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Mozilla’s now director of public policy once asked me, with a straight face, why I was giving them a hard time and holding Mozilla to a higher standard: “we’re just another Silicon Valley tech company.”

But that’s not what you tell people publicly, is it, Mozilla?

Still, it’s time y’all got this.

Mozilla is a half-billion-dollar for-profit corporation – whose CEO makes >$3M/yr – that has a foundation do its PR.

https://www.howtogeek.com/760425/firefox-now-sends-your-address-bar-keystrokes-to-mozilla/

#mozilla #SiliconValley #BigTech #SurveillanceCapitalism

[Update: Mozilla Fixes Its Documentation] Firefox Now Sends Your Address Bar Keystrokes to Mozilla

Firefox now sends your keystrokes and location to Mozilla as you type in your address bar. Here's what you need to know.
Chris Hoffman (How-To Geek)
#surveillancecapitalism #mozilla #bigtech #siliconvalley
JonossaSeuraava
is there even an option left? Like there is basicly firefox and then chrome forks, right?

What's there to do for a lazy mildly caring person?
Aral Balkan
Yeah, it’s not looking good.

Last I looked Librewolf was doing a good job of remaining current and stripping out Mozilla’s bullshit from their fork of Firefox: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/

Not a long term solution. Ideally we’d fund an independent not for profit org with EU taxpayer money to build an independent browser for the common good.
Bill Hooker
@JonossaSeuraava YES -- where is the taxpayer funded browser? Search engine? These things make as much sense as public libraries, public green space, public transport.
@JonossaSeuraava
M.S. Bellows, Jr.
@JonossaSeuraava Is there a Librewolf-type app for Android?
@JonossaSeuraava
Jonas Vautherin
half a billion, most of which comes from Google, right? Not donations. And they allow you to disable the ads in the search bar and donate, if you think it's a better model.

I don't get all the hate for that move. Mozilla is not perfect, I get it, and the CEO earns a lot, ok. But I see many people recommending LibreWolf, which is Firefox, which suggests that they don't hate the project, but just the optional ads. Still, do they donate?
M.S. Bellows, Jr.
@jonasvautherin Also, although I share the frustration at high CEO salaries, we *do* want valuable, community-improving organizations to have good leadership, and if someone talented will take $3M to run a nonprofit well instead of $30M to enshittifiy yet another commercial venture, that's a good thing. (I don't know enough to opine on whether that's the case here, but the principle is true.)
@Jonas Vautherin
Aral Balkan
Mozilla isn’t an ally. Mozilla is Big Tech. Mozilla is Big Web.

#SmallTech #SmallWeb
#smalltech #SmallWeb
Floppy 💾
Yes, Mozilla's CEO is also not a great role model and not every decision for e.g. Firefox was perfect. It might be Big Tech and not I can see why you wouldn't call them ally. But to me Mozilla (or their products) seem not as bad as GAFAM (or their products). I'm reluctant to call Mozilla an enemy among the ranks of evilness as other Big Tech.

Do you think some differentiated judgement does make sense or really they don't deserve getting cut any slack?
Aral Balkan
If anything they’re worse: they have everyone believing they’re a not-for-profit fighting for human rights etc., when that’s just PR and they’re just another Silicon Valley Big Tech company.
George Lund
@floppy the salary thing is controversial but there's an ownership structure that can hold management to account and a mission that is not about fidiciary duty to shareholders. That seems OK to me. You aren't gonna develop a secure Web browser without paid staff, that's for sure.
@Floppy 💾
Job
@georgelund
I guess you haven't heard of that time in 2020 when Mozilla laid off 25% of its employees, but still raised the pay of upper management that was already in the millions?

Also, how do you justify the fact that it's not possible to directly donate to the development of the Firefox browser, but only to Mozilla?

@aral @floppy
@Aral Balkan @Floppy 💾 @George Lund
George Lund
@vanderZwan @floppy do I think there might be cases where an organisation needs to be smaller, but executive pay must rise to be competitive? Yes actually, but I haven't read the foundation's minutes so no, I don't know if it was justified in that case. And Firefox is huge and certainly historically has had Google cash. It makes sense for them to use donations in any way that best fulfils their non-profit objectives.
@Floppy 💾 @Job
Aral Balkan
@georgelund @vanderZwan @floppy Where “historically” means currently, to the tune of half a billion dollars a year.
@Floppy 💾 @Job @George Lund
Andrei Cristian Petcu
Mozilla is the best we have right now, even if it's not perfect. All the hate it gets does not create better products, it just pushes people to Chrome and it's clones.
Aral Balkan
It’s definitely not the “best we have right now.” That’s probably GNOME Web in terms of ethics. Sadly, it’s the “best we have under the Silicon Valley model.”

And there, again, folks should use it without being used by it by using Librewolf instead.

What we need is a to fund an organisation from public funds, to create a browser for the public good.

I know, how communist of me ;)
Aral Balkan
@blazeward7 Careful with Opera. They’re now owned by a Chinese consortium.

(Firefox works fine for me on Fedora Silverblue.)
@Blaze Ward
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