It's astounding how shameless Mozilla can be sometimes. They've received billions of dollars over the last 2 decades and accomplished nothing toward an "open and free Internet", if anything regressing.
How about an open and free Internet where anyone can right click a folder and choose "share on the web"? Nginx hasn't had a security vulnerability in 10+ years that affects a basic, static http 1 site.
How about a wysiwyg editor for blog posts with some basic themes and RSS?
How about browsers with built in RSS (oops they removed that) driving a start page?
How about a browser with built in torrent/magnet link support to share videos? Have the wysiwyg editor generate magnets by default when dropping a video.
If you want to be real counter-culture, how about p2p overlay comment systems like dissenter (oops they banned that)?
They've obviously been Google's thrall/controlled opposition for at least a decade. Instead of building infrastructure to give people autonomy to share and interact directly without the control and influence of the web's Owners, the say things like
> digital advertising is critical for the sustainability of free content, services and experiences.
i.e. "you need your owners". Meanwhile there are threads about how $200 mini-pcs have enough horsepower to easily serve 10s of thousands of web requests/second and you can buy 1 TB of flash for $50.
Computers are so incredibly cheap and powerful today that it is obvious that there is no vision in that organization for a "free and open Internet". Anyone familiar with tech knows mega corporations aren't needed to fund it. It's entirely about making it easy/normie friendly to self-host, which Mozilla is somewhere between uninterested and hostile toward.
Most of the functionality you're describing is better relegated to third party websites/software/extensions. I want my web browser to just be a web browser, no unnecessary add-ons.
There's already lots of great solutions for RSS. Ditto for torrents. You can't build a wysiwyg editor that will work across the entire web, there's countless formats which are specific to each website.
They just need to focus on building a top-notch web browser, no unnecessary bells or whistles.
You don't need the wysiwyg editor to be embedded into the browser (though it could share the rendering engine). It's just an enabling technology. And it is doable; they existed in the 90s/2000s! But it's very much within the scope of an organization that's ostensibly trying to build technologies for an open web.
If your goal is to let people self publish something like Twitter/Facebook/Substack posts with embedded video, you don't need much more than a basic rich text editor with some CSS themes (and ability to edit/share custom CSS for advanced users). No JavaScript needed (it's not like those sites let you use it).
Torrenting should have built in support. Torrent support is needed to be able to use magnet links as a src for media. RSS is less necessary, but built in support would be one component of a decent home page like iGoogle tried to build back in the day.
>I want my web browser to just be a web browser, no unnecessary add-ons.
When i try to consider what that really means, it leads me to think it actually encompasses a large and ever-increasing scope of features that have just become the norm. Browsers are becoming almost a general purpose OS.
Also, some of those features clearly require network effect to function which entails having it officially supported and suggested to the users (or even making it default).
Why do you presume it must be built into a browser? Mozilla alteady has mumore products and services than just ff. These ideas could be standalone too.
Mozilla Board abruptly fired CEO Mitchell Baker for poor performance before even locating a replacement. It selected a board member as interim CEO.
Presumably this "performance" refers to profits.
It's astounding that this organisation can advertise itself as a "non-profit" to create an "open and free internet". It is more like an internet advertising trade group. Making sure web browser features align with online ad services.
Mozilla and Apple sell your traffic to Google already, it's not like any major party is leaving that money on the table. If any of them had a clean reputation before now it's because people weren't paying attention.
Choice of default search provider impacts where search traffic goes. When you enter a search query into the location bar, you generate traffic for the default search provider. When Google purchased the right to be the default search provider, they were purchasing that traffic.
I think there’s a need for a business to let customers know they exist. I’m not against ads per se, but certainly against tracking and poorly integrated and over-stuffing of ads into content. And at times I’ve wished there was a non-tracking, “tasteful” ad company.
A business directory or trade magazines are legitimate ways for people to find out about businesses, services, and products they're interested in. i.e. a pull model. A push model inevitably is used not just to inform, but to manipulate people's desires to increase consumptive behavior, turning them into worse humans. Many businesses prey upon and amplify people's insecurities to do this, making people deeply unhappy.
The spying is evil. The actual messages delivered are evil. The entire industry is rotten to the core.
Generally speaking, advertising is necessary and can be done in a way that benefits everyone. In practice, how advertising is actually done (and particularly how it's done online) is utterly despicable.
I completely agree that pull vs push is a core, super-relevant distinction and pull is vastly less dubious in basically every way...
... but isn't a search engine's response basically a pull? You've explicitly stated that you're interested in X by searching for it. "An x" vs "The x" is of course relevant, but you can't reliably infer that.
Or do you mean that the difference is whether you're looking in advertising-focused places? Like having a dedicated "include ads" option on search or something.
When people place a search query their intent is not always to purchase something (though the search results these days often seem to suggest otherwise).
There is no fundamental privacy issue with "influencing your future" without disclosure to the advertiser. The question is what is it that this ad tech company claims to offer? And then does run in practice? There is certainly space for more vendors in this direction.
There are other issues but not so much privacy. For example a self-hosted ad platform which offers to run ads based on internal browsing profile would be let through at this site at least. In reasonable amount, bandwidth overhead and annoyance to the human. The issue currently is that there seems to be much more money in selling all the data outright - and that gets a sharp no.
How about an open and free Internet where anyone can right click a folder and choose "share on the web"? Nginx hasn't had a security vulnerability in 10+ years that affects a basic, static http 1 site.
How about a wysiwyg editor for blog posts with some basic themes and RSS?
How about browsers with built in RSS (oops they removed that) driving a start page?
How about a browser with built in torrent/magnet link support to share videos? Have the wysiwyg editor generate magnets by default when dropping a video.
If you want to be real counter-culture, how about p2p overlay comment systems like dissenter (oops they banned that)?
They've obviously been Google's thrall/controlled opposition for at least a decade. Instead of building infrastructure to give people autonomy to share and interact directly without the control and influence of the web's Owners, the say things like
> digital advertising is critical for the sustainability of free content, services and experiences.
i.e. "you need your owners". Meanwhile there are threads about how $200 mini-pcs have enough horsepower to easily serve 10s of thousands of web requests/second and you can buy 1 TB of flash for $50.
Computers are so incredibly cheap and powerful today that it is obvious that there is no vision in that organization for a "free and open Internet". Anyone familiar with tech knows mega corporations aren't needed to fund it. It's entirely about making it easy/normie friendly to self-host, which Mozilla is somewhere between uninterested and hostile toward.