Let me pay for Firefox

Many people on HN hold Mozilla to impossible and conflicting standards. It is simultaneously a compromised propaganda arm of Google for taking the Google bribe, while also being compromised money-grabbing wankers diluting their mission when they try to generate alternative revenues of income. I realise that HN has different people posting different arguments, but I've seen many people post both over the years.

All of that is frequently married with an the amount of vitriol that seems out of place and downright bizarre. There is typically a lack of constructive discourse or suggestions, beyond vague hand-waving about how they should "just do better", or "just do this or that". Well, if it's that easy then why don't you start a browser?

In-between all of that there is the inevitable political vitriol and flaming about Mozilla. Have we gotten a flamewar about Brendan Eich (who left over 11 years ago) yet? It's the Godwin Law of Mozilla/Firefox.

These threads bring out the absolute worst of the site and many people with more nuanced views probably make a habit of staying out of them. When I've commented on this before I've been accosted with highly aggressive personal attacks. So now I often just hide them.

It’s not about getting overly vitriolic. It’s simply that they said this:

“The Firefox Browser is the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers”

And then, they changed it:

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/03/02/mozilla_introduce...

Google also had an unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil” and said:

“Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating”

https://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/

And they changed it.

So- sure, sometimes people change their minds.

But, Google never promised it wouldn’t sell your data.

Mozilla did, and users continued to use it, many without knowledge of it; it should be a banner over all the pages: “Hey, we sell your data. Click here to acknowledge.”

[flagged]

This is great: https://aframe.io/

Not every front, they gave us MDN and Rust, both of which will probably outlive them. KaiOS (the continuation of Firefox OS) is very popular in less developed areas of the world. Not that they managed to make anything off that.

Thank you for proving my point.

I cant buy your firefox data.

I can buy a huge block of aggregate data that has some things of yours in it.

MDN was a consolidation of several vendors’ web documentation efforts (I still remember Opera’s Web Fundamentals course fondly), which they collectively decided to put under Mozilla’s stewardship because surely Mozilla, among all of them, would maintain it neutrally and for the public benefit. It was a good run and Mozilla did do a good job at the maintenance for the last decade, but with their recent monetization efforts around MDN, I’m not hopeful for the future. (This is also why I’m incensed by Google’s web.dev—it’s not just the domain name, it’s that they are reneging on that old agreement.)

The Mozilla corporation made sure to wash its hands of all those successes.

That’s very... VRML of them. Not that VRML was bad as a concept, just surprised to see it make a comeback.

>Google is a convicted criminal that suppressed competition and is now awaiting sentencing

>Google's illegal monopoly

>Google's criminality is the one mitigating favor

As someone who switched from Firefox to Chrome a while ago, these remarks made me curious enough to research the case.

The judge ruled based on "billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets".

The crime of the century laid bare before our eyes. A search engine company caught red-handed paying companies to set its search engine as the default search engine as everyone everywhere knew and saw for decades. Utterly reprehensible.

- Advertisers buy user data from Firefox, who can then resell or provide this data to others.

- Others buy that data.

- Big data companies and others aggregate this information.

- Cookie or IP are not necessarily required to identify users; thumbprinting, datetime, and behavioral matching can identify users adequately.

- Advertisers and analytics giants can ingest data that includes PII, if it’s encrypted, and that can be decrypted.

- New methods of tracking have replaced old ones and new methods are even better than old ones.

- This data can be used to group users in many ways, so it can know essentially who you are, when you do things, what you will do, and who you’ll do them with.

- This information is used for targeting ads, but can be used for other purposes.

- Technology to utilize this data has been evolving much more quickly.

- Why just target ads? Why not provide users with a version of reality that optimizes their consumer behavior?

- Why attempt to ensure control through enforcement? Why not control motivation and thought?

- Why have political elections? Why not control decisions?

IMO buying defaults isn't as bad as Google's rigging the ad market. At least others have outbid them for search defaults in the past and in other markets.

Okay. If you think they should be above the law, that's who you are. Those are your values. Thanks for letting us know.

I'm of the humble view that it's at least as important to enforce the law when it comes to the most powerful corporations in the world, as it is to enforce it on the average person.

But maybe you see things differently.

Their handling of MDN has been disappointing. Laying off their staff, asking for unpaid contributors, and selling more advertising space was greedy business.

They're currently running a REDIS advertisement that looks like a critical error. The ad is a bright red toast!

_Speaking personally_, MDN is Mozilla's most valuable resource. It is the only resource I want to survive Moz's leadership.

Firefox isn't supposed to be a business to begin with. Mozilla is a nonprofit organization, isn't it?

If they can't survive off of donations, then they don't deserve to exist. If they want to sell user data or search defaults, Mozilla should fork Firefox.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2H8wx1aBiQ

When Zuck said this, I could feel the smarm, but I respect his honesty, and I know what he's not saying. Mozilla is trying to spit the same game about its Google search default deal, as if that is the same thing. It's not, because when Facebook does it, it's a for-profit corporation selling out its users. When Mozilla does it, it's a nonprofit organization selling out its users to the single largest for-profit web property in the history of the Internet.

Google is a monopolist. They should lose the right to pay off their competition.

Kinda inevitable after we got good VR headsets.

I was in grad school when VRML came out, I used it for things like visualizing 3-d slices of 5-d energy surfaces embedded in a 6-d phase space. I almost went to the VR CAVE to try it out but didn't quite, ironically I work in the social sciences cluster now and the former CAVE is our storage area and still has some big projectors on the floor which were expensive once.

