6 ms·

Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1]. Never say "Never"... Next is Thunderbird. Let's go Andreas! [1]

by keyle 2y ago

Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1]. Never say "Never"... Next is Thunderbird. Let's go Andreas! [1] https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e#diff-a24e74e4595fa85440a2f4e7e5dcfe68aba6e1e593aef05a2d35581a91423847 https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

suobset 2y ago
Getting to know about this through here, and tbh I believe the writing has been on the wall for Mozilla for quite a while. This honestly does not surprise me as much as I thought it would. That being said, I am sad to see this fear of mine come true. Mozilla products were rock solid, and available on virtually every platform imaginable. I do not want to live in a Chromium and WebKit only world.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- theturtletalks 2y ago
  And here I was thinking opensource was immune to enshittification...
  - weikju 2y ago
    It is, but people/corporations aren’t.
  - RobotToaster 2y ago
    You obviously never used wordpress, lol
  - aswerty 2y ago
    I guess the quality here is resilience more so than immunity. I guess you can say opensource is much more resilient to enshittification. I think Mozilla has been a good example of that but the perception has been that resilience has been crumbling for years. Without an independent business model they have been in a really terrible position from the get-go.
    - ForTheKidz 2y ago
      > Without an independent business model they have been in a really terrible position from the get-go. That's one way to look at it, I guess. You could also look at it like a business model will inevitably enshittify.
- notpushkin 2y ago
  I think forks, such as Librewolf or Waterfox, will live for a while even if (and that’s a big if IMO) Mozilla comes down. Consider donating to them (and to Ladybird).
  - the-grump 2y ago
    Vouching for librewolf. Not only does it not bother me with things like pocket and "Firefox sync", it also does not track me, and the browsing experience is genuinely superior. I didn't realize how much webgl and other cruft slowed things down until I started using librewolf. The one improvement I'm hoping for is that the project would be checked into the official Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora package repos as those are less risky than the repo controlled by the developers.
    - abustamam 2y ago
      Is it possible to do things like "send tab to device" using Librewolf? Sometimes I'll stumble upon a programming library in my feed on my phone and I want to send it to my desktop, and Firefox sync makes that possible.
      - the-grump 2y ago
        I have never used that so I don't know, but I use pocket for a similar purpose. Firefox sync is something you can enable, I believe
        abustamam 2y ago
        Yea, I use Firefox sync since I'm still using Firefox, but with the way things are going I'm looking for a ship to jump to that still supports my workflows.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Mozilla has been pink washing itself for a decade. This has paid off incredibly well for them since anyone pointing out that it's primary purpose was to enrich the CEO while letting her band of merry women support their pet causes was called everything from a fascist to an incel. Till today the most blatantly farcical situation was that Mozilla funded women who code boot-camps while firing all the women who code inside Mozilla. I guess people are finally waking up when Mozilla pulled an Ubuntu and decided that everything you do through their software is something they own actually. They also flag and harass anyone who points out the grift.
chubot 2y ago
What's crazy is that Firefox on Debian has been nagging me for weeks that I won't be able to use it after March 14th? I have never seen those nag screens in Firefox, near the bookmarks toolbar. I think that is working around Debian's policies, IIUC. I have never had software on Debian nag me to update It seems like this is under the guise of some DRM updates, and the like. So I'm supposed to update, and then they apply a new Terms and Conditions that I didn't agree to? And sell my personal data, I guess because there's a big market in AI now. Also Firefox seems increasingly buggy -- I have had to switch to Chromium for 2 particular sites, so I guess I need to find a new browser ... --- This reminds me of the Twitter thing where they asked for your phone number for security purposes, and then used it for advertising. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/25/twitter-user-data-advertising-settlement https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/25/twitter-u... I think Firefox is forcing updates ostensibly for one reason, but the real reason is because they found a market for data, and want to apply a new T&C
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  >Firefox seems increasingly buggy Yes, seems. I think web developers are increasingly neglecting testing on it.
  - acomjean 2y ago
    I haven’t found anything yet that fails just on Firefox. But I’ve noticed I have ublock-origin installed on Firefox and when the 2 sites that I had issues with started working when that was disabled…
- Narishma 2y ago
  > Also Firefox seems increasingly buggy -- I have had to switch to Chromium for 2 particular sites, so I guess I need to find a new browser ... Is it Firefox that's buggy or those websites that only test on Chrome?
  - reidrac 2y ago
