Lets just take Firefox and make it the open source standard. If we all get behind it like we did for Blender, we might succeed.
I doubt it tbh.
For blender it’s fine, but for browser engines it’s different because of their sheer size, complexity, need to adhere and collaborate with others to form web standards, need for security experts, day one vulnerability patches, etc.
If Mozilla dies, random volunteers or existing projects like LibreWolf can’t just pick up the slack.
Volunteers can’t run a modern web engine, it takes hundreds of millions per year to upkeep.
There’s a reason why we’re down to just Google, Apple, and Mozilla. Nobody wants to foot the massive bill unless they have a damn good reason for doing so.
It’s probably more expensive to maintain a browser engine than a full operating system at this point. It’s truly insane how large and costly they are.
The Linux kernel is actually a perfect example of this.
It’s worked on by hundreds of companies, and the bulk of the work is done by a small number of megacorps.
If it was worked on by a group of volunteers doing bits whenever they had spare time, it’d be in a much less useful state right now.
You’re seriously underestimating how large and complex web engines are. There’s a reason we’re down to 3 engines and the community hasn’t been able to create one.
It’s hard to do. It requires hundreds of millions a year to keep going.
If it were genuinely so trivial to maintain a browser engine, more would be doing it. Even easier, Firefox forks could take over maintaining the engine, as opposed to just tweaking the browser (not even having to work from scratch with a new engine). But they don’t, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned.
Linux is its own OS, not a Windows clone with the goal of binary compatibility.
With Web browsers the problem is in trying to deceive ourselves that the Web itself is a neutral space. It has long ago become a hostile space, controlled by the enemy. Its standards are intended to prevent pluralism.
Check out Ladybird tho, from serenity os project (it also works in Linux). It’s developed by an open source community, and some companies are sponsoring it’s development. It’s not at a usable point, but it’s development has been impressive. If more money is donated by other companies it could be an alternative, maybe
Of course they can’t compete on the adversary’s field when that adversary has bigger resources and monopoly in many areas.
What I don’t understand is why nobody has tried to sell the idea of an alternative Web to the wider audience?
Like Gemini, only without the “minimal” and “non-commercial hobbyist” parts.
Without trying to follow Google/MS/etc on the path intentionally chosen to not be passable for others.
That would be excellent, but trying to convince everybody to move to a “new web” would be extremely difficult in itself, even before we start to think about the likes of Google that very much want to maintain the status quo
Arguably since mainly what people actually want from the Web is just a cross-platform document renderer/UI system, if you designed something new from the ground-up with zero legacy nonsense, well, those are both complex problems, but I somewhat suspect we’d end up with something better and easier to develop for than the Byzantine nightmare that is the web.
Network effects would limit growth, but I think as the web gets shittier and shittier there would be growth.
The issue is that Firefox needs an org to get the Widevine DRM from its vendor (Google). Without it, they can’t support Netflix or Apple TV or YouTube.
Or we can just drop DRM from the Standard. It’s honestly about 15 years past about time.
Why? Well, it was Chrome. Yes, I know many of you spit at the very name. Get over it.
OK, boomer (yes, “surprise! surprise!”, this harticle – for “hate driven article” – was written by a boomer, and one that writes for several online publications, too).
This article is not only a (staggering) failure from the aforementioned boomer to grasp what really is at play here, but it also shows a significant, shocking lack of quality assurance in the way “theregister” determines what gets published. This piece isn’t an opinion as much as a flaming bag of shit, meant to stink everyone’s shoes, and motivated only by the author’s ineptitude-fuelled frustration in what seems a textbook example of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
Lemme first address my primary point, in relation to what I quoted at the top, I’ll get to illustrating the various failures of the author after that.
No, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, we will not “get over it”.
The first inaccuracy is in depicting Mozilla Firefox as “a browser”. It isn’t merely just another browser. Firefox is the last widespread multiplatform browser that isn’t using the Blink engine (yes I know GNOME Web and Konqueror use WebKit, which is Blink’s ancestor, BTW[1] , but they are hardly widespread. And safari isn’t multiplatform).
Why does that matter? Because the engine is essentially all that a browser is, once you strip away the cosmetics. So the actual contest here isn’t between a dozen of browsers, but between two engines, and Firefox’s (Gecko) is, indeed, in a dire position. But if we let it go further, it will, as Steven puts it, fall into irrelevance (the inaccuracy here is that the harticle depicts Firefox as already irrelevant).
