Not saying this is the case but to me Java looks like the choice of someone who's fresh out of school. Nobody would start a new project in Java if he had the choice.
One of them syncs your tabs and bookmarks, and the other one syncs you tabs and bookmarks and can create stronger links with their already extremely prevalent browser tracking technologies which they then can tie in to their analytics on your email to support their largely advertising-driven, for-profit enterprise?
> Chrome pushes you to create a Google account to sync. Firefox pushes you to create a Firefox account to sync. You'll tell me where the difference is.
With Firefox account, Mozilla is not selling any of your data data, a Google account not only is a goldmine of data to sell, but you're signing for a lot more services than just Sync itself.
You mean, except for shipping CliqZ, a cooperative project between Mozilla, and the German ad, tracking and publishing house Burda, which receives all the URLs your visit (as a test, this was bundled with 1% of German Firefox installs)?
While bundling CliqZ was certainly a poor decision that does not inspire confidence, my comment above fast specifically in regards to Firefox Sync.
If you honestly believe that Google is less or equal in terms of user data privacy as Mozilla, then I'm not sure I can convince you otherwise, but despite all the recent blunders, I still trust Mozilla more in this regard, be it with a watchful eye.
about:addons uses Google Analytics, and yes, I know Google promised Mozilla not to look at that data.
But either I have to trust Google that they don't use the data from Chrome's Enterprise and Chromium builds. Or I have to trust Google that they don't use the data from Firefox' about:addons and Firefox Focus, and that CliqZ doesn't use the data from Firefox.
If I have to trust Google anyway, I can just use Chrome.
Chromium pushed (and kept pushing) me to open an account in order to install addons.
I never used the Mozilla sync-feature, but have no problem with it announcing its availability once in a new install. And likewise for the Google-browser, if that's what it does.
You've already managed to post a lot of flamebait and many unsubstantive comments to HN. That's exactly what this site is not for, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take them to heart from now on?
For what it's worth, the Eich incident has been in the back of my mind reading these comments. I was surprised it wasn't coming up more in all the "et tu Mozilla?"
To be clear, moderating for trolling is fair, but past PR disasters are pretty on topic assuming they are earnest thoughts on the news.
I don't quite agree, because as the HN guidelines have pointed out for years, classic flamewar topics rarely involve anything new to say. And boy is that one a classic.
It's also useful for people to understand that longstanding disagreements are still there. People have been sharing their estimations of the Mozilla organization and for many people, that estimation took a huge hit with the Eich business.
If we're not willing to keep talking about controversial issues, even at the risk of flamewars, we just retrench in our old us vs them mentalities and bubbles. And that has proven to be bad in all sorts of ways in recent history.
Anyway, I thought it would be useful to register another opinion explicitly. I hope it is taken well.
For sure and no problem! And I think you make some fine arguments. In cases like what we're discussing, though, we need to remember the focus of the site: intellectual curiosity. Knowing what HN is trying to be and what it is not trying to be is critical.
Keeping intellectual curiosity as the top priority has surprisingly strong consequences if you think about it. It means, for example, that any social benefits are side effects—welcome side effects, but not the purpose of the site.
He had only been CEO for two weeks. Three board members quit before he started, likely due to the fact that they wanted to hire an outside person to help revamp the company. I don't think his short tenure is the real reason Mozilla has been falling from grace.
CEO for 2 weeks doesn't accurately capture his contribution.
"He started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995"
"In early 1998, Eich co-founded the Mozilla project with Mitchell Baker, creating the website mozilla.org that was meant to manage open-source contributions to the Netscape source code. He served as Mozilla's chief architect."
"In August 2005, after serving as Lead Technologist and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Mozilla Foundation, Eich became CTO of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation"
If your publicly held view is "a big chunk of people don't deserve the same rights as others", and your job requires working with lots of different people, then I'd argue you're probably not a good choice for the job.
A big part of any CEO's job is to be a public representative, and such a representative should not air controversial public views that have nothing to do with his job.
