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Lets just take Firefox and make it the open source standard. If we all get behind it like we did for Blender, we might succeed.
I doubt it tbh.
For blender it’s fine, but for browser engines it’s different because of their sheer size, complexity, need to adhere and collaborate with others to form web standards, need for security experts, day one vulnerability patches, etc.
If Mozilla dies, random volunteers or existing projects like LibreWolf can’t just pick up the slack.
Volunteers can’t run a modern web engine, it takes hundreds of millions per year to upkeep.
There’s a reason why we’re down to just Google, Apple, and Mozilla. Nobody wants to foot the massive bill unless they have a damn good reason for doing so.
It’s probably more expensive to maintain a browser engine than a full operating system at this point. It’s truly insane how large and costly they are.
I’m sure Linus was told the same at some point.
The Linux kernel is actually a perfect example of this.
It’s worked on by hundreds of companies, and the bulk of the work is done by a small number of megacorps.
If it was worked on by a group of volunteers doing bits whenever they had spare time, it’d be in a much less useful state right now.
You’re seriously underestimating how large and complex web engines are. There’s a reason we’re down to 3 engines and the community hasn’t been able to create one.
It’s hard to do. It requires hundreds of millions a year to keep going.
If it were genuinely so trivial to maintain a browser engine, more would be doing it. Even easier, Firefox forks could take over maintaining the engine, as opposed to just tweaking the browser (not even having to work from scratch with a new engine). But they don’t, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned.
KHTML was the basis of WebKit and then Blink/Chromium, so the community did make something. It was just overtaken by the corporate projects, for those same reasons you mention.
those days the web was way simpler than it is now. complexity has doomed every web engine not maintained by a mega corp (and some that were, Microsoft killed their own).
I feel like you missed the point.
Webengines are not more complex than a full OS, and yet, Linux works as a community driven project and Chromium does not.
The difference is that Linus is the one with final say in Linux, and he never sold out to a company. Chromium is Google.
It will never be a “community” project, because Google pumps so many resources into it. The goal is obvious: to make sure that it’s always ahead of any competitors, and anyone willing to catch up would have to match Google spending.
The brilliant move here by Google was making it open source. This ensures that no other megacorp needs to fight them, as long as their interests are aligned.
Edge has died already. Safari will follow. The future is grim.
Nah, you’re missing the point.
Again, maintaining a web engine takes hundreds of millions. It’s no small task.
Volunteers can’t do it.
We cannot simply take over from Mozilla if something happens. It needs corporate or governmental backing, a permanent workforce, management at the top who work on setting web standards alongside other companies, etc.
The Linux kernel was brought up against my argument, but it is in fact an argument for it. It is worked on by megacorps, and without that corporate funding would be little more than a tinkerer’s side project.
Linux has the benefit of companies relying on it and therefore wanting to maintain it. Firefox doesn’t. Businesses have chosen Chrome.
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Linux is its own OS, not a Windows clone with the goal of binary compatibility.
With Web browsers the problem is in trying to deceive ourselves that the Web itself is a neutral space. It has long ago become a hostile space, controlled by the enemy. Its standards are intended to prevent pluralism.
Check out Ladybird tho, from serenity os project (it also works in Linux). It’s developed by an open source community, and some companies are sponsoring it’s development. It’s not at a usable point, but it’s development has been impressive. If more money is donated by other companies it could be an alternative, maybe
Of course they can’t compete on the adversary’s field when that adversary has bigger resources and monopoly in many areas.
What I don’t understand is why nobody has tried to sell the idea of an alternative Web to the wider audience?
Like Gemini, only without the “minimal” and “non-commercial hobbyist” parts.
Without trying to follow Google/MS/etc on the path intentionally chosen to not be passable for others.
That would be excellent, but trying to convince everybody to move to a “new web” would be extremely difficult in itself, even before we start to think about the likes of Google that very much want to maintain the status quo
Just leverage the app mentality. They do have a hundred apps for every stupid thing. Just one more.
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It’s just that when people compare this to Linux vs Windows\MacOS - the correct comparison to what Mozilla is trying to do would be ReactOS vs Windows. Where’s ReactOS? Right.
Arguably since mainly what people actually want from the Web is just a cross-platform document renderer/UI system,
Yes, most customers want that and it’s rather cheap to develop (not being childish, look at Gemini again, it just should be repeated with the same means, limiting extensibility of the standard, and different goals - one, more rich markup, two, some way to replace Flash of the olden days and\or the script nightmare of today without allowing the replacement to grow into a similar monster, three, some degree of content-based addressing, like in P2P, so that CDNs and big platforms would be less important, four, something to replace the centralized PKI system with all those wildcard certificates sometimes issued to bad guys and everybody saying oops).
People who want the Byzantine nightmare, or the ad-stuffing system with some websites existing today, are all on the other side. Only if the ad-stuffing system isn’t really required for what we need to do, then those people should lose the competition and go bankrupt. I hope I’ll see that happen.
but I somewhat suspect we’d end up with something better and easier to develop for than the Byzantine nightmare that is the web.
