Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs.
Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.
Frederic Lardinois for TechCrunch
I’d like to remind everyone that I’ve been warning the Linux world about the precarious, uncertain future of Firefox for years now. The single most important desktop Linux application is in a death spiral and entirely dependent on free Google money. Not a good base to work from.
With today’s news, I only feel strengthened in my conviction that the major desktop projects in the Linux world need to come together in a serious manner to discuss the establishment of a browser project optimised for Linux. Pick an engine, let the GNOME and KDE developers build a native UI on top, and take matters into your own hands. If you can build the two best desktop environments in desktop computing today, you can build a first-class browser together.
This is existential.
I’m sure we all know that KHTML begat WebKit, and WebKit begat Blink. So the Linux world already created a first-class browser engine. It was used by commercial entities to make their own. That’s a feature of free software, not a bug. Today we’ve got a dozen generally usable browser engines, but we’ve also got major websites which code things to the quirks of Chrome, just as we saw happen when Internet Explorer was the dominant browser. I’m not sure this is an avoidable problem. It’s a necessary evolution in web development that teams get squeezed to get things done, and they end up coding the quickest solution to the dominant browser of the time.
The difference this time is that Blink is almost entirely open source, and besides draconian DRM and proprietary cloud service tie-ins, I’m not aware of any other major features which source isn’t disclosed. We’ve got soft forks of Chromium (such as Brave), which enhance user privacy and add other useful features. We’ve got whole UI rewrites using Blink (such as Falkon). What more would we get from *another* “first-class” browser engine? I put first-class in quotes precisely because it likely won’t ever be that. It will always play second fiddle to whatever the dominant browser currently is.
I don’t really care for some of the design choices that Google has made in the last few years, which seem more to do with their own business interests than they do with fostering a healthy web ecosystem, but what else do you expect from a commercial entity in charge of the dominant web browser? However, that’s not to say that we’re not *worlds* better than we were when Microsoft was in charge via IE. We have a TON more choice than we did then, largely because of the availability of the source code for the browser engine which is the defacto “standard” for the web today.
Things could be a lot worse, and we know that because we lived through a time when it *was* a lot worse.
These are good points and a well reasoned argument in favor of focusing development on a chromium-based browser.
However the downside is that Google is in control. So if they don’t like adblocker extensions hurting their multi-trillion dollar ad slinging empire, they just change chromium from mv2 to mv3. Voila! Death to adblockers. Allowing Google to control the browser and the web standards is like allowing a drunk driver to drive a bus full of school children down a busy highway – the bus might get to its destination fast, but there’s no guarantee anyone will survive the trip.
The ability of Google to “kill” ad blockers is being overstated, in my opinion. Both of the 2 types of browsers that I mentioned above (Chromium soft forks like Brave, and Blink UI rewrites like Falkon) deal with that issue already. They build in ad blocking functionality, so obviously Google’s efforts to kill ad blocking by changing chromium from mv2 to mv3 isn’t a serious threat.
Indeed, Manifest V2 and V3 aren’t what I would call “web standards.” They’re not about how web pages themselves are constructed and interpreted; they’re standards for browser addons/extensions.
jasutton,
Technically there’s a lot that google can do to put an end to adblocking, but they’ve been testing the waters rather slowly because they know how unpopular it is and they don’t want to encourage mass protests/defections. For example youtube merely added delays for some adblocking FF users and only for a limited time. It’s clear it was only a test. If they chose to really commit, they could do a lot more to block us permanently. The question is whether google is willing to pull the trigger at the expense of their own market-share.
This was one aspect of how they were going to harness adblocking in chrome. The other was creating browser DRM. Both of these proved very popular and they shelved the DRM at least for now. Manifest 3 is still in the pipeline IIRC.
I don’t know what google are planning, but their plan may be to put all the pieces they’ve been testing recently together at the same time so that when chrome’s adblocking becomes less effective, FF and other browsers with adblockers are subjected to an even worse user experience thereby discouraging users from jumping to those alternatives.
The thing is, WebKit is far from dead. Apple still develops WebKit2 which is open source and used prominently in Safari on Apple devices but also by Gnome (and Haiku!) for their default browser.
I don’t understand why other browsers than Chrome actually use Blink/Chromium at all.
Blink is used by so many apps over WebKit because Blink is the engine used by the most popular browser–a browser that is dominant on every platform except iOS devices (and it would be dominant there if it weren’t for Apple’s draconian platform restrictions). It’s hard to overstate the benefits (to the developers) of going with the prevailing option.
Apple uses WebKit because that’s their in-house thing. Gnome uses WebKit because they want to be Apple (this is a bit of snark as it’s commonly believed that Gnome tries to be the Apple of the FOSS world).
