Elsewhere I saw someone post this image as a defense of rather than parody of Mozilla's corporate structure. Apparently this infographic comes from somewhere deep within the comically un-navigable "stateof.mozilla.org" (seriously, that site's design is like the "don't" list for the modern web's ills.)
“Sometimes I think back on my time amongst these clowns and realize that if I had stayed in the tech industry instead of buying a bar, I would be repellently rich right now. On the other hand I probably would have killed myself, so there's that.”
As someone who quit my cushy job in the tech industry over exactly this kind of thing, it means a lot to hear you say this. It seems like none of my friends or coworkers really understand.
@jztusk@thomholwerda I have no idea who this guy is, but he linked to primary sources and drew the obvious conclusions. If you have dispute about the numbers in the annual report from Mozilla itself I'd sure love to hear about that.
@jztusk If you want to make the claim that the collection of shell companies that all call themselves Mozilla are focused on making the web browser succeed, go for it -- because from all available evidence, that is very much [citation needed].
@jwz@jztusk Mozilla's mission isn't about making money off a browser though. Firefox could have a 90% market share and that wouldn't mean Mozilla is successful.
The mission revolves around a healthy, open web. While the browser, and standards obviously play some role in that, the web has grown a lot since 2000 and it's going to take a lot more to make/keep it healthy.
(Disclaimer: I am employed by Mozilla to work on Firefox)
@Schouten_B@jztusk Wow.... If you think Firefox could have 90% market share and Mozilla could be considered a failure, I guess we really have nothing to discuss.
@jwz@jztusk I absolutely believe that. As a matter of fact, that may make the web less healthy as it would mean both WebKit and Blink would have diminishingly small market shares, and engine diversity plays a huge role in ensuring a healthy web. 40/30/30 would be a much more desirable situation.
At the same time Firefox can perfectly be used to browse a web that is fundamentally flawed and harms people's lives and mental health. (Hell, it is)
ROTFL what? No surprise Firefox is in free nosedive when people employed by Mozilla to work on Firefox work that way. A browser with a market share to compete with Blink is literally the only thing left to protect “a healthy, open web”. One that supports web standards regardless of what Google decides to do with Chrome, instead of meekly following what the overlord dictates.
Having said that, not a nosedive market share has been flattening and in 2023 it has actually been stable 🙂.
I work hard to make Firefox faster and we've made some great progress and I'm proud of all the hard work people did. But that doesn't mean I don't acknowledge the fact we have to to beyond that.
Firefox is doing absolutely nothing to “make a difference”.
No one can use JPEG XL if no browser decides to support it. UA implementors have to make the first step here, and by refusing to do so Firefox is driving the last nail in the format's coffin. If the same attitude had been used for web standards when IE had 90% market share, the open web would have been killed then and there.
Thanks for confirming that Firefox is doing nothing to protect the open web today.
@oblomov@Schouten_B@jwz@jztusk Supporting JPEG XL or any other “niche” feature (yup I said it) is not going to make any significant difference.
Today’s Firefox is as good as any other browser.
Nothing technical will stop Google and their billion dollar marketing and dirty games from taking away the final bit of non-Chrome browser market share. Sadly.
Mozilla has never had a good strategy for desktop and mobile browsers other than ship something every month.
Supporting JPEG XL, RSS and other web standards would make a lot of difference, as it would signal that Mozilla actually cares about web standards and the open web.
Today's Firefox is not as good as any other browser. Vivaldi, for example, is much better under most respect, expect for it being a Blink skin with non-free components —and yet managing to do a better job than Firefox at promoting the open web despite this. This is how bad the situation is.
@oblomov@Schouten_B@jwz@jztusk You say this because you live in a bubble and you know your tech very well. However for 99.99% of users, “regular" people, what happens in that rectangular area in which content is rendered is pretty much the same between any modern browser. Those people do not choose a browser based on a checklist that contains RSS or WebBluetooth or JPEG XL.
Mozilla has done absolutely nothing to differentiate Firefox from Chrome, and in fact has actively done all it can to make it as indistinguishable as possible, to the point of actively removing features to drop down to “parity” with Chrome. No shit nothing made a difference in terms of market share. Why should anyone use Firefox, when the only reason to use it is «it's not Chrome»?
@oblomov@st3fan@jwz@jztusk For one we have very different data collection policies that have a significant impact on how much of your personal data you implicitly 'sell', at least when compared to Chrome.
