Firefox is on a slippery slope

Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by naner on Saturday December 16, 2017 @12:38PM (#15940553)

They're ruining their brand image. It's hard to be considered trustworthy when it appears like you compromise your values due to financial hardship. It reminds me of the Ubuntu Amazon integration thing as well. One of the Cardinal rules of free software seems to be don't sell your users by forcing 3rd party integration nobody asked for.

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Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by rdtsc on Saturday December 16, 2017 @12:49PM (#15940633)

It's always interesting how this happens. Is it new executives how come to power and they never realize what the brand meant to users but see a short term stunt to get some extra profit and go for it.

It happened to Lenovo and other laptops when they started installing spyware (Superfish) on their machines. They basically ruined the brand image that took years to build up.

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Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by mulmen on Saturday December 16, 2017 @05:32PM (#15942595)

In the case of Lenovo the brand was sold by IBM to a third party who immediately drove it into the ground.

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Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by digi_owl on Saturday December 16, 2017 @11:28PM (#15944106)

funny thing is that none if the issues have ever been found on the thinkpad libe, only the ideapad line.

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Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by rdtsc on Saturday December 16, 2017 @11:37PM (#15944134)

True and I'd still look at Thinkpads if I had to buy a new machine, but knowing what they did with the E, Y, G and Edge series would make me always look a bit harder at other brands first from now on.

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Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by rdiddly on Saturday December 16, 2017 @01:34PM (#15940979)

Yeah I get impatient with the "they need to make money" apologist argument. Oh, I get it, you're saying I should trust them because they're in it for the money like everybody else. Makes sense thanx.

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Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by marten-de-vries on Saturday December 16, 2017 @02:54PM (#15941591)

No, they're not in it for money. In the end (the foundation owns the corporation), Mozilla is a non-profit.

They need money to achieve their mission though: maintaining a browser (in a landscape of evolving security challenges, performance & web standards) and research (e.g. projects like Rust, Servo & pdf.js originated that way) is not cheap. And currently it mostly comes from search engine deals. If they cannot get a similar one, it all collapses.

I can see why they try to diversify their income. That said, I don't agree with the way they do it here.

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Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by jessaustin on Saturday December 16, 2017 @09:02PM (#15943535)

"Non-profit" just means that shareholders don't profit. Nonprofits offer many opportunities for executives to personally profit.

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Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by arkh on Saturday December 16, 2017 @06:33PM (#15942915)

If they want to diversify they can work on other projects making money instead of fucking up their current userbase.

IMO coding missile software to pay for those projects would be a lot more ethical than what they're doing. Yeah I consider the ad industry and its privacy crushing consequences worse than weapons almost never fired.

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Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by FireBeyond on Saturday December 16, 2017 @02:42PM (#15941500)

Especially as a company with over $440M in assets, $330M of which is invested, with less than $60M/year in accounts payable and liabilities, that received $500M in royalties last year.

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Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by throwaway2048 on Saturday December 16, 2017 @02:52PM (#15941574)

I think the real issue is mozilla essentially gets an infinite supply of money from parties like Google, no matter how shockingly incompetent they are.

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