Even worse, they’re spending the revenue they do get in wildly irresponsible ways.
The AI initiative makes no sense. Currently, dozens of industry leading groups are doing a great job converting unlimited Chinese govt grants, monopoly rents, and VC money into open infrastructure and open weights
Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical, regardless of whether it respects privacy. Examples:
- A friend struggled with prescription drug addiction and repeatedly relapsed due to targeted ads.
- Entire industries are built on targeting people with gambling problems.
- Companies like Cambridge Analytica explicitly target mentally ill people to change election outcomes and dismantle democracies.
Anyway, I wish they’d spin off Firefox and related stuff (Rust made sense, I think FirefoxOS did too), and abandon the rest of their “mission”.
Why do people keep bring this up? It's been known for years and years that you can't donate directly to firefox unless you just donate to one of the forked projects like librewolf or waterfox that might eventually make changes that will go back upstream. I agree that mozilla needs to take a step back, slim down to just the browser and browser related tasks like open standards and then move forward instead of trying to save the world. If one of their offerings like security monitoring or VPN or such actually is a net money maker they should keep those as well, but everything else should go.
> Why do people keep bring this up? It's been known for years and years that you can't donate directly to firefox
Maybe it's been known to you, but there are people in these threads over the last 72 hours who have thought that money they give to Mozilla supports Firefox. So it should keep getting repeated until everyone knows.
> I wish they’d spin off Firefox and related stuff..., and abandon the rest of their “mission”.
I wish the community (I don't have the technical skills myself) would fork Firefox back into a privacy-focused browser; strip out all the Mozilla "products" code that's snuck in it, and manage the development in a non-profit organization like how the Linux kernel gets developed.
The Iceweasel in Debian was Firefox without branding, IceCat (which was called Iceweasel before Debian created Iceweasel) is a GNU fork (and there are Thunderbird and Skymonkey equivalents).
I really wish they would do to Firefox what they did to Thunderbird, which is to spin it off into its own thing so it can stand independently. I want to support Firefox, but I do not feel comfortable donating to the Mozilla foundation.
Firefox should just do a Wikipedia style beg button once a year and be transparent on where the money is being spent.
>The AI initiative makes no sense. Currently, dozens of industry leading groups are doing a great job converting unlimited Chinese govt grants, monopoly rents, and VC money into open infrastructure and open weights
Open weights yes, but what about the applications that people actually use? "AI" goes far beyond a LLM hooked up to a chat UI.
>Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical, regardless of whether it respects privacy. Examples: [...]
I don't see how listing a bunch of worst case examples is is supposed to prove the claim that "Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical". Contextual advertising is "targeted advertising", but I don't see what's unethical about putting software developer job ads next to stackoverflow, for instance.
>Anyway, I wish they’d spin off Firefox and related stuff (Rust made sense, I think FirefoxOS did too), and abandon the rest of their “mission”.
> I don't see how listing a bunch of worst case examples is is supposed to prove the claim that "Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical".
I'd agree that targeted advertising isn't an inherent evil, but left unrestricted it will inevitably be used in evil ways and bring about surveillance capitalism which is very much evil.
>Companies like Cambridge Analytica explicitly target mentally ill people to change election outcomes and dismantle democracies.
What's not that years ago? Also wdym with targeting mentally ill people to dismantle democracies? Last thing I read about that was a FB api abuse to collect user data but nothing about targeting a specific demographic
In another alternative dimension, the Firefox guys 10 years ago would have capitalized on what their users wanted which is mostly around privacy and not being Google. Instead we got pocket, a re-hashed VPN and a bunch of privacy-degrading changes which slowly erode trust.
For what it’s worth, as a Pocket user from before it got bought by Mozilla, it’s only gotten worse since then. First the mobile apps lost the ability to show full web pages (“Web View”) while offline, which was basically the whole point for me originally. Now the Share Link button has stopped sharing the actual link and instead uses a redirection service (pocket.co) presumably so that Pocket/Mozilla can track you.
The commitment is to develop privacy-preserving advertising. If successful, it would revolutionize privacy because, as we know, ads and their surveillance are everywhere.
Instead, maybe nobody will work in that project if you succeed in slandering Mozilla.
You can't have "privacy-preserving advertising". Either you track users to ensure ads get displayed (because the places you'd serve the ads wouldn't serve them if they could/claim more ad views than happened), or you have no clients (because their ads aren't displayed). Broadcast works for ads because the clients can verify that you are broadcasting (and it means you can disconnect the group serving the ads from those who verify "views").
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke Mozilla to remove this feature. I agree with you was the entire reason I used Pocket (literally replacing AvantGo for me).
Now Pocket is basically yet another ... web portal? advertisement platform? social network? I do not know how to describe what it is now, other than useless.
Pocket still saves articles offline. It just saves them in article view. Which is the same as what Instaaper does. I just checked my phone and it has 1.07 gigabytes of articles saved for offline reading.
I don't recall it ever saving web pages in web view (though maybe you used to be able to see them offline when you used the premium plan, but now the premium plan doesn't save the WebView offline? I'm not interested enough in paying for it to find out so all I have is guestimation.).
So they do save, but they save as article view and not the webpage itself. Which is the same as the other services.
You definitely were able to save the web view at some point during the "Pocket" timeframe. I explicitly remember even the "notification with progress" that showed up when it was doing that (since I would have to wait for it to finish before turning off the radios). Heck, the Mozilla docs still mention Pocket as downloading the web view, e.g. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/getting-started-pocket-...
> Offline Downloading: Pocket will decide the best view to download by default. If you want to specify whether to download Article View, Web View, or both, uncheck Download Best View.
