alt Hacker NewsI am sorry sir. Somebody who says they want to put back control to people using Internet and someone saying humans over profit cant NOT expect pushback for their actions. They are going against the entire community. You cant go for the saviour of the open internet, BS the community and not get push back.
I would argue mozilla doesnt have general audience like google chrome. They have OSS enthusiasts, privacy enthusiasts, power users kind of crowd. Buying a behavioural ads company which will do data surveillance or shoving ai is not what we want.
Not to mention, I and many stuck with Firefox despite being it being horrible until quantum release because Mozilla was aligned with community. But their tech is better now but they aren't aligned with community.
It was the community that made Firefox overtake IE. They seem to forget that.
Unless its gonna come pre-installed like chrome, they need community make the user base grow. They are absolutely dumb for going after a crowd who are happy with Chrome while shitting on the crowd which want to be with them.
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See this is kind of hitting the nail on the head here.
Mozilla is treated like a PhD holder and nobel prize winner, and Google is treated as a stupid baby.
When the stupid baby shits his pants, nobody cares. In fact, they expect it. But when the PhD student gets a tiny piece of information wrong about the French revolution, they're crucified and called an idiot.
Mozilla makes mistakes, but the objective reality is that even if you add up alllll the mistakes, they're MILES ahead of Google when it comes to how they treat their users.
Google Chrome users get fucked up the ass and then beg for more. Firefox users get sent flowers and chocolate and then complain the chocolate has nuts.
I'm not saying whether they should/shouldn't get pushback about these things - just that 95% of this pushback in places like this comes from <1% of their userbase and isn't as relevant to Mozilla as those making the feedback would like to believe. Meanwhile, the main portion of the userbase is leaving for completely different reasons and doesn't even know what this kind of stuff like MV3 is, let alone care about it.
Firefox definitely has a general audience much larger than any measure of power users. More than half of the users don't have a single extension installed, and that counts language pack extensions. Half have <= 4 cores, <= 16 GB of RAM, or a 1080p screen. The most common OS is Windows 11 at 44% - with Windows 10 at 34.5% and Windows 7 still above Linux. Over 1/3 of their ~200 million userbase is in the US, and even if every tech-literate power user or privacy fiend in the US used Firefox (they don't) it still wouldn't amount to that many people.
The average Firefox user is nothing like you or I, nor will they find their community in catering to privacy. The community over IE was that IE wa plain awful to use and Firefox just did everything better. It didn't matter if you cared about privacy, performance, standards, community, customizability, compatibility, or whatever - it just mopped the floor with the popular option. That's not going to be the situation with Chrom*, it's actually active and well funded, nor is focusing on a single minority which demands to exclude things other groups care about (even if you and I would prefer not to have them) going to bring them back to the forefront.