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  • She went on to work at eBay for 13 years, followed by PayPal, Skype, and Airbnb. source

    why would Mozilla choose to be directed by an ebay+paypal+airbnb experience and can somebody with that background not think like this ☞

    "Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better internet. And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible."

    • Advertising will not improve unless we address the underlying data sharing issues, and solve for the economic incentives that rely on that data.

      thanks to Mozilla for assuming the responsibility of improving advertising

      We can’t just ignore online advertising — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in online advertising over the past few years. - MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA source

      if we stay with that metaphor of "We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it", it's not difficult to imagine Mark and Mozilla being swallowed by the monster he's "staring straight in the eyes" :/

      i hope they can filter the shit Mozilla will include in Firefox from mull and mullvad

      • She's not particularly wrong, but this highlights the problem for me.

        Why does the corporate arm behind one of the last "free" browsers out there need to become involved in this clear conflict of interest?

        Why does this need to be developed as core functionality in the browser codebase instead of as an addon like most of the previous experiments?

        There is repeated insistence that this is key to the future of the web. I don't neccessarily disagree. I disagree entirely that this should have any direct contact with the Firefox project. Create a separate subsidiary within Mozilla for this shit. Anything to maintain a wall between the clearly conflicting goals.

        This all reads like a new CEO coming in hungry to make a mark rather than actually just be a steward to keeping business as usual going.

  • But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history.

    Is it?

    I would rather have a world where Mozilla is actively engaged in creating positive solutions for hard problems, than one where we only critique from the sidelines.

    Maybe your users don't.

    • Yeah adblock plus said the same thing. A lot of companies have said the same thing. It always comes down to greed

    • In addition to your good points:

      a world where Mozilla is actively engaged

      That doesn't have to mean a world where Firefox itself is involved in this engagement, despite her insistence that it for some reason must be. Firefox is not Mozilla as a whole.

  • This feels like the turning point for Firefox that we all feared would come. They've now switched to outright gas lighting their users. They're trying to convince us that if they take a stab at doing ads the right way, that we can have a web filled with tolerable ads that work for both the user and the business.

    Ads and user data collection are the worst part of the internet. Nothing has ever gotten better because of them. And there's already far too much focus in this area. Mozilla just wants to be another exploiter so that they can have a piece of the stolen value pie.

  • My problem with this in spite of the dire situation they face if Google is forced to cut funding by anti-trust court rulings (or not even forced but they make paying off Mozilla a moot point so they stop) is that they become an ad company. Ads become tied to their CEO compensation, to the salaries of the people who develop it.

    They claim they're making a better kind of ad network, a privacy respecting kind. The problem is the ad industry doesn't want less data, they want more. There are no looming laws that would force the ad industry to adopt a more privacy respecting alternative or die and without that the ad industry is going to shun this and it'll be a failure and then they'll have a failed ad network that they can either discard entirely or adapt to industry standards of privacy invasion and abuse and continue to exist and then they'll make another "hard choices" post about having to do that.

    And I can see it now. This experiment will fail and after some pressure from the ad industry and some devil-on-shoulder whispering Mozilla will begrudgingly start to enshittify. Their ad network will become less privacy respecting by tiny little steps, by salami-slicing or boiling the frog, the whole privacy-preserving measurement thing will be thrown out BUT they'll still claim they respect you more than Google and will at first perhaps but that will erode. Maybe they'll just implode at some point after that which given Google is being found a monopoly works just fine for Google and the rest of big tech who want a more centralized, locked down browser company that wants to help implement DRM that can't be circumvented, that wants to help lock down everything on the web to restrict users freedoms to choose what is displayed or if they can save it or record it or copy it to say nothing of blocking ads.

  • I don't see how they think it's a good move. I'm not speaking about people being upset. Most of the Firefox users are either people having at least some tech knowledge or people which use it because of a person with some tech knowledge.

    And most of these people use an ad-blocker, know how to install a fork and so on. So, from the beginning, I don't know who think it's a good idea other than to kill Firefox.

235 comments