Most of Mozilla’s money of course comes from Google to make them the default search engine on Firefox. And of course its a way for Google to ensure there’s at least one alternative browser engine. Reading about how Texeira was recently fired and how executives have been pushing for AI features for a long time, Mozilla certainly loves chasing trends and then forgetting them, like how Google kills lots of products. It seems like the company can’t stand on its own two feet without Google’s funding and is poorly run.

What happened to Mozilla over the years? How much effort did they put in to trying to be a successful tech company? because it hasn’t been until the past few that I really started following Firefox and Mozilla news.

I wonder if Mozilla could’ve been Proton, years before Proton AG existed, making their own comprehensive suite of privacy-friendly tools, since Mozilla makes privacy their brand. And they were late to the smartphone game with Firefox OS. If they were smart, they would’ve ensured their long term survival with an actual business, to continue funding development of their privacy and FOSS software like Firefox, without large funding sources like Google.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    0·
    3 months ago

    The only reason Mozilla still exists is because Google needs them to so Chrome can’t be a complete monopoly.

    Their priorities have always been… questionnable. Like, we got FirefoxOS all while Firefox was basically unusable on Android and Chrome rapidly eating their lunch, PWA support was abandonned then removed, which was the whole idea behind FirefoxOS… Then they started Servo, the rewrite of the rendering in Rust only to cancel it midway.

    But hey they acquired an ad company, as if people don’t use Firefox so uBlock keeps working. And Pocket, and VPNs and a whole bunch of other crapware nobody wants from Mozilla. It’s like they go out of their way to be the second option.

    • TheTwelveYearOld@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      01·
      3 months ago

      The only reason Mozilla still exists is because Google needs them to so Chrome can’t be a complete monopoly.

      Yep this is exactly what I meant. Maybe I should’ve made that clear.

        • TheTwelveYearOld@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          01·
          3 months ago

          No way in hell would Proton make a Chromium-based browser, the only way that would not be hypocritical is if they fully open sourced it (you could compile it yourself), and maintained their own fork completely devoid of Google tracking and telemetry.

    • TheTwelveYearOld@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      01·
      3 months ago

      Right now I don’t think Proton would do much better than existing options. There are browsers on different ends of the privacy to convenience spectrum (and these are all Gecko based):

      • Firefox: decent privacy by default without changing any settings
      • Librewolf: Firefox but with hardened settings for privacy
      • Mullvad Browser: Almost the same as Tor but not on the Tor network, which is admittedly slow
      • Tor: Uses the Tor Network and by default very hardened for Privacy but makes lots of convenience and QoL tradeoffs, including letterboxing to common browser resolutions.