jwzJun 22, 2024

Mozilla's Original Sin.

Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a *company shipping products*, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.

Those are different things and are very much in conflict. [...]
https://jwz.org/b/ykVr

Mozilla's Original Sin

Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web. Those are different ...

Show threadewhacJun 22, 2024

@jwz Respectful dissent, sir.

Mozilla's *worst* decision was inflicting JavaScript upon the world, for the lamest reasons possible.

All anyone had to do was talk to victims of MS Word macro viruses to realize putting a scripting language into what is putatively a document, and then *running them by default*, was a monstrously dumb idea.

"But Micros~1 would have..." Yeah. And then Mozilla could point and say, "Word macro viruses at *Web scale?* Are they completely deranged?"

Show threadjwzJun 22, 2024

@ewhac
1994 called, they want their BLINK tag back.

1992 called, they want their IMG tag back.

Show threadewhac

@jwz Well, now that you've brought up BLINK...

When I first saw that tag in the HTML spec, I was convinced it was put in as a sop to convince advertisers that they could migrate over from NAPLPS (used by the Prodigy online service), which defined a blink attribute, and which also got overused.

Also: The browser that shipped with BeOS -- NetPositive -- had an easter egg in it where, every 100th blink, the blinking text would be replaced with "Buy Now."

Jun 22, 2024 at 8:38pmWeb
Show threaddraNgNonJun 22, 2024
@ewhac (off topic) omigersh I haven't seen a mention of BeOS in forever @jwz