I think that Mozilla is harming Firefox much more with their decisions. Adding ads to address bar and sending metadata to unknown third parties alienated lots of users, I can’t blame them for looking for alternatives - or making one.

I'm not thrilled with every decision Mozilla has ever made but I think people have gotten so used to the unlimited resources that Apple, Microsoft, and Google are able to pour into their unprofitable ecosystem moats that they've lost sight of what running a self sustaining business in this space would even look like.

> they've lost sight of what running a self sustaining business in this space would even look like

Get your facts right.

Mozilla Corporate receives 400mil a year from Google, for google search to be the default search engine. The engineering costs of Mozilla in 2020 were about 300mil. [0]

So in actual fact you could maintain the not-for-profit status, fire all the corporate staff and still sit on a trove of cash every year.

The google money will not dry out because it is the only CYA situation that Google has against an anti-trust case on Chrome.

There is absolutely no reason Mozilla could not maintain the not-for-profit status and tick along, like other foundations such as Linux, Gnome, Apache, etc.

[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3600206/mozilla-report...

> they've lost sight of what running a sustainable business in this space would look like

Is the claim that it is economically impossible to create a browser without turning it in to surveillance malware?

To the extent that's true, it is the best argument yet for shutting down the web.

Are you implying that Firefox is "surveillance malware"? Precisely what surveillance are you referring to? Telemetry isn't surveillance. Recommended content (e.g. on the default New Tab page) doesn't involve surveillance.

> Telemetry isn't surveillance.

As a categorical statement, this is false. "Not all telemetry is surveillance" is true.

Telemetry is exfiltrated data the user did not ask to send. The line between telemetry and surveillance depends on the use and intent of the data recipient, not (necessarily) the data itself, and that use is opaque to the person whose actions generated the data.

It is interesting to note that telemetry can become surveillance after it is collected. Perhaps a new manager has a different plan, perhaps the cops show up with a subpoena.

Your prejudice is showing. "Exfiltrate" implies a surreptitious operation. E.g. Merriam-Webster: "to remove (someone) furtively from a hostile area"; Dictionary.com: "to escape furtively from an area under enemy control"; Collins: "to remove (data) from a computer, network, etc surreptitiously and without permission or unlawfully".

When Firefox is first launched, it opens the Privacy Notice page https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/, which is totally up-front about data being collected. Nothing surreptitious about it. Data is not "exfiltrated", it's simply "sent". But that doesn't sound nearly as evil, does it?

I'm talking about telemetry, not FF. But whatever, I'm not going to have a pointless discussion with someone more interested in criticizing word choice than replying to what I wrote.

>Are you implying that Firefox is "surveillance malware"? >Telemetry isn't surveillance.

(honest question) Why is this necessary then: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

Why do you assume it's necessary? FWIW, I'd rate quite a bit of what it does as "not necessary".

On another thread, I was told: "Firefox is feeding your data to Google. You need to disable it in the user.js file"

To google? Other than it being the default search engine, highly doubt.

And those “home calls” are nothing more than calls like whether you are on the public internet, whether a new update is available and other mundane things.

AFAIK Mozilla uses Google services for some telemetry. But that's exactly the kind of thing that warrants detailed consideration and not just "there's traffic touching a Google IP, THEY ARE FEEDING DATA TO GOOGLE!" and random scripts from the internet that disable IPv6 "against tracking"

Oh, some random stranger on the Internet said so? That must be right, then.

I was not proclaiming that it was a fact. I am openly frustrated and confused. An oft repeated claim is that "people just don't care about their privacy." I am moderately technical and I am totally unsure of how to keep my data from these parasite companies. Achieving privacy is incredibly arcane and confusing. Instead of quipping at me with a low value post, why don't you tell me exactly what Mozilla's telemetry does? Do you know?

If you want to know about Mozilla's telemetry, you could start with https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid and its links to additional details.

Perhaps these indicate data leakage?

>Searches: Firefox sends Mozilla what you type into the search bar and Mozilla may share that data with its partners.

>Sites you visit: For the Suggestions you click, Firefox sends Mozilla the website URL, and Mozilla may share that data with its partners.

Interesting that turning off "suggestions" is not located in the "privacy" section.

I can’t tell if this is supposed to be serious, but just in case [1].

In case it is, really, shut down the web? What would that look like? Why would we do it? How? How can “browsers are expensive” possibly be worth doing something that extreme?

[1] https://xkcd.com/1454/

The majority of the web should be standardized uniformed wizards. Then people can apply whatever the skin they want onto all of the web. We don't want to deal with all kinds of design that are hard to make, require crazy powerful browsers, and was asked for by no one anyway.

Fancy UIs are made to slow people down in their tasks and draw attention to things that don't matter to what they want to do.

Web developers and creative people like to think the web is their playground but really the most important role of the web should be delivering informations and services efficiently, and get the hell out the way.

Something I vehemently agree with

Can't drain the swamps if the goal is to have moats.

