In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
1. Evangelize Firefox to people you know any chance you get and show them all the reasons why its better than Chrome (focus on privacy as an important point). Show them how great browsing can be with a few key extensions (like uBlock Origin, Containers, Privacy Possum, etc.). This does not imply that Mozilla is beyond criticism or that Firefox should not be held to a higher standard.
2. If you can, donate money to Mozilla regularly. [1] As of a couple of years ago (IIRC), more than 90% of Mozilla's revenue was from its partnership with Google for being the default search engine in many geographies. As long as this remains true, Google will only tolerate Firefox being a viable competitor while Firefox still remains as small to moderately sized competition (to avoid antitrust action). If/when Firefox gains a much larger piece of the market, Google will (as it has been doing all these years) even more forcefully use its money and marketing muscle on all its properties as well as add more tiny annoyances on its properties to make Firefox seem buggy citing tangential things like "web standards" or "pushing the web forward" and other euphemisms that companies like Google use to crush competition.
IMO, there needs to be a lot more individual funding of Mozilla while keeping it accountable to users and as per its own manifesto. The level of competition among browsers right now leaves us all vulnerable.
Edit: After seeing a reply to this comment, I did a quick search and found that donating money to Mozilla means donating to the Mozilla Foundation, and that the money may not go to funding Firefox development, which is part of Mozilla Corporation. See this discussion from December 2018 on reddit. [2] It may be desirable for at least part of the donation (as decided by Mozilla Corporation) to go to Firefox development. Does it already happen that way or is there a way to get this result, like in the case of Mozilla Thunderbird where donations go to that project (alone)?
[1]: https://donate.mozilla.org
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t...
Please keep in mind that this is not a personal attack as I don't know you and I don't find it particularly constructive to engage in this kind of attacks, so please only focus on my argument:
I cannot understand this way of thinking.
On one hand we have the option to give Mozilla some money to use them however they see fit.
This means that from the sum of the donations they can use whatever percentage they see fit to fund different products/aspects, e.g. the engineering department so that they can keep working on Firefox, the marketing department to increase the awareness and drive adoption, the user researchers to better understand their user needs etc.
On the other hand we have the "default" stance where we don't support what Mozilla is doing.
This means that the development of Firefox, the marketing to raise awareness etc, are depended on Google and on Pocket which is something that we want to get away from.
I think it mostly boils down to some simple questions and how we feel about the answers:
- Do I prefer to know that all my money go to hire more engineers and improve Firefox? Probably (tbh personally I would focus a bit more on user research, it's the everyday people that they should be after, not us)
- Do I prefer to allow Mozilla to be depended on Google? Definitely not.
- Can my donations be used to make the current situation worse (i.e. tie them tighter on Google's business)? No.
So for me, although I don't control where my money goes, I think that they can only be used to improve things.
If you ask me, it’s because most of us work very hard for our money and don’t have a lot to spare.
If we are going to make the sacrifice of donating, we want to make sure the sacrifice is worth it.
If my hard earned money is going to be used for something like the moz://@ nonsense, it’s not worth the sacrifice.
If it’s going to be used to support development of privacy features in the browser, then it is.
I want Mozilla to build a browser and a mail program. Nothing else. It's easy as that.
And if I have to "fear" that they will use my money to build something else, I will not donate to them.
Think of them as a company with several products. People would buy Firefox, they would buy Thunderbird, but probably nobody would buy the aforementioned "moz://" product or Pocket.
In a traditional company this would lead to a production stop of the later two and to a better focus on the first two products.
With Mozilla, and other donation-based "companies" it will not work that way. There will be other stuff that gets allocated lots of money, because "the money is there" and needs to be used.
Then buy Mozilla, the company, or buy FF/mail server devs to do it. By donating to mozilla you are actually supporting at least one effort Mozilla is participating in. If their revenue goes down after pursuing Pocket, then Mozilla will understand in general their donors don’t approve of pocket. On another coin, by not donating to Mozilla one also is fine with not funding FF/Mail because money just might go to things one doesn’t approve of.
So lets say you donated specifically for development of module X. What if a server died and it was in desperate need of repair? What if they need to hire Y person that had good talent for module X? People could construe the funding for interviews for that talent as not being specifically for development.
In short, a lot of people don't understand the bureaucracy of the company enough to make targeted donations for specific use. And it often hampers the organization when you do it.
I guess it's a case if you want Mozilla as an organization to exist as a whole since much of its parts are probably needed to get the product out the door, or caring about one specific piece of code which, in that case, you might as well just fork it and work on it yourself.
Not made up example: nobody wants their donation to go to marketing. It’s not very sexy. But (to a point) money spent on marketing has a non-zero return. Basically every charity pays for their marketing out of their general fund and it’s always strained because it feels like pure overhead but it actually fuels their growth.
Talk to anyone who works in development and they’ll tell you that unrestricted donations have the largest impact.
For Mozilla their diversity campaigns are the same way. They’re banking on bootstrapping a large undervalued talent pool as a long-term growth strategy and social good.
> For Mozilla their diversity campaigns are the same way. They’re banking on bootstrapping a large undervalued talent pool as a long-term growth strategy and social good.
I would prefer not to see tech companies trying to fix our society. We have seen numerous examples where this went really wrong and maybe we should stop that right now.
This is laughable. Nearly every single technological advancement affected society in some manner. Just because you have some narrow view of examples where they did something wrong, doesn't mean you should be militant in your view and try an weasel funding out of an organization that does 95% good. Much better than any private corporation in my opinion.
And restricted funding is based on donor request. You can't say restricted funds are used for X unless donor said for X.
Exactly! Donor in question does not want his or her money to be spent on Mozilla fixing diversity. There's nothing that prevents Mozilla from courting Zuck or Musk or Gates or whoever else that according to their positions think diversity is more important than the ad blocking.
Here's a way to avoid having to deal with restrictions on the funds raised from people: become a regular company that sells a product.
Yeah, have Mozilla become a private company, beholden to shareholders and profit. Look how that turned out for companies that supposedly coined the "Don't be evil" motto.
Plus, there's nothing that prevents others from donating their money without restrictions for the "good of Mozilla"
What I mean is that those limitations are made up. You just have to clearly state what you want to do with the money and that will fix those problems. Obviously restricted funds are nothing that is set up in 5 minutes, but I would expect that somebody really thinks about that.
And if you state that up to 10% of the restricted funds might also be used for any other projects of Mozilla, that might be okay.
Something like "your fund will be used for maintaining the infrastructure necessary to provide downloads of the latest binaries" would also be totally fine for me in terms of "buy a new server for this whenever you need it", be it a flooding or just the old server dying. But that obviously does not cover putting money into whatever shiny project is prioritized right now and might die in a year or less.
Otherwise you'll have a cash cow project that finances everything else. While that might be nice for one side, the other side would love to know that their funds are used to improve the already good product.
Otherwise you'll have a cash cow project that finances everything else. While that might be nice for one side, the other side would love to know that their funds are used to improve the already good product.
It's a holistic endeavor. Improving the product includes getting it in the hands of a lot of people, making decisions during conflicting ideas, writing better code, etc.
Restricted funding only hampers this on the perceived notion that the organization is stupid and will waste it all. There's no indication Mozilla will do this.
People who do not think like you should be taught to donate to restricted funds.
Why make people who would like to support development of the privacy first browser support decision of Mozilla to lease class A office space in a slew of expensive cities?
Stupid argumentation. If you don't like the new Apple MBP keyboards, you don't buy Apple itself, but just another notebook from another vendor. Same thing applies here, just that I don't need to "not buy" something but can just decide not to donate.
> On another coin, by not donating to Mozilla one also is fine with not funding FF/Mail because money just might go to things one doesn’t approve of.
No need to make me feel guilty. Simply decouple those projects cleanly from each other and everything is fine. If I could donate for a specific purpose, that would be okay, too. But just like Wikimedia, it's not about keeping the servers running but cross-financing other "projects" (broad term for really anything here) that I do not want to support.
