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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the state-of-the-art dept.

Co-founder of Netscape (formerly Mosaic Communications Corporation) and of Mozilla.org, Jamie Zawinski, has some brief comments about the current situation with Mozilla and its browser.

Back to Mozilla -- in my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

  1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
  2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
  3. There is no 3.

And they just completely threw in the towel on standards when they grabbed their ankles and allowed W3C to add DRM. At this point, I assume Mozilla's voice on the standards committees has all the world-trembling gravitas of "EFF writes amicus brief."

By the way, one dynamic that the cited article missed is that a huge part of the reason for Google's "investment" in Mozilla was not just to drive search traffic -- it was antitrust insurance. Mozilla continuing to exist made Chrome not be the only remaining web browser, and that kept certain wolves at bay.

Google has decided that they don't need to buy antitrust insurance any more. Wonder why.

Jamie is responding to the summary of the current situation with Mozilla outlined by software engineer Cal Paterson who points out that Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay having gone up 400%.

One of the most popular and most intuitive ways to evaluate an NGO is to judge how much of their spending is on their programme of works (or "mission") and how much is on other things, like administration and fundraising. If you give money to a charity for feeding people in the third world you hope that most of the money you give them goes on food - and not, for example, on company cars for head office staff.

Mozilla looks bad when considered in this light. Fully 30% of all expenditure goes on administration. Charity Navigator, an organisation that measures NGO effectiveness, would give them zero out of ten on the relevant metric. For context, to achieve 5/10 on that measure Mozilla admin would need to be under 25% of spending and, for 10/10, under 15%.

Previously:
(2020) Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
(2020) Firefox Browser Use Drops as Mozilla's Worst Microsoft Edge Fears Come True
(2020) The Web Is Now Too Complex To Allow The Creation of New Browsers
(2019) The Future of Browsers


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:47AM (11 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:47AM (#1057161)

    Expect a full on assault of the wrongs of Firefox/Mozilla and anonymous praise and blind worship of MS "Edge" until FF ceases to exist.

    It's a ONE MICROSOFT WAY world, my friends. Anywhere there's FOSS, they're almost bound to be there.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:49AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:49AM (#1057163)

      i wonder how many former microsoftees work at mozilla on ff. just sayin'.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:57AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:57AM (#1057167)

        I wonder how many NSA agents work at Mozilla on FF. FTFY.

        • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:38AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:38AM (#1057183)

          I wonder how many NSA agents work on SoylentNews.

          FTFY

          • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:36AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:36AM (#1057194)

            Never enough of them.

            • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @02:38PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @02:38PM (#1057257)

              NSA? Dammit we told them this was our op.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:09AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:09AM (#1057171)

      Wanna know what Microsoft Edgy isn't? Distinct from Google Chrome in any meaningful way.

      Google dumps money into Mozilla, inflating salaries and funding toxic behavior and diversity initiatives. That drives away talent and results in complete paralysis of the organization. Then Google gets to pretend that there isn't a browser monoculture.

      Mozilla is a lapdog, and Firefox is a failed experiment.

      • (Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday September 27 2020, @08:17AM

        by driverless (4770) on Sunday September 27 2020, @08:17AM (#1057571)

        This implies some sort of planning and evil scheming on Google's part. They actually don't need to do anything apart from sit back and hold marshmellows over the Mozilla dumpster fire. You don't need to actively push an organisation that's already busy committing suicide all by itself.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @12:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @12:04PM (#1057216)

      He left not long after Mozilla decided to fuck us all by rewriting their browser from scratch rather than reusing the netscape 4.x base that would have seen them release a year earlier and without all the performance problems mozilla had for its first 4 years of development, is one of the most prolific contributors to xscreensaver (having produced a few dozen of the demos in it during the 90s-early 00s including the Xmatrix screensaver), has been vocally critizing mozilla when they fucked up since, oh yeah and he ran the DNA lounge and a couple independent pizza places for most of the 2000s, so yeah, this guy is not a shill and quite legit.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @12:38PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @12:38PM (#1057222)

      Have you woken up from a 15 year coma?
      Microsoft is no longer a player in the web browsers space. They publish a fork of Chromium.

      Google now controls the browser space with an Iron fist MS could only ever dream of. Chromium is the de-facto rich client for the web.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:06PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:06PM (#1057411)

        >Have you woken up from a 15 year coma?
        Microsoft is no longer a player in the web browsers space. They publish a fork of Chromium.

        Nice try. I don't believe in the, "New Microsoft" idea so many shills are pushing.

        Their actions remind me of predatory bird(s) which lay their eggs in the nest of another bird's and the mother raises an alien bird.

