You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this.
And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content.
I can't help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no way improves Mozilla's browser.
> It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world.
That's exactly what they're doing with the biggest ad trackers and browser vendors. A lot of Mozilla's "side-projects" are stupid and I also agree they should focus more on Firefox, but this one is pretty in line with their general mission of "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".
I can compare it in a way when Rage Against the Machine signed with a major label conscious that the tradeoff was worth it.
>"Evil Empire" entered the Billboard charts at No. 1, which reflects the broad audience the band has built. "I personally never thought that we'd ever sell a single record," Morello recalls, but it looks as if signing with Epic has worked. "True, we are a major-label band," he concedes. "But we're using the mechanism of the record label to spread revolutionary propaganda." [1]
... one which they also made a nice little profit of. $150M in the non-voting stock they bought in 1997 turned into $550M in 2003 when they sold most of it.
On the face of it that sounds like a burn on Microsoft, wisely found by studying the finances, but... by the nature of Apple being the best performing stock in the world for multiple years isn't the same true for most companies, that they could've made more money investing in Apple than in themselves?
Heck, maybe investing hundreds of millions in Apple today would, in X years, be worth more money than spending marketing money / development budgets for new features for their own products; or worth more than investing in OpenAI and related products - but it's not exactly something anyone would suggest Microsoft should do (in terms of just becoming a shareholder, of course there could be collaborations without changing this point).
Technically yes, but not really. It’s specifically valid to observe with regards to Microsoft because Microsoft did in actual fact hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Apple stock for a decent stretch of time. Most companies did not.
Microsoft chose to sell their Apple stock in 2003. This was entirely their choice. They didn't have to. They could have sold it in 2005 and made an additional billion dollars. They could have sold it in 2007 and made another ten billion dollars. They could have sold it today and made a hundred billion dollars.
Microsoft never gave them any lifeline. Microsoft was caught shipping stolen Apple Quicktime code and quietly settled with Apple to the tune of $150mil and shipping Apple versions of Office/IE.
"the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million."
"Intel gave this code to Microsoft as part of a joint development program called Display Control Interface."
"Canyon admitted that it had copied to Intel code developed for and assigned to Apple. In September 1994, Apple's software was distributed by Microsoft in its developer kits, and in Microsoft's Video for Windows version 1.1d."
MS buying Apple stock involved a pretty complicated deal that also involved settling a number of court disputes between the two companies, Apple agreeing to ship Internet Explorer for Mac (rather than Netscape) and MS agreeing to ship Office for at least 5 more years.
At the time and subsequently it was absolutely seen as a lifeline.
For example:
> Providing the biggest sign of hope yet for ailing Apple Computer, Microsoft today announced it was forging a new era of cooperation with its longtime rival that includes an investment of $150 million. [snip] News of the alliance sent Apple's stock up $7 a share, or 35 percent
Yes and/but there was real concern then that they'd stop supporting it which would have killed Mac use in corporate environments where specific version of office compatibility was a huge issue (As anyone who remembers the Office 2.0 vs Office 6 update on Windows will remember).
Unclear why people are disagreeing with this. It's outlined in the DoJ "finding of fact":
> Recognizing the importance of Mac Office to Apple's survival, Microsoft threatened to cancel the product unless Apple compromised on a number of outstanding issues between the companies. One of these issues was the extent to which Apple distributed and promoted Internet Explorer, as opposed to Navigator, with the Mac OS.
> At the end of June 1997, the Microsoft executive in charge of Mac Office, Ben Waldman, sent a message to Gates and Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer, Greg Maffei. The message reflected Waldman's understanding that Microsoft was threatening to cancel Mac Office:
> The pace of our discussions with Apple as well as their recent unsatisfactory response have certainly frustrated a lot of people at Microsoft. The threat to cancel Mac Office 97 is certainly the strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately. I also believe that Apple is taking this threat pretty seriously
[snip]
> Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office . . . ."
Ah it was Word 2.0 vs Word 6.0 (which was roughly Office 3.0 vs Office 4.0)
Word 2.0 shipped on a lot of Windows NT computers with Office 3.0 and these were the days when there weren't forced updates and you had to pay so it hung around for ages.
When Microsoft invested a paltry $250M in Apple, Apple had already secured a line of credit of $4 Billion.
On top of that, Apple turned around a spent $100 million the same quarter to buy out PowerComputing’s Mac license. Apple lost way more than $150 million before they became profitable.
The idea is that Rust is to Firefox what C is to Unix. It is a general purpose language, but one that is specifically designed to address the kind of problem you have when writing a web browser.
It was a Mozilla side project, but with Servo, totally in line with its mission of making a good web browser. I'd even say it was a necessary long term plan. Chrome was the better, more modern browser, and Firefox needed fundamental improvements like these to compete. If anything, I think they should have spent more energy on Rust and Servo, not less.
> Software developer Graydon Hoare created Rust as a personal project while working at Mozilla Research in 2006. Mozilla officially sponsored the project in 2009
Rust is different though, because its purpose was to make Firefox more secure. So the ultimate goal was to improve the browser. Maybe there is some way this acquisition leads to a better browser, but I don't see it.
"Actively collaborating" meaning doing the bare minimum to keep Google paying while actively fighting the bad things Google does everywhere else?
This is the rich philanthropists debate all over again. Yea, sure, they got rich from participating in the system, but they're using a big chunk of that wealth to fight its consequences. Sure as hell beats the alternative, where the only people willing to fight are the ones without the resources to do it.
I'd honestly rather see Firefox development be funded by selling NFTs and mining crypto, than not funded at all. Volunteer/donation-driven FOSS is great, but it has never been able to compete with for-profit products and it sure as hell couldn't compete with Google here.
But their marketing copy has a bunch of differently colored corporate Memphis people doing happy and fun things, surely they have our best interest at heart!
> "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".
Smoke and mirrors more like it. They collaborate with Facebook and Google all the time. 80%-90% of their revenue comes from Google. Fighting the 'big guys' for real would mean shutting shop and never to be seen again.
wtf are y'all on about?? Do you really think we'd be better off with Chromium becoming the one and only web engine, with Google singlehandedly deciding what web features are implemented and how?
Has Google ever mentioned anything about privacy? (privacy from hackers doesn't count, that's security) Do you think Apple, with the joke of a browser that is Safari and basically zero stake in the web, would be able to keep Google from turning the web into its own closed little sandbox?
Who would say "if Chrome kills adblockers, switch to our browser" and be able to actually sustain it, not just keep their Chromium fork slightly out of date for as long as they can get away with?
The only reason Firefox has been able to survive this long after Chrome's launch is Mozilla's historic importance. A new player could never dream to compete with Google - even Microsoft failed! If Mozilla folds, who else do you think will be able to compete with Google? Stallman himself?? This is the real world and compromises must be made.
> Do you really think we'd be better off with Chromium becoming the one and only web engine, with Google singlehandedly deciding what web features are implemented and how?
What makes you think they're not doing that now and Mozilla's existence even matters in this case? Funny enough, they're only keeping Mozilla alive to avoid any antitrust cases.
> would be able to keep Google from turning the web into its own closed little sandbox?
Flawed argument. If Google all of a sudden stops funding Mozilla, do you think that they're going to continue development of the browser? Firefox has steadily been losing market share for years, the writing is on the walls.
The fact that Mozilla's existence itself depends on Big-Tech is one huge irony. It's like saying, “I'm against meat eating... Oh hey, my hamburger is here!”.
> Who would say "if Chrome kills adblockers, switch to our browser" and be able to actually sustain it, not just keep their Chromium fork slightly out of date for as long as they can get away with?
> What makes you think they're not doing that now and Mozilla's existence even matters in this case? Funny enough, they're only keeping Mozilla alive to avoid any antitrust cases.
Firefox developers are still in the standards organisations and their position on new proposals does have some weight on the way they're written. Google is funding Mozilla for good PR, it's not like they're in any real danger from antitrust legislation. I say take the money if they're offering and do as much good for the web as you can until it runs out. It's not like you're sacrificing anything for it, it's basically free money.
> If Google all of a sudden stops funding Mozilla, do you think that they're going to continue development of the browser?
I don't know, but even if they immediately drop Firefox when that happens, we still have it until then. If Firefox disappears now, we're fucked. But who knows what might change until then - maybe someone figures out a business model for browsers, or some other tech or policy makes it easier to compete. When/if that happens, starting from a near-monopoly is way better than a complete monopoly.
> Literally Brave
What was that about ethics again? Also, it's just a closely following Chromium fork, so they don't really have a say in how Blink develops.
We should not be talking about ethics if we're talking about Mozilla either. From shameless extension backdoors to not blocking trackers from Google on purpose, it's all over the place when it comes to ethics and privacy. At least Brave directly challenges Big Tech by making bolder decisions to block them instead of being afraid like Firefox, enabling trackers and not providing any privacy against Google.
What Brave has done with respect to privacy features, Firefox couldn't even do it in decades:
I do understand that Brave is a chromium fork and that they depend on Chromium for patches but this is still a FOSS browser that is independently funded and has better statistical chances of survival than Firefox. Brave's MAU is very good, almost doubling every year since its first release. On top of that, they're the only existing company that challenges Big Tech search engine monopoly by actually providing a great privacy focused search engine that is also independently indexed.
Firefox is a series of unfulfilled promises and failures. An untapped potential ruined by management.
> We should not be talking about ethics if we're talking about Mozilla either. From shameless extension backdoors to not blocking trackers from Google on purpose, it's all over the place when it comes to ethics and privacy. At least Brave directly challenges Big Tech by making bolder decisions to block them instead of being afraid like Firefox, enabling trackers and not providing any privacy against Google.
You mean the Brave that collected rewards revenue for websites that weren't enrolled in their program? Or the brave that literally changed the url that the users typed in the url bar?
Also, do you have any source for Mozilla not blocking googles trackers? AFAIK they do, and did, block their trackers thou they had to do it differently for google analytics as to not break some webpages. Because of that you did not see those being blocked in the UI but they were blocked.
> What Brave has done with respect to privacy features, Firefox couldn't even do it in decades:
Well, unlike Brave, Mozilla is making a whole browser.
> I do understand that Brave is a chromium fork and that they depend on Chromium for patches but this is still a FOSS browser that is independently funded
You asked earlier how long would Mozilla exist if google cut their founding. How long do you think would Brave exist if google decided to go closed source with chrome?
