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I don’t get it though. I mean it should only be as bad as before. It shouldn’t be worse now. If maintaining two browsers is too much work, they’ll just maintain the WebKit version as before. Browsers aren’t forced to use their own engine where they can, right? Even though of course it would be best if they were allowed to use their own engine everywhere. 👍 But the point is it shouldn’t be worse now. Only equally shitty. At least for developers. From a goodwill standpoint it should be putting Apple in a worse light for sure. 🫤
Bro legit question, why can’t all the app developers pull their app from apple store. Within no time apple will change its tune
Apple recently became the number one smart phone manufacturer in the world (not just NA), and have 61% of the US market.
Nobody with a brain is pulling out of that.
The 30% fee developers keep complaining about has been in place from the start, so they really should have protested the app store at launch. Now they’re too dependent on app revenue for any kind of protest.
Would you pay for the missed income then? Who would?
Because app developers have to jump through a lot of hoops to get into the app store, and even if every single app was pulled then the developers would have to jump through all those hoops again. And this time, Apple won’t make it easy. Meanwhile, they are hemorrhaging money for every minute their app is not on the app store. On the other hand, Apple would give incentives to new applicants to replace everything that was pulled, and the app store returns to relatively normal within 24 hours since there are tons of apps out there that just aren’t popular enough to be on the app store at the moment. Would you want to be the first developer to pull their app?
It would take a google or a Meta to pull out for Apple to actually care. Which is why they already have special deals around the general rules anyway
Apple only has this power because its users are a major source of income for developers.
Well, to be fair the EU can’t force Apple to change outside of its territories, and it makes sense that Apple prefers to maintain the status-quo untill other countries will follow EU example with similar regulations.
I can see Mozilla’s point there, but this scenario, even it it’s not optimal, still seems me a better one compared to the All-WebKit-Everywhere one. If Mozilla struggles to maintain two versions of Firefox for iOS, I’d say they can drop the useless WebKit version and just maintain the real version for EU only market (untill other markets will follow).
How many people are currently choosing FF in favour of Safari on iOS after all?
I used FF on my phone for a while, back when my old MacBook was stuck on a version of macOS that didn’t offer iCloud syncing. Firefox on both devices worked perfectly, but I always slightly preferred to use Safari wherever possible.
These days I keep FF on my Mac for if ever I need a second browser, and it’s the first thing I install if I ever need to setup a Windows VM.
The problem is that Firefox desperately needs more users and even those who use the WebKit version are better than nothing. The WebKit version at least gets the name of Firefox out there.
I am a Firefox user both on desktop and on my android phone. And not only to support Mozilla in keeping the browser engine competition alive, but also because of some really good features that alternatives are missing (respectively Multi-Account containers on desktop and extensions on Android).
On my iPad, though, I tried using Firefox (even just to have bookmarks and history synced) but it’s really just a reskin of Safari with worse integration with the system and less features. Therefore I moved back to safari.
Why am I telling this? Because for any non tech-savvy user, if their first experience with FF is on their iPhone / iPad (with the WebKit version), they will probably not like it, and eventually associate in their mind “Firefox = bad browser”, preventing them to give it a try on their desktop. So, from a certain point of view, maybe getting rid of the WebKit version would help Mozilla gather some more users on the other platforms in the long term…
Fair point. Honestly had no idea as I’ve never owned any apple devices myself, but yeah that sucks and I’d probably also reluctantly stick to Safari in that case.
Fuck Apple
When a company’ website doesn’t work on Firefox I don’t get angry at Firefox, I just don’t use the site. When a company makes their cookie popups are a pain in the ass I don’t get angry at the EU, I get angry at the company that made the popup. I use Firefox as a Canary that dies when a website is a piece of shit.
Maybe it’s a win-win, I don’t have to deal with Apple’s bullshit and Apple doesn’t have to waste resources on me, for me to block all their shady shit.
Got to buy material for house renovation, several hundreds € of saving if I bought on one website that didn’t work with Firefox. Guess what I did.
Almost everyone choose money and commodity over everything else. Firefox is doomed to fail, and I say that as Firefox user.
You could have said the same for Internet Explorer some years ago, and they got their lunch eaten despite being free AND the default owned by a monopoly
Yes but Internet Explorer had massive issue, nowadays it’s Firefox that has compatibility issue, doesn’t have a platform where its default (Microsoft has windows/edge, android/chrome, iPhone/safari) and no meaningfull advantage on the other.
The cards are stacked against it, if only they could use Google money to get some advantage, like a better design. Right now if I open Firefox there is 3 row of sponsored clickbait articles. The reason I paid money for Mac is because I was fed up of the very same bullshit on windows, make something lean, sleek that works well and people might use it but here it’s a kind of dinosaur software that is even filled with sponsored articles.
