this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Another day, more Mozilla FUD. I just saw the switched on Linux guy posted some too. They arent a perfect company, but lets not pretend they're exactly like google or a mini google. It feels almost coordinated to get you to feel like all companies are compromised, so you should just use the popular thing and forget about privacy and security.
People are criticizing Mozilla for the ads, tracking, and AI stuff. The stuff Google does. Criticizing Mozilla is not an endorsement of Google, in fact quite the opposite.
Their ad metrics thing is 100% private. Nobody, not even Mozilla, can tie the data back to you. Each data point is packaged separately (so that you can't get all of it and easily work out who it is). Mozilla created an effective way to have genuinely privacy-respecting and metrics and they're hated for it.
I don't like ads, I use an adblock, but the internet runs on ads. Ads unfortunately have to exist if we still want all this online content, and if they do exist, they should be private.
With any hope, the likes of the EU will push for this over the kinds of ad systems that Google and Meta push.
As for the AI integration in Firefox - it runs locally and does stuff like offline translation (i.e not sending the contents of the page to Google translate), as well as enhanced screen reader functionality for blind people. Stop trying to equate it to the likes of ChatGPT.
the internet doesn't run on ads. we were all fine before the megacorporations came in and started pushing ads down our throats for delivering the exact same services that already existed for free. it just so happens ads are more profitable, and with more profit, you have more ways to achieve exposure, which gives you more profit, ad infinitum.
point is, we'd be fine without ads.
What services were free and not ad supported that survived unlimited VC funds from the 90s?
Do you use any Firefox or chromium web browser, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, or WASM because I'm 90% most of the development for all of that comes from Ad companies or companies funded by ads.
these techs existed long before web based ad companies. but, ad companies exist, so obviously they will contribute to the technologies they need to continue to exist. to do otherwise would be corporate suicide and it's a stupid argument to pretend like we wouldn't be fine without them just because they are putting their fingers in the cake. nothing was wrong with the older browsers; modern browsers are essentially just a war of proprietary rendering to try and kill competition bringing us back to the era of fucking internet explorer; which no one sane would want.
heck, firefox came to exist from netscape, so its basically ancient history at this point, and chromium (blink) is a fork off webkit which in turn is a fork of khtml from KDE (linux) konqueror browser - and as a matter of fact, khtml was discontinued just last year. i don't see the relevance of ad companies when things have been fine and still are; without them.
but as we continue to abandon the practice of IT and todays kids grow up thinking google created the internet and all they know is how to touch the rainbow icon on their screens, the future is fucked.
I don't disagree that there is a ton of development from volunteers and non profit (ngos, Universitys and governments) but the majority seems to be from big tech at the moment.
Just saying they are contributing a lot and in those ways the Internet is better for it.
The exact same services? Did YouTube exist in the 1980s?
there were tons of video streaming sites around before youtube came around. i even ran one at the time.
And did you pay those people? How much money were they able to make off their artistic efforts?
The entitlement is real.
are you 12? it seems you have no experience or memory of a world before 2012. everything which is currently being controlled by a handful of companies like Meta or Google today existed in huge volumes before these snakes paid their way into global dominance. i.e. there were hundreds of big community websites long before facebook. there were several great search engines before google. there were several streaming sites before youtube. there were tons of chat applications before Messenger/WhatsApp. there were thousands of email services before gmail, hotmail, and yahoo created their "whitelist", etc etc. Heck, Messenger (and google talk, etc) - all used XMPP originally, but isolated their network when it grew big enough to kill competition and force users onto their platform. we all USED to be able to use whatever client we wanted and still keep in touch with family and friends. we all USED to be able to run our own mail servers. we all USED to...
fuck it. why am I putting effort into this lol.
Which search engine was running without ads? Were any of those streaming sites paying content creators? Was your streaming site handing traffic for more than 10 users? What was your outgoing bandwidth bill from your ISP?
People see AI and immediately think of ChatGPT. This is despite the fact that AI has been around far longer and does way more things including OCR and data mining. It's never been AI that's the problem, but rather certain uses of AI.
I DON'T want all this online content. I'm not on instagram/facebook/tiktok/whatever two-word website/app the next generation will worship. I don't tweet. I don't follow influencers. The media I consume is mostly youtube, and even that's been recently decreasing. The internet can die tomorrow and I won't miss anything that ran on ads, the biggest impact would be that now I can't buy things online so I'd need to physically purchase some items.
Fuck this version of the internet. If there's ever a moment that adblockers stop fighting the good fight, I'm cutting costs and just not paying for internet anymore. It's not worth it.
Ok. But that is just you personally, and the internet carers to far more than just you.
Which is ad-based, even if you and I likely use ublock.
You won't miss any YouTube content? Really? There's not a single YouTube channel you like? You won't miss hundreds of news websites? Game mod websites? Sites with Old game archives? Etc etc.
Ok whatever, let's assume that's right. It still doesn't change anything. You feeling that way doesn't mean ads will no longer exist.
Ads will exist regardless of your feelings on the matter, because so much of the internet is reliant on it. With that in mind, surely you'd rather ads not be the privacy nightmare they are right now, no?
I feel like people are shitting on a real improvement to the way things currently are in order to fawn over a completely unrealistic change. In other words, letting perfect be the enemy of good.
It is not really FUD to point out that Mozilla wastes ungodly amounts of money on projects of dubious utility instead of investing it into their browser. Their current trajectory doesn't inspire much confidence either. Mozilla started to waste even more money on 'AI' features nobody asked for.
