That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.
I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one day someone like (and if they read this, and anyone who reads this will think I'm crazy) CloudFlare just buys Firefox itself from Mozilla so it can finally be funded correctly. CloudFlare has an interesting talent pool and I'm sure there's people who work with Rust / have worked with Rust who can help fund something like Firefox. Then I would like to see them create a true open foundation whose entire bottom line goes towards Firefox, not to anything else.
Free the fox from corporate shennanigans. By my own corporate shennanigans. And CF could be swapped out with any company bold enough to free the fox.
(Disclosure: I work at Mozilla, but not on Firefox.)
different point of view: tab grouping took 20+y to develop (since opera had it in 2000s).
in 2026 firefox should have: - fast ui - fast js - fast rendering - hw acceleration for video - same look and feel on all platforms - faster adblocker
just the basics, no? didn't add more advanced features here.
and let's see what is actually here: - UI rendered via HTML/xul. an abomination. a slow abomination at that. right clicking something can show you stagers of rendering of a menu. - check any Js benchmarks, you will see how FF stands - rendering,... there was a talk in one of the conferences explaining timing requests and time-to-picture. this may be blamed on the standards, but chrome does it better - video hw acceleration on Linux? is this actually working? and I don't mean 3/100 relevant codecs - same look and feel - done - AdBlock is the only advantage you have over other platforms. it would make sense to implement this in the browser and not rely on Js and extensions
it's sad and funny that people with only a couple million are going to soon catch up to Mozilla and make it obsolete, by building a Bowser engine, not only a shell around blink/WebKit.
There was, in my opinion, no better browser company past or present than Opera in the 2000s and 2010s (sorry Mozilla). But their example exposes the fallacy of assuming that building out great features guarantees market share gains.
Unfortunately the side bets are disproportionately visible relative to the vast majority of what they actually do, which is ship millions of lines of code in browser improvements every quarter, keeping pace with Google despite a fraction of Google's resources.
I certainly think a better strategic partner than Google would be ideal. Yahoo had a strategically promising moment that slipped through its fingers that I think will always be a what-if. Cloudflare is interesting because they're very much a create-a-blue-ocean kind of company, and the problem with browsers has always been that the browser space simply isn't a revenue driver, it's something you subsidize from other businesses.
Firefox is, remarkably, the most successful self funded browser engine in the history of the world, but many great companies have come and gone in this space (e.g. Opera) and still fell behind. They invest more in the browser now than they ever have, they have shipped more production Rust code than anybody. But that's not louder than the noise in the modern internet.
I think you're right that someone like Cloudflare would be an interesting partner and I can't think of a better one off the top of my head. And if AI is eclipsing search, that threatens search licensing they're currently relying on. I don't know what AI in the browser is, what new norms, what new expectations, what core concepts are going to matter the most. But something is going to change and you have to get out ahead of that now, to be relevant tomorrow.
And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
I mean, even literally this one sentence is self-contradictory. Thunderbird is not their browser. You complain that they "invest more effort into everything other than their browser" and then complain that they don't invest enough in Thunderbird.
No win situation for them in terms of public opinion.
* They can't get diversify their revenue to be less dependent on Google without doing things that people view as "distractions"
* They don't get credit when the "distractions" are for the public good, like LetsEncrypt, Rust, Opus / AV1, etc.
* They get punished for de-prioritizing "distractions" like Thunderbird and Servo and Rust because those distractions are popular.
* For years they were simultaneously being dragged for dropping the XUL extension ecosystem, and also dragged for low performance and lack of multiprocessing and a bunch of other things which were being kneecapped hard by the XUL extension ecosystem.
