OblomovThe recent developments have made me realize that I should probably write a #FirefoxRequiem series not unlike the #OperaRequiem I started when the first news of its sellout came around, but the truth is that I've never been invested in #Mozilla #Firefox the way I was in the #OperaBrowser, and @mozilla's failure (intentional or not) to keep their browser at the forefront of the defense of #OpenStandards and a free web really doesn't help.
I don't know how much credence to give the voices claiming that today @mozilla is essentially controlled opposition, but there's little doubt that they are putting suspiciously low effort in making sure that their browser is appealingly competitive, preferring to pour resources in side endeavors that I doubt help them in any way in improving the cash flow, other than distracting them from improving the product Google doesn't want to see being improved.
I should clarify that I'm not claiming that their “other” products are useless, or that we would be better without, but rather that the #openWeb, and in fact #FLOSS in general, would benefit more if they invested more in their main product(s) rather than claiming “lack of resources” for their choices to not give standards the support they deserve.
And yes, this is (also) about my pet peeves (#RSS, #MNG, #JPEGXL, dropped and newer protocol support), but it goes beyond that:
And yes, this is (also) about my pet peeves (#RSS, #MNG, #JPEGXL, dropped and newer protocol support), but it goes beyond that:
the #openWeb today has no champion. It's really as simple as that. The biggest competitor to Google in the user agent space (#Mozilla #Firefox) has no backbone, and innovation/resistance is mostly left to small realities like the partially closed source @Vivaldi or the one-person project #OtterBrowser —that still depend on #Google (or at best #Apple) for the rendering part. This is dramatic. This is even worse than the browser wars of lore.
Unsurprisingly this minithread of mine rustled some jimmies (relevant comment thread <https://mastodon.social/@yoasif/110073508546039228>). Just as unsurprisingly, @mozilla will keep doing nothing to actually make their browser competitive and will continue investing resources in endeavors that have nothing to do with it.
Ghost0x0