I am shocked. Shocked! /s
This sucks (Was it really costing much money to run?) but as long as Firefox continues to work with full-flavor ublock I’m happy.
did an AI become their CEO by now? dumb moz foundation.
I am definitely starting to hate #Mozilla.
As a remark: I have always been fine with their deal with Pocket and having Google as their default search engine. In the end, there are bills to be paid.
Until I learned that e.g. Mozilla Corporation’s CEO is on a multi-million dollar salary, and they’re hiring ai and ad people.
Not OK for an entity where many highly skilled people code for free.
It’s not what users want the cash to be spent on.
Leaving the Fedi is the final drop
@mina @dantheclamman if so many people code for free, couldn’t they have a simple Mastodon server run by a tech community? I think the actual leadership has no idea what Mozilla Foundation was.
Running a simple Mastodon server is not a big thing.
Setting up a resilient big instance, like Vivaldi does, requires commitment.
I mean vivaldi is 1/10th the size of mozilla and running a server 5x as large
Exactly! Mozilla wants people to know, they don’t give a shit.
A few years of party for executives are still possible, and just before Firefox and Thunderbird go into oblivion, quickly into a new management position at an ai company (or whatever may be the hype, then).
Mark my words!
It seems like the kind of thing the Foundation would run anyway (or sponsor as a separate project), rather than the Corporation being involved at all.
I was cool with them buying Pocket. But as a long time user of Pocket, I feel it has horribly stagnated. Far more features have been lost than have been gained.
And JFC the monthly subscription price for Pocket is steep for what it offers.
Yes, I’m grandfathered into the old cost, or I’d definitely pivot and move to Omnivore
You are the product. All they care about is getting companies paying
Stagnation is Mozilla’s MO. Fuck, go look at Thunderbird and be transported back to the 90’s.
Even Microsoft is updating outlook - fucking outlook is innovating, Outlook being the cancer on email that’s held it back for decades, is being updated.
Thunderbird is a perfect app, it does not need to change.
I think you might be overestimating how much code is contributed by unpaid volunteers…
Why does it matter that they don’t run an instance? Most open source projects do not.
As long as they keep an account on an instance and keep it up to date, this is the main thing.
Hate is a strong emotional decision for a company making an internet browser…
Wasn’t by far my only point.
However: Making a commitment and then pulling back, is a statement.
No. It’s trying something. If company’s get punished for investing and trying something, others won’t even try in future. I respect they tried. If I was in charge, I wouldn’t have bothered.
I wonder, how increasing CEO pay year by year worked out for them.
Certainly, definitely not in growing the user base, but also not in revenue that would make up it.
Separate issue entirely. I’m talking specifically about Fediverse investment and why that was the final straw.
I thought the discussion was about that and not a “I hate Mozilla” greatest hits.
You can always throw in that Google fund them and a 10 year old bug that hasn’t been resolved if that was your purpose.
I guess ranting can help you feel better, so I hope it helped.
You did not read the entire post you first replied to, did you?
I read it, just had nothing to add.
For the record, I disagree with the AI funding, CEO pay and pocket stuff. It doesn’t make me hate them though. They build the biggest open source alternative to Google dictating standards for web. That’s massive. I strongly dislike google for a multitude of reasons and hating a company that challenges that is a strange position to take. If Firefox goes, we’re mega fucked.
Maybe place your anger with the actual bad actors in the browser space.
Mozilla 2012: We’re winning the browser war and saving the web. You’re welcome.
Mozilla 2017: Competing with Chrome is hard. What if we break all existing extensions and never let people replace them all?
Mozilla 2021: Through inclusiveness and the power of positive thinking we will facilitate leadership towards in-depth studies of what we can do to improve social media.
Mozilla 2024: Running a small mastodon instance is just too hard, we give up.
Just a little comment on 2021: It seems disingenuous, from their perspective. Steve Teixeira, In a lawsuit, is claiming that not only did Mozilla try to get him to fire employees who were disproportionately minorities, but they were within a group that was producing a profit for Mozilla.
In other words, Mozilla might have been preaching inclusivity publicly while practicing exclusivity privately.
Color me shocked
Corporate only pay lip services to the public? I’m so shock! Shock I tell you!
what is even happening right now
Mozilla in early 2000s: We’re glad we’ve broken you away from Internet Explorer’s chains. You’re welcome.
Mozilla 2017: Competing with Chrome is hard. What if we break all existing extensions and never let people replace them all?
This is the one that broke my back. Understandable that XPCOM extensions had to go, but leaving nothing to replace them, and then going on to push their trash UI redesigns without giving us any recourse to change them back - that was just unforgivable.
Then again, that was still well before they started pushing spyware in their own browser, so in retrospect, those were very quaint times!
The only thing you need to know about how Lemmings think about politics is that they bash Mozilla more than Google.
What are you talking about? This is the Firefox community, not many people are going to stop mid-post to say “BTW I hate Google more”
… BTW, I hate Google more.
And you’re incorrect: the community for leaving Google is more than four times the size of the community about Google.
