>"Big tech has built its success by exploiting your data. When you join Mozilla Rally studies, your data helps us uncover Facebook's tracking network, understand search engine choice, and help local news find sustainability."
Understand search engine choice? That's an absurd thing to say; 90% of their revenue comes from default-search-engine contracts...
Yeah, what I see here is a moralistic attacks on the "Facebook tracking network" from an organization that's 90% bankrolled by one of their largest competitors.
No doubt they'll report some true and nasty stuff about Facebook, but this is straight out of the "Big Tobacco/Oil" research funding playbook.
> Each study has a clear focus, unique data needs, and specific goals. Before you enroll, we’ll tell you exactly who we’re working with, which data is being collected, where it’s going, and how it’s being used.
Ironically, the page loads JS from https://cdn-3.convertexperiments.com (seems to belong to convert.com) and Twitter, without disclosing the fact that Mozilla is sharing your browser data with those two entities.
I'm a daily Firefox user myself, but I can't help to feel that each political effort they try to execute either backfires, or draws resources from what really has to be done: developing and maintaining a excellent user agent for the open web.
>"Ironically, the page loads JS from https://cdn-3.convertexperiments.com (seems to belong to convert.com) and Twitter, without disclosing the fact that Mozilla is sharing your browser data with those two entities."
This is why (for the narrow demographic that bothers to care) uMatrix is such an awesome tool. This page is completely functional without loading either of those domains' shovelware -- and it saves laptop battery life too. This is true for most pages.
Ironic indeed that it's mozilla.org illustrating this point.
Block everything by default! Block all the things!
uMatrix and it's cousin is truly a miracle for the web! I've run it (or a variant of it) for as long as I can remember.
The requests were blocked in my browser, but the reason I checked in the first is the same reason I check every time some service claims to be pro-privacy or other similar things like this landing page: Are you actually living up to your words? In this case, they didn't, and honestly, there is not a cases where they do live up to their word 100%.
Or maybe the premise that Mozilla is beholden to Google because of their income stream is false?
It seems like every other month there's a thread complaining about how Mozilla would never really do anything against Google's interests because of their income stream, and then every other month in between those rant threads Mozilla launches some new tracking protection [0] or privacy initiative directed specifically against Google.
Facebook is a boogeyman and a distraction from the huge and shady ad-tech industry as a whole. Zuck takes a few on the chin in front of an inept US Congress, who eventually proposes some weak legislation that doesn't actually protect anyone, and the industry chugs happily along making money and not giving a shit about the repercussions. Pretty much the same as oil & gas, big pharma, big ag, etc.
Even if you're getting a lot of money from someone, you can still bite the hand that feeds you a bit. For example, Apple receives a lot of money from Google so that Google is the default search on iOS. The UK government has noted that Apple receives a "substantial majority" of the $1.5B Google spends to be in the default position in the UK alone. Let's assume that substantial majority is at least two-thirds of that so Google gives Apple $1B to be the iPhone's search engine in the UK every year. That's $15 for every person in the UK - including infants, people with Android phones, etc. At the same time, Apple is working hard to limit ad tracking.
Some people have estimated that Google gives Apple $15B in total for its default search position. That could mean that around 16-23% of Apple's profits come from Google paying for being the default search engine. Heck, analysts said it would probably reach $18-20B for 2022 (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/27/google-could-pay-apple-...). Apple's profits for the past 12 months was $94.7B (which is up around 66% against the previous 12 months). $20B would still be 21% of that. Even $15B is 16% of that.
The default search on iPhone is one of Apple's largest businesses. It's bigger than its Mac business or its iPad business or its wearables business.
Yet Apple is still biting the hand that feeds them by working against ad tracking. One can argue that it might help Apple in other ways like customer goodwill, making marketers more reliant on Apple-provided data if third parties can't track as well, weakening Google in ways that might weaken the Android ecosystem, etc. Similarly, Mozilla is trying to get a certain amount of customer goodwill and potentially finding other ways for marketers to reach their customers.
While Apple's position in the market is quite secure, Mozilla might be seeing a future where Google doesn't think it needs to pay Mozilla for that default search position. Firefox users are likely people who know how to switch browser defaults and Firefox marketshare is getting small and continuing to decline. I think that's a big reason that we're seeing Mozilla search for new sources of revenue. It looks like Firefox usage is down more than 50% over the past 5 years alone. That means its default search position is a lot less valuable. Even if Google will continue to pay, those payments are likely shrinking. Firefox's position on mobile is even worse.
Even if Mozilla is mostly financed by Google, that financing is likely shrinking. At the same time, software engineers in the US are getting really expensive and Google is pouring money into Chrome (engineers and marketing). Chrome also benefits from a lot of third parties putting money into Chrome. Microsoft is now using Chromium for Edge and Node and the rest of the JS world uses V8. That puts so much weight behind Chromium for Mozilla to fight against - while likely seeing their funding from Google shrink.
It looks like Mozilla's royalty revenue is declining a bit (probably around 10% over the past 5 years), but not too substantially so far (and there's always some noise). But it's also not growing which puts them in a bit of a precarious position given that Google and others are investing more and more in Chromium, their marketshare is declining (which will likely lead to declines in search engine payments in the future), and the increasing cost of software engineers. So do you try to stick it out with the Google search agreement knowing that your users landing on Google's website will be told to upgrade to Chrome or do you try and find a source of revenue that isn't a competitor?
I've lost faith in Mozilla over the last decade and this initiative is a great example. The web is in a rough state but doing research on user data isn't going to solve anything. The way it gets fixed is new technologies that allow new apps and social networks that replace the old ones. This is what Mozilla should working on.
Firefox sends search queries to Google by default, by agreement, and derives almost all of its revenue from that business partnership with Google ("Big Tech"). Mozilla is Google's ally. Rally purports to uncover the tracking network of Google's main competitor, Facebook, as well as to "understand search engine choice" (no pun intended), Google's formidable competitors for web search market share.
There was a time when Mozilla really did fight big tech. I loved working there. Internally the phrase "we fight for the user" was used, and it felt true.
Now they're just using that same war-cry as marketing to get you to sign up and fill out surveys for their market research. They're doing exactly what they're mad big tech is doing (collecting data), but with a dose of moral superiority.
It's sad that they've taken a message that resonates and just haphazardly use it for messaging anything they're building.
I installed firefox focus which is a privacy first mobile browser that advertises that it cuts out phoning home. I was irate when I dug into the settings and found out that "Studies" is on by default. Research data collection should always be opt-in rather than opt-out, especially for privacy focused software.
Being mad about something like this is just choosing the wrong hill to die on, honestly. Studies (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/shield) are clearly just a/b testing of features for the browser. Doing this opt-in creates selection bias which corrupts the whole idea of running a/b tests.
So instead of saying "you should run your a/b tests opt-in only", what you really mean is "in order to fight for privacy, you should never run a/b tests", which, again, totally wrong hill to die on. Why is it so important they not be allowed to try different features to figure out which ones work and which ones don't?
