I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but it means nothing to "own" the browser when, realistically, you're going to be playing catch-up with the whims of the one corporation that basically controls nearly all decisions on the spec.
The spec only has the power it does because of the market share of Google’s browser though. More people using independent browsers means less power by google to single-handedly control the spec.
Basically noone other than browser vendors will look at the spec anyway. The reality is effectively descriptive, not prescriptive.
Sure, without having a majority marketshare a browser can't by itself push for their new features to be supported by other browsers, but they will effectively disincentivize website owners to not use features they don't support if they have marketshare of any significance. At which point it'd be in W3C's best interest to allow Ladybird to participate, or else their work gets underutilized.
This seems so much more relevant in light of the recent Firefox new terms and conditions. I think the writing was on the wall but I didn’t wanted to see it.
It might be time to explore librewolf or Vivaldi again
Wasn't their entire original premise the Basic Attention Token? It was some kind of crypto that you'd buy and then the browser would block ads for you and instead pay a small amount to the website owners. Problem was if the website owner wasn't part of the program they'd just keep the tokens for themselves, something like that.
OK that does ring a bell. The whole project always seemed a little on the scammy side and I wasn't sure what the browser actually brought to the table that Firefox didn't, so why even check it out?
Much better performance on less powerful hardware (I don't care about synthetic benchmarks, do your own testing and you will notice the difference).
Vertical tabs. Built-in tor support, built-in efficient adblocker that supports ublock origin rules, but is complied into native code.
More anti-tracking and anti-fingerprinting measures (in total, and only counting those enabled out of the box). Configurable shortcuts for absolutely everything. Probably something else I'm forgetting.
Plus a bunch of crypto bullshit, but it's disabled unless you make an effort to enable it.
Purchase referral code swap thing? As far as I know, nothing like that has existed. There's a ton of FUD "reporting" about Brave out there intended to drive users away.
There was a function that'd suggest a campaign partner while typing things in the address bar (eg. "binan" for binance.com, it'd show an ad for binance as one of the dropdown suggestions). For one day, it had a bug that if you wrote a complete url (eg. binance.com) in it and that matched a campaign partner, it'd give the ad as a suggestion. The bug was fixed within one day of being reported and the whole ad suggestion thing turned off by default.
As far as I know, they've never done anything to referral codes within websites. The current browser does have a function where if you right-click a link, it gives you an option to copy a clean link by stripping tracking nonsense out of it. Eg. X links just become plain links to tweets and so on.
Even if I agreed with the “block ads and then show our own” business model, which I don’t, I will never install a web browser, or any other application, that includes a cryptocurrency wallet.
Sadly, this also includes Signal at the moment, but I won’t be moved.
"Yes it comes with awful stuff but you don't have to use it" is not an argument. There are plenty of alternatives without that awful stuff in the first place.
It's awful, in your opinion. Clearly plenty of people enjoy it, and it provides a simple means of monetization that's far more on the up-and-up than the typical alternative of - 'spy on users, profile them endlessly, secretly monetize them.'
I also am unaware of any reasonable alternatives with similar functionality and compatibility. Single click access/tweaking of a native ad blocker, auto-https, script blocker/toggler, anti finger-printing, and much more is just awesome. And for better or for worse the Web is built to target Chrome and so Chromium based remains desirable, even if it is clearly becoming more onerous to decrappify it over time. It may eventually prove unsustainable, but we're not especially close to that point yet and at that point a fork would probably still be more desirable than a new root.
I'd amend this list to place anything that can run UBO (the real version, not kneecapped lite version that now runs on chrome) at the top. AFAIK that still only includes Firefox and derivatives.
Reading down discussion indicates they're "sharing anonymized data with partners" and that some jurisdictions think that's at odds with claiming you don't sell user data. I.. agree? Sounds like selling user data to me.
I switched from Arc to Vivaldi and have been mostly happy with the it. Arc has a very polished UI, but has a number of annoying UX decisions. I've found I could customize Vivaldi to a point where it's basically Arc without the UX annoyances.
I think the diversification of options for web browsers is increasingly important, because Google has made Chromium the de facto standard for the web and positioned themselves to be able to drive standards changes that Google wants, such as DRM.
And because building a browser can be so complex, even the major alternative browsers now are based on Chromium, which is controlled by a pool of Google developers. So Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, often referenced as alternatives to Google Chrome, are still to a significant degree Google Chrome under their respective hoods.
The only truly independent browser from a credible company with reasonable market share to stand in the way is Firefox by Mozilla. There's also Safari from Apple, but if you're concerned about Google, Apple is not necessarily a reassuring alternative.
Lady Bird seems like an ambitious and credible alternative intending to fully comply with modern web standards with a seemingly inspired and committed developer at the head of it. It can help maintain a diversity of web browsing options, which is increasingly important.
Diversification is good but considering ladybird choose a liberal BSD license, there is no protection from Google, Microsoft and friends. If it ever takes off they can just do the good old embrace, extend, and exterminate on it.
We need a GPLv3 licensed browser to ensure it will always stay open.
Thing is, so was Firefox. Say, for example, Ladybird becomes a massive success. What is stopping it from going down the Chrome and Firefox route? No project is immune to money.
Just installed Waterfox a couple hours ago. ( https://www.waterfox.net/ ) I'm getting fed up with all the latest Mozilla bullshit to the point I'm ready to switch browsers.
Ladybird is starting to look good too, from an end user daily driver perspective, technically it has been impressive for a long time.
One other thing I'm really hopeful is to embed Ladybird engine in a "first class" way. Think of if as an Electron alternative but in a sane way.
Waterfox looks worth a try, but I opted for LibreWolf because it's verified on Flathub and Waterfox is not. It looks like the Flathub version of Waterfox was packaged the same BrowserWorks Ltd that makes Waterfox, but they didn't take the extra steps to get verified so we can't be sure. Hopefully they can remedy that. Browsers are too important to install from untrusted sources.
For what it's worth, it's the opposite situation on Windows: The Waterfox installer is signed (even with an Extended Validation certificate), the LibreWolf installer isn't.
