Sinking itself.
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
Lmao.
Saving nobody and blowing up what little is left of itself.Every day we stray further from JWZ’s grace
Neither.
Two correct answers and it chose the only wrong one.
You beat me to it… Exact same word.
Please say that will be optional… Mozilla say it won’t “force” anyone to use AI in Firefox or Thunderbird, and that “classic mode” will remain available for those who prefer it.
But? They also say they will work “just as much on AI as on the web”, and with AI features tied to revenue targets… Well, you won’t make millions by hiding new features away in a settings menu on the off-chance someone “opts-in”. Ergo: prepare for nags.
Mozilla is in the difficult position of competing with multi-billion dollar companies to put out a free product that doesn’t make any money.
I have no idea how they’re not cooked long term.
This AI bullshit is just accelerating the process. Tanking their public opinion.
I wish Mozilla came up with useful paid services.
For a moment I thought Mozilla Monitor Plus could be such a service, but it turns out they outsourced that to a company that’s owned by a guy that also owns data brokers siphoning people’s data. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-after-ceo-admits-to-running-people-search-networks/
There’s also Firefox Relay but their phone protection and VPN services still aren’t available. https://relay.firefox.com/
Given what happened to Monitor Plus they’d need to be very transparent about relay’s management and proove their online services are trustworthy.
The for-profit corporation attached to the open source project is the failure. The linux kernel isn’t attached to Linux Corporation, ffmpeg isn’t attached to FFmpeg Corporation. Android is attached to Google Corporation, but Google Corporation already existed and had massive revenue streams before making Android, thus Android as an open source OS doesn’t need to drive revenue (of course, they put their greedy tentacles into Android with stuff like the Play Store and Gemini).
Mozilla Corporation shouldn’t exist. That’s not to say Firefox (or Linux, or ffmpeg, etc) developers shouldn’t have avenues to make money. But it should only be developers making money, not a holding corporation parasitizing the one (two if you count Thunderbird) meaningful project undertaken by “Mozilla”. The project gets a lot more sustainable when all you need to do is ensure that actual contributors to the software development are paid fairly for that actual work.
A CEO can decide what Firefox does (and in ways that inevitably influence the FOSS Mozcorpless forks). No CEO can decide what Linux does.
Well said!!
Mozilla existed as an application suite (formerly Netscape’s) in the turn of the milennium. (1998-2003)
App suite isn’t corporation.
Okay, realistically, if Mozilla continues to shit the bed with everything, what’s the future of Webkit browsers? How tied into Mozilla is it? I’m using Waterfox at the moment, will I need to be looking for a new browser in the next few years or is it decoupled enough that we can keep the forks and root out the bullshit?
Adding to Vincent’s reply, if Firefox truly goes away then we’d be looking to (only) Ladybird to save us.
WebKit is Safari, Firefox is Gecko. But Gecko is mainly supported by Mozilla, so if Mozilla can’t support it financially, it remains to be seen whether someone else can or will (and if so, how).
