>Even if it were inferior in any aspect to other options, I'd still use it for the above mentioned reasons.
I agree with you, but luckily, it's not inferior!
I agree with you, but luckily, it's not inferior!
It surely isn't generally "inferior" but let's say it has character.
I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development.
Let's not forget the ridiculous pay for the executives which has been shown to not correlate with revenue (or anything else):
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
I give to the Thunderbird fund every year but have not given to Mozilla for a long time!
If it followed the product's success, products that are going through a bad patch, or are going downwards, would not be able to attract good executives, when arguably they are the ones who need the best executives, relative to products that are doing well, which on many occasions can sustain themselves purely on momentum.
This is further complicated for non profits which cannot use ownership stakes as an incentive either.
I may be a naive person who generally detests the organization chart gymnasts, but I honestly believe Mozilla would be better off if they just got rid of all C-suites and handed that cash to their developers to do whatever they want. So many open source projects are hugely successful without a CEO. Why would Mozilla be different? Keep the cash for the devs, and it's already miles ahead of any other big open source project financially!
For countless years they've been handed some 400-500 million(!) for "free", just by keeping Google the default search engine. For a conventional company, this kind of money requires a massive operation, customer base, etc.
Mozilla just gets a check. Half a billion for free. And then pisses away this money on projects where most are questionable, have no impact, etc. All the while the user base shrinking further and further, for over a decade now.
If that is the situation, it seems pretty reasonable to me to just get rid of leadership altogether. Let the tech people figure it out, it's not like they can do worse.
I'd love to see them pour more resources into it, but it's a huge project, so I think moving the needle likely is never as simple as "a bit" more attention.
It would be neat if Mozilla added a "where do you want your money to go to" option in donations. The bulk of their funding would likely continue be from partnerships, but it would make it so much more tangible that the users really care about browser development. We're not just noisy people in the HN comments--we'll put money into it given the option.
+1 A whole back I wanted to give to Firefox but I wanted to specify which projects it goes to. Many other orgs do this but last I checked Mozilla does not
In fact if they cannot avoid answering their answer is that donations are not even allowed to go to the browser. Something about Mozilla being a non-profit and Firefox being a fully owned commercial company.
To which I have to say that this is weird: 1. non-profits are allowed to do maintenance of their buildings and machinery, why not something that keeps generating income 2. even if the above doesn't work because of tax reasons they could just stop bleeding it dry. Firefox alone without Mozilla is very cash positive.
Summary: Donating to Firefox goes to Mozilla, the organization that keeps taking away all the money that Firefox generates.
Update: Firefox VPN and maybe Pocket too goes through Mozilla Corporation I think, but verify this before buying 1000 subscriptions :-)
I haven’t been excited for a browser upgrade in years. I see these announcements and I know I’ll lose time re-learning something or just missing old functionality that has been removed.
The Mozilla of 2022 is very much only the least evil option.
Google Maps performance seems to be way worse
I do wonder how's the WASM performance
Without bugs in the driver, even bad behaviour from the browser shouldn't bring the whole machine down.
Graphics drivers are sadly famously buggy, and occasionally the hardware is buggy too, and the driver needs to work around those bugs in the hardware, and occasionally the users hardware specifically is broken in some way, and then there's no winning.
It's probably true that Firefox has less workarounds for buggy drivers hardcoded into it than Chromium, but in the end the blame is on the driver, and if they had blacklisted your driver the likely "improvement" is you'd no longer have any hardware accelleration, which is not exactly a great result - the real fix needs to be better drivers that don't crash the system for no good reason.
And no problems with websites either. I don't even have Chrome or any chromium based browser installed.
To use software WebRender, set about:config pref “gfx.webrender.software” = true. To use software WebGL, set "widget.dmabuf-webgl.enabled" = false. To use software video decoding, set "media.ffmpeg.vaapi-drm-display.enabled" = false.
If those settings do avoid the crashes, please file a bug report in Bugzilla with a copy of your Firefox's about:support information. Perhaps there is a GPU driver bug that Firefox needs to work around.
If file a bug report in Bugzilla with a copy of your Firefox's about:support information, Firefox developers can work around the buggy GPU driver so other users don't experience the driver crash.
(And one of the PCs it's on runs a GT 710 with now outdated drivers)
I can't remember a single time when it last crashed on me in the last 2 years on both operating systems.