Mozilla has fired Chief Product Officer Steve Teixeira after cancer diagnosis : firefox

[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 50 points 5 days ago

Are they TRYING to speedrun losing their credibility?

[–] aberrate_junior_beatnik@lemmy.world 139 points 6 days ago (16 children)

It's truly wild how hard of a heel turn mozilla has taken. I'm going to cancel my recurring donations to them, and get off all of their products.

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[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 65 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

No no, guys Mozilla are the good guys. They never did something nasty like bundling tons of spyware and 3rd party calls with Firefox nor adding unique IDs to every installation. Mozilla also acquired an ad analytics company recently for some reason.

[–] irreticent@lemmy.world 32 points 6 days ago (2 children)

adding unique IDs to every installation.

I wasn't familiar with that so I did a quick search. For anyone else interested here is some info about it:

Each Firefox download has a unique identifier -ghacks, Mar. 2022

"Internet users who download the Firefox web browser from the official Mozilla website get a unique identifier attached to the installer that is submitted to Mozilla on install and first run."

[...]

"Firefox users who prefer to download the browser without the unique identifier may do so in the following two ways:"

Download the Firefox installer from Mozilla's HTTPS repository (formerly the FTP repository).
Download Firefox from third-party download sites that host the installer, e.g., from Softonic.

"The downloaded installers do not have the unique identifier, as they are identical whenever they are downloaded."

In the comments section someone says:

"It seems that getting Firefox from GNU/Linux repos (Debian, etc.), doesn’t come with unique IDs."

[–] barsquid@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

Must be for ad attribution and install tracking. Only something a major portion of their users are specifically trying to avoid when they're choosing Firefox.

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[–] Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world 26 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Wtf happened in the last month? Everyone used to love and jerk off Mozilla and suddenly we hate them?

[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 21 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Nothing, not everyone liked it, the only difference is that my comment would result in a shit show of downvotes last week while not people are starting to realize what Mozilla/Firefox really is. Mozilla was never the "all savior" pained them to be and it only took Wireshark and a couple of minutes to see it.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Even if Mozilla/Firefox was at some point a healthy organization, the shear incredible disparity of power between Google and Mozilla/Firefox means that the probability that Mozilla/Firefox would remain a healthy, functional organization approaches zero over a long enough period of time.

This is a problem that needs legislative action to destroy Google's incredible power and pseudo-monopoly control of search.

I am not saying Mozilla/Firefox isn't toxic, but there a million ways that Mozilla/Firefox could end up a toxic entity and billions of dollars that are directly interested in that being the case so shrugs.

....but yeah I agree with you, Mozilla/Firefox definitely didnt turn into a shithole overnight, but until recently criticizing them has been very difficuly to do in a lot of circles.

[–] irreticent@lemmy.world 14 points 6 days ago (3 children)

bundling tons of spyware

I couldn't find any info about this with a quick search. Do you have any links to where I can read more about this?

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[–] Quintus@lemmy.ml 107 points 6 days ago (2 children)

It's almost like they are intentionally trying to get in trouble.

[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 80 points 6 days ago (3 children)

I feel like the CEO of Mozilla is paid by Google to be as fucking stupid as possible.

[–] psycho_driver@lemmy.world 31 points 6 days ago (2 children)

To be fair I believe being as fucking stupid as possible is a prerequisite of being a CEO of anything.

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[–] LWD@lemm.ee 33 points 6 days ago

Honestly. Even my most cynical assumption was that Mozilla would subtly pressure him to leave the company, making life harder for him in ways that wouldn't be possible to legally prove.

I haven't seen anything this egregious since Elon Musk fired Halli.

[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 56 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

I genuinely believe that the Mozilla board is secretly working for Google. They already get most of their funding from that search engine deal, is a backroom agreement to slowly run the organization into the ground in order to force the last holdouts over to Chrome that hard to believe?

[–] Rozauhtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone 39 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Don't ascribe intention where incompetence is enough.

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 18 points 6 days ago (3 children)

It's better to treat incompetence as maliciousness, than to treat maliciousness as incompetence.

The benefit of the doubt should only apply in the absence of a longstanding pattern of behavior to the contrary.

IMO Mozilla has run out of goodwill.

