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63 points pabs3 | 4 comments | | HN request time: 1.355s | source

How much would you and or your company be willing to fund Mozilla should it need to become independent of Google?
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ItsBob ◴[] No.43342257[source]
I'd fund a browser that has the following:

1. Zero telemetry. I mean ZERO: remove all telemetry code from the codebase. They can ask me about features the old-fashioned way - surveys!

2. Focus on privacy and security. Put these to the top of the list.

3. Stop paying your CEO millions! Not worth it imo!

4. Stop with all the other Mozilla shit! I am interested in a browser (and perhaps an email client... I'll let you work on that too!). No more Pocket, VPN and all that other shite.

5. ZERO, I mean ZERO data capture at all! Nothing. Not a single bit except when someone clicks the link to download Firefox, you can capture their userAgent and whatnot. But the browser, Firefox, should not be capturing a single byte of data from me once installed (except perhaps a periodic version check and you can pass in the version like this: https://firefox.com/update?v=123.568).

6. For sync, allow me to sync an encrypted file to Dropbox, OneDrive, Local drive, Whatever.com. That way my passwords, bookmarks etc. can be sync'd from MY location that I control, not yours!).

7. Have a "Block all shady JS tactics" button. This would include fingerprinting, location and such. Perhaps you could send bogus, random data when it's asked for instead. That'd be fine too.

I think that's it :)

For a browser that did this, and was properly audited to prevent anything shady from creeping in, I'd pay $30 a year for it.

Edit: To clarify - I wouldn't pay the current Mozilla a single penny!

replies(2): >>43342603 #>>43342635 #
1. bossyTeacher ◴[] No.43342603[source]
> Zero telemetry.

So no crash logs or similar issues? Logging is seen as a subset of telemetry

I agree with most of your points but you missed out an important one: active lobbying to counteract or reduce google's dominance on the web. As long as Chrome reigns supreme, Firefox will always be playing catch up as Google can break the web for non chrome devices by regularly adding apis that are only in chrome and forcing devs to use them

replies(1): >>43342944 #
2. ItsBob ◴[] No.43342944[source]
I don't consider things like crash logs and debug stuff to be telemetry. This can easily be dealt with by a popup saying "want to upload the crash log?". It can just be a text file with a bunch of data.

I'm fine with that.

Telemetry to me is knowing what I'm doing, like clicking a button, using a feature etc. They record that shit! Also, sending data about my websites back to the mothership so they can sell ads (or sell to ad companies... same thing).

That's what I mean when I talk about telemetry.

replies(1): >>43346447 #
3. bossyTeacher ◴[] No.43346447[source]
Fairs. But logging and similar is a type of telemetry. It is worth being clear about this stuff. And surely, you don't want to send logs only when your software crashes (which seems to be your proposal) as it might never crash. Not all software bugs lead to crashes. Doesn't mean they don't need investigation.
replies(1): >>43351048 #
4. ItsBob ◴[] No.43351048{3}[source]
> Doesn't mean they don't need investigation.

True. But there was a time when we managed to program software and not send every keystroke back to the mothership.

It's possible to have a daily/weekly/monthly popup that says "We've detected a few bugs over the last week, can we send the reports to the mothership?"

It's as simple as zipping the text files and sending them to an API endpoint.

I have no issue with this. Hell, you could even make it automatic where I can check a box that says "Automatically send weekly crash reports".

I have a massive issue with the devs thinking that it's ok to send telemetry back about every single thing I do in the software I've installed on MY computer so that they can "improve my experience" or whatever bullshit they use to justify it.

It's time for that to stop.