What he believes in private, and shares with his friends and family is his own business. What appears in news stories is not his own private business, and needs to be managed.
To be fair to Eich, he didn't really "air" said views, iirc they were brought to light through a $1000 donation to an organization that was campaigning for California Prop 8, which would have re-banned gay marriage (and did, briefly, when it was passed before being struck down in court). Also it was made ~6 years prior to his brief tenure as CEO of Mozilla.
Not that I agree at all with the withholding of rights on the basis of sexuality etc, and am particularly disappointed and confused when intelligent people hold such retrograde views. But I don't think it would have precluded him from being an effective leader until third parties, likely with ulterior motives, launched media campaigns about it.
It's really unfortunate how the oppressed turn into the oppressor the moment they are given power. It tells us a lot about humanity right there. The very people telling other's to accept they have a different opinion when they are in the minority, but then turn around and deny opinions to those they disagree with when they are in the majority. It is shameful.
"I don't believe that your friends and loved ones deserve the same rights I have" is not a point of view I am particularly worried about learning about. It is prima facie unacceptable and should be rejected by organizations that care about being decent; digging into the disaster represented by that hidebound bigotry (and it is an insult in the company of decent parts of humanity) just cements it.
Outside of a few extremely devout Buddhists, very, very few people I've spoken with adhere to a consistent set of first principles when it comes to making moral decisions across abortion, infanticide, euthanasia and vegetarianism.
The question of what gives a life its value is a difficult one and is nearly impossible to discuss on a forum like this.
You say you don't "insult" pro-choice people, but you use the term "abortionist" which is weaponized specifically by the fundamentalist right wing to imply that people who don't feel that they can assert supremacy over the bodies of women like abortions. Meanwhile, pro-choice folks, in most of the Western world, have generally sought policies that make abortion as "safe, legal, and rare".
So forgive me if I don't buy in. Words mean things and words tell you things and yours underline your bad faith.
There almost certainly is not a way to invisibly install add-ons, unless you are part of Mozilla, and, you know, making Firefox. If paranoia is your thing, it might be worth considering that Mozilla can do anything it wants inside Firefox core, all of it is "invisible" to you.
And this is the point where even the most Mozilla-supporting users move away. For me, this is it, I’m going to Chromium.
Fuck this shit, in the past months we had CliqZ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708, we had Mozilla adding new telemetry, we had Mozilla force-enable toolkit.telemetry.enabled, we had Mozilla say that, if you download Nightly, that is considered opt-in to tracking, we had Mozilla put Google Analytics into the Addons menu (because it’s loaded from addons.mozilla.org: https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785 ), and we had Mozilla say that, if we don’t trust Google, we shouldn’t use Firefox.
Regarding telemetry, take a look at the settings in about:config. There are several toolkit.telemetry.Ping settings which are set to true by default. In the spirit of charity I'm going to assume that those phone home pings - on startup, shutdown, update - are not enabled unless telemetry is enabled. But I have not checked...
Disabled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
Disabled Web Runtime (deprecated as of 2015)
Removed Pocket
Removed Telemetry
Removed data collection
Removed startup profiling
Allow running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins
Allow running of unsigned extensions
Removal of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page
Addition of Duplicate Tab option
Locale selector in about:preferences > General
I hate the fact that Firefox increasingly makes me jump through all sorts of hoops to find all the hidden options to turn off their various spyware attempts. Its the Win10 of browsers...
Yeah, its so intuitive for the average person to type: about:config in address bar and scroll through hundreds of oddly named parameters to turn off spyware.
Comments like yours are illustrative of a certain mindset. When you encounter the complexity of domains you are not intimately familiar with (court system, law, finance, etc), and those complexities are designed specifically to make it hard for you to protect yourself, I'm sure you are just as understanding as you are now.
Errr... is "dom.enable_performance" really a privacy setting?
