[HN Gopher] Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla
___________________________________________________________________
Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla
Author : mattweinberg
Score : 335 points
Date : 2023-05-02 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fakespot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fakespot.com)
| ve55 wrote:
| How do they expect to lead in identifying fake content when the
| problem is intractable if adversaries are even somewhat
| competent?
|
| You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay
| ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI
| models properly, there is no way to differentiate.
| maxamillion2020 wrote:
| https://styrate.co/landing/ I'm building a product discovery
| website that actually uses AI and community input to filter out
| fake reviews
| tornato7 wrote:
| The problem is not intractable if the analysis of reviews is
| statistical and reputation-based instead of content-based. They
| can look at how many reviews were added over time, how the
| product page has changed over time, if the reviewers are
| genuine users or if they only leave 5-star reviews on a handful
| of sketchy products, etc.
|
| Of course, it would be much easier for Amazon to do this,
| because they could look at IP addresses, purchase history,
| mailing address, etc. - but it's in their best interest to let
| the spam continue, apparently.
| wslh wrote:
| You can even follow the Amazon Mechanical Turk [1] + ChatGPT +
| editors type of workflow which will be indistinguishable from a
| real content? I am eager to see what arises from this
| acquisition. I remember using Disqus in Wordpress to expect
| more competitive spam detection. The result? It didn't even
| detect obvious network bots. Fakespot raised $ 5.3m [2]. Is
| there a disclosure of the number for this acquisition? [3].
|
| [1] https://www.mturk.com/worker
|
| [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fakespot
|
| [3]
| https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:C2WWi4...
| nfriedly wrote:
| It looks like the Fakespot add-on is NOT one of the ~20 approved
| add-ons in Firefox for Android.
|
| It'd be funny if it wasn't so frustrating.
| mdaniel wrote:
| That matches my expectations given this was just announced.
| However, if it's still true this time next week, that'll be
| some :facepalm:
| purpleidea wrote:
| I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know...
| building a web browser.
|
| There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from
| integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to
| porting to rust, to...
|
| Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more
| companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| On the contrary Mozilla correctly anticipates that low quality
| AI generated content will increasingly ruin web experience and
| has therefore correctly chosen to invest in technology that
| will combat that.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| You'd have to invest in quality engineering on the browser
| itself with no guarantee that this would actually improve
| anything or drive revenue.
|
| The idea would be a gambit that you could improve the software
| sufficiently that it accidentally became actually competitive
| with chrome.
|
| Right now, it feels like some weird hobby project that falls
| short of the engineering chops that went into Chrome, and I
| suspect people can feel this too.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Mediocre web browsers aren't making them money though. The
| search partnership royalties are. If it is still making them
| money, why try harder?
|
| Is Firefox-centric Mozilla still relevant in 2023? No, not
| really.
|
| People also assume that x is a distraction to the goal of y,
| but why would it be? If it hasn't happened yet, it probably
| isn't going to.
|
| At this point, they arguably lost the browser war, even if they
| made a great browser, it is going to struggle to win meaningful
| marketshare, and even then, how many people are going to
| subscribe to Pocket or a VPN? Nowhere near as much as what
| their search royalties make them, which likely isn't going to
| last forever in this climate.
|
| What about if Google pulls the plug on their search partnership
| due to declining Firefox numbers? They're largely dependent on
| Google. They probably can't pay their CEO $3m salary if that
| goes South.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _Mediocre web browsers aren 't making them money though.
| The search partnership royalties are. If it is still making
| them money, why try harder?_
|
| Wouldn't they get more royalties if they could attract more
| users to their web browser?
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| It's a coin-flip. Google could just decide to pull the deal
| if consumers end up using AI more than search engines. AI
| is the next warfront for Google.
|
| The browser war isn't going to be won by Mozilla at this
| point. It's been and gone. Most consumers live in non-
| browser apps most of the time.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Sure, most consumers have marched off desktop os entirely
| to walled garden mobile apps. That probably also means
| whats left of the desktop browser users are perhaps more
| likely to be firefox users than beforehand when it was
| more of a mass market.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Why are they more likely? The browser statistics paint a
| _completely_ different picture about Firefox usage.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I'd imagine firefox usage is enriched among techies who
| are enriched among desktop os users, increasingly so as
| aunt sally moves to the ipad.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Your imagination aside, the statistics show a decline in
| Firefox numbers, and it has a woefully small marketshare
| (~4% across all devices). It's been declining for 12
| years. They lost ~50m users in ~3y.
|
| "Techies" have or are moving on because Mozilla's pace of
| development is woeful, and compatibility is poor. Killing
| the RSS reader was the final straw for many. Disney
| advertising in-browser was another major moment.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is just the Mythical Man Month stated differently: that if
| only more people were on the browser the projects it's on would
| get faster. The company is obviously desperately searching for
| a way to stay in the game as Safari / Chrome / Edge come
| bundled with platforms.
|
| It took this massive effort 15 years ago to get Firefox onto
| people's computers back in the day. Mozilla kicked off the web
| standardization drive and transformed the Internet. That sort
| of thing is not feasible now because the commercial browsers
| are damned good.
|
| They're either done or they have to find another way to use
| their resources to advance their mission. Unsurprisingly, they
| pick the latter.
| waboremo wrote:
| I'm confused, are you assuming that this acquisition is what is
| preventing those things from happening?
| 878654Tom wrote:
| Why do you expect this from Mozilla but not Microsoft, Google,
| Apple,...?
| function_seven wrote:
| Because I expect Microsoft and Google to build more features
| for advertisers to target me, and Apple to build more
| features that lock me into their ecosystem.
|
| I expect better from Mozilla.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| If history is any indicator, why are you still expecting
| anything different from Mozilla in 2023? Same shit,
| different year.
| function_seven wrote:
| Because I let my nostalgia of 2004 get the best of me.
| And as much as I may gripe about their loss of focus, or
| their lagging behind in certain areas, I still appreciate
| them for the good things they do (e.g. fingerprint
| resisting, containers) and for the potential that they
| still have--even today--to implement user-focused
| improvements in their browser.
|
| They may not lean into it as much as I'd like, but they
| still do better than Google or Microsoft in this regard.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Microsoft has the potential to make Windows 11 UX great.
| They made it worse than 10 by removing functionality
| that's existed for years.
|
| Will Microsoft do it just because the potential exists?
| No.
|
| Mozilla CEO takes a $3m salary and their biggest earner
| by many magnitudes is a search partnership with Google.
| Nothing is going to change with how they treat Firefox at
| a consumer-level until they need to man the battle
| stations with a rugpull on losing that partnership.
|
| "Why would they lose it?" AI happened and the current
| economic climate means Google is reducing spending by
| killing things that don't bring tangible value.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Microsoft has the potential to make Windows 11 UX
| great.
|
| Technically true, but I've become convinced that
| Microsoft is genuinely incapable of actually
| accomplishing that.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Is this a serious question? Mozilla is mostly known for its
| web browser, and historically this was always the case.
| Microsoft is known for its OS and office suite, Google is
| known for search (and many other things), and Apple for its
| iDevices. None of these companies has ever been a browser-
| first company, so I wouldn't expect any of them to focus
| primarily on building a web browser.
| cxr wrote:
| Which of those three corporations are non-profits chartered
| for a specific purpose with an additional implied social
| contract with their contributors and users?
| smsm42 wrote:
| Because Mozilla is supposed to be an _alternative_ to
| Microsoft, Google, Apple,.. and not just "the same but with
| less money".
| Barrin92 wrote:
| If your first step as PM of a browser that desperately needs to
| win back market share is to work on gnome-keyring, a feature
| only relevant on an operating system that less than 1% of
| people use your tenure is going to be very short-lived. This is
| engineering virtue-signaling, for lack of a better phrase.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Many Linux distros use Gnome, including enterprise ones.
| lkbm wrote:
| I agree, but to be fair, software usability often experiences
| death by a thousand UX cuts, and gnome-keyring support is one
| of those cuts. I don't think that's the case with web
| browsers, though. for the most part, things that matter _do_
| just work, both in Firefox and Chrome.
|
| The things I suspect could make a difference to Firefox
| marketshare are performance and transformative features.
|
| For performance, UI latency needs to be near-zero to make it
| feel snappier than Chrome, and JS- and CSS-heavy pages
| noticeably faster than in Chrome. (Yes, pages shouldn't be so
| JS- and CSS-heavy, but they are, and users don't care that
| it's the web developers' fault. The browser that solves that
| problem wins.)
|
| For features, tabs are one clear example, as were blocking
| popups, and session restore. Containers, adblock, Pocket
| integration, and Reader Mode all seem like they _could_ have
| been this, but they weren 't. Big features will be hit-or-
| miss, and will quickly be copied, but possibly a big deal for
| a short while.
|
| Perf, of course, is a lot of hard engineering work, and
| features may be as well, in addition to being potential duds.
| Things like gnome-keyring feels like a relatively simple
| quick-win, despite being very low value compared to various
| other possibilities.
|
| Personally, I thing I switched back to Firefox when they made
| restarting it when you have a hundred tabs retain the tabs,
| but not load them until you switch to them. That moved
| restarting the browser from a big deal to something I can
| just do whenever. (It was also when Quantum/Servo stuff was
| happening, but I think it was the tab thing that got me.)
| nortonham wrote:
| working on gnome-keyrting might be important to them
| considering that the biggest commercial linux distros ship
| with gnome ootb
| qzw wrote:
| But the first line of his resume will be "Achieved 100%
| market share among gnome-keyring users." That's gonna bring
| all the recruiters to the yard.
| derefr wrote:
| Mozilla doesn't build Firefox (which is what I assume you're
| meaning here by "building a web browser.") Firefox -- and all
| those system-integration features you're mentioning -- are
| developed by Firefox Corporation.
|
| Mozilla is a separate company, with separate employees, that
| does everything _except_ building Firefox.
|
| (This division was originally created to firewall off the
| corporate moneys donated to, and influence of corporate
| developers on, Firefox, from the rest of Mozilla. Back when
| Google was sponsoring Firefox to use Google as its search
| engine, their money went exclusively to Firefox Corporation,
| with none of that money ever going to Mozilla.)
|
| Note that this doesn't mean that Mozilla doesn't build _a_ web
| browser. Mozilla develop the engine (Gecko /Servo) that _goes
| into_ Firefox; and they also co-develop some of the Gecko
| /Servo-based browsers used by various FOSS projects -- Tor
| Browser, for example. This is roughly the same structure as how
| the open-source Chromium project (which produces its own
| "Chromium browser") is the basis for the closed-source Google
| Chrome.