        Or, maybe something like mites or other predatory insect who eventually kill their hosts and then eat them, or eat them while they're still alive.

        M$ does M$. It always has, it always will, that's my opinion. EEE is very much a concern.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:07PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:07PM (#1057412)

          just like the buttfucked Novell to death.

  • (Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:48AM (16 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:48AM (#1057162)

    Mozilla Needs Your Help to Expose YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm, because they have nothing better to do and how dare you suggest their priorities are skewed.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:33AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:33AM (#1057181)

      Their priorities are just fine. If they get plenty of evidence the YouTube algorithm is bad, they might get a bit more leverage over Google to keep that money flowing. That's the whole point of being at the top of a multimillion dollar organization like this: Making tons of money for themselves and their friends, right? That and keeping their name in the public consciousness by announcing things like this all the time, so as to allow more opportunities for the former.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @08:43AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @08:43AM (#1057575)

        If they get plenty of evidence the YouTube algorithm is bad, they might get a bit more leverage over Google to keep that money flowing.

        Or how about instead, they never find any real evidence, or any evidence they 'find' isn't really bad, but just acceptable behaviour to the powers at be?

        If anything, they've *already* been paid off. An investigation by Mozilla into Google? That's like expecting a dog to attack someone who feeds it more than anyone else!! How can people think it's a real investigation?!

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:40AM (1 child)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:40AM (#1057184) Journal

      Actually, it's a smart move. If they manage to reverse engineer Google's algo, they have Google by the balls. Squeeze them a bit, milk Google of some money.
      Iff they gather enough crowd participation, the may pull it ou... off, I mean.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:31AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:31AM (#1057192)

        Everyone already knows how the algo works. What they want is to pressure Google to change the algo to hide more wrongthink. Google already does that to appease advertisers so Mozilla is just pissing in the ocean. Which is the best way to describe all of Mozilla's activities.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by EEMac on Saturday September 26 2020, @01:42PM (11 children)

      by EEMac (6423) on Saturday September 26 2020, @01:42PM (#1057239)

      When a FireFox update announced FireFox was "more than a browser" and I was part of a social movement for using it, I knew it was time to consider Chrome.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @05:44PM (9 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @05:44PM (#1057325)

        Sorry you got modded down. I'm a woke hippie leftie, all in on many modern social/ist movements.
        But that's no place for a browser project. I'm with Cal Peterson (who wrote the article that JWZ commented on) and JWZ. Mozilla Foundation should have focused on financial sustainability without spending their entire budget each year, and their goal should have been making the best browser in the world and defending web standards. All these digressions are killing them.

        • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:49PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:49PM (#1057401)

          Mozilla Foundation should have focused on financial sustainability without spending their entire budget each year, and their goal should have been making the best browser in the world and defending web standards.

          I'll let someone else downmod you. How dare you absolve Mozilla from their societal responsibility to right the wrongs White Patriarchy has wreaked upon the intersectionally oppressed in the world? By the way, where is *your* commitment to hand over all the ill gotten gains your privilege has afforded you to outreach efforts, getting poor females with no interest in a four-year CS course a chance to take your job, which you only got via your privilege?

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @04:46PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @04:46PM (#1057669)

            Oh, so our industry never had a problem with sexism and sexual harrassment in education or the workplace. Gotcha.

            And no white man ever got a psychological benefit from existing in classrooms dominated by white men, teaching staff almost all white men, and managers almost all white men. Gotcha again.

            I'm in my 40s, and I had women classmates get told by professors and managers in the field that technology was a man's job and being a woman made them inherently incapable of doing it well. It's easy for me to say that if I was born a woman, I would have fought past that - but I wasn't, so we'll never know. And I haven't even touched on racism.

            In summary, go fuck yourself.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:17PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:17PM (#1057686)

              So what? That's called a Birthright. If anything, we have been way too nice, and have been giving it all away. We should have shipped the Africans back home after the civil war and only ever accepted immigration from White countries. Women should be at home having White children, not whoring themselves for fake Jew money.

            • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday September 27 2020, @06:12PM

              by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 27 2020, @06:12PM (#1057716) Homepage Journal

              My wife entered medical school in Manitoba the year that the informal quotas on female admissions were made slightly more permissive. That was back in the 60's.
              On her first class a professor surveyed the classroom and remarked on the waste of money being spent on women who were just looking for their Mrs. degree.

              Female doctors were rare in those days; and they tended to be among the best doctors available because the selection criteria were far more stringent than those for men.

              -- hendrik

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @03:40AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @03:40AM (#1057505)

          [...] I'm a woke hippie leftie, all in on many modern social/ist movements. [...]