Mozilla has made so many missteps they circled a small planet with them. This isn't one of them.
If you advertise a browser as being all about privacy, you absolutely should not be a/b testing users without their explicit consent. It is amazing to me that this needs to be said.
Okay, why? What does a/b testing have to do with privacy?
If I told you right now that HN is A/B testing the size of the vote arrows, and you see larger ones than I do, how exactly are your privacy rights violated?
I've never seen A/B testing used for crash reporting. Perhaps it could be used for this, but it's flabbergasting to me that you see it as only for crash reporting.
> My behavior on a site is now being sent to the browser author, an unrelated party.
But you're just assuming it is. It could also be "On uninstall and crash, report back which studies were enabled" to track how many people are uninstalling their browser when the flag stupid_feature="on" is set.
Be mad about the data collected [specifically, what type of data is collected], not about the concept of a/b testing. Set clear boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable. Otherwise you're fighting an ever-uphiller battle. Because if they want to know which sites you visit and the privacy boundary is "a/b testing isn't acceptable", they'll do it via history syncing instead.
> Be mad about the data collected, not about the concept of a/b testing.
What does this sentence mean? A/B testing fundamentally requires data collection, so I don't understand how to be mad about the data collected but not A/B testing.
I think they're saying to be mad about what data is collected. For example, be mad if they're storing your IP address and location and not be mad if they're just storing a counter of how many people visited their marketing page.
A privacy first browser should be completely up front about what data is being collected. The simple fact that they did while implying something else means that they arent to be trusted to not abuse the privilege in the future.
You're not assuming the worst if your assumption is that "some third-party I distrust will respect the checkbox they themselves control".
Mozilla has arbitrary code execution rights on your computer the moment you allow them auto-updates. They're also entirely free to ignore your opt-out or opt-in requests.
That's not a analogous situation. You can inspect and control what the code does on your device, but you can't inspect what is done with your data after it leaves it.
Yeah... no. If your claim is that the code on your own device can just be inspected, then you can inspect what data leaves your device instead of assuming Mozilla hoovers up everything including your porn stash, credit cards and the weed hidden in your cd tray.
> My behavior on a site is now being sent to the browser author, an unrelated party.
What is the consequence of this? In the abstract I understand that it doesn’t feel great, but I’m asking in the specific, how does it make a difference to any individual user?
If you knew that the user in the A group made fewer misclicks after the back button was shrunk … how does that harm anyone?
You could say the same thing about pretty much all adtech tracking, since nearly everyone would be unable demonstrate any concrete harm to themselves.
That's not the point. The point is unless you are doing data collection on anything but an opt-in basis, you are not pro-privacy. What you do with the data or why you collect it or if that collection is harmful is irrelevant to this principle.
That's just extra data points that you give away for no good reason. Realistically it will not amount to anything (like, I'm sure, absolute majority of data collected even by sleaziest adtech). But worst case scenario? You data gets sold to a medical insurer, deanonymised, fed into ML models, then used to justify increasing premiums based on inferred health info.
Obviously you'd need to know how they're measuring the effect. And I think that's the problem: Firefox doesn't make that easy enough. If Firefox gave on installation
* a short list of all the data they could collect, and
* a promise that they won't collect anything else without asking for the user's consent again,
except for that one time they silently pushed an extension marketing a TV show, which is probably how anyone who's heard of Firefox studies found out about them.
Yes, I'm aware. This is one of their million missteps (and this was a particularly bad one). But that their marketing people are absolute idiots has no bearing on whether a/b testing as a concept infringes on privacy. They could have used any other thing, they're literally in control of what runs on your computer the moment you allow them auto-update rights.
Informed consent is a standard practice for human experimentation. It's a serious ethical lapse that the web companies have decided it doesn't apply to them simply because it's inconvenient. Here's some references:
Research ethics is way too deontologically focused, it needs reform. See: at minimum tens of thousands of deaths directly caused by failure to use challenge trials.
This is often taken too far. If the research is "try out an experimental medicine" then yes, of course you need informed consent, because the patient is taking a risk.
If it's "see which color blue people like best in your UI" then this is nonsense. Nobody is going to be harmed regardless of which color blue you pick, so they don't need to be informed. Some privacy zealots may want to be informed, but they don't have a reasonable argument for why they need to know.
It doesn't need to be so life or death here. This is a privacy focused browser with the explicit message that it cuts out tracking, so the tracking without consent is pure hypocrisy.
It absolutely should apply to psychological experiments as well. If you can't see that treating fellow humans as lab rats for you to experiment on is deeply problematic, then you're an actual sociopath.
I don't care how you rationalize it, as long as there is any sort of intervention, you need informed consent.
If changing a color in a UI is a "psychological experiment" then all artists and UI designers are doing psychological experiments all the time. Are you doing a psychological experiment every time you edit a CSS file?
This is redefining something ordinary to sound bad, but that doesn't make it bad.
Secretly monitoring unaware people to see how they behave based on the UI design is absolutely experimenting on people, and deeply problematic. It doesn't matter if other people are doing it. It's wrong. People aren't for experimenting on.
It's experimenting on software, not experimenting on people. "People" aren't the part of the equation that anyone cares about in this scenario.
And I do not think you're even sort of having this argument in good faith. You can't possibly be a rational person and believe that changing UI colors is "deeply problematic experimentation on people".
Forgive me if I'm a little pissed off but this privacy extremism shit is exactly what leads to people looking down at anyone who is a privacy advocate as a nutjob. So, thanks a lot for that, more work for those of us out there who want, to, I dunno, protect citizens from being genuinely fucking spied on and their data passed around like candy so better ads can be served.
But hey, it's all good, you're keeping those pesky UI designers from knowing which of their redesign is better, so at least we got that going for us.
It seems a bit dismissive to wave off pp's discomfort with becoming an unwitting UI test subject.
I also would not agree with any argument like "opt-in is necessary to reign in anti-privacy activities of bad companies like Facebook, but we're good UI designers at Mozilla so we don't need to use opt-in and can use opt-out with impunity."
A browser that collects and reports any information on its users without their explicit permission is simply not putting privacy first.
Any privacy-focused browser should make UI testing - or any other telemetry or analytics - opt-in and should generally clearly disclose any information being collected (and preferably make it available for inspection) and also describe all parties that will have access to the information as well as what it will be used for.
The fundamental problem is your view of human beings as tools to be used to further your goals. Other people aren't tools for you to use. They are your peers.
If you view them as instruments, you're a villain. It doesn't matter if your intentions are good. Everyone has good intentions. Every atrocity in human history has been made with good intentions.
It doesn't matter if you don't think it will do them any harm. That's not for you to decide.
What's wrong with filling out surveys? Data collection is an important way for product developers to improve their products. This can either be done without user consent through shady data collection practices or explicitly with the user's consent as is the case with surveys.