Another thing that surprised me is that there is a Waterfox Android build in the Play Store. Reviews of that are however mixed.
Similar on macOS, the LibreWolf team (somewhat understandably) refuses to pay for Apple's developer account to notarize their builds, so every update I have to remove the quarantine extended attribute (Homebrew can do this as part of updating now) or the OS helpfully tells me my browser is damaged and needs to be deleted.
Swift can be just as fast as C or C++. The danger, in my experience, is that it's not always clear what the performance implications of the language's many convenient abstractions are. (A random example, I recently improved one code path by over an order of magnitude by replacing some serialisation that used Codable with hand-rolled code. Still 100% Swift, just paid a lot of attention to avoiding RTTI and allocations.)
I gather there are no binaries because it's for development use ? Are we all really supposed to compile it? Really should have alpha binaries. The only download link I can find is sourceforge and it looks sketchy.
Getting to know about this through here, and tbh I believe the writing has been on the wall for Mozilla for quite a while. This honestly does not surprise me as much as I thought it would.
That being said, I am sad to see this fear of mine come true. Mozilla products were rock solid, and available on virtually every platform imaginable. I do not want to live in a Chromium and WebKit only world.
I guess the quality here is resilience more so than immunity. I guess you can say opensource is much more resilient to enshittification.
I think Mozilla has been a good example of that but the perception has been that resilience has been crumbling for years. Without an independent business model they have been in a really terrible position from the get-go.
I think forks, such as Librewolf or Waterfox, will live for a while even if (and that’s a big if IMO) Mozilla comes down. Consider donating to them (and to Ladybird).
Vouching for librewolf. Not only does it not bother me with things like pocket and "Firefox sync", it also does not track me, and the browsing experience is genuinely superior.
I didn't realize how much webgl and other cruft slowed things down until I started using librewolf.
The one improvement I'm hoping for is that the project would be checked into the official Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora package repos as those are less risky than the repo controlled by the developers.
Is it possible to do things like "send tab to device" using Librewolf? Sometimes I'll stumble upon a programming library in my feed on my phone and I want to send it to my desktop, and Firefox sync makes that possible.
Yea, I use Firefox sync since I'm still using Firefox, but with the way things are going I'm looking for a ship to jump to that still supports my workflows.
Mozilla has been pink washing itself for a decade.
This has paid off incredibly well for them since anyone pointing out that it's primary purpose was to enrich the CEO while letting her band of merry women support their pet causes was called everything from a fascist to an incel.
Till today the most blatantly farcical situation was that Mozilla funded women who code boot-camps while firing all the women who code inside Mozilla.
I guess people are finally waking up when Mozilla pulled an Ubuntu and decided that everything you do through their software is something they own actually.
They also flag and harass anyone who points out the grift.
What's crazy is that Firefox on Debian has been nagging me for weeks that I won't be able to use it after March 14th?
I have never seen those nag screens in Firefox, near the bookmarks toolbar. I think that is working around Debian's policies, IIUC. I have never had software on Debian nag me to update
It seems like this is under the guise of some DRM updates, and the like.
So I'm supposed to update, and then they apply a new Terms and Conditions that I didn't agree to?
And sell my personal data, I guess because there's a big market in AI now.
Also Firefox seems increasingly buggy -- I have had to switch to Chromium for 2 particular sites, so I guess I need to find a new browser ...
---
This reminds me of the Twitter thing where they asked for your phone number for security purposes, and then used it for advertising.
In my experience it is usually something related to cookies that work on Chrome and not in Firefox, and in those cases I find hard to blame Firefox.
Yet, sometimes you need to use those websites fore a reason. Firefox should perhaps make it easier so users don't need to fall back to a different browser.
I am getting them on openbsd, I assumed it was going to be some sort of certificate issue, I was going to update, but with these recent reports of Mozilla getting ready to turn full bore into a ad company, I might just wait until after March 14th and see what happens.
What is especially funny/insulting, is there is a click here to update button, and I am like "there is approximately a 0% chance that will actually work on openbsd".
I got the same message on an older version of Ubuntu where Firefox isn't installed via snap. On my main machine with Ubuntu / firefox snap I do not get this msg.
I get it on my desnapified Ubuntu, but Ubuntu says firefox is up-to-date, and the "download update" button downloads firefox-135.0.1.tar.xz but there are ZERO docs on how to update my current firefox. And running the unzipped firefox executable gives me a message that it can't find my current config, so I guess that means no addons (ublock, privacy badger, container-tabs), bookmarks, or config.
I'm taking this as a good reason to wait for an official Ubuntu update, tho, if this thread is accurate, it looks like all I'll need to keep my current version running will be new root certs.
I don't understand what the issue is with that change in wording. They seem to indicate that nothing has changed as far as privacy and personal data is concerned.
I wish to some day have as much optimism about anything as you have about Mozilla. How you can see the ToS change and this diff and conclude that the outrage is astroturfing is difficult for me to grasp. Both this FAQ entry and the ToS are specifically about the Firefox browser, the wording was unambiguous...
They literally went and deleted a paragraph that said Firefox would "never" sell your personal data. If they needed to clarify a technicality, they wouldn't need to delete that.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. ...
There are valid complaints you could have about this change (for example, I wish they were more specific about the potential legal issues), but calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“)
> calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling.
It's not. One of their biggest selling (!) points is that they are privacy focused so when they make these changes, it is extra alarming. It's not like, e.g. Google, saying the same thing (which would be equally shocking but for opposite reasons.
The paragraph I'm referring to in that diff does not appear to be replaced directly by anything, it just got removed. They did, however, add that non-answer paragraph separately, apparently hours ago.
Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious. They're making steps in a certain direction. Enshittification doesn't usually happen entirely overnight, but you don't have to extrapolate a whole lot to see the blatantly obvious eventuality this is all pointing to. This is well beyond typical levels of brazen for a first step.