I'm happy for them to branch out, but it is discouraging that once every 3-4 months I run into a bug or feature I need, google it, and am taken to a bug report in their tracker from 5-10 years ago that hasn't been touched.
I don't know of any software projects of comparable size and complexity that doesn't have years-old bugs languishing in limbo. This is the normal state of affairs for a web browser, and it's the result of human-factor bottlenecks that aren't easy to solve even for well-capitalized projects. Large projects end up having subsystems that work reliably enough, such that their developers can afford to shift their attention elsewhere. Over time various details fall out of working memory. You get to a point where there is a high up-front cost to making any significant changes to the subsystem because it requires a significant investment of time for people to acquire (or re-acquire) the degree of familiarity that is needed to make such changes comfortably. If this cost can be amortized over a large backlog of feature requests and bugs, so it can keep someone busy for a while, then it is worthwhile. But it often isn't.
A primary software at work is $1,500 to $10,000 a seat (depending on extensions) plus 10% annual maintenance. Our department annual fee is ~$70,000. I have a long list of "vote up this enhancement request or bug to get it fixed" that goes back almost two decades. (It's hard to identify the oldest because the vendor has switched tracking platforms twice.)
I never understood what geolocation was supposed to be within the context of of a desktop browser. If a website asks for this information, and I approve, what information is transmitted that couldn't be determined serverside via geoip?
GeoIP tells you at best what city someone is in, and even then, for smaller towns, will usually report the nearest large city, which could be quite a ways a way. Not to mention it's often even just flat-out wrong. VPNs and other things distort where you are. Sometimes a website might need (or at least think it needs) correct, fine-grained location information.
I do suspect that most websites that ask for location information could do fine with GeoIP, but that doesn't mean there isn't any use for more reliable, fine-grained location data.
It's something a webpage can access on it's backend (the database of ssid/bssid and their locations) and something your computer uses(the access points its seeing) to locate you in the lack of a gps receiver and saying yes to the browser seeing your location.
Browsers have geolocation api, webpage uses it. Then browser utilizes underlying OS capabilities to determine the location. On the phone it could use GPS, regular PC may relay on SSID of wifi networks, etc.
I don't think the BSSIDs are sent using the HTML5 location service.
Instead your computer operating system sends the BSSIDs to another service, get the location back and then your browser uses this location service to send a lat,long to the requesting website.
Then you represent a trivially small fraction of users. My desktop doesn't have wifi either, but most modern motherboards come with a wifi card built in. Not to mention the majority of visitors to mainstream sites are on mobile and a good chunk of the rest are on a laptop. Also Firefox has 3% market share so we're talking about a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.
I run Qubes unless I'm doing something very performance-oriented like massively parallel workloads. So Firefox doesn't know about the builtin wifi card, which has no antenna connected, because I don't use it and it's just in the way anyway.
So yeah I have a wifi card, technically, but also technically don't from the point of view of firefox or any other program on my computer.
On the desktop, it might be limited in the sources it has. GeoIP is one source, of course, but that's often wrong or too coarse-grained (or distorted by things like VPNs). The BSSIDs of nearby WiFi access points can help make that better, but that depends on you being close enough to APs in its dataset. Most desktops don't have actual GPS hardware.
Of course. But the desktop reports both estimated location and estimated accuracy. I'm complaining about the inaccuracy of the accuracy, not of the location.
Most MacBooks have a GPS antenna, so they will return pretty accurate location.
And having a consistent API is important too, not having to care if your code is running on mobile or desktop is pretty nice.
Although I am unfamiliar with what is sent with geolocation, I do use a VPN, and allowing geolocation on a website does pull my correct location even when connected somewhere far away.
The geolocation API uses location services on your device. This doesn't rely on your IP and instead looks at nearby WiFi access points and uses a 3rd party service to translate them to GPS locations.
for implicit it is reverse-geocoded from your IP address
for explicit it is using device GPS and/or cell tower
either you are not actually connected to the VPN or the website is storing your consent to access GPS coordinates. I'm not sure which is scarier
to test the former go to a few different websites that tell you your IP address
for the latter, fully clear your browser's cookies and cache and retry. does it ask to access fine location?
another reason could be that you are logged in to e.g. google who already knows where you are based on historic searches, nearby wifi and bluetooth devices, etc.
Thank you for the response, most likely it is browser cookies, as I've checked my IP address has changed and that there are no leaks. I will try running from a different browser in incognito mode to see if it still works.
I've had a cross-platform issue for ELEVEN YEARS with Firefox randomly not copying text into the clipboard, even when I 'cut' it-- i.e. the text disappears on cut but paste pastes whatever was in the clipboard before. I cannot be the only person with this problem. And yet the bug persists, and invariably someone pops in and tells me it's down to the extensions I have installed, despite not having any of the same extensions now that I did in 2012.
As a user, Firefox feels like hobby project, but at least it's not a Google product.
> but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding
I had been using Firefox since 2002, when it was called Phoenix.
I switched to a Chromium-based browser because the performance difference was noticable enough, and I am in the browser often enough, to finally throw in the towel and switch.
They have a huge amount of money coming in from Google. Why is this going to acquisitions like this and not towards strengthening the development so that it remains competitive? Or are they, and I am not aware?
If it doesn't remain competitive on things like performance, standards compliance, etc. there are very few reasons for the average user to choose Firefox over any other browser at the moment. The privacy-focus is good, but there are other browsers that do the same on Chromium.
How long ago did you switch? I also switched around 2010 or so, but since a few years the performance is definitely acceptable and I’ve been using it for like 6 years now
For a year or two now you'd hear people moving back to ff because of improved performance but you decided to ditch ff after the improved performance. Strange.
I have a similar history, although a year or two ago I switched back to FF for everything other than development - I still find their dev tools far slower and less helpful than Chrome/Edge. For general use though, FF has been just fine and it has container tabs, which is pretty much a killer feature for me.
From my perspective Mozilla is doing a better job with their browser than Google and Apple are, that's why I use it (despite the market share, I prefer their implementation of most things compared to alternatives). Everything else is gravy.
I'm not sure that the money Mozilla spends on other things would be better spent on the browser... would it realistically close any existing gaps between their competition? Arguably they might even be better off spending it on marketing the browser than any technical metric. I'd rather this kind of thing than marketing.
Depends on what metrics you are using. Compatibility, APIs, Performance, Firefox is objectively worse than Chrome on all aspects.
I like Mozilla as a company and I still use Firefox over Chrome knowing that it is objectively a worse browser and experience because I dislike Google and their business practices and i support businesses that I believe in. I am very much against the monopoly Google has over the web space and their positioning to dictate future web standards that will probably benefit their ad revenue over user experience.
I do not remember the last time a website actually failed to work in Firefox. Once in a blue moon I'll come across a site (looking at you, SnapChat) that claims it won't work, but suddenly is just just hunky-dory with a quick User-Agent string swap. We've gotten to a point where if your site doesn't work identically in Firefox and Chrome, you're probably doing something pathological.
With regards to APIs, I'm very happy with Firefox's commitment to telling Google to go fuck itself when it comes to Manifest V3 neutering of adblocking.
Chrome's compatibility is 100%, because it's defined in terms of compatibility with Chrome. (Despite the fact took 21 years before Chromium got a limited subset of MathML, when Firefox had it from Mozilla 1.)
> I am very much against the monopoly Google has over the web space and their positioning to dictate future web standards
Then, to the extent you can, stop using Google-controlled browser engines. Google can only dictate future web "standards" if they're the de-facto standard browser engine… so just refuse to acknowledge them.
If you make websites, use stuff that only works in Firefox (and the indie browsers), like Content MathML, or stick to stuff that works in every browser – and by that, I mean clean, semantic HTML. Force Google to play catch-up for once, or make the whole "catch-up" game irrelevant.
My favourite such feature is alternate stylesheets. Supported by Firefox, and by basically every CSS-supporting indie browser, but by almost none of the Chromiums.
In terms of compatibility, depends what is being tested. Firefox (and IE curiously) have had far better support for splitting content when printing - Chrome requiring odd hacks to avoid bits of elements overlapping the table header/footer when page split for a very long time (last time I retested the situation had somewhat improved. It still had issues with splitting but content no longer merged making hiding the tbody under the thead easier).
Chrome also deliberately broke CSS2 years after it was supposedly completely implemented to simplify their rendering, breaking existing websites. (this was showcased on their "html5 rocks" website at one point to quite a lot of protest from other browsers). Everyone ended having to follow Chrome's lead at that point, but for a while who was "fully compliant" would be up in the air. Amusingly it seems to me anchor positioning Chrome just added to CSS3 allows doing those things they considered un-performant, a decade later.
Google has also implemented rather dubious specs, like WebUSB where it is understandable no one else has implemented yet due to security concerns - but that would also drag down scores further.
Firefox mobile allows me to use uBlock Origin. That alone for me is worth more than any other browser features combined.
Now, if I can find how to make it stop opening a new tab every time I enter an URL in the address bar instead of reusing the current tab, the experience would be blissful.
There are no Chrome builds for Linux on ARM, for instance. (There might be Chromium builds but that won't have the proprietary Google stuff like account sync.)
> And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world.
I use FakeSpot a lot, and it's less about finding AI written reviews and more about finding any fake reviews, human written or not. They don't need to try and tell if reviews are actually written by a human, just if they are authentic. A reviewer with only 1 review on their whole account will be flagged as suspicious. A reviewer with only reviews for the same company will be marked as definitely fake. It also does things like look for repeated sentiments across all reviews for a product. Sometimes it gets false positives, like a review for a chair might legitimately have 30% of users saying the phrase "super/very/really comfy" at some point in their review. But because it's repeated so much it's flagged as indicating fake reviews.
There are lots of companies working on making convincing language models. ChatGPT is pretty much already at that level for something simple like Amazon reviews. But there aren't any large AI companies working on AI that can fake looking like an authentic group of reviewers. Those are all more shady businesses without billion dollar budgets.
Sure the problem of writing a single convincing review is now solved for those shady businesses. But the really sophisticated ones were already paying humans to write the reviews before good LLM's came along. There's also the issue of sellers themselves including a card or followup email promising a small gift card in exchange for a 5 star review.
You're thinking like an engineer (functionality) and not like a businessman (assets).
You've addressed some of the assets well: the tech, product, etc.
Mozilla isn't just paying for that, they are paying for the audience. I.e. the millions of people monthly who search for authentic product information.
Mozilla may be interested in selling them another product , or revising the fakespot product – who knows?
