this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2021
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People are going to complain no matter how they try to raise money, but this should at least have been opt-in with clear consent.
I don't know about how Vivaldi works, but Brave stans can shut up. Their ad system is a hundred times worse than Mozilla's.
I mean, I don't like how they went about this either, but considering the alternative of a 100% Google dominated browser space, and the fact that you can just disable it and the base Firefox code is still open source, it's not a huge deal.
Yeah, I'm not really defending them (from my point of view any feature that does something without my knowledge or consent being turned on by default is unacceptable) but from my point of view they'll always have to dance with a devil of some sort. I say people are going to complain no matter what based on past experiences: e.g. the "sponsored content on new tab", where they made sure to run all the "recommendation" logic locally so that no data was being sent out of the browser, that still wasn't enough because "ads are bad." So maybe from Mozilla's point of view there is no incentive to try to make these folks happy. People complained whenever they tried to offer Pocket or the VPN thing or the password manager because those weren't "core products" but they're also not allowed to monetize the "core product" either. It's like these people expect Mozilla to be able to synthesize money from air.
And, I am not really sure of the value of suggesting Vivaldi (which is vehemently anti-free software) or Brave (dodgy crypto scheme) which also further Google's dominance over the modern web as a side effect, when we have community versions of Firefox such as LibreWolf or IceCat which are basically the Gecko equivalent of those shady Chromium clones.
I think I'm starting to come around to Drew DeVault's position that it is impossible to implement the web as it exists today.
I rarely use closed source software. My exceptions are
Vivaldi just works so wonderful. Once you use it you can't go back (Check out the in browser mail client). I really wish they were FOSS though.
It doesn't matter to me how much better Vivaldi works over Firefox or even Base Chromium. TBH, this is just something I'm willing to sacrifice in the name of FLOSS. iPhones and Macs are amazingly user friendly too, but I still avoid them like the plague because of Apple's absolute hatred of FLOSS and especially Right to Repair.
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
Yeah sure, but I'm not very convinced this is the best way for them to make money. And you also have to keep in mind that company internal decisions have been really bad, which got augmented by covid. The whole absurd CEO salary is a fine example of the downhill path Mozilla is taking...
I understand what you (and many other say) but....why not give some alternative ideas on how to make money as well?
Because I am not qualified to make good proposals, nor do I know the inner workings of Mozilla. I could spew out some ideas but nothing that could concretely be implemented.
I can, however, criticize them in an attempt to raise aawareness and directly, or indirectly, make them work on solving the issues. And as I mentioned, my biggest grudge with them isn't even this (which won't be that big of a problem since you can turn it off), but rather completely derranged distribution of salaries that Mozilla has.