Copying portion of the comment I said under another comment:
I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.
It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget that.
Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want to be with them.
I switched back to Firefox around the quantum release and have been very happy with it since. I certainly have some complaints, but it's night and day compared to what Google wants me to deal with.
Ofcourse it is. But that also doesn't make my above comment wrong though. Not to mention, many were silent for so long against their actions. Now it looks like the entire community has started voicing against it. The ball is now on Mozilla's court.
Not to mention there is more than just technical aspect with Firefox and community. A lot of people have invested a ton of time in it.
Mozilla warrants all the flack they are getting. I am just saying they can't virtue signal their way through this. It wont work.
I am sorry sir. Somebody who says they want to put back control to people using Internet and someone saying humans over profit cant NOT expect pushback for their actions. They are going against the entire community. You cant go for the saviour of the open internet, BS the community and not get push back.
I would argue mozilla doesnt have general audience like google chrome. They have OSS enthusiasts, privacy enthusiasts, power users kind of crowd. Buying a behavioural ads company which will do data surveillance or shoving ai is not what we want.
Not to mention, I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.
It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget that.
Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want to be with them.
I'm not saying whether they should/shouldn't get pushback about these things - just that 95% of this pushback in places like this comes from <1% of their userbase and isn't as relevant to Mozilla as those making the feedback would like to believe. Meanwhile, the main portion of the userbase is leaving for completely different reasons and doesn't even know what this kind of stuff like MV3 is, let alone care about it.
Firefox definitely has a general audience much larger than any measure of power users. More than half of the users don't have a single extension installed, and that counts language pack extensions. Half have <= 4 cores, <= 16 GB of RAM, or a 1080p screen. The most common OS is Windows 11 at 44% - with Windows 10 at 34.5% and Windows 7 still above Linux. Over 1/3 of their ~200 million userbase is in the US, and even if every tech-literate power user or privacy fiend in the US used Firefox (they don't) it still wouldn't amount to that many people.
The average Firefox user is nothing like you or I, nor will they find their community in catering to privacy. The community over IE was that IE wa plain awful to use and Firefox just did everything better. It didn't matter if you cared about privacy, performance, standards, community, customizability, compatibility, or whatever - it just mopped the floor with the popular option. That's not going to be the situation with Chrom*, it's actually active and well funded, nor is focusing on a single minority which demands to exclude things other groups care about (even if you and I would prefer not to have them) going to bring them back to the forefront.
Most people who has Firefox installed is either installing because that's what they have always used or is using because someone recommended it. They have to be explicitly installed. Keep that in mind. Don't you remember firefox installation fest and stuff? That 1% pushes Firefox to non-users at home, in their companies and where not. That 1% is responsible for a lot of the rest of the 99%.
The folks Mozilla is trying to attract don't care for all of these. Their biggest selling point is privacy and being community friendly. If it's getting deteriorated, why should the general folks who don't know what Manifest V3 is install it?
Especially when tech enthusiasts are talking bad about it. What impression does it make to a non-tech guy who woke up one day drinking filter coffee and thought... Huh! From today onwards, I want privacy!!??
I agree most either have used it for a long time or because someone recommended it. It's nearly tautological. I disagree the recommendations for the average user only/primarily come from <1% of the user base or that's what makes the installs stick when they do. Power users desperately want to feel key to the success, but the reality is people stick with a browser based on what it does for them not how much it does for their power user friend who recommended it 20 years ago. The same is true in reverse: power users can comment here all they want about privacy nits or what Mozilla should do blah blah but it doesn't matter to the average user because they aren't reading tech forums for opinions on browsers. Most Firefox users probably couldn't tell you what Mozilla even is in relation to Firefox.
The 200 million normal users can also recommend trying to use Firefox all the time to their friends again, they just don't have a reason to do so because often, for their cares, Chrome and others are the ones with better target to them. Pre-installs is definitely a problem, as it always has been, but it never stopped Firefox before.
If the non-tech person wakes up one day and decides privacy is a key concern for the browser then they join the few that learn about each in this detail and pick from there and the niche has a new member. When things like 1,000,000,000 people wake up and decided mobile performance and battery life were important for years it resulted in Firefox having next to no presence on mobile more than any other reason.
