Having a separate, open source JavaScript engine is in everyone’s interests even if they don’t know what they’d lose without the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox. I’m a web developer and Mozilla has protected the open web for all of us and if people understood what they’ve done, they’d all donate.
Google and Microsoft cannot and should not control standards. Mozilla is the conscience of the industry. Support it or you won’t know what you lost.
I was donating until I got an email telling me to donate more signed by their CEO or something who earns a couple hundred thousand a year.
Mind, I wasn't opted into communcation like that. Only updates and news this was neither. If their new CEO cleans house and refocuses as they said they will, I will consider renewing my donations again.
She earned 7 million and then asked for 3.5 million in donations iirc.
A couple hundred thousand is a pittance if he's keeping shit together. When CEOs push 500 to over a million at a nonprofit, that's absurdity.
She received 6.9 million dollars in 2022 and 5 million in 2021, 3 million in 2020.
CEOs are scum who do not earn anywhere near close to that. They should be lucky to get a couple hundred thousand.
And fuck Firefox having the nerve to ask for donations.
She.
And how are they keeping anything together. Market share isn't substantially better than before and rather than focusing on the product mozilla was created for they keep pivoting to weird BS like this AI grab. I actually think market shares gone up recently... cause google pushed through manifestv3. That would've happened even if mozilla did nothing. I think mozillq is still the better browser but that sure as hell doesn't seem to be because of whose in charge.
When CEOs push 500 to over a million at a nonprofit, that's absurdity.
If any CEO should make this much, I think it's the one helping to keep browser choice a thing
The CEO of the Mozilla Corporation shouldn't be asking for donations. It's the non-profit Mozilla Foundation which collects donations (and owns the Mozilla Corporation). It is a bit confusing, yes...
...and, more importantly, none of the donations go towards Firefox development. Instead they go towards "causes" that Mozilla Foundation finds worthy, and usually they have nothing to do with the open web.
Note that the best way to support it is to actually use its products, Firefox in particular. That's what gives Mozilla the ability to influence the direction of the web and web standards.
They actually have money in the bank, they just aren't profitable on their own in any way, and rely on search partnerships for yearly funds. I think they are just being responsible here and cutting people who aren't working on relevant projects going forward.
I’m not saying they are the right size. Just that if we lose Mozilla and Firefox, it’ll be almost as bad as losing Wikimedia for certain things. We need to protect the open web.
The problem is that the vast majority of end users prefer apps over websites.
They have no clue whatsoever that 99% of all apps are essentially just wrapped websites.
Since Mozilla has been unable to find a viable business model (No, relying on Google handouts is not a viable business model) I fear that there is only one possible future and a free web is not part of it.
This is the only realistic answer. Corporations have effectively decided that the future of the web is closed source proprietary javascript bloatware apps that are all functional skinner boxes. Many people, especially young people, have no clue how to use an actual computer. It's "click the bubble to make it pop and give us your mom's credit card number to unlock super premium bubbles." That's the future of the internet. But probably worse.
@mindlight@ShittyBeatlesFCPres When they took away SSB's (aka PWA) in Firefox 86 and utterly refused to reconsider, that was the end for me. Idiots
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Mozilla (the foundation) is still involved with Firefox, so chance that your donation won't go toward maintaining the engine. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-do/
Mozilla (the company) manages Firefox and doesn't seem to accept donation. They do accept manpower contribution: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute
Yeah, employing this many employees, the donations would not cover it and you can hardly guarantee a stable job position. It might take just one scandal (whether it's true or not) for everyone to stop donating.
The Mozilla Foundation uses donation money rather for political activism and they've also often distributed money to important open-source projects which are too small to collect donations.
@Ephera@redcalcium I don't mind them using funds on activism directly related to privacy and an open web but they have been blowing huge amounts on far left political causes unrelated. That's why I ignore donstion requests.
They get 500M every year from Google and keep focusing on random bullshit instead of Firefox. Plus, the money you donate in no way is guaranteed to go to Firefox.
There's no way I'm donating money to an org like that. I use Firefox because it's the only alternative, but honestly, I hope Mozilla dies and is reborn as a Firefox non-profit. One singular focus: browsers. Only then will I donate.
But Google won't let them die. They need an excuse should they ever be accused of web domination. "What do you mean domination? We give half a billion a year to at least one competitor out there. What else are we supposed to do?".
In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.
