This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I think Mozilla could use a new CEO and I want to be optimistic. That said:
Yep. Not a single non-profit or open-source related position in her CV
You gotta start somewhere, just give her a chance, we'll see if she fucks up or not
She smells of glass cliff to me. We'll see.
I've known Mozilla being great wouldn't last forever, and there it is. Someone from those companies at the helm? Here comes the enshitification.
Hard to say. You kind of want someone that was part of a successful product. And successful for-profit products are almost always menaces.
Yes, but hiring someone who's good at making for-profit "services" successful generally means you want your product to be for-profit.
And as you say, successful for-profit companies are often menaces.
Would you call any of those successful products 'good' tho? Yes they have made a lot of money but at the same time....2 of 3 are straight up evil. Ebay...eh. Could be worse. Thats the best I can say for them. Paypal has straight up stolen people's money on countless occasions and gotten away with it. Then there was that huge violin fiasco. Airbnb is flat out a part of destroying the housing market, they know this, they don't care.
I get it, most big companies are 'menaces' like you say but...these are absolutely horrible companies responsible for true evil and, odds are, he's going to bring that energy to Mozilla.
I don't really disagree, but what do you want as an organization, someone that built a "good" product that nobody ever used and fell into obscurity? Or someone that built a product that attracted and retained millions of users that you might consider "bad"? And tbh, most of the "bad" from these products is just because of their size and monopoly, which would arguably be a good problem to have for Mozilla.
Probably an easy choice if I was on the board.
Also, not that it matters to our discussion but just as a minor correction, the new CEO is a woman.
Yeah the Airbnb, PayPal, eBay pedigree has me more concerned than anything. I wouldn't want any of Mozilla's stuff to be anything close to these things.
what happened with ebay?
eBay banned NFTs, I'm onboard with eBay.
Well there was this thing. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/29/ebay-executive-sentenced-couple-harassment-newsletter
Any bets on which horrible technology fad this one hitches Mozilla's horse to and spends all their money on?
Pocket Powered by AI.
The browser is going to automatically set a new homepage for you based the hottest topics according to AI analysis.
Dynamic bookmarks is going to add suggested sites and automatically sort your bookmarks based on AI-powered ratings.
Hey if we can bend that out of shape to use the open source model mixtral. I been specifically trying to get locallama to organize my tabs and bookmarks into something usable for a while already.
Sure, the normies get AI advertising but we'll get to repurpose for our own use.
I bet it’s Automated Irrigation, also known as AI.
Artificial Insemination. Which was probably the first AI.
Anal Insemination .... trying to create something new in a way that will never work but is fetishized by everyone
Enshitification incoming.
They're going to screw their business customers to claw back value for themselves?
Hadn't yet really started on the users, so we'll be getting it first
"Focus" and "streamline" are usually MBA buzzwords to describe layoffs. Hopefully not the case but sounds rough.
Doubling down on our core products, like Firefox
Expected them to double down on Google tracking, AI, and pocket while laying off Firefox engineers. Still do, but maybe slightly slower now.
"We will be rewriting our base code, working off of Chromium!"
I'd be switching to servo then.
LibreWolf is a very decent Firefox fork. Open Source is great because bad CEOs can't really threaten the source code.
Not saying this one is bad though — I have no idea. The last one was raking in $7 million/year which is less than ideal for an open source project.
Open Source is great because bad CEOs can't really threaten the source code.
Most of the time this is true, 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, LibreWolf can't just pick up the slack. They die too. Volunteers alone can't run a modern web engine, it takes hundreds of millions per year to upkeep.
It's probably more expensive to maintain a browser engine than a full operating system at this point.
I'll never understand why Microsoft dropped their engine. They can afford to develop it and it would've been a great advantage vs Google. I mean, it wouldn't have helped open source folk either way, but I just don't get why they dropped it.
Yeah, I was hoping MS could make a competent engine with a fresh start. I wouldn't even be mad if it was Windows only. Now Edge is just another Microsoft L
What makes it a great advantage vs Google?
Because they now have to go along with most things that Google says. They're reliant on Google now, they have to do what daddy tells them.
Add to that, they've conceded any sway in setting web standards, granting Google more control to push the web in the direction that benefits Google and harms competition.
Perhaps we should take the clue and - if we also see clues of Mozilla enshittifying - switch globally to an easier internet that's also easier to program for. Something like Gemini (the post-Gopher thingy, not Google's latest fad) for example, where I take it maintaining a browser is nowhere near the same order of magnitude as complex.
I wish more distro's packaged librewolf. I know there's an appimage and such but I prefer native tested packages where possible.
Doubling down on our core products, like Firefox
Well, I sure fucking hope so. When are we getting back XUL addons or something comparable, you know, the feature that made your browser stand out?
(One can dream, right? Hahaha)
The reason that Firefox sucked ass for so long in speed and features was because xul was an unbeatable burden to maintain. Also, firefoxs extensions are still the most powerful out of any browser
Indeed, they don't have to bring back the XUL. The power users would just appreciate...
OK, apart from the management bullshit lingo of the article, has anyone an idea what is going to happen?
Obviously they're going to be building platforms that accelerate momentum.
And synergize. We'll loop back and reach out in a couple months to see their single pane of glass.
This is how I read it also... Scroll-scroll... Bullshit statements, scroll, marketing, marketing, self congratulaty shit, marketing, scroll, scroll....
Where does it say what they are going to actually do??
Scroll, scroll, scroll, give up, post on Lemmy. :)
Nothing concrete was said.
“interim” CEO…
