Hey, I don’t hate you, but I feel like Ghostty has users.
Is it critical software? Unsure- it will feel critical if it hangs when you’re doing some data processing via a shell its running- but that's besides the point.
Maybe “production” requires it being used for a backend? ;)
his conservative viewpoints and political support (which incidentally i do not share) do not automatically make his beliefs “far right”. i have not seen or heard a single thing he’s expressed or done that suggests “far right”. if anything, he appears rather centrist.
and can we stop already with the smearing? it clearly wasn’t intended to be a nazi salute, which both the ADL as well as the person who made the gesture have clarified. do we think he is lying about that? why would someone who wants to make nazi salutes on stage then go and lie about it later?
scott adams, however, has said and clarified his far-right viewpoints many times publicly. there’s no ambiguity there.
> I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!
And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
I mean, even literally this one sentence is self-contradictory. Thunderbird is not their browser. You complain that they "invest more effort into everything other than their browser" and then complain that they don't invest enough in Thunderbird.
No win situation for them in terms of public opinion.
* They can't get diversify their revenue to be less dependent on Google without doing things that people view as "distractions"
* They don't get credit when the "distractions" are for the public good, like LetsEncrypt, Rust, Opus / AV1, etc.
* They get punished for de-prioritizing "distractions" like Thunderbird and Servo and Rust because those distractions are popular.
* For years they were simultaneously being dragged for dropping the XUL extension ecosystem, and also dragged for low performance and lack of multiprocessing and a bunch of other things which were being kneecapped hard by the XUL extension ecosystem.
It's not like I love their management or anything, certainly they've made mistakes, but the narcissism of small differences hits them with full force relative to every other competitor in the space.
Mozilla has had an endowment for, I think, ~15 years now, and they have invested it and grown it from around $90 million to around $1.2 billion and counting. Which now is a firewall in case of emergency, as well as a resource that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue.
They already spend more on developing the browser now than at any point in the entire history of Firefox, and that's after adjusting for inflation. They ship millions of lines of new code every year and apply thousands of patches. It's probably one of the biggest and most active open source projects in the entire world.
And just so we're clear, are you suggesting they shouldn't have an endowment at all, or that they shouldn't use the endowment to create any lines of long term revenue, or that they should but spending a fraction of a percent of it on a VC fund would not be successful? Whichever one you pick, there's at least one person who's exactly as upset at Mozilla for the opposite reason.
Edit: I would go so far as to say I think the VC fund is the single best idea Mozilla has ever had for long term financial independence. It builds on the success they've had thus far (such as it is) raising money from search licensing, and then using that search licensing money to stand up the endowment. Now, the VC fund leverages the endowment in a way that's the most serious path to financial independence they've ever had.
You started this thread by falsely claiming Mozilla had no endowment. You were fully possessed by the certainty that this was simply more proof of their bad management. Can you acknowledge you were wrong about that instead of just shifting to new accusations?
500 million could net you about 50 to 70 million annually if you put it all on the S&P 500... A few years of this and you're a self-funded non-profit...
They're doing that. Their endowment is invested and it does grow by a non-trivial amount, though I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head.
Reminder: Ladybird is being developed by a handful of people with contributions from the community. It's far from being complete, but it clearly shows that you don't need an enormous budget to build a Web browser entirely from scratch, let alone maintain one.
It is more easier to secure revenue/funding from Google once they retain existing market share and gain more. They need to improve the product for that to happen.
With all the distractions they are abandoning their primary product and they are bleeding whatever miniscule market share they have. This means Google has more leverage over them and can eventually stop the funding once their market share drops beyond a threshold say 0.5% because we all know antitrust is not a strong reason anymore to keep FF alive based on trends of recent rulings.
If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share. That worked in the early 2000s when the competition (internet explorer) was utterly stagnant and the internet-using population was composed predominantly of techies willing to try new things. Browsers are commodities now, and most people aren't going to try a new browser when they're already using Chrome / Safari on their mobile device with all of the integrations that are available between the two.
Chrome gained marketshare not just because it was a good product but because they paid Adobe, Oracle, and legions of freeware antivirus providers lots of $$$ to put a checked-by-default box in their installers to install Google Chrome and make it the default browser for anyone not paying enough attention to uncheck the boxes, and because they targeted Firefox users visiting google.com with popups advertising how much better Chrome was. Mozilla could never do that and they would be excoriated if they tried. And as I mentioned, many of the aspects of Chrome that were indeed superior, were met with kicking and screaming when Mozilla tried to follow, e.g. choosing performance over the XUL extension ecosystem.
Sadly I think their best hope to regain marketshare is to indirectly benefit from Linux to capturing marketshare from Windows.
