Someday this will be Firefox too. You used to be cool Opera, but all good things to poop one day go.
Mozilla has bad resource management, that's a fact.
However turning into a loan shark app business? I really don't think so. Unless another browser enters the market and takes off (which is extremely difficult given the tons of features browsers are built to support for all sorts of websites) Mozilla never has to worry that much about money since Google is their top funder; and Google's main reason to fund them is to not deal with all sorts of legal issues and fines they'll recieve for creating a monopoly.
Didn't Mozilla just do a big roadmap talking about what they plan to do in the future and it was basically all AI and Activism with no mention of Firefox?
I hope to see Firefox grow, but who knows. Especially if antitrust actions or a continued drop in Firefox usage cuts off the Google money and makes Mozilla go poof.
But of course at least Gecko is Foss so it can't disappear entirely if the community doesn't let it.
Oh come now. Who would have predicted Opera would have ended up like this? Even with hindsight this dark path is hard to predict bit the overall trend is not.
Mozilla has created something of value and it has amassed a growing audience. If you are willing to invest in your confidence, I would happily short you in 10years or less, it's nearly ripe for corruption and not at all immune from something similar to what has become of Opera. Trusting that Google will doing anything consistent is another lesson in ignoring trends.
Can you name any other non profits, around for as long as mozilla, and as large as mozilla, that have become "something similar" to a Chinese malware producer?
Besides opera? Its a decent case example.
openai started as nonprofit. You think they have your best interest in mind right now?
Is openai similar to a Chinese malware producer?
The moment Opera was sold to China it was obvious that it's time to jump ship.
What happened with Opera was very predictable. When it comes to companies and corporations, and when their software products are proprietary, the pattern is always the same. They make something that might be good, maybe very good. Good enough to get some level of popularity. That's how they start. Over time though, the profit driven model inherent in corporations pressures them to implement questionable features - things that might generate more revenue, but are things people might tolerate at best. At some point they become more anti-features than questionable. And eventually both the company and their product devolve into garbage and we find out they've been basically an arm of the surveillance state the whole time.
Mozilla is not immune to corruption. The deal people are referring to here is that Mozilla sets the built in default search engine to whoever is the highest bidder. If I recall, there was a brief period where either Microsoft or Yahoo was going to be that company. But generally it's Google. And not everything Mozilla does with Firefox is considered good for privacy. That's why we have smaller projects like Mull - basically somebody takes Firefox, removes all the problematic parts, and adds extra security and privacy features.
But those projects have a tendency to come and go, because maintaining a complex piece of software like a browser is challenging and costly, and those projects do not generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining.
So Mozilla isn't perfect, but they are a nonprofit organization, which does provide them with a revenue model that allows them to strike a decent balance, and on the whole Firefox is a net good, and has always been one of the most important bulwarks for the free and open web. And the fact that Firefox is entirely open-source forces them to stay good.
at least someone will be able to fork Firefox's code, unlike the sad story with Opera's old Presto engine, that due to being proprietary suffered an inevitable dead.
😅Love the optimism here! And Firefox fanboyism here! I'm a FF user too, but if you think FF is immune to going down shitty paths in the future like almost all well-intentioned tech products eventually do, there is antifreeze in your kool-aid, and I'm afraid you've gone blind.
Firefox has so many issues. I do hear people say that if you use the nightly build it gets better, but e.g. the app store version on a mobile has a lot of stuff turned off.
I still use it, both on mobile and desktop, but its main appeal for me right now is that it is "not Chrome". The 5% breakage of Firefox is nowhere close to the 50% enshittification of Chrome:-(.
but e.g. the app store version on a mobile has a lot of stuff turned off.
Considering that the chrome app does not even have a way to install extensions, this is still a massive win for Firefox.
It does keep getting better and better (while Chrome gets shittier and shittier).
In the olden days they had 100% support for extentions
Well put
Thank you for the comment in spite of the downvoters:-)
The Mozilla circlejerk is strong (and pathetic) on the Fediverse.
It is like "even a stopped watch is correct twice a day - but that does not mean that you should trust the time that you see". It is possible, in more ways than one, to be both right yet also very wrong at the same time. :-P
Someday this will be Firefox too. You used to be cool Opera, but all good things to poop one day go.