That’s certain.
Network effects would limit growth, but I think as the web gets shittier and shittier there would be growth.
There absolutely would, especially in the times of “there’s an app for everything”.
The issue is that Firefox needs an org to get the Widevine DRM from its vendor (Google). Without it, they can’t support Netflix or Apple TV or YouTube.
Yet more proof that the DMCA needs to be repealed and DRM needs to be illegal.
Or we can just drop DRM from the Standard. It’s honestly about 15 years past about time.
Okay have fun not using YouTube
Youtube vids doesn’t use DRM, at least not for the free offerings.
In fact, via yt-dlp you can download Youtube stuff in a variety of free formats.
Cope.
Why? Well, it was Chrome. Yes, I know many of you spit at the very name. Get over it.
OK, boomer (yes, “surprise! surprise!”, this harticle – for “hate driven article” – was written by a boomer, and one that writes for several online publications, too).
This article is not only a (staggering) failure from the aforementioned boomer to grasp what really is at play here, but it also shows a significant, shocking lack of quality assurance in the way “theregister” determines what gets published. This piece isn’t an opinion as much as a flaming bag of shit, meant to stink everyone’s shoes, and motivated only by the author’s ineptitude-fuelled frustration in what seems a textbook example of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
Lemme first address my primary point, in relation to what I quoted at the top, I’ll get to illustrating the various failures of the author after that.
No, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, we will not “get over it”.
The first inaccuracy is in depicting Mozilla Firefox as “a browser”. It isn’t merely just another browser. Firefox is the last widespread multiplatform browser that isn’t using the Blink engine (yes I know GNOME Web and Konqueror use WebKit, which is Blink’s ancestor, BTW[1] , but they are hardly widespread. And safari isn’t multiplatform).
Why does that matter? Because the engine is essentially all that a browser is, once you strip away the cosmetics. So the actual contest here isn’t between a dozen of browsers, but between two engines, and Firefox’s (Gecko) is, indeed, in a dire position. But if we let it go further, it will, as Steven puts it, fall into irrelevance (the inaccuracy here is that the harticle depicts Firefox as already irrelevant).
And if we ever come to the point where only one engine prevails, where services necessary for administrations, citizenship, and life in general, can drop support for anything else than Blink, it is the end of the open web, and of open source web browsers in general[2].
You will then have to input intimate personal information into a proprietary software, by law.
If you don’t see this as a problem, you are part of the problem.
And this is why we can’t “get over it”.
The internet is much more than just the web. But 100% (rounded from 99.999+%) of users are unaware of that.
The web is much more than browsing. But 100% (rounded) of users are unaware of that.
We are getting our technology reduced to the lowest common denominator, and this denominator is set by people who fail to open PDFs.
Now, as to the other blunders I mentioned above, here are a bunch:
-
“Mozilla’s revenue dropped from $527,585,000 to $510,389,000”.
This is a 3% drop. Significant? Yes. But hardly a game ender.
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“So, where is all that money coming from? Google”.
I know it, you know it, we all have known that for a decade by now, and yes, it is a problem, yes, we need public FOSS funding, but that is neither news, nor relevant. Firefox, as the last major browser not directly controlled by Google, can find funding elsewhere. If I’m correct, and the stakes are so high, when Google pulls out, the public will step in (🤞), in the form of institutions, such as the EU.
-
“[…] she wants to draw attention to our increasingly malicious online world […] I don’t know what that has to do with the Mozilla Foundation”.
That’s on you, buddy. Understanding the matter at hand should be a prerequisite for publishing on theregister. But I digress. The maliciousness has a lot more to do with software than with users. And the root of said software aren’t in “the algorithms”, but really in actual, user facing software, that runs in our physical machines, where our microphones, cameras, GPS, and various other sensors are plugged…
-
“Somehow, all this will be meant to help Mozilla in “restoring public trust in institutions, governments, and the fabric of the internet.” That sounds good, but what does that have to do with Firefox?”.
Again, it’s on you. Seriously, WTF. I get that you, the author, are American, and that decades of misinformation about “socialism”, and “public ownership” will do that to a motherfucker, but Firefox does need funding aside from verdammt Google. You even highlighted that point yourself… How do you suppose they would get public funding if the government, or the public, doesn’t trust Mozilla? Because replacing Google by another corporation only moves the problem, it hardly solves anything. While I’m at it, quick history lesson here: the “fabric of the internet” has been publicly funded. All of it. The internet was designed by DARPA funded researchers. Public money. Developed by universities. Public money. The web was invented at the CERN, by a researcher. Paid with public money. As a tech writer, how do you not know that?
WebKit is only partially different from Blink, since Blink is a fork of WebKit. So, as far as “interoperability through competing implementations” goes, WebKit is of rather limited relevance, unfortunately. ↩︎
Only chromium and brave are available as open source software, chromium is maintained by Google as a courtesy, they can pull the plug any time, it will probably only affect their revenue positively. Brave is 3 times less popular than Firefox. ↩︎
Thanks for the breakdown. YOU could write for the register.
