Oof… I don’t find that as long or intense of a pattern as with brave but the behaviour to reach out and repeatedly bug the guy about his small blog post reflects strangely and poorly on his character :/ I had no idea kagi kinda came with baggage as well.

And yeah, it definitely is. Thats part of why I try really hard not to let perfect be the enemy of good. There is no perfect, and I still want to be involved in good where I can, to the extent that there is good available.

Thank you very much for taking the time to share a ton of additional context. I often have a hard time keeping in the loop about things and if I’m going to use imperfect things because I think they’re better than the alternative, then I want to at least pay attention to and understand their imperfections

Thank you!

And yeah the fact that brave sucks so god damn much is frustrating. Brave is the best independent search engine with their own index (of the free options) in my opinion. At some point I need to try searx and kagi, but I prefer an independent engine rather than a meta search engine, and am broke as fuck 😅

If I understand correctly they’re actually not directly a Mozilla project or something anymore. They’re loosely connected, but not actually run by Mozilla.

Wasn’t sure if there were better places to post this, feel free to cross-post if you know other fitting communities :)

They recently announced terms of service that they (I think?) Partially walked back. But honestly it’s a longer term issue-

Mozilla is dependent on Google giving them lots of money to be the default Firefox search engine, and anti-monopoly rulings in Europe may mean Google has to stop doing that, which would really jeopardize Mozilla’s financial sustainability

The gecko engine is way behind on web standards, and while it generally gets the job done for average users, I’ve learned recently lots of devs don’t test their sites with it or support it not just because it’s a minority browser, but because it doesn’t support a lot of stuff and is hard to work with.

Mozilla seems to believe their path forward financially is AI features. Which are very unpopular with a lot of the folks who follow Mozilla, even if implemented thoughtful, and seems like a dubious financial future given even huge companies like openai are struggling to make ai financially self sustaining.

Add to it the privacy preserving ad tracking stuff they wanted as an alternative to cookies a while back, and the picture doesn’t really get better

All of these are small things. The compatibility with web standards isn’t the end of the world for most users. A big bug was/is that firefox rendered gradients horrendously for like 12 years or something with the bug reports just sitting there, but most Foss nerds who use firefox don’t super care if a website’s gradient looks crappy. The features that chrome has but Firefox doesn’t aren’t dealbreakers for most users. The privacy preserving trackers or whatever they were called seemed at least relatively thoughtfully implemented from a privacy standpoint. AI could hypothetically be done in a way that isn’t totally shitty, and maybe possibly they could build a financial future out of it. The terms of service debacle could stop here and not devolve into actual enshitification.

But it all culminates together in feeling like mozilla is out of touch with their core audience and has no real viable plan for staying afloat, sans google paying them shitloads of money to be the default browser engine. :/

While I do think the point about forking is true, it is worth acknowledging that the gecko engine is
a) very behind other browsers in terms of implemented functionality and standards, and
b) I’ve seen devs say on multiple occasions that because of the wide range of platforms it has officially supported over time (or other reasons), the codebase has become very hard to work with and apparently it’s really hard to add new standards to it

That definitely adds a bit more context still. Thank you for the additional information.

I don’t know much about either of the first two people, but I do know lunduke and think he’s gross (if you have context on the first two you’re welcome to share but no obligation to of course :)

Though, I’m also a fan of futo and Louis Rossman. I try to air on the side of being able to appreciate people doing good work even if I don’t agree with everything they do or think. People come from different backgrounds and not everyone will see the world the way I do, or be sensitive to the pain caused by the issues that affect me personally 🤷‍♂️

True, but I’m not one to let perfect be the enemy of good.

I wasn’t aware of anything along those lines, but reading through the whole thread of discussion was interesting.

Things seem ambiguous currently I’ll have to keep an eye on that issue, I appreciate you mentioning it

I definitely agree. They feel deeply confused about their audience and like they perpetually flounder trying to find a sustainable direction or future :/

Aw, fuck yeah! I’m glad you mentioned it :)

Is that in the video or just your hope? If that’s the case I missed it, and that would be super exciting!

The part with the progress graph compared to other browsers over time is especially cool!

The part with the progress graph compared to other browsers over time is especially cool!

ಠ_ಠ