> As for "making the world a better place", again, there seems to be some kind of implicit political agenda.
Ironically, Firefox could make the world a slightly better place (in a very specific aspect of the world) if they focused simply in making a great web browser, without unnecessary bells and whistles and without any politic posturing, but that aimed at denting the Chrome monopoly.
That's no longer their goal, though. Their goal is to appear like they care about making a better browser, while actually doing whatever makes the executives the most money.
So, is Firefox effectively on life-support, and functioning purely as a corpse from which the MBA-type vultures who encircle it can pluck morsels of resumé-fluff at the browser's expense?
It's just my opinion, but yes and no. There's still quite a few decent people working on the browser, and they deserve props. The browser is really good code-wise. The problem is everything else around it.
The current CEO, Mitchell Baker, is clearly in it for the money. She got a salary increase while cutting 250 employees last year, and still had the audacity to say it wasn't enough. Brendan Eich had a bit of political controversy, but being a technical person I think he would've been better as far as focusing on the actual browser.
> Brendan Eich had a bit of political controversy, but being a technical person I think he would've been better as far as focusing on the actual browser.
He didn't have a political controversy. He was pushed out because he didn't subscribe to the US democrat partisan allowed views, but quite the opposite, which is a fireable offense, apparently.
I don't agree with him on that stance but it shouldn't matter to run a tech company.
I absolutely know that those who censor and fire for political differences definitely don't have my best interests at heart and, while claiming to represent me and my "diversity", they'll brush me aside with a label as soon as I'm not convenient to them or go against their power hungry messaging.
Brendan Eich was a sign of the authoritarian and censorious movement which also tried to bring down the likes of Linus Torvalds or RMS but ultimately failed because it doesn't really produce value and they do, far too much.
Just because someone says they're doing good while claiming you're evil if you don't agree with their non debatable measures doesn't mean they're right, consistent and/or honest.
Eich was in a position to benefit from the size and scope of Mozilla's user base, much as Mitchell Baker is today. The difference is, AFAIK Baker doesn't use her money and influence to rally the electorate to deprive other people of their rights.
It's disingenuous in the extreme for you to cite Eich's victimhood at the hands of a mythical "cancel culture" when the real cancel culture is powered by government-backed forces that he helped to nurture and guide.
In short, if you want to leverage your celebrity and influence to make the world a worse place rather than a better one, you can't expect people to ignore it. There's a fellow named Musk who is likely to learn the same lesson if he doesn't step off the path he's on now.
I wrote a whole reply and then deleted when you're basically:
- pushing for deplatforming based on your own authoritarianism.
- claiming whatever you do is right and should allow no debate.
- threatening Elon mask för some weird reason.
Authoritarians who feel right to censor, attack and deplatform are a problem no matter if they're Religious conservatives or identity politics fanatics.
Both are rabid and don't make the world a better place.
You seem to be one of them and your threats are tired at this point.
No one censored Eich. They just exercised their right to determine whom they associated with... a right I suspect you'd defend to the death in other circumstances.
It's all fun and games until the guns come out. At that point, the person who initiates force, or who supports those who do, is the bad guy. That would be Eich.
> No one censored Eich. They just exercised their right to determine whom they associated with... a right I suspect you'd defend to the death in other circumstances.
That is semantic bullshit. Anyone who is paying a modicum of attention knows that a mixture of woke/US democrat pushed causes have a very specific narrative that, when you oppose them, your person, job, funding, etc might be attacked no matter how many people agree with you. It's not about democracy or diversity but power. BLM or trans issues are the most obvious ones at the moment.
I don't agree with Eich on that particular point but that doesn't matter. Most of the woke mob didn't think those things either until suddenly "they had to".
A very apt man for the job was set aside because he had dared contributed politically to a cause that US democrat narrative decided in "current year" that was bad (funny how current year - N, they might be held those positions).
> It's all fun and games until the guns come out. At that point, the person who initiates force, or who supports those who do, is the bad guy. That would be Eich
No. That would be you and the woke mob, camper bob. Because you posit that words or political opinions are guns or force, which is insane. You call speech violence in order to justify using violence or censorship yourself. But you're the very type of thing you claim to be against, the bully that attacks pretending they're the victim and simply responding in kind.
You're the problem because you think your moral superiority should allow you to exert violence whenever you want for you have the "righteousness" on your side.
