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It's tough. People at Mozilla care so much about privacy, to the point that (when I worked there 2010-2012), they refused to do "services" the same way Google

It's tough. People at Mozilla care so much about privacy, to the point that (when I worked there 2010-2012), they refused to do "services" the same way Google did (aka a login and a central server). So as a result, Chrome "just worked" and Firefox was completely unusable. The people at Mozilla really care about privacy. But they also have to build something people can actually use. That means finding a balance between privacy and usability. To you it's "fixing the Internet", but to most normal people it's "removing features." Like, can you imagine explaining to the average user why they can't just type a search into the address bar and get Google results? (More specifically, though, what would you strip? Pocket is owned by Mozilla and is just a fancy bookmark manager, but sure. Google is just a default search; data isn't being sent to them. Outside of those, what would you remove?)

dependenttypes 6y ago
> they refused to do "services" the same way Google did What services? > More specifically, though, what would you strip? Telemetry and the normandy/shield backdoor first of all. Then remove the google analytics from the about:addons page (or at least let adblockers work on it). Then let adblockers work on the mozilla pages. Then disable things like pings, beacons, etc by default and integrate more tor browser patches. Firefox right now is the browser that calls back the most https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165858896176660480 https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604... As for Pocket, Mozilla promised ages ago to make the server foss, still no luck with it.
- gonational 6y ago
  This is an underrated comment.
pythux 6y ago
> Google is just a default search; data isn't being sent to them. You mean, apart from everything typed in the URL bar by default?
bhauer 6y ago
> ...they refused to do "services" the same way Google did (aka a login and a central server). So as a result, Chrome "just worked" and Firefox was completely unusable. I think Mozilla found the perfect solution to services. They provide a service and open source the implementation [1]. This gives a "just works" option (which is still probably setting a pretty high privacy bar because it's Mozilla) and a fully self-hosted ultra-private option for those who want to go the extra mile. [1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/ https://github.com/mozilla-services/
- Conan_Kudo 6y ago
  As someone else said in here, I don't think they've open sourced the Pocket server software... At least I haven't seen it yet.

dependenttypes 6y ago

> they refused to do "services" the same way Google did What services? > More specifically, though, what would you strip? Telemetry and the normandy/shield backdoor first of all. Then remove the google analytics from the about:addons page (or at least let adblockers work on it). Then let adblockers work on the mozilla pages. Then disable things like pings, beacons, etc by default and integrate more tor browser patches. Firefox right now is the browser that calls back the most https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165858896176660480 https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604... As for Pocket, Mozilla promised ages ago to make the server foss, still no luck with it.

gonational 6y ago
This is an underrated comment.

pythux 6y ago

> Google is just a default search; data isn't being sent to them. You mean, apart from everything typed in the URL bar by default?

bhauer 6y ago

> ...they refused to do "services" the same way Google did (aka a login and a central server). So as a result, Chrome "just worked" and Firefox was completely unusable. I think Mozilla found the perfect solution to services. They provide a service and open source the implementation [1]. This gives a "just works" option (which is still probably setting a pretty high privacy bar because it's Mozilla) and a fully self-hosted ultra-private option for those who want to go the extra mile. [1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/ https://github.com/mozilla-services/

Conan_Kudo 6y ago
As someone else said in here, I don't think they've open sourced the Pocket server software... At least I haven't seen it yet.