The article view was a nice novelty 10 years ago, but as it is completely based on heuristics (readerJS-like, in fact I think it _is_ readerJS ) and they have not really bothered upgrading it, it is no longer a reliable way to capture web sites for offline reading .
I stand corrected! I will note that at least from my use case a saved copy of web view is a rather idiosyncratic user need not catered to by I think any of the other apps. As you do get article view and article view is what I actually want.
But you have reminded me, because I do recall that phrasing that you quoted about pocket deciding whether to choose Article or Web View.
I don't it's a particularly huge loss, and the exasperation from the commenter I was replying to seemed to suggest that they thought saving of any articles had been removed, which would be an appropriate cause for exasperation. But I don't think that reaction is warranted at all, just from not saving web view.
I also think it's not quite right to suggest that saved article view "doesn't work" or is a mere novelty. I just went through a bunch of my articles and randomly spot-checked them, and all of the ones saved to article view are without problems. Although I do recognize there's an occasional issue, but those are the exception rather than the rule. It remains a critical antidote to the unviewable overloaded with ads viewing experience that is the default experience for most people with most web pages. There's also an open secret that it bypasses login screens and pay walls, fir which it continues to be one of the best solutions.
But alas, I was not correct to suggest this had never previously been available.
Here are the ten most recent pages on my list, with [A] for article view working correctly, [B] for article view being broken, [W] for article view (and thus offline access) being completely unavailable:
The same test on my saved articles would show [A] for just about everything.
I don't think Pocket ever built itself with intended use cases being such things as looking at tables of server logs showing IP addresses (jimbojones) or Microsoft support pages, and I believe those are probably exactly the instances where switching to a web view exists to account for that.
If your deal-breaking use case is that you need an offline only archived web view of Microsoft support for a note about how "OpLock" means the same as "opportunistic lock" I think they're well within their rights to say that that's outside of their intended use cases, and that's what Web View (built into pocket) is for.
Certainly room for improvement, but they're just very idiosyncratic use cases. Do you get more success with those same pages on InstaPaper?
> a note about how "OpLock" means the same as "opportunistic lock"
This one is a bit silly, I admit, but consider this one:
> Note: Your application should not perform any file system operations on the file between [calling CreateFile2] and [requesting an oplock]. Doing so may cause deadlocks.
>First the mobile apps lost the ability to show full web pages (“Web View”) while offline,
I've used Pocket on and off since back when it was called Read It Later and I don't recall it ever offering this feature (offline access to saved web page versions of articles), at least not outside of the premium service.
So I tried my best Googling skills, which seems to have increasingly diminishing returns with every passing day, but I did find a LinkedIn article from 2017 noting that this archive of web page feature was premium even then.
(Edit: It's worth noting that InstaPaper doesn't offer this either. Nor does Raindrop, nor did Omnivore (RIP) although you could print to PDF and upload it to Omnivore. The only article saver service I'm aware of that does is Wallabag, which is self-hosted.)
>10. Premium options
>So far, every feature has been free. If you upgrade to a premium plan, you'll get other features, such as permanent copies of your articles in case they're removed from the web, suggested tags to make bookmarking even easier, and the removal of sponsored posts from Your List.
>This post was originally published on Proof Is In the Writing on July 20, 2017.
Those are two different features. The premium one saved (saves?) things on Pocket’s servers. The one I was talking about saved full web pages on your device. It wasn’t “permanent” in that, for example, if you reinstalled the app and the page had disappeared from the web, you’d lose it, but otherwise it worked well enough that at some point Pocket was the main consumer of storage on my phone.
The setting was “Always fetch Web View”, next to the still-extant “Always fetch Article View”, and searching for that phrase will give you some contemporary discussions[1,2]; alternatively, Pocket’s own docs on the Wayback Machine[3] will tell you that, as recently as 2022 (and at least as early as 2012[4]),
> Pocket will download the “Best View” by default. To override this decision, you can configure Pocket to always download Article View, Web View, or both.
> It’s possible to control whether Pocket downloads Article or Web View:
> [...]
> 4. Enable Always fetch Article View, Always fetch Web View, or both
I can recommend Zotero. You also don’t have to pay for storage if you have a server/device that is webdav capable. I connected it to my Synology nas and the setup was trivial.
I don't understand how they could be pulling in half a billion a year for a decade and still have financial problems... even if they just put that money in a low risk money market investment account the whole company could have just ran off interest by this point.
Well, they took over things like Pocket, build that VPN service and Firefox Send and probably founded other projects that are not important to the core of their "business".
If Mozilla would have solely focused on Firefox and Thunderbird we could be in a better place right now.
> If Mozilla would have solely focused on Firefox and Thunderbird we could be in a better place right now.
I have no idea what the motivations of Mozilla are, but it is important to remember that many players in the industry faded away simply because the industry changes fast and those players failed to anticipate those changes. It is entirely possible that Mozilla was trying to anticipate those changes and ended up making a string of very bad bets.
Instead they're losing all the advantage they once had by failing to focus on their core.
Being one half of a duopoly is a pretty stable position. Just about the only way to lose it is to fuck around and quit playing the game. There's really no external force that could have destroyed Mozilla if they had just stayed focused.
Mozilla needed to be a browser company, trying to be an "everything" company was a really stupid move.
The "industry change" that would make Firefox fade away would be the death of web browsers in general, replaced by site-specific apps that leave users with no freedom to control how they interact with a site aside from a complete boycott of the site and its app. Resisting that industry change is exactly what Mozilla should have been prioritizing. Nobody wants Mozilla to support or follow that trend.
Right, and that seems a relatively modest commitment of resources in the grand scheme of things. And it seems like the implication is supposed to be that those resources came at the expense of sustaining other parts of the browser experience.
