I find it really interesting that when a company is making moves in a direction that benefits privacy of consumers, everyone takes the opportunity to shit on them for past mistakes or how it isn't good enough or why isn't it on by default or any other thing they can find to shit on.
Yes, every single company has made mistakes. FireFox is no exception. Some of them were pretty egregious. Mistakes are - hopefully - an opportunity to learn and adjust, move forward, and continue progress towards something we all want: privacy.
We should absolutely call out companies when they make mistakes or ill-advised choices. I'm not saying we shouldn't. However, we should also _applaud_ efforts that are in-line with bringing privacy to consumers. Not just spend all of our time looking for something negative to be outraged at.
This always-negative/outrage attitude just erodes any sort of meaningful discussion.
It also reduces incentives to actually make moves that benefit privacy. Because if the people who say they care about privacy aren't going to support you, why bother?
Nah, the people who care are happy. The problem is the guys who like to talk. It's the same with security. There's like an army of people who've learned about it from internet commentary exclusively and they bluster a lot as a substitute for competence.
Tell me about it! The security people. yum update every 3 hours, reboot every 6 hours, hyperthreading off for some theoretical reason, what else! There's security as in keeping your iOS device on auto updates when you have it connected to WiFi, and then there's internet forum security...
I applaud this move by Mozilla towards privacy and security, and I have hope that they'll be increasing their focus on this.
The criticisms like "why isn't this the default", "why didn't you do this when you had patches years ago", "why did you play along with standardization of these mechanisms in the first place", and "what about all these other things you're doing" might reflect a knowledge of technology and history. And frustration, since, now, with Firefox's diminished market share, and having already given up privacy&security ground, Mozilla probably has to tiptoe.
A possible alternative to tiptoeing... With Google handing Mozilla a huge freebie right now, with the anti-adblocking move, there might be a new opening for Mozilla to "go rogue", from the perspective of many dotcom abusers, reclaim some lost ground, and start actually making the abusers angry. For that to work, Mozilla needs users who, when an abusing site says "Firefox broke this; switch to Chrome", will yell at the abusing site, and leave the site. They'll also need to live up to the expectations of those dedicated users, not do data-grabbing/leaking dotcom behavior themselves, which will require some internal rethinking. If they piss off some funding sources, they'll need to find some minimal level of funding, to pay for the jobs that simply can't be done by volunteers, and for expenses for things actually essential to the core mission. (And to get all their hardware&connectivity infrastructure donated by companies that would like the goodwill, and who will sign legal commitments to not use incidental data, with severe penalty clauses.)
Mozilla has a conflict of interest. It pays its developers indirectly from internet ad revenue through deals with companies that sell ads. More importantly it seeks to compete with a browser controlled by ad sales company.
Giving the users commenting negatively the privacy they want would mean that Firefox would not implement the "features" that its developers believe are necessary for a "good browser".1
What "good browser" really means to these developers is a browser that does what the "competing" browser does first and foremost, not the ideal browser some vocal group of ad-loathing, privacy-conscious users want. That is how Mozilla defines "good". "Good" to them means "competitive". To the users who comment on Firefox flaws, "good" means something else. It does not necessarily mean one that "competes" with Chrome.
The honest response from Mozilla to negative comments would be to acknowledge they do not exist primarily for all users. They exist primarily for the developers who work there, as part of a project to be "competitive" with commercially-driven browsers.
Cutting ties to the revenue stream of internet advertising and the browsers that it finances is not an option for Mozilla. It is not volunteer-driven like many open source projects. It has to pay developers a competitive salary.
The idea of "something we all want: privacy" is at odds with developers who are being paid to support the internet ad business. The pervasive advertising found on the internet would not be possible without the cooperation of browser authors.
1 "Without the Yahoo ad deal, or "the ability to inject code remotely in your browser" i.e. automatic updates, or reliable telemetry from the majority of Firefox users, it would have been impossible to build a good browser." - Mozilla employee
Mozilla doesn't exist for its developers. Most of its developers could make a lot more money working elsewhere.
The reality is that if Firefox isn't competitive in performance, security, and Web compatibility, very few people will use it, in which case why even bother?
There's more at stake here than just privacy, too. An open platform that isn't controlled by a single vendor, that doesn't have gatekeepers, that has lots of content AND lots of clients is really important. The standards-based Web is the only candidate at this point. Mozilla cares a lot about that, and they need a competitive browser with significant marketshare or they have no leverage.
What is an easier solution to improving browsing experience, performance and security than blocking ads? Don't you think a simple extension like ublock demonstrates a whole paradigm shift in browsing experience? One that moz://a should be striving for?
I think you fundamentally misunderstand my message.
The point I was trying to get across is this:
Companies do bad things, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident, and sometimes because they were misguided. Companies also do good things, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident. How are we, as users, able to communicate our thoughts with the company in question in these cases?