I'm just calling attention to the assets that the business paid for and that they are worth the money paid.
Not to mention, improving the browser in the space of adblockers installed by default ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... ftw! ) would remove most incentives for AI generated content in the first place. /inserts shrugging emoji
Adblockers increase the incentives for AI generated "organic" content since in the absence of the ability to push explicitly-marked ads, you're gonna get astroturfing and such instead.
Advertising is not about the Seller of the product and the Publisher of the content. Oh no.
The money in advertisement is the hundreds of companies that prey on each other all the way connecting seller and publisher. Because nobody trust anybody in advertisement. There's traffic validate. Click validation. Sales attribution. Sales attribution validation. MRC Accreditation for the sales attribution validation. etc. etc. etc.
Exactly the same feeling as when Mozilla acquired Pocket and promised to opensource it. I had the feeling that it doesn't make sense and it's not what their audience wants.
Because Mozilla the foundation has shown itself to be a very poor steward of Firefox the application. If there was a way to directly fund Firefox I’m sure many people would do that, but atm it appears you can only send money to be wasted by Mozilla.
>This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla.
>The browser wars are basically over
and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.
Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they could do" shrug. They built their tech in such an obtuse and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate anywhere else, milked their millions selling off customer data to Google via the default search interface, burned the money on private jets and shockingly overpaid low-talent low-vision executives. Burned engineering talent on a VPN service no one asked for just because it's a good money making scam if you advertize it on the right podcasts, made huge parts of their deep engineering teams redundant.
To be perfectly honest the only good long term vision for Mozilla is an empty office or a landfill. Their existence under the current management doomed the internet back to the IE6 era of browser variety. Firefox the browser would be way better off if Mozilla the company didn't exist.
Baffles me they have any good will left at all from people who care about the internet. This company will literally do anything else than work hard on their browser.
Bias disclaimer: I've worked on Chrome and Edge, opinions strictly my own
>and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.
Could and should Mozilla have done better? Yes. "Any energy?" is uncalled for, however.
There was the entire Quantum rewrite for significant performance boosts (around the time Chrome started getting called out for bad perf). There's containers, anti-tracker tech, and a big privacy push.
There is much more they could have done, and my outsider opinion is that Mozilla the organization lost its way and focused too much money and effort on things that don't matter, but it's not like they pulled an IE6 and abandoned Firefox.
I just feel that Mozilla has spent way too much on PR, marketing and ventures that make no sense in their space. They got big by being a leader in the browser tech stack, and making tools developers and tech guys wanted to use. That led to the influence over other areas, but advising friends and family to use it.
Mozilla org has completely lost sight of their base. A good 70-80% of their budget should be on their core product development and adjacent products only. The fact that only recently have they discovered, hey, we had this pretty good email client that we let all but die off.
They should separate their core rendering and script engine teams to focus on better embed-ability and security structures. Another team(s) focused on the integration for Firefox as a browser. Another for Thunderbird. The fact that they killed off their Rust efforts, XULRunner and so many other things that could be really useful today is just painful.
Yeah, XUL didn't run great on 1998 hardware, but what are so many apps targeting today, Electron. And now there's a resurgence towards lighter options (Tauri and others) because it kind of makes sense to (re)use a browser rendering engine for general UI development. It's extremely flexible, has a flushed out (if somewhat complex) styling and theming system, multiple language support, complete font rendering, svg rendering, and accessibility support and runs on/under everything under the sun.
Maybe hire on some of the types that have tried and failed to remake email and browsers that have some creative vision on how users actually use these applications, and let them work with the engineering teams to make quality software again. Spend less time on branding, and more time on the core tech. They still have enough brand reach and clout that people will try the new stuff and if it's good, then organic growth can and would work (again).
Hell, if they want to branch out... make a REALLY great email and communications platform that is open-source with a hosted model. How big of a pain is it to self-host many of these things today? If they want to acquire someone, bring in Caddy, Fastmail and/or Zimbra for adjacent tech development.
I only harp on the email and Thunderbird side because two decades ago, they were in a better spot than anyone to offer a competing product to Outlook+Exchange and they just didn't even try. And now even Outlook kind of sucks because the cloud integration is what it is at scale. Leaving a gaping hole where that entire market used to live. A great open-source core product, with a good extensibility model and some commercially licensed integration points could have been insanely popular.
> The fact that only recently have they discovered, hey, we had this pretty good email client that we let all but die off.
... You think Mozilla don't focus enough on Firefox, so you think they should spend more money on Thunderbird, which is an app in an almost-nonexistent market (desktop email)?
Some folks are just never happy with Mozilla.
Firefox has massively improved in recent years. WebExtensions being async prevented horrific freezes that used to happen. Rewriting components in Rust, and using web assembly for native libs, are both good for security. And WebRender was revolutionary.
That's not quite my point... my point is they should definitely focus on Firefox. They should probably go back towards doing it in a way that using their rendering engine and JS engine in other products is easier in terms of embedding. And that adjacent products should lend themselves towards those resources being re-utilized or grown organically.
Two decades ago, Thunderbird was in the single best position to provide an alternative to Outlook. Now, not so much. If they'd had the foresight to do that two+ decades ago, they could be in a similar position to Google Docs or O365 today in terms of revenue generation.
They're a bit behind at this point on what people even like in a browser. They should focus on the core technology. I think dropping Servo and the Rust efforts was probably a misstep and burning cash on marketing and buying out unrelated companies altogether doesn't help.
edit: Also, Thunderbird doesn't HAVE to be just a desktop email client. If blackberry had developed email clients for iOS and Android early on, they would still be relevant today.
That's how it felt to me too. Stretched too thin. Yet as a small company compared to MS or Google, I can imagine how hard it is to try to thrive or just survive and maintaining a stable path when you're fighting big pockets.
I just wished they could rebalance their allocation and focus on simple daily usability things. Just a bit more.
ps: for instance, the screenshot tool is brilliant
They fired Brendan Eich, who invented JS, led Netscape past IE, and then headed Mozilla. Who, when fired, started Brave and turned it into a bigger system than FF (including the only relatively new free search engine with its own index), from scratch, in a world already dominated by Chrome, and Safari.
I know, I know, Eich donated personal money to some cause that some people on the internet didn't like. But from a business perspective, it was the stupidest thing they could have done, and is the point at which FF went from growth to (fast) loss.
(And the cause itself was not justified, especially considering it was a private donation, it was a legal org (not like KK or whatever), and he apologized afterwards. Even if it was a mistake, that should not have been justification for firing him.)
Mozilla's mistake was not in firing Brendan Eich (and Brendan Eich was not fired).
Mozilla's mistake was in promoting Brendan Eich to CEO.
Mozilla employees said ~"we were not totally comfortable with Brendan as a leader in the Technology role, but we recognized his long history with the Org and his Technical excellence, so we kept mostly quiet. But we strongly object to his promotion to CEO and primary representative of Mozilla to the world, because we do not feel that he represents the Org's values and do not believe he will be an effective leader of us."
Brendan probably could have returned to his CTO role with little fuss. But he may have had larger aspirations, he may have been sick of working under existing leadership, and he may have been personally disappointed by the Org's vote of no confidence in him. All are 100% reasonable! So he resigned. He was not fired. Yes the board might have "recommended" that he resign, but he would have been crazy (and display poor leadership abilities!) to try to stay in the CEO role after that drama.
> and he apologized afterwards
Has he? Not really. At least not contemporaneously with the events at Mozilla, and likely not since then. To be clear -- I don't think he should feel the need to apologize for personally-held beliefs. But I don't think it's possible to be a leader of people in any Org while simultaneously holding beliefs that are so offensive to the same people.
...
We do agree that Brendan's resignation was a net loss for Mozilla. But he might have not been able to succeed in the Mozilla Org anyway. Even as CEO, he'd have the board to contend with. As CTO, he had the CEO and the board to contend with. If there are effective people in that group, they are not making themselves known.
... which is often directly related to company size, or at least funding. It's not like Mozilla has all these great independent revenue sources. Google and Microsoft can afford to throw significantly more money at their browser without thinking about how to make any money off of it, or off of related things. Mozilla has no such luck.
It's not about the overall company its about browser team. I'd love to see a comparison of the actual sizes of the teams creating browsers, isn't Safari only a handful of (admittedly extremely talented) people?
But to a far, far lesser degree. The importance of this to me is that I used to be able to customize away the terrible aspects of the FF UI. Now, I can't really do that anymore.
Not that it matters, because FF performance has become so terrible for me that it was no longer really usable anyway.
> Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they could do" shrug. They built their tech in such an obtuse and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate anywhere else, milked their millions selling off customer data to Google via the default search interface, burned the money on private jets and shockingly overpaid low-talent low-vision executives. Burned engineering talent on a VPN service no one asked for just because it's a good money making scam if you advertize it on the right podcasts, made huge parts of their deep engineering teams redundant.
Is any of this actually evidenced somewhere? I'm not aware of Mozilla ever using private jets, and the last time I checked their executive compensation it was on the lower side of average for corporations with their footprint and financials.
Maybe there are facts or sources that you aren't presenting, but this as-is just comes off as a screed.
Firefox the browser is still a great piece of software, literally unique, and also open-source.
Do you think any other company / organization would be able to take over it / fork it and develop it adequately? If so, where would they get the money? Many high-profile open-source projects (e.g. Python, Blender, well, Linux itself) managed to secure corporate sponsorships or donations in a much less toxic way than the Mozilla-Google deal.
Yes. The browser, though, is very easy to build, requires few dependencies, a few minutes to build and runs fine on Linux. The result is quite impressive. And experimental.
I haven't actually looked at it, but I have the feeling that the Firefox code base is godawful and nobody who isn't being paid for a 40 hour weekday actually wants to get involved in it.
> I haven't actually looked at it, but I have the feeling that the Firefox code base is godawful...
Damn, didn't know that one can develop skills to evaluate the quality of a code-base by just "feeling" it and not looking at it at all - quite impressive!
Google has and had major distribution advantages for Chrome; same with Apple/MS and their browsers.
I've gone back and forth between FF and Chrome a few times and since the big FF perf improvements several years ago, I don't understand why Chrome is still seen as a wildly better product except for residual Google goodwill among the tech crowd. FF has had much much much more reliable session management / sync for me for years now.
There must be something different about my web use, because I keep hearing anecdotally that Firefox has reasonable performance relative to chrome. My experience is now and has always been that they aren't even close. I'm working on a React app at the moment and just confirmed: some basic operations that are buttery-smooth and instantaneous in Chrome have noticeable delay in FF. No extensions installed in either.
