My eyes also popped out of my sockets, so I read the Mozilla blog source article. It is just a proposal to W3C, as it stands. And since this is NOT something proprietary like FLoC and particularly NOT meant as an alternative tracking method, there seems to be more to it than what the anti Mozilla and pro Chromium squads want to believe.
Why is this reactionary attitude going on? It happened with the “deplatforming” article, and now this.
How many people are not okay with USA Big Tech corpos submitting patches to Linux kernel? Did you stop using Linux and choose… Windows or MacOS due to it?
Linux accepting patches from Facebook that improves btrfs isn’t the same thing as working with Facebook on ad tech tracking proposals.
I haven’t read the thing and I’ll be waiting for someone decently trustworthy to explain this to me, but I consider tracking and advertising to be immoral, so this doesn’t bode well.
I don’t think there’s any anti-mozilla, pro-chromium squads roaming the wilds, but yeah, Mozilla has not fallen, they’re just working on a spec, with engineers from facebook, to enhance privacy.
The reason why I said it’s a good thing: do you honestly trust the likes of facebook/google to design something privacy oriented, even if their intentions are entirely honest? No, of course not. Regardless of their intention, they have been built, as companies on principles opposing such design. They had to be. They don’t have the people, the experience, the methodology, the principles etc.
So it’s great to see them joined by someone who does (Mozilla) who I’m sure they’ll respect if they want to have the proposal accepted not just by W3C, but the greater community.
GrapheneOS squad, for example, is anti Mozilla and pro Chromium, and is a massive internet troll group. There are some anti Mozilla stans with Chromium based recommendations on Lemmy doing the rounds too.
Facebook’s business model is to manipulate and study us for profit. It’s like a tobacco company. If facebook collect less data or no data, their business will collapse. The interests of facebook are opposed to the interests of the people. There’s no way for them to become ethical because their model is based on something completely unethical.
The only impact mozilla can have on facebook is to make sure that more people feel comfortable using facebook. This is done through their association with Mozilla and the creation and adoption of new orwellian terms.
In other words, Mozilla is enabling Facebook. This is hideous.
Many people are upset about this, but it is in my opinion an excellent thing. Mozilla and Facebook are working together to improve one aspect of Facebook’s privacy
It’s not like Mozilla is shilling and getting paid off, as some people seem to think.
This is how privacy is really improved, by working with the companies and governments that have power in the space, not by sitting in your cave using only librewolf and tor, and refusing to use anything you don’t build from source and self host.
That only helps you at best, and the privacy abusers (google, facebook) will just ignore you.
I don’t know, but FF, although having nice options for privacy, don’t set them by default, leaving the user to go investigate what to set and whatnot… And adds is a sensitive topic, though it’s understandable they want to make money…
That’s why I use instead Librewolf, which is pretty much FF with sane settings by default (actually I have to modify some not allowing me to use the browser under some scenarios), and removing binary blobs (FF still includes binary blobs). For Librewolf, the other nice thing is that it comes with uBlock-Origin by default, however it might be it’ll be harder for uBlock to actually block new ways of adds…
You missed the point, it’s not about firefox.
Yea, well, I don’t trust Facebook/Meta any bit, and although mozilla can teach them a few more ethical things, as I don’t trust such partner it’s dealing with, then I get suspicious, and I don’t know if the end result will be also included on FF, since its sort of a web spec, and as said, FF tend to make sane privacy options not the default, and not so obvious, which hadn’t stopped me from using it, I just use Librewolf which is pretty close, it’s a derivative with sane defaults for privacy, and I hope if the spec materializes, and becomes part of FF, there’s a way on Librewolf to opt it out by default, or make it more obvious, or at least helped somehow by uBlock… We’ll see …
I see it as on the same level of a vegan advocacy organisation working with one of the biggest meat companies in the world. Sure, the vegan org might reduce the suffering of the animals under their control, but that shouldn’t be their goal, complete abolishment of animal agriculture should be.
I am vegan and must hope any lessening of suffering happens. I hate hunting, but know that a dairy cow is far more likely to suffer far more than a deer a hunter shot. I’d be willing to negotiate if I knew i could lessen the problem. Case by case, of course. All-or-nothing might make the individual feel holier-than-thou, but the problem is just as bad as before. Idealism is not the same as realism. I’d argue that both can be done - diminish a problem by offering some solutions, but go right back by trying to eliminate that problem.
It’s an apt comparison, but do you want complete abolishment of all forms of telemetry, tracking or advertising? Or perhaps more relevant, is that Mozilla’s goal? I don’t think so. See this post by them.
Is it Mozilla’s goal?
2020’s Unfck the Internet, by Mozilla:
"A whole sh*tton of how we communicate is controlled by a few centi-billionaires. That’s a new word for all of us: centi-billionaire. It means worth over $100 billion USD. Each.
Social networks are using us as much as we use them. They slice and dice us into categories to get micro-targeted. Newsflash: people aren’t “targets” and it’s not cool to create little bubbles.
Oh and security. If you’re sick of reading about — and getting caught in — one data breach after another, we feel you.
If you want to get out of this mess, we are with you. Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind Firefox, was purpose-built to make the internet what it can be: an open tool for everyone — the powerful and the weak, the right and the left, everyone."
Yes, yes and yes. And Mozilla have been selling out their user’s data since the day they took money from Google.
This is honestly what annoys me more than anything about Mozilla: they pretend to be champions for privacy, but they aren’t. And people fall for it. They are controlled opposition. They are the social democrats of the privacy world: channeling privacy supporters into their compromise (and compromised) position and painting the radicals as unreasonable dreamers.
