I’d pay for a browser if it wouldn’t sell my data.
If tech giants such as Google cannot be broken up, then their services should be required to be compatible and all data exportable to competitors. See the EFFʼs “Competitive Compatibility” concept. Buy a movie off Google’s YouTube but Google misbehaves? It must be exportable to a market competitor that you do support. Don’t like how Google handles your email? You should be able to switch your email address to a competitor just like you can change phone companies without losing your phone number.
Basically, if the US Federal government cannot discipline monopolies by breaking them up directly, they should break up the moats and walled gardens the monopolies built to keep customers locked in to maintain their monopolies. See Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.
I switched to brave anyway.
In my utopia, Google would be forced to continue to pay out the current annual contract sum, at a decreasing percentage every year, for some number of years, to all affected companies, giving them the opportunity to divest and pivot.
The root problem doesn’t get fixed if the company with enough money to be a monopolist still has the money when this is “resolved.”
That is actually fairly smart. That way you don’t shock the ecosystem and effect the economy.
Hopefully Ladybird turns out well
When I heard the news, my first though was a mix of “Oh. oh no…”, “yay! no vendor-lock-in”, and “OH, NO.”
My expectation for the future is that a crowd fundraiser like on Wikipedia (does anyone remember those?) will be on the way for Mozilla… there is no way they can survive a 80% drop in the budget gracefully.
- Mozilla will take money from Microsoft
- Firefox gets Office 365, Exchange, and Azure AD integration
- Netflix partners with Microsoft for advanced HD and DRM
- Microsoft and Mozilla partner to deliver Microsoft-enhanced Firefox for Windows
- ActiveX 2.0
ActiveX 2.0
Every old ass exploit and C2 targeting internet explorer is gonna dig itself out of the grave lmao
- Firefox requires an account to use
Microsoft is declared a monopoly (again). Firefox has to find new funding (again)
You should clarify which Mozilla you are mentioning. Mozilla Foundation or Mozilla Corporation?
Firefox; being open source as it is; is not in danger.
Firefox seems fine now and it’s open source. I get that no software is maintenance free, but how much work actually needs to be done each year?
You can’t just maintain a browser, the web is ever evolving.
That’d be a good way to get left behind. Even now there are technologies that chromium supports and ff doesn’t, e.g. the new-ish webusb api. (Actually checking now it is supported as experimental, but my point stands)I think they dont implement it on purpose
That’s a valid question. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to quantify.
The state of browsers in general has been a moving target since NCSA Mosiac; about around 1993 or so. So the last three decades has been a ceaseless grind of new features, security enhancements, performance enhancements, and so on. And this feature set is absolutely monstrous in scale, as it includes backwards compatibility to most of those features (if not all of) back to that beginning over 30 years ago. So, work on any browser is by definition perennial, and it only ever gets more complex.
For Firefox, well, just take a look at their bug tracker. It’s broken down by component, but each link on this page is its own fresh hell of things to do, many of which are barely a year old: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Firefox
I would also argue that the only other software projects that compare to a web browser in terms of sheer scale, compatibility, and longevity, are things like the Linux Kernel or maybe the entire Microsoft Office suite. IMO, software in this class is a lot of work to keep going, no matter how you slice it.
For a browser…
A huge amount
lol is this a joke or are you being serious?
Tell me you’ve never worked on a long-running software project without telling me you’ve never work on one.
Seems like a rude response to me asking a sincere question.
I think the point is that the world is constantly moving. If something isn’t maintained properly the technical dept builds up to the point where it can’t be salvaged. (See Xorg)
Meant it more playful, but tone is hard to communicate over the internet.
It’s around 30 million lines of code. You need actual human beings who have enough knowledge of this code to make decisions.
When I’m on a project with 30000 lines of code as a reasonably experienced dev, I consider that rather challenging to know most details of. This is obviously some complete ballpark math, but that would mean they need 1000 devs.
They had around 750 employees in 2020, after they laid off 250 employees. This includes HR, management, IT support and such, so possibly 650 actual devs, of which not all are working on Firefox.
A browser is one of the most complex pieces of software you will find. There’s a reason why only 2.5 browsers exist (I’m counting chromium and safari as 1.5 because they are not the same but they are both WebKit). Maintaining a browser is difficult and making a new one is even more difficult.
Take Microsoft, one of/the most valuable company in the world. They had a browser (internet explorer) that has been state of the art, then they couldn’t maintain it anymore and it became a joke. They made a new one instead (old edge) with all the intention of making it a real player. Fucking Microsoft couldn’t do it and had to give up. They replaced it with a reskin of chrome (new edge).
Apple and Google manage to maintain chrome and safari both thanks to their position of monopoly, and because their position of monopoly depends on it. Firefox exist(ed) as a tax sponge for Google, but it’s definitely behind chrome in technology, but if it was a new browser, and not one order than safari, they would never be able to make it.
Coming soon: [Firefox - Mozilla Ads Edition]
well then they can start resetting duckduckgo as the default search engine
They honestly should partner with DDG. They are in the same industry.
I wonder if German govt. funds Mozilla
something like the sovereign tech fund for gnome
tax money should improve public infrastructure and Firefox is digitally doing thatAlways that Bing money!
Good.