          I discovered that as soon as I turn off my television, all of the latest & greatest social movements vanish.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:50AM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:50AM (#1057534)

          One thing I've long wondered is where all of that money is actually going. The Gnome Foundation crippled itself in much the same way years ago and I have to wonder if it is the same outreach programs involved with Mozilla, and just how exactly are the respective CEOs related to them.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @04:39PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @04:39PM (#1057664)

            I wrote the parent comment. I don't know how much GNOME Foundation spent, but Outreachy at Mozilla covered 20 interns for six months each year, when they had 1,000 employees. 75% of their staff is male and 75% is white, and less than 7% total is a combination of black, Latino, or Native American. So Mozilla's diversity initiatives and their impact on company demographics and company budget are irrelevant to their implosion. The CEO cost more in a single year than their entire diversity program over its life.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:22PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:22PM (#1057690)

              The numbers don't matter. Racial discrimination is "wrong" remember? Or is racism OK, as long as it's used against Whitey? Also, if everyone is equal, then what the fuck does race have to do with programming? All cultural Marxist BS.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @07:13PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @07:13PM (#1057745)

              It's harder to quantify the damage caused by injecting woke dangerhair activists into the organization.

      • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday September 28 2020, @04:47PM

        by Freeman (732) on Monday September 28 2020, @04:47PM (#1058189) Journal

        The problem with Chrome is that it's owned by Google. The problem with Edge is that it may as well be owned by Google, except now your data is likely going straight to Microsoft or maybe to Google and Microsoft.

        At least Firefox is still a Third Party program. They don't have built-in incentives to funnel all your data to the parent company or to monetize you (at least not as much).

        --
        Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:00AM (4 children)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:00AM (#1057168)

    I'll just leave that there...

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:22AM

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:22AM (#1057177) Journal

      Lynx is fine, but many sites are so rotten with javascript these days that they fail to render in any way, shape, or form in Lynx. The sites are not just off a little, they are completely broken. That's an area where Jamie points out that Mozilla could have some clout and that it is important for the survival of the Web: the enforcement of standards. I'd add that in the case of being able to use Lynx it is a matter of sticking to HTML supplemented with CSS as much as it is a matter of proper development such that uncessary bells and whistles stay unnecessary and the pages degrade gracefully. Javascript is a pox which not only make sites both unsafe and impossible to render, it also slows down the experience to something intolerable .

      Mozilla could take RFC 3271 [ietf.org] to heart as it applies to the WWW as a subset of the Internet. Doing so would cause a lot of good and would not interfere with the use of blue hair dye one bit.

      --
      Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:02AM (2 children)

      by Marand (1081) on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:02AM (#1057198) Journal

      Lynx? get with the times, old man: use elinks or links2.

      Jokes aside, elinks is seriously better than lynx in basically every way possible and should be the go-to for command line browsing, not lynx. Links2 (via 'links2 -g') on the other hand is useful as a lightweight hybrid for situations where you want text browser style pages and easier image viewing, but none of the other modern web stuff.

      I've gotten a lot of use out of both on poor connections over the years.

      • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday September 28 2020, @04:52PM (1 child)

        by Freeman (732) on Monday September 28 2020, @04:52PM (#1058190) Journal

        Interesting, but I've never made serious use of lynx. I may have used it once or twice, but 99.9999999%+ of webpages are designed with a GUI in mind. Some pages are simple enough that they convert well to a command line interface by happenstance. I'd rather invest in a cheap e-bay laptop or the like, so I can run a decent browser. Then, find a random coffee shop for internet or an internet cafe, if you're in a part of the world where that's actually a thing. In the USA, you can go to your local public library and likely have free or low cost access to a computer and decent internet.

        --
        Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Tuesday September 29 2020, @03:10AM

          by Marand (1081) on Tuesday September 29 2020, @03:10AM (#1058476) Journal

          but 99.9999999%+ of webpages are designed with a GUI in mind. Some pages are simple enough that they convert well to a command line interface by happenstance.

          elinks does a surprisingly good job of dealing with newer websites as long as they don't require JS to render. It even has some limited JS support for a few common things to help it play nice with newer web design. It can be good for documentation sites, and I've used it a lot over the years in weird situations like needing to hit nvidia.com (a site that's not particularly lynx-friendly) to get a driver blob because "Oh I need to reinstall the driver, fuck I should just get a newer version since I have to anyway" so I needed to get to the driver downloads without a GUI. Or in times when internet connectivity is almost dead but just usable enough to do text browsing. Or when accessing a remote machine via ssh and just "fuckit let me download this directly".