It's not like I love their management or anything, certainly they've made mistakes, but the narcissism of small differences hits them with full force relative to every other competitor in the space.
if they had set up an endowment instead of blowing it on unrelated pointless crap for decades they would have been self-funded indefinitely
they were pulling in over $500 MILLION a year
Mozilla has had an endowment for, I think, ~15 years now, and they have invested it and grown it from around $90 million to around $1.2 billion and counting. Which now is a firewall in case of emergency, as well as a resource that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue.
oh for fucks sake, that's even worse than blowing it on stupid ideas
JUST USE THE MONEY FOR THE BROWSER
And just so we're clear, are you suggesting they shouldn't have an endowment at all, or that they shouldn't use the endowment to create any lines of long term revenue, or that they should but spending a fraction of a percent of it on a VC fund would not be successful? Whichever one you pick, there's at least one person who's exactly as upset at Mozilla for the opposite reason.
Edit: I would go so far as to say I think the VC fund is the single best idea Mozilla has ever had for long term financial independence. It builds on the success they've had thus far (such as it is) raising money from search licensing, and then using that search licensing money to stand up the endowment. Now, the VC fund leverages the endowment in a way that's the most serious path to financial independence they've ever had.
With all the distractions they are abandoning their primary product and they are bleeding whatever miniscule market share they have. This means Google has more leverage over them and can eventually stop the funding once their market share drops beyond a threshold say 0.5% because we all know antitrust is not a strong reason anymore to keep FF alive based on trends of recent rulings.
Chrome gained marketshare not just because it was a good product but because they paid Adobe, Oracle, and legions of freeware antivirus providers lots of $$$ to put a checked-by-default box in their installers to install Google Chrome and make it the default browser for anyone not paying enough attention to uncheck the boxes, and because they targeted Firefox users visiting google.com with popups advertising how much better Chrome was. Mozilla could never do that and they would be excoriated if they tried. And as I mentioned, many of the aspects of Chrome that were indeed superior, were met with kicking and screaming when Mozilla tried to follow, e.g. choosing performance over the XUL extension ecosystem.
Sadly I think their best hope to regain marketshare is to indirectly benefit from Linux to capturing marketshare from Windows.
Exactly right. They did the dang thing with Project Quantum, a massive rewrite of the browser, a massive leap forward in stability and performance. The thing everyone asked for. And they..... continued to lose market share. Because there are other factors, like monopoly power, and distribution lock-in.
You don't have to imagine what it looks like for a browser company to lap the field with an excellent development team, creative revenue raising ideas, being ahead of the curve on mobile, having best in class stability and performance, and building out features that their core user base loves and swears by. Because Opera was that company in the 2000s and 2010s.
But even Opera had to sell to a new ownership group and abandon their Presto engine for Chromium. Because, like Spock said, you can make every decision correctly and still lose. Which is kind of depressing, but it at least helpfully bursts the bubble of people claiming changes in market share are a one-to-one relationship to specific decisions about which features to build in a browser.
I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative. End user dont really care if their favourite markdown editor or notes software is based on electron or gecko but it would have made sure that developers do not target, develop and test for only chromium based browsers.
It also wouldn't be directly revenue diversification. You can't beat Electron by selling an alternative.
Firefox has somewhat tried to target developers. There's Developer Edition with a "direct to the dev tools" focus. Firefox's Dev Tools still generally are somewhat ahead of Safari's and Chrome's (though not always Edge's, even in the Edgmium era one of the few teams that still exists that doesn't upstream everything immediately is Edge's Dev Tools work). Firefox was directly ahead on Flexbox and CSS Grid debugging tools, though now everyone else has copied them. (Not to mention that the history of Dev Tools in the first place all points back to Firebug and other Firefox extensions that went mainstream and then made sense to prioritize as out-of-the-box tools.)
Firefox probably can't do much more to target developers on its own, from a browser perspective. Targeting developers doesn't seem to move the needle enough in marketshare, either.
