Mozilla is fighting an uphill battle, but that doesn't give them a free pass. The Pocket, Cliqz, and Mr. Robot controversies undermine Mozilla's core message. Whether or not they are simply failures of marketing and branding doesn't change the fact that they hurt the company. That being said, a lot of people will never know about these issues so the damage is not catastrophic.

I would also argue that "just being better than X" was shown not to be effective in the last US Presidential election.

Am I the only one looking at this and thinking that the so-called controversies are absurdly tame in comparison with the outcry associated with them?

They're missteps, not trust breakers. Quantum was a massive step in the right direction. The Mr. Robot Easter Egg was non-malicious poor execution. I don't think it's a free pass to just contextualize how small their missteps have been in the grand scheme of things.

I think you are wrong about them not being "trust breakers" and right about them being fairly tame.

The reason the response seems outsized is because of the breach of trust involved, much more so than the technical impacts.

Quantum is great, and I just like a lot of the UX decisions Firefox makes. But a major reason for my support of Mozilla is their stated mission. And regularly making bumbling moves that overtly compromise that stated mission makes you start to question their commitment to it. Is it really their mission, or is it just a thing it is good for them to keep saying? POSIWID and all that.

Of the named examples, you can only somewhat reasonably make the argument that it goes against the mission for Cliqz. The rest did not negatively impact making the internet a global public resource, accessible to all.

I’m afraid that the current environment means outcry is always around the corner. I’m rooting for Mozilla but I’d like it if they could learn to avoid drawing negative attention.

Despite the non-maliciousness of the easter egg, I do think the act of just installing an extension into a browser could be viewed as a trust-breaker. I think the other "controversies" are overblown, but them remotely installing an extension like that doesn't sit right with me.

But that's only because it's called an extension. Nobody is up in arms about Mozilla "just installing" about:mozilla.

Chrome doesn't magically revert privacy or search engine settings in updates, but Firefox apparently does. To quote from https://drewdevault.com/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-... :

> Not only are these experiments enabled by default, but updates have been known to re-enable it if you turn it off.

Chrome has some troubling defaults but Google never decided to flip the default search engine or turn on any phone-home feature once it has been turned off. Even though they had/have the power to do so, they know people won't trust Chrome if they ever tried to do that. In my book that's more trustworthy than a vendor that decides to use updates to surreptitiously enable features that users disabled.

While that may be true, defaults matter too. Even as a privacy conscious techie it's possible to forget the X different settings one must change with each new install or device.

And for some dissidents or researchers those defaults could be life or career ending.

I don't think that it can be argued that Chrome is privacy-friendly. There are dark patterns built into the browser.

Prove it or show code! This statements sounds like a conspiracy theory.

Exactly. I ran the beta and when it became the release version, I changed my update channel to "release." It has not reverted any settings I've made.

I also had the Shield stuff turned off (my choice), and it hasn't been reverted, nor did the Mr. Robot extension ever show up. I agree, though, that that was a Bad Idea.

If you delete Chrome's shitty preset search engines, it adds them back with every update.

> I don't really understand this attitude. Mozilla doesn't need to be everything I ever wanted from a browser in order to get my support.

Having a Mozilla option is good, but when Mozilla screws up it needs to get a clear indication that it did. I think folks saying "down with Mozilla" do not really mean this 100%; but they do want Mozilla to know that it seriously screwed up in their view. And we should not treat it as a shrinking violet -- it is not a tiny startup; it is a large corporation with funding in hundreds of millions.

> It only needs to be better than Google.

This, IMO, is setting the bar way too low. It should aim to do what the users want and consumer technology easily allows. If there is a big gap between those we should encourage new entrants, not entrench Mozilla as "the" alternative to pick-your-evil. My 2c.

These past episodes show that Mozilla can be tempted by money to go against their core values of user choice and privacy. Only in small ways so far, but trust is easy to lose.

If you don't like Google, you can always use Chromium or Brave. I trust them not to run marketing campaigns inside my browser.

> I trust them not to run marketing campaigns inside my browser.

Do you also trust them not to listen to your mic? I think debian had to have a discussion with them about that.

Google is transparent. I know what they are doing. I know why they are doing it.

Mozilla became a shady character. It engages in "it depends on a meaning of the word 'is'" speak.

Here's how Mozilla can get back into my graces - it needs to publicly FIRE whoever approved it and whoever advocated for this project.

> Google is transparent. I know what they are doing.

You do? Okay, I don't. Please, show me exactly how Google uses data they collect from their users. Every usage. Not just a few. And no "but they say they can use it for whatever they want!" - then we can talk about transparency.

Sure it is - it markets my information to advertisers via its own platform. It is my neighborhood drug dealer, and drug are pretty good - nicely packaged and no one fucks with me when i use its drug delivery service.

Mozilla is pretending to be a health store. But we are starting to see that they are also peddling drugs. Not Google drugs - drugs with security and drugs with delivery system and drugs that we are pretty sure how they work - but some other drugs, from shady producers using shady means.

Can you specify which "shady drugs" are these? Because I'm not seeing it. In this particular case, the addon was written by Mozilla employees, and was completely harmless. I don't think Mozilla did well - and I've said so in the original thread - but calling it shady compared to Google ads? That's laughable. DoubleClick is one of the largest malware distribution platforms in history.

Pocket.

Mr. Robot.

Google tells me - "Dude, for providing me your information you get gooodieeeees!"

Mozilla tells me - "We respect your privacy. "

In a micro-font : "except when we do things that you should not be concerned about"

Which of those violated your privacy?

It's a myth that Google literally sells your information to advertisers. It uses your information to show you advertisements which both it and its advertisers hopes are relevant and useful (so you will click on them). If you think about it, that business model essentially requires that the ads not be too annoying, because if they are, people will use ad blockers and the business model dies.

The really annoying ads which auto-play videos, block content, etc., tend to be served by companies who aren't taking the long view --- which is why Chrome is going to be adding adblocking for those ads that are ultra-annyoing early next year.

There's a pretty big difference between "using your information for marketing", and "marketing your information to advertisers". The second implies that your private information is getting divulged for a price, and that's simply not true.

There is less of a difference between those than there seems to be, there are a lot of interesting research papers and experiments regarding methods to create a feedback loop between targeting ads and then identifying those targeted.

If I narrowly target an ad and then I know you saw it, I now know all those things about you.

So, yes, they do not literally sell your information, there is one level of indirection there. And the amount of information that data brokers get their hands on tells me that it is very likely people are exporting this information regularly.

> it markets my information to advertisers

and what other uses?

That is the whole point. You know it does it, fair game. Mozilla is speaking one doing and doing shady things also.

my point was that people don't know the full scope and nature of what google does, so suggesting they're 'better' is comical.

I do not need to know a full scope of what Google does. Lets stipulate that they sell all the information. There, I now know the entire scope.

what makes you think that is the "entire scope"?