I’m not sure if there was an official announcement, but:&gt; We didn&#x27;t make any money off of this; it was intended as an easter egg in Firefox for fans of the show. 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.metafilter.com&#x2F;171227&#x2F;Your-Reality-Is-Driven-By-Marketing#7265127" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.metafilter.com&#x2F;171227&#x2F;Your-Reality-Is-Driven-By-...</a>

Did they actually acknowledge that it was a paid advertising campaign?

Thank you, interesting.&gt;Up to this point, Opera was trialware and had to be purchased after the trial period ended. Version 5.0 (released in 2000) saw the end of this requirement. Instead, Opera became ad-sponsored, displaying advertisements to users who had not paid for it. Later versions of Opera gave the user the choice of seeing banner ads or targeted text advertisements from Google. With version 8.5 (released in 2005) the advertisements were removed entirely and primary financial support for the browser came through revenue from Google (which is by contract Opera&#x27;s default search engine). <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Opera_(web_browser)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Opera_(web_browser)</a>

don&#x27;t buy now. it&#x27;s now Chinese owned

Way back in olden times? Yes. You could buy Netscape Navigator in a box.

iCab
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.icab.de" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.icab.de</a>Theres also a nice iPhone app with tons of functionality

I had completely forgot about Netscape in a box!I like that business model. Something that just works, no ads, nothing. The sublime text model is good too. I will happily pay a one time license for a browser for $100 if it meant no ads and they gave me some cool functionality for it, maybe additional customizations? Then add a solid built in password manager that I know is provably secure that they sync between my devices for me while allowing me to have my own backup, I’d pay $5&#x2F;month for that through Firefox.

Even if you could buy a browser do you seriously believe that would change _anything_, like even in the slightest? These days they still track you whether you buy or not, the data is simply too valuable to ignore.

It was very common back before Firefox. Netscape, Opera and Omniweb (which in Mac OS X&#x27;s early days was the best browser for that platform) were the biggest ones. Internet Explorer made it a very tough sell on Windows, and Firefox and later Chrome completely destroyed the market by giving away a better browser than the commercial ones or Explorer. Opera and Omniweb ended up going free as well because the market just wasn&#x27;t there anymore.

Safari appears to have a good track record. You’re paying a bit more for the whole machine but I don’t see a problem with the bundling.

Has there ever been a desktop browser you could buy instead of using these ad supported&#x2F;os bundled ones?

Same, I had it as my default browser for a few weeks and it was a huge improvement, but ultimately I had to switch back to Chrome.No default zoom or pinch-to-zoom were my biggest pain points, then performance (mostly comparable with Chrome, except videos consistently spike the CPU above 100%), and the last straw was the ridiculous number of OS X kernel panics I was getting. Beyond that, a lot of little enhancements would make a huge difference, like support for pasting without formatting, support for whatever clipboard APIs Google Docs needs, U2F support, and top-level await in the console.I generally love the new Firefox and got my configuration in a state where I was sad to leave the UI&#x2F;UX for Chrome&#x27;s, but there were too many downsides to the point where it was becoming an obstacle to doing my job. Really hoping these issues can all be sorted out relatively soon.

I gave it a good strong shot when 57 came out (I had been on Vivaldi for a while). The performance was way better for sure, but it still wasn&#x27;t quite there. I also hate how default zoom level still requires a plugin and isn&#x27;t built into the browser.

I just switched back to Firefox too :&#x2F;

Given they&#x27;d just one a lot of people back with 57, this was a pretty dumb thing to do.

Interestingly, the qutebrowser repo has a list of similar projects: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;qutebrowser&#x2F;qutebrowser#similar-projects" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;qutebrowser&#x2F;qutebrowser#similar-projects</a>

Drew changed to qutebrowserSource: the blog post

I started trying Vivaldi a while back, mainly due to performance issues. It&#x27;s missing some of the features I&#x27;ve grown to like about Firefox and has some additional bugs, but overall it&#x27;s considerably faster.

You&#x27;re making a fool of yourself, if you think that other browsers are better in any way, shape or form.

Unfortunately I&#x27;ve not had time to do browser research, what are people switching to?

Ultimately, and I don&#x27;t say this as an excuse but as reality: if you&#x27;re not paying for it, you&#x27;re not the customer. Yes Mozilla is a foundation and gets a lot of donations but you&#x27;d have a much stronger leg to stand on if you paid for the browser. Are you willing to pay $50 or more for a web browser so that there&#x27;s no temptation for the vendor to sell out to advertisers?

It does not matter how few they are, if they are the ones making the decisions then they represent Mozilla. Unless dramatic change occurs immediately, we can only conclude that Mozilla is shoveling crapware into Firefox.

Yeah, same here. Awful performance and stability on MacOS. Going to back to Chrome &lt;sigh&gt;

Here is the closest I&#x27;ve seen to a statement: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;lookingglass" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;lookingglass</a>.
I don&#x27;t think the explanation that &quot;The Mr. Robot series centers around the theme of online privacy and security&quot; is what the users were looking for...

It&#x27;s the weekend. Execs don&#x27;t work on weekends.

I am also concerned about the accountability. It&#x27;s been some time -- 48 hours or so, and not even a brief statement from management?This is like PR 101 to me. The most shocking thing so far is their silence -- Mozilla is not a new organization!!

I&#x27;ll try and reproduce&#x2F;file a bug when I get a chance! I know that&#x27;s a meaningful contribution to the project!

&gt; Also, even since 57, this week Firefox (&quot;stable&quot; build) consistently gets hung up with just one tab open and spins 100% CPU on one thread.I mean, this probably isn&#x27;t the right venue to ask about this, but that sounds rather serious. I know you&#x27;re probably a bit disenfranchised at this point, but could I ask you to capture a profile using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;perf-html.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;perf-html.io</a> and file a bug?If filing a bug is too much work, you can email me (email in profile), but filing a bug will get more eyes on it quicker.

Damn. This sound like the actions of a few inside Mozilla... Cause it&#x27;s definitely not in line with the organization&#x27;s stated goals. So where&#x27;s the accountability? The people who made these decisions should be held accountable.Also, even since 57, this week Firefox (&quot;stable&quot; build) consistently gets hung up with just one tab open and spins 100% CPU on one thread. I hope it isn&#x27;t trying to invert the word &quot;robot&quot; when the thread gets stuck.

My default search engine is set to DDG on Firefox and through countless updates Firefox has never once attempted to reset it to whatever Mozilla are taking money to promote now.

TryFirefox 24 in a VMIt&#x27;s insecure, slow, but it&#x27;s the last good version of Firefox.Anything after 24, has Australis, which is the beginning of the end of Mozilla IMHO.

&quot;Sign in&quot; as in into Chrome Sync?

I know it’s kind of the opposite action, but I lost trust in Chrome over it persistently and repeatedly  deleting my extensions. Searching for help reveals I have to “sign in” to keep my extensions.  When a browser built by an advertising company wants me to sign in, the only conclusion I can make is they want to track my browsing behavior. I probably consented to that through the click wrap agreement, or maybe not. Who knows? I’m not about to spend a whole day reading 10 miles of legalese to find out.

