it’s not like they used the move to improve the fucking browser anyway
I hope Mozilla put most of that Google money into index funds or something. At least it didn’t go into paying the developers.
I haven’t confirmed this but according to this
They didn’t
That… Is a weird link that doesn’t open
I switched to brave anyway.
Meh. It’s just Monopoly money /j
It’s likely if other browsers collapse they could rule chrome a monopoly too
Firefox; being open source as it is; is not in danger.
Oh no, they will have to stop paying their CEO a ridiculous amount of money. TRAGIC.
CEO will still get their pay, just have to lay off bunch of devs to “balance the losses”
I suppose it’s time to fork Firefox. Can call the fork “Netscape Navigator”. Ya, I think that has a nice ring to it.
well then they can start resetting duckduckgo as the default search engine
They honestly should partner with DDG. They are in the same industry.
Mozillas mo’ problems
Penalize Google many much monies and use some of those to endow a trust that gives yearly funding distributions.
Simple.
3,2,1… more spyware coming to Firefox.
dude, just use librewolf, firefox without any bullshit. done.
Librewolf kinda depends on the existence of Firefox
The librewolf maintainers have written some patches, scripts and config to remove some specific bits of Firefox and bundle a few extensions. They will not necessarily have the ability to develop a whole web browser on their own
if the solution to mozilla’s money problems involves selling their users, then i guess it’s time for them to die, along with firefox and librewolf. at that point i guess i’ll just have to use the best available option, like i’ve always done
If Firefox dies, the entire Internet goes with it because Google’s hegemony over web standards will go unchecked.
wow. guess i better enjoy having internet while i can then
“ah nuts, well nothing for it, best just give ourselves willingly over to our google overlords when the time comes”
for real? you’re not even gonna try?
try what? give mozilla money? sure, i’d buy a browser, maybe even a reasonably priced subscription. but would that guarantee a bullshit-free product? i’m skeptical. also, they’d never make enough money that way
this thread is full of lamenting over google’s global takeover and downvotes for me not stomping my feet about it, but i’ve yet to see an actionable suggestion for what to do about it
Giving your money to Mozilla wouldn’t even guarantee it went to Firefox. First 6M have to go to its CEO.
If the Mozilla Foundation isn’t working on Gecko and Firefox, there isn’t a Librewolf.
there are other options, none of them perfect, nor immortal. but if mozilla’s days are numbered, then it is what it is.
maybe i should have said “use the thing that’s not exploiting you for money,” librewolf being one option. either way, don’t fall into becoming a fanboy who simps for software. enshittification is inevitable for all platforms, as evidenced by…all platforms
Truth. Make the switch and be done with FF.
If firefox is not maintained, librewolf dies too.
Bullshit. It’ll become the new firefox without Mozilla.
Mozilla has around 750 full-time employees. LibreWolf is a few volunteers in a trenchcoat. There is absolutely no way they’ll just take over that work, not to mention without a source of income.
You think if mozilla dies its users are just going to start using chrome, brave and safari? And the devs are just going to move on to those projects? No shot bro
Will people slowly stop using an outdated browser? yes
will people who are out of a job no longer do their job? also yes
I am not saying that. What I am saying, is that the vast majority of those devs cannot continue full-time work on Firefox when they need to work another full-time job to actually earn money.
If you’re expecting Mozilla to implode and then LibreWolf to be overrun by donations over night, so they can hire all those devs, well, there’s the first problem that LibreWolf doesn’t accept donations. But even if they did, they’d have to hire the management and such of Mozilla, too. It would be Mozilla in a trenchcoat immediately.
I guess, a Mozilla that suddenly can rely completely on donations, can make more decisions that are popular with those making donations. But yeah, you can already donate to the Mozilla Foundation, and so far, people largely don’t.
But even if they did, they’d have to hire the management and such of Mozilla, too. It would be Mozilla in a trenchcoat immediately.
Hiring them wouldn’t be mandatory. Look at Godot. They figured their shit out right quick after whatever it was that the other game engine pulled. LibreWolf will have the time to prepare for this. Courts move slowly.
