Enshittification isn’t an overnight thing, red flags are building and it’s important to call it out.
Comment on The Mozilla Graveyard
burgeoning@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Another day, more Mozilla FUD. I just saw the switched on Linux guy posted some too. They arent a perfect company, but lets not pretend they’re exactly like google or a mini google. It feels almost coordinated to get you to feel like all companies are compromised, so you should just use the popular thing and forget about privacy and security.
cm0002@lemmy.world 1 month ago
corbin@infosec.pub 1 month ago
The Mozilla FUD where I said I like Firefox and pointed out how many of the projects continued in some form after Mozilla ended them?
cley_faye@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You’re right, they aren’t google. Not for lack of trying though.
You see posts putting some shade over Mozilla, and your immediate reaction is “it feels almost coordinated”. Well, that may be. But it would be hard to distinguish a “coordinated attack” from a “that’s just the things they’re doing, and there’s report on it” article, no? Especially when most of it can be fact-checked.
In this particular case, those abandoned projects got picked up by other… sometimes. And sometimes not. But they were abandoned. There’s no denying that.
If you want some more hot water for Mozilla, since you’re talking about privacy and security, you’d be interested in their recent switch regarding these points. Sure, the PR is all about protecting privacy and users, but looking into the acts, the message is a bit more diluted. And there’s always a fair amount of people that are ready to do the opposite of what you claims; namely discarding all criticism because “Mozilla”, when the same criticism are totally fair play when talking about other big companies.
Being keen on maintaining user privacy, system security, and trust, is not the same as picking a “champion” and sticking to it until the end. Mozilla have been doing shady things for half a decade now, and they should not get a free pass because they’re still the lesser evil for now.
e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
It is not really FUD to point out that Mozilla wastes ungodly amounts of money on projects of dubious utility instead of investing into their browser. Their current trajectory doesn’t inspire much confidence either. Mozilla started to waste even more money on ‘AI’ features nobody asked for.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Mozilla doesn’t exist to fund Firefox. Firefox exists to fund Mozilla. It’s been that since the very fucking beginning: Mozilla is a general internet charity that makes money with a browser. It’s always been that way. It never has been any different. I may have to repeat myself: The purpose of Mozilla isn’t to fund Firefox the purpose of Firefox is to be a money-maker for Mozilla’s charitable causes.
lime@feddit.nu 1 month ago
usually you invest in the main product to drive higher returns for diversifying. diversifying first means your baseline is unstable.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
During the google money years the ROI on Firefox was so mind-bogglingly high it would’ve been insanity to drop it all into the browser: It couldn’t possibly have soaked up the sheer amount of resources.
Meanwhile, yes they did sink a large amount of resources into it in a way a profit-driven company never would have: They designed a whole fucking new programming language to get proper concurrency into the thing. Rust is, in a very real way, a language to write browsers in. That’s its purpose. And then they set the language free because, among other things, you can’t make money with it.
Sure, lots of those investments tanked. But OTOH you have stuff like pocket which makes money and could probably keep the lights on by itself. If everything but pocket were to fail Mozilla absolutely would have to downsize, would definitely have to scale back its charity spending, rely more on the FLOSS community to actually write code, but it’d continue with the same kind of force as say Blender, which wouldn’t be what it is without its paid staff (both coders and artists) and sidle-hustles (commercial support, training, and cloud services, mostly. Oh, t-shirts and mugs. Don’t forget t-shirts and mugs).
I guess overall the gripe I have with the “Mozilla should invest more in Firefox” chorus is that it implies “Do you want Mozilla to be way smaller and less capable of shaping the web than it currently is”. People have no sense of the scale of Mozilla, think that it’s running on donations etc.
Mbourgon@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Actually, their new AI thing is actually useful: stays on-device, and summarizes web pages and videos.
But yes, they could stand to spend more money on the browser, and less on their CEO and other non-browser things.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah. Offline translation (i.e. that doesn’t send data to Google to translate), better screen reader functionality for blind people? Sign me the fuck up.
People are just seeing “AI” and getting upset about it. Absolutely stupid.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Also they made llamafile We need a slur for the obnoxious and deluded anti ai people
Mbourgon@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’ll be honest, when I first heard that Mozilla had come out with an AI I figured it was on the back of them trying a couple different ad scenarios, and assumed the worst. Pleasantly surprised by Orbit.
lime@feddit.nu 1 month ago
it’s a good idea to not look to deeply into the historic actions of the creator of llamafile. she’s pretty polarising.