RE: https://social.vmbrasseur.com/@vmbrasseur/115922995190919975
Mozilla wants your input. Here's mine:
Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
1: Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
2: Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
3: There is no 3.
Mozilla should have NOTHING to do with AI. Nobody wants it. Stop forcing AI into every corner of every project because your VC-brained management have completely lost the plot.
@jwz Firefox market share is <6%. Zen is trying to port the much-loved features from the now stagnant Arc, but the result so far is clunky and I've returned to Arc because it's more perfect right now for how I work and play.
Mozilla needs a mission bigger than just a standards-based browser. It should be experimenting with new UX. Not Liquid Glass UI/UX, but Arc-like UX.
Perhaps they should be experimenting with AI, with the goal of making AI invisible to the user without boiling the oceans.
@jwz What is accomplished with an irrelevant Mozilla? What are FF and Mozilla in 10 years being only a standards based browser?
My original post agreed with points 1 and 2, but I trimmed them due to length. I believe those are noble goals, but you are effectively killing FF. Maybe you want EFF but for the Web.
That said, I didn't really agree with any of the question choices so I posted only a comment.
@jwz @n3bulous EFF but for the Web is basically IceCat. I like IceCat, even though it's basically unusable. IceCat is unusable because of how websites are implemented, not because of how IceCat is implemented. I like to fire it up every now and then just to update my mental friend/foe list. Privacy Badger (also supplied by EFF) is also very educational in that way. The Tor Browser has a similar but different usability/unusability pattern. Retail websites block Tor exit nodes about as aggressively as news media websites accuse tracker blockers (such as Privacy Badger) of being ad blockers (which it absolutely is not).
People speak of tools like Privacy Badger "breaking" certain websites. The message discipline I use reverses this. I describe tracker-dependent sites as "breaking" Privacy Badger. With such tools amplifying the contrast between "figure" and "ground" (breakage and non-breakage), you can practically see the outline of various business models. It's as entertaining as it is educational.
What I really want is the pre-Web Internet. Do the young people even know that the Internet is older than the Web?
jwz
Kevin McFadden
Lorraine Lee