You are free not to fill out the surveys but saying that any form of data collection is akin to "doing what big tech is doing" is an extremist position and undermines companies which are respecting users' privacy and requesting rather than forcibly extracting data about user behaviour.
More directly, I think the point that I read from multiple comments here is that Mozilla is somewhat different, but not that different. In being not that different but using messaging like they are that different it comes off as equally egregious.
I see the current things they're running through this, and it's university studies on various topics that could use browsing data. So I see value in having a simpler route for researchers to get that, and one that respects users' choice in what to participate in and so on... but the "fight Big Tech" gloss is a turn-off.
I suppose when you know your audience is dwindling down closer and closer to just "people who are ideologically opposed to Chrome" this is the messaging you go with.
What I couldn't find was: does Mozilla get paid by the researchers for this data? There's language around users "donating" their data, and a sort of caveat-ed pledge not to "sell your data" but what the actualy structure of this program is was unclear to me. Their site isn't really clear about whether this falls under the auspices of the "corporation" or "foundation" side of Mozilla's operations.
I also wonder for research purposes, the extreme opt-in nature of this program, you need to be using Firefox, you need to opt-in to Rally, and opt-in to the specific study. You have so much selection bias there that the data feels like it won't be terribly useful for extrapolating valid patterns about, say, COVID-19 information/misinformation (as one of the studies is examining).
It has nothing to do specifically with Firefox, but is all about the incentives. If someone puts a non-trivial amount of effort into developing a product, they could be motivated by:
1. Trying to make money off selling it to end users.
2. Trying to make money by selling the end users' attention to advertisers.
3. Vanity, if it's a side/hobby project.
4. Influence the audience (pushing things aligned with their values into the audience's attention span).
5. Being a loss leader of a sort. E.g., trying to grab a market share in expectations to make money later, or sell growth figures to investors.
So, specifically to web browsers:
* Chrome, the de-facto standard, is clearly sustained by option #2.
* Because Chrome is free-to-use, option #1 is not viable for any competition.
* Because web browsers are complex and require a lot of upkeep, #3 is also mostly out of the picture.
So, if Mozilla wants to stay alive, they have no other choice than to treat their end users as the merchandise. And, to differentiate themselves from Google, they will keep making bullshit claims that will have nothing to do with reality. Even worse, as long as the current approach to antitrust doesn't change, there won't be any long-term alternatives to this model.
All of this could be swiftly solved by deeming indirectly subsidized "free" products anti-competitive (e.g. cash flow coming from outside the direct users), and not allowing mergers above something like a 20% market share, but I can't see this happen anytime soon.
They could just take that $400 mil/year and dump it entirely into the browser for as long as the money lasts. Ideally spending some money refactoring their codebase such that it could be more likely for the code to survive on after a loss of funding as an non-Mozilla open-source project. Follow the public radio route and take donations, build a sense of community. Possibly spin up a commercial Rust consultancy/side-business (I know this is hypocritical, it's just that Rust seems like the "git" to Mozilla's equivalent of "linux", out of all the things I've seen them try. Sorry Thunderbird lovers :P)
I'm not sure we can meaningfully advocate for privacy atm without having a better understanding of what data big tech collects, what inferences they can glean from even limited data sets, what changes in behavior their customers can nudge users toward, and the worst-case hazards that extant algos can create.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind joining an "Evilcorp" social media network run by FSF, EFF, or some such, if it were done in a way where the insights gleaned about big tech dangers were to be made public in a responsible way. It's one thing to watch a documentary that provides a vignette with actors showing how social media might nudge a teen away socializing to instead check their status updates. It's quite another to find out that a single, seemingly trivial change to the "Evilcorp" feed caused an average of 2 hours less sleep for its userbase.
I'd also want to know-- what's the worst case sleep loss average? It's important to have detailed answers to these kinds of questions if we want to meaningfully protect our privacy online. And we don't even have something as crucial as `git blame` for these types of things.
And given the ubiquity of data mining today, the dangers of creating such a dataset must be a drop in the bucket by comparison.
>pushing projects that are antithetical to privacy is just nauseating
this is a research tool. People voluntarily and with their own consent contribute data to understand how tech companies and algorithms use data.
If privacy now apparently entails that voluntarily collected data for scientific purposes is illegitimate we better close every university and business on earth down. These complaints are getting a little bit ridiculous.
>"The illustration style is flat, geometric, figurative, and usually made up of solid colours... It’s an aesthetic that’s often referred to as ‘Corporate Memphis’, and it’s become the definitive style for big tech and small startups, relentlessly imitated and increasingly parodied. It involves the use of simple, well-bounded scenes of flat cartoon figures in action, often with a slight distortion in proportions (the most common of which being long, bendy arms) to signal that a company is fun and creative."
From "How we use your data":
>> ...put the power to create a positive change in the right hands.
No way would I touch something like this with your pole. This is langauge that paves a clear path for abuse. This isn't even modern day virtue signaling, it's been around for ages.
I can't manage to see Mozilla as standing on integrous ground, with their constant spewing of 'woke' bs and muddy objectives/chasing of butterflies.
Create something new to love, rather than fighting against what you hate.
Doesn't Mozilla's main source of revenue come from putting Google in their browser? I.e., they are dependent on Big Tech partnerships for their continued existence.
Anytime someone uses "big" as an adjective like a pejorative, the argument should be obviously weak to anyone with a critical mind. Why should the size of a company have any relevance to its unethical or abusive actions?
If a company engages in monopolistic, anti-competitive, or abusive behavior, call it that.
There is an argument that the larger the company, the less human - the more admin and beholdenness to anonymous shareholders after short term profits and therefore it correlates to the type of anti-social behaviour you reference even if it will vary from company to company.
More practically: larger means more power, which means greater market asymmetry and general power asymmetry in society. Such situations should always IMO be viewed with skepticism at best.
The term "evil" came from some of the oldest written languages and was originally used in a religious/supernatural context, and almost always is used in a religious/supernatural context today. If you intend on using it without a supernatural context, you could say "bad".
"But, large non-bad companies do not exist." I hope this helps you realize how unbased in reality this statement is. Maybe you could give me some basis as to how you justify this opinion?
Easy. Imagine an asshole restauranteur who kicks you out without recourse every time. Annoying, fuck that guy, but not too bad. Say he owns a few places. Still not too bad, the world's full of competition. Now imagine that asshole owning almost all restaurants and enforcing his fuck-beebman-in-particular policy.
Or, say, a bookseller delists some book for ideological reasons. If it's one private location, little harm, little foul. Amazon? Uh oh.
Size and market share do matter, and some effects depend on that.
I'm kind of surprised they got two people to let them stick their faces with quotes that are so irrelevant to the pages content, other than being some kind of endorsement.
> “Mozilla Rally has the potential to be the Hubble Space Telescope of the Internet.”
> David Lazer, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences, Northeastern University
and
> “Mozilla Rally is a revelatory tool that seeks to fix the information imbalance created by tech platforms at the public’s expense.”
