 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....  63 comments
 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...  @jakimfett @jwz I've seen that name pop up a few times. I'll put it on the list of things to try. @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. @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.  @jwz Man... all Microsoft had to do was ditch IE and then wait for everyone else to enshitify slightly worse than Edge. @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: https://librewolf.net/installation/ @peachfiend @Chiquidrakula @Brentguernsey @jwz The main problem I have with Librewolf is that the UI choices are shit @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?  @jwz >be Mozilla I can’t even imagine what the thought process was here. Why not crypto? That grift actually seems to work…  WTF?!!! What happened in recent years for Mozilla case of possibly being leaded by even much worse managers than Steve Case? @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.... @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   @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.  @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? > 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 ? @i_d_radfahrer @jwz right now, there is no organisation structure here, just one main dev (Mauro), and a bunch of volunteers ;) @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?  @jwz It is a frustrating affair. @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. @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".  @jwz @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.  @jwz Build a browser with what money? Donations alone cannot finance a project like Firefox. @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'.   @jwz And that solves the Encrypted Media Extensions issue how? https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/ 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 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 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  Servo taking over seems a long way off, but still somehow closer to reality than Mozilla getting its act together.  @jwz "Anonym is building technology that can provide more privacy-preserving infrastructure for data sharing between advertisers and publishers."     @jwz Time for a hard fork and a rebrand. Maybe the IceWeasel name that the Debian project used for a time can be revived?  @jwz My brain is still struggling to process the fact that Mozilla seems to employ over 1,000 people :blobfoxeyes: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozilla-downsizes-as-it-refocuses-on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/   |
Gregory's Server
@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.