This tilt manifests in a variety of ways. For example: making it harder for a user to download and use a different browser, ignoring or resetting a user’s default browser preference, restricting capabilities to the first-party browser, or requiring the use of the first-party browser engine for third-party browsers.
For years, Mozilla has engaged in dialog with platform vendors in an effort to address these issues. With renewed public attention and an evolving regulatory environment, we think it’s time to publish these concerns using the same transparent process and tools we use to develop positions on emerging technical standards. So today we’re publishing a new issue tracker where we intend to document the ways in which platforms put Firefox at a disadvantage and engage with the vendors of those platforms to resolve them.
The official Mozilla blog
Excellent initative.
My first reaction is laughter, my second reaction is just sorrow. Morally, striving for an even playing field is a great initiative, but it’s hopelessly naive. Maybe mozilla can get some wins in antitrust-land, but I don’t see any other way to get a leg up.
If they get their case clear, the could get some EU regulatory muscle behind.
It is way too cold and windy in northern sweden -45 the other day, the EU should regulate that as well. And when will i know when it is poopy time without a dictator from brussels telling me when i am allowed to be crowning?
Currently it is rather pleasant temperature wise -4C, but winds that tore off my measurement device, stopped at around 60m/s or something. What governmental body do i complain to in this case?
Nah send the poor and educated muscle into Ukraine…
EU is the worst thing that happened to europe since the ottoman empire, and i am not kidding.
NaGERST,
Obviously you are being dramatic for effect, but in all seriousness would you think it’s better to live under the control of robber barons and monopolistic corporations?
To the extent that it’s possible to have a government that democratically serves the people, is that not what we should strive for? BTW I fully concede the potential for governmental abuses, there are serious oversteps all the time. These are upsetting and wrong. But at the same time we need to be smart enough to realize that the absence of government oversight does not equal freedom. So many failed governments have lead to autocratic dictatorships, which should terrify anyone who believes in rights and freedoms.
I wish things were better, but simply protesting government and voting for candidates that stir up rage while failing to actually offer any plans to make society better is no solution. The whole “maga” movement speaks to this, giving lip service to those who are angry, but peaking behind the curtain and they’re all doubling down on the corruption and autocracy. There are good reasons to protest the government policies that don’t serve the public good, but we shouldn’t forget the role that government has in keeping markets fair and protecting our freedoms and democracy from those who would take all of that away to empower themselves.
My first reaction was that if Mozilla wants to get move forward, they need to seriously restructure themselves. Here take a look:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200097189
The first that sticks out is $208K for a Director of Advocacy and the second is $304K for Advocacy and Engagement. Seriously? The project is a browser and email client (lumping in Thunderbird since it appears to be brought back into the fold) and NOT a social justice platform. Imagine if just those two amounts were used to hire no less than 5 developers to actually fix all outstanding bugs.
That that level of funding and what I believe is stupidity in management means I will never donate to that project.
dekernel,
I get what you’re saying, although I suspect that’s the norm for all corporations of comparable size. They could do some belt tightening, and I suspect they will continue to downsize, although I don’t think that’s a primary reason behind the downward tends for alternatives.
It reminds me of when openbsd were financially struggling to pay their bills. Of course they needed more money, but were also getting flack over continuing to spend money to support old architectures.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/electricity-bill-threatens-survival-of-openbsd/
While I agree there is justified criticism for just about any project, I would still consider the closure of mainstream alternatives a net loss for society. And we risk missing this principal if we get too caught up in the weeds.
Alfman,
I believe improvements should always come from both ends in these situations.
Yes, they cam trim some expenses. But they also need to bring in fresh blood and more revenue. You cannot cut forever into prosperity. At one point they will be unable to bring actual talent, and can no longer compete.
(They might have even reached that point already).
How can they make more money? They tried a few things. Like Yahoo sponsorship (backfired), online services (I think never took off), mobile phones, and several others I don’t remember.
How can a free web browser make money?
sukru,
I started writing a lengthy comment but…I don’t know. I have no good answer. for how to do that without subverting user interests
No great answers, but some not complete awful suggestions for raising money;
Ads. ( duh)
NPR style user supported, complete with pledge drives.
Its kind of dire, I’m not sure they’ll be around in the future, but then again I’m surprised mozilla was as successful as it was after Netscape’s death. With Google being google, I’m also concerned about Chromium continuing to exist as usable software. Or did that get killed as well?