Firefox has almost imperceptible jank, but it is there if you squint.
Since forever I have a test that firefox always fails at: on first load, or if you haven't right clicked in a while, the context menu takes a perceptible amount of time to show up fully, and within this very short amount of time, you can visually see the menu options cascade out as the CSS engine finishes laying out and rendering the context menu.
This kind of jank still happens on latest firefox. It's little things like this that make it feel unpolished.
> This company will literally do anything else than work hard on their browser.
OK, I'm not a fan of Firefox anymore but this isn't the case. They undeniably worked very, very hard and poured a lot of money into the revamp of Firefox.
Leaning hard into delivering content that you can "trust" would be an interesting direction for Mozilla. I suspect that will put some crosshairs on Mozilla as an organization, though. While that would be good for users, there will be folks who don't like the idea of spotting fake content or doing any labeling of content...
Given their complete reliance on google for funding and biased political stance. I don't think they are in a great position to deliver content you can "trust".
While I do agree to some extent. I think the vast majority of the tech side of Mozilla who work on the products and not the marketing are more concerned about the tech. I only wish they got the bulk of funding, and Mozilla org would cut way back and let the products speak for themselves for a while. If they hadn't spent so much trying to find other funding and revenue streams, they could have had decades of runway to work on improving their software.
I think a lot of University computer labs still use Firefox. At least at some point, that was because it was easier to lock down — no directory "an administrator" (i.e. malware) could just dump an extension into to treat it as force-installed.
The browser wars are over because Firefox lost them by spending all the time patting themselves on the back about how much better they were than the competition, wasting their money on stupid stuff like this instead of improving their browser.
Getting themselves into a deeper hole is unlikely to help, imo.
I mean, they did a lot of improvements over time. ASM.js which became WASM, with fast bindings, Webrender, new JS engine, the memshrink project are ones that jump out at me. From the wpt.fyi interop stats year over yearit's pretty clear they are constantly working on implementing new specs.
But IMO everyone is chasing Chrome or just using their engine now. Their engineering team is apparently 10x that of Mozilla.
And, back when Chrome was rolling out they used their dominant position online very aggressively. Google sites worked best in Chrome, period. Chrome was pushed on google. Google tech demos, similar to Microsoft ones, worked best in or only in Chrome. Android was a big Chrome advantage too. Chrome was heavily advertised, pushed as an install bundle in things like Adobe.. I'm not disagreeing Mozilla made some poor decisions but I don't think they had much of a chance regardless.
At that time, Google was seen as "the good guys" when it went against Microsoft, pushing for open web standards against the monopoly of IE6. Both Chrome (initially) adhering to open standards and open source protocols like Google Talk. It looked like the David vs Goliath biblical tale.
People thought Google was gonna maintain that position forever. It turned out that the "cool nerds doing open source and making money meanwhile" stance was just a sham, and Google abruptly became another faceless corporation.
A lot of people fell for it. Even the Mozilla developers. When Firefox started having compatibility issues with Gmail, they considered it as bugs in the Gmail software, and Google developers were all like "oh haha sorry I'll fix that in no time", but over time the compatibility issues piled up and the anti competitive stance slowly unveiled by itself.
It was a fantastic gamble IMO. Low chance of success, but enormous payoff if it had succeeded. Imagine a commercially viable alternative to iPhone and Android with multiple manufacturers and a completely open platform. Ultimately, I think they came to market too late and Android moved into the niche (low end market) they were targeting.
They gave up on FirefoxOS too soon. They also didn't promote it in the markets where it could have made a real impact. I live in India, and a dirt cheap FirefoxOS phone would have done very well here if only they had made it easy to purchase. I had one of their early phones, but I had to get mine from the US.
After being abandoned by Mozilla, FirefoxOS was resurrected as KaiOS. For a while, it was the second most popular mobile operating system in India, mostly because Reliance decided to use it for some of their low-end Jio phones[1]. Where would FirefoxOS be today if Mozilla had stuck with it? If hundreds of millions of people had their first taste of the Internet via FirefoxOS and not Android?
I've been a Firefox user since 2004, but I don't think Mozilla understands how to conduct business. They're an ideological organization first and foremost. It's not a bad thing -- we need somebody to stand up to Big Tech -- but it means that they probably won't be taking a big share of any market except by complete accident.
They gambled away the only open source browser with this and other money drains. Would I like an 50%+ market share open source phone OS? Yes. Would I gamble and lose the much more important open source browser? No.
Yeah, I'm glad they tried. I absolutely think they should be spending a chunk of their money on things that might broaden their impact and their revenue, even when some of those things don't pan out.
They took Gecko, the slowest rendering engine that there was (is?), made an entire OS around it, and put it on the slowest mobile phones that existed back then. That was not a gamble, that was throwing money down the drain.
Firefox OS was not that bad. It was sold on terrible phones. Anyway it led to tons of APIs that we use now, like passing phone camera and microphone input to the browser.
Even then, it's really limited in terms of hardware, and the application support isn't that great either without the google services that are typically deployed. I don't lay it on Mozilla though.
I think that FirefoxOS could have been great if they'd kept up the development a few more years. Much like XULRunner was a bit ahead of it's time... The hardware got better enough over a few generations, that if it ran on current phones or even last gen it could be pretty good.
I'm running a Pixel 4a, and current Android runs like hot garbage at times, I've got an older Pixel 2XL that needs a new battery... I'd like to take both and put something more open on them to at least play with.
Unfortunately, Mozilla doesn't understand how Firefox even got to be where it was at its' height. They seem to think it's just about marketing buzz. They got to #1 on organic growth alone. By creating something better than the alternatives at a technical level. They need to do that again, but also need some creative types to steer the ship as well. I'm still mad about how they let Thunderbird die on the vine, and if any related tech could have been their ongoing revenue stream it could have been in that space.
I'm not that surprised... They're not just trendy, but hardware wise pretty nice in terms of quality, appearance and battery life. I don't use it much, but my M1 Air that I got for personal use generally makes it through a week of use on road trips without needing to recharge. Hour or two of email/reading a day, about 60% brightness.
I think MacOS feels a bit old at this point, but the hardware is pretty nice for what's on offer in the mobile space. I may well go framework for my next laptop in a few years though.
I just bought my first Mac in ~30 years, having been all Windows or Linux in that period. I've been blown away by now nice it is - both the hardware and MacOS. Sure, there are some annoyances for a "power user" where something like showing hidden files requires an obscure key combo, but for the most part it has been a refreshing change.
It's also just blazingly fast compared to the similarly priced ~3yo Dell that it replaced.
Normally I'd say... "They'd better write it in the bylaws that Mozilla isn't allowed to buy any more companies" but a system for identifying fake content on the web might (unlike all the other Mozilla acquisitions such as the thoroughly pizzled Pocket) improve the web browsing experience.
> If it had been branded as a new "reading list" feature native to Mozilla I don't think it would have caused a stir.
I imagine Mozilla's thinking there was that they should position the feature so that people who already use Pocket will realize that Firefox isn't adding a separate reading list (like the Safari one nobody uses), but rather that you can just sign into your existing Pocket account in Firefox, and see your existing Pocket reading-list.
But yeah, in the end that probably wasn't nearly as important as getting people who didn't already use Pocket to see the reading list as "Firefox's reading list" rather than some channel-partner bloatware encroachment.
A happy medium would probably have been if the Firefox reading list was its own skin of Pocket, and synced using your Firefox Sync account, without needing to create a separate Pocket account; but when you first went to use it, it would ask if you want to sign into your Pocket account; and if you do, then your Pocket account would be merged with your Firefox Sync account, because "Pocket Sync is now part of Firefox Sync."
> I imagine Mozilla's thinking there was that they should position the feature so that people who already use Pocket will realize that Firefox isn't adding a separate reading list (like the Safari one nobody uses), but rather that you can just sign into your existing Pocket account in Firefox, and see your existing Pocket reading-list.
That was pretty much how it was viewed at the time (I worked at Mozilla during the Pocket acquisition). It was seen as, "we were going to build our own reading list, but let's just buy this instead and integrate it as /the/ reading list for Firefox."
I agree that the external perception was different, and remains so to this day.
Tbh, all I recall about pocket is it showed me a load of random content which I had no interest in, which felt spammy. And I think it needs a login for some reason? It certainly looked and felt like an external addon rather than a built-in thing.
If it had just been a reading list I'd have been much more interested.
Exactly, it's basically offensive to put any product in a customer's face.
I remember how Microsoft killed OneNote (a rather good note taking application) by (1) trying to shove it up your fingernails, into your armpits, etc. (I remember there being three onenote icons pinned to the task bar) and (2) going 100% cloud as opposed to the XML files OneNote used to leave on your computer that were very easy to parse and build tools to process.
People are automatically going to assume a bundled product is crap because we're so used to drive-by downloads and other dark patterns.
Did you mean making Pocket end to end encrypted like Firefox Sync? Pocket's business model was data mining. Or did you mean making a part of Firefox Sync send your data to a 3rd party data miner? I don't think it would have helped.
Pocket caused a stir because it broke Mozilla's commitments to privacy, interoperability, and FOSS. They removed an open source end to end encrypted reading list feature in development and replaced it with a proprietary 3rd party data miner. They promote it with the lie "privacy is paramount" still.[1] And they responded to correct guesses Pocket paid Mozilla by denying Pocket paid them for the integration until it came out Pocket paid them for referrals. Trying harder to hide Pocket's nature would have amplified the loss of trust.
I think Chrome added the reading list feature recently - I've been using Vivaldi for close to a year now. And while I know Vivaldi uses the chromium engine below, it's nice to have a non-google browser anyway.
On a separate note, there is a chance this could be futile.
The objective of AI like LLMs is to create output indistinguishable from human output, should it reach that stage - generated text have no telltale signs of being AI output - then it would be impossible to tell from human output.
A group of people who are receiving manufactured products of an automatic factory that they don't want get a chance to fill out a feedback form and write "the product was thoroughly pizzled" as a deliberate neologism to confuse the computer. The factory sent a representative who asked what this meant and they defined it as "unwanted".
Thanks for the reference, had missed that story. PKD notches up another one ...
A phrase in the story caught my attention: "all hell is bursting [instead of breaking] loose" - it's nearly a googlewhack, only two other unrelated hits.
