https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1711854

So yeah I have a wifi card, technically, but also technically don't from the point of view of firefox or any other program on my computer.

Instead your computer operating system sends the BSSIDs to another service, get the location back and then your browser uses this location service to send a lat,long to the requesting website.

See https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mh35873/mac and https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-location...

Edit: s/100ft/10ft after I remembered better

I do suspect that most websites that ask for location information could do fine with GeoIP, but that doesn't mean there isn't any use for more reliable, fine-grained location data.

for explicit it is using device GPS and/or cell tower

either you are not actually connected to the VPN or the website is storing your consent to access GPS coordinates. I'm not sure which is scarier

to test the former go to a few different websites that tell you your IP address

for the latter, fully clear your browser's cookies and cache and retry. does it ask to access fine location?

another reason could be that you are logged in to e.g. google who already knows where you are based on historic searches, nearby wifi and bluetooth devices, etc.

A primary software at work is $1,500 to $10,000 a seat (depending on extensions) plus 10% annual maintenance. Our department annual fee is ~$70,000. I have a long list of "vote up this enhancement request or bug to get it fixed" that goes back almost two decades. (It's hard to identify the oldest because the vendor has switched tracking platforms twice.)

As a user, Firefox feels like hobby project, but at least it's not a Google product.

Advertising is not about the Seller of the product and the Publisher of the content. Oh no.

The money in advertisement is the hundreds of companies that prey on each other all the way connecting seller and publisher. Because nobody trust anybody in advertisement. There's traffic validate. Click validation. Sales attribution. Sales attribution validation. MRC Accreditation for the sales attribution validation. etc. etc. etc.

Interesting, did not know this happened.

I'm not sure that the money Mozilla spends on other things would be better spent on the browser... would it realistically close any existing gaps between their competition? Arguably they might even be better off spending it on marketing the browser than any technical metric. I'd rather this kind of thing than marketing.

Now, if I can find how to make it stop opening a new tab every time I enter an URL in the address bar instead of reusing the current tab, the experience would be blissful.

Is this what you're after?

I like Mozilla as a company and I still use Firefox over Chrome knowing that it is objectively a worse browser and experience because I dislike Google and their business practices and i support businesses that I believe in. I am very much against the monopoly Google has over the web space and their positioning to dictate future web standards that will probably benefit their ad revenue over user experience.

With regards to APIs, I'm very happy with Firefox's commitment to telling Google to go fuck itself when it comes to Manifest V3 neutering of adblocking.

> I am very much against the monopoly Google has over the web space and their positioning to dictate future web standards

Then, to the extent you can, stop using Google-controlled browser engines. Google can only dictate future web "standards" if they're the de-facto standard browser engine… so just refuse to acknowledge them.

If you make websites, use stuff that only works in Firefox (and the indie browsers), like Content MathML, or stick to stuff that works in every browser – and by that, I mean clean, semantic HTML. Force Google to play catch-up for once, or make the whole "catch-up" game irrelevant.

My favourite such feature is alternate stylesheets. Supported by Firefox, and by basically every CSS-supporting indie browser, but by almost none of the Chromiums.

Chrome also deliberately broke CSS2 years after it was supposedly completely implemented to simplify their rendering, breaking existing websites. (this was showcased on their "html5 rocks" website at one point to quite a lot of protest from other browsers). Everyone ended having to follow Chrome's lead at that point, but for a while who was "fully compliant" would be up in the air. Amusingly it seems to me anchor positioning Chrome just added to CSS3 allows doing those things they considered un-performant, a decade later.

Google has also implemented rather dubious specs, like WebUSB where it is understandable no one else has implemented yet due to security concerns - but that would also drag down scores further.

That's exactly what they're doing with the biggest ad trackers and browser vendors. A lot of Mozilla's "side-projects" are stupid and I also agree they should focus more on Firefox, but this one is pretty in line with their general mission of "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will".

Heck, maybe investing hundreds of millions in Apple today would, in X years, be worth more money than spending marketing money / development budgets for new features for their own products; or worth more than investing in OpenAI and related products - but it's not exactly something anyone would suggest Microsoft should do (in terms of just becoming a shareholder, of course there could be collaborations without changing this point).

Technically yes, but not really. It’s specifically valid to observe with regards to Microsoft because Microsoft did in actual fact hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Apple stock for a decent stretch of time. Most companies did not.

Microsoft chose to sell their Apple stock in 2003. This was entirely their choice. They didn't have to. They could have sold it in 2005 and made an additional billion dollars. They could have sold it in 2007 and made another ten billion dollars. They could have sold it today and made a hundred billion dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...

"the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million."

"Intel gave this code to Microsoft as part of a joint development program called Display Control Interface."