This whole comment section is full of weird not-true accusations against Firefox in a way that feels really weird to me. Why would anyone want to lie to attack Firefox? Just use genuine facts to express concern, there’s plenty of legitimate concern without hyperbole.
People repeat this ad nauseum, but assume away all the critical details that would actually make the argument work.
Do we have any assessment, other than people in comment sections randomly just saying so, that any of these actually came at the cost of developer resources on the core browser?
I feel like people have heard this repeated so many times that they keep saying it now. All of these issues were real, in 2016. And Firefox did the thing: they rebuilt the browser from the ground up under Quantum, achieving breakthrough performance and stability that everybody was asking for. And in the present day, the differences are real but subtle, and I don't think they have anything to do with the actual drivers of browser market share, which is about Google leveraging its unparalleled position in search and on Android.
Is the argument supposed to be that if the VPN wasn't there then like the tab snapping would work more smoothly and there would still be 35% market share? Once you start saying these things out loud, it becomes clear how nonsensical and vibes-based the whole argument is.
It's not to say that there's no concern with the pivot into erosions of privacy commitments. But it doesn't excuse the kind of tulip mania that seems to have spread across hn comment sections in reaction to every mention of Mozilla.
I keep pleading with people who perpetuate these narratives to try and make real arguments accountable to our usual standards of causation and substantiation, and they never do.
> Is the argument supposed to be that if the VPN wasn't there then like the tab snapping would work more smoothly and there would still be 35% market share?
No, the argument is that if Mozilla didn't spend so much money on side projects, they wouldn't now be in such a precarious financial situation that they're making a drastic, controversial change with the stated purpose of ensuring their financial future. They might still have been poor stewards of the core browser project's technical development, but at least they'd have enough accumulated savings to continue without selling user data.
>No, the argument is that if Mozilla didn't spend so much money on side projects, they wouldn't now be in such a precarious financial situation that they're making a drastic, controversial change with the stated purpose of ensuring their financial future
A couple of problems here. First, despite your protestations to the contrary, the argument for many is about market share. Secondly they're sitting on $1.2 billion in assets, so it's not that they're underwater, but that they're trying to diversify their income away from just Google.
I also have to note that you said no, but then proceeded to make an argument that bears the very form that I was criticizing.
You are saying that side bets (like the VPN) are what compromise their financial position. That's at least a coherent statement, but now comes the substantiating it and tracing out the cause and effect, articulating the actual scale of those investments, where it has the effect that you're claiming it does.
It takes more than just going ahead and saying it and it's weird that I have to keep pointing this out.
One person in this discussion claims they could live off the interest of $500 million invested in money markets. That's the level of seriousness and credibility so far.
Do you have something more substantive, with evidence, or are you just piling on an open source project and the people who work hard at it.
* Anything that goes to the Mozilla Foundation is not spent on Firefox or Thunderbird (by definition).
* Mozilla Corporation (which spends money to maintain Firefox, and used to spend money on Thunderbird and is now separate and hence not considered in these numbers) sends some proportion of its income to the Mozilla Foundation.
* We have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances which lists total revenue, total expenses and software development expenses (I did find https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/ that wikipedia page, but some of the links are broken, so I'm going to stick with wikipedia's numbers).
I assume (which could totally be wrong) that "total expenses" minus "software development expenses" goes to the Mozilla Foundation or is otherwise not available (note that "software development expenses" would have likely included things like FirefoxOS, Pocket, MozillaVPN etc. but I suspect it's all going to come out in the wash anyway).
Since 2010, that pot that wasn't spent of software dev is $1.89 billion (which assuming $300 million a year on software dev which is above what Mozilla Corp spent every year bar 2019, is more than 6 years worth of funding). That doesn't include donations (as they all go to Mozilla Foundation).
The numbers are somewhat rubbery, but let me leave this note: why is it NOYB that is ensuring that the GDPR is being followed, rather than Mozilla?
> Anything that goes to the Mozilla Foundation is not spent on Firefox or Thunderbird (by definition).
Not at all. Much or almost all the Foundation does benefits Firefox. (I think putting Thunderbird in the same sentence is an exaggeration of its importance.)
> I assume (which could totally be wrong) that "total expenses" minus "software development expenses" goes to the Mozilla Foundation
That's a big leap. Salary expense would be their biggest item, I would guess.
> Not at all. Much or almost all the Foundation does benefits Firefox. (I think putting Thunderbird in the same sentence is an exaggeration of its importance.)
Can you be specific about how the Foundation benefits Firefox (because it can't use money)? As far as I know, the Foundation also never supported Thunderbird's development financially either (due to how they are organised).
As noted, I'm using the values I could quickly find, and wikipedia had a table I could read off. Given the numbers, I expect salaries to be under "software development expenses".
Only a small portion of Mozilla's money goes to the Foundation, something like 2%.
>I assume (which could totally be wrong) that "total expenses" minus "software development expenses" goes to the Mozilla Foundation or is otherwise not available
You're attempting to put under the under "otherwise not available" label things like legal and compliance, server, bandwidth, and infrastructure costs, all of which fall under the title of general operations in their audited statement. The marketing budget has gone up to 100 million but they are a global brand and I'm not sure that that's anything I'd consider out of the ordinary given their footprint.
I'm not sure I'm seeing anything like an aha moment where they're spending it on something I'd consider wasteful, or the cause and effect between that and some missed opportunity to invest more in development that would have driven changes to market share. (This was all supposed to be an argument about market share right?)
And at this point we're six or seven comments deep in a sub thread where people are attempting to backfill all of that data into arguments they committed to before having looked at it.
