MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ionwake | 2025-12-17 10:29:47+00:00
I dont know how anyone could take mozilla seriously after they integrated google analytics into it about 10 years ago for no reason I can fathom. It immediately made me think somethings off, and I never used it again.

Instead I thought screw it and just went nuts deep into chrome, atleast it was more functional.

ps - ( apparently mozilla took it out sometime later , but to me the damage to its reputation was done)
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-12-17 10:29:56+00:00
> dbus-java exists, does that magically turn dbus into being primarily implemented in Java?

it does if the only other implementation is basically the JNI native methods of dbus-java. This is what libbinder_ndk looks like from the outside. If there's a newer libbinder that does not look like a Java mess , I have not yet seen it.

Not negating that it may exist; the libbinder you quoted above looks similar to openbinder but I have never used it.
by caidan | 2025-12-17 10:30:10+00:00
You guys are a godsend to the python tooling world. I’ve been far more excited about the impact rust is having on the software world than that of AI, and your work is a big part of that. While I have not seen any real net productivity gains from AI in mine or my juniors work, I’ve definitely seen real gains from using your tooling!

In fact as Jetbrains has been spending years chasing various rabbits including AI, instead of substantially improving or fixing PyCharm, without you steadily replacing/repairing big chunks of Pycharms functionality I would be miserable. If it came down to it, we would happily pay a reasonable license fee to use your tools as long as they stayed free for non-commercial usage.
by lxgr | 2025-12-17 10:30:18+00:00
>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.

> It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.

Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M USD".
by Yizahi | 2025-12-17 10:30:20+00:00
I've bought and redeemed gift cards for only one single company ever. Can you guess what company? :) Exactly - Apple. Because these MFs generously banned whole countries from using their services, and not because of the justified sanctions or a law, but simply because they could. So when I lived in Ukraine and got my first Apple device, I had to buy and use gift cards to purchase any app or media in the Apple's closed system.
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-12-17 10:30:31+00:00
Amazing how they continue not to cater to their core audience. They literally have lost 90% of their market share from their peak, I guess I can see the temptation to try to regain it by reaching out to others, but doing that at the expense of your core is a terrible business strategy. It's not like those users are all that sticky, they're leaving as Mozilla pisses them off, and likely Mozilla are going to be left with what they stand for - which these days is nothing.

It's sad, I'm sure there was a better path Mozilla could have taken, but they've had a decade or more of terrible management. I wonder if the non-profit / corp structure hasn't helped, or if it's just a later-stage company with a management layer who are disconnected from the original company's mission and strategy.
by runeks | 2025-12-17 10:30:35+00:00
> As the verification process itself becomes automated, the challenge will move to correctly defining the specification: that is, how do you know that the properties that were proved are actually the properties that you cared about? Reading and writing such formal specifications still requires expertise and careful thought. But writing the spec is vastly easier and quicker than writing the proof by hand, so this is progress.

How big is the effort of writing a specification for an application versus implementing the application in the traditional way? Can someone with more knowledge chime in here please?
by concinds | 2025-12-17 10:30:41+00:00
You can't monetize a browser. They have to keep trying to create new products, but they inevitably fail. Pocket, FirefoxOS, Persona, all dead. This new stuff will fail too, because Mozilla has no USP and no way to create a best-in-class product in any market. So they rely on imitating what everyone else is doing, but with more "crunchy" vibes ("values", "trust", "we're a nonprofit") because that's the only angle they can compete on. They missed mobile completely so even their browser is bleeding users and dying.

The way to interpret Mozilla is that they're a dying/zombie company, fighting heroically to delay the inevitable.
by okanat | 2025-12-17 10:31:31+00:00
They did change a lot. Previously Microsoft actually cared about its main product lines. They did lots of anticompetitive things to get people onboarded. Being anticompetitive and making products that deeply bundled stuff was their evil badge not hypetrain rugpulls. However, they were adding features developers and sysadmins wanted. That's how so many businesses got Active Directory. There is still no equivalent alternative to AD. There are subsets but no equivalent set of the complete featureset. After Ballmer the company changed.

Microsoft of Nadella is different. It looks more like a boring Silicon Valley monopoly. They had good products years ago and it got people hooked and now its a game of endless rugpulls. Microsoft of now doesn't care about the featureset. They just jump from one hype train to another. People keep paying them for the stuff they did in early 2000s. Nobody cares about newer stuff including Microsoft themselves.
by 47282847 | 2025-12-17 10:31:43+00:00
The fundamental difference is that ICC invites partners to agree with their legal assessment. It is each country’s sovereign decision to enforce it or not. The US applies force and boldly assumes they not only have the power but the right to do so, outside of their national jurisdiction. That is US exceptionalism at its best.