&gt; updates have been known to re-enable it if you turn it off ... But it doesn’t matter - you’re going to re-enable it on the next update.It&#x27;s surprising how ... trustworthy Chrome is in this regard. My default search engine is set to DDG and through countless updates Chrome has never once attempted to reset it to Google.

It&#x27;s always interesting how this happens. Is it new executives how come to power and they never realize what the brand meant to users but see a short term stunt to get some extra profit and go for it.It happened to Lenovo and other laptops when they started installing spyware (Superfish) on their machines. They basically ruined the brand image that took years to build up.

Yeah I get impatient with the &quot;they need to make money&quot; apologist argument. Oh, I get it, you&#x27;re saying I should trust them because they&#x27;re in it for the money like everybody else. Makes sense thanx.

They&#x27;re ruining their brand image. It&#x27;s hard to be considered trustworthy when it appears like you compromise your values due to financial hardship. It reminds me of the Ubuntu Amazon integration thing as well. One of the Cardinal rules of free software seems to be don&#x27;t sell your users by forcing 3rd party integration nobody asked for.

Im not certain I buy the arguement that the decline of mozilla is purely a bad management situation. In threads about this, or pocket or cliqz or any of the other mozilla diasaters of the last while, you have a huge amount of what appear to be line level engineer employees defending this crap voraciously.Something has gone very wrong with the culture of mozilla in general, I think its a copout to suggest that its merely some evil pointy haired boss.

This is MoCo as usual: top notch engineering ruined by Dilbert-worthy high level management &#x2F; executives.

Switching from Firefox to Chrome is jumping from pan to flame. Google are at least as bad, and in all probability much worse. The Safari saga. In fact, the amount of protestations one here are deeply suspicious.

That correlates with the sudden switch from Firefox to Chrome in Germany: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gs.statcounter.com&#x2F;browser-market-share&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;germany" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gs.statcounter.com&#x2F;browser-market-share&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;germa...</a>If there is causality, Cliqz wasn&#x27;t just a controversy, it was a loss that the benefit of Quantum will have a hard time counteracting.We will have to see what drop, if any, the Robot controversy brings.

By it not actually being a privacy-concern and the &quot;shitstorms&quot; frankly being tiny. These are completely isolated to HN, Reddit, Slashdot and the like. No serious journalist is going to report on it, because doing even the tiniest bit of research shows you that there&#x27;s nothing to report on. As such, the shitstorm is never going to reach roundabout 99% of their users.

I doubt they&#x27;re going to change anything about Cliqz, as there&#x27;s no actual privacy concern with it. There&#x27;s the technological feasibility for Cliqz GmbH to steal user data, but Mozilla owns parts of Cliqz GmbH, so knows what&#x27;s going on inside the company and they have a contract with Cliqz that prohibits the storing of personal data.Mozilla has also made an official statement saying that no user data will be stored, so break that promise would be misleading of customers, and their Privacy Statement does not constitute the storing of such data, so allowing it anyways would count as violation of contract.Additionally, they&#x27;re testing it in Germany, where this sort of hidden collection of data either has to be obvious (for example, if you order something online, it&#x27;s clear that they have to process your address), which is clearly not the case with Cliqz, or the user has to be prompted for opt-in, not either the case with Cliqz, or it may not be personal data. So, if it were personal data, they&#x27;d be violating German law.And the handful of shitstorms in tech-focused online communities are hardly the end of the world for Mozilla. Making the internet rely less on search engines, which is what they&#x27;re ultimately trying to achieve with Cliqz, is more important than that.

Their behavior here with regards to handling the bug tracker is exactly the same as with Cliqz. So this isn&#x27;t a one off thing. It&#x27;s the start of a pattern and a dark one at that.And speaking of which, I made a post prior to FF57 asking where the Cliqz situation went and got no responses. Any idea as to what happened with it? I haven&#x27;t seen any updates on the situation since and feel like it&#x27;s just been swept under the rug.

And the article doesn’t even mention the Cliqz controversy [1]. How can you try to promote your browser as the privacy-oriented, user-first alternative and at the same time run into shitstorms like this all the time? Shouldn’t there be someone who can properly judge the effect of decisions like this?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15421708" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15421708</a>

Everyone keeps coming with the money problem. But... how about they maintain a browser, with browser functions only? No PDF-JS, no Pocket, no Hello, etc. Just core browser functions and features.Yes, it might mean scaling back, which is one of the swear words in a growth-oriented belief, but that way, the money should be enough - it was enough for a decade, what changed?

There are plenty of open source companies. The company I founded is built on open source principles many of them inspired by Mozilla. It&#x27;s a bigger challenge, because it restricts your freedoms as a company in favour of the user&#x27;s freedoms. However Mozilla&#x27;s mistakes are not due to the open source nature of the company at all, they are due to mismanagement.They are due to poor understanding of your own userbase. Poor communication with users and employees. Complete lack of judgement.These are sticks Mozilla puts in its own wheels. It&#x27;s hard to make money, but it&#x27;s easy to know what not to do. Simply asking your employees: &quot;Is this a good idea?&quot; would have yielded a clear &quot;Fuck no&quot;. That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not.

&gt; The trouble is, it costs money [..] I would imagine getting some funding helps keep things afloat.Mozilla has accrued a lot of money over the years. So much money that they could have funded--just on interest--a comfortable loft somewhere filled with hackers on a decent salary who are fanatical about the open web, and maybe a single guy with a tie to &quot;call google&quot;, in perpetuity.That should have been the base case for Mozilla: open web, modern browser, users first.Unfortunately, brass doesn&#x27;t vote itself out for the greater good. A modern browser is a delivery platform. The &quot;open web&quot; is a marketing tool. And users are not as important as advertisers.The rationale is that without clout, they&#x27;ll be unable to prevent worse things from happening, so they have to allow for these compromises on the open web to maintain that clout, and every setback is relegated to &quot;not our hill to die on,&quot; with every next hill becoming &quot;not our hill.&quot;It seems like an unavoidable tragedy, but if we look at similar organisations, can we imagine the FSF or the EFF making compromises on their respective missions, even if they lose popularity or even run out of funding?I feel they would rather cease to exist than allow for corruption of their stated mission.

I think the trouble is that the &quot;web&quot; is an overcomplicated BS clusterf___ for exploiting the plebes.Some guy posted here a week ago in wonderment over how Mozilla can maintain a browser for a mere $400M+ a year. $400M+ a year!!!If it takes that much engineering to deliver something which is not substantially different than what we were using 17 years ago, I&#x27;d count that as an engineering failure.

This.I like my niche obscure anti marketing parasite browsers. But I am well aware there&#x27;s a lot of Mozilla code in Waterfox and Pale Moon.And ultimately its MS, Mozilla and Google who run this show. And out of those Mozilla is still the least bad.