    In my experience it is usually something related to cookies that work on Chrome and not in Firefox, and in those cases I find hard to blame Firefox. Yet, sometimes you need to use those websites fore a reason. Firefox should perhaps make it easier so users don't need to fall back to a different browser.
user3939382 2y ago
Wow what the fuck Mozilla. I’ve been complaining about the phoning home on startup and shut down for a long time but this is just disgusting.
ericjmorey 2y ago
I don't understand what the issue is with that change in wording. They seem to indicate that nothing has changed as far as privacy and personal data is concerned.
- cmeacham98 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - jchw 2y ago
    I wish to some day have as much optimism about anything as you have about Mozilla. How you can see the ToS change and this diff and conclude that the outrage is astroturfing is difficult for me to grasp. Both this FAQ entry and the ToS are specifically about the Firefox browser, the wording was unambiguous... They literally went and deleted a paragraph that said Firefox would "never" sell your personal data. If they needed to clarify a technicality, they wouldn't need to delete that.
    - cmeacham98 2y ago
      They replaced that paragraph with this: > Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. ... There are valid complaints you could have about this change (for example, I wish they were more specific about the potential legal issues), but calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling.
      - noisy_boy 2y ago
        > Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“) > calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling. It's not. One of their biggest selling (!) points is that they are privacy focused so when they make these changes, it is extra alarming. It's not like, e.g. Google, saying the same thing (which would be equally shocking but for opposite reasons.
spondyl 2y ago
I don't have any special insight on these events but I've seen that commit linked a lot. From a pure optics point of view, it looks extremely bad but reading some of the comments, it sounds like that repo is basically a mirror of some upstream project where terms and conditions/faqs etc are stored as pseudo-structured data and that they're migrating parts of that repo to some other project? I feel like a lot of context is missing publicly but if I squint, that seems to be what this comment is trying to express: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e#commitcomment-153027146 https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b... Don't get me wrong, I love bagging on Mozilla as much as the next person but as extremely bad as it looks, I'm not convinced that it's literally what it looks like?
- chefandy 2y ago
  I also lack any inside info, but that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous. And if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?
  - spondyl 2y ago
    > if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous? If a company was being competently "evil"[1] then it probably would look like this! Personally, I don't know that I consider Mozilla competent enough to reach that bar though given a lot of their previous blunders seemed like, well, blunders and not finely crafted acts of trickery. > that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous I suppose in this scenario, if it were innocuous and this is just some automated mirroring thing that someone triggered without realising the optics of, I wouldn't then automatically assume that same organisation would have a level of coordination to recognise or put out a blanket statement about the issue? I mean, you'd think surely some amount of Firefox/Mozilla folks are very online and this would be raised internally but if this is downstream of some process owned by mostly legal and non-internet/chat using folks, it might make sense that they a) take some time to be notified, b) take some time to realise a lot of the internet is saying "What the fuck" and c) take a while to figure out what to do about it (ie; issue a press release to not make it worse? someone higher up acks and is like reverse whatever this mess is?) My only real basis for all this is I've occasionally run into some compliance/legal types in tech and they can have extremely bad mental models of the company and product they work for so I can feasibly believe this all being accidental but in saying that, I dunno who works for Mozilla and this is very much a stereotype I'm applying. Anyway, as above, I'm not saying this isn't malicious, just that personally I think the door is still open that this could all be a complete mess that has no real intent behind it
spartanatreyu 2y ago
I honestly think that Wikipedia should buy Mozilla to fund Firefox
- weikju 2y ago
  They should directly buy Firefox and let Mozilla perish
- somenameforme 2y ago
  I don't think most people realize how huge Mozilla is. Their annual revenue has been flirting breaking a billion dollars for some time now and was ~$500 mil as of 2023 - primarily due to 'partnering' with Google, which was always a bellwether to anybody who cared to see it. Wikimedia has never broken $200 million per year. In other words, it's Mozilla that could buy Wikipedia, not the other way around.
  - thorw93040494 2y ago
    But how much goes into firefox development? Maybe 2% of revenue like with Linux Fiundation and Linux kernel? Mozilla is ads company, it does activism, outreach, it organizes Marxist conferences, management gets paid millions... Firefox development is just tiny fraction of what Mozilla does. And frankly Wikipedia has the same overhead problem as Mozilla.