And if we ever come to the point where only one engine prevails, where services necessary for administrations, citizenship, and life in general, can drop support for anything else than Blink, it is the end of the open web, and of open source web browsers in general[2].
You will then have to input intimate personal information into a proprietary software, by law.
If you don’t see this as a problem, you are part of the problem.
And this is why we can’t “get over it”.
The internet is much more than just the web. But 100% (rounded from 99.999+%) of users are unaware of that.
The web is much more than browsing. But 100% (rounded) of users are unaware of that.
We are getting our technology reduced to the lowest common denominator, and this denominator is set by people who fail to open PDFs.
Now, as to the other blunders I mentioned above, here are a bunch:
-
“Mozilla’s revenue dropped from $527,585,000 to $510,389,000”.
This is a 3% drop. Significant? Yes. But hardly a game ender.
-
“So, where is all that money coming from? Google”.
I know it, you know it, we all have known that for a decade by now, and yes, it is a problem, yes, we need public FOSS funding, but that is neither news, nor relevant. Firefox, as the last major browser not directly controlled by Google, can find funding elsewhere. If I’m correct, and the stakes are so high, when Google pulls out, the public will step in (🤞), in the form of institutions, such as the EU.
-
“[…] she wants to draw attention to our increasingly malicious online world […] I don’t know what that has to do with the Mozilla Foundation”.
That’s on you, buddy. Understanding the matter at hand should be a prerequisite for publishing on theregister. But I digress. The maliciousness has a lot more to do with software than with users. And the root of said software aren’t in “the algorithms”, but really in actual, user facing software, that runs in our physical machines, where our microphones, cameras, GPS, and various other sensors are plugged…
-
“Somehow, all this will be meant to help Mozilla in “restoring public trust in institutions, governments, and the fabric of the internet.” That sounds good, but what does that have to do with Firefox?”.
Again, it’s on you. Seriously, WTF. I get that you, the author, are American, and that decades of misinformation about “socialism”, and “public ownership” will do that to a motherfucker, but Firefox does need funding aside from verdammt Google. You even highlighted that point yourself… How do you suppose they would get public funding if the government, or the public, doesn’t trust Mozilla? Because replacing Google by another corporation only moves the problem, it hardly solves anything. While I’m at it, quick history lesson here: the “fabric of the internet” has been publicly funded. All of it. The internet was designed by DARPA funded researchers. Public money. Developed by universities. Public money. The web was invented at the CERN, by a researcher. Paid with public money. As a tech writer, how do you not know that?
WebKit is only partially different from Blink, since Blink is a fork of WebKit. So, as far as “interoperability through competing implementations” goes, WebKit is of rather limited relevance, unfortunately. ↩︎
Only chromium and brave are available as open source software, chromium is maintained by Google as a courtesy, they can pull the plug any time, it will probably only affect their revenue positively. Brave is 3 times less popular than Firefox. ↩︎
Thank you for this, it’s a great breakdown. One question lingers for me:
You will then have to input intimate personal information into a proprietary software, by law.
Isn’t Blink also FOSS? As you mentioned Chromium is open source, and my (weak) understanding is that Google are themselves bound by LGPL when it comes to Blink. So it’s hyperbole - or just false - to say you’d be required to use proprietary software. It’s developed by a shoddy company but it’s not proprietary software - so long as other browsers exist that use the engine, of which there are plenty.
AOSP is under the Apache 2.0. Yet, if you ever used a “de-googled” lineageos phone, you probably know that the OS you get is a far cry from the commercially supported versions (extremely bare-bones, lots of missing features, lots of apps that don’t work, etc). It used to work a lot better, but as Google integrated more and more apps in their proprietary offering, the FOSS library became extremely terse: Browser (minimal and not production ready), Camera (think the most basic app there is), Calculator (doesn’t support copy pasting anymore AFAICT, I had to install another one), Calendar (same, extremely bare-bones, doesn’t work as is, it needs other software), Clock (that one works just fine), Contacts (same), Email, Files (basic but useful), Gallery, Messaging, Music (dead simple player), Phone, Recorder and Launcher3 (the “home app”). Anything else and you will need to side-load f-droid.
So much so that commercial implementations such as /e/OS have to use alternative implementations such as microG, and put extensive effort in going around the limitations the hard way (providing their own store, etc). In my experience, they are really buggy, and not a commercially viable alternative to using the Google services.
In the end, I use LineageOS as my daily driver on my phone, I have since 2013, but it isn’t without sacrifices (and it is terrible enough that I decided to eventually migrate away from smartphones entirely: the alternative of using a non FOSS phone doesn’t work for me).
