Firefox

This will be easy to hate on, but let's be careful not to get carried away.

Maintaining a web browser is basically the toughest mission in software. LibreWolf and PaleMoon and IceWhatsit and all the rest are small-time amateur projects that are dependent on Firefox. They do not solve the problem we have. To keep a modicum of privacy and openness, the web is de-facto dependent on Firefox continuing to exist in the medium term. And it has to be paid for somehow.

This reminds me of the furore about EME, the DRM sandbox that makes Netflix work. I was against it at the time but I see now that the alternative would have been worse. It would have been the end of Firefox. Sometimes there's no good option and you have to accept the least bad.

A fundamental flaw in this, is it still involves user data, even if "anonymized". You can advertise without any user data. We do it all the time. Does a television channel know your gender? Does a radio station know if you bought a car recently? Does the newspaper know your hobbies?

We do not need a corporate structure to maintain software.

This stinks of C-suite justifying their existence when the alternative is well established and very successful.

Users don't want ads and advertisers want something that can collect as much data as possible.

Mozilla as lost both

A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy

Free as in free beer, not as in freedom unfortunately

I'm completely fine with anonymized ads being an option in theory, but there needs to be a way to compensate services w/o resorting to advertising. I think Mozilla should provide a way for users to pay to opt-out of ads, and get websites on board that way.

Websites want to get paid for their work, and advertising is the easiest way to do that. The solution isn't better ads, but alternative revenue streams for websites, and I'm 100% fine with Mozilla taking a cut of that alternative revenue stream. But I will not tolerate ads on my browser.

I hoped Brave would've solved this problem by letting users pay to remove ads, but instead they went to crypto to reward viewing ads. That's the opposite of what I want, and I really hope Mozilla has someone still working there in a position that matters that understands that.

Mozilla has a clear conflict of interest in their statements: they are now an ad company. Because of this, they must be approached with skepticism.

Every corporation invested in unhealthy ventures will say it is necessary, and they can do it ethically, regardless of how misleading or untrue it is. They will launder their bad behavior through an organization to make it appear more ethical and healthy.

Mozilla is doing nothing new under the sun. But for some reason, after burning through so much community goodwill, some people are still willing to give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt with a technology that they surely would not have given Google or Adobe or Facebook the same treatment.

Surely we wouldn't ignore the canary in the coal mine until it was too late. Surely, we wouldn't look at a huge corporation and say "this time it won't be the same."

When Google acquired DoubleClick, they positioned it as a net good for everybody in terms of privacy. DoubleClick was notoriously awful in those terms. Google said (and people, including myself, believed) that by owning them, Google can make them into something better.

Instead, DoubleClick made Google into something much, much worse.

Mozilla: For the foreseeable future, there's a lot of money in advertising, and we want some of it. It's all over the Internet. Why shouldn't some of the profit go to people like us, people who wish things were different even while bravely facing the harsh reality that there is no other choice but to devote ourselves to commercial advertising?

We know that everyone in our community will hate the idea, but surely this too is a sign that we are on the right path. By doing unpopular things, we demonstrate the courage that's needed to save the Internet from the kind of future where Mozilla can't get a piece of the biggest market on the Internet, the only one that matters, the market for advertising.

JWZ was one of the main instigators of Mozilla/Firefox, and Mozilla’s launch party was held at his nightclub.

Some relevant posts from his blog:

• Mozilla's CEO doubles down on them being an advertising company now
• Mozilla's Original Sin.
• Mozilla is an advertising company now.
• "Open source, at least in a spiritual sense."
• CEO pay skyrockets, while Firefox Marketshare nosedives.
• "Today I learned about Mozilla's new AI startup from my gas pump."
• "The only way to get a corporation to behave ethically is to create a PR disaster for their comms team."
• "This is where the Innovation goes in."

For now I installed Librefox on my devices until I am familiar with the json scripts stripping Firefox from these new features.

“Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has been a core focus for Mozilla from our founding. How do we ensure creators get paid for their work? How do we prevent huge segments of the world from being priced out of access through paywalls? How do we ensure that privacy is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? These are significant and enduring questions that have no single answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a big part of the answer is online advertising.“ Advertisers always want more data on the people they are selling to. I hope you can hold the line. No one else has been able to that I know of.