    - wruza 2y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620146
      - thorw93040494 2y ago
        》 Mozilla isn’t just another tech company — we’re a global crew of activists, technologists and builders, all working to keep the internet free, open and accessible. 》 “Mozilla isn’t your typical tech brand; it’s a trailblazing, activist organization in both its mission and its approach,” https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-of-tech/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-o... I do not doubt they employ 750 people. I am saying they have tons of other projects. If you go throught their blog posts, Firefox has tiny fraction of posts.
moralestapia 2y ago
Firefox has been trash for the past 10 years, let alone the Mozilla Foundation. There are some idealistic people that still vouch for them, they're only making a fool of themselves, lol.
- tasty_freeze 2y ago
  You are so right! I'm deleting Firefox right now and installing Chrome. I don't want anyone selling my data! /s
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    Brave is the good one these days.
    - ParetoOptimal 2y ago
      For crypto bros and those that excuse Brendan Eich
      - porridgeraisin 2y ago
        > crypto One-time disable and completely not intrusive. No popups. Nothing. It's the equivalent of firefox's suggested sites on the homepage when you install it that you have to turn off. Do you hold that to the same standard? > Brendain Eich Art, artist, etc
        grumbel 2y ago
        It's not even a "one-time disable", it's off by default until you enable it and the icon in the URL takes two clicks to hide. And more generally, lack of easy payment is at the root of so many problems with the modern Internet, that I really can't blame Brave for trying this, quite the opposite, that's exactly the kind of feature we need.
    - sph 2y ago
      I don't have a rabid hateboner like most of HN for Brave, but I refuse to help Google/Blink expand their monopoly on the web so I'll continue to put up with Mozilla and their silliness until a decent enough competitor appears. Which is unfortunate because WebKit is terrible outside of macOS, so every single alternative browser is built on Blink and thus indirectly giving more power to Google. The web is too important to accept a monoculture, and it saddens me to see that most of my peers have no moral fibre to resist against it. As much as I dislike Apple, thank god they have a billion devices out there with an alternative engine, though they still happily take the bribe to force Google down your throat.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1]. I'm still not convinced that Firefox is The Actual Devil for potentially appearing to perform .000001% of the bad behavior that is fully-baked into popular Chromium browsers. But for the sake of argument, lets say that .0000001% > 99.99999%. What is the browser I can install+configure right now, that will perform what Firefox does every day. For ex: natively support containers, provide fully uncrippled element control, provide reader mode when *I* want it, locally save and sync windows, provide granular redirection control, and the other functions that are mostly unique to Firefox ecosystem ?
- gkbrk 2y ago
  LibreWolf
  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    Why and how?
    - eloisant 2y ago
      It's literally Firefox without all the telemetry and Mozilla's cloud services. Also a few privacy-related settings but it's mostly that.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    I will give LibreWolf a legit look-over. My browser conversations always start with "I need containers" - which rules out everything non-Firefox. Besides running Ffx, I'm also running Waterfox and Floorp - which just about exhausts my options for modern Ffx forks + Windows + Extensions.
  - keyle 2y ago
    Shame they don't sign their macOS builds.
    - 2y ago
basilgohar 2y ago
You know what the really sad part about this is? If we switch to an alternative browser, fingerprinting makes us even more easily tracked. It's lose-lose nowadays. We need political changes to make selling off our private data no longer profitable.
mizzao 2y ago
For those of us that missed the memo — what is happening with Firefox at a macro level, aside from that commit message you linked?
- N19PEDL2 2y ago
  I think it's related to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065
kleiba 2y ago
HNers, become part of this! Put your skills where your mouth is and start contributing code, tests, bug reports, etc. Get involved: https://ladybird.org/#gi https://ladybird.org/#gi
liendolucas 2y ago
I truly can't understand. We live in world where you can potentially make business in so many ways, even if Mozilla asked me for some money to continue as a good faith browser I don't mind to pay for it. But for god's sake, can't a single human being come up with a business model that *IS NOT* related to our fucking private data?
- NoGravitas 2y ago
  Because given any business model not related to your fucking private data, they can also make more money by also mining your fucking private data.
  - n4r9 2y ago
    They make more money and 99% of users don't care enough to switch.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  It's a lot easier to sell user data than to ask users for money.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by keyle 2y ago

