In my utopia, Google would be forced to continue to pay out the current annual contract sum, at a decreasing percentage every year, for some number of years, to all affected companies, giving them the opportunity to divest and pivot.
The root problem doesn’t get fixed if the company with enough money to be a monopolist still has the money when this is “resolved.”
That is actually fairly smart. That way you don’t shock the ecosystem and effect the economy.
Mozilla chose a stupid business model. 🤷
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I always got the opposite impression: people here love Firefox. But it seems that’s part of why they’re critical of its shortcomings.
At least for me, if I’m criticizing something, it probably means I care at least a little bit about whatever I’m criticizing. Not worth time talking about things I actually dislike.
this does mystify me. only time I nearly dropped firefox was when they did the big change that broke add ons but firefox with the addons I like is the best browser for me. nothing they have done has been consequentially bad. philosophically maybe but the actual effect is not bad compared to any other options.
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For the money they are (were I guess) handed to set that it’s clearly worth it.
Not disagreeing with you. I just want to point out that Google is probably deliberately “overpaying” on this Mozilla deal, because they want to keep Firefox afloat, because they don’t want to catch a court ruling that they are monopolizing the browser market too.
Dirty tricks with web browsers is the antitrust charge that actually caught Microsoft in the 90s.
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oh yeah. duck duck go is for my firefox. duck duck go is another one with a lot of drama that amounts to nothing. have tried a few alts but went back.
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Only viable competitor is a bizarre thing to drop when browsers like Opera exist.
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Consider that many of the same people think of Arch as a viable daily driver distro for the everyman. Some folks are more accepting of jank than others.
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its an emotional reaction. google has always been bad, them doing a bad thing is just business as usual. who cares
but when mozilla does something bad? mozilla is supposed to be the good guy! they betrayed us!
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I don’t think people hate Firefox as much as people hate Mozilla and what they’re doing with Firefox.
It is shocking to me how many people on Lemmy hate Firefox
Although some people are Google fanbois or reactionary dumbasses, I think most of what you’re misinterpreting as “Firefox hate” is actually love for Firefox and hate for what Mozilla has done to it.
Most Firefox-critics’ feelings towards it are more like this:
I remember building Phoenix from source when it was basically still an experiment to decouple it from the suite. Good times.
Love the browser, hate the corpos desperately trying to fuck it up because that’s the cool thing to do to your software now days.
Don’t you think they dabbled on stupid projects and acquired some companies like pocket precisely because just a browser wasn’t enough to pay the bills?
Why does this percentage keep going up? Who keeps inflating the numbers? The first time I heard about this, it was like 64%. Then 77%. Now 81%?! Tomorrow, I’m gonna see a meme stating 97% of Mozilla’s income is from Google.
Um, it’s actually 114% of Mozilla’s total income.
The actual numbers are $510MM/y from Google out of $593MM/y total revenue. So 86% if my math is correct. It’s bonkers how dependent on a single deal they are.
Are they dependent?
All I see is Google throwing a fuck tonne of money at them, and Mozilla spaffing it on pointless crap. They could probably raise more if Google went away, but they could also reduce spend significantly if they didn’t have stupid money get thrown at them.
Its like giving your kids $100 a day. Sure they could blow it on pay to win games, but what would happen if you reduced it to $10 a day? Probably nothing of note, just less spending on crap.
I can’t say if they are completely dependent without seeing where the other ~$80MM comes from. If they come from products that require significant staff and server cost, then yes they are fully dependant. If the $$ comes from something they can keep going for much less than ~$80MM, then they are not.
They could probably raise more if Google went away
I’m interested in how you think Mozilla would raise more than half a billion dollars if they didn’t take any money from Alphabet/Google. Genuinely. In what ways could Mozilla raise money that they’re not doing right now?
That’s not what I said. Their fundraising is dead because they don’t need to raise any more cash.
They literally throw cash away each month. Without Googles dump truck money I am sure they could increase fundraising to raise what they actually need to operate. Not that they could increase fundraising to match Googles current contributions.
I think it’s fair to think that they could refocus their efforts on the browser if they didn’t have that large slush fund from Google. I don’t think “hey we don’t take Google money anymore” is going to lead to a lot of new donations, however.
Fire their overpriced C-Suite for starters
I doubt they would make Google stop paying Mozilla. That would make Google more of a monopoly
Google pays because Firefox has Google as the default search engine. That deal is where the problem lies.
I switched to brave anyway.
Which would ironically give even more monopoly over how the web is viewed to Google. Chrome and Firefox are just about the only two players in that space right now.
No they’re not, there’s safari and Edge. Don’t forget about opera.
