[hartator]

> it's infinitely less evil than Google

The thing is Mozilla get more than 80% of its revenue from Google.

It’s fine to question if they are not just an extension of Google at that point. They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers; while pushing things like https everywhere that makes ads and trackers life easier.

[dralley]

>The thing is Mozilla get more than 80% of its revenue from Google.

Why criticize them for this in a thread _about_ Mozilla diversifying their revenue?

Half of HN seems to hate them for being so dependent on Google and the other half seems to hate them for having profitable (if small) ventures that reduce their dependence on Google, like the VPN or Pocket, or this.

>They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers

This is total garbage and I suspect you know that. If not, please do some more research.

https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi...

https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest...

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#native-file-s...

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

[Nextgrid]

Diversifying their revenue with equally-hostile sources is not really solving the problem, not to mention that if Mozilla needs money, maybe better management of their existing money would be a good start.

[dralley]

What other sources of money exist? Look around you, years of lax anti-trust enforcement has left a wasteland for any tech company that's not funded by Saudi Oil money (YC / Softbank / Venture Capital generally) or a top N tech company like Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft. And the situation outside of tech is way worse.

The gains in the average 401k are primarily due to the 40% of it that is Tesla / Facebook / Apple / Amazon / Alphabet.

Microsoft (Bing) has their own browser so why would they bother with Firefox, same for Apple. Yahoo is dead. Facebook is evil. Google probably only does it for antitrust reasons.

[Nextgrid]

In the good old days there was the concept of making a product and getting your customers to pay for it.

I believe there's enough value in a user-agent in a world where browsers are increasingly user-hostile. Sell a browser with out-of-the-box security & privacy features such as ad blocking (with officially-maintained & reviewed filter lists), spyware protection and some enterprise-friendly features that are best implemented in the browser (TLS interception, DLP, etc) instead of shitty middleboxes.

[hartator]

> This is total garbage and I suspect you know that. If not, please do some more research.

I take the bait.

> https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185

Firefox doesn't block Google Analytics. This is not true.

The rest is PR fluff. Can you cite one feature that provide better privacy than Brave that blocks ads and trackers natively?

[dralley]

Yes it does. It isn't enabled by default because it breaks some websites. Enhanced tracking protection is not marketing fluff.

[roblabla]

err, sorry, but what? HTTPS everywhere does not help ads/trackers at all. It _does_ prevent your ISP to inject ads in your webpages, something that was done by quite a few US ISPs. And more importantly, it prevents anyone not between you and the TLS termination from snooping on the contents of your communication, which is a definite upside.

There are a bunch of valid reason to dislike Mozilla, this is a really weird hill to die on...

[dralley]

Imagine thinking HTTPS is a bad thing, jesus... They'd probably be even madder if they found out how much involvement Mozilla had in getting LetsEncrypt off the ground.

[yoasif_]

> They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers

Really? Take a look at https://blog.mozilla.org/security/category/privacy/

[Nextgrid]

The vast majority of these have been doable for a decade with open-source, permissively-licensed add-ons such as uBlock Origin so they're quite late to the party (especially when they could literally bundle the aforementioned add-ons as built-ins), not to mention that a lot of these only work on the strictest level of tracking protection which isn't enabled by default - providing a false sense of security to less technically-savvy users.

[yoasif_]

That is a different argument than doing nothing.

[Nextgrid]

You could argue that they're doing nothing in the sense that they're not doing anything extra that other browsers (who don't boast about privacy at every possible opportunity) don't already do. For a browser & company that makes privacy claims all the time I'd expect them to be ahead of the others, especially when permissively-licensed solutions exist that can be bundled with little effort.

[yoasif_]

> You could argue that they're doing nothing in the sense that they're not doing anything extra that other browsers (who don't boast about privacy at every possible opportunity) don't already do.

You could, but you would be wrong, right?

[Nextgrid]

Well yes indeed, feel free to disagree; just trying to explain my understanding of the parent's argument.