There's no guilt here. It's strictly true. Not donating to Mozilla because they might use the funds in a way the donator doesn't like is also saying the risk of the funds being used for other initiatives is not worth participating in the funding of things they do like.
Donations with conditions lessen the good that the nonprofit could do with them, because then they cannot use those funds to keep the nonprofit alive, much less use those funds to fund the things they do.
You donate towards their mission and you are probably not informed enough about the back-stage politics of their foundation.
I like Pocket because it provides features I don’t find in other browsers. I would happily pay for it especially knowing that this is the money that may also be used for the development of the browser engine.
It’s like donating to Wikipedia, but only donating toward articles about Biology. The issue is that you are donating towards infrastructure, not the actual articles written by someone.
> Mozilla is not a democracy.
Obviously not, no. But as a user and a society we can still democratically decide how to handle companies and how they do business. And we can express our opinions just like I did and some people seem to have the same opinion, that's nice.
> You donate towards their mission and you are probably not informed enough about the back-stage politics of their foundation.
What is this? Some kind of "Our savior knows better than you, so keep your mouth shut, sheep!" didactics? From what little I can see from the front, I really don't want to get to know their back-stage politics.
And why back-stage politics after all? What's wrong about a clear "let's build the best, privacy-focused browser and best mail program" as a company mission? Actually that would be a great mission in this day and age. No need for back-stage politics and a more complicated mission.
> It’s like donating to Wikipedia [...] The issue is that you are donating towards infrastructure [...]
Especially this is not correct for Wikipedia/Wikimedia. They are doing _lots of_ stuff with that money that has absolutely nothing to do with keeping Wikipedia up and running. See [0] or [1] for lots of examples.
[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia... [1] https://www.wikimedia.de/de/themen
So would you think it’s a good idea to allow people to only donate to certain parts of the stuff they do, then?
What other good can I do with my dollars?
That donating to Mozilla wont make it worse is such a low bar when there are kids that need malaria nets or deworming or whatnot.
If you think about the opportunity cost of donating to an organisation thats doing some things you think are really important as well as some things that you think are only kinda sorta important, when there are organisations that focus 100% on things you think are really important, then that should clear things up for you.
Many consider it an important work, including myself.
It's short, with several free versions linked to from the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(Thoreau).
Wikipedia is a big one for this: the donation campaign is all about 'keeping our servers running', and then huge chunks of the spending goes on community feelgood stuff.
I've nothing against diversity campaigning but if you were to treat donation like any other 'purchase' you'd be pretty miffed if you thought you were ordering a cheeseburger and you got a carrot and the waiter gave himself a bottle of beer.
A lie is a lie whether it is related to a donation or a purchase.
"The direct work of the Mozilla Foundation focuses on fueling the movement for a healthy internet. We do this by supporting a diverse group of fellows working on key internet issues, connecting open Internet leaders at events like MozFest, publishing critical research in the Internet Health Report, and rallying citizens around advocacy issues that connect the wellbeing of the Internet directly to everyday life."
I think this is the crux of this thread of discussion.
It's inherently a social development in the form of software.
Surely you aren't suggesting that for Google to develop anti-privacy code would require them to have anti-privacy social development?
For example, if you were trying to construct an app to measure diversity, you would need to know what category to measure, how to measure it, how to present it, etc.
And getting requirements right is paramount to the results of the code.
Of course, there are projects where these discussions are probably minimal (such as a kernel for instance), but in most cases, it compromises the majority of software development.
And I entirely disagree that programming code /requires/ any social interaction at all. You can do it purely alone in a basement with no contact with anyone.
Even if you're making your own product, you at least want to get market data and/or customer feedback once you release it. Otherwise, what's the point of selling a product if your customers don't like it?
And I'm not saying that gathering requirements is Mozilla's only social development. I'm saying that you underestimate how much social involvement there is to development, especially on the organization level, where code isn't purely technical.
Because I think that is a core distinction many of the commenters are concerned about here.
If you don't want people telling you what to do, Hacker News ain't a great place to be.
A specific comment on part of this thread seems to indicate it's part of their charter. (or something, not sure what to call it)
> "The direct work of the Mozilla Foundation focuses on fueling the movement for a healthy internet. We do this by supporting a diverse group of fellows working on key internet issues, connecting open Internet leaders at events like MozFest, publishing critical research in the Internet Health Report, and rallying citizens around advocacy issues that connect the wellbeing of the Internet directly to everyday life."
Do you have any documentation on the budget inside Mozilla? Because I think this would solve the issue of transparency for many people here.
If only a tiny fraction of the money went to social programs, maybe more people wouldn't care. But if it's a significant portion, then maybe they are being misleading. Either way, it would end some debate on the matter.
As a foundation (charity/NFP) its records are, by law, very transparent. Any issue of transparency has been invented.
Is anyone here an accountant? Or know of a summary online somewhere by an accountant? The tax paperwork for the company I work at is many hundreds of pages (if not thousands), and I know I could not determine from that paperwork how the money is spent. I'd need actual access to internal books, and even then I'd likely not be able to tell.
It seems some budget clarity is in their annual reports:
>"In addition to building products and technology, Mozilla also invests in people and organizations around the world who share its mission."
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/
Who are they supporting?
Some real numbers from this page:
>In 2017, Mozilla spent $966,365 on its agenda-setting work.
>In 2017, Mozilla spent $2,733,016 to support our mobilization work.
>In 2017, Mozilla spent $13,256,720 to support the Mozilla Leadership Program.
This last bit is suspicious, mainly because it's the same technique used by IKEA to avoid millions in taxes and in this circumstances is a bit scam-like. (trademark royalties)
>$10.1M of this revenue came from the proceeds from Firefox, which are transferred from Mozilla Corporation to Mozilla Foundation through a trademark royalty agreement.
So here's a clear statement that $10.1 million dollars is moved away from Firefox development and put into the Mozilla Foundation.
Why this is really odd is because Mozilla Corp is owned by Mozilla Foundation. Why is the parent organization taking funding from the corporation it's supposed to be supporting?
So, it seems that many people are right about Mozilla being clear about where their money is going, but no one seems to be stating they truly understand where that is. This seems like three car monty with donations to Firefox.
But I'd argue you don't know where the money is going. I just found that in 2017 income from Firefox development was syphoned off to pay from Mozilla Corporation to Mozzila Foundation to pay for various programs and re-donated to others.
Hell, X and Y don't even have to be all that different. Did you know Make-A-Wish doesn't grant wishes for hunting or fishing, while other charities do that exclusively?
Unless they turn out to be deceitful, duplicitous, or otherwise exceptionally wasteful, second guessing and/or judging their decision making process from the outside isn't likely to be a particularly fruitful endeavour for any of the parties involved.
If you want to explicitly target a very narrow case, you need to donate explicitly to that very narrow case. There are NPOs and charities that provide this kind of explicit service[0], for narrow targeted funding where you control exactly where your money goes. If you donate to an organisation with a broader mission, you shouldn't have any specific expectations of where that money is spent.
[0] e.g. https://www.donorschoose.org/
Do you want to make $10k a year for 5 years on something that costs you $2k? Buy a copier on ebay and lease it to a 501(c)3. That's why smart donors restrict funds.
Non-profits hate that because that money cannot be used for G&A, their other pet projects, feel good stuff or say charitable events used for fundraising (you know, the fabulous parties that non-profits throw - spend $300k to raise $303k while important people at the non-profit have a good time being photographed). Make sure to donate to restricted funds. In that case your funds will either be returned to you ( your donation rejected ) or it will be used with the restrictions you put on it.
For the downvoters:
They do have the option to send a check so you could restrict it for only Firefox development but any money that is not restricted is fungible. This means if I donate $100 for Firefox development they can take another $100 (that is not restricted) that they would have used on Firefox on something else. Most people do not mark their donations as restricted so I would still for all intents and purposes be funding something other than Firefox.
