Mozilla 2023 Annual Report: CEO pay skyrockets, while Firefox Marketshare nosedives

I'm so out of the loop here. Never heard of him before. A quick web search yielded little. But his seemingly-abandoned Twitter profile is...something. https://nitter.net/bryanlunduke

I used to say controversial things that I don't really believe to try and get attention. Now I've changed. Black Lives Matter. He / Him

🤷

What's his deal?

Good catch.

noted racist

How is he a racist? If he's a noted racist. That must mean there's a ton of proof you can link to, right.

It's this fucking lunduke again, he is a right-wing that tries to call Mozilla for whatever reason from time to time.

Lunduke is such a contrarian. He cannot help himself from trying to argue that he understands better than common opinion, whether or not his position makes sense.

This is the man who disabled HTTPS on his site because he felt that the fact certificates can expire and domains can change hands made it not secure enough... and that using plain HTTP was somehow a more pragmatic security approach.

I think I recognize the name from distant past, but not up to date. He's problematic?

deleted

They spun off the Servo browser project if you want to work on that.

That said browsers are as complex as kernels now a days, it's crazy how much work is involved in it.

I'm not an expert, but I was curious so I did 15 minutes of digging and this is what I found. Take it in context.

Wikipedia's Usage share of web browsers page references two sources for stats: StatCounter and NetMarketShare.

StatCounter is an analytics tool for web site operators. They cover their methodology here: https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology . To quote:

Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally.

Their installation guide explains that they use a small JavaScript snippet embedded into the site's HTML.

Firefox blocks this if enhanced tracking protection is set to strict. Discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34502986 . Some commenters there also said that uBlock origin blocks it. I have not confirmed.

NetMarketShare also refers to collecting data from user browsers and requiring JavaScript. https://netmarketshare.com/methodology

I would be interested to see server-side statistics based on HTTP user-agent from major global sites like Wikipedia, but I was not able to find that. I imagine spoofing user-agents is less common than ad blocking and tracker blocking

Edit: Found Wikimedia's browser stats:

https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-browser/browser-family-and-major-hierarchical-view

Linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics#Analytics

Do note that is not for the foundation which runs and develops Firefox, but for the company. Still shit, but separate from the browser.

This article is chudposting, remember that

Yeah, that's been the case for like 10 years now.

The focus should be on securing independent funding. This means paid services or increased independent donations. Some ideas:

• Mozilla VPN - essentially a wrapper over Mullvad, but the landing page doesn't give a good reason to choose it over Mullvad (e.g. container tabs); choosing a server per site should be front and center
• email - I know they tried at some point, but they really should integrate with something like ProtonMail (e.g. FF-specific TLD with service through ProtonMail)
• password manager - they have their own solution, but it's FF-only; perhaps have a cobranded Bitwarden that integrates with other Mozilla products cleanly
• ad blocker - Mozilla should work with major websites to drop ads and let the user choose between privacy-respecting ads (served by Mozilla based on local browsing history) or anonymous payment (Mozilla would host something like GNU Taler, which you'd load through a method of your choosing)

The last I think could be truly disruptive.