Google's vassal company

I think this is what's happening.

If Google loses appeals, Mozilla (and many other browsers that rely heavily on getting their revenue from Google), will have to find new ways to generate revenue. Unfortunately, they seem to be looking for the easiest way out, and that's selling out their users.

I've noticed the same thing you have, but I suspect it has a different explanation. I think it's more an echo chamber thing. People have said variations of this for a while now in HN comment threads, on reddit and here. And there's a snowball effect from more people saying it.

But there's been a throughline of bizarrely apathetic and insubstantial low effort comments. That's the one thing that has tied them together, which is why I think they are echo-chambery. Just for one example: one guy just never read a 990 before (a standard nonprofit form), and read Mozilla's and thought it was a conspiracy, and wrote an anti-Mozilla blog post. And then someone linked to that on Lemmy and said it was shady finances. Tons of upvotes.

But I'm convinced that no one reads through these links, including the people posting them. Because it takes two seconds to realize they are nonsense. But it doesn't stop them from getting upvoted.

So my theory is echo chamber.

I also noticed the same trend here and elsewhere as well.

Dude SAME. I find it extremely hard to believe that Google would astroturf Lemmy but it really does feel like all of a sudden in the past ~month a bunch of vague or minor complaints being repeated over and over in every thread.

I use to follow a subreddit called /r/degoogle, which was nominally for conversation about how to remove and avoid using google products. ... But I ended up leaving because in pretty much every thread there was a whole lot of posts shitting on any and every suggested alternative, mostly for not being hardcore enough. It was as if the only acceptable approach was to never use any electronic device ever again. Firefox of course was constantly under fire for taking money from Google; which apparently made them worse than Google themselves. ... Anyway, I strongly suspected that people were deliberately trying to destabilize the group so that it couldn't grow or become functional. I had no other explanation for how counter-productive the bulk of the conversations were, and it would certainly be an easy and potentially useful group for pro-google people to target.

I'm less convinced that it is happening here though, but I'm certainly more suspicious of it after that experience with /r/degoogle. I reckon probably why we see a lot of any Mozilla stuff here is just that the audience on Lemmy is very interested in what Mozilla is doing - and negative news always gets more traction than positive news.

It's interesting to see gorhill's reaction. I understand that he's fed up with all of this bullshit around both the advertising industry and mozilla's internal happenings, but maybe this was not a logical decision. I hope he is well, or that he gets the help he needs.

TBH, we'd probably all do well to use the internet a little less

Mozilla doesn't show their work (the reasoning behind the removal) but gorhill does.

Being on the fence is an interesting position to take, but I would be genuinely shocked if one of the most reputable creators of one of the most reputable extensions of all time is lying to its user base about the locations and contents of the files in the open source extension that can be audited by literally anybody just by browsing to that directory on their computer, because in addition to being open source on GitHub, it's the same source on your PC.

ETA:

Mozilla also accuses uBlock Origin Lite of not having a privacy policy (a detail I removed from my post for brevity's sake) but gorhill provides a screenshot of it. I guess that could have been faked too. Less difficult to fake: the archives of the privacy policy on Mozilla's site, which took me too long to track down

My own reading of the situation on the developer's GitHub is unfortunately that the review by Mozilla is indeed completely inaccurate in every way. No way to even read it as a "Each side has their own story" type of thing since they reproduce Mozilla's emails verbatim. They seem just materially incorrect. The source files referenced by the emails are visible on the same GitHub account, along with their complete histories showing no changes at all - the issues referenced don't and never did exist.

The only redeeming thing I can find is that the dev (ambiguously) seems to have never replied to the email from Mozilla about the issues, and so Mozilla was never made aware that there was an issue with the review that needed fixing. They seem to have done this because they perceived the process as hostile and not worth engaging with, which... fair, I guess.

Except, you know, the reasons stated above. He didn't just make a lite version for no reason

That explanation does seem plausible, but Mozilla's emails say the review was performed manually. Either way, the result wasn't great.

Brave is currently looking like the best balance between compatibility and privacy.

Brave is the funding vehicle of a far right political activist. Fuck Brendan Eich, fuck Brave.

https://librewolf.net/

It's very privacy focused but if sites break you can turn of fingerprinting protection and thing like that in the settings with one click.

Great browser