>If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share.
Exactly right. They did the dang thing with Project Quantum, a massive rewrite of the browser, a massive leap forward in stability and performance. The thing everyone asked for. And they..... continued to lose market share. Because there are other factors, like monopoly power, and distribution lock-in.
You don't have to imagine what it looks like for a browser company to lap the field with an excellent development team, creative revenue raising ideas, being ahead of the curve on mobile, having best in class stability and performance, and building out features that their core user base loves and swears by. Because Opera was that company in the 2000s and 2010s.
But even Opera had to sell to a new ownership group and abandon their Presto engine for Chromium. Because, like Spock said, you can make every decision correctly and still lose. Which is kind of depressing, but it at least helpfully bursts the bubble of people claiming changes in market share are a one-to-one relationship to specific decisions about which features to build in a browser.
End users are easily influenced but they could have targeted developers.
I think they should have pushed for a gecko based electron alternative. End user dont really care if their favourite markdown editor or notes software is based on electron or gecko but it would have made sure that developers do not target, develop and test for only chromium based browsers.
That would probably also be considered a "distraction" by HN. Electron isn't built by the Chrome team.
It also wouldn't be directly revenue diversification. You can't beat Electron by selling an alternative.
Firefox has somewhat tried to target developers. There's Developer Edition with a "direct to the dev tools" focus. Firefox's Dev Tools still generally are somewhat ahead of Safari's and Chrome's (though not always Edge's, even in the Edgmium era one of the few teams that still exists that doesn't upstream everything immediately is Edge's Dev Tools work). Firefox was directly ahead on Flexbox and CSS Grid debugging tools, though now everyone else has copied them. (Not to mention that the history of Dev Tools in the first place all points back to Firebug and other Firefox extensions that went mainstream and then made sense to prioritize as out-of-the-box tools.)
Firefox probably can't do much more to target developers on its own, from a browser perspective. Targeting developers doesn't seem to move the needle enough in marketshare, either.
It's not just Electron that developers are stuck in "develop and test for only chromium based browsers" modes. There's also all the top-down pressure in corporate environments to standardize on only one browser to "cut down" on "testing costs". There are the board room-driven development cycles of "I only care if it looks good on the CEO's iPhone" or "the CEO is into Android this year, that's the focus, everything else is garbage". There's also the hard to avoid spiral of "Firefox marketshare is low, don't worry about it" to more sites not working as well in Firefox to Firefox marketshare getting lower to more "don't worry about it" websites and so on.
Is anyone else seeing this pattern? "Mozilla should have an endowment". They do! "Well they should have invested the endowment!" They do. "They should have done a gecko based electron alternative". They did. "They should have tab grouping". They've never not had it, between native support and extensions. "They should be spending on the browser." They literally spend more now than ever in their history.
It's vibes and drive by cheap shots, all the way down. I get that dabbling in adtech is not great, I get that they've cycled through side bets recently without committing to them (unlike Google?!), but it's an ounce of truth with every pound of nonsense. Mozilla Derangement Syndrome.
Developers are no longer a significant fraction of the pie, and a significant fraction of those are web developers or do web development, and those users will in all likelihood primarily use what their users are using, which isn't Firefox.
> And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
Proton Mail, Google Workspace, iCloud, Dropbox are all viable money-making products that line up well with Mozilla's core mission if they made their own alternatives. Persona could've been really good, if one of these products existed and had enough traction to build a user base that made third parties want to depend on Persona.
There is a world where Mozilla built services people actually want instead of focusing on trust-eroding gimmicks like Pocket, and they'd be thriving right now.
>And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.
Wish I read this before posting my comment, I wholeheartedly agree at every level. The criticisms are a mile wide, an inch deep, and sometimes legitimate, but often deeply contradictory, and there's no attitude of accountability or self awareness when someone jumps in for the millionth time saying "don't get distracted" but also "offer something new to generate revenue".
And the factual literacy of the drive-by critics is, unfortunately, sometimes brutally off the mark and even veering into conspiratorial. Some unfortunate threads appear to be young adults reading a Mozilla 990 filing for the first time and misreading a conspiracy into every single line, very casual attitudes about accusing them of falsifying financial statements or accusations of controlled opposition, or ridiculous suggestions that they spend down their endowment on "engineering" to no particular end, and sometimes completely misrepresenting how much of a time suck and energy suck certain projects were (e.g. blockchain is sometimes on the Rap Sheet of Bad Things, but they basically wrote a white paper or two).
