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I'm repeating myself (from other threads) but Mozilla should use this sales pitch. Very few users can evaluate business' privacy practices; they only can trust

I'm repeating myself (from other threads) but Mozilla should use this sales pitch. Very few users can evaluate business' privacy practices; they only can trust the business. Due to their non-profit, public good status, their mission, and their track record, nobody could compete with Mozilla on trust. EDIT: I'll add: Certainly the other two leading browser makers couldn't compete, and in mobile platforms only Apple, if they sell Cook's pitch effectively, can provide any competition.

byuu 11y ago
Does Mozilla's track record include their suggested advertising tiles on your newtab page, based off your browsing history? Or their defaulting to Yahoo to send your searches because they were the highest bidder? Now yes, they say the tiles are based on your local history and not transmitted anywhere; so it's not as bad (I don't care if other people don't see it, I don't want my data mined even locally for the purpose of showing me ads); but it's pretty clear that Mozilla is a business that wants to earn money. And as the saying goes, "if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer -- you're the product." But you're right about one thing: they're probably the least bad of all the browser manufacturers on all this. Maybe what we need is a crowdfunded browser, where the company listens to their users and has no conflicts of interest.
- riquito 11y ago
  > Maybe what we need is a crowdfunded browser, where the company listens to their users and has no conflicts of interest. Then "just" collect enough money for Mozilla so that they don't need other sources of income
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  The huge difference is that they are completely upfront about it, turning it off is trivial and requires no digging into settings as the switch is right on that page, what they do with your data in terms of the tiles is entirely open source, etc. Plus, the default search engine is paid everywhere. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, etc all pay for placement in browsers. Users are free to select whatever browser they want in good browsers.
- CHY872 11y ago
  Mozilla's a non-profit - the money it collects goes into supporting additional open-source products. At the moment, it does this on income of $300 million per year (mostly from their search provider). Of this money, $200 million goes on software development, $10 million goes on running their services (downloads, sync etc), and $70 million goes on administration, general costs (buildings etc) and marketing. So yes, if you're hoping to crowdfund you a browser, then if you can't persuade people to donate millions and millions and millions then you're not going to be successful. A modern browser engine is millions of lines of highly optimised code long (check out Servo), and that corresponds to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. At the moment, you're essentially trying to say that being open-source and being actively developed are mutually exclusive, which seems odd (if Mozilla threw away Yahoo, they'd be bankrupt).
  - byuu 11y ago
    > A modern browser engine is millions of lines of highly optimised code long, and that corresponds to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment Currently Firefox is 12,000,000 LOC, so each line of code costs $25 per year? o_O If so, I am in the wrong business, given my main project is 300,000 lines of my own code. Now, I totally believe the costs are astronomical to run a web browser team and all the servers required for such a feat. But surely it can't cost nearly this much. Especially with volunteers working on it as a labor of love as with many other major open-source projects, such as Linux. In my ideal world, access to technology has become so essential that I think it's not unreasonable to consider public funding for things like an operating system and web browser. I do realize this is the worst site possible to suggest such a thing, of course ;) There's countless problems with that idea as well. We'd need a government that didn't spy on its own citizens, and wasn't far more wasteful than the private sector. But a man can dream. But at this point, I'd be happy with a $1m Kickstarter to develop a fully-featured Webkit-based browser UI that is absolutely by the users, for the users. Taking only their input in mind (no crazy designers that "know better than the users"), no compromises on corporate interests (DRM), and never implementing any form of advertising nor doing any backroom deals with companies that want to mine your data like Google and Yahoo.
    - 11y ago
- hackuser 11y ago
  > Does Mozilla's track record include their suggested advertising tiles on your newtab page, based off your browsing history? Yes, in fact it enhances Mozilla's reputation (or should): 1) It doesn't compromise your confidentiality because, as you point out, your data never leaves your computer; and 2) They provide a way (and open code) for the whole industry to greatly improve the confidentiality of their advertising. > I don't want my data mined even locally for the purpose of showing me ads That's fine, but it's not a confidentiality issue. > defaulting to Yahoo to send your searches because they were the highest bidder? Given that there are confidential search vendors, such as DuckDuckGo, I agree that this is a confidentiality issue.

