Is Firefox killing itself slowly? Exclusive Weekly Patroncast - Episode 44

The Linux Experiment

Well, comments didn't seem too negative on the Startpage video, people don't generally seem super hostile to it, apart from the few "it's a 9 min ad" comments :D But yeah, the idea isn't to accept anything coming in, I decline a lot of sponsorship offers, because they just don't fit, or I don't think they're good products, and I'm definitely going to keep it this way. These sponsored videos are generally just a bonus in terms of revenue as well, I can make do without them perfectly fine, so I can be measured in terms of what I pick.

I do wonder what the larger viewer-base really thinks of fully-sponsored videos but in the case of the Startpage it still felt like a great objective video. I think Adam Ragusea's recent video about multivitamins is an example of a fully sponsored video that feels a bit dry, at least compared to his normal content. However, his fully-sponsored videos do not take away from his regular upload schedule but are sort of “bonus” content, I believe. So that's an idea, and perhaps if you do continue with it be smart about curating the right sponsors. I'm definitely looking forward to the Protonmail video and seeing your thoughts on it compared to what you use (self-hosted Nextcloud, I think it was?) 😄

The Linux Experiment

I personally really dislike that "go woke, go broke" thing. Generally, what people call "woke" is what we used to call "be a decent human being". it's being inclusive, accepting of other's differences, and trying to make sure that the web or the world is a nice place for these people as well. Of course, people are free to disagree and stop using Mozilla's products if they want to, but punishing a company for trying to make the world more inclusive will always be something I can't understand. I do think that they're wasting resources on stuff that isn't related to Firefox or their core products, and that it's impacting the rate at which this browser has progressed, though. As per package management, I have no preferences, but if I were a company, or a nonprofit, I'd stay away from Snaps, just because they have a really bad reputation, and pushing them instead of other, equivalent formats is just... a bad idea.

Mozilla used to be cool! Internet cool. Not Woke. Mozilla devs developed Rust as a replacement for C++ in firefox. This is just awesome, they gave us a language that is going to give us more security, speed and modern build/dependency management in future applications. But it might also be a reason that firefox slowed down as they were likely re-writing parts of the app. When I was a fledgling dev learning my first languages, my professor urged to join the mozilla foundation. Honestly I forget what they provided to us for learning resources (we were learning python in an extra curricular setting along side C# which was the main language) but they were cool. Mozilla is a good example of "Go Woke, Go Broke". Packaging wise, personally I like appimages. They're easy to distribute, cross-distribution and runtime-less/infrastructure-less. I'm not entirely sure what the cons of appimage are, probably that they bundle everything, so may theres a slightly inefficiency? Personally I use whatever my package manager has by default + appimages. So in my case, the AUR + appimages. App images are also very reminiscent of how apple does things.