And the blame for Mozilla’s lack of transparency rests entirely on Mozilla’s shoulders.

If you know anything about Mozilla’s finances at all, you know that they always are one to two years out of date. So your response, which I’ve seen before, is ignorant at best, and really disingenuous at worst. I hope for the former.

$6.9 mil the last time they said. And that was in a year where CEO salary was (on average) cut across all for-profit companies, because even businesses react to market forces sometimes.

Either you die young or you live long enough to turn into the Blink engine.

My thought’s exactly. It doesn’t look perfect, but it’s the first time anybody is seeing this on a nightly release. I’ve had my issues with Firefox, but they’re really cooking right now.

This looks promising. Some of it is half-cooked, but the developers are soliciting feedback and actually responding to it there.

The dropdown should only be visible when the search bar is focused or the new tab / blank page is open

There is work being done to implement that behaviour

Back to the post, Mozilla also poses this question…

How Does This Benefit You?

…before providing some great answers. It’s good to see Mozilla still knows its target audience(s) and is still capable of communicating with them.

I would have loved if they had released an anniversary icon for FF.

You might have seen it already, but is this close enough?

More like a vasectomy.

Some Bitwarden and Firefox Nightly users recently pressed Ctrl+Shift+L and discovered that instead of logging them into their various websites, Firefox enabled Firefox’s AI chatbot.

You posted a privately sent email that contradicts a publicly accessible privacy policy. In the four weeks it took them to send that to you, nothing has been changed, same as the prior year. And they couldn’t even bother to spell their own product name right.

Do you acknowledge that the privacy policy makes it extremely clear that they do sell private data, as outlined in the table that they made for people who struggle to read and mentally parse full paragraphs of text?

What an email to read. I find it particularly valuable for the things it does not say, but not at all encouraging.

We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

They don’t say the TOS is incorrect or too broad. And they don’t say they will remove their promise to sell private data to advertisers.

At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws.

At this time? Pursuant to the law? If Mozilla is abiding by law and nothing more, that explains why they are legally forced to admit they sell private data to advertisers.

And the law is the lowest bar imaginable. Google operates under the law. Is Mozilla not better than them?

… service providers who make Faksepot run…

…and they can’t spell their own name right.

Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:

• It’s made by an ad company
• The same ad company runs multiple popular ad blockers (including AdBlock Plus)
• There are no standards on privacy invasion

uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.

The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla’s own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.

I’m still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.

It’s probably the nature of the change, too.

1. It’s easy to add a switch to disable the button.
2. It doesn’t cut into their bottom line.
3. It’s damn good PR.

Other stuff that people have been complaining about, like the massive backlash against baking in 3rd-party AI, won’t make the cut.

Relatively benign things like tab grouping are challenging, so despite being much more popular, the easier-to-implement AI features were given a fast pass to Release versions of Firefox.

Are there raw numbers on how many people use web browsers in general? Firefox releases a report, and it’s definitely been dipping, but that dip might be accounted for by a switch to other browsers (based on its percent of market share).

I’d be curious if you had any good sources for this, because my searches are mostly yielding crappy listicle blogs.

I’ve seen their reasoning, but I don’t agree with it. The biggest counterexample to their concerns are other browsers: Firefox is no trouble maintaining its IP, and Brave is fully open source yet has not been formed once AFAIK.

I’m very aware of its built-in bloat, but the ad blocking still seems to perform more like an MV2 ad blocker than an MV3 one (more is blocked even when using the same lists), and it allows you to natively select individual elements to block yourself.

In my personal experience, and with great regret, I must say that Brave does a better job with its built-in ad blocking than Vivaldi has. Even after I did my damnedest to tweak the ad blocker settings (adding more lists from more sources, removing the “allow some ads” list, etc).

Based on every browser statistic page I can find, about 2/3 of mobile traffic is through Google Chrome. There’s no ad blocker on that.

And mobile traffic is significant nowadays - it comprises around half of all traffic anywhere, despite requiring the viewer to be hunched over a phone or tablet.

Santander Bank user [solved by reducing ETP to Standard] (almost lost this user we’ve had since 2003!):

Give this employee a raise

It’s worse: I would say every group is malicious. Ad companies try to look like they are policing themselves, in the hopes that they don’t suffer external regulation. But back when AdBlock Plus started this nonsense, people made uBlock Origin in response. People wouldn’t just take the ad industry at its word.

Now… For some reason, people have changed their minds.

There’s actually a whole group called the Acceptable Ads Committee who decides on making advertisements distinct and unintrusive… But they don’t have any policies regarding privacy invasion.

They also partner with popular ad blocking software developers, such as AdBlock Plus.

They also have eight members, via their other name “eyeo”, on the W3C PATCG committee (alongside Mozilla, Facebook, Google, more ad companies).

Let’s say there’s a table, and sitting at it are nine companies that want to wring every penny out of consumers by any means necessary. Mozilla sits at the table.

How many horrid companies are there at the table now?

Theres a massive difference between advocating for something bu havinf some power and influence, and doing so with the power of a monopoly.

And what a table it is.