I have an idea for Mozilla: cut the random activism projects, keep Firefox competitive and resume the experimental stuff once you've got the browser sorted.
A browser that's not pushed by an advertising company is really important. If we lose Firefox, we lose badly, and these diversions are putting that key bulwark at risk.
I'm not a fan of making Google break up, nor Facebook. I don't think breaking them up serves the public interest best. I'd rather have stricter oversight and regulation of certain aspects.
How would Chrome as a standalone business generate revenue?
That's the worst way to come at the question, because then you're judging why a company does two things and you're dangerously close to overregulating. For decades GE made light bulbs, aircraft engines, washing machines, and nuclear reactors, and there was nothing wrong with it. Why can't Google make a search engine, and an office suite?
My question here was how would would we benefit from the breakup? And how would some products which are dependent on he search revenue survive? At least they sell GSuite so it's an actual competitor to Office.Chrome is just to get more people using a browser that makes more web experiences better so they'll use more Google products.
It is not a problem if a company makes two (or more) separate products. But it is when these products are integrated into each other in ways that aren't open to others, or when there are any kinds of deals where you get a product for free for or at a lower price if you also buy another.
These things discourage customers from mixing products from different companies, thus reducing competition.
Another way to look at it is that there are two ways for a large company to get its software to work well with others: Either it participates in open standards, or it creates its own ecosystem to lock its customers into. The former is better for customers, but companies obviously choose the latter. So we need to take that option away from them.
I don't know if this applies to Google Docs and search. It might have been a bad example.
If a product can't survive on its own, it should die – that is how a market economy works.
I paid for Netscape back in the day and I’d pay quite a bit annually for Firefox or some other browser. But people are used to not paying for browsers and I’m not very convinced most or maybe not even enough people would.
If the Mozilla Foundation really has nothing to do with the organization that develops Mozilla Firefox, they should consider using a name that isn't "Mozilla" or "Firefox".
As it stands, the primary activity of the Foundation is to take money and goodwill earned by Firefox and divert it to unrelated activism.
How should they make it clearer? Their donate page says the donations are to "carry out our mission to keep the Web open and free" and links to a FAQ that details what the donations are used for and how Firefox is separate.
Except, "keep the web open and free" was a big part of the marketing around Firefox when the target was IE.
The New York Times ad was paid for through donations to present an alternative to the closed ecosystem dominated by one browser that didn't follow open standards.
Early versions of Firefox featured links to various news organizations and stories pulled from their feeds, until certain jurisdictions threatened to block the browser entirely.
At some point their missions may have diverged, but the marketing of both were closely intertwined. MoFo accepted donations and other sources of funds which it used, in part, to fund development of a browser by MoCo. Other projects came later, but the community's understanding of their respective roles remained the same.
As a long-term observer I followed this closely when the Foundation and Commercial split was announced, and remember reassurance s about the core mission being loudly proclaimed.
>The New York Times ad was paid for through donations
While true, those donations were largely from sources connected to Netscape. If they had built a normal corporation, it'd be startup capital.
>MoFo accepted donations and other sources of funds which it used, in part, to fund development of a browser by MoCo
Mozilla Corporation saw $60 million in revenue in the first year, at no point were the donations a significant source of income.
>remember reassurance s about the core mission being loudly proclaimed.
Here's the actual "core mission" they launched at the time, note the pledge containing
>Use the Mozilla assets (intellectual property such as copyrights and trademarks, infrastructure, funds, and reputation) to keep the Internet an open platform;
At first I thought it is a tool to fight against clickbait / spam videos, which could be quite useful. But no, it is a tool to report videos about opinions that made you feel uneasy. Wow.
From my point of view the proper way to solve this is to educate people and build up "media competence".
Who defines what a harmful video is? Such classification is always influenced by current trends, social norms and so on.
What might be harmful to a child might be not even worth a shrug to an adult. What is fact today, might be laughable tomorrow and heresy the day after. Have fun navigating this.
If you think that youtube guides people on downward spirals towards extremism and is not willing to acknowledge or change it - talk to your kids and peers about it. Repeat this until they are able to decide for themselves.