On some level, I hope that anyone reading this can appreciate that this whole exercise is ridiculous because what it's revealing is that no one really knows anything about most of these finances and are guessing and squinting and assuming and attempting to backfill arguments that they were perfectly comfortable making in the absence of this knowledge. And that, in and of itself is enough to prove my point that no one claiming that Mozilla's side bets compromised their company has any clue what they're talking about.
How much do executives at similarly sized organizations make? Moreover, if you want to cut executive salaries, how do you avoid the "pay peanuts, get monkeys" problem? Mozilla has nearly 1.5B in assets. A cheaper CEO might save you a few million, but cause far more than that in damage to the organization.
Perhaps linking a greater share of pay to success would be a good idea. How about $200,000 + $1 million per percentage of Firefox market share? In recent years, CEO pay has doubled while Firefox appears to be in terminal decline.
IMHO it was a worth bet. Had it succeeded we could have one extra mobile OS with much more freedom today. It lost steam, but it would be a shame if not even attempted. It lives through FireOS, despite negligible market share. And I still have my Alcatel One Touch Fire as a keepsake.
Huge missed opportunity for the Mozilla-Yahoo partnership in my opinion. I was intrigued by it at the time, but I think I recall opinionated bloggers on the subject that what it needed was the bare bones, features like maps and an email client and so on. And Yahoo was still at a point where it was relevant enough that it could have pitched in on this front, although that would have required strategic vision that Yahoo never had. A big risk, but the right kind of idea.
It's the kind of paradox of all of these Mozilla criticisms. "Do something to diversify your revenue. No, not that... Not that either."
>which is mostly around privacy and not being Google.
I don't understand why you're framing this as though those were mutually exclusive. They did the privacy stuff, and they did the side bets at the same time.
The side bets didn't come at the expense of privacy despite repeated breathless attempts to imply otherwise, mostly here in the backwaters of hn comment sections. That whole argument has been vibes all the way down and it's depressing to see so many people repeating it.
> > which is mostly around privacy and not being Google.
> I don't understand why you're framing this as though those were mutually exclusive.
They... didn't? If you frame it "mostly around (privacy and not being Google)" and not "(mostly around privacy) and (not being Google)". But even the "and" doesn't seem exclusive to me.
A much more valid argument! But also a change of subject.
The previously mentioned side bets, e.g. VPNs, Pocket, Relay, Fakespot -- there's been a narrative attempting to imply that those involved a trade-off from, well, sometimes the argument was quality of the core browser experience, but in this particular variation it's suggesting that these side bets were a reason they couldn't maintain commitments to privacy.
The adtech purchases absolutely do raise an eyebrow, but they have nothing to do with this narrative that attempted to tie the side bets to compromises on privacy. If anything, I want to encourage them to do more of these, precisely because they don't involve any of those compromises and everyone seems to want them to diversify their sources of revenue in non-adtech directions.
All those distractions cost money, and wanting more money is the reason that they are not maintaining their commitment to privacy.
If they had instead invested that money sensibly, they could have used it over time to do the only thing that the world wants from Mozilla: pay for developers to work on Firefox.
It's like a never-ending horde of zombies that keep coming and repeating the same argument. So as ever, my reply is going to be the same. Sure, they cost money, but they cost more or less, and they either do or don't cost engineering resources, and they cost more or less of those as well. Nobody can articulate what the missing browser feature is, that's not there because of this bet on side bets. No one can articulate the relative scale of the investment on side bets and what the impact is on engineering resources and no one can draw a connection between that and market share (if anything, it's the relatively inexpensive resource demand that probably made them attractive strategic options to begin with). And none of this is responsive to actual macro-level forces that drive market share, which is Google leveraging its footprint in the search space, in Android, and over Chromebooks to drive up its own market share.
And those are the things you would have to think through in order for any of that argument to work, not just hand-wave toward their possibility. The ability to trace cause and effect, the ability to assess the relative scale of different investments, these are all like the 101 level things that would sanity check the argument.
The option I don't see listed in your post is for the developers to do nothing except for maintain, fix bugs, fix CVEs, maybe comply with new standards, maybe find ways to make it faster.
No it's not. Read the article linked: The adtech company is developing advertising solutions that preserve privacy, with the goal of changing the ad industry. It fits directly with Mozilla's core mission and also a long-time project they've pursued internally.
I want to stress that "more" is relatively speaking. I think squaring the circle on "privacy preserving" ads involves sliding definitions of privacy that I'm not super comfortable with. Certainly a move in the right direction, but, unlike with all the other side bets, if someone is pointing to the adtech stuff I feel less comfortable dismissing them as uninformed.
I don't see how aggregate data is 'about you' in a way that impacts privacy, unless they aggregate it from just a few users.
From one of your linked comments:
> Abstracted profiling still works, and digs deeper than you might suspect (I recall the netflix data that could predict interests across different categories, like people watching House of Cards also liking It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia).
Abstracted profiling (if we're talking about the same thing) predicts things about the user - otherwise it wouldn't be valuable - but the question is whether it identifies the user.
> It's also just part of the long slow, death by one thousand cuts transformation into a company that doesn't have categorical commitments to privacy
They've been doing privacy-preserving ads for - a decade? It's not part of a transformation. The claim that Mozilla "doesn't have categorical commitments to privacy" would need to be stablished, unless 'categorial' means 'absolutely perfect in every way'.
Part of the problem is that the users don't pay, so foss devs often get creative to find revenue.
Another issue is that when you get donations, they are usually more than needed, so FOSS devs get to work adding new features which make the product worse.