BTW I hate Google more
One can and should critique a company when they make mistakes.
Lemmings are bashing Mozilla because they are expecting better from them, while I don’t even expect Google to not be evil
That’s precisely my point. Tell Lemmy you’re a leftist but not vegan? They’ll call you a murderer. Tell them you’re a leftist but not an anarcho-communist? Yeah I’ll bet you love capitalism and the human suffering it causes, you Chauvinist pig! Tell them you’re a liberal? You’re practically a Nazi collaborator! (All things I have actually heard Lemmings say.) But tell them you’re a conservative and they leave you alone.
No matter what I do, I will never be leftist enough for people to be satisfied. The further left I let myself get pushed, the more vitriol I get for not being even lefter. Apparently suggesting people vote for Kamala Harris to prevent a Trump victory makes me a genocide enabler. On top of that, if I make even one step backward, much like Mozilla deciding they don’t have the resources to moderate an entire Mastodon instance on top of everything else they do, I might as well have joined the enemy. But if I stop agreeing with them at all, suddenly I’m not worth harassing. It’s enough to push a boy right, it really is.
I want to be a good person. I do. But if my choices are don’t do that or be seen in public agreeing with leftists, especially if leftists are in earshot… it’s a tougher call than I’d hoped.
People aren’t required to abruptly stop talking about the subject of their posts to also remind people that other companies are shit also. That’s absurd.
This must be the tech version of having to type up a 10,000 word essay on how Republicans are worse then democrats before you can type a single word of criticism against the Democratic party.
Can you point me to an example of that happening here?
Perhaps I should rephrase. They attack Mozilla (and users of Firefox) infinitely more than Google (and users of various Google products). I heard it said after Mozilla introduced their opt-out privacy-respecting ad tracking that users should “move to a more privacy-friendly browser like Google Chrome”.
This is true of Lemmy’s political stance in general. Tell them you’re a leftist but not vegan? They’ll call you a murderer. Tell them you’re a leftist but not an anarcho-communist? Yeah I’ll bet you love capitalism and the human suffering it causes, you Chauvinist pig! Tell them you’re a liberal? You’re practically a Nazi collaborator! (All things I have actually heard Lemmings say.) But tell them you’re a conservative and they leave you alone.
Perhaps I should rephrase. They attack Mozilla (and users of Firefox) infinitely more than Google (and users of various Google products). I heard it said after Mozilla introduced their opt-out privacy-respecting ad tracking that users should “move to a more privacy-friendly browser like Google Chrome”.
One of those entities claims to be on the side of users. When it constantly throws those same users under the bus anyway, it isn’t surprising that it gets more hate than the entity that removed “don’t be evil” from its motto.
Tell them you’re a liberal? You’re practically a Nazi collaborator!
It’s not our fault that fascists bleed when liberals get scratched.
I’ve never seen self-proclaimed leftists hurl more vitriol than when an openly-socialist labor organizer in my union said they were for freedom of speech (for humans) and generally supportive of firearm ownership. Absolutely wild reaction.
“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”
- Karl Marx
But don’t you understand? Any language or policy the right adopts, we must abandon, even if, on its face (if not in the right wing implementation of it), it’s something we agree with. Otherwise how will we identify and shun right wingers? They could be hiding anywhere, you know.
Here’s one example of a mega-upvoted post that is critical of Mozilla:
https://lemmy.ml/post/13081759/9195853
I think it’s indicative not only of the prevalence of the view but also the quality (or lack thereof) of the arguments backing the view.
…he literally said firefox was better than most in the post? I don’t understand why you believe mozilla to be above criticism just because they’re better than google
and why bother criticizing a company so laughably awful as google, try saying you use chrome on a post, everyone will recommend you switch.
Where did that post indicate that Google was better?
Perhaps they didn’t want to associate with Meta.
And yet people are still angry when I say that Mozilla is malicious.
Why are they angry? Are you providing evidence in your comments or just ranting?
I don’t know. I haven’t asked them. I have just seen the downvotes on my post(s) that were related to bashing Mozilla on Lemmy.
Closing down an instance you chose to run is malicious? If you cannot fully moderate it, it can take your reputation. The labour cost isn’t insignificant and is not something they should be focussing on.
Just make a good browser… Thats all I care about from mozilla.
Same,i wish they can make their browser fast and actually private since gecko is slower then chromium (and maybe webkit?) its even worse on windows
I understand that they need to diversify so that they’re not so dependent on Google’s default search engine money. I don’t know how they should do that.
But I’m not sure what they’ve been doing has been all that good of an idea.
well paying execs multimillion dollar salaries aint helping thats for sure!
Also. What’s the point of their mastodon server? It’s cool but so what
make their browser engine useable for 3rd parties and sell support, make an electron-like product and add premium features… there are so many browser-based products that people sell, and owning 1 of the only viable browser engines should be huge… the fact that firefox is still only barely able to be embedded is a travesty
it’d be especially valuable if they made a premium electron product that provided security/privacy guarantees, performance benefits, etc - they should siphon some of the profit off the number of for-profit companies that build electron apps
I kinda like the idea but I also kinda hate it.