suobset 2y ago

Getting to know about this through here, and tbh I believe the writing has been on the wall for Mozilla for quite a while. This honestly does not surprise me as much as I thought it would. That being said, I am sad to see this fear of mine come true. Mozilla products were rock solid, and available on virtually every platform imaginable. I do not want to live in a Chromium and WebKit only world.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
theturtletalks 2y ago
And here I was thinking opensource was immune to enshittification...
- weikju 2y ago
  It is, but people/corporations aren’t.
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  You obviously never used wordpress, lol
- aswerty 2y ago
  I guess the quality here is resilience more so than immunity. I guess you can say opensource is much more resilient to enshittification. I think Mozilla has been a good example of that but the perception has been that resilience has been crumbling for years. Without an independent business model they have been in a really terrible position from the get-go.
  - ForTheKidz 2y ago
    > Without an independent business model they have been in a really terrible position from the get-go. That's one way to look at it, I guess. You could also look at it like a business model will inevitably enshittify.
notpushkin 2y ago
I think forks, such as Librewolf or Waterfox, will live for a while even if (and that’s a big if IMO) Mozilla comes down. Consider donating to them (and to Ladybird).
- the-grump 2y ago
  Vouching for librewolf. Not only does it not bother me with things like pocket and "Firefox sync", it also does not track me, and the browsing experience is genuinely superior. I didn't realize how much webgl and other cruft slowed things down until I started using librewolf. The one improvement I'm hoping for is that the project would be checked into the official Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora package repos as those are less risky than the repo controlled by the developers.
  - abustamam 2y ago
    Is it possible to do things like "send tab to device" using Librewolf? Sometimes I'll stumble upon a programming library in my feed on my phone and I want to send it to my desktop, and Firefox sync makes that possible.
    - the-grump 2y ago
      I have never used that so I don't know, but I use pocket for a similar purpose. Firefox sync is something you can enable, I believe
      - abustamam 2y ago
        Yea, I use Firefox sync since I'm still using Firefox, but with the way things are going I'm looking for a ship to jump to that still supports my workflows.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
llm_trw 2y ago
Mozilla has been pink washing itself for a decade. This has paid off incredibly well for them since anyone pointing out that it's primary purpose was to enrich the CEO while letting her band of merry women support their pet causes was called everything from a fascist to an incel. Till today the most blatantly farcical situation was that Mozilla funded women who code boot-camps while firing all the women who code inside Mozilla. I guess people are finally waking up when Mozilla pulled an Ubuntu and decided that everything you do through their software is something they own actually. They also flag and harass anyone who points out the grift.

chubot 2y ago

What's crazy is that Firefox on Debian has been nagging me for weeks that I won't be able to use it after March 14th? I have never seen those nag screens in Firefox, near the bookmarks toolbar. I think that is working around Debian's policies, IIUC. I have never had software on Debian nag me to update It seems like this is under the guise of some DRM updates, and the like. So I'm supposed to update, and then they apply a new Terms and Conditions that I didn't agree to? And sell my personal data, I guess because there's a big market in AI now. Also Firefox seems increasingly buggy -- I have had to switch to Chromium for 2 particular sites, so I guess I need to find a new browser ... --- This reminds me of the Twitter thing where they asked for your phone number for security purposes, and then used it for advertising. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/25/twitter-user-data-advertising-settlement https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/25/twitter-u... I think Firefox is forcing updates ostensibly for one reason, but the real reason is because they found a market for data, and want to apply a new T&C

ahartmetz 2y ago
>Firefox seems increasingly buggy Yes, seems. I think web developers are increasingly neglecting testing on it.
- acomjean 2y ago
  I haven’t found anything yet that fails just on Firefox. But I’ve noticed I have ublock-origin installed on Firefox and when the 2 sites that I had issues with started working when that was disabled…
Narishma 2y ago
> Also Firefox seems increasingly buggy -- I have had to switch to Chromium for 2 particular sites, so I guess I need to find a new browser ... Is it Firefox that's buggy or those websites that only test on Chrome?
- reidrac 2y ago
  In my experience it is usually something related to cookies that work on Chrome and not in Firefox, and in those cases I find hard to blame Firefox. Yet, sometimes you need to use those websites fore a reason. Firefox should perhaps make it easier so users don't need to fall back to a different browser.