> Julia Angwin, Editor-in-Chief and Founder of The Markup
Mozilla should go ham on Rust. Make a Rust GUI and then an app store and a cloud hosting service. Become the one stop shop for building anything Rust and make money that way.
This is nonsense. The Firefox user base is narrow, self-selecting, and small. They won't be able to "uncover Facebook's tracking network, understand search engine choice, and help local news find sustainability" with that limited instrument. How many Firefox users actually use Facebook? Maybe 100 total?
> We combine our best-in-class technology & data science to operate one of the world’s most advanced Responsive Acquisition Marketing Platforms (RAMP). RAMP enables us to build powerful brands across multiple consumer verticals, develop & grow our suite of privacy-focused products, and deliver high-intent customers to our advertising partners.
Brave is the new Mozilla. Mozilla is a husk. Brave launched a new search engine (which works great. try it!), have built-in Tor support, Wayback Machine support, experiment with new revenue models and unlike Mitchell "we need more than deplatforming" Baker, Eich actually seems to have the visceral inclination for the things that Mozilla claims to stand for.
You can turn off the Brave Rewards if you don't want them.
If you want to cut off your access to technologies because the man who invented them doesn't meet your puritanical world-view then you should also disable JavaScript since Brendan Eich invented JavaScript.
As a gay man I could give two shits about his opinion on gay marriage. In my opinion marriage is inherently a religious institution and the state has no business regulating it whatsoever. From the state's standpoint any combination of genders should be considered a civil union for taxation purposes and if you want to have your union blessed by the religion of your choice, go ahead. They can call it marriage, they can call it a ham sandwich. "Gay marriage" shouldn't legally exist because neither should "marriage." But nuance doesn't exist in a world of anger-driven online lynch mobs.
You're calling equal rights for gay people puritanical?
You're playing a lot of mental gymnastics here. Eich isn't anti-marriage, he specifically supported excluding gay people from marriage. He gave money to one of the most vocal prop 8 supporters and a group that fund-raised on prop 8 specifically. Where's the nuance?
I’m not saying I agree with Brendan Eich’s opinions. I’m saying I don’t care what his opinions are. Prop 8 was dumb and I voted against it but I can respect and understand why people _did_ vote for it.
It doesn’t make people _heretics_ to have a political disagreement.
You could cancel Brave because you think Eich hates the gays. You could cancel Apple because their phones are made in sweatshop conditions that drive workers to mass suicide. Cancel electric cars because the cobalt batteries are mined by African children who die of exposure. Cance Nike because despite their woke posturing they use sweatshops too. Don’t wear clothes because the factories collapse etc.
Nobody in our first world capitalist bubble is blameless, we are all fat and happy off the exploitation of the weak, so to get on a moral high horse against the inventor of JavaScript is laughable. Just chill out and drink your Starbucks and keep those sweet rent checks rolling in.
No one suggested ostracizing Eich... just not supporting his company.
I'm sorry this makes you so angry. Maybe you have a convincing point to make, but the way you're trying to make it will be lost on anyone that doesn't already agree with you.
> You could cancel Brave because you think Eich hates the gays. You could cancel Apple because their phones are made in sweatshop conditions that drive workers to mass suicide. Cancel electric cars because the cobalt batteries are mined by African children who die of exposure. Cance Nike because despite their woke posturing they use sweatshops too. Don’t wear clothes because the factories collapse etc.
All of those seem like ... good things to me? (At least to the extent that I believe the factual claims.) Call me crazy, but I am not yet so cynical as to believe that I cannot with my actions make any difference in the world. To be clear, the problem is not so much Eich "hating the gays" as it is him collecting a ~7 figure salary and funneling money from that into right wing causes that hurt people in the real world.
Do you sincerely believe that your existence is a net negative to the world as a whole? Have you internalized that belief? I would quite literally not be able to live with myself if I believed that. I try to minimize the negative impacts my consumption has on others as far as I can. It's not about "cancellation", because that's become a stupid meme and lost any meaning it had, it's about being careful abut what I consume. I don't, for example, buy anything from Nestle.
> Nobody in our first world capitalist bubble is blameless, we are all fat and happy off the exploitation of the weak, so to get on a moral high horse against the inventor of JavaScript is laughable. Just chill out and drink your Starbucks and keep those sweet rent checks rolling in.
This is, at the end of the day, just pure cynicism.
Cool. But that isn’t really that cool. That one is easy. What makes you okay with buying products from Apple but not from Nestle? Is it that Nestle has enough competition that it’s a low cost protest? Is it that Apple is hurting people far away from you while Nestle is exploiting your more local environment?
What would it take to make you buy from Nestle again? If they somehow bought Apple’s laptop division?
Having no beliefs is more laudable than people who act on only the convenient beliefs.
> Having no beliefs is more laudable than people who act on only the convenient beliefs.
what? laudable by whom? sure it’s lazy to only act on convenient beliefs, but it’s certainly more interesting than doing literally nothing
if my one belief is to cut those little six-pack pop rings before putting them in the trash to benefit sea turtles… how is not doing that laudable? because someone told you it’s cool to not care about anything?
Nobody has ever told me in any way, shape or form that not caring is cool. In fact, in my generation the opposite is true, caring is 100% cool. See the scene in the remake of “21 Jump Street” where Channing Tatum’s character is thrown off by how “activist” everyone is.
My point though was more specific to the poster I replied to, they hand-waved the parent comment away (partially) by mentioning that they boycott Nestle. It rings hollow that all of the other points are less relevant because they boycott what is quite possibly the easiest company to boycott. I would have more respected a response of either “yeah, I pick and choose what I boycott based on both logically tangible and emotional reasons, so trying to find consistency is not only impossible but also foolish” or just to say “who I boycott and why is up to me. Maybe I boycott all of those companies, maybe none. I don’t boycott to be performative”
No. What he's calling puritanical is an attitude where you won't touch things made by people who disagree with you on something. What your position on gay marriage is is largely irrelevant.
I'm sorry, am I not supposed to be able to "vote with my wallet"?
If someone says "hey the guy that runs this company doesn't think you should be treated the same as others because of your sexual preference" I should ignore that because "who cares"?
I'm just not sure what the counter-argument is here... it sounds like "everything and everyone sucks, and you suck too, so stop paying attention and trying to improve anything"
> I'm sorry, am I not supposed to be able to "vote with my wallet"?
Well, yes. But there's another angle as to what you vote for with it.
Voting for the creator's politics is one angle, but there's another one. Whether the creator puts politics into their product.
One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics outside what matters for a browser. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services. I don't get politics outside privacy, user control and independent web services pushed to me by Brave. The politics that are there matter to a browser, and the stuff that's outside that scope is left as the people's own prerogative.
The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they also keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it.
I know I'll disagree on weighty matters by people making both products, but as far the browser matters, we all agree.
Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second, and they are not shy about inserting their extraneous politics into the browser.