[1] Pizzle is a Middle English word for penis, derived from Low German pesel or Flemish Dutch pezel, diminutive of pees, meaning 'sinew'. The word is used today to signify the penis of an animal, chiefly in Australia and New Zealand.
[2] Interestingly, it is used in medical slang (Dictionary of medical slang -Jacob Edward) and it is defined as exhausted, or to its point:
~ Pizzle chewer ... A female who relieves a male of his phallic tension by fondling the instrument in her mouth.
~ Pizzle-grinder ... 1. A butcher. 2. A prostitute.
~ Pizzle honker ... A prostitute who satisfies her patrons by manual friction.
~ Pizzle warmer . . . The pudendum muliebre, esp. the vagina.
~ Pizzled . . . Exhausted physically or mentally.
So I guess you could say that Pocket is a Fizzled[3] Pizzle.
In the 19th C it was a word in the West Country dialect Thomas Hardy knew well, and appears in Jude the Obscure to describe the pig's member that is thrown at Jude. Apart from this description, it gets called "that part of the pig which is thrown away" and other euphemisms, so I suppose Hardy must have thought pizzle was already obscure enough not to get him into trouble.
Right now, if Mozilla doesn't think Firefox is central to its mission and if they're giving up the fight in browser wars (as many in this thread suggest) ..
... I don't see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that's it?
I'd like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (the rest of it) do whatever they want.
Except Firefox is the golden goose.
(Ffx user here, I'm using it for dev, browsing and mobile (ffocus), ie. everything that doesn't require chrome).
Cool product, but I'm actually concerned about privacy using a tool like FakeSpot. Their privacy policy is extremely broad and includes handing over purchase history and search history on shopping websites to the extension authors:
> Browser Extensions: We collect the following data when you use Fakespot’s Browser Extensions and may link it to your personal identity in order to effectively market our products and services to you and others:
Contact Info
Identifiers
Usage Data
Application Search History (e.g. not your Google/Bing/other search engine history)
Purchases
Diagnostics
Yeah you don't want to install their extension as it stands. Which is why they try so hard to push it, instead of just putting the analyzer on the front page.
As much as I love Firefox, let's not lie about the state of affairs: "We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet." no you are not, Firefox is nowhere near one of the most popular browsers. It's essentially a non-player in the browser space, and while the people working for Mozilla are still meaningfully contributing to standards bodies, the browser itself is basically irrelevant in the global market. I wish it wasn't, but the good old days of "we beat IE" are long gone, and FF did not step up to Chrome, nor to the Chromification of the rest of the browser landscape. It just threw ideas at the wall in the hopes that something would end up being a revenue stream while Firefox languished. Quantum was the right move, except they should have kept making moves. You don't win by being "pretty decent", you win by doing things people didn't realize they needed their browser to do, and doing all the things they do know they need to do better than the competition. It's been drastically down hill since Chris Beard left.
I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated gnome-keyring.
Firefox is behind on general web support compared to any other browser. That's not just weird APIs like WebUSB and WebSerial and WebGPU, but also CSS things. It's almost as bad as Safari, except it's broken in very different areas.
There's plenty to improve. On Android there's the whole extension mess (and tons of other quality of life improvements), on desktop Firefox could use some proper PWA support (even Safari has that implemented well now), Spidermonkey is still the slowest mainstream Javascript engine out there, and Chrome's process sandboxing has some features that Firefox is yet to implement if at all. Firefox users on Gnome on Linux are a subset of a subset of a subset, that's hardly important, but "Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" is.
Mozilla cares more about their charity programs than they do about their browser (that's why you can't directly donate to Firefox, only to Mozilla). Maybe this acquisition is a way to add a new revenue stream, though I doubt it'll matter much because I've never seen AI detection that actually works. I hope this was a smart move, but I fear this will end up as one of those buttons everyone disables in the default toolbar, like Pocket has become.
Mozilla has also fired 250 people during the pandemic, so somehow coming up with the money to buy a company feels a little jarring when dev capacity still hasn't recovered.
I use both Chrome and FF regularly on Mac and PC desktops and laptops with vintages ranging from 2011-2023. There is no perceptible difference to me. Admittedly all of my machines are relatively comfortably specced. Desktop-class CPUs, 16GB+ of RAM, SSDs. Perhaps the difference is more pronounced when the computing environment is more constrained.
Moving from my subjective opinion to hard benchmarks, Firefox wins some and loses others. Overall they're close.
I don't use Android so I don't know the FF situation there. It certainly sounds like a mess. I will take your word for it.
The only reason I use FF on android is for the extensions (especially ad / tracking blockers). Whatever mess it might be, it still is far better than the alternatives and not really noticeable to me during daily use.
Firefox is fine on all platforms. Smooth even! But in terms of loading time and raw JS performance, Chrome wins hands down every time in my experience.
Using https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ this is quantified not only by some arbitrary number but also through the visibly slower update speed during the DOM tests.
I use Firefox on every device, but Chrome is just faster. I can live with the impact on speed for all the privacy features, but if Mozilla ever wants to get their market share above 5% again they'll need to provide the common user a reason to switch and that'll be hard when the browser is noticeably slower.
In the discussion above I'm referring to folks saying that FF "bogs down" or becomes unresponsive in real world usage, something I've never experienced.
But benchmarks are fun too...
this is quantified not only by some arbitrary
number but also through the visibly slower
update speed during the DOM tests.
I ran that and Chrome was 50% faster than FF on my 2018 MBP. Safari was even faster than Chrome by a few %. I would also agree that there was a visible difference in those benchmarks.
My opinion is that while benchmarks are vital, I don't believe that a benchmark such as that necessarily correlates with user experience. There are benchmarks where FF is faster and certainly they can't all be right. (At first glance, the one you linked appears to be a mix of modern UI frameworks, which seems pretty reasonable to me)
A look at a browser's dev tools during my "normal" usage certainly aligns with what I'm saying -- network bandwidth/latency really dominates perceived performance in nearly every use case; blasting out DOM updates as fast as possible via a synthetic benchmark does not resemble my browsing sessions.
That is of course just my subjective opinion. You may have other use cases in which your browser is truly the bottleneck. Or you can just have another set of preferences.
I think it really depends on what you do and where you live. I have access to high-speed internet, have (way too) many tabs open at all times and use various web applications. Someone who's just reading the news and social media behind a DSL line will have a completely different experience.
I rarely encounter loading times that are caused by network traffic. Some servers are slow to reach, but most pages load almost instantaneously. Perhaps that's why things that I see Firefox lose to Chrome at are noticeable to me but not to many others.
The benchmark itself is not an indicator of what the average user will do in their browser, but it does show that Firefox is objectively slower in certain areas. Whether those areas bother you is another question, of course.
Firefox becoming completely unresponsive happens to me more than I like. This is due to a difference in architecture; Firefox spawns a process for every CPU thread and divides the work whereas Chrome spawns a new thread for every page. When a badly written page slows down to a crawl (i.e. leaving Reddit open for more than two minutes), the tabs sharing that process become unresponsive. On multiple occasions I've had to kill tabs that were shown as "loading" because other tabs stopped functioning if they lost the render process lottery. It's not as extreme as people claim and it's certainly not as bad as it was five years ago, but Firefox does have weird freezes and bugs that Chrome seemingly just doesn't have.
On the other hand, I'm convinced part of the reason for slowdowns and problems is that Firefox tries to strip away a lot of the privacy invasions that have become the norm on the modern web. I'll gladly keep taking those slowdowns, but even outside those there's still a lot of work that can be done to bring Firefox on par with Chrome.
I haven't had FF "bog down" (but I'm not really a tab user, either). But on every machine I've put the new FF on, the startup time for it ranges from 2-5 minutes, and the initial load time for web pages is achingly slow (sometimes up to a minute or so).
No other browser I've used performs this poorly. Even the old, pre-reworked, FF performs much better than that.
But on every machine I've put the new FF on, the
startup time for it ranges from 2-5 minutes
What? Is this a typo? Do you mean seconds?
I've never seen that on any machine and again, this is many dozens of computers over the years, including one company where FF was the standard browser for the company enterprise/intranet app so thousands of people were using it all day long.
and the initial load time for web pages is
achingly slow (sometimes up to a minute or so).
It's not a typo. It's also not a particular machine. It's all of my machines.
It's why I stopped using Firefox. It wasn't always like that -- pre-quantum, Firefox was reasonably performant. And post-quantum it was as well (although I never saw the performance gains others reported). I don't remember which release this started happening in, but it was a couple of years ago.
Just to forestall advice -- every time I've mentioned this, people have engaged with me to make sure it's not the usual issues (have I completely erased FF and installed it fresh, am I using extensions, etc.). And many think I'm lying.
But this is my actual experience with Firefox. I was willing to stick with using it on principle despite the fact that post-quantum firefox does a poor job if meeting my browser needs, but I couldn't. It's essentially unusable for me.
Does the issue persist on other networks? I wonder if it's a DNS/proxy/something issue.
I don't know the particulars, but Firefox does some talking over the network at startup. It checks for browser updates, blocklist updates, captive portal detection, etc. I am not certain which if any of these happen at startup, and AFAIK none of these are blocking (but I admittedly have only the vaguest knowledge here)
I've not tried with those machines on a different network. I assume it's related to networking in some way. My network is more complex than most. All of these machines are Linux (Debian). I haven't experienced this on Windows machines at work (although I also haven't noticed that Firefox had become any faster on them).
I wonder what happens if you launch FF with your wifi disabled and/or the cable unplugged?
On MacOS and Windows (I can try this on PopOS as well if you like) FF launches instantly with no complaints if the network is down. Which tells me that FF seems to properly handle situations where things are merely unreachable.
The fact that it's hanging for you implies to me that perhaps FF is getting some kind of malformed response from... something on your network. A firewall, a proxy, I don't know.
I've not tried with those machines on a different
network. I assume it's related to networking in some
way. My network is more complex than most.
I don't know if you're open to feedback on this or not, but it feels disingenuous to state "Firefox is unusably slow" without noting that it appears to be some specific interaction between Firefox and your network. If it is a network issue, it certainly sounds like it is something FF should handle more gracefully/informatively, but that is a different matter from "Firefox unusably slow."
> it feels disingenuous to state "Firefox is unusably slow" without noting that it appears to be some specific interaction between Firefox and your network.
I don't think it's disingenuous because it's only Firefox that has this issue. Every other browser is fine.
