Comment by b59831
Comment by b59831 8 days ago
Hopefully they'll replace them with people who'll make firefox better.
Comment by b59831 8 days ago
Hopefully they'll replace them with people who'll make firefox better.
What they should have done was build an endowment when they were getting crazy google money. It obviously wasn't going to last forever.
Yes, definitely. It would have been easy back then to build an endowment if they hadn't blown money on so much BS and prepared for a future where they wouldn't have all that money coming in. I think it's too late for them now, and I don't see how they can possibly trim things down into a lean, efficient organization, especially not in the US. That's why I think someone in a cheaper country needs to fork the thing and take over Firefox development. This will probably have to wait until Mozilla is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy though.
Why haven't some EU and/or Latin American countries funded a Web browser in a meaningful way, in an effort to be less under the thumb of US tech companies?
They could fork Firefox or Chromium, poach some current developers, hire some more, and assert a strong presence on standards.
Either they need to do drastic cuts & focus on fundamentals. Or a fork with less funding entanglements can. Or an alternative project like LadyBird can.
What's wrong with Firefox? It's my daily browser and works great. What am I missing?
I use FF as well. I think the problem is lack of focus on core workflows. This is a problem with all major browsers.
For example, why is the address bar so tiny on high resolution screens? One would think this is an easy fix that would improve the UX for many people. Yet years go by with unresolved issues in the trackers.
If management cared about the browser they would have never had this staff in the first place, a similar amount of staff for programming, testing, and marketing their browser would have been effective at making a better browser and getting more market share.
Now that few people use it, major sites are not just no longer testing on Firefox they are actively blocking it. Slack, for instance.
I went back and investigated: Huddles is blocked and I was using a user agent switcher to get around it. Then I had to switch back to Firefox agent string so Google Meet would work. Apparently my user agent switcher has out of date agent strings for Firefox so Slack started blocking me entirely.
So Slack was blocking me entirely because it thought I was using an out of date Firefox but using the default user agent string it works again.
I doubt it. This company seems to have major structural problems, and cutting some stuff here and there isn't going to fix it. Its expenses are huge, and it pays its executives obscene amounts of money, and meanwhile they've been wasting tons of money on stuff like Pocket, AI crap, and now they're pissing off supporters by getting into ads.
I think what we really need is for a new company to get started in some other country, where the cost of living and the cost of executive salaries is much, much cheaper. Have that company fork the Firefox codebase, and then only concentrate on Firefox (Newfox? Betterfox?) browser development and maintenance, and nothing else. They could work more like Wikipedia, just taking donations and building up an endowment with that to fund themselves, and keeping their operations very lean so they don't need that much money to begin with.