The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Firefox could be doomed (News)

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

The DOJ's beef with Google might spell doom for Mozilla, Clayton Ramsey makes a plea for not using ChatGPT for writing, Tim Cook loses a big gamble, Brandon Reinhart migrates his game dev away from Rust and Bevy, and Ibrahim Diallo throws zip bombs at malicious bots.

What up nerds? I'm Jared and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, May 5th, 2025. Adam asked a big question on the most recent friends. Who here is addicted to their phone? I've been hyper aware of my own phone addiction ever since and I even left it at home on purpose for an entire evening out last week. What happened next might shock you. Nothing.

I didn't miss an emergency. I didn't get lost driving. I didn't even think much about my phone beyond that first 15 to 30 minutes of feeling naked without it. It was just a really nice time. I say all that to say this, maybe try life without your phone for a bit. Can't suffer the thought? Come on, dream a little.

Okay, let's get into this week's news. Firefox could be doomed. The court's ruling on the US vs Google LLC case on search competition won't merely impact the tech giant itself. Quote, the DOJ wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google's own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals." End quote.

Mozilla CFO, Eric Mulheim testified in Google's defense that losing the revenue from Google's default placement deal would doom the company and serve to only further Google's browser monopoly. Why? Because Firefox makes up 90% of Mozilla's revenue and about 85% of Firefox revenue comes from that single deal alone. On cross-examination by the DOJ, Molheim conceded that it would be preferable not to rely on

one customer for the vast majority of its revenue, regardless of the court's ruling in this case." This single point of failure for Mozilla's business may be shocking, but it's not new. I consider it a case of gross ineptitude that Mozilla leadership hasn't found a way to diversify their income considering just how beholden they are to a single customer who also happens to make a rival browser to theirs. What path might they take to get there? I enjoyed this comment by Sly Mr. Fox on the Linked Verge article. Quote, let me pay you money for Firefox.

Stop doing all the other weird crap and just make a good, user-focused browser and let me pay you money for it. This is not hard. Resolve all conflicts of interest? Be the caggy of browsers? No, you won't beat Chrome, but you will do good work and help to keep a free internet. I'd rather read the prompt.

Clayton Ramsey, a PhD student studying computer science at Rice University, grades other students' assignments and regularly sees ChatGT copypasta. So he wrote this article as a plea to everyone, not just the students, all of us. Quote, don't let a computer write for you. I say this not for reasons of intellectual

honesty or for the spirit of fairness. I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more interesting, meaningful and valuable than whatever a large language model can transform them into." My name is Jared Santo and I approve this message. I write a lot. I've literally written this newsletter every Monday morning 143 times and I'm here to tell you that I never filter a single character through an LLM. Not because I'm not lazy. I'm super lazy.

So lazy, in fact, that I didn't take the time to rewrite that last sentence to make it more scrutable. And guess what? I'm not rewriting this one either. See? My laziness abounds. I don't use LLMs for writing because their stuff is just mid, by design. They are professional C students

and I am just not interested in C content. I'm shooting for at least B minus. Tim Cook's big losing gamble. Surely you've heard of the recent judgment against Apple's requirement that apps only use Apple's payment methods and not linked to external methods. Developers rejoiced when Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers excoriated Apple in her finding, quote,

Apple's response to the injunction strains credulity. After two sets of evidentiary hearings, the truth emerged. Apple, despite knowing its obligations there under, thwarted the injunction's goals and continued its anti-competitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. Remarkably, Apple believed that this court would not see through its obvious coverup." One interesting fact that was exposed in the process

was that Tim Cook eschewed Phil Schiller's advice that Apple comply with the original 2021 injunction. Quote, internally, Philip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly.

End quote. I'm reminded of the ancient king of Israel, Rehoboam, who eschewed elderly wise counsel when he came to power, opting instead to increase the tax burden on the people. The 12 tribe kingdom divided, leaving only two tribes under Rehoboam's rule. Will Tim Cook's iOS kingdom see a similar fate? Dan Moran from Six Colors thinks so.

He says quote, to paraphrase the immortal words of one of our greatest heroines, the more Apple tightens its grip, the more revenue will slip through its fingers. It's now time for sponsored news. Use AI to generate fully working apps in Retool. Retool has been hard at work building powerful, enterprise-ready AI capabilities.

Today, they're opening an invite for customers to request early access to something new, using AI to generate fully working apps in Retool. If you're interested in getting early access to these powerful new capabilities and helping shape the future of AI in Retool, join the waitlist for early access. There's a link in your chapter data and of course, in the newsletter. Thank you to Retool for sponsoring ChangeLog News. Migrating Away From Rust

In 2023, Brandon Reinhart picked Rust and the Bevy game engine to build his game Architect of Ruin. However, over the course of six weeks, he rewrote the game entirely in C sharp and has been using it with Unity for the past three months. In this blog post, Brandon explains why he decided to migrate away from Rust and Bevy. Quote, I want to begin by stating that I anticipated many of these challenges before they manifested.

I knew that using a game engine early in its development life cycle would pose unique risks and costs. I considered those costs to be likely worthwhile and surmountable. My love of Rust and Bevy meant that I would be willing to bear some pain that other game developers might choose to avoid. I didn't walk blindly into these specific problems, but they a bit harder than I was expecting." End quote. He goes on to describe challenges that he faced

with collaboration, abstraction, keeping up with migrations, learning, and modding with Bevy. Looking back at the rewrite, Brandon learned two important lessons from the entire ordeal. One, I failed to fairly evaluate my options at the start of the project.

Rust is great and I love it, but I didn't give alternatives a fair shake. In particular, I didn't spend time examining the differences between Unreal and Unity more closely. And two, sometimes you have to burn time to earn time. I think we are way ahead of where we would have been had we stuck with Bevy. Our agility in implementing rendering features while also pushing gameplay forward is much higher. I use zip bombs to protect my server. Ibrahim Diallo came up with a fun new, at least to me, way to troll malicious bots that cause

havoc in his life. Quote, at my old employer, a bot discovered a WordPress vulnerability and inserted a malicious script into our server. It then turned the machine into a botnet used for DDoS. One of my first websites was yanked off of Google search entirely due to bots generating spam. At some point, I had to find a way to protect myself from these bots. That's when I started using zip bombs. End quote. these bots, that's when I started using zip bombs."

A zip bomb starts off as a small compressed file, but upon download, it expands into a very large file that can overwhelm a machine's disk. Ibrahim will tell you exactly how he builds and sends zip bombs, but first, quote, before I tell you how to create a zip bomb, I do have to warn you that you can potentially crash and destroy your own device. Continue at your own risk.

That's the news for now. But go and subscribe to the ChangeLog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on. Such as. Redis is open source again. The enshitification of tech jobs. And a Rust web framework that does not use async. Get in on that newsletter at changelog.com. in the