The difference is that Google had the capital and a monopoly itself. Mozilla doesn’t have shit.
Except and arguably better product in the browser space?
Both Mozilla and Opera had better browsers.
Mozilla has a regular income from Google.
Yeah, they’re pretty much owned by Google, thus not a competitor.
Google paying Firefox explicitly to make Google the default search engine. That doesn’t mean they own Firefox in any way shape or form. Firefox routinely makes anti Google decisions, and acts against googles interest. It’s pretty clear they aren’t googles bitch.
Most of the revenue of Mozilla Corporation comes from Google (81% in 2022). They have influence.
The excuse of search engine funding is a fig leaf for the US and monopoly laws.
But you’re forgetting something important: Firefox is open-source, meaning that it is literally impossible for it to fail. Even if the Mozilla org goes down in flames tomorrow.
If Mozilla dies, someone else will become a maintainer for the Firefox open-source project. If they are compromised or bought out, someone will fork the project (again). If 100% of websites make some code change that forces them to only work on a Chromium rendering engine, the developers of one of the Firefox forks (or, more likely, all of them) will implement a fix within days that spoofs whatever signal the lock-in code requires. If some form of online DRM is implemented, it will be cracked and the solution will be made available online. Or the relevant chunk of Chromium will be copied and modified to generate that verification key on Firefox without telemetry.
The browser may never achieve market dominance, but it doesn’t have to. It’s on the Internet, and on the Internet nothing ever truly goes away.
Sure nothing goes away on the internet but things get deprecated. Keeping up with a browser development must require highly technical engineer, who often don’t work for free. If Mozilla were to disappear or get 80% of its budget removed (Google) one can doubt they would be able to keep up with the evolution of internet.
I mean just look at Linux desktop, people working on it for free is great but it’s slow, innefective and it goes to all direction at the same time. Without million of $ behind it, Firefox would be gone in a year or two whatever the amount of fork happening.
That’s just…not true on any level at all. Of course things get deprecated, but engineers work for free on open source projects all the time.
And you understand nothing about Linux development if you think its development is slow; the kernel already has stable support for Intel’s Meteor Lake graphics, which were released only 43 days ago at the time of this comment.
The idea that Firefox would be “gone in a year or two” without Google’s money ignores the reality that there are thousands of large, successful open-source projects without massive financial endowments, projects that are still continuously updated over years and even decades for no other reason than that the maintainers want to use them.
Misunderstanding, I was speaking of Linux desktop environment. You think I speak of Linux. Linux is backed by dozen of companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta. It sure doesn’t lack any fund. Now compare it to the Linux desktop environment where this is mostly people working for free, shit doesn’t get done in 43 days. For instance, Wayland has been out for several years and many environment still doesn’t work with it or have not even started working on it.
The closest open source project I can think of is libreoffice. Just check it, it lacks tons of functions compared to ms but most important is that it barely improved at all in years. Now doc document aren’t going to change drastically , file from the 90’s are still compatible but the web foundation it improves very fast. When I say 2 years I’m generous, its already half dead (3.14% user !), breaking compatibility would be the nail in the coffin.
Actually, LibreOffice is the perfect example, thank you. After OOo development went in a direction the community didn’t agree with, the Document Foundation was formed and the project was immediately forked. 13½ years later, the project is still updated every six months. It has every necessary feature and supports all formats. A browser would be similar; web standards don’t change that much. Wayland, by comparison, is currently a niche product for a niche product; it doesn’t need the same support, and so it doesn’t get it.
Well I admire your optimism, personally I don’t have much faith into open source project because their is often very little or no money for the developer.
Firefox has add-ons that automatically reject all on cookie pop ups. It works great and sometimes you see it working which is really satisfying.
I use it. Sometimes it can’t though, which is my cue to leave.
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Presumably rejecting them? It’s the legitimate toggle that gets me though. How do 400 partners require access to my browsing information in order for your site to run?
That’s the obvious bullshit lol, exactly
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I use Firefox as a Canary
You shouldn’t capitalize canary, it’s like saying goose or pigeon.
I feel the same but I also cannot avoid some sites. Ohio’s unemployment and job board only works with Chrome based sites and I have to use those when I’m in between jobs.
can you send fake device headers using a plug in?
Or can you use a stripped down version of Chromium?
I just use Chromium or Edge. It’s too much effort to be stubborn otherwise.
This brings up an interesting thought though. Should governments and states be able to prefer you to use a certain browser or should they be required to make the website function on all…
It would be reasonable for a govt to tell Google that actions taken on their platform which force users to use a certain browser to access a govt website are violating some equal opportunity law or something.