          For a laugh I even rigged an image to ansi converter as an image viewer (via a small wrapper) so I can view images without GUI in rare cases where I have no other option (like remote connections or "oops broke X11")

          I'd rather invest in a cheap e-bay laptop or the like, so I can run a decent browser.

          It's almost never about system specs, it's usually about connectivity issues or hardware issues.

          In the USA, you can go to your local public library and likely have free or low cost access to a computer and decent internet.

          In the USA you can also just as easily be in a rural area where the nearest library is a 20+ minute drive away and your best options for connectivity at home are satellite (with oppressive monthly data caps and horrible latency) or dialup (with insufficient bandwidth for modern websites). Been there, done that because I was having to stay with my grandparents and help take care of them for a while, and they were in an area where you couldn't even get a mobile signal.

          In that situation, text browsing some sites is a far better option than "lol just go to a library dude" or trying to suffer through using a modern graphical browser for everything. On dialup I started out turning images off in graphical browsers but the heavy use of JS on some sites meant I'd still have to wait for megabytes of JS everywhere on a 28.8 link (lines sucked, couldn't even hit 56k), so elinks won for most things. On satellite I'd also browse with images off to save data cap, but if it got a bit cloudy outside I'd have massive packet loss, up to 90% loss during storms and snowy weather. Somewhere past 50% packet loss about all that works reliably is text, so text browsing, IRC, RSS, and mosh (UDP-based ssh alternative) were pretty much it for connectivity at times, especially in the winter.

          The US has a lot of areas with really shit connectivity and elinks is a godsend when you're in one. It's easy to forget this because "shitty internet" in many areas is still pretty usable, but the places that are really bad off have it even worse than you'd expect because everyone develops sites and software on the expectation of fast connections now. Like when Windows 10 first came out, my grandmother's Win7 PC forcibly updated itself to 10, which used up most of their monthly cap overnight, and then Win10 took away all control over update scheduling so you couldn't schedule updates to happen during small free bandwidth window at night (intended for updates, so data usage didn't count against monthly cap). Couldn't even set it as a metered connection because it was wired, and wired was automatically considered unmetered unless you did a registry tweak that occasionally reset itself after updating. Thanks to that, they ended up spending most of the months over data cap and throttled to sub-dialup speeds because bad software design assumed fast internet and said "FUCK YOU" to configuration. I couldn't even fix it reliably because I lived too far away to visit often, it would reset itself at random, and between the horrible connection and the satellite provider's use of carrier-grade NAT I had no reliable way to connect and fix things for them remotely.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:30AM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:30AM (#1057180)

    They're so bad at everything that it seems like they're actively trying to destroy Firefox. Take mobile browsing. I genuinely don't know why mobile Firefox hasn't been more popular, because of its ad-blocking ability. Nevertheless this is the only real reason to use Firefox on mobile. It's quite usable, but Chrome is better, except for this one killer feature.

    So Mozilla gets rid of it. Now I can't really upgrade Firefox on my phone, and will eventually have to stop using it.

    That's really been their main consistent behavior for a decade : figure out what their users like, and break it.

    I'm not a conspiracy theorist by nature, but it really seems to me that the only purpose of Mozilla is to provide antitrust insurance for Google. They need to have a browser to achieve that - but they want as few people to use it as possible.

    It's clear that they've reached a tipping point now, where Google doesn't need them any more, and there's not enough left to be worth saving.

    I'm not sure I agree with the article on overhead, though. In a traditional charity, the purpose is to give that money away (or buy things and give them away). Mozilla develops software. They give the software away, but the line between administration and product is very blurry in software development. The CEO is overpaid (unless you assume that the purpose is to self destruct, in which case their performance has been excellent) but I'm not sure if it's possible to accurately measure the line between overhead and mission in an organization like Mozilla. Wikimedia is another example - they have tremendous overhead, but most of their actual value comes from their volunteer writers, which can't even be measured. So that overhead fraction can't be right.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:53AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:53AM (#1057189)

      Charity Navigator and the IRS has a definition of overhead and it works even for charities that produces tangible goods or directly provides services. How much money do you spend on things you need to produce product vs how much money do you spend on things that don't go to the product is the basic decision. The division is not foggy with that in mind and you can look it up yourself. Programmer or their managers payroll isn't admin; HR payroll or the receptionist are. Server time to host downloads or docs isn't admin; server time to host your compliance docs or fundraising is. Drawing pretty icons for the browser isn't; making a pretty press release for the public is admin. Etc. And in many cases, the non-profit gets to say what goes into each category anyway with no verification because almost none are audited unless malfeasance is suspected.

