Comment by shiroiushi

Comment by shiroiushi 8 days ago

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.

bawolff 8 days ago

What they should have done was build an endowment when they were getting crazy google money. It obviously wasn't going to last forever.

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shiroiushi 8 days ago

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.

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- neilv 8 days ago
  
  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.
  
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  I_AM_A_SMURF 8 days ago
  
  Microsoft gave up on building a Web Browser engine and you think a government can? Browser engines are really hard to build. They requires a lot of (very expensive) niche technical talent. Not to mention the need to keep up with the rate of Google's improvements to Chrome/Blink. We're at a point where Chrome has a 10 year head start to any other engine other than Firefox, building a general purpose new engine from scratch is basically off the table, and hard forking Chrome/Blink is also off the table (because why would you toss the ~1bn$ Google puts into chrome every year?). We're in a world of a single browser engine, no way to go back for the foreseeable future.
  
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  shiroiushi 8 days ago
  
  >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?
  As with many things, it's just like Dark Helmet said in Spaceballs: "Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
  Not to say that the US (or Mozilla or Google) is evil and the EU and LATAM are good (LATAM in particular is a really screwed up place, with a few exceptions that aren't as broken like Chile), but while the US obviously has its problems and does really stupid stuff (see the current election), other places do incredibly stupid stuff too (see Germany disarming, shutting down all its nuclear power and trying to make itself dependent on Russian fossil fuel energy). Honestly, I think the main reason the US is still doing as well as it is (see the strength of the USD) is because everyone else is so busy shooting themselves in the foot with a shotgun.
  So yes, I totally agree: theoretically it should be pretty simple to just fork Firefox (or Chromium, though I think the former is a much better choice so we don't the whole web dependent on a single browser engine, if for no other reason), poach some current devs, hire some new ones locally, and then become the new "open standard". But good luck getting some national government (or even a group of them, like with the EU) having some vision and backing such a move.
  
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  123yawaworht456 7 days ago
  
  a EU funded/developed browser would have a built-in blacklist. malinformation is the greatest threat to so-called democracies
  
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  shiroiushi 7 days ago
  
  A built-in blacklist is fine. It's trivially easy to download some source code and delete a blacklist and recompile.
  
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- tcfhgj 8 days ago
  
  not that easy if your money source is your competitor... conflict of interest
  
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  shiroiushi 8 days ago
  
  Google being the source of their money did not, in any way, prevent Mozilla from spending their money more wisely and putting some into an endowment.
  
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[removed] 8 days ago

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briantakita 8 days ago

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.

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