The trouble is, it costs money (or a lot of time from talented people) to support a project the size of a browser. I would imagine getting some funding helps keep things afloat.You even say, &quot;maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation&#x27;s backing behind it (or a government&#x27;s)&quot;.I suppose we should expect the goodwill of corporate sponsorship, but this relationship can quickly turn into the &quot;sponsor&quot; asking for things in exchange for donations.This situation exposes a weakness and requires the recognition of the fragility of the open source model (at least for larger-scale projects). We&#x27;ve seen weird corporate-backed things in NPM projects before. It happens, but what is the better alternative? How do we prevent it? Most corporations only support open source projects out of self-interest: that is, they have a stake in seeing a particular project succeed because their stack may depend on the software.

It was quantum. Firefox got faster than Chrome with it.

update your conciousness because a complete revamp is what happened. what mozilla did was stupid but its nothing compared to being tracked by google.

&gt; &quot;That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me.&quot;so that&#x27;s why you stick with chrome, a browser designed to send all your browsing habits straight to google, the largest online advertising company and commercial tracker in the world?

&gt; a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me.Remember, the extension was not there to advertise the show!I don&#x27;t know if that affects the way you&#x27;re using the term &quot;for advertising&quot;, but it affects how I care a lot.

&gt; Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of usersThis was the new interface, right? I just saw this the other day and though it looked pretty good; was actually considering a trial switch back (after moving to chrome years ago, when a single bad tab would take down the entire browser).That’s now put on hold - a compulsory extension is one thing, but having it be purely for advertising is a massive “No” flag to me.I’m of the view that getting (most) people to consider switching browsers only comes every few years and requires a very large incentive; “We’ve fixed that one incremental problem” isn’t enough. A complete revamp would do it, but takes time to permeate into conciousness. And in the meantime they do this. “Squandered goodwill” seems to be spot-on.

No offense, but &quot;like, China?&quot; I don&#x27;t see how involving government(s) and therefore politicising the whole thing is going to make the situation any better. Even if it were support from a government you (but others not) would find acceptable.

&gt; needs a corporation&#x27;s backing behind it (or a government&#x27;s)You touch on an interesting point, maybe Firefox should be soliciting donations from governments who are concerned about the US surveillance state instead of relying so heavily on search ad revenue and being forced to turn to things like this to make a buck.

Sorry but where&#x27;s your evidence?Mozilla is still today doing incredible work. The work on Quantum was extremely forward-thinking in a way that most corporations cannot support; it brought us Rust, which is a fantastic contribution to the ecosystem.Furthermore, Mozilla has always had troubles with judgement and mismanagement, this is not new. The problems that have been surfacing are old problems, they&#x27;re just getting more severe.

&gt; There&#x27;s a lot of power in branding, apparently. People keep saying things like, &quot;Mozilla is a good company at heart&quot;, and I&#x27;m at a loss. Mozilla 2017 is nothing like the Mozilla that existed when the Foundation was established, or when the Mozilla Manifesto was adopted.I don&#x27;t know, Rust and Servo seem to show that there&#x27;s still the hacker spirit that was there at the beginning, it&#x27;s just they accumulated a lot of &#x27;business types&#x27; if you will over the years and they need to put that engineering face back at the top, instead of being too focused at running a multi-million dollar enterprise.

The ship exists but whether it remains the same ship is a matter of opinion; and yet Theseus sails onward.I see Mozilla as suffering from a crisis of identity, internally; it&#x27;s acting as though it is staffed by believers in the manifesto but is now steered by those enamoured with The Bay Area and its ways.Rust, Firefox 57, and even FirefoxOS are&#x2F;were noble efforts to succeed in delivering on the manifesto. Pocket and this latest advert update smack of an executive that is thirsty to exploit the Mozilla brand for profit.

Indeed. The first indication was perhaps when they freaked out and decided to chase Google on version numbers.After that they got into all kinds of &quot;social signaling&quot; shenanigans, and the rest is history.

&gt; There&#x27;s a lot of power in branding, apparently.The Iron Law of Bureaucracy applies to do-good missions just as easily as it does to the worst of avaricious corporations or bloated gov&#x27;t depts.

Wait, just because the old guard is gone, implies that the people there no longer care at all about the original mission?  I get where you&#x27;re coming from, but throwing up ones hands and saying Mozilla is already fucked is not helpful—Mozilla is our best chance at maintaining an open web.  If we just roll over and let Google have the web because things aren&#x27;t perfect then we are well and truly fucked because there&#x27;s really no question of the agenda there.  No, we should be holding their feet to the fire, not giving up in impotent cynicism.

Exactly. I&#x27;m totally fed up with this &quot;Mozilla is a good company at heart&quot; contrary to every evidence (letting FF slip b&#x2F;c of all the side projects, Pocket, now this).

There is a natural tension between the desire to do good and the need to make money.If you can&#x27;t be financially self-sustaining, then no level of desire to do good in the world will result in the long term ability to continue doing good.It is like the phrase, Justice without power is inefficient and power without justice is tyranny. You need both profit and philosophy to do good.

It&#x27;s surprising that people are surprised by these things. Mozilla is not on a slippery slope. That was true years ago, but it proceeded unmitigated. By now, though, these things are the natural result of that decay.There&#x27;s a lot of power in branding, apparently. People keep saying things like, &quot;Mozilla is a good company at heart&quot;, and I&#x27;m at a loss. Mozilla 2017 is nothing like the Mozilla that existed when the Foundation was established, or when the Mozilla Manifesto was adopted. Tons of key people left in a few different waves: first when Google pulled them off the project to go build Chrome, and then lots more who trickled out over the years during and after the Kovacs&#x2F;FirefoxOS era. What remains is (a derivative of) the codebase + the name &quot;Mozilla&quot; + and, like, Mitchell. But that&#x27;s it. Keep calling it the same thing, though, and somehow folks act like we&#x27;re talking about the same thing.Mozilla imploded—or rather, got Netscapified—years ago. To believe that Mozilla or Firefox is your old friend who&#x27;s still helping you fight the good fight is incredibly naive and can only come from someone who hasn&#x27;t actually been paying attention and is easily fooled by (trivially contradicted) surface-level details (like a name). I mean, it&#x27;s not even like some philosophically tricky ship-of-Theseus problem. Mozilla is dead, people, and this isn&#x27;t news.

This is indeed comically sad after the nice Quantum boost.It was a poor taste joke at the wrong time.. Mozilla is gonna regret this.

&gt;because the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time.Really? I haven&#x27;t experienced a single crash, and I was on nightlies before 57 was released, so I could try Quantum.

&gt; the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the timeThat has not been my experience, so let&#x27;s not overstate personal anecdotes as facts.

I&#x27;ve been using Firefox 57 since the release, and had zero crashes.

I&#x27;ve seen firefox running on computers everywhere during meetings and presentations which I haven&#x27;t seen for a long time.

Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of usersLet&#x27;s not overstate things. Firefox 57 gained good will from some users. It also seriously annoyed others, both because of the loss of many useful extensions, and because the new version is horribly buggy and crashes all the time.The one thing Mozilla still had going for them compared to Google or Microsoft was the emphasis on privacy and respecting the user, and yet I&#x27;ve read about several different cases in recent weeks where that trust has been undermined, this being the latest.