We're more and more into a culture where everything under the Sun has to preach some sort of politics, and it usually detracts from making an actually good product, in my experience. I like to support organizations that focus on making good hammers and leave the politics to the parts of life where they belong. Life is far more civil that way.
~2014. I am curious if his opinion has changed. Sometimes you find yourself on the wrong side of history and re-evaluate positions such as these. Given your link is getting old... maybe he has?
If his opinion hasn't changed, I wonder if this political/religious stance really affects my decision of browser? I suspect it doesn't. People are allowed to have political opinions.
I suppose in dec 2020 Fauci had admitted that he lied about masks being ineffective. Overall though I really didnt see the content in this nytimes article to justify the title.
I suppose the bigger question for me, does this dude matter at all? Let's say he's literal reincarnation of hitler. Does that really change the browser?
Flipside, this guy's wiki page says he invented Javascript. Clearly he is hitler.
> If his opinion hasn't changed, I wonder if this political/religious stance really affects my decision of browser? I suspect it doesn't. People are allowed to have political opinions.
One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services.
The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it.
Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second. And their "rebellion" is a $400 million Google dollar one.
I know one thing: When I see a privacy-friendly organization saying we need more than deplatforming and to tweak feeds to suit political agendas, I bail.
>One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services.
So in your opinion, Mozilla's CEO shouldn't be saying we need to do more than deplatform politicians? I suppose she was unclear in what more that was exactly?
>The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it.
Yes, I have vivaldi over on my pinebook pro. I haven't really done much yet with it. excited to check it out.
>Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second. And their "rebellion" is a $400 million Google dollar one.
Their budget is what 90% from google? That money has attachments im sure. Hence probably why they have trashed firefox so badly.
>I know one thing: When I see a privacy-friendly organization saying we need more than deplatforming and to tweak feeds to suit political agendas, I bail.
Yes, it's clear firefox deserves their 7% market share and dropping. I wouldn't recommend firefox to anyone.
> So in your opinion, Mozilla's CEO shouldn't be saying we need to do more than deplatform politicians? I suppose she was unclear in what more that was exactly?
Mozilla was actually reasonably clear. Some of it was stuff that might in principle be okay (more transparency on who funds what, which on one hand is good for highlighting certain kinds of corruption but on another can open people up for witch hunts in this fucked up social atmosphere we live in nowadays), but they explicitly praised Facebook altering its feed to prioritize sources Mozilla liked over ones it doesn't - namely the legacy prestige media who are ideological liars the same as anyone else. They might've been less so back in the day, but in the current business model and post TDS, nope.
Let's also not forget that cancel culture and throwing out incendiary labels like "conspiracy theorist" based on a particular set of personal views you and the establishment deem "incorrect" really belongs on Reddit and Twitter, not on HN.
For every two links you give for Brave, any random HNer can give 10x or more that amount for Google/Chrome or any other Big Tech company these days.
Curious, why would someone use brave over Chromium?
Brave as I understand it is just the Chromium browser at its core. (Similar to how all browsers on iOS are just safari wrapped in a different application layer)
We work closely with uBO folks, but as a browser we got a lot farther than Google allows an extension to go (and with Manifest V3 they're getting more restrictive). See the blog series at https://brave.com/privacy-updates/ and see also the work detailed at https://brave.com/research/. Thanks.
I don't particularly care for the remnant of Mozilla either, but it's not at all clear to me that Brave is a better option. It seems very much like they're trying to position themselves as a kinder, gentler flavor of adtech. I don't want that; I hate that the modern web has turned into an adtech ouroboros, and I want a browser whose mission is to gut the whole thing, not a browser with a new recipe for a more delicious tail.
Brave user-private ads are opt in, so I don't agree on your positioning. Ad-tech is always intermediation between advertisers and publishers. We don't puts ads in page at all, and only in user inventory when the user opts in -- and they get 70% of the gross, to align interests. No data collection at all (ad matching against pushed catalog; confirmed via Privacy Pass like protocol, moving on-chain with Solana). HTH
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062636 among others. The fight right now is not over engine layer, and no point dying on that hill. Rather, the fight is one level up at user-first economics, vs. big-tech's "users as sheep to shear or take to slaughterhouse" model.
I'm now waiting for this to be installed by default, 'a la' Pocket. It is yet another feature the users are not asking for.
Give me privacy and, after that, speed. I don't want ANY data collection that is not opt-in. As it is I have to go out of my way to use a custom `user.js` to get this instead of it coming out of the box.
I dislike Rust the community but Rust the language was a good fit for an alternative browser, IMO Mozilla could afford to hire competent developers outside high paid cities and have them continue doing developer work then just putting more money in side-projects. A faster and safer browser would make a larger difference then some marketing and a giant difference then poor side projects.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadUnderstand search engine choice? That's an absurd thing to say; 90% of their revenue comes from default-search-engine contracts...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...
>"The majority of Mozilla's income (over 90 percent) is generated from relationships with search engines and Google has always been top of the list."
No doubt they'll report some true and nasty stuff about Facebook, but this is straight out of the "Big Tobacco/Oil" research funding playbook.
Ironically, the page loads JS from https://cdn-3.convertexperiments.com (seems to belong to convert.com) and Twitter, without disclosing the fact that Mozilla is sharing your browser data with those two entities.
I'm a daily Firefox user myself, but I can't help to feel that each political effort they try to execute either backfires, or draws resources from what really has to be done: developing and maintaining a excellent user agent for the open web.
This is why (for the narrow demographic that bothers to care) uMatrix is such an awesome tool. This page is completely functional without loading either of those domains' shovelware -- and it saves laptop battery life too. This is true for most pages.
Ironic indeed that it's mozilla.org illustrating this point.
Block everything by default! Block all the things!
The requests were blocked in my browser, but the reason I checked in the first is the same reason I check every time some service claims to be pro-privacy or other similar things like this landing page: Are you actually living up to your words? In this case, they didn't, and honestly, there is not a cases where they do live up to their word 100%.
It seems like every other month there's a thread complaining about how Mozilla would never really do anything against Google's interests because of their income stream, and then every other month in between those rant threads Mozilla launches some new tracking protection [0] or privacy initiative directed specifically against Google.
[0] https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185
- Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
- Source: https://github.com/containers-everywhere/contain-google
Some people have estimated that Google gives Apple $15B in total for its default search position. That could mean that around 16-23% of Apple's profits come from Google paying for being the default search engine. Heck, analysts said it would probably reach $18-20B for 2022 (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/27/google-could-pay-apple-...). Apple's profits for the past 12 months was $94.7B (which is up around 66% against the previous 12 months). $20B would still be 21% of that. Even $15B is 16% of that.
The default search on iPhone is one of Apple's largest businesses. It's bigger than its Mac business or its iPad business or its wearables business.