A grad student who sat next to me, who I had endless arguments about "Linux vs Windows" told me that VRML was crap and the evidence was that it wasn't adequate to make 3-d games like Quake.

Today I'd compare A-Frame to Entity Component Systems (ECS) like Unity. A-Frame still has an object graph and it still has the awful primitives that VRML had that Horizon Worlds is stuck with, but you can make complex shapes with textures and import real models.

My one trouble with it as a developer is memory management, if you load too much geometry on an MQ3 it "just doesn't work." I got stuck on a project with it, I've got a good idea how to fix it but it was enough of a setback that I've been working on other things sense.

I did learn a lot more about the ECS paradigm this year when I was in a hackathon and joined up with a good Unity programmer and a designer to make a winning game (brought my mad Project|Product Management skills as well as my startup-honed talent of demonstrating broken software on stage and making it look perfect.) Now I play low-budget games and have a pretty clear idea how you'd implement them with an ECS framework so one day I'll put down the controller and make another crack at my VR project.

If you think what I said was a vitriolic personal attack, I have no idea what I could say that you wouldn't construe as one, and honestly, don't care enough about Internet debates to try; best of luck.

Sure, the law should be enforced against them. The law's the law. I wasn't trying to imply they should not face the full penalties the law requires, here. Obviously they should. No one is above the law.

The tone of your post just carried an impression of criminality in the sense of wanton fraud or murder rather than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts with technology product providers and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations.

That one is definitely a lot worse and a danger of a monopoly/extremely powerful market player. I would argue that a monopoly is not inherently "bad"* but has much more ability to do bad things if it chooses to, with not much potential recourse from others.

https://economictimes.com/news/international/world-news/ad-v...

*Strictly in an ethics and fairness sense. It might (or might not) be worse for consumers. Just worse in a kind of boring rather than nefarious or deeply harmful way.

A-Frame is awesome; I use it to share all the photospheres I take with friends and family. I'm not aware of another easy, cross platform way to do that.

kaios is basically dead

Aren't you implying that actual fraud, as well as things like copyright infringement, would be anything more than an organization using its money to put itself in a position to make more money via consensual contracts and running afoul of "wait, you can't be too good at running a business" regulations?

> The tone of your post just carried an impression of criminality in the sense of wanton fraud

Oh, they also did that [1]. If a bank did this kind of stuff, perpetrators would see jail.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

I was a cofounder of MDN (originally "DevMo"), and we did not use Opera or other materials, we used Netscape's DevEdge content which was released to us. You may be thinking of a later reformulation to unite with others outside Mozilla. See

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/about#our_journey

Sorry, I probably did not phrase that well: I did not mean to imply that (what ultimately became) MDN was built on others’ materials. Rather, my impression was that other browser developers had agreed on taking down their own web documentation in favour of directing people to MDN, and that the Opera course (itself quite new at the time) was among the casualties.

Checking the Wayback Machine, looks like my subjective time was quite warped then: I had read the course around 2010 (which was actually called the Web Standards Curriculum[1,2], oops) and was sure it had been memory-holed with a redirect to MDN (along with the rest of Dev.Opera) when Presto was still alive (so before 2014), but it turns out that that did not happen[3] until 2018, matching your timeline.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100119040913/http://dev.opera....

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20111128034924/http://www.w3.org...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20171013125336/https://www.w3.or...

Fraud usually implies deceiving someone or something.

Well, since this discussion is about the law as well:

>In September 2022, a ruling in the case dismissed claims there was collusion between Google and Facebook regarding the matters covered in the agreement.

Which is just a company being better at business than you. Selling promises and breaking them is a very good business model, in a free market without government intervention, since it makes a lot of profit. If you were good at business, you wouldn't give money to those companies. Hence, them being better at business than you.

The scope of the part of this ruling alluded to by this wikipedia quote is extremely limited. All it says is that facebook didn't explicitly promise to not develop header bidding in the future, so the agreement is not a collusion between fb and google.

In essence, all that it says is that this lawsuit is limited to Google's fraud and monopoly behaviour, and does not extend to Facebook.

In many other matters, the judge allowed the litigation to go forward. Just check out the document below [1] and ctrl-f "the complaint plausibly alleges".

[1]: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...

That's not what a nonprofit is. They do not survive off of donations alone. They have to have a public or charitable purpose. They can sell products and services for any amount or profit. They are required to reinvest the profits and not distribute them to owners.

They had my faith until they started selling user data. I've written about this before. When they pulled the Mr. Robot stunt, Mozilla fully jumped the shark while riding Firefox. Let's just say I'm not feeling charitable towards them ever since. I think that's justified.

Selling user data isn't what Firefox is; it's what Mozilla is. Firefox is free software.

fair enough. how do you feel about duckduckgo? I see ddg as doing the same thing Mozilla is: selling anonymized, aggregate data to help marketers find out what is being searched for, but not connecting it to the individuals.

If you know about the third party doctrine and you still collect user data while praising the ideal of privacy, I think you’re serving at least two masters, and Mammon is one. Privacy may be another, but I’m free to doubt your commitment to privacy while serving idols. I don’t believe that anonymization is the issue, though it’s related. It’s about creating a system of control, and I have no desire to be part of that system.

They’re outsourcing the liability and accountability of gathering the data in the first place while saying they value my privacy. I know they do: they’re cashing the checks.