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A forgotten one is webassembly.studio, an in-browser IDE for creating WASM projects with way less pain than other methods. It got discontinued the year I needed it for my school project. It was open source but I failed to rehost it myself and public mirrors only appeared after I spent days trying to make Emscripten work, tore my hair out over WebGL and then finally painfully built the whole thing with CSS (and a bit of JS; yes, it was indeed a disaster).
Twenty things Mozilla the company killed and they didn’t mention ITS OWN NAMESAKE APP. It’s didn’t ‘evolve’ into Firefox: they split the baby in half and cut away the connective tissue.
Seamonkey is still kinda alive.
Another day, more Mozilla FUD. I just saw the switched on Linux guy posted some too. They arent a perfect company, but lets not pretend they’re exactly like google or a mini google. It feels almost coordinated to get you to feel like all companies are compromised, so you should just use the popular thing and forget about privacy and security.
Enshittification isn’t an overnight thing, red flags are building and it’s important to call it out.
It feels almost coordinated to get you to feel like all companies are compromised, so you should just use the popular thing and forget about privacy and security.
People are criticizing Mozilla for the ads, tracking, and AI stuff. The stuff Google does. Criticizing Mozilla is not an endorsement of Google, in fact quite the opposite.
Their ad metrics thing is 100% private. Nobody, not even Mozilla, can tie the data back to you. Each data point is packaged separately (so that you can’t get all of it and easily work out who it is). Mozilla created an effective way to have genuinely privacy-respecting and metrics and they’re hated for it.
I don’t like ads, I use an adblock, but the internet runs on ads. Ads unfortunately have to exist if we still want all this online content, and if they do exist, they should be private.
With any hope, the likes of the EU will push for this over the kinds of ad systems that Google and Meta push.
As for the AI integration in Firefox - it runs locally and does stuff like offline translation (i.e not sending the contents of the page to Google translate), as well as enhanced screen reader functionality for blind people. Stop trying to equate it to the likes of ChatGPT.
Ads unfortunately have to exist if we still want all this online content
I DON’T want all this online content. I’m not on instagram/facebook/tiktok/whatever two-word website/app the next generation will worship. I don’t tweet. I don’t follow influencers. The media I consume is mostly youtube, and even that’s been recently decreasing. The internet can die tomorrow and I won’t miss anything that ran on ads, the biggest impact would be that now I can’t buy things online so I’d need to physically purchase some items.
Fuck this version of the internet. If there’s ever a moment that adblockers stop fighting the good fight, I’m cutting costs and just not paying for internet anymore. It’s not worth it.
It is not really FUD to point out that Mozilla wastes ungodly amounts of money on projects of dubious utility instead of investing it into their browser. Their current trajectory doesn’t inspire much confidence either. Mozilla started to waste even more money on ‘AI’ features nobody asked for.
Mozilla doesn’t exist to fund Firefox. Firefox exists to fund Mozilla. It’s been that since the very fucking beginning: Mozilla is a general internet charity that makes money with a browser. It’s always been that way. It never has been any different. I may have to repeat myself: The purpose of Mozilla isn’t to fund Firefox the purpose of Firefox is to be a money-maker for Mozilla’s charitable causes.
usually you invest in the main product to drive higher returns for diversifying. diversifying first means your baseline is unstable.
Actually, their new AI thing is actually useful: stays on-device, and summarizes web pages and videos.
But yes, they could stand to spend more money on the browser, and less on their CEO and other non-browser things.
Yeah. Offline translation (i.e. that doesn’t send data to Google to translate), better screen reader functionality for blind people? Sign me the fuck up.
People are just seeing “AI” and getting upset about it. Absolutely stupid.
Also they made llamafile We need a slur for the obnoxious and deluded anti ai people
I’ll be honest, when I first heard that Mozilla had come out with an AI I figured it was on the back of them trying a couple different ad scenarios, and assumed the worst. Pleasantly surprised by Orbit.
it’s a good idea to not look to deeply into the historic actions of the creator of llamafile. she’s pretty polarising.
Care to share some highlights?
she was the face of the occupy wall street movement, but her views back then were more ancap than anti capital. while working for google she tried to petition the us government to shut itself down and hand the reins over to the tech industry, with google’s ceo as president.
the base of the APE library that powers llamafile is called cosmopolitan libC, iirc in direct reference to the old soviet term.
to give credit she’s mellowed out a lot in recent years.
I don’t care who they are or what their Xitter history is.
The tools is great, the tool is not backdoored. I ruthlessly use effective tools that I can get my hands on.
Using open source software on its own does not even entails economic support for its creator.
llamafile is not really “effective”. it’s incredibly impressive, but it’s the opposite of effective. it’s a collection of a bunch of hacks reliant on coincidences in OS design, and works by basically recompiling itself on the fly to work with different architectures.
if you want effective, run llama.cpp compiled with actual optimizations for your platform.
The Mozilla FUD where I said I like Firefox and pointed out how many of the projects continued in some form after Mozilla ended them?
I wonder if Mozilla would’ve benefitted if something like Hello was still around when the pandemic hit. Hello was a Firefox feature that made video chatting easy. You just needed to click the link.
20 dead Mozilla and Firefox products
Those are rookie numbers!
–A single Google product manager, probably
People talk about dead Google products, but a lot of them have just been superceded by other products.
Honestly a number of these were abandoned for reasons that are fair enough.
Additionally, lots of these are open source and either have been or can be forked.
Many of these have public, archived repositories, differently from hundreds of dead Google projects.
The loss of FirefoxOS was quite a shame at the time, but i can’t say i miss the rest. Servo, on the other hand, is all but dead. Cannot wait to see what the future holds for the project
so you missed the huge amount of effort going into Servo recently?
Servo isn’t dead it’s just on slow burn. Also, under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation Europe. As far as Mozilla is concerned it has served its purpose: Prototype stuff that then got included in Firefox to get rid of a quite large amount of technical debt.
The long and short of it is: Firefox is supposed to make money for Mozilla’s charitable causes. It’s not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
I think Firefox OS could have a successful reboot today. JavaScript frameworks were not what they are now, and between react, vue, svelte, and angular, I think we are in a good place.
I feel electron and tauri have demonstrated how well JavaScript can be used for interface while allowing it to access system resources in a safe way.
Perhaps it should not be run by Mozilla, though, IMO they should focus on Firefox.
it did. it lives on as the proprietary KaiOS, used in cheap feature phones.
At least they tried.
You mean they throw a lot of money at the wall hoping that something will stick?
That’s how it works, yes.
You spend money creating something, hoping the market will pick it up.