One method is by calling out the negatives and applying pressure so that, hopefully, the company feels some obligation to act or risk user exodus. This is an example of what you are doing - and it is a valid way of communicating displeasure with a company when they have made a decision the users don't agree with. Negative reinforcement absolutely has its place.
However, an often forgotten method of communication is positive reinforcement. This is how we can tell a company "Hey, good job on this specific thing. It's in a direction we would like to see you keep moving in.". This signals to the company that they are on the right track and, hopefully, encourages them to continue developing that way.
In the specific context of Mozilla, this means that I try to encourage them when they do positive things (blocking fingerprinting) while still expressing my displeasure over the certificate fiasco and other issues.
However, my original post was not meant to be read only in the context of Mozilla, nor was it meant to be read in a way that makes you think that you cannot also raise your concerns. There is a time and place for both positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. It just seems like people forget about the positive one.
Irrelevant. Conflicts of interest aren't a problem in and of themselves. Most people and companies have conflicts of interest all over the place—if you're prepared to look hard enough. It could be as simple as the conflict between retaining good employees and turning a profit. Conflicts are everywhere.
The question is whether the conflict is causing the company to make decisions which you think are bad—and whether you can convince others to agree with you that they're bad.
The remainder of your post is an equivocation fallacy between the ability to deeply track individual people and the ability to run advertisements at all. You don't need deep tracking in order for advertising to work well. (...unless perhaps you're relying on a fully automated algorithm to do all the work...)
> The honest response from Mozilla to negative comments would be to acknowledge they do not exist primarily for all users. They exist primarily for the developers who work there, as part of a project to be "competitive" with commercially-driven browsers.
I don’t understand- how is trying to offer a competitive, viable product not “for all users”? Are you suggesting that if they focus on a non-competitive product that’s better for “all users”?
That's a meaningful insight. I think Web is in a place now where anyone with technical insight is frustrated. Yes, frustration is the right word. And confused. And it's this mix of confusion and frustration that has people going around bad mouthing all browsers, or at least I think so. Mozilla Firefox is the only significant browser that has the economic incentives to take care of privacy (there's no debate about that right? well there could be Safari, but it's closed source). I'm pretty close to chanting "the end is nigh". If you compare the resources available to the privacy-invading businesses, and the privacy-preserving businesses, how does it look? Or maybe regulative action will be taken? 100x more restrictive and better thought through than GDPR should be enough. Somehow I don't see that happening. Someone with a lighter outlook, chime in.
If you compare the resources available to the
privacy-invading businesses, and the
privacy-preserving businesses, how does it look?
I think this highlights an underlying problem: invading privacy has proven to be extremely profitable, which gives the companies that do it disproportionate resources when it comes to controlling the privacy discussion.
Vote with your dollars and your eyeballs, and retreat from the parts of the Web that are abusing you and everyone else. You lived fine before Facebook and Instagram, you can live fine without them now.
Sure there is. Mozilla depends heavily on revenue from Google whereas Apple doesn't. For Mozilla it's life or death and for Apple it's not (to be the default search engine).
There isn't a single tech company where the business incentives are more aligned with privacy than Apple.
If you think of "privacy-preserving" for a company as a costly virtue, then the standard advice is to appear virtuous without actually bearing all the cost of truly being virtious.
Since they are closed source and secretive, there is a significant information asymmetry and we will never know how honest they are being.
Firefox, on the other hand, has an incentive to honestly preserve privacy, as their attempts to test the water on privacy-reducing features have a high probability of becoming public.
I'd be glad to forget Mozilla's past if they'd show that they have learned from them. The problem is that they haven't. In some cases, they've doubled down on them.
I say this as someone who uses firefox on every device he can.
Projecting political views onto browser users by default is a big one (new tab). Another is the limiting of user control by not allowing them to install third-party extensions. They also enable telemetry by default, and that not all telemetry can be disabled without going into about:config (i.e the settings in the preference page do not disable telemetry about telemetry itself; the browser can and will still send some telemetry even when telemetry is set as disabled).
I (and many others) use Firefox because we need a trustworthy browser, but issues like these take away from that trustworthiness.
> This always-negative/outrage attitude just erodes any sort of meaningful discussion.
They destroyed some of my bookmarks when they dropped RSS support. That isn't privacy-eroding, it's data destruction, and they didn't even let me opt out.
I know they probably had a lot of conversation about it, but when the conversation ends with "And then we destroy the data of random people without letting them say no", you need to back up a few steps and look closely at what went wrong in your process.
This is what I mean by an attitude that doesn't contribute anything to the discussion at hand. They announced this change in October, and implemented it in December.[1] I don't understand why you were unable to make alternate arrangements in that time. It feels like you're going out of your way to find something to be angry about.
In addition:
>Firefox will tell you when support for Live Bookmarks has ended and will do the following:
>Automatically export all existing Live Bookmarks to an OPML file on your desktop named Firefox feeds backup.opml which you can import into another feed reader.