Yet Apple is still biting the hand that feeds them by working against ad tracking. One can argue that it might help Apple in other ways like customer goodwill, making marketers more reliant on Apple-provided data if third parties can't track as well, weakening Google in ways that might weaken the Android ecosystem, etc. Similarly, Mozilla is trying to get a certain amount of customer goodwill and potentially finding other ways for marketers to reach their customers.
While Apple's position in the market is quite secure, Mozilla might be seeing a future where Google doesn't think it needs to pay Mozilla for that default search position. Firefox users are likely people who know how to switch browser defaults and Firefox marketshare is getting small and continuing to decline. I think that's a big reason that we're seeing Mozilla search for new sources of revenue. It looks like Firefox usage is down more than 50% over the past 5 years alone. That means its default search position is a lot less valuable. Even if Google will continue to pay, those payments are likely shrinking. Firefox's position on mobile is even worse.
Even if Mozilla is mostly financed by Google, that financing is likely shrinking. At the same time, software engineers in the US are getting really expensive and Google is pouring money into Chrome (engineers and marketing). Chrome also benefits from a lot of third parties putting money into Chrome. Microsoft is now using Chromium for Edge and Node and the rest of the JS world uses V8. That puts so much weight behind Chromium for Mozilla to fight against - while likely seeing their funding from Google shrink.
It looks like Mozilla's royalty revenue is declining a bit (probably around 10% over the past 5 years), but not too substantially so far (and there's always some noise). But it's also not growing which puts them in a bit of a precarious position given that Google and others are investing more and more in Chromium, their marketshare is declining (which will likely lead to declines in search engine payments in the future), and the increasing cost of software engineers. So do you try to stick it out with the Google search agreement knowing that your users landing on Google's website will be told to upgrade to Chrome or do you try and find a source of revenue that isn't a competitor?
To me Mozilla is barely distinguishable from Google at this point
Now they're just using that same war-cry as marketing to get you to sign up and fill out surveys for their market research. They're doing exactly what they're mad big tech is doing (collecting data), but with a dose of moral superiority.
It's sad that they've taken a message that resonates and just haphazardly use it for messaging anything they're building.
So instead of saying "you should run your a/b tests opt-in only", what you really mean is "in order to fight for privacy, you should never run a/b tests", which, again, totally wrong hill to die on. Why is it so important they not be allowed to try different features to figure out which ones work and which ones don't?
Mozilla has made so many missteps they circled a small planet with them. This isn't one of them.
I may agree with the goals, but that doesn't mean I should blindly trust them to execute them, right?
If I told you right now that HN is A/B testing the size of the vote arrows, and you see larger ones than I do, how exactly are your privacy rights violated?
On a website, that isn't too much of a problem, because you expect your activity to be tracked since you are interacting with a web server.
In a browser, the same tracking is more intrusive. My behavior on a site is now being sent to the browser author, an unrelated party.
But you're just assuming it is. It could also be "On uninstall and crash, report back which studies were enabled" to track how many people are uninstalling their browser when the flag stupid_feature="on" is set.
Be mad about the data collected [specifically, what type of data is collected], not about the concept of a/b testing. Set clear boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable. Otherwise you're fighting an ever-uphiller battle. Because if they want to know which sites you visit and the privacy boundary is "a/b testing isn't acceptable", they'll do it via history syncing instead.
What does this sentence mean? A/B testing fundamentally requires data collection, so I don't understand how to be mad about the data collected but not A/B testing.
Don’t be mad _that_ data is collected, be mad about _what specific_ data is collected.
I don’t know that I agree, but it does help me understand the meaning of the previous post. Thanks!
Of course we are. We didn't consent to being experimented upon or to have our behavior analyzed, so we have no basis for trust.
> Set clear boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable
Acceptable depends on trust. Ask for permission, not forgiveness, and I am more inclined to trust. Without that, I assume the worst.
Mozilla has arbitrary code execution rights on your computer the moment you allow them auto-updates. They're also entirely free to ignore your opt-out or opt-in requests.
What is the consequence of this? In the abstract I understand that it doesn’t feel great, but I’m asking in the specific, how does it make a difference to any individual user?
If you knew that the user in the A group made fewer misclicks after the back button was shrunk … how does that harm anyone?
That's not the point. The point is unless you are doing data collection on anything but an opt-in basis, you are not pro-privacy. What you do with the data or why you collect it or if that collection is harmful is irrelevant to this principle.
A _privacy marketed_ browser sending such analytics data back home is different from a regular browser doing so.
* a short list of all the data they could collect, and
* a promise that they won't collect anything else without asking for the user's consent again,
then I doubt anyone would complain.
https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/18/mozilla_mr_robot_fire...
https://researchbasics.education.uconn.edu/ethics-and-inform... https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/conduc...
If it's "see which color blue people like best in your UI" then this is nonsense. Nobody is going to be harmed regardless of which color blue you pick, so they don't need to be informed. Some privacy zealots may want to be informed, but they don't have a reasonable argument for why they need to know.
I don't care how you rationalize it, as long as there is any sort of intervention, you need informed consent.
This is redefining something ordinary to sound bad, but that doesn't make it bad.
And I do not think you're even sort of having this argument in good faith. You can't possibly be a rational person and believe that changing UI colors is "deeply problematic experimentation on people".
Forgive me if I'm a little pissed off but this privacy extremism shit is exactly what leads to people looking down at anyone who is a privacy advocate as a nutjob. So, thanks a lot for that, more work for those of us out there who want, to, I dunno, protect citizens from being genuinely fucking spied on and their data passed around like candy so better ads can be served.
But hey, it's all good, you're keeping those pesky UI designers from knowing which of their redesign is better, so at least we got that going for us.
I also would not agree with any argument like "opt-in is necessary to reign in anti-privacy activities of bad companies like Facebook, but we're good UI designers at Mozilla so we don't need to use opt-in and can use opt-out with impunity."
A browser that collects and reports any information on its users without their explicit permission is simply not putting privacy first.
Any privacy-focused browser should make UI testing - or any other telemetry or analytics - opt-in and should generally clearly disclose any information being collected (and preferably make it available for inspection) and also describe all parties that will have access to the information as well as what it will be used for.
If you view them as instruments, you're a villain. It doesn't matter if your intentions are good. Everyone has good intentions. Every atrocity in human history has been made with good intentions.
It doesn't matter if you don't think it will do them any harm. That's not for you to decide.
You are free not to fill out the surveys but saying that any form of data collection is akin to "doing what big tech is doing" is an extremist position and undermines companies which are respecting users' privacy and requesting rather than forcibly extracting data about user behaviour.
I suppose when you know your audience is dwindling down closer and closer to just "people who are ideologically opposed to Chrome" this is the messaging you go with.
What I couldn't find was: does Mozilla get paid by the researchers for this data? There's language around users "donating" their data, and a sort of caveat-ed pledge not to "sell your data" but what the actualy structure of this program is was unclear to me. Their site isn't really clear about whether this falls under the auspices of the "corporation" or "foundation" side of Mozilla's operations.
