Did they actually say that?
I think we need to Wait and See, to give the ad company the benefit of the doubt. And by "the ad company," I'll let you figure out whether I'm referring to Mozilla or Google.
Why are you applying the Wait And See philosophy to Firefox but not to Chrome?
Seems a bit... Reactionary.
Based on the content of that article, the problem is not that DRM is currently in Firefox, but the process by which DRM became mandatory in browsers to begin with.
Second ad company, if you count FakeSpot selling private data to other ad providers!
And those are probably the "anything"s they would rather not respond to.
The trouble with "wait and see" is that people will often forget what we were waiting for.
Speaking of which, do you remember FakeSpot? That was Mozilla's first foray into directly selling private data to ad companies. At the time, a lot of people said, "they might allow it now, but let's wait and see."
And today, Mozilla FakeSpot continues selling data to ad companies.
It's a shame Mozilla hasn't added a way to put custom widgets in the New Tab Page. It's relatively inconsequential compared to the whole Mozilla situation, but in a perfect world, I think it would be nice to have.
If it makes you feel better, donations wouldn't go to Firefox development anyway, and they never have.
(I believe you can donate directly to SeaMonkey, and that they receive a couple million dollars in donations every year. But don't quote me on that.)
It feels like they heard about what Bill Gates did to Paul Allen and decided to replicate it.
It's really disheartening. Among other things, Steve fought against the firing of employees in general because Mozilla was actually turning a profit under his leadership.
Based on this and a couple Reddit threads I have since uncovered, he seems like a generally upstanding guy. And he's on Mastodon, @stevetex@mozilla.social
There seems to be minimal information about this online, so I'm leaving this here so cooler heads can prevail in discussion.
Link to filing: https://archive.org/details/jyjfub
Notable portions:
Teixeira was hired as Chief Product Officer and was in line to become CEO.
> Mr. Teixeira became Chief Product Officer (“CPO”) of Mozilla in August, 2022. During the hiring process, Mr. Teixeira had conversations with executive recruiting firm, Russell Reynolds Associates, that one of Mozilla Corporation’s hiring criteria for the CPO role was an executive that could succeed Mitchell Baker as CEO. > > Also, shortly after being hired, Mr. Teixeira had conversations with Ms. Baker about being positioned as her successor.
After taking medical leave to deal with cancer, Mozilla swiftly moved to replace CEO Mitchell Baker with someone else.
> Shortly before Mr. Teixeira returned from leave, Mozilla board member Laura Chambers was appointed Interim CEO of Mozilla and Ms. Baker was removed as CEO and became Executive Chair of the Board of Directors.
After returning, Teixeira was ordered to lay off 50 preselected employees, and he objected due to Mozilla not needing to cut them and their disproportionate minority status.
> In a meeting with Human Resources Business Partner Joni Cassidy, Mr. Teixeira discussed his concern that people from groups underrepresented in technology, like female leaders and persons of color, were disproportionately impacted by the layoff. > >... Ms. Chehak verbally reprimanded Mr. Teixeira, accusing him of violating [a] non-existent “onboarding plan” and threatening to place Mr. Teixeira back on medical leave if he did not execute the layoffs as instructed.
Mozilla's lack of inclusivity was a known problem
>In February 2022, Mozilla commissioned the firm of Tiangay Kemokai Law, P.C. to assess its performance in providing a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace culture. > > The report delivered in 2023 from Tiangay Kemokai Law, P.C. states in part: “MoCo falls into the Cultural Incapacity category based on leadership’s inadequate response to the needs of a diverse culture or else the need to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture, which is reflected in current systems, processes and procedures, policies and practices, or the lack thereof, and are incongruent with MoCo’s stated values and goals.”
Steve Teixeira has been put on leave.