There's more of course, but that's the primary one for me -personally-. (Other people may have motivations around adblockers/add-ons and tracking protection for example)
So: eople who care about privacy have better options than Firefox, and people who don't will use Chrome anyway, because Firefox has nothing to offer compared to it. When “less worse privacy” is literally the only selling point against Chrome, is it really any surprise that Firefox has lost so much market share?
I'm not in good faith? Who is it again that made the claim that not supporting web standards was the best choice to protect the open web?
You want to go for maximum irony? Firefox could enable JPEG XL and Mozilla could partner with Meta to advertise the browser as the superior choice for faster image loading, and this would still do more for the open web that what Firefox has done in the last decade. This is how bad the situation is.
I'm sure your overpaid CEO has a better chance at striking such a deal than any contact I could pass to you. (What was that again about limited resources?)
@oblomov@st3fan@jwz@jztusk It's cute and at the same time somewhat worrying that you think we don't talk to Meta when we make these types of decisions.
Which is why I'm interested in what your assumption that we 'could' do that is based on :-).
@oblomov@jwz@jztusk When IE had 90% market share decisions about what to support were made as well.
There's numerous reasons for this, not least of which security.
I'm sorry you feel Firefox isn't doing anything to help the open web, but JPEG-XR (whose patents are only made available under the CP), is far from the only component of an open web.
And you'll notice that “not supporting transparent PNGs because IE doesn't suppor it” with security as an excuse wasn't one of them.
Also, it's the second time you confuse JPEG XL with JPEG XR. They are not the same thing.
And yes, JXL is not the only component of the open web (are you trolling?), but it's one of the many that Firefox is disregarding since Papa Google said it shouldn't be supported. You know, like RSS. These aren't opinions, but facts.
I'm not familiar enough with the merits of XL to have much of an informed opinion on it I'm afraid.
But I doubt the decision to support it was related to 'papa google' (other than the reality that a format only supported by Firefox is not going to get much adoption, and in some ways, it shouldn't except if it's -really- compelling).
It sure won't get any adoption if not even Firefox supports. Ironically, Apple (of all the frigging companies) has a healthier attitude than that and added JPEG XL support in Safari. Something that in Firefox is literally just a switch flip at build time. Tell me again how this isn't because Papa Google doesn't want it.
And again, JPEG XL isn't even the point. Mozilla's attitude to web standards and the open web is.
@DBG3D@ophiocephalic@thomholwerda@jwz then everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi. I refuse to wash away the meaning of a truly horrible ideology, and neither should you.
@pinchito@DBG3D@ophiocephalic@thomholwerda
I implore all of you -- regardless of what you think about this dude, who I am not defending - can we please focus on Mozilla, the actual topic?
Maybe the worst person you know made a good point. It happens. If someone less weird had posted a coherent thing I probably would have linked to that instead, But they didn't. So here we are. So we can make this the Nth referendum on hating the alt-right, which I do, or instead we can talk about Mozilla.
@jwz@pinchito@DBG3D@thomholwerda
Actually no. Regardless of what Mozilla is up to, and some of it's not good, never platform a fascist. This blogger you're promoting and sending traffic to is a rabid transphobic misogynist who mixes up cherry-picked facts and bullshit to attack and undermine open-source projects: https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/111666210818055445
These people want to eradicate everything that makes life worth living, and all of our bloodlines too. We're at war with them, and everything we do should be framed in that light. "Does this toot or blog post make it harder or easier for fascism to prevail?"
You're letting your strings get pulled by our worst enemies. This liberal "gotta hand it to them" impulse is a weakness that will get us all killed. They're coming for you and that queer burlesque in your joint too, @jwz
@ophiocephalic@jwz@DBG3D@thomholwerda that is fine, if we all shared your goals in life and your exact modus operandi. As it is, we may choose to pursue our own goals as we see fit. In this case we seem to share with a right wing bigot the bigger goal of keeping Firefox alive.
@pinchito@jwz@DBG3D@thomholwerda
As I mentioned above, that bigot doesn't want to keep Firefox alive, he wants to destroy it - and by spreading his message, you're helping him
@jwz This explains a lot about why I've been seeing a worse experience in Firefox lately. God dammit Mozilla, you were a light in the darkness and you've descended into the shitpile with everything else on the internet.
@jwz FWIW, Mozilla's post doesn't give me that vibe, and I've written many documents like that one, so I understand how they're written. They're simply talking more about the exciting stuff in a forward-looking post.
