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jwz

Mozilla's CEO doubles down on them being an advertising company now.

tl;dr: "LOL get fucked"

They've decided who their customers are, and it's not you, it's people who build and invest in surveillance advertising networks. But in a "respectful" way....
jwz.org/b/ykaO

63 comments
Dan Scott

@jwz I fully agree with your stated opinion about what Mozilla should be doing: building a browser (without AI / adtech / crypto / privacy threatening crap) and advocating for / defending web standards.

We *need* that. Mozilla is uniquely positioned to deliver that.

Bee O'Problem

@jwz

Hard fork time? (Or everyone jumping ship to one of the existing forks time?)

J.elgato

@beeoproblem @jwz

I think the official course of action is that we are all supposed to get together and sing "Where Do We Go From Here?" From the 7th Season musical episode "Once More With Feeling" of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer...

Tessalation

@beeoproblem @jwz LibreWolf has been treating me pretty well.

Bee O'Problem

@jakimfett @jwz I've seen that name pop up a few times. I'll put it on the list of things to try.

Lance Bachmeier

@jwz The Mozilla that has a Threads account that they've chosen not to federate? The Mozilla that introduced their CEO by linking to her LinkedIn profile? I'm shocked.

Amy ☣

@jwz@mastodon.social I keep seeing people talk about this, but like... what options are there other than Firefox and Chrome these days? Everything else is like based on one of the two, right? Safari didn't use to be, but I thought I saw someone saying it's Chrome based now.

Mathaetaes

@jwz Man... all Microsoft had to do was ditch IE and then wait for everyone else to enshitify slightly worse than Edge.

Brent Guernsey, Artrocity Studio

@jwz

I've used Firefox for years. This is so disappointing.

What are the best alternatives?

Hugo

@Brentguernsey @jwz i use librewolf, “a custom version of firefox”

joshie

@Chiquidrakula @Brentguernsey @jwz 2nd that. LibreWolf has been good to me. just add their repo to my sources.list and voilà. good instructions for many systems: librewolf.net/installation/

HowToPhil (Phillip R)

@peachfiend @Chiquidrakula @Brentguernsey @jwz The main problem I have with Librewolf is that the UI choices are shit

aspragg

@Brentguernsey @jwz

There’s #epiphany (aka Gnome Web) which works fine on 99% of the sites I use

🎃 Spice Taffer :godot: 🇨🇦

@Brentguernsey @jwz I'm leery of Firefox forks; they seem to get behind on merging updates, and I worry about them just fizzling out. Browsers are stupidly complex and require a lot of effort.

Vivaldi might be the least-bad Chrome browser, but none of the Chrome browsers ever "feels" right, and I can't figure out what about the UI bugs me.

Hopefully Servo gets viable soon?

#mozilla #firefox #vivaldi #servo

slyborg

@jwz >be Mozilla
>have virtually no market share in anything
>conclude the free cash from Google may soon dry up and blow away, threatening Mitchell Baker’s yacht upgrade
>immediately alienate basically your entire puny userbase and pivot to competing with … Google

I can’t even imagine what the thought process was here. Why not crypto? That grift actually seems to work…

KB.3.0

@jwz in no time they will update the documents which they created against other browser companies.

Teixi

@jwz

WTF?!!!

What happened in recent years for Mozilla case of possibly being leaded by even much worse managers than Steve Case?

cc @hipsterelectron

14mission

@jwz Does Mozilla technically own Firefox? There's nothing to stop another group from taking over maintenance, or us users from switching where we get it, right?

Victor Raton :python: :debian:

@14mission @jwz maybe tor project or even librewilf can do that, in worst case, can be illegak to install from outside of firefox repos, but who cares....

Job Bautista
@14mission Mozilla only fully owns the Firefox trademarks (name, branding, etc). The source code is fair game as long as the MPL is followed to the letter.

@jwz
canleaf08 ⌘ ✅

@jwz How did they end up wirse than with Brendan Eich?

Jungle George 🌿🌳🌴

@jwz The terrible leadership (including Mitchell Baker) at Mozilla has really destroyed Firefox. They should change the tagine to Profit Over People. It's finally true in every sense.

Alan Campbell For Harris

@jwz well now this sound a bit fucked up. I'm looking at this on Safari/MBP, I only occasionally run Firefox on the PC. Mostly use Firefox at work so not so bothered there. Still I've using Firefox as an alternative to Chrome or Edge but now the alternative itself is messed up?

Immer die Radfahrer

@jwz

> Now hear me out, but What If...? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?

I don't know about nonprofit, but what about @zenbrowser ?

Zen

@i_d_radfahrer @jwz right now, there is no organisation structure here, just one main dev (Mauro), and a bunch of volunteers ;)

David Somers

@jwz Mozilla got distracted with lots of side-projects, and have squandered the funding they have received over the years. Is anybody really surprised they have now embraced enshittification to the next level by actively getting into bed with advertising?

Perhaps we need to rethink the browser. I just want something to safely fetch and display html. No more. No less. Do I really have to go back to dropping into the cli to use Lynx?

rockpick

@jwz the thing is. It is still the right choice to oppose the Chromium market dominance. Just now it's not with vanilla firefox anymore. Librewolf ftw!