Yeah, I'm not sure this is the "renewed focus" we're looking for, chief
Hmm. Yeah might be a big mistake if they add more bloat.
Absolutely. I suppose the AI stuff could be disabled in config but it would still be more dead weight to download with every update, like Pocket and the other shit they built into the browser.
@0xtero@petsoi Firing staff, studiously ignoring _long standing_ complaints by end users and jumping like a meth addict on the latest tech craze whilst continuing to blow the rivers of gold from Google on far left political causes ... the future looks dim.
Despite Firefox’s declining marketshare on desktop the browser is in use health. It’s fast and feature enough to hold its own against its rivals
Huh?
AI
No AI writes this badly
No, they usually write this worse. If this is Mozilla's AI they're fucking up something fierce.
And a bad one too. Modern LLMs can write flawless English at 7B.
Yeah that's badly written, but Firefox is actually gaining de desktop marketshare now!
(According to gs.statcounter.com)
The problem with stats like these are that Firefox users (and the browser's defaults) block a lot of the scripts and images used for tracking.
Cloudflare's stats show higher Firefox usage (4.737% for 2023 Q3), although that's still less than even Edge. My own logs show more still, although my visitors are more technical than usual.
Yeah, its gaining marketshare, I'm glad we agree.
(I use StatCounter mostly for trends, not hard numbers, because of the exact thing you just said)
"is in good health"? I was looking for autocorrect typos but can't figure out anything likely, unless they're not using querty.
Yes, focus on your main thing. It's the thing that makes you matter. I want your browser to stay competitive.
"trustworthy AI"
Why? Why can't we have even a single decent browser? Servo is my last hope.
I'd never heard of Servo before this, but judging from the website it's nowhere near a GUI offering. The work they're doing on the engine looks solid (to me as not-a-developer) but it's a telltale sign that there are no UI screenshots on their landing page. So, not an alternative to Firefox yet.
Because, as pointed in the page, Servo is being developed as a(n embeddable) Rendering Engine, not as a full blown end user Browser.
Its alternatives are not Chrome, Safari or Firefox, but Webkit, Blink and Gecko
There's an example GUI called Servoshell, but it is more of a testing ground and example on how to embed the engine in an app than a serious alternative to anything currently in the market.
Already this kind of work is difficult and daunting. Adding to it a full GUI would make it completely impossible for the current size and financial backing Servo has.
Big words aside it just means that Servo wants to be only one of the parts that compose a real browser: the one that takes HTML, Javascript, WASM and translates them into the things you see on your monitor. All the user facing functionality are left to the devs of the app that embed it.
Thanks for the big word elaboration! 👍
While it's not an alternative right now, I think Servo's focus on being embeddable might help it in the long run. A big issue with Gecko is that it was difficult, if not impossible to embed. It'd be nice to see something like Vivaldi that runs on Servo.
Oh, that's fair. I'm not complaining about the work being put into a new browser engine, and there is definitely space for improvement over the ones we have.
Vivaldi, though? I'd vastly prefer an open source browser, and maybe one with less baggage than Vivaldi has — but I'll look forward to any GUI implementation of Servo, when and if, etc.
I was more talking about Vivaldi feature-wise, FWIW. There's features I'd like from Vivaldi that don't have a close equivalent to Firefox, not even from its forks (tab tiling's my go-to example), and maybe in the distant future, there'd be a browser like it running on Servo.
@Flaky@halm be nice if you could just essentially plug-in engines and swap them out etc
in theory they are all supposed to support the same standards
Hmm. Now there's an idea for developers. Some kind of modular compatibility standard.
@Flaky@halm Vivaldi design is _strongly_ reminiscent of Mozilla SeaMonkey (antecedent Netscape Navigator) with a dose of old Opera.
Obviously not. Building a modern browser engine from scratch is an immense undertaking, so it's definitely possible that it will never be usable as a replacement for every day webbrowsing. But for now I won't give up hope :)
I want them to make an untrustworthy AI so that I can post funny conversations online for internet clout.
Would probably be more useful.
The actual news is "renews focus on AI bullshit".
I want an API to control firefox with ny own text gen open source AI. Locally and offline.
I don't understand what this is for or how it applies
Edit:
Oh wait.. ok I think I get it. Maybe tjis is what I need then. If I can just, list tab titles, read tab content, move tabs around, close tabs, open tabs from the console cli, then that coyld be it.
There are paid APIs that make this simpler, but I didn't look them up because the OP is about self hosted software.
In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.
