[metadat]

You should check these assumptions, Mozilla has been hard at work enshittifying their entire portfolio. Instead of giving the public features they actually want (the most secure, performant, and predictable web browser), the current CEO has directed the focus towards revenue-generating features.

My god, there is so much telemetry in FF now, and it's tricky to hunt down all the about:configs to disable it. Not friendly or privacy conscious at all. Do you really want Mozilla to get pinged with your IP address every time your browser process starts and exits? Yuck!

Quick FF enshittification example from 2 months ago:

Alert HN: Mozilla puts advertising into Firefox AGAIN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351322 (48 comments)

Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085642 (220 comments)

[hipsterstal1n]

> the current CEO has directed the focus towards revenue-generating features.

They literally can't win. One group of vocal users is outraged by how much money Mozilla takes from Google while the other half screams about how Mozilla is trying to gasp gain additional revenue streams that isn't taking money from their biggest competitor.

> Do you really want Mozilla to get pinged with your IP address every time your browser process starts and exits? Yuck!

No, but I really don't give a shit either. At a certain point, I looked in the mirror and said life is too short to care about stupid shit like that. If I was a spy or a journalist in some state like China or Iran, maybe I would care. But this feels odd to hone in on when any website you go to is collecting all sorts of info of this sort.

[esperent]

> No, but I really don't give a shit either.

Nobody's asking you to personally fight for everything. Life truly is too short for that. All we're asking for is your tacit support, or failing even that, your abstinence from the conversation.

I don't personally have time to look after stray dogs in my area, for example. But I sure as hell don't come out with "I looked in the mirror and decided I don't give a shit" when I meet someone who does care about that. Not online and not offline. Instead I'll be supportive and tell them how amazing they are for spending their valuable time on this.

Even if it's something I don't personally care about at all, or even if I think it's a massive waste of time but I can see it's important to someone else, I'd still never tell them that I don't give a shit.

Is it too much to ask you to have the same respect for people who care about important issues like online privacy? If it's not important to you, that's fine! Go be somewhere else instead of interrupting people who do care about this. There's about 500 million other conversations happening on the internet at this very second. Surely one of them is something you actually do care about enough to engage with in a positive way?

[metadat]

The thing is about Mozilla of today is that the leadership isn't committed to the fundamentals -- privacy, security, functionality, and control by the end user.

At this point, Brave is a more promising bet than MZ.

[soundnote]

I mind Mozilla trying to find alternate revenue sources 0%. It's a good thing: Organizations like Mozilla and Brave SHOULD be making their own money and not be stuck to the Google teat.

Mozilla doesn't go about it in as upfront way as Brave does, IME, but stuff like VPN, Pocket and other browser-related services I mind not at all.

I have no sympathy to the current political shitfest that Mozilla is as an organization, but as makers of Firefox I feel like Mozilla is in an impossible bind: Their users expect a fairytale of an independent, donation-funded browser that people spontaneously adopt, and go nuts about stuff like the inclusion of Pocket. I know, I used to be one of those people back when Pocket was introduced. But reeing about Mozilla trying to have independent funding by giving people useful services is just strange. It's exactly what they should be doing, and Brave setting up revenue streams like Talk and Search is great. Especially because they operate in the normal money universe for those of us who aren't terribly enthusiastic about crypto.

[reitanqild]

I also think it is great that browsers seek out alternative sources of funding.

My problems with Mozilla are:

- Misuse of money: the browser team have brought in lots of money over the years (we talk billions) and the foundation is milking it dry. If the income created by the browser had stayed with the browser team they would have had funding for years to come.

- Being dishonest: Mozilla has sought donations for Firefox and I think many of us have donated thinking we supported Firefox, while in reality the Firefox team funds itself and the rest of Mozilla and Mozilla isn't even allowed to send money the other way.

- Not being up front about what they do: they more or less lied about their relationship with Pocket. I like Pocket, both the product and as a way to bring in income, but whenever it comes up, everyone who was there starts thinking about their lies.

- Nerfing the extension API.

- Writing "dear community members" in emails begging for money while simultaneously being rude to us in responses to real issues in Bugzilla.

Now, if anyone think I use Chrome, think again.

I am still optimistically waiting for authorities to wake up and punish Google the same way they punished Microsoft - huge fines and browser ballots - but that does not mean I give Mozilla a free pass ;-)

[soundnote]

> they more or less lied about their relationship with Pocket.