It's not just Electron that developers are stuck in "develop and test for only chromium based browsers" modes. There's also all the top-down pressure in corporate environments to standardize on only one browser to "cut down" on "testing costs". There are the board room-driven development cycles of "I only care if it looks good on the CEO's iPhone" or "the CEO is into Android this year, that's the focus, everything else is garbage". There's also the hard to avoid spiral of "Firefox marketshare is low, don't worry about it" to more sites not working as well in Firefox to Firefox marketshare getting lower to more "don't worry about it" websites and so on.
They did! At least three different versions of it!
Proton Mail, Google Workspace, iCloud, Dropbox are all viable money-making products that line up well with Mozilla's core mission if they made their own alternatives. Persona could've been really good, if one of these products existed and had enough traction to build a user base that made third parties want to depend on Persona.
There is a world where Mozilla built services people actually want instead of focusing on trust-eroding gimmicks like Pocket, and they'd be thriving right now.
Wish I read this before posting my comment, I wholeheartedly agree at every level. The criticisms are a mile wide, an inch deep, and sometimes legitimate, but often deeply contradictory, and there's no attitude of accountability or self awareness when someone jumps in for the millionth time saying "don't get distracted" but also "offer something new to generate revenue".
And the factual literacy of the drive-by critics is, unfortunately, sometimes brutally off the mark and even veering into conspiratorial. Some unfortunate threads appear to be young adults reading a Mozilla 990 filing for the first time and misreading a conspiracy into every single line, very casual attitudes about accusing them of falsifying financial statements or accusations of controlled opposition, or ridiculous suggestions that they spend down their endowment on "engineering" to no particular end, and sometimes completely misrepresenting how much of a time suck and energy suck certain projects were (e.g. blockchain is sometimes on the Rap Sheet of Bad Things, but they basically wrote a white paper or two).
Which, as you note, isn't to say there's no legitimate concerns: "privacy preserving ads" is a contradiction in terms, the strategic reliance on Google is precarious, and side bets like Pocket were left to languish. In normal times I might consider myself a critic. But unfortunately too often the comment section is an out of control orgy of completely uninformed cheap shots, with an ounce of truth to every pound of confidently incorrect accusation. And that phenomenon, to my mind, is as big as any misstep Mozilla is or isn't making.
I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is right, but the bad will of the tech crowd is a bit exhausting.
Writing this as a former Firefox contributor.
At least that's how it looked from this side. I switched to Vivaldi some 4-5 years ago, and it looks and works pretty much the same since I started using it. New features and changes have happened, but they've been able to be ignored/disabled/hidden without doing CSS brain surgery.
If/when the Google Adblockerblocker changes trickles down to Vivaldi I may have to crawl back to Firefox, but I dread the prospect.
When I worked on Firefox, most of the changes happened exactly because user research determined that users wanted them and/or that not having them hurt the product. We changed the tabs at least once because users thought that the old shape of tabs made the browser feel slow (true story, sadly). We changed the add-on API (after having warned add-on developers for at least 6 years) because the old API was incompatible with multi-threading, multi-process, sandboxing, which in turn was really bad for both performance and security.
I'll absolutely grant you that Mozilla hasn't been very good at communicating these choices, but again, the sheer hostility of tech crowds is exhausting.
Against the avalanche of claims that they've "done nothing", it can be tedious to pull out examples of, say, major projects achieving huge performance improvements in WebGPU, but meanwhile it costs nothing to claim Firefox has "done nothing since Quantum" which I've heard claimed in these parts in full sincerity.
There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome
I'm using 3+ year old hardware that was mid-range even when it was new and it seems to do everything I would want with reasonable performance.
Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for.
Last time I checked, Mozilla received 90%+ of its funding from Google. This is a situation that nobody likes (except Google, of course). These ads are an attempt to diversify income streams.
People are really unhappy that Mozilla gets money from Google, but also extremely vocally unhappy whenever Mozilla attempts to find other sources.
I haven't seen anyone suggest alternate solutions yet.
If you are a (the) leading browser like Firefox once was, the "what are the complaints?" is the right question.
If you are a minor browser like Firefox currently is (~2.5% market share), the "what is it doing better?" is the correct question.
