alt Hacker NewsThe interpretation is not the problem. Whether he will do it, is actually secondary to the fact that he thinks cutting adblock can bringing in money.
No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
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Who selects these CEOs? It almost seems like a caste system at this point. You can be a complete clown, but it's the best we have in our small caste so you're the one.
The question is what happens if he thinks the browser will die without that money. Is it a hill to die on?
For me as a user it is, but is it for him as a CEO?
Is it him or is it you? I'd think within the Mozilla organization is a data trove of telemetry which renders a fairly good picture of how many users actually are using ad blockers.
The current pattern in software is, sadly:
1. Innovate
2. Dominate
3. Enshitify to cash in.
You can't skip step #2.
Right now, Firefox's market share is a rounding error compared to Chrome. Users are starting to switch away from Chrome because it's currently in step 3 (in spades). That trend will not continue if Firefox beats Chrome to the bottom of the pig-pen. Firefox's current focus on AI is concerning enough, but mirroring Chrome's shift to Manifest v3 (i.e. What killed full-blooded ad blocking in Chrome) would be outright suicide.
Mozilla needs to listen to their users. Most don't particularly want "let me run that through an AI for you" popups everywhere. Practically nobody running Firefox wants to be cut off from effective ad blocking.
Monetization is hard, for Mozilla in particular. It was always weird that most of their funding came from Google. Now that Google is yanking it, Mozilla needs to find alternative sources of filthy lucre. However, if they destroy their product's only competitive advantages, there will be nothing left to monetize. If Firefox remains a browser that can provide decent privacy and ad-blocking then Mozilla has a chance to find alternative revenue streams. If, instead, Mozilla throws those advantages away to make a quick buck, that's the last buck they'll ever make.
> No, it will just kill the browser. The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
Believe me when I say this but 99.99999% of the human population does not give a shit what is Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave, whatever.
Their survival is completely detached from how "good" it is. As long as it runs, opens a page, opens picture, plays video.
We all live in the tech bubble, to them its an "app" that is "annoying me with ads". And that if they know its an ad, not just part of the page. That is if they even know its a page, not just something my son told me to click if I want to go to "Facebook".
> The fact he thinks otherwise tells me how out of touch he is.
We don't know what he really thinks. Maybe he knows it's a risk he wouldn't want to take but presents it as a goodwill
He may have a bad model of the world, but at least he is somewhat aligned with the user base.
This is academic discussion, where you think when X is said it means this, somebody (others here) think its that and so on. Grasping straws and all. I guess when around Christmas work churn slows down and some people spend more (too much?) time here.
Firefox has a market share around 3%. Even most technologists stopped using it long ago. Many banks and government websites don’t even support it anymore and loudly tell people to use Chrome instead, especially in developing countries.
Nothing can kill Firefox, because it’s already dead for all practical purposes.
Like many others, the ability to run uBO is the main reason I use Firefox. Otherwise I'd use Chrome or Safari.