|
| Interestingly, this means that for Firefox Corporation to get
| features into Gecko, they have to submit PRs "upstream" to
| Mozilla, who might very well reject them as "only serving
| corporate interests at the expense of the user." This is quite
| _unlike_ Chromium, where both Chromium and Chrome are
| ultimately _steered_ by Google.
| alex_lav wrote:
| This seems incredibly naive. Why can't 1500 people work on two
| things at once?
| dblohm7 wrote:
| That's basically been the tone of every bit of Mozilla
| commentary for the past decade.
| dokem wrote:
| I use firefox everyday at work and home and can't think of a
| single thing that 'needs' to be fixed from a user perspective.
| It loads up the internet and is fast. So I don't think defining
| Mozilla's vision as 'fix a bunch of random issues' is very
| wise. Gnome key-ring support and porting to rust? How is that
| going to grow the user base?
| [deleted]
| jdwithit wrote:
| I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than
| one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time
| on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated
| gnome-keyring.
| notatoad wrote:
| the general state of firefox suggests that they are not large
| enough to do more than one thing.
| Entinel wrote:
| This is a thing that has just become a thing to say with no
| substance. I use FF everyday and have since the Quantum
| release and have few complaints.
| krono wrote:
| Its great that everything just magically seems to work so
| well for you, but behind the curtains it took additional
| effort from the developers of websites you visit to make
| it so. Same goes for Safari and some of the less popular
| browsers.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I mean, this is a broad topic and I am more of a backend
| engineer than frontend these days.
|
| However, I _did_ do a lot of frontend back in the old IE6
| /IE7/IE8 days when you essentially had to code a whole
| separate front end for Microsoft's standards-flaunting
| mess. So this is definitely an issue I care about.
| but behind the curtains it took additional effort from
| the developers of websites you visit to make it so
|
| This is true, but in my (limited recent) experience often
| it's because Chrome implements some rando de facto new
| "standard" thing they cooked up so _of course_ they are
| out in front of the other browsers.
|
| So yes, you often can't run your Chrome-specific shit
| elsewhere without workarounds and polyfills, but this
| doesn't automatically mean everybody except Google is
| screwing up. In some cases, complaints such as yours
| sound like folks in 2004 complaining that their ActiveX
| controls work in IE but not Firefox.
| notatoad wrote:
| >your chrome-specific shit
|
| okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not
| supporting that stuff other than "we have limited
| resources to implement these things"?
|
| a lot of that chrome-specific shit is _really really
| nice_. like CSS nesting - that would be amazing. firefox
| has a bug for tracking the implementation, and supported
| the standardization of it. but there 's no sign of any
| progress towards an implementation. meanwhile safari and
| chrome have both shipped it.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I feel like each feature has it's own story (and it's own
| party to blame, when some browsers support it but not
| others)
|
| If FF is lagging behind Safari on a particular CSS
| feature that certainly points to FF being behind the
| curve.
|
| Sometimes it's FF or Safari simply being slower than
| Google. Sometimes it's a matter of the Chrome team
| creating an implementation of feature XYZ and getting it
| minted into the standard so of course they have the only
| implementation for a while.
|
| Sometimes the FF and Safari teams have specific
| objections to a feature, often because unlike Google they
| actually consider user privacy a core part of their
| mission. Although, of course, with CSS features... that's
| not gonna be a privacy thing.
| Entinel wrote:
| > okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not
| supporting that stuff other than "we have limited
| resources to implement these things"?
|
| That depends on what you are referring to. No there is
| not a one size fits all answer. For example, Chrome has
| implemented Filesystem API that Mozilla is still debating
| on because they see it as a security issue. You can agree
| or disagree but there reason is still something other
| than "we don't have the resources to do it"
| krono wrote:
| Yes absolutely! Also why I tagged on that call-out of
| Safari and other browsers.
|
| And not to forget that Google has even shipped several
| early-days standards track features to production of
| which the API was still in flux. In a few cases the API
| later changed in - for Chrome, at least - breaking ways.
| Fun times.
| Aeolun wrote:
| What state is that? I've been very satisfied with FF over
| the past 5 years.
| pissedoff1 wrote:
| no print feature in over 5 years. How can a browser not
| implement print? (on android) They removed it, then
| claimed they were working on it, and shut down every
| single github issue about it
| saghm wrote:
| Sample size of one, but it's also probably been able five
| years since I've physically printed something.
| aimor wrote:
| This one got me recently, and the workaround that saved
| me was the save-as-pdf option hidden behind the "share"
| icon. Thankfully it uses the print stylesheet specified
| by the website.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Imo out of the box it needs extensions to get it to be
| worthwhile. Its generally worse on battery than say
| safari, only being comparable when you factor the savings
| not having to render ads with ublock origin. I catch
| firefox processes all the time using 15% cpu with no tabs
| left open, restart it and it drops back to 3% like
| safari, so something weird is certainly going on.
| Sometimes I use firefox over an x11 connection and its
| like a new circle of hell (not what x11 is really for but
| its uniquely bad for a gui app on that imo, considering
| some full on gui ides are useable).
| pmontra wrote:
| about:performance gives you a list of tabs with energy
| and memory usage. You can find which tab is misbehaving.
| It works on Android too.
| cma wrote:
| Basic keyboard shortcuts that worked in the 90s don't
| work on Firefox Android.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Android is a touch-first OS, keyboard shortcut support is
| woeful in _general_ in most apps. '90s desktop browsers
| didn't work well with touchscreens.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Android was a keyboard-only Blackberry clone before it
| gained touch support. This is why soft keyboards have
| always been modular since they are a bolted on substitute
| for physical keys.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Android is a touch-first OS
|
| Android has native support for keyboards since API 1.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| The word "first" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and
| has jackshit to do with it supporting it. Why? Because
| the overwhelming majority of Android users aren't using a
| keyboard and are using a touchscreen. You could even
| extrapolate the woeful state of Android tablet UX,
| because there's far more Android tablet users than there
| will be keyboard users because hey, most Android devices
| only ship with a touchscreen and are cellphones.
|
| An iPad can support a keyboard too. It's a touch-first
| device.
|
| A Mac can support a touchscreen with a third-party
| driver, but it's a KBM-first UX and support of the
| touchscreen is horrible in most apps that only accept one
| input at a time.
| wiseowise wrote:
| While I understand your point, I disagree that just
| because majority is using touch, you shouldn't care about
| minority using keyboard.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Why? It's not an accessibility feature, and desktop OS
| versions of Firefox still exist. Choosing a hobbled
| Android device and expecting desktop-class experience is
| a user issue.
|
| Will it drive worthwhile value? No.
|
| Are there more pressing matters? Yes.
|
| With that said, it's open source. Why don't you implement
| it yourself? Meanwhile the rest of us have long since
| moved on from Firefox.
| ysavir wrote:
| Same here. I've been using Firefox as my main browser for
| 20 years now. There was a period where it would have some
| issues, but it's been run great and smooth for the past
| few years. I don't get the hate.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Same here very rarely I have issues.
|
| Even the fully local translation is really usable now <3.
| I don't use chrome for anything and it's not even
| installed on my daily driver anymore.
|
| Ironically, the only time I have had issues, overriding
| the user agent to look like chrome or edge fixed it. So
| those websites were deliberately broken with Firefox, not
| Mozilla's fault but pure malice and dark patterns. Office
| 365 is one of these sites by the way.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| Since the engine was ported to Rust, it's been fantastic
| as a user. Sure, the app ecosystem favors Chrome due to
| market trends, but that's minor.
| lucideer wrote:
| Not sure how much of this is living in a bubble or
| selection bias of negative experiences in common but my
| own impression of the firefox userbase is that a
| significant portion of it are using firefox as a "least
| worst" browser, rather than one they are actually very
| happy with.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This was me for a few years after the revamp, even after
| the loss of important functionality after extensions were
| neutered. But eventually, I couldn't take it anymore and
| bailed on FF entirely.
|
| I'm pleased to see others have good experience with FF
| performance, but for me, the performance simply became
| unacceptable.
| sgc wrote:
| That nails me. But that is also the impetus behind my use
| of almost every single product I use, from my house, to
| my car, to my food, to my computers, to the os and other
| software on them. I don't think that is indicative of
| anything very specific to FF.
| lucideer wrote:
| I get what you're saying: I'm the same for most products,
| though I do go out of my way to find and use things that
| are exceptional and in some cases I've actually kinda
| succeeded in finding that.
|
| The issue here is that this wasn't always the case, or at
| least wasn't always this bad. While Firefox has always
| been far from perfect, there was a time when mozillazine
| consisted mostly of praise and evangelism, and not all of
| it naive fandom. Also, as a former Opera user, there was
| also a time when the landscape as a whole contained a
| higher quality set of options in general. There were
| numerous browsers then better than the current least
| worst.
|
| Even recently, Firefox has inspired hope & interest with
| Servo, Quantum, and even things like the amazing
| webextension migration effort: controversial and
| unpopular with many it was nonetheless a greatly
| successful engineering effort, and has borne fruit in the
| recent furore over v3 manifests, with Firefox coming out
| ahead. It's also got cool added APIs that makes sense for
| the traditional Firefox community but are still standards
| compliant and interoperable. But all that progress is now
| already waning with Servo dev cut, progressive popular
| distinguishing features like MAC being relegated to APIs
| & UI removed from core.
|
| There's precious little left to distinguish Firefox from
| Chrome, and nothing new on the horizon.
| notatoad wrote:
| every year i try using firefox again, because the
| dominance of chrome bothers me and i want there to be a
| good competitor. and every year i inevitably run into
| some issue that makes me give up and go back to chrome. I
| think last time it was a themeing issue with ubuntu's
| default built-in dark theme. a previous year it was a
| sync issue.
|
| with their continued slide in marketshare to what is
| essentially an irrelevant portion of the market, i'm
| guessing this isn't just me.
| wslh wrote:
| Yes, they can work on many things simultaneously but it is
| worrisome when the execution of their core product fails [1]
| it shows a big management failure.
