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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, 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?

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  • (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?