Thunderbird got millions in donations and are free of Mozilla. When you donate to Thunderbird, guess where that money goes. That’s right, Thunderbird. Not some CEO who takes 6M in bonuses. Librewolf can provide a harbor for firefox devs if they decide to get their shit together when clouds start forming.
Of course it’s possible that another org will swoop in.
And who will develop it?
Do you know where 99% of the code in Librewolf comes from?
Where do you think development resources are going to go to once there is a void? They’re just going to go poof and never work on a project again? Or do you expect a new contender to pop in with a full shaped org to sweep them up?
alas everything dies at some point. if mozilla goes away because they couldn’t live without google, then i’ll observe a moment of silence for firefox and librewolf, and find something else
I will browse the web with raw curl commands
OK buddy Stallman
Just use Lynx.
Just wait until Ladybird kicks off, then Mozilla can die.
Oh, the complete pipedream that has an ambitious release date of 2026?
And that has already gotten its lead maintainer into trouble over claiming the use of gender-neutral pronouns in the documentation is “political”?
Deyr fé, deyja frændr, deyr sjalfr it sama, ek veit einn, at aldrei deyr: dómr um dauðan hvern.
it sounds like no one else does either
Maintaining a browser that doesn’t rely on someone else’s upstream code is quite an ordeal. Of the four main browsers (Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox), 3 are built by large for-profit enterprises and the other relies on money from a large for-profit enterprise. Browsers are very complex pieces of technology and can’t be maintained by 3 guys on GitHub in their spare time.
in other words, we’re fucked.
it was fun while it lasted
Mozilla chose a stupid business model. 🤷
They’ve undoubtedly been preparing for this day in some capacity. If they didn’t and collapse then yes they chose a stupid business model. But until that happens I think this is a premature statement.
It is shocking to me how many people on Lemmy hate Firefox, which is basically the only real non-chromium alternative that most people can use with minimal compromises. So many people hate Google here yet y’all seem to hate the only viable competitor even more. It’s bizarre to me.
its an emotional reaction. google has always been bad, them doing a bad thing is just business as usual. who cares
but when mozilla does something bad? mozilla is supposed to be the good guy! they betrayed us!
I’d like you to show me how Mozilla is operating on the same evil level as Google. There’s no way you can make that argument. And yes “less bad” by orders of magnitude is way better and enough for me to use Firefox over Chrome.
I always got the opposite impression: people here love Firefox. But it seems that’s part of why they’re critical of its shortcomings.
At least for me, if I’m criticizing something, it probably means I care at least a little bit about whatever I’m criticizing. Not worth time talking about things I actually dislike.
Only viable competitor is a bizarre thing to drop when browsers like Opera exist.
Built on chromium.
Consider that many of the same people think of Arch as a viable daily driver distro for the everyman. Some folks are more accepting of jank than others.
Those are just people who forgot what it was like to not be confident/super knowledgeable with computers and have lost the ability to talk about how to help “the average” user.
I don’t think people hate Firefox as much as people hate Mozilla and what they’re doing with Firefox.
this does mystify me. only time I nearly dropped firefox was when they did the big change that broke add ons but firefox with the addons I like is the best browser for me. nothing they have done has been consequentially bad. philosophically maybe but the actual effect is not bad compared to any other options.
I think people make a way too big of a deal out of the “Google is the default search engine” thing. If you are worried about that, you can turn it off with like two clicks. For the money they are (were I guess) handed to set that it’s clearly worth it and I would’ve done the same exact thing.
Besides that I just don’t think there is enough reason to be so anti-Firefox. Especially given our current internet climate. And for those who really are that adamant, there are plenty of forks.
For the money they are (were I guess) handed to set that it’s clearly worth it.
Not disagreeing with you. I just want to point out that Google is probably deliberately “overpaying” on this Mozilla deal, because they want to keep Firefox afloat, because they don’t want to catch a court ruling that they are monopolizing the browser market too.