Realistically, Google removing "Don't be evil" also didn't really mean anything directly, either... but that doesn't mean it doesn't tell you anything.
And now without cutting it conveniently before the fun bit:
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
You appear to have cut off the part where they say that actually yeah they have to stop saying they don't sell your data because they are selling your data.
No, actually, they don't say that. They very clearly say that they don't (and don't believe most people will) consider what they are doing "selling your data", but that it may legally considered selling your data in some countries.
For example, Firefox runs ads using your language and city/country (on the default new tab page) - but no other data. I think the vast majority people would fine with the privacy implications of that, but this may be legally considered selling your data.
"the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate"
Agreed, it's a ridiculous mischaracterization and part of a pattern that's become a self-sustaining spiral with no quality control.
I don't believe it's astroturfing, simply just mind bogglingly awful arguments. Claiming the decline in market share is tied to inadequate browser features with no two conversations ever agreeing on what those features are. No coherent theory of cause and effect between features and market share while ignoring structural advantages that are much more important drivers, which Google leverages. Claims that CEO pay is the problem when it's 1% of annual revenue. Idiosyncratic interpretations of their published statements that make unfalsifiable assumptions about intentions. And a basic inability to grasp and compare the relative scale of different types of transgressions (e.g. Google is increasingly driving the web into deeper dependence on Chromium, but Mozilla once did a Mr. Robot promo!)
I think the worst of the worst were on Lemmy where similar conversations happen and one person looked at a 990 form from the Mozilla Foundation, a standard non-profit disclosure form, and breathlessly went through the lines as if they were evidence of a conspiracy.
I don't think everyone makes arguments that bad, but I think exposure to this normalized, low-quality discourse has socialized people into perpetuating the narrative with increasingly tenuous arguments.
It's perfectly normal to hold good actors to a higher standard than bad actors. And the leadership should be fired instead of rewarding itself. What if they put 10% of the hundred million a year they got from Google for the last dozen years into an endowment instead? They'd be sustainable without needing to sell out.
I don't know if you read everything that I laid out, but none of the above had anything to do with holding the good actors to hire standards. Thinking that a 990 form is secret evidence of a conspiracy because the nonprofit spent like $10,000 on a consultant here and there is at a fundamental level a form of information illiteracy. It's not like a principled attempt to hold them to a higher standard.
And my contention is that it's things like those that increasingly are what people mean when they say "everything" bad Mozilla is doing. It's more like a tulip craze than a well thought out argument.
> Claims that CEO pay is the problem when it's 1% of annual revenue.
I fully support Mozilla. I don't think this change is bad. However, I do think executive pay should be reined in. Not just the CEO but the board as well. It is also not just about the money but the culture as well. I sincerely believe the CEO shouldn't make more than the median employee salary. This is too much.
If a CEO typically works 12-16 hours a day with no overtime pay I'm fine if he earns more than the employee who doesn't do overtime or gets paid. I also don't care if he earns slightly more than everybody else. It being median pay is certainly exaggerating.
But unfortunately, many CEOs make at least 10 times the money of the median and often 100x or more.
In my experience, I have been "exempt" even though I have zero supervisory or management authority as an individual contributor. If there are people like me in any organization, the CEO should not get extra pay for being exempt.
Yes, it is a little extreme to demand median pay but this is the starting point of a conversation to highlight that CEO make 10 or 100 maybe more times the median salary.
>However, I do think executive pay should be reined in.
I do too, but let's keep our eye on the ball for a second. CEO pay is not (1) driving Mozilla towards unprofitability, (2) taking developer resources away from critical investments in the browser (3) the reason why the market share is lower (4) a revelation of malevolent intent regarding user data and privacy (5) an indicator of moral equivalence with Google.
It's a vague generality that's barely about anything, but it's half made arguments like these that are driving perceptions in these threads.
They're not linking to a change in wording? The "Does Firefox sell your personal data?" question was deleted entirely. Unless the parent comment or link was edited at some point, maybe.
Deleting or obsoleting every mention of "we don’t sell your personal data" is pretty ominous. Yes, they don't come out and say "we now sell your personal data", but why would they remove the former if they didn't intend the latter?
To be clear on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/ they changed this
>>It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.
to this:
>>It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Of course, saying "(in the way that most people think about “selling data“)" makes the guarantee completely meaningless. The rest of the paragraph is just marketing puffery. Its meaningless bromides about how much they value your privacy. Notice they only say they put "lots of work" into stripping identifying information provided to commercial partners (which is just another way of saying selling). Again, this is meaningless. They went from a very strong guarantee to no guarantee at all. Any company that sells your data that makes any effort at all to strip identifying information can make this claim regardless of whether personally identifying information can be recovered with a modicum of effort.
If we manage to read the next 2 questions on the list, or spend 30 seconds on a web search, one would find the link to Firefox's privacy policy which details the specific types of data they collect and how they use it, and has enumerated rights for users: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
This is actually a much stronger guarantee than "we don't sell your data", which is not actually a strong guarantee at all. "Selling your data" is a nebulous term that means different things from person to person, and any company that doesn't literally exchange money for data could probably claim it with some level of credulity.
Speaking on "reading the next thing", let me repeat yjftsjthsd-h's comment below, which of course you ignored (a pattern for people excusing Mozilla in these recent convos):
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yjftsjthsd-h 2 hours ago | unvote | root | parent | prev | next [–]
And now without cutting it conveniently before the fun bit:
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
You appear to have cut off the part where they say that actually yeah they have to stop saying they don't sell your data because they are selling your data.
No, actually, they don't say that. They very clearly say that they don't (and don't believe most people will) consider what they are doing "selling your data", but that it may legally considered selling your data in some countries.
For example, Firefox runs ads using your language and city/country (on the default new tab page) - but no other data. I think the vast majority people would fine with the privacy implications of that, but this may be legally considered selling your data.
Being specific about what types of data they collect and how they use it is actually far superior to some nebulous promise that has no definition.
I don't have any special insight on these events but I've seen that commit linked a lot.