Doing someone online searching now, not seeing an explanation for it. There is one other HN post though, also mentioning it in a privacy context, but not further info either. :/
> It's right in the main browser settings, under the Privacy and Security section where one would expect settings like this to be
If you asked me "where would you go to change settings to prevent the browser from violating your privacy and infringing on your security?", then, yes, I would go to "Privacy and Security". If, however, you asked me "what would you expect to find under 'Privacy and Security'?", my answer would be that that's where I would go to protect myself from malicious websites, not from malicious browsers.
(I know that 'malicious' is quite, and almost certainly too, strong here, but the point is that I think, and am explicitly encouraged to think, of Mozilla as being on my side against the sites I visit, and I don't think it's natural to expect that I will start thinking of how I need to protect myself from Mozilla to use their products in the way that I, rather than they, intend.)
How exactly? Whether they push out code to you by just changing the binary or by installing an extension makes no difference. In fact, pushing it out as an extension, means they actually have less control over your browser, because are bound to the restrictions that extensions have.
Every browser vendor has this control over you when you use their browser. Some have even more, because they don't even need to tell you about it when they're closed-source.
Adds are annoying yes, but they are only bad for your privacy if they track and profile you. Adds allow for free stuff and they can be done the right way. Granted this is becoming more and more rare so I understand your standard association of adds with distrust. The adds you refer to are non tracking (please tell me if I'm wrong though) and will slowly be replaced by sites you visit (often).
The opposite is true: ads must be paid for, which makes products and services more expensive.
Ads are a convoluted, inefficient form of wealth redistribution; whether that's "good" or "bad" depends on the specific circumstances.
For example, we might (simplistically) say it's "good" when we receive something paid for by ad revenue, but the burden of paying for (e.g. by price increases) and being subjected to those ads is carried by others. For example, if we tune in to a radio station, listen to a song, and tune out before some ad for a product we don't use.
We could say it's "bad" when the opposite happens, for example if we pay higher fees for shopping on Amazon, which then get spent on advertising Prime Video which we don't use.
How do they abuse your privacy without tracking? Of course if they didn't abuse your time and attention they wouldn't make sense. But someone has to be paying Firefox's development, and it is not you. I'll take that last part back if you contribute to Mozilla. Hey, maybe it's an idea for a donation: make a 5$ Firefox without adds. I'd pay. To bad part goes to Google that way.
The irony is that people pay, just not to the right place. Every unnecessarily-bloated download tears through data plans and costs people money to their ISP that never makes it to the provider.
I want plain-text ads that provide just as much revenue to web sites but without obnoxious experiences and fat downloads.
This is going to put me in weird company but I really don't see why metered billing is such a terrible thing. Most other utilities are pay-for-amount-used. And as a bonus, this creates an incentive for developers (via customer pressure) to not use insane amounts of data.
It is because data, unlike water or electricity, isn't a finite resource.
Your electricity bill includes the generation in the power plant and the transmission over the power lines.
When it comes to Internet access, you're paying for the transmission (bandwidth), but there isn't a "packet generation plant" that you should have to pay for.
Also, data caps mean people will use less data, meaning using less bandwidth, meaning ISPs will have less of an incentive to upgrade their already ancient infrastructure. It would be giving them more money to use less of what they provide.
No. Firefox was too big for my old phone and I switched to palemoon when firefox stopped allowing unsigned plugins on my desktop. I've been using habit browser on my phone. I don't really trust it at all so I give it minimal permissions and try not to do any browsing on my phone I don't expect to be tracked or monitored. It's fast and customizable and has a built in adblocker so I've been fairly happy with it. I've tried a lot of different mobile browsers. I haven't really found any I liked. They all kinda suck in one way or another. I was really hoping something from F-Droid would be appealing to use but they were all disappointing. The state of mobile browsers in general is kind of abysmal.
I think they are feeling betrayed by Mozilla, and that they are saying language like "We all love the web" and "Internet for people" inspires feelings.