This interpretation of his comment is... generous. I agree that there's a legitimate point around wanting your donation to go specifically to browser development and not overhead or other side-projects, but it's pretty clear that he was using the word diversity contemptuously.
Edit: rather than trying to read OP's mind or surmise what they may be thinking, I'll give my own experience on this. I have seen companies spend money on diversity as lip-service, or targeting groups that don't really aid diversity much.
As much as I support female/LGBTQ/race rights and diversity, I suspect many companies I have been a part of would have got a better number of "units of diversity per dollar spent" had they spent money on people from lower socio-economic classes, or countries with poorer education/access to facilities (or maybe combined with the previous groups; I suspect the middle+ classes of female/LGBTQ/different ethnic origin groups are far better catered for than their working class counterparts).
But perhaps people don't consider social class or country of origin diversity? Perhaps "we hired lots of underprivileged people" doesn't give as much political capital? I'm not sure.
Sometimes it seems to me that whereas in the past we had Churches in a privileged position, telling us how to behave, that we now have NGOs doing the same thing.
For example there was just last week a report in the UK about how employees in oxfam shops had sign NDAs in settlements so that the organisation would not get negative publicity for not practicing as they preach.
It's very perplexing that you make this conclusion as a legitimate opposition to diversity.
I think diversity is just being used as a proxy for "social do-gooding, rather than tech do-gooding" and the commenter feels the former is not the thing s/he cares to support. Which is fine! I choose not to support all sorts of nominally good things. Lets not witch-hunt people for caring about different things.
In my world, that is the complete opposite of diversity.
Don’t you know Karl Popper’s formulation - a tolerant world cannot tolerate intolerance.
It's like saying you need heavy censorship in order to have free speech. Complete bullshit.
The core point is, if you have a society that accepts anything and everything, that society will not end up with all the things, because it'll also accept people working explicitly to get rid of some of the things. It will instead end up with few things, being run by "dictatorship of small, intolerant minorities"[0]. Therefore, if the society wants to stay accepting, it has to carve an exception - it needs to reject anyone who doesn't also accept anything and everything.
Reasoning behind the "paradox" is sound, but its application to real world varies. In particular, I've recently noticed that the "paradox of tolerance" is primarily being wielded by small, intolerant groups that want to aggressively force their way on everyone else.
--
I have never seen any more intolerance than in people who thinks social justice is important. I do not tolerate these peoples intolerance.
I obviously do not accept anything and everything, that is why I am upset at Mozilla and their actions.
> "dictatorship of small, intolerant minorities"
This. This is what a lot of the tech world has become like in my opinion. A lot is dictated by people that think a code of conduct is more important than contributions and actual value.
As soon as you say make a sexual joke, say "there is only two genders" etc you will get banned from that community, be called a nazi, people will try to take your job and income away. Just look at all my posts here, they are all downvoted not because I spam or write something objectively false, but because my opinion is incorrect according to the dictatorship.
And you are probably downvoted constantly because you are spewing beliefs and opinions that scream, "I would prefer to work in a Mad Men era office, than one that values and respects the opinions and beliefs of others."
Fact of the matter, our society is better by saying that beliefs about making a statement like, "there are only two genders", are inappropriate and have no place in modern society.
As always you are more than welcome to exercise your right to free speech, but that doesn't mean others can't exercise their freedoms to remove you from the equation.
I always say whatever I believe, even if I am at work. If the company would fire me over a joke then fine I wouldn't want to work there anyway. So far I haven't met any issues on that front. Also I don't work in the US so you can't really fire someone where I live because of a joke and it's outright illegal to do it over beliefs.
I do not get the mad men reference, since I haven't seen the show. But so what if I am? No one values or respects everyone's opinions, that is just such a load of horseshit imo. Obviously people here don't value or respect my opinion for example.
> are inappropriate and have no place in modern society
This is very funny, a biological hard fact has no place in modern society? I don't even understand how this is even a controversial thing to believe yet you believe it has no place in a modern society.
I do not wish to live in your definition of a modern society.
John Finnemore says it better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAMHBlt_CQA
I should've added that I do speak my mind when asked about it or if its a open discussion. I don't go around calling people overweight, but if they ask me if I think they are I will for sure tell them what I think they are ;)
While it may seem like that, people aren't valuing your opinion that involves beliefs or views that can inherinitly make groups of people feel discriminated against. A person that identifies as non-binary or gender-fluid would not feel comfortable being around your opinions.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions and beliefs, but when you say whatever you believe you have to understand the potential to be disliked because of that.
People constantly view your dongle jokes or whatever as being insane that you can't make them anymore, but the thing is even before it wasn't socially acceptable, people still were made uncomfortable by it.
It's like a sect that people just seems to buy into for some reason. It doesn't make any sense, it doesn't have any scientific validity what so ever and still that is a touchy subject but calling out other silly stuff people believe aren't? Do you also believe in a flat earth perhaps? If not, why not?
I have a hard time living that hypocrisy, dislike me or not. I do not care if everyone doesn't like me as I expect everyone not to. It is ok if you have another opinion but it is pretty typical since intolerant people usually are like that, can't accept that other people do not share their worldviews. Also I actually am pretty good at making jokes, so it doesn't seem that way to me.
Maybe people like you just lack a sense of humor?
I think 'ecmascript was referencing a particularly well-known case of a person making a sexual joke to another in a causal private conversation outside of work, in which some busybody overheard the joke and made so big a ruckus that the joker got fired from his job.
> but that doesn't mean others can't exercise their freedoms to remove you from the equation.
I know you didn't mean it like that, but the way you phrased it kind of reinforces ecmascript's point about social justice being pushed by a group of extremely intolerant people, who are willing to break all the rules of civilized discourse in order to have things their way.
Websites started user agent detecting Firefox and putting banners saying to not use Firefox because of their homophobic CEO.
It's pathetic that people like you hide behind censorship arguments and "diversity of thought" when defending the right to attack minorities.
This kind of disingenuous thinking makes me question anyone evangelising Brave as a web browser.
He didn't attack any minority, stop spreading objectively false information. I am defending his right to believe whatever he likes in private. It will be a quick downhill (as we already have seen) as soon as you start listing bad values and try to hate on people that have these values.
You may think I'm pathetic if you wish, I don't care. But remember, I will defend your right to your opinion too. It's kind of obvious you do not believe in the same thing and if more people would be like you we would find ourselves in a dark dystopia. You could move to China, they are well on their way to building the kind of society you seem to strive for. :)
Really? What's the point in arguing stupid semantics.
People are defined by their actions.
He has a right to believe what he wants.
He also has to accept the consequences of those beliefs.
At the end of the day it's just a job. As CEO or an executive you're a figurehead. Your actions are publicly associated with the company you head.
You can decry the evils of "wokeness" or "social justice" but it's also the right of the employees of the company to complain or even campaign against the CEO.
Why is one political campaign acceptable and another not?
Because it really seems like you just don't agree with the politics of one.
Your disingenuousness is what I'm calling pathetic. Like calling up China?
An authoritarian country where the state owns all business whilst discussing the actions of a private company in America.
There are plenty of conservative companies in the USA which would be fine with his political contributions.
The idea of having no social consequences or accountability for your actions isn't a Chinese thing and it isn't an American thing. But it seems to be an effective playbook adopted by conservatives worldwide.
But anyway, it's not like I'm going to change your mind :)
Many philosophers of free speech and first amendment jurisprudence would argue that some restrictions on free speech for the sake of free speech could hypothetically be permitted. The law does this all the time; it restricts action in order to help guarantee the freedom of action of others. The most basic formulation of this is in the harm principle, in which it is recognized that harm should not be permitted because it interferes with others' rights.
But on a more serious note, from the little I know he got fired because he supported banning same-sex marriage. Which is not just about 'opinion'. That's about discrimination and he should be called out for it.
Your comment is a prime example of what's wrong with the tech industry in my opinion.
Genuinely curious, how isn't that discrimination? Since when did it being his own money in his free time stop it being a discriminatory stance?