I think there's an edge-condition bug in Firefox that I'm triggering that causes this. I've spent quite a while trying to work this out before giving up entirely. However -- since it's really not at all hard to find people who have performance problems with Firefox generally, there is something going on with it. And it's something that (based on interactions with the dev team) Mozilla seems not willing to worry much about.
All that said, I try very hard to be fair to Mozilla and Firefox, in part because I've been a huge backer of Firefox since the very beginning, and still care.
Don't you have an experience that Chrome works better on old-end hardware? I have in an active use some 2005-2013 hardware and I describe Firefox as significant worse (freezes and consumes more memory per tab), I do not like Chrome but I use it because I use that hardware sometimes.
Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB. Than Firefox unleashes its ability to work just fine even with a lot of extensions.
Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB
My oldest in-use machine is an i7-3770 (3.4hgz, 4 core) with 16GB of RAM and an SSD running Windows 10. That's an Ivy Bridge from ~2011 which is a generation older than your Haswell but, honestly, it's still pretty modern... performs at about 50% of a 2023 i5 in CPU benchmarks.
FF absolutely smooth on there.
Typical usage on that machine is usual recreational web crap. It's my game/relaxing machine. Running 1-2 windows with some mix of Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, Amazon, whatever.
Zooming out, I have been running a mix of FF and Chrome for dev work ever since their respective debuts. We're talking easily 2000+ hours a year of browser usage for 20+ years. I have never seen the FF performance issues others get into a fuss about.
I honestly have no explanation for this. I'm sure that other people are telling the truth but I find it mystifying. I've never had monster high-end CPUs but I've always run AdBlock/uBlock, I generally have as much RAM as feasible, and was an early SSD adopter. Maybe I dodged some FF issues that way. I also never have massive numbers of tabs/windows... usually a max of 10-15 tabs over 1-3 windows. I'm also not running "big" browser-native apps like Figma or whatever in FF.
It's not that I'm insensitive to performance. I run 144hz monitors for gaming and that's a big difference to my eyes. There are also some UI things that are noticeably faster in Chrome like dragging a tab to a new window but that's not a big part of my browsing experience.
(FWIW, Safari has always felt significantly faster to me during my infrequent usage. IIRC they do some latency reduction tricks on MacOS. So even though typical web benchmarks show it as slower, it "feels" faster to me)
If Firefox and Thunderbird development were financed from money collected from the VPN profits and / or donations, I'd happily pay. But I'd like it to be directed exactly there, or into other clearly stated initiatives I can understand and approve of, like Rust back in the day.
I have the exact opposite opinion. They should get out of the rendering engine business and start using Blink like just about everybody else. Take Blink and make a better browser from it using those 20 side projects. Pour resources into them and move them from mediocre to great. Take what Google gives away and spend resources on what Google ignores. Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me.
If Apple allows third party browsers and Chrome is adopted by enough iOS / iPadOS users, everything other than Blink will be non-standard in a de facto sense.
This is a fairly new opinion for me. On Windows I've started using Edge alongside Firefox and I find myself using Firefox less and less often. On my machine doing the things I need to do, Edge is significantly faster.
Having an independent rendering engine has a lot of value, in both diversity and control aspects. Having another chrome layer around he same engine is kinda meh. I mean not that a good chrome can't improve things - it very well may - but the importance of having it is less.
> Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me.
And that's exactly why we need a strong independent org to do this. Because it is hard and it doesn't make sense for most people. Anyone can get an idea of a chrome improvement, get a VC to sign up and start yet another "same browser as 50 others but with this little twist" thing. This is not a huge breakthrough that has any fundamental importance. Having the whole web rendering infrastructure not owned by a single entity sounds kinda important though. Yes, it's hard to pull off - that's exactly why it is valuable, as opposed to make another quick buck by doing a quick tweak over somebody else's work. Quick buck things are valuable too - but they are not fundamental. It's like developing a new theme for Windows as opposed to developing Linux. I think having Linux is much more important than having one more Windows theme.
> Having another chrome layer around he same engine is kinda meh
Yep. Browsers in general are meh at this point. Mozilla is looking for things like Fakespot because all of the big browsers have been good enough for quite a while now. There really isn't anything they can do with the core of Firefox make a difference. Users don't care.
> There really isn't anything they can do with the core of Firefox make a difference. Users don't care.
That comment placed in a thread filled to the brim with "Firefox is slow" and (at least on macOS) "Firefox eats my battery"
That's not even getting into the horrors of their dev-tools impl, or the missing CSS items cited in this same discussion, both of which I grant not _every_ user cares about but there are for sure users who care about all 4 of those things
Its great that everything just magically seems to work so well for you, but behind the curtains it took additional effort from the developers of websites you visit to make it so. Same goes for Safari and some of the less popular browsers.
I mean, this is a broad topic and I am more of a backend engineer than frontend these days.
However, I did do a lot of frontend back in the old IE6/IE7/IE8 days when you essentially had to code a whole separate front end for Microsoft's standards-flaunting mess. So this is definitely an issue I care about.
but behind the curtains it took additional effort from
the developers of websites you visit to make it so
This is true, but in my (limited recent) experience often it's because Chrome implements some rando de facto new "standard" thing they cooked up so of course they are out in front of the other browsers.
So yes, you often can't run your Chrome-specific shit elsewhere without workarounds and polyfills, but this doesn't automatically mean everybody except Google is screwing up. In some cases, complaints such as yours sound like folks in 2004 complaining that their ActiveX controls work in IE but not Firefox.
Yes absolutely! Also why I tagged on that call-out of Safari and other browsers.
And not to forget that Google has even shipped several early-days standards track features to production of which the API was still in flux. In a few cases the API later changed in - for Chrome, at least - breaking ways. Fun times.
okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not supporting that stuff other than "we have limited resources to implement these things"?
a lot of that chrome-specific shit is really really nice. like CSS nesting - that would be amazing. firefox has a bug for tracking the implementation, and supported the standardization of it. but there's no sign of any progress towards an implementation. meanwhile safari and chrome have both shipped it.
> okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not supporting that stuff other than "we have limited resources to implement these things"?
That depends on what you are referring to. No there is not a one size fits all answer. For example, Chrome has implemented Filesystem API that Mozilla is still debating on because they see it as a security issue. You can agree or disagree but there reason is still something other than "we don't have the resources to do it"
For example, Chrome has implemented Filesystem API
that Mozilla is still debating on
This also highlights the vastly differing goals of the various parties.
Google explicitly wants two major things from Chrome.
One, they obviously want to track as much personal information as they possibly can, because they are an ad company.
Two, they want "the web" to essentially be a full OS replacement, with filesystem access etc. Because Microsoft is one of their primary rivals (or frenemies, if you will) and they can't leave themselves to the whims of others' platforms. They need their own platform.
These goals are... well, let's say divergent (to put it mildly) from what "the web" means to others. HTTP was originally supposed to be a human-readable way to publish and link information, not an OS replacement, and certainly not a PII-siphoning tool.
And yet, some folks still default to simply assuming whatever Google decides for the web is right, simply because they seem to be moving the fastest.
Yeah, they're usually moving the fastest, but people should think about where they're heading and why.
I feel like each feature has it's own story (and it's own party to blame, when some browsers support it but not others)
If FF is lagging behind Safari on a particular CSS feature that certainly points to FF being behind the curve.
Sometimes it's FF or Safari simply being slower than Google. Sometimes it's a matter of the Chrome team creating an implementation of feature XYZ and getting it minted into the standard so of course they have the only implementation for a while.
Sometimes the FF and Safari teams have specific objections to a feature, often because unlike Google they actually consider user privacy a core part of their mission. Although, of course, with CSS features... that's not gonna be a privacy thing.
Not sure how much of this is living in a bubble or selection bias of negative experiences in common but my own impression of the firefox userbase is that a significant portion of it are using firefox as a "least worst" browser, rather than one they are actually very happy with.
This was me for a few years after the revamp, even after the loss of important functionality after extensions were neutered. But eventually, I couldn't take it anymore and bailed on FF entirely.
I'm pleased to see others have good experience with FF performance, but for me, the performance simply became unacceptable.
That nails me. But that is also the impetus behind my use of almost every single product I use, from my house, to my car, to my food, to my computers, to the os and other software on them. I don't think that is indicative of anything very specific to FF.
I get what you're saying: I'm the same for most products, though I do go out of my way to find and use things that are exceptional and in some cases I've actually kinda succeeded in finding that.
The issue here is that this wasn't always the case, or at least wasn't always this bad. While Firefox has always been far from perfect, there was a time when mozillazine consisted mostly of praise and evangelism, and not all of it naive fandom. Also, as a former Opera user, there was also a time when the landscape as a whole contained a higher quality set of options in general. There were numerous browsers then better than the current least worst.
Even recently, Firefox has inspired hope & interest with Servo, Quantum, and even things like the amazing webextension migration effort: controversial and unpopular with many it was nonetheless a greatly successful engineering effort, and has borne fruit in the recent furore over v3 manifests, with Firefox coming out ahead. It's also got cool added APIs that makes sense for the traditional Firefox community but are still standards compliant and interoperable. But all that progress is now already waning with Servo dev cut, progressive popular distinguishing features like MAC being relegated to APIs & UI removed from core.
There's precious little left to distinguish Firefox from Chrome, and nothing new on the horizon.
Same here. I've been using Firefox as my main browser for 20 years now. There was a period where it would have some issues, but it's been run great and smooth for the past few years. I don't get the hate.
Even the fully local translation is really usable now <3. I don't use chrome for anything and it's not even installed on my daily driver anymore.
Ironically, the only time I have had issues, overriding the user agent to look like chrome or edge fixed it. So those websites were deliberately broken with Firefox, not Mozilla's fault but pure malice and dark patterns. Office 365 is one of these sites by the way.
Imo out of the box it needs extensions to get it to be worthwhile. Its generally worse on battery than say safari, only being comparable when you factor the savings not having to render ads with ublock origin. I catch firefox processes all the time using 15% cpu with no tabs left open, restart it and it drops back to 3% like safari, so something weird is certainly going on. Sometimes I use firefox over an x11 connection and its like a new circle of hell (not what x11 is really for but its uniquely bad for a gui app on that imo, considering some full on gui ides are useable).
no print feature in over 5 years. How can a browser not implement print? (on android) They removed it, then claimed they were working on it, and shut down every single github issue about it
This one got me recently, and the workaround that saved me was the save-as-pdf option hidden behind the "share" icon. Thankfully it uses the print stylesheet specified by the website.
every year i try using firefox again, because the dominance of chrome bothers me and i want there to be a good competitor. and every year i inevitably run into some issue that makes me give up and go back to chrome. I think last time it was a themeing issue with ubuntu's default built-in dark theme. a previous year it was a sync issue.
with their continued slide in marketshare to what is essentially an irrelevant portion of the market, i'm guessing this isn't just me.
