The author may be a right-wing fellow. Nonetheless, the data he exposes are taken from official Mozilla docs.
I’ve heard that it wouldn’t it be possible due to tax laws, but I do wish that you could donate directly to Mozilla Corporation itself. The foundation’s advocacy work is important, but it would also be important to ensure Firefox’s continued development without them having to rely on Google
You could just buy one of their products (Pocket, VPN, etc.) and not use it if you want.
Besides the CEO thing, this makes me wanna donate even more to the foundation
And this is one of the many reasons I don’t donate to Firefox. Firefox employees should really fork that project and make it better than what it is now instead of just being Google’s dog + an excuse to pay millions to a single person and hundreds of thousands to random individuals, who have nothing to do with Firefox.
400M in cash could go to a lot of development efforts. They could rewrite Firefox entirely in Rust, make it run on any platform, move the needle on web technologies in a big way, hell, they could make their own damn phone with that kind of money, or even write their own competitor to ChromeOS.
But instead…
What are you on about? This is super confusing to me. Mozilla does a lot of great work. It’s insanely hard to make and develop a web browser… Are you aware of that? Apple probably spends a large fraction of the amount Mozilla does and yet safari benefits more from open source than Mozilla and is still one of the biggest shit piles on the planet.
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All I know is that as a frontend Dev, features in safari are about 5-10 years late to the party. the world’s first trillion dollar company is years behind a non profit…
Apple’s big selling point has never been their software.
What has it been then? I think hundreds of millions of people would say their software “just works” and that’s why they love it.
Hardware and the fact that their products became bourgie status symbols. Their aesthetic game is on point and UI is fairly polished, but their software can be super limited in annoying ways.
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I’ve never bothered to test on Safari (don’t have a device that runs it and I won’t buy one for it either)
This explains why you don’t think safari is that bad. Lol, you don’t test in it. It’s fucking bad. Every time I think I’m doing some safe that safari can’t botch and don’t test for a few days in safari, I’m shown what a foolish thought that is. The types of sites I work on have some less common features admittedly, but every other browser, even silk browser on ancient Kindle devices, works flawlessly most times while safari has a problem with SO much. Even back when we supported IE 11 (trident) the weird issues were worse on safari.
I find WebKit to be a fine browser engine most of the time.
It is worth mentioning that the WebKit port for GTK does not support WebRTC and that it is not supported at all by Apple. It’s an effort by Igalia, one person from Red Hat and volunteers.
There’s also essentially no WebKit browser for windows. WebKit is often slow at adopting new web technologies as well.
All that to say - WebKit is not the example of a success outside of helping big corporations to make their own big proprietary browsers.
They tried making a phone already and it failed to gain steam.
And what do you do after three years? Then the cash will be used up.
Mozilla isn’t just developing the Firefox browser. Technology is inherently political - and educating people and influencing actors politically on the free and open web is very important. Firefox is much less likely to mis-align away from their browser users than chrome simply because they don’t have the misaligned incentives like the chrome Browser which is equally made by the largest internet advertising firm of the world.
They even has created FirefoxOS for phone at some point in the past 10 years. But I don’t remember what happened with that.
The author may be a right-wing fellow. Nonetheless, the data he exposes is not fake!
This should not be noteworthy much less be sufficient to make the article seem credible.
The people who tout justifications like this have clearly not paid enough attention in school to learn about things like secondary sources, misrepresenting data, or false extrapolations.
Or they’ve somehow forgotten all about how the far right has been falsely portraying information for years now, and using a kernel of truth to say “See? Therefore everything else I’m saying is also true!” so that the gullible will believe their lies.
Someone’s political beliefs aren’t indicative of how well they can form an argument. People can misrepresent data regardless of their political leanings, this whole talking point in the comments is irrelevant.
That perspective requires a wanton and purposeful ignorance of the right wing misinformation and disinformation campaigns of the last ten years.
It’s only irrelevant if you want to act like the author isn’t part of a political group that frequently lies.
The way you’re framing it seems disingenuous. You act like only people on the right lie and spread misinformation (and they do!). It feels like you’re making a childish jab at the right because you don’t like them.
Left-wing people and right-wing people both lie to you plenty, because political leanings have nothing to do with it.
I’m not claiming the piece itself is truthful, but you’ve got your head deep in the sand if you think the right wing is the only group lying to you, while the left & everyone else is truthful.
You’re acting like I’m not talking about QAnon or MAGA types for some reason. Why?
I’m not saying to dismiss anyone just because you politically disagree with them. I’m saying don’t trust a Nazi when he gives his opinion on Jews.
I’m not saying only one side lies. I’m saying there’s a political contingent that only operates on lies, and this guy is with them.
Stop trying to reduce the situation to talk about someone else. This is a QAnon type author writing falsities based on falsely interpreted data, not Noam Chomsky waffling on if something is a crime or not.
It’s so painfully obvious that the article was written to push a personal agenda rather than objectively address the topic
Given the author’s political affiliation and the apparent lack of coverage of this anywhere else I find it difficult to make any conclusions other than those that would indicate the author’s politically makes.
So where’s Lunduke’s articles on the numerous right-wing shady organizations? I haven’t listened to or read anything by this hack in many years now because of the fact that he has a clear agenda motivated by his own political bullshit.
