I dunno, Firefox of 3.0 times was the shit. It itself was the browser that should be, more welcoming to customization than Windows of the time was to porn winlockers. They also had XULRunner for alternative ideas. Gecko was the FOSS browser engine that various alternative "nice" MacOS and Linux browsers used.

Though between 2004 and 2008 only four years passed. Less than between Windows 2000 and Vista (let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000).

All firefox really needed to be once google took over everything, was to be a viable alternative and find a way to metabolize all this cash in a way that doesn't damage google's own cash machine or threaten it's actual dominance.

For google the pitance they give firefox is a very cheap insurance policy against against anti-trust legislation. Just like Intel with AMD, this shows how toothless the liberal anti-trust legislation are, even if they were really being enforced, they cannot handle a token 2nd player. It cannot handle controlled opposition if it's credible and believable. So an actual thriving ecosystem doesn't need to exist, we just get duopolies instead of monopolies but in practices we get ducked up the cloaca just the same.

This is the exact block I came to quote.

The rest of the article is good too, though.

forks cant survive without firefox unfortunately

Qutebrowser is my main and Lynx is my "feed" browser. Qutebrowser you don't need anything else. it just works and you can script the thing to your hearts content.

For a long time I was using Floorp, and while I like floorp and the dev team behind it, I just stopped using it as my main. Sure it's a fork of firefox and they're at the whims of mozilla which lately has been clearly evident with the slow updates to floorp.

Qutebrowser just works. The dev for it is a nice dude who is easily accessible for help. the community for it is also very helpful. the integration with things like greasemonkey make scripting and customizing anything so painfully easy. I mean there's a great script for it right now that completely 100% circumvents youtube ads and it's been working for months straight without any need to update. It also meshes extremely well with my Bitwarden.

I'll never use a different browser again.

The article says you should stick with Firefox. If you have time, I'd recommend reading the entire article!

I've been very happy with Waterfox so far. Made with the Gecko Engine but not maintained by Mozilla.

Markup pro tip: to have multiple separate lines appear as a single large block quote, insert the quote signifier (>) into the blank newlines between them as well.

so this

is one giant

block quote

despite the newlines.

Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.

Unfortunately others are deciding on web standards mostly. Which makes it hard for it to keep up even if it were trying to be such.

Also Mozilla was kinda that, until it wasn't - because they decided to go the other way and because apparently they lacked money (doesn't look like that from their spending, but).

That assumes though that the definition of web browser and its needed stack stays static.

What happens if we all browse the net primarily via VR then? The line is blurry, so is Mozilla org.

and it’s incredibly shit that you can’t donate to firefox… people donate to mozilla assuming they’re donating to firefox but none of the donations go towards firefox development

i emailed them about this a while ago… i can’t remember exactly what i said, but basically that i didn’t want to donate to adtech and ai slop but wanted to support firefox development… this is their reply

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback with us. We genuinely value hearing from our supporters, as your insights help us understand what matters most to the Mozilla community.

It’s important to note that the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation are two separate entities within the Mozilla umbrella - Mozilla Corporation is responsible for developing and maintaining Firefox and other software products, and they are continuously working on improving the user experience, including addressing compatibility issues and promoting the browser to a wider audience.

The Mozilla Foundation, on the other hand, focuses on broader internet health and advocacy work. Our mission is to ensure the internet remains open and accessible for everyone, and this includes issues related to privacy, digital rights, and equity. To confirm, the survey that you had received was from the Mozilla Foundation.

With that being said, Firefox is funded by revenue generated through the product rather than donations. At the moment, there is no way for supporters to make a donation that will be designated to the development of Firefox. Have no fear, things are looking good for Firefox's future and they plan to be around a long time, supporting folks with the most secure browser experience! Continuing to use Firefox, and recommending it to others, is the best way to support this project.

We truly appreciate your concerns about Firefox and their top priorities - We on the Mozilla Foundation strongly believe that issues such as privacy, online safety, and data security are connected to the products and services we all use every day. The work we do in these areas complements Mozilla Corporation’s focus on building better, more secure software like Firefox, and w encourage you to participate in our survey!

If you would like to input some of your thoughts and ideas into our Ideas discussion forum regarding Firefox and other Mozilla products, please visit: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas

We thank you again for reaching out to our Mozilla Foundation Donor Care team, and please let us know if we can support your further!

All the best,

<redacted their name>
Donor Care Team

Mozilla Foundation https://foundation.mozilla.org/

You could always use a WebKit-based browser. They’re still out there, and as they aren’t owned by a company that also sells web ads they are significantly more privacy focussed.

I'm with you. I was using Netscape way back and loved Firefox from its inception, and tried to convince everyone I knew to use it. Earlier this year I finally switched to Waterfox, and I haven't looked back. I tried Librewolf first, and it was great, but they don't have an app and that was a dealbreaker for me. Waterfox feels a lot like older Firefox UI-wise, and I love the tab containers.