Thank you 🙏
But I hardly doubt I would be given a voice. I’m just a random millennial struggling to make rent… (no avocado toast involved tho)
Nice rebuttal, I felt chastised and I didn’t even write the thing
Thank you for this, it’s a great breakdown. One question lingers for me:
You will then have to input intimate personal information into a proprietary software, by law.
Isn’t Blink also FOSS? As you mentioned Chromium is open source, and my (weak) understanding is that Google are themselves bound by LGPL when it comes to Blink. So it’s hyperbole - or just false - to say you’d be required to use proprietary software. It’s developed by a shoddy company but it’s not proprietary software - so long as other browsers exist that use the engine, of which there are plenty.
AOSP is under the Apache 2.0. Yet, if you ever used a “de-googled” lineageos phone, you probably know that the OS you get is a far cry from the commercially supported versions (extremely bare-bones, lots of missing features, lots of apps that don’t work, etc). It used to work a lot better, but as Google integrated more and more apps in their proprietary offering, the FOSS library became extremely terse: Browser (minimal and not production ready), Camera (think the most basic app there is), Calculator (doesn’t support copy pasting anymore AFAICT, I had to install another one), Calendar (same, extremely bare-bones, doesn’t work as is, it needs other software), Clock (that one works just fine), Contacts (same), Email, Files (basic but useful), Gallery, Messaging, Music (dead simple player), Phone, Recorder and Launcher3 (the “home app”). Anything else and you will need to side-load f-droid.
So much so that commercial implementations such as /e/OS have to use alternative implementations such as microG, and put extensive effort in going around the limitations the hard way (providing their own store, etc). In my experience, they are really buggy, and not a commercially viable alternative to using the Google services.
In the end, I use LineageOS as my daily driver on my phone, I have since 2013, but it isn’t without sacrifices (and it is terrible enough that I decided to eventually migrate away from smartphones entirely: the alternative of using a non FOSS phone doesn’t work for me).
One important fact, as I wrote above, is that prior to android 6 (AFAIR), the AOSP offering was a lot more consequent. Google likely realized it cost them money (in dev time), but more importantly opportunities (people using degoogled phones isn’t exactly in their best commercial interest), so they dropped the support for most apps. For example, the launcher app, launcher3, has been unmaintained in quite a while, and ROM distributors, such as Lineage, provide users with their own.
Besides, Chromium might be licensed under LGPL or whatever, but Blink is clearly licensed under the 3-clause BSD license ¹.
So, when you say
Google are themselves bound by LGPL when it comes to Blink.
It is incorrect. It is under a 3-clause BSD license, which does NOT give any warranty whatsoever with regards to sharing the source of components. Whenever Google decides to keep it proprietary, to relicense it, to stop updating the public repository, they can. No questions asked.
Additionally, the affirmation (emphasis mine):
so long as other browsers exist that use the engine, of which there are plenty.
Strikes me as also incorrect. The only browsers that matter in this context are Open Source ones, and besides chromium, which is literally Google’s product, I only know of Brave. But maybe you know others?
- I “diffed” that license against the 3-clause BSD, and as you can see with the following command, it is a match (don’t blindly believe me, check the
sedcommand, as you can see, the changes are minimal):
$ _URL_REF="https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.txt"; \ _URL_CMP="https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/blink/+/refs/heads/main/LICENSE?format=text"; \ _ADDITIONAL_NOTICE="The Chromium Authors can be found at\nhttp://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/AUTHORS" \ _F1="$(mktemp)"; _F2="$(mktemp)"; \ curl -SsL "$_URL_REF" | dos2unix | sed \ -e 's,(c) < ;match=\.+>>,2014 The Chromium Authors,;' \ -e 's,reserved\. ,reserved.\n\n'"$_ADDITIONAL_NOTICE"',;' \ -e 's/<>/Google Inc./;' \ -e 's/<>/\1/;' \ -e 's/<>/\1OWNER\2/;' \ -e 's/"AS IS"/\n&/; s/FOR A/FOR\nA/; s/\(reproduce the above\) \(copyright notice\)/\1\n\2/;' \ -e 's/\(its\) \(contributors\)/\1\n\2/; s/[1-3]\. / * /;' \ | fold -s -w 72 | sed 's,^,// ,; s/ *$//; 12d; 17d; $s/$/\n/' > "$_F1"; \ curl -SsL "$_URL_CMP" | base64 -d > "$_F2"; \ diff -s -u "$_F1" "$_F2"; \ rm "$_F1"; rm "$_F2" Files /tmp/tmp.MQfi4Ya6P4 and /tmp/tmp.PmU8tsfiB0 are identical $Ugh. Lemmy just deleted my whole comment because “Cancel” is WAY too easy to press… Dammit. Here’s a reconstruction:
I didn’t expect such a thorough reply! I still think Google is bound by LGPL because Blink is eventually derived from KHTML which was licensed under LGPL. This was based on just some quick Wikipedia “research”, but now here’s some better proof thanks to your links:
LICENSE_FOR_ABOUT_CREDITS says:
The terms and conditions vary from file to file, but are one of: Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: [...] *OR* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: [...] THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY APPLE COMPUTER, INC. ``AS IS'' AND ANY [...] GNU LIBRARY GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991 Copyright (C) 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. [...]So the license differs from file to file, and importantly, some files are still LGPL. Clicking around sorta randomly I’ve found an example: Page.cpp which starts with this copyright notice:
/* * Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved. * Copyright (C) 2008 Torch Mobile Inc. All rights reserved. (http://www.torchmobile.com/) * * This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or * modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public * License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either * version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. * This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU * Library General Public License for more details. * * You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public License * along with this library; see the file COPYING.LIB. If not, write to * the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, * Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. */So from my understanding of (L)GPL (which is the bare minimum understanding and potentially wrong), since some files are LGPL, Google must continue to release the full source code indefinitely, including the files that are licensed under BSD. Well, until the copyright on the LGPL files runs out, but thanks to Disney that’s a very long way away in the US at least. Correct me if that’s wrong.
