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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Firefox as an organization does not get branding at all. They claim to be the champions on privacy and user freedom yet they keep breaking that image over and over again with unwanted ads, telemetry, and services you can't disable. I still use Firefox as my main browser, but I can't fathom how they come up with such poor decisions every single time.

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You can disable the ads in the preferences. The telemetry can be mostly disabled there too, more if you use about:config. Pocket, which I assume is the service you mention, can also be disabled in about:config.

You can find more here: https://www.privacy-handbuch.de/handbuch_21u.htm

This user.js will disable most of the telemetry and other things: https://www.privacy-handbuch.de/download/minimal/user.js

So yes, you can disable these.

But it isn't by default, that is the issue

If telemetry was off by default, Mozilla would be blind to what the users are doing, to common sources of crashes and to what features are not being used.

Mozilla needs that information to be able to make a decision on where to focus.

Same for ads, default off ads defeats the entire purpose.

Mozilla is a privacy-aware and even -focused corporation and I will assume that the defaults of the browser are good for the common end user. Everything else may be configured.

mozilla needs to ask before collecting data. What is difficult about that?

They need to ask if they collect personal data as per GDPR or the US Data Privacy laws. If the data collected is not of private nature they don't need to ask.

Usage patterns can be granular enough to identify a user online, its easy enough to do that with machine learning nowadays. They have to ask anyway.

It doesn't send that granular enough of a usage pattern though, they have a group of people making sure that they data they collect cannot be used to identify someone.

Maybe if users were willing to pay for a browser, they wouldn't be so desperately scrambling around for non-Google revenue sources.

They could try to offer some kind of "pay us to forgo marketing partnerships" deal, but I somehow doubt even most of the well-paid privacy advocates on HN would sign up.

Have they ever tried crowdfunding campaigns? I don't think so. Wikipedia seems to be doing fine with it. At least they should experiment with some ideas in that line and see what works.

And then people will complain that Mozilla is nagging them for money. I doubt anyone likes the nag screen that Wikipedia pops down about 15 seconds into reading a page and it covering almost half the screen.

Wikipedia has sufficient marketshare to survive despite that.

The ads that mozilla shows are fairly privacy-friendly, much more than any other ads you'd find on most websites. That's an improvement.

If you don't like them you can easily disable them.

I can't say that I like the wikipedia reminders, but I don't dislike them. They remind me to pay for a service I use daily. So I do and they don't remind for a while. It is fine.

>And then people will complain that Mozilla is nagging them for money. I doubt anyone likes the nag screen that Wikipedia pops down about 15 seconds into reading a page and it covering almost half the screen.

Users may not like nag screens, but I doubt they like the shitty ads Mozilla shows on the new tab page by default either. As long as the screen is easy to dismiss I don't see the problem.

Even easy to dismiss screens can disrupt the users flow similarly to how I mentioned that it interrupts my reading of the wikipedia page.

Wikipedia has, as mentioned, the market monopoly advantage so they can do as please, Firefox doesn't and can't afford to annoy users.

I would doubt users are more annoyed by ads, especially the type of ads that Mozilla uses, than nag screens.

> They could try to offer some kind of "pay us to forgo marketing partnerships" deal, but I somehow doubt even most of the well-paid privacy advocates on HN would sign up.

I would pay for this, provided it was a one time payment! (I feel I need to add that caveat nowadays, since subscriptions are all the rage.)

> I would pay for this, provided it was a one time payment!

The problem is that web browsers require some of the most intensive software maintenance of any software, ever. They're one of the most exposed attack surfaces to external security threats; and piles of new features are unfortunately getting continuously added to web standards, which need to be supported for compatibility reasons.

I think a one time tip-jar payment makes sense for a lot of software, but not for web browsers. I think a subscription-type contribution makes the most sense for them.

Put the money into a trust fund? I suppose I could do that on my end, but that's a little extreme from an effort point of view.

Subscriptions are just difficult to manage, I can't deal with individual recurring costs for so many pieces of software.

Maybe crowdfund API development for some of the 'power user' features, like live bookmarks or tree style tabs?

Why can't the community do this for themselves, without having to make Mozilla do everything?

Why do you still use it?

"Choose Firefox now, or later you won't have a choice"

https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-l...

Honestly that's a very poor rationale. People should be choosing Firefox because it's a better product or a more ethical one (sadly they are doing a poor job at convincing us of that), not because we need to keep a competitor alive forever no matter what.

I'll happily use a (marginally) inferior competitor because I value competition for its own sake. I use Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Bing Maps.