Naturally - losing a few hundred million users is likely why they are trying to find a different strategy than focusing on privacy or what power users comment on in the following decade and expecting better results for some reason.
Mozilla's funding comes almost entirely from the Google search deal. They can't afford to let the user count continue to dwindle on a principled stance alone. They either need to find workable alternative income of the same scale (which they've tried at least a dozen things that didn't pan out) or try to focus on what the average user wants in a browser rather than what the GNU fan power user comments in tech forums. They don't need a few principled people to stick with it, they need to be popular with the average person again.
See this is kind of hitting the nail on the head here.
Mozilla is treated like a PhD holder and nobel prize winner, and Google is treated as a stupid baby.
When the stupid baby shits his pants, nobody cares. In fact, they expect it. But when the PhD student gets a tiny piece of information wrong about the French revolution, they're crucified and called an idiot.
Mozilla makes mistakes, but the objective reality is that even if you add up alllll the mistakes, they're MILES ahead of Google when it comes to how they treat their users.
Google Chrome users get fucked up the ass and then beg for more. Firefox users get sent flowers and chocolate and then complain the chocolate has nuts.
The stupid boy is working in bad faith. Everybody knows. And nobody has invested even quarter the time with the stupid boy like the community has with Mozilla.
Mozilla is also not making mistakes. They are changing direction.
They started this by taking privileges and power from community leaders around 2015/16? There was a huge exodus of community then if ypu remember. And one after the other it reached until they bought a behavioural ad company. Its directly in conflict of interest with the humans over profit BS they are whining in marketing.
They have been in bad faith for so long. I dont see mistakes, I see pivoting. So, they can't just piggy back good PR while talking giving power back to internet users BS. Come on dude, they can't have it both ways.
They are yet another bad faith company saying they are not evil. That is it. Bare minimum, they should at least stop virtue signalling.
> Given oligopoly cloud corps are the biggest exploiters of OSS
Not exploiters unless they are breaching OSS licenses. Why do you think Cursor exists? The forked and made VS code their own. Why is it exploiting when Amazon or MS is doing the same? Am nowhere close a fan of these corps but we need to be very clear when throwing words around like exploiters.
All the LLMs are probably breaching the OSS license though. We don't care about that cos we need it. How can we complain about something we use daily eh?
I wrote about this recently. If we adopt SAS at the cost of OSS, its gonna make it even more harder to fight against corps which are against users and communities. We need to rally for OSS more than ever IMO.
My problem is when you automate, the benefits are not passed on to the entire chain of people involved even though we start the discussion with that. So what do we do?
In a competitive market, efficiency gains are generally going to end up as lower prices to the customer, which is the main way that ordinary people benefit from them. That doesn't happen when the market is consolidated and the oligopoly keeps the gains themselves.
So, ensure competitive markets by thwarting regulatory capture and enforcing antitrust laws.
Yes, that has been the rule for now. But I am wondering that if the prices drop so much, but the price to pay for that abundance would be the loss of significant part of job market, then how can we keep the economy humming ?
We would need to find a way to give money to people so they can keep participating in the economy even though everything is cheap. If not UBI, we would need to find ways for the majority to do something that is not automated, and give them some coins in exchange.
For millennia the currency has been energy (human labor, then machines) and intelligence (human intelligence, then artificial intelligence). If energy and intelligence price goes down, and the amount of energy and intelligence increases, then what is left for humans to claim some reward/coins ?
> But I am wondering that if the prices drop so much, but the price to pay for that abundance would be the loss of significant part of job market, then how can we keep the economy humming ?
Money is an abstraction, so prices are always relative to wages. If prices go down, that's equivalent to wages going up. If your costs are $1000 and your wages are $1000, that's the same to you as if your costs are $100 and your wages are $100.
So the problem solves itself. You previously needed a job that would pay you $1000 to cover your costs, now you only need one that pays $100. And there is still $100 of work that needs to be done, because that's why things cost $100 instead of $0.
I agree, so the prices of everything would go down. People would be unemployed. Do we plan to give some money to pay for basic stuff (food, shelter) ?
Even if the cost for food and shelter is $1 per month, if there is no revenue, it is still too expensive, right ?