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+market+share&oq=f
| ire...
| slg wrote:
| Market share is not always indicative of execution. There
| is a reasonable argument that their browser market share
| decreasing or not growing should prompt diversification of
| their business rather than doubling down on something that
| is not showing great returns on investment.
| wslh wrote:
| I am not saying that is always indicative of execution
| but I don't think Mozilla has any indicative of good
| execution? Hey, they invented a new programming language
| to reengineer the browser. The programming language is
| very succesful and it is growing in market share but
| Firefox continues to be written in C++.
|
| IMHO there is a room for innovation in this space, long
| term but you can see if this happenning observing the
| project. Currently browser engines are one of the most
| complex pieces of software. There are new ways to attack
| these mammoths.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > Firefox continues to be written in C++
|
| The amount of Rust code in Firefox is pretty substantial,
| and growing. Did you expect an instant rewrite?
| wslh wrote:
| Rust is from 2015, one year ago the Rust code in Firefox
| was 10%. What is now?
| waboremo wrote:
| I would argue the opposite: their core product is great,
| best in market. However, due to the browser landscape, your
| core product is virtually WORTHLESS. Every browser does
| just enough right to be interchangeable, so unless you are
| drastically taking a new approach to browsing in general
| (and your brand), you have zero chance in hell without
| being able to leverage your own hardware/added services.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > their core product is great, best in market
|
| Man, I wish that were my experience. I'd _love_ to keep
| using Firefox. My experience is the opposite of that,
| though.
| wslh wrote:
| Best in market? Why?
| pjmlp wrote:
| I still use Firefox, however it has long stop being relevant
| in browser support matrixes for project acceptance delivery.
| smsm42 wrote:
| > I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more
| than one thing at once
|
| Maybe that's the problem. Why Mozilla should be large enough
| to do those things? I'd rather have one good browser than 20
| mediocre side projects.
| nine_k wrote:
| If Firefox and Thunderbird development were financed from
| money collected from the VPN profits and / or donations,
| I'd happily pay. But I'd like it to be directed exactly
| there, or into other clearly stated initiatives I can
| understand and approve of, like Rust back in the day.
| criddell wrote:
| I have the exact opposite opinion. They should get out of
| the rendering engine business and start using Blink like
| just about everybody else. Take Blink and make a better
| browser from it using those 20 side projects. Pour
| resources into them and move them from mediocre to great.
| Take what Google gives away and spend resources on what
| Google ignores. Battling Google and Apple on rendering
| technology makes no sense to me.
|
| If Apple allows third party browsers and Chrome is adopted
| by enough iOS / iPadOS users, everything other than Blink
| will be non-standard in a de facto sense.
|
| This is a fairly new opinion for me. On Windows I've
| started using Edge alongside Firefox and I find myself
| using Firefox less and less often. On my machine doing the
| things I need to do, Edge is significantly faster.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Having an independent rendering engine has a lot of
| value, in both diversity and control aspects. Having
| another chrome layer around he same engine is kinda meh.
| I mean not that a good chrome can't improve things - it
| very well may - but the importance of having it is less.
|
| > Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes
| no sense to me.
|
| And that's exactly why we need a strong independent org
| to do this. Because it is hard and it doesn't make sense
| for most people. Anyone can get an idea of a chrome
| improvement, get a VC to sign up and start yet another
| "same browser as 50 others but with this little twist"
| thing. This is not a huge breakthrough that has any
| fundamental importance. Having the whole web rendering
| infrastructure not owned by a single entity sounds kinda
| important though. Yes, it's hard to pull off - that's
| exactly why it is valuable, as opposed to make another
| quick buck by doing a quick tweak over somebody else's
| work. Quick buck things are valuable too - but they are
| not fundamental. It's like developing a new theme for
| Windows as opposed to developing Linux. I think having
| Linux is much more important than having one more Windows
| theme.
| criddell wrote:
| > Having another chrome layer around he same engine is
| kinda meh
|
| Yep. Browsers in general are meh at this point. Mozilla
| is looking for things like Fakespot because all of the
| big browsers have been good enough for quite a while now.
| There really isn't anything they can do with the core of
| Firefox make a difference. Users don't care.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > There really isn't anything they can do with the core
| of Firefox make a difference. Users don't care.
|
| That comment placed in a thread filled to the brim with
| "Firefox is slow" and (at least on macOS) "Firefox eats
| my battery"
|
| That's not even getting into the horrors of their dev-
| tools impl, or the missing CSS items cited in this same
| discussion, both of which I grant not _every_ user cares
| about but there are for sure users who care about all 4
| of those things
| miragecraft wrote:
| If you're a browser user you won't notice, but as someone who
| build websites Firefox is noticeably behind other browsers
| and is the lone holdout that have not rolled out the CSS
| `:has()`, `@property` and nesting features.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Firefox is behind on general web support compared to any
| other browser. That's not just weird APIs like WebUSB and
| WebSerial and WebGPU, but also CSS things. It's almost as bad
| as Safari, except it's broken in very different areas.
|
| There's plenty to improve. On Android there's the whole
| extension mess (and tons of other quality of life
| improvements), on desktop Firefox could use some proper PWA
| support (even Safari has that implemented well now),
| Spidermonkey is still the slowest mainstream Javascript
| engine out there, and Chrome's process sandboxing has some
| features that Firefox is yet to implement if at all. Firefox
| users on Gnome on Linux are a subset of a subset of a subset,
| that's hardly important, but "Firefox is slower than all the
| other browsers" is.
|
| Mozilla cares more about their charity programs than they do
| about their browser (that's why you can't directly donate to
| Firefox, only to Mozilla). Maybe this acquisition is a way to
| add a new revenue stream, though I doubt it'll matter much
| because I've never seen AI detection that actually works. I
| hope this was a smart move, but I fear this will end up as
| one of those buttons everyone disables in the default
| toolbar, like Pocket has become.
|
| Mozilla has also fired 250 people during the pandemic, so
| somehow coming up with the money to buy a company feels a
| little jarring when dev capacity still hasn't recovered.
| [deleted]
| JohnBooty wrote:
| "Firefox is slower than all the other browsers"
|
| Wow, absolutely not my experience.
|
| I use both Chrome and FF regularly on Mac and PC desktops
| and laptops with vintages ranging from 2011-2023. There is
| no perceptible difference to me. Admittedly all of my
| machines are relatively comfortably specced. Desktop-class
| CPUs, 16GB+ of RAM, SSDs. Perhaps the difference is more
| pronounced when the computing environment is more
| constrained.
|
| Moving from my subjective opinion to hard benchmarks,
| Firefox wins some and loses others. Overall they're close.
|
| I don't use Android so I don't know the FF situation there.
| It certainly sounds like a mess. I will take your word for
| it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Firefox is fine on all platforms. Smooth even! But in
| terms of loading time and raw JS performance, Chrome wins
| hands down every time in my experience.
|
| Using https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ this is
| quantified not only by some arbitrary number but also
| through the visibly slower update speed during the DOM
| tests.
|
| I use Firefox on every device, but Chrome is just faster.
| I can live with the impact on speed for all the privacy
| features, but if Mozilla ever wants to get their market
| share above 5% again they'll need to provide the common
| user a reason to switch and that'll be hard when the
| browser is noticeably slower.
| eimrine wrote:
| Don't you have an experience that Chrome works better on
| old-end hardware? I have in an active use some 2005-2013
| hardware and I describe Firefox as significant worse
| (freezes and consumes more memory per tab), I do not like
| Chrome but I use it because I use that hardware
| sometimes.
|
| Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB.
| Than Firefox unleashes its ability to work just fine even
| with a lot of extensions.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB
|
| My oldest in-use machine is an i7-3770 (3.4hgz, 4 core)
| with 16GB of RAM and an SSD running Windows 10. That's an
| Ivy Bridge from ~2011 which is a generation older than
| your Haswell but, honestly, it's still pretty modern...
| performs at about 50% of a 2023 i5 in CPU benchmarks.
|
| FF absolutely smooth on there.
|
| Typical usage on that machine is usual recreational web
| crap. It's my game/relaxing machine. Running 1-2 windows
| with some mix of Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, Amazon,
| whatever.
|
| Zooming out, I have been running a mix of FF and Chrome
| for dev work ever since their respective debuts. We're
| talking easily 2000+ hours a year of browser usage for
| 20+ years. I have _never_ seen the FF performance issues
| others get into a fuss about.
|
| I honestly have no explanation for this. I'm sure that
| other people are telling the truth but I find it
| mystifying. I've never had monster high-end CPUs but I've
| always run AdBlock/uBlock, I generally have as much RAM
| as feasible, and was an early SSD adopter. Maybe I dodged
| some FF issues that way. I also never have massive
| numbers of tabs/windows... usually a max of 10-15 tabs
| over 1-3 windows. I'm also not running "big" browser-
| native apps like Figma or whatever in FF.
|
| It's not that I'm insensitive to performance. I run 144hz
| monitors for gaming and that's a big difference to my
| eyes. There are also some UI things that are noticeably
| faster in Chrome like dragging a tab to a new window but
| that's not a big part of my browsing experience.
|
| (FWIW, Safari _has_ always felt significantly faster to
| me during my infrequent usage. IIRC they do some latency
| reduction tricks on MacOS. So even though typical web
| benchmarks show it as slower, it "feels" faster to me)
| zgk7iqea wrote:
| IIRC apple significantly improved safari performance in
| the last year or so. It's even faster than chrome in a
| lot of cases
| sgc wrote:
| The only reason I use FF on android is for the extensions
| (especially ad / tracking blockers). Whatever mess it
| might be, it still is far better than the alternatives
| and not really noticeable to me during daily use.
| Rapzid wrote:
| It would be nice if they added the ability to more completely
| style their scrollbars. They could at least pretend it's 2015
| or so.
| causi wrote:
| Still no way to change UserAgent on Firefox Mobile.
| mdaniel wrote:
| The irony doesn't escape me that if they'd just turn off the
| extension restriction there are like a thousand extensions
| that would do that and more for any audience where such a
| thing still matters
|
| I haven't tried to build Firefox for Android in a _really
| long time_ but I wonder what the level of effort would be to
| just track the release tags with such a patch applied (i.e.
| the world 's shallowest fork)
| godshatter wrote:
| > if they'd just turn off the extension restriction
|
| That's basically Fennec. Download it from F-Droid. It's
| basically a clone of Firefox with extensions turned back
| on.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Negative, I just tried https://f-droid.org/en/packages/or
| g.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/ (which, delightfully, wasn't
| 0.99.beta-patch3 or some such nonsense) but it for sure
| was not "allow me to install whatever add-on I want".
| It's the same stupid list as normal Firefox for Android
|
| Maybe you're thinking of Firefox Nightly, which I do run
| from the Play store and _is_ better than "normal people
| Firefox" but this for sure is not the good old days of
| "Let Me Install Violentmonkey not stupid Tapermonkey"
| didip wrote:
| I thought you have no money, Mozilla? What are you doing?