Mozilla has bad resource management, that's a fact.
However turning into a loan shark app business? I really don't think so. Unless another browser enters the market and takes off (which is extremely difficult given the tons of features browsers are built to support for all sorts of websites) Mozilla never has to worry that much about money since Google is their top funder; and Google's main reason to fund them is to not deal with all sorts of legal issues and fines they'll recieve for creating a monopoly.
Didn't Mozilla just do a big roadmap talking about what they plan to do in the future and it was basically all AI and Activism with no mention of Firefox?
I hope to see Firefox grow, but who knows. Especially if antitrust actions or a continued drop in Firefox usage cuts off the Google money and makes Mozilla go poof.
But of course at least Gecko is Foss so it can't disappear entirely if the community doesn't let it.
Oh come now. Who would have predicted Opera would have ended up like this? Even with hindsight this dark path is hard to predict bit the overall trend is not.
Mozilla has created something of value and it has amassed a growing audience. If you are willing to invest in your confidence, I would happily short you in 10years or less, it's nearly ripe for corruption and not at all immune from something similar to what has become of Opera. Trusting that Google will doing anything consistent is another lesson in ignoring trends.
Can you name any other non profits, around for as long as mozilla, and as large as mozilla, that have become "something similar" to a Chinese malware producer?
Besides opera? Its a decent case example. openai started as nonprofit. You think they have your best interest in mind right now?
Is openai similar to a Chinese malware producer?
The moment Opera was sold to China it was obvious that it's time to jump ship.
What happened with Opera was very predictable. When it comes to companies and corporations, and when their software products are proprietary, the pattern is always the same. They make something that might be good, maybe very good. Good enough to get some level of popularity. That's how they start. Over time though, the profit driven model inherent in corporations pressures them to implement questionable features - things that might generate more revenue, but are things people might tolerate at best. At some point they become more anti-features than questionable. And eventually both the company and their product devolve into garbage and we find out they've been basically an arm of the surveillance state the whole time.
Mozilla is not immune to corruption. The deal people are referring to here is that Mozilla sets the built in default search engine to whoever is the highest bidder. If I recall, there was a brief period where either Microsoft or Yahoo was going to be that company. But generally it's Google. And not everything Mozilla does with Firefox is considered good for privacy. That's why we have smaller projects like Mull - basically somebody takes Firefox, removes all the problematic parts, and adds extra security and privacy features.
But those projects have a tendency to come and go, because maintaining a complex piece of software like a browser is challenging and costly, and those projects do not generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining.
So Mozilla isn't perfect, but they are a nonprofit organization, which does provide them with a revenue model that allows them to strike a decent balance, and on the whole Firefox is a net good, and has always been one of the most important bulwarks for the free and open web. And the fact that Firefox is entirely open-source forces them to stay good.
at least someone will be able to fork Firefox's code, unlike the sad story with Opera's old Presto engine, that due to being proprietary suffered an inevitable dead.
😅Love the optimism here! And Firefox fanboyism here! I'm a FF user too, but if you think FF is immune to going down shitty paths in the future like almost all well-intentioned tech products eventually do, there is antifreeze in your kool-aid, and I'm afraid you've gone blind.
Firefox has so many issues. I do hear people say that if you use the nightly build it gets better, but e.g. the app store version on a mobile has a lot of stuff turned off.
I still use it, both on mobile and desktop, but its main appeal for me right now is that it is "not Chrome". The 5% breakage of Firefox is nowhere close to the 50% enshittification of Chrome:-(.
Considering that the chrome app does not even have a way to install extensions, this is still a massive win for Firefox.
Mozilla has also started to make more and more extensions compatible with the mobile app recently, see https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/11/01/is-your-extension-ready-for-firefox-for-android/
It does keep getting better and better (while Chrome gets shittier and shittier).
In the olden days they had 100% support for extentions
Well put
Thank you for the comment in spite of the downvoters:-)
The Mozilla circlejerk is strong (and pathetic) on the Fediverse.
It is like "even a stopped watch is correct twice a day - but that does not mean that you should trust the time that you see". It is possible, in more ways than one, to be both right yet also very wrong at the same time. :-P