- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.ml
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Imagine my disappointment when I realized “Firefox advance” wasn’t for the Gameboy advance :(
Seeing “the source is available here on GitHub”, “the project was forked and is now maintained as (other name)”, etc. after most of these really helps show the difference with Google. Well that and the length of the article, Google has far more deaths under their belt.
I used the Notes quite a bit and thought it was a mistake to get rid of it. People pay for notes and tasks related sync services, so it could have been a revenue source. I also miss Firefox Panorama
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).
Do you still use WASM? I’ve been exploring the space and wasn’t sure what the best tools are for developing in that space.
Nope. But I guess a mirror of WebAssembly Studio would still be the best starting point despite its slow development lately. The WAsm plugin for VSCodium was broken for me too.
Note that unlike JS, WASM won’t run from
file://URLs; you need to run a local http server or commit to an online repo to run your code. There might be anabout:configoption to change this but many IDEs (incl. WA Studio, presumably) come with servers for this reason.
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.
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.
the internet doesn’t run on ads. we were all fine before the megacorporations came in and started pushing ads down our throats for delivering the exact same services that already existed for free. it just so happens ads are more profitable, and with more profit, you have more ways to achieve exposure, which gives you more profit, ad infinitum.
point is, we’d be fine without ads.
The entitlement is real.
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.
Ok. But that is just you personally, and the internet carers to far more than just you.
The media I consume is mostly youtube
Which is ad-based, even if you and I likely use ublock.
I won’t miss anything that ran on ads
You won’t miss any YouTube content? Really? There’s not a single YouTube channel you like? You won’t miss hundreds of news websites? Game mod websites? Sites with Old game archives? Etc etc.
Ok whatever, let’s assume that’s right. It still doesn’t change anything. You feeling that way doesn’t mean ads will no longer exist.
Ads will exist regardless of your feelings on the matter, because so much of the internet is reliant on it. With that in mind, surely you’d rather ads not be the privacy nightmare they are right now, no?
I feel like people are shitting on a real improvement to the way things currently are in order to fawn over a completely unrealistic change. In other words, letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Enshittification isn’t an overnight thing, red flags are building and it’s important to call it out.
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
We already have one. They’re called luddites. They’ve always existed, and will bemoan any new technological advancement.
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?
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.
A few, not a lot.
Besides the 13 messaging platforms I’d say most of them haven’t.
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.
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.
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.
If you create a good product the market will pick it up, throwing cash at random projects and killing it when it doesn’t make huge profit sounds wasteful.
Committing resources to projects then keeping them/killing them depending on how they go really isn’t abnormal or a poor business practice, no matter how much you try to make it sound like one.
