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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

> Firefox is a fine browser by itself [...] I have the comfort of knowing that my personal information is protected (to the extent possible) – and also that my portal to the web is not custom-built to track me and serve me ads

FF is fantastic, but the uncomfortable question is, will it always be, given Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well? Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and developer incentives.

For a sustainable web (what's left of it anyway), it would be more helpful to radically simplify the web such that developers have reasonable and feasible specs to work against, and have diversity in browsers once again. Meanwhile, Google is working hard to lead audiences elsewhere via AMP, a Trojan made possible by JavaScript in the first place.

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> FF is fantastic, but the uncomfortable question is, will it always be, given Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well? Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and developer incentives.

Looks like they've got a plan in place to handle this. I also secretly wish Mozilla would offer up a paid email service that only scans emails to filter our spam. Maybe some incredible Rust based email server.

https://thenextweb.com/apps/2019/06/10/mozilla-will-reported...

I have to believe that spam filtering is a solved problem that could be cheaply self-hosted. Is that not true?

I suppose this is true as well. Would just be a nice to have.

Its a perpetual arms race, if the spammers have access to the blocking software they can work around it. Anti-evil works best when the evil cant see the inner workings.

As somebody who runs their own mail server, I think it's also just a problem of time and relative importance. The full-time job of a spammer is to spam, while I adjust my anti-spam solution only when the spam gets bad enough to prompt action in my spare time.

At this point I'd love to turn running my mail server over to a paid service that I trusted, because they could have full-time people dealing with spam proactively. But Google's free service means a lot of people no longer pay, so the market seems to be very limited.

Does no one offer a solution that uses data from "voluntarily" monitored emails which can be self-hosted?

Vipuls razor?

> Anti-evil works best when the evil cant see the inner workings.

That’s just security by obscurity.

Being able to see what a spam filter is filtering for makes it easier to avoid the rules.

It's not security through obscurity.

Spam filtering is a horrendous problem which can never be "solved" because people continue to innovate around the filters. It only looks "solved" because gmail have enough data to do an amazing job of it.

I have a gmail account and a non-gmail account, and the non-gmail privately hosted one gets considerable spam, some of which even makes it through my manually curated filters.

I used to self-host email but the minimum time and expertise investment is now too high for me - I got fed up of having to fix breakages or losing email from random other sources.

> Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well?

This was also mentioned at the bottom of the article:

> If I were a Product executive at Mozilla, I would be banging the table to introduce useful, paid products that could enrich and support the Firefox ecosystem. Chief among these would be a low-cost, independent email service focused on privacy and spam protection that would allow people to migrate off of Gmail; a VPN service; a media/content whitelisting service combined with an ad-blocker that allowed people to easily pay for content; and maybe even its own password manager.

> introduce useful, paid products that could enrich and support the Firefox ecosystem

This is where I'm wary, that it could become just a better walled garden. I trust Mozilla more than Google, but they've had hiccups in the past that tarnished that trust.

> allow people to migrate off of Gmail

My utopian dream is Mozilla spearheading open alternatives to all Google services: email, Open Street Maps, search, password manager, P2P file transfer, ad blockers, maybe even ethical ads. It gives me hope to see them already embracing some of this general direction.

No, they just have to offer ads without tracking clicks or impressions.

Something similar to the former service of Project Wonderful.

Google pays Apple $12 billion a year to be the default search in Safari unfortunately, so Apple are making a lot of money from keeping Google happy.

The billions Google pays Apple is purely a tax that they extract from them. If it's meant to buy Apple off then it doesn't appear to be working given the privacy features that Apple continues to roll out.

Do you use Safari?

>Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and developer incentives.

Apple gets credit for being aligned with users and developers?

Out of any of the tech companies, I see Apple the most detached from their users and developers.

Forcing proprietary software, hardware, and accessories is not "for users and developers".

That's Apple's way of generating additional sales and data for Apple.

If they had users and developers as their primary goal, it would be easier to be an Apple customer.

At least with Apple, the users are actually customers. Google's customers are advertisers.

I assume they meant aligned _with respect to users and developers_. Google is primarily an advertising company, and Firefox's revenue comes mostly from Google. Apple has no interests in ads these days (and their old ad platform never did browser ads anyway), so you don't have the same sort of competing incentives.

> Apple gets credit for being aligned with users and developers?

Yeah I can see where this wasn't very well put into words. I meant Safari core browser development is financed via Apple sales, as opposed to FF being in the position where Mozilla wouldn't want to bite the hands that feed them. Though Apple is also taking Google money for listing them as default search provider on Safari and has ambitions to push their service business.

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