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by marginalia_nu 1090 days ago
It's sort of hard to take Firefox serious as a competitor to Chrome when their main source of income seems to be Google.

They're ostensibly kept on a leash, permitted to exist because it's convenient for Google to have token competition from an anti-trust perspective, but it's sure as hell not real competition.
2 comments
sebazzz 1090 days ago
> It's sort of hard to take Firefox serious as a competitor to Chrome when their main source of income seems to be Google.

Which is exactly why I don't understand that not more organisations sponsor Mozilla.

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marginalia_nu 1090 days ago
Mozilla just doesn't come off as particularly credible. They talk a big game but then they waste no opportunity to fail to to live up to their values.

Consider this: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

Even looking past how little it's actually saying, there are so many contradictions.

> Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.

> Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on it.

And yet...

* It's damn near impossible to disable telemetry in Firefox. It's very clear they're fighting to prevent you from doing this, as evidenced by the fact that there are options that sort of half-disable telemetry, but not all of it. Fully disabling telemetry requires navigating a minefield of dark patterns and obscure configuration dialogues. [1]

* Firefox will use said connections to, without asking let alone telling you, change feature flags in the software you've installed on your computer, or reset configuration options. [2]

* Firefox forces ads and third party integrations like Pocket onto its users. Time and time again. No respect for consent or user preferences. [3]

It's abundantly clear that privacy and user choice only matters to Mozilla when other organizations are violating them.

[1] https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Dat...

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/normandy/

[3] http://techrights.org/2022/10/21/mozilla-no-respect-for-cons...

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rchaud 1090 days ago
Downloading Firefox from the Play Store and loading it up with real adblocker extensions is a pretty generous leash.
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