It is not discrimination because there is not any individual being discriminated against. He did not use his position to discriminate against gay people for example.
He outright did the exact opposite and wrote that he was going to push for equality at Mozilla. I do not believe that he would discriminate anyone at Mozilla that was married to someone of the same sex.
I believe that a person can have professional courtesy.
I contacted Mozilla and told them I would never give them another nickle as long as their CEO was evil. I find it hard to believe you were ok with it.
Because that is just, right? You supported the same thing as Brendan.
People should be held accountable for such views. It should be clear to anyone that having "an opinion" which discriminates a whole group of people is not that same as sharing an opinion about Star Wars..
Same-sex marriage was a very hot topic just a few years ago, should we unperson everyone who was ever against the cause? Even though the entire point of having freedom of speech and association is to allow safe political discourse?
Where would you draw the line? Next do we start firing everyone who supports Trump? Every conservative? Anyone against late-term abortions?
It's a shame that you don't seem to appreciate the value of diversity of thought.
It's to reduce the need for violent revolution against the government by making such discourse that challenges the government safe from retaliation by the government. It is not to make discourse free of consequence more generally. That may in some cases be desirable on its own merits, but it is not part of the “entire point of having freedom of speech”.
Well, in my country (and I think in the entire EU) what you want is very illegal and is taken very seriously. I think you choose a very fitting username. ;)
Edit: btw with held accountable I don't mean that is should be illegal. I meant that people have a right to react to "injustice"
I'm sure there's reasonable arguments against affirmative diversity in general or Mozilla's diversity projects in specific, but incompatibility with meritocracy is not a strong one.
Say I am a hiring manager at Mozilla and I hire a college graduate from Rwandan not because he is best but because of a diversity quota. What if there is also a Sudanese grad who is looking for a job or a Nepalese transgender MtF? How do I decide at that point?
Is it my call and only my call or should there be regulation and legislation to deal with situations like this? I have one spot and many diverse candidates. How do I choose?
When everyone has an equal opportunity.
You should be able to derive the rest of the answers to your questions from that.
"Equal opportunity" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "equal opportunity" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of equal opportunity by which a society that enforces equal opportunity could be judged. (Very much /s, of course.)
The point being that any arguments made against the unattainability of true meritocracy apply just as well to true equal opportunity.
By the way, targets do not need to be attainable in order to produce (also quantifiable) positive effects.
And measuring skills is not?
In short, a "skillocracy" tends to look and act very, very much like an aristocracy, which is kind of the opposite of the idea I think most people try to express with the word "meritocracy".
It's misguided to think that by manually ensuring diversity (eg. By hiring someone for simply being a qualified minority rather than necessarily the best candidate) is pushing for meritocracy.
If diversity programs were interested in maintaining meritocracy while increasing diversity, they'd focus their energy on uplifting poor families through things like training or scholarship programs so their kids have a better shot at life.
E.g. Stanford (used to) vigorously recruited qualified minority candidates to help improve diversity on campus.
My assumption was that not enough qualified minority candidates exist, obviously there are qualified minority candidates, just not enough, thus why they aren't as equally represented in the field in question.
Of course one is in service to bigotry, and the other to equality. That makes them pretty different.
If you're driving down the road, and your car pulls slightly to the right, you steer slightly to the left to compensate. Sure, we'd all like a car that steers straight. But it doesn't. So we steer slightly to one side.
It would be great if the people who preach we should not discriminate based on ethnicity, religion, and so forth would actually stop doing that, and start paying more attention to skills, which is actually more relevant to the job. It seems like that they do not wish (or at the very least do not, regardless of intent) to stop discriminating, they just steer to a different side.
The old tired argument that "It's just another sort of bias!" is bankrupt. Its a sort of bias that seeks to repair real problems, not keep them.
But that's a really big "if". Selections are not completely merit based. They are not blind to race and sex. Minority candidates who use a male western sounding name are much more likely to get invited for interviews than if the have a female or foreign sounding name.
The bias is there. We need to undo it or compensate for it. Extra effort to hire from underrepresented groups makes a lot of sense. Bars should not get lowered for them, but they should be able to get a fair shot.
And maybe the problem is not so much that there are not enough minority candidates, but that there are too many unqualified majority candidates who are taking up space.
Which is completely true - SV companies employee percentages fairly accurately mimic CS graduates percentages. So the majority of bias isn't in hiring... In other words, by the time you're picking the most qualified candidate it's already too late to correct for any cultural/societal bias (you should start in primary school or even earlier).
Here is statements I wish people would honestly try to argue against: A person like to be in a environment where they feel safe (claim 1) and people feel safer being in a majority than in a minority (claim 2).
Why would minority candidates seek to be in an environment at the same rather as majority candidates, if everything else is equal?
I disagree. At least for the majority of cases. It's possible that there are skills or jobs where the talent to excel is extremely rare in certain demographic groups, but I think those cases are extremely rare. For the vast majority of cases, a lack of representation of certain demographic groups would be very strong indication that something is preventing those groups from participating on an equal basis.
> "nor is simply increasing diversity a sign of meritocracy."
That is absolutely true. There are definitely wrong ways to increase diversity that are contrary to meritocracy, but there are also correct ways to do it.
> "uplifting poor families through things like training or scholarship programs so their kids have a better shot at life."
An excellent example of what should be done more.
But even if merely increasing diversity for its own sake does not improve meritocracy, it can actually help meritocracy indirectly: research has shown that people hiring for a job are inclined to hire people who look like the people already in that job. So if a certain industry is dominated by white men, they are inclined to hire more white men for that job. Even if the person hiring for that job is not a white man, and even if they are aware of this issue. So simply increasing diversity can make it easier for talent from minority groups to get recognised for their merit and get hired.
But I think anyone who has any amount of work experience will be under no illusions about the meritocracy in the corporate world. There are plenty of incompetent people getting hired or promoted over more competent people, and that's certainly not a new development. Meritocracy is mostly a fantasy, and I think people who consider diversity a threat to meritocracy are confusing it with aristocracy: the old aristocracy would also claim that they were obviously inherently more suited to rule. They may have claimed to have merit, but the whole point of meritocracy is that it opposed that, and that anyone should be able to rise to the top. Meritocracy and diversity should be going hand in hand. If they're not, you're probably confusing something else for meritocracy.
"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
Is your meritocracy measuring merit in the way you think it is?
(Quickly googled example: https://www.nonprofitissues.com/to-the-point/can-earmarked-c... )
It turns out people are diverse anyway and that's why not everyone end up in tech.
Slightly off-topic but it is also funny that X would praise diversity, and at the same time imply that we should balance some things out when it is the people themselves who are the cause for the imbalance. They make the assumption that imbalance is bad. Imbalance is not a problem! We do not have to balance/even things out. Examples: construction workers? Mostly males. Nurses? Mostly females, although this has been changing. So what? I do not see these people trying to push women into getting to construction work. Let people decide. We do not have to intervene. If women do not want to get into construction, that is fine! If they do not want to get into IT, that is also fine (but apparently it is not)!
That's true but also ignores the problem that many people drop out of tech due to discrimination or feeling like they don't belong even though they are interested.
"While a majority of the men in the study reported that their internship experiences were positive, women’s experiences were much more of a mixed bag, full of ageism, sexism, and not being taken seriously"
https://www.womenintech.com/mit-study-figures-out-why-so-man...
It seems to me the former can be done without the latter, which makes me suspect anybody who asks for the latter as though it were a prerequisite for doing the former.
It should be abundantly clear that certain groups, especially white women, are actually preferentially selected. There is no discrimination against them. Other groups, like black women, may have a stronger case, but you can't just take an individual's word that they failed due to discrimination. There needs to be evidence far beyond self-reported victimisation.
"Chairwoman," Philip Philipovich corrected her.
"Would like to ask you," at this point the woman pulled out of her coat-front a few brightly coloured journals, still damp from the snow, "to take a few journals sold for the benefit of German children. 50 kopecks each."