If you act like a bully, you will not make friends. It’s as simple as that.
by mrtksn | 2025-12-17 10:31:53+00:00
The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, the land grab was complete and the time to recoup the investment has come.

Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome.

It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.
by tigranbs | 2025-12-17 10:31:56+00:00
Firefox has been lagging in Web features for a long time. I have been a Zen browser user for about a year, and recently moved back to Arc just because almost all interactive websites look bad on the Firefox engine; somehow, they don't have the same level of JS API support as Chrome does, especially for WebRTC, Audio, or Video. And this is frustrating that they think the problem is the AdBlockers!
by ElectricalUnion | 2025-12-17 10:32:13+00:00
I know that before, Unicode and locale aware systems were supposed to use unicode tags (U+E0000..U+E007F) to invisibly and "for all plaintext purposes" mark text for such han unification handling but that use is now deprecated.

What I am supposed to use those days? HTML-encoded in utf-8, with lang attributes, so <span lang="ja-JA"> and <bdi lang="zh-Hans"> infested text?
by apflkx | 2025-12-17 10:32:41+00:00
Thanks for the correction!

しんじゅく (Cиндзюку, Sindzyuku) is an interesting case, as it has both し and じゅ in it. This is where Polivanov is similar to Kunrei. OTOH, Fukushima is cyrillized as Фукусима (Fukusima), where the ふ is a fu in Hepburn, hu in Kunrei and fu in Polivanov but し is not shi as in Hepburn, but si as in Kunrei.
by chii | 2025-12-17 10:33:05+00:00
> a pretty uncharitable interpretation

like hoping for the best, but planning for the worst, you must interpret people's intentions using the same methodology. By quoting that axing adblock could be bringing $150mil, but also saying that he doesn't want to do it, it's advertising that a higher price would work - it's a way to deniably solicit an offer.
by williamdclt | 2025-12-17 10:34:42+00:00
> if you assume all countries follow the same type of happiness distribution that is simply shifted/stretched lower or higher.

That's a pretty strong assumption, seems more likely that there's variation at the extremes than not. For example, if a small percentage of the population deals badly with extended nighttime in long winters, then it'll affect Finland's most-unhappy stats (and suicide rates) without meaning much for the average happiness.
by cardanome | 2025-12-17 10:35:10+00:00
The Mozilla Foundation does lots of "spreading awareness" but does not contribute to Firefox development.

That is the most vexing part. I want to donate for Firefox development. Not marketing, not side projects, let me just fund the devs. But no, that is not possible.

Blender is a huge success story relying on sponsors and donations, Wikipedia is swimming in money but no we can't just have a free browser.

No we need to have a Mozilla Corporation that lives on Google money for being the controlled opposition i.e. technically avoiding monopoly situation thing. After all CEOs can't get rich on donations, can they?
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-17 10:36:04+00:00
I think AI in the browser could be useful. It just isn't that useful now.

So far, the most useful "AI feature" Firefox has ever shipped is the page translation system, which uses a local AI to work. I wouldn't mind seeing more of things like that.

Eventually, "browser use" skill in AIs is going to get better too. And I'd trust Firefox with an official vendor agnostic "AI integration" interface, one that allows an AI of user's choice to drive it, over something like OpenAI's browser - made solely by one AI company for its own product.
by viraptor | 2025-12-17 10:36:23+00:00
https://www.perplexity.ai/comet

https://chatgpt.com/atlas/

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/copilot-mode

https://www.genspark.ai/browser

https://www.operaneon.com/

https://www.diabrowser.com/

https://fellou.ai/

And many many more...
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-12-17 10:36:32+00:00
I think I've found those unreliable in the past, but much more reliable as time goes on. I can't really remember the last time an address or credit card info was mishandled by autofill. I get that addresses can be poorly defined, but for one you've entered yourself, that you just want to be re-entered, I don't see why we can't solve that problem without AI.
by roenxi | 2025-12-17 10:38:44+00:00
Yeah, the article's quoting didn't help its case. It doesn't seem fair to quote someone saying [I don't think X is a good idea] as evidence they are about to do X.

That being said, in the original context [0] it does sound a lot more like an option on the table. That original article presents it as the weakest of a list of things they're about to explore - but who knows, maybe the journalist has butchered what was said. It is an ambiguous idea without more context about how close it is to Mozilla trying to make life hard for ad-blockers.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz...
by sjw987 | 2025-12-17 10:39:00+00:00
If the author is going to over apply a new idea she's found, she should go all the way.

Consumption isn't just buying things. It's the media, food, drink, and substances you consume as well. Sitting in an empty house watching videos/playing games on your phone all day is just as vacant of a lived life than filling your time with shopping and products.

