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- cross-posted to:
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Another CEO for mozilla. Good or bad news?
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I think Mozilla could use a new CEO and I want to be optimistic. That said:
- Red flag 1: They made someone from the BoD the new CEO. This rarely works out well
- Red flag 2: The new CEOs CV is full of things that turned into menaces to the public and/or internet (airbnb, paypal, ebay)
Yep. Not a single non-profit or open-source related position in her CV
You gotta start somewhere, just give her a chance, we’ll see if she fucks up or not
She smells of glass cliff to me. We’ll see.
I’ve known Mozilla being great wouldn’t last forever, and there it is. Someone from those companies at the helm? Here comes the enshitification.
Hard to say. You kind of want someone that was part of a successful product. And successful for-profit products are almost always menaces.
Yes, but hiring someone who’s good at making for-profit “services” successful generally means you want your product to be for-profit.
And as you say, successful for-profit companies are often menaces.
Would you call any of those successful products ‘good’ tho? Yes they have made a lot of money but at the same time…2 of 3 are straight up evil. Ebay…eh. Could be worse. Thats the best I can say for them. Paypal has straight up stolen people’s money on countless occasions and gotten away with it. Then there was that huge violin fiasco. Airbnb is flat out a part of destroying the housing market, they know this, they don’t care.
I get it, most big companies are ‘menaces’ like you say but…these are absolutely horrible companies responsible for true evil and, odds are, he’s going to bring that energy to Mozilla.
I don’t really disagree, but what do you want as an organization, someone that built a “good” product that nobody ever used and fell into obscurity? Or someone that built a product that attracted and retained millions of users that you might consider “bad”? And tbh, most of the “bad” from these products is just because of their size and monopoly, which would arguably be a good problem to have for Mozilla.
Probably an easy choice if I was on the board.
Also, not that it matters to our discussion but just as a minor correction, the new CEO is a woman.
Airbnb actually provides a useful service, unlike PayPal which only extracts fees
Giving an avenue for rich development companies to snatch up properties they can short-term rent to rich travelers is a useful service?
Because those companies can’t go to booking.com if there’s no airbnb?
Assuning thats normally for hotels and such, not as easily, no. AirBnB’s specific purpose is to remove barriers of entry for hosting people in your property. Initially that meant renting one of your rooms to a traveler on the cheap. Now it means companies that would otherwise have to jump through tons of regulatory hoops to put their properties on booking sites.
Not to mention… even if its the same, then its the same and still not a useful service, yeah? It’s just another booking service. Which, coincidentally, mostly extracts fees.
Nestle provides a useful service, does that make their literal slave labor acceptable?
Didn’t say that, I’m comparing companies that do nothing useful to companies that do something useful
Would you want Nestle to take over Mozilla then?
Airbnb is a social plague, its perpetrators should be in prison.
For what crime?
Large scale real estate without a license. Penalty : death in wood chipper, feet first.
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We can version freeze forever. Anything that won’t work in 2023 firefox is probably trash anyway.
So you can’t. There are cert stores, new protocols and ciphers, and eventually u patched zero days.
I know this because I’ve been playing with a g3 powerboat and all the browsers at this point are no longer maintained to support the above things as of last year. The last person working on it gave up
Not much of problem. Run in a VM, disable certificate validation. Html5 and javascript is still going to last a long long time. Anything that can’t run with that is soydev shit and you don’t need it.
Called palemoon, except version freeze is much older.
Anything else will goatsy your computer to all forms of zero days.
Yeah the Airbnb, PayPal, eBay pedigree has me more concerned than anything. I wouldn’t want any of Mozilla’s stuff to be anything close to these things.
what happened with ebay?
Well there was this thing. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/29/ebay-executive-sentenced-couple-harassment-newsletter
eBay banned NFTs, I’m onboard with eBay.
Removed by mod
Any bets on which horrible technology fad this one hitches Mozilla’s horse to and spends all their money on?
Pocket Powered by AI.
The browser is going to automatically set a new homepage for you based the hottest topics according to AI analysis.
Dynamic bookmarks is going to add suggested sites and automatically sort your bookmarks based on AI-powered ratings.
