In 2011 Mozilla income was 85% derrived from Google, through the primary search engine deal. Around a billion was paid over three years as part of this deal at some point. Appearantly there was bidding by Microsoft for making Bing the default, which pushed up the pricing.

So every time Mozilla speaks out against Google, it is a bit awkward, since they are biting the hand that feeds them. I suppose they could take a deal from Microsoft, Yahoo or even DDG (or Baidu!), but without interest from Google I presume the funding would be lower. Quite an interesting situation. Thank God both Firefox and Chrome are open source. That is at least some small degree of insurance against potential freedom-limiting shenanigans by tech giants.

I think that if they cut back on some of the other projects in the short-term, they could ensure the foundation was funded for the long-term - to support Firefox and anything else they deem valuable.

For example, the per-device configuration (GPU acceleration enabled or not, etc) is not there, the statistics collection infrastructure, the WebAPK minting code is not there, etc.

Chromium being open source is a red herring. The web is a protocol between clients and servers, and having the ability to fork the client doesn't matter if all the servers ignore your fork and continue speaking the protocol dictated by the dominant client. You need to fork the entire protocol, which is to say, you need to fork the entire web.

Mozilla's opposition to such initiatives matters only because of their users. And there are no other significant fighters in this ring on _our_ side, unfortunately.

I can't think of a single candidate other than Mozilla that has the technical expertise, experience, trust, reputation, resources (not to mention non-profit structure) built over 20 years defending the open web. I don't understand why Mozilla is dragging their feet on this. They should have owned the entire VPN market by now. VPNs aren't cryogenic rockets.

Of the remaining 1%, most don't need a VPN for anything personal. It's literally just a handful of geeks who need VPN (mainly for secure piracy, or accessing different regional Netflix catalogs), and maybe a few dozen journalists living in dictatorships.

Mozilla needs to gut spending. Get rid of all the diversity /hr/evangelism people bloating their employee headcount and funneling people's donations to divisive causes like that org that doesn't hire white men (forgot the name but it made me cancel my monthly donation to Mozilla). They shouldn't need more than 25% non-technical staff, and the purpose of those 25% should be exclusively to support the technical staff. Instead they became another bloated Big NGO that's basically welfare for liberal arts majors in California.

I would love to have a Mozilla hosted email and calendar service from them, for example. I don't understand why they aren't branching out into more common web citizen needed services.

Not at all. Controlled opposition has to pretend being an opposition.

I switched to Chrome pretty much the day it first came out and it was revolutionary. Switched back to Firefox a few years ago due to Chrome becoming too dominant and Google throwing their weight around in standards committees too much. When I desperately need Chromium for something I use Edge (which I actually rather like).

Mozilla was once a bright shinning beacon of hope for the open web, but they wasted their good will on too many of us, and it pains me to think what could have been.

This is a perfect case in which I’d like to see my taxes funding their work.

I don't know what you're doing wrong (all I can say is that the name of the collection is case sensitive) but I haven't had any trouble adding the custom collection settings to my Firefox installs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883

Definitely not with the Iceweasel fork. https://github.com/fork-maintainers/fenix

The point is that using anything that's not Google Chrome is better for the internet.

> In August 2005,[11] the GNUzilla project adopted the GNU IceWeasel name for a rebranded distribution of Firefox that made no references to nonfree plugins.

> [...]

> The GNU LibreJS extension detects and blocks non-free non-trivial JavaScript.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat

Some will point out that Chrome is based on open-source software. In reality, however, Google has a huge amount of power here. If Google is serious about this initiative, they will try to force it into the projects, and make it an essential part of the web experience. As others have pointed out, Google is also a primary supporter of Firefox, so they have influence there as well.

Extreme technological complexity is just about the best possible moat a huge business can have. Though in this case "walls around the prison in which the users are incarcerated" might be a better analogy.

And all the prisoners, who just can't resist the endless shiny new goodies added to the web standards, are forever building their own prison walls higher...

