Almost all the links in my front homepage are sponsored now. What’s next, a few ads in the bookmark bar? How about when I enter a URL, I then have to type “McDonald’s” before I can actually navigate there?

  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
    409·
    7 days ago

    Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money. It doesn’t need any more to maintain a browser and an email client.

    From jwz, who founded Mozilla & Firefox:

    .

    Mozilla had a duty to preserve the open web.

    Instead they cosplayed as a startup, chasing product dreams of “growth hacking”, with Google’s ad money as their stand-in for a VC-funding firehose, with absolutely predictable and tragic results.

    And those dreams of growth and market penetration failed catastrophically anyway.

    (Except for the C-suite, who made out quite well. And Google, who got exactly what they paid for: a decade of antitrust-prosecution insurance. It was never about ad revenue. The on-paper existence of Firefox as a hypothetical competitor kept the Federal wolves at bay, and that’s all Google cared about.)

    Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?

    As I have said many times:

    In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

    1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
    2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
    3. There is no 3.
    • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
      273·
      7 days ago

      Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money

      no. they don’t.

      the google money that they rely too heavily on, may not always be there. they need more diverse funding. these paid placements, which can be turned off, are one way to do that.

      turn off and delete the sponsored stuff at install, never see 'em again. it’s not like they’re microsoft or something, constantly turning that kind of shit back on with every-other-update.

    • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
      256·
      7 days ago

      https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozilla-is-an-advertising-company-now/#comment-249969

      Preemptive subtwit.

      Let’s say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren’t covering it.

      So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.

      Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, 'Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren’t selling kitten deli slices?"

      Some might say – maybe you aren’t an animal shelter any more. Some might say.

      • o_d [he/him]@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        31·
        7 days ago

        It’s a real shame what’s happened to Mozilla. Maybe Trump will add browser software to the list of sanctions on China and we’ll end up with a Deepfox in a year or two.

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
      9·
      7 days ago

      While this analysis is somewhat convincing, let’s not forget that for now Firefox is all we have. Important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

      In my ideal scenario, Mozilla becomes like the Wikimedia Foundation. Which has somehow also accumulated “Scrooge McDuck amounts” of cash but seems to be on a firmer footing and better managed.

        • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
          1·
          6 days ago

          Okay but you mean which is harder?? Both projects rely on a bunch of salaried professionals supervising an army of volunteers. Firefox is a web browser, i.e. notoriously the space shuttle of software. But the Wikipedia is doing some surprisingly innovative and cutting-edge stuff with its own codebase too, as I understand it. Whichever is costlier, I’m not sure we’re talking about an order of magnitude of difference.

      • o_d [he/him]@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        1·
        7 days ago

        It’s amazing what you can pull off with free labour and CIA funding. I also find it funny how that donation banner still shows up every year when they’ve already accumulated so much capital.