That’s not really where the problem lies. It lies in the choices made when developing the site. “Do we use a framework or feature that isn’t part of the HTML standard to force users to use the subset of browsers that support that or do we use one of the many other options that do follow the standard?”
It wouldn’t surprise me if those choices are being made by some web devs because those high up don’t even think about it and those implementing it don’t think much about the standards and just do it the way they do it because it’s easy or that’s just the way they know how to do it.
Governments (and their agents) shouldn’t be choosing proprietary options that force people to use a specific company’s resources.
Most government sites must be accessible to individuals with disabilities such as low vision or other imapirments. You can’t require a blind person to use chrome to apply for a job.
They just ignore it, even if it’s law somewhere, because “are you nuts, everybody’s using Chrome, you are a luddite boomer, we’ll do things the normal way”.
Well, it would be nice to be enlightened about countries where government sites really are usable with screenreaders and\or Lynx.
Pretty sure the old fuckers in the legislature aren’t writing that into the contracts. If you ask them what browser they’re using they’ll probably say “internet.”
You would have to find a good definition of “all browsers”, and I think that would be nearly impossible.
I absolutely agree that governments should support Firefox, that’s a reasonable claim. But do they need to support the earliest version of netscape? Or the browser I made as a hobby project last week and published as open source? There’s a limit to what’s reasonable and workable.
Specific versions of basic standards would do. HTML forms, as another comment says. With tables and CSS which doesn’t make it unusable if your browser doesn’t support CSS.
Conforms to a specific revision of HTML with a specific revision of JavaScript and css, also requiring it to not use any proprietary extensions of either HTML or JavaScript.
Or the government could just use PDFs and email, I think that might be able to accomplish all the functionality of most websites.
As the others have mentioned, it’s about following standards. Like if you specify a design for a plug using standard measurement units, people can then make plugs that plug into that using whatever measurement and calibration tools they want because they all generally follow standards.
It would be like if the government released some device that was meant to be repaired by anyone but used some proprietary Apple screw head for all the screws. That’s not repairable by anyone, that’s only repairable by Apple customers.
If the government cared at all about accessibility, then you’d be able to do your taxes in an HTML form.
Yeah. Now that we have a functioning FCC again we might see some progress.
Until Chrome starts doing its bullshit “attestor” stuff that’ll essentially make websites not work on Chrome if they allow Firefox and other browsers that respect privacy.
Pretty much zero websites will choose Chrome over Firefox.
More people should buy apple products. Let’s end humanity…woohooo I am going crazy living in this shitty world.
Apple: hold my beer!
This is why I support Linux and open source stuff whenever I can. Always used Firefox. Linux on the server and desktop. Doesn’t work for everyone but it’s the last free open thing we’ve got. What’s been great about Linux is now that basically everything is a Web app Linux is the perfect OS. But now we are dealing with bullshit browser wars. Uhg. Firefox will be the Linux if browsers in no time.
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Yeah I last booted windows consistently to play elden ring. I’m back now and playing other games in my library without issue. Proton has seen strides in improvement year over year. It’s amazing.
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How many people know why CEO’s get paid what they do?
A lot of it is they are actually worth more than me and you.
But the main thing that made CEO wages increase is that a law was passed for CEOs wages to be made public to discourage high wages. When that happened they competed against each other and the wage inflated.
Currently the negotiating position of businesses is far higher than that of workers because they are scared of not having a job/ don’t know what they are worth. The workers need public salaries. But like a lot of things in this world the workers vote against their own interests.
I’m not really sure how to fix that. But I’m starting to feel like someone really needs to try.
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I’m pretty sure any CEO will try squeeze as much money out of their company whether they are doing well or not. That’s irrelevant.
I actually talked to a (small) CEO last week he said all CEO’s either do it for ego or for money. That’s all it is to them.
But that’s not really the point you are making. The board chooses the rules of the game and its up to the CEO to win it, that’s their job. In this case the board wasn’t rewarding market share as that didn’t interest them, they were rewarding other metrics which Mozilla improved on. I don’t know anything about this company other than its my desktop browser but here is an article I just found
I’d take lunduke with a bowl of salt. That dude has had a hate boner against Mozilla for over a decade.
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I don’t understand. What makes you say that?
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I feel like of a group of dedicated Firefox engineers should fork the source code and start their own company.
If they would focus on adding really useful features at a rapid pace, people would be willing to pay for it.
Similiar to Kagi, if you make a really good software, you will get a group of dedicated people to support you.
Just a tech company without these super expensive CEOs that are not needed in a smaller company.
