Mozilla chose to waste most of it.
I kinda get why they (and other companies) have to try AI at the moment though.
It’s not what people claim it is, but it could end up being an essential tool for the modern world, and if they don’t invest in it early their business might end up getting left behind.
We’ve certainly seen companies fall because they’ve not tried to stay on the cutting edge before.
We’ve certainly seen companies fall because they’ve not tried to stay on the cutting edge before
Best example I can think of is Kodak and digital cameras. They invented it then sat on it until it was too late because they didn’t want to cut into their film scam.
I hate to see AI (I suppose we mean specifically GPTs in this instance) trashed all the time, just because companies use it incorrectly. They shove it in every hole they can to hike the stock price. But it’s a great tool, that arguably needs more time in the oven, which has legitimate helpful uses. Especially in the context of a browser.
For example, in Arc Browser I can semantically search the page/article for anything and it will show me the location of the information I need (ever tried to find the recipe itself in an article about the recipe?). I can also do some obvious stuff, like summarize and translate sections, which I could do by copying it into a dedicated service, but it’s definitely much more convenient being built-in.
Would be much better if it ran locally off the NPU, but we are not there yet.
Downvotes from the people who believe that all “AI” is an LLM/GPT that must be trained on the collective stolen works of all humanity and requires all of South America’s collective power supply for just a day’s worth of queries
Maybe that’s not bad for firefox.
Maybe less money means less ridiculous side projects and just focus on delivering a good browser.
Algo the lack of google as financial support means they’ll rely more on donations, which would mean that they really need to focus on offering a good browser.
I’ll gladly donate to firefox if I would see they are really focusing on it.
I donate around 5 dollars to Wikipedia every month. Another 5 to Mozilla isn’t an issue for me.
I think in the future I will try to donate like 10 dollars a month for free software that I use, including Firefox, KDE, Thunderbird, Wikipedia, Lemmy, etc.
I think it’s very important to support open source financially, because without it we would all be fucked by huge corporations. And I might sound overly anti-capitalist, but I think that most of them should be broken up.
If I had the money, an extra $5 or so would definitely be something I’d spend monthly on donating to Mozilla/Firefox.
Mozilla (not Google) got rid of the side projects, increased the CEO’s salary, and laid off a bunch of employees during the pandemic. It basically got rid of the innovation that could have made Firefox a faster, more secure, and pleasant experience. Rust and Rust-based Servo, as a replacement for Gecko, were two of those side projects. These are the things Mozilla needs to invest in.
Also, I think Mozilla needs to ask the user upon install what the default search engine should be from a list of search engines including Google, Duck Duck Go, Bing, and Yahoo. Maybe the order of those could be arranged based on how much they’re able to finagle from the search engines.
The real monopoly is their control over Chrome. That’s what they should be forced to split from the company that owns the search engine. Development and design of Chrome should not and cannot be done by the company that runs the search engine and gets its revenue from ads.
Google got rid of the side projects, increased the CEO’s salary, and laid off a bunch of employees during the pandemic.
How did Google do any of that? Wasn’t that all Mozilla Corp?
Development and design of Chrome should not and cannot be done by the company that runs the search engine and gets its revenue from ads.
I’d go so far as to argue the exact same for development of: Operating systems, automotive, smartphones, residential fiber…
The ulterior motive is simply never in a user’s best interest when every function ultimately becomes part of the “influence towards the purchase of goods and services” funnel.
While I find your assertion inspiring and very worthy of consideration, I have to wonder what the incentive is to sustain Android development. Apple sells the hardware that goes with its OS(es), so they get the hardware revenue (not to mention the App Store and iCloud subscription revenues). They would have to start charging devices to use their operating system or something, and I have to wonder if that would be possible under open source licenses.
I would love an open, sustained, and even open source, secure operating system for phones that’s the target of app development. I think the Linux stack should should develop an NPR/PBS type ecosystem public funding of development (with maybe the corporate underwriting of those networks being equivalent to contributions from corporate employed developers to the open source code) and I’d love for it to be a real competitor in the smart phone market (knowing the Android stack modifies and sits on top of Linux).
Maybe the order of those could be arranged based on how much they’re able to finagle from the search engines.