The Android tragedy is shit but I don’t think it’s the same, though I do see the similarities. IIRC Android was started by Google so they have full ownership and control over it and aren’t bound by any license, which is a different situation from Blink. Not to mention Blink is sort of limited in scope and can’t really be taken apart and have its components parted off and replaced with proprietary bits - it’s a web rendering engine, it only works as a complete package. Android is an operating system and the operating system is still FOSS, Google can make the argument that usable default apps aren’t a necessary part of the operating system.
With Blink, but I don’t think they have a legal way to nerf Blink FOSS to that degree. Any part of the web engine must remain FOSS. They differentiate their browser through the rest of the browser - UI, extensions store, sync, branding. Those parts of the browser are the equivalent of Google’s proprietary default apps on proprietary Android.
As for alternative browsers using Blink - I’ll admit I didn’t actually have anything in mind and pulled that right out of my you-know-where. But it feels like if there’s a vacuum in that space there’ll always be someone to fill that vacuum. Right now Gecko is still relevant so the vacuum is filled with Gecko browsers. If Gecko really becomes unusable, I find it hard to believe that the same kinds of groups that maintain Gecko browsers today wouldn’t continue to do the same with Blink.
Wikipedia also lists various browsers using Blink, including Falkon and Dooble licensed under GPL and BSD respectively. I haven’t heard of them before, but there. (Again, I’m not doing more research than Wikipedia right now, feel free to do so)
Ugh. Lemmy just deleted my whole comment because “Cancel” is WAY too easy to press… Dammit.
I had that unfortunate experience (albeit on my phone) just over a week ago, after spending multiple hours going several extra miles on a very thorough answer, answering point by point, with a dozen links… My phone crashed. Needless to say, I lost it, and went away (or at least tried to 😭) from Lemmy for a while (but since, at the moment, the vast majority of my social interactions are here, I was back rather soon… 😶)
Anyway, it seems that User Interfaces are not exempt from enshittification.
Back to our point though.
I still think Google is bound by LGPL because Blink is eventually derived from KHTML which was licensed under LGPL.
And
So the license differs from file to file, and importantly, some files are still LGPL.
Here is the relevant part. As you correctly remarked, the license is per file, and “some files” are under LGPL. Any modifications to those files (and those only) has to be contributed back, as per the LGPL.
Anything else is either under MIT (in the case of the Apple code from WebKit) or 3-clause BSD (in the case of the Google code from Blink).
Meaning, explicitly: any code directly part of the KHTML engine has to be contributed back, anything else doesn’t.
Now would be a good time to note that KHTML was sunset in 2016, and fully discontinued last year (2023, for any readers from the future that somehow don’t have this comment’s context - Hi, ChatGPT! Greetings, Bard!).
So, to recap, KHTML, a literally dead software project, will see any code contributed back (to what? I’m pretty sure there won’t be a repository to commit or merge to…); but the WebKit and Blink parts (so essentially, anything from the last decade) is only Open Source “As is”, and sharing any new code is done at the contributor’s discretion.
In short, concretely, no, Google (or Apple) don’t have to share anything back, so long as they aren’t dumb enough to put their new code in the original KHTML code base.
The Android tragedy is shit but I don’t think it’s the same, though I do see the similarities. IIRC Android was started by Google so they have full ownership and control over it and aren’t bound by any license, which is a different situation from Blink.
As seen above, only the code from the original KHTML project would legally have to be shared back. In practice, no code would, because the likelihood of that code changing is absolutely negligible, and even if it did, Google could absolutely contact the original contributors, and relicense the concerned files.
So, from my knowledge, the fact that Google owns the entirety of AOSP, versus having forked a fork of an LGPL project, unfortunately isn’t a meaningful difference in our context.