Servo is a fork of a Mozilla research project, it’s moved to the Linux foundation.
They are rebuilding a web engine built for the internet today, rather than adapting the older web engines of yesterday. Mozilla already uses some of their components in Firefox.
But they are only building a web engine, for other people to turn into browsers, we views, electron alternatives etc.
Lol. Firefox cost of development is $500 milions a year. Stop bs. No one can develop a browser anymore, even Microsoft. And the salary of CEO is not the problem.
Cost of development was 221 mio in 2022
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf
Same magnitude. We can not fork firefox with serious support
Yeah, I guess your point stands. But also, it’s 221 mio for Mozilla as a whole. Firefox might again be a fraction of this. While e.g. the Linux foundation has a lower budget, with all the contributed work hours of volunteers / corporations, a fork of Firefox is more realistic than the 500 mio make it out to be.
It is not the same software. A lot of drivers are developed externally for Linux. You can not do that with Firefox. Firefox is the main project of Mozilla
I don’t think your idea is bad but remember that the reason that small companies (like the one that makes arc) can maintain a browser is that they’re using chromium, and maintaining a browser engine is the hard part
Aren’t there already a bunch of forks of Firefox already? How will one more help anything?
There is a difference between forks made by other people to tweak a project/do something specific for it, and the base project’s dev team moving away from whatever it became.
I’m usually not in favor of such fork because the reason for moving away is sometime dubious; some project just rename themselves to “start fresh and drop legacy compatibility issue”. But in the case of Firefox, Mozilla is the thing holding back features while adding bloat. Since it can’t change to a saner structure with more long-term sustainability plans, devs/engineers could move into a fork to not be bound to that anymore.
Of course it’s not that easy; for all the bad Mozilla (foundation or other, I don’t care much that they are two entities at this point since one is owned by the other) is doing to the actual software, they do provide salaries. At least, for now.
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I absolutely love how Mozilla has been calling out Apple, Google, and Microsoft. So good.
Sad thing is they don’t have enough pull to make people listen.
Well they recently got people to get scared of what car manufacturers want to do with all sensitive data they get access to, who knows
Yeah, normies went from IE straight to Chrome.
They’ll never admit when they were wrong.
They still gladly accept Google’s sweet money (while asking for donations). So brave of them! /s
Isn’t it just for the default search engine which you change without any difficulty?
Just? You call someone out and still accept money from them? Highly hypocritical behavior, if you ask me.
Moreover, here it comes the cognitive dissonance of Mozilla’s fans: they say “the default search engine can be changed easily”, while a the same time they blame “Chrome/Edge being the default” for the low FF market share, when in reality installing a different app is easier for tech illiterates than changing the default search engine.
Doublethink can be amazing.
Your vitriol is pathetic and exhausting. Take all this energy you have and maybe advocate for what you think is a better browser rather than berating people. You may live in Spain and not be American, but your attitude and the way you present yourself, at least in comments, is glaringly American.
“I vehemently hate dancing, to the point I can get upset even if someone just suggests it to me.”
Holy shit, you lack the self control to keep composure at the fucking mention of dancing? I thoroughly pity your child.
Take your fuckin’ meds, dude. Get help.
Just block me, just as I’m going to do with you. Goodbye.
Good advice. Bye!
So brave!
The point is, donations barely cover the “salary” of its president (7-something millions dollar) and funds allocated to dev dwindle each year. Which is plainly stated in their yearly reports. The google money is a large part of what makes it possible to do anything else than pay the board; the donations are the cherry on the cake at this point.
Bluntly, where would Mozilla be without Google’s funding?
Gone, probably.
So while I agree that it is poisonous and there is something very wrong with Mozilla corporate structure, it is a necessary evil.
Who cares? Nobody needs Mozilla anyway.
You appear to be lost, corporate deepthroaters anonymous is down the hall on the left.
Get lost.
Tis you who seems lost
Get lost you too.
Is anyone really surprised by this?
Lmao i was calling apple out earlier in a thread for this exact reason!!!
Keep us informed!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Apple’s new rules in the European Union mean browsers like Firefox can finally use their own engines on iOS.
Although this may seem like a welcome change, Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte tells The Verge it’s “extremely disappointed” with the way things turned out.
“We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple’s proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps,” DeMonte says.
In iOS 17.4, Apple will no longer force browsers in the EU to use WebKit, the underlying engine that powers Safari.
“Apple’s proposals fail to give consumers viable choices by making it as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari,” DeMonte adds.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney called the new terms a “horror show,” while Spotify said the changes are a “farce.” Apple’s guidelines are still pending approval by the EU Commission.
The original article contains 285 words, the summary contains 142 words. Saved 50%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