Consider Whatsapp, after 15 years we can count the added features in 1 or 2 hands. They manage to find great restraint, possibly related to a low engineer-personnel ratio.
FOSS engineer orgs have no chance at staying the course. It reminds me of the sex mantra, if they likes it just keep doing it don't do it harder.
Exact same thing happens with Wikipedia. But the community puts a halt to most initiatives and they have to keep doing spinoffs like wikidata and wikiuniversity and such
Both Firefox/Mozilla and Wikipedia are actually exceptions in this world as they do get quite a large substantial amount of donations.
So I don't really see this being true. Also foundations shouldn't seek to grow but to keep doing why they do.
See how Wikipedia/Wikimedia, while both getting more money and providing almost the same service, still haven't updated how people can actually parse their content but, at least, didn't start selling data.
My understanding is that the Mozilla Foundation is insulated from the development work on Firefox. I think it's good to have the voice alongside EFF and others advocating for good web standards. And that's definitely not a bad thing. Especially if the reason for supporting Firefox is the diversification away from Google's dominance in the browser space.
But I think it's the paid subscriptions that are the main channel of personally contributing revenue towards the part of the organization that develops the browser.
I wasn't super clear, but I was thinking of their subscription based products such as Pocket and I believe the VPN.
EFF does a number of things such as advocate for web standards that don't benefit Google at the expense of other browsers. They get involved in legal action and legislating and they publish privacy badger, an extension that blocks tracking. My understanding is they also worked with Mozilla to stand up Le's Encrypt as a broadly accessible way to access HTTPS.
Donations don't go to Firefox. As the comment you replied to indicated, they've set up their organization in a way so that users can't pay/donate to Firefox.
Slowliness of the user base trust erosion means annual bonuses for the C-levels. Every year. That's by design. I'm sure they are pro's in burning frogs (or users) slowly. (Until one morning we realize that FF has become Chrome).
What do you mean by that "mostly around privacy and not being Google"?
Can you elaborate further?
It is a not-feature ("X without Y and Z"), and it is hard to capitalize on. Also, what purpose can be served today with even the die-hard Linux guys I know are willing to succumb to binge-watch on TikTok or any other popular app so that there appears to be some double standard and/or lost battle since you cannot prevent data gathering in the public service or transportation, carriers, hotels that combined more than compensate for any measures taken by a "privacy first" browser, security leaks not to mention.
Mozilla seems to have forgotten that they survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly privacy-focused. They've since stopped being that. Even if they are still tacitly privacy-focused, that's not good enough anymore.
We assume Mozilla is now just another ad-pandering jackwagon because that is the only safe assumption when presented with the facts: a major change in management, followed by removal of "we won't sell your data" across all of their marketing.
Their userbase is arguably mostly people who put up with browser disparity for the sake of peace of mind about their data. That type of user will abandon Firefox the same way we did Chrome.
I've been seeking out and trying alternatives for years, but there's one thing that I think is essential to practicing safe Internet: a uMatrix/uBlock-style connection blocker. No alternative browser I've tried comes close to acting as my user agent, it doesn't seem to be a priority for any of them.
Mozilla being explicitly privacy focused didn't get them any effective brownie points. The only thing that saves them is that they are the only viable competitor so, Google, via Chromium has to support them financially so that they don't fail. This is literally the I support my competitor so the argument that I'm a monopoly looks weaker. (BTW, Google practices around Chrome were anti-competitive)
>Mozilla seems to have forgotten that they survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly privacy-focused.
I don't think I would agree that they ever actually 'survived' Chrome at all. Mozilla had market share because it was the best thing before Chrome, in largely a pre-mobile era (at least in terms of pools of users that determined who led browser market share.) The focus on privacy was sourced from an ethos that has long existed in the software development community as a kind of baked-in default that I think was broadly shared by a lot of people and depressingly now is regarded as a kind of unique personality twist that the occasional company has.
The onset of Chrome I don't think involved survival, but was instead a steady march toward Chrome gaining dominant market share.
Mozilla seems to have forgotten that they survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly privacy-focused.
Mozilla survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly and almost totally dependent on Google --- one of (if not "the") world's biggest privacy invaders.
And I seriously doubt they have forgotten where almost all their money comes from.
This is nonsense: firefox was and remains a better browser than chrome just in terms of usability. If you ever believed that a browser maker cared about "privacy" I have a bridge to sell you.
I mean, just look at their business model. Enshittification or bankruptcy was always the future.
How so? The two are basically indistinguishable to me in terms of UI, their layouts are almost entirely identical. If anything I think Firefox has become more like Chrome over time.
What concern? You mentioned Firefox having better UI, I was asking how you think the two differ - ad blocking and containers are fair points, it wasn't quite what I was thinking of as UI, but fair enough.
I'm using both every day. Firefox has better adblocking and better integration of tree style tabs. Both provided via extensions. I also prefer Firefox Sync to whatever Google has, though given Mozilla's trajectory it'll be a toss up sooner or later.
All the executives and developers at Mozilla are being paid very well by Google. Ignoring this influence is to deny the economic reality that you live in and enables your own existence.
You might as well try to deny their TOS were just changed --- apparently in order to avoid liability for privacy claims that wouldn't withstand legal scrutiny.
I will write this for posterity just that the general sentiment does not go unnoticed. It's hard to keep defending the company I convinced most of my undecided-but-tech-savvy friends to switch to after the Manifest API debacle. Mozilla has, in my eyes, become an advertising-adjacent company. Data collection for advertising is just as indefensible as working on face recognition for kamikaze drones. Mozilla has acquired my patronage through perceived support for these values, and this step back has prompted me to cancel my existing and future subscriptions to Mozilla services I use.
