Can the sleeping fox ever wake up?

Mozilla seems to be asleep at the wheel, when it once drove online activity and communications. We have some suggestions where it could go.

  • elouboub@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    Mozilla, please stop aping Chrome. Copying is rarely the way to win big.

    Yes! Please. Firefox devs should fork and make an org that focuses on Firefox alone. Make it a true competitor to Chrome/Chromium. Innovate instead of copying. Be something different and get rid of your management with fat salaries. It could be much better used on development and improving the web.

  • Laser@feddit.de
    3·
    1 year ago

    In recent years that seems to be eating into every major OS… but six months into the pandemic, Mozilla laid off the entire team, killing its next-gen rendering engine, Servo.

    (Much of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google, of course. This couldn’t be because Rust was, and is, outshining Google’s GoLang? Surely not?)

    How does one even make that connection? Why would Google be interested in such a topic? I’m pretty sure GoLang doesn’t make them money directly, but rather as it streamlines their in-house work. I don’t think they profit off this even a tiny bit.

    Also GoLang, while probably not a better language in every aspect, has some very neat properties which set it apart from Rust (and vice versa).

    • Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah it’s a weird thing to say. Google pays Mozilla a HUGE amount of money to be Firefox’s default search engine. Although the main reason they’re happy to pay so much for that is that they WANT to keep at least one Chrome competitor alive, so they don’t end up in an anti-trust shitfest like Microsoft did with Internet Explorer.

  • lily33@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    Also, bundling extensions with the browser is not the way to cater to power users - they will install the extensions they want anyway.

    If gecko became embeddable (or better yet, servo was finished), so users could make alternative firefox-based browsers, that would be really good for power users. Right now things like qutebrowser are all based on blink, because that’s the only option.

    • Skimmer@lemmy.zip
      0·
      1 year ago

      Not sure I follow, there are plenty of Firefox-based browsers:

      Tor, Mullvad, LibreWolf, Floorp, Pulse, Mull, Waterfox, Mercury, Ghostery, IceCat, Iceraven, etc.

      • lily33@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 year ago

        There is a difference between forefox-based browser and chromium-based one. Namely, if you base it on chromium, you take the blink engine and you can build watever UI around it you want. If you base it on firefox, you actually have to take the full firefox code and make changes to it.

        All those firefox-based browsers are very similar to firefox with some small changes made. If you actually want to make large changes, keeping up with updates will quickly become a mess.

        By contrast, qutebrowser has very little in common with Chromium except for the rendering engine - the user experience is totally different.