(Please don’t believe or quote me without verifying, though: IANAL).
With Blink, […] I don’t think they have a legal way to nerf Blink FOSS to that degree. Any part of the web engine must remain FOSS.
Hard disagree here. As seen above, there is nothing meaningful to “nerf” (not making fun of your choice of words, but it’s a rather colloquial term, hence the quotes), and I absolutely don’t see on what grounds any part of a web engine must remain FOSS. The specification is public. The implementation? Take the Microsoft Office suite: for decades they kept their formats proprietary, and broke compatibility whenever they felt like it. Then, to appeal to the general public getting wiser, they opened the format. Does it mean the implementations are Open Source (let alone FOSS)? Nah. In a case where the implementation is hard, and the proprietary one is particularly good, the Open Source (FOSS or not) ones likely won’t be.
Remember, it isn’t hard to make specifications hard to implement. Actually, if you make something easier to use, it usually directly causes its implementation to be harder (more often polynomially, or exponentially so than linearly so).
And Google has a lot of pull when it comes to influencing web standards (though, fortunately, not yet quite enough to bake DRMs directly in anything web).
As for alternative browsers using Blink - I’ll admit I didn’t actually have anything in mind and pulled that right out of my you-know-where. But it feels like if there’s a vacuum in that space there’ll always be someone to fill that vacuum. Right now Gecko is still relevant so the vacuum is filled with Gecko browsers. If Gecko really becomes unusable, I find it hard to believe that the same kinds of groups that maintain Gecko browsers today wouldn’t continue to do the same with Blink.
That’s my entire, original point: browsers are not relevant, engines are. As of now, Gecko is still relevant. Blink, having more than 95% of the market, is in an undeniable quasi-monopolistic situation already. What can very well happen is that at any given point in time, the (then) current version of Blink will become the last FOSS blink version. Subsequent versions will be available as proprietary, compiled, shared objects (and maybe even paid, with a crippled “freemium” option).
When that happens, the choice will be between: (A) a fully functional, open source Gecko engine that will not[1] work on many websites you will legally have to use; (B) a barely functional, open source Blink engine fork that may or may not work (but mostly won’t) on many websites you will legally have to use: and © a proprietary Blink engine that will be 100% supported on all the websites you will legally have to use.
And the same group that maintains Gecko might take on that Blink challenge… However, why would it be different then than it is with Gecko now? If they are already struggling, and at a disadvantage, with a solution they have decades of experience with, that they designed themselves, and that they entirely, fully control, what makes you think they will have a better time with a foreign, potentially purposely hostile software?
this is already the case with some (thankfully not legally mandatory) websites: many vendors artificially serve Firefox users popups prompting them to use “another browser” because Firefox “does not play well with others”… In most cases, for now, changing the User Agent is enough, but it isn’t technically hard to use JavaScript to test what browser a user has. ↩︎
Ugh. Lemmy just deleted my whole comment because “Cancel” is WAY too easy to press… Dammit. Here’s a reconstruction: What client are you using?
The website on desktop. Footer says “BE: 0.19.3” so it’s up to date.
- I “diffed” that license against the 3-clause BSD, and as you can see with the following command, it is a match (don’t blindly believe me, check the
Love the clapback
Great post but I just wasn’t able to let this go:
publicated
Published
Thank you so much. 🙏
I have no excuse, the autocorrect even underlined it…
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Today, only a relative handful of Firefox users are left. According to the US federal government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP), which gives us the running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits, only 2.2 percent of visitors use Firefox.
Look, I know far fewer people use Firefox than Chrome, but basing it on who uses U.S. government websites in the last 90 days doesn’t even make sense if Firefox users were only in the U.S.
I’m in the U.S. and use Firefox and I haven’t been to a U.S. government website in the last 90 days as far as I know.
And, I don’t know if the author knows this or not, but there’s around 200 other countries out there.
Some of those government websites only work on chromium too, which is irritating
You guys know of government websites that actually work?
For all the flaws of the UK our gov websites show information about gov laws and how to use services, and medical topics.
The ones hosted by my government literally shut down outside business hours…
Try to login to view your tax info for example and it’ll tell you to come back 9-5 mon-fri.
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Based off the User Agent varriable?
Opinion piece by a person who has little to say outside of ad-hominem.
Indeed. Article reads like a spoiled brat. “Get over it”. The second something like that appears, it’s crystal clear the writer thinks they’re above the reader.
Yeah, and she didn’t quit, she stepped down to get previous position on the board.
A lot of people in this thread seem to downplay the article with “yeah, that might be your opinion…” but two facts that are facts and not opinions are:
- The market share Firefox hold is insignificant.
- Mozilla’s business is a near 100% dependency on one “customer”, Google.
This means that if Google decides to stop bank rolling Mozilla it’s game over. Firstly because other revenue streams are currently near insignificant when you look at the total expenses.
