cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/46655413
The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.”
Why the heck did Mozilla need 120 employees for anyway? I hate that Firefox is updated so often because I always get Firefox Update Fatigue. I hope that fewer employees means fewer Firefox updates.
Well this is a unique take. But don’t worry, there’s a Firefox for you, too. Try the ESR, or Extended Support Release, it
receives major updates on average every 52 weeks with minor updates such as crash fixes, security fixes and policy updates as needed, but at least every four weeks.
Just turn the updates off. Might want to remove the seatbelts from your car too, so annoying having to put them on and take them off every time you need to drive somewhere.
Doesn’t work. Firefox keeps nagging me to update every freaking time I open the browser. Now if they let me turn the nagging off it wouldn’t be so bad.
I want an update once per quarter, not once per week. Only more often than that if there is a critical security fix.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/desktop-esr/
Here you go brother. Hope this helps.
Everytime I see comments regarding Mozilla’'s financials,I have the same effing question: How does a company like brave or opera maintain their browser ?? AFAIK both don’t have the level of community backing that Mozilla does nor do they have any (again AFAIK) agreement with a company like google for default search engine placement
those are just rebranded chrome(ium). all browsers except firefox and safari are rebranded chromium or firefox. edit: there are some other projects but none are mature.
Brave and Opera are both forks of Chromium that incorporate upstream changes. Firefox is an entire browser.
Fair enough. Didn’t think that maintaining the engine is what Mozilla spends majority of it’s Firefox budget on
Regardless, don’t use chrome.
If Mozilla does become defunct, it does raise the question of whether Chrome would be considered a Google monopoly, and therefore subject to antitrust legislation.
I can’t imagine any governments would look kindly upon internet access being guarded behind a single company’s product.
There is a new browser based on WebKit (safari), called Orion that looks promising. However, it’s only on macOS and iOS at this point. Hopefully Linux and Android will be a consideration at some point.
Chrome’s engine was originally forked from WebKit. That makes them too similar (even years later) for WebKit to count as a real alternative.
There’s also a new browser based on Firefox/Gecko called Zen. There’s way too many browsers based on Webkit or Blink.
They could try to employ some kind of Apple defense, like, you wouldn’t hit Apple for having monopoly on iOS. As long as it’s not the only solution on the market. And for web, most of time, you could access the same resources and get similar experience by downloading… the apps… wait, they have a monopoly on that, too. Well, they are completely screwed in that case.
Splitting Chrome from Google wouldn’t make Chrome not a monopoly, though, right?
If this Firefox trend continues, then we won’t really have a choice in the matter anymore.
Their question is: how much would you pay for not using a Chromium based browser?
People switching to the browser and zapping all ads, demanding open source and vitriol for any kind of monetization. How can they survive? They would have to become a subsidized utility, which not even the Internet as a whole has achieved.
I get not wanting to use a google, microsoft or crypto laden browser, but I would be willing to use a well supported browser that used chromium as the page rendering engine. It seems to be extremely difficult to get another engine to be competitive in the marketplace. Maybe the resources would be better spent putting the chromium engine inside a different container. I’m sure there would be drawbacks, but I think there would be compatibility benefits too.
There was a poll a while back on mastodon and the majority answered they’d be ok with 5$/year to support Firefox.
The kind of people you find on Mastodon following Firefox news are not the same as the average person. They are a bubble.
A few thousand people paying $5 per year is not enough to replace hundreds of millions.
A few thousand people paying $5 per year is not enough to replace hundreds of millions.
…people or dollars? ‘Cos i don’t think “hundreds of millions” of people are chippin’ in, it’s Google that’s financing “hundreds of millions” of dollars…
But yeah, that target audience is a bubble, normies don’t care.
CEO first please. He’s not worth it
