Mozilla is unhappy because the use of browser engines other than WebKit will be restricted to the EU, forcing them to develop two different apps.
For an independent browser like Firefox, managing two browsers is not easy, so it can be forgiven that this could be seen as almost harassment.
Also, the fact that the use of browser engines other than WebKit is limited to iOS means that the use of WebKit is still forced on iPadOS, which also increases the effort for Mozilla.
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I’m fucking enraged man. I hope we can regulate these assholes.
There is a very easy solution. Don’t buy apple.
People should fully own the computers they buy, regardless of which company they buy from.
This means root access and a replacable primary bootloader, let alone just being able to install apps not on a curated market (what Apple calls sideloading). macOS and Windows both manage to allow root access, and so do certain Android devices (and obviously other OSs as well). Replacable primary bootloaders are more rare, though, especially in ARM devices due to efuse-based secure boot in the CPU that is impossible to turn off. There’s only one phone I can think of that allows for replacing the primary bootloader (Shift 6mq).
We shouldn’t allow for artificial restrictions placed by corporations on devices they sell, because as we have seen time and time again, companies copy each others’ restrictions, especially Apple. Same goes with game consoles, IoT devices, Smart TVs, etc. And before you mention the potential for piracy, DRM is an artificial restriction placed by corporations, and should also be removed from devices.
Anything less means that you don’t own the device that you paid for.
Apple is clearly attempting to comply with the EU DMA in bad faith so that they can maintain as much control over their users and app developers as possible.
boycotts barely work, and doubly so when the company has a legion of faithful fanbois and its among the biggest corporations on the planet.
I don’t. Many people do. To protect their very clear monopolistic goals, we need to protect consumers from this stuff.
I’d like to add that even if you sell apple. The only other alternative is android and they have their own set of issues.
For me, an iPhone that allows sideloading would be a huge step towards perfect.
And that’s coming from someone who has “applelover” in their username. They fucked up big time by pissing off even their most loyal fans.
(/j)
Honestly, I don’t know how many normies this will upset. Pretty much only techies follow this and the people being annoyed by it might just blame the app developer and not Apple. Time will tell
I mean, this is basically malicious compliance. They did everything in their power to follow the letter but eschew the spirit of the law. Let’s hope the EU has teeth and keeps applying pressure.
So hear me out. What if we took $6.9M out of the CEO bonus and dropped the Mozilla AI project?
Maybe that would be enough to hire a maintainer or two for Firefox iOS port?
Maybe that could work?
I don’t know, just an idea. Crazy.I don’t know what you coul have against mozilla ai?
Mozilla: ignores years of customer complaints and requests
Mozilla: creates new product nobody asked for
Fans: “What’s wrong with Product?”
Mozilla: ignores years of customer complaints and requests
Are these customers donating, or purchasing mozilla products or services so that mozilla doesn’t have to rely on google’s donations?
Mozilla: creates new product nobody asked for
https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho
Nearly 10k and 400 stars on those respective repos.
A way to run a large language model on any operating system, in any OS, in a simple, local, and privacy respecting manner?
For linux we have docker, but Windows users were starving for a good way to do this, and even on linux, removing the step of configuring docker (or other container runtimes) to work with nvidia, is nice.
And it’s still FOSS stuff they aren’t being paid for, currently. But there are plenty of ways to monetize this.
Here’s an easy one: tie in the the vpn service they have to allow you to access the web ui of the computer running the llamafile remotely. Configure something like end to end encryption or or nat traversal (so not even mozilla can sniff the traffic), and you end up with a private LLM you can access remotely.
With this, maybe they can afford some actual development on firefox, without having to rely on google money.
Are these customers donating, or purchasing mozilla products or services so that mozilla doesn’t have to rely on google’s donations?
I’m confused what you’re trying to say here.
Are you saying that Google has more of a right to dictate what Mozilla does because Google gives Mozilla the most money?
Are you saying Google told Mozilla to work on things other than Firefox with the money they were given?
Why bring up Google at all?
Because much of mozilla’s funding is from a deal with google, that’s why.
