Ikr. They're up to some questionable decisions since long.

- Acquire companies like Pocket, Anonym in multi-million dollar deals and also the millions in bonuses that the CEO likes to enjoy.

- At the same time, no significant expenditure towards developing its core software. Firefox is still ridden with bugs. They even went as far as firing the people that used to work on Servo, Rust, WASM, etc.

I think it's clear to them that there's not enough money to be made with small tricks like Pocket, VPN, Relay, etc. Firefox is still the only profitable product and contributes ~90% to Mozilla's revenue. Much of it coming from Google which is the one thing that people have been asking them to be less dependent on.

And we shouldn't be surprised if they double down on making more money off of Google and also introduce ads. Acquiring Anonym, an ads company, implies that it might have already started.

"They even went as far as firing the people that used to work on Servo, Rust, WASM, etc."

And at the same time greatly raising compensation for the CEO, despite shrinking numbers.

Servo had so much potential as the flagship Rust project, a fast and memory safe browser engine.

Such a loss to see it jettisoned and abandoned. Myopic decisions like these are filling the cloud of pessimism that now shrouds Mozilla.

FWIW Servo is seeing work as e.g. an Electron replacement. There is hope, even if one wishes the Mozilla Foundation CEO had used some $6M on developer salaries instead of pocketing it.

Full browser feature set is hard, but an app that bundles its own webview can choose to not trigger the edge cases, so that's a realistic path forward.

Also they stopped developing Servo :(

As in Mozilla stopped developing officially? Because I have seen active development on GitHub and monthly updates on their blog.

Mozilla stopped in 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865

The project limped along for a bit, then recently Igalia started putting resources into it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39269949

Yes, a while ago. But fortunately people continue. Just not with the billion dollar budget of Mozilla and with seemingly less traction. I have not heard of them in a while.

But I very much endorse both. And yes, in theory energy should be focused, but I rather have 2 smallish projects, but with potential, than one slightly bigger one, with fighting about direction all the time.

Yes, that's correct. It was later adopted by the Linux Foundation with some industry support: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/open-sou...

I see some nice parallels with Wikipedia. Makes me wonder if anyone's yet developed a theory of "foundation capture" where you find some marvellous free thing that is made for and by humanity at large and extract/redirect money from its market share/good will.

I think the pump-and-dump extraction of value from any brand works pretty similarly, whether a non-profit or regular business.

Lots of companies with centuries-long record of manufacturing previously durable goods have in the last decade or two switched to using e.g. inferior quality steel to increase profits. That'll destroy the brand, but in the meanwhile there's great profits to be had!

I guess for that we have to thank Aesop, the original corporate raider.

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

Firefox is open source, it would be far easier for the community to make a stripped down Firefox port with no telemetry, no ads and no upsells for Mozilla services.

With that said, almost all of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google, which might possibly influence what features they implement, their stance on various web standards etc.

As pointed out, these do exist. I've been using several over the decades. And chrome forks too.

They all tend to lag behind over time, until the fork is eventually too old and it's either abandoned, useful changes I was relying on are dropped, or becomes just too old compared to upstream to be fully compatible (and thus just annoying to use).

Just the burden to upkeep the upstream changes, in either firefox or chrome forks, seems to be significant enough that I'm quite pessimistic on the lifespan of these projects.

You might just as well do your own thing, and don't pretend to be a mainstream browser replacement altogether.

Keeping up with an already built browser is too hard so we’ll create an entirely new browser that takes even more work?

The way I see it is "I'll have fun at something that feels interesting"

Yes and those forks exists and are a solution now.

But long term, I would much rather see a truly independent open source browser engine.

> which might possibly influence what features they implement, their stance on various web standards etc.

Unless you’ve got some examples to back this up, it’s FUD. Posting hypotheticals is how rumours start, and this is just stirring the pot.

Conflict of interests is a real thing to worry about. I wouldn't trust scientist working in tobacco company on cigarette harm, even if I have no evidence of wrongdoing.

FYI https://librewolf.net/

Sure, there are forks such as LibreWolf. I understand the reservations regarding Mozilla Foundation, although I generally like what they've been doing. Every org has people with stupid ideas. However, the way I see it, it's unlikely that the community will be able to produce a competitive browser in a broader sense (stability, performance, security, cross-platform...), meaning that the likelihood of Firefox being still around ten years from now is significantly higher than that we build and maintain a comparable browser ourselves. Then come the evolving web standards and lobbying power...

The way things are going at Mozilla currently, I wouldn't be surprised if Firefox is just another Chromium wrapper in 10 years. Technology doesn't seem to count as much as the C-suite filling their pockets at this "new" Mozilla.

This about sums it up. Plus donating to Mozilla means your money goes to all sorts of things, but hardly if at all where you want it to.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by your claims of firefox having “spyware and ads activated by default”?

Install a new version of firefox, have a look in settings under "data" (or whatever they call it in english). There you will see "studies" as activated, which is cryptic talk for ad tracking. And more recently, literal tracking for a advertisement company.

And as a bonus, those were added and activated as features via update, without telling. At least for me.

(and paid ads you have on the home screen)

> And as a bonus, those were added and activated as features via update, without telling. At least for me.

Ouch, they were new to me and also activated.

Yep, stuff like this makes me question many things. I mean in a sane world this should be enough to sue them into oblivion. But the general bar in that regard is so low, that apparently even open source companies can do it as default.

Why don’t you think it’s a sane enough world to “sue them into oblivion”?

Because I do not think one will have success with it. Same with Microsoft, Google and co.

Studies are not ad tracking. It's worse and more like a backdoor for A/B testing of browser features. A few years back an update broke the Metamask extension and it was fixed by pushing via studies. At that point users weren't very aware the feature even existed and it caused some backlash since users realized there was a backdoor to push code into their browsers.

The backlash resulted in studies being opt-in, and I thought it still was but I don't know, I use "policies.json" to setup my browsers.

Am I being a total chud? These don't really seem egregious? I already accept (and expect) that Firefox receives background updates in the background.

https://i.imgur.com/S7d4ZXg.png

https://i.imgur.com/n2euIrQ.png

https://i.imgur.com/BUjukOy.png

I don't mind the feature as opt-in, just like telemetry it can be useful. But depending on the threat model it can be a big problem. I still use Firefox as my main browser.

> Yes, can all be deactivated, I also use FF, but I do not trust Mozilla anymore.

And so I feel much more at home with Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.