I also wonder for research purposes, the extreme opt-in nature of this program, you need to be using Firefox, you need to opt-in to Rally, and opt-in to the specific study. You have so much selection bias there that the data feels like it won't be terribly useful for extrapolating valid patterns about, say, COVID-19 information/misinformation (as one of the studies is examining).
1. Trying to make money off selling it to end users.
2. Trying to make money by selling the end users' attention to advertisers.
3. Vanity, if it's a side/hobby project.
4. Influence the audience (pushing things aligned with their values into the audience's attention span).
5. Being a loss leader of a sort. E.g., trying to grab a market share in expectations to make money later, or sell growth figures to investors.
So, specifically to web browsers:
* Chrome, the de-facto standard, is clearly sustained by option #2.
* Because Chrome is free-to-use, option #1 is not viable for any competition.
* Because web browsers are complex and require a lot of upkeep, #3 is also mostly out of the picture.
So, if Mozilla wants to stay alive, they have no other choice than to treat their end users as the merchandise. And, to differentiate themselves from Google, they will keep making bullshit claims that will have nothing to do with reality. Even worse, as long as the current approach to antitrust doesn't change, there won't be any long-term alternatives to this model.
All of this could be swiftly solved by deeming indirectly subsidized "free" products anti-competitive (e.g. cash flow coming from outside the direct users), and not allowing mergers above something like a 20% market share, but I can't see this happen anytime soon.
Mozilla's positioning as a privacy advocate while consistently pushing projects that are antithetical to privacy is just nauseating.
I'm not sure we can meaningfully advocate for privacy atm without having a better understanding of what data big tech collects, what inferences they can glean from even limited data sets, what changes in behavior their customers can nudge users toward, and the worst-case hazards that extant algos can create.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind joining an "Evilcorp" social media network run by FSF, EFF, or some such, if it were done in a way where the insights gleaned about big tech dangers were to be made public in a responsible way. It's one thing to watch a documentary that provides a vignette with actors showing how social media might nudge a teen away socializing to instead check their status updates. It's quite another to find out that a single, seemingly trivial change to the "Evilcorp" feed caused an average of 2 hours less sleep for its userbase.
I'd also want to know-- what's the worst case sleep loss average? It's important to have detailed answers to these kinds of questions if we want to meaningfully protect our privacy online. And we don't even have something as crucial as `git blame` for these types of things.
And given the ubiquity of data mining today, the dangers of creating such a dataset must be a drop in the bucket by comparison.
this is a research tool. People voluntarily and with their own consent contribute data to understand how tech companies and algorithms use data.
If privacy now apparently entails that voluntarily collected data for scientific purposes is illegitimate we better close every university and business on earth down. These complaints are getting a little bit ridiculous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27107820 ("Why does every advert look the same? Corporate Memphis (wired.co.uk)") [189 comments]
>"The illustration style is flat, geometric, figurative, and usually made up of solid colours... It’s an aesthetic that’s often referred to as ‘Corporate Memphis’, and it’s become the definitive style for big tech and small startups, relentlessly imitated and increasingly parodied. It involves the use of simple, well-bounded scenes of flat cartoon figures in action, often with a slight distortion in proportions (the most common of which being long, bendy arms) to signal that a company is fun and creative."
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...
No way would I touch something like this with your pole. This is langauge that paves a clear path for abuse. This isn't even modern day virtue signaling, it's been around for ages.
I can't manage to see Mozilla as standing on integrous ground, with their constant spewing of 'woke' bs and muddy objectives/chasing of butterflies.
Create something new to love, rather than fighting against what you hate.
If a company engages in monopolistic, anti-competitive, or abusive behavior, call it that.
But, large non-evil companies do not exist.
"But, large non-bad companies do not exist." I hope this helps you realize how unbased in reality this statement is. Maybe you could give me some basis as to how you justify this opinion?
> monopolistic, anti-competitive, or abusive behavior
Or, say, a bookseller delists some book for ideological reasons. If it's one private location, little harm, little foul. Amazon? Uh oh.
Size and market share do matter, and some effects depend on that.
> “Mozilla Rally has the potential to be the Hubble Space Telescope of the Internet.”
> David Lazer, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences, Northeastern University
and
> “Mozilla Rally is a revelatory tool that seeks to fix the information imbalance created by tech platforms at the public’s expense.”
> Julia Angwin, Editor-in-Chief and Founder of The Markup
Their poor decision making, including Pocket integration, started after they forced Brendan Eich out.
https://system1.com/what-we-do
https://librewolf.net/
If you want to cut off your access to technologies because the man who invented them doesn't meet your puritanical world-view then you should also disable JavaScript since Brendan Eich invented JavaScript.
As a gay man I could give two shits about his opinion on gay marriage. In my opinion marriage is inherently a religious institution and the state has no business regulating it whatsoever. From the state's standpoint any combination of genders should be considered a civil union for taxation purposes and if you want to have your union blessed by the religion of your choice, go ahead. They can call it marriage, they can call it a ham sandwich. "Gay marriage" shouldn't legally exist because neither should "marriage." But nuance doesn't exist in a world of anger-driven online lynch mobs.
You're playing a lot of mental gymnastics here. Eich isn't anti-marriage, he specifically supported excluding gay people from marriage. He gave money to one of the most vocal prop 8 supporters and a group that fund-raised on prop 8 specifically. Where's the nuance?
It doesn’t make people _heretics_ to have a political disagreement.
You could cancel Brave because you think Eich hates the gays. You could cancel Apple because their phones are made in sweatshop conditions that drive workers to mass suicide. Cancel electric cars because the cobalt batteries are mined by African children who die of exposure. Cance Nike because despite their woke posturing they use sweatshops too. Don’t wear clothes because the factories collapse etc.
Nobody in our first world capitalist bubble is blameless, we are all fat and happy off the exploitation of the weak, so to get on a moral high horse against the inventor of JavaScript is laughable. Just chill out and drink your Starbucks and keep those sweet rent checks rolling in.
I'm sorry this makes you so angry. Maybe you have a convincing point to make, but the way you're trying to make it will be lost on anyone that doesn't already agree with you.
All of those seem like ... good things to me? (At least to the extent that I believe the factual claims.) Call me crazy, but I am not yet so cynical as to believe that I cannot with my actions make any difference in the world. To be clear, the problem is not so much Eich "hating the gays" as it is him collecting a ~7 figure salary and funneling money from that into right wing causes that hurt people in the real world.
Do you sincerely believe that your existence is a net negative to the world as a whole? Have you internalized that belief? I would quite literally not be able to live with myself if I believed that. I try to minimize the negative impacts my consumption has on others as far as I can. It's not about "cancellation", because that's become a stupid meme and lost any meaning it had, it's about being careful abut what I consume. I don't, for example, buy anything from Nestle.
> Nobody in our first world capitalist bubble is blameless, we are all fat and happy off the exploitation of the weak, so to get on a moral high horse against the inventor of JavaScript is laughable. Just chill out and drink your Starbucks and keep those sweet rent checks rolling in.
