The "woke" crowd waves so many flags it often ends up shooting themselves in the foot.
People got outraged because Mozilla asked for donations in crypto, because it's not green energy.
They want a commercial grade browser, made with zero ads, zero crypto, with enough features to work both with DRM protected video but also with hardware video acceleration in even the most obscure OS, funded only by donations. And, in practice, money made from donations it's not enough at all for the amount of manpower needed for a project like this.
I'm in favor for being sensible and having an inclusive environment. But people expect too much from a software project.
PD: What's worse, the CEO of Mozilla Corporation raised her salary up to over 3 million dollars, while Firefox marketshare is down over 85%. Not very woke IMHO
- those pushing a political agenda they don't advertise
If you prefer clandestine back-room dealing to front-room blogpost announcements because they aren't all in-your-face about it, that's a fair preference. But don't fall into the trap of believing there's such a thing as a company pushing no agenda; companies are made up of people, politics is the interaction of people.
Every CEO, CFO, CTO, and VP has an opinion on topics like the one Mozilla posted about and the products they control grow to reflect those opinions
This kind of "everything is political" thinking is incredibly divisive and is literally the cause of the culture war tearing apart the US (not sure where you live) right now.
Plus, I straight-up don't believe it, and you've provided no evidence to support your claim.
> companies are made up of people, politics is the interaction of people.
conflates (intentionally or not) two very different kinds of "politics" - GP was talking about partisan politics, but you started discussing organizational politics. Unless you're claiming that all human interaction is intrinsically partisan...
Also, I don't believe the claim that all execs are unable to prevent their political opinions from leaking into their direction for the company. They're often motivated extremely strongly by money, and I'm sure that we all know of at least one person that is willing to compromise on their morals (-> political views) for money.
Finally, even treating the claim as true for the sake of argument - not all companies will push their own political agenda with the same strength, and it's entirely reasonable to avoid those that push harder.
> Unless you're claiming that all human interaction is intrinsically partisan
Basically, yes. Most people are out for themselves (which is of course partisan); those who believe in some other more altruistic model are operating under a philosophy that is also partisan ("We should be for others in addition to ourselves").
> They're often motivated extremely strongly by money
I agree; that is also a political position. When considering a company with that position, one must ask "Okay, so what is the most damage they could do in pursuit of the almighty dollar?" and keep an eye out for behavior fitting that (are they cutting corners, abusing workers, abusing resources in a way that pushes externalities onto other people), and make one's own decisions accordingly. There's a reason we have laws requiring declaration of activity.
> I straight-up don't believe it, and you've provided no evidence to support your claim.
That's fair; I assumed this was a given and didn't think it needed support because of observations of how things have gone in the past decade or so (as people have come to realize that there are consequences to the "just get along attitude:" things don't get better for those for whom getting along is not an option).
Most companies have some kind of agenda, yes. I wouldn't exactly begrudge hammersmiths having opinions related to hammers, for example.
But if you look at the breadth of company politics at say, Brave or Vivaldi, and contrast those with Mozilla, it's night and day. Brave and Vivaldi have politics of privacy and user control, and it shows. Mozilla has many other concerns, like cultural coolness (hello, color themes by an ex-Nike designer. Street smart, eh?).
There are narrow, relevant-to-topic stances on things which companies very well should have.
The browser war has ended up like every presidential election cycle.
In the end: two candidates to choose from, and the majority of people wouldn't prefer them as their president anyways. Both candidates are too milquetoast to accomplish what their constituents actually want/need, both are paid by the same people, both are friends in their little secret societies. Third party candidates never make it, because we're too far gone, and nobody has the will to vote differently at risk of wasting theirs.
It's actually funny and scary how similar the two situations are.
- Your browser already makes "your internet" different than mine. You will see different different content and (at stores) pricing in Chrome than you do Firefox on a bunch of major sites. Try it, it is pretty obvious.
- Second, the article is specifically referring to Facebook's "algorithm". This is frustrating, because we can't talk knowledgeably about what they actually did after Jan 6. But why anyone assumes the "more conflict" slider is somehow "more honest" is beyond me - it is a black box whose function feeds Facebook money. They were not tuning for honest before, and they weren't after. But of course, they were talking about FB, not their own product.
Now, can you name specific concerns about what you fear FF might do with their browser to start gaslighting you?
Brave is an ad company basing it's browser on another as company's browser, you know.