Technology

Cool. Mozilla is a corrupt, useless org anyway. Not much better than Google.

I can very much imagine this being a short to medium term issue (and still an existential threat to Mozilla), but hopefully, this improves the situation to the point that there is no future company like google who artificially maintains control over browsers and search engines, rendering competitors dependent on these massive contracts? I mean, this is what got them there, right?

If were going to go after them for a monopoly, shouldn't it be for chromium? At least with search there are actual viable alternatives that don't get 86% of their money from a direct competitor...

Even if Mozilla survives it'll need to cut off some spendings.

I have written this elsewhere many times and I know it's extremely unpopular with FOSS crowd but truth needs to be told in here once again:

Everyday I use Debian, Ubuntu and Windows 10/11/Servers.

I'm an "IT guy" and have installed Firefox on literally hundreds of computers over a decade. I also install and setup extensions like uBlock Origin (with few comprehensive ad & malware blocking lists) , Dark Reader, Auto Delete Cookies, Crypto blocking and many more... but I have given up on Firefox 2016 onwards.

You could give Mozilla 10 billion per year just to develop Firefox but Mozilla can and will decide that they wanna spend only 1 or 10 percent of that money on actual Firefox development.

They will spend most of their money on anything but Firefox.

I mean I love world peace and cancer, aids free world too but with the money Mozilla get in a year, none of that gonna happen.

Mozilla couldn't stop Russia attack on Ukraine; neither were able to solve Israel Palestinian conflict nor hunger and migration from African countries to Europe...

Then what are they spending money on?

What they could have done successfully is to spend all the money they made from Firefox towards Firefox development alone. But this is the thing Mozilla do not want to do and are open about it.

Now I don't want Mozilla to stop developing Firefox either but because Firefox needs money from Google, Google must allow their monopoly on search... is utterly insane thinking.

If Mozilla cannot survive without Google monopoly, so be it.

I would say some open source/ Linux foundations/ Linux distros needs to fork Firefox and let Mozilla die peacefully.

Don't worry, we have a possible replacement for Mozilla, meet Ladybird

While I do want competition in the web space, its a good thing that Google could get told to stop doing stuff like this.

I dont want Mozilla to die of course but companies need to be held responsible for all the shit they pull. I'd imagine if Mozilla wasnt able to maintain firefox anymore it would fall to the open source community like they said in the article and I'd probably still use it.

No one company should own the internet.

$510MM out of $593MM?!? WTF Mozilla?

Based on their 2022 report, only half of their expenses were on software development costs - around $220m, and it’s not clear what portion of that was on Firefox vs other projects.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf

In terms of revenue: around $100m was from sources other than Google.

Therefore, it seems plausible to me that Firefox development could still be funded with $100m of annual revenue. At a smaller level no doubt, but still in existence nonetheless.

I would pay money to keep Firefox foss for other people who can't afford to do so.

Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots

Is this llamafile?

The thing about LLMs is that no one knows how to write the ultra low level optimizations/runtimes, so they port others (llamafile largely borrows from llama.cpp AFAIK, albeit with some major contributions from their own devs).

Performance is insanely critical because they're so darn hard to run, and new models/features come out weekly which no sane dev can keep up with without massive critical mass (like HF Transformers, mainly, with llama.cpp barely keeping up with some major jank).

So... I'm not sure what Mozilla is thinking here. They don't have many of those kind of devs, they don't have a GPU farm, they're not even contributing to promising webassembly projects like mlc-llm. They're just one of a bazillion companies that was ordered to get into AI with no real purpose or advantage. And while Gemma 2B may be the "first" model that's kinda OK on average PCs, we're still a long way away from easy mass local deployment.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I'm a local LLM tinkerer, and I've never touched or even looked at anything from Mozilla. The community would have if anything of theirs was super useful.

Everybody forgets that if chrome and chromium breaks away from Google because of this ruling, it's going to have the same issues as Firefox, if not worse because it's an arguably worse product. The ruling has been pronounced, but what will happen because of it is yet to be defined.

I needed, I would pay $5 per month in perpetuity for access to Firefox. Fuck google

Fuck.