The real spiritual problem is not having hobbies or interests, or only having surface level versions of those two things.
by bjord | 2025-12-17 10:39:13+00:00
last I checked, firefox doesn't download AI models unless you try to use a (clearly-labeled) feature that requires them. you can also manage/uninstall them at about:addons

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models

totally uncharitable interpretation of the quote linked here aside, how is providing an interface for using fully local models not user first software?
by belatwing | 2025-12-17 10:39:14+00:00
Traveling to Israel, particularly the vibrant city of Tel Aviv, has never been easier or more affordable. With an increasing number of airlines offering competitive rates, finding cheap flights, low fare air tickets, and international flight deals is now simpler than ever. Whether you are planning a quick weekend getaway or an extended vacation, Tel Aviv promises a blend of modernity, culture, and history that appeals to every traveler. This guide will walk you through finding the best airline tickets online, planning your trip, and enjoying everything this Mediterranean gem has to offer.
by elashri | 2025-12-17 10:39:30+00:00
Yes you can actually self-host both Firefox sync server [1] and use Firefox accounts (which also can be self-hosted [2] and someone put something simpler in docker image [3]). And those can be used even with Firefox itself not only the forks.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel...

[3] https://github.com/jackyzy823/fxa-selfhosting
by erk__ | 2025-12-17 10:40:12+00:00
Is the whole issue not that they are less of a band of activists than they used to be. Now it is suddenly no longer about free and open source software, but more of means to run the whole machine, which is why they probably have profit oriented CEO as bad as that is.

IMO they need to be more a crew of activists than they are now. Fight against stuff like intrusion of AI in every single part of our lives and such.
by xenator | 2025-12-17 10:40:18+00:00
Imagine you are in a marriage and your spouse say: "I can sleep with other people, doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission".

I don't understand context, but my honest reaction will be: "WTF, you just said? What type of relationship you think we have if we discuss such things?"

I definitely understand why people worry. This is just crazy to weight trust in money. If this is on the table and discussed internally, then what we are talking about?

'T' in Mozilla Firefox means 'Trust'.
by MrAlex94 | 2025-12-17 10:40:40+00:00
> lags behind upstream Firefox in terms of security fixes

I’m not sure why this has become a thing - usually I either release Waterfox the week before ESR releases (the week the code freeze happens and new version gets tagged) or, if I’m actively working on features and they need to coincide with the next update I push, I will release on the same Tuesday the ESR releases.

You can check the GitHub tag history for Waterfox to see it’s been that way for a good while :)
by magicalhippo | 2025-12-17 10:40:41+00:00
> whatever imagined problem is solved by marking clipboard text with some magical locale indicator is surely not as important as being able to interop literally just unicode characters between programs without having to read a 2-part blog post

Unicode-enabled Win32 applications can already do this as described in the article, the program pasting to the clipboard adds CF_UNICODETEXT format, and the program reading from the clipboard checks if CF_UNICODETEXT is available and prefers it over CF_TEXT.

The CF_LOCALE is used by the system to convert[1] CF_TEXT to CF_UNICODETEXT, so a Unicode-enabled application can get the right contents from a non-Unicode-enabled application.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dataxchg/sta...
by buran77 | 2025-12-17 10:40:52+00:00
The only reason Mozilla matters in the eyes of Google is because it gives the impression there's competition in the browser market.

But Firefox's users are the kind who choose the browser, not use whatever is there. And that choice is driven in part by having solid ad-blockers. People stick with Firefox despite the issues for the ad-blocker. Take that away and Firefox's userbase dwindles to even lower numbers to the point where nobody can pretend they are "competition". That's when they lose any value for Google.

Without the best-of-the-best ad-blocking I will drop Firefox like a rock and move to the next best thing, which will have to be a Chromium based browser. I'll even have a better overall experience on the web when it comes to the engine itself, to give me consolation for not having the best ad-blocker.
by matwood | 2025-12-17 10:41:41+00:00
The problem with your argument is there are dictators all over the world the US ignores. If anti-dictator is enough, why the tepid response for Ukraine? What about the various African nations? What about Haiti and the violence there?

The difference is oil, and Trump's also very petty and Maduro has told him to pound sand.

> Oil is unconvincing since it took years before production recovered, so that clearly wasn’t the priority.

Haliburton, Exxon, Chevron, etc... made a ton of money rebuilding the infrastructure and continue to make money on the oil reserves.
by lopis | 2025-12-17 10:41:48+00:00
I'm not sure how well know this is, but besides their contract with Google to be the default search option, Firefox does earn money through revenue share with all other default search options. A normal healthy company would just rely on those. Growing the user base would therefore grow the amount of rev-share income. So improving the product by itself, and thus attracting users, does make money - and probably enough to run Firefox and Mozilla. Just not enough to pay their CEO.
by crowdyriver | 2025-12-17 10:42:45+00:00
You already have this problem whenever you are using a library in any programming language. Unless you are extremely strict, vendor it and read line by line what the library does, you are just trusting that the code that you are using works.