Hey if we can bend that out of shape to use the open source model mixtral. I been specifically trying to get locallama to organize my tabs and bookmarks into something usable for a while already.
Sure, the normies get AI advertising but we’ll get to repurpose for our own use.
I bet it’s Automated Irrigation, also known as AI.
Artificial Insemination. Which was probably the first AI.
Anal Insemination … trying to create something new in a way that will never work but is fetishized by everyone
Enshitification incoming.
They’re going to screw their business customers to claw back value for themselves?
Hadn’t yet really started on the users, so we’ll be getting it first
“Focus” and “streamline” are usually MBA buzzwords to describe layoffs. Hopefully not the case but sounds rough.
Doubling down on our core products, like Firefox
Expected them to double down on Google tracking, AI, and pocket while laying off Firefox engineers. Still do, but maybe slightly slower now.
“We will be rewriting our base code, working off of Chromium!”
I’d be switching to servo then.
LibreWolf is a very decent Firefox fork. Open Source is great because bad CEOs can’t really threaten the source code.
Not saying this one is bad though — I have no idea. The last one was raking in $7 million/year which is less than ideal for an open source project.
Open Source is great because bad CEOs can’t really threaten the source code.
Most of the time this is true, but for browser engines it’s different because of their sheer size, complexity, need to adhere and collaborate with others to form web standards, need for security experts, day one vulnerability patches, etc.
If Mozilla dies, LibreWolf can’t just pick up the slack. They die too. Volunteers alone can’t run a modern web engine, it takes hundreds of millions per year to upkeep.
There’s a reason why we’re down to just Google, Apple, and Mozilla. Nobody wants to foot that bill unless they have a damn good reason for doing so.
It’s probably more expensive to maintain a browser engine than a full operating system at this point.
I’ll never understand why Microsoft dropped their engine. They can afford to develop it and it would’ve been a great advantage vs Google. I mean, it wouldn’t have helped open source folk either way, but I just don’t get why they dropped it.
Yeah, I was hoping MS could make a competent engine with a fresh start. I wouldn’t even be mad if it was Windows only. Now Edge is just another Microsoft L
What makes it a great advantage vs Google?
Because they now have to go along with most things that Google says. They’re reliant on Google now, they have to do what daddy tells them.
Add to that, they’ve conceded any sway in setting web standards, granting Google more control to push the web in the direction that benefits Google and harms competition.
Perhaps we should take the clue and - if we also see clues of Mozilla enshittifying - switch globally to an easier internet that’s also easier to program for. Something like Gemini (the post-Gopher thingy, not Google’s latest fad) for example, where I take it maintaining a browser is nowhere near the same order of magnitude as complex.
I wish more distro’s packaged librewolf. I know there’s an appimage and such but I prefer native tested packages where possible.
Doubling down on our core products, like Firefox
Well, I sure fucking hope so. When are we getting back XUL addons or something comparable, you know, the feature that made your browser stand out?
(One can dream, right? Hahaha)
The reason that Firefox sucked ass for so long in speed and features was because xul was an unbeatable burden to maintain. Also, firefoxs extensions are still the most powerful out of any browser
Indeed, they don’t have to bring back the XUL. The power users would just appreciate…
- new extension APIs that interact with the browser UI
- bring back toolbar customization that was removed for no reason (we can’t even move the extension button at this point…)
- bring back compact mode and better themes (without requiring CSS and about:config tweaks)
Remember when Mozilla the company had a product named Mozilla?
Doubling is nowhere near enough, they need to Quintuple down on that shit
OK, apart from the management bullshit lingo of the article, has anyone an idea what is going to happen?
Obviously they’re going to be building platforms that accelerate momentum.
And synergize. We’ll loop back and reach out in a couple months to see their single pane of glass.
This is how I read it also… Scroll-scroll… Bullshit statements, scroll, marketing, marketing, self congratulaty shit, marketing, scroll, scroll…
Where does it say what they are going to actually do??
Scroll, scroll, scroll, give up, post on Lemmy. :)
Nothing concrete was said.
“interim” CEO…