"Canyon admitted that it had copied to Intel code developed for and assigned to Apple. In September 1994, Apple's software was distributed by Microsoft in its developer kits, and in Microsoft's Video for Windows version 1.1d."

[0]https://infostory.com/2013/08/18/steve-jobs-thank-you-bill-g...

At the time and subsequently it was absolutely seen as a lifeline.

For example:

> Providing the biggest sign of hope yet for ailing Apple Computer, Microsoft today announced it was forging a new era of cooperation with its longtime rival that includes an investment of $150 million. [snip] News of the alliance sent Apple's stock up $7 a share, or 35 percent

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19970806&slug...

> Recognizing the importance of Mac Office to Apple's survival, Microsoft threatened to cancel the product unless Apple compromised on a number of outstanding issues between the companies. One of these issues was the extent to which Apple distributed and promoted Internet Explorer, as opposed to Navigator, with the Mac OS.

> At the end of June 1997, the Microsoft executive in charge of Mac Office, Ben Waldman, sent a message to Gates and Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer, Greg Maffei. The message reflected Waldman's understanding that Microsoft was threatening to cancel Mac Office:

> The pace of our discussions with Apple as well as their recent unsatisfactory response have certainly frustrated a lot of people at Microsoft. The threat to cancel Mac Office 97 is certainly the strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately. I also believe that Apple is taking this threat pretty seriously

[snip]

> Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office . . . ."

from https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f... paragraph 345 onwards.

Jobs' deal with MS fixed this problem.

I think you're misremembering or mistyping the numbers, unless Wikipedia is wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Office

Word 2.0 shipped on a lot of Windows NT computers with Office 3.0 and these were the days when there weren't forced updates and you had to pay so it hung around for ages.

When Microsoft invested a paltry $250M in Apple, Apple had already secured a line of credit of $4 Billion.

On top of that, Apple turned around a spent $100 million the same quarter to buy out PowerComputing’s Mac license. Apple lost way more than $150 million before they became profitable.

>"Evil Empire" entered the Billboard charts at No. 1, which reflects the broad audience the band has built. "I personally never thought that we'd ever sell a single record," Morello recalls, but it looks as if signing with Epic has worked. "True, we are a major-label band," he concedes. "But we're using the mechanism of the record label to spread revolutionary propaganda." [1]

[1] RAGE: CO-OPTING THE MACHINE (1996)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1996/08/16/...

I'd be more convinced of this if they weren't actively collaborating with the big guys.

This is the rich philanthropists debate all over again. Yea, sure, they got rich from participating in the system, but they're using a big chunk of that wealth to fight its consequences. Sure as hell beats the alternative, where the only people willing to fight are the ones without the resources to do it.

I'd honestly rather see Firefox development be funded by selling NFTs and mining crypto, than not funded at all. Volunteer/donation-driven FOSS is great, but it has never been able to compete with for-profit products and it sure as hell couldn't compete with Google here.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)

It was a Mozilla side project, but with Servo, totally in line with its mission of making a good web browser. I'd even say it was a necessary long term plan. Chrome was the better, more modern browser, and Firefox needed fundamental improvements like these to compete. If anything, I think they should have spent more energy on Rust and Servo, not less.

Smoke and mirrors more like it. They collaborate with Facebook and Google all the time. 80%-90% of their revenue comes from Google. Fighting the 'big guys' for real would mean shutting shop and never to be seen again.

Has Google ever mentioned anything about privacy? (privacy from hackers doesn't count, that's security) Do you think Apple, with the joke of a browser that is Safari and basically zero stake in the web, would be able to keep Google from turning the web into its own closed little sandbox?

Who would say "if Chrome kills adblockers, switch to our browser" and be able to actually sustain it, not just keep their Chromium fork slightly out of date for as long as they can get away with?

The only reason Firefox has been able to survive this long after Chrome's launch is Mozilla's historic importance. A new player could never dream to compete with Google - even Microsoft failed! If Mozilla folds, who else do you think will be able to compete with Google? Stallman himself?? This is the real world and compromises must be made.

What makes you think they're not doing that now and Mozilla's existence even matters in this case? Funny enough, they're only keeping Mozilla alive to avoid any antitrust cases.

> would be able to keep Google from turning the web into its own closed little sandbox?

Flawed argument. If Google all of a sudden stops funding Mozilla, do you think that they're going to continue development of the browser? Firefox has steadily been losing market share for years, the writing is on the walls.

The fact that Mozilla's existence itself depends on Big-Tech is one huge irony. It's like saying, “I'm against meat eating... Oh hey, my hamburger is here!”.

> Who would say "if Chrome kills adblockers, switch to our browser" and be able to actually sustain it, not just keep their Chromium fork slightly out of date for as long as they can get away with?

Literally Brave.