But pushing some information (sort of propaganda) and hiding some information (sort of censorship) both lead down a dangerous path.
I can't put my finger right on the spot, but it seems like nuking a hurricane.
There’s a sucker born every minute. Or more than one sucker per minute, even. Far more people join the Internet every day than could possibly be reached by education. That’s kinda what “Eternal September” was: the moment when the Internet began growing too quickly for the existing social mores of IT people to become impressed onto the next generation of Internet users.
Barnum’s sideshows eventually stopped, but it wasn’t education that stopped them. Mostly, it was government regulation stripping away all the big draws (the big-top shows) by making a lot of them (rightfully) illegal. That just required a few experts and politicians to achieve consensus on the subject; a secular shift in public opinion wasn’t required.
>But pushing some information (sort of propaganda) and hiding some information (sort of censorship) both lead down a dangerous path
What information is this pushing or hiding? This is trying to better understand how YouTube is making these recommendations, so it is a known factor when you talk to your kids and peers.
> What information is this pushing or hiding? This is trying to better understand how YouTube is making these recommendations, so it is a known factor when you talk to your kids and peers.
Well, I personally doubt that this project aims at purely understanding the recommendation logic and then doing nothing. But i might be mistaken. Time will tell.
What kind of useful information can this provide? What actual use could Mozilla make from this information? Mozilla used to be about privacy and technology, but now its asking us to share with them our embarrassing habits of video watching?
Can it report Mozilla Decision Regrets? Because this is such a out of focus feature from a company that develops the only browser that's not developed by for-profit company and not chromium based.
This looks even worse to after reading that many brilliant engineers were let go due to financial reasons.
The reason you stumble upon youtube videos that make you uncomfortable is because we have a free and open web where anyone can publish whatever they want (except the most extreme content such as terrorism how-tos).
I don't see how this Mozilla tool could ever contribute to making the web more free and more open; in fact it seems to be designed by activists to make the web _less_ free and _less_ open.
Understanding how YouTube's algorithm works provides a more free and open web as it would be easier for anyone to use the algorithm to improve their views.
I really don't understand why people think this makes the web less free and open. Somebody voicing their opinion about a video to a third party doesnt block the video.
As opposed to... firefox? It's frequently pointed out in firefox/mozilla threads that donations to mozilla foundation does not go toward firefox development, since that's done by mozilla corporation (the for-profit subsidiary of mozilla foundation).
This is the sort of thing I find myself frequently forgetting, too. After all, it stands to reason that the open source browser would be funded by the non-profit Mozilla entity, not the for-profit Mozilla entity.
Honestly, short of going and looking it up, I haven't got a clue what the for-profit mozilla entity does other than the browser. Sign deals exchanging money for the default search engine position?
> After all, it stands to reason that the open source browser would be funded by the non-profit Mozilla entity, not the for-profit Mozilla entity.
Why would that stand to reason? Firefox makes Mozilla money (through search provider sponsorship), and therefore needs to be a company to receive that revenue. Nothing else Mozilla does makes them money, and therefore nothing else they do needs to be a company. What would you imagine the Mozilla Corporation exists to do, if not to make money from Firefox (and then plow that money back into Firefox development)?
After a year or two, Mozilla realized that the foundation would not make a third of it's revenue from donations, so they needed to create a taxable corporation.
Wow, just straight out installing an add-on just to help Google train it's YouTube recommendation algorithm. Why are you devoting resources to an extension instead of letting Google do it?
Funnily enough, if Mozilla just focused on keeping Firefox competitive they would do more good for the world than whatever these random activist projects are supposed to be
It’s pretty stunning to me that this tool could have been made without its authors recognizing that it serves a very specific belief system. No mention of that fact anywhere.
A simple act of etiquette would be to recognize your own astounding biases and at least put up a little warning sign or something: “Made by and for American Progressivism Activists”.
A browser that's not pushed by an advertising company is really important. If we lose Firefox, we lose badly, and these diversions are putting that key bulwark at risk.