Sarah Jamie Lewis
"Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising."
"we do this fully acknowledging our expanded focus on online advertising won’t be embraced by everyone in our community" - https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-advertising/
I appreciate Mozilla laying their intent out explicitly with no room for interpretation or guesswork.
Personally, I think this is not just a huge misstep, but a deathknell.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
Browser development and maintenance is a costly endeavor - any firefox fork has to either commit to that upkeep, or rely on being able to sift critical changes from unwanted cruft in a timely manner.
Ultimately I think the only way we can dig ourselves out of this mess is by making it easier to build and maintain browsers (There are perhaps alternative foundations to build on, such as servo on the horizon - but they too need funding.)
Sarah Jamie Lewis
Short term....we have two cross-platform browser engines.
Both maintained by advertising companies - both with a multitude of forks claiming to disable and/or patch out the bad stuff.
But ultimately, both base browsers - and this the underlying web standards - are being primarily driven by the needs to advertisers.
Kit Rhett Aultman
@sarahjamielewis I do keep a hopeful eye on Ladybird.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
I like Mozilla, or rather I liked what Mozilla once was. Over the years I've volunteered time on various Mozilla projects - both online and in-person. I've advocated for Firefox for two decades.....
Time after time, especially in recent years, I've given Mozilla the benefit of the doubt - because I both believed they were honestly doing things for the right reasons.
I no longer believe that.
Tom Walker
@freediverx @frumble @stcwhite @sarahjamielewis Are there any web browsers available from companies that you do trust? I can't think of any. (But also I don't trust companies.)
Jecogeo
@tomw @freediverx @frumble @stcwhite @sarahjamielewis I personally would trust @protonprivacy. The thing is most of the companies we would trust are fund-limited and very focused on specific services. A new browser from scratch is a considerable endeavor…
freediverx
@frumble @stcwhite @sarahjamielewis
Same difference. How can you use a browser from a company you can't trust?
Maxi 10x 💉
@stcwhite @sarahjamielewis Don’t quit on Firefox, the browser is not not the actual problem, it’s its maintainer.
stcwhite
@sarahjamielewis Guess I am going to finally have to cut that cord. Alas. I have stuck with Firefox since its inception, I believe.
Kit Rhett Aultman
@lachlan @sarahjamielewis The mid 90s were...a thing. The web was too new for people to know how it'd be embraced anyway and we didn't have a lot of the features needed for the kind of advertising we see today. But what we *did* have was Microsoft trying to abuse their PC OS monopoly power to try and push people into making sites that worked only with Internet Explorer...and IE couldn't be removed from Windows 95.
lachlan but less spooky
@sarahjamielewis I don't know whether it always used to be this bad, or if I didn't know any better in the mid 90s, but yikes, we're in an awful place now.
I'm so damned sick of the advertising industry.
Demian
@sarahjamielewis some parallels between viable browsers and viable US political parties. Perhaps a bit of a stretch but the two have been pretty top of mind
Kit Rhett Aultman
@dgodon @sarahjamielewis I mean, that sort of "80/20 rule" crops up everywhere. You can see it in the popularity of teams in premiership football, too.
Cranberry Sauce is People!!!
@mcc @sarahjamielewis Yup ... and they sucked. Google saw an opening and they took it.
Darnell Clayton :verified:
@AlgoCompSynth @mcc @sarahjamielewis When Google forked WebKit & launched Blink (what Chromium is based on), I knew the other players were going to face some steep competition. I did not expect Google to dominate the browsing experience on desktop & mobile.
Cranberry Sauce is People!!!
@sarahjamielewis No, the death knell was when Google built a better browser than Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox, supplied it with cutting edge developer tools, and gave it away for free. It was a monopolist's move and it worked.
mcc
@AlgoCompSynth @sarahjamielewis two of those three browsers are free products given away by monopolists
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