lmao calm down firefox is fine

Section three: teaming up with vladdy daddy (vladimir putin).

This one is... weird. I feel there is too little information just "they are doing it". They also don't feel like the kinda people to do that. Westerners, most likely libs, pro-diversity (not trying to say this in a chuddy way. And at least outwardly). Unless I'm completely off, it just doesn't feel right.

Modzilla decided to incredibly stupid recently, you wanna know how? They added checks notes """"privacy"""" preserving advertising in their browser,

They opened an Origin Trial for it, which means: "It will only be available for certain sites. Note that because Mozilla is paying the DAP aggregation service costs, so participation is by invitation only."

The only site so far is MDN. It does not do anything on websites that are not MDN.

which is the exact same thing that brave has got hate for, for obvious reasons.

From the Intent to Experiment: "Chrome ships similar functionality with their Attribution Reporting API (the Summary Reports, not Event-Level Reporting), but with effectively no privacy protections. See https://github.com/WICG/attribution-reporting-api"

Safari has another version of this, which is also not privacy-friendly.

To contrast, PPA is an open standard published by the W3C PATCG and cryptographically vetted by the IETF Network Working Group, never mind that its implementation in Firefox is only a temporary, origin-restricted research prototype.

Why is Modzilla adding advertisements to Firefox?

Mozilla's CTO did a AMA yesterday to give the community answers, with respect to Private Attribution. He's also not just some executive, he's a former Servo dev and long-time Firefox dev, his words carry technical weight. One of the things he said: "There's no tracking involved here because nobody outside the local machine gets any individualized data, just aggregate counts."

Because they are getting desperate. They want to make sure that their big daddy CEO gets millions while we have to put up with the the bullshit that we all moved away from Chrome because of.

As the CTO said, "There's no partnership or money changing hands. This is an engineer-to-engineer collaboration at the W3C."

The real reason for Mozilla doing this is stated in their original Intent to Experiment: "Use of PPA effectively eliminates one key justification advertisers use for tracking people online."

They're trying to get Chrome and Safari to use it instead of the privacy-invading alternatives they currently use. Needless to say, if you use uBlock Origin, your Firefox install will not use PPA anyway.

For a DeGoogled android operating system, I recommend you use Vandium, it's a browser made by the people over at the GrapheneOS project and it's amazing.

"Stop using Firefox because you should use this Chromium reskin instead"

Section three: teaming up with vladdy daddy (vladimir putin). You heard me right. Firefox is teaming up with the Russian Federation to stop people from forming their own opinion on the Ukraine war,

If this "disinformation" sways western libs into not supporting NATO's goofy territory war for which thousands of Ukrainians have died, that's a net good

EDIT: I see this is about Mozilla removing a "russian censorship remover" addon from their store. They are beholden to governments in the countries they operate in should they just not operate in Russia? If yes, they should also not operate in the US lol

To me, it depends on what's gettin censored on russian net. Nato propaganda? Rad, fuck em. Queer webpages? Not so rad.

They are joining Chrome in becoming a monopoly in themselves

This makes no sense, what does Mozilla have a monopoly over?

Some counterpoints:

1. Turn it off in the settings. It's shitty that it's on by default, but you can turn it off and not worry about it again.

2. See Above

3. ??? Point taken, they shouldn't be doing this but phrased very weirdly

4. Point taken, but worth noting that Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit that owns the nominally for-profit Mozilla Corporation, although they claim to reinvest all profits made back into their projects. Make of that what you will.

5. Librewolf is good for desktop. Vanadium is currently unavailable outside GrapheneOS unless you build it yourself, and even still it will lack critical security features outside GrapheneOS. Privacyguides recommends specially configured Brave and Mull for Android, although Chromium browsers like the former are actually preferred due to site isolation. ~~Bromite~~ Cromite is also thrown around as another Chromium based option.

6. I'd push back against this a guilt-by-association a little. In 2022, 81% of Mozilla Corp's revenue came from Google. They are basically being held hostage and propped up by Google so no one gets any ideas about coming after them for browser monopoly.

Also what's the deal with "Modzilla"? is this a "Micro$$$oft WinBlow$$$" type thing I'm not FOSSist-Maoist enough to understand?

May Servo save us all when it actually finishes development

I exclusively browse the internet from the command line now.

Third point is good though? Russia's comments about the war have been all quite factual.

So if you used Google at any point you supported every war and proxy war USA had a stake in (so every war).

I dont disagree with that. But note that Google is like pollution, it's everywhere, and even to lower that pollution within a controlled area costs effort (with diminishing returns).

bmf posting is back baby!

checks notes """"privacy"""" preserving advertising in their browser, which is the exact same thing that brave has got hate for

No it isn't. Brave replaces ads with those that companies have directly paid Brave to advertise. Their privacy-preserving nature is predicated on trusting Brave. Once landed on the advertisers page, there's no system in place to preserve your privacy. Mozilla's implementation sends deindentified data to a 3rd party unrelated to Mozilla. I'm not saying this is good but saying it's exactly the same thing is fundamentally incorrect and misleading.

If you want to boycott Google, you can easily do so while using Firefox. And Mozilla still gets paid, so this doesn't help Google at all (for users that don't want it to)

There's no action to substantiate your 3rd point which hasn't also been retracted.

The rest is conjecture. There is very little reason to introduce potential vulnerabilities to my system by using a Firefox fork when there's nothing really wrong with the upstream releases.

Yeah, no. I'm not going to use some sketchy "privacy" browser over Firefox.

So I gotta side B to get back on stage now? That does nerf an overused character but in a really weird way