I really wish PWAs worked properly cross-platform instead. :(
totally agree, but also you can do more with an electron-like app - elevated privileges, less sandbox, etc because the user expects such things from an installed “native” app
SSB was killed after it sat behind an about:config flag, then their telemetry (that most power users disable) reported folks weren’t using. But what average users would be using a setting they would need to poke around to find. It’s a real shame too since I want to say it was PeppermintOS that was largely built around PWAs.
That sounds dumb. :(
Pretty standard for Mozilla logic if you have watched the features cut over the years.
They’re 80% dependent on google there is no choice. Mozilla’s behaviour since they got the google deal was the begining of the end. I honestly believe that due to Mozilla’s current leadership it would be best for open source developers to all refocus on the ladybird project. I don’t have any affiliation to that project and I understand how huge of an undertaking it is to build a web engine from scratch but the gecko engine is polluted by the Mozilla’s execs and by extension Google.
To make it clear Google controls Firefox by, in practice, owning an 80% share of Mozilla.
with how many singular developers managed to do it based on Firefox when Mozilla couldn’t pull their shit together, idk why anyone would still be holding their breath. just switch to a competent fork.
most forks still use the firefox base
that’s what’s i said, but they’re all better functioning than firefox
But without the base they can’t operate
but there is a base, and it isn’t good. the forks are. you said you want a good browser. they’re not making it. the forks are good. idk what you’re arguing about.
Most forks take an ESR version and build on top of that. Who is gonna make that ESR base?
You’re saying the equivalent of ‘I don’t care about the Linux kernel cause Ubuntu is better and everyone should use that’ of arguments.
Not saying you are literally saying ^
have I said anywhere that Firefox should cease to exist or Mozilla shouldn’t do security patches or whatever because i thought we were talking about having a good browser experience.
Well …
They don’t know how to do that and never did.
It’s always been “Uhhh let’s have people make Firefox accounts, yeah!” When, in this day and age, the last thing people need is yet another account to keep track of.
“Lets get into AI, yeah!” Said no one ever.
Like, is it too much to fucking ask for a simple, privacy-centric, security (not overreaching), performance priority browser?
I mean look around how many forks of Firefox that there are out there, having to do the legwork because Firefox isn’t that much of the shit it thinks it is.
I’ve never understood the argument. It seems to have kind of been collectively hallucinated into existence by waves of internet comment sections over the years. But these aren’t mutually exclusive, and nobody has made a case that the resources for these other features are compromising the ability to deliver core browser functionality.
They also seem to assume that it’s development decisions, rather than Google leveraging its search dominance and financial muscle, that are tied to changes in market share. I actually think these value-adds can be good, can punch above their weight and can, if they are smart in picking their spots, do so without necessarily compromising their ability to advance the development of Firefox.
And nobody ever stops, breathes in and out, collects the evidence and makes the actual case. It’s just kind of assumed, asserted, repeated, assumed again, repeated again ad nauseum. Because enough people have seen other people say it, so they say it too knowing it leads to upvotes.
The ones closest to citing evidence, thankfully understanding at least how a real argument would actually work, are also the most unhinged, which probably isn’t a coincidence.
Why would I take the time and energy out of my day to jump through hoops to prove my case. At the very likely chance that someone like you will refute it anyways and waive it off like you did with my comment?
Not worth it.
Weird that they called it a “Beta”, like running a chat server you didn’t code is somehow an experiment. Just say you couldn’t be arsed running it anymore.
Does it matter that they don’t run an instance?
As long as they have accounts and keep them up to date, that is the main thing.
How many open source projects actually run and moderate instances?
The effectiveness of the internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.
- Mozilla Manifesto, Principle 6, emphasis mine
Unfortunate, but not unexpected.
I don’t get why, I can’t see this be difficult or costly to run, but then again I have no clue, never ran a Mastodon instance.
I would assume that it’s not worth the small reach compared to running X / Bluesky / Threads accounts but then again, like I said, the cost must be super small. 🤷
If Mozilla doesn’t discontinue a Mastodon server with under 300 people, how will it continue funding the $65 million AI and venture capital investments they’ve been making?! 😬
I’m not sure why they created one to begin with
Running the server probably costs about $100 per year, plus one person’s $180,000 salary
GoogleMozilla shutting down yet another project:I guess hating Mozilla is very much in fashion. The tech chatterati have made it so.
They’ll move on, as they always do. I just hope Firefox is still here.
Critiquing Mozilla when they make mistakes is not the same as hating them. It is healthy to keep these organizations accountable
The issue is all signs point to them pivoting to AI and ad driven nonsense - they’ll move on, but if the product goes to shit so will I. The rest is noise.
How defeatist of you, Mozilla. Whatever happened to your pride? Oh, it went a long time ago when you make a big deal about going 3.0 and how you claimed to have improved Firefox’s performance. Been a long time, but Firefox remains ever more the same as it did way back then, just cluttered with more features that weighs it’s performance.
“Features”