"Firefox is dead to me," wrote Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols last month for The Register, complaining about everything from layoffs at Mozilla to Firefox's discontinuation of Pocket and Fakespot, its small market share, and some user complaints that the browser might be becoming slower. But a new rebuttal (also published by The Register) argues instead that Mozilla just has "a management layer that doesn't appear to understand what works for its product nor which parts of it matter most to users..." "Steven's core point is correct. Firefox is in a bit of a mess — but, seriously, not such a bad mess. You're still better off with it — or one of its forks, because this is FOSS — than pretty much any of the alternatives." Like many things, unfortunately, much of computing is run on feelings, tradition, and group loyalties, when it should use facts, evidence, and hard numbers. Don't bother saying Firefox is getting slower. It's not. It's faster than it has been in years. Phoronix, the go-to site for benchmarks on FOSS stuff, just benchmarked 21 versions, and from late 2023 to now, Firefox has steadily got faster and faster... Ever since Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Firefox has never had to compete. It's been attached like a mosquito to an artery to the Google cash firehose... Mozilla's leadership is directionless and flailing because it's never had to do, or be, anything else. It's never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit. It's no wonder it has no real direction or vision or clue: it never needed them. It's role-playing being a business. Like we said, don't blame the app. You're still better off with Firefox or a fork such as Waterfox. Chrome even snoops on you when in incognito mode... One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation — one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi... Zawinski has repeatedly said: "Now hear me out, but What If...? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?" "In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only: — Building THE reference implementation web browser, and — Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees. — There is no 3." Perhaps this is the only viable resolution. Mozilla, for all its many failings, has invented a lot of amazing tech, from Rust to Servo to the leading budget phone OS. It shouldn't be trying to capitalize on this stuff. Maybe encourage it to have semi-independent spinoffs, such as Thunderbird, and as KaiOS ought to be, and as Rust could have been. But Zawinski has the only clear vision and solution we've seen yet. Perhaps he's right, and Mozilla should be a nonprofit, working to fund the one independent, non-vendor-driven, standards-compliant browser engine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a series of posts on X, the AI chatbot Grok apologized for what it admitted was “horrific behavior.” The posts appear to be an official statement from xAI, the Elon Musk-led company behind Grok, as opposed to an AI-generated explanation for Grok’s posts. (xAI recently acquired X, where Grok is prominently featured.)

On June 18th, we enabled a new pricing feature called Effort-Based Pricing for all newly signed up Replit users. After monitoring usage for two weeks, we began rolling this feature out to the remaining users last week on July 2nd. In this post, we would like to share more about the rationale for the change, what we have observed so far, address some of our users’ concerns, and share how we are continuing to improve pricing. We are confident that the new Effort-Based pricing is the model that will best serve our users and enable more powerful AI tools to Replit members, however the transition to the new pricing model did not meet our standards for how we like to roll out major changes (we will discuss some examples of areas where we fell short). Therefore, we would like to offer $10 in free Replit credits to all Replit members who used the new pricing model as a way to show that we appreciate your feedback and your patience during this transition. This will automatically be applied to all active accounts that have used the new pricing model. There is nothing that users need to do to claim this credit. July 11th Incident: One example of where we fell short in our rollout of the pricing happened on July 11th between the hours of 11:26AM PDT - 5:43PM PDT. During this time, and due to an error in cost calculation, Replit checkpoint charges were being incorrectly computed and were often much larger than they should have been. After 5:43PM the fix was rolled out to production. This impacted approximately 6% of paying users. We have performed a thorough incident analysis, ensured that all charges related to the incident are refunded/credited, and have applied additional guardrails to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. We apologize for this July 11th incident and we thank our community members for helping us identify this issue. We were able to determine exactly who was impacted, by how much, and will automatically issue refunds or credits to any user that was impacted by this error. There is nothing that these users need to do to initiate the refund. The total cost of all impacted checkpoints will be reimbursed. Impacted users will also receive an email explaining what has happened. These refunds will be in addition to the additional $10 in credits that we are offering to all active Replit members who have been using the new Effort-Based Pricing.

Commodore announced its first new computer in over 30 years, the Commodore 64 Ultimate. You can pre-order it now, with pricing starting at $299.

The post Tech Nostalgia: Commodore is Back, and so is the C64! appeared first on Thurrott.com.

Microsoft has laid off over 15,000 employees in the past two months, but its rationale for doing so is vague and unbelievable.

The post Yes, AI is to Blame for the Microsoft Layoffs appeared first on Thurrott.com.

OpenAI was set to acquire AI coding startup Windsurf in May for $3 billion, but Microsoft refused to authorize the transaction.

The post Thanks, Microsoft! Google Snags Top Windsurf Talent After Nixed OpenAI Deal appeared first on Thurrott.com.