Today, amid a sea of internet companies and products that routinely put profits ahead of people, Mozilla is unveiling an ambitious new venture capital fund to transform technology investment — and the internet more broadly.
Yes, this is exactly what the only browser standing between us and complete Chrome dominance needs. Can you taste the sarcasm?
While I agree with the sentiment, I don’t know that I have faith in mozilla to put our interests above profits.
I was looking at my parent’s computer and Mozilla was advertising VPN services through means that bypassed the normal adblockers. I also caught firefox overriding preferences the other day, re-enabling “pocket” and other stuff that was intentionally turned off…something to the extent of refreshing firefox to get the best experience – It’s a subtle way of getting their ads re-enabled while pretending it’s for user benefit. I also vehemently oppose mozilla turning firefox into a walled garden and depriving owner control. Firefox is one of the last bastians of independence against the chrome monoculture, & monopoly and that’s why I support it, but IMHO it’s makes it harder to promote firefox as a browser defending user interests and protecting us from corporate overreach when they’re doing these things themselves.
IDK, still willing to give them a little leeway just for the sponsorship of RUST, that took a lot of faith. While they didn’t continue to fund it once it took off their early support was vital.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
They’ve done good work, work that we should give them credit for. But I think we have to recognize that some of their self-promotional values are at odds with their actions giving rise to elements of hypocrisy. IMHO their walled garden policies directly contradict the mozilla manifesto to take away owner freedoms. Even if the argument is “to protect owners from themselves”, I feel it’s a terrible judgement call by mozilla echoing some of the worst justifications that other corporations are using to control industries. Ironically the exact same justification that mozilla uses to justify keeping firefox users in a walled garden is used by apple to prohibit their users from installing 3rd party browsers including firefox. They are both morally wrong to restrict what owners are allowed to do and I have to call them both out on it; mozilla won’t get a pass from me just because they’re mozilla. So that to me was an unforced moral error and I hope someone at mozilla in the future will correct it, probably not though.
Regarding sustainability and business operations, things become complicated because regardless of intentions, everything costs money. What do you do when inevitably the need to generate money contradicts public interests? I honestly have no idea how to solve this. Donations alone won’t support mozilla, it would become a fraction of itself. They’ve been pushing content sponsorship and paid services, which I don’t necessarily fault them for because…what choice do they have? Though I do get annoyed when they override settings to push their ads through.
The truth is that many FOSS projects, even those with giant user bases, can struggle financially. Take a look at the PBX space where many open source projects have gone under. Those that survived transformed to a microtransaction model where the base is FOSS but additional features are sold once users are hooked by the free version. I don’t think anybody really likes the model, but it’s what the devs have to do to make money.
https://nerdvittles.com/some-asterisk-resolutions-for-the-new-year/
This is the aspect of FOSS I’ve always had the most trouble with. Granted it is meant to be “free as in liberty, not as in beer”, but how are typical FOSS developers supposed to get paid? The big names at the top have cushy corporate jobs and get booked for million dollar speaking engagements, but rank and file devs don’t have such income.
…boy I really got off track here…but I agree with what you said 🙂
Cutting Rust loose and starting a foundation to administer it was the correct call.
1: Programming languages are a fundamental building block of software, and they work better when they are FOSS. No one is going to make money off a programming language these days.
2: Community drives programming languages these days, and programming languages are healthier when they aren’t owned by one company or individual.
This may be a good thing, in the end. Mozilla has received absolutely massive amounts of money (mostly from google), and spent it on … who knows what, really. If they had put all that money into some boring low-risk investment, the interest alone would have been enough to sustain them forever by now. Investing a bit of that money in companies that have some low but non-zero chance of being profitable seems like an improvement?
That war is over. Google won, and the community has realized they need to move on from hoping Mozilla won’t fold.
Maybe Mozilla can finally give up and create an independent Firefox foundation to house the FF code. That would be the best outcome, and maybe FF will become a first tier FOSS project which multiple people can contribute to. Red Hat, Suse, and Canonical come to mind as companies I would like to see contribute more to FF.
Mozilla has failed to create any tech anybody wants, so now they’re crowdsourcing ideas. I’ve always wondered how much the donors (Google, MS, etc.) interfered with the internals of Mozilla corp. Mozilla itself didn’t help since their FOSS projects have never been particularly community friendly. They would release stuff, but the projects were hard to build and get running.
Aside from shielding projects from interference by donors, this sounds like a PR and marketing play on the part of Mozilla. They’ve been hit pretty hard lately, and people have lost a lot of faith in them, rightfully so.
Anyway, this sounds like they’re copying the European efforts to fund FOSS, except adding SV VC bullsh*t sauce on top to make it extra tasty.
Links:
https://interpeer.io/
https://nlnet.nl/
https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-zero/
https://www.isocfoundation.org/ (US)
More links are needed!
Flatland_Spider,
But that happened with thunderbird and that makes me skeptical that this is the best direction for firefox. Technically TB has an active dev, but the project is so far behind on the bug tracker that there are still know bugs older than a decade that will probably never get fixed because of a lack of resources.
Personally I don’t think the problem is with their tech though. The main issue is that they cannot compete against far larger corporations that easily control the market. Even microsoft, after having their market control strategies gimped in antitrust lawsuits, struggled to compete and ultimately ceded the browser market to google technology. I think the only platform firefox is doing well on is the platform on which it primarily gets bundled on, which is linux. Unfortunately that’s a relatively small market, and it’s probably not enough to sustain mozilla as a company.
