āLast month, Mozilla made a quiet change in Firefox that caused some diehard users to revoltā¦ā
Mozilla wants us to love Firefox again? Ok, well, itās actually pretty simple: treat us like customers users, instead of products again. Make the product for us, not for the corpos. Strange how betrayal turns a friend into a foe, isnāt itā¦
E: changed customers to users, as another user here suggested the difference between them. (thanks, fellow lemming!)
Which (pr nightmare aside) I wouldnāt be against. Itās not gonna fly, people are accustomed to āfreeā browsers to the point theyād balk at the idea. Even if they werenāt most would take a free chromium based browser or Firefox fork over a paid alternative that doesnāt give them anything extra. But browsers are massive pieces of tech, they need a lot of dev time, and the money needs to come from somewhere, just relying on volunteers wonāt cut it.
Mozilla has been looking for sources of funding for years, sometimes in ways that are their own type of pr nightmare and sometimes in ways Iām not thrilled by, but I get their predicament. I wish there would be (more) state funding. EU, US. Whatever. Much like governments should invest in public transit we should invest in critical software infra.
I also wish Googleās other branches were divorced from their browser dev branch. The stranglehold on the web given to Google by chrome is a huge part of the problem.
The problem is in our current society itās simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation or government, who are usually driven by profits because we live in a capitalist world whether you like it or believe it or not.
itās simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation
Please donāt excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that itās unavoidable.
There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standardsā¦ it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.
For the purposes of my argument I donāt consider blender to be āvery popularā in the same way that Chrome or even Firefox is. Blender has less than 2% of the number of users that even Firefox has. I think if Blender were to get Firefox-level popular (for example, over 100 million users), then it too would succumb to greedy corporate interests.
If you know of this funding model working successfully at the scale of 100 million users/customers or more, I would be interested to learn about it though.
In a capitalist world, it is possible (and prudent) to treat your customers like customers. Your line will still go up, and for longer. Yes, if you treat them like products, your line will go up faster, until it wonāt.
E: if they made this ad network an opt-in with a proper explanation, many people would have opted in. Not everyone, but many would have. And their reputation would not have been sullied.
I donāt want to throw the word enshitiffication around, especially when Iām not sure if I can spell it, but the platforms that people jump ship to when that happens are probably especially vulnerable to people jumping ship again.
I canāt imagine Mozilla effectively marketing Firefox as anything but the bullshit free browser, and when they lose that, people will just move to the next actual bullshit free option.