Can you elaborate? I don't really remember much about those kinds of things.

> - Nerfing the extension API.

This I think was necessary if you want a modern, secure browser. Wouldn't be against a more extensive extension API that double-checked with the user wrt access to more dangerous permissions, which is partly what the current ones do already.

[reitanqild]

The implementation of the old API was a problem: extension authors could do almost whatever they wanted.

Today however Mozilla stalls at giving us back basic primitives like for example a programmatic way to hide the top tab bar when an extension provide an alternative tab bar like Tree Style Tabs or Sideberry.

[lern_too_spel]

Brave sees Mozilla's political shitfest and raises a political shitbacchanalia.

[soundnote]

How so? If you're thinking about Eich's politics, those are/were HIS, not Brave or Mozilla the organization's. Brave the organization's politics are pretty narrow and what you'd want out of a browser: Privacy and user control.

Meanwhile Mozilla the organization boots people for politics, wants "more than deplatforming" and uses as one of their examples organizations deciding what I should see on the Internet - preferring outlets that Mozilla themselves like, naturally. They publish stuff with the gist of "did you encounter other politics on YouTube, how scary".

Meanwhile the organization spends money on getting a sneaker designer to make time-limited color themes for their browser and writes a pile of copy about how cool it is that a sneaker designer painted the browser blue.

https://imgur.com/a/ZmUzr0q

Meanwhile, Brave releases a user-customizable filtering function for their search engine so you, not someone else, can decide from what POV you see the Internet and added native vertical tabs to the browser.

One organization is blatantly political, the other just makes a good browser.

You can run a similar set of comparisons for Vivaldi, who are also clearly a much more product-focused organization and it shows. They have some more visible political leans as an org, but still far milder than Mozilla's, a lot of those leans being just being vehemently anti-crypto, with the biggest focus going to user control and privacy, as it should.

[lern_too_spel]

Brave the organization runs and integrates with anarchocapitalist cryptoscams. That's far beyond anything Mozilla the organization has done, and if it's not worse in magnitude by itself, that's only because Brave thankfully remains a miniscule also-ran. Writing copy about sponsoring Web3 gaming expos is far stupider than writing about getting a sneaker designer to add some browser themes.

But yes, Eich and his horrible treatment of gays, which he still hasn't renounced (instead doubling-down and saying that the "deal" was that they could have civil unions but they went too far to get marriage too — they can ride on the same bus, but they can only sit in the back), as well as his nonstop promotion of conspiracy theories is something no sensible person would want to support. If you think Mozilla "[booted Eich] for politics" instead of for taking public actions that tarnished the reputation of the company, you seem like the type of fellow who would have cheered Stephen Douglas in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. As Douglas repeatedly stated, laws concerning the sale of "negroes" are no different from laws concerning the sale of dry goods or liquor, and the people of Illinois should no more tell Missouri how it can sell people than it should tell them how it can sell dry goods — that's Missouri's politics, and Illinois should mind its own business.

[memefrog]

Disagreements about the meaning of the English word "marriage" arent even political disagreements. No more so than any other disagreements about what words mean. Disagreeing that marriage can, by definition, include homosexual relationships isnt "treatment" of anyone. You dont treat someone differently by saying "I think you should be able to have a legally recognised relationship but I refuse to allow language to be actively and deliberately manipulated".

[lern_too_spel]

> You dont treat someone differently by saying "I think you should be able to have a legally recognised relationship but I refuse to allow language to be actively and deliberately manipulated".

You do if the word has a legal definition and you refuse the benefits tied to that legal definition. Eich is free to call it whatever he wants as long as people get the benefits of marriage, something he paid to stop from happening. What kind of asshole thinks it's OK to treat someone poorly because of quibbles over how everyone else is allowed to use a word? For that matter, Douglas is free to call black people "human goods" so long as he doesn't allow them to actually be bought and sold by controlling legal definitions that allow for it.

[cayley_graph]

https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-project/blob/main/mod...

I'm curious to see what you think about this. If you're not okay with Firefox telling Mozilla your IP address every time you connect, does the same go for Brave sending entire pages of your search results to them? This also includes which results you've clicked on.

[gurgunday]

This is opt-in, and a rather hard-to-mistakenly-enable kind of opt-in that I personally think is consistent with their great™ privacy by default stance

Brave offers a simple deal: if you believe or have audited their technical claims, you give them fully anonymized snippets of URLs and web pages, and they improve their search index for everyone