@pluralistic Has Mozilla enshittified, according to your theory of the process and how it proceeds, or is something else going on there? Can we right the ship, or are we better to scuttle it and build a new one from fresh wood?
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Lot's of replies to this have missed the point completely. I'm not talking about Firefox. I'm talking about *Mozilla*.
We need a community-driven Free Code browser. For that, we need coordination and governance. #Mozilla was set up to provide that, for code liberated by NetScape.
But Mozilla has observably failed to be a good steward for community-driven Free Code projects. Many projects have died or languished on its watch, including FF.
So do we try to fix it, or build anew from scratch?
@strypey
I'm quite liking Vivaldi oddly enough... although I always was a bit of an Opera fan, so I guess it goes with the territory.
I quite like the look of Brave as well, although I've never actually tried it on account of it being run/owned by a dickhead.
vis a vis enshitification - sorry for butting in from the cheap seats etc... it's showing the early signs, but doesn't have quite the relentless imperial logic of the monopoly platforms on account of not being a monopoly.
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@nicktaylor
> doesn't have quite the relentless imperial logic of the monopoly platforms on account of not being a monopoly
That's the standard PR line if enshittifiers. Oh no, they say, we're not a monopoly, here's a subtly misleading framing of the market situation that shows we have competition. Goggle funded almost 100% of Mozilla's budget for decades to keep Firefox alive, purely so it could tap that sign, as a hedge against antitrust enforcement on its Chrome monopoly.
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FF's market segment is Free Code web browsers not owned by DataFarming corporations. Unless you count its own forks, all of which are small-scale community efforts that depend 100% on upstream, Mozilla had a total monopoly on that market.
Of course, now Mozilla have done an Ubuntu and become DataFarmers too. Which is why I'm asking question to figure out whether to reform or revolt.
@strypey
Yea - that thing where google were paying Mozilla to keep Google as the default search-engine was a bit of a mind-boggler. I never knew.
Browsers are not monopolies in the same way that Google, Facebook, YT, Amazon are though. The transition costs are not the same by any stretch.
I can change browser without blinking - boycotting Amazon cost me 40% of my income, and getting off Facebook has caused me to lose touch with about 50 people that I really didn't want to lose touch with.
I can do that because I am rock-hard and mental. Other people aren't set up to self-destruct and recover like I can. They have families etc. The mechanics of enshitiffication kindof depend on this vendor-lockin
EYC etc : https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLrD42FThPK
re: "From the ground up" - Ladybird is having a go:
"WIndows is not a priority" lol.
@nicktaylor @strypey I'm starting to warm up to Vivaldi too. The latest reason is that Mozilla is forcing an AI on Firefox users with no real way to turn it off, at least from what I see.
@strypey @pluralistic
I do not think it will be easy to fork.
A crowdsourced designed browser is probably the path forward. It will not be easy. Certainly, many will have input wrt to bad design choices.
@Puck
> I walked away from them. Using Vivaldi now
> I walked away from them. Using Vivaldi now
I would have said it more gently, but I agree with @dancingtreefrog that moving from a proprietary browser built around a Free Code browser, to ... a proprietary browser built around a (mostly) Free Code browser, is not a fix. The same forces that turned FF into a turkey are at work.
There are plenty of community forks of FF which have much better UX, because they scrape off all the proprietary crud Mozilla trowels on top of the core.
@Puck @strypey @pluralistic So, you moved from Mozilla to avoid "enshitification", to a browser based on Google's Chromium? Like Google has never enshittified anything, ever, I'm sure, as it continues to fight antitracking and support privacy invasion on the internet.
Of course, bringing down Mozilla will also topple all other browsers that use its engine; none have the resources to do more than make their own individual patches to Mozilla source...
Oh, well.
@strypey @pluralistic I don't *see* any enshittification in the UI
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