Android was a keyboard-only Blackberry clone before it gained touch support. This is why soft keyboards have always been modular since they are a bolted on substitute for physical keys.
The word "first" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and has jackshit to do with it supporting it. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of Android users aren't using a keyboard and are using a touchscreen. You could even extrapolate the woeful state of Android tablet UX, because there's far more Android tablet users than there will be keyboard users because hey, most Android devices only ship with a touchscreen and are cellphones.
An iPad can support a keyboard too. It's a touch-first device.
A Mac can support a touchscreen with a third-party driver, but it's a KBM-first UX and support of the touchscreen is horrible in most apps that only accept one input at a time.
Why? It's not an accessibility feature, and desktop OS versions of Firefox still exist. Choosing a hobbled Android device and expecting desktop-class experience is a user issue.
Will it drive worthwhile value? No.
Are there more pressing matters? Yes.
With that said, it's open source. Why don't you implement it yourself? Meanwhile the rest of us have long since moved on from Firefox.
Samsung phones can do things like wireless beam a desktop over to a TV. You can then use a bluetooth keyboard with it fine with Chrome, but not Firefox.
If you’re a browser user you won’t notice, but as someone who build websites Firefox is noticeably behind other browsers and is the lone holdout that have not rolled out the CSS `:has()`, `@property` and nesting features.
Yes, they can work on many things simultaneously but it is worrisome when the execution of their core product fails [1] it shows a big management failure.
I would argue the opposite: their core product is great, best in market. However, due to the browser landscape, your core product is virtually WORTHLESS. Every browser does just enough right to be interchangeable, so unless you are drastically taking a new approach to browsing in general (and your brand), you have zero chance in hell without being able to leverage your own hardware/added services.
Market share is not always indicative of execution. There is a reasonable argument that their browser market share decreasing or not growing should prompt diversification of their business rather than doubling down on something that is not showing great returns on investment.
I am not saying that is always indicative of execution but I don't think Mozilla has any indicative of good execution? Hey, they invented a new programming language to reengineer the browser. The programming language is very succesful and it is growing in market share but Firefox continues to be written in C++.
IMHO there is a room for innovation in this space, long term but you can see if this happenning observing the project. Currently browser engines are one of the most complex pieces of software. There are new ways to attack these mammoths.
I use firefox everyday at work and home and can't think of a single thing that 'needs' to be fixed from a user perspective. It loads up the internet and is fast. So I don't think defining Mozilla's vision as 'fix a bunch of random issues' is very wise. Gnome key-ring support and porting to rust? How is that going to grow the user base?
If your first step as PM of a browser that desperately needs to win back market share is to work on gnome-keyring, a feature only relevant on an operating system that less than 1% of people use your tenure is going to be very short-lived. This is engineering virtue-signaling, for lack of a better phrase.
I agree, but to be fair, software usability often experiences death by a thousand UX cuts, and gnome-keyring support is one of those cuts. I don't think that's the case with web browsers, though. for the most part, things that matter do just work, both in Firefox and Chrome.
The things I suspect could make a difference to Firefox marketshare are performance and transformative features.
For performance, UI latency needs to be near-zero to make it feel snappier than Chrome, and JS- and CSS-heavy pages noticeably faster than in Chrome. (Yes, pages shouldn't be so JS- and CSS-heavy, but they are, and users don't care that it's the web developers' fault. The browser that solves that problem wins.)
For features, tabs are one clear example, as were blocking popups, and session restore. Containers, adblock, Pocket integration, and Reader Mode all seem like they could have been this, but they weren't. Big features will be hit-or-miss, and will quickly be copied, but possibly a big deal for a short while.
Perf, of course, is a lot of hard engineering work, and features may be as well, in addition to being potential duds. Things like gnome-keyring feels like a relatively simple quick-win, despite being very low value compared to various other possibilities.
Personally, I thing I switched back to Firefox when they made restarting it when you have a hundred tabs retain the tabs, but not load them until you switch to them. That moved restarting the browser from a big deal to something I can just do whenever. (It was also when Quantum/Servo stuff was happening, but I think it was the tab thing that got me.)
Mediocre web browsers aren't making them money though. The search partnership royalties are. If it is still making them money, why try harder?
Is Firefox-centric Mozilla still relevant in 2023? No, not really.
People also assume that x is a distraction to the goal of y, but why would it be? If it hasn't happened yet, it probably isn't going to.
At this point, they arguably lost the browser war, even if they made a great browser, it is going to struggle to win meaningful marketshare, and even then, how many people are going to subscribe to Pocket or a VPN? Nowhere near as much as what their search royalties make them, which likely isn't going to last forever in this climate.
What about if Google pulls the plug on their search partnership due to declining Firefox numbers? They're largely dependent on Google. They probably can't pay their CEO $3m salary if that goes South.
Sure, most consumers have marched off desktop os entirely to walled garden mobile apps. That probably also means whats left of the desktop browser users are perhaps more likely to be firefox users than beforehand when it was more of a mass market.
Your imagination aside, the statistics show a decline in Firefox numbers, and it has a woefully small marketshare (~4% across all devices). It's been declining for 12 years. They lost ~50m users in ~3y.
"Techies" have or are moving on because Mozilla's pace of development is woeful, and compatibility is poor. Killing the RSS reader was the final straw for many. Disney advertising in-browser was another major moment.
You'd have to invest in quality engineering on the browser itself with no guarantee that this would actually improve anything or drive revenue.
The idea would be a gambit that you could improve the software sufficiently that it accidentally became actually competitive with chrome.
Right now, it feels like some weird hobby project that falls short of the engineering chops that went into Chrome, and I suspect people can feel this too.
Is this a serious question? Mozilla is mostly known for its web browser, and historically this was always the case. Microsoft is known for its OS and office suite, Google is known for search (and many other things), and Apple for its iDevices. None of these companies has ever been a browser-first company, so I wouldn't expect any of them to focus primarily on building a web browser.
Because I expect Microsoft and Google to build more features for advertisers to target me, and Apple to build more features that lock me into their ecosystem.
Because I let my nostalgia of 2004 get the best of me. And as much as I may gripe about their loss of focus, or their lagging behind in certain areas, I still appreciate them for the good things they do (e.g. fingerprint resisting, containers) and for the potential that they still have—even today—to implement user-focused improvements in their browser.
They may not lean into it as much as I'd like, but they still do better than Google or Microsoft in this regard.
Microsoft has the potential to make Windows 11 UX great. They made it worse than 10 by removing functionality that's existed for years.
Will Microsoft do it just because the potential exists? No.
Mozilla CEO takes a $3m salary and their biggest earner by many magnitudes is a search partnership with Google. Nothing is going to change with how they treat Firefox at a consumer-level until they need to man the battle stations with a rugpull on losing that partnership.
"Why would they lose it?"
AI happened and the current economic climate means Google is reducing spending by killing things that don't bring tangible value.
Which of those three corporations are non-profits chartered for a specific purpose with an additional implied social contract with their contributors and users?
It shows that there's no strong-focused mission. Which is ok for a generic shareholder company - ultimately, not many care how exactly the profits are achieved, as long as there are profits. But less ok for a purposeful non-profit.
The irony doesn't escape me that if they'd just turn off the extension restriction there are like a thousand extensions that would do that and more for any audience where such a thing still matters
I haven't tried to build Firefox for Android in a really long time but I wonder what the level of effort would be to just track the release tags with such a patch applied (i.e. the world's shallowest fork)
Negative, I just tried https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/ (which, delightfully, wasn't 0.99.beta-patch3 or some such nonsense) but it for sure was not "allow me to install whatever add-on I want". It's the same stupid list as normal Firefox for Android
Maybe you're thinking of Firefox Nightly, which I do run from the Play store and is better than "normal people Firefox" but this for sure is not the good old days of "Let Me Install Violentmonkey not stupid Tapermonkey"
Weird, I thought Fennec had those. I downloaded it and use it for browsing, but I mostly don't browse on my phone. From a web search though, I found out you can go into settings, click on "About Fennec" and click on the logo five times to unlock debug mode which apparently gives you access to custom add-on collections. You have to go to the firefox add-ons page and make a custom collection under your account for it to be useful. This presumably allows all add-ons through this method.
On the contrary Mozilla correctly anticipates that low quality AI generated content will increasingly ruin web experience and has therefore correctly chosen to invest in technology that will combat that.
Mozilla doesn't build Firefox (which is what I assume you're meaning here by "building a web browser.") Firefox — and all those system-integration features you're mentioning — are developed by Firefox Corporation.
Mozilla is a separate company, with separate employees, that does everything except building Firefox.
(This division was originally created to firewall off the corporate moneys donated to, and influence of corporate developers on, Firefox, from the rest of Mozilla. Back when Google was sponsoring Firefox to use Google as its search engine, their money went exclusively to Firefox Corporation, with none of that money ever going to Mozilla.)
Note that this doesn't mean that Mozilla doesn't build a web browser. Mozilla develop the engine (Gecko/Servo) that goes into Firefox; and they also co-develop some of the Gecko/Servo-based browsers used by various FOSS projects — Tor Browser, for example. This is roughly the same structure as how the open-source Chromium project (which produces its own "Chromium browser") is the basis for the closed-source Google Chrome.
Interestingly, this means that for Firefox Corporation to get features into Gecko, they have to submit PRs "upstream" to Mozilla, who might very well reject them as "only serving corporate interests at the expense of the user." This is quite unlike Chromium, where both Chromium and Chrome are ultimately steered by Google.
Firefox developers work for Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla Corporation is a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. Mitchell Baker is CEO of both.
In 2005 they said a for profit subsidiary was for revenue flexibility. Where did you learn it was to limit corporate developers influencing Mozilla Foundation?
Google's sponsorship of Firefox continues. Most of Mozilla Foundation's revenue comes from Google through Mozilla Corporation.
Mozilla Corporation employees develop Gecko. They developed Servo until it was transferred to the Linux Foundation. They land code with no sign of Mozilla Foundation review routinely. Can you show a PR Mozilla Foundation rejected as "only serving corporate interests at the expense of the user."?