Victim blaming BS.

Let's see who else is the problem. How about all those engineers who decided not to contribute to Firefox? Or all those website developers who didn't test their site in Firefox? Or hell, why not all those Mozilla engineers who didn't fix Firefox hard enough?

Let's put the blame where it actually is. Google is to blame. Not the users of their free products they advertise all over the place and have an unlimited marketing budget for.

It’s not always so easy to walk away from an entire platform. People’s entire livelihoods could be based around Google.

I don’t see any issue with Google owning some of this responsibility.

You cannot expect Google to act against its own self-interest only because you ask nicely. You have to stop giving them the market power to do it.

I don’t expect Google to act against its own will, but they should.

If you don’t want to stop using Chrome, then your alternative is to buy a controlling share of Alphabet and appoint a Board that forgoes advertising revenue in exchange for being nice to adblock users.

Most people "choose" a specific browser like I "choose" my landlord when I move in to a new place. It's what's there.

I never seen a single chrome add. I'm sure we're in different part of the world and in different add segments, but seems to me chrome marketing in not that widespread, is it ?

As a retired FE engineer, the top reason I used chrome and test with it was the powerful yet light devtools.

Try browsing Google from a browser other than Chrome.

This time I won't be shamed into doing it again. I don't have the time or motivation.

edit: forgot to mention explicitly, it's not Firefox, it's me. I'm not strong enough.

The problems I experienced that can be fixed in Firefox itself probably already got fixed.

My (personal) problem with Firefox is that functionally it's not Chrome and doesn't look/feel like it. The claimed non-functional improvements (privacy, freedom, ...) DON'T make up for the difference for me personally.

If Firefox looked and felt more or less exactly like Chrome for the functional parts then I would not have any problem switching for good. It's not at the moment, so this is what stops me from adoption.

I don't propose to change anything (you did). I was merely stating why I'm not on Firefox yet as a data point.

I see your point and it is absolutely within your right to stay on Chrome if you don't want to change. I've found it pretty much identical in terms of functionality and UX for the past decade though. Do you have any particular functional improvements in mind that you're missing in Firefox?

I think that personally I'm a lost cause. Either give me Firefox in a Chrome's pelt or I stay with Chrome. And maybe that's good this way: Firefox should just focus on new users and make the best browser for "them".

I have zero issues using FF everywhere. I used to have to use Chromium every couple months because some dumb website was pulling in a library that was using some non-industry-standard thing chromium did - and everything broke due to their utter lack of testing - but even that has died down. There is a newer trend where I have to disable uBlock every once in a while to complete a task, which is just as bad, but I rarely have to actually use another browser.

You're gonna have to explain why you think this, because publicly, Firefox is owned by Mozilla which is not owned by Google in any way.

But maybe you know something the rest of us don't?

Who owns Mozilla? Put another way, if Google stops funding Mozilla, will it still exist?

The only reason Firefox exists is because Google wants something they can point to in court and say "look! we're not a monopoly!"

I'm guessing you're referring to the search partnership between the two? That doesn't mean that Google owns Mozilla, unless you're really unclear about what "partnership" or "deal" means. Mozilla have multiple deals with search engines, not just Google.

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/852

I guess they would.

The internal organisation of Mozilla doesn't really seem relevant here.

Also, Bing has on average twice higher RPMs, so, a 50% of drop in income after rev-share.

So, you remove 90% of the revenue, and you divide by 2 what is remaining.

If Google stops funding Mozilla, would they manage to get another deal, e.g. with Bing? If so, the power of Google would be limited.

A competitor that survives at the charity of a monopoly is evidence of a monopoly, not evidence of the opposite. A court might see a non-profit that is directly dependent on Google for ongoing operating cash very differently that how it saw Gates' one-time personal investment in Apple.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

If Google turned off this money faucet, Mozilla would be severely impacted. Unfortunately as Firefox's market penetration gets lower, the value of that deal gets lower, should Google stop paying it and someone like Bing takes over.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...

