Mozilla is an advertising company now
www.jwz.org
This seems completely normal and cool and not troublesome in any way. Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a [blah blah blah] raise the bar for the advertising industry [blah blah blah] while delivering effective advertising solutions. [...] Anonym was founded with two core beliefs: [blah blah blah] and second, that digital advertising is critical for the sustainability of free content, services and ...

Also from Jamie Zawinski yesterday: Mozilla’s Original Sin

Some will tell you that Mozilla’s worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.

Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.

  • mke@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    I try my best to keep calm and judge things fairly and rationally but, truth is, you get kinda tired of seeing so many iffy-maybe-alright news about Mozilla.

    My fear is that by the time “something happens” to Firefox, it’ll be something that was entirely avoidable if only we had acted sooner. I’m always wondering if I’m at the point I should be acting.

    • I’m still salty about their previous CEO, Mitchell Baker, I believe, getting bigger bonuses while Firefox market share fell (and layoffs happened, but we lack details to understand those properly).
    • I’m unconvinced that, in a world where the percentage of people using an adblocker is rising, they’ll find a way to change people’s minds and look at ads, even if they are perfectly, technomagically privacy preserving.
    • I’m unconvinced that owning Firefox, which puts uBlock as a front-and-center extension, and Anonym, and adtech company, will not create a conflict of interest—just like what happened to Google.

    For the record, this is my first time commenting on this and I’m also deeply bothered by “reactionary nerds” (everyone switch to librewolf!!), but I understand the sentiment. Hope that added some perspective.

    • verdigris@lemmy.ml
      0·
      5 months ago

      I mean, I definitely think it’s not ideal and there’s room for improvement and social pressure for Mozilla to change its priorities, but I also don’t think it’s any reason to abandon the project. The reality is that a modern web browser is too massive of a project for a non-commercial entity to reasonably develop and keep updated, and Mozilla is the only such entity that’s even remotely got its heart in the right place.

      • mke@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        Oh, we’re fully in agreement. I’m not arguing in favor of abandoning Firefox or Mozilla at all. I’m just saying frustration and anxiety are to be expected sometimes. Note that I’m not excusing rudeness or the like.

        Re: the burden of developing a modern browser, I wonder what librewolf evangelists think would happen to the project, if Firefox development by Mozilla were to fall due to any reason. To my view, the forks only exist because Firefox still does. After all, if managing an entire browser was possible with their resources, they wouldn’t need to fork one.

        • leopold@lemmy.kde.socialEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          At best, another Pale Moon is what would happen. They’ve been maintaining their own hard fork of Gecko by themselves since 2016. They clearly have people capable of maintaining a browser engine, though perhaps not quite enough of them. If Firefox were to die, perhaps joining up with Goanna would be the smart move.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      if only we had acted sooner

      Doing what, exactly? Create a fork? Done. Fill their feedback queue with endless screeching about how everything is dooooooom? Done, 10x over. Use another browser instead, say, Chrome? That’s what virtually everyone did, yes.=

      Plus shouldn’t this on paper be positive news? Mozilla can, if they run Anonym well enough, be independent of other ad networks. Run their own. Which in turn means they can control the data and where it’s stored, an important issue with third-party ad networks.