From a pure optics point of view, it looks extremely bad but reading some of the comments, it sounds like that repo is basically a mirror of some upstream project where terms and conditions/faqs etc are stored as pseudo-structured data and that they're migrating parts of that repo to some other project?
Don't get me wrong, I love bagging on Mozilla as much as the next person but as extremely bad as it looks, I'm not convinced that it's literally what it looks like?
I also lack any inside info, but that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous. And if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?
> if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?
If a company was being competently "evil"[1] then it probably would look like this!
Personally, I don't know that I consider Mozilla competent enough to reach that bar though given a lot of their previous blunders seemed like, well, blunders and not finely crafted acts of trickery.
> that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous
I suppose in this scenario, if it were innocuous and this is just some automated mirroring thing that someone triggered without realising the optics of, I wouldn't then automatically assume that same organisation would have a level of coordination to recognise or put out a blanket statement about the issue?
I mean, you'd think surely some amount of Firefox/Mozilla folks are very online and this would be raised internally but if this is downstream of some process owned by mostly legal and non-internet/chat using folks, it might make sense that they a) take some time to be notified, b) take some time to realise a lot of the internet is saying "What the fuck" and c) take a while to figure out what to do about it (ie; issue a press release to not make it worse? someone higher up acks and is like reverse whatever this mess is?)
My only real basis for all this is I've occasionally run into some compliance/legal types in tech and they can have extremely bad mental models of the company and product they work for so I can feasibly believe this all being accidental but in saying that, I dunno who works for Mozilla and this is very much a stereotype I'm applying.
Anyway, as above, I'm not saying this isn't malicious, just that personally I think the door is still open that this could all be a complete mess that has no real intent behind it
I don't think most people realize how huge Mozilla is. Their annual revenue has been flirting breaking a billion dollars for some time now and was ~$500 mil as of 2023 - primarily due to 'partnering' with Google, which was always a bellwether to anybody who cared to see it. Wikimedia has never broken $200 million per year. In other words, it's Mozilla that could buy Wikipedia, not the other way around.
But how much goes into firefox development? Maybe 2% of revenue like with Linux Fiundation and Linux kernel?
Mozilla is ads company, it does activism, outreach, it organizes Marxist conferences, management gets paid millions... Firefox development is just tiny fraction of what Mozilla does.
And frankly Wikipedia has the same overhead problem as Mozilla.
》 Mozilla isn’t just another tech company — we’re a global crew of activists, technologists and builders, all working to keep the internet free, open and accessible.
》 “Mozilla isn’t your typical tech brand; it’s a trailblazing, activist organization in both its mission and its approach,”
I do not doubt they employ 750 people. I am saying they have tons of other projects. If you go throught their blog posts, Firefox has tiny fraction of posts.
The Wikimedia Foundation has developed many of the same corruption issues that Mozilla has. It would just be kicking the can down the road, and not very far at that.
> Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1].
I'm still not convinced that Firefox is The Actual Devil for potentially appearing to perform .000001% of the bad behavior that is fully-baked into popular Chromium browsers.
But for the sake of argument, lets say that .0000001% > 99.99999%. What is the browser I can install+configure right now, that will perform what Firefox does every day. For ex:
natively support containers,
provide fully uncrippled element control,
provide reader mode when *I* want it,
locally save and sync windows,
provide granular redirection control,
and the other functions that are mostly unique to Firefox ecosystem
?
The website looks good, but as I scroll down in mobile Safari the page starts glitching until it fully crashes and Safari says an error repeatedly occurred. It doesn’t inspire much confidence when the web page for a web browser is broken.
Have you tested the waters with a request for the devs to remove whatever you consider suspicious in that list?
I believe the current issue regarding Firefox is it's new terms of use, which are not presently in Zen browser. Other than that is a pretty close copy of Firefox, which is the point, and why I suggested it to parent as an option.
I did not. However considering that they have advertised themselves as "privacy-focused" Firefox alternative and can't be bothered to do the most superficial of tests, I don't think they care or are competent[1] enough to change it.
If you want an actual private Firefox alternative there are already multiple long standing and competent projects such as arkenfox, librewolf, mullvad and tor browser.
> We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so I want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice. We’ve added this note to our blog to clarify, so thank you for your feedback.[1]
And the US DoJ ruling last year that Google had an illegal monopoly on web search, and one of the mooted remedies was to bar Google paying to be the default search engine in other browsers... and about 90% of Mozilla's income is Google paying to be the default search engine.
But sure, "why now", maybe someone reported a typo or something.
That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that.
Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.
By that logic, and with some hyperbole, a text editor would need a license from the user to be able to turn their keystrokes into visible text display.
It smells really bad of privacy violation, data hoarding, targeted psychological manipulation (also known as advertisements), and behaviour analysis. That is why people are reacting so furiously.
> That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that.
Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.
Every browser I’ve used in the past decade does “search as you type” by default. That does require local access to your browser and your key strokes.
Normal people wouldn’t use a browser that didn’t do search as you type.
But at no point does any of what you type need to be sent to Mozilla. That only needs to be between the browser and the configured search engine and nothing in between.
> We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible
wow, that's scary.
So either
a) the current license doesn't allow some current basic functionality or
b) the basic functionality of firefox is about to change
I can't imagine how a) can be true. So b) must be true and quote implies, that firefox's basic functionality is about to change. And I do not see how it can change for the better regarding the context of the quote.
> Can I backup my container configuration to a json file on disk or do I still need to sync it to the cloud to save it?
I will guess the ability to save containers locally must be possible, based on this: Every night, my desktop ffx profiles are copied over to a VM. The VM hosts firefox as a remote app.
That remote app instance of ffx has all of my sessions and saved passwords. I can access it from anywhere over VPN and they never leave the house. I'm typing on it now.
Included in that are all of my containers - so in theory they're transportable. I've never thought to try to isolate them from the profile - but my gut says it should be possible.
Firefox has been trash for the past 10 years, let alone the Mozilla Foundation. There are some idealistic people that still vouch for them, they're only making a fool of themselves, lol.