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[–] servobobo@feddit.nl 17 points 6 days ago

It's in Google's interest to keep Firefox/Mozilla alive to skirt antitrust laws, so any backdoor deal would be more making Chrome alternatives not look too attractive while keeping them on life support.

[–] romp_2_door@lemmy.world 13 points 6 days ago

I don't think they're working for Google but I'm convinced that they're trying to setup their own advertising business

Trying to get some of that sweet ad revenue money

but Google controls so much of everything that of course they're indirectly funded by Google, so it may look like they're working for Google

In this Tecnofeudalist reality that we live in, we all indirectly work for our feudal lords Google / Meta / Amazon. We are granted their grace and allowed to exist in their server space and use their internet cables. In return we have to work the land and give our data as a tribute.

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 70 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Ok wtf is Moxilla doing? They know their company is built on good community perception, right?

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 22 points 6 days ago

They honestly have a monopoly in the sense that they are the only think not Chrome

[–] romp_2_door@lemmy.world 12 points 6 days ago (4 children)

I mean they've been pedaling AI crap for a while without negative backlash.

Similarly they tried to ride the Blockchain train back in the crypto scam days and also didn't face any backlash.

They've publicly vouched to become an AI company and an advertising company without backlash.

I think most Firefox users don't care

[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 21 points 6 days ago (3 children)

I think most Firefox users don’t care

Oh we care, but there's no alternative besides Chrome and Safari and those companies are even worse (Google definitely is, anyway, Apple is debatable)

Luckily there's still alternatives like Librewolf that unfortunately still use Mozilla's browser engine.

I do hope the Servo project will be ready to use in a production browser soon.

[–] harsh3466@lemmy.ml 12 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Apple is definitely just as fucking terrible.

[–] KLISHDFSDF@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Hard agree. Apple's ecosystem is primarily completely closed-source. If you abandon them or they abandon you you're left with nothing. At least with open source-based projects like Chrome/Firefox you can fork the code and not have to start from zero against a goliath. Apple would never give its customers that kind of leverage.

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[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What they mean with AI features is also their offline website translation feature, which is something I've wanted for years. The alternative is online Google website translation.

[–] KLISHDFSDF@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 days ago

I agree with you. It's frustrating to see people lump in genuinely good AI/ML work like private on-device translations in attempts to discredit Mozilla. There are good criticisms against them. They've made mistakes. There's zero need to lump in AI/ML.

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[–] hperrin@lemmy.world 53 points 6 days ago (4 children)

I just canceled my MDN Plus subscription. Man, Mozilla has been so disappointing recently. I have to wonder if Google infiltrated them or something.

[–] orcrist@lemm.ee 16 points 6 days ago

It doesn't really matter if they've been infiltrated, because they're so dependent on Google's cash. The money corrupts, even if there are no specific moles.

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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 57 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Jesus isn't rule number one of an employee suing you is to NOT FIRE THEM?

Seriously Monty Burns did this. Monty fucking burns. A cartoon villain

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[–] DynamoSunshirtSandals@possumpat.io 45 points 6 days ago (13 children)

If Mozilla really starts to go downhill, what are the chances we get a Linux kernel-style community fork that we can rely on instead? Curious why that hasn't happened before -- perhaps because Mozilla has always toed the line of not-quite-awful enough?

I just hope we can keep an alternative browser engine alive. Would be nice if some rich person would just set up a funding model that can pay a few devs to keep it going indefinitely without ads or spyware.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 28 points 6 days ago

Because developing and maintaining an entire browser is a huge task. That's why we don't see much competition in browsers (I mean independent browsers). Also Mozilla isn't doing that bad, the browser is still really good. It's not the technical side that is a problem, its mostly marketing and the image of Mozilla.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 9 points 6 days ago

Librewolf is kind of like that. It pulls a lot from Tor

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[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 49 points 6 days ago

EEO court here we come

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 23 points 6 days ago

Prolonged, multi-level fuckery with dozens of witnesses - and that's just with what they did to this one guy.

[–] cm0002@lemmy.world 19 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Yet another thing to add to my growing pile of reasons that Mozilla is enshittifying. I wonder what tomorrow's reasons will be?

Slight sidetrack, I thought Mastodon was federated with Lemmy? Or is it just Boost that can't handle Mastodon links?

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