Hey, Laura. Fuck you. Fuck your profits and your corporate greed. Enshit yourself till you close down.

The enshitification of Firefox continues 😢

Frankly, I’m surprised it took them so long to say this publicly. For over a year, Mozilla has had a de facto conflict of interest when it came to their stance on advertisements, so take anything they say about their necessity with a huge grain of salt…

May 2023: Mozilla purchases FakeSpot, a company that sells private data to advertisers. Mozilla keeps selling private data to advertisers to this day.

June 2024: Mozilla purchases Anonym, an AdTech company.

But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history.

Is it?

I would rather have a world where Mozilla is actively engaged in creating positive solutions for hard problems, than one where we only critique from the sidelines.

Maybe your users don’t.

Not good

Not everyone?

Does anyone?

Good thing we can fork, I guess, but it’s kinda sad to watch a previously good org die

Ladybird is not usable yet, but it’s an independent browser and engine that accepts donations

repo - https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird

youtube channel with monthly updates - https://www.youtube.com/@LadybirdBrowser/videos

She went on to work at eBay for 13 years, followed by PayPal, Skype, and Airbnb. source

why would Mozilla choose to be directed by an ebay+paypal+airbnb experience and can somebody with that background not think like this ☞

“Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better internet. And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.”

I wonder if this has anything to do with the Google ad monopoly case?

We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history. And that willingness to take on the hard things, even when not universally accepted, is exactly what the internet needs today.

But you’re not doing the hard things. You’re doing the easy thing. Capitulation to surveillance capitalism is the easy thing.

Squidward on the floor saying “Future, future”

In parallel to our existing consumer products, we have the opportunity to build a better infrastructure for the online advertising industry as a whole. Advertising at large cannot be improved unless the tech it’s built upon prioritizes securing user data. This is precisely why we acquired Anonym.

Catering to the ad industry is backwards thinking, imo. Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.

Imo, the fact companies have changed the narrative in favor of advertisers and data collection, proves only profit matters, not the people.

Yeah, perhaps because advertisements go against the values that users look for in your browser?

But at least forking is still an option. The instant they make any moves that inhibit forking or privacy on forks, Firefox will be completely dead. For now, it’s just gangrenous.