You would buy them out so they could focus 100% of their time to an endeavor that doesn't bring in any money except from a ludicrously generous gift from Google that might be illegal?

Like I get it, I wish they could just be a browser company too but all their other side ventures are desperate attempts to diversify their revenue. They don't have a billion dollar ad business obviate their need to actually be a business.

▲

jm4 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

Vivaldi seems to be doing ok and they only focus on a free browser. Brave seems to be doing well too, even if some of what they're doing is controversial. I admire them for at least taking a shot.

I don't necessarily fault Mozilla for trying to diversify revenue. The problem is when they neglect the browser to work on silly projects like Pocket, VPN's, mail relay, etc. and not even do a good job on those either. All of them were bolted on via acquisition or partnership, felt like an afterthought, and didn't provide anything that wasn't already easily accessible.

The organization doesn't execute well at any level and hasn't for a long time. They only exist because of Google and the remaining holdout users who feel obligated to use a sub-par, non-Chromium browser. I'm finally off that bandwagon. For the first time in over 20 years, I don't even have Mozilla's browser installed on my system.

	▲	giancarlostoro 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		The more I think of who I wish would buy them out based on some of the things they've done for side funding. I think someone like CloudFlare (not Google, Microsoft or Apple) would fit the bill for me. Mozilla birthed Rust, they very likely still have Rust talent onboard. CloudFlare relies on Rust for critical software. I kind of miss the world the Mozilla was going all in on Rust for Firefox, I think the language could benefit greatly from it, especially in terms of out of the box libraries. One of my hopes was that Rust would eventually build out a standard GUI stack that's cross-platform that would be used by Firefox, but could be used by everyone. Same could be said of all the different pieces that make up Firefox, including the JS engine, could have been its own discrete Rust crate.

▲

giancarlostoro 7 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You would buy them out so they could focus 100% of their time to an endeavor that doesn't bring in any money except from a ludicrously generous gift from Google that might be illegal?

If I could buy them out, I wouldn't be taking any money from Google ;)

▲

noosphr 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

A charity focusing on their mission instead of making money? Inconceivable!