@americanjeff@jwz The main point here is that donations do not go to the Corporation and aren't involved in paying the salary of people in the corporation (including the CEO).
@jwz@americanjeff It's not money laundering. They serve different purposes. Donations should go directly to promoting the open web, not to the development of profitable products.
Analogously Mitchell's CEO salary of a (very profitable) for-profit company should not be paid from the donations people make to the mission of Mozilla. The structure supports that.
@Schouten_B@americanjeff Yeaaahhhhhh see, now you're doing the "I work for Mozilla, not Mozilla" thing again and shell-corp three card monte is the very basis of a money laundry.
@jwz@americanjeff But I do work for a for-profit corporation. It would be very disingenuous to deny that. And it would be absurd to accept the salary that I receive if it was coming out or donations rather than a profitable product.
Could I make a lot more at Facebook? Sure. That doesn't mean I'm being a philanthropist here. It's important to be clear about the difference.
@jwz It's also fascinating to me how he doesn't see what's wrong with their model intentionally not giving the donations directly to #Firefox's development. You know, the very "product" people know #Mozilla for???
And I definitely know many people who have donated to Mozilla thinking it will help developers spend more time improving Firefox, when it's clearly not the case!
@mima
Serious question: given this dilemma, how can one best fund open source browser development? (Regardless if firefox or not)
Encourage the people working on FF to setup liberapay? @jwz@Schouten_B@americanjeff
@mima
Serious question: given this dilemma, how can one best fund open source browser development? (Regardless if firefox or not)
Encourage the people working on FF to setup liberapay? @jwz@Schouten_B@americanjeff
@gabriel@jwz@americanjeff@mima Honest answer: I don't think funding is helpful or needed here. The most useful thing you can do is to spread the message of why engine diversity matters and encourage people around you to make a conscious choice as to what browsers to use! Those users will pay for themselves and implicitly help browser development!
Oh. And file bugs and tell us why they matter when you find them 🙂.
@gabriel@jwz@americanjeff@mima (I'm very familiar with the 'where can I send my money' sentiment, as for those of us with plenty of financial resources money is so much less precious than time. But sadly I'm afraid our money can do a lot less good here than our time and effort 🙂)
@gabriel I don't really have the best answer that can apply to all open-source browsers out there; I don't think it can be universal. One thing's for sure though: if they want to rely entirely on donations, that's totally cool! If they want to rely entirely on partnership deals and profits from a corporation, that's fine too, just make it absolutely clear that you're doing that (so no using the exact same name preceding "Corporation" and "Foundation" please).
I can tell you about one browser called #PaleMoon whose monetary model I know well and is simple: development benefits from both donations and a search partnership deal with #DuckDuckGo. However they're able to do this because they don't have to spin-off a corporation to take the DDG money (which probably just number around some thousands of dollars or maybe even just some hundreds, all I know is that donations still make up most of the revenue). And most of the time it isn't really money that is holding back Pale Moon's development, but lack of developers who can work in the CSS and JS engines.
So that's why it's not simple to answer that question. But if you really want an answer, I guess just accept both kinds of money and try to make it legal? Not sure how Mozilla could do that though... And it's not simple to let the browser's development just be entirely funded by donations either, because while there is no doubt a dedicated amount of users who will give out money, I am skeptical it can be enough to sustain the speed of development Firefox is in right now with its 4-week release cycle.
FF really doesn't respect ppls donations. They are Goo-funded. Scamazon and Cloud(G)lare work through them too. A few years ago Mozilla snubbed bitcoin donations. Their priorities are clear.
Projects that seem to respect ppl and/or seem to need support/volunteers, include #I2P, #gNUSocial, FSF, #Parabola (gnulinux), #libreboot.at, ForgeFed, #OpenWRT, DeCloudflare.
A few years ago Mozilla snubbed bitcoin donations.
Small FOSS projects like #PaleMoon reject donations in cryptocurrency (especially Bitcoin) too, due to how unstable its market price is (gotta convert it back to real cash you know, so you can actually use it to feed yourself) and how it's most notoriously used in crime. It has nothing to do with your conspiracy thinking that corporate influence is somehow behind why FOSS projects don't want your crypto; it's practicality in the real world which from time-to-time again that field has failed to deliver.> Their priorities are clear.
Which is to get real funding, not what is essentially shares in the stock market.
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