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The problem is that, looking back at GNOME history, we get curious about what really happened.

But Sonny is not protesting or something, so we cannot say anything about it.


Seems like a wonderful regime according to Tucker Carlson, Heritage Foundation and MAGA Republicans. Putin is a true conservative, champion of liberty, to them.


Whataboutism doesn't change that Spotify is right in this instance.


Mitchell Baker was important for Mozilla/Netscape in the past. She was the primary author of Mozilla Public License in 1998 (MPL 2.0 is a very good license). I bet that many of us were just infants when she was at Mozilla.

The problem is that many feel that she is not a good leader for Mozilla today, not that she is not a historical figure for Mozilla and the open source community in general.


She's an excellent lawyer. How did she get promoted to head the software company that makes software?


With Mitchel Baker at helm, all the initiatives that would make Firefox more embeddable were cancelled to cut cost.

Now Firefox can't be used to make webapps effectively, the only alternative is to use Electron and fortify Chromium's monopoly.


> With Mitchel Baker at helm, all the initiatives that would make Firefox more embeddable were cancelled to cut cost.

Will you name them? Mozilla cut embedding when Gary Kovacs was CEO. XULRunner, Graphene, and Positron were cut when Chris Beard was CEO. GeckoView was not cut.


I'm not a Baker fan at all, but no such initiative was cut under her leadership, because none existed.

Electron won not because chromium was more embeddable, it won because it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies. Everything else you could do already before with XulRunner...


> it made it easy to pull hundred of MB of nodejs dependencies

That's exactly what "more embeddable" is. It made itself easier to turn into Node.js, Electron, etc. I don't think it was a pure coincidence.


XulRunner existed before Electron. Node.js used v8, but could have use SpiderMonkey instead (this is what Gnome did). These were choices, not situations where using Mozilla tech was impossible. In the end that cemented Google stronghold on the web.


The problem is that Gecko is not that customizable, everything in Firefox is tightly integrated, and they abandoned all initiatives to make Gecko embeddable -- and this was a very big mistake imo.

If Mozilla tried to address this, I think many Chromium-based browsers today would at least try the possibility to be Gecko-based.


They did with Thunderbird, and Thunderbird is becoming better.


Thunderbird rejoined Mozilla - from Wikipedia

“ On January 28, 2020, the Mozilla Foundation announced that the project would henceforth be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary, MZLA Technologies Corporation, in order to explore offering products and services that were not previously possible and to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations.[69][70]”


Does no mechanism exist to fire Mitchell Baker or, at least, addressing her leadership at Mozilla?


She answers to the board. I guess they're happy with her.


She's also the board chair so answers to herself, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Board


There’s an implicit public interest. You don’t get to do whatever you feel like just because you decide not to pay taxes.


Yes, the board is supposed to represent the public interest.


Unfortunately, nothing non-Chromium based.


People complain all the time and nothing changes. She doesn't care and in a month everybody forget that Firefox is in dire straits.

Google's Chromium project push new standards every month or so, and web developers are fast to adopt these standards and don't care about testing it on Firefox anymore. The Chromium monopoly is already a reality.


You have reminded me about this. I failed an interview the other day because the site couldn't work with Firefox. I hate it. I have been forced to install Google chrome for just interviews and other things where Firefox fails. It seems like devs no longer do Firefox tests


I've been using Firefox for years and rarely run into websites where something works on Chrome but not Firefox. The only one I can think of is my apartment's payment portal, and that website is just generally awful.


The Chromium monopoly is already a reality.

Yes. They got it fair and square --- they paid Mozilla for it --- and they still are.


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