mozilla's main problem right now appears to be they just do not recognise that they have pissed users' trust up a wall and now we are suspicious of everything they do.
you cannot, in a position like that, just do things which look dodgy as fuck and expect users to suck it up quietly, whether or not they are as they look.
look, i'm going to put this in simple words that even a mozilla employee could understand:
earn back our trust or die.
mozilla is pretty fucked anyway, they have relied on google buying default search engine placement illegally.
even if they manage to scrape out of this by building back trust, we are all likely to move onto servo at some point.
you may recall moz started servo, then merged part of it into gecko, then abandoned servo.
like they did with rust and some other things. things they've done for the better are the things they are abandoning.
@dysfun And they fail to realise that the people who stayed are not the normal “I just want to go to Google” people.
We are the weird ones. The ones who use DDG and Signal, who turn off location tracking and notifications for everything, who read the fucking licence agreements.
They have no idea who their users are.
@dysfun this is the part that does my head in
there are so many cool and worthwhile projects that mozilla started and then just ..... noped out on
but then there's shit like "Firefox Personality" and all kinds of other junk which they spent way too much time on, both per project and as total mindshare
management priorities for the utterly deranged
@dysfun For me it started when they embraced putting DRM into the HTML spec.
"The whole purpose of Mozilla is to get a seat at the table where Web standards are set so we can fight for users' interests."
"No, we can't fight for users' interests, because then we'd lose our seat at the table."
@dalias @dysfun volunteer foss is an extremely ineffective development model for a browser where you really need people with deep expertise who stay with the project long term in a committed manner.
that kind of commitment and experience requirement will naturally yield either grift which doesn't have competence to work on the core (most Firefox forks; avoiding the requirement) or the worst demographics and working environment in open source (see also the Linux kernel)
@dalias @dysfun the only people who can actually get that level of depth in their free time have the amount of free time typical of a ~40 white cis man with a tech job in the global North
browsers also need constant resourcing to deal with chromium having over 10 million dollars in engineering budget and adding spec features where you lose any of your casual userbase if you're late to the party. so you need full time developers, full stop
none of the forks are serious *browser* projects
@dalias @dysfun like, i don't know what the answer is here but i think it involves building a non profit corporation to hire actual employees to do it. and it's not just going to be "make an e.V." because stuff like the CCC can't exist entirely as an e.V. due to severe limits on the amount of money an e.V. is allowed to hold at a time so you need a "for profit" entity owned by your e.V.
it's starting to sound a whole lot like the MoCo/MoFo situation. how do you not reproduce their mistakes?
@dalias well sure but it makes you the "open source" person with the "broken" browser complaining about sites not working, and it seems like everyone who has any value for their time (most people who don't use Linux, even computer people!) will go use Chrome instead, because making sites give a damn about 1% of the userbase is wishful thinking
i too use the "broken" operating system. it works for 99% of what i want. people don't put up with 5% broken.
@dalias the reason that having software developed exclusively by unpaid tech bros sucks is that a team of *generic Linux man* will, in the vast majority of cases, not develop usable software for anyone but software people
see: darktable is used by approximately zero professional photographers, with the exact demographic distribution mentioned above; its entire community is self taught amateurs (predominantly engineers), fundamentally leading to the project direction being amiss wrt actual needs
Are Blender developers paid to develop it?
Yes, actually, they are. https://www.blender.org/about/people/
@dalias @leftpaddotpy Same goes for Kdenlive but it’s not so instantly obvious on where the money goes or if the devs are paid full-time (I assume they are paid for full-time work). (https://kdenlive.org/en/fund/ and https://kdenlive.org/en/about/)
We will use your donation to support members of the Kdenlive team, helping them continue working on the project to add major features and implement technologies required by the industry, keep the software stable and reliable, and maintain the code base.
@dysfun Or they're looking at it as being the only other browser left standing and going "Yeah, so? We're still better than the other options you have."
That sort of decision making has come up far too often in the last decade for me, no idea why being the least worst is an acceptable position for some to take.
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