This is, at the end of the day, just pure cynicism.
Cool. But that isn’t really that cool. That one is easy. What makes you okay with buying products from Apple but not from Nestle? Is it that Nestle has enough competition that it’s a low cost protest? Is it that Apple is hurting people far away from you while Nestle is exploiting your more local environment?
What would it take to make you buy from Nestle again? If they somehow bought Apple’s laptop division?
Having no beliefs is more laudable than people who act on only the convenient beliefs.
what? laudable by whom? sure it’s lazy to only act on convenient beliefs, but it’s certainly more interesting than doing literally nothing
if my one belief is to cut those little six-pack pop rings before putting them in the trash to benefit sea turtles… how is not doing that laudable? because someone told you it’s cool to not care about anything?
My point though was more specific to the poster I replied to, they hand-waved the parent comment away (partially) by mentioning that they boycott Nestle. It rings hollow that all of the other points are less relevant because they boycott what is quite possibly the easiest company to boycott. I would have more respected a response of either “yeah, I pick and choose what I boycott based on both logically tangible and emotional reasons, so trying to find consistency is not only impossible but also foolish” or just to say “who I boycott and why is up to me. Maybe I boycott all of those companies, maybe none. I don’t boycott to be performative”
If someone says "hey the guy that runs this company doesn't think you should be treated the same as others because of your sexual preference" I should ignore that because "who cares"?
I'm just not sure what the counter-argument is here... it sounds like "everything and everyone sucks, and you suck too, so stop paying attention and trying to improve anything"
Well, yes. But there's another angle as to what you vote for with it.
Voting for the creator's politics is one angle, but there's another one. Whether the creator puts politics into their product.
One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics outside what matters for a browser. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services. I don't get politics outside privacy, user control and independent web services pushed to me by Brave. The politics that are there matter to a browser, and the stuff that's outside that scope is left as the people's own prerogative.
The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they also keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it.
I know I'll disagree on weighty matters by people making both products, but as far the browser matters, we all agree.
Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second, and they are not shy about inserting their extraneous politics into the browser.
We're more and more into a culture where everything under the Sun has to preach some sort of politics, and it usually detracts from making an actually good product, in my experience. I like to support organizations that focus on making good hammers and leave the politics to the parts of life where they belong. Life is far more civil that way.
You've got that precisely backwards. You have to explicitly enable that feature if you want it.
vs
> your puritanical world-view
I was reading this page earlier today. https://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/choose-your-browser-care...
The criticism against brave seems pretty hollow without really any remaining criticism. Brave does have this: https://brave.com/privacy/browser/
Would be interesting to see a link showing Brave collecting data. My understanding is that they don't collect data.
I must admit I am rather ignorant about the fake coins.
>Let's also not forget Brendan Eich is anti-gay marriage. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536
~2014. I am curious if his opinion has changed. Sometimes you find yourself on the wrong side of history and re-evaluate positions such as these. Given your link is getting old... maybe he has?
If his opinion hasn't changed, I wonder if this political/religious stance really affects my decision of browser? I suspect it doesn't. People are allowed to have political opinions.
>He is also a COVID conspiracy theorist. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-ei...
I suppose this is more recent. The problem here is that how many 'conspiracy theories' are now not conspiracy theories.
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1339367981084672000
I suppose in dec 2020 Fauci had admitted that he lied about masks being ineffective. Overall though I really didnt see the content in this nytimes article to justify the title.
I suppose the bigger question for me, does this dude matter at all? Let's say he's literal reincarnation of hitler. Does that really change the browser?
Flipside, this guy's wiki page says he invented Javascript. Clearly he is hitler.
One of the main reasons I use Brave is because it doesn't do politics. Eich may think whatever the fuck he wants, his team the same. But they seem very focused on building a privacy-respecting browser and standalone Internet services.
The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it.
Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second. And their "rebellion" is a $400 million Google dollar one.
I know one thing: When I see a privacy-friendly organization saying we need more than deplatforming and to tweak feeds to suit political agendas, I bail.
So in your opinion, Mozilla's CEO shouldn't be saying we need to do more than deplatform politicians? I suppose she was unclear in what more that was exactly?
>The team at Vivaldi definitely has people who disagree with Eich. I like them too, why? Because they keep browser-making and their politics separate, and "politics" in their context mostly translates to user control and privacy, as it does at Brave. Both teams understand that they're there to make a tool, and that's it.
Yes, I have vivaldi over on my pinebook pro. I haven't really done much yet with it. excited to check it out.
>Mozilla is just the reverse: It's about activism first, a browser second. And their "rebellion" is a $400 million Google dollar one.
Their budget is what 90% from google? That money has attachments im sure. Hence probably why they have trashed firefox so badly.
>I know one thing: When I see a privacy-friendly organization saying we need more than deplatforming and to tweak feeds to suit political agendas, I bail.
Yes, it's clear firefox deserves their 7% market share and dropping. I wouldn't recommend firefox to anyone.
Mozilla was actually reasonably clear. Some of it was stuff that might in principle be okay (more transparency on who funds what, which on one hand is good for highlighting certain kinds of corruption but on another can open people up for witch hunts in this fucked up social atmosphere we live in nowadays), but they explicitly praised Facebook altering its feed to prioritize sources Mozilla liked over ones it doesn't - namely the legacy prestige media who are ideological liars the same as anyone else. They might've been less so back in the day, but in the current business model and post TDS, nope.
For every two links you give for Brave, any random HNer can give 10x or more that amount for Google/Chrome or any other Big Tech company these days.
https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-why-mozill...
Brave had technical scams too:
https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761
https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters-ansible/issues/45
https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137if_/https://twitte...
https://web.archive.org/web/20181221231556if_/https://twitte...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
Brave as I understand it is just the Chromium browser at its core. (Similar to how all browsers on iOS are just safari wrapped in a different application layer)
https://www.chromium.org/Home
- Native adblocker based on uBlock Origin algo
- Proxy all requests to Google based service in use in Chromium such as Safebrowsing
- Added anti fingerprinting stuff on some web techs such as webgl, canvas, plugins
- Still open source (to be noted: the ads code, server side, is not)
- Everything documented on their wiki
- Trusted binaries unlike ungoogled-chromium
If you can set aside the crypto part of Brave, I believe this is the best Chromium based browser currently.
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
Mozilla hasn't managed to sell me something yet and in fact relies on money from google which makes money with ads.
but no... it's real
For example tracking facebooks tracking pixels (https://rally.mozilla.org/current-studies/facebook-pixel-hun...).
I can't determine if this is "fighting big tech with their own weapon" or "adding more tracking to the problem of too much tracking".
Give me privacy and, after that, speed. I don't want ANY data collection that is not opt-in. As it is I have to go out of my way to use a custom `user.js` to get this instead of it coming out of the box.
But it should have been opt-in.