Or morphs itself into another Chrome in search of more revenue to support their new corporate lifestyle. I'm more worried about that. Since they made it a corporation with all the usual trimmings like an overpaid CEO they are becoming like all the other big tech. Flirting with big investors, looking at ROIs. All those paths lead the same way and it's away from the user.

It's frustrating that "filling a niche and filling it well" is just anathema these days. Everyone is hustling to become a trillion dollar whatever, and burning customers, money and good will in the process.

There should be nothing wrong with just bring good at what you do and not seeking endless expansion (and yes, I know, it's actually dangerous because you're vulnerable to predation in that position).

> It's frustrating that "filling a niche and filling it well" is just anathema these days

On the contrary, a lot of (offline) companies are deciding that diversification is bad and they should divest everything outside of one core business. Be it ThyssenKrupp, Alsthom, Bombardier, GE, Phillips, take your pick.

However many web companies choose to diversify. Why not? It helps them retain and gain users, and protects them against heavy hitting competitors (FAANG can copy your business model and features quite quick). E.g. take someone like Snapchat - their features were copied by competitors and they had no differentiator, so they floundered. A Telegram or Signal was little differentiation bar potential diversification, which is why both tried some crypto crap.

This really can't be overstated. The CEO's compensation has skyrocketed for years while by every objective measure the Mozilla is struggling if not outright failing at its mission - with a continuously declining market share.

It baffles me that Mozilla had/has multiple offices located in some of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. Not just in those markets, but in the very-most expensive parts of said markets.

For example, in Boston they're dead center downtown, for no explicable reason other than the prestige.

I don't think Mozilla has any office presence in downtown Boston? They used to rent a tiny co-working space there for Boston-based employees to use if they felt like it, but I think they got rid of it well before the pandemic.

Mozilla had more money than they had ever dreamed thanks to Google contract and they failed to realize how to properly utilize it and must be blind spending.

It feels like a kid who received 5 games for Christmas and doesn't know what to do.

That’s pretty much the same as dying..

Fork the web. I'd be down for a non-commercial / ad hostile design.

Sounds like Gemini.

>In terms of simplicity, the native content type, “gemtext”, is meant to be loaded in a single request, therefore there are no inline images, no iFrames, fonts, scripts or anything else.

Good luck replacing the web with request/response markdown. I would figure at the least something that could serve Wikipedia would be a bare minimum.

It sounds like that can serve wikipedia, just without inline pictures. In fact, the cursory reading suggests that you can even have pictures if they're not in line. I admit that that's a small step down from the current experience, but it might be worth it.

I guess the larger picture is we all know the internet-at-large community would never accept it.

Can you imagine ATT or Amazon or whatever company website as a slightly fancier markdown file?

The only people that would do it are blogger types.

Yes, that's true. Although in some ways that's not a problem with the technology; companies would hate it in no small part because it limits the anti-user things they can do, which is part of the appeal.

And who pays for it?

I mainly use Kiwi browser on Android which is Chromium fork with full extension support and DevTools. It is not update very often and I can feel that they are in need of more maintainers but it still works best for me. I stopped using Firefox since they restricted addons and removed about:config