That’s the issue that caused this. Google was paying Mozilla to be the default search engine at the top of the list in Firefox and other browsers.
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Right now it’s already set as the default search engine and you have to work to change it to something else as I understand it. I’m proposing that no default is set and that the user is asked to select one upon first installing Firefox from an ordered list of search engines. If that’s already the case (it’s been a while since I installed Firefox from scratch), then I’d argue that’s fine. And it allows other search engines to contribute to be higher up in the rankings.
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I can’t think of anything that would replace the revenue that Google pays Mozilla that sustains the development salaries to hopefully keep Mozilla competitive and hopefully making it the best performing, convenient and private browser.
Maybe less money means less ridiculous side projects
Like Firefox?
It really seemed like it’s been a bit of a side project those last few years…
They are throwing things at the wall hoping something sticks.
For some reason people don’t want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.
For some reason people don’t want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.
By their own account, it’s not meant to be lucrative.
"Corporation. Foundation. Not-for-profit.
Mozilla puts people over profit in everything we say, build and do. In fact, there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise."
Straight from Mozilla’s About Us page for you. Maybe they ought to live up to their words and start focusing on making a solid browser that respects users’ privacy with the majority of their time, funding and energy, rather than squandering these assets on current tech hype nonsense that people don’t actually want.
I really hope that’s sarcastic, because Rust is one of the most valuable additions to the whole IT field in a good while.
Entire industries have been stuck on C/C++ for decades. Industries, which are normally extremely late to any form of modern software development, are now practically jolting to get Rust integrated into their toolchains.
Similarly, languages without runtimes allow for building libraries that can be called from other programming languages, which so far meant C/C++. That’s a big reason why many widely used open-source projects like OpenSSL, SQLite, OpenGL etc. are written in those.
Even if, for whatever reason, you think Rust is awful, getting a third language into the mix will allow many more people to build similar libraries, which is again really good for everyone.
In reality it means they’ll have to focus more on monetization, which will create more enshittification and not less.
Maybe they can stop paying their CEO 7 million per year
Maybe that CEO will also quit, because other companies offer them a higher salary.
It’s so easy to say they should just pay their CEO less. I mean, I get it, it’s a ridiculous amount of money that no one needs. But few people, who are qualified for that job, will just do it out of the goodness of their hearts for a salary far below industry standards.
I know many of us don’t really like AI stuff. But it is just a door opener - and Mozilla needs funding like any company.
The product we sell at our company also has AI features. So far AI got us to talk to many more customers. So far none of them bought the AI stuff - even if in my opinion it would provide productivity increases. For us AI is a net positive: it cost us 2 weeks of writing gluecode, didnt sell at all, opened many doors for selling the main product.
- Mozilla will take money from Microsoft
- Firefox gets Office 365, Exchange, and Azure AD integration
- Netflix partners with Microsoft for advanced HD and DRM
- Microsoft and Mozilla partner to deliver Microsoft-enhanced Firefox for Windows
- ActiveX 2.0
Mozilla chose a stupid business model. 🤷
It is shocking to me how many people on Lemmy hate Firefox
Although some people are Google fanbois or reactionary dumbasses, I think most of what you’re misinterpreting as “Firefox hate” is actually love for Firefox and hate for what Mozilla has done to it.
Most Firefox-critics’ feelings towards it are more like this:
Consider that many of the same people think of Arch as a viable daily driver distro for the everyman. Some folks are more accepting of jank than others.
this does mystify me. only time I nearly dropped firefox was when they did the big change that broke add ons but firefox with the addons I like is the best browser for me. nothing they have done has been consequentially bad. philosophically maybe but the actual effect is not bad compared to any other options.
I always got the opposite impression: people here love Firefox. But it seems that’s part of why they’re critical of its shortcomings.
At least for me, if I’m criticizing something, it probably means I care at least a little bit about whatever I’m criticizing. Not worth time talking about things I actually dislike.
its an emotional reaction. google has always been bad, them doing a bad thing is just business as usual. who cares
but when mozilla does something bad? mozilla is supposed to be the good guy! they betrayed us!
Only viable competitor is a bizarre thing to drop when browsers like Opera exist.
