Yet another thing to add to my growing pile of reasons that Mozilla is enshittifying. I wonder what tomorrow’s reasons will be?
Slight sidetrack, I thought Mastodon was federated with Lemmy? Or is it just Boost that can’t handle Mastodon links?
Here’s a comment about it I made a few weeks back in the context of why Jellyfin came to be and why I only ever recommend Plex or Jellyfin
This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.
~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don’t know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))
Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that’s why I’m generally fine with Plex
Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.
Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn’t even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it…yea. fuck em
I try not to be, but attention does need to be called to it, and I see a lot of handwaving away in regards to Mozilla. People should be demanding more answers from them to at least delay enshittification a little to give more time to the alternatives like Ladybird and Servo to develop and refine for widespread usage
Which thanks for pointing me towards Servo, I missed that one lol, but I still don’t think it has yet achieved feature parity with Gecko or Chromium
The big problem is the browser engine at the heart of all browsers, all the FF or Chromium forks very rarely modify the core. When they do, it’s minor stuff. That’s why AFAIK not a single chromium fork is maintaining manifest v2 in defiance of Google.
If Mozilla goes full tilt enshittification, all the FF forks will suffer a similar fate, they’ll make changes all over, custom interface, cool little features here and there etc; but they’ll never make major changes to the core and that’s assuming they keep the core open source. If they take the core closed source and the forks can no longer get upstream updates for it they’ll wither and die
A browser engine is kinda like the Linux kernel, it’s large, complex and takes a lot of time and effort to make and keep it usable. I’ve seen estimates that if we needed to start from scratch on the Linux kernel it’d take 2-4 years just to get something decently usable.
Browser engines are similar, Ladybird for example, is a new open source browser AND engine from scratch that’s been in development for about 2 years, they’re estimating to have something “generally usable” in 2026
It’s Mozilla that’s slowly enshittifying, Firefox itself is theoretically insulated from the worst decisions they could make, but those safeguards are going to be put to the test real soon I bet.
Was it Crapcast? I bet it was Crapcast, it sounds like a Crapcast thing to do lol
Our time has come! night owls rise up!
Nintendo: Can we sue them over the designs?
Lawyer: Not really, this shit is impossible to prove
… starts closing the money briefcase
Lawyer: But we can sue them anyway
We’re growing the Mozilla Ads product team, passionate about display advertising in Mozilla products that is privacy-respecting and values-aligned. You will be one of the lead engineers that will craft, build, and be responsible for the core systems, both front-end and back-end, that support advertising in clients (Firefox, MDN, Pocket, Fakespot, etc). You and your team will be the domain guides when it comes to advertising, providing direction and shepherding to various product teams across Mozilla.
Ofc some reading between the lines is needed, they’re not going to just blatantly say something they know will be incredibly unpopular this early.
And like I said, its just another on a pile of mounting evidence of a year of bad decisions
Not in the browser. From web pages sure, but it sure as hell sounds like they’re going to shove ads in the browser like MS has been testing in the start menu. Once that starts who knows, maybe they’ll have their own little Chrome manifest v3 rollout that breaks adblocking for webpages too.
Based on this and the past year of “mistakes” it’s sure looking more and more like they’re trying to push ahead on the enshittification path.
If they’re so desperate to find other sources of income why does the Mozilla CEO not take a pay cut out of that 10 million/year
We’re going to explore doing so in an organic method across our products using the methodology that big tech is generating money, but with a Mozilla spin.
Hm yes, the “we’re built different so we won’t be affected by enshittification” option
that support advertising in clients (Firefox, MDN, Pocket, Fakespot, etc)
Ah, the “Mozilla Spin” is to put fucking ads in Firefox, got it.
bad battery bloat
We call that a “Spicy Pillow” sir
don’t tell me what to do!
Its a joke lol, why are you so serious all the time
Sorry, I’ve already posted the new internet rules and they took immediate effect, I’ll have to report this incident to…the council.
Clearly we need an Arch version of rule 34 and rule 35
Rule 34a: If linux software exists, it’s in the AUR. No exceptions.
Rule 35a: If linux software is not in the AUR, it will be made available in the AUR.
Yea, at least with those who have attained a minimum of mid-close friend tier status lol
Yea if nothing else hopefully it’ll at least point you in the right direction