The people still complaining about firefox are its most faithful users. The reason some are vicious is because they are trapped - they'll consider cutting their use of the internet before using an non-FOSS browser. 90% of firefox's users left. People who could stand a closed browser have already decided to use one. You're in an extreme minority if you even know anything about firefox to complain about. This year the Linux desktop, of all impossible things, has become more popular than firefox.
Yet there's still this confidence and attitude about even the remaining users that comes from being spoon-fed cash by your direct competitor in return for nothing.
According to statcounter's stats, Firefox never cracked 1% of monthly mobile traffic any month from when stats started in 2009. Even Opera and UC have more than double Firefox's average for the last year and they are just Chromium forks users are downloading off the stores.
It still didn't make a dent in mobile browser shares.
Sure, Mozilla could have invested even more in Firefox mobile, but at some point, this would have come at the expense of Firefox desktop, which was the source of ~100% of the funding.
It's a sad story because Firefox was so good on mobile when nobody had a chance to use it then it was crap when they did. On desktop Firefox is still the #1 non-bundled browser, things went so poorly on mobile they can't even come close to that today. In a parallel universe timings were inverted and Firefox may have even had more users on mobile than it does desktop today.
Interestingly the most recent anti-trust case against Google, one proposed remedy was spinning off the Chrome browser into its own company, but that option was judged to be unrealistic, because how would a browser survive on it's own without distribution advantages and all its costs subsidized by other revenue drivers? A great question.
I returned to Firefox again after years of IE8+ and Spartan Edge. I've never liked the "mouthfeel" of Chrome, have generally felt it to be bloated and slow and ad-heavy adware (though not as strongly as my father and I often do know how Chrome gets backdoor installed through shameful adware deals like with Adobe), and when Edge switched to being just another Chromium I still felt the same in my dislike of Chromium and I went back to Firefox. (Spartan Edge had so much better performance and battery usage than Chromium. It's death was not mourned by enough people.)
Feel free to correlate these two counter-anecdotes with more and see if you find some patterns to reach your own conclusion. That's the fun of anecdata and marketing, there are patterns on every side, you can interpret it how you want. "Popularity" isn't facts, pattern matching based on popularity of certain anecdotes can lead to incorrect conclusions. Especially when Marketing is involved. Marketing is about making popular things that aren't necessarily facts, especially when an advertiser is unscrupulous and no one is busy enforcing truth in advertising laws.
adblock is the single most important feature of a web browser to me. Firefox has the best adblock support.
Except for the very big use case of mobile browsing, where only Firefox allows extensions.
I occasionally have to use Chrome to test with it. Can someone explain concisely how it manages Google logins? They clearly bolted it in at some low level to help violate privacy, and or shove dark patterns.
Also, the out of the box spam and dark patterns are over the top. It reminds me of Win 95 bundled software bullshit.
That’s to say nothing of their B-tier properties, like Google TV or YouTube client:
When the kids use this garbage it’s all “Bruh, what is this screen?”, or “I swear I’m not touching the remote!”
(The official YouTube client loses monitor sync(!!) as it rapid cycles through ads on its own now. I guess this is part of an apparent google-run ad fraud campaign, since it routinely seems to think it ran > 5-10 ads to completion in ~15 seconds. We can’t even see all the ads start because each bumps the monitor settings around, which has the effect of auto-mute.)
- full uBlock support
- the ability to still be themed
- first-party isolation
The common wisdom is that overall Firefox can feel bottlenecked at render and draw times (“less snappy”). That could be a result of a slower JavaScript engine (takes longer to get to drawing), or a result of poorer hardware acceleration (slower drawing), or a less optimized multiprocessing/multithreading model (more resource contention when drawing).
I honestly can't see it in the real world, but synthetic benchmark are pretty clear on that front.
I have at home 13 year old hardware running Firefox and no performance complaints.