      Not that the browser is under Mozilla the charity anyway. The non-profit is mostly a grant organization anymore.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:10AM

      by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:10AM (#1057190)

      It's quite usable, but Chrome is better, except for this one killer feature.

      Actually, its most interesting feature is that it's neither Google nor Microsoft. In other words, it's the only viable escape route from dataraping without consent.

      Same as Firefox for desktop. In fact, I suspect a sizeable part of the people who stick to Firefox do so for that very reason, and that's partly what keeps Mozilla afloat.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @03:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @03:50PM (#1057286)

      PLEASE READ!

      I'm sorry to interrupt your thread, but if everyone who reads Soylent News donated only $3,298.72 each, the Wikimedia Foundation could purchase those Italian barista machines that we've been eyeing for a while. It is a small price to pay to allow us to maintain our $50M bank account and allowing us to drink lattes in the afternoon.

      THANK YOU!

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @05:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @05:54PM (#1057327)

      Being completely serious, I'd bet it's just a leadership team trying to justify their existence. If they did the right thing, "Okay team, carry on working on the browser. Let me know if you need anything." They would feel useless and people might start asking for cuts to executive staff. So instead, "New user interface! New layout! Side project FirefoxOS! Another new layout! Publicity campaign! Acquire Pocket! Another new layout! Email spam! A different publicity campaign! File transfers! And another new layout! VPN! See, look at all of the initiatives we've been pushing! We're working hard!"

      And now we have an organization that run through a billion dollars with an ever-declining share of the browser market and favorable public opinion to show for it. The same thing happens all of the time inside big corporations, it's just usually less visible save for some high profile "do something for the sake of doing something" projects like Ubuntu Unity or Windows 8.

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday September 26 2020, @07:31PM (1 child)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Saturday September 26 2020, @07:31PM (#1057349)

      I genuinely don't know why mobile Firefox hasn't been more popular, because of its ad-blocking ability. Nevertheless this is the only real reason to use Firefox on mobile. It's quite usable, but Chrome is better, except for this one killer feature.

      So Mozilla gets rid of it. Now I can't really upgrade Firefox on my phone, and will eventually have to stop using it.

      What are you talking about? I just got a new phone about a month ago, installed Firefox on it from the Google Play Store (just like I always do), installed Ublock Origin on it (like I always do), and it works just fine. Am I missing something? The newest FF is a little odd in that the URL bar is at the bottom, but other than that it seems to be working like normal.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:43PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:43PM (#1057371)

        New Firefox on mobile only allows nine explicitly whitelisted extensions, one of which is ublock origin. But immediately after this happened, ublock origin became "unmaintained." In a couple of months Mozilla will do something to break it, and then it will be gone for good.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @02:57AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @02:57AM (#1057491)

      In the new firefox for Android, bookmarks in the home screan are gone in the new version with some home screen icons replacing them, but they only appear on a brand new tab, so it is klunky and annoying to use now (back button / open new tab and close old one to get to the icons).

      uMatrix does not work anymore, and since uMatrix has been abandoned by its author, it isn't going to.

      You cannot resize in reader mode anymore. Someone at Mozilla decided that smaller fonts and white space at the margins is "better" than having legible text, and you have no choice.

      I tried to go to about:config to see if any of the above could be undone, but Mozilla is using some Android library that is missing from my phone to display the warning page, and firefox will not continue past the error. So, on some phones, no more about:config.

      This is what I've noticed in a few minutes of browsing after updating since there was an exploit announced in the old version.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @12:19PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @12:19PM (#1057602)

      IceCat is far better on Mobile. You can install Firefox plugins directly from the mozille addons site. What more could you want?

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:36AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:36AM (#1057193)

    Mozilla has totally stopped caring about standards. In fact they have been implementing BUGS just to be compatible with Google Crumb.

    Noticed this the other day - the main login page on monster.com was not working in Palemoon and other slightly older mozilla based browsers. (The script for the Sign In button fails to run when you click the button). :

    Specifically, this code:
    function loginFormValidate() {
                    resetLoginFormValidationMessage();

                    var isEmailFieldValid = validateEmailField();
                    var isPasswordFieldValid = validatePasswordField();

                    if (isEmailFieldValid && isPasswordFieldValid) {
                        login(event);
                        return false;
                    }
                }