Yes, you can do that. But if you want it to be sustainable, you can't use that kind of line to convince people at large. And note that until Firefox 57, Firefox was not "marginally" inferior, it was substantially inferior in a number of metrics. They have improved since then, but it took them a very long time - you can't expect users to wait forever for you.

If we can't expect educated, tech-savvy users on HN to take the long view and support Mozilla, then I guess you're saying the game is already lost.

We might as well just make our peace that the age of an open internet and general-purpose computing is coming to an end. In future, we'll enjoy AOL 2.0 access on our Google Home Terminal Appliances.

I was talking about "people at large", not HN users.

Since Quantum, I actually find it to be a better product.

Right now, it is both, it is a better product and a more ethical one.

If people will not use it for these reasons now, then they will not be able to use it in the future.

That's the argument, and it seems pretty straightforward to me.

> it is a better product

Maybe for you. For me, it's unuseable until they add hardware accelerated video decoding.

Regardless of the reason why, we're now reaping the fruits of Google's unchecked rampage across the browser space, what with Chromium/WebKit all but taking over. Mozilla continues to be starved for cash. Most Firefox users despise one of its only monetization strategies (selling advertisements). FF would be dead tomorrow if Yahoo (or whoever the default search engine is) pulled their funding. Mozilla is surrounded by rocks and hard places on all sides, what else can they do?

"Should be" doesn't get us anywhere. The rationale is sound, regardless of whether it should be.

For the lack of better alternatives (I need some specific extensions, and I don't want to use Chrome). I also use alternative browsers like qutebrowser but it cannot replace everything I need to do.

There is an extension called Chrome Store Foxified. It's like wine for Firefox. Check it out.

[..]This add-on has been discontinued. I am leaving it here because it still works in some versions of Firefox. Discontinue Notice and Discussion[..]

Source: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/chrome-store-fox...

The linked discussion makes the impression that they try to revive it.

Have you tried Brave? I'm really liking it.

Nope, I want no ads in my browsers and Brave does not interest me in that sense.

Firefox is being sabotaged from the executive level, I'm 100 % sure of this. Tech-wise, solid. Administration, a complete disaster.

Probably. It's pretty sad when you see something great stuck in a local minima because of "thinking heads" that know better.

They should bring back Brian Eich, things were better for the users when he was in charge.

He's running brave now

I have no idea if Brave is going to succeed at their goals, but they are the only ones trying to comprehensively change the model...I wish them success!

And Steve Jobs was running NeXT. And like NeXT, Brave doesn't really seem to be catching on...

From what I understand though, Eich has lost faith in Mozilla maintaining their own renderer, so if he came back to Mozilla it would probably coincide with Firefox becoming yet another chromium skin.

Mozilla is sticking with Gecko for now, and they do not need my faith to continue.

Brave is growing, has grown every month, not at over 5.5M MAU. I am not sure how to interpret "Brave doesn't seem to be catching on" as other than false. Firefox in 1H2004 was in a similar trendline. People then still said "IE for evar!"

1) That's not his name.

2) "Things were better before so let's revert to where we were five years ago" is a terrible strategy.

>"Things were better before so let's revert to where we were five years ago" is a terrible strategy.

I mean, if things really were better before, reverting to how they were sounds like a pretty good strategy. That's kind of a tautology.

Worked pretty swell for intel when netburst got out of hand and they backtracked. 10 years of market dominance followed.

Intel can't revert the market back 10 years, but the problem with Mozilla isn't its struggles with the market. If it is true that Mozilla's problem is compromised leadership, then it would make perfect sense to go back to independent leadership.

I don't think it was him in particular, it was just that firing him gave them the opportunity to replace him and his people with people more attuned to their agendas. It's the agendas that should change, the people would follow. They installed a new culture at the top that was more interested in using Firefox as a transitional way to burnish their resumés, and any semblance of core values disappeared in a tangle of projects that were branded as innovation and that everybody could sign. Meanwhile they've been in consistent negative growth in users that is actually starting to look insignificant because their entire userbase is now insignificant. I mean: losing 1%/month of the number of the users they have now seems like a rounding error compared to 1%/month of the users they had 5 years ago.

Anyway, they'll always be guaranteed at least 3% of the market from diehard anti-Google/Microsoft/closed-source users like me, and users from outside the US who are concerned by unaccountable US tech behemoths who are intimately intertwined with the government. With that 3%, they'll be able to fulfill their primary function of being something that Google can claim in an antitrust hearing keeps them from being a monopoly.

Exactly. And they still don't advertise a lot of the Firefox features outside of release notes. I mean REALLY advertise. Google used to have regular commercials with celebrities to advertise Chrome, and people are still somehow baffled that they're number one now? FOSS devs build some good software, but we're terrible at marketing.

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