this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
176 points (96.3% liked)

Open Source

33944 readers
204 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Update was from 3 days ago, I'm really hopeful ladybird could be a future browser option to help break the stranglehold chrome has over the market, while Mozilla is struggling to find meaningful direction.

It seems like an exciting project with monthly progress updates :) they keep chipping away at compatibility.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 55 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I hope they can do it. Mozilla hasn't fundamentally changed from where they were at least a year ago (re: their inability to clearly communicate policy "changes"), but the fact that they don't seem to know what concerns their users and how to communicate in a way that doesn't stoke their fears—it just makes them harder to work with and recommend.

Hopefully Ladybird can inject some much-needed competition into browsers.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I definitely agree. They feel deeply confused about their audience and like they perpetually flounder trying to find a sustainable direction or future :/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Ootl, what happened with Mozilla ? I use Firefox and very happy with it so this sounds surprising

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

They recently announced terms of service that they (I think?) Partially walked back. But honestly it's a longer term issue-

Mozilla is dependent on Google giving them lots of money to be the default Firefox search engine, and anti-monopoly rulings in Europe may mean Google has to stop doing that, which would really jeopardize Mozilla's financial sustainability

The gecko engine is way behind on web standards, and while it generally gets the job done for average users, I've learned recently lots of devs don't test their sites with it or support it not just because it's a minority browser, but because it doesn't support a lot of stuff and is hard to work with.

Mozilla seems to believe their path forward financially is AI features. Which are very unpopular with a lot of the folks who follow Mozilla, even if implemented thoughtful, and seems like a dubious financial future given even huge companies like openai are struggling to make ai financially self sustaining.

Add to it the privacy preserving ad tracking stuff they wanted as an alternative to cookies a while back, and the picture doesn't really get better

All of these are small things. The compatibility with web standards isn't the end of the world for most users. A big bug was/is that firefox rendered gradients horrendously for like 12 years or something with the bug reports just sitting there, but most Foss nerds who use firefox don't super care if a website's gradient looks crappy. The features that chrome has but Firefox doesn't aren't dealbreakers for most users. The privacy preserving trackers or whatever they were called seemed at least relatively thoughtfully implemented from a privacy standpoint. AI could hypothetically be done in a way that isn't totally shitty, and maybe possibly they could build a financial future out of it. The terms of service debacle could stop here and not devolve into actual enshitification.

But it all culminates together in feeling like mozilla is out of touch with their core audience and has no real viable plan for staying afloat, sans google paying them shitloads of money to be the default browser engine. :/

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

In short, they're trying to make much more money to pay the executives' 7 figure salaries, and are giving up browser privacy to do so.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

7 figure salary ? for an oss project ? that doesn't sound good or sustainable at all

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

And remember that Mozilla is supposed to be a non-profit.

I don't understand how it makes sense for a nonprofit to make it so profitable to their executives to manage it... why is that not regulated?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

https://tilvids.com/w/fAvzwwK2abKCGUea6FT9va

There's also bs like this:

https://www.maketecheasier.com/firefox-testing-new-privacy-feature-with-meta/

The browser is cool but Mozilla as a company is an absolute trainwreck of borked public communication (again and again and again) and bullshit products that noone asked for (Pocket, AI etc).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Oh, I think they're communicating just fine. They're signalling the direction they plan to take and it's not a good one.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I disagree, but I understand why you think that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Yeah, mostly because of the entire tech industry for the last decade. I've gad every ounce of trust incinerated.