Is it good so far?

stand up against racism and discrimination

What does this mean for a browser company? I understand this being an important company value, but I don't want them filtering the internet or anything. Their primary goal should be to foster a privacy respecting web and a high performance, standards based browser.

I don't think eliminating profit from the web should be a goal. I don't care if websites make money, I just care they don't profit from my data without me agreeing to it explicitly.

I think Firefox needs to become financially independent, and that means finding a privacy respecting business model. My personal preference is a micro payment system where I can pay websites for content in exchange for no ads. That provides value to me and websites that I'd otherwise block ads on.

If AI is part of that, sure, just make it opt-in and very obvious when it's working.

I personally think it's not about Mozilla. It's about the Web.

You need to see the bigger picture always.

The Web as an application for global system of hypertext documents served from different computers is fine.

The Web wasn't intended as a platform for platforms for global applications.

It's used as one, because that allows a certain kind of people to gather power. Networked personal computers made the civil society too powerful. Needed a solution.

Why the Web and not just "Facebook native application" and "Google native application"? Well, it's hard to maintain a hypertext document system made application platform. It limits competition. It also allows Facebook and Google popularity to affect web browser and web techologies popularity. If these don't work in a browser, that browser is doomed.

While the verticals and monopolies themselves allow thieves and murderers in governments to control the Internet.

So - there weren't that many websites, if you think about it, requiring any particular web technology when it came into existence. Those mostly started specifically for Google, Facebook etc services and/or policies. Say, HTML5 to phase out Netscape plugin API, which was presented as phasing out Flash (everybody hated Flash).

Mozilla followed those policies and appeared neutral, yes.

But in general the moment using Dillo or Netsurf or Links became plainly, completely not an option for the Web, it was decided. A world standard that has only a handful of compliant realizations is not a standard. It's an oligopoly.

So, getting back to hypertext - Flash was hated by some because it didn't allow to turn the whole webpage into an application, but that wasn't its purpose. JS was a mistake, I think. Any interpreted content should have been embedded in its clear place separate from the rest of the page with its own plugin, similar to Flash applets. But - one can accept that in year 1996 they didn't think of such consequences.

And remote big services not being standardized were also a mistake. I wrote a bit on that from time to time here, gets tiring to repeat - a lot of what the server side of many applications does is just routing to another client, computation and storage. One can devise a standard for remote services. So that local applications would be different, but would use the same pooled infrastructure, found and announced via trackers similar to torrents. With global identifiers of entities to allow interoperability, so that "post #12435324646dasgtshdryh" would be the same text on any of such storage services (having it) and at any point in time.

That, of course, is a bit late. In our current world things like Briar and other mesh are probably a better direction. One can have what I described over them too, but it will also require management of bandwidth and bottlenecks and stuff not reachable directly.

y’all need to stand up against racism and discrimination

I concur, I think they should push towards a more positive internet. Though I think they are a bit wary of doing it ever since the toxic backlash to this blog post

https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/

Companies should be allowed to make a profit, you need that to cover bad years, invest in the future of the company, etc. A company without profit (unless it is a non-profit) will not survive.

How viscous is the cycle

There's been investment bubbles, overshooting and disingenuous rent seeking in many economies before. It was temporarily reduced in many western economies by various FDR type policies in the '30s-'60s. The '70s and '80s were just the banks wresting back their freedom to implement market "rationality". And we get the benefits ever since.

People do keep voting for it though so it is hard to argue they're not satisfied. Even the ones who protest vote don't seem to see the "investment" markets as any part of the problem; or as important at all. That's either some pretty effective demagoguery, or some dumb fucking electorate.

Check out enshittification and the rot economy. I feel like those two terms encompass pretty much what we are seeing these days

I'ld like to vote Cryptonimics as term, because it encompasses both the cryptic nature of the product, and the clear example of cryptocurrency.

Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big.

That's not entirely correct. Black and white stones used in voting in someplace antique also have no actual value, but they substitute a vote.

BTC is used as a mechanism of exchange, like a decentralized bank.

Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.

Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?

Or would you doubt that the person talking has good idea of the problem and the solutions, offering the bluntest one?

"Regulation" of the "property rights protection" kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn't work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it's theft. Providing a "communication platform" augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that's not heavy regulation, that's an update to pretty light regulation.

Maybe also obligation for every big service on the Internet to have global identifiers and provide a global API exposing all its inner entities, be that posts or users or comments or reactions, with those global identifiers. So that you could export all of Facebook to a decentralized cache, for example. That's heavy regulation, but also pretty reasonable, in line with old approaches to libraries, press and freedom of speech.