Secondly because since Firefox hold no significant market share, no one else would be interested in investing in Mozilla and the future of Firefox. After all, whatever Mozilla will throw up on the wall as the “grand masterplan for world dominance” would just end up in the question “Why didn’t you do this before?”.
I’ve been using Firefox for almost 20 years. I started using it because I saw what happens when one company controls the browser market. That web browser did so much damage and we only really got rid of it some year ago.
Chrome is a perfect example that the history repeats itself and that people are fucking stupid. People are actually acting surprised and complain about Google putting effort into making adblocking impossible in Chrome.
So all in all, if Mozilla doesn’t find other revenue streams, Firefox is dead… It just doesn’t know it yet.
Now, everyone yapping about that Linux was an insignificant player and still made it to the top just sound like enthusiasts who really doesn’t know history and the harsh reality of doing business.
Linux was just a little more than hobby project (business wise) that essentially only Red Hat and Suse made real money from in the 90’s.
Arguably you could say that the turning point was when the CEO of IBM, Lou Gerstner, shocked the world by saying that IBM was going to pump in 1 billion dollars in Linux during 2001. Now, that doesn’t look like much today when just Red Hat has a yearly revenue of 3-4 billion, but that’s how insignificant Linux was at that time.
After that milestone Linux went for the jugular on Windows Server. For ordinary people it would still take almost 10 years before they would hold something Linux in their hands.
The rocket engine that accelerated Linux and pieces that it was ready for end users was Google and Android in 2007. Linux’s growth the last 20 years wasn’t mainly driven by enthusiasts, it was business pumping in money in future opportunities.
What future opportunities can Mozilla sell to investors with the market share Firefox has today?
Yup. Mozilla really needs to diversify and find new revenue sources.
They’ve been trying, but it’s proving difficult to do while still refraining from hoovering up and selling everybody’s data. Nobody wants to pay.
To make matters worse, anytime Mozilla tries to make any money, people accuse them of selling out or say they should just focus on Firefox. Some of these people even say that Firefox needs to get rid of Google funding immediately to get rid of Google’s influence.
But that means the death of Firefox. I don’t really get what these people want.
These people want to be rid of Google’s influence, which is why they chose Firefox over Chrome to begin with. But they don’t understand the position Mozilla is in…
Well yeah, I want that too, but it can’t happen until Mozilla is making a decent amount themselves
Some of these people even say that Firefox needs to get rid of Google funding immediately to get rid of Google’s influence.
Which is an importnt factor, because Mozilla is currently being kept alive specifcally to lose.
To be fair, those people (and lots others too) watch everyday some millionaires or billionaires just up and throwing money. Under that premise, it “should be as easy” as just convincing a random capitalist with narcissist complex to fund Mozilla. The problem with that is, people’s memory on the internet tends to not be retrospeculative, so they don’t notice if Mozilla did that they’d be in just about the same position eg.: Reddit was 5 years before 2023.
The issue is biggest for web browsers, but I also feel like I see that issue for a whole lot of web industries. Journalism, for instance. Everyone wants everything for free, and so the “articles” you see are garbage half churned out from algorithms to optimize click rate, and blanketed with dozens of ads. To take another example, games, we have a market saturated with freemium games that encourage people to spend nothing (and then hundreds). Pirates would now claim it’s a moral responsibility to pirate, but if we end up in that world, only a slim minority of people would ever make a living out of it.
The general unwillingness/inability for consumers to pay for digital content definitely causes a lot of problems now. I personally attribute it to a generally low minimum wage, but it could be an issue going beyond that.
Arguably Google needs Firefox and co to not lose chrome in Europe due to anti monopoly rulings. Think that is sadly the best thing Firefox has to offer investors.
The rocket engine that accelerated Linux and pieces that it was ready for end users was Google and Android in 2007.
N-no. Correct about IBM though.
It seems that what made Linux and FreeBSD relevant was the late 90s’ and early 00s’ Web. And FreeBSD then lost to Linux, not to Windows Server or Solaris.
Linux’s growth the last 20 years wasn’t mainly driven by enthusiasts, it was business pumping in money in future opportunities.
Only there are different kinds of businesses, and the balance between them is becoming worse.
Before IBM made that statement there were essentially no major software vendors that ported and supported their software on Linux.
Yes, one might argue that Linux-Apache-MySql-Php revolutionized things but other than that a clear majority of things were run on solutions that put money in Microsoft’s pockets.
Feel free to name drop some major finance systems or similar enterprise systems you could run without Microsoft cashing in on the OS in some way between 1990-2005.
As I wrote before, it took us 20 years to get rid of IE and a lot of proprietary server side junk Microsoft blessed us with. It’s not an coincidence. 99% of all companies were stuck in development tools from Microsoft.
It wasn’t until the hardware really really caught up with Java requirements that things really changed.
I’ve just found mentions of Linux support by Oracle before that, so there were things before IBM and that statement. Though on that page there’s no Linux link, but there are AIX, Solaris etc and an NT one.