byuu 11y ago

Does Mozilla's track record include their suggested advertising tiles on your newtab page, based off your browsing history? Or their defaulting to Yahoo to send your searches because they were the highest bidder? Now yes, they say the tiles are based on your local history and not transmitted anywhere; so it's not as bad (I don't care if other people don't see it, I don't want my data mined even locally for the purpose of showing me ads); but it's pretty clear that Mozilla is a business that wants to earn money. And as the saying goes, "if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer -- you're the product." But you're right about one thing: they're probably the least bad of all the browser manufacturers on all this. Maybe what we need is a crowdfunded browser, where the company listens to their users and has no conflicts of interest.

riquito 11y ago
> Maybe what we need is a crowdfunded browser, where the company listens to their users and has no conflicts of interest. Then "just" collect enough money for Mozilla so that they don't need other sources of income
JohnTHaller 11y ago
The huge difference is that they are completely upfront about it, turning it off is trivial and requires no digging into settings as the switch is right on that page, what they do with your data in terms of the tiles is entirely open source, etc. Plus, the default search engine is paid everywhere. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, etc all pay for placement in browsers. Users are free to select whatever browser they want in good browsers.
CHY872 11y ago
Mozilla's a non-profit - the money it collects goes into supporting additional open-source products. At the moment, it does this on income of $300 million per year (mostly from their search provider). Of this money, $200 million goes on software development, $10 million goes on running their services (downloads, sync etc), and $70 million goes on administration, general costs (buildings etc) and marketing. So yes, if you're hoping to crowdfund you a browser, then if you can't persuade people to donate millions and millions and millions then you're not going to be successful. A modern browser engine is millions of lines of highly optimised code long (check out Servo), and that corresponds to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. At the moment, you're essentially trying to say that being open-source and being actively developed are mutually exclusive, which seems odd (if Mozilla threw away Yahoo, they'd be bankrupt).
- byuu 11y ago
  > A modern browser engine is millions of lines of highly optimised code long, and that corresponds to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment Currently Firefox is 12,000,000 LOC, so each line of code costs $25 per year? o_O If so, I am in the wrong business, given my main project is 300,000 lines of my own code. Now, I totally believe the costs are astronomical to run a web browser team and all the servers required for such a feat. But surely it can't cost nearly this much. Especially with volunteers working on it as a labor of love as with many other major open-source projects, such as Linux. In my ideal world, access to technology has become so essential that I think it's not unreasonable to consider public funding for things like an operating system and web browser. I do realize this is the worst site possible to suggest such a thing, of course ;) There's countless problems with that idea as well. We'd need a government that didn't spy on its own citizens, and wasn't far more wasteful than the private sector. But a man can dream. But at this point, I'd be happy with a $1m Kickstarter to develop a fully-featured Webkit-based browser UI that is absolutely by the users, for the users. Taking only their input in mind (no crazy designers that "know better than the users"), no compromises on corporate interests (DRM), and never implementing any form of advertising nor doing any backroom deals with companies that want to mine your data like Google and Yahoo.
  - 11y ago
hackuser 11y ago
> Does Mozilla's track record include their suggested advertising tiles on your newtab page, based off your browsing history? Yes, in fact it enhances Mozilla's reputation (or should): 1) It doesn't compromise your confidentiality because, as you point out, your data never leaves your computer; and 2) They provide a way (and open code) for the whole industry to greatly improve the confidentiality of their advertising. > I don't want my data mined even locally for the purpose of showing me ads That's fine, but it's not a confidentiality issue. > defaulting to Yahoo to send your searches because they were the highest bidder? Given that there are confidential search vendors, such as DuckDuckGo, I agree that this is a confidentiality issue.