Except if you go full-on Neo-Amish/Luddite and use

[->] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

or the remaining stuff which stays accessible via simple

browsers like [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetSurf ,

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo ,

or textmode stuff like Lynx, (E)Links(2), W3M, and similar.

> the unlimited resources that Apple, Microsoft, and Google are able to pour into their unprofitable ecosystem moats

No sane company pours money into unprofitable anything. They pour money into those moats precisely because it pays dividends.

My point (which I'm confident you do understand despite the pedantry) is that the browsers themselves are not profitable without taking into account their effects on the entire ecosystem.

Mozilla doesn't have an ecosystem like Google, Microsoft and Apple do. If they want to stay afloat they have to be profitable with the browser alone. So trying to directly compare that to the "free candy" approach which the others can get away with is unrealistic.

It's like asking why Target and Best Buy can't match the prices of Amazon retail, which has a money fountain named AWS in their backyard that can subsidize their other activities for "ecosystem growth". If Amazon retail had been a separate standalone business which had to succeed on its own for the past decade, it probably would have been run differently.

Can't see the value of Amazon Retail here without going full-in with Prime, and not even then.

Though that may be regional, as I speak from Germany.

excelent explanation

If a fork like this would decrease ff's user base, Mozilla can change ff or have their lunch eaten by said fork. Hard to see a down side.

Is this fork going to actively develop Firefox if Mozilla's lunch is eaten? Are they going to continue implementing the ever moving standards? That's the down side.

I'd say if there's any harm, it would rather be related to money, as in Mozilla has less to bargain for their deals with their sponsors.

However, seeing how these forks are just "cosmetic", they still use the same rendering engine, which doesn't increase Google's relative user base. As far as this monopoly is concerned, all these forks are still Firefox.

> As far as this monopoly is concerned, all these forks are still Firefox.

Not in the website statistics I guess, unless the forks present themselves as Firefox, which I doubt.

To defend against browser fingerprinting you absolutely want them to present themselves as Firefox.

Which forks are actually doing this?

The one we're discussing here, LibreWolf. Here's my UA:

`User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0`

Note that I am on Linux, so your line of thinking has some validity.

Librewolf does this. It presents itself as Firefox on Windows.

This one.

so far, nobody has been more successful at decreasing the firefox user base than the actual firefox developers.

mozilla is not the kind of entity I'd want to have control over the web either, considering the shit they feel comfortable doing even as an underdog with 3% market share.

> Doesn't it help the Google monopoly on the web?

Can't answer your other question, but this fork has a chance of helping those who don't want to use Mozilla Firefox avoid switching to Chromium browsers by offering a choice.

They’re sponsored by Google, and use google services and google as the default search engine. How are they not part of the Google ecosystem, or monopoly as you call it?

Firefox does not receive orders from Google (except the default search). All decisions and code are independent.

They use Google safesearch to send all your browsing data to Google, and use Google as the default search engine. Tell me how why its not part of the monopoly you mentioned? How is this fighting Google at all?

It is fighting the Google monopoly in browsers, not in search.

No, since a fork is still fundamentally Firefox.

No. Mozilla is actually helping Google build and maintain a monopoly on search (for money) and is accepting the scraps that Google leaves on the table from the browser market.

Mozilla has continuously and repeatedly fucked up when it comes to defaulting to grab telemetry and shady deals with Google, to asking for money while spending way too much salaries for its execs for a supposed non-profit corporation (that is exempt from Federal income taxation).

Although I'm a Firefox user, it pains me to say that I can't wait for the day where Mozilla and Firefox dies. At least it'll hasten the rise of a new effort. And I'd take anything other than Chrome or the Edges of the world.

I'm still hoping Brave will wake up and properly fork Firefox and give Mozilla the big FUCK YOU.

Edit: a special ps to down voters: Fuck Mozilla and its CEO.

Seriously, why are people down voting this? They have been paying the CEO a lot while laying off a ton off people at MDN!

I don't think Mozilla is intentionally helping Google, but they are bleeding a ton of money with community events etc, laying off people while giving this horrible execs increased salaries. Like seriously WTH?

Mozilla need to kill the current leadership, get lean on spenting and most importantly cater to their audience. They don't have much general users. A huge portion are hardcore fans, OpenSource folks, people who value privacy or anti-chrome. Pushing ads to this audience, is only going to accelerate the downfall.

Focus on pleasing power users and devs. Market on shit that matters to power users, sys admins, devs and privacy folks, journalists! Like containers, and dev tools (some of which are already cool). Then these folks will whole heartedly embrace it in their workplaces, recommend to friends and family. Devs will write things more for FF. And don't break extensions again! This is how you got us before. Do it again. Then the general audiences will come.

Currently all these power users an others are themselves not sure about Firefox. They are stuck with it cos neither can they donate directly to Firefox development, nor are they happy with the leadership decisions. They are just waiting till the last day of FF's existence so that they can be a lil more private until they have to move to Chrome based browsers.

When their heart was at the right place their tech sucked. Their tech is better now, but their heart is not in the right place.