| InCityDreams wrote:
| ...and people still think mozilla is on their side.
| nbar1 wrote:
| I think this is a great acquisition, but I'm curious where this
| may give Mozilla an advantage. Do they plan on baking this into
| Firefox, and if so, to what degree are we willing to let the
| browser govern the content?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It feels like this business has no real "moat." But I think for
| once that's not really a problem: I would hope Google decides
| they need to add comparable functionality to a browser!
|
| And then maybe it can begin expanding for more general use...
| detecting likelihood of any content being artificial... hmm I'm
| scared again.
| nailer wrote:
| I imagine the moat is an ML model of inauthentic reviews.
| Getting training data for known inauthentic and known
| authentic reviews is difficult.
| cxr wrote:
| How can this strike you as a great acquisition if you aren't
| sure what the advantage is?
| nbar1 wrote:
| FakeSpot will benefit from a parent company like Mozilla.
| jmann99999 wrote:
| I used Fakespot a few years ago. It seemed to work well at that
| time. I switched computers and didn't go back to it (probably out
| of laziness).
|
| Does the HN community still view it as a trusted source to make
| better buying decisions?
| jkestner wrote:
| I use it just about any time I'm buying something on Amazon
| that isn't from a trusted brand's store.
| jmann99999 wrote:
| Thanks for that! A few days ago I looked at returning to it
| but wondered if it had become gamed. I appreciate it.
| dahwolf wrote:
| I'm surprised people are still reasoning about Mozilla in their
| former "glory".
|
| Firefox market share has been tanking for 13 years(!) straight.
| Already 6 years ago the CTO of Mozilla concluded that Chrome had
| won:
|
| https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/
|
| There's nothing Mozilla can do to reverse Firefox's course. It's
| not an engineering problem, they have no reach to push anything
| and for ordinary people default-shipped browsers are just fine.
|
| The real question indeed is what Mozilla really is with this
| reality check in mind. A type of do-good activist organization
| that does a lot of preaching yet fails to convert this into
| actual meaning or impact?
|
| All of this made possible by "easy money". They literally do not
| have to do a damn thing to receive $0.5B from Google. Just keep
| things as-is.
|
| As they are trying to find alternative income streams, for the
| first time in their history they're learning what hard money is.
| Generating $0.5B in the tech market by delivering an actual
| service/product people will pay you for...is fucking hard.
|
| As such, it's odd that in their borrowed time they continue to
| give away money or do takeovers of products that do not add
| revenue. I guess they'll never learn.
| bcx wrote:
| This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla.
|
| The browser wars are basically over _, and Mozilla as an
| organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve
| veracity on the internet.
|
| With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0,
| figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an
| increasingly hard challenge.
|
| _ Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% -
| Firefox/Mozilla 3.9% - Safari
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Stats vary a lot by source, for example[1] puts FF and Safari
| neck and neck (which seems optimistic to me, as much as I like
| FF).
|
| 1: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/
| derefr wrote:
| I think a lot of University computer labs still use Firefox.
| At least at some point, that was because it was easier to
| lock down -- no directory "an administrator" (i.e. malware)
| could just dump an extension into to treat it as force-
| installed.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share/desktop/worl... 5.59% for Firefox in the desktop
| category. (mobile is tough for any alternative browser -
| chrome has a hard time on iOS although I'm sure only being a
| skin over webkit doesn't help)
|
| Desktop is a better market to compare anyway, if including
| Edge. Is Microsoft even trying anymore on mobile?
| robocat wrote:
| Browser stats for _just_ desktop computers, worldwide:
| Google Chrome 66% Safari 12% Edge 11% Firefox
| 6%
|
| Source https://www.macrumors.com/2023/05/02/safari-overtakes-
| edge-p... discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35786080
|
| https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage shows
| distribution of requests to Cloudflare by user agent:
| Chrome 29.1% Chrome Mobile 27.1% Mobile Safari
| 11.4% Chrome Mobile Webview 6.5% Firefox 5.7%
| Edge 4.4% Facebook 3.5% Safari 3.3%
|
| No idea where commenter is getting their stats from.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Surely that is desktop browser stats. Safari must be doing
| better when accounting for iPads and iPhones.
| [deleted]
| recursive wrote:
| The browser wars were also over 20 years ago. Until the next
| ones.
| [deleted]
| jzb wrote:
| Leaning hard into delivering content that you can "trust" would
| be an interesting direction for Mozilla. I suspect that will
| put some crosshairs on Mozilla as an organization, though.
| While that would be good for users, there will be folks who
| don't like the idea of spotting fake content or doing any
| labeling of content...
| timtom39 wrote:
| Given their complete reliance on google for funding and
| biased political stance. I don't think they are in a great
| position to deliver content you can "trust".
| tracker1 wrote:
| While I do agree to some extent. I think the vast majority
| of the tech side of Mozilla who work on the products and
| not the marketing are more concerned about the tech. I only
| wish they got the bulk of funding, and Mozilla org would
| cut way back and let the products speak for themselves for
| a while. If they hadn't spent so much trying to find other
| funding and revenue streams, they could have had decades of
| runway to work on improving their software.
| justinclift wrote:
| Do you reckon they'll be the same people unhappy with Mozilla
| about their pro-privacy / "lets try and cut down ads"
| approach?
| bbarnett wrote:
| _The browser wars are basically over_
|
| That's silly. More than once, browsers have had _more_
| marketshare than chrome. IE 's highest marketshare makes chrome
| look silly in comparison.
|
| Now, is not the same as "what will happen".
| fafzv wrote:
| The browser wars are over because Firefox lost them by spending
| all the time patting themselves on the back about how much
| better they were than the competition, wasting their money on
| stupid stuff like this instead of improving their browser.
|
| Getting themselves into a deeper hole is unlikely to help, imo.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Remember "Firefox OS"?
| failbuffer wrote:
| It was a fantastic gamble IMO. Low chance of success, but
| enormous payoff if it had succeeded. Imagine a commercially
| viable alternative to iPhone and Android with multiple
| manufacturers and a completely open platform. Ultimately, I
| think they came to market too late and Android moved into
| the niche (low end market) they were targeting.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, I'm glad they tried. I absolutely think they should
| be spending a chunk of their money on things that might
| broaden their impact and their revenue, even when some of
| those things don't pan out.
| fafzv wrote:
| They took Gecko, the slowest rendering engine that there
| was (is?), made an entire OS around it, and put it on the
| slowest mobile phones that existed back then. That was
| not a gamble, that was throwing money down the drain.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| I seem to recall them saying they did reuse part of that
| work in Firefox on Android in terms of low-end
| performance, so it wasn't 100% wasted.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| An open source phone OS would have literally changed
| society. If it had succeeded. Alas it did not. I don't know
| why not. But it was not a wrong goal.
| hgsgm wrote:
| AOSP is open source, and open source user facing systems
| are available (Lineage, Graphene)
| tracker1 wrote:
| Even then, it's really limited in terms of hardware, and
| the application support isn't that great either without
| the google services that are typically deployed. I don't
| lay it on Mozilla though.
|
| I think that FirefoxOS could have been great if they'd
| kept up the development a few more years. Much like
| XULRunner was a bit ahead of it's time... The hardware
| got better enough over a few generations, that if it ran
| on current phones or even last gen it could be pretty
| good.
|
| I'm running a Pixel 4a, and current Android runs like hot
| garbage at times, I've got an older Pixel 2XL that needs
| a new battery... I'd like to take both and put something
| more open on them to at least play with.
|
| Unfortunately, Mozilla doesn't understand how Firefox
| even got to be where it was at its' height. They seem to
| think it's just about marketing buzz. They got to #1 on
| organic growth alone. By creating something better than
| the alternatives at a technical level. They need to do
| that again, but also need some creative types to steer
| the ship as well. I'm still mad about how they let
| Thunderbird die on the vine, and if any related tech
| could have been their ongoing revenue stream it could
| have been in that space.
| kibwen wrote:
| FirefoxOS was the sort of sheer audacity that I'm glad
| Mozilla invested in. Same with Servo, which eventually gave
| us Rust.
| sp332 wrote:
| Firefox OS was not that bad. It was sold on terrible
| phones. Anyway it led to tons of APIs that we use now, like
| passing phone camera and microphone input to the browser.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| I mean, they did a lot of improvements over time. ASM.js
| which became WASM, with fast bindings, Webrender, new JS
| engine, the memshrink project are ones that jump out at me.
| From the wpt.fyi interop stats year over yearit's pretty
| clear they are constantly working on implementing new specs.
|
| But IMO everyone is chasing Chrome or just using their engine
| now. Their engineering team is apparently 10x that of
| Mozilla.
|
| And, back when Chrome was rolling out they used their
| dominant position online very aggressively. Google sites
| worked best in Chrome, period. Chrome was pushed on google.
| Google tech demos, similar to Microsoft ones, worked best in
| or only in Chrome. Android was a big Chrome advantage too.
| Chrome was heavily advertised, pushed as an install bundle in
| things like Adobe.. I'm not disagreeing Mozilla made some
| poor decisions but I don't think they had much of a chance
| regardless.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| At that time, Google was seen as "the good guys" when it
| went against Microsoft, pushing for open web standards
| against the monopoly of IE6. Both Chrome (initially)
| adhering to open standards and open source protocols like
| Google Talk. It looked like the David vs Goliath biblical
| tale.
|
| People thought Google was gonna maintain that position
| forever. It turned out that the "cool nerds doing open
| source and making money meanwhile" stance was just a sham,
| and Google abruptly became another faceless corporation.
|
| A lot of people fell for it. Even the Mozilla developers.
| When Firefox started having compatibility issues with
| Gmail, they considered it as bugs in the Gmail software,
| and Google developers were all like "oh haha sorry I'll fix
| that in no time", but over time the compatibility issues
| piled up and the anti competitive stance slowly unveiled by
| itself.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla.
|
| >The browser wars are basically over
|
| and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into
| getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it
| started to bleed out to Chrome.
|
| Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they
| could do" _shrug_. They built their tech in such an obtuse and
| opinionated way it 's impossible to integrate anywhere else,
| milked their millions selling off customer data to Google via
| the default search interface, burned the money on private jets
| and shockingly overpaid low-talent low-vision executives.
| Burned engineering talent on a VPN service no one asked for
| just because it's a good money making scam if you advertize it
| on the right podcasts, made huge parts of their deep
| engineering teams redundant.