They have no motivation to "turn off the money faucet" since the payment is effectively lead generation -- bringing eyeballs to their ads that pay them more.

So by "don't bite the hand that feeds you" logic, they couldn't be interested in being too adverse with Google, because in the end, this could threaten their whole existence.

Not sure if this is still the case though, or if they managed to diversify.

If Mozilla had put most of its income into an endowment fund instead of hiring tons of staff for a miriad of now-mostly-canceled projects, they'd be in a much better position today. (Hindsight is 20-20 and all that.)

But I think it's an overstatement to say that Google owns Firefox. I donate monthly, and I think a smaller form of Mozilla could survive completely without Google.

https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-att...

1. Native integration across devices: Safari integrates seamlessly with Apple's ecosystem due to proprietary features like iCloud, Handoff, and universal clipboard, allowing for a consistent user experience across all Apple devices, with seamless transition among them to stay in your flow across devices.

2. iCloud Private Relay: This is a recent security tool from Apple and participating CDNs that encrypts all Safari traffic and protects the user's privacy by preventing anyone, including both Apple and network providers, from seeing which sites are visited.

3. Password Management Integration: Safari offers seamless integration with Apple’s Keychain for password and two-factor authentication (2FA) management across devices and across apps and browsers. Safari leverages Apple's OS level full password manager that's been quietly iterated each major release, now including support for TOTP and compromised-site checks.

4. Increased security/privacy: Safari uses AI/ML backed Intelligent Tracking Prevention to identify and block trackers, ensuring enhanced user privacy. While similar features can be added to Firefox via extensions, Safari has these capabilities by default.

5. Improved Power Efficiency and Performance: Multiple battery life tests confirm that Safari is significantly more power-efficient than Firefox and Chrome. Apple pulls this off through co-optimization of hardware and software, power-efficient technologies, hardware acceleration, conservative use of resources, efficient resource handling, and the blocking of resource-heavy ads and trackers. In real world use, you may see twice the battery life during web heavy usage.

6. Extended Support for WebKit: Use the browser your users use, so you understand and support their experience.

Other factors like persistent tab groups, 120hz scroll performance, and first class "retina" typography simply add to the smooth experience Safari provides on macOS and iOS.

Here are some lesser known tips for tuning up Safari to your liking and using features folks may be less familiar with:

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/hidden-tricks-inside-apples-saf...

Apple has a pretty terrible record on security given the Pegasus spyware and 0 clicks. Although most are related to iMessage and hardware exploits.

I still have a hard time believing the Privacy stuff since PRISM and Apple's openness to give data to China and Russia. But if you believe them, don't mind the government's access, and don't want to use other software, I can see where you are coming from.

You don't need to believe me, info on the authenticity of their effort is priced into the markets.

Or, you can believe those lined up to fight Apple on these capabilities.

This is really outdated: https://images.apple.com/safari/docs/Safari_White_Paper_Nov_...

But boy did it get Meta mad:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/09/facebook-warns-about-apple-i...

But they did more:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/07/apple-beefing-up-...

And now more:

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ios-17-will-stop-websites-fro...

Every time generating letters to Washington and Brussels how Apple's taking food out of the mouths of data and ad brokers.

I'd have run out of tiny violins if I didn't have GarageBand to make me a loop.

I will concede that Safari is more power efficient on macOS, so if I know I'm going to be on battery all day, I may switch to Safari for the day.

not sure how far using 'ungoogled-chromium' takes you though.

Money is going to be a required tool to fight back against google, whether we like it or not. Capitalizing on the lesser evil to fight the bigger evil is not a terrible idea in my estimation.

I feel like they could do better, but on the whole, I'm happy with what they provide to everyone for free.

Browsers are still memory hogs, but at some point you have to decide if you want speed or low memory usage. Fast reaction time or nicely rendered pictures. On a decent machine, not even a fast one, there is no difference. That said, I despise notebooks and usually use towers.