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Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox web browser and other open source projects, has announced its Mozilla Information Trust Initiative. This initiative involves Mozilla "developing products, research, and communities to battle information pollution and so-called 'fake news' online."
Although the announcement from Mozilla claims that the "spread of misinformation violates nearly every tenet of the Mozilla Manifesto", this initiative does raise some concerning questions. Should a web browser vendor be actively patrolling content on the web? Is such patrolling of content harmful to a truly open web? Is this merely the first step toward web browsers censoring or controlling the dissemination of information available on the web? Would the resources expended on this initiative be better spent improving the performance and efficiency of Firefox?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:26AM (8 children)
The issue with Eich wasn't the political view ITSELF, it was the fact that he had providing funding on such a level that it was legally a matter of public record.
It would be akin to a Catholic Priest putting 2k or 10k or whatever down for pro-abortion legislation. Would he still have a job with the Church? Same deal with Mozilla and its Pro-Liberal inclusive LGBT stance. Having him as a president with that publicly available background tarnished the social image they were going for. People pretend like conservatives have never done this to liberals in a similiar position.
Having said that: I believe, much like people haven't been doing with social networking, that people need to keep in mind the social consequences when financially supporting those views in a manner that is required to be public record. At that point the cat is out of the bag and whether you are a liberal or a conservative or a moderate you *WILL* be villified by whichever sides vehemently disagree with you. And whatever anyone wants to say, there are plenty of places where your views might get you killed, whether you're white or black, liberal or conservative, or even in some cases of indeterminate ethnicity or moderate politics.
America isn't all that and your side is no more justified than the other. Deal with it.
Last thing: Fucking up royally has been Mozilla's thing since they were still Netscape pre-AOL. While all these social initiatives are dumb, don't forget about the technical decisions people financially supports that let them reach this point: Abandoning the original C browser/build environment to replace the entire UI with Javascript. The 3-5 years it took them to make said browser run fast enough to be usable on a medium to low end computer. The abandonment of Mozilla Suite for Phoenix(eventually Firefox, which if I remember correctly was native GTK without the XUL toolchain until they usurped it from its original developer when it became a Mozilla project... Hint: It wasn't originally a Mozilla project.) Then after sort of 'righting the ship' between 0.5 and the 3 series, the clusterfuck of changes made after Firefox 3.5-3.6 which was when Firefox finally reached feature parity with other browsers, had massive adoption over IE6 which wasn't standards conformant, and had a UI that was fast, responsive, generally well liked among users, and similiar enough to older Netscape suite browsers/IE that anyone could use it. This mess has been a long time coming and the other way it will be resolved is to let the Mozilla Foundation die and have it replaced with new non-profits supporting forks, which based on the past 15 years, isn't going to happen, leaving us with kde's webkit fork, blink or whatever the replacement chrome engine is, and edge if you're on windows. Yay for the open source movement failing to innovate! Or fork.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday August 12 2017, @07:18AM (5 children)
So there an opening for a new browser built on the original C browser/build environment using GTK?
Oh and the feature fix list is long by now.
The $$ questions is how to fund it or who will sponsor..
(Score: 2) by chromas on Saturday August 12 2017, @11:18PM (4 children)
It's so old now, you're probably better off starting from scratch. I doubt ol' Phoenix could handle the 1.21 jiggabytes of javascript every page imports now. But it sure would be nice.
Unfortunately, 100% of all modern browsers that aren't Firefox or IE are all Chromium forks. Boo. When Opera dumped its code to make a Chromium fork, some of the devs left to make their own Chromium fork (Vivaldi). When Brendan Eich left Mozilla, he started up his own...Chromium fork (Brave). Boo.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday August 12 2017, @11:53PM (3 children)
So which open source (Unix) browser is the best now in your opinion?
What would be the best starting point for a new browsing project that aims to beat the others? should it use C? C++? JS? Objective-C/Swift/C#? what rendering engine or make a new one?
One approach would be to simply strip a lot of webmonkey stuff such that the complexity and resource requirements are reduced. I tested this using a greasemonkey like proxy. It works very well.
I'll sure would like to see a more sane program language than Javaterror.
Not sure if CSS and other slap on are good or bad as a concept.
The browser could sure use a "Browser process XX uses jiggabytes of memory - want to KILL it like yesterday NOW?" ;)
(Score: 2) by chromas on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:02AM (2 children)
Emacs. :D
Also, it'd be cool to get more people onto Pale Moon development. It's effectively a fork of Firefox without the ui and extension shenanigans, but I think it's got very few people behind it at the moment.
It would also be nice if people would quit trying to turn web browsers into operating systems.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:12AM (1 child)
Web pages with some runnable code are good for when say you want to have a page where you can input some parameters and have the formula output without consulting the server of the page. Faster response and less load. Same goes for say vector browsing of mapping applications etc. Or realtime display of cameras or control loop setups.
Thus code has it uses. I can see that. The problem is moron webmonkeys have gotten in a position to make decisions they are neither qualified for and have perverted incentives to fuckup.
And javascript sucks as a language. I'm less sure how much javacode sucks. It can be used to say build a interactive vector map browser. A lot less messy than building something that has to be installed on the client computer.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:39AM
Sure, well there's no law saying the script language has to be javascript—in fact, there's a parameter just for specifying the type—it's just that most browsers only support js. You don't even need to have the server return html.
Imagine clicking a gmail shortcut and getting a qml file that represents a Qt application which appears on the desktop like any other program (but you can see the source because it's not compiled). Then it could use javscript or python or whatever to handle events and stuff. Or even a compiled language if you want something good. No reason it couldn't be done, other than using a web browser as an SDK is cool while using an SDK as an SDK is lame and oldschool and $other_buzzword.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @01:05PM (1 child)
Would he have lost his job had he donated to, say, some pro-gay-marriage cause instead? Probably not. He probably would have been lauded and celebrated by lefties.
But in reality he donated to a cause that these crazed lefties disagree with, so they rabidly attacked him because he held the "wrong" opinion.
He was a victim of lefty intolerance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @03:58PM
At least he didn't end up hanging from a tree... Look to your own problems first, stop racial violence and then you can get on your high horse.