> On May 23, 2024, Mozilla placed Mr. Teixeira on administrative leave. > > Mr. Teixeira requested a reason for being placed on administrative leave. > >Mozilla did not provide Mr. Teixeira with a reason why he was placed on administrative leave. > >Mozilla cut off Mr. Teixeira’s access to email, Slack messaging, and other Mozilla systems. > >Mozilla instructed employees not to communicate with Mr. Teixeira about work-related matters. > >Upon information and belief, an investigation into Mr. Teixeira’s allegations was finally conducted in late May 2024, but Mozilla did not do so under its internal policies and procedures regarding managing complaints of discrimination. Mr. Teixeira was not contacted to participate in the investigation into his complaint of unlawful treatment.
Coverage online so far
I say "alleged" because there appears to be no consensus on the veracity of this document.
Update: this appears to be confirmed.
This has received no "news" coverage besides one angry loudmouth (Bryan Lunduke) whose entire commentary career has been shaped by his political beliefs, regardless of truth.
You assumed and misinterpreted everything you could assume and misinterpret in order to paint standard notes in the best possible light.
the old approach wasn't very secure or scalable?
No, the older approach was more scalable, and they made it more difficult to do
95-99% of the Javascript that has ever run in your browser is open source frameworks or packages
No, I was not talking about frameworks.
Your response was so offbase and full of assumptions that I simply edited my original post.
All FOSS projects have a team of dictators...
And the Standard Notes team makes a lot of bad choices that make self-hosting harder.
"Just fork it and make your own" is a Hail Mary response... Because most people cannot.
I think you can add your own money into Brave to tip people extra.
And the biggest difference is...
- Brave sold itself on this as a feature since day one
- Brave had the audience who wanted this
- The Brave software is a known factor; what's going to happen to Firefox is unknown.
I don't like to speculate, but I think it was mental illness, which may have started during the CopperheadOS days (the predecessor to Graphene).
Unfortunately, that does call into question the recommendations on that page, which I already had a little worry about because Vanadium is their thing, of course they're going to recommend it.
But I do genuinely want to know how significant of a risk this lack of isolation and sandboxing causes.
I too have a hard time telling whether the isolation features is a huge security risk or a minor one because things get too technical too quickly for me to follow.
Case in point, this website makes it sound relatively trivial just due 8 how technical it is (Ctrl+F for Firefox)
Fun fact: Cliqz also developed a search engine, which later got purchased by Brave and renamed Brave Search.
Standard Notes wants to charge you money to run open source JavaScript code, including other people's markdown and spreadsheet editors, on your own server. To do this, they go out of their way to make self-hosting harder.
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Standard Notes went out of their way to make it harder to self-host extensions a couple years ago, which IMO was pretty tasteless on its own. Instead of letting you install a single bundle of extensions with one URL, you would have to manually add each extension and then manually update it later.
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They opted for charging for other people's work. Their editor extensions were other people's work. For example, their rich text editor was somebody else's rich text editor with a thin wrapper that allowed it to run in Standard Notes. (Using so many other people's editors also led to a bit of a lack of stylistic direction.)
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And then, more recently, they decided to shut off web app access to third-party servers entirely.
"FOSS" only means so much when they dictate what goes into the source code. Unfortunately.
Recently, I've been getting a lot of ads injected in one particular Firefox profile. All I have to do to make it go away (for now) is to switch to a different tab container.
But this is Google rolling out anti-ad-blocking technology and testing the waters. So your mileage may vary.
Yes, but it's not very easy. I used ViolentMonkey with this userscript.
Edit: your method is really cool too
Personally I disagree with the conclusions stated by the blog post, but I can respect the reasoning for getting there, and I can draw my own conclusions from it myself.
All I can do is tap on the little graphic I made from their last buyout (that literally made Mozilla into an data broker):
FakeSpot privacy lowlights (I can't tell if the image is linking correctly)
The wing of Mozilla that puts out press releases about invasive car companies seems to have no influence on the wing of Mozilla acquiring and injecting random crap into Firefox.