    On proper browsers, the code doesn't execute because "event" isn't passed down correctly to login() from wherever it was declared initially, so the entire login button's code is invalidated and not run.
    On other browsers (chrome), their JS engines don't care and assume. That is wrong. Another instance of web-developers catering to Chrome and following its quirks (just like IE6!!!!). Forcing conventional Firefox to adopt that and follow suit just to stay relevant.
    And leaving users of browsers that don't adopt such insanity in the dust.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bolek_b on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:34AM

      by bolek_b (1460) on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:34AM (#1057203)
      I believe the event refers to window.event [mozilla.org] property; see also here [caniuse.com]. Quite self-explanatory: JS engines in other browsers don't have a reason to complain. But I think the rationale on the MDN is correct and developers should follow it, the code sample is stupid in more than one aspect.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by knarf on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:51AM (3 children)

    by knarf (2042) on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:51AM (#1057207)

    Were I at Mozilla developing Firefox I'd feel a strong urge to go back to the roots - being Phoenix, a creature capable of repeated rebirth - and launch a new program. I'd call it Ouroboros or Fenghuang or Anastasia or Fawkes or whathaveyou, as long as the name is related to rebirth. A new dawn with a new, lean browser which does just that and no more. Just like Firefox, back then, back before Mozilla became a corporation with a well-remunerated CEO who started to walk the walk and talk the talk of well-remunerated CEO's.

    Ouroboros, mark than name.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @01:06PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @01:06PM (#1057228)

      Other than the naming choice, isn't that basically what Firefox Quantum was and everyone here hated it?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @02:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @02:20PM (#1057248)

        On the contrary, it made me go back to Firefox for a while.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:45AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:45AM (#1057533)

        The hate was about not caring what add-ons required and providing the API to match previous features, so rewriting them would be possible. They went mostly with WebExtensions API and saying it was for security. Some add-on developers were very vocal about how all was mishandled. Below someone mentions that the add-on destruction happened other time (IIRC they promised one thing, lasting a couple of years, and then delivered second harder hit with WebExtensions). So the browser lost functionality, stopping being the ultra configurable one that cared about privacy, freedom, etc. They even clone the Chrome UI again and again, "because they are the leader". Haha, typical cargo cult mentality.

        And if you have to go with Chrome, which is getting pushed to you constantly, or a poor copy that requiries effort to install, why go with the copy? People just give up.

        Oh, btw, the new extesions keep on saying they need to access this and that, read-write, no option to reduce permissions... where is the big security improvement?

  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:54AM (2 children)

    by RamiK (1813) on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:54AM (#1057211)

    The manpower it takes to develop and maintain a standards compliant web browser nowadays will leave any non-profit at the mercy of its corporate donors.

    Someone could fork Chromium and get some work done there for a while... But regardless, practically speaking, the web standards and their committees are a lost cause.

    --
    compiling...
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @06:25PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @06:25PM (#1057334)

      But Mozilla diverted funds to so many side projects. I'm ignoring Outreachy - that was 20 entry level interns for 6 months per year, which is not significant. Mozilla started the FirefoxOS project, they built Firefox Hello, Firefox Sync, etc... they bought Pocket. They overpaid their executives an absurd amount.

      If they stayed lean and focused, maybe they would be in a better position today.

      • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:50PM

        by RamiK (1813) on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:50PM (#1057372)

        That's very hard to say: One's seat at those panels is determined via social networking after all. I mean, look at all those browsers that came and went and couldn't secure any voice: Wasn't it the fact that they kept things lean and focused that doomed them?

        Practically speaking what we need is a p2p web with such a clean, lean and easy to implement hypertext markdown that it can compete against the existing corporate web. A good way to pull it off is to develop it side-to-side with an IRC / Discord chatting API so the kids and scene groups adopt it and then start writing hypertext pages for it to list content and FAQs and whatnot so it will grow organically from there. But as for Mozilla, I don't see them doing anything remotely close to any of this.

        --
        compiling...
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday September 26 2020, @12:12PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday September 26 2020, @12:12PM (#1057220) Journal

    One thing I found hilarious is that the message "you have to enable DRM to view this content" often blocked videos I didn't want playing anyway. Somehow, browsers can no longer completely stop videos from automatically playing, unless they are flagged as protected. Ad blocking can't stop all the video either. Makes me wonder if the days of HTML4 and Flash maybe weren't so bad after all, because if you didn't want autoplay video, all you had to do was not install Flash. I agree that adding DRM hooks to HTML5 was a huge mistake.

    A serious bug in Firefox is now, once you have played a video on YouTube, the threads Firefox started persist forever, gobbling up system resources and draining batteries. You're not looking at any video any more, you've closed the page that was showing YouTube, but all these processes are still going. PulseAudio (a waste of resources on its own) is among the battery draining, system resource hogs, despite the fact that no audio is being played. Only way I have found to stop it is completely exit Firefox.