People know it is wrong to stay on Chrome and empower Google to the extent that it is, but they're stuck on that workflow and don't want to change, so they find nits to pick about firefox and get very LOUD about that. Then it becomes Mozill's fault that they're still using Chrome, and you can't blame them for anything.
Sorry this is too handwavy for me.
According to this logic, Mozilla is likely going to die believing it did nothing wrong.
VSCode gets a pass, because apparently it is the only programmer's editor that many only care about providing plugins nowadays.
"Project Ticino: Microsoft's Erich Gamma on Visual Studio Code past, present, and future"
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/28/erich_gamma_on_vs_cod...
Huh, never heard about this before, and took a look at emacs and vim/neovim as those are the two most popular editors I know of, neither can run VS code plugins, that'd be crazy if true.
But I understood "VS code plugin compatible layer" to mean there is something that lets you run VSCode plugins with other editors, which is what I haven't seen anywhere (yet?).
IIRC, debugger support for java needed a component from one of the official plug-ins.
Especially because I know I'm one of very few people that uses it that much.
I don't have a problem w/ Firefox not being perfect. I have a problem with the Mozilla Foundation spending money on seemingly random other stuff and not on Firefox.
Nobody has ever complained about anything not being perfect. That's just something dishonest people say when they want to avoid mentioning specific criticisms.
Pure cope
That reverses cause and effect to a great degree. Many are very skeptical because they read everyone slamming it. It's a mob psychology.
I googled this https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w...
Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100 pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or a puny amount, it depends.
It would feel good and I certainly wouldn't mind it, but it's much closer to a drop in the bucket than a panacea.
Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.
If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable.
On the other hand, if you return spoofed values, it means that Firefox developers cannot debug platform/hardware-specific crashes. If you disable Telemetry, improving performance becomes impossible, because you're suddenly unable to determine where your users suffer. If you remove WebGL, plenty of websites suddenly stop working, and people assume that Firefox is broken.
It's not only what gets send to Mozilla as telemetry or crash reports that is a problem. That can be turned off (many Linux distros do), or firewalled.
The main issue is that websites can more or less accurately identify users uniquely by extracting information that they should not have access to if the browser was designed with privacy in mind.
This includes, but is not limited to, fonts installed, system language, time zone, window size, browser version, hardware information (number of cores, device memory), canvas fingerprint, and many others attributes. When you combine all of that with the originating IP address, you can reliably determine who visited a website, because that information is shared and correlated with services where people identify themselves (Google accounts, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) Even masking your IP may not be enough because typically there is enough information in the other data points to track you already.
And saying that improving performance is impossible without it is hyperbolic. Developers did that before every major application turned into actual spyware. Profilers still work without it.
Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values for identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js does all of this and more, but these options are not enabled by default. This shows that Firefox does not care much about privacy in practice.
The only "breakage" that I have encountered with such a hardened configuration is related to the spoofing of the time zone. But the fundamental issue is that Javascript/browsers should have not been designed to allow websites to extract this kind of personal information in the first place. But even that is not enough and users are still fingerprintable. In an ideal world, the only thing a website should see is the originating IP and nothing else.
If anything, Brave has done more to harden Chromium than Mozilla has with Firefox, even though Brave comes with its own set of problems (scammy crypto integrations, AI, VPN and other stuff).
I suspect that it shows that Firefox developers do a good job at making Firefox work, and this good job enables forks to work.
Maybe that's true for the websites you visit, like HN.
Very many, very popular sites don't run without JavaScript, including most shopping, social media, mapping, etc etc.
Isn't that pretty much the current situation?
It is an uplift from Tor, and I believe Tor just enables it in their build, though it doesn't end up being quite the same. Tor is always going to be better for this.
But turning it on in the stock Firefox configuration would be suicide in terms of market share. When "I want maximal privacy" fights "I want this site to work", guess which one wins?
However, I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.
> I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.
As opposed to what? Chrome? What's the future there?