Firefox developers are still in the standards organisations and their position on new proposals does have some weight on the way they're written. Google is funding Mozilla for good PR, it's not like they're in any real danger from antitrust legislation. I say take the money if they're offering and do as much good for the web as you can until it runs out. It's not like you're sacrificing anything for it, it's basically free money.

> If Google all of a sudden stops funding Mozilla, do you think that they're going to continue development of the browser?

I don't know, but even if they immediately drop Firefox when that happens, we still have it until then. If Firefox disappears now, we're fucked. But who knows what might change until then - maybe someone figures out a business model for browsers, or some other tech or policy makes it easier to compete. When/if that happens, starting from a near-monopoly is way better than a complete monopoly.

> Literally Brave

What was that about ethics again? Also, it's just a closely following Chromium fork, so they don't really have a say in how Blink develops.

We should not be talking about ethics if we're talking about Mozilla either. From shameless extension backdoors to not blocking trackers from Google on purpose, it's all over the place when it comes to ethics and privacy. At least Brave directly challenges Big Tech by making bolder decisions to block them instead of being afraid like Firefox, enabling trackers and not providing any privacy against Google.

What Brave has done with respect to privacy features, Firefox couldn't even do it in decades:

https://privacytests.org

https://brave.com/privacy-updates/

I do understand that Brave is a chromium fork and that they depend on Chromium for patches but this is still a FOSS browser that is independently funded and has better statistical chances of survival than Firefox. Brave's MAU is very good, almost doubling every year since its first release. On top of that, they're the only existing company that challenges Big Tech search engine monopoly by actually providing a great privacy focused search engine that is also independently indexed.

Firefox is a series of unfulfilled promises and failures. An untapped potential ruined by management.

You mean the Brave that collected rewards revenue for websites that weren't enrolled in their program? Or the brave that literally changed the url that the users typed in the url bar?

Also, do you have any source for Mozilla not blocking googles trackers? AFAIK they do, and did, block their trackers thou they had to do it differently for google analytics as to not break some webpages. Because of that you did not see those being blocked in the UI but they were blocked.

> What Brave has done with respect to privacy features, Firefox couldn't even do it in decades:

Well, unlike Brave, Mozilla is making a whole browser.

> I do understand that Brave is a chromium fork and that they depend on Chromium for patches but this is still a FOSS browser that is independently funded

You asked earlier how long would Mozilla exist if google cut their founding. How long do you think would Brave exist if google decided to go closed source with chrome?

I had been using Firefox since 2002, when it was called Phoenix.

I switched to a Chromium-based browser because the performance difference was noticable enough, and I am in the browser often enough, to finally throw in the towel and switch.

They have a huge amount of money coming in from Google. Why is this going to acquisitions like this and not towards strengthening the development so that it remains competitive? Or are they, and I am not aware?

If it doesn't remain competitive on things like performance, standards compliance, etc. there are very few reasons for the average user to choose Firefox over any other browser at the moment. The privacy-focus is good, but there are other browsers that do the same on Chromium.

So firefox now is.. a worse chrome reskin. I use both daily and firefox is just not that good.

Mozilla foundation is completely not interested in getting firefox fixed to have its competetive advantage back - and to be the customizable browser.

I guess they are just happy to spend money on travel and side projects -> they just boost their CV to jump ship somewhere else.

You may be thinking about Microsoft Edge, which switched from EdgeHTML to Chromium in 2020.

You've addressed some of the assets well: the tech, product, etc.

Mozilla isn't just paying for that, they are paying for the audience. I.e. the millions of people monthly who search for authentic product information.

Mozilla may be interested in selling them another product , or revising the fakespot product – who knows?

I'm just calling attention to the assets that the business paid for and that they are worth the money paid.

I use FakeSpot a lot, and it's less about finding AI written reviews and more about finding any fake reviews, human written or not. They don't need to try and tell if reviews are actually written by a human, just if they are authentic. A reviewer with only 1 review on their whole account will be flagged as suspicious. A reviewer with only reviews for the same company will be marked as definitely fake. It also does things like look for repeated sentiments across all reviews for a product. Sometimes it gets false positives, like a review for a chair might legitimately have 30% of users saying the phrase "super/very/really comfy" at some point in their review. But because it's repeated so much it's flagged as indicating fake reviews.

There are lots of companies working on making convincing language models. ChatGPT is pretty much already at that level for something simple like Amazon reviews. But there aren't any large AI companies working on AI that can fake looking like an authentic group of reviewers. Those are all more shady businesses without billion dollar budgets.

Sure the problem of writing a single convincing review is now solved for those shady businesses. But the really sophisticated ones were already paying humans to write the reviews before good LLM's came along. There's also the issue of sellers themselves including a card or followup email promising a small gift card in exchange for a 5 star review.

I think that's an advantage that something like this has because basically you just have to function as a critic