Why does a browser company need to own a social media space? I am an avid Firefox user but don't see any pragmatic point in this "exploration".

Maybe they want to own their instance and therefore control their identity? That kind of makes sense—we might see more of that from individual businesses in the future. But this announcement is not about that.

> Why does a browser company need to own a social media space?

Mozilla isn't a browser company, and did you read the post? All the examples cited where decentralized/federalized alternatives. They specifically DON'T wanna own anything

They literally say in the first sentence that they will run a public instance on Mozilla.Social. This means they will own that instance.

You could argue that no one owns anything exclusively in today's federalized world but that is not true in practical terms. They will own the identities/social graphs/content created locally. "Own" meaning they have total control over that instance and can, for example, enforce Mozilla-friendly policies, remove content, ban users (without the ability to export one's identity and social graph).

But Mastodon is specifically built against that. Users can freely migrate their accounts and all posts are still accessible on other instances (up to a point). The whole point of Mastodon is that users and their content have "exit".

If Mozilla does some weird shit with their instance, people can just... use a different instance. That's kinda the point. And Mozilla's instance will surely take the Mastodon Server Covenant which, among other things, requires users be notified at least 3 months ahead of time before a server gets shut down

You are misunderstanding federalization. People can migrate their account and social graph to a different instance _only_ if the current instance allows them to do that. If you are banned from Mozilla.social - you can't migrate. The instance owns you.

While Mozilla is best known for Firefox, they already have a lot of experience in another software for a federated protocol : Thunderbird for e-mail.

Are you seriously asking why they would be interested in the Fediverse ??

Were you questioning Opera (now Vivaldi) when they were experimenting with all those weird browser features ?

    Are you *seriously* asking why they would be interested in the Fediverse ??

I think it's entirely valid to point out that for the last decade, Mozilla has been distracted with side projects that haven't gone anywhere (Firefox OS, Persona, etc), while the browser has languished. And now we see Mozilla pursuing yet another side project that, let's face it, will probably die an unmourned death in two or three years, while Firefox still languishes.

Furthermore, given that Mozilla very recently had a round of layoffs, ostensibly to cut the fat and refocus on the browser, where are they going to get the developer resources to work on this new project?

Imagine if Firefox OS would have gone somewhere. We would have an entirely open mobile OS right now, breaking up the duopoly of Google/Apple. I don't blame them for trying.

I do. Imagine if Mozilla, instead of trying to make another mobile OS to challenge the Apple/Google duopoly, had focused on making Firefox a top-tier browser, both on desktop and mobile? We might be in a situation today where, certainly on Android, there would be more than one option for a mobile browser.

We are rapidly regressing towards where the web was in 2002, only with Google Chrome taking the place of Internet Explorer. Could Mozilla have prevented this by focusing on Firefox? I don't know. What I do know is that they didn't even try.

What makes you say that Firefox isn't a top tier browser ? Including on Android ? (Where the cards are stacked against it, better dump Android at this point anyway.)

This goes double for when Firefox OS was around : 7-9 years ago.

If Firefox were a top tier browser it wouldn't have bugs that were old enough to legally purchase alcohol in the United States [1]. Or have bugs that are old enough to have a drivers' license [2]. It wouldn't have decade-old bugs that break AJAX forms [3]. It would correctly support prefetching links [4].

And those are just the outstanding bugs. In terms of performance, Firefox is still slower than Chrome. It still has more UI jank, even on Linux. The new plugin API still doesn't give extensions the same level of functionality that they had with the old API, despite years of promising otherwise. Its responses to interaction media queries are inconsistent, necessitating the creation of a test page [5] to determine what its actual responses are (W3C specifications? what are those?).

No, Firefox is not a top-tier browser. It's more privacy-preserving than Chrome, which is why I use it, but I will never claim that Firefox is a better browser.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10212

[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317081

[3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=654072

[4]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1527334

[5]: https://demos.obormot.net/interaction-media-query-test

EDIT:

    better dump Android at this point anyway

Dump Android for what, exactly? An even more user-hostile platform, like iOS?

Being worse than Chrome doesn't mean it's not top tier. Agreed about the old loss of functionality. At least performance is better now.