:|
Sorry. I’m having a hard time keeping a straight face while I say that…
Edge is a Chrome clone. Safari exists purely because of Apple. It is designed to not work well so you get trapped in the Apple app store.
Lightweights!
Opera and Edge are Chromium based. Even most of the alternatives are still Google controlled.
There are still versions of Opera with their own original engine going around.
Damn, Presto should return. That thing could load like 300 tabs in like 30, maybe 60 MB RAM tops.
It’s likely if other browsers collapse they could rule chrome a monopoly too
Firefox; being open source as it is; is not in danger.
I suppose it’s time to fork Firefox. Can call the fork “Netscape Navigator”. Ya, I think that has a nice ring to it.
3,2,1… more spyware coming to Firefox.
Mozillas mo’ problems
Penalize Google many much monies and use some of those to endow a trust that gives yearly funding distributions.
Simple.
Coming soon: [Firefox - Mozilla Ads Edition]
Revenue of Mozilla Corporation. Not Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla chose to waste most of it.
…compensating their CEO of all people doing good work in there
Right? I don’t need AI BS. I just want a solid browser.
What AI bullshit? I didn’t get the memo.
There’s no mention of adding AI to the browser. It’s just an AI platform or ecosystem for development.
Mozilla has a finite amount of money. If they’re (as far as I’m concerned) wasting it on AI nonsense, that’s less development funds that can go toward Firefox.
I don’t know. I think for them it’s an opportunity to draw more attention and investments. Especially now with how hot AI is at the moment.
I think people are overreacting a bit.
While ML does have legit uses in many specific cases, this whole “throw ‘AI’ into everything” hype/trend is just blockchain all over again. IMO, the ones who are overreacting are the ones swept up in the hype.
In that there is a finite amount of money, there is also a finite amount of development that can go on at once. If they just pile tons and tons of bodies on what you might call useful endeavors, it can lead to bloat and the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.
What do you mean, you don’t want an opt-out ad tracker?
I kinda get why they (and other companies) have to try AI at the moment though.
It’s not what people claim it is, but it could end up being an essential tool for the modern world, and if they don’t invest in it early their business might end up getting left behind.
We’ve certainly seen companies fall because they’ve not tried to stay on the cutting edge before.
But is a bullshit generator even cutting edge in terms of web browsing? Feels like solutions without a problem.
We’ve certainly seen companies fall because they’ve not tried to stay on the cutting edge before
Best example I can think of is Kodak and digital cameras. They invented it then sat on it until it was too late because they didn’t want to cut into their film scam.
Sears. They got wrecked by the internet.
Sears had a massive mail order catalog. Easy to switch that to Internet, right? But they decided to focus on stores.
It’s quite unbelievable that it was literally right there. The logistics were like 60% solved for them already, the remaining 40% was just making sure the online content remained linked with inventory and fulfillment, and expanding that capacity.
“We think online shopping will be just a fad” - the unimaginable hubris…
I was refreshing myself on wiki. They launched prodigy, but it was too early for online shopping. So they probably got a bad taste for that kind of thing. A thing in venture capital is that it’s all about timing.
Nokia. They were at the top before iPhone. They couldn’t catch up with smart phones at all.
I believe Intel will be another potential example, but we’ll see about that.
I hate to see AI (I suppose we mean specifically GPTs in this instance) trashed all the time, just because companies use it incorrectly. They shove it in every hole they can to hike the stock price. But it’s a great tool, that arguably needs more time in the oven, which has legitimate helpful uses. Especially in the context of a browser.
For example, in Arc Browser I can semantically search the page/article for anything and it will show me the location of the information I need (ever tried to find the recipe itself in an article about the recipe?). I can also do some obvious stuff, like summarize and translate sections, which I could do by copying it into a dedicated service, but it’s definitely much more convenient being built-in.
Would be much better if it ran locally off the NPU, but we are not there yet.Downvotes from the people who believe that all “AI” is an LLM/GPT that must be trained on the collective stolen works of all humanity and requires all of South America’s collective power supply for just a day’s worth of queries
No one is protesting machine learning.
The lemmy community “Fuck AI” literally has
A place for all those who loathe machine-learning
as a description.
Yeah, lots of people are.
Because this comment reminded me of it, here’s a website that strips the garbage out of bullshit recipe articles. Copy/paste the url of the recipe into the box on this site.
That’s cool. It also uses LLMs, I presume?
Investors want AI BS that’s why.
But, but but, it’s AI!! It’ll solve
noneall of your problems!Netscape navigator ftw
I still have a retail copy somewhere on a CD. I wonder if it’ll even load on a modern OS.