|
| To be perfectly honest the only good long term vision for
| Mozilla is an empty office or a landfill. Their existence under
| the current management doomed the internet back to the IE6 era
| of browser variety. Firefox the browser would be way better off
| if Mozilla the company didn't exist.
|
| Baffles me they have any good will left at all from people who
| care about the internet. This company will literally do
| anything else than work hard on their browser.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| To me - as a long term FF user and Mozilla critic - it looks
| like:
|
| Spend money on everything except browser development (>$5
| billions!).
|
| Market share down the drain.
|
| Use the market share as an argument for a lost cause and
| spend money on everything except Browser development.
|
| Ladybird - a browser spearheaded by one person - will expose
| Mozilla of what it is.
| vxNsr wrote:
| >Ladybird
|
| What's the deal with serenityOS? Can it be run on bare
| metal yet, last I checked they only have a way to run it in
| a vm.
| jraph wrote:
| Yes. The browser, though, is very easy to build, requires
| few dependencies, a few minutes to build and runs fine on
| Linux. The result is quite impressive. And experimental.
| gsich wrote:
| Possible on some devices.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| The RPi ARM64 port is showing promise, they now have it
| booting to the desktop.
| leidenfrost wrote:
| I haven't actually looked at it, but I have the feeling
| that the Firefox code base is godawful and nobody who isn't
| being paid for a 40 hour weekday actually wants to get
| involved in it.
| asldkfjaslkdj wrote:
| oh google pay a LOT of people to do it.
|
| Either outright commits by at-google email addresses, or
| things like summer of code. All to play catch up with the
| features they shove on chrome.
| nine_k wrote:
| Firefox the browser is still a great piece of software,
| literally unique, and also open-source.
|
| Do you think any other company / organization would be able
| to take over it / fork it and develop it adequately? If so,
| where would they get the money? Many high-profile open-
| source projects (e.g. Python, Blender, well, Linux itself)
| managed to secure corporate sponsorships or donations in a
| much less toxic way than the Mozilla-Google deal.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Mozilla is funded by Google. (i.e. Chrome.)
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing
| they could do" shrug. They built their tech in such an obtuse
| and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate anywhere
| else, milked their millions selling off customer data to
| Google via the default search interface, burned the money on
| private jets and shockingly overpaid low-talent low-vision
| executives. Burned engineering talent on a VPN service no one
| asked for just because it's a good money making scam if you
| advertize it on the right podcasts, made huge parts of their
| deep engineering teams redundant.
|
| Is _any_ of this actually evidenced somewhere? I 'm not aware
| of Mozilla ever using private jets, and the last time I
| checked their executive compensation it was on the lower side
| of average for corporations with their footprint and
| financials.
|
| Maybe there are facts or sources that you aren't presenting,
| but this as-is just comes off as a screed.
| simon_o wrote:
| Exactly. Mozilla management is the Stephen Elop of Firefox.
| Arainach wrote:
| Bias disclaimer: I've worked on Chrome and Edge, opinions
| strictly my own
|
| >and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy
| into getting better or pulling back market share from the
| moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.
|
| Could and should Mozilla have done better? Yes. "Any energy?"
| is uncalled for, however.
|
| There was the entire Quantum rewrite for significant
| performance boosts (around the time Chrome started getting
| called out for bad perf). There's containers, anti-tracker
| tech, and a big privacy push.
|
| There is much more they could have done, and my outsider
| opinion is that Mozilla the organization lost its way and
| focused too much money and effort on things that don't
| matter, but it's not like they pulled an IE6 and abandoned
| Firefox.
| agumonkey wrote:
| That's how it felt to me too. Stretched too thin. Yet as a
| small company compared to MS or Google, I can imagine how
| hard it is to try to thrive or just survive and maintaining
| a stable path when you're fighting big pockets.
|
| I just wished they could rebalance their allocation and
| focus on simple daily usability things. Just a bit more.
|
| ps: for instance, the screenshot tool is brilliant
| threeseed wrote:
| Size of the company is actually irrelevant.
|
| What's important is the number of developers they put on
| the project.
| kelnos wrote:
| ... which is often directly related to company size, or
| at least funding. It's not like Mozilla has all these
| great independent revenue sources. Google and Microsoft
| can afford to throw significantly more money at their
| browser without thinking about how to make any money off
| of it, or off of related things. Mozilla has no such
| luck.
| fooker wrote:
| >Stretched too thin
|
| Meanwhile they have had consistently growing revenues and
| consistently declining number of developers.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| > Meanwhile they have had consistently growing revenues
| and consistently declining number of developers.
|
| Citation needed? And no, the 2020 layoffs don't count:
| It's 2023.
| sam_goody wrote:
| Stretched too thin?
|
| They fired Brendan Eich, who invented JS, led Netscape
| past IE, and then headed Mozilla. Who, when fired,
| started Brave and turned it into a bigger system than FF
| (including the only relatively new free search engine
| with its own index), from scratch, in a world already
| dominated by Chrome, and Safari.
|
| I know, I know, Eich donated personal money to some cause
| that some people on the internet didn't like. But from a
| business perspective, it was the stupidest thing they
| could have done, and is the point at which FF went from
| growth to (fast) loss.
|
| (And the cause itself was not justified, especially
| considering it was a private donation, it was a legal org
| (not like KK or whatever), and he apologized afterwards.
| Even if it was a mistake, that should not have been
| justification for firing him.)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _started Brave and turned it into a bigger system than
| FF_
|
| On what metric is Brave bigger than Firefox?
| tracker1 wrote:
| I just feel that Mozilla has spent way too much on PR,
| marketing and ventures that make no sense in their space.
| They got big by being a leader in the browser tech stack,
| and making tools developers and tech guys wanted to use.
| That led to the influence over other areas, but advising
| friends and family to use it.
|
| Mozilla org has completely lost sight of their base. A good
| 70-80% of their budget should be on their core product
| development and adjacent products only. The fact that only
| recently have they discovered, hey, we had this pretty good
| email client that we let all but die off.
|
| They should separate their core rendering and script engine
| teams to focus on better embed-ability and security
| structures. Another team(s) focused on the integration for
| Firefox as a browser. Another for Thunderbird. The fact
| that they killed off their Rust efforts, XULRunner and so
| many other things that could be really useful today is just
| painful.
|
| Yeah, XUL didn't run great on 1998 hardware, but what are
| so many apps targeting today, Electron. And now there's a
| resurgence towards lighter options (Tauri and others)
| because it kind of makes sense to (re)use a browser
| rendering engine for general UI development. It's extremely
| flexible, has a flushed out (if somewhat complex) styling
| and theming system, multiple language support, complete
| font rendering, svg rendering, and accessibility support
| and runs on/under everything under the sun.
|
| Maybe hire on some of the types that have tried and failed
| to remake email and browsers that have some creative vision
| on how users actually use these applications, and let them
| work with the engineering teams to make quality software
| again. Spend less time on branding, and more time on the
| core tech. They still have enough brand reach and clout
| that people will try the new stuff and if it's good, then
| organic growth can and would work (again).
|
| Hell, if they want to branch out... make a REALLY great
| email and communications platform that is open-source with
| a hosted model. How big of a pain is it to self-host many
| of these things today? If they want to acquire someone,
| bring in Caddy, Fastmail and/or Zimbra for adjacent tech
| development.
|
| I only harp on the email and Thunderbird side because two
| decades ago, they were in a better spot than anyone to
| offer a competing product to Outlook+Exchange and they just
| didn't even try. And now even Outlook kind of sucks because
| the cloud integration is what it is at scale. Leaving a
| gaping hole where that entire market used to live. A great
| open-source core product, with a good extensibility model
| and some commercially licensed integration points could
| have been insanely popular.
| orra wrote:
| > The fact that only recently have they discovered, hey,
| we had this pretty good email client that we let all but
| die off.
|
| ... You think Mozilla don't focus enough on Firefox, so
| you think they should spend more money on Thunderbird,
| which is an app in an almost-nonexistent market (desktop
| email)?
|
| Some folks are just never happy with Mozilla.
|
| Firefox has massively improved in recent years.
| WebExtensions being async prevented horrific freezes that
| used to happen. Rewriting components in Rust, and using
| web assembly for native libs, are both good for security.
| And WebRender was revolutionary.
| tracker1 wrote:
| That's not quite my point... my point is they should
| definitely focus on Firefox. They should probably go back
| towards doing it in a way that using their rendering
| engine and JS engine in other products is easier in terms
| of embedding. And that adjacent products should lend
| themselves towards those resources being re-utilized or
| grown organically.
|
| Two decades ago, Thunderbird was in the single best
| position to provide an alternative to Outlook. Now, not
| so much. If they'd had the foresight to do that two+
| decades ago, they could be in a similar position to
| Google Docs or O365 today in terms of revenue generation.
|
| They're a bit behind at this point on what people even
| like in a browser. They should focus on the core
| technology. I think dropping Servo and the Rust efforts
| was probably a misstep and burning cash on marketing and
| buying out unrelated companies altogether doesn't help.
|
| edit: Also, Thunderbird doesn't _HAVE_ to be just a
| desktop email client. If blackberry had developed email
| clients for iOS and Android early on, they would still be
| relevant today.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > This company will literally do anything else than work hard
| on their browser.
|
| OK, I'm not a fan of Firefox anymore but this isn't the case.
| They undeniably worked very, very hard and poured a lot of
| money into the revamp of Firefox.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Oh because Mozilla hasn 't put any energy into getting
| better or pulling back market share from the moment it
| started to bleed out to Chrome._
|
| This demonstrates that you have absolutely no clue what
| you're talking about.
| majormajor wrote:
| Firefox has certainly improved a lot since 2008.
|
| Google has and had major distribution advantages for Chrome;
| same with Apple/MS and their browsers.
|
| I've gone back and forth between FF and Chrome a few times
| and since the big FF perf improvements several years ago, I
| don't understand why Chrome is still seen as a wildly better
| product except for residual Google goodwill among the tech
| crowd. FF has had much much much more reliable session
| management / sync for me for years now.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Firefox has almost imperceptible jank, but it is there if
| you squint.
|
| Since forever I have a test that firefox always fails at:
| on first load, or if you haven't right clicked in a while,
| the context menu takes a perceptible amount of time to show
| up fully, and within this very short amount of time, you
| can visually see the menu options cascade out as the CSS
| engine finishes laying out and rendering the context menu.
|
| This kind of jank still happens on latest firefox. It's
| little things like this that make it feel unpolished.
|
| I never observe this behaviour on Chrome.