The business model of the Internet is surveillance and advertising. It&#x27;s incredibly hard to resist. It seems like there&#x27;s an infinite amount of money available if you&#x27;re willing to surveil and sell out your users.

Noone can hate with more fierceness than someone that once loved. If you depend on your users to love you, be careful with their trust.

No, otherwise Mozilla C-Levels would not be getting $500000+ salaries (Google it, it is real) and flying on privately chartered business jets

&gt; Is Mozilla strapped for cash or something?Nope. According to their financial statement, the Mozilla Foundation had $69M in &quot;cash and cash equivalents&quot; at the end of last year, about $329M in investments, and literally gave away millions of dollars in grant funding. It&#x27;s not entirely clear to me how the financial interaction works between them, but the privately-held Mozilla Corporation (i.e. the 1000+(!) employee company that actually makes Firefox, and which the Foundation owns as a subsidiary) had over $500M in revenue from their search engine deals...See &quot;State of Mozilla 2016&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;foundation&#x2F;annualreport&#x2F;2016&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;foundation&#x2F;annualreport&#x2F;2016&#x2F;</a> and also check out the Foundation&#x27;s financial statement and tax form PDFs on the bottom for more details.

For those that want to donate: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donate.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donate.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;</a>

Is Mozilla strapped for cash or something? I’m happy to donate a bit if it keeps them independent.Google’s behavior with Android&#x2F;AOSP suggests they’re more than willing to make the open source version of Chrome useless in practice the second there is no viable competition.I don’t see any organization other than Mozilla that can keep them honest.

I really didn&#x27;t mind the Pocket integration, probably because I&#x27;m a Pocket user myself so can&#x27;t see the problem.This is pretty bad though, I&#x27;d say this is worse than the Pocket thing because it&#x27;s abusing the trust and good will of their users

Curious what those things are, because all I can think of is workaround that exploited out-of-spec behaviour (and, of course, web extensions, which has been covered to such a degree it&#x27;s not just a dead horse but a fresh patch of grass by now)

Firefox 57 has no love from a lot of web developers I know.  It broke things that were working just fine before.

&gt; If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation&#x27;s backing behind it (or a government&#x27;s).Perhaps the problem is the fact that the Web is so complex that popular web browsers could only possibly be developed by corporations to begin with.

I feel really sorry for Steve and other real developers. Mozilla is not different from any other managers driven corporation. Very sad.
I almost wonder if that&#x27;s an organized action aiming at removing competition. It&#x27;s too bad to be unintentional.

&gt; the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla.Yes. If anyone wants to do a git bisect to find when the Mozilla Corporation lost its integrity, we can say it was definitely &quot;bad&quot; by the time they forced out Eich in April 2014.

&gt; &quot;Fork it&quot; is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it&#x27;s with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they&#x27;re an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them.Well, how do you suggest doing this when it appears that the relevant decision-making parts of Mozilla do not answer to anyone &quot;on our side&quot; in any meaningful way?It seems to me that the only solution is to make an organisation with a fundamentally different system of governance. By virtue of institutional inertia, I figure it would be very hard to do this by actually raising a competing project from the ground up and hoping to capture any of Mozilla&#x27;s market share or developer base (not to mention the amply made elsewhere in this thread point that Mozilla is big and expensive for a reason).The far easier, and quite well-tried, solution is to put financial and social pressure on the current leadership to voluntarily open itself to downstream control. The former may be most easily achieved by having an Iceweasel-style &quot;condom organisation&quot; gain traction - that is, someone who tries their best to replicate all of Mozilla&#x27;s user-facing I&#x2F;O (releases, sync servers...) in a timely fashion, systematically acts as a QC layer to strip bad decisions like this or Cliqz and otherwise does not waste developer time on niche interests like classic UIs. For the latter, whatever you may think of the person of the tactic, the Brendan Eich story unfortunately shows that pitchfork mob tactics work on Mozilla. Even more cynically, it may be the case that they are the main way anything gets done these days. The (very significant, in my eyes) moral reservations aside, from a result-oriented perspective of what is most useful to reform Mozilla as an organisation, is there any good argument against the &quot;identify a representative set of heads behind this latest measure and call for them&quot; approach?

So, the first post in the thread was ~11:30am. The last one was about ~5pm. I basically appended to it during the day, as my thoughts and feelings evolved on an issue. It&#x27;s not like I completely tossed out all these tweets at once.That said, everyone uses Twitter differently. I tweet a lot. Some people don&#x27;t. I personally blog when I have a long-form, well thought out thing to say. I tweet whatever is on my brain at a given moment. Twitter is more raw, more personal. This is a raw, personal issue for me.

&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;steveklabnik&#x2F;status&#x2F;941709048529014784" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;steveklabnik&#x2F;status&#x2F;941709048529014784</a>This is such a terrible way to make an argument, present a case, or say anything that can&#x27;t be said in a few dozen words. He has a blog, it&#x27;s linked right there. I can&#x27;t understand why people use twitter like this.

&gt; Mozilla is a good companyNot since the incident.

I made my warning about Mozilla Corp+Found a week ago, and as I recall, it was not warmly received... by anyone!What a difference a week makes!

I strong disagree that Mozilla is a good company at heart.They are horribly mismanaged on every level.They have burned hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a second rate browser that has seen its market share collapse.They took hundreds of millions from Google and in exchange unquestioningly supported Google&#x27;s advertising and surveillance agenda.They have consistently failed to introduce new features that would actually benefit new users.They blame the &quot;standards process&quot; for their lack of innovation and features that benefit users when they know that the standards process is a b.s. game. For profit corporations break standards whenever it benefits them. Firefox is the only browser that follows standards written by Google, Microsoft, and Apple, while the other 3 break them, or force through their own changes whenever it benefits them.Apple blocked 3rd party cookies and Microsoft defaulted to Do Not Track while Firefox kept doing Google&#x27;s bidding to collect their checks. Just one example of many.In the place of real innovation, being truly independent, and actually standing up for users Mozilla gives people dumb crusades like Net Neutrality.Firefox could have used their market share to develop truly innovative features, like what Opera tried. For that matter they could have partnered with Opera to create standards for a true open web, but of course they never did that because the Google bucks were just to sweet for them.Mozilla has been a failed organization for a long time. This is only the latest reminder.

Firefox 57 was so nice I started using it every day and was actively migrating things to it from Chrome. I could live with the Pocket thing even though I wasn&#x27;t wild about it. I hadn&#x27;t gone as far as setting up a Mozilla cloud account because privacy was a high priority and I didn&#x27;t want to swap one cloud service for another.Then this thing blew my machine up the other day, I lost days of work, and...hmm. I don&#x27;t know why a company would ever do something like this, it&#x27;s incredibly foolish.