One-time disable and completely not intrusive. No popups. Nothing. It's the equivalent of firefox's suggested sites on the homepage when you install it that you have to turn off. Do you hold that to the same standard?
It's not even a "one-time disable", it's off by default until you enable it and the icon in the URL takes two clicks to hide.
And more generally, lack of easy payment is at the root of so many problems with the modern Internet, that I really can't blame Brave for trying this, quite the opposite, that's exactly the kind of feature we need.
I don't have a rabid hateboner like most of HN for Brave, but I refuse to help Google/Blink expand their monopoly on the web so I'll continue to put up with Mozilla and their silliness until a decent enough competitor appears.
Which is unfortunate because WebKit is terrible outside of macOS, so every single alternative browser is built on Blink and thus indirectly giving more power to Google. The web is too important to accept a monoculture, and it saddens me to see that most of my peers have no moral fibre to resist against it.
As much as I dislike Apple, thank god they have a billion devices out there with an alternative engine, though they still happily take the bribe to force Google down your throat.
Firefox is the lesser of the evils. I hate what Mozilla is doing, but I also don't want to cede control of the web to Google. Vote with your feet. I'm hopeful for Ladybirds future.
You know what the really sad part about this is? If we switch to an alternative browser, fingerprinting makes us even more easily tracked. It's lose-lose nowadays. We need political changes to make selling off our private data no longer profitable.
I truly can't understand. We live in world where you can potentially make business in so many ways, even if Mozilla asked me for some money to continue as a good faith browser I don't mind to pay for it. But for god's sake, can't a single human being come up with a business model that *IS NOT* related to our fucking private data?
Maybe I’m overlooking it, but is there any mention of how browser extensions will (or won’t) work? I imagine I’m not alone in needing a password manager and ad blocking extensions for any browser I use. Either way, looking forward to seeing how this develops!
Considering now most browsers are either Chromium (including Opera and Edge) or Firefox-based, a new alternative built from scratch will be interesting.
Andreas Kling is pouring his attention into this. He's a grit elemental. I believe he will accomplish this no matter how many people tell him it's a doomed effort, impossible, whatever. What happens in the longer term depends on if enough people value what he and his team does.
Looking at what FF has recently decided about selling out its users, I think demand will catalyze.
Companies like Shopify will invest because a healthy ecosystem is good for their bottom line in the long term. Monopolies are not good for them in the long term.
Why does it need to be accomplished without monetization?
I'd gladly pay for a good browser, that respects my privacy. Quite frankly we all need to start opening our pockets for this; the idea that big companies will benevolently supply stuff like this to us for free without trying to spy on us is naive.
I think the term monetisation is being used in a broad, VC/corporate investment/selling services etc sense. Donations or paying for the browser also takes care of money.
Why the /s. The idea that you can only get qualified developers for silicon valley salaries is absurd. It's not like tech companies in europe generally pay that much and they do just fine.
Ladybird is lucky in that it has someone who knows how important marketing is, even for opensource projects. There are other opensource browser engine projects languishing because of lack of PR, patronage and / or volunteers. For e.g. NetSurf https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ - website is outdated because of lack of volunteers but the project has active development - https://source.netsurf-browser.org/netsurf.git/ (already has partial support for CSS3, and Flex layout). It can develop into a great alternative if it had some more volunteers. Servo (https://servo.org/) is another project but it has some decent PR because of its Rust codebase and the Rust PR team. There's the Goanna browser engine too ( http://www.palemoon.org/ ) but, like Mozilla Gecko, the project isn't truly modular to offer a stand-alone browser engine as Goanna also strives to be an XUL renderer.
Also, I really, REALLY wish the devs don't surrender to user's pressure for the plethora of features offered by the commercial products, done ASAP.
Please maintain the tinkering, passion and devs-first codebase it has now, and don't end up as a huge mess just because users want things like VDPAU asap.
I don't mind waiting a few more years. For the "just works" part of my life, I already have chromium+Firefox
I think that Ladybird's success has more to do with the fact that kling is one of the few people who knows how to write the whole browser than with marketing. But yeah, kling is also a great communicator.
SerenityOS was already quite successful before they started Ladybird. So successful that he was already making enough off sponsorship to do it full time. It was having the time to take on something as ambitious as a full web browser for SerenityOS that led to the project to begin with.
I agree that Ladybird is lucky to have a dev not only of his seniority but of his specific expertise. However, there is no denying that a huge reason for the success of his projects is non-technical and more about his ability to build community and engagement.
Thanks I forgot about NetSurf. After Microsoft abandoning Blink and Opera abandoning Presto to use Chromium, the internet needs these alternatives more than ether
Is Palemoon the most popular Goanna-based browser?
The data isn't available because PaleMoon doesn't collect any analytic or telemetry data. So they don't know how big their userbase is. (Recently though, I think they have started collecting some data on hardware because they wanted to revamp their code base. See this discussion - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=30909 - I however don't know how extensive, or persistent, this data collection is / was).
I wouldn't call that "getting bent out of shape" by any stretch of the imagination. That was what I would call a very measured response to someone who was clearly trying to cause trouble by starting political fights.
Arc is VC funded, and Brave has Brandon Eich's fingerprints all over it (and he sometimes posts here) so we would have to first start by defining what we want independent to mean here, first.
Did the title change since you asked, or what is claiming that they aren't? I don't see anything on the title, the README, or the website making the claim you want defended. It just says "a" truly independent web browser, that doesn't seemingly claim exclusivity to that status.
359 comments
[ 12.8 ms ] story [ 335 ms ] thread1 year ago (625 points, 284 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39271449
2 years ago (1341 points, 473 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32809126
Let him enjoy making a great browser.
I'll be using this as soon as it comes out anyway. It's not like there are a lot of alternatives in this space, so I very much welcome fresh takes.
