7 ms·
It is indeed disturbing that Mozilla's finances depend so much on advertising. No matter how well-intentioned the folks at Mozilla Foundation/Corporation might
by kijin 13y ago
It is indeed disturbing that Mozilla's finances depend so much on advertising. No matter how well-intentioned the folks at Mozilla Foundation/Corporation might be, it's difficult for human beings to avoid getting side-tracked when their wallet are running thin and there's easy money up for grabs out there.
But I don't think the author's suggestions are compatible what what we (or at least, I) want Firefox to be, either.
1. Spinning off a variant named PrivateFox just sends the message that the regular Firefox will no longer respect your privacy. It will also make regular, free, not-private Firefox users second-class citizens of the Internet. People deserve to have their privacy protected, regardless of whether they can pay or not. In fact, people who can't pay (minors, the poor, citizens of oppressive third-world regimes, etc.) are often in need of the most protection. Moreover, even if you can afford PrivateFox, the payment creates a paper trail that might negate the benefit of using PrivateFox.
2. Crowdsourcing sounds cool, but only if everyone benefits. There's no point in creating "The World’s First Fully Private Browser" and keeping it proprietary. If there exists technology to improve everyone's privacy, it should be included in every copy of Firefox by default.
3. Intentcasting is an interesting concept, but in the context of a web browser it sounds like just another "Ubuntu sends my searches to Amazon" debacle waiting to happen. If I want good privacy, I probably don't want to tell faceless multinational corporations what I want to buy, either.
Unfortunately, the only alternative that I can think of is a variant of Wikimedia Foundation's annual donation drive. As a long-time Firefox fan, I would certainly donate as much as I can. (Is there someone at Mozilla who can give creepy stares in a banner ad as well as Jimmy Wales does?) But again there's a problem: Mozilla's budget is several times the size of Wikimedia's (300MM vs. 80MM), and I'm not sure that the moral value of Firefox, although significant, exceeds that of Wikipedia. Mozilla needs to be seriously trimmed down if they're ever going to be supported by donations.
- 1ris 13y agoThere is the tor browser that is this a Firefox that respects privacy.
- kijin 13y agoTor browser is made by EFF, and the only reason it doesn't threaten vanilla Firefox's market share is because tor is slow as hell. If Mozilla made two versions of Firefox that were just as fast as each other but only one of them respected privacy, there would be no reason for anyone to choose the non-privacy-respecting version.
- lelandriordan 13y agoThere is a new movement to use Bitcoin nodes to greatly increase the speed of Tor. Its called Toroken. It was just announced this week: http://www.dailydot.com/technology/toroken-tor-bitcoin-anonymity/ http://www.dailydot.com/technology/toroken-tor-bitcoin-anony...
- pbiggar 13y ago> No matter how well-intentioned the folks at Mozilla Foundation/Corporation might be, it's difficult for human beings to avoid getting side-tracked when their wallet are running thin and there's easy money up for grabs out there. As a former Mozillian, I can't begin to describe how inaccurate this is. Discussion of money, or revenue, were relatively rare compared to the things that Mozillians actually care about. Here's a list of things that were discussed about 100x more than advertising revenue: - building the mozilla community - open source - rust and servo - where to go for lunch - javascript performance - keeping the web open - making firefox builds fast - firefox memory usage - proprietary codecs vs vp8
- anon1385 13y ago>proprietary codecs vs vp8 VP8 is proprietary. I'd appreciate it if downvoters could point me towards the standards body that oversees the VP8 standard. Apparently I just missed the news when it was submitted to an independent standards organisation… (This debate makes me appreciate how RMS must feel trying to educate people about the difference between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom)
- scrollaway 13y ago"In May 2010, after the purchase of On2 Technologies, Google provided an irrevocable patent promise on its patents for implementing the VP8 format, and released a specification of the format under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.[6] That same year, Google also released libvpx, the reference implementation of VP8, under a BSD license.[7]"
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- syjer 13y agoThis is quite old: the patent "issue" is more clear, see http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/google-mpeg-la-agree-to-royalty-free-terms-for-vp8-video-codec/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/google... . There is still an issue with Nokia ( http://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/2035/ http://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/2035/ ) but at the moment it looks like that everybody is ignoring them.