I for one cannot stand the Pocket integration, I prefer Bookmark OS

Watching the whole thing unfold has been heartbreaking. Most mozillians do not support this. This Twitter thread is one insight into it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;steveklabnik&#x2F;status&#x2F;941709048529014784" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;steveklabnik&#x2F;status&#x2F;941709048529014784</a>Firefox 57 gained a ton of good will from a lot of users, and they pull this crap right after. They absolutely should know better. They should have known better with Pocket; they should have learned from Pocket.&quot;Fork it&quot; is not an acceptable answer. The problem is not with Firefox, it&#x27;s with Mozilla. Mozilla is a good company at heart and they&#x27;re an important pillar of the web. Losing them to stupid stuff like this sucks, we should fight for them. There&#x27;s tons of Firefox forks, none of them get the point though, you might as well use Chromium. If Firefox disappears and the fork remains, the fork dies because maintaining a web browser is work that needs a corporation&#x27;s backing behind it (or a government&#x27;s).Mozilla&#x27;s role goes beyond the web browser as well. Its mission was to &quot;keep the web open&quot;, &quot;keep the web free&quot;. This goal was reflected in projects such as Firefox OS, Hello and Persona (and to some extent, Thunderbird)... but atrocious management made those projects a waste of time and money.It&#x27;s not Firefox you need to fork, it&#x27;s Mozilla.

Seeking profits at all costs is a bit much. Mozilla isnt great here or in several past instances, but they are still above many other corporations.

Or that the privacy conscious people don&#x27;t bring in revenue.  As soon as the foundation&#x2F;corporation split happened, some people warned that the end game would be the corporation seeking profits at all costs.

Mozilla must believe that privacy conscious users make up a small percentage of their user base. There&#x27;s no other explanation for moves like this and their &quot;differential privacy&quot; fiasco from August.Between that, broken U2F support in FF57, and pages that are broken in FF but work fine in Chrome (I assume due to devs catering to the huge market share) it&#x27;s becoming increasingly difficult to stick with Firefox.

You can do that in Firefox, too. Use this [1] addon and you can create as many containers as you&#x27;d like and log into different Google accounts.1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account-containers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account...</a>

Being able to switch between Google accounts in Chrome is so huge to me now that I can&#x27;t use anything else.

Nightly was, so I assume any with experiments turned on.

I run Nightly as my daily driver and I don&#x27;t have this addon installed.Edit: Apparently some have: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1424977#c0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1424977#c0</a>

Define &quot;affected&quot;. The extension might have gotten installed. The extension did not actually do anything, though, if you did not enable its function via about:config.

Does anyone know if the Developer Edition was affected?

Maybe we need a stable browser without surprises. Less cutting edge. Maybe.

So what&#x27;s the plan to sustain the existence of the fork?Browsers are very complex and expensive to keep cutting edge.

The fact it ought to be an extension that pocket users could add by visiting addons.mozilla.org but instead it was rolled into the core browser.People assume Pocket offered Mozilla a lot of money, as there&#x27;s really no other reason Pocket shouldn&#x27;t be an extension.People are naturally nervous when browsers start deploying third-party code in exchange for cash. Especially when auto-update mechanisms are used.Some would see that as an important line to cross - will they be able to resist the much larger sums they&#x27;ll be offered to &quot;help users see more relevant ads&quot; and &quot;help users keep safe from viruses&quot;?

It makes a fine browser extension. It ABSOLUTELY does not make good embedded code.There is no good reason for it to be &quot;core functionality&quot; in a browser, other than the fact that Moz:&#x2F;&#x2F;a got a fistfull of dollars and foisted it upon us.EDIT: For example, what would be a good use of core functionality, is if Moz:&#x2F;&#x2F;a included IPFS resolution and native support. That is a protocol level support, and thus would need native support rather than plugins. Plugins do indeed work, but require significant workarounds. For example, native could be ipfs:&#x2F;&#x2F;hash whereas the plugins need to specify <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;127.0.0.1:8080&#x2F;ipfs&#x2F;hash" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;127.0.0.1:8080&#x2F;ipfs&#x2F;hash</a>

A real fork might be impossible, but a soft fork that just disables features like this should be possible.

&quot;It is impossible to fork Firefox and survive&quot;Pale Moon did this a while ago and is still around, although in need of donations as many other volunteer-driven projects.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palemoon.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palemoon.org&#x2F;</a>

It is impossible to fork Firefox and survive. If you destroy Mozilla all the users will migrate to Chrome. There is no successful financial model for browser development. Browser development is a financial black hole and requires alternative revenue streams for developers to put food on the table.

And you don&#x27;t see a problem with having no money for actually developing the browser?

I think it&#x27;s time there was a legitimate, organized fork of Firefox. None of this Iceweasel nonsense, but a proper, mature, organized initiative to diverge from Mozilla&#x27;s codebase. They&#x27;ve made it very clear with the addition of Pocket, suggested sites, and now this addon that their calling has been diluted in pursuit of sustaining their own existence.

Well it&#x27;s probably not fair to call it an Easter egg if it had a commercial tie-in and presumably resulted in money for Firefox. Those are called ads. No matter how whimsically they&#x27;re packagedBut yes, people do like to get up in arms about free code bases that they don&#x27;t pay for. People need to keep in mind the Facebook rule -- that when you don&#x27;t pay for a service, you aren&#x27;t the customer, you are the product.

I wouldn&#x27;t call this an Easter egg. about:mozilla is an Easter egg. Installing a strange, unexplained add-on is not.

Well, thankfully the extension did not actually do anything at all. You would have had to manually enable it in about:config, before it would have done what you described.

Yeah, that attemp at positive spin won&#x27;t fly here, not with this audience. Silent sideload of a paid-placement extension that changes headers and page content is not an easter egg. Maybe if it were activated by a ctrl sequence, but even then... this is a hole in perimeter security. It&#x27;s the sort of thing that makes me reconsider my institution&#x27;s security policy to sanction Firefox as a supported and authorized browser. Not cool Mozilla, we can get by with chrome and IE &#x2F; Edge... MS might not be bleeding edge in browsers but at least they understand this sort of Enterprise requirement. MS might pull some ad placement bs on windows home, but they were smart enough to avoid it with pro.

It&#x27;s not an Easter egg, it&#x27;s an advertisement for a TV show.

Well ignoring that it altered your headers and display of content.... yeah had no effect at all.

So, people are angry because of an easter egg in Firefox?It did not collect any data, it did not have any effect on the browser (unless you turned on the preference) except look spooky if you look at your list of add-ons.So yeah, it was spooky, and it could certainly have been done better, but come on, it was an easter egg dedicated to a spooky tv series.

&gt; Firefox devs need to eat.This is just greed.

They didn&#x27;t make money off of this making this argument invalid.

The article was misleading here. Zero people unexpectedly had content change as a result of this. The only way that could happen is if you edit an undocumented config option. That is not what the controversy is about. It&#x27;s about Firefox adding an addon with a name that sounded suspicious to many, and whose purpose was marketing-related and did not provide any functionality benefit to the user.Present or not, enabled or not, it didn&#x27;t actually do anything without explicit user action. But that&#x27;s not the point, for people whom this bothered.

Mozilla silently injecting ads into the content of websites through the browser is unacceptable. Full stop.This is the same type of scummy shit that ISPs have been pulling for years. But unlike ISPs, there&#x27;s competition in the browser space. Mozilla must hold themselves to a higher standard if they want to survive.