Having observed the trajectory of Mozilla since the Internet Explorer days, I am saddened and reminded of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy[1], which seems especially apt here. While Mozilla has become increasingly irrelevant in the eyes of its users and fans, apparently it is still quite lucrative for those at the center of its bureaucracy[2]. What's extra sad is that Firefox is clearly a valuable public good, which seems fated to go down with the rest of this rotten ship.
Mozilla is an epic management failure.
I've never heard anything good about their management i think.
And I've been using Firefox since its very beginnings.
Maybe I’m missing something important, but why would a locally installed application running on your own machine, open source or not, require to have «terms of use» in the first place?
Mozilla seems truly lost.
Edit: said more clearly, the outrage against the contents of the “terms of use” is misguided. The outrage should be over there actually being a “terms of use” in the first place.
Can you point me to GIMP's Terms of Use? All I can find is the GPL, which doesn't say anything about collecting data. I also checked OBS Studio and LibreOffice for good measure with the same result—I can only find a straightforward copyright license like GPL, MPL, MIT and so on.
I tried some of the largest projects on purpose because surely they'd be the most likely to have language like you claim, but maybe for some reason smaller projects are more likely? Do you have some in mind?
They do that distinction, the only confusion here is that they also include language that allows them to act as the User Agent. That's everything that pertains to Firefox the browser. Everything else is about services that are available through Firefox the browser: Sync, Pocket, New Tab, Telemetry, Studies, etc.
That's patently untrue. There are plenty of open source projects that do not have "about the same thing" in their terms of use and in fact, just a simple license with easily understandable and permissive terms.
Check out Creative Commons for example, and compare it to what Mozilla asks, if you're interested in learning more. You'll find they're very different.
Every open source has a disclaimer that says that they are not liable of the usage of the software. This is saying that they collect data, yes, but are only liable in case they collect data that you, the user, hasn't explicitly told them to collect, otherwise, they are not liable, because their product would only do as you intend to use it. Mozilla literally agrees with everyone that this law is a good law.
Their services on the other hand, has language that services on the same category has, like VPN where you have language that says that you wouldn't do something illegal with it.
I'm convinced by this and your other recent posts you're just trolling at this point. (or you're beholden to a company that's forced you to think this way and what Mozilla is doing is fine and normal)
A survey like this is always going to skew heavily toward people who are agitated enough to go and answer it - particularly when you preface it with a biased post about the issue you're asking people about...
Does the Firefox in Debian also spy on you? There is no user agreement to click on at least, so it would be illegal (in the EU it would be illegal even if you click "yes", because terms like that would be thrown out by courts).
Time for a hard fork. Or is it better to double down on the upcoming alternatives like Servo and Ladybug? None of them seem close to being ready though.
Part of the uphill struggle for these forks is convincing people their brand is trustworthy.
I’m not sure exactly how, for example with LibreWolf’s lead contributor @ohfp, they are supposed to do this but having a much more fleshed (!) out set of biographies for the core team would help? Everyone’s real name, day job, background — the full curriculum vitae if you will. That would be a really good way of building trust with me, and I’m certainly someone in the market for switching to one of these forks.
I’m not saying that this kind of auto-doxing is a requirement and if it were I would be the first to decry it as an obnoxious entrance fee for the bazaar of free and open source software. We’re talking about a browser though — something as crucial as a text editor, kernel, file system, or programming runtime — and to that end it would be nice to have as much real-name trust built with users as Vim, Linux, Ext4, or Python. By way of analogy, everyone is entitled to a private life etc., but if you’re running for office then you should consider sharing as much not as little as possible.
Sorry if I sound entitled. I don’t mean to be. I’m just realistic about how terrifying it would be to find a supply chain attack in my browser.
Another uphill struggle is cloudflare. Get ready for sites being unavailable because of CF, and endless captchas that make you wonder if they even work.
This would be an excellent opportunity for CF to assert a commitment to a secure and private web by propping up one of the FF forks, even a little bit, and simply make sure it's not auto-killed by their managed policies.
Obviously if a customer wants to manually kill it, it's on them, but CF has a lot of power in choosing defaults.
As someone who cares about privacy, knowing that the company that MITMs a massive chunk of my TLS traffic to websites also controls my browser's funding would make me feel uneasy.
My experience is that anything that tries to tamper with the UA will send CF into a frenzy.
My regular firefox instance is pretty much okay. Unfortunately there is a bunch of super popular crapware shit like Teams and Slack that refuses to properly work on Firefox, unless you tweak the UA. The last time I had to do this was about half a year ago, but Slack refused to let me "huddle", unless I changed my UA. Same with Teams, it straight up said I need to install chrome if I want video chat.
Any time I forgot to change back my UA, CF would not let me in anywhere. I got the captcha, clicked on it, it said "all good", reloaded the page, and I got redirected back to the captcha. Endless loop.
> Part of the uphill struggle for these forks is convincing people their brand is trustworthy.
Agreed. I recently installed one of the forks, appreciate how it defaults to the privacy related features that need to be manually enabled in Firefox, but won't use it for anything where privacy and security is important. Which kind of defeats the point.
As for how to build trust: I don't have a clue. Things like real names, day jobs, and backgrounds don't really mean much to me. First of all, verification would be an issue. Second, it isn't really an expectation that I hold any other project or organization to. I suppose being in the main repository of a distribution that I trust would help.
(It's also worth noting that trust is more than trust in motivation. There is also trust in the competence of the individuals involved and in the project's decision making process. One can build trust under a handle. True names are not required.)
