this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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Why do people love to hate on Firefox? People have been harping on Pocket for years as a waste of resources that hardly anyone uses, but now that they are eliminating it, people are coming out of the woodwork to wax nostalgic?
It turns out that making a modern browser is a huge, complex task. It's been said that it is more on par with maintaining an OS than another type of app. Mozilla is not perfect but why are we so quick to let the perfect be the enemy of the good?
It's pretty tone-deaf to criticize layoffs on the same article that acknowledges their historic dependence on Google's rapidly collapsing monopoly. Where is the money going to come from?
A poorly thought out blog post about the only major browser that isn't built on Apple, Google, or Microsoft.
It's pretty tone-deaf to criticize layoffs on the same article that acknowledges their historic dependence on Google's rapidly collapsing monopoly. Where is the money going to come from?
If you scroll up, you'll see the part of the article that mentions Mozilla wasting tens of millions of dollars on AI.
Where do you think that money comes from?
The author's timeline is off. The AI investment was in 2023, before most of the Google antitrust activity. They are also scaling back their AI programs.
Today [October 28, 2024] Germ announces pre-seed funding from investors K5 Global via partner Daniel Marcotte, Mozilla Ventures, Gaingels, and angel investors including Nick Sullivan, Jessica Millstone of Copper Wire Ventures, and Adam Sah.
https://www.germnetwork.com/blog/germ-announces-pre-seed-funding
Looks like a step in the right direction. E2EE messaging is a worthy venture under the Mozilla umbrella.
Not sure why you are posting about it in this thread about AI.
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You seem to be really stuck on this. You posted about a grant program that Mozilla is involved in for a startup to work on developing a secure chat on a more open protocol. Now you dug up a LinkedIn post about the same startup attending an unrelated AI technology conference.
No one is saying that Mozilla isn't involved in AI at all. The only thing I said is that the foundation is in trouble because Google antitrust actions are likely to harm their funding. As a result, they are cutting back in a lot of areas, including staffing, AI, and other side projects.
The original article ignorantly and irresponsibly overlooks the basic math of the situation.
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I'm not happy with how Mozilla leadership has navigated the ship, but what is the alternative? If Mozilla dies, there isn't enough funding for one of the forks to take over the browser.
Yeah it's bad. Most of the points made in that article are valid.
And once Firefox is gone, all the LibreWolfs and IronFoxs are gone too.
At some point in time FF was a normal project. A good project even. It could be in theory forked as easily as INN, or LibreOffice, or Xorg (oops, never mind), or whatever else big and "classical". It was open to contributors, open in leadership. It was kinda anarchist.
Like a good FOSS project, they considered all the tinkery\hobbyist use cases, having xulrunner and XUL in general. Like a good FOSS project, they didn't treat what's now normal there as normal.
They had a sane UI. They supported the SeaMonkey project, because why be a jerk when you need not.
But then at some point they made a deal with Google. So that's a lesson - any deal works both ways.
For me dropping XUL was the first firm sign of FF's death, because they didn't replace it with anything as good. It almost felt as if the main technical merit of dropping XUL was inability to tinker with it, and XUL's problems with security and parallelism were used as excuses. They could have made an incompatible, but just as functional replacement, not just for my convenience, but for their own too.
So, IMHO, if FF hadn't died, they'd just split paths with the commercial web as far as a decade ago. Probably come up with something like what's Gemini project is doing now, except much more.
BTW, FF was a big enough browser to even affect de facto web standards, were it a good thing to use while ignoring Google's bullshit. Instead they decided to track the bullshit and make the FF itself crappier and "more like Chrome" to compete for Chrome users.
I've been using Zen which is nice and has some stuff removed that we don't want.
But it'll only be around as long as Firefox is around.
I’m in the same boat using Zen. Eagerly waiting on Ladybird to come out. They are writing it from the ground up not even a package being used according to them. Oh and this isn’t some rando this is a guy who done decades of coding(mostly browser) so my hopes are high as Snoop
Ladybird is nice, but has a long way to go.