I hear you, but they aren’t a normal corporation because they are 501(c). If they want to be a non-profit then people rightfully so expect certain types of austerity with donations.
dekernel,
Well, it depends if we’re referring to the corporation or foundation (which owns the corporation).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
I’m not too knowledgeable about the details, but I believe they created the corporation to be allowed to make business deals with other partners including google. The vast majority of money comes in through the mozilla corporation and is a corporation in the eyes of the law.
https://assets.mofoprod.net/network/documents/mozilla-fdn-2020-short-form-0926.pdf
I don’t know if running FF as a not for profit project would work. I have no experience with that, although I have my doubts.
@Alfman
The link I gave was for the umbrella foundation so I will be the old grumpy guy I am and hold to my statement
In my opinion, they have burned through so much good-will with all the foolish features and UI changes where was simply no need. Of it all, I do think Rust could have the biggest impact on the general community as time goes on, but all that $$$ for Rust…..kinda burns me some.
Mozilla is too spastic… they literally had a foot in the door with FirefoxOS, I would probably still be running it if it were available on a recent good device.
KaiOS pretty much owns the low end phone market right now and they gave up on it and pretty much gifted it away.
There are so many initiatives they could be persuing, instead of just hiring more loudmouths to say stuff on social media for $500k. Marketing is important, but like, what?
They invented rust, then tossed it out. It makes some sense, no one can figure out how to market a new language for profit, at least not without a platform to go with it (Apple has their OSes, and Swift/Obj-C, Android has Java, MS has C#, etc.). so instead of solving the second problem (making. platform to market the cool thing) they just tossed out the whole thing. They have all this cool tech – what about a React Native like runtime, that uses the CSS and the layout engine, but leaves JS behind, that allows users to build electron like native apps, with Rust as the core language? Flutter, React Native, etc. have all done similar things. I think this would be so cool. And it would at least partially address the platform question. KaiOS could have done something similar.
I’m sure they have this strange single product focus that seems to be so prevalent in silicon valley companies (that’s a whole thing too), but they could be trying to branch out in more directions. Like, I can imagine a sentiment that’s like, “We can’t push Rust, or Rhai because that competes with JavaScript, and we don’t want to communicate that JS is slow” – I don’t have any kind of evidence they are doing this, but I’ve seen plenty of this type of bad reasoning too in the broader industry.
Ultimately, Mozilla are run like a nonprofit, and it shows. But they are at a significant disadvantage. It’s not like they have a large and reliable revenue stream. And they simply didn’t win the openness battle. The rest of the industry is working on a shared code base – it just isn’t theirs. I’ve been using Mozilla since Netscape 3 – but even I am questioning the real value of this. What if Mozilla was engaged at the source level with Blink (especially if they are not going to make the rust parts of Firefox useable outside of Firefox)?
It’s even other tuff – like there’s a core password manager, and they had this other things (lockwise) that could manage passwords on Android, but they somehow never managed to get that outside of just Android. Then they threw in the towel. Why? It’s still there in Firefox proper, but that’s just baffling to me. And more baffling that there’s no similar tech I can use on macOS and Windows.
There are so many alternative platforms they could be delivering to provide deep hooks in to their services and platforms, and they just – don’t.
Look, Mozilla did that with themselves. Onmce they were on the path to become the #1 browser, but insisting on XUL, and being very slow to change to using native toolkits for the browser and making some bad decisions, opened the path to Chrome.
For those who did not mess with it, XUL was such a mess that even putting favicons in the bookmarks was a nightmware. And it was SLOW, really slow.
protomank,
I think XUL served a purpose back in the day, because their previous software was in much worse shape.
Specifically, Netscape Navigator would occasionally crash, many times freeze parsing long pages, and overall seems to be running single threaded with lackluster UI. And they were very slow in adopting new Web standards.
They might have found supporting multiple platforms (Unix: IRIX, SunOS, Linux, Windows, Mac, and others) was probably their main issue, and hence they decided to build “yet another multi-platform framework”.
But, yes, they might have overdone it.
think about a smaller browser, without any corporation backing them they might have an nigh-impossible task ahead of them.
Unless they somehow gain significant user traction organically.
Or *mad* people like terry, andreas kling daniel silvertone, jorge arellano and david faure
They all become iterations of modern browsers we use today. Sometimes in the case of netsurf in closed touch terminals (netsurf-fb), konqueror became webkit and google forked it, terry is deadl, i loved his videos but sadly his “safe” browser never was spublished but as seen working inside templeos “because you cia n***ers said i could not do it” I am still hopeful for ladybird, kling is an awesome coder and he has excellent people working with him. so this one might stick as well.
AFAIK ALL of the are a success in their uses, your desktop might not be one of the main targets. Love you and wish you all the best.
I mean King’s browser is the 3rd runner up behind Chrome and Firefox as an independant engine right now… as long as you don’t count all the FF and Chrome forks (which you probably shouldn’t).