Also from Jamie Zawinski yesterday: Mozilla’s Original Sin
Some will tell you that Mozilla’s worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.
Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.
I mean, I definitely think it’s not ideal and there’s room for improvement and social pressure for Mozilla to change its priorities, but I also don’t think it’s any reason to abandon the project. The reality is that a modern web browser is too massive of a project for a non-commercial entity to reasonably develop and keep updated, and Mozilla is the only such entity that’s even remotely got its heart in the right place.
Oh, we’re fully in agreement. I’m not arguing in favor of abandoning Firefox or Mozilla at all. I’m just saying frustration and anxiety are to be expected sometimes. Note that I’m not excusing rudeness or the like.
Re: the burden of developing a modern browser, I wonder what librewolf evangelists think would happen to the project, if Firefox development by Mozilla were to fall due to any reason. To my view, the forks only exist because Firefox still does. After all, if managing an entire browser was possible with their resources, they wouldn’t need to fork one.
At best, another Pale Moon is what would happen. They’ve been maintaining their own hard fork of Gecko by themselves since 2016. They clearly have people capable of maintaining a browser engine, though perhaps not quite enough of them. If Firefox were to die, perhaps joining up with Goanna would be the smart move.