Yeah, this is part of the new Reaganomics I like to call AIconomics. The goal isn't to produce a good product, the goal to make something flashy that tech billionaires want to throw cash at. It's not unlike crypto. Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big. Meanwhile tech billionaires keep minting new ones to entice new suckers every other week. The tech billionaires want you hooked on AI so you'll give up your private info that they can sell to each other so they can cash in, the software companies are investing their time and resources into making AI LLMs in order to get tech billionaires to give them money. It's a viscous capitalist circle. Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation. But with Republicans in charge that will absolutely never happen. Trump practically made his entire cabinet out of billionaires and corporate shills. And too many Democrats gave them the thumb up, so don't count of Dems doing a whole lot to stall the big tech chokehold on everything either.
There's been investment bubbles, overshooting and disingenuous rent seeking in many economies before. It was temporarily reduced in many western economies by various FDR type policies in the '30s-'60s. The '70s and '80s were just the banks wresting back their freedom to implement market "rationality". And we get the benefits ever since.
People do keep voting for it though so it is hard to argue they're not satisfied. Even the ones who protest vote don't seem to see the "investment" markets as any part of the problem; or as important at all. That's either some pretty effective demagoguery, or some dumb fucking electorate.
How viscous is the cycle
Very. It's like molasses.
I'ld like to vote Cryptonimics as term, because it encompasses both the cryptic nature of the product, and the clear example of cryptocurrency.
Check out enshittification and the rot economy. I feel like those two terms encompass pretty much what we are seeing these days
You know you fucked up when even a traditionally hardcore Mozilla fan since the early 2000s like myself has had enuff and recently switched to Librewolf.
I'm with you. I was using Netscape way back and loved Firefox from its inception, and tried to convince everyone I knew to use it. Earlier this year I finally switched to Waterfox, and I haven't looked back. I tried Librewolf first, and it was great, but they don't have an app and that was a dealbreaker for me. Waterfox feels a lot like older Firefox UI-wise, and I love the tab containers.
Librewolf has tab containers as well. So does Firefox. Unless Waterfox works differently somehow?
Oh... so they do. I guess Waterfox just enabled it by default and I never noticed
Haha, that's ok. I had the same thing with my claim about pw manager in Librewolf.
Is it good so far?
Yes! A bit annoying with no built in pw manager but I manage. It did show me how much of the problems which I thought were Gecko related were actually Firefox related, tho.
Basically it's a faster, bluer, and less buggy Firefox. 🐺>🦊
One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi
...
Zawinski has repeatedly said:
Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
This makes sense to me. I initially thought everything that Proton does, that should have been Mozilla. They should have been a collection of services to compete with like O365 and Google One. So I didn’t see a problem with Mozilla selling a VPN, even though if I remember right it being just a Mullvad rebrand.
Right now to me it looks like Proton is the closest mostly missing a web browser and a more cloud office offering.
Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.
Linux kernel devs do Linux kernel development and distros small and large do the integration with everything else needed for an operating system, branding, support, etc. Sounds like Mozilla should have been the core devs for a number of reference software projects. Firefox browser engine. Maybe an equivalent to Electron based on Servo. Shouldn't have dropped Rust and been the steward for the reference Rust compiler. Could have been the steward for FirefoxOS/KaiOS/etc. Support PostmarketOS maybe.
Linux foundation stewards or contributes to all sorts of software projects not just the kernel but they're all pretty much things that are relevant for users of Linux operating systems. Mozilla could have found some software centric focus that in some way came together thematically. I would guess privacy focused browser and software services
Sadly I am running into more and more things that don't work on firefox. Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently. They don't say it is the browser. I don't know how they are doing it, but google is winning the fight.
When I asked a couple of developers who work on websites/webapps with a lot of moving parts, they said it was easiest to just test for chrome, since that's what most people use.
It's turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's so damn stupid. If your site works meaningfully differently in Firefox vs Chromium, you're already doing something very, very wrong.
Yep, this is why at least for me when I develop websites I use Firefox first for development to make sure that the website runs on Firefox.
It's ironic that I use Firefox personally but unfortunately we prioritized Chrome when I did more front end work too. Firefox would often render views differently compared to Chrome (Safari was also a shetshow) and we had to prioritize work ofc, especially for legacy stuff.
The thing is, as a pure guess, I would bet that it's Chrome that's not adhering to the web standards.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox at work recently once they added tab groups. A few parts of one of the web apps my team maintains straight up don't work. I mentioned it in a meeting, received a full 10 seconds of silence before someone said "Well customers aren't complaining..."
If a site I have to use doesn't work for no apparent reason, I e-mail the company's Support. Let them sort it out, or provide another way I can do what I'm trying to do. Personally, I think a lot of the problems are from more and more websites integrating privacy-invading "features", and FF interfering with their operation.
Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently.
I recall how South Korea literally painted itself into a corner for becoming too dependent on Internet Explorer after years of using it with a security implementation based entirely on ActiveX.
I'm currently using a user-agent switcher plugin. Allows me to spoof servers into believing I'm running a different browser.
Firefox still hasn't fixed Bug 1938998 despite me reporting it multiple times. There's a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile. I've been using the internet for 26 years, and have used Mozilla based browsers since 2001, I want them to survive to the next era of the internet, but they are struggling to keep up. Opera and Edge already gave up their engines, Webkit and Blink are basically the same engine with different standards enabled, and Firefox is under 2% on some days on Statcounter. I feel that soon AI based browsers using their own AI-engine will probably take over the internet soon anyway.
I use Firefox on mobile all the time. Works fine for me. The fact that I get adblock on mobile makes it a no-brainer to use over chrome.
I have never encountered that bug, seems like an issue with the duck duck go not doing proper url encoding. I daily Firefox on mobile and its the best option by far with all the available extensions and of course working adblock
I use it on mobile. It's mostly OK tbh, and the addition of a working ad blocker means it's far better than Chrome for me.
In fairness that is an invalid URL in my book, but it should at least be consistent across desktop and mobile, or at least tucked behind an option.
There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile.
And the reason is monopoly abuse by the big tech companies. Apple is banning other browser engines from the app store and does not allow Firefox onto iPhones. Google is shipping its own Chrome with every Android device and they are breaking their own sites like YouTube or Gmail on purpose for Firefox users and push them to install Chrome. Microsoft is bundling Edge with Windows as a default browser and will aggressively enable it as a default browser during updates.
I just moved back to ff in November, because of ubo. I have to move again? Where to?
Did you read the article? It says Firefox is the best choice you have, and all of the criticism is directed at the organization's leadership.
i’m running waterfox… it’s firefox, but with junk stripped out, and performance optimisations
there’s no real alternatives between chromium and firefox based engines, and chromium includes pretty much everything you’ve heard of except firefox
I run IronFox for Android and Librewolf on Desktop. Since they are both Firefox forks, migrating is not that bad.
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