Mozilla Acquires Active Replica To Build On its Metaverse Vision (techcrunch.com) 39
An automated status updater for Slack isn't the only thing Mozilla acquired this week. From a report: On Wednesday, the company announced that it snatched up Active Replica, a Vancouver-based startup developing a "web-based metaverse." According to Mozilla SVP Imo Udom, Active Replica will support Mozilla's ongoing work with Hubs, the latter's VR chatroom service and open source project. Specifically, he sees the Active Replica team working on personalized subscription tiers, improving the onboarding experience and introducing new interaction capabilities in Hubs.
"Together, we see this as a key opportunity to bring even more innovation and creativity to Hubs than we could alone," Udom said in a blog post. "We will benefit from their unique experience and ability to create amazing experiences that help organizations use virtual spaces to drive impact. They will benefit from our scale, our talent, and our ability to help bring their innovations to the market faster." Active Replica was founded in 2020 by Jacob Ervin and Valerian Denis. Ervin is a software engineer by trade, having held roles at AR/VR startups Metaio, Liminal AR and Occipital. Denis has a history in project management -- he worked for VR firms including BackLight, which specializes in location-based and immersive VR experiences for brands.
"Together, we see this as a key opportunity to bring even more innovation and creativity to Hubs than we could alone," Udom said in a blog post. "We will benefit from their unique experience and ability to create amazing experiences that help organizations use virtual spaces to drive impact. They will benefit from our scale, our talent, and our ability to help bring their innovations to the market faster." Active Replica was founded in 2020 by Jacob Ervin and Valerian Denis. Ervin is a software engineer by trade, having held roles at AR/VR startups Metaio, Liminal AR and Occipital. Denis has a history in project management -- he worked for VR firms including BackLight, which specializes in location-based and immersive VR experiences for brands.
Sigh, I want an option only fund FireFox.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you funded "only" Firefox they would still buy an AI startup whose product is a slack status updater, they still would have bought Pocket for $20M and integrated it when nobody was asking for it, they still would have killed a lot of plugin functionality... face it, virtually all of Mozilla's revenues come from Google, they are not making the browser for us.
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the problem is that many people say they will support mozilla, but fail to really do that... mozilla main revenue is still google, not end user, so they try to do this kind o things to try to get other revenues and keep independent from google... i bet that if mozilla was more aggressive blocking google spy features, google would drop the fund and mozilla would not have enough money to pay the bills
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the problem is that many people say they will support mozilla, but fail to really do that...
Why would I? They don't make the browser I want. They refuse to fix bugs which have persisted for years. Giving them money would just be funding my own abuse. Finally, they don't need my money. They can operate for years on their cash on hand, especially if they stop doing stupid shit.
If Google stops funding them, and they start doing the stuff I want them to do, then I'll donate. Otherwise, fuck them sideways, I'm not going to pay them to fuck up my favorite browser when they will do it for free.
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Mozilla has more than enough money to pay the bills.
The problem is they have so much money that they don't know what to do with it, so they have branched out into politics, social justice, and non-web-browsing-related technologies.
Be a tech company, focus on creating the best browsing experience possible, and let others do the rest.
Do one thing. Do it well.
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> virtually all of Mozilla's revenues come from Google,
I was under the impression that Google was slowly shutting down the money spigot, and that Mozilla's management had to be making moves for the future after that money is gone. Not chasing after a future industry they have neither the capital or talent to be competitive.
Re:Sigh, I want an option only fund FireFox.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I feel like Firefox continues to exist despite the foundation's efforts rather than because of them.
How is Mozilla still in business? (Score:1)
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user contributions, pocket, vpn do generate some revenue, amazon, bing and duckduckgo also give some money to be included in the list of search engies (but much less than google, as it is the default)
finally, may of the work is done by not paid people, mozilla pays the infra and some core developers
Mozilla has lost its way (Score:1)
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I'd hate to say it,
So why'd you say it?
but we need a Trump style Make Firefox Great again movement
So you want to make Firefox great for racist oppressors? Because that's what MAGA is about.
to take back control of Firefox from Wokezilla.
What's supposedly "Woke" about a foundation that took a browser that was sold to the user base as light, fast, and with the bullshit removed, and keeps shoveling bullshit into it while collecting big piles of money from Google? The fact that they fired a CEO that the user base was strongly opposed to? lol, and also lol.
Your MAGAt shit is obvious, fuck off with it immediately.
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> What's supposedly "Woke" about a foundation that took a browser that was sold to the user base as light, fast, and with the bullshit removed, and keeps shoveling bullshit into it while collecting big piles of money from Google? The fact that they fired a CEO that the user base was strongly opposed to? lol, and also lol.
The fact that the CEO they fired was most focused on the Firefox esthetic of light, fast, & bullshit removed because the loud ("woke") majority didn't like that he was a Mormon and a
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The fact that the CEO they fired was most focused on the Firefox esthetic of light, fast, & bullshit removed because the loud ("woke") majority didn't like that he was a Mormon and anti-LGBTQ opinions he didn't bring into the business! How more "woke" can you get than that???