No, most people should be using a dumbphone these days, at least until we hackers get our shit together enough that alternatives Librem/Pinephone are good enough.

I don't think Firefox is in the place where it is today because of technological reasons. It's there because of Google's marketing power (i.e. putting Chrome ads on the front page and Gmail, and bundling it with Android) and bad marketing by Mozilla. If Firefox OS would have succeeded, it would have propped up Firefox along the way.

Good point about the layoffs, but, like startups, most side projects never go anywhere, why would you expect them to ?

Last I checked, the average failure rate of software projects was 90 % (which is a good thing, other kinds of projects, like bridges, can't afford to, and have to be "over"engineered).

Yes. I don't think they should invest into social media experiments. In my opinion they did a horrible job at that so far (Pocket was promising but is unusable because of its "social sharing" confusion). Social media introduces wrong incentives.

[reposting my earlier reply] Furthermore, I imagine the reason they are so keen to be a player in social media is because someone at Mozilla really promotes the idea that there is a community around Firefox (sure, Thunderbird, MDN, etc). There is no community. People who use a browser are not a community: we don't need a place to "hang out" because we all use Firefox. It's a ridiculous aspirational thinking that only moves Mozilla further into irrelevancy.

Why not, worked pretty well for Opera/Vivaldi despite them being closed source !

Also, ok, if not social media as a Mastodon instance, then what kind of project do you suggest they should start in order to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse ?

I can't tell if you are trolling or are serious. Neither Opera nor Vivaldi have succeeded as social media platforms. They experiment a lot with different features but remain a minuscule niche browser. If that's the inspiration for Mozilla - then sure, they should go all in into social media.

> in order to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse

What does that mean? What should Ableton Live or Pixelmator Pro do to acclimate themselves to the Fediverse?

Because it's a Web standard that Mozilla should pay attention to ?

I don't see how twitter is essential to the browser space. I can see how a site like del.icio.us is essential or flickr is essential or OneDrive/GDrive is essential. But not twitter.

This is nothing more than an open-source attempt at mastadon, and possible diversification for Mozilla.

We can expect more open source diversification attempts in the future.

BTW, where is an open source email service network? And open source identity service network? And open source password saver network?

What are you talking about, Mastodon is open source...

> BTW, where is an open source email service network?

That's what most email that isnt run by Google and Microsoft has always been...

I think Mozilla intends to develop mastodon further by first becoming a major player.

And I mean open source email server. Something like an alternative to an enhanced email server like ms exchange or even gmail.

> And I mean open source email server. Something like an alternative to an enhanced email server like ms exchange or even gmail.

Like I said, all of the other ones are open source.. There's dozens. This seems like you just don't know about them.

E-mail has always been decentralized. But if you're looking for a feature-packed server/client, then maybe iRedMail and Roundcube will do?

As for identity service, in its early years OAuth had many service providers. But then the providers don't bother to maintain the service so many sites also stopped using OAuth as login alternative due to unreliabiliy of the feature.

For password saver, KeePass + (sync service of your choice) also works? (Personally, I don't use it)

I didn’t hear about keepass before. Mozilla used to have Firefox lockwise. But then retired it as a standalone service model. It would have been a great replacement to lastpass or Bitwarden. And a great way of entering the oauth service market. The other oauth players attached it to their primary service(s). Deactivate service means deactivation of oauth.

I had not heard of red mail or roundcube either. Mozilla stopped innovation on thunderbird and have now tried to go to thunderbird on mobile. What they sh/could be working on is “thunder nest” aka email server software.

we dont have that atm?

I could be inferring something the OP didn't intend - but I took their comment to indicate Mozilla should "stay in their lane" and focus on making an incredible web browser - not some side project/distraction that will inevitably fail.

Additionally, firefox has an abysmal market share currently, about 3%, not much different than Samsung Browser of Opera. If Mozilla want to make a competitive browser, it may not be the best time to devote resources to having a me too offering that rides on a current wave of interest

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Mozilla has been distracted with side projects and posturing for so many years... one has to wonder if they can even find their way back at this point.

What would Firefox have to include to draw people back? The browser is solid, IME, so I'm not sure what they'd be doing if not their side projects. Do they need to figure out some way to market it as a viable alternative to Chromes?

