Are they TRYING to speedrun losing their credibility?
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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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.
Wtf happened in the last month? Everyone used to love and jerk off Mozilla and suddenly we hate them?
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.
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.
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."
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.
Yeah repositories and FTP don't include that, but it is kind shady that the first way to get it (website) for the majority of regular users (Windows/macOS) has a unique ID - after all this is the company that goes all in for privacy...
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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?
Don't ascribe intention where incompetence is enough.
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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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.
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Right so what browser should I use now??? 😡
Another org may fork popular software like Firefox, like OpenOffice vs libre office for example.
In the meantime we're going full text interfaces by 2030 to save cycles for the env, https://man.archlinux.org/man/lynx.1.en /s
Ok wtf is Moxilla doing? They know their company is built on good community perception, right?
The users most likely to complain are also the users least likely to stop using their products.
They honestly have a monopoly in the sense that they are the only think not Chrome
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Remember: Mozilla killed mozilla the app long before it killed Mozilla the company.
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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It's almost like they are intentionally trying to get in trouble.
I feel like the CEO of Mozilla is paid by Google to be as fucking stupid as possible.
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I just canceled my MDN Plus subscription. Man, Mozilla has been so disappointing recently. I have to wonder if Google infiltrated them or something.
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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.
Librewolf is kind of like that. It pulls a lot from Tor
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