"No, thank you," replied Philip Philipovich briefly, glancing at the journals.
The four indicated total amazement and the woman went the colour of cranberry juice.
"Why do you refuse?"
"I don't want them."
"You have no sympathy for the children of Germany?"
"On the contrary."
"You grudge fifty copecks?"
"No."
"Why then?"
"I don't want them."
-- "The Heart of a Dog", Mikhail Bulgakov
https://medium.com/aleria/unconscious-bias-trainings-are-oft...
Unconscious Bias Trainings are (Often) a Waste of Your Money
I personally value everything that Mozilla Foundation does (including diversity campaigns) and wouldn't hesitate to donate to it (I've been donating for a few years now), but I would also like to donate to Mozilla Corporation and directly fund its activities, even if it means some money may go to Pocket or Lockwise or anything else. I don't want to micromanage how the company manages my money. It would be defeatist and unfair to ask that, IMO.
Anyway, I can see this being inconvenient for Mozilla. But it is desirable for some users. I don't see how it is defeatist, and it's not unfair either - donors can say, "we want to give money for specific purposes", and Mozilla can accept or refuse. Neither outcome is unfair to anyone; donations are still voluntary transactions.
But it can be made more complicated by that, depending on the organizational policies, levels of transparency, and funding methods. If, for example, they have an internal fund labeled "for Firefox", I'd expect $N in donations to go there, and would be pissed if less money appeared. Alternatively, if they were running a funding model of "$X for Firefox + money from donations", then I'd be pissed if Firefox was getting less than $X + $N (this would be equivalent to the recent "companies are stealing tips" dramas of share economy).
It's worth noting that charities handling multiple causes usually solve this by creating separate accounts for donating to each cause.
This ultimately can get as complex as Mozilla would like, but Mozilla has also a perfectly valid option of not allowing donations for specific purposes at all, and I think it's fine if they do that. Donors have no right to force Mozilla to implement earmarking if they don't want to.
Otherwise, you can recruit and hire someone to write the features you approve of.
Money is fungible but budgets have a nasty habit of being elastic.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...
Even if you did donate to development, development is not averse to administration, marketing, hiring, and diversity. And developers are not spending time at Firefox getting the product in the hands of people so it can get better with feedback. Marketing and all the other areas you find "problematic" are trying to do that.
Either way, even if your money doesn't go where you want it, that's a bad reason to not donate considering there's no indication that their product is substantially inferior to competition, they're making hugely poor decisions, etc.
FOSS foundations should (and typically do) accept code contributions that aren't restricted to their leadership's agenda, so why should they not accept financial contributions beyond their agenda?
Financial contributions affect all areas of the organization and the needs/wants of the organization changes daily, some times spontaneously. People simply donating to "writing code" doesn't make an organization function. There has to be some sort of PR. There has to be some sort of administration. There has to be marketing, quality, distribution, etc.
For example: I see that Firefox still hasn't yet made all SVG elements attributes into presentation attributes per the SVG 2 spec. So right now in Firefox you can't do 'rect.style.width = "12px"' but in Chrome you can.
Not sure you could easily get full coverage (e.g., I'd bet css "d" atty would be tricky). But there's probably a fairly workable introductory subset for which one could create a fairly clean patch set.
Or pick a different self-contained, non-controversial feature/bug and fund a dev to attack it.
Better yet-- buy a few meals for a dev to write a tool to generate this data for you.
You've jumped to discussing an imagined general purpose digital payment pooling system that works at scale.
So instead with my non-techsavvy friends I usually just set up Firefox with ublock and tell them to give it a try. You don't have to mention ublock is available on chrome too, right?
Most of them never knew it was possible, but I love to see how wide their eyes get when they see it. "Holy hells! you mean I don't have to look at all that crap?"
In fact there's a sibling comment to yours asking what privacy difference there is between Alexa and a smart phone. And here we are on one of the most tech focused places on the internet! If everyone here doesn't know the difference, how is the average person?
Another counter is what happened with the "anonymized" NYC data set. People discovered that combining two separate data sets can be used to reconstruct the information that was censored.
I have nothing to hide is a false statement that never made sense.
I used to be one of these people but I am no longer. I have switched my default browser from Firefox to Brave since I cannot withstand Mozillas bullshit anymore.
Not only is it a complete joke that firefox put Google Analytics on their privacy pages but their actions of "wokeness" in which they fired Brendan Eich and all their diversity shit has left me very unhappy with Mozilla as an organisation. I stopped my monthly donation a while back and I do not recommend Firefox anymore, only Brave.
Why should I donate money towards Firefox when I know it's probably not going to fund Firefox but rather some woke campaign that I am against? They even fired their own CEO when he privately used his own money to fund a political campaign. That is not ok according to Mozilla since diversity of opinion is not something they believe in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MozillaInAction/top/?t=all (there is a lot of other crap in there as well, but mainly about Mozilla and other tech companies)
Where will your donation go now if not to Mozilla?
Probably I will just save the money for now, but perhaps in the near future I will increase donations to some open source contributors via Open Collective (where I know it will fund the developers directly).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...
Additionally, Eich was not fired but resigned even though the Mozilla board asked him to stay.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
Judging from the parent’s multiple posts in this thread it appears he is adjusting facts to fit his narrative.
Sure, he wasn't really fired by the letter but rather he was smeared and a lot of people organized a hate campaign towards him. Who would want to stay in such a toxic environment?
Incredible that the same people that claim to value diversity and inclusion just loves to exclude and give people incredible amounts of hate when they do not conform to the exact same beliefs.
No one in the board backed their CEO or defended him. I am not adjusting the facts. I do believe in same-sex marriage. You can marry whomever you want beacause I do not care, but to give someone the treatment he got for not believing the same thing is just horrible and unjust.
There was some discussion about this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20850950
(For the record, full page translate with translate.google.com doesn't work in many cases. Ex: Amazon Japan product page)
I must say, it's great to see this brought to light in HN comments. It may be a small minority of users, but clearly some can see through this nonsense.
Although, having been a web user before there was Google, I think it is more than just Google that created this atmosphere where some browser is portrayed as being inferior to another. I think it started before Google.
Think about the influence of web developers. In the earlier days of the web, they wanted to make money by making websites. To sell those services they needed the web to have more than just basic functionality. They wanted complex browsers loaded with features that could "wow" the user, which enabled marketing and ideally commercial transactions over the web. Why would any web developer be interested in a browser that is not optimised for marketing?
Then think about the growth of websites. Today, every company has one, every organization has one. No web developer has to convince anyone anymore that they "need a website". Web developers today probably have better employment prospects than ever before. Many website owners want to make money directly or indirectly from their websites. Often they are sold on the promise of a return from advertising. Would those websites be interested in "supporting" browsers that are not optimised for web marketing?
We could create a browser for users that had all the features users needed to retrieve and view information and various media types, but which lacked features that enable easy web marketing, ads, tracking, etc. A browser that catered to users' interests above all others. This is possible. However, what would web developers and commercial websites think of such a browser?
Perhaps they would not be interested in designing websites that "worked" with such a browser. For one, they would probably argue that the market share of such a browser is too low to warrant their attention. I have seen this argument made many times on HN.
The point of this comment, which I am probably not getting across very well, is to suggest that developers themsleves are in the best position to control the market share of browsers, not users:
I have used command line TCP/HTTP clients and text-only browser for many years to retrieve information from the web. It has always worked flawlessly for my purposes and continues to do so. One of the amusing side effects of accessing websites this way is that I see all manner of messaging from web developers on websites that tries to persuade users to use one browser or another, and to make sure some browser feature is enabled. Much of it has become increasingly didactic. Developers increasingly are not asking users to comply, they are telling them they "must" do something, or else.
The vast majority of web users follow those instructions. If they are told to use some browser or else a website "will not work", then they will comply. Truthfully, it is almost always still possible to retrieve the information without the preferred browser or without the "necessary" feature. However, most users will follow the path of least resistance. They will do as the web developers tell them to do.