Coding to a common standard and sticking to it is the only way forward. Anything less is unprofessional. Software engineering will never be truly done right until they have a professional order and code of ethics like doctors, psychologists, structural engineers etc…
While that might be cool, I don’t think it’s desirable to force such a change. Those types of professions need that rigid structure because people’s very lives depend on things being standardized. I doubt you could make a similar argument for web standards, at least not without much tilting at windmills.
More support to linux and it will be the default for all time. Also build VC moderls that runs in windows 7 /23) of all computer in the world.
Let me be the heretic here. What we need are trustworthy browsers that don’t include anti-features. Firefox fits the bill, but fully developing a competing browser against Chrome/Chromium seems to be an untennable job. Maybe it’t time for Mozilla to throw in the towel and retire Gecko. Rebase on Chromium and build a user friendly interface on top.
We need competition which offers a browser with respect for privacy and helpful features. Basically Chrome made by Google if they weren’t evil. Mozilla can deliver that. Dropping the development of their own engine frees up a lot of resources and ensures compatibility. Since Blink is FOSS, the mono-culture forces uniformity, but it doesn’t preclude entry to market. Google will do the heavy lifting and Mozilla can add the value we need for a web that isn’t fully controlled by Chrome.
Oh man… I had an experience with Mozilla VPN.
It was priced double that of Surfshark.
They didn’t have servers in Turkey, even though I needed that option sometimes.
I knew it was just a rebranded Mullvad VPN.
It did not accept registrations from Turkey. The site directed me to a waitlist. Anyway, I have a brother in the US, and he registered for me.
I didn’t mind any of these. I just wanted to support them somehow, and I needed a VPN now and then.
Then they told me their service doesn’t work on Win7.
Well… That was the final straw. To concede, the refund process was seamless.
If Mozilla is really in need of cash, they should have made some effort to get it. I no longer believe they need cash, as they never expanded the geographical scope of that VPN offering.
All Mozilla does is theatrics, begging and blackmailing us all the way through.
Personally, I have zero interest in a VPN that doesn’t do port-forwarding, since without it you’d be hitting and running any torrent you come across. Port forwarding makes the port your torrent client announces to the tracker actually reachable. Any torrent that doesn’t have port-forwarding is selling proxy bandwidth at an insane markup. Sure, you can use such a VPN to bypass (some) geofencing restrictions (if they have the location you are interested in), but you can do the same with a proxy tbh.
Unfortunately, most VPNs don’t support port-forwarding, and neither does Mozilla VPN. I use ProtonVPN, it supports port-forwarding but doesn’t allow you to reserve a port number (which means you have to change your torrent client port settings every time you connect, but at least it works)..
* port setting (not port settings)
“Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.”
RIP, time to switch to ungoogled-chromium or something soon I guess. I wish Falkon and other QtWebengine browsers had support for Firefox extensions. Bitwarden would be nice as a bare minimum, its standalone app is kinda garbage.
rainbowsocks,
I think we do need “trustworthy AI”. At face value, trustworthy AI is something we should be applauding so that there are viable FOSS alternatives to the tech monopolists in the space. With that said, I’m not clear on what Mozilla are trying to do here. If this is just adding mozilla AI services to the browser in the same vein as “pocket” did, then I don’t feel this is beneficial.
If, on the other hand, mozilla were going to build and deliver a framework to run local client side AI models in the browser, then I actually think that could add significant value to browsers similar to how “HTML5” help to unify video and bring rich teleconferencing support in the browser. Local highly portable AI applications that could be hosted by anyone could bring huge benefits to end users and making AI much more accessible without making us so dependent on yucky invading service providers invading our privacy. It’s a big “if”, but if this is what mozilla are planning, then I actually think it’s a great idea that could help democratize AI with open standards that empower us instead of tethering us to more damn cloud service providers.
I think we should wait and see. Mozilla still plays an important role in hedging against google’s web DRM initiatives. Mozilla’s death could have negative repercussions for all of us beyond simply not having firefox anymore.
Shall we take bets as to if Trustworthy AI == Google Bard?
I can’t see their paymasters encouraging them to use an alternative and they haven’t got deep enough pockets to compete with Google/MS and build their own.
Adurbe.
I hope it’s not something like that, but you’re right that it could be. For me, trustworthy AI means something open source that users are free to host independently without being tethered to a proprietary 3rd party provider.. IMHO that would be antithetical for a FOSS company like mozilla.
Yet another non feature I have to turn off in firefox just to keep truckin… like its 2014 sigh.
I used to worry about Firefox until I started using Pale Moon more seriously. It’s undergone tremendous development the past 3-4 years to keep up with the Chrome-dominated web, and is so good now that I can use it for over 99% of websites. And super lightweight compared to the memory hogging monstrosities that Firefox and chromium have become. I often build it on my machine without compiling the trademarked branding, which makes it completely freely licensed.