Many FOSS projects compete with proprietary software without compromising their FOSS principles.  There&#x27;s nothing wrong with Mozilla wanting to make money, but if Mozilla is indeed a for-profit enterprise then they should clearly say so, so users know what to expect.  Deceiving the public about their real intentions, that&#x27;s not acceptable.

If they can&#x27;t do that without compromising their own product they deserve the fallout they get.

Firefox devs need to eat.Chrome is sponsored by one of the largest companies in the world. How will a free open-source project ever compete with that? Of course they’re trying to make money.

I&#x27;m pretty curious about this as well. I sent an email to their governance list[0] a number of months ago that never got any reply. As someone who&#x27;s not involved in day-to-day, it would be extremely entitled if me to expect my views to be automatically taken on board, but the absolute silence (and general low level of activity) gave me the vague impression there must be discussion taking place elsewhere.I&#x27;ve also tried lurking on a few IRC channels, which were similarly lacking in content on this (beyond idle chat, or helping out beginners new to the channels).If the answer is that I need to email some individual to get into some private group to participate in (or even just to observe) discussion on governance, then that really isn&#x27;t very transparent. Certainly public mailing lists I&#x27;ve checked don&#x27;t seem to contain enormous amounts of contextual content on these kinds of things.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;m&#x2F;#!forum&#x2F;mozilla.governance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;m&#x2F;#!forum&#x2F;mozilla.governance</a>

Mozilla Corporation is, well, a corporation. There was almost certainly not any sort of community governance process involved. The marketing department presumably got a &quot;cool&quot; idea and had someone implement it. How they got the OK to deploy it to everybody is another question but that process doesn&#x27;t involve the greater community either.

It would be cool if someone with insight into the mozilla community&#x27;s structure could elaborate on how consensus to deploy experiments like this is established. I know that mozilla is very open, but as a fairly huge community it&#x27;s still somewhat opaque to outsiders like me and I wouldn&#x27;t know where to start looking. Are there pertinent mailing lists? Are things like this hatchd out on bug comments filed against the Shield product on bugzilla?

I don&#x27;t think firefox is spying on you in the same way.   Let&#x27;s remember the bigger picture.

People in this thread are really overdoing it. Mozilla and Firefox are still nothing close to what major tech companies do with user privacy.

It&#x27;s really an astounding accomplishment to make a browser developed by a non-profit less trustworthy in this respect than the one developed by the world&#x27;s largest advertising company.

Just post and damn the internet points. There are hundreds of firefox employees browsing every firefox thread, and a far larger proportion of them are going to downvote than would a more representative group of technologists or firefox users. Bad PR for firefox could potentially financially affect them personally, so it&#x27;s totally understandable and human (though annoying.)

I got massively downloaded about a month ago for complaining about the direction that Firefox was going. I was hoping I&#x27;d be wrong about the general direction they seem to be taking in this article doesn&#x27;t give me much hope for that prospect.

Mozilla has taken on all of the worst qualities of a modern University...ostensibly for the &quot;public good&quot;, but really just a vehicle for the whims of a few &quot;enlightened intellectuals&quot; who will &quot;save us all&quot; (from ourselves apparently)but hey, Mr Robot uses Kali Linux (they only show us this about twenty times per episode) so he should be fine

May I suggest dillo where possible, and icecat everywhere else?

What do you use to browse the web? A self compiled version of curl? wget?

Good luck in the jungle. I suggest to download the Primitive Technology channel first from YouTube.

Agreed, I now NEVER trust any company or startup anymore with my data. Everyone is involved with spyware of some sort.I thought Mozilla was an exception, Oh well. :&#x2F;

&quot;Not only are these experiments enabled by default, but updates have been known to re-enable it if you turn it off.&quot;are you kidding me? Mozilla risks our opsec and I did&#x27;t even know?

I&#x27;d never used userContent.css before, but just tried it and it works fine. 57.0.2 (64-bit) on Win7.I&#x27;d suggest raising a bug.

Except this wasn’t an auto update - it’s a completely different infrastructure pushing stuff into the browser without affirmative consent or even knowledge. And in true malvertising fashion, this system is both opt-out and turns itself back on sometimes.

Auto-update doesn&#x27;t carry the implicit moral right to install anything company behind it wants.Auto-update is a consensual agreement with the user. If you use auto-update to deploy something that a vast majority of your users do not want and did not expect, and intentionally so (refusing to roll back a &#x27;mistake&#x27;), then you have broken that agreement or moral code.You cannot use the excuse of &quot;oh well if they don&#x27;t like it they can uninstall it and use another product&quot; to condone this bait-and-switch behavior. Just because the behavior is legal does not make it moral.This behavior is absolutely immoral and must be condemned.

&gt; Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent.Auto-updating software has been the norm for a while. This is nothing new, just because it was put into an extension instead.

Both userChrome and userContent work just fine on ff57(+). I&#x27;m using both right now with the nightly build. What are you having issues with?

The fundamental problem is that the software that serves the user needs to be paid for. If every FF user would chip in a small sum, that might work, but people would rather switch to chrome.

Do people actually think Stallman was wrong?

Perhaps Stallman and the FSF are right?We can fork Firefox, but I agree with many other commenters that a fork isn&#x27;t sufficient.It is the underlying concept I am trying to shine a light on: software should serve the user. When Mozilla becomes user-hostile, we can establish new guards for our future security. But if we, the software writers, become user-hostile, then there will be no one left.

Maybe that worked in the past, but these days, time and time again we see companies offering paid software and services with an extra layer of advertising on top. Old adages like &quot;you&#x27;re either a paying customer, or the one being sold&quot; no longer apply, you can be a paying customer and sold for extra profit. Companies, by their nature, will try to maximize profits, and that translates to them using any means they can get away with.

&quot;I am deeply disappointed in so much software lately, especially by the folks who once championed software freedom, privacy, and quality.&quot;PAY. FOR. IT.What can you expect from a group of people working for you for free, trying to scratch together their salaries from wherever they can.The answer is not &#x27;fork it&#x27; - because the existential question remains: who will develop the fork?You?Me?A magical person who works without income?More likely - someone who needs an income, and will have to find creative, weird ways like &#x27;Mr Robot&#x27; to make it work.A simple answer is &#x27;pay for it&#x27;. A company &#x2F; non-profit can still be committed to those things you mentioned.

That was my initial reaction too, but I think it misses a subtlety.Mozilla installs software on our computers without our explicit consent all the time, each time you update Firefox; or when you visit mozilla.org and your browser downloads some JS.It would be impossible for most people to give genuine informed consent, because they&#x27;d have to understand what each part of the software does. Most people have not learned to read source code and don&#x27;t want to. (And the source is available for people sufficiently motivated.) Practically, there isn&#x27;t time to personally code-review every software update on your system. We defer this to distributors we trust.And in this case, Mozilla genuinely didn&#x27;t run any questionable code. They could have done (and arguably have in the past), but didn&#x27;t. They installed software that actually does nothing. (about:mozilla at least engages the CSS parser; this doesn&#x27;t even do that.)I think the problem is just that they&#x27;re messing with our stuff. Like if someone rearranged the books on your bookshelf to spell out the name of your least favourite whatever, they haven&#x27;t actually done you any practical damage, but it&#x27;s really annoying and rude. On principle, it&#x27;s my stuff and they should leave it alone. Stop being a bad roommate, Mozilla!