One important fact, as I wrote above, is that prior to android 6 (AFAIR), the AOSP offering was a lot more consequent. Google likely realized it cost them money (in dev time), but more importantly opportunities (people using degoogled phones isn’t exactly in their best commercial interest), so they dropped the support for most apps. For example, the launcher app, launcher3, has been unmaintained in quite a while, and ROM distributors, such as Lineage, provide users with their own.
Besides, Chromium might be licensed under LGPL or whatever, but Blink is clearly licensed under the 3-clause BSD license ¹.
So, when you say
Google are themselves bound by LGPL when it comes to Blink.
It is incorrect. It is under a 3-clause BSD license, which does NOT give any warranty whatsoever with regards to sharing the source of components. Whenever Google decides to keep it proprietary, to relicense it, to stop updating the public repository, they can. No questions asked.
Additionally, the affirmation (emphasis mine):
so long as other browsers exist that use the engine, of which there are plenty.
Strikes me as also incorrect. The only browsers that matter in this context are Open Source ones, and besides chromium, which is literally Google’s product, I only know of Brave. But maybe you know others?
- I “diffed” that license against the 3-clause BSD, and as you can see with the following command, it is a match (don’t blindly believe me, check the
sedcommand, as you can see, the changes are minimal):
$ _URL_REF="https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.txt"; \
_URL_CMP="https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/blink/+/refs/heads/main/LICENSE?format=text"; \
_ADDITIONAL_NOTICE="The Chromium Authors can be found at\nhttp://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/AUTHORS" \
_F1="$(mktemp)"; _F2="$(mktemp)"; \
curl -SsL "$_URL_REF" | dos2unix | sed \
-e 's,(c) <<var;name=copyright;original= <year> <owner>;match=\.+>>,2014 The Chromium Authors,;' \
-e 's,reserved\. ,reserved.\n\n'"$_ADDITIONAL_NOTICE"',;' \
-e 's/<<var;name=organizationClause3;original=the copyright holder;match=\.+>>/Google Inc./;' \
-e 's/<<var;name=copyrightHolderAsIs;original=\([^;]*\);match=\.+>>/\1/;' \
-e 's/<<var;name=copyrightHolderLiability;original=\([A-Z ]*\)HOLDER\([A-Z ]*\);match=\.+>>/\1OWNER\2/;' \
-e 's/"AS IS"/\n&/; s/FOR A/FOR\nA/; s/\(reproduce the above\) \(copyright notice\)/\1\n\2/;' \
-e 's/\(its\) \(contributors\)/\1\n\2/; s/[1-3]\. / * /;' \
| fold -s -w 72 | sed 's,^,// ,; s/ *$//; 12d; 17d; $s/$/\n/' > "$_F1"; \
curl -SsL "$_URL_CMP" | base64 -d > "$_F2"; \
diff -s -u "$_F1" "$_F2"; \
rm "$_F1"; rm "$_F2"
Files /tmp/tmp.MQfi4Ya6P4 and /tmp/tmp.PmU8tsfiB0 are identical
$
Ugh. Lemmy just deleted my whole comment because “Cancel” is WAY too easy to press… Dammit. Here’s a reconstruction:
I didn’t expect such a thorough reply! I still think Google is bound by LGPL because Blink is eventually derived from KHTML which was licensed under LGPL. This was based on just some quick Wikipedia “research”, but now here’s some better proof thanks to your links:
LICENSE_FOR_ABOUT_CREDITS says:
The terms and conditions vary from file to file, but are one of:
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:
[...]
*OR*
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:
[...]
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY APPLE COMPUTER, INC. ``AS IS'' AND ANY
[...]
GNU LIBRARY GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
[...]
So the license differs from file to file, and importantly, some files are still LGPL. Clicking around sorta randomly I’ve found an example: Page.cpp which starts with this copyright notice:
/*
* Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved.
* Copyright (C) 2008 Torch Mobile Inc. All rights reserved. (http://www.torchmobile.com/)
*
* This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
* modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public
* License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
* version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
* This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
* Library General Public License for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public License
* along with this library; see the file COPYING.LIB. If not, write to
* the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
* Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
*/
So from my understanding of (L)GPL (which is the bare minimum understanding and potentially wrong), since some files are LGPL, Google must continue to release the full source code indefinitely, including the files that are licensed under BSD. Well, until the copyright on the LGPL files runs out, but thanks to Disney that’s a very long way away in the US at least. Correct me if that’s wrong.