    I used to be fully confident that DRM was too stupid to survive its own illogic, and would eventually die out. In recent years, I've begun to have doubts. They're still sly about it, still trying to be sneaky, but the public is being conditioned to accept a low level of DRM. For instance, Steam's boast that it is "DRM done right". There is no such thing as good DRM! DRM is bad. Period. Saying otherwise is the same as saying that a modest amount of fascism or slavery is acceptable, and even good.

    Well, now we've had 4 years of a much closer view and experience of fascism than anyone with a brain really wanted. Would be nice if it has provoked enough resistance and rebellion that it will spill over into the technical realm. But I'm not holding my breath.

    The GNU fork these days is called IceCat. It's not anywhere to be found in the Linux Mint repos.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:37PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:37PM (#1057698)

      i would be curious to know what fascism you are referring to. I understand you're referencing Ole Uncle Trumpy, but what specifically has his admin done that you consider 1) actually his fault and 2) fascism.

  • (Score: 2) by chewbacon on Saturday September 26 2020, @12:49PM

    by chewbacon (1032) on Saturday September 26 2020, @12:49PM (#1057224)

    This is not unique to Mozilla. It happens all over. A guy I know does benefits and compensation for a large construction company. The CEO alleged he wasn't being compensated at market rates and wanted an insane raise. My friend disputed it claiming the CEO was looking at market rates of other industries and actually stuck up for the little guys, their lower level workers, who had fallen behind market rates. The CEO threatened to leave the company. The company became worried because they had some gains under this CEO, so they granted him the raise. Little guys got shit.

    In this case, the little guys are getting fired while the biggest guys at Mozilla (the fucking users!) are getting shit on.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 26 2020, @02:14PM (3 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 26 2020, @02:14PM (#1057246) Journal

    FF lost a lot of users when they changed how addons work. There is no way to count the people who abandoned the browser, because they felt abandoned by Mozilla. If Mozilla is dying the death of a thousand cuts, the addons decision was a mistake where they cut excessively deep. The forums were filled with people posting their disgust at the time.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @04:51PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @04:51PM (#1057310)

      Not once. Twice. Changed addons twice. Always forcing TABS on TOP. And motherfucking Pocket reenabled and smiling in your fucking face every upgrade.

      • (Score: 2) by DeVilla on Monday September 28 2020, @05:13AM

        by DeVilla (5354) on Monday September 28 2020, @05:13AM (#1058057)

        Definitely more than once. At least two of the plugins that I lost (and never found replacements for) were because their respective authors had just finished an almost total re-write due to the multi-process thing (electrolysis?) only to then be informed they were going to have to do another total re-write due to abandonment of xul plugins.

        I suspect one of those two plugin would have been broken the way tab mix plus was & still is broken, due to the lack of function provided by the new (now current) plugin API. But the other plugin already supported chrome. Both authors threw up their hands and gave up. They didn't have the time to deal with firefox support anymore.

        We need an alternative browser that can be a credible force in pursuing Mozilla's original goals. Mozilla surrendered long ago and I don't see how they or another upstart could champion those goals with any credible way of achieving them. Between the size of work needed to implement the current standard, combined with the fact that HTML5 is a "living standard" effectively controller by the incumbents, no small operation has a chance to become influential enough to matter.

        The only hope would be to get a movement supporting a functional, non-moving target standard that is (mostly?) a subset of HTML 5. I would assume it would have to happen in the universities. Any small business these days are too busy trying to find the version of "Open Core" that "works". Fighting for a truly open web standard ain't it.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @12:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @12:25PM (#1057603)

      I still don't get why they made the URL bar pop out. So much time and wasted effort. Users ranting at them to have an option to disable it. Having an option, then removing it after a short while. It's just stupid.

      Personally, I have a touch of OCD. Changes like that in the UI grab my attention immediately.

      Removing the ability to natively change the UI using the chrome CSS is another stupid move. Now you have to find an obscure flag to enable it. For what? To save 1 microsecond on browser start?

      There is a point where you have to say "This entity no longer deserves to exist. It is too stupid to live".

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @02:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @02:22PM (#1057249)

    Only half joking. FF is a fork of a fork of a fork by now. The WWW is getting "features" added to it, it seems every week that make it less egalitarian. I could list a dozen features that would give any browser more utility, but none of the vendors implement them because the goal right now is to steal value from the creators by constraining the market. Browser vendors have always been racing to the bottom to be the most broken products. And this is so because the most broken wins. Being broken is what allows them to render bad code. But it also allows them to render insecure code.

    The assumption has been that appearing broken is worse than actually being broken. That assumption plays into redmonds hands, and it always has.

