Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (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.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=2, Interesting=1, Informative=1, Total=4
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5