But if there is more browser diversity, and less support for Chrome Only things, maybe that starts (continues?) the path of Chrome becoming IE6
Sure, without having a majority marketshare a browser can't by itself push for their new features to be supported by other browsers, but they will effectively disincentivize website owners to not use features they don't support if they have marketshare of any significance. At which point it'd be in W3C's best interest to allow Ladybird to participate, or else their work gets underutilized.
It might be time to explore librewolf or Vivaldi again
https://privacytests.org/
I would say
#1 LibreWolf
#2 Brave
The controversy came when it was found out they were inserting their own affiliate code into links. That's scummy.
Vertical tabs. Built-in tor support, built-in efficient adblocker that supports ublock origin rules, but is complied into native code.
More anti-tracking and anti-fingerprinting measures (in total, and only counting those enabled out of the box). Configurable shortcuts for absolutely everything. Probably something else I'm forgetting.
Plus a bunch of crypto bullshit, but it's disabled unless you make an effort to enable it.
Privacy violations - https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/nxce6t/brav...
Bundling crapware
https://community.brave.com/t/brave-has-become-malware/51041...
There was a function that'd suggest a campaign partner while typing things in the address bar (eg. "binan" for binance.com, it'd show an ad for binance as one of the dropdown suggestions). For one day, it had a bug that if you wrote a complete url (eg. binance.com) in it and that matched a campaign partner, it'd give the ad as a suggestion. The bug was fixed within one day of being reported and the whole ad suggestion thing turned off by default.
As far as I know, they've never done anything to referral codes within websites. The current browser does have a function where if you right-click a link, it gives you an option to copy a clean link by stripping tracking nonsense out of it. Eg. X links just become plain links to tweets and so on.
Sadly, this also includes Signal at the moment, but I won’t be moved.
And what do you use as an alternative to Signal?
I also am unaware of any reasonable alternatives with similar functionality and compatibility. Single click access/tweaking of a native ad blocker, auto-https, script blocker/toggler, anti finger-printing, and much more is just awesome. And for better or for worse the Web is built to target Chrome and so Chromium based remains desirable, even if it is clearly becoming more onerous to decrappify it over time. It may eventually prove unsustainable, but we're not especially close to that point yet and at that point a fork would probably still be more desirable than a new root.
Opera has has said they will continue to support them going forward.
Additionally, it's worth noting the Vivaldi is Chromium-based
Does it "seems" that we should see what you did there?
However, sync does include your bookmarks, your browsing history, and anything else?
Are you saying that these new ToS are just legal CYA for previously enabled features, and nothing else?
And because building a browser can be so complex, even the major alternative browsers now are based on Chromium, which is controlled by a pool of Google developers. So Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, often referenced as alternatives to Google Chrome, are still to a significant degree Google Chrome under their respective hoods.
The only truly independent browser from a credible company with reasonable market share to stand in the way is Firefox by Mozilla. There's also Safari from Apple, but if you're concerned about Google, Apple is not necessarily a reassuring alternative.
Lady Bird seems like an ambitious and credible alternative intending to fully comply with modern web standards with a seemingly inspired and committed developer at the head of it. It can help maintain a diversity of web browsing options, which is increasingly important.
We need a GPLv3 licensed browser to ensure it will always stay open.
Ladybird is starting to look good too, from an end user daily driver perspective, technically it has been impressive for a long time.
One other thing I'm really hopeful is to embed Ladybird engine in a "first class" way. Think of if as an Electron alternative but in a sane way.
Another thing that surprised me is that there is a Waterfox Android build in the Play Store. Reviews of that are however mixed.
Not surprisen that Waterfox can be signed by Microsoft.
Stealth BoD(s)?
I have the same hope. If it were performant enough I would find reasons to use it for gamedev, even with quirks.
(: Although anything can be made as slow as python yada yada)
It just opens the door for non-technical people to badmouth the software complaining that nothing works and expecting a fully functional browser.
Never say "Never"... Next is Thunderbird.
Let's go Andreas!
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
That being said, I am sad to see this fear of mine come true. Mozilla products were rock solid, and available on virtually every platform imaginable. I do not want to live in a Chromium and WebKit only world.
I think Mozilla has been a good example of that but the perception has been that resilience has been crumbling for years. Without an independent business model they have been in a really terrible position from the get-go.
That's one way to look at it, I guess. You could also look at it like a business model will inevitably enshittify.
I didn't realize how much webgl and other cruft slowed things down until I started using librewolf.
The one improvement I'm hoping for is that the project would be checked into the official Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora package repos as those are less risky than the repo controlled by the developers.
Firefox sync is something you can enable, I believe
This has paid off incredibly well for them since anyone pointing out that it's primary purpose was to enrich the CEO while letting her band of merry women support their pet causes was called everything from a fascist to an incel.
Till today the most blatantly farcical situation was that Mozilla funded women who code boot-camps while firing all the women who code inside Mozilla.
I guess people are finally waking up when Mozilla pulled an Ubuntu and decided that everything you do through their software is something they own actually.
They also flag and harass anyone who points out the grift.
I have never seen those nag screens in Firefox, near the bookmarks toolbar. I think that is working around Debian's policies, IIUC. I have never had software on Debian nag me to update
It seems like this is under the guise of some DRM updates, and the like.
So I'm supposed to update, and then they apply a new Terms and Conditions that I didn't agree to?
And sell my personal data, I guess because there's a big market in AI now.
Also Firefox seems increasingly buggy -- I have had to switch to Chromium for 2 particular sites, so I guess I need to find a new browser ...
---
This reminds me of the Twitter thing where they asked for your phone number for security purposes, and then used it for advertising.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/25/twitter-u...
I think Firefox is forcing updates ostensibly for one reason, but the real reason is because they found a market for data, and want to apply a new T&C
Yes, seems. I think web developers are increasingly neglecting testing on it.
But I’ve noticed I have ublock-origin installed on Firefox and when the 2 sites that I had issues with started working when that was disabled…
Is it Firefox that's buggy or those websites that only test on Chrome?
Yet, sometimes you need to use those websites fore a reason. Firefox should perhaps make it easier so users don't need to fall back to a different browser.