Feel free to name drop some major finance systems or similar enterprise systems you could run without Microsoft cashing in on the OS in some way between 1990-2005.
Could you please, on the contrary, name some such systems strongly requiring Microsoft really? IIS and AD are not that.
I mean, OK, for the thick clients for administrators likely it’d be many things.
But everything IBM or commercial Unix-based, like, again, Oracle databases.
I’m born in 1996, so don’t really know what I’m talking about. Just seems a bit skewed.
Great write up, thank you very much!
I expect Google to keep Mozilla/Firefox on the lifeline indefinitely to avoid antitrust issues in the states and EU, so Mozilla/Firefox won’t go anywhere.
Still, this doesn’t mean anything, because I often need Chrome or Safari to access some websites.
In the end it is quite funny: Moving a lot of stuff to the web made Linux a more realistic desktop option, at the same time to access a lot of stuff on the web one needs to run a Blink browser.
IMHO the most annoying thing is, that we could have at least some laws, which mandate that every government service must be available to Open Source users and every government paid software must run on at least Linux. Thanks to lobbying and power this will never happen.
Edit: To state it more clearly: Firefox is IMHO in bad shape and in a bad situation. Firefox won’t die, but at the same time right now I already need Chrome/Safari browsers, because Firefox support is broken on many sites. I see no way Firefox can gain significant market share, especially seeing what regular consumers tolerate from Microsoft/Edge and Google/Chrome.
One big problem, even if Google continues to pour money into Mozilla, is that more and more sites and systems drops support for Firefox. When I say “drop” I mean implement measures for making it harder to use a service if you use Firefox. Even Google does this.
Really appreciate the perspective, thank you for sharing
It’s just sad. I love my Firefox and will always do…
Solid write up and a great question!
This sure is an opinion.
Lol, that sentence sure describes The Register in general
Never even heard of The Register before right now. Been using Firefox for most of my life. This checks out.
My only question is, why do so few people use Firefox?
Most internet usage is mobile and people use whatever’s preinstalled on their phone because it just works is my guess.
And also Firefox on mobile is kind of a hot mess. Videos regularly are unable to play and dark mode is wonky until you restart the app.
How do you mean? I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and aside from one website (my bank) everything I’ve tried to do with it has been perfectly fine. It even has adblock and videos play in the background. I’ve also not seen any issues with dark mode; I’m using dark mode right now, actually.
By videos you also mean youtube videos? Because last time I tried firefox it could not do that.
I have auto dark mode during night time. In the morning, my phone will switch to light mode, but parts of the Firefox UI do not. It will be half in and out of dark mode. Bottom toolbar will be dark, but the top bar (notifications, battery, etc.) will be white text against white background. In the mornings, Youtube videos frequently wont play until I restart the app.
As far as I know, Firefox Mobile doesn’t have a bottom toolbar so I’m not really sure what you are referring to there (at least, there’s no bottom toolbar in Firefox on Android where I’m using it), and the notification/battery area is definitely not part of Firefox. It sounds like your phone’s system UI is providing those elements, and it’s likely not really fair to blame problems with the system UI on Firefox.
Firefox on Android can be configured with the address / tab bar at the bottom - possibly this is what they’re referring to, but that also doesn’t dynamically change per site as far as I’m aware.
It does have a bottom toolbar and was configured like that by default before. They must have changed the default some time ago.
System UI is just standard Google Pixel UI and it reacts to apps signaling to it what color theme it’s in. Firefox just isn’t signaling it correctly. It also should be reacting normally to dark mode toggle but it doesn’t because the main Fx toolbar doesn’t change to light mode in the mornings. No other app has this issue.
I totally agree, this has been my experience with FF mobile too. It’s not a killer but it is a bit annoying, especially for those of us who still do use light mode when outdoors on a bright day.
Try the Firefox Beta instead of stable, no clue why, but it runs much better. You also get access to “about:config” back (they removed it from the stable version :-/).
Never had any issues. Been using it for years. It was slow in the early days, but now its a better experience then Chrome. Might be different on IOS.
Agree it is kind of buggy on iOS.
Flawless on desktop though.
that’s ironic, because Firefox on iOS is just rebranded Safari, as is every other browser on iOS.
Yeah I know. Sometimes tabs just stop working and I have to kill the app.
Firefox on iOS is just Safari with a skin. You’re likely experiencing quirks with Apple’s WebKit engine.
I see, yeah that makes sense. Especially because mobile firefox really wasn’t that good as a normal browser anyway.
It’s pretty good now and you can install add-ons like uBlock Origin in it.
No idea why I got downvoted but I’ve been using it on my phone since I switched from iOS to android in 2014.
And yes I also very welcome that they finally let you install extensions.
You could install extensions beforehand as well.
but only a hand full as I remember.
Any browser without adblock is utter crap. So Firefox with uBlock Origin has been doing great for me. Try the Firefox Beta version, it somehow runs a lot better than stable.
