I really can’t stand their skewed priorities in contrast to the state of Firefox.
Skewed priorities like trying to make sure that Firefox continues to exist even with the massive amount of competition in the browser space and everything being taken over by chromium. Yeah. Definitely skewed priorities.
Mozilla laid off the entire Servo team (new browser engine built with rust) in 2020 and shifted more focus to products and services other than Firefox (like their VPN, Pocket, etc.) - this is public knowledge, they literally published the email that was sent to employees that day (https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Message-to-Employees-Change-in-Difficult-Times.pdf ).
naah, I like mozilla while they aren’t perfect but they are on our side in my opinion
They really just can’t get a break. When they take money from Google they get attacked. When they try to create other revenue streams (pocket, vpn, etc.) they get attacked. I don’t think you want the browser to be a paid for subscription product and the donations aren’t enough to reliably cover browser development.
Maintaining and keeping secure a large standards compliant browser is decidedly expensive. And most of the expenses are not one off they are ongoing.
factually incorrect, they’re just paid to have them as the default search engine and they need that money to maintain the browser
I really don’t get the hate. So they release a lot of silly projects that go nowhere. They need to keep trying new stuff! Sometimes cool stuff comes out of it.
I use Firefox daily. I also use other Mozilla projects, like the MDN. MDN has the absolute highest quality JavaScript reference anywhere. I would never want to lose that just so Mozilla can work on one thing and one thing only (FF).
Keeping the spirit of experimentation alive and strong in Mozilla’s DNA is worth having a few projects that don’t work out. Most organizations don’t have that.
can you elaborate?
Bad take
Listen, I love what Mozilla stands for, or at least what they claim to stand for. But every time they’ve been asked to choose between their principles and money, they’ve chosen money. On the one hand, I kind of don’t blame them – after all, if I was a scrappy broke nonprofit singlehandedly maintaining one of the most complex and fast-moving pieces of software mankind has ever devised, I’d probably take money wherever I could get it too – but on the other, paying lip service to caring about your users’ privacy isn’t a good look
I’m mostly thinking of making Google the default search engine and not doing much of anything to stop its data-gathering out of the box (although I will give them credit for the Tracking Protection feature in private windows and not taking active steps to prevent people from protecting their privacy, what the hell Google), integrating the famously-invasive Pocket into the browser with no obvious way to remove it, and creating a new paid-exclusive AI help chatbot for web deevelopers that’s just ChatGPT in a trenchcoat
Admittedly Mozilla’s track record is light years better than any of the other software companies out there, and I won’t begrudge them taking Google money in order to survive, but…
Are you really complaining for the default search engine? Wtf just change it. Mozzilla really needs the money to stay afloat, just don’t use Google if you don’t want to.