| kokanee wrote:
| There must be something different about my web use, because
| I keep hearing anecdotally that Firefox has reasonable
| performance relative to chrome. My experience is now and
| has always been that they aren't even close. I'm working on
| a React app at the moment and just confirmed: some basic
| operations that are buttery-smooth and instantaneous in
| Chrome have noticeable delay in FF. No extensions installed
| in either.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Its amazing how consistently poor safari adoption has been.
| paulddraper wrote:
| When you're the only browser that can't run on the world's
| most popular desktop OS or mobile OS...
|
| You're just not going to compete well for market share.
| eli wrote:
| It doesn't really run at all on Windows, the most popular
| desktop operating system by a huge margin.
| fafzv wrote:
| Safari only runs on Apple hardware and the world at large is
| poor. Like really, really poor.
|
| Safari has 34.6% share in the US:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share/all/united-s...
| derefr wrote:
| Would be interesting to calculate a global "number of
| e-commerce dollars spent per browser."
| capitainenemo wrote:
| I was surprised that was still 22.4% even after narrowing
| down to desktop US https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-
| market-share/desktop/unit...
|
| I didn't realise Macs were a quarter of the desktop market.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm not that surprised... They're not just trendy, but
| hardware wise pretty nice in terms of quality, appearance
| and battery life. I don't use it much, but my M1 Air that
| I got for personal use generally makes it through a week
| of use on road trips without needing to recharge. Hour or
| two of email/reading a day, about 60% brightness.
|
| I think MacOS feels a bit old at this point, but the
| hardware is pretty nice for what's on offer in the mobile
| space. I may well go framework for my next laptop in a
| few years though.
| frabcus wrote:
| Presume they'll bring the add-on into their standard monitoring /
| security checking!
|
| "This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla.
| Make sure you trust it before installing."
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fakespot-fake...
| krono wrote:
| Many Firefox extensions including the "recommended" ones which
| are claimed to be actively monitored are breaking Mozilla's
| extension policies by secretly sending telemetry, injecting
| advertisements, load and execute external resources, etc.
|
| None of the ones I reported have had their recommended status
| revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to publish
| new versions where the same violations are still present and
| even a few published updates that introduced additional
| violations.
|
| To Mozilla: If you want to change the world, start with
| yourself.
|
| To the rest: Whenever you install or update an extension,
| always go through its published source first. You can get to it
| by right-clicking the install/download button to "save as" and
| then simply unpacking the xpi file.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > None of the ones I reported have had their recommended
| status revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to
| publish new versions where the same violations are still
| present
|
| Could you publish these publicly anywhere, so that we can do
| for ourselves the job that Mozilla apparently is failing to
| do (while claiming to)?
| krono wrote:
| Here are a few that contained violations at the time when I
| checked them out last February:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/giphy-for-
| fir...
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabliss/
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-
| subsc...
|
| The official policies can be found here:
|
| https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/add-
| on-p...
|
| Some highlights of commonly "forgotten" rules:
|
| > No Surprises
|
| > Add-ons must be self-contained and not load remote code
| for execution.
|
| > Add-ons must limit data collection to what is necessary
| for functionality [...] Data includes all information the
| add-on collects, regardless of the manner.
|
| > Collecting, or facilitating the collection of ancillary
| information (e.g. any data not required for the add-on's
| functionality as stated in the description) is prohibited.
|
| > Modifying web content or facilitating redirects to
| include affiliate promotion tags is not permitted
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered
| absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch
| out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands
| and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this.
|
| And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses
| on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content.
| It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against the
| all the biggest AI companies in the world. Literally all the
| largest tech companies in the world are right now focused on
| making AI content indistinguishable from human-generated content.
|
| I can't help think that this is an infinite money sink, and in no
| way improves Mozilla's browser.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| From my perspective Mozilla is doing a better job with their
| browser than Google and Apple are, that's why I use it (despite
| the market share, I prefer their implementation of most things
| compared to alternatives). Everything else is gravy.
|
| I'm not sure that the money Mozilla spends on other things
| would be better spent on the browser... would it realistically
| close any existing gaps between their competition? Arguably
| they might even be better off spending it on marketing the
| browser than any technical metric. I'd rather this kind of
| thing than marketing.
| dkural wrote:
| Genuinely asking: Why do you think Firefox is outperforming
| Chrome / Safari in your opinion?
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Not GP, but Firefox runs on every OS I use, Safari does
| not. Chrome maybe does, but I doubt it.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| What OS doesn't run chrome? BSD?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| general usability experience, privacy, color and image
| rendering (webkit is bad at scaling down without
| introducing blur for some reason)
| [deleted]
| bleep_bloop wrote:
| Depends on what metrics you are using. Compatibility, APIs,
| Performance, Firefox is objectively worse than Chrome on all
| aspects.
|
| I like Mozilla as a company and I still use Firefox over
| Chrome knowing that it is objectively a worse browser and
| experience because I dislike Google and their business
| practices and i support businesses that I believe in. I am
| very much against the monopoly Google has over the web space
| and their positioning to dictate future web standards that
| will probably benefit their ad revenue over user experience.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Those are the kind of metrics that look nice on paper, but
| they've all passed a point where I cease to care about any
| further improvements.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I do not remember the last time a website actually failed
| to work in Firefox. Once in a blue moon I'll come across a
| site (looking at you, SnapChat) that claims it won't work,
| but suddenly is just just hunky-dory with a quick User-
| Agent string swap. We've gotten to a point where if your
| site doesn't work identically in Firefox and Chrome, you're
| probably doing something pathological.
|
| With regards to APIs, I'm very happy with Firefox's
| commitment to telling Google to go fuck itself when it
| comes to Manifest V3 neutering of adblocking.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Chrome's compatibility is 100%, because it's defined in
| terms of compatibility with Chrome. (Despite the fact took
| 21 years before Chromium got a _limited subset_ of MathML,
| when Firefox had it from Mozilla 1.)
|
| > _I am very much against the monopoly Google has over the
| web space and their positioning to dictate future web
| standards_
|
| Then, to the extent you can, stop using Google-controlled
| browser engines. Google can only dictate future web
| "standards" if they're the de-facto standard browser
| engine... so just refuse to acknowledge them.
|
| If you make websites, use stuff that only works in Firefox
| (and the indie browsers), like Content MathML, or stick to
| stuff that works in _every_ browser - and by that, I mean
| clean, semantic HTML. Force Google to play catch-up for
| once, or make the whole "catch-up" game irrelevant.
|
| My favourite such feature is alternate stylesheets.
| Supported by Firefox, and by basically every CSS-supporting
| indie browser, but by almost none of the Chromiums.
| samstave wrote:
| At least its a small step for mankind...
| tonymet wrote:
| You're thinking like an engineer (functionality) and not like a
| businessman (assets).
|
| You've addressed some of the assets well: the tech, product,
| etc.
|
| Mozilla isn't just paying for that, they are paying for the
| audience. I.e. the millions of people monthly who search for
| authentic product information.
|
| Mozilla may be interested in selling them another product , or
| revising the fakespot product - who knows?
|
| I'm just calling attention to the assets that the business paid
| for and that they are worth the money paid.
| amelius wrote:
| I'm starting to wonder why the EU isn't Mozilla's biggest
| funder.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Because Mozilla the foundation has shown itself to be a very
| poor steward of Firefox the application. If there was a way
| to directly fund Firefox I'm sure many people would do that,
| but atm it appears you can only send money to be wasted by
| Mozilla.
| agilob wrote:
| Exactly the same feeling as when Mozilla acquired Pocket and
| promised to opensource it. I had the feeling that it doesn't
| make sense and it's not what their audience wants.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I'm happy for them to branch out, but it is discouraging that
| once every 3-4 months I run into a bug or feature I need,
| google it, and am taken to a bug report in their tracker from
| 5-10 years ago that hasn't been touched.
| ncann wrote:
| Case in point: network ping spikes after using Geolocation
| that will persist until FF is closed:
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1711854
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I never understood what geolocation was supposed to be
| within the context of of a desktop browser. If a website
| asks for this information, and I approve, what information
| is transmitted that couldn't be determined serverside via
| geoip?
| kelnos wrote:
| GeoIP tells you at best what city someone is in, and even
| then, for smaller towns, will usually report the nearest
| large city, which could be quite a ways a way. Not to
| mention it's often even just flat-out wrong. VPNs and
| other things distort where you are. Sometimes a website
| might need (or at least think it needs) correct, fine-
| grained location information.
|
| I do suspect that most websites that ask for location
| information could do fine with GeoIP, but that doesn't
| mean there isn't any use for more reliable, fine-grained
| location data.
| danielheath wrote:
| Okay, but I never told Firefox my location, so what's it
| doing that geoip can't?
| ktosobcy wrote:
| like Google and apple - they use exact locations of WiFi
| hotspots most of the time...
| lights0123 wrote:
| BSSIDs of nearby WiFi networks that are compared to lists
| sent by mobile devices with real GPS
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| And if I don't even have a wifi card?
| NavinF wrote:
| Then you represent a trivially small fraction of users.
| My desktop doesn't have wifi either, but most modern
| motherboards come with a wifi card built in. Not to
| mention the majority of visitors to mainstream sites are
| on mobile and a good chunk of the rest are on a laptop.
| Also Firefox has 3% market share so we're talking about a
| tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| Although I am unfamiliar with what is sent with
| geolocation, I do use a VPN, and allowing geolocation on
| a website does pull my correct location even when
| connected somewhere far away.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| for implicit it is reverse-geocoded from your IP address
|
| for explicit it is using device GPS and/or cell tower
|
| either you are not actually connected to the VPN or the
| website is storing your consent to access GPS
| coordinates. I'm not sure which is scarier
|
| to test the former go to a few different websites that
| tell you your IP address
|
| for the latter, fully clear your browser's cookies and
| cache and retry. does it ask to access fine location?
|
| another reason could be that you are logged in to e.g.
| google who already knows where you are based on historic
| searches, nearby wifi and bluetooth devices, etc.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| Thank you for the response, most likely it is browser
| cookies, as I've checked my IP address has changed and
| that there are no leaks. I will try running from a
| different browser in incognito mode to see if it still
| works.
| deesep wrote:
| WebRTC leaks expose your real identity and location even
| when you use a VPN. You should disable it in your
| browsers.
| vhcr wrote:
| Most MacBooks have a GPS antenna, so they will return
| pretty accurate location. And having a consistent API is
| important too, not having to care if your code is running
| on mobile or desktop is pretty nice.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| I think this is a gnome bug rather than an ff one, but
| it's pretty shit on my desktop. It reports absurd (<10ft)
| accuracy while being off by miles.
