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by gcb0 4041 days ago
not necessarily spyware, but moving away from the community focus.

   1. UI copying chrome
   2. telefonica servers for video chat
   3. Ads on your new-tab-page
   4. Yahoo search deal
   5. Adobe binary blob DRM installed and enabled by default. this is flash security holes all over again.
   6. google binary blob DRM on android.
mozilla have long gone from being a incubator the firefox project to try to be a startup coming up with the next big thing, for who knows why. like their sync thing that they keep annoying me to use every time. it's like ubuntu trying hard with ubuntu one. but ubuntu at least was started to make money.
2 comments
icebraining 4041 days ago
How is the Yahoo search deal any different than the search deal with Google that they've had for years and years?

And the EME module, good or bad, is not a security hole like Flash. The CDM modules are heavily sandboxed, preventing them from doing anything in the system besides talking to the browser. On Linux, it uses seccomp: https://lwn.net/Articles/332974/

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comex 4041 days ago
I think the difference is that Google is a superior search engine, so in a world where technology trumps money it would be the default.* Of course, abiding by that would kill Mozilla's bargaining position, and Mozilla losing funding would suck for everyone, but...

* or DuckDuckGo (inferior but privacy conscious), but good luck with them funding Mozilla

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realusername 4041 days ago
1. I still prefer the FireFox UI since it works better with lot of tabs, in Chrome the tabs are becoming smaller and smaller until the point that you can't see them. And Firefox's preference screen is so much nicer, so no it's not a verbatim copy, they improved a lot the interface. The history autocomplete is also one of the strong features of Firefox and still does not exist on Chrome.

2. The servers are only use to find clients, the data is transiting directly between the computers with WebRTC.

3. The ad tiles are there until the screen is full (which happens very fast). In practice, almost half of the ads are for Mozilla itself (Firefox for Android, Marketplace ...).

4. And so ? What's the problem by having Yahoo instead of Google in some countries ? It provides some diversity and competition in the search market which really needs it.

5. I agree on this but it's not like Mozilla had a choice, they tried to resist up to the last minute. And their implementation unlike Chrome's one (if I remember) is going to be strictly sandboxed. So they tried to do what they could. This is really Chrome's fault here.

6. I think they did not have a choice either on this one, unlike what Google is advertising, Android is much less open than they say. A lot of proprietary binaries are needed to run the OS and the stock Android is just the bare minimum. Maybe in the future they could provide an open-source replacement to it but I think they did not have enough resources.

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