Haha, yeah. Believe it or not, some people have the “problem” of having more money than they know what to do with, and that’s where these SV VC firms come in. It’s such a starkly different reality from the local main street companies. There’s always the lucky few, but I bet a lot of people are disappointed on joining the workforce to see that the SV they saw on TV isn’t the norm. Unless of course they were watching “the IT crowd” 🙂
Please add the recent acquisition of ‘K9 mail’ to the discussion about Thunderbird.
Saifi Khan,
Wow, I use both and didn’t realize that k9 was planning to rebrand as thunderbird for mobile. Thanks for letting us know!
I’m probably not the best person to ask since mobile is secondary for me – I do everything on desktop. A couple feature improvements could make sense, but K9 is fairly mature and probably doesn’t need a full time dev if they’re just planning on keeping it in its current form, which I’d be ok with. Other people might want more changes though. For example my wife has been complaining about k9’s search capabilities.
There will be rebranding and feature parity with the desktop client, I believe. I get most of my Thunderbird news from their Fediverse account.
https://mastodon.online/@thunderbird
I’m glad they were able to merge. Thunderbird has been missing from the mobile space, and it provides K9 Mail with a long term home.
That may be true, but TB is better off. There is real movement again. People are actually working on the code base again, and while it may not be many people, it’s better then Mozilla Corp neglecting TB the way it was.
TB is still the best Linux, and maybe Windows, email client.
TB is still under the Mozilla Foundation and administered by the MZLA Corporation, so it’s not totally free of Mozilla.
This is partially true. Mozilla management has been pretty bad, and consumers trusted the Google brand more.
FF quality has varied over the years. The last days of the single process FF were painful above a few tabs.
Mozilla stopped considering FF to be a application base. TB is one of the few left. Everything else uses Electron. Mozilla had Electron before Electron, and people were using FF as an application base.
Mozilla bills itself as the Internet company, but all the JS libraries people use come from Facebook or Twitter. Fonts come from Google.
Mozilla has had decent consumer ideas over the years, but they’ve killed them as soon as they start getting traction. Lockwise is the most recent, that could have been a nice little revenue stream as a Bitwarden competitor. Persona was another good idea they killed. People wanted to keep this one going, but they couldn’t get the repo code working.
Firefox OS was a decent idea as an IoT platform, and could have been a nice little revenue stream. Offering people or companies something like hosted central management or stable releases of a management suite would have been valuable. Buying IFTTT to add to the IoT offering would have been a good move. FFOS is still alive in the feature phone sector as KaiOS.
Mozilla hasn’t produced any new tech people have wanted to use. Corps open source stuff all the time as halo projects, but not Mozilla. They’re more like Canonical then Red Hat or Suse in that regard.
Exactly, which is why I think Mozilla should figure out how to get FF into the hands of the Linux companies. Red Hat has a better track record with stewardship of FOSS projects then almost anyone else. Unless, RH or Suse are going to focus on Epiphany or Falkon, FF fits well on their OS. I’m assuming Canonical would push Chrome, Edge, or some Chromium based browser from Amazon.
Flatland_Spider,
It still feels like they’re under resourced for dealing with such a large backlog. I don’t blame them for this though, it’s just doing the best you can with the cards you’re dealt.
I think that the decline of end-user IMAP and SMTP in favor of webmail providers and gmail in particular is creating massive consolidation away from not only TB but all email clients in general. While these still have fans like us, they’re just not really attracting a new user base.
I don’t know if it’s enough for firefox to be just a primarily linux property though. It’s a serious problem if the rest of the computing world standardizes on a single browser engine with no viable alternatives. I’m seeing more websites officially and unofficially requiring a chrome based browser While I think chrome is a good enough browser, it does feel like a regression towards the state of the IE monopoly where no other browsers get tested or are relevant.
I find it such a damn shame that even the linux foundation themselves explicitly require a chrome browser for their certifications. Support chrome obviously, but to require it? WTF are they thinking?!?
https://training.linuxfoundation.org/about/faqs/certification-faq/
I’m sure they are. They’re in a better situation then they were at least.
It didn’t help, or the shift to mobile where TB didn’t have a presence. The stock Android mail client was awful, and then Google killed it in favor of the Gmail client.
People are coming back to desktop clients, and the new TB Sync features will help with that. Re-adding signatures and accounts was always annoying, but that wasn’t a problem with web email clients.
Luckily for TB, almost every other email client is much, much worse. They didn’t get eclipsed by their Chrome.
FF needs to stabilize their base, and then they can work on making inroads on other platforms.
Yeah. I do think the Chrome user experience is awful. I’ve tried using Chromium as my dd browser for work, and I like the way FF does things. I do still use Chromium for some work things to keep data separate, but I use FF, LibreWolf, and FF Dev for most things.
My guess: FF’s war against tracking has blocked the JS Linux Foundation uses to monitor tests, or “That Google money is so sweet! It even smells better then regular money! Taste it, taste it!” XD
Flatland_Spider,
I don’t feel as confident as you, but I do hope you’re right. I’m in agreement with you that it’s the best client for me. Time will tell if they end up on sturdier footing and can maintain or even retake market share.
I do as well, however I’m finding more sites where something doesn’t work but works in chrome. As a dev it’s so easy to make portable HTML5 sites these days that I’m very bothered that companies don’t even care. If you complain the first thing they tell you is to switch to chrome. It is the modern equivalent of forcing users to use IE. Their actions solidify the monopoly and as a user there is nothing I can do about it because my voice is in the minority.
I just find it in really poor taste given that they’re supposed to be representing FOSS user interests. Following your comment, I did take a closer look and sure enough they use google tracking. I don’t know if this is the source of the problem or not, it might be, but IMHO the linux foundation ought to take some responsibility for giving users the choice to not take part in the google browser and tracking monopolies. After all many developers like me would be happy to build them 1st party websites that don’t depend on 3rd parties like google.