This is a helpful contribution. Thank you. My counterpoint is only on real names: LKML and Debian Developers are two examples of projects I trust and I think part of that is real names. Another part is the publicly known application process: namely that you can’t join unless vouched for by other members, and a degree of vetting is in place.
Elevating a browser to the same standard as (or even higher than!) an OS is completely reasonable.
I can definitely understand the need for real names from the perspective of people managing a project, along with someone vouching for those people. But managing a project is different from using the product of that projects. I very much doubt that many users have the ability or desire to do the vetting themselves so I am perfectly fine with maintaining the privacy of developers.
Also agreed that browsers should be held to the same high standard as operating systems. Many people access confidential data with their browsers, may it be their own data or data about other people. (Going back to the notion of trust, I worked for a bank in the early days of the public Internet. The bank I worked for only allowed clients to use the bank's own software. In retrospect, a big part of the reason was the human angle rather than the technical angle. Sure, web browsers may have used the same level of encryption. Yet that is meaningless when the browser itself may serve as a man-in-the-middle.)
By default - Google disabled the store extension pages for browsers it flags as "Not Google" (incl ungoogled-chromium) but the extensions are still compatible.
I'm using UnGoogled Chromium right now, and it seems not to be willing to install uBlock Origin. You can use uBlock Origin Lite. Ironically, The author of uBlock originally recommended switching to Firefox; I wonder if he'll want to change that recommendation now...
> I wonder if he'll want to change that recommendation now...
The recommendation is because Firefox is the only browser running full uBo (and even before uBo on FF had slightly more features than Chrome). Nothing changed there.
I do hope that any FF replacement can run uBo. Well, ideally the best situation is FF changes course by putting the users in control, but I don't see that happening.
>I'm using UnGoogled Chromium right now, and it seems not to be willing to install uBlock Origin.
Works fine on my machine. What version/distribution are you using? There's a specific patch to enable manifest v2 extensions, so it's supposed to be working.
Apparently, at some point, manifest V2 support was introduced. Maybe my build was too old, maybe there was some other issue, but - it seems that current Ungoogled Chromium for Windows builds _do_ support manifest V2.
Vivaldi does quite a bit of upstream development (for their team size), and it is as close to the original Opera as you're going to get. It is proprietary, though (but their history w.r.t to treating their users right is better than everybody else, except maybe Apple).
Some offer functionality not found in the main browser they fork from, like Waterefox having the ability to share normal, private and tor tabs all in one browser window.
Nowhere. The whole panic is just attention. Nothing's gonna change wrt to your data at Mozilla, especially that you can disable *everything* straight from settings and/or about:config.
Can you explain what burned you? I imagine many of us are trying to sift through the raft of alternatives, and waterfox is a frequent mention, so data about pros and cons is valuable.
For what it's worth, Waterfox has issues with the mozilla addon store at the moment. I was planning on Firefox Sync'ing everything over to my waterfox install, then deleting my account, but it's unable to install and reconfigure my shitload of plugins I'm using.
i've been using floorp for about a year with no issues other than the rare "chrome only" pages, for those I just use vivaldi. Floorp with sideberry and ublock is a pretty nice setup.
Lynx is the only clear choice. It doesn't sell your data. It doesn't advertise other services like Pocket. It doesn't need an ad blocker. Its immune to JavaScript exploits.
Brave's entire business model is pretty explicitly about selling your data for targeted advertisements. I find it unreasonable to even suggest Brave as an alternative if your concern with Mozilla is the "selling your data" language.
Also re MitM'ing for crypto mining: I was never in favor of pushing Brendan out of Mozilla for being a supposed right-wing nut, but I am not surprised either to see that, given free reign, he _is_ a right-wing nut.
There's even more FUD about Brave than there is about Mozilla. Brave downloads all ads and decides on what it shows you locally; the data never leaves your machine. You also have to opt-in into this system, it is disabled by default.
Maybe, it's also the time I uninstalled it. Maybe it's a completely different company now, or maybe it's the same one. Briefly checking controversies on Wikipedia and since then they've installed promoted VPNS, and pretending to be Tom Scott to solicit donations: https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/https://twitter.c...
What we do catch makes me decide how much to trust companies to do what we don't see.
Mozilla becoming untrustworthy doesn't make another company trustworthy.
That sounds like the Brave Rewards system that's opt-in afaik. It's a grift, but so far one that at least provides a decent user experience while being somewhere in the ballpark of just as bad as Firefox could be extrapolated to become in the near future.
Firefox's sponsored startpage blocks and search suggestions are opt-out features. If you don't trust an opt-in system, you should trust an opt-out one even less.
If it's opt-in now that's an improvement. When I was using Brave around 2018ish it appeared as part of an update. Companies trying to 'redefine' advertising always make me suspicious - it's similar to what Mozilla has been trying to do over the last couple of years.
I have some shamefully bloated webpages and some rather low end computes. I don't know why or how and realize it is highly anecdotal. Just sharing my surprise. I don't have any extensions. (if you do add things to chrome that are native in brave I imagine it to work slower) Perhaps it is my limited ram that holds back (the more memory hungry) chrome. Not sure how regularly calling home affects chrome.
Do not need to move anywhere. This is literally a non-issue started for fun by tiktok idiots who didn't read the ToS. Nothing in Mozillas behaviour is changing, they had to reword the ToS for legal reasons. https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1j0n4un/firefox_...
> Nothing in Mozillas behaviour is changing, they had to reword the ToS for legal reasons.
The legal reasons appear to be that they are and/or have been and/or will sell user data:
> In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar.
Mull has been officially discontinued by DivestOS back in December, along with most of their other projects. A fork by the name IronFox emerged but it's too new to know whether it's a real contender.