|
| Edit: s/100ft/10ft after I remembered better
| kelnos wrote:
| On the desktop, it might be limited in the sources it
| has. GeoIP is one source, of course, but that's often
| wrong or too coarse-grained (or distorted by things like
| VPNs). The BSSIDs of nearby WiFi access points can help
| make that better, but that depends on you being close
| enough to APs in its dataset. Most desktops don't have
| actual GPS hardware.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Of course. But the desktop reports both estimated
| location and estimated accuracy. I'm complaining about
| the inaccuracy of the accuracy, not of the location.
| atdt wrote:
| I don't know of any software projects of comparable size and
| complexity that doesn't have years-old bugs languishing in
| limbo. This is the normal state of affairs for a web browser,
| and it's the result of human-factor bottlenecks that aren't
| easy to solve even for well-capitalized projects. Large
| projects end up having subsystems that work reliably enough,
| such that their developers can afford to shift their
| attention elsewhere. Over time various details fall out of
| working memory. You get to a point where there is a high up-
| front cost to making any significant changes to the subsystem
| because it requires a significant investment of time for
| people to acquire (or re-acquire) the degree of familiarity
| that is needed to make such changes comfortably. If this cost
| can be amortized over a large backlog of feature requests and
| bugs, so it can keep someone busy for a while, then it is
| worthwhile. But it often isn't.
| theodric wrote:
| I've had a cross-platform issue for ELEVEN YEARS with Firefox
| randomly not copying text into the clipboard, even when I
| 'cut' it-- i.e. the text disappears on cut but paste pastes
| whatever was in the clipboard before. I cannot be the only
| person with this problem. And yet the bug persists, and
| invariably someone pops in and tells me it's down to the
| extensions I have installed, despite not having any of the
| same extensions now that I did in 2012.
|
| As a user, Firefox feels like hobby project, but at least
| it's not a Google product.
| asldkfjaslkdj wrote:
| Not to mention, improving the browser in the space of
| adblockers installed by default (
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
| ftw! ) would remove most incentives for AI generated content in
| the first place. /inserts shrugging emoji
| mynonameaccount wrote:
| Google would defund Mozilla in an instant
| majormajor wrote:
| Adblockers _increase_ the incentives for AI generated
| "organic" content since in the absence of the ability to push
| explicitly-marked ads, you're gonna get astroturfing and such
| instead.
| asldkfjaslkdj wrote:
| You assume an efficient market.
|
| Advertising is not about the Seller of the product and the
| Publisher of the content. Oh no.
|
| The money in advertisement is the hundreds of companies
| that prey on each other all the way connecting seller and
| publisher. Because nobody trust anybody in advertisement.
| There's traffic validate. Click validation. Sales
| attribution. Sales attribution validation. MRC
| Accreditation for the sales attribution validation. etc.
| etc. etc.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/amazon-convinced-apple-to-r...
|
| Interesting, did not know this happened.
| [deleted]
| waveBidder wrote:
| they've been the one thing that actually makes Amazon remotely
| useful for years, so I'm glad to see them getting outside help
| from a nonprofit
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding
|
| I had been using Firefox since 2002, when it was called
| Phoenix.
|
| I switched to a Chromium-based browser because the performance
| difference was noticable enough, and I am in the browser often
| enough, to finally throw in the towel and switch.
|
| They have a huge amount of money coming in from Google. Why is
| this going to acquisitions like this and not towards
| strengthening the development so that it remains competitive?
| Or are they, and I am not aware?
|
| If it doesn't remain competitive on things like performance,
| standards compliance, etc. there are very few reasons for the
| average user to choose Firefox over any other browser at the
| moment. The privacy-focus is good, but there are other browsers
| that do the same on Chromium.
| franga2000 wrote:
| > It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mole against
| the all the biggest AI companies in the world.
|
| That's exactly what they're doing with the biggest ad trackers
| and browser vendors. A lot of Mozilla's "side-projects" are
| stupid and I also agree they should focus more on Firefox, but
| this one is pretty in line with their general mission of "we'll
| fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".
| hospitalhusband wrote:
| Mozilla is almost entirely funded by half a billion dollars a
| year from Google. They are a vassal.
| pfisch wrote:
| So was apple once.
| kbd wrote:
| I wonder how things would be different if Microsoft never
| gave them that life-line when they needed it.
| exhilaration wrote:
| I imagine that Apple would have been bought by HP or IBM
| and you can guess how that would have turned out.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Microsoft needed an OS competitor to have any viable
| antitrust defense.
| Y-bar wrote:
| ... one which they also made a nice little profit of.
| $150M in the non-voting stock they bought in 1997 turned
| into $550M in 2003 when they sold most of it.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Ouch. They must've wished that they kept that stock for a
| few more years.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Your point being? The fact that it probably isn't
| sustainable doesn't negate all the good they do.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _we 'll fight the big guys_
|
| I'd be more convinced of this if they weren't actively
| collaborating with the big guys.
| sockaddr wrote:
| But their marketing copy has a bunch of differently colored
| corporate Memphis people doing happy and fun things, surely
| they have our best interest at heart!
| franga2000 wrote:
| "Actively collaborating" meaning doing the bare minimum to
| keep Google paying while actively fighting the bad things
| Google does everywhere else?
|
| This is the rich philanthropists debate all over again.
| Yea, sure, they got rich from participating in the system,
| but they're using a big chunk of that wealth to fight its
| consequences. Sure as hell beats the alternative, where the
| only people willing to fight are the ones without the
| resources to do it.
|
| I'd honestly rather see Firefox development be funded by
| selling NFTs and mining crypto, than not funded at all.
| Volunteer/donation-driven FOSS is great, but it has _never_
| been able to compete with for-profit products and it sure
| as hell couldn 't compete with Google here.
| kivlad wrote:
| I'm saddened by the sudden and intermittent disappearance of
| ReviewMeta, which prided itself as not inserting affiliate links
| into their site/extension. Reading this news leads me to believe
| that this is a perfect fit in accordance with Mozilla's overall
| mission, making this a good outcome for something that could've
| easily been exploited by a bad actor making the acquisition.
| tornato7 wrote:
| I'm upset to hear that ReviewMeta is gone. They had much better
| detection than FakeSpot, in my opinion.
| tivert wrote:
| Wow, Mozilla is acquiring a side-project that's actually useful?
| Color me pleased. Beats wasting time on an a commodity VPN
| service.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| > Beats wasting time on an a commodity VPN service.
|
| That service is what earns them non-Google revenue.
| jdiff wrote:
| Their VPN is just reselling someone else's service, minimal
| effort invested while opening a mainstream service that
| actually provides an income stream. Seems like a solid strategy
| to me.
| dm_me_dogs wrote:
| It also helps that the service they're re-selling is actually
| good.
|
| (Mullvad, if you weren't aware)
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Firefox VPN is great for beginners, but it assumes too much
| and isn't flexible enough for power users. I had to cancel
| it because "Allow LAN connections" didn't base itself off
| my local subnet, but on RFC1918. My network is in a private
| IPv4 net other than that, and I couldn't configure split-
| tunnel manually.
|
| Proton VPN works wonders and I like their mail product too.
| krono wrote:
| Fully automated profiling, deciding, and then advertising to as
| many people as possible whether you are a scammer or if a review
| you left is genuine. And the only method through which you can
| discover that you are the victim of of a false accusation is to
| use this product to actively and manually monitor your own
| content.
|
| Both freedom of expression and automated decision-making are
| already quite heavily regulated in the EU today with even more
| and tighter rules currently the way[1]. These new regulations
| also happen to extensively cover the combating of fake and
| illegal content by online platforms.
|
| Additionally this seems contrary to Mozilla's claim[2] of
| commitment to human dignity, individual expression,
| accountability, and most of all: trust.
|
| Strange thing to be investing in for any other reason than to
| make it disappear, which I don't think is the plan. Money would
| have been better spent elsewhere... or anywhere else, really.
|
| [1]: A Europe fit for the digital age
| https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
|
| [2]: Mozilla Manifesto https://www.mozilla.org/en-
| US/about/manifesto/
| guestbest wrote:
| [flagged]
| msla wrote:
| > Sorry about being pedantic, but is no such thing as fake
| content, there is only more content.
|
| This isn't pedantic, it's ignoring context: In context, "Fake"
| clearly means that the so-called review wasn't written by a
| human who had used the product. Given what a review is, and
| what purpose we expect reviews to serve, so-called "reviews"
| written by a language model are clearly fake, just like a non-
| driveable toy car is a fake car.
| guestbest wrote:
| Online reviews are a product, not a nebulous concept and
| sites like Amazon depend on them to drive sales of products
| or are a company's entire unique value proposition like in
| the case of Yelp. The idea that reviews are not in some way
| manipulated at 'fake' since they drive capital towards or
| away from businesses. In other words there are no altruistic
| reviews. The only neutral content comes from a Random Number
| Generator, which is thus far impossible to create
| msla wrote:
| A review written by a human who didn't use the product is
| fake, _a fortiori_ a review written by a non-human that
| doesn 't use any products is fake.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| People can argue over word definition. If I pay someone to
| write me a false positive review, I'd say that's much more
| closer to a definition of a "fake content" than "more content".
| We can call it fake, false, malicious, misleading, bogus, sham,
| deceptive or any other similar names.
| nothingneko wrote:
| How does Mozilla even have the money to do this? I thought they
| were broke.
| kgbcia wrote:
| I tried to use Pocket and just couldn't get into it. Software
| like Adblock and this fakespot thing have to be part of the
| browser for it to work seamless.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Fakespot is one of those utilities that is better if fewer people
| know about it.
|
| If everyone starts using Fakespot, vendors will just optimize to
| fool Fakespot.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Will this acquisition enable Fakespot to focus on their core
| offering instead of continuing to sell user search and purchase
| data?
| senko wrote:
| Mozilla is a company in search of relevance.
|
| Right now, if Mozilla doesn't think Firefox is central to its
| mission and if they're giving up the fight in browser wars (as
| many in this thread suggest) ..
|
| ... I don't see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it
| has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that's it?
|
| I'd like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related
| revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (the rest of it) do
| whatever they want.
|
| Except Firefox is the golden goose.
|
| (Ffx user here, I'm using it for dev, browsing and mobile
| (ffocus), ie. everything that doesn't _require_ chrome).
| vxNsr wrote:
| 100% agree. Mozilla uses Firefox to raise funds and then spends
| it on pet projects and executive bonuses instead of putting it
| into Firefox.