If they were to finally die, that would probably be good for online privacy. A real non-corrupt free software fork of chromium could take off with built-in ad blocking and actually good privacy defaults. Firefox is sucking the oxygen out of the room right now.
Ultimately all tracking and data collecting besides what’s absolutely necessary needs to be declared 100% illegal. I have no hope Mozilla will help in this fight at all.
Starting from paragraph 2, I could replace “Mozilla” and “chromium” vice versa and your comment would actually hold true.
I just think that when Firefox dies, maintaining a chromium fork with Google tracking crap ripped out is going to be way easier than continuing development on Firefox, and can be done by way fewer people.
Firefox will take down Tor Project with it. Chromium/Blink is that bad. Also, Firefox allows user.js and userchrome.css modifications, something unparalleled in Blink/WebKit world.
Firefox is not going anywhere. Google is scared of antitrust and antimonopoly lawsuits.
complete abolishment of animal agriculture is not done overnight with in one fell swoop. It’s done with small changes here and there. Slowly forging a new culture where it is considered worse and worse to treat animals badly. (and what counts as animal abuse will start covering more and more things). Slowly changing the norm. Same goes for privacy, user rights, etc. There are of course some key moments, watershed moments, legislations (GDPR for example), but those had a long journey of tiny steps all over the world before they came into being. Sort of like tectonic plates building up tension over tens, hundreds, thousands of years before they snap into place in one huge earthquake
How is that supposed to work? Firefox’s own products in itself are not that reassuring for user privacy. It was better when Moxie collaborated with them to improve whatsapp code. At least that guy’s products were respected for privacy at that time.
Even if they don’t live up to your standards, you can agree they are way ahead of the competition.
Are you talking about Chrome?
Does Chrome allow editable user.js and userchrome.css? Does Chrome not leak IPs via WebRTC? Is Chrome used as base for Tor Browser?
Mozilla and Facebook are working together to improve one aspect of Facebook’s privacy
Pretty naïve statement, in my opinion. Mozilla should fight for the complete disruption of the ad-supported web, not pretending to “improve” it. Anyway, a sinking ship is a sinking ship…
Y’all, please stop and read this comment before jumping on your guns. I also saw this in Reddit and I’m just copy-pasting my comment from there.
All Mozilla did was to just work with a group of ppl from Meta to create a proposal and send that proposal to the W3 Consortium. THAT’S IT. Nothing else. This isn’t public yet. It’s nothing more than a proposal.
Many of the responders are in negation that the projects and the internet runs with money 💵. All these privacy conscious companies are trying to find solutions to balance having Ads with everything else. Remember most people online wants or expects everything to be free as in free beer. Innovation and coordination requires the Ads companies, which are mainly Google or Facebook. What should be scrutinize is How they do it more than What they do, to the extent that is reasonable.
Curious, if every user paid a browser $5 a year for a subscription and every search engine $5 a year, would tht cover costs and allow for a small profit? I realize that depends on how many users there are, but seems like if we can put a pigs heart in a human and have the human live (poor, poor pig) and have a human walk on the moon that we’s be able to find a private way for the individual to browse the internet.
We all deserve a salary for our work. But, what about profit? Are there shareholders, angel investors - how does the profit aspect of a browser or search engine work?
Could users buy early shares to later be paid back with future users’ payments? The browser would have to accept anonymous users/payments - such as money orders or the equivalent, I think.
This is a good question I also have. I think we do need to explore some monetization options. As an example, ads on youtube allowed for independent media to thrive. It was good.
But youtube, or alphabet as a publicly traded company, wants more money than just to pay the creators. They gotta increase profit to please the shareholders so we are seeing more ads.
I think we should normalize paying a subscription fee for content so that we don’t pay with it with our data. But it becomes a chicken and egg problem. Unless a creator or website is huge, not many ppl will subscribe for it initially. So what do creators or small websites do? Maybe there is room for ethical ads if we cant get enough users to pay or donate.
why should you even concider to use facebook . Mozilla and Google
At this point we need a serious effort to fork Firefox and maintain it as a sustainable open source project. I know there are a few forks floating around, but they’re small projects with only a handful of contributors. These kinds of efforts will never be a serious alternative.
A web browser is one of the most important piece of software nowadays, and currently neither Chromium nor Firefox are true community efforts. We need something on the level of the Linux Kernel Foundation in my opinion.
If you want something like the linux kernel, then those forks also have to be profitable enough to support firefox.
Or to get enough community funding as non-profit. The whole problem with Mozilla is precisely that it depends on profit and it’s driven by accountants.
Just to add and remind, the amount of LOC and work in a web browser and its engine is more than Linux kernel itself at this point. This goes for both Gecko and Blink/WebKit browsers.
People underestimate the amount of work put in modern web browsers. They are ecosystems at this point.
Yeah, a browser is effectively an operating system at this point.
Thats because todays browsers are way too bloated. A fork that trims unnecessary features could be very effective.
A fork that trimmed features would be unable to render many websites. The problem is more the protocol than the implementation.
My position is that the way forward is ultimately to abandon the web (ie. HTTP), and replace it with alternative protocols for each thing it does. Gemini for example for the “primary” use case of the web (publishing documents).
There are browsers that try that only to have broken websites left and right. cough*(GNOME Web)
There exist things like NetSurf. Or, remove JS execution from web browsers, and now you have un-bloated web browser that cannot access… 80% of clearnet, and cannot comment on Lemmy.
There have been ideas explored in this direction, like Gemini and Gopher protocols. Some people use them.
No fucking way
Fuck ads and fuck Mozilla. We need a modern alternative.