The various Firefox derivatives will die a quick death if Firefox dies. The strings attached to Chrome derivatives make them pointless. So, what's left? What are we discussing here? There's no alternative, it's that simple.
On the other hand, joining the hate-fest on various forums cannot and does not help Mozilla to find a better way. One is peeved by this, another by that, go figure... I'd call it childish if it wasn't so damaging.
So I think what we can do is give them the benefit of the doubt and approach this with cautious optimism for now instead of just negativity.
His first communication reduced trust: "It is a privilege to lead an organization with a long history of standing up for people and building technology that puts them first."
Now let's put people first by making Firefox an AI first browser. Enzor-Demeo would have made an excellent Microsoft product manager. Too bad he didn't get the job.
What models is Mozilla talking about?
- Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic platforms like LangChain / LangGraph.
- Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your competitor, your model will be inferior.
- Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking on EU open source funding & co.
- Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open Source research.
- Newsletter
What I meant to say is that existing competing solutions like LangGraph and LangChain are already Open Source themselves. So releasing Open Source AI libraries is not a new twist that Mozilla is bringing.
Is it really possible to start training from scratch at this stage and compete with the existing models, using only ethical datasets? Hasn't it been established that without the stolen data, those models could not exist or compete?
whether or not it's possible to compete I guess we'll see but I am hopeful and appreciative that Mozilla is trying, as I am getting tired of big tech trying to force everyone to hand over even more unhinged amounts of data than what they're already taking from us.
They've lost their way completely as an independent entity, and a post like this that doesn't reaaally seem to grasp that weight of that conundrum comes no closer to convincing me that they can find their way back to the light.
Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop.
Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.
The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.
I don’t know if the 55% number for IE is 100% correct but it sounds like the right ballpark to me. The browser market was a lot more fragmented 15+ years ago, so saying that IE had 55% market share and Firefox had 32%, leaving 13% for other browsers, sounds completely right to me.
However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might make the bubble pop finally.
Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.
All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do something that isn't written in English, because - surprise - they're just too small.
There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switching the models between pages.
Instead of useful AI stuff that is a clear improvement to accessibility, they're insistent on ham-fisting LLM solutions that no one have even asked for.
Off the top of my head, they could instead:
1. Integrate something like whisper to add automatic captions to videos or transcribe audio
2. Integrate one of the many really great text to speech models to read articles or text out loud
I can't seem to find anything that mentions a Firefox integration though?
Note that how well it works on Linux will depend on your distro and default settings, as is common for Linux world. They do try to provide setup instructions if your linux distro has issues.
... now whether that model is integrated by default, no idea. I imagine that depends on size.
Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing they added that I've found super helpful. Chrome still requires sending the content to their servers.
> Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing they added that I've found super helpful.
Yes, it's awesome! And one of my favorite additions to Firefox in many years, it's stuff like that they should focus on if they want AI, imo.
yeah, that's where the bad news start.
They have a tendency to go from trend to trend and always a "me too, I'm here" player. Deliver first and stick with it, Mozilla's goodwill fund is long gone to be excited about "mission statements".
No, I just want Mozilla to focus on Firefox, the browser.
Saying I hate AI and I’m not going to use it is really trending and makes people feel like they’re doing something meaningful, but it’s just another version of trying to vote the problem away. It doesn’t work. The real solution is to roll up the sleeves and built an a version of this technology that’s open, transparent, and community driven.
I'm still bitching, years later, about thunderbird failing to update IMAP folder contents (i.e. sync with server) until I click on the folder.
While it may still reign as the "capital of the industry", there's a certain kind of technical brain damage that comes from being located in the bay area.
Let's just call it "proximity to venture capital"...
This is a sad statement. It reminds me of Wall-E. Big tech created the environmental ruins of today’s internet through perverse incentives. Now we need robots to go sift through the garbage and think for us so we don’t have to be exposed to the toxic internet.
It feels like we have lost so much.
Nope! Very happy to be entirely out, thanks.