I am trying to understand the speed comparison between how fast the prices will go down, vs. how fast people will lose their jobs. If job loss goes faster than the price decrease, we might have a problem to solve.
But if we fully automate how to make and sell and deliver TVs and blenders and now I can get a 200" TV for $2 and a blender for $0.05 but now I don't have a job so I can't afford even a basic apartment what do we do with our society?
Like sure all the goods are stupid cheap but things that are actually naturally rivalrous and exclusive like real estate continue to hold value most random people are pretty fucked it seems.
> But if we fully automate how to make and sell and deliver TVs and blenders and now I can get a 200" TV for $2 and a blender for $0.05 but now I don't have a job so I can't afford even a basic apartment what do we do with our society?
Delivery should be automated.
Rent would obviously crater as building housing craters too (robots making it, materials being extracted and manufactured by robots too). But again, it would still cost something (energy at very least and assuming energy is not free).
So I suspect that even if 100% is automated, we would still need little money to pay for the basics (food, shelter).
> but now I don't have a job so I can't afford even a basic apartment what do we do with our society?
Apartments aren't land, they're buildings. Buildings can be made arbitrarily tall; if we built tall buildings we'd have more housing units than people long before we ran out of land.
So if there is a machine that can build buildings for free, apartments should be cheap. If there isn't a machine that can build buildings for free, get a job building buildings for money.
Even if 100% automated, there might still be a residual cost to building as it needs energy (assuming than raw material is free). I do not think that because the building would be not free, it would allow human to compete (too slow, inaccurate, etc.)
Make sure you try to talk in English and see. Most people should know or atleast understand english there. And Kerala food can be spicy and it's hot out there. Make sure your drink enough water and stay hydrated.:)
I do not agree with the parent, however the first part of your objection is not really valid. Red Hat were able to ditch Centos because they owned it. You canbase something independent on RH.
What drives me personally nuts about the CentOS saga is all the “community” hand-waving about creating a bit for bit clone of a distro.
There can be no “community just shipping builds of RHEL code as, by definition, you cannot change anything. That means you cannot contribute. In my view, an Open Source “community” cannot just be people that use things for free. It is supposed to be about collaborating to build things.
At least now we have Alma Linux which strives to be ABI compatible with RHEL but builds it themselves from CentOS Stream. They actually build something. They can actually contribute (and they do). They can innovate. For example, they have continued the x86-64v2 builds even though RHEL has abandoned them. On Alma, you can at least claim to be building a community.
I do not use any of these distros by the way, in case you think I am shilling something.
It warms my heart to see someone else recognize this. The bug-for-bug model that classic CentOS Linux followed was fundamentally broken. Sure there were lots of consumers, but without the ability to fix bugs or accept contributions it was dysfunctional. The underlying motivation of the CentOS Stream changes was resolving this conflict, so that bugs can be fixed and contributions can be merged, resulting in a more sustainable distro.
LLMs will have limited seats for external urls. So they will eventually go for paid urls OR even organically, it logically makes sense for them to prioritise StackOverflow, Reddit, Quora kind of sites instead of independent websites. It will wield more advertising power to do this. Following money makes sense?
This is just waiting for the dust to settle in I guess.
That's a very valid concern, especially for content-heavy sites (blogs, wikis). If an LLM can summarize the answer, the user has no reason to click.
However, I suspect there's a distinction between Information and Utilities.
An LLM can summarize a StackOverflow discussion on "how to compress a PDF," but it cannot (yet) reliably perform the heavy client-side processing to actually do it securely in the browser without uploading data.
For tools and utilities, the "click" is still necessary to perform the action. My bet is that AI will act more as a dispatcher for specific tasks ("Go here to fix X") rather than just a summarizer.
But you're right — once LLMs get native, sandboxed execution environments, even tools might get absorbed.
I think indie products win on specific constraints.
If a user prompts generic stuff like "best pdf editor", the AI will likely route them to Adobe or the paid giants.
But users often prompt with constraints: "compress pdf locally", "convert pdf without uploading", or "pdf tools no signup".
That's where the indie product fits in. The big incumbents usually require uploads (for data harvesting) or logins (for growth). By strictly adhering to "privacy-first / local-only", my site satisfies a constraint that the big players structurally cannot.
I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.
It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget that.
Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want to be with them.
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