Well, for starters - they need to figure out why all the browser skinners (Edge, Brave, etc) keep using Chromium as a base instead of Firefox. I don't pretend to know the reasons - but I would wager there's some pretty good reasons Chromium is dominating that space.

Microsoft and Google are at total odds with each other - I can't imagine using Chromium as a base sent people skipping down the halls in Redmond.

One thing that they could do is make Firefox at least as responsive on iOS as Safari is.

I know that browsers on iOS are forced to use WebKit (although that might change soon[1]). But Safari is also using WebKit, and the lag that I get in Firefox when opening a new tab is testing my commitment to them.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/14/apple-considering-non-w...

not pissing off power users - who are the only people who use firefox - in an utterly futile attempt to attract the general population.

this plea - that many people had made over the years - falls on deaf ears. mozilla is now ran by the kind of people who knows better than its users what we need, and we're wrong if we disagree.

Important. Firefox got where it was partially because many of us installed it for coworkers and relatives and everyone else, not because ordinary users sat down to try to figure out what browsers existed and which one was better.

Towards the end, Firefox was an easy sell.

And, as you write, today they don't care or even actively resist when we try to help.

Copying Chrome perfectly won't get any their users back.

Funding all kinds of weird side projects won't get users back.

Amazing, resource-efficient skinning might get some people back.

Tree Style Tags and other plugins working amazingly well might get some users back.

And when they start listen and fix the things we report things can improve very rapidly.

There are also probably a number of other improvements that can be done (I've advocated looking into doing the same as asm.js, but with html and css: something like a put meta-tag announcing html-lite or html/asm or something in the head, use a restricted set of css and html that is rendering friendly and only uses these well thought out js-libraries and we will pass your code down a much more efficient rendering branch!)

Bring back the things that made us power users love it and generally start caring more about bug reports.

Firefox market share is 7.1% on desktop - not great, but more than double the aggregate, which should tell you something. Competing with Chrome on Android or Safari on iOS is virtually impossible. The ability to sync bookmarks, passwords, credit cards, etc. through the primary browser on Android to the desktop, and/or vice versa, ended the competition. The problem for Firefox/Mozilla is that the landscape for distributing a browser changed in a highly unfavorable way for an independent developer. We're not going back to the old days without a competitive mobile landscape (not happening).

Now, that doesn't put Mozilla's decisions or operations beyond scrutiny, but set expectations reasonably. Firefox is already a competitive browser, and even dramatically leap-frogging Chrome would do nothing to market share.

Pretty much this. A 4% share would be better than a 3% share. The browser is still good, but the wider company just does weird shit.

I hope Firefox devs for the code and establish their own foundation, Id give Firefox money, but not Mozilla - I’m not interested in funding a bunch of wannabe tech bros weird exploration of projects destined to fail.

Not really, no. Marketshare is currently split roughly 3% Firefox, 18.7% Safari, 78.3% Chromium variants (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, etc). If Firefox disappeared almost nothing would change, which is not good. Ideally Firefox's share should at least equal Safari's so developers can't ignore it with impunity, and in a perfect world it'd be split evenly three ways so Google can't steamroll through when Mozilla and Apple disagree with them.

Safari is going to drop big time when alt browsers become mandated on iOS by the EU. We will have chrome and chrome forks only.

I too think that unfortunately, this is what will happen. There's practically no chance of Firefox for iOS making significant headway.

The only silver lining is that this might land Google in an antitrust lawsuit that forces them to spin Chromium and Blink off into a Mozilla-like nonprofit with wholly independent leadership, which is about the best outcome possible in a single-web-engine world.

I'm old enough to remember when it was netscape or IE... thats it.

so I see today as fairly diverse

Kinda off topic and really barking up the wrong tree. Mozilla is literally the only company maintaining a non-webkit browser (Blink is still a WK fork)

I agree, Mozilla building a social network is off topic, they should remain on topic, making a browser.

Who’s going to pay for that? They’re completely dependent on Google right now.

I can’t, so Whoever is paying for this social media pet project.

Afaik There’s no way to directly donate to firefox, which I would do, but there’s no chance I’ll be donating to Mozilla when they waste money on this kind of stuff.