> If your mission really is a free and open as well as privacy respecting web you don't invite the largest privacy violator on the planet to the table to have a say.

If you're trying to insinuate that working with Google or Facebook on this issue means that Mozilla fundamentally doesn't care about privacy, that is a ridiculous, fantastical claim that requires closing your eyes to years of work from the company.

I am right here criticizing Mozilla for partnering with Facebook, they should not be doing that. It's irresponsible and harmful. Nevertheless, Firefox is objectively the most private consumer-grade browser on the market, including Brave and DeGoogled Chromium. Nevertheless, Mozilla has done more to push web privacy forward than the majority of people on this site myself included, and more to push web privacy forward than the entirety of the rest of the browser market.

Even if you are on topic, there's nothing constructive about jumping onto every Mozilla thread arguing that Mozilla is the same as Google when they're very clearly not. It's unproductive because I shouldn't even need to be wasting my time defending a company that I came here to criticize. It makes it harder to fix real problems when all of them are equated and treated as being identically severe, and when the conclusion everyone draws from every problem is "use something based on Chrome and give up on the entire effort".

A Mozilla that fundamentally cared about privacy would have made none of these decisions. I've grown increasingly cynical over the last couple of years that this is just another marketing ploy, it sounds good and keeps us in but you have to wonder whether it is really true given their decisions to date.

The 'years of work from the company' are fantastic, but should not give them a pass in the present, given that the last couple of years most of that goodwill has been burned.

Additionally, it seems like it would be practically zero up front cost for Mozilla to provide a no-telemetry, no-google, no-pocket, no-ads, no-sync, no-experiments, no-privacy-compromise alternative build as a one-click option for people who actually want a privacy-focused browser. Instead, we have to download the normal "product-manager-ized" one and turn off a bunch of intrusive stuff we never really wanted in a browser.

They don't do this, though. I speculate (without any direct knowledge of the situation) that this is because they believe that the majority of their users would opt for this build instead, and they would lose "insights" (and of course revenue).

Someone, somewhere, is prioritizing "line go up and to the right" over embodying the fundamental ethos of a privacy-focused company. If you ship private software, there is of course no line.

It is interesting though how long people will continue to assume the best, in a way it is endearing, and it worked for for instance Google for more than a decade. There are still people who believe they are acting in our best interest even today.

> but should not give them a pass in the present

I don't know how you can possibly read either my comments or the general tone of the other people responding to me as giving Mozilla a pass on this, or naively assuming the best about them.

Even with that criticism, it is still just plain silly to say that Mozilla even in its modern state is not meaningfully different from Google/Facebook/etc. You can be as cynical as you want to be, but if you can't tell the difference between Chrome/Chromium and Firefox today, then that's not cynicism, it's either a lack of realism or a lack of attention.

I've gone into a few of the tangible differences elsewhere, but even in recent years and even with recent missteps, it's still pretty obvious that Mozilla is better on privacy and user rights than Google is. And it's OK to want better than Mozilla. It's OK to want a company that takes more hard-line stances and that pushes harder on its core browser. Lots of people want that, myself included. Doesn't change anything about what I've said above though.

> it's still pretty obvious that Mozilla is better on privacy and user rights than Google is.

'better than Google', after Facebook the #2 privacy violator on the plant isn't much of a bar.

> And it's OK to want better than Mozilla. It's OK to want a company that takes more hard-line stances and that pushes harder on its core browser.

Mozilla claims to be that company, and that is why I have a problem with all these issues. Once upon a time they were the gold standard, that's no longer true today.

> 'better than Google', after Facebook the #2 privacy violator on the plant isn't much of a bar.

And it is the only bar to clear. Here's the list of browser makers we have right now:

- Google

- Microsoft

- Apple

- Brave

- Some people off someplace trying desperately to make Gecko secure.

- Some people off someplace trying desperately to make V8/Electron/Chromium competitive on privacy.

- Some proprietary stuff like Vivaldi that's also based on Chromium.

- Mozilla

Mozilla wins that fight. They are still the gold standard by virtue of nobody else being able to make a competitively private browser.

> Mozilla claims to be that company

Even with its faults, Mozilla is still completely accurate in claiming that they push meaningfully harder for both privacy and user agency on the web than other browser manufacturers. Now, as you say, that may be a low bar to clear. But given that no one else is even trying to clear the bar, that is still a meaningful difference between Mozilla and its competition.

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I think the biggest issue I have with these kinds of debates is that there's never anything constructive or new being offered, it's not even pointing out a new criticism. I know about Mozilla's failings as a company, you're not illuminating anything for me on that front, I know about all of their controversies. So you've identified that Mozilla could be better, great. Now what?

There's value in pointing out problems when it actually draws attention to an issue, but everybody on this thread knows what the issues are with Mozilla. And it is still obvious that Mozilla is noticeably better on these issues than the rest of the browser market, and that Mozilla is still doing quite a lot of good in that space. You're commenting on a thread of people who are pointing out Mozilla's flaws and telling it to do better -- and you're putting those people down and calling them naive.

Well, if pointing out Mozilla's flaws and telling them to be better is a waste of time, what would you propose instead? Moving over to Chrome? Pretending that indie Gekko projects have the resources to be private or secure? Giving up on the entire thing and not using the web anymore? I mean, drop a donation link to Servo, do something other than snubbing people for caring about trying to make the web better. You have exactly one available group of allies in this fight, and your response to that is to call them naive and say they're not good enough.

You're talking to someone who likely agrees with you on the vast majority of your privacy stances, and who is actively criticizing Mozilla right now, but that's not enough unless it's paired with despair and a complete dismissal of the company? Don't you see how that's unhelpful? And it's not even accurate: Mozilla may have "fallen", but they are still overall doing more good than harm in this area and they are still producing the best browser for privacy on the market. There's a huge lack of perspective in the doom-and-gloom takes, they're just as narrow and selective as the the view that Mozilla can do nothing wrong -- it's acting like all of the recent work on ETP and supercookies just doesn't exist or something, it's as if DoS or multi-account containers were never made. The Tor Uplift project only started in 2016 and only went live in mainline Firefox in 2019, but sure, Mozilla isn't doing anything for privacy now.

It's simple: absolute vs relative. For you Mozilla is in a relative sense the best because they take the foremost stance about privacy. For me being 'privacy first' is an absolute thing: it precludes you from doing a whole raft of things that Mozilla has done. So for me they lost the title, that doesn't mean they aren't still the best.

plant->planet