Users cannot be expected to simply switch to some other browser that better protects their interests. Not without cooperation from web developers and their clients, website owners.
This is also likely a smokescreen on Google's part to defend against allegations that they are abusing an arguable monopoly decision in the browser market.
'We're not abusing our monopoly position! We give money to The Mozilla Foundation that produces a competing browser!'
On Wikipedia it says they get 2% of their corporation's revenue, which they own in its entirety, they can increase their funding more just by increasing the 2% they assign themselves from their own revenue. Not even a third of their funding is donations according to a dated IRS audit so they look pretty much secured financially and will appreciate, but otherwise not notice your money hitting the pile.
I think a more important thing we can do to help is make our work exclusively dependent on open technologies instead of Chrome APIs, which might one day be open technologies but till they are they promote not using Firefox.
They're sitting on half a billion in assets - https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...
Yes, let's have pity on these poor publishers who are relentless infiltrating and measuring our online lives so they can squeeze a few more bucks out of the data grab.
Trackers have gotten insidious. I have privacy badger and on one particular news site there were 36 distinct trackers. And somehow they're still getting around the blockers because I'm getting ads and suggestions correlating to some activity I did on a completely different device.
This business model is toxic and I really hope all the companies using it either pivot or go bankrupt.
I also hope that any sort of tracking-based business model goes extinct. Unfortunately, in the case of online publishing, consumers have repeatedly rejected micropayments (most recently Blendle[1]), which I believe is the only viable alternative.
Of course, Wired is not a respectable publication, and this just goes to show that.
In my "daily driver" browser (a customised Firefox), nothing loads by default but the HTML. No JS, no CSS, no web fonts, etc. No overlays. The text fills the page, rendered in the font I prefer, in the size that I find easiest to read. No ads. Only a handful of requests. People tell me I'm crazy for rejecting the modern web, but the experience is often superior.
(In fact both microtargeting and micropayments are arguably much worse, less stable business models from the perspective of a publisher. Y "demographic" or "universal" advertisers at a steady monthly ad buy with X subscribers at a steady monthly spend is an easy formula to forecast future revenue from. O(X).Y micro-targeted ad buys with X readers at O(X).Z articles per month, is almost entirely impossible to forecast with any accuracy.)
We as consumers never agreed to this. We were never even asked. Make the entire industry illegal, and publishers will revert to traditional advertisement. Again and again it's been made clear that the ad tech industry cannot be trusted with our data, so why do we continue allowing it to collect it and use it to show us crap we don't want?
Throw it all in the garbage. The whole damn thing.
This is still a massive issue, however. Because the internet makes most online publishers global, consumers have access to many more content sources, and so if even if publishers adjust their subscription prices to match the lower distribution costs and larger audiences that they have access to, the effort of signing up for more than just one or two subscriptions will be much more than most consumers (including me) want to invest.
This is idiotic because tracking is GOOD FOR GOOGLE and BAD FOR PUBLISHERS. If the saying in advertising is that half of your budget is wasted, why the hell would publishers want to tell advertisers which half?
Imagine you're a publisher, and your audience can be divided as 50% coffee drinkers and 50% tea drinkers. Without tracking, you have advertisers each paying you $X to run site-wide ads, while with tracking you can get closer to $2X because the coffee sellers target only the coffee drinkers and the same with tea.
(Disclosure: I work for Google on ads, speaking for myself)
So, yes, in the end, the ad market has a certain size, independent of the advertising companies in it, but now the link between that market and actual writers making actual content people want is broken and everything is turning to shit.
Since then, Firefox has been gaining some momentum + performance and add tracking, surely not planning to switch back to Chrome/Safari anytime soon.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
I think touch recognition is better on Chrome too, as sliders and other touch-sensitive UI elements feel a bit more laggy in FF.
On mobile, I'm happy using Brave, which is Chromium but allows you turn off scripts if you want to (goodbye autoplaying videos). On desktop, FF all the way. Except when I need to use Dev Tools.
about:performance
Hamburger->More->Task Manager
Edit: not to mention that you can configure the number of webrender processes Firefox uses to render web pages. If you have a fast enough processor, just set it to one or two and call it a day.
Chrome uses a more complicated algorithm based on the source domain and the tab "dependency" tree. You have pretty much zero control over this.
I don’t heavily use tabs like 50+ but people who do say Firefox uses less RAM.
Either way it’s fast enough now for me not to have any performance complaints.
They've been putting out blog posts over the last 2 years specifically talking about the performance fixes they've put in.
Firefox themselves have admitted it's not FUD. They acknowledged it was a real problem.
It is pretty fast now, but a few years ago (at most 4), it was bloody awful.
Good job you don't work in user experience design, then, because how things feel to people is a huge part of that. If software feels bad to use, people won't use it, simple as that.
No amount of haughtiness from your high horse will change that.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/
Also, like someone else mentioned, you can visit this in the address bar:
about:performanceYou can also start it from Menu -> More -> Task Manager. The only thing I'm missing is a handy keyboard shortcut (Shift + Esc works in Chrome/ium).
One Tab acted maliciously: If you open One Tab, it doesn't show any tabs, so as someone who never used it before, I clicked "bring all tabs to One Tab" think you had to click a button to activate it. Nope, it closed all the tabs instead with absolutely no warning or way to undo it.
That's an extremely bad design.
Not sure what you were expecting. And on the OneTab page that gets generated, there's a link that says "Restore All" right at the top.
(Yes, cue the comments saying "just delete it" or "I deleted mine" but for a lot of people it's not practical and FB knows this and continues to act like complete fucking cunts)
Clicking away happens even more so if the site I'm trying to view is "user hostile". Bad readability, banners, popups, those cookie preferences that really don't work, just clicking Yes to hide them works.
When you think about it, it's incredible that Firefox is as good as it is (same re Linux.)
But obviously if Google wants to stay better than Firefox, whether it takes a year or a decade, they'll always be able to because they have an absurd amount of resources.
So I wonder, what are Firefox's competitive advantages?
1. Privacy: They can do things like this, blocking trackers, things that benefit the user over the platforms. Because Google can pay lip service to this but at the end of the day their customers are advertisers.
2. What else?
Also, Google has advantages, in that they have synergetic (is that the right way to put it?) products. Like Android and Chrome OS that promote Chrome over the competition.
Can Mozilla compete by adopting a similar approach?
Linux kind of fulfills the role of the OS with Firefox by default, usually. It certainly should, at least.
Of course, Linux suffers from the same lack of resources compared to the competition.
Less constraints: Firefox does not need to block release of a new feature because an Android API it depends on got blocked by legal due to regulations in Namibia.
Organisational stability: Firefox has a good revenue stream and stable leadership, with pretty constant direction.
Main competency: Firefox is the thing for Mozilla. For Google, Chrome is an insurance policy against Apple.
I can't see how it could ever happen. No matter what they do they can't beat the developer and monetary resources of Google.
Acting in the interest of the user.
Chrome has a history of adding or removing features, to align more to Google's business strategy, than to what really matters to the users.
While Chrome is open source, there’s not a true community making decisions. It’s just google doing stuff and releasing code. That is really nice, but not as nice as a community and foundation developing and making decisions based on community desires rather than what fits into Google’s corporate plan.
Google does a lot of stuff that I like and I use many of their services and software. But Google’s direct interests are not my own. Google wants to sell ads. I don’t care about selling ads so everything with them is a trade off between what I want and what I’m willing to pay.
> page that's broken in FF
I don't know any, and have used FF for as long as it exists. Could you give an example (or better yet, tell Mozilla via FF's built-in feedback)?
> developer tools
FF's devtools are far superior to Chrome's IMO for core web tech such as CSS debugging (Chrome is better for JavaScript debugging and profiling, that I'll give you)
> shopping
Y'know, not everybody is ok with Google knowing everything about us, including card details and purchases
> Google properties
That Google pushes GMail and YouTube users to use Chrome and boycots other browsers is hardly an argument (except for an antitrust case).