US$300 million annually. Approximately 90% of Mozilla’s royalties revenue for 2014 was derived from this contract
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
A lot of money, but not enough to actually to actually do a lot. They keep cutting features their “customers” like. Why?
Because development is expensive.
Google props mozilla up to pretend they don’t have a monopoly on the internet. Just enough money to barely keep up, not enough to truly stay competitive.
Mozilla wants to not rely on google money, so they are trying to expand their products. AI is overhyped, but still useful, and something worth investing in.
I know that, but why did you bring it up in order to contrast it with Mozilla’s consumer base? Do you mean to say that Google is the actual paying customer?
It seems like such a bizarre thing to bring up at all.
Telemitry is way more useful than you think, because the loudest are not always right. Same for donations.
Yeah, that will fix Apple being total utter assholes. Giving them what they want always fixes everyone being assholes.
Mozilla has a budget of around 200 mil for software development, so the 7 mil are probably not enough. Not defending the high pay though.
Also, AI Integration into browsers could very well be a deciding factor for mainstream users when choosing a browser. So having some expertise around e.g. running LLMs privacy preserving on client hardware for page summarisation could pay off. Llamafile for example, is something cool coming from the Mozilla AI stuff.
page summarisation
I see a future where the journalist gives the LLM two sentences and asks it to spit out a 2000 word article out of that.
The user then asks the LLM to Tl;Dr the article down to the two core sentences.
Same probably for business email. Jane goes “send an email to Joe saying no.” The LLM goes “dear joe… we appreciate… your valuable conteibution… unfortunately at this time… cannot consider… looking forward… thanks for … whatever”. Joe then clicks the “summarise” button and gets “Jane says no”.
Amazing how far we’ve come.
The same with resumes. Using a LLM to write a resume and cover letter out of key facts, sending it, turning it back into key facts around the applicant.
Firefox is the only browser with local website translation. Literally the extension is the only app on Android that does that.
Wrong. Vivaldi has had local translation for half a year now.
Cool! So it works on Chromium, they just need to implement it. Is it Foss? Do they use the same thing as Firefox?
- jackpot ( @jackpot@lemmy.ml ) 9•5 months ago
oh yeah put the onus on mozilla, nice one
Yes, but also require Apple to expand its EU software to people not in the EU
i used to think that, but I cringe at myself. I’m not sure what other managers there are being paid, and in the CEO’s defence, she was at Mozilla since the beginning, even through their bad times, pre-firefox days, and through their chrome days.
That being said, if its 6.9m dollars though, that is getting a bit high…
I like how just about everyone I who’s looked at this is basically like, “fuck apple”.
There are a few fanboys, but they are way less common than usual.
I’m hoping Apple picks up on this and reverses course.
I mean, I’ll take a stab at speaking for Apple fans, and in fact developers. (I’m an ex-employee.)
There are a lot of things we like about the user experience on their platforms, and we appreciate their general interest in privacy while not engaging in the dirty data mining / advertising business of Google and Microsoft. There is a polish on their platforms that is best in class.
But I don’t believe any of us actually support the App Store lockdown situation. It’s probably the biggest black mark on their record. I think they got it right on macOS, requiring the binaries to be notarised (signed digitally) in such a way that malware can be blacklisted. This is a useful security feature. But developers are free to distribute however they want and third party stores like SetApp and Steam coexist happily with the App Store.
100% of their arguments about keeping the App Store as the sole distribution chain are bullshit because macOS is the proof. It’s pure rent-seeking behaviour.
There is a polish on their platforms that is best in class
As someone who was an Android user and tried switching to an iPhone, I see lots of weird bugs and behaviors I never had with Android. Sure, the OS is slightly better, and rarely crashes, but everything else is a little bit worse.
Literally every Google app is better than Apple’s. Be it Google maps, keyboard, mail, calendar, etc. But because they aren’t made for iPhone, there’s all kinds of little bugs, mostly visual/UI related.
And then there’s all these nonsensical decisions that make my life harder. Hotspot can’t run with wifi on, you can’t record your calls (very useful when talking to banks, government, etc.), can’t even arrange the icons in “home” screen to fixed locations or make them smaller.
