tech demo right now
Yes, but I still don’t know why they seem to think it’s so important to write a new browser engine instead of improving Gecko or Servo. To me it just seems like people like it because they don’t know other things aside from the Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browser engines exist and just chase something new and shiny.
that’s fair, but i think there’s space for multiple to compete… servo and ladybird have different ethos from what i can tell… ladybird is trying to build everything from scratch, as well as being completely independent (whilst servo was mozilla and is now the linux foundation)
personally, i prefer servo just because its rust and i don’t think that independence from the linux foundation is really that important
but that’s not to say that what ladybird is trying to achieve, or their reasons are wrong
Why not just run a community build of Firefox, like IceCat?
If Firefox doesn’t keep up with web standards, neither will any of the forks
Cold take: we need to stop chasing web Standards that are purposefully set up by big corpo to be exlusionary.
What we need, what Firefox could hope to be, is a browser developed for a new old internet paradigm. Maybe Gopher, or Gemini (the good one). Alternatively a purposefully reduced HTML+CSS, no JS.
Trim down the fat so that it is actually possible to finance the development of a web engine an browser without leeching on a dick corpo (and sabotagong open internet in the process).
Question. Does it have uBO or an equivalent yet?
Without it, it’ll simply not be internet-ready.
Why the downvotes??
the ladybird devs have a history of major transphobia though
I think this may be the issue to which you are referring:
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
While this is troubling to read about, this narrative’s lack of evidence or references keep me from accepting it at face value. Old mastodon chatter (and perhaps deleted posts or scuttled instances) may be difficult to retrieve, but GitHub discussions shouldn’t be hard to find.
So I’m withholding judgement for the moment.
UPDATE: Commenter [email protected] wrote this terrific comment that provides confirmation of the above narrative, corrective action that the LadyBird engineering team has taken taken, plus some vitally important context of the entire kerfuffle. A+ work.
You don’t consider it rather exclusionary to imply that only men use computers?
at one point or another we all have a penis in us.
some context and/or link would help for everyone who just learned about this project and knows nothing about the devs
I’ll just copy a comment I made a while back. It was about the usage of “he” instead of gender neutral pronouns in the documentation:
So I looked further into this, and while I found awesomekling’s comment to be a cause of concern, I’m hoping it’s a cultural misunderstanding due to his Swedish background.
That comment is from 3 years ago, and since then there was a commit merged, that had the sole purpose of fixing these pronouns.
I’m hoping it’s a cultural misunderstanding due to his Swedish background.
Jag pratar inte Svenska but I know enough that it has gendered pronouns just like English. Actually, it’s better than English in that it preserved the neuter singular pronoun (which used to be “thou” in English) so there’s even less excuse in terms of linguistic background.
this is incorrect. we recently added a neuter singular pronoun. “hen” was introduced in 2009, and not widely used until like 2019. Also, in technical documentation, masculine pronouns were taught as the default to use (both in swedish and in english) when i was in university in the early 10s. this has changed now, but it definitely wasn’t on the table when kling was in school.
Interesting, thanks for the correction! I thought it was a medieval form that stuck around.
Masculine being the default was the case for English (and French) too, but not anymore, and certainly not by implying anything other than the masculine is “political”.
yeah smaller languages have taken longer to adapt to that change, because it started in the anglophone world and the concepts of gendered language don’t translate well. it’s like how the word “man” in english used to mean “human” and not be gendered at all, and when language is updated to remove the – now gendered – word and then translated, the translation stops making any sense because the context of a word is so different.
i always give massive leeway when language is involved, because the culture around progressive language is basically 99% centred on the US.
There was a pull request to change “he” to “they” somewhere in the code and the dev refused, saying people should leave “their politics” out of it. I wouldn’t say it’s transphobic specifically - it may also be misogynistic. Either way, it doesn’t look good.
i can offer some context to that, but first let’s clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.
the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by “code of conduct” PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it’s not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they’re not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.
anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn’t show each change, it just shows “n files changed, +n lines -n lines”, and a description talking about “gender-neutral language”. now, kling is not a “typical” developer. he’s a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don’t know what that’s like, but i imagine it means you don’t have a lot of mental overhead for things you don’t want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn’t want to deal with it.
it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.
This is very valuable context.
For citations, the only references I see to “pronouns” in their github project is in a section called “Human language policy” in
CONTRIBUTING.md(link). Here’s the relevant part:In Ladybird, we treat human language as seriously as we do programming language. The following applies to all user-facing strings, code, comments, and commit messages: … Use gender-neutral pronouns, except when referring to a specific person.
That sounds pretty cash-money to me.
There’s one additional reference in a pull request discussing whether or not to use “we” when referring to recommendations of the engineering team (as in “we recommend” vs “it is recommended”). Minutia.
I’m not as interested in litigating this matter than I am in putting it to bed (along with any and all definitive citations and evidence such that I can refer back to this comment thread in the future when the question inevitably comes up again.)