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| [dead]
| notacoward wrote:
| Funnily enough, I happened to visit fakespot for the first time
| in ages today, after I discovered that reviewmeta is dead. It
| looks like the functionality has already been bundled into
| Firefox/Chrome extensions instead of being a standalone website,
| and they're already pushing an AI angle. That was quick.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| This is interesting. FakeSpot is already getting aggressive with
| injected ads and recommendations on product listing pages (Amazon
| as an example) and this tells me they're going money-heavy, while
| Mozilla on the other hand might have much left at all actually.
| How exactly the financial aspect shapes out remains to be seen.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| As much as I love Firefox, let's not lie about the state of
| affairs: "We are joining a company that develops one of the most
| popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that
| dates back to the origins of the internet." no you are not,
| Firefox is _nowhere near_ one of the most popular browsers. It 's
| essentially a non-player in the browser space, and while the
| people working for Mozilla are still meaningfully contributing to
| standards bodies, the browser itself is basically irrelevant in
| the global market. I wish it wasn't, but the good old days of "we
| beat IE" are _long_ gone, and FF did not step up to Chrome, nor
| to the Chromification of the rest of the browser landscape. It
| just threw ideas at the wall in the hopes that something would
| end up being a revenue stream while Firefox languished. Quantum
| was the right move, except they should have kept making moves.
| You don 't win by being "pretty decent", you win by doing things
| people didn't realize they needed their browser to do, and doing
| all the things they do know they need to do better than the
| competition. It's been drastically down hill since Chris Beard
| left.
| Zamicol wrote:
| Did they mean to say "Firefox [has] a lineage that dates back to
| the origins of the internet web"? Tim Berners Lee invented the
| Web, not the Internet.
| natch wrote:
| Ironically it's humans that generate spam and choose to, and are
| incentivized to continue to choose to, monetize content.
|
| I've asked ChatGPT for product recommendations and it's a breath
| of fresh air to get suggestions that are not filtered for
| affiliate commission potential. Let's hope this lasts but in the
| meantime I doubt I'm the only one noticing that this AI content
| is not steering you based on the potential for profit.
|
| So, fakespot kind of had it backwards, in a way. What we need is
| Humanspot to warn us away from content, AI generated or not, that
| has been corrupted by a human profit motive.
| qzw wrote:
| I'm hoping that Mozilla has a secret plan to extend Fakespot
| beyond just shopping and to become the killer app for
| distinguishing all AI generated content. May not even be possible
| to achieve, but that would be a worthy goal for Mozilla.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Is Pocket going to start recommending "fakespot certified"
| products via affiliate links?
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| Please don't give Mozilla any more ideas
| progmetaldev wrote:
| I see a lot of people here complaining that Mozilla isn't
| spending enough of its money on the development of Firefox, but a
| lot of that money comes from their Google deal. If Firefox
| started to gain market share over Chrome, do you think that
| Google would continue to fund them, and if not then who would?
| negative_zero wrote:
| I believe that the sentiment is that Google funds Firefox
| despite it's now poor market share as "antitrust insurance".
| progmetaldev wrote:
| That makes a lot of sense!
| vindarel wrote:
| Other search engines would. It already happened that Yahoo paid
| to be the default search engine in Firefox, for certain regions
| of the world (Yahoo was for the US, they also had deals with
| Yandex and Baidu). And Google would probably still want to have
| its search engine available out of the box to millions of
| users, even through an other browser.
| rank0 wrote:
| Please Mozilla just give me built in tab groups.
|
| FF is like the only remaining browser without this feature.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Sideberry does that and also puts the tab bar sideways
| applecrazy wrote:
| Cool product, but I'm actually concerned about privacy using a
| tool like FakeSpot. Their privacy policy is extremely broad and
| includes handing over purchase history and search history on
| shopping websites to the extension authors:
|
| > Browser Extensions: We collect the following data when you use
| Fakespot's Browser Extensions and may link it to your personal
| identity in order to effectively market our products and services
| to you and others: Contact Info
| Identifiers Usage Data Application Search History
| (e.g. not your Google/Bing/other search engine history)
| Purchases Diagnostics
|
| https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| Yeah you don't want to install their extension as it stands.
| Which is why they try so hard to push it, instead of just
| putting the analyzer on the front page.
|
| See if you can even find it: https://www.fakespot.com/
|
| Meanhwhile there are 3 links to the chrome extension, and two
| to the app.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Maybe Moz is on to something here; while they're at it, how about
| telling apart original content from copycat sites?
|
| But what's really interesting is, can we not put ML to good use
| for generating a new browser for us, given a corpus of expected
| renderings? Or have we managed to make web standards so fscking
| complicated and out of hand so as to make that infeasible?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Normally I'd say... "They'd better write it in the bylaws that
| Mozilla isn't allowed to buy any more companies" but a system for
| identifying fake content on the web might (unlike all the other
| Mozilla acquisitions such as the thoroughly pizzled Pocket)
| improve the web browsing experience.
| blowski wrote:
| I agree with your comment, but I'm curious what "pizzled"
| means.
| Logans_Run wrote:
| NSFW definition (depending on I.T. policies)
|
| [1] Pizzle is a Middle English word for penis, derived from
| Low German pesel or Flemish Dutch pezel, diminutive of pees,
| meaning 'sinew'. The word is used today to signify the penis
| of an animal, chiefly in Australia and New Zealand.
|
| [2] Interestingly, it is used in medical slang (Dictionary of
| medical slang -Jacob Edward) and it is defined as exhausted,
| or to its point:
|
| ~ Pizzle chewer ... A female who relieves a male of his
| phallic tension by fondling the instrument in her mouth.
|
| ~ Pizzle-grinder ... 1. A butcher. 2. A prostitute.
|
| ~ Pizzle honker ... A prostitute who satisfies her patrons by
| manual friction.
|
| ~ Pizzle warmer . . . The pudendum muliebre, esp. the vagina.
|
| ~ Pizzled . . . Exhausted physically or mentally.
|
| So I guess you could say that Pocket is a Fizzled[3] Pizzle.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzle [2] https://english.
| stackexchange.com/questions/166295/etymology... [3] Fizzle:
| To finish slowly in a way that is disappointing or has become
| less interesting & There is often an initial indication of
| interest, but then it fizzles out and no cash materialises.
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fizzle
| BellsOnSunday wrote:
| In the 19th C it was a word in the West Country dialect
| Thomas Hardy knew well, and appears in Jude the Obscure to
| describe the pig's member that is thrown at Jude. Apart
| from this description, it gets called "that part of the pig
| which is thrown away" and other euphemisms, so I suppose
| Hardy must have thought pizzle was already obscure enough
| not to get him into trouble.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Hey, I learned a new word today! And an excellent one at
| that.
| ehPReth wrote:
| I suppose in this case it means "fucked Pocket"
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a reference to a Phillip K. Dick short story, see
|
| https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/thoroughly-
| pizzled-...
|
| A group of people who are receiving manufactured products of
| an automatic factory that they don't want get a chance to
| fill out a feedback form and write "the product was
| thoroughly pizzled" as a deliberate neologism to confuse the
| computer. The factory sent a representative who asked what
| this meant and they defined it as "unwanted".
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The problem with Pocket was that it was a separate brand name
| with a weird UX.
|
| If it had been branded as a new "reading list" feature native
| to Mozilla I don't think it would have caused a stir.
|
| I use Vivaldi now for two reasons: One, it is better than
| Firefox Mobile, and two, I like the ergonomics of its bookmarks
| and reading list sync.
|
| Having the ability for the browser to be a suite isn't crazy.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Chrome has a reading list feature, and a separate new tab
| page spam feature. Firefox combined them both in Pocket.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I think Chrome added the reading list feature recently -
| I've been using Vivaldi for close to a year now. And while
| I know Vivaldi uses the chromium engine below, it's nice to
| have a non-google browser anyway.
| derefr wrote:
| > If it had been branded as a new "reading list" feature
| native to Mozilla I don't think it would have caused a stir.
|
| I imagine Mozilla's thinking there was that they should
| position the feature so that people who already use Pocket
| will realize that Firefox isn't adding a _separate_ reading
| list (like the Safari one nobody uses), but rather that you
| can just sign into your existing Pocket account in Firefox,
| and see your existing Pocket reading-list.
|
| But yeah, in the end that probably wasn't nearly as important
| as getting people who _didn 't_ already use Pocket to see the
| reading list as "Firefox's reading list" rather than some
| channel-partner bloatware encroachment.
|
| A happy medium would probably have been if the Firefox
| reading list was its own skin of Pocket, and synced using
| your Firefox Sync account, without needing to create a
| separate Pocket account; but when you first went to use it,
| it would ask if you want to _sign into_ your Pocket account;
| and if you do, then your Pocket account would be _merged
| with_ your Firefox Sync account, because "Pocket Sync is now
| part of Firefox Sync."
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Exactly, it's basically offensive to put any product in a
| customer's face.
|
| I remember how Microsoft killed OneNote (a rather good note
| taking application) by (1) trying to shove it up your
| fingernails, into your armpits, etc. (I remember there
| being three onenote icons pinned to the task bar) and (2)
| going 100% cloud as opposed to the XML files OneNote used
| to leave on your computer that were very easy to parse and
| build tools to process.
|
| People are automatically going to assume a bundled product
| is crap because we're so used to drive-by downloads and
| other dark patterns.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| > I imagine Mozilla's thinking there was that they should
| position the feature so that people who already use Pocket
| will realize that Firefox isn't adding a separate reading
| list (like the Safari one nobody uses), but rather that you
| can just sign into your existing Pocket account in Firefox,
| and see your existing Pocket reading-list.
|
| That was pretty much how it was viewed at the time (I
| worked at Mozilla during the Pocket acquisition). It was
| seen as, "we were going to build our own reading list, but
| let's just buy this instead and integrate it as /the/
| reading list for Firefox."
|
| I agree that the external perception was different, and
| remains so to this day.
| ChrisSD wrote:
| Tbh, all I recall about pocket is it showed me a load of
| random content which I had no interest in, which felt
| spammy. And I think it needs a login for some reason? It
| certainly looked and felt like an external addon rather
| than a built-in thing.
|
| If it had just been a reading list I'd have been much
| more interested.
| JohnFen wrote:
| That makes sense. Mozilla's handling of Pocket was very
| poor.
| activiation wrote:
| Great purchase if they integrate it.
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