Just tried Zen Browser, it's interface maybe clean but user experience is very not zen. It was frustrating to find out how to remove all the Google and WhatsApp from he default layout. Left / right tab system is find but it needs a fly out/in button like IDEs have to terminal / console to compact the view.
They will face the same issues Mozilla is facing if they ever want to collect user data. Also, they will probably be financially supported by Google because Google do not want the argument of monopoly to have hold.
Also I don’t see any problem selling a VPN. I want one anyway and it’s a nice way to support Firefox.
Also maybe a stretch to call them an ad company. They are now recently in the ad business having acquired an ad company. But that’s like calling Microsoft an ad company.
You are right, quantum seems decent and based on Servo. However I can't edit the post already. Two less reasons to dump Firefox then.
Unlike Microsoft, Mozilla happens to be a smaller company than M$ with Firefox being their biggest offering, and they actually started trying to sell ads[0].
This is yet again a nothing burger. They had to change that definition because in California "selling" means "[...] releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring [...]" in exchange for “monetary” or *“other valuable consideration.”*. You can see user collected data publicly, and use said data to improve Firefox the browser, that would be argued that is a valuable consideration.
As was extensively discussed yesterday [0], their argument about why they had to change the terms actually makes things worse. They try to pass it off as "California has a bad definition of selling" but the definition of selling that they try to throw under the bus is just... common sense. If they're not compliant with California's definition of selling data, then they're selling data by most people's intuitive definition of selling data.
If I tell you "hey, I need to collect data from your system, and said data will be shared with everyone else publicly in our bug tracker", how would a legal scholar read that wrt California law? BTW, layman arguing about legal definitions are not conclusions in matter of law.
Mozilla isn't changing their terms of use because of anything relating to their bug tracker.
But to answer your irrelevant question, California law would probably not consider Mozilla putting user data on to Mozilla's public bug tracker to be a sale of user data because California's definition of "sale" requires Mozilla to be getting something of value in return, but Mozilla's public bug tracker is free for anyone to access.
As you said above, random commenters on the internet don't get to interpret the law. Who is the recipient of the data and who is giving the consideration under your framework? The wider internet? Random people on Bugzilla?
Consideration is the word used, and it has a specific meaning which involves a contract between two parties. I'm not at all sure how that can be mapped onto "using the data to improve our own product", and you're just vaguely insinuating that it might without any evidence.
use said data to improve Firefox the browser, that would be argued that is a valuable consideration.
Nice try but no.
A "sale" is a transaction between two legally distinct parties. Mozilla does not "sell" your data to itself and it does not "sell" your data to the public or to other users of Firefox either.
If Mozilla is concerned about the legal definition of "sell", there must be some other party involved. Wonder who that could be?
If so, their execution of that change is terrible. They could have explicitly clarified things, replacing "sell" with more expansive language that would maintain the explicit commitment to user privacy. But instead they changed their words to sound like Microsoft and Google, two notorious privacy violators, and have since only made it worse by only giving us circular explanations.
> In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our Privacy Notice.
And that's what people are objecting to. The reason they need to clarify their terms "in accordance with California law" is because it is a good law, not because they have done nothing wrong.
> In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our Privacy Notice.
Partners include people like you and me that work with them on specific experiments. Depending on the kind of data, for example Normandy [1] data, Nimbus [2] data are used on those experiments and help to develop and improve the product. Results of those specifically are usually private [3], but other telemetry are public [4] which also collects what could be considered PII.
That might be part of the data they share, but they also clearly said in the blog post I linked above that they also share some data with their ad partners.
> This is literally language that had to change to describe Mozilla's actions in line with California's law.
Am I missing something or does that law not apply to Mozilla giving Mozilla the data like you're implying?
Internal data transfer afaik doesn't matter. Using firefox collected data to improve firefox would amount to nothing, it's only when they give that data itself to a third party (in any ways shape or form as you said) that the law comes into effect.
The problem is that they also transfer that data and make it public [1] and also share with partners researchers for improving the software. Those two usages are selling according to California law, just because they can be argued as something that improves the product Firefox or Mozilla services.
Mozilla has been told to shed users.
The reasons for that are simple, in order not to face racketiering and monopoly prosecutions, there needs to be a plausible "competitor" for the monopoloists to point to,but since there realy is no difference between an internet browser and a full blown OS, they cant let things get out of hand. So all the things have to keep breaking and changing, unless the user base becomes large, relevant and aware.
Whats should have them terrified is that the whole alternative software eco system, could be wiped out, leaving no option but to close there grip all the way.
Brave as a browser sucks !!!
Most sites dont load on it
Most sites appear blank brave cannot render unless repeatedly refresh like in 90s
Even with 60 tabs opened in android it lags as hell, both opening and switching tabs takes 30s to 1min or more
No reliability over sync, lost my bookmarks many time
cannot easily run bookmarklets
and much more
Its now just a hunk of paid crypto AI VPN servicea
It turns out it wouldn’t go to software development, so I did not donate:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a...
Even worse, they’re spending the revenue they do get in wildly irresponsible ways.
The AI initiative makes no sense. Currently, dozens of industry leading groups are doing a great job converting unlimited Chinese govt grants, monopoly rents, and VC money into open infrastructure and open weights
Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical, regardless of whether it respects privacy. Examples:
- A friend struggled with prescription drug addiction and repeatedly relapsed due to targeted ads.
- Entire industries are built on targeting people with gambling problems.
- Companies like Cambridge Analytica explicitly target mentally ill people to change election outcomes and dismantle democracies.
Anyway, I wish they’d spin off Firefox and related stuff (Rust made sense, I think FirefoxOS did too), and abandon the rest of their “mission”.