Dirty tricks with web browsers is the antitrust charge that actually caught Microsoft in the 90s.
I mean let Google play their stupid game and cash the checks. I understand the moral question here but in reality we make compromises, and that compromise didn’t fundamentally break Firefox or make it suddenly untrustworthy. This has always been out in the open and with clear, simple consequences. Mozilla/Firefox get money, Google is default (but easily changeable) search engine.
oh yeah. duck duck go is for my firefox. duck duck go is another one with a lot of drama that amounts to nothing. have tried a few alts but went back.
Same. DDG is fine/flawed, google is terrible (morally and otherwise) and the results are actively getting worse.
It is shocking to me how many people on Lemmy hate Firefox
Although some people are Google fanbois or reactionary dumbasses, I think most of what you’re misinterpreting as “Firefox hate” is actually love for Firefox and hate for what Mozilla has done to it.
Most Firefox-critics’ feelings towards it are more like this:
Love the browser, hate the corpos desperately trying to fuck it up because that’s the cool thing to do to your software now days.
I remember building Phoenix from source when it was basically still an experiment to decouple it from the suite. Good times.
Don’t you think they dabbled on stupid projects and acquired some companies like pocket precisely because just a browser wasn’t enough to pay the bills?
Others will present themselves. Mozilla have been on a downtrend for years. I’ve heard of a couple of alternatives, but I don’t have the experience with any of them. If anyone knows any good Firefox alternatives, please let us know!
If by that you mean “some alt-right-adjacent bro will come up with a new browser that’s essentially reskinned Chromium with a crypto wallet duct-taped to it”, you’re probably right
It’s okay you can just say Brave
Isnt that brave?
those already exist
All good modern browsers are based either on firefox or chromium if I’m not terribly misinformed
I think Safari is WebKit.
Webkit is Chromium (or at least, Chromium is Webkit, since the inheritance goes in the other direction).
The only 1 browser engine that is a completely separate and independent codebase from Chrome is Firefox’s.
(1 aside from extremely niche/unusable stuff like Lynx)
Close. Chromium uses Blink which was originally a fork of WebKit. I have no idea how much they’ve diverged since then.
The fork was 11 years ago, so a lot. So much that they are considered different engines now.
fair enough, although I’m not sure that falls in the “good” category :P
Vivaldi is pretty alright.
And also based on chrome. That’s the thing that people seem to keep ignoring. Your browser options are Firefox or something based on chrome.
No one asked for something that wasn’t Chromium based here. It’s the open source community, that’s how it works, most of us are very happy to settle for just having some different maintainers. We weren’t ignoring it, it’s just not relevant in this particular post.
Well, given the people talking about it I’m not sure I’d agree that no one was asking or talking about finding something not chromium based.
A lot of people don’t like having a monoculture, Google driving the entire cadence for new feature development for the web, or having a privacy focused browser whose process is to try to delete the tracking from a not privacy focused browser.
pre-chromium Edge was too good to be true.
It was shit. Once Edge changed to Chromium it actually became a viable option and in my opinion made Chrome irrelevant in business environment.
Chromium browsers are good. I personally prefer Firefox, but Chromium is alright.
I suppose for me personally the question will always be: how good is it with adblocks? Especially on youtube as that’s where I spend a lot of my time. SponsorBlock on Firefox has been invaluable for me, not just blocking ads, but auto-skipping the whole “like, comment subscribe” and in-video ads etc.
It has Adblock Plus built in which is not the best, but still pretty alright. You can still install most regular chrome extensions though and should be able to get mostly the same experience you have now.
Built in ad block is decent, you can add extra filter lists the same way you can with ublock origin
That said, just install ublock origin and sponsorblock as an extension from the chrome store
Vivaldi is my favourite browser, made by decent people.
Also chromium
Forks are often dependent on the original unless the source just gave up.
This used to be the thought, but the trouble is, HTML is now such a vastly complex web of requirements, mixed with the unwritten rules set by Chrome, it’s doubtful another browser could push forward easily; especially without a major source of funding.
