What happens when you launch Google Chrome for the first time?

Privacy aware users should take all resonable steps to protect their on privacy, but it is also appropriate to call out Mozilla.

Mozilla (and advocates) promote Firefox as the privacy conscious browser while Mozilla repeatedly takes actions that would appear to go against that claim.

> In this new era of looking for premium service opportunities I suspect there will be value in having metrics of some kind.

"Mozilla went through a year long legal discussion with GA."

I wonder why. Implementing some basic analytics on a few pages shouldn't be that hard.

My bank argues the same way and uses Google Analytics to track their visitors, including inside the online banking system. Fine, so they trust Google to honor agreements and not connect profiles, but I'd still prefer Google to simply not know when and how often I'm logging in to check my account balance.

It's good that Mozilla goes the extra mile to get a custom contract, but I believe that most people aren't expecting a self-proclaimed privacy champion to use an anti-privacy-service by one of the largest corporate enemies of privacy. Explicit opt-in would be the right thing to do here.

If Google is not going enough, Mozilla shouldn't use Google for analytics on the add-ons page when there are plenty of other options and an opportunity to do something valuable by building a site-private analytics product as part of their core mission of protecting the web.

This misrepresents the ability of a contract.

No law can prevent a thing, no written agreement can prevent cheating. Law can only set out that such cheating might be illegal in the sense that it can be argued in court that penalties should apply.

Do they really think people are that naive?

Many guides to creating Hackintosh setups hinge on having at least one existing Mac. The only saving grace for KVM is that people have developed tools to download macOS directly from the Mac App Store CDN and deal with the DMG image.

Notice that you'll find cloud providers offering Linux and Windows, but almost never MacOS virtual machines.

That sounds like a contradiction. If he uses ads it's so that his development gets supported this way.

But that's exactly what's happening with browsers. Suddenly, Google wants to raze ad blocking, and everyone else follows. All the good points for browsers are restrictions and standardisations, which are fully present in exemplary containers. I don't see how you can get vendor locked-in via docker or kubernetes, I can see how webkit and DRM can.

Every release gets a bit more of that, regardless how many feel about the store or UWP API in general.

Linux apps supports permission management in flatpak, but the packaging can be a big headache.

A native app might be able to violate my privacy. But an OS that can do so is much more dangerous. The reason is the volume of data that can be collected by the gatekeeper.

No, that's wrong.

There are quite a few cross-platform frameworks in a number of different domains.

The reason people post stuff to twitter is because they have an addiction to the gamification of social media like/share statistics.

Here's a screenshot of both accounts side-by-side, compare and contrast:

* https://twitter.com/Mcnst/status/1166520716826763264

Obviously, if this original review were to come from Brave or a Brave-employee directly, it probably would have been taken differently than coming from a "grass-roots" individual, hence the intentional deception on his part.

Twitter explicitly allows one to have multiple accounts as long as you use them for different purposes; in this instance, it's very difficult to see what purpose this Brave-less account has (other than intentionally misleading the public by hiding the Brave affiliation whilst still talking about browsers).

The threads aren't hit pieces; they were the curious musing of a software engineer and browser builder. And it's worth noting that I spend time yesterday working with Mozilla on their telemetry bugs; so I'm not her to throw mud. Somebody else posted my thread here, and caused it to blow up. Don't lay that on me

[0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5830

Brave is relatively less trackable than most default browsers.

And the password sync thing was related to the server that runs sync - it's E2EE, but Brave controls the update process and could very well deploy a malicious update that exfiltrates sync data or leaves it open to attacks.

That's why my point is about where you place your trust - if you're not up to the task of building your own browser (or at least auditing and building chromium yourself) and running your own sync software, you have to trust someone; oftentimes this means giving up privacy (Google) or giving up security (Again, choosing Brave isn't really giving up the security of your sync data, you're just now trusting a company that might not have the same security procedures and amount of resources dedicated to audits).

What you're advocating is for Mozilla to become a walled-garden, just like Brave and Chrome are.

Since when is a walled-garden a good thing?

If you trust Mozilla more than you trust Google, I think it follows that you should also trust their decision that NOT proxying and going directly to Google.com for this data is acceptable.

It's a practical problem. On the one hand, you have people turned off by the perception of Mozilla betraying its principles. On the other hand, you have resources to be directed to substitute the analytics backend. The right thing to do would be to pick an option that maximizes the amount of resources available for Firefox development/Mozilla's mission.

My impression is that building and maintaining an analytics backend consistent with their mission would not require that much of resources, so the balance would fall in favor of doing it. But maybe (probably?) I'm wrong about this, and it's better to stick with Google for now.

Only if they got caught, and only if the person who caught them saw fit to make waves about it and let other people know. And even then they could likely worm their way out of any real trouble by apologizing and pleading that it was accidental (because the sycophants would likely eat that shit up.)

Corporations break contracts every damn day. There is no way for me to even hope to verify that Google isn't breaking their contract in this case. You and others in this thread expect me to trust Google and trust that the threat of a contract breach lawsuit will keep them compliant, but there is no reason that I should. They don't deserve the benefit of my doubt. They lost that a long time ago.