And nothing is stopping the AI from making the unreadable mess more readable in later iterations. It can make it pass the spec first and make it cleaner later. Just like we do!
by lelanthran | 2025-12-17 10:42:50+00:00
> I think the difference between the two is shrinking by the day. At this point I almost never need to address anything with the LLM's solution and could easily just go straight to testing for most things.

Do you believe that atrophy is not a real thing?

I've found that LLMs massively over-engineer things, regardless of the prompt used. How do you counter that without going back and forth at least a few times?
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-12-17 10:42:51+00:00
> You can't monetize a browser.

You very much can if all the competitors are either a) ad-ridden, ai-infested, bloated monstrosities or b) don't provide the functionality people want. In that case, there's apparently lots of demand which could easily support either a pay-once or a low-subscription-fee model.
by rvba | 2025-12-17 10:44:35+00:00
They dont have to.

They could be lean and focus on firefox only.

Now they get 150m from google, spend just a part on firefox and rest on failures and hobby projects to get promoted.

If they were focued on core business, 1) they would have a war chest 2) they could leave off donations

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
by nephihaha | 2025-12-17 10:44:37+00:00
Academic confirmed to Wall Street Journal that he sought disgraced financier’s assistance in moving funds but insists none of the money. Chomsky further said of Epstein, “I knew him and we met occasionally.” The two men had planned several meetings between 2015 and 2016, including a dinner between them, Woody Allen and Allen’s stepdaughter-turned-wife Soon-Yi Previn, and another meeting with a former Harvard University president."
by hsiudh | 2025-12-17 10:45:13+00:00
You clearly don't know anything about the history of the country. It was never about classism or racism, venezuelans are racially diverse with lots of mix between the original indigenous inhabitants, colonial europeans, african slaves and then the second wave of european immigrants after the WWII.

> The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.

There was no 'regime', there was a democracy with corruption problems but that was still functional. Nor it was 'overthrown', a populist was elected due to disenchantment and the populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle.
by walski | 2025-12-17 10:45:25+00:00
> TLA+ is a formal specification language developed by Leslie Lamport. It is used for designing, modelling, documentation, and verification of programs, especially concurrent systems and distributed systems. TLA+ is considered to be exhaustively-testable pseudocode, and its use likened to drawing blueprints for software systems;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLA+
by falcor84 | 2025-12-17 10:45:26+00:00
Good point. I'd actually be happy to pay a couple of bucks a month for a good syncing solution based on an open source protocol, to make it easier for me to use the same history and preferences across browsers, IDEs and other such tools. It's actually a similar need and setup to that of a password manager, so I wonder if this is something Bitwarden could take on.
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-12-17 10:45:37+00:00
Of all the things you listed, which are surely important, you also said the single most important factor in the end:

> once you have enough users, that becomes its own reason to join. There's not really a way to jump start it

So, a monopoly that was lucky enough to be the first one to solve some (minor, if I may) technical problems.

We need forced interoperability. Facebook has no right to control the communications of so many billions of people, just because Whatsapp got lucky and then facebook acquired them.

Who knows how much data they harvest.
by Joker_vD | 2025-12-17 10:45:43+00:00
Oh, it's a transliteration of Russian "офтоп", which itself started as a borrowing of "off-topic" from English (but as a noun instead of an adjective/stative) and then went some natural linguistic developments, namely loss of a hyphen and degemination, surface analysis of the trailing "-ic" as Russian suffix "-ик" [0], and its subsequent removal to obtain the supposed "original, non-derived" form.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-%D0%B8%D0%BA#Russian
by master-lincoln | 2025-12-17 10:45:44+00:00
I don't see how your 2 questions are related to each other.

> Do any of these forks have the ability to sync, either with Firefox or something self hosted?

The Firefox Sync web service is provided by Mozilla but can be self hosted: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs. That could also be used in forks. See e.g. https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-firefox-sync-with-... . I don't understand what you mean by sync with Firefox.

> Or are they all just basically reskins with a single toggle added or such?

Hard to generalize, but definitely not all of them. see e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/1012453/
by graemep | 2025-12-17 10:46:10+00:00
Legal definitions are often not the same as plain English, and wording used in legislation is often politicised.

The nature of copyright is that it is a monopoly right. It is almost indistinguishable from letters patent (e.g. in the case of the KJV Bible in the UK). I am less familiar with US law but I believe US copyright law is based on a clause in the constitution giving the federal government the power to grant monopolies?