This is just the Mythical Man Month stated differently: that if only more people were on the browser the projects it's on would get faster. The company is obviously desperately searching for a way to stay in the game as Safari / Chrome / Edge come bundled with platforms.
It took this massive effort 15 years ago to get Firefox onto people's computers back in the day. Mozilla kicked off the web standardization drive and transformed the Internet. That sort of thing is not feasible now because the commercial browsers are damned good.
They're either done or they have to find another way to use their resources to advance their mission. Unsurprisingly, they pick the latter.
I’m hoping that Mozilla has a secret plan to extend Fakespot beyond just shopping and to become the killer app for distinguishing all AI generated content. May not even be possible to achieve, but that would be a worthy goal for Mozilla.
How do they expect to lead in identifying fake content when the problem is intractable if adversaries are even somewhat competent?
You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI models properly, there is no way to differentiate.
You can even follow the Amazon Mechanical Turk [1] + ChatGPT + editors type of workflow which will be indistinguishable from a real content? I am eager to see what arises from this acquisition. I remember using Disqus in Wordpress to expect more competitive spam detection. The result? It didn't even detect obvious network bots. Fakespot raised $ 5.3m [2]. Is there a disclosure of the number for this acquisition? [3].
The problem is not intractable if the analysis of reviews is statistical and reputation-based instead of content-based. They can look at how many reviews were added over time, how the product page has changed over time, if the reviewers are genuine users or if they only leave 5-star reviews on a handful of sketchy products, etc.
Of course, it would be much easier for Amazon to do this, because they could look at IP addresses, purchase history, mailing address, etc. - but it's in their best interest to let the spam continue, apparently.
This is the oldest conundrum in Trust & Safety. The target party (Amazon) has pretty much all of the rich data (IPs, cards, addresses) while the interested party (usually a small company) is trying to scrape their way to solve a problem that the first party is half-assed interested in solving because they (1) have an internal "abuse" team to deal with it already and/or (2) are probably making money by keeping the problem alive either directly or indirectly.
As if the above is not already, there's one more complication: the interested small company needs to pitch their solution as a service to the platform because in general that's the only interested party of real business value. i.e. end users would not pay for such protection or won't pay enough.
Apply it to social media impersonation and scams, Adtech scams, etc etc.
I'm saddened by the sudden and intermittent disappearance of ReviewMeta, which prided itself as not inserting affiliate links into their site/extension. Reading this news leads me to believe that this is a perfect fit in accordance with Mozilla's overall mission, making this a good outcome for something that could've easily been exploited by a bad actor making the acquisition.
I think this is a great acquisition, but I'm curious where this may give Mozilla an advantage. Do they plan on baking this into Firefox, and if so, to what degree are we willing to let the browser govern the content?
It feels like this business has no real "moat." But I think for once that's not really a problem: I would hope Google decides they need to add comparable functionality to a browser!
And then maybe it can begin expanding for more general use... detecting likelihood of any content being artificial... hmm I'm scared again.
Fully automated profiling, deciding, and then advertising to as many people as possible whether you are a scammer or if a review you left is genuine. And the only method through which you can discover that you are the victim of of a false accusation is to use this product to actively and manually monitor your own content.
Both freedom of expression and automated decision-making are already quite heavily regulated in the EU today with even more and tighter rules currently the way[1]. These new regulations also happen to extensively cover the combating of fake and illegal content by online platforms.
Additionally this seems contrary to Mozilla's claim[2] of commitment to human dignity, individual expression, accountability, and most of all: trust.
Strange thing to be investing in for any other reason than to make it disappear, which I don't think is the plan. Money would have been better spent elsewhere... or anywhere else, really.
There's nothing Mozilla can do to reverse Firefox's course. It's not an engineering problem, they have no reach to push anything and for ordinary people default-shipped browsers are just fine.
The real question indeed is what Mozilla really is with this reality check in mind. A type of do-good activist organization that does a lot of preaching yet fails to convert this into actual meaning or impact?
All of this made possible by "easy money". They literally do not have to do a damn thing to receive $0.5B from Google. Just keep things as-is.
As they are trying to find alternative income streams, for the first time in their history they're learning what hard money is. Generating $0.5B in the tech market by delivering an actual service/product people will pay you for...is fucking hard.
As such, it's odd that in their borrowed time they continue to give away money or do takeovers of products that do not add revenue. I guess they'll never learn.
Many Firefox extensions including the "recommended" ones which are claimed to be actively monitored are breaking Mozilla's extension policies by secretly sending telemetry, injecting advertisements, load and execute external resources, etc.
None of the ones I reported have had their recommended status revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to publish new versions where the same violations are still present and even a few published updates that introduced additional violations.
To Mozilla: If you want to change the world, start with yourself.
To the rest: Whenever you install or update an extension, always go through its published source first. You can get to it by right-clicking the install/download button to "save as" and then simply unpacking the xpi file.
> None of the ones I reported have had their recommended status revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to publish new versions where the same violations are still present
Could you publish these publicly anywhere, so that we can do for ourselves the job that Mozilla apparently is failing to do (while claiming to)?
> Add-ons must be self-contained and not load remote code for execution.
> Add-ons must limit data collection to what is necessary for functionality [...] Data includes all information the add-on collects, regardless of the manner.
> Collecting, or facilitating the collection of ancillary information (e.g. any data not required for the add-on’s functionality as stated in the description) is prohibited.
> Modifying web content or facilitating redirects to include affiliate promotion tags is not permitted
I guess I'm in the minority in that I love Fakespot as a tool to determine the "real" review scores of products on Amazon and other online shops. I get tired of the "1000 reviews, 5 stars" that turns out to be pure garbage. Instead, I find that half of the very amazing 5 star, 10k reviews products are rated a C, D, or F.
I think it'd be great to have this integrated into the browser and be able to get a sense for what's real or "likely fake" when browsing the web of tomorrow.
I would prefer Mozilla spend effort in improving the performance of Firefox; I always switch to it and then, to my repeated dismay, always fall back to Chrome because it just feels snappier.
Instead of identifying fake content, I'm more interested in features that generate fake stats for analytics, effectively making them useless. However, not sure if the Google money would keep flowing for such efforts.
Their VPN is just reselling someone else's service, minimal effort invested while opening a mainstream service that actually provides an income stream. Seems like a solid strategy to me.
Firefox VPN is great for beginners, but it assumes too much and isn't flexible enough for power users. I had to cancel it because "Allow LAN connections" didn't base itself off my local subnet, but on RFC1918. My network is in a private IPv4 net other than that, and I couldn't configure split-tunnel manually.
Proton VPN works wonders and I like their mail product too.
Maybe Moz is on to something here; while they're at it, how about telling apart original content from copycat sites?
But what's really interesting is, can we not put ML to good use for generating a new browser for us, given a corpus of expected renderings? Or have we managed to make web standards so fscking complicated and out of hand so as to make that infeasible?
It would too suspicious if Google directly buys Fakespot (a control on which allows to manipulate any review autencity). So Mozilla, which is totally funded from Google money, buys them.
A cookie consent on fakespot page states mainly Fakespot and Google cookies in a surprising manner. They give two options, but none to refuse any cookies:
- ok
- do not sell or share my personal information
How are they different? From reading details, I assume no difference.
There's no way to turn off any non-necessary cookies group (shared with Meta/Facebook (!) and Google).
It will be sad to stop using FF because of this integration.
Mozilla only exists so Google and Microsoft can claim that they have no monopoly on the browser market. That is why many of Mozillas moves basically make no sense.
This is interesting. FakeSpot is already getting aggressive with injected ads and recommendations on product listing pages (Amazon as an example) and this tells me they're going money-heavy, while Mozilla on the other hand might have much left at all actually. How exactly the financial aspect shapes out remains to be seen.
Funnily enough, I happened to visit fakespot for the first time in ages today, after I discovered that reviewmeta is dead. It looks like the functionality has already been bundled into Firefox/Chrome extensions instead of being a standalone website, and they're already pushing an AI angle. That was quick.
I see a lot of people here complaining that Mozilla isn't spending enough of its money on the development of Firefox, but a lot of that money comes from their Google deal. If Firefox started to gain market share over Chrome, do you think that Google would continue to fund them, and if not then who would?
Other search engines would. It already happened that Yahoo paid to be the default search engine in Firefox, for certain regions of the world (Yahoo was for the US, they also had deals with Yandex and Baidu). And Google would probably still want to have its search engine available out of the box to millions of users, even through an other browser.
This will probably allow building a detailed model of every FF user (as Fakespot will be probably enabled by default). Not only browsing history (like in a failed Google Chrome FLoC attempt). Shopping interests, behavior on every page and so on. Even mouse movements and key press frequences.
So, how long before Cloudflare buys Mozilla or Brave (or builds it own)? Feels like they would be a better long term home than Mozilla surviving off an annual stipend from Google.
Did they mean to say "Firefox [has] a lineage that dates back to the origins of the i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ web"? Tim Berners Lee invented the Web, not the Internet.
I tried to use Pocket and just couldn't get into it. Software like Adblock and this fakespot thing have to be part of the browser for it to work seamless.
People can argue over word definition. If I pay someone to write me a false positive review, I'd say that's much more closer to a definition of a "fake content" than "more content". We can call it fake, false, malicious, misleading, bogus, sham, deceptive or any other similar names.
> Sorry about being pedantic, but is no such thing as fake content, there is only more content.
This isn't pedantic, it's ignoring context: In context, "Fake" clearly means that the so-called review wasn't written by a human who had used the product. Given what a review is, and what purpose we expect reviews to serve, so-called "reviews" written by a language model are clearly fake, just like a non-driveable toy car is a fake car.
Online reviews are a product, not a nebulous concept and sites like Amazon depend on them to drive sales of products or are a company’s entire unique value proposition like in the case of Yelp. The idea that reviews are not in some way manipulated at ‘fake’ since they drive capital towards or away from businesses. In other words there are no altruistic reviews. The only neutral content comes from a Random Number Generator, which is thus far impossible to create
Ironically it’s humans that generate spam and choose to, and are incentivized to continue to choose to, monetize content.
I’ve asked ChatGPT for product recommendations and it’s a breath of fresh air to get suggestions that are not filtered for affiliate commission potential. Let’s hope this lasts but in the meantime I doubt I’m the only one noticing that this AI content is not steering you based on the potential for profit.
So, fakespot kind of had it backwards, in a way. What we need is Humanspot to warn us away from content, AI generated or not, that has been corrupted by a human profit motive.
And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content.
I can't help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no way improves Mozilla's browser.