It doesn't matter why people wanted him gone, duh. All that mattered was that they did. They would have gotten rid of him for any reason that people glommed onto. Believing they're "woke" because they shitcanned someone who alienated their audience is dumb as shit.
I'm no braindead MAGA fan
Stop playing one on Slashdot, then.
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I challenge you to demonstrate that any measurable majority of "the user base" was opposed to that CEO.
Dramatically more of the users wanted him gone than wanted him kept. That's all it takes. The people who don't have an opinion don't matter when controversy exists.
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"So you want to make Firefox great for racist oppressors"
Anyone who accuses people of being racist/fascist/traitor etc. AT NO RISK TO HIMSELF is a scumbag.
This is a specialization of the principle that if you don't take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.
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Wokezilla? Mozilla is aware of the fact that systematic issues lead to not everyone in society having an equal opportunity at a good life?
Because that's the only thing "woke" ever meant to the Left before the Right coopted it to mean "anything I don't like". Now it's completely meaningless specifically because it now means "anything I don't like". The other day I saw someone using it to mean "taking action to avoid being charged with copyright infringement", for crying out loud. Though I'm not sure if th
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"that's the only thing "woke" ever meant to the Left before the Right coopted it"
I also had the notion that it meant "woke" like The Matrix - no longer asleep and dreaming the shared dream propaganda BS that the system tries to feed us.
Just me?
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The term came from the African-American community; you were "woke" to the fact that there were systemic issues that made it much more difficult for certain segments of the country to succeed - initially focused on African-Americans. Long predates the Matrix.Though maybe The Matrix helped raise awareness of the term by giving it a new analogy? By around 2010 or so, it spread to other groups on the left - e.g. sexism, homophobia, etc - but always retained the same meaning (awareness of systemic issues that
Re: Mozilla has lost its way (Score:1)
Of course now "red pill" means "incel" (because of the group who chose to identify with it) while "woke" means "anything not far enough alt-right" (because the right loves to redefine words to confuse their base into foaming at the mouth over completely reasonable and benign concepts, just like they did with "CRT").
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I hope you are aware the source code for Firefox is free/open, you can fork it and make the fork as great as you can/want. The hard reality is the vast majority of Firefox is developed by paid coders, not hackers in their spare time, so who pays the salary defines what the code should do.
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mozilla is not happy with the chrome monopoly, but is hard to take it back. people still mostly use chrome
in mobile, chrome and similar are king, firefox enter late to the mobile market and old firefox limitation make it worse... it is now much better, but the new developement made it worse for add-ons, one of the main advantage of firefox
On desktop, again the old code make it worse, it is now much better state, but chrome is still a little faster (but eats all the RAM from your machine) and sites a little
Great, more bloat in Firefox (Score:2)
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This is plain FUD by people that do not use firefox!
people keep complaining about pocket, but pocket takes almost no resources at all if you don't use it
pocket is a icon and little more, you are not wasting resources with that (i also do not use it, but that feature is light enough to not be a problem)
What other bload you have?
location service? useful for many services, but you can disable it in the preferences, no need for about:config
block malware? also useful for many people and you can also disable in i
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HR-style gobbledegook (Score:4, Insightful)
We will benefit from their unique experience and ability to create amazing experiences that help organizations use virtual spaces to drive impact.
What the fuck does that even mean? Is that drivel actually representative of Mr. Udom's "thinking" process? If so, I can clearly see why Mozilla has become such a shit-show - they suffer from institutional brain-rot, pure and simple.
I would have been flunked out of primary school English for writing anything so incoherent.
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"I would have been flunked out of primary school English for writing anything so incoherent."
And sadly, then later welcomed into Marketing 101 for it.
More bad decisions by Mozilla (Score:2)
It is amply clear that the inmates are running the asylum there. The best we can hope for is a swift death.
Follow the money (Score:2)
Find who personally profits from such fuckery and all will be clear.
Mozilla management like Slashdot editors no longer need care about users to get paid.
I'm out (Score:2)
I'm done with Mozilla. I was there, in San Francisco, for the launch party, even had the T-shirt for a number of years. But so many things have gone wrong over the years, that each time I've donated I felt a little less comfortable doing so. But this has come to an end.
Time to fork the code, and get a team of people who are interested in programming rather their their huge egos in an expansive organization that is no longer fit for purpose.
But⦠(Score:2)
Sure seems like inmates and asylum (Score:2)
Probably late in the asking, but with more money than God to piss away why didn't they just buy Second Life source as a start on their code base? Those avatars have had legs for, like, FOREVER!
Too much money (Score:2)
Kool-Aid (Score:2)
What flavor of Kool-Aid do these folks all drink? Something must be wrong with Hetch-Hetchy. No wonder they closed off access to Pulgas Water Temple.