That said I moved to Vivaldi since most of the useful addons I had became incompatible with FF post-Quantum (nor, last I checked, is there any longer a way to save webpages as MHTML which I use frequently and exclusively to save web page content). Though I sorely miss the ability to disable DirectWrite in Blink browsers, which allowed MacType to affect the font rendering for far better text legibility.
https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/czle25/holy_crap_...
I honestly don't think I've seen this in years, and I load thousands of pages weekly. My adblockers break sites sometimes, but not FF. What kind of weird-ass sites are you visiting?
I give firefox a shot from time to time. I switch all devices to it, and then I use it exclusively all the time.
My most recent attempt failed few days ago, after a bit more than a month with it.
Firefox performance just doesn't feel the same as chrome, from constant small freezes, to using 100% CPU pretty often.
And just overall experience on some platforms - especially macOS doesn't feel native at all. On top of that some websites don't support it that good (not Firefox's fault here - but I don't want to deal with that day to day).
Firefox also seemed snappier on the first few runs, but as the time went on I didn't find it faster or feeling less bloated than chrome as a lot of people like to portray it.
Chrome for me, as an average user, does not have any of these downsides. The closest to a downside for some people you could pin to chrome is that it's owned by google.
At the end of the day, chrome gets the job done, and does it without being in my way, on all the platforms I use, - and that's what I want from a browser, so for now I'm sticking with chrome.
Plus the non-native feel you mentioned. No pinch-to-zoom, moving tabs between windows feels clunky, and scrolling feels different than almost every other app.
I try Firefox for Android from time to time, and I also have a lot of issues with polish that make me stop using it every time. Tab management is extremely clunky, the address bar is inconsistent with virtually every other Android text input (e.g. there's a big X that I expect to clear the address bar, but in Firefox this escapes me from input mode). Even getting the toolbars to reappear by scrolling is troublesome - infuriating.
It sucks, because I care about privacy and web diversity, and have been a Firefox user since back in the Phoenix days.
I don't get those problems, but even if I did, it would be well worth it as opposed to seeing ads all the time. If Google wanted me to uninstall Firefox forever and use Chrome they'd allow for plug-ins for Chrome (on Android). While they don't I'll simply never switch. I have no idea how people tolerate ads.
For those sites, and others that are intrusive, if you need them, you can use containers. I use containers for things like Twitter and Facebook.
I don't know if this is site dependent or just a general issue but it bugs me too much to use firefox right now.
Firefox works perfectly on my linux and macos machines but on windows it seems to crumble after most Windows updates which is a shame. I imagine this is mostly due to Windows rather than Firefox but it's meant I've had to start using Chrome for a lot of things at home on my game / leisure machine.
Stored credit card / payment information.
Chromecast because of the ecosystem devices in my house that use it. There are extensions to do this but they're not great. (Disclaimer: I work @ Google on Chromecast platform stuff.)
Other than that, it's great.
You may have to turn it on manually, though.
"This site works best on Chrome" is only what is needed now to reduce the Firefox userbase further.
Note - This comment was typed on firefox.
IE is probably the hardest of these. The reason that still has non trivial amounts of users is because so many websites can't afford to lose access to those users.
If you are offering services to us, you probably can’t afford to ignore FF. If you are a German company, that goes double.
Europe-wide figures would be more relevant, but it's tough for me to see any company that isn't Germany-specific (or at best, regional) caring much about a fraction of the userbase of a country whose GDP is itself a fraction of potential markets.
Now don't get me wrong, businesses that are Germany-only are still pretty massive objectively, but it doesn't seem like that would be enough to move the needle on the way the Web ecosystem develops. German (eg) bank support for FF seems like not much more than a regional technological quirk, like if you found out that Kazakhstan's banks only worked well on IE6
Ignoring Google's properties (because we all know by now that they don't really play fair), the only examples I see there are Bank of America and some user complaining about his D3 animation being slow.
I'd hardly call that many.
I have no nefarious intent. I just need to figure out what features my users are using so I can fix them if they're broken.
It would be nice to possibly get some sort of explicit opt-in from Firefox.
I guess one workaround I could have is to call the analytics APIs on my server directly...
Talking to our users their main complaint isn't necessarily that I'm tracking them more that the data is going to Google so maybe the solution is to run mixpanel.
Is there a way you can do this without collecting any data, or making it opt-in?
So, Mozilla has two ways:
1. Build a really fast browser. 2. Die as Internet Explorer.
It's realistic way to handle things. People don't care about privacy in general, browser is too complex to build for privacy/security activists only. Time to focus on business instead promoting services like Pocket & including Google analytics in addons page.
Do or die.
People like you are a minority. Most people expect Internet content to be free.
If you ask the average person whether they'd prefer to pay for web content or cop ads and trackers, they'd probably tell you to shove your subscription service or whatever alternative you can come up with up your ass.
As for taxes and traffic stops, these help me and people around me. Advertising is made to hurt me, to rob me of my money by subtly manipulating my consumption choices. It's a malicious act.
If I see an advertisement for a good or service which I purchase because of the ad and which subsequently benefits my life, yes the advertiser has profited, but so have I.
If I make a product which benefits humanity (say something that's a better quality, more environmentally friendly alternative to a popular product) is it not more selfish not not advertise and spread the word?
I believe that it's not some, but upwards of 90% of advertisements that are manipulative and dishonest, and that's before talking about methods of delivery. Therefore, I feel justified in accusing the whole industry.
I've expanded on the topic at length here: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.
> If I see an advertisement for a good or service which I purchase because of the ad and which subsequently benefits my life, yes the advertiser has profited, but so have I.
That's arguably a rare case. Of most product categories that are advertised you're already aware of, the goal of the advertising is to make you choose one option over other for reasons other than the value you'll get for your money.
> If I make a product which benefits humanity (say something that's a better quality, more environmentally friendly alternative to a popular product) is it not more selfish not not advertise and spread the word?
The word about that product being on the market should be spread, and it could be without getting into all the negative aspects of advertising iff everyone's attention wasn't already saturated by all the other companies advertising indiscriminately. When everyone's shouting through the megaphone at each other, you have to pick a megaphone too just to have a chance of being heard. What I'm arguing is to take everyone's megaphones away, so that we could all talk to each other.
And your focus/time. The image I have of Las Vegas drives me insane. I find it peculiar such attention thievery is even legal, or deemed safe.
I think the vast majority of employed users on HN are to a greater or lesser degree dependant on ads. Mostly indirectly I'd guess, and with varying independent levels of cognitive dissonance and awareness of their dependence. With a little bit of thought about how their organisation actually works they can see their place in it and the impact on the wider world.
For example "I make web apps for a widget maker, we don't have ads on our websites and I'm not dependant on ads for my wage". Ask the CEO of the widget company and they will tell you that with less advertising fewer would buy their widget and they would have to fire the developer.
Even after many years of debates and experiments, there is still no practical way to do anonymous micropayments. And I doubt there ever will be, because governments will always want to regulate payments.
So direct payment for content will very likely end up being yet another stronghold of all-powerful gatekeepers, just like the app stores.
In my view, these schemes will only be tolerated as long as they are tiny enough to fly under the radar.
Accumulate and pay in bulk.
I will always applaud the termination of the tracking advertising that we have online.
I think there final straw that breaks the advertising model is when browsers finally disallow/ discourage cross site communications. ie, even an image hosted on a different domain will be treated the same way mixed http/https is currently treated.
Google, of course will no doubt vehemently oppose such moves. On the flip side, I like how HN keeps blatant advertising away, except for the odd YC announcements: it just shows how sites with something tangible don't need to resort to subversive ads.
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[0] - which didn't start as advertising technology, but ended up being used this way.
The advertisers don't need to know a thing about me, they just need to know the general demographics and interests of the publication.
For example, the ads on this blog[1] are far more relevant and less invasive/annoying than anything that Google ever showed me before I started aggressively blocking ad networks. I assume that it is because the blog knows what I am interested in better than Google does, simply because I voluntarily go to their website and read their content.