I personally think just tracking today's Web is useless. It's dying. It's a system that went from conscious development to malicious growth of standards for the purpose of capturing the field.
There's a need of at least search, payments, hosting and CDN (and pooling in there, and paying for a resource and selling a resource) being integrated into the system for the new Web-like thing. So that siloed services solving these problems weren't needed. I'm thinking lately of a system with some kind of "resource market", where it's seamless to globally sell and buy storage and computing resources, and transparent routing to those resources, with the market itself reminiscent of MMORPG markets, like in EVE. With search and payments being uniform, so that your client would aggregate results of many automatically retrieved indexers from a pool, without dependence on a single search engine.
I dunno if this looks stupid. Just - paying for things with ads seems to have been a bad idea retrospectively.
Hard agree on most of these. Try searchxng regards the search bit. It’s a self hostable search proxy. It’ll use everything from bing to duckduck and the topics(eg map search images) are more relevant and specific (at least for me) it looks like the unshitified google era.
And ofc ladybird is far af but i think it’s something that we need right now
Regardless of opinions, this ~~article~~ opinion piece is written like by an angry teenage nerd.
I don't understand what these angry anti FF people want that keep on having weekly rants on the topic. You are free to not use the software if you don't like it or the company or whatever. Just move on and be happy.
I'm getting tired of these haters any time Mozilla does literally anything and there is not a single constructive idea ever but the demand that Mozilla must operate like a benefactor for nerds that do not have to pay for anything ever.
Damn, I almost wish Mozilla went commercial with FF to fund the development of it just because.
It's the Register, ranty articles written like a teenager is kind of their brand.
people who never donated or contributed getting made at mozilla cancelling services like pocket and fakespot is amusing.
I don't want to donate to Mozilla, I want to donate to Firefox. I can donate to Mozilla, but little if any money would go to firefox, instead it goes to various causes unrelated to web browsers.
Exactly. Mozilla needs to stay in their fucking lane and work on Firefox. That's what they should exist for. Not all this other crap.
There are reasons I went to Seamonkey for a couple of years, then to Pale Moon (which is divergent enough now that I expect it to keep chugging along even if Firefox folds—most of Mozilla's patches are no longer relevant to its codebase). I'm interested to see what Ladybird will bring to the table, though.
If firebox being bankrolled by Google didn't raise red flags for you before, I have some NFTs I'd like to sell you that I think you'll find interesting.
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Never had issue with Firefox in my day to day use, sites load fine, uBlock stops all the annoyances and thankfully youtube works well for me.
Isn't it technically possible to split browser functions so we can recombine as we like? - i.e. separating the rendering / js engine from everything around the side - managing all the tabs, bookmarks, cookies and passwords, workspaces and sessions, mail, notes etc.
In my case, I like the workspace structure provided by Vivaldi, but don't see why it has to be built on chromium browser.
Anyway as a developer I need to test against blink, webkit and gecko, so would be nice to swap them within the same user interface structure.
By the way, I develop a "javascript-heavy" web-app (interactive climate model) and it seems to be working fine, and fast, in firefox, so I'm not convinced by complaints in the article.
That's what we had with xulrunner. Unfortunately Mozilla dropped XUL and didn't offer a good replacement.
You could make any kind of browser with xulrunner.
Ok, don't use it but when all the pages work only in Chrome with disabled AdBlock don't come back crying.
Servo?
Orion browser is also good. Coming to Linux soon.
isn't onion b. just tor browser adapted to the limitations of ios?
I think they meant Orion, not onion.
Thanks for the correction 😅
No, it’s a different project that runs on WebKit. The iOS version is fully open source, but as for desktop development, they mentioned that it will be open sourced in the future. It’s Safari, but with enhanced features. You can install both Chrome and Firefox extensions. It’s one of the fastest browsers I’ve used.
Look outside of the US.
Other countries have better laws around digital privacy and AI. Try products from those countries instead.