Comment by antisol

Comment by antisol a day ago

6 replies

This, 1000%.

I've been saying for over a decade that Mozilla decided to abandon their core demographic - power users, instead going after people who "really like chrome, but think that it’s just too fast and doesn’t use enough memory".

I always questioned how big that demographic was. Looking at a chart of Firefox's market share would seem to indicate that I might have been on to something.

But Mozilla just keep doubling down on trash. They're not actually interested in hearing what people want. People like me tried to tell them before we abandoned Firefox. But they weren't interested in listening. It's been this way for 10 years or more now.

I've long been of the opinion that the best thing for Mozilla would be for it to die, so that some other FOSS group (maybe the FSF, or debian, someone like that) could take its place with a firefox fork. And maybe even start actually improving the software again.

eviks a day ago

> that some other FOSS group...could take its place with a firefox fork

What stops them from contributing improvements now?

  • M95D a day ago

    The state of mess the code is in?

    • edelbitter a day ago

      To be fair, Mozilla-affiliated developers have accomplished some serious cleanup in recent years. New & redesigned features are fake tabs with special permissions instead of that unholy intertwining of web standards and local UI in C++. Storage is almost-proper sqlite3. Dynamic linking against system libraries old&new just works(tm). Even the vendored Rust packages more or less build fine, now even across multiple compiler versions. Plus, AMDs new-ish CPUs with ginormous L3 brought recompile (and thus, bisect) times to almost reasonable levels, so that is not as pressing of an issue any more. I would guesstimate only 25 years left at the current speed till Firefox can be considered maintainable again.

      • M95D a day ago

        And only 24 years left until Ladybird is usable as a replacement. /s

    • eviks a day ago

      So will the mess suddenly disappear?

  • antisol a day ago

    Multiple factors, e.g the perceived lack of an immediate need, and also Mozilla's control of the firefox codebase.

    For instance, one improvement that a more user-respecting group might contribute is ripping out all the AI slop. But as pointed out in the article, Mozilla like the AI slop and wouldn't accept those changes.

    If Mozilla was to disappear, orgs like those I mentioned would likely see a more urgent need to take over in order to break the chrom(ium) monoculture.