That's pretty concerning. It could go either way but I assume they are going to try to shove more sponsored content in an effort to further monetize Firefox in spite of getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year in donations. Maybe I'm just cynical about Mozilla though.
Yes, the change of focus is good news overall but there’s still reasons to be concerned about Mozilla. It’s good that they are moving focus back to Firefox from struggling ancillary projects.
But what they want to do with that additional focus could be a problem. Another round of gimmicks with some newer buzzwords isn’t likely to help Firefox.
And this only just after they enabled a whole raft of add-ons in their mobile browser that have already stripped away so much shit from my daily browsing experience.
I switched last year when Google entered their new phase of ad tracker evil and I bet I wasn't the only one. Feels to me like Firefox fucked with the money and they're being brought to heel.
What? They're laying off people working on a metaverse platform, mozilla.social, and other assorted products nobody cares about. They're doing exactly what everyone said they should do, slimming down and focusing on Firefox
fediverse*
I'm sorry but what word are you trying to replace? I can't tell
They misinterpreted "metaverse platform, mozilla.social" as a single item in the list, not as two items.
For anyone who isn't aware, Mozilla has a thing called Mozilla Hubs that could be considered a metaverse product
A I see, thank you for clarifying,.I was genuinely confused
Grammatically it can be properly read either way, but I think you're right that's probably how they meant it.
Metaverse. mozilla.social is the fediverse
I know, they had also opened a thing called Mozilla hubs, something I consider metaverse product, like the other person said, I am aware mozilla.social is a fediverse platform
Cool, I'm liking this new Mozilla already! ...NOT!!!
Why? Isn't it good that Mozilla is focusing on Firefox instead of a host of random shit?
In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.
Eww.
I’ll need to switch browsers soon. I do not want AI crap.
Edit - There is also the reduction in their privacy services (VPN, Relay etc.). This could be the start of a trend in that direction too. Only time will tell.
Worry not. I'm sure Tor Browseeu and lots of other Firefox derivatives will simply strip out the AI bits
Yeah, thankfully.
When they say ai, I think they mean stuff like the tra elation feature in Firefox, not those stupid obnoxious ai sidebars
Use librewolf
That’s some serious spin there in the title.
They finally woke up
I hope to be optimistic too but I'd hold on to the cheers for a bit still personally
Having a separate, open source JavaScript engine is in everyone’s interests even if they don’t know what they’d lose without the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox. I’m a web developer and Mozilla has protected the open web for all of us and if people understood what they’ve done, they’d all donate.
Google and Microsoft cannot and should not control standards. Mozilla is the conscience of the industry. Support it or you won’t know what you lost.
I was donating until I got an email telling me to donate more signed by their CEO or something who earns a couple hundred thousand a year.
Mind, I wasn't opted into communcation like that. Only updates and news this was neither. If their new CEO cleans house and refocuses as they said they will, I will consider renewing my donations again.
She earned 7 million and then asked for 3.5 million in donations iirc.
A couple hundred thousand is a pittance if he's keeping shit together. When CEOs push 500 to over a million at a nonprofit, that's absurdity.
She received 6.9 million dollars in 2022 and 5 million in 2021, 3 million in 2020.
CEOs are scum who do not earn anywhere near close to that. They should be lucky to get a couple hundred thousand.
And fuck Firefox having the nerve to ask for donations.
She.
And how are they keeping anything together. Market share isn't substantially better than before and rather than focusing on the product mozilla was created for they keep pivoting to weird BS like this AI grab. I actually think market shares gone up recently... cause google pushed through manifestv3. That would've happened even if mozilla did nothing. I think mozillq is still the better browser but that sure as hell doesn't seem to be because of whose in charge.
If any CEO should make this much, I think it's the one helping to keep browser choice a thing
The CEO of the Mozilla Corporation shouldn't be asking for donations. It's the non-profit Mozilla Foundation which collects donations (and owns the Mozilla Corporation). It is a bit confusing, yes...
...and, more importantly, none of the donations go towards Firefox development. Instead they go towards "causes" that Mozilla Foundation finds worthy, and usually they have nothing to do with the open web.
@amju_wolf @Ephera _Exactly right_
Note that the best way to support it is to actually use its products, Firefox in particular. That's what gives Mozilla the ability to influence the direction of the web and web standards.
They actually have money in the bank, they just aren't profitable on their own in any way, and rely on search partnerships for yearly funds. I think they are just being responsible here and cutting people who aren't working on relevant projects going forward.
