Are all these people sticking with Chrome because Mozilla is not holding up to its values really think Google is better at taking care of our freedom?!
I would also argue that "just being better than X" was shown not to be effective in the last US Presidential election.
They're missteps, not trust breakers. Quantum was a massive step in the right direction. The Mr. Robot Easter Egg was non-malicious poor execution. I don't think it's a free pass to just contextualize how small their missteps have been in the grand scheme of things.
The reason the response seems outsized is because of the breach of trust involved, much more so than the technical impacts.
Quantum is great, and I just like a lot of the UX decisions Firefox makes. But a major reason for my support of Mozilla is their stated mission. And regularly making bumbling moves that overtly compromise that stated mission makes you start to question their commitment to it. Is it really their mission, or is it just a thing it is good for them to keep saying? POSIWID and all that.
> Not only are these experiments enabled by default, but updates have been known to re-enable it if you turn it off.
Chrome has some troubling defaults but Google never decided to flip the default search engine or turn on any phone-home feature once it has been turned off. Even though they had/have the power to do so, they know people won't trust Chrome if they ever tried to do that. In my book that's more trustworthy than a vendor that decides to use updates to surreptitiously enable features that users disabled.
And for some dissidents or researchers those defaults could be life or career ending.
I also had the Shield stuff turned off (my choice), and it hasn't been reverted, nor did the Mr. Robot extension ever show up. I agree, though, that that was a Bad Idea.
Having a Mozilla option is good, but when Mozilla screws up it needs to get a clear indication that it did. I think folks saying "down with Mozilla" do not really mean this 100%; but they do want Mozilla to know that it seriously screwed up in their view. And we should not treat it as a shrinking violet -- it is not a tiny startup; it is a large corporation with funding in hundreds of millions.
> It only needs to be better than Google.
This, IMO, is setting the bar way too low. It should aim to do what the users want and consumer technology easily allows. If there is a big gap between those we should encourage new entrants, not entrench Mozilla as "the" alternative to pick-your-evil. My 2c.
If you don't like Google, you can always use Chromium or Brave. I trust them not to run marketing campaigns inside my browser.
Do you also trust them not to listen to your mic? I think debian had to have a discussion with them about that.
Mozilla became a shady character. It engages in "it depends on a meaning of the word 'is'" speak.
Here's how Mozilla can get back into my graces - it needs to publicly FIRE whoever approved it and whoever advocated for this project.
You do? Okay, I don't. Please, show me exactly how Google uses data they collect from their users. Every usage. Not just a few. And no "but they say they can use it for whatever they want!" - then we can talk about transparency.
Mozilla is pretending to be a health store. But we are starting to see that they are also peddling drugs. Not Google drugs - drugs with security and drugs with delivery system and drugs that we are pretty sure how they work - but some other drugs, from shady producers using shady means.
Mr. Robot.
Google tells me - "Dude, for providing me your information you get gooodieeeees!"
Mozilla tells me - "We respect your privacy. "
In a micro-font : "except when we do things that you should not be concerned about"
and what other uses?
The really annoying ads which auto-play videos, block content, etc., tend to be served by companies who aren't taking the long view --- which is why Chrome is going to be adding adblocking for those ads that are ultra-annyoing early next year.
There's a pretty big difference between "using your information for marketing", and "marketing your information to advertisers". The second implies that your private information is getting divulged for a price, and that's simply not true.
If I narrowly target an ad and then I know you saw it, I now know all those things about you.
So, yes, they do not literally sell your information, there is one level of indirection there. And the amount of information that data brokers get their hands on tells me that it is very likely people are exporting this information regularly.