Thanks for the context - I still intensely dislike the “political” reaction, but people can learn and change. I also don’t like that Canadian arch-jackass Tobi Lutke is a major supporter of the project; he’s a bit like Brendan Eich. I’ll reserve judgment until the browser launches. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it.
Brendan Eich
I honestly don’t understand the hate here. I get that he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that’s terrible, but I’ve also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla. I honestly think he would’ve been a better CEO at Mozilla because he’s interested in the tech. His largest problem was making a personal contribution with his own money to an unpopular cause, and someone dug it up looking for dirt.
Isn’t that exactly how people should act? Leave your politics at home and work well with others. I work in a diverse group with a mix of immigrants, likely gay people, atheists and religious types, Trump supporters and critics, and even a couple furries. None of that matters and we work well together. In fact, most of the turnover we’ve had has been over compensation because our company has been stingy recently, and they all say they wouldn’t have considered leaving otherwise.
You can disagree on very important things and still work well together, it’s called professionalism. I dislike Eich’s views, but I believe he had way more professionalism than his loudest critics.
he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that’s terrible,
but I’ve also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla
How on earth can you reconcile these two statements? “I respect you so much I’ll pass a law to make you illegal”?
yeah that ties in to my other comment; it’s not political in american english culture (well it is, but only to chuds), but other countries don’t have the same context for this stuff. and when those cultural barriers are crossed without knowing the differences, there is bound to be friction.
Thanks so much for this layout of everything. I wasn’t even aware of what was going on, and your comment put it all together. Cheers!
with a project named ladybird you’d think otherwise.
I suppose, unless you’ve watched King of the Hill.
I truly couldn’t give a single solitary fuck what opinions the devs of software I use have, no matter what that opinion is. As long as they’re not trying to shove that opinion down my throat via their software, their opinions literally have no effect on me whatsoever. You either, whether you want to believe that or not.
I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I’d rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word “Allah”, etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don’t want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?
Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I’m not going to take that into consideration, because that’s not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.
Lastly, all other things equal, I’d rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let’s be honest, especially developers) won’t want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that’s reasonable or not, it’s hard to deny. It’s certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.
This article appears to be pretty even-handed.
My assessment? Get fucked, Ladybird. I don’t want to trust my web security to people who think like this, especially since web security is very political and will only become more so as the Trump administration continues.
TL;DR;
A few days later, someone pointed out an issue in SerenityOS where a new contributor offered to update the documentation to include gender-neutral language instead of always assuming the person building the project was a man. Kling rejected it with the statement: “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
…Kling and the Ladybird project doubled down on rejecting active inclusion in the name of being “apolitical.” Others tried to explain that rejecting inclusivity is inherently a political decision.
If you’ve watched enough of these things play out, it’s usually the doubling down that causes a lasting split, more than the original disagreement.
So not some kind of JK Rowling transphobia or even stock republiQan misogyny as much as a fairly tone-deaf executive position on documentation that became a thing.
Making documentation gender-neutral is not radical or ‘political’ other than it’s trying to reflect the reality that more than just men use and create code. It seems like Kling thought his project was under threat of takeover by some radical pansexual furry anarcho-collective (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and said something stupid like “documentation isn’t a place for political debate” which, is sort of true and also not relevant to the change requested.
As the article states, the real issue is the doubling down. That’s not good.
After reading this, in particular the “The Facts” section, my understanding is: he got pulled into making a political statement about gender and he didn’t want to get involved with that.
Yet again, that “crowd” didn’t like Ladybird’s refusal to play, therefore that “crowd” does what they’re known best doing: cry high and loud on the internet playing the victim.
In a sense, that “crowd” shoved their political agenda down his throat, and that’s the only thing I personally find reprehensible here.
Refusal to make a “political” statement is very much political when the politics in question is about acknowledging non-men exist. There is no politically neutral choice when there are two options who are both political.
That’s totally false.
One can write using the generic masculine form without making a political statement.
This is not even close to not acknowledge there is non-men in this world.
What you are putting forward is absurd. No one is saying that only men exist anywhere in here.
It was a trivial change to some documentation. The fact that he chose this hill to die on says a lot.
like spam filtering out anything with the word “Allah”, etc
That’s valid tbh. Nice Muslims say Ilah. Mean monotheists say Allah.
unless they start curating things like censoring specific words or searches.
Exactly. How FOSS devs spend their time and money isn’t my business, what is my business is foundation financials and whether the software is reliable and safe to use.
I strongly disagree with Lemmy devs on politics and how they run their instances, but that doesn’t impact me so whatever.
As long as ladybird devs don’t go out of their way to be jerks to trans people, I’m good. The worst I’ve seen is rejecting pronoun changes in code comments and docs, which isn’t a big deal.
If that’s true, shame on them. But it doesn’t mean their browser isn’t good.
it’s not at all true… it was misunderstanding that people seemed to have blown way out of proportion without understanding context, and now they have A+ policies in place
Right, so what does that have to do with ladybird
mozilla sucks
Excuse you, I don’t have a problem.
