I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren’t so bad.
I was wrong.
I’ll continue using Firefox because it’s the least bad option, but I can’t advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don’t expect it to last long with this orientation.
So it goes.
This breaks my heart.
Mozilla’s non-profit status needs to be revoked.
I think at this point they have a nonprofit and a company, the later being used for all their taxable income.
I know; they should not be allowed to do that.
Time to switch to other fork
At this point, I don’t see many other options to keep everything going for Firefox. If they somehow lose the go*gle money they use to keep themselves going, they need another revenue source and I severely doubt there are enough Firefox users willing to pay enough to keep it going as it currently does. Don’t like it, but I’m gonna at least play devil’s advocate.
It would be nice if they at least allowed for even being able to donate to the browser itself. All the options that I am aware of are either the paid extra stuff they have, or to the overall company. Which is annoying since I imagine that the current “donation” option means that the money is being used mostly for the upper execs and routed to the extra shit that already has options for paying subs.
They could try not having an overinflated budget?
Where would you cut?
What if we could have a world that wasn’t powered by ads? I’d like to get past this “only one way to run the internet” train of thought.
I’m just so tired of ads, commercials and advertising in general. It’s exhausting.
It’s either that, a subscription model of some sort, going to pay to install models, or something else to fund themselves. I’d suggest going to a donation based model, but I doubt there’s enough Firefox users willing to pay to even be able to keep it alive more than a year or two tops.
Well, do you subscribe to news sites, YouTube Premium, Kagi? The world you dream of is available to you today
Even of they reduced everything down to just Firefox, Thunderbird, and all in infra to run those products (Mozilla accounts, addons stores, hosting, dev/build services…), as well as continuing to pay for dev time on open source they use/contribute to, and the time their employees put into w3c and other foundation/standards/steering initiatives, I don’t think you’d want to see the cost of a monthly subscription.
This stuff costs way more than people think it does, and behind the scenes Mozilla does a lot of work (with google, Microsoft, apple) on web standards, and trust me, you want them still involved seeing as each other browser group involved is well… You know… Much worse for privacy generally.
YouTube premium and kagi aren’t even remotely in the same league for comparison when it comes to the cost and value a “Firefox” or “Mozilla” subscription would be.
Does this mean they are gonna brick ublock origin and force me to Google’s 3.0 shit? (I forgot the name of it)
Very unlikely. They will support new extension API’s (they are already 90%+ compatible with manifest v3) bit Mozilla has committed to maintaining compatibility for the manifest v2 API’s that don’t exist in v3.
Claims otherwise are FUD.
Manifest v3? I gather they’re already moving towards this but not in a manner which harms ad blocking
In parallel to our existing consumer products, we have the opportunity to build a better infrastructure for the online advertising industry as a whole. Advertising at large cannot be improved unless the tech it’s built upon prioritizes securing user data. This is precisely why we acquired Anonym.
Catering to the ad industry is backwards thinking, imo. Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Imo, the fact companies have changed the narrative in favor of advertisers and data collection, proves only profit matters, not the people.
She went on to work at eBay for 13 years, followed by PayPal, Skype, and Airbnb. source
why would Mozilla choose to be directed by an ebay+paypal+airbnb experience and can somebody with that background not think like this ☞
“Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better internet. And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.”
Advertising will not improve unless we address the underlying data sharing issues, and solve for the economic incentives that rely on that data.
thanks to Mozilla for assuming the responsibility of improving advertising
We can’t just ignore online advertising — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in online advertising over the past few years. - MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA source
if we stay with that metaphor of “We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it”, it’s not difficult to imagine Mark and Mozilla being swallowed by the monster he’s “staring straight in the eyes” :/
i hope they can filter the shit Mozilla will include in Firefox from mull and mullvad
She’s not particularly wrong, but this highlights the problem for me.
Why does the corporate arm behind one of the last “free” browsers out there need to become involved in this clear conflict of interest?
Why does this need to be developed as core functionality in the browser codebase instead of as an addon like most of the previous experiments?
There is repeated insistence that this is key to the future of the web. I don’t neccessarily disagree. I disagree entirely that this should have any direct contact with the Firefox project. Create a separate subsidiary within Mozilla for this shit. Anything to maintain a wall between the clearly conflicting goals.
This all reads like a new CEO coming in hungry to make a mark rather than actually just be a steward to keeping business as usual going.
She’s not particularly wrong,
yes, and that’s the saddest part
Not everyone?
Does anyone?
Good thing we can fork, I guess, but it’s kinda sad to watch a previously good org die
Fork, blah, blah, blah.
When one of these forks doesn’t depend on Mozilla to do all the heavy lifting of security updates and compatibility fixes, then maybe we can talk seriously about forks. But no fork does fuck-all towards the hard part of maintaining a web browser engine. So forks mean nothing.
So just stick with firefox?
Well, if users don’t the source of the actual work, then none of the forks survive. I don’t know what people think are going to happen.
Shitting on Mozilla seems to be a competitor sport around here sometimes, and it’s fucking self-defeating. In 5 years, there will only be the Chromium engine, and then Google will shut down the opensource side like they pretty much did with Android. And then we’re truly fucked.
I’ve been using librewolf over the last week. Honestly… It’s a drop in replacement for me
Does it support containers and sync settings between installs on multiple systems? If so I’m in without hesitation.
It’s basically hardened Firefox, you can do all the same things here too. Alas using it with an account kind of defeats the purpose. However you can use your account once to sync everything.
I switched to a fork of Firefox (Zen) without their bs…
Based. I switched to Midori
Yeah, perhaps because advertisements go against the values that users look for in your browser?
The enshitification of Firefox continues 😢
Cory Doctorow: “Disenshittify or die!” (YouTube)
I wonder if this has anything to do with the Google ad monopoly case?
It’s probably at least a factor, yeah. They’ve been trying to reduce dependence on Google for a long time, which was always a smash hit with the community (not), but if there’s a very concrete scenario where will stop paying, then the urgency ramps up quickly.
Frankly, I’m surprised it took them so long to say this publicly. For over a year, Mozilla has had a de facto conflict of interest when it came to their stance on advertisements, so take anything they say about their necessity with a huge grain of salt…
May 2023: Mozilla purchases FakeSpot, a company that sells private data to advertisers. Mozilla keeps selling private data to advertisers to this day.
June 2024: Mozilla purchases Anonym, an AdTech company.