user3939382 2y ago

Wow what the fuck Mozilla. I’ve been complaining about the phoning home on startup and shut down for a long time but this is just disgusting.

ericjmorey 2y ago

I don't understand what the issue is with that change in wording. They seem to indicate that nothing has changed as far as privacy and personal data is concerned.

cmeacham98 2y ago
[flagged]
- jchw 2y ago
  I wish to some day have as much optimism about anything as you have about Mozilla. How you can see the ToS change and this diff and conclude that the outrage is astroturfing is difficult for me to grasp. Both this FAQ entry and the ToS are specifically about the Firefox browser, the wording was unambiguous... They literally went and deleted a paragraph that said Firefox would "never" sell your personal data. If they needed to clarify a technicality, they wouldn't need to delete that.
  - cmeacham98 2y ago
    They replaced that paragraph with this: > Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. ... There are valid complaints you could have about this change (for example, I wish they were more specific about the potential legal issues), but calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling.
    - noisy_boy 2y ago
      > Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“) > calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling. It's not. One of their biggest selling (!) points is that they are privacy focused so when they make these changes, it is extra alarming. It's not like, e.g. Google, saying the same thing (which would be equally shocking but for opposite reasons.

spondyl 2y ago

I don't have any special insight on these events but I've seen that commit linked a lot. From a pure optics point of view, it looks extremely bad but reading some of the comments, it sounds like that repo is basically a mirror of some upstream project where terms and conditions/faqs etc are stored as pseudo-structured data and that they're migrating parts of that repo to some other project? I feel like a lot of context is missing publicly but if I squint, that seems to be what this comment is trying to express: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e#commitcomment-153027146 https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b... Don't get me wrong, I love bagging on Mozilla as much as the next person but as extremely bad as it looks, I'm not convinced that it's literally what it looks like?

chefandy 2y ago
I also lack any inside info, but that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous. And if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?
- spondyl 2y ago
  > if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous? If a company was being competently "evil"[1] then it probably would look like this! Personally, I don't know that I consider Mozilla competent enough to reach that bar though given a lot of their previous blunders seemed like, well, blunders and not finely crafted acts of trickery. > that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous I suppose in this scenario, if it were innocuous and this is just some automated mirroring thing that someone triggered without realising the optics of, I wouldn't then automatically assume that same organisation would have a level of coordination to recognise or put out a blanket statement about the issue? I mean, you'd think surely some amount of Firefox/Mozilla folks are very online and this would be raised internally but if this is downstream of some process owned by mostly legal and non-internet/chat using folks, it might make sense that they a) take some time to be notified, b) take some time to realise a lot of the internet is saying "What the fuck" and c) take a while to figure out what to do about it (ie; issue a press release to not make it worse? someone higher up acks and is like reverse whatever this mess is?) My only real basis for all this is I've occasionally run into some compliance/legal types in tech and they can have extremely bad mental models of the company and product they work for so I can feasibly believe this all being accidental but in saying that, I dunno who works for Mozilla and this is very much a stereotype I'm applying. Anyway, as above, I'm not saying this isn't malicious, just that personally I think the door is still open that this could all be a complete mess that has no real intent behind it

spartanatreyu 2y ago

I honestly think that Wikipedia should buy Mozilla to fund Firefox

weikju 2y ago
They should directly buy Firefox and let Mozilla perish
somenameforme 2y ago
I don't think most people realize how huge Mozilla is. Their annual revenue has been flirting breaking a billion dollars for some time now and was ~$500 mil as of 2023 - primarily due to 'partnering' with Google, which was always a bellwether to anybody who cared to see it. Wikimedia has never broken $200 million per year. In other words, it's Mozilla that could buy Wikipedia, not the other way around.
- thorw93040494 2y ago
  But how much goes into firefox development? Maybe 2% of revenue like with Linux Fiundation and Linux kernel? Mozilla is ads company, it does activism, outreach, it organizes Marxist conferences, management gets paid millions... Firefox development is just tiny fraction of what Mozilla does. And frankly Wikipedia has the same overhead problem as Mozilla.
  - wruza 2y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620146
    - thorw93040494 2y ago
      》 Mozilla isn’t just another tech company — we’re a global crew of activists, technologists and builders, all working to keep the internet free, open and accessible. 》 “Mozilla isn’t your typical tech brand; it’s a trailblazing, activist organization in both its mission and its approach,” https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-of-tech/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-o... I do not doubt they employ 750 people. I am saying they have tons of other projects. If you go throught their blog posts, Firefox has tiny fraction of posts.