The Android tragedy is shit but I don’t think it’s the same, though I do see the similarities. IIRC Android was started by Google so they have full ownership and control over it and aren’t bound by any license, which is a different situation from Blink. Not to mention Blink is sort of limited in scope and can’t really be taken apart and have its components parted off and replaced with proprietary bits - it’s a web rendering engine, it only works as a complete package. Android is an operating system and the operating system is still FOSS, Google can make the argument that usable default apps aren’t a necessary part of the operating system.
With Blink, but I don’t think they have a legal way to nerf Blink FOSS to that degree. Any part of the web engine must remain FOSS. They differentiate their browser through the rest of the browser - UI, extensions store, sync, branding. Those parts of the browser are the equivalent of Google’s proprietary default apps on proprietary Android.
As for alternative browsers using Blink - I’ll admit I didn’t actually have anything in mind and pulled that right out of my you-know-where. But it feels like if there’s a vacuum in that space there’ll always be someone to fill that vacuum. Right now Gecko is still relevant so the vacuum is filled with Gecko browsers. If Gecko really becomes unusable, I find it hard to believe that the same kinds of groups that maintain Gecko browsers today wouldn’t continue to do the same with Blink.
Wikipedia also lists various browsers using Blink, including Falkon and Dooble licensed under GPL and BSD respectively. I haven’t heard of them before, but there. (Again, I’m not doing more research than Wikipedia right now, feel free to do so)
Today, only a relative handful of Firefox users are left. According to the US federal government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP), which gives us the running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits, only 2.2 percent of visitors use Firefox.
Look, I know far fewer people use Firefox than Chrome, but basing it on who uses U.S. government websites in the last 90 days doesn’t even make sense if Firefox users were only in the U.S.
I’m in the U.S. and use Firefox and I haven’t been to a U.S. government website in the last 90 days as far as I know.
And, I don’t know if the author knows this or not, but there’s around 200 other countries out there.
Some of those government websites only work on chromium too, which is irritating
Back in the day it was the case with IE as well.
The cause?
At least in IE’s case, deliberate siloing of non-standard features needed for table input.
Microsoft didn’t have to write it that way, but they did, knowing it would capture a fucktonne of government and regulatory sites.
I had to support IE all the way to 2018 at one site because the only way they could pull permits was from an ancient government site that only supported IE.
Opinion piece by a person who has little to say outside of ad-hominem.
A lot of people in this thread seem to downplay the article with “yeah, that might be your opinion…” but two facts that are facts and not opinions are:
- The market share Firefox hold is insignificant.
- Mozilla’s business is a near 100% dependency on one “customer”, Google.
This means that if Google decides to stop bank rolling Mozilla it’s game over. Firstly because other revenue streams are currently near insignificant when you look at the total expenses.
Secondly because since Firefox hold no significant market share, no one else would be interested in investing in Mozilla and the future of Firefox. After all, whatever Mozilla will throw up on the wall as the “grand masterplan for world dominance” would just end up in the question “Why didn’t you do this before?”.
I’ve been using Firefox for almost 20 years. I started using it because I saw what happens when one company controls the browser market. That web browser did so much damage and we only really got rid of it some year ago.
Chrome is a perfect example that the history repeats itself and that people are fucking stupid. People are actually acting surprised and complain about Google putting effort into making adblocking impossible in Chrome.
So all in all, if Mozilla doesn’t find other revenue streams, Firefox is dead… It just doesn’t know it yet.
Now, everyone yapping about that Linux was an insignificant player and still made it to the top just sound like enthusiasts who really doesn’t know history and the harsh reality of doing business.
Linux was just a little more than hobby project (business wise) that essentially only Red Hat and Suse made real money from in the 90’s.
Arguably you could say that the turning point was when the CEO of IBM, Lou Gerstner, shocked the world by saying that IBM was going to pump in 1 billion dollars in Linux during 2001. Now, that doesn’t look like much today when just Red Hat has a yearly revenue of 3-4 billion, but that’s how insignificant Linux was at that time.
After that milestone Linux went for the jugular on Windows Server. For ordinary people it would still take almost 10 years before they would hold something Linux in their hands.
The rocket engine that accelerated Linux and pieces that it was ready for end users was Google and Android in 2007. Linux’s growth the last 20 years wasn’t mainly driven by enthusiasts, it was business pumping in money in future opportunities.
What future opportunities can Mozilla sell to investors with the market share Firefox has today?