&gt; Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent.this is what was wrong about the whole thing. What Jascha Kaykas-Wolff heard from the community, that &quot;the experience [we] created caused confusion&quot; is NOT the point.

This is nothing new. There has always been &quot;sell offs&quot; in the Open&#x2F;Free Software sphere. An old-ish example that comes to mind is SourceForge. When it started, it was the place to host and search for Open Source or Free Software. It was amasing. Little by little, the service started to rot, became full of ads and just felt sketchy.Then GitHub arrived, and a fresh platforfm for hosting open source software was born.

(After others here said userContent.css was working for them, I fiddled a bit more. Found an earlier rule in the file that I had somehow mangled and it seems that somehow affected the parsing of the file. Removed the earlier lines, everything works great. So yeah, my fault, not Firefox&#x27;s.)

I am deeply disappointed in so much software lately, especially by the folks who once championed software freedom, privacy, and quality.A lot of people thought the Mr. Robot stunt meant that they had been hacked. Well, you know what? They were hacked. Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent.(Side note: I also discovered last night that Firefox Quantum does not use or support userContent.css - maybe this is a Stylo thing but it really annoyed me.)(EDIT: per the below, my experience with userContent.css doesn&#x27;t seem to be shared. I may have messed it up on my end. Will report back when I get a chance.)

I am trying to switch from Chrome to FF, but FF is making it really hard. Some sites freeze regularly. Facebook the other day was trying to open a YouTube link. 30 seconds of complete unresponsiveness. Google products work unreliable as well (inbox freezes, black tab on google maps). Just very frustrating overall and I keep finding myself back on Chrome until I realize what I am doing and conscientiously switch back

I don&#x27;t agree with the &quot;without our permission&quot; thing. You installed Firefox — you gave them permission.

I haven&#x27;t seen the series, but I also find the idea of ARGs interesting.What it&#x27;s being discussed here is not if the addon is interesting or not, it&#x27;s the fact that Mozilla, a supposedly freedom and privacy advocate has installed something in all of our computers, without our knowledge or permission as a publicity stunt for a different company and, when found out, the best explanation we&#x27;ve received is &quot;Oops! You guys shouldn&#x27;t have seen that&quot;.

Personally, I&#x27;d much rather have them make money through these sort of small tidbits than rely entirely on Google money. If they actually were on a slippery slope and selling out user privacy or whatnot for profit, I&#x27;d also not think of it to be acceptable, but to me there&#x27;s always a clear distance from that slope in anything that Mozilla does, by ensuring that no privacy violations or anything along those lines happen. Specifically with things that people will spin conspiracy theories about and bring out the pitchforks, they always go the extra mile to ensure that really nothing is actually bad about it.

I&#x27;m I the only one who thought the little easter egg was interesting.  I am a fan of the show.

And this despite the push for Firefox 57, meaning the loss was probably even higher.

For the first time since monthly browser usage statistics exist, Firefox is not the #1 browser in Germany anymore.CliqZ alone has cost them 5% of the market share – 15% of Firefox users – within of 2 months.This, too, will just accelerate that.

How many years of work did it take to get to the surge in good will around Firefox 57 in recent months?All that can disappear overnight if they&#x27;re not careful. Don&#x27;t fuck this up, Mozilla.

Dillo was awesome last time I have checked.

I linked this in the article, but the browser I use now is qutebrowser: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qutebrowser.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qutebrowser.org</a>It&#x27;s not something I suggest for muggles, but for the HN audience it&#x27;s probably suitable. I love it.

Pale Moon. A fork of Firefox from back when Mozilla going off the rails.

I personally don&#x27;t see a problem with what Mozilla is doing, but I really don&#x27;t care what browser people are using, as long as it&#x27;s not from a for-profit, so: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;otter-browser.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;otter-browser.org&#x2F;</a>

Forks seem to be the best option right now.Fork of Firefox: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.waterfoxproject.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.waterfoxproject.org</a>Fork of Chrome: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium</a>

I can&#x27;t whitelist&#x2F;blacklist domains for cookies.

What&#x27;s your beef with Firefox&#x27;s cookie management? :-&#x2F;

I made one based on Chromium: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cretz.github.io&#x2F;doogie&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cretz.github.io&#x2F;doogie&#x2F;</a>. I don&#x27;t have cookie management per se beyond dev tools. Also it&#x27;s not the most mature&#x2F;stable yet.

I&#x27;ve been looking for some time now for an alternative to Firefox. The integration of Pocket was the big red flag that made me start to doubt Mozillas intentions.- My focus is not on performance or compatibility, but usability, privacy and security.- The interface must be graphical.- Native cookie management. I can&#x27;t fathom how bad FireFox is at that.- Support for JavaScript is not necessary. It&#x27;s mostly used against my interest anyways.- I don&#x27;t want want my Browser to make any unsolicited access to check for updates or metrics or anything of that sort, at all.- Of course, it must be free software.Any ideas?

That&#x27;s what you get when technologists no longer run companies, but trendy &quot;cool gals&#x2F;guys&quot;. Mr. Robot is on decline as well; maybe one Mozilla exec knows another at Mr. Robot production and decided to return a favor? Can&#x27;t wait to get Watchdogs 2 on WebAssembly playing in Firefox next...

That&#x27;s horrible. When I saw pocket suggestions, I thought, that it&#x27;s made by Firefox, and it&#x27;s a new feature which preserves my privacy, and not a commercial company. I removed Firefox, from my computer, and returned to Chrome.

You can&#x27;t manage, sanitize, nor mainstream punk; you can name something managed, sanitized, and mainstreamed, punk, but that doesn&#x27;t make it punk

As Lenin put it, the capitalist will sell you the rope you use to hang him with. Basically big media will produce all kinds of &quot;anti-establishement&quot; entertainment, carefully tailored to be just this side of risky.Damn it, they managed to sanitize and mainstream punk!

The show Mr. Robot rails against corporate greed, corrupt government officials, and other unethical practices that&#x27;s rife in our society. In a twist of fate, in one episode someone at E Corp gets arrested for secretly installing malware in products without the user&#x27;s knowledge. He is prompted arrested by the FBI after a tip-off from Elliot.They create a global revolution over this behavior. To do what&#x27;s just. For the people to have a say once again.It is highly ironic that USA Network and Mozilla did the exact opposite of what the show is all about and promoted it this way. In fact, Mozilla&#x27;s principles about creating a no-fuss browser runs counter to this very behavior.

I&#x27;ve been an overly faithful Firefox user since the first versions, through all of its performance problems and lagging behind Chrome. 12+ or whatever years of daily use. I was thrilled with the quantum update, finally Firefox was competitive again.I agree with the article. Whoever signed off on this obvious user abuse, should be immediately fired. It&#x27;s inexcusable. I use Firefox so I don&#x27;t have to use Google&#x27;s Chrome as my primary browser. If Mozilla keeps behaving badly, I have no reason to use Firefox, it&#x27;s that simple.