Which, as you note, isn't to say there's no legitimate concerns: "privacy preserving ads" is a contradiction in terms, the strategic reliance on Google is precarious, and side bets like Pocket were left to languish. In normal times I might consider myself a critic. But unfortunately too often the comment section is an out of control orgy of completely uninformed cheap shots, with an ounce of truth to every pound of confidently incorrect accusation. And that phenomenon, to my mind, is as big as any misstep Mozilla is or isn't making.
I'd love to hear an argument for this being true that doesn't involve counting all of the deaths caused by Sunni-Shia sectarian violence in Iraq, suicide bombings in civilian markets, ISIS etc. as caused by America.
Well there's Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya etc which would tally ~300k civilian deaths alone. Given the blatantly false pretences that America invaded Iraq under, and the sectarian violence that significantly flared post-Saddam, I don't see why you'd not want to involve Iraq in the stats?
I accept US responsibility for a great many of the civilian deaths caused in Vietnam. I don't accept US responsibility for Islamists of different varieties blowing up each other's markets and places of worship with weapons provided by Iran and Syria.
So you don't accept the fact that a lot of this sectarian violence flared after the toppling of Saddam, which was because of the US? And how many of the deaths do you attribute to the sectarian violence, as opposed to the direct actions of the US in the region?
That was caused by a power vacuum and US's intentional act to oust the Ba'ath Party, remove all control from a country and it will fall to chaos especially when blood feuds are involved .
This seems to be a theme of people with certain political inclinations. "It's really America's fault they're blowing themselves up in crowded markets because...."
After toppling Saddam Hussein the US took political control in the country and decided who got to decide what. The slaughter that followed was a direct and rather predictable result of this.
You might be into that. The rest of us like to analyse things honestly, especially given America is going down the route of making the same moves as history. If you don't see that, then it'd probably be better for you to go read something than to offer pithy comments on here.
What is your preferred term for individuals and groups whose stated goal is to create a non-pluralistic religious state advantaging specifically their own religious sect, and whose means involves committing public mass killing of civilians along sectarian religious lines?
Less than half of Israelis are Askenazi, and unless your solution is to "ethnically cleanse" by sending people back to the countries their grandparents fled, it hardly matters.
Americans and Europeans have the false notion that Israeli Jews are predominantly European. They are not.
While I agree that the land has been taken by force, unfortunately returning the land is no longer an acceptable option.
The land of Israel has been developed in such a way that it has become completely different from what it was one century ago, and there is no doubt that its previous owners could have never succeeded to do a similar development, due to a combination of lacking both the financial means and the skilled labor capabilities.
While I believe that returning the land would be unjust at this time, I also believe that the never-ending war between Israelis and their neighbors can be stopped in only 2 ways, one of which is not acceptable in the modern world and which would bring eternal shame on Israel if they would ever succeed to realize it.
The second option is for Israel to do the same that Israel has demanded and has obtained from states like Germany. This means that Israel should admit that they have occupied the land by force and they should repair this by paying a just compensation to the remaining descendants of the former inhabitants, exactly like Israel has received from countries responsible for the oppression against Jews during WWII.
You need to take into account that Zionists are aging out of the population. The younger generations in the West absolutely support military action against Israel. If it was taken by force, it can be returned by force. I would definitely support US military action against Israel to defeat Zionism.
> younger generations in the West absolutely support military action against Israel
The West–and America in particular–has always had a contingent that believes in drawing foreign borders through force. Particularly in the Middle East. It goes back to Sykes and Picot.
I wouldn't put a war with Israel out of the cards in my lifetime. But it’s not happening in the next two decades—our neo-imperial ambitions have found purchase closer to home.
No land was stolen. All land was purchased before the war. All land taken after wars was taken after wars started by the Arabs.
That's always been the case with nations who lost wars. Germany lost the war and lost land because of it. Should Germany take back land that was "brutally taken from them"?
Or should they maybe just accept that they shouldn't have started the war? The Germans certainly have accepted that.
> If a war has finished, should the victor still be able to keep taking land off the loser? What’s the duration of that right?
Practically? In 2026? As long as you can keep it. We're back to deciding borders through force versus treaty. Which, based on the rhetoric around Gaza, is ambiguously worse.
At some point, all land has been taken either by direct force, or by the threat of force.
All land, everywhere. It is NOT a natural right that anyone owns any land, nor that any countries exist. That is something everyone's ancestors fought each other for and created as a system of human society.
Of course that's written in the past tense. Facing reality rather than the fantasy presented in history books and documentaries; not only did our ancestors do that, it hasn't stopped. The bloodshed still happens today in so many places. Those we might hear about in the news, and others forgotten even in the news because it is considered normal and thus ignored.
We are not yet a species of plenty. Scarcity still exists, at the very least in the real form of land where people want to be.
Antarctica is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent.
Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean [ and ] is the fifth-largest continent, being about 40% larger than Europe, and has an area of 14,200,000 km2 (5,500,000 sq mi).
There was no one to "take it from" and when it was divided up by "Great powers" that was more by competition (race to open routes) and some notion of good sport:
Antarctica was claimed by several states since the 16th century, culminating in a territorial competition in the first half of the 20th century when its interior was explored and the first Antarctic camps and bases were set up.
Then there are the more remote parts of Australia, nominally "taken" by the English (despite not being reached for some time) and later returned (post Mabo) to the descendants of what seems likely to be first settlers some tens of thousands of years past (the multiple waves of settlement arguments and other aspects of the History Wars in the Black Armband / Quadrant circles are looking thin in these days of genetic markers).
But that one's a complex can of worms that takes some time to unpack.
> At some point, all land has been taken either by direct force, or by the threat of force
You're broadly correct. But there is land that was settled within the historical record.
The Levant, obviously, is not that. It was settled prior to the historical record. It is the coast closest to our cradle of civilisation. Every human with ancestry outside Africa has some sort of claim to lineage to that land.
'within the historical record' -- No one still makes a big deal about it because it happened long enough ago.
There are places that are not widely contested today, generally most of their present borders are assumed to be generally stable. Or places with obvious natural geographic bounds and mostly internal conflict through history.
Yet at some point were those places not battled over? Even the internal conflicts count, even if as a whole the majority of a country's population of today considers themselves of one people.
The regions that remain in conflict are considered such largely because of the people who have, at some point, lived in an area long enough for it to become a notable part of their history, they have not unified as a people OF a place, but as a distinct ethnic group (be that religious or otherwise) who happened to have at some time lived in some area.
They have all been 'wronged', and all* (generally an assumption but likely to be true) have 'wronged' others (at least in 'aggressive self defense' if not in some other way) at some point.
-- put into a metaphor --
There's a public park owned by the people (earth) which has a single tree that many children have made memories with. However two or more groups of childhood friends want to continue making memories with that tree and disagree with each other and how each other interact with the tree.
What is the solution?
The evil answer from a fiction writer is to destroy the tree to remove the problem. However that does not make a right.
Using any method to give the tree to one group would be a wrong to the other groups.
The groups cannot agree on how to share, nor how to all be full adults and make memories with the tree in peaceful coexistence.
Thus, lacking an accepted answer, the problem remains unresolved.
Maybe it's better now in some distros. Not sure about other distros, but I don't like Ubuntu's Snap package. Snap packages typically start slower, use more RAM, require sudo privileges to install, and run in an isolated environment only on systems with AppArmour. Snap also tends to slow things some at boot and shutdown. People report issues like theming mismatches, permissions/file-access friction. Firefox theming complaints are a common example. It's almost like running a docker container for each application. Flatpaks seem slightly better, but still a bandaid. Just nobody is going to fix the compatibility problems in Linux.
I think he still considers this to be the case. He was interviewed on Linus tech tips recently. And he bemoaned in passing the terrible application ecosystem on Linux.
It makes sense. Every distribution wants to be in charge of what set of libraries are available on their platform. And they all have their own way to manage software. Developing applications on Linux that can be widely used across distributions is way more complex than it needs to be. I can just ship a binary for windows and macOS. For Linux, you need an rpm and a dpkg and so on.
I use davinci resolve on Linux. The resolve developers only officially support Rocky Linux because anything else is too hard. I use it in Linux mint anyway. The application has no title bar and recording audio doesn’t work properly. Bleh.
I don’t understand this view point. How is anyone reading ‘way too much’ into the post based on what’s being discussed in this thread. A senior engineer leading a team at Microsoft saying that his goal is to rewrite/replace all C and C++ code with Rust using AI to facilitate the work is plainly saying what the comments in this thread are reacting to. No onenis reading into the statement, just plain reading. And even though it’s been edited since attention got focused on it, the post still says a goal for his team is 1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.
Further, this is not a random speculative post, it is an announcement for a job opening on the posters team.
Microsoft has thousands of senior engineers and one of them engaging in this project and perhaps hiring a small handful of people does not equate to a large company-wide planned mandate.
He is not a senior engineer; he's a distinguished engineer. His pay package is comparable to a director's or VP's, so no he's not just one of thousands of senior engineers.
That is true, there is a lot of emphasis being placed on his post as though it were the embodiment of Microsoft’s goals and policies going forward. I was a little surprised that he is just a lead on a research team from the bombastic tone of the post.
I’ll own up to not considering that when I wrote my comment, still think discussing Microsoft’s seemingly head first dive into massive AI generation of code is entertaining, even if it is not really as important (or important at all) as it would be if this was a post from the CEO.
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