They recently announced terms of service that they (I think?) Partially walked back. But honestly it’s a longer term issue-

Mozilla is dependent on Google giving them lots of money to be the default Firefox search engine, and anti-monopoly rulings in Europe may mean Google has to stop doing that, which would really jeopardize Mozilla’s financial sustainability

The gecko engine is way behind on web standards, and while it generally gets the job done for average users, I’ve learned recently lots of devs don’t test their sites with it or support it not just because it’s a minority browser, but because it doesn’t support a lot of stuff and is hard to work with.

Mozilla seems to believe their path forward financially is AI features. Which are very unpopular with a lot of the folks who follow Mozilla, even if implemented thoughtful, and seems like a dubious financial future given even huge companies like openai are struggling to make ai financially self sustaining.

Add to it the privacy preserving ad tracking stuff they wanted as an alternative to cookies a while back, and the picture doesn’t really get better

All of these are small things. The compatibility with web standards isn’t the end of the world for most users. A big bug was/is that firefox rendered gradients horrendously for like 12 years or something with the bug reports just sitting there, but most Foss nerds who use firefox don’t super care if a website’s gradient looks crappy. The features that chrome has but Firefox doesn’t aren’t dealbreakers for most users. The privacy preserving trackers or whatever they were called seemed at least relatively thoughtfully implemented from a privacy standpoint. AI could hypothetically be done in a way that isn’t totally shitty, and maybe possibly they could build a financial future out of it. The terms of service debacle could stop here and not devolve into actual enshitification.

But it all culminates together in feeling like mozilla is out of touch with their core audience and has no real viable plan for staying afloat, sans google paying them shitloads of money to be the default browser engine. :/

True, but I’m not one to let perfect be the enemy of good.

I definitely agree. They feel deeply confused about their audience and like they perpetually flounder trying to find a sustainable direction or future :/

Aw, fuck yeah! I’m glad you mentioned it :)

Is that in the video or just your hope? If that’s the case I missed it, and that would be super exciting!

The part with the progress graph compared to other browsers over time is especially cool!

That would be very fun

It occurs to me this could be considered a low effort post, if this isnt welcome please feel free to take it down or let me know and take it down myself, I don’t wish to submit stuff that isn’t a fit for the community :)

A well written article, thank you for sharing. I think this did a better job of characterizing why people are so frustrated than most things I’ve seen.

There’s been lots of critisisms of how callus the collective response has been, but at it’s core, the anger folks have really isn’t about worshipping a killer, it’s about how humanity seems to belong exclusively to the rich. All while they systematically deprive the poor of their basic human dignity and at times, even lives.

If you move sim racing, would you mind replying to me to let me know? I follow the current one just cause I think sim racing is neat. If it gets moved I’d love to follow the new one

(Totally fine if that’s too much work :)

I appreciate you mentioning that, thats how I’m considering using the 5 if it ends up as my phone replacement, but I have a hard time interpreting the info around wireless frequency bandwidths supported 🙃 I like pretty user interfaces, networking hurts my brain

I don’t mind a little bit of simplification, as the previous logo had a lot of little granular details that arent going to be as legible at different scales, but I’m not sure I’m entirely in love with the execution here. I like that they kept the nodes offset as opposed to the previous version for smaller scale applications, but the point where the left node originates from is too close to the base of the house, putting too many corners in close proximity for them to read clearly enough as separate corners and for them to not just merge into a bit of an organic wiggle if you’re not looking close enough.

I don’t hate it though, and I think overall its a decent improvement in some respects. But I think the old one had more character, and was a bit better executed, even if it didn’t works as well at all scales

Dope!

Just that it gives me a route that feels like it makes more sense. I’ve been trying out organic maps and OSMand lately in place of routes I would normally drive with google maps, and previously it had felt like OSMand had the better routing but organic maps had the better interface (though there are some aspects that are better with OSMand, namely the display/label for the next turn is a little crummy in organic maps) but lately the routing has been good enough in organic maps that I’ve been preferring to use it over OSMand. I can’t wait to see it continue to improve

Aw fuck yeah! I dont have android auto but thats still super cool. I’m loving the improvements to routing lately

Thanks for posting to let folks know about it! I’m curious to see what the new strategic plan and project priorities are

Oh, Yeah I agree. I was referring to the mods who decided to ban the piracy communities, not the bigoted guy who loves intellectual property law

That’s a very fair argument and I appreciate you explaining that, though I don’t think it changes my stance on whether I agree with their decision. I feel there’s still a difference between hosting it directly vs the federated nature of the platform meaning that the content is copied so it can be served to an end user. Banning the communities feels a bit knee jerk to me, and it doesn’t help that the person pushing for the changes is clearly not interested in reasonable discussions about how the platform we’re on should or shouldn’t dictate ethical choices for their users (and is also a raging homophobe).

Issues with the person pushing mods to make this change aside (since thats essentially irrelevant to whether it was the right call in a vacuum. Doesn’t matter that the guy sucks), the decision doesn’t sit right with me, even if I can empathize with the provided rationale.

I’m not really inclined to immediately write off anyone who makes a decision I don’t like as a shitty person and bad faith actor, but I certainly don’t agree with their decision.

Just about finished setting up my new account here on Lemm.ee, hopefully it’ll do a better job of providing the kind of vanilla experience I’m looking for, where I’m the one deciding what I do or don’t want to see.

I genuinely do understand concerns about legal issues and the risk of facilitating illegal activities- but its not even hosted on their instance, why would it mater that the communities EXIST. They’re literally hosted by someone else…?