Auto-updates can not do data collection without new consent, under the new regulation. Consent must be given for each collection and purpose individually. Service cannot be denied for refusing to give consent.I&#x27;m not saying sueing Mozilla is what should be done. But I&#x27;m very much interested if it will be possible.

I&#x27;m not sure depleting their budget would achieve the desired result, but in any case, I don&#x27;t believe this would make for a very strong case. It doesn&#x27;t compromise privacy, you&#x27;re probably already accepting auto-updates, it&#x27;s just not a way to go about things if you respect your users.

The GDPR allows suing of any organisation, whether from the EU or not, as long as they process data from people in the EU.But for that, you need Mozilla to actually violate privacy or for them to perform a contract with another company and then not ensuring enough that the data is handled correctly by that contractee. The pure speculation that on a technological level, it would be possible for your privacy to be infringed by Mozilla or through their use of Pocket, Cliqz, Google Analytics or indeed this extension (though I still don&#x27;t understand how it&#x27;s supposed to be privacy infringing in the first place), does not suffice to successfully sue them.Mozilla ensures legally towards its users that their privacy is not infringed upon in their Privacy Statement and just as well has legal contracts ensuring that Read It Later Inc. (former developer of Pocket, now owned by Mozilla), Cliqz GmbH or Google Inc. don&#x27;t infringe upon this user privacy either. So, legally Mozilla is not touchable here.If you can prove that they do not comply with their Privacy Statement or the GDPR, or do not do enough to ensure that their contracted companies comply with those, then you can again sue them. But you are were already perfectly able to sue them for violating their own Privacy Statement for as long as they&#x27;ve existed.

With the new Privacy Regulation in the EU, and since Mozilla is distributing FireFox globally, would there soon be a way to sue Mozilla in the case of privacy invading updates?

Well, I don&#x27;t think the add-on promotion&#x2F;spam was funding the expenses of the whole corporation. Perhaps they can augment their business model with donations instead of crazy initiatives that alienate their users?I also wonder if--once they figure out what percentage of users donates--donations couldn&#x27;t be predictable.By basing their business model on donations (at least in part), their focus would shift to getting more users (or making existing users like them more), which would in turn mean creating a better product. I don&#x27;t see how that would not be a huge gain for everyone.DISCLAIMER: I have never run a corporation though, so I have no idea :-)

I don&#x27;t think the problem is sourci g individual donations. It&#x27;s more of a predictable revenue model they can make decisions on. Crowd funding the expenses of a whole corporation seems a difficult process to take on every year.Sustainability is something that plagues every open source project.

Ah. Never seen that.So, I assume the donation strategy is not working.

&gt; I&#x27;m sure people would give something if Mozilla asked--kind of like Wikipedia do it with a message on their site.They do ask, I have a Mozilla request for donations today on FF57&#x27;s about:newtab, yes every time I open a a new tab.There is a blue button to &#x27;make a donation&#x27; once I have selected the appropriate amount ( 50, 25, 10 or 3 Euros ). Apparently this goes towards protecting my privacy on the Internet.There is no button to say &#x27;no thanks&#x27; or &#x27;already did&#x27; or &#x27;that&#x27;s a bit hypocritical given your latest stunt&#x27;

This appears to not have been about money[0]. It was supposed to be an easter egg written by some folks at FireFox who were fans of Mr. Robot. It wasn&#x27;t supposed to be the bomb that it turned out to be. Shame, really.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.metafilter.com&#x2F;171227&#x2F;Your-Reality-Is-Driven-By-Marketing#7265127" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.metafilter.com&#x2F;171227&#x2F;Your-Reality-Is-Driven-By-...</a>

I&#x27;ve given money to FOSS projects before (last time $5 for a really basic color picker for elementary OS).I&#x27;m sure people would give something if Mozilla asked--kind of like Wikipedia do it with a message on their site.Why can&#x27;t they just do that? It doesn&#x27;t look like it could hurt more than this.

Very strange to see that. Are the managers responsible at Mozilla not aware that a significant part of the appeal of Firefox is user autonomy and privacy? No reason to gamble away your reputation by violating user trust like that.I understand they need money to develop a browser, but surely there must be better ways to promote partnerships. I personally probably wouldn&#x27;t have a problem with Firefox asking me to opt-in to ads and promotions in the new tab page at first startup to support Firefox, for instance.

Apparently, there wasn&#x27;t even any payment involved, which is probably even worse, since it&#x27;s pushback for nothing.

What makes this really stupid is that Mozilla is compromising user trust for what is undoubtedly a tiny payment from Mr. Robot. At least Google and friends are the wealthiest companies the world has ever seen as a result of their data shenanigans...

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&#x27;s what it does.

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?

Firefox sync is encrypted client-side so Mozilla can&#x27;t access your data. And the server is open source and self-hostable:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mozilla-services.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;howtos&#x2F;run-sync-1.5.html#howto-run-sync15" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mozilla-services.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;howtos&#x2F;run...</a>

&gt; Chrome pushes you to create a Google account to sync. Firefox pushes you to create a Firefox account to sync. You&#x27;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&#x27;re signing for a lot more services than just Sync itself.

Chrome pushes you to create a Google account to sync. Firefox pushes you to create a Firefox account to sync. You&#x27;ll tell me where the difference is.At least Google does not also push you to create a Pocket account... ;^)

Not too well, last time I looked. And my irrational distaste for its Chromium heritage.But probably time to take another peek.

Iridium seems far better maintained in AUR [Arch Linux User Repo]. I shall give it a spin. Thanks for the reminder.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iridiumbrowser.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iridiumbrowser.de&#x2F;</a>

Un-Googled Chromium: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium</a>

Last time I took a peek at Chromium (yeah, not even Chrome. Chromium!) I was still getting pummelled with nonsense about the need for me to open some sort of Google or AppStore (or whatever they call it) account. I&#x27;m not joining that universe.So where to go? At the moment I&#x27;m happy with my Waterfox. And there&#x27;s the somewhat similar Basilisk-project from the Pale Moon camp. But I realize these are overwhelmingly likely to be dead ends in the slightly longer run. There&#x27;ll come a day when recent uMatrix et alia will no longer work. And a day when the dev-teams themselves throw in their towels.The FF57-thing is just depressing in its own right, even without this added round of Mozila idiocy. They couldn&#x27;t offer us just the option of an extra toolbar, or any customization worth the name, really. Firefox of ten years ago had vastly better UI than this latest, dumbed-down iteration.But I suspect I shall sooner or later have to return.[Edit: typo]

So, you know, basically the same as every other open source project in existence, from Wikipedia to Linux, the countless distros and Linux desktops to Krita, GIMP and Blender.Completely Impossible &#x2F;s

Taking money from Google, which people dislike as well.Basically Mozilla is supposed to develop a browser that&#x27;s faster than Chrome, more customizable than anything out there, doesn&#x27;t allow even the vaguest conspiracy theory of something being privacy-infringing even if it&#x27;s not, and do all of that without money.

if they don&#x27;t do this, how do they make any money? (just asking)

Firefox is on a slippery slope