I’m not saying they are the right size. Just that if we lose Mozilla and Firefox, it’ll be almost as bad as losing Wikimedia for certain things. We need to protect the open web.
The problem is that the vast majority of end users prefer apps over websites. They have no clue whatsoever that 99% of all apps are essentially just wrapped websites.
Since Mozilla has been unable to find a viable business model (No, relying on Google handouts is not a viable business model) I fear that there is only one possible future and a free web is not part of it.
This is the only realistic answer. Corporations have effectively decided that the future of the web is closed source proprietary javascript bloatware apps that are all functional skinner boxes. Many people, especially young people, have no clue how to use an actual computer. It's "click the bubble to make it pop and give us your mom's credit card number to unlock super premium bubbles." That's the future of the internet. But probably worse.
@mindlight @ShittyBeatlesFCPres When they took away SSB's (aka PWA) in Firefox 86 and utterly refused to reconsider, that was the end for me. Idiots
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Mozilla (the foundation) is still involved with Firefox, so chance that your donation won't go toward maintaining the engine. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-do/
Mozilla (the company) manages Firefox and doesn't seem to accept donation. They do accept manpower contribution: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute
Yeah, employing this many employees, the donations would not cover it and you can hardly guarantee a stable job position. It might take just one scandal (whether it's true or not) for everyone to stop donating.
The Mozilla Foundation uses donation money rather for political activism and they've also often distributed money to important open-source projects which are too small to collect donations.
@Ephera @redcalcium I don't mind them using funds on activism directly related to privacy and an open web but they have been blowing huge amounts on far left political causes unrelated. That's why I ignore donstion requests.
They get 500M every year from Google and keep focusing on random bullshit instead of Firefox. Plus, the money you donate in no way is guaranteed to go to Firefox.
There's no way I'm donating money to an org like that. I use Firefox because it's the only alternative, but honestly, I hope Mozilla dies and is reborn as a Firefox non-profit. One singular focus: browsers. Only then will I donate.
But Google won't let them die. They need an excuse should they ever be accused of web domination. "What do you mean domination? We give half a billion a year to at least one competitor out there. What else are we supposed to do?".
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Yeah, I'm not sure this is the "renewed focus" we're looking for, chief
Hmm. Yeah might be a big mistake if they add more bloat.
Absolutely. I suppose the AI stuff could be disabled in config but it would still be more dead weight to download with every update, like Pocket and the other shit they built into the browser.
@0xtero @petsoi Firing staff, studiously ignoring _long standing_ complaints by end users and jumping like a meth addict on the latest tech craze whilst continuing to blow the rivers of gold from Google on far left political causes ... the future looks dim.
Huh?
AI
No AI writes this badly
No, they usually write this worse. If this is Mozilla's AI they're fucking up something fierce.
And a bad one too. Modern LLMs can write flawless English at 7B.
Yeah that's badly written, but Firefox is actually gaining de desktop marketshare now!
(According to gs.statcounter.com)
The problem with stats like these are that Firefox users (and the browser's defaults) block a lot of the scripts and images used for tracking.
Cloudflare's stats show higher Firefox usage (4.737% for 2023 Q3), although that's still less than even Edge. My own logs show more still, although my visitors are more technical than usual.
Yeah, its gaining marketshare, I'm glad we agree.
(I use StatCounter mostly for trends, not hard numbers, because of the exact thing you just said)
"is in good health"? I was looking for autocorrect typos but can't figure out anything likely, unless they're not using querty.
Yes, focus on your main thing. It's the thing that makes you matter. I want your browser to stay competitive.
"trustworthy AI"
Why? Why can't we have even a single decent browser? Servo is my last hope.
I'd never heard of Servo before this, but judging from the website it's nowhere near a GUI offering. The work they're doing on the engine looks solid (to me as not-a-developer) but it's a telltale sign that there are no UI screenshots on their landing page. So, not an alternative to Firefox yet.
Because, as pointed in the page, Servo is being developed as a(n embeddable) Rendering Engine, not as a full blown end user Browser.
Its alternatives are not Chrome, Safari or Firefox, but Webkit, Blink and Gecko
There's an example GUI called Servoshell, but it is more of a testing ground and example on how to embed the engine in an app than a serious alternative to anything currently in the market.
Already this kind of work is difficult and daunting. Adding to it a full GUI would make it completely impossible for the current size and financial backing Servo has.