(Mozilla dev here, not speaking for Moz)

"grab telemetery" - that data is really, really useful in making development decisions, and we are hyperparanoid about what we collect. From an armchair, it may seem like you can make the right guess about how to eg adjust garbage collection scheduling priorities, but actual data always surprises you in one way or another. It can make the difference between spending a month on a tough project that ends up making no difference for the vast majority of users, and having a month to spend on something more impactful.

I really don't like to speculate on executive pay, but I'm pretty baffled why this is seen as such a big deal. Your argument sounds valid to me. So does the argument that we're talking about the CEO of a tech company that is competing directly with multiple Big Tech competitors, and perhaps paying comparatively bargain basement prices is not the smartest idea. Which is not to say that I'm happy about the layoffs.

Mozilla has messed up on a number of things, multiple times, including at least one time when it ended up (as in, made a deal to and carried it out) sending a bunch of data to a third party. (It was more nuanced than is generally appreciated, but I won't go there.)

I sincerely apologize that Mozilla isn't up to the pristine standards of the big technology companies. /s

I'm not going to explain the MoCo/MoFo structure here. I'll just say that MoCo most definitely pays taxes, MoFo asks for donations because it's a nonprofit with its own initiatives and direction, and you can get tons of information about the finances involving both because of MoFo's nonprofit status and the resulting annual report. (MoCo = Mozilla Corporation, MoFo = Mozilla Foundation, MoFo owns MoCo.)

The Google deal is, like, how MoCo makes money and is able to exist. What's shady about it? I'd certainly like the funding to be more independent. Maybe Mozilla can try drilling for oil on the land it doesn't own or start selling off the user data it doesn't collect?

> I really don't like to speculate on executive pay, but I'm pretty baffled why this is seen as such a big deal.

The problem is not the exec getting paid this much. It is about getting paid this much when to me and many long time users like me see a sinking ship with ever decreasing user base... while on the brink of no more pay from Google... Trying to push ads to us. < THIS IS WHERE EXEC PAY COMES INTO PLAY >

The context is important. It's like when your house is on fire and you are casually using the fire to light up a cigar.

> I sincerely apologize that Mozilla isn't up to the pristine standards of the big technology companies. /s

In all seriousness, we just need the heart of the old MoCo (Pre quantum) and the tech of the current MoCo. ;)

Firefox users are ideologically invested in the browser. I do feel like Mozilla is trying to push things like you are this big corp (In a way MoCo is.). While I am absolutely happy with the technical progress and direction Firefox taking, MoFo/MoCo should understand the ideological element here. This is why you see more outcry against "how things should be run" against Mozilla and not Google.

> I really don't like to speculate on executive pay, but I'm pretty baffled why this is seen as such a big deal.

They lay off 250+ people - many of whom are the very people needed to make the technical improvements many users desire - while the executives get pay raises. You wonder why it's a 'big deal'?

Did the execs get raises after the layoffs? About half the ones that were at Mozilla at that time are gone now.

> "grab telemetery" - that data is really, really useful in making development decisions, and we are hyperparanoid about what we collect.

We understand that, and we're saying no. You can do whatever you want. I will use LibreWolf.

Yeah that’s a weird attitude to have, the only reason there are users who feel personally hurt by the attitude Mozilla has been taking for the past few years is because they know things could be going way better.

No one is arguing that telemetry can be helpful but forcing users into it while acting holier than though is not just shady, but very much scammy.

The whole structuring difference between the foundation and the corporation sounds a lot like a tactic to push for some things under the non profit front and others under the company front, aka scammy.

All this turns on alarms in people’s heads… in a way I don’t find it weird that you guys still don’t see it, this is a sinking ship, and you’re going to think everything is going well until the last breath.

I'm absolutely with you on this. In fact, when I heard about the servo team and the CEO's salary, I stopped using Firefox. Now I mostly use qutebrowser (and Vivaldi for stuff I need more security).

I will start using Firefox when it leaves Mozilla and I'd pay a subscription for it. For me, the ideal situation is a lean team (hopefully only the devs, because I'm not paying any useless middle or high level managers a penny) start developing it for a fee. Just the browser will do, no password managers, no vpns, no nonsense. I already pay for subscriptions for those.

I've seen many here on hacker news expressing willingness to pay and the only reason that they don't is because they don't want to pay for other Mozilla nonsense but Mozilla doesn't want to open a direct channel for the community to support the Firefox team. I find this outrageous. Clearly, they are using Firefox, its very talented devs and the image of their noble fight for a private internet to fill the pockets of executives who don't know shit about engineering or the ethos of opensource software.

> and Vivaldi for stuff I need more security).

I agree with you on almost everything except Vivaldi. They are closed source and Firefox is 100% much more capable of supporting privacy than Vivaldi.

I have my own problems with Firefox but don't intend to stop using Firefox. They are still great. I will have to see this through I feel. lol.

Also, when you use a browser based on Blink engine (Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, Edge, Chromium) you are giving more leverage to Google at W3C. This makes FLoC kind of stuff more probable from Google.

"You need to change the browser engine as well, NOT JUST THE BROWSER." ;)

Always choose Gecko or Gecko based (like Librewolf) :)