Mozilla doesn't exist to fund Firefox. Firefox exists to fund Mozilla. It's been that since the very fucking beginning: Mozilla is a general internet charity that makes money with a browser. It's always been that way. It never has been any different. I may have to repeat myself: The purpose of Mozilla isn't to fund Firefox the purpose of Firefox is to be a money-maker for Mozilla's charitable causes.
usually you invest in the main product to drive higher returns for diversifying. diversifying first means your baseline is unstable.
During the google money years the ROI on Firefox was so mind-bogglingly high it would've been insanity to drop it all into the browser: It couldn't possibly have soaked up the sheer amount of resources.
Meanwhile, yes they did sink a large amount of resources into it in a way a profit-driven company never would have: They designed a whole fucking new programming language to get proper concurrency into the thing. Rust is, in a very real way, a language to write browsers in. That's its purpose. And then they set the language free because, among other things, you can't make money with it.
Sure, lots of those investments tanked. But OTOH you have stuff like pocket which makes money and could probably keep the lights on by itself. If everything but pocket were to fail Mozilla absolutely would have to downsize, would definitely have to scale back its charity spending, rely more on the FLOSS community to actually write code, but it'd continue with the same kind of force as say Blender, which wouldn't be what it is without its paid staff (both coders and artists) and sidle-hustles (commercial support, training, and cloud services, mostly. Oh, t-shirts and mugs. Don't forget t-shirts and mugs).
I guess overall the gripe I have with the "Mozilla should invest more in Firefox" chorus is that it implies "Do you want Mozilla to be way smaller and less capable of shaping the web than it currently is". People have no sense of the scale of Mozilla, think that it's running on donations etc.
wait, pocket makes money?
There's a subscription if you want and they're also earning some money off referrals. In 2022 they made ~80m dollars off all those side hustles, should probably be 100m by now. Selling the default search engine spot is still the biggest number, about 500m. And they have a piggy bank of over a billion.
man, i haven't thought about pocket for like 10 years. i remember being annoyed that they added yet another binary blob to the software.
It's not a blob the client is definitely open source, not sure about the server software but you're not running that. It's an extension like any other, just that it comes bundled with the default install and doesn't use the usual extension enable/disable UI: Go to
about:config, setextensions.pocket.enabledto false. It's going to stay that way, this isn't microsoft which likes to "fix" your settings.when moz first bought pocket and the extension was included by default, it was before they open-sourced it. this was in the NPAPI days when plugins could do basically anything on the host system. that shit got disabled the moment it touched my browser. same as the drm blob.
Actually, their new AI thing is actually useful: stays on-device, and summarizes web pages and videos.
But yes, they could stand to spend more money on the browser, and less on their CEO and other non-browser things.
Yeah. Offline translation (i.e. that doesn't send data to Google to translate), better screen reader functionality for blind people? Sign me the fuck up.
People are just seeing "AI" and getting upset about it. Absolutely stupid.
Also they made llamafile We need a slur for the obnoxious and deluded anti ai people
I’ll be honest, when I first heard that Mozilla had come out with an AI I figured it was on the back of them trying a couple different ad scenarios, and assumed the worst. Pleasantly surprised by Orbit.
it's a good idea to not look to deeply into the historic actions of the creator of llamafile. she's pretty polarising.
Care to share some highlights?
she was the face of the occupy wall street movement, but her views back then were more ancap than anti capital. while working for google she tried to petition the us government to shut itself down and hand the reins over to the tech industry, with google's ceo as president.
the base of the APE library that powers llamafile is called cosmopolitan libC, iirc in direct reference to the old soviet term.
to give credit she's mellowed out a lot in recent years.
I don't care who they are or what their Xitter history is.
The tools is great, the tool is not backdoored. I ruthlessly use effective tools that I can get my hands on.
Using open source software on its own does not even entails economic support for its creator.
llamafile is not really "effective". it's incredibly impressive, but it's the opposite of effective. it's a collection of a bunch of hacks reliant on coincidences in OS design, and works by basically recompiling itself on the fly to work with different architectures.
if you want effective, run llama.cpp compiled with actual optimizations for your platform.
By effective I mean, I downloaded one file, renamed it to .exe, ran it and now my shitty company laptop was running a basic LLM with actually lots of features, right then and there. I didn't even have a GPU or admin privileges, and it just worked
Sure, maybe it's possible to squeeze more performance out of a 3 years old laptop, but that was actually very usable out of the box. And I didn't even need to unbox it !
We already have one. They're called luddites. They've always existed, and will bemoan any new technological advancement.
Actually luddites were and are based. Neoluddites might be able to help artistes get unfucked by Disney & co
Enshittification isn't an overnight thing, red flags are building and it's important to call it out.
The Mozilla FUD where I said I like Firefox and pointed out how many of the projects continued in some form after Mozilla ended them?
You're right, they aren't google. Not for lack of trying though.
You see posts putting some shade over Mozilla, and your immediate reaction is "it feels almost coordinated". Well, that may be. But it would be hard to distinguish a "coordinated attack" from a "that's just the things they're doing, and there's report on it" article, no? Especially when most of it can be fact-checked.
In this particular case, those abandoned projects got picked up by other… sometimes. And sometimes not. But they were abandoned. There's no denying that.
If you want some more hot water for Mozilla, since you're talking about privacy and security, you'd be interested in their recent switch regarding these points. Sure, the PR is all about protecting privacy and users, but looking into the acts, the message is a bit more diluted. And there's always a fair amount of people that are ready to do the opposite of what you claims; namely discarding all criticism because "Mozilla", when the same criticism are totally fair play when talking about other big companies.
Being keen on maintaining user privacy, system security, and trust, is not the same as picking a "champion" and sticking to it until the end. Mozilla have been doing shady things for half a decade now, and they should not get a free pass because they're still the lesser evil for now.