Mozilla is not your freind
I agree that the majority of the backlash is overblown, and mostly the result of unclear messaging. However, it’s important that Mozilla is held to a standard. They have presented themselves as a privacy-respecting alternative, and when they do things that sow distrust, it undermines their mission.
They’re one of the few nonprofit organizations that can reasonably compete with the other major players in the browser space, and I hope they can continue to exist while keeping their integrity intact. It seems that task is proving extremely difficult in the current industry.
This video lost me within the first one and a half minutes: I appreciate the creator being upfront about basically saying “I believe Mozilla is fundamentally good” because that basically ends the discussion for me. If you assume this conclusion, literally everything they have done can be written off using best-faith interpretations of their terms. All I know is I’ve seen plenty of people do the same thing with many of the other companies that are named as counterexamples, the “bad ones.” Most notably, Google.
I’m not going to watch the rest, but I hope that It doesn’t continue by saying things like “this legal document isn’t bad if you interpret Mozilla as having no ill intent.” And I will hope the creator does draw a line in the sand for when skepticism is finally acceptable…
Don’t bother commenting if you’re not even going to watch more than 10% of the video. You’re right that he has some bias, but he is aware of Mozilla’s flaws and presents some good points.
And how much of the video did you watch, my friend?
I’m trying to figure out whether you told me to waste my time out of hypocrisy or malicious awareness.
Per your recommendation, I wasted more time to discover I was correct.
4:22 “Mozilla has been one of the foremost advocates for online privacy and ethical advertisement technology”
5:55 “through it all I believe in Mozilla’s mission that is clearly defined in their manifesto” and I believe the manifesto has been turned into toilet paper because they sure don’t adhere to it
11:50 “I’m willing to give Mozilla’s lawyers the benefit of the doubt”
It’ll be really interesting following this moving forward to see what’s going to happen.
They literally said they had rights to everything you typed into Firefox, and then said for “necessary” purposes. Then in the same stroke of the pen removed all references to “Never selling your data”. Nope, it’s black and white for me. This video can try and convince me that “I don’t understand legalese”, but I read it right there.
Legalese is just very precise wording. When they use something as vague as “necessary” without defining what necessary means - it means it has no definition. Necessary to who? For them to operate Firefox but will never leave my PC? Then that would have been something they could have written into the actual agreement. Does it mean Necessary for Mozilla to maintain their market position by selling data? Again, we have no idea because it wasn’t written down. No, the vagueness was there on purpose. They know what data I’m typing into my browser and how much it’s worth.
And I haven’t even mentioned how they tried to tell me how I could not use my browser on my computer to look at “explicit imagery”.
No, fuck Mozilla, they were very clear in what they said.
I don’t get what other options we have though. Some say forks others say safari.
Personally I switched to LibreWolf and it’s a drop in replacement. I don’t know if it’ll be my forever decision, but I’ve been using it for 4 straight days and don’t even notice it.
Do you access DRM-protected media on it, ever?
haven’t yet, but it’s a fork so I assume it handles the same way as FF
I previously had bad luck with DRM content in forks, so I’m curious if things get better. Right now I’m hanging onto my current FF and watching changelogs like a hawk.
(case in point: the Weather display is sponsored content.)
No