I finally figured out that when Apple fans talk about polish, they just mean it looks pretty and feels high-end. Which, sure, I can concede that. But that’s not what I actually care about.
Anyway, rant over, sorry to take it out on you!
But the privacy is just a facade, right? Like with that recent scandal about the government requesting push notification info, Google of all companies was actually only handing it over with valid warrants while Apple was giving it to any law enforcement who asked.
They are absolutely mining data.
My wife has an iPad and one of the things I hate the most is that you can’t install adblock extensions into Firefox on it like you can on Android. Which is a thing that has made using the browser on the phone wayyyy more enjoyable.
The Orion browser for iOS/iPadOS supports both Firefox and Chromium extensions, however, the support is quite buggy and limited. Nonetheless, a valiant effort by Orion devs.
Why not stopping developing apps for Apple systems? Fuck them.
The issue is that larger companies which could have an impact (Netflix, google, Meta) already have special deals in place that bypass these rules
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2024-01-26/apples-proposed-changes-reject-the-goals-of-the-dma/
And it comes down to a fundamental question: Will the European Commission follow through with its intent to right-size Apple’s abuse of power? Or will the DMA be nice in theory, but in practice, have no substantive meaning for most developers?
From Spotify.
Update: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/29/24054943/microsoft-apple-app-store-dma-rule-change-response Xbox (Microsoft)
Because then Apple fanbois will complain and tarnish Mozilla’s/Firefox’s reputation
They already do that, they can say whatever, they will be isolated with their shitty Apple products and if they want decent browsers then they will need to use decent systems. Apple can’t abuse of their power and force us to follow their abusive rules, they can’t even have a decent UI desktop. They are so bad programmers.
Developing a crippled port that is limited/restricted by design due to Apple policies would not really help Mozilla’s/Firefox’s reputation anyway. Apple fanbois will complain ether way.
If those fanbois want a Firefox app on Apple systems, it’s Apple the one they should complain to.
it’s Apple the one they should complain to.
Or walk away from.
Apple always had been painfull for any third party devs. Also Vivaldi worked several years to create a browser which works in this iPhone thing, and now, after it’s release, Apple admits Chromium.
The fun life of an Apple customer.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Apple’s new rules in the European Union mean browsers like Firefox can finally use their own engines on iOS.
Although this may seem like a welcome change, Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte tells The Verge it’s “extremely disappointed” with the way things turned out.
“We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple’s proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps,” DeMonte says.
In iOS 17.4, Apple will no longer force browsers in the EU to use WebKit, the underlying engine that powers Safari.
“Apple’s proposals fail to give consumers viable choices by making it as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari,” DeMonte adds.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney called the new terms a “horror show,” while Spotify said the changes are a “farce.” Apple’s guidelines are still pending approval by the EU Commission.
The original article contains 285 words, the summary contains 142 words. Saved 50%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I really hope the EU gives them the middle finger and tells them to apply the law in good faith, not like this.
Still can’t do much for markets outside the EU though. Countries like the US, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia should implement similar laws. That would force Apple’s hand.
Well… It may be arguable that limiting the dev base to Europe only is damaging for Europe users thus regulators may make a comeback.
Honestly, Mozilla doesn’t even have the resources to maintain a proper WebKit-based version of Firefox on iPadOS, when a large amount of the work is handled for them by Apple. (See, for example, the fact that it still does not support multiple windows, a feature that has been available since 2019.) It would seem a mistake for them to try taking on a much larger load of work when they can’t handle what they’ve already taken on.
It’s not like they’d develop a new engine for iOS. They already have one which can now be used for iOS as well – but not everywhere.
Apple, Google, Microsoft all worthy of a massive boycott.
Apple does not care and will never care about open source other than the bits it has to care about because they’re a part of Darwin, their core.
They’re a company offering a particular “experience” and open source products do not fit into that model well at all. I use apple phones because I’m partially blind and for a very long time the accessibility story on Android was a screaming nightmare (I’m told it’s got better) but I have no illusions that they’re anything other than a profit seeking MegaCorp with all that implies.