Which version of each are you running? I use esr these days (I don't remember why I switched though).
What is especially funny/insulting, is there is a click here to update button, and I am like "there is approximately a 0% chance that will actually work on openbsd".
update I looked it up, they say it is a certificate issue. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/root-certificate-expiration
I'm taking this as a good reason to wait for an official Ubuntu update, tho, if this thread is accurate, it looks like all I'll need to keep my current version running will be new root certs.
Or a new browser, unfortunately.
They literally went and deleted a paragraph that said Firefox would "never" sell your personal data. If they needed to clarify a technicality, they wouldn't need to delete that.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. ...
There are valid complaints you could have about this change (for example, I wish they were more specific about the potential legal issues), but calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling.
> calling this selling your soul is unironically bad faith trolling.
It's not. One of their biggest selling (!) points is that they are privacy focused so when they make these changes, it is extra alarming. It's not like, e.g. Google, saying the same thing (which would be equally shocking but for opposite reasons.
Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious. They're making steps in a certain direction. Enshittification doesn't usually happen entirely overnight, but you don't have to extrapolate a whole lot to see the blatantly obvious eventuality this is all pointing to. This is well beyond typical levels of brazen for a first step.
Realistically, Google removing "Don't be evil" also didn't really mean anything directly, either... but that doesn't mean it doesn't tell you anything.
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
You appear to have cut off the part where they say that actually yeah they have to stop saying they don't sell your data because they are selling your data.
For example, Firefox runs ads using your language and city/country (on the default new tab page) - but no other data. I think the vast majority people would fine with the privacy implications of that, but this may be legally considered selling your data.
"the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate"
I don't believe it's astroturfing, simply just mind bogglingly awful arguments. Claiming the decline in market share is tied to inadequate browser features with no two conversations ever agreeing on what those features are. No coherent theory of cause and effect between features and market share while ignoring structural advantages that are much more important drivers, which Google leverages. Claims that CEO pay is the problem when it's 1% of annual revenue. Idiosyncratic interpretations of their published statements that make unfalsifiable assumptions about intentions. And a basic inability to grasp and compare the relative scale of different types of transgressions (e.g. Google is increasingly driving the web into deeper dependence on Chromium, but Mozilla once did a Mr. Robot promo!)
I think the worst of the worst were on Lemmy where similar conversations happen and one person looked at a 990 form from the Mozilla Foundation, a standard non-profit disclosure form, and breathlessly went through the lines as if they were evidence of a conspiracy.
I don't think everyone makes arguments that bad, but I think exposure to this normalized, low-quality discourse has socialized people into perpetuating the narrative with increasingly tenuous arguments.
And my contention is that it's things like those that increasingly are what people mean when they say "everything" bad Mozilla is doing. It's more like a tulip craze than a well thought out argument.
I fully support Mozilla. I don't think this change is bad. However, I do think executive pay should be reined in. Not just the CEO but the board as well. It is also not just about the money but the culture as well. I sincerely believe the CEO shouldn't make more than the median employee salary. This is too much.
But unfortunately, many CEOs make at least 10 times the money of the median and often 100x or more.
Yes, it is a little extreme to demand median pay but this is the starting point of a conversation to highlight that CEO make 10 or 100 maybe more times the median salary.
I do too, but let's keep our eye on the ball for a second. CEO pay is not (1) driving Mozilla towards unprofitability, (2) taking developer resources away from critical investments in the browser (3) the reason why the market share is lower (4) a revelation of malevolent intent regarding user data and privacy (5) an indicator of moral equivalence with Google.
It's a vague generality that's barely about anything, but it's half made arguments like these that are driving perceptions in these threads.
to this: >>It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
Of course, saying "(in the way that most people think about “selling data“)" makes the guarantee completely meaningless. The rest of the paragraph is just marketing puffery. Its meaningless bromides about how much they value your privacy. Notice they only say they put "lots of work" into stripping identifying information provided to commercial partners (which is just another way of saying selling). Again, this is meaningless. They went from a very strong guarantee to no guarantee at all. Any company that sells your data that makes any effort at all to strip identifying information can make this claim regardless of whether personally identifying information can be recovered with a modicum of effort.
This is actually a much stronger guarantee than "we don't sell your data", which is not actually a strong guarantee at all. "Selling your data" is a nebulous term that means different things from person to person, and any company that doesn't literally exchange money for data could probably claim it with some level of credulity.
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And now without cutting it conveniently before the fun bit:
> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
You appear to have cut off the part where they say that actually yeah they have to stop saying they don't sell your data because they are selling your data.
reply --------
For example, Firefox runs ads using your language and city/country (on the default new tab page) - but no other data. I think the vast majority people would fine with the privacy implications of that, but this may be legally considered selling your data.
Being specific about what types of data they collect and how they use it is actually far superior to some nebulous promise that has no definition.
From a pure optics point of view, it looks extremely bad but reading some of the comments, it sounds like that repo is basically a mirror of some upstream project where terms and conditions/faqs etc are stored as pseudo-structured data and that they're migrating parts of that repo to some other project?
I feel like a lot of context is missing publicly but if I squint, that seems to be what this comment is trying to express: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
Don't get me wrong, I love bagging on Mozilla as much as the next person but as extremely bad as it looks, I'm not convinced that it's literally what it looks like?
If a company was being competently "evil"[1] then it probably would look like this!
Personally, I don't know that I consider Mozilla competent enough to reach that bar though given a lot of their previous blunders seemed like, well, blunders and not finely crafted acts of trickery.
> that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous
I suppose in this scenario, if it were innocuous and this is just some automated mirroring thing that someone triggered without realising the optics of, I wouldn't then automatically assume that same organisation would have a level of coordination to recognise or put out a blanket statement about the issue?
I mean, you'd think surely some amount of Firefox/Mozilla folks are very online and this would be raised internally but if this is downstream of some process owned by mostly legal and non-internet/chat using folks, it might make sense that they a) take some time to be notified, b) take some time to realise a lot of the internet is saying "What the fuck" and c) take a while to figure out what to do about it (ie; issue a press release to not make it worse? someone higher up acks and is like reverse whatever this mess is?)
