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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Having a separate, open source JavaScript engine is in everyone’s interests even if they don’t know what they’d lose without the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox. I’m a web developer and Mozilla has protected the open web for all of us and if people understood what they’ve done, they’d all donate.
Google and Microsoft cannot and should not control standards. Mozilla is the conscience of the industry. Support it or you won’t know what you lost.
Support it or you won’t know what you lost.
Note that the best way to support it is to actually use its products, Firefox in particular. That's what gives Mozilla the ability to influence the direction of the web and web standards.
They actually have money in the bank, they just aren't profitable on their own in any way, and rely on search partnerships for yearly funds. I think they are just being responsible here and cutting people who aren't working on relevant projects going forward.
I’m not saying they are the right size. Just that if we lose Mozilla and Firefox, it’ll be almost as bad as losing Wikimedia for certain things. We need to protect the open web.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Mozilla (the foundation) is still involved with Firefox, so chance that your donation won't go toward maintaining the engine. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-do/
Mozilla (the company) manages Firefox and doesn't seem to accept donation. They do accept manpower contribution: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute
Yeah, employing this many employees, the donations would not cover it and you can hardly guarantee a stable job position. It might take just one scandal (whether it's true or not) for everyone to stop donating.
The Mozilla Foundation uses donation money rather for political activism and they've also often distributed money to important open-source projects which are too small to collect donations.
The problem is that the vast majority of end users prefer apps over websites. They have no clue whatsoever that 99% of all apps are essentially just wrapped websites.
Since Mozilla has been unable to find a viable business model (No, relying on Google handouts is not a viable business model) I fear that there is only one possible future and a free web is not part of it.
This is the only realistic answer. Corporations have effectively decided that the future of the web is closed source proprietary javascript bloatware apps that are all functional skinner boxes. Many people, especially young people, have no clue how to use an actual computer. It's "click the bubble to make it pop and give us your mom's credit card number to unlock super premium bubbles." That's the future of the internet. But probably worse.
In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.
Yeah, I'm not sure this is the "renewed focus" we're looking for, chief
Hmm. Yeah might be a big mistake if they add more bloat.
Absolutely. I suppose the AI stuff could be disabled in config but it would still be more dead weight to download with every update, like Pocket and the other shit they built into the browser.
Despite Firefox’s declining marketshare on desktop the browser is in use health. It’s fast and feature enough to hold its own against its rivals
Huh?
AI
No AI writes this badly
No, they usually write this worse. If this is Mozilla's AI they're fucking up something fierce.
And a bad one too. Modern LLMs can write flawless English at 7B.
"is in good health"? I was looking for autocorrect typos but can't figure out anything likely, unless they're not using querty.
Yeah that's badly written, but Firefox is actually gaining de desktop marketshare now!
(According to gs.statcounter.com)
The problem with stats like these are that Firefox users (and the browser's defaults) block a lot of the scripts and images used for tracking.
Cloudflare's stats show higher Firefox usage (4.737% for 2023 Q3), although that's still less than even Edge. My own logs show more still, although my visitors are more technical than usual.
"trustworthy AI"
Why? Why can't we have even a single decent browser? Servo is my last hope.
I'd never heard of Servo before this, but judging from the website it's nowhere near a GUI offering. The work they're doing on the engine looks solid (to me as not-a-developer) but it's a telltale sign that there are no UI screenshots on their landing page. So, not an alternative to Firefox yet.
Because, as pointed in the page, Servo is being developed as a(n embeddable) Rendering Engine, not as a full blown end user Browser.
Its alternatives are not Chrome, Safari or Firefox, but Webkit, Blink and Gecko
There's an example GUI called Servoshell, but it is more of a testing ground and example on how to embed the engine in an app than a serious alternative to anything currently in the market.
Already this kind of work is difficult and daunting. Adding to it a full GUI would make it completely impossible for the current size and financial backing Servo has.
Big words aside it just means that Servo wants to be only one of the parts that compose a real browser: the one that takes HTML, Javascript, WASM and translates them into the things you see on your monitor. All the user facing functionality are left to the devs of the app that embed it.
Thanks for the big word elaboration! 👍
While it's not an alternative right now, I think Servo's focus on being embeddable might help it in the long run. A big issue with Gecko is that it was difficult, if not impossible to embed. It'd be nice to see something like Vivaldi that runs on Servo.
Oh, that's fair. I'm not complaining about the work being put into a new browser engine, and there is definitely space for improvement over the ones we have.
Vivaldi, though? I'd vastly prefer an open source browser, and maybe one with less baggage than Vivaldi has — but I'll look forward to any GUI implementation of Servo, when and if, etc.
I was more talking about Vivaldi feature-wise, FWIW. There's features I'd like from Vivaldi that don't have a close equivalent to Firefox, not even from its forks (tab tiling's my go-to example), and maybe in the distant future, there'd be a browser like it running on Servo.
Hmm. Now there's an idea for developers. Some kind of modular compatibility standard.
Obviously not. Building a modern browser engine from scratch is an immense undertaking, so it's definitely possible that it will never be usable as a replacement for every day webbrowsing. But for now I won't give up hope :)
I want them to make an untrustworthy AI so that I can post funny conversations online for internet clout.
Would probably be more useful.
Yes, focus on your main thing. It's the thing that makes you matter. I want your browser to stay competitive.
The actual news is "renews focus on AI bullshit".
I want an API to control firefox with ny own text gen open source AI. Locally and offline.
And this only just after they enabled a whole raft of add-ons in their mobile browser that have already stripped away so much shit from my daily browsing experience.
I switched last year when Google entered their new phase of ad tracker evil and I bet I wasn't the only one. Feels to me like Firefox fucked with the money and they're being brought to heel.
What? They're laying off people working on a metaverse platform, mozilla.social, and other assorted products nobody cares about. They're doing exactly what everyone said they should do, slimming down and focusing on Firefox
fediverse*
I'm sorry but what word are you trying to replace? I can't tell
They misinterpreted "metaverse platform, mozilla.social" as a single item in the list, not as two items.
For anyone who isn't aware, Mozilla has a thing called Mozilla Hubs that could be considered a metaverse product
A I see, thank you for clarifying,.I was genuinely confused
Grammatically it can be properly read either way, but I think you're right that's probably how they meant it.
Cool, I'm liking this new Mozilla already! ...NOT!!!
That’s some serious spin there in the title.