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Mozilla: We’re going to start cannibalising babies
Tech apologists: Well, developers gotta eat too…
@aral I get that Mozilla getting into ads is unpopular. But you've also highlighted their dependancy on Google as problematic.
How would you recommend they fund themselves?
@fabienmarry I couldn’t care less. As their head of public policy once told me, they’re “just another Silicon Valley tech company.” So they’re the wrong vehicle to provide a browser for the common good (or anything else). And yes, I could care less how just another Silicon Valley tech company funds itself. What I do care about is them representing themselves publicly as something they are not, being a honeypot for devs who care, and generally sucking all the air out of the room.
@aral Ok, so then who provide browsers? Just Google and Apple?…
@fabienmarry No, you fund independent organisations from the commons.
buff dog himbo@fabienmarry @aral isn't it wild how there somehow magically used to be a varied & vibrant ecosystem of developers & projects, with a wide selection of viable open source projects (including browsers), & now it seems like we just have a digital wasteland where no new project can expect to survive unless it feeds from the teats of one or more of 5 gigantic companies? Haha weird, probably unrelated to the fact that 5 gigantic companies have swallowed everything up over the past 15 years. Anywayyy
@fabienmarry @aral Maybe we need to rethink. Browsers have got too complex for anybody to build one from scratch, so no incentive for anybody else to enter the market. Will somebody put up a bucket of money to build a competitor? Or do we lower to requirements for what a browser is and has to do? At the end of the day, fetch html and display it. Everything else is bullshit.
@fabienmarry @aral And even html is too much. Let’s go simpler, perhaps markdown or geminiprotocol’s gemtext.
@aral @fabienmarry this the crux of the problem. It’s a UX facade over the same old thing. It’s great that Mozilla makes a browser and keeps the web rendering scene from being limited to chromium, but they are trapped by the image they have cultivated of being *the good one*. Everything they do in the name of business will feel deceptive in that context because they gained false legitimacy as an organisation which is somehow not putting themselves first.
@fasterandworse Honestly that's from peeps who haven't been [paying attention for a while. How many decades since Mozilla makes 90% + of their income from Google?
@fabienmarry the thing is that’s a lot of peeps
@aral I feel like we ought to care. I mean, if they’re the last standing company that produces an open browser alternative to Chromium, then it’s in our interest that it remains alive - at least until a credible alternative comes to the market.
They have surely made dubious decisions. They have had no focus at all for the past few years and diluted their impact in products that offered nothing more compared to the competition. They even had a Mastodon instance that apparently nobody cared about, probably because someone gave managers a wrong idea of how the Fediverse works. But, to their defense, they’ve tried their best to diversify their revenue stream to stop being dependent on Google’s spare change.
At least, unlike other large Silicon Valley companies, they are more receptive to the feedback they get from us as users - as well as desperate for profitability. We can leverage that.
I honestly feel like Mozilla should just be a foundation, remove the profit component and get lavish donations like the Linux foundation, so they can just focus on what they do best. But the Mozilla Foundation exists, it barely makes $25M/y, and with that money you can barely pay the salaries of two teams or engineers in the Silicon Valley - which might not even be enough to keep the lights on for Firefox. So they have no alternative left but to do standard “IT business” stuff to make money.
Do we have better ideas? Let’s share them. Let’s give them feedback. We can’t simply say “I don’t care of how you make money, I only care if you do it wrong”. If Mozilla feels like it’s losing the support of the privacy-aware folks then it’ll just go full-in on adware and AI vaporware like any other Silicon Valley company, without having to be accountable anymore to a technological niche. That’s a kind of scenario where really everyone loses.