Morten Juhl-Johansen

@jwz It is a frustrating affair.
I have been thinking a lot about how Thunderbird is reconquering mind- and marketshare with the desktop version and the K-9 Mail-based Thunderbird for Android.
I can hope it will not be polluted with AI, but that seems unlikely in the long run.

jwz

@mjj I don't know anything about what's going on technically with Thunderbird these days, but for years they've been playing word-games where they pretend to be a "Mozilla" project when it suits them and utterly independent when the press is going the other way.

"We're a part of Mozilla, not Mozilla or Mozilla or Mozilla" is a thing that they say and it does not inspire confidence, because either it's intentionally deceptive or it's just comically bad messaging, and neither are great.

Glitch

@jwz @mjj as far as I understand it, Thunderbird just is completely deprioritized after 2020 (minus them buying out K-9 Mail to turn it into Thunderbird for Android), with Mozilla basically trying to handle it like the Apache Foundation, where they're "just the stewards", which is just code language for "we can't be arsed to keep developing it".

Simon 🥧 man 🥥🌴 🇺🇸

@jwz
If they wanted to do advertising they should just figure out what Brave did with privacy preserving client side ads - as a plug-in - but without the crypto. But of course the ad industry doesn't want that because if your browser isn't stealing your data then they want to. Why? Because they are ignorant monkeys who don't know any better [HHGTTG quote].

moooping

@jwz Oh dear. Can anyone recommend an alternative browser? Thank you!

jwz

@moooping No, no one can. Things were allowed to get so bad that you're just completely screwed.

moooping

@jwz I feared this might be the case.

Nemo Thorx

@moooping @jwz Firefox is the worst mainstream browser. Except for all the other ones that are available.

Afaik, at the moment any fork of Firefox still relies on Firefox to do the core developing and they just polish the edges to suit whatever niche they're catering for.

I suspect the interest in a hard/community fork of Firefox is growing, but probably impossible to predict when (or even if) it will pass critical mass threshold and actually happen in any usefully self sustaining way.

Dušan 🇷🇸 :arch: ⚛️

@jwz Build a browser with what money? Donations alone cannot finance a project like Firefox.

Pete / Syllopsium

@dusnm @jwz Don't see why not, you just need a *lot* of donations.

Do you mean, like some other open projects, it needs to be funded by someone with lots of money because almost all the general populace and a not inconsiderable number of open source enthusiasts see 'free as in beer', not 'open source code'.

Andreas K

@jwz And that solves the Encrypted Media Extensions issue how?

blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/t

Building a better web browser (engine)? Hard but doable.

Building a web browser that is competitive in the mainstream (aka can play netflix & co), dream on.

jwz

@yacc143 Try to imagine how many shits I give as to whether my web browser can play Netflix. Try.

Andreas K

@jwz Try how you'll gain a mainstream critical mass (so that websites simply don't lock you out, as happens occasionally with Firefox already), with a browser that does not have the relevant EME CDM modules.

Oops, so yes, you and me care about watching netflix on our laptops not very much, 🤷 About 99% of the websites do not care very much about you and me.

(OTOH, what happens when you cannot watch videos for your uni classes, because of that? Right, Manifest V3 Chrome it is for the moment.)

jwz

@yacc143 Also try to imagine how much I care about the angry opinions of strangers. *plonk*

magsafe genitalia

@jwz not content with continuing to put merely their foot in, Mozilla proceed to try and demonstrate they can in fact horf down their entire leg

kbal

Servo taking over seems a long way off, but still somehow closer to reality than Mozilla getting its act together.

Bill Seitz

@jwz "Anonym is building technology that can provide more privacy-preserving infrastructure for data sharing between advertisers and publishers."
War is Peace

Carlos Solís
@jwz Sigh... who the heck designed that Mozilla Goatse? (Moatze?)
Mauve 👁💜

@jwz I'd love to hear the perspective of someone that actually has positive feelings about this.

The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus

@jwz Time for a hard fork and a rebrand. Maybe the IceWeasel name that the Debian project used for a time can be revived?

Plakat

@jwz too bad. I used Firefox like… forever. I even paid for Firefox VPN not because I needed it (running my own WireGuard servers), but to sponsor Firefox a bit. Not anymore, today I cancelled that. So sorry to see this once noble project go downhill. And accelerating at that.

Linux Is Best

@jwz@mastodon.social What to replace Firefox with?

Vivaldi web browser is everything Firefox should have been the last decade or more.

Yes, Vivaldi Browser is based off of the open source code, chromium, but it does not follow Google's lead, supporting both v2 and v3 browser extensions (meaning uBlock will still work). Vivaldi, includes their own ad and tracker blocker, is not owned and managed by an ad company, and is the ONLY web browser to be A.I. free (does not include an AI).

The latest version, 6.9, even added support to ensure uBlock will continue to work.

@jwz@mastodon.social What to replace Firefox with?

Vivaldi web browser is everything Firefox should have been the last decade or more.

Yes, Vivaldi Browser is based off of the open source code, chromium, but it does not follow Google's lead, supporting both v2 and v3 browser extensions (meaning uBlock will still work). Vivaldi, includes their own ad and tracker blocker, is not owned and managed by an ad company, and is the ONLY web browser to be A.I. free (does not include an AI).

The latest version,...

Martin Hamilton

@jwz My brain is still struggling to process the fact that Mozilla seems to employ over 1,000 people :blobfoxeyes:

techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozi

Dominic.tech

@m @jwz euh... did'nt know that is so much !! 😮

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