Maybe find an article that is written by someone reputable and post that to numerous communities.
This right here.
He was always a shit. But seeing him in 2020 parroting alt-right talking points and defending the Proud Boys showed exactly what kind of person he is.
I don’t really care if someone fights in both directions if their points are valid. Misgendering or not, mozilla has had some troubling developments internally and it’s good people shed light on it.
Shedding light with bias is the whole problem with media in the current landscape. They’re never done objectively. All it does is provide a feedback loop within the echo chamber, further dividing people with the result of “see, I told you the other side is bad.” Motivations matter. Lunduke has, in the past, proven where his motivations are. If he actually reported on all political, economic, technological goings-on in an objective manner, given he is a pretty good communicator, then I’d withdraw my opposition to him. Until such time, I keep to my opinion of him and have no interest in his articles. I can form my own opinion of Mozilla independent of what Lunduke or FOX News or MSNBC tries to get me to ingest.
It is stated within the article that Mckensie Mack is non-binary, however the author chose to refer to them with she/her pronouns. Regardless of “politics” and “beliefs”, I don’t agree with ignoring or disrespecting somebody’s identity.
Hey folks - Just want to note that the !Technology mod team is aware of the reports on this post. After some discussion we decided to leave the thread up, since it had already generated a decent amount of good discussion despite the problems with the article itself. However, I do want to make it clear that we do not condone intentionally misgendering people.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reply here or DM me.
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I think this approach is doomed. People only care about Mozilla because of Firefox and Firefox is falling behind again, no doubt coinciding with the mass layoffs and the ejection of the Servo engine. They’ve caught up with Chrome on most fronts a year or three ago when their reinvented CSS and layout engine was released, but they’re still on the back foot these days.
This is incorrect. Firefox recently surpassed Chrome in a key benchmark and has generally been on a roll lately.
Yes, their current iterative improvements are not as sexy as the big release of Quantum, but to say they’re currently falling behind is the opposite of the truth. They’ve just pulled ahead.
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This is not correct.
arewefastyet.com shows very clearly that although chrome beats firefox in some benchmarks, firefox trades blows with it and is similar to or faster in others.
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Chrome also boasts about having the best performance.
Meanwhile, in the real world, running the two side-by-side tends to spell a whole different picture.
This “report” is exactly what I would expect from Lunduke. It is really sad that this reactionary content comes from someone who I once thought was cool.
The only part I can agree on : the execs at Mozilla are getting paid too much in the current situation.
Now to get to the real meat.
The combined spendings to political organizations make up around 1m$. This is less than the donations made to Mozilla foundation. Considering the very political nature of the foundation, these spendings were likely authorized there.
Now, why would a technology company spend on political organisations? Well, simply put : technology is political. People trying to peddle that technology is not political are trying to sell you the status quo.
Technology companies spend insane amounts of money on lobbying.
Now, why would Mozilla spend money on left-leaning organisations? Well, simply put : left-leaning politics (though embedded in neoliberal Californian ideals of the internet) are embedded at the core of Mozilla from the start with Mozilla manifesto.
I’m not gonna get into why Lunduke thinks that these organisations are bad but consider it a red flag.
Now, what I would ask to anyone reading this : why do you think Lunduke is ignoring this? Why would Lunduke try to paint this picture?
The problem isn’t that they’re spending money on political causes and I wouldn’t even expect them to do some false balance bs where they’d spend money on left and right wing politics, but spending money on political causes with almost zero transparency (like what do orgs do with the money, how effective are they, are they actually aligned with certain values, who is involved in these orgs, etc) seems fishy as fuck.
(like what do orgs do with the money, how effective are they, are they actually aligned with certain values, who is involved in these orgs, etc)
These are all issues of the organizations own reporting, not anything Mozilla did. Mozilla is not responsible for disclosing the operational details of places it donates to or works with.
The laws and regulations surrounding NPOs, charities, and foundations and what they report are a whole other rabbit hole.
I’d say the CEO is the only one who’s overpaid. The other executives make between $200k to $370k, which is a lot of money but barely noteworthy imo.
If they’re living in SF, then it’s even less money. It’s a lot, don’t get me wrong, but it takes a lot of money to afford to live in (or around) that city.
Yeah, for sure, the CEO is the clear outlier. I just count them as an exec though that might be misusing how that term is used colloquially.
This “report” is exactly what I would expect from Lunduke. It is really sad that this reactionary content comes from someone who I once thought was cool.
It’s sad. When I discovered the Linux Action Show back in 2006 or 2007, he seemed like a fun and interesting person. But it’s amazing how quickly that perception proved false. And his Twitter feed in 2020 was a dumpster fire.
Well, simply put : left-leaning politics (though embedded in neoliberal Californian ideals of the internet) are embedded at the core of Mozilla from the start with Mozilla manifesto.
Which is so fascinating given the involvement of people like Brendan Eich, and also descending from noted Libertarian and capitalist Marc Andreesen
I mean, the neolib Californian ideals of the internet was anarchist so always anti-gov but not anti-corporate. That’s how you end up with compromise points in the Mozilla manifesto like this:
Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.
Worth mentioning that Eich came from the Netscape days and was highly influential on a technical level.
