Web browsers don't make money. It's why only chrome basically exists and that's a cost center to support Google's Internet ad hegemony and they spend billions a year on it.

Yep. Well, I don't necessarily agree it started exclusively for the ads, but they definitely wanted to create something that they control. Microsoft Edge and Opera switching to Chromium just means Google has more soft control on how the web operates. (Even saying "soft" there is pretty generous.) A majority of browsers are Chromium forks. Google can control how the web operates because of it.

But to your point though, thwarting ad blocking is a huge part of it now. The manifest V3 changes (which severely limited what sorts of ad blocking extensions could do) came the same year they listed ad blocking as a significant risk to their revenue in their shareholder statement. Which, I just wanna mention for folks who might not be keeping up with this as much, isn't some sort of conspiratorial statement. It's a public document because they're a publicly traded company.

I guarantee you that most Firefox users do not feel the level of emotions that you do on these issues, either about the AI prompt sidebar or the CEO's salary. They also don't use Firefox to spite Google. They use it because they think it's better than Chromium.

You're unhappy with Firefox? Easy fork. Off you go. Want to convince me to be mad too? Okay, make your case, but don't just assume that I'd just have to be mad if I just knew that there's gasp an AI sidebar that I can use if I want to.

shoutout to MPV!

A big share of Linux contributions come from big tech companies, which are definitely making a profit from it

So basically what it all comes down to is competition and not just greed like most people believe. If you don't make more money than the competition, you will fail. That's why companies keep getting bought out all the time, they lost this game. Most people have no idea just how many companies they know are owned by bigger ones they may not know. The whole thing is conglomerating like the T-1000 after it had been shattered and melted. So rabid profit chasing is a matter of survival.

It's got OpenOffice in it. This picture must be ancient.

The Mozilla Foundation is non-profit, but the Mozilla Corporation is for-profit.

Obligatory shoutout to curl.

I'm not sure Firefox belongs on this list. Google finances Mozilla's operation to the tune of $420M a year. It's not for-profit, but it's also not the same as the others.

Audacity sold out and is now spyware; use Tenacity instead.

When money comes in the picture, then profit is more important than the product, and this people really loved the product they are doing, if they have enough money to live comfortably they get to keep control of something they care and love.

I'm more of a wget kinda guy myself.

LibreOffice has been updated? Interface still looks like it was designed for Windows 95.

Firefox is not high quality. Every other browser is just worse.

For real!? Damn

Tbh I quite like it

If you have better ideas for financing firefox, go ahead :)

🫢 Kof, kof! ...fork browsers.

That is precisely correct, capitalism is in some sense like a story, I don't remember who wrote it, in which human scientists ask a semi-omnipotent AI to answer some question, and the AI decides that in order to solve it, it needs to transform all the matter in the solar system into an even greater AI, and calmly treats human extinction as an irrelevant side effect.

"Maximize profit forever" is a bad algorithm if the goal is to sustain a thriving human society. It has no goal state. Just more, forever. Capitalism is fundamentally flawed in its core design and central idea, that somehow, by creating ever more "wealth", everyone gets richer as a whole, while not taking into account the societal effects of some getting vastly richer than others, compounding over time unto infinity.

I could go on. But capitalism is a fundamentally broken idea that will implode on itself as a matter of causation as it plays out over time, it is logically and physically incapable of sustaining itself. We are seeing the late stage effects of it play out before our eyes right now.

Same issues

Also Deltahedra.

Never doubt the power of nerds arguing over their specific interests to make something amazing. Wikipedia is arguably one of the greatest achievements of humankind, entirely powered by nerd fights.

I’m more of a Zmodem guy.

It still looks and behaves like StarOffice.

The templates they include look ancient as well. They do have a mediocre copy of Microsoft’s ribbon interface.

They actually pay their employees.

???
Of course they do.
I don't see your point.

Because it’s fun!

First of all, I'd get rid of a CEO that wants to be paid millions of dollars a year.

Media Wiki actually makes money though.

It's an easy paycheck for allowing Google as the default search setting. If Microsoft paid as much we would be seeing the same arguments about Bing.

Do what they did with Thunderbird. https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving-our-2022-financial-report/

Not really, it's still fully FOSS, they were just terrible at communicating what they actually wanted to do and people got spooked.

At least they listened to users and made it easy to turn off. Still not acceptable, but at least something.

If all you use is HTTP or FTP then sure.

yeah I recently built myself a music player because I was just so disappointed with all the available options on Linux. Nothing had EVERYTHING I wanted. Many had really crappy shuffles or just didn't include one at all. many just wouldn't play the entirety of your music collection and most simply wouldn't do both online streaming and local music playback. So I built one that's TUI based that does everything I want and it's perfect. Allows me to play music from QoBuz, my Navidrome server, or just local music files OR I can play all three making a "SUPER" music library. Shuffle that ACTUALLY shuffles the ENTIRE collection. search feature, integration with soulseek to download music to either my local machine or navidrome and qobuz search to add to that playlist.

I'm not going to release it because A. like i said it's perfect for me and B. I dont' want to deal with users git issues or having to deal with other devs wanting to contribute. It works, it's mine, and that's that. will never see the light of day.

hmm.....if Firefox dies, can LibreWolf continue? 🤔

Doubtful. Librewolf still uses Firefox as base.

Almost certainly not. All the offshoots from Mozilla's tech rely first and foremost on Mozilla's production of the foundational software, which eats up a significant portion of their roughly $500M/yr operational costs. The heavy development cost of modern browsers is why everything is either Chromium or Gecko-based.

That said, Mozilla will be around as long as Chromium continues to dominate the market. Google literally funds Mozilla because it's cheaper to prop up a competitor than it is to be sued by the government for monopolistic practices (check out 1998 decision against Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows).

😤 I'm upset I never thought about it this way till now.

Check out MangoJelly on YouTube. The guy has hundreds of tutorials for FreeCAD and they're great

Ok, while most of these don’t have companies behind them with huge revenues, most work on these projects is done by paid developers, with money coming from sponsorships, grants, donations and support deals. (Or in the case of Linux - device drivers are a prerequisite for anyone buying your product).

Developers getting paid to work on open source is a good thing. These projects may have begun their life as small hobby projects - they aren’t anymore. (And that’s probably good)

Can I ask how you integrated Qobuz? I see they have a locked API and no other obvious way to integrate

The image says "making", not "rebranding".

Blender is so incredibly good. Big fan here. I'm just a hobbyist tho

Pretty sure you can convert videos with vlc and watch iptv

I wonder if it changed much in the last year. The assembly implementation is what's holding me back. Well, that and staring at cad all day at work already.

definitely a goated application on linux by now. I've just started using it, and holy cow, it's way more capable than I thought it was. 1.0 was a blessing!

Non-profit means the corporation isn't set up to make a profit and the business operates off of donations instead of selling a product. So there is always a profit motive. I wish more people understood this. Everything from Greenpeace to MADD is still a corporation ran by people who want to make lots and lots of cash.

Line goes down :(

Google wants to finance anything they can get their damn search engine into, that's not entirely the fault of Firefox. I still use a firefox-based browser, but only for now.

There is ladybird on the horizon, a browser being built from scratch, not based on either Gecko or Webkit.