Big words aside it just means that Servo wants to be only one of the parts that compose a real browser: the one that takes HTML, Javascript, WASM and translates them into the things you see on your monitor. All the user facing functionality are left to the devs of the app that embed it.
Thanks for the big word elaboration! 👍
While it's not an alternative right now, I think Servo's focus on being embeddable might help it in the long run. A big issue with Gecko is that it was difficult, if not impossible to embed. It'd be nice to see something like Vivaldi that runs on Servo.
Oh, that's fair. I'm not complaining about the work being put into a new browser engine, and there is definitely space for improvement over the ones we have.
Vivaldi, though? I'd vastly prefer an open source browser, and maybe one with less baggage than Vivaldi has — but I'll look forward to any GUI implementation of Servo, when and if, etc.
I was more talking about Vivaldi feature-wise, FWIW. There's features I'd like from Vivaldi that don't have a close equivalent to Firefox, not even from its forks (tab tiling's my go-to example), and maybe in the distant future, there'd be a browser like it running on Servo.
@Flaky @halm be nice if you could just essentially plug-in engines and swap them out etc
in theory they are all supposed to support the same standards
Hmm. Now there's an idea for developers. Some kind of modular compatibility standard.
@Flaky @halm Vivaldi design is _strongly_ reminiscent of Mozilla SeaMonkey (antecedent Netscape Navigator) with a dose of old Opera.
Obviously not. Building a modern browser engine from scratch is an immense undertaking, so it's definitely possible that it will never be usable as a replacement for every day webbrowsing. But for now I won't give up hope :)
I want them to make an untrustworthy AI so that I can post funny conversations online for internet clout.
Would probably be more useful.
The actual news is "renews focus on AI bullshit".
I want an API to control firefox with ny own text gen open source AI. Locally and offline.
Playwright ?
I don't understand what this is for or how it applies
Edit:
Oh wait.. ok I think I get it. Maybe tjis is what I need then. If I can just, list tab titles, read tab content, move tabs around, close tabs, open tabs from the console cli, then that coyld be it.
There are paid APIs that make this simpler, but I didn't look them up because the OP is about self hosted software.
That's pretty concerning. It could go either way but I assume they are going to try to shove more sponsored content in an effort to further monetize Firefox in spite of getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year in donations. Maybe I'm just cynical about Mozilla though.
Yes, the change of focus is good news overall but there’s still reasons to be concerned about Mozilla. It’s good that they are moving focus back to Firefox from struggling ancillary projects.
But what they want to do with that additional focus could be a problem. Another round of gimmicks with some newer buzzwords isn’t likely to help Firefox.
And this only just after they enabled a whole raft of add-ons in their mobile browser that have already stripped away so much shit from my daily browsing experience.
I switched last year when Google entered their new phase of ad tracker evil and I bet I wasn't the only one. Feels to me like Firefox fucked with the money and they're being brought to heel.
What? They're laying off people working on a metaverse platform, mozilla.social, and other assorted products nobody cares about. They're doing exactly what everyone said they should do, slimming down and focusing on Firefox
fediverse*
I'm sorry but what word are you trying to replace? I can't tell
They misinterpreted "metaverse platform, mozilla.social" as a single item in the list, not as two items.
For anyone who isn't aware, Mozilla has a thing called Mozilla Hubs that could be considered a metaverse product
A I see, thank you for clarifying,.I was genuinely confused
Grammatically it can be properly read either way, but I think you're right that's probably how they meant it.
Metaverse. mozilla.social is the fediverse
I know, they had also opened a thing called Mozilla hubs, something I consider metaverse product, like the other person said, I am aware mozilla.social is a fediverse platform
Cool, I'm liking this new Mozilla already! ...NOT!!!
Why? Isn't it good that Mozilla is focusing on Firefox instead of a host of random shit?
Eww.
I’ll need to switch browsers soon. I do not want AI crap.
Edit - There is also the reduction in their privacy services (VPN, Relay etc.). This could be the start of a trend in that direction too. Only time will tell.
Worry not. I'm sure Tor Browseeu and lots of other Firefox derivatives will simply strip out the AI bits
Yeah, thankfully.
When they say ai, I think they mean stuff like the tra elation feature in Firefox, not those stupid obnoxious ai sidebars
Use librewolf
That’s some serious spin there in the title.
They finally woke up
I hope to be optimistic too but I'd hold on to the cheers for a bit still personally