>Live Bookmarks will be turned into regular static bookmarks if Firefox can identify the URL. If the URL doesn't exist, the original Live Bookmark is removed.
>ESR version 60 will support the built-in feed reader and live bookmarks features. Support for these features will be removed in October 2019, when ESR 60 is no longer supported.[2]
So, what would suggest instead of (or in addition to) providing months of warning, automatic export, and extended support that will continue for another 4-5 months?
The funny thing is, no matter how I reply to your comment I lose by default. If I say I have - you say I'm lying. If I say I haven't, your point is proven. What option do I have?
Perhaps you'd like to chime in on the discussion at hand rather than speculating on my personal life.
Kiro does have a point. Not you personally, but in general the popular opinion is that Google is morally bad, while Mozilla is good. I think it would currently be very unpopular to say that Google just made some bad decisions, as in it's not actually "bad", because it would muddy the one-dimensional good-bad discourse to which most of these mainstream problems descend to. Note I'm not actually passing judgements, just talking about group think.
I concede that this is a valid outlook (which I did not gather from Kiro's comment, so thanks for clarifying).
I tried to word my comment in a way that made it clear that I believe this mentality should apply to _all_ companies, including Google, when a company makes a move in the direction of benefiting consumer privacy. I perhaps could have made that more clear in my original comment.
You may not remember this, but Google used to be cool.
"Don't be evil", and all that. There was a lot of hope - when Microsoft was still the bad guys. Working at Google was the dream - they made movies about that.
Nowadays we all feel stupid, obviously.
Right up to deleting "Don't be evil". Literally taking it out. The nerve.
Alphabet is Google's parent company and did not exist when "Don't be evil" was put at the top of Googles preamble.
Functionally, they took it out. Both by not using it in the new parent company, and deleting it out of the preamble of Google itself.
Yeah okay it still occurs somewhere.
But "Do the right thing" as substitute to "Don't be evil" has clear implications except if you are terribly naive.
Good reputations are hard to gain and easily lost, we shouldn't forget how we got to the sorry current state of the web and Mozillas mistakes are a large part of how that happened. Had mozilla not pissed away market share while they rewrote things in rust, broke extensions, built a horrible UI, etc, then they would have had enough weight to do things look push back against DRM.
Obviously having a spyware company like google control the web is a bad thing, but that doesn't make mozilla good, they've been poor stewards for a long time and we should be looking toward others, the pale moon fork to name one example.
The thing is there is disparity between the value they promote - privacy - and Mozilla actions.
If privacy first was truly the Mozilla mission, we won't have Google Analytics on extension internal pages, the Mr Robot Ad, the Yahoo ad deal, and the ability to inject code remotely in your browser. Privacy seems to be a Mozilla concern but it's not a primary one.
Mozilla will gladly protect you from other entities, but they are not user freedom respecting enough to realize that they should also not require you to submit yourself to them. My argument is that allowing users to "opt out" from tracking is insufficient, and I will argue against it whenever possible.. You should be asked and informed before ANY DATA IS SENT to them, not just informed that it is already happening and then asked if you want to keep it on.
You're right - the user should be asked and informed before any data is sent. But the situation is more complex than that.
- For better or worse, most people aren't scared of the Internet, so they don't want a detailed, itemised list of risks and mitigations to allay their fears, they just want to get down to business. How do you ask and inform a user who refuses to answer or read?
- People want to use the web-browser that works best with the sites they visit, and the connectivity they have available. While every person's situation is different, the Pareto principle says an awful lot of people will be in a very similar situation, so any browser vendor willing to accurately measure people's situations and optimize for them would become tremendously more attractive for most people. Refusing to implement telemetry, or leaving it as opt-in, means voluntarily giving up the mass market to less scrupulous browser vendors.
> People want to use the web-browser that works best with the sites they visit, and the connectivity they have available.
Firefox has fought this uphill battle before and they didn't need telemetry to do it. When chrome first came out it had improved the UI and it didn't need telemetry to do it.
Since firefox added telemetry their market share has declined and their UI has got worse, the idea that telemetry improves products needs to die.
Without the Yahoo ad deal, or "the ability to inject code remotely in your browser" i.e. automatic updates, or reliable telemetry from the majority of Firefox users, it would have been impossible to build a good browser.
Yes, every single company has made mistakes. FireFox is no exception. Some of them were pretty egregious. Mistakes are - hopefully - an opportunity to learn and adjust, move forward, and continue progress towards something we all want: privacy.
We should absolutely call out companies when they make mistakes or ill-advised choices. I'm not saying we shouldn't. However, we should also _applaud_ efforts that are in-line with bringing privacy to consumers. Not just spend all of our time looking for something negative to be outraged at.
This always-negative/outrage attitude just erodes any sort of meaningful discussion.