    Mozilla has a lot of projects other than FF. Their involvement in RUST is probably their most important project right now, and I can see FF dying on the vine because of that. My guess is the FF source code base is a mess. Decades of tweaks to get functionality to work as poorly as the other vendors can not have had a positive effect. So the market is ripe for some disruption. But that disruption really needs to integrate at lower levels of the OSI stack. Adding entropy is adding attack vectors. So There is some redisign that needs to be considered that isn't: "Oh hey I've got a GREAT idea, lets add a whole new rendering standard that works in parallel to the existing ones."

    YMMV.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @02:52PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @02:52PM (#1057267)

    "Gynocentrist-radical-extremists".

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @04:34PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @04:34PM (#1057305)

      Three words for you:

      Loud, whiny victim.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:58PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @08:58PM (#1057377)

        Hey, being loud and whiny is THE way to the top in a nanny state!
        Does your whiny ass fear the competition already? Whine louder! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 1, Troll) by Tangaroa on Saturday September 26 2020, @03:13PM

    by Tangaroa (682) on Saturday September 26 2020, @03:13PM (#1057275) Homepage
    The foundation is run by the husband of "a Toronto-based social entrepreneur, and the founding executive director and current CEO of the Centre for Social Innovation." [wikipedia.org] So the whole project is being used for social experimentation, they're spending donations on this instead of programming (and this is probably what Google [wikileaks.org] is paying for), and the managers are going to kick out any devs who aren't on board with this.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by gtomorrow on Saturday September 26 2020, @03:35PM (2 children)

    by gtomorrow (2230) on Saturday September 26 2020, @03:35PM (#1057281)

    Y'all can keep slamming Mozilla and Firefox all you like. Firefox for me is most definitely "you can pry it from my cold, dead hands." Firefox plus a few select addons get immediately installed on all my machines. Despite the changes through the years, for better or worse, there's been nothing and I mean nothing insurmountable. Maybe if you all wiped away the crocodile tears you'd see that.

    Chrome/Vivaldi/Brave/Edge/Pale Moon/Waterfox/etc....you can keep 'em.*

    * Safari's OK but I use it only occasionally. Chromium?...only when I have to. I like Dillo!

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:52PM (2 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday September 26 2020, @09:52PM (#1057387) Journal

    “Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay having gone up 400%.”

    Despite? Is there supposed to be a rule that users like your product better if you pay the top execs more money?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @02:18AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @02:18AM (#1057479)

      You got the causation completely backwards.

      If you can't drive users to your sole useful product, than everything you've done as a CEO is pointless.

    • (Score: 2) by DeVilla on Monday September 28 2020, @05:18AM

      by DeVilla (5354) on Monday September 28 2020, @05:18AM (#1058058)

      I think the point is, you get what you reward.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:31PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:31PM (#1057395)

    A 90s engineer comes back from the cold 20 years later. Can he still speak without falling afoul of 2020s SJW dogma? He's an oppressor white male, but he does get intersectionality points for being a Jew.

    Jamie, last I heard you were out of the IT industry and running the DNA lounge. Perhaps until Gov. Newsom outlawed the bar industry. It is good to hear from someone who built up the Internet that I built my life upon, what he thinks about the craziness that befell a large open source project.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:02PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:02PM (#1057409)

      One question:

      Don't you ever get tired of proclaiming your victimhood everywhere?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:57PM (3 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday September 26 2020, @10:57PM (#1057406) Journal

    A.K.A. "it's the extensions, stupid." I've been running Falkon as much as possible but still need to fall back on Firefox for some sites like reddit, probably because I lock Falkon down pretty hard and its adblocking/scriptblocking seems a bit hamhanded.

    If Falkon wants to succeed, it should focus on porting uBlock Origin, PrivacyBadger, and the DuckDuckGo extension to itself, and ideally bundle these with it. This would probably make it usable for 99%+ of cases.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 26 2020, @11:09PM (#1057413)

      Jesus loves you, you know.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:37AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @05:37AM (#1057531)

      Falkon wraps Chromium, that is embracing monoculture. They will be lucky if they do not have to fork Chromium or accept whatever crap Google pushes that "by change, word" makes things hard or impossible.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @06:03AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @06:03AM (#1057536)

        They can't fork Chromium, they can't even properly audit it. The codebase is simply too large and too convoluted, and the 'standards' are changing too fast, for anything other than a major corporation to keep up. Which is the point. Chrome is IE6 all over again, only with an actual budget to keep them ahead of everyone else.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @12:48PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 27 2020, @12:48PM (#1057607)

    It still doesn't make sense?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 29 2020, @01:48AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 29 2020, @01:48AM (#1058441)

      because. chrome,s lackeys

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