Also from Jamie Zawinski yesterday: Mozilla’s Original Sin
Some will tell you that Mozilla’s worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.
Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.
Still the best browser to support, still the best hope of defending open web standards from Google. Call me when they implement the ads in an onerous way.
Fucking finally. So many reactionary nerds here. Yes, it may turn to shit. It may not. The result is unknown. What I do know is Firefox has been my browser of choice for two whole decades. Chromium actively is killing adblockers. Firefox right now is not.
If something happens I’ll make a switch. Right now, nothing has.
I try my best to keep calm and judge things fairly and rationally but, truth is, you get kinda tired of seeing so many iffy-maybe-alright news about Mozilla.
Inline edit: not even a week later, Teixeira v. Moz. Why, Mozilla? Liking you shouldn’t be this complicated.
My fear is that by the time “something happens” to Firefox, it’ll be something that was entirely avoidable if only we had acted sooner. I’m always wondering if I’m at the point I should be acting.
- I’m still salty about their previous CEO, Mitchell Baker, I believe, getting bigger bonuses while Firefox market share fell (and layoffs happened, but we lack details to understand those properly).
- I’m unconvinced that, in a world where the percentage of people using an adblocker is rising, they’ll find a way to change people’s minds and look at ads, even if they are perfectly, technomagically privacy preserving.
- I’m unconvinced that owning Firefox, which puts uBlock as a front-and-center extension, and Anonym, an adtech company, will not create a conflict of interest—just like what happened to Google.
For the record, this is my first time commenting on this and I’m also deeply bothered by “reactionary nerds” (everyone switch to librewolf!!), but I understand the sentiment. Hope that added some perspective.
I mean, I definitely think it’s not ideal and there’s room for improvement and social pressure for Mozilla to change its priorities, but I also don’t think it’s any reason to abandon the project. The reality is that a modern web browser is too massive of a project for a non-commercial entity to reasonably develop and keep updated, and Mozilla is the only such entity that’s even remotely got its heart in the right place.
if only we had acted sooner
Doing what, exactly? Create a fork? Done. Fill their feedback queue with endless screeching about how everything is dooooooom? Done, 10x over. Use another browser instead, say, Chrome? That’s what virtually everyone did, yes.=
Plus shouldn’t this on paper be positive news? Mozilla can, if they run Anonym well enough, be independent of other ad networks. Run their own. Which in turn means they can control the data and where it’s stored, an important issue with third-party ad networks.
Yeah, everything kinda bad Firefox does, everything else seems to do worse. So I’m staying with it until that changes.
The web dying (i mean web browsers, html, javascript, etc) wouldn’t be such a bad thing imo.
Look at what’s happened to nearly every static content site in the past few years, they’ve become nearly unusable.
News companies can try to convince ppl to use their apps, but everyone else will continue to use social media apps to get most of their news like they already do anyway. Ppl wanting static content can use the minimal protocols like gemini, gopher, or even a simple markdown web browser, which are already better than most news sites.
part of the reason I haven’t done anything right there. what is there to switch to? Chromium? Where they are actively killing adblockers?
The trouble with “wait and see” is that people will often forget what we were waiting for.
Speaking of which, do you remember FakeSpot? That was Mozilla’s first foray into directly selling private data to ad companies. At the time, a lot of people said, “they might allow it now, but let’s wait and see.”
And today, Mozilla FakeSpot continues selling data to ad companies.
