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Is It Worth Killing Mozilla to Shave Off Less Than 1% From Google’s Market Share? - Open Web Advocacy
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this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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I'm not convinced it requires 1/2 a billion dollars to keep Mozilla running. I think Mozilla is mismanaged, wasteful, easily distracted by unrelated projects, & bogged down with 'bullshit jobs.'
I've yet to see convincing evidence to the contrary short of folks simply telling me 'developing browsers is insanely expensive!'
The modern internet, driven by corporate mandates, is rather complex. A browser needs to (at least):
And that's just the tip of the iceberg! I've come around to the idea that the modern internet is actually, to be technical here, totally fucked. Big Tech is going to keep pushing users deeper into walled proprietary gardens. They've already made the open internet so complex and heavy that it requires a multimillion dollar company (dependent on Google's allowance or massive ad dollars) to create a browser for it.
I think the only solution is to throw it all away and start over. Twitter and reddit aren't being "saved" by the "resistance" users. The concept of free and open exchange of ideas on the net is being saved by new protocols and services that are built to resist corporate ownership, like Gemini and the Fediverse.
It's going to be hard weening off the flashy, ad driven Web, but its the only way. Go download Lagrange and start browsing Gemini space. If you weren't around for the 90s era of GameFAQs and the mostly-text web driven by individual writers and hosts, then here's your chance to go back to a better way of doing things.
We can't "fix" an internet that's owned by Big Tech, we need new spaces owned by the people using them.
I guess a less extreme solution is the one we're all currently looking at. I'm posting from PieFed which more or less works from freaking Lynx.
I'm trying to stop using the bloated web entirely, and it's easier than I thought it would be.
I'd love to get into Gemini, but I've found the challenges of hosting a Gemini site too great to overcome. It's a fun space to look around in some times.
Burning things down and starting again is a silly fantasy. Just like the dream of revolution in politics, in practice it never works and only makes things even worse than they were already. This is a terrible take.
And that is why we are all still Egyptians who worship our dog faced Lord & Savior, Set.
No, you don't need a hovercraft to go grocery shopping.
A browser doesn't need to be multiplatform, or work on gopher, or build a JS VM from the ground up, or build a media renderer from the ground up, or build a text rendering engine from the ground up.
Building browsers is hard enough, you don't need to make it artificially harder by tacking on bullshit requirements.
Yeah, you can just use Google's VM, Google's renderer, Google's sponsored image library, write it in Google's language, and you can probably borrow some of the WebGL code from the Servo project.
Obviously the problem is so trivial when you're just bolting together premade components that the fairies delivered to you. Good thing none of those components are hard to write, hard to integrate, or written with corporate interests in mind.
Hey where's your snap-together browser project? It's so easy, all this free code just laying around.
Oh or were you arguing that I said you had to write everything from scratch? Because I didn't say that. I also didn't say that you needed all those things for communication, kind of the exact opposite. What exactly was the point of your "well acktshually" comment?
Unfortunately any viable web browser has to be able to browse the real web, which means the awful bloated web that is actually out there in the real world, rather than the clean and sane web that we idealists might wish for. Mozilla is at least partly to blame for the current situation, but that's not of much help for most users today. So here we are.
I always see the same developing browsers is hard sentiment. But if it’s not true, why hasn’t a completely free open source volunteer team created a popular usable browser yet?
There are other open source browsers/engines.
Aside from that, Imo, it's not cheap to do what Mozilla is doing, but 1/2 billion annually is probably more than enough.
I believe thar be grifting in them waters.
I mean, all those WebKit browsers are descended from Konqueror, which was free and open source. But those were different times.
That's happening right now: https://ladybird.org/
Like implementing fucking ai