moralestapia 2y ago

Firefox has been trash for the past 10 years, let alone the Mozilla Foundation. There are some idealistic people that still vouch for them, they're only making a fool of themselves, lol.

tasty_freeze 2y ago
You are so right! I'm deleting Firefox right now and installing Chrome. I don't want anyone selling my data! /s
- moralestapia 2y ago
  Brave is the good one these days.
  - ParetoOptimal 2y ago
    For crypto bros and those that excuse Brendan Eich
    - porridgeraisin 2y ago
      > crypto One-time disable and completely not intrusive. No popups. Nothing. It's the equivalent of firefox's suggested sites on the homepage when you install it that you have to turn off. Do you hold that to the same standard? > Brendain Eich Art, artist, etc
      - grumbel 2y ago
        It's not even a "one-time disable", it's off by default until you enable it and the icon in the URL takes two clicks to hide. And more generally, lack of easy payment is at the root of so many problems with the modern Internet, that I really can't blame Brave for trying this, quite the opposite, that's exactly the kind of feature we need.
  - sph 2y ago
    I don't have a rabid hateboner like most of HN for Brave, but I refuse to help Google/Blink expand their monopoly on the web so I'll continue to put up with Mozilla and their silliness until a decent enough competitor appears. Which is unfortunate because WebKit is terrible outside of macOS, so every single alternative browser is built on Blink and thus indirectly giving more power to Google. The web is too important to accept a monoculture, and it saddens me to see that most of my peers have no moral fibre to resist against it. As much as I dislike Apple, thank god they have a billion devices out there with an alternative engine, though they still happily take the bribe to force Google down your throat.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

> Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1]. I'm still not convinced that Firefox is The Actual Devil for potentially appearing to perform .000001% of the bad behavior that is fully-baked into popular Chromium browsers. But for the sake of argument, lets say that .0000001% > 99.99999%. What is the browser I can install+configure right now, that will perform what Firefox does every day. For ex: natively support containers, provide fully uncrippled element control, provide reader mode when *I* want it, locally save and sync windows, provide granular redirection control, and the other functions that are mostly unique to Firefox ecosystem ?

gkbrk 2y ago
LibreWolf
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  Why and how?
  - eloisant 2y ago
    It's literally Firefox without all the telemetry and Mozilla's cloud services. Also a few privacy-related settings but it's mostly that.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  I will give LibreWolf a legit look-over. My browser conversations always start with "I need containers" - which rules out everything non-Firefox. Besides running Ffx, I'm also running Waterfox and Floorp - which just about exhausts my options for modern Ffx forks + Windows + Extensions.
- keyle 2y ago
  Shame they don't sign their macOS builds.
  - 2y ago

basilgohar 2y ago

You know what the really sad part about this is? If we switch to an alternative browser, fingerprinting makes us even more easily tracked. It's lose-lose nowadays. We need political changes to make selling off our private data no longer profitable.

mizzao 2y ago

For those of us that missed the memo — what is happening with Firefox at a macro level, aside from that commit message you linked?

N19PEDL2 2y ago
I think it's related to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065

kleiba 2y ago

HNers, become part of this! Put your skills where your mouth is and start contributing code, tests, bug reports, etc. Get involved: https://ladybird.org/#gi https://ladybird.org/#gi

liendolucas 2y ago

I truly can't understand. We live in world where you can potentially make business in so many ways, even if Mozilla asked me for some money to continue as a good faith browser I don't mind to pay for it. But for god's sake, can't a single human being come up with a business model that *IS NOT* related to our fucking private data?

NoGravitas 2y ago
Because given any business model not related to your fucking private data, they can also make more money by also mining your fucking private data.
- n4r9 2y ago
  They make more money and 99% of users don't care enough to switch.
markus_zhang 2y ago
It's a lot easier to sell user data than to ask users for money.

deleted 2y ago

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