My only real basis for all this is I've occasionally run into some compliance/legal types in tech and they can have extremely bad mental models of the company and product they work for so I can feasibly believe this all being accidental but in saying that, I dunno who works for Mozilla and this is very much a stereotype I'm applying.
Anyway, as above, I'm not saying this isn't malicious, just that personally I think the door is still open that this could all be a complete mess that has no real intent behind it
Mozilla is ads company, it does activism, outreach, it organizes Marxist conferences, management gets paid millions... Firefox development is just tiny fraction of what Mozilla does.
And frankly Wikipedia has the same overhead problem as Mozilla.
》 “Mozilla isn’t your typical tech brand; it’s a trailblazing, activist organization in both its mission and its approach,”
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-o...
I do not doubt they employ 750 people. I am saying they have tons of other projects. If you go throught their blog posts, Firefox has tiny fraction of posts.
I'm still not convinced that Firefox is The Actual Devil for potentially appearing to perform .000001% of the bad behavior that is fully-baked into popular Chromium browsers.
But for the sake of argument, lets say that .0000001% > 99.99999%. What is the browser I can install+configure right now, that will perform what Firefox does every day. For ex:
Besides running Ffx, I'm also running Waterfox and Floorp - which just about exhausts my options for modern Ffx forks + Windows + Extensions.
It's relatively new, but I liked using it more than other of the forks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887594
I believe the current issue regarding Firefox is it's new terms of use, which are not presently in Zen browser. Other than that is a pretty close copy of Firefox, which is the point, and why I suggested it to parent as an option.
[1] https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927
If you want an actual private Firefox alternative there are already multiple long standing and competent projects such as arkenfox, librewolf, mullvad and tor browser.
So, did the internet explode again for no reason?
[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/information-about...
Usually the answer is something really mundane. They did a privacy policy review and realized a couple of their core fewtures break the policy.
Or someone new joined the team who had an interest in their privacy policy and realized it contradicts.
There could be a thousand mundane reasons for why now.
And their "aquisition" of an adtech company last year, and their rollout of its data collection into the browser: https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-ppa-ad/
And the US DoJ ruling last year that Google had an illegal monopoly on web search, and one of the mooted remedies was to bar Google paying to be the default search engine in other browsers... and about 90% of Mozilla's income is Google paying to be the default search engine.
But sure, "why now", maybe someone reported a typo or something.
>Mozilla has just deleted the following: “Does Firefox sell your personal data?”
“Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. " https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203096
Yeah, could be a mundane reason for that too....
Edit add: My sibling list some other things that just so happened to be going on...
Mozilla needs to answer it and your “I’m above it all” snark needs to disappear.
Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.
By that logic, and with some hyperbole, a text editor would need a license from the user to be able to turn their keystrokes into visible text display.
It smells really bad of privacy violation, data hoarding, targeted psychological manipulation (also known as advertisements), and behaviour analysis. That is why people are reacting so furiously.
Every browser I’ve used in the past decade does “search as you type” by default. That does require local access to your browser and your key strokes.
Normal people wouldn’t use a browser that didn’t do search as you type.
wow, that's scary.
So either a) the current license doesn't allow some current basic functionality or b) the basic functionality of firefox is about to change
I can't imagine how a) can be true. So b) must be true and quote implies, that firefox's basic functionality is about to change. And I do not see how it can change for the better regarding the context of the quote.
I will guess the ability to save containers locally must be possible, based on this: Every night, my desktop ffx profiles are copied over to a VM. The VM hosts firefox as a remote app.
That remote app instance of ffx has all of my sessions and saved passwords. I can access it from anywhere over VPN and they never leave the house. I'm typing on it now.
Included in that are all of my containers - so in theory they're transportable. I've never thought to try to isolate them from the profile - but my gut says it should be possible.
One-time disable and completely not intrusive. No popups. Nothing. It's the equivalent of firefox's suggested sites on the homepage when you install it that you have to turn off. Do you hold that to the same standard?
> Brendain Eich
Art, artist, etc
And more generally, lack of easy payment is at the root of so many problems with the modern Internet, that I really can't blame Brave for trying this, quite the opposite, that's exactly the kind of feature we need.
Which is unfortunate because WebKit is terrible outside of macOS, so every single alternative browser is built on Blink and thus indirectly giving more power to Google. The web is too important to accept a monoculture, and it saddens me to see that most of my peers have no moral fibre to resist against it.
As much as I dislike Apple, thank god they have a billion devices out there with an alternative engine, though they still happily take the bribe to force Google down your throat.
Get involved: https://ladybird.org/#gi
Monoculture is bad. smh
Considering now most browsers are either Chromium (including Opera and Edge) or Firefox-based, a new alternative built from scratch will be interesting.
In the old thread I see the non-profit was seeded with $1M. That’s 5 good US developers for 1 year. What next?
Looking at what FF has recently decided about selling out its users, I think demand will catalyze.
They get sponsors through enthusiasm, which is the way it should be for a project like this.
After reading their website, I know that I am going to request my company to donate, so there’s at least one more contribution.
Companies like Shopify will invest because a healthy ecosystem is good for their bottom line in the long term. Monopolies are not good for them in the long term.
I'd gladly pay for a good browser, that respects my privacy. Quite frankly we all need to start opening our pockets for this; the idea that big companies will benevolently supply stuff like this to us for free without trying to spy on us is naive.
Please maintain the tinkering, passion and devs-first codebase it has now, and don't end up as a huge mess just because users want things like VDPAU asap.
I don't mind waiting a few more years. For the "just works" part of my life, I already have chromium+Firefox
I agree that Ladybird is lucky to have a dev not only of his seniority but of his specific expertise. However, there is no denying that a huge reason for the success of his projects is non-technical and more about his ability to build community and engagement.
Is Palemoon the most popular Goanna-based browser?
Whether that level of independence is important is up to you I guess?