I recently downloaded Firefox Nightly and noticed some new settings that were enabled by default:
> * Suggestions from Firefox Nightly Get suggestions from the web related to your search > * Suggestions from sponsors Support Firefox Nightly with occasional sponsored suggestions > > Learn more about Firefox Suggest
The link in the UI doesn't mention sponsorships anywhere. But this page does:
> Who are Mozilla’s partners for sponsored suggestions? > >We partner with organizations to serve up some of these suggestion types... For sponsored results, we primarily work with adMarketplace, while also providing non-sponsored results from Wikipedia.
This page links to the adMarketplace Privacy Policy which makes it pretty clear this company is okay with collecting your IP address and passing it to further unnamed entities.
Elsewhere, they say Firefox sends them "the number of times Firefox suggests or displays specific content and your clicks on that content, as well as basic data about your interactions with Firefox Suggest", and then will share interaction information "in an aggregate manner with our partners".
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Update: Switched the link from the Desktop to the Mobile version. Added more quotes from FF, and bolded info about their one named AdTech partner.
A recent article from the Economic Policy Institute notes that CEO pay slumped slightly in 2022:
> CEO pay is linked strongly to the stock market—and market declines in 2022 led to an uncharacteristic dip in CEO pay... > > CEOs are getting paid more because of their leverage over corporate boards, not because of contributions they make to their firms.
Another site calculated the average decrease:
> [I]n 2022, CEO pay decreased 7.3% and 2.7% for the overall Russell 3000® and S&P 500® indices, respectively
And yet, the Mozilla CEO pay has risen from $5,591,406 in 2021 to $6,903,089 in 2022. That's a 23.5% increase.
Kenya has some reservations about Worldcoin.
Today, when I navigated to amazon\.com on Firefox for Android, I received a jarring message that I could "try" a new service, Fakespot, on the app.
Fakespot is littered with privacy issues.
Among other things, FakeSpot/Mozilla was forced to admit: "We sell and share your personal information"
Fakespot's privacy policy allows them to store and/or sell:
- Your email address
- Your IP address
- "Protected chacteristics" ie gender, sexuality, race...
- Data scraped from across the web
- Account IDs
- Things you bought (This is sold to advertisers)
- Things you considered buying (This is sold to advertisers)
- Your precise location (This is sold to advertisers)
- Inferences about you (This is sold to advertisers)
Right before Mozilla acquired them, Fakespot updated their privacy policy to allow transfer of private data to any company that acquired them. (Previous Privacy Policy here. Search "merge" in both.)
People donate to Mozilla because they believe in the company's stated goals. Why were the donations put into an acquisition of a company with this kind of privacy policy? And why has Mozilla focused on bundling it as bloat into their browser? Now that Brave is in hot water for becoming bloated, Mozilla should buck the trend, not follow it.
Today, when I navigated to amazon.com on Firefox for Android, I received a jarring message [https://i.imgur.com/fp2pigl.png] that I could “try” a new service, Fakespot, on the app. What’s Fakespot? A review-checking, scammer-spotting service Fakespot for Firefox [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023...
Today, when I navigated to amazon\.com on Firefox for Android, I received a jarring message that I could "try" a new service, Fakespot, on the app.
What's Fakespot? A "review-checking, scammer-spotting service for Firefox."
Among other things, FakeSpot/Mozilla was forced to admit: "We sell and share your personal information"
Fakespot's privacy policy allows them to collect and sell:
- Your email address
- Your IP address
- Account IDs
- A list of things you purchased and considered purchasing
- Your precise location (which will be sent to advertising partners)
- Data about you publicly available on the web
- Your curated profile (which will also be sent to advertising providers)
Right before Mozilla acquired them, Fakespot updated their privacy policy to allow transfer of private data to any company that acquired them. (Previous Privacy Policy here. Search "merge" in both.)
Who asked for this? Who demanded integration into Firefox, since it was already a (relatively unpopular) browser extension people could have used instead?