Yup. Mozilla really needs to diversify and find new revenue sources.
They’ve been trying, but it’s proving difficult to do while still refraining from hoovering up and selling everybody’s data. Nobody wants to pay.
To make matters worse, anytime Mozilla tries to make any money, people accuse them of selling out or say they should just focus on Firefox. Some of these people even say that Firefox needs to get rid of Google funding immediately to get rid of Google’s influence.
But that means the death of Firefox. I don’t really get what these people want.
These people want to be rid of Google’s influence, which is why they chose Firefox over Chrome to begin with. But they don’t understand the position Mozilla is in…
Some of these people even say that Firefox needs to get rid of Google funding immediately to get rid of Google’s influence.
Which is an importnt factor, because Mozilla is currently being kept alive specifcally to lose.
To be fair, those people (and lots others too) watch everyday some millionaires or billionaires just up and throwing money. Under that premise, it “should be as easy” as just convincing a random capitalist with narcissist complex to fund Mozilla. The problem with that is, people’s memory on the internet tends to not be retrospeculative, so they don’t notice if Mozilla did that they’d be in just about the same position eg.: Reddit was 5 years before 2023.
The issue is biggest for web browsers, but I also feel like I see that issue for a whole lot of web industries. Journalism, for instance. Everyone wants everything for free, and so the “articles” you see are garbage half churned out from algorithms to optimize click rate, and blanketed with dozens of ads. To take another example, games, we have a market saturated with freemium games that encourage people to spend nothing (and then hundreds). Pirates would now claim it’s a moral responsibility to pirate, but if we end up in that world, only a slim minority of people would ever make a living out of it.
The general unwillingness/inability for consumers to pay for digital content definitely causes a lot of problems now. I personally attribute it to a generally low minimum wage, but it could be an issue going beyond that.
The rocket engine that accelerated Linux and pieces that it was ready for end users was Google and Android in 2007.
N-no. Correct about IBM though.
It seems that what made Linux and FreeBSD relevant was the late 90s’ and early 00s’ Web. And FreeBSD then lost to Linux, not to Windows Server or Solaris.
Linux’s growth the last 20 years wasn’t mainly driven by enthusiasts, it was business pumping in money in future opportunities.
Only there are different kinds of businesses, and the balance between them is becoming worse.
Before IBM made that statement there were essentially no major software vendors that ported and supported their software on Linux.
Yes, one might argue that Linux-Apache-MySql-Php revolutionized things but other than that a clear majority of things were run on solutions that put money in Microsoft’s pockets.
Feel free to name drop some major finance systems or similar enterprise systems you could run without Microsoft cashing in on the OS in some way between 1990-2005.
As I wrote before, it took us 20 years to get rid of IE and a lot of proprietary server side junk Microsoft blessed us with. It’s not an coincidence. 99% of all companies were stuck in development tools from Microsoft.
It wasn’t until the hardware really really caught up with Java requirements that things really changed.
I’ve just found mentions of Linux support by Oracle before that, so there were things before IBM and that statement. Though on that page there’s no Linux link, but there are AIX, Solaris etc and an NT one.
Feel free to name drop some major finance systems or similar enterprise systems you could run without Microsoft cashing in on the OS in some way between 1990-2005.
Could you please, on the contrary, name some such systems strongly requiring Microsoft really? IIS and AD are not that.
I mean, OK, for the thick clients for administrators likely it’d be many things.
But everything IBM or commercial Unix-based, like, again, Oracle databases.
I’m born in 1996, so don’t really know what I’m talking about. Just seems a bit skewed.
Great write up, thank you very much!
I expect Google to keep Mozilla/Firefox on the lifeline indefinitely to avoid antitrust issues in the states and EU, so Mozilla/Firefox won’t go anywhere.
Still, this doesn’t mean anything, because I often need Chrome or Safari to access some websites.
In the end it is quite funny: Moving a lot of stuff to the web made Linux a more realistic desktop option, at the same time to access a lot of stuff on the web one needs to run a Blink browser.
IMHO the most annoying thing is, that we could have at least some laws, which mandate that every government service must be available to Open Source users and every government paid software must run on at least Linux. Thanks to lobbying and power this will never happen.
Edit: To state it more clearly: Firefox is IMHO in bad shape and in a bad situation. Firefox won’t die, but at the same time right now I already need Chrome/Safari browsers, because Firefox support is broken on many sites. I see no way Firefox can gain significant market share, especially seeing what regular consumers tolerate from Microsoft/Edge and Google/Chrome.