There are features, like swiping the url bar to switch tabs, that are missing on the pre installed Chrome, but the firefox has them. Chrome has nothing to offer over firefox, besides your data collection
I can swipe the URL bar on Chrome to switch tabs, what do you mean?
Ah, seems like it works now, it has been a while since I’ve used it. But it still doesn’t have an option for moving the url bar to the bottom of the screen and blocking trackers.
As I recall, Chrome got it first, and I was waiting for a long while for Firefox to add it too.
But yeah, bar at the bottom is where it’s at.
I wonder if it’s the diversification within the Chromium user space.
There are a ton of browsers based on Chromium each with their own little gimmick.
On the other side there’s basically just Firefox.
From a casual point of view, I don’t think there’s much reason to go for Firefox. It doesn’t really stand out from that point of view.
Website incompatibility keeps me from using it 100%. Certain websites are simply non-functional except in a Chrome-based browser and I don’t have the shits to give to swap only for those sites. I might start the day with Firefox and by the end I’m using Brave.
I switched back to Firefox about 2 years ago, and I’ve only encountered a few sites that don’t work properly.
With the exception of ONE annoying SaaS site I need at work (which I might use a ton for a week then not again for weeks), I’ve only had to open a site in Chrome/edge maybe once a month. That includes running Firefox on my phone in addition to my work and personal desktop/laptops.
Do some websites refuse to function even with useragent spoofing?
Haven’t tried this before. Worth a shot.
Nice try Manifest v3 pushers
I just like the cute fox picture
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Firefox will live on regardless of Mozilla’s support. Since it’s FOSS the community will keep it alive
Will it though? Seems like the kind of task that requires a huge amount of effort, way beyond the kind of capacity you get from casual contributions in peoples’ spare time…might be difficult to maintain feature parity and implement new standards without a full time team on it.
couldnt you say the same about linux?
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Linux is cheating by having every major tech company help develop the kernel
Sounds like we just gotta add Firefox to the kernel while Linus is on vacation.
firefox doesnt have any corporate friends besides mozilla?
Not many and none that I can think of with deep pockets (besides google). I think the corporate world has almost completely piled on Chrome.
True, but web designers already treat Firefox and its offshoots as an afterthought. Do you think without Mozilla it would get even worse?
the corporate world seems desperate to kill it. its chrome/edge or GTFO
In swear this mainly has to do with it’s about:config being so much more robust and vast than chromium’s //flags settings. The fact so many privacy related forks (Librewolf, Mullvad, Mull, Tor) are based off of firefox and not chromium (Ungoogled Chromium) should point to why these corporations are seething at it.
Google was/is keeping Firefox afloat via funding as the article points out. This is mainly due to the fact that Google didn’t have a real competitor in the browser space for some time until Microsoft got Edge off the ground and finally killed Internet Explorer.
Personally I see Firefox as being the superior browser for privacy and customization. I also don’t think it’s going anywhere, but it’s funding relying so heavily on one entity is an issue. If Google decides to pull it’s funding of Firefox and no other major corporation steps in to provide the needed cash flow… well who knows, guess it’ll be a chromium world after all.
Good corpos should made suffer ,the more they cope and seethe the better
They all want to FULLY control the end user.
- probe and profile the device used
- force unstoppable ads
- require GPS location and maybe 2fa to make sure it’s you that is watching the ads. -web assembly alone will make script blocking impossible and enable scammers to run anything they want.
The end result will be something like the DVD menus from the 90s and 00s. The difference is that it will have full access to all the data on your computer or device.
A huge portion of Firefox code is ancient. Never mind that the codebase is gigantic. Small FOSS projects fail to organize properly, I can’t imagine maintaining Firefox without Mozilla would be a small feat.
People like this scare me.
I scare me too
I often can’t tell if they are just saying stuff like that to cope or they are really that optimistic/naive. It’s a similar mentality to people constantly giving benefit of the doubt to kickstarter / early access projects that have like a 1% chance of actually living up to the made promises.
The feds should mandate that all websites must be accessible by Firefox. Plus, they should completely switch to Firefox internally.
How would you define “accessible”? The web app I’m working on works in Firefox, but a few text labels are misaligned with their input controls due to slight CSS deviation from Chromium. It’s those things that are most of the problems for supporting both browsers, functionality-wise they’re very close (except newer features that Firefox hasn’t implemented yet or Google-specific features like WebUSB).
I thought it was funny when cockpit a web interface for Linux servers said my Firefox browser was out of date. It locked me out for security reasons until I accessed it with an updated version of Firefox. I was using archlinux and ran updates that morning.
It wasn’t that inconvenient I just SSH into my server for whatever I was doing and they fixed it in about a week.
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The firefox looks more like foxkeh from the old japanese firefox site.
Kinda disappointed in The Register of all things adopting this faux personal life story reporting style on such a matter.
This is the opinion column.
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I blocked this website on my news feed because of this article. It’s opinion piece written by an asshat.
