this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla's earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I hope everybody criticizing the move either do not use products from Mozilla or, if they do, contribute however they can up to their own capabilities. If you don't, if you ONLY criticize, yet use Firefox (or a derivative, e.g. LibreWolf) or arguably worst use something fueled by ads (e.g. Chromium based browsers) then you are unfortunately contributing precisely to the model you are rejecting.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So just to be clear, people aren't allowed to criticize ads in Firefox unless they're open source developers actively contributing to Firefox or they only use... What, Opera?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 month ago

I thought saying

contribute however they can up to their own capabilities

was actually very clear but seems I wasn't clear enough so that means... literally doing ANYTHING except only criticizing. That can mean being an open-source developer, yes, but that can also means translation, giving literally 1 cent, etc. It means doing anything at all that would not ONLY be saying "this is good, but it's not good enough" without doing actually a single thing to change, especially while actually using another free of charge browser that is funded by advertisement. Honestly if that's not clear enough I'm not sure what would be ... but please, do ask again I will genuinely try to be clearer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Mozilla could have focused on being user-supported through fundraising like Wikipedia. Instead they chose the comfortable path of being funded by their biggest competitor, who is an evil monopoly spyware ad business, which has been compelling Mozilla to kill Firefox and become the badies on the way down.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can donate to Mozilla.

Perhaps they should've put that more front and center. But if they add a prominent donate button the people on here would probably lose their shit too.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

What on earth would that do? The poisonous leadership would not use it to improve the browser nor would they start working for donors instead of Google.

My point is that there is a funding model that they could have pursued when they still had goodwill and trust. And my hope is if the government finally puts the boot in with Google, then this current version of mozilla will collapse, the rats will leave the ship and hopefully a good browser will emerge the way firefox emerged from netscape.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

But you just said

Mozilla could have focused on being user-supported through fundraising like Wikipedia.

It is an option.

Clearly it isn't working well enough for them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

They would have had to build that infrastructure. I'm not saying fundraising is easy. But it's possible as proven by wikipedia. They could have cut Google loose 10 years ago and said "we're going to use our runway to try to put together a wikimedia foundation style fundraising operation. I don't think they can do it now because the trust, goodwill and quite frankly, userbase is gone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

If you were implying that I said being funded by Alphabet/Google was a good thing then let me be explicit, I did NOT say that nor believe it to be the case. Now, once again, cf my actual comment about pragmatic better alternative we can rely on and support today. If you meant to suggest better and are supporting that, please do share.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago

So, blaming the victim.