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Drew DeVault recently wrote about the failures of Mozilla management to sustain the Firefox browser as viable opposition to commercial offerings, from Google in particular. This is less a reply to Drew, rather just my thoughts on reading his article.
gemini://drewdevault.com/2020/10/22/Firefox-the-embarassment-of-FOSS.gmi
It's disheartening to have to agree with him, and infuriating to think of the missed opportunities that would have avoided this situation. They had a lot of money, and contrary to what Mozilla claimed internally, the browser is absolutely where it's at. It's as if Mozilla wantonly ignored every bit of Internet history, every bitter corporate fight, and every piece of subsequent legislation.
Clearly, with such a huge chunk of funding having come from Google itself, there was always going to be the threat of interference from Google. I can't help but wonder who drove some of the more stupid spending decisions that Mozilla made - it's hard to imagine Google not insisting on significant influence.
Yet, Firefox is at this point in time still a technically fantastic browser. It's faster than it has ever been, renders everything beautifully, provides awesome development tools. And it still allows uBlock Origin to operate properly.
This last point is almost certainly a sharp thorn for Google. Ad-blocking threatens the existence of the commercial web, it is obviously seen as an existential risk inside Google. There may be ways to attack ad-blockers, but they tend to make everyone a loser.
While Google is trying to make their environment hostile to ad-blockers, the problem they have is that the web experience on Firefox will then look noticeably better. It will be the only major browser that offers full blocking of tracking and ads, and I know from experience that people really do notice this. This is the existential risk that Firefox poses to Google, and it's the reason it has to have its wings clipped, so to speak.
For Mozilla, the money they earned from selling search traffic should have been used to secure the future of their technical teams - Firefox is their goose that lays golden eggs. They have teams of very bright hackers who are ideologically driven to fight for a web they love, which is something even more valuable than the goose!
Yet, they squandered. For example, $25M and more buying Pocket, which earns less than $3M per year, for a service that damages their reputation and, in any case, could have been developed in-house for a fraction of that cost, while avoiding the need for privacy invasions. Instead, after 10 years they might break even. What were they thinking?
So, there are forces of either incompetence or malice within Mozilla. Their browser always thrived through a combination of useability and trust. I credit Firefox with the high level of standards compliance that we see today - they drove that. Likely it would never to out-compete the strongest commercial forces, but it always seemed to reach enough market share to remain a threat and an influencer.
I haven't given up on Mozilla or Firefox. Let's hope they focus back on the browser. When Firefox works well, and when Mozilla earns our trust, then we naturally evangelise, because we like sharing good things.
Firefox doesn't solve the problem of crap on the web, but it mitigates it to some extent and, really, it's the last hope we have before the web turns into one big infomercial.
Brave is essentially Chrome's renderer, but with its own user interface and, crucially, it has ad-blocking and tracking protection built in. I often recommend it to the riff-raff because they smell of Facebook, and I'd rather not hang around them while installing uBlock Origin on Firefox.
However there are many risks choosing Brave - while it seems okay at the moment, it's still dependent on Google. You just have to look at Android to see how deeply fucked up Google can make their free and open source software when they put their mind to it. It's also trying to 'innovate' ways of generating revenue so, you know, expect change.
People need to be encouraged to have a 'privacy browser'. Most people want privacy for at least some of their browsing, so that's a foot in the door. There's often no point going into more detail - just leave it hanging that Firefox + uBlock Origin, or Brave, are 'privacy browsers' and leave any implications to their imagination.
Of course, there's still a good chance that they'll end up with a scamcoin miner and a botnet controller instead, but you know, at least you tried.