In any case, people are wising up to it. If all ethnicities, country of origin, creeds, etc. They don't want to be attacked (themselves or their livelihoods) because they don't hold the right opinion TM: Identity Politics, the current year war (Iraq, Libya, Ukraine) or whatever else US centric thing people push down our throats.
I really feel they shouldn't go all in on it right now. Winds are changing and they'll end up alienating the new youth that I see hints of starting to push back at the feel good activism for the sake of activism.
Why, make a browser that is lighter, faster, and more privacy focused. And with excellent support for plugin developers. Let the bells and whistles be plugins developed by third parties.
Chrome is the product of a company whose mandate is extracting as much data as possible from its users to feed their ad business. Firefox can and should be better, as they could be 100% user focused.
A Chrome monopoly in the browser space has the potential to be more damaging to the web than the Microsoft monopoly in days gone by. They want to make the world a better place? Well, they could have made the web a better place, if they could meaningfully take some share away from Chrome.
It's going to be hard, almost impossible, to be faster than chrome, with the huge amount of money and man-power Google can throw at things. They can probably get "lighter" (as in support fewer things), but I don't think that's going to make things any faster.
Also, experience tells us that being fast and light is incompatible with excellent plugin support, as the more hooks you provide for plugins, the less you can change without breaking those plugins -- that was Firefox's previous problem.
Google's main focus is in extracting rent from their dominance, not in making the browser faster, lighter or whatever.
As for plugin support, that's the challenge no? Make it so the contract for third party plugins can be maintained without breaking them every 6 months as the browser improves.
Firefox has excellent developers. The fact that it still has some relevance despite many years of mismanagement is testament to that. I bet if the company behind the browser was laser focused in making it as good as possible, with no compromise, they could challenge Chrome dominant position.
> In what significant ways could Firefox be improved, such that it would help most users, over Chrome?
Finish making gecko reusable so people can use it instead of blink whenever someone wants to make a custom skin, or instead of electron for "desktop" apps. I grant that it's not immediately user-facing, but it would help give them the actual market share so that web devs have a reason to care about gecko.
FWIW, the Firefox devs who were doing the WebReplay time travel debugging POC weren't, as far as I know, fired. Instead, they left and started Replay ( https://replay.io ), a true time-traveling debugger for JavaScript.
I joined Replay as a senior front-end dev a year ago. It's real, it works, we're building it, and it's genuinely life-changing as a developer :)
Not sure how well this would have fit into Firefox as a specific feature, given both the browser C++ runtime customizations and cloud wizardry needed to make this work. But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.
Obligatory sales pitch while I'm writing this:
The basic idea of Replay: Use our special browser to make a recording of your app, load the recording in our debugger, and you can pause at any point in the recording. In fact, you can add print statements to any line of code, and it will show you what it would have printed _every time that line of code ran_!
From there, you can jump to any of those print statement hits, and do typical step debugging and inspection of variables. So, it's the best of both worlds - you can use print statements and step debugging, together, at any point in time in the recording.
> Not sure how well this would have fit into Firefox as a specific feature, given both the browser C++ runtime customizations and cloud wizardry needed to make this work.
Well it worked on firefox before, but only on macOS:
One improvement would be to have their actions reflect their messaging. They claim their browser is about privacy, yet I am tweaking more and more settings as time goes on. Sometimes it is to enjoy the features where they are available. In other cases, it is to circumvent their actions which are contrary to my definition of privacy.
For Android, Firefox still only allows a small list of "recommend" add-ons. The developer workaround requires listing them in some online account.
I want a way to instal things on my system without a third party graciously allowing me to, that's what I'd consider freedom and why I try to avoid the playstore like the plague. Seeing Mozilla to not be better either is just sad :(
In one sentence: Make it the browser that fixes the web. E.g. Remove ads, privacy popups , paywalls, ad tracking, and other annoyances. Make the plugin ecosystem so good that people flock to help you with that and then people will only want go browse the web that way.
It should be a noble goal that acts as a beacon for others to follow. It'll lose money at first, but they'll keep their core privacy and power user base, until people come around.
Oh and stop following google and privacy advocates supposed efforts to make the web "safer". Those are all mostly propaganda and feel good initiatives whilst the tracking still happens. But that's a long side rant from a pet peeve of mine.
Ironically, Firefox could make the world a slightly better place (in a very specific aspect of the world) if they focused simply in making a great web browser, without unnecessary bells and whistles and without any politic posturing, but that aimed at denting the Chrome monopoly.