The problem is in the user. They do this because we let them. Spread the adblock around your non-technical peers whenever you can.
I agree that we should block those even harder. The bad side is that whitelisting sites doesn't work well and well behaved actors are punished too. Especially those, since they do not employ measures against blocking in the first place. That does cost those sites that you actually do want to support.
So the current situation is that bad actors ruin it for everyone.
So if they do use an ad network, it seems like one that can connect me with products that I'm interested in without being intrusive.
I guess that I have no assurances that they aren't collecting my information and not using it, but down that road lies madness.
The promise of the ad networks is that they'll find the niche sites for the advertisers who then don't have to find suitable places to advertise on and buy ad space in a bunch of different places - less administration needed.
I don't think that this adds enough value to be worth eroding the privacy of all web users, but apparently it is according to the people who make the decisions. ️:shrug:
(Apparently HN strips away emoji from comments, didn't know that.)
And a lot of them aren't, and a big reason why people read HN or /r/$someNiche instead of an industry news site is because community link aggregators do a good job at weeding out the advertising.
> Ads do not benefit the user directly, they benefit the business, which expands and improves its products, which itself benefits the user.
I'd be careful, because this line of argument can justify anything a business does to make more money, because "they'll expand and improve its products". In reality, the "improvement" of a product is measured by its profitability, so if you let a business play unfairly and abusively, they'll only do more of that.
That business is sort of necessary for democracy, as decision-making requires information to close the feedback loop.
Therefore, I wouldn't quite so readily cheer the downfall of the industry with nothing more than the typical "be better and you'll find more paying customers" advice.
That's because it's the easiest and most profitable business model available. Kill it off, and media will shift to a different model. Advertising isn't necessary for media to exist, and it's not like people want media to exist because of ads.
> That business is sort of necessary for democracy, as decision-making requires information to close the feedback loop.
Sort of, kind of. Some news reporting is the part that's necessary for democracy. Not the entirety of what news sites serve today, and definitely not the larger media industry.
News reporting is already pretty much as low as it can get, thanks to advertising-based business model. Facts and reasoned opinions matter little; fake news and outrage-inducing reporting generates more page views, leading to more ad impressions, and thus more money for the news organization.
The alternative model is to make users pay. Imagine all news sites hiding behind paywalls. Advertising is not only easiest and more profitable, it is also most convenient for the end users.
I imagine this and I think we'd end up with a much saner world, but that's a separate topic.
One twist to that business model I can imagine that - I feel - would allow private news sites to exist while not burdening people and making the state actually pay for its democracy protection service is: allow everyone to deduct money they spend on news subscriptions from their taxes. This way, the free market for independent news services still works, but now the state is funding it - as it should, since timely news is a public good.
> it is also most convenient for the end users
That's because true costs are distributed and hidden; that doesn't mean they aren't there.
The bigger question for me is why publisher payouts keep dropping even while online advertising spend is skyrocketing.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachel_Soloveichik/publ...
https://ark-invest.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/internet-a...
Personally, I do not want a healthy competition in adtech breeding further innovation. That's like wanting a healthy competition in bacteria breeding super germs. I want the adtech market to die.
Chrome mobile not allowing extensions and therefore adblockers is a crime. There are different revenue sources other than ads (patreon or crypto micropayments for instance) which might evolve as the next means of payment for the internet and search engines. Google purposefully stopping the growth of new technology in order to grasp at an increasingly shrinking past is hurting the end user and is evil.
>> Brave browser (Stage 1) is a Trojan Horse for their actual business which is a blockchain-based advertising platform (Stage 2). https://mobile.twitter.com/aral/status/1013047635253526530
If you think that's true, then your idea of what constitutes an ad is very narrow, to the point it leaves out a large swath of reality.
An ad is an informational transaction between an entity offering a good or service and a consumer that may want that service.
When done poorly, it's an exchange neither are happy with. When done well, it's an exchange that both are happy with. We're all familiar with poor ads. The perfect ad is likely the signage above a retail space that let's the person looking for it know it's at that location. Even then, for those not looking for that specific store, it could be seen as unwanted (and that's also why a lot of cities limit the size of signage for buildings).
You might see this as a distinction without purpose, but I think viewing things completely (and often as a spectrum) helps put into focus the specific problems that we want to combat and let us focus our efforts on things that actually make poegress in those problems, rather than ineffectually attack a symptom.
Advertising isn't the problem. Poorly matched advertising is annoying, in effective, and costly. Tracking and profiling of the individual has risencin use to combat this, but has many other negative consequences. If we prevent tracking and profiling, the market will shift to some other way to match advertising, and we'll have less privacy problems (but possibly worse targeted ads). But at least it isn't overly broad and done in a way that doesn't help the real problem, tracking.
Do we really want to support something so draconian that even HN's minimal advertising articles, or someone's personal blog that endorses something would fall under those regulations? If not (if for not other reason it wouldn't help anything), we should be careful how we approach this, and target the real problem.
The Internet is utterly dominated by ads that are bad for the viewer, and beneficial to the advertiser. They're all pushed (vs. pulled) or resource heavy or manipulative or outright lying or optimized to give you bad deal or tracking you to various degree, and I mean "or" in mathematical sense - a lot of ads have all of these qualities.
Saying that not all ads are bad is - in the real world, accounting for the shape of the ad spectrum - like saying not all fungus you scrape off a wall is unsafe to eat.
I note it's a spectrum not just to protect some ads. Almost the entirety of that spectrum may be taken up with horrible ads. The important part is identifying what attributes set something acceptable (or even useful) apart from something that is not? Those are the things we want to understand and target, and we'll never even consider them if our approach is "ads are bad". How we frame the question informs our solution. The last thing I want is to replay the spam legislation of the early 2000's (not because I think there was much of a spectrum of spam from good to bad, but because the legislation was laughably ineffective.
A better service would be one where consumers pay with money to ask a service for the best recommendation of a product by an independent company. However automatic ads slapped on to every webpage are never warranted, are worse quality than the products shown without them, and are at best annoying, at worst misleading. 99% of ads do not fit into your definition of a good ad, in so far as I would catagorize your idea of a good ad just as a brokerage service, and not an ad at all. Consumers never go looking for ads, it's always the other way around.
Furthermore there are multiple other ways to make revenue online that don't involve ads, such as patreon. Imagine every site, but the only ads found are for the site's own support page. The quality of that site or creator rises, while still generating revenue. In the future, I believe that products and services that are not on some sort of crowdfunding service, will be outcompeted by those who are, no ads are necessary here.
This, along with your focusing entirely on online ads, leads me to believe you failed to understand my comment, or at least what the purpose of it was.
> A better service would be one where consumers pay with money to ask a service for the best recommendation of a product by an independent company.
That's a different way. It may or may not be better, depending on the service and and category, and how much money you have. One possible downside is that you need to know what you're looking for. A simple example of this is movie trailers. I used to see a lot of them, and I enjoyed knowing what movies were coming out later. A few years back I dropped cable, and only use a few online streaming services now. I remember once every 6-12 months to look at movie trailers on Hulu, otherwise I really only hear about stuff from word of mouth or from some interest site that is excited about it. Entire movies come and go that I never hear of now. Is that better? I don't particularly think so. I liked the exposure of movie trailers. Could some trailers be played too much and be annoying? Yes. Do I think the entire lack of them is a better? For me, no.
> Furthermore there are multiple other ways to make revenue online that don't involve ads
I'm not defending the current online ad industry. I'm trying to lay down a framework that leads to a solution that works better, by trying to re-frame the conversation on the actual problem elements instead of what happens so often, which is attacking symptoms and letting the actual problem surface somewhere else, just as bad if not worse. Attacking ads will not stock tracking, it will stop ads that track you. If you care about tracking and privacy, fight against tracking and for privacy, and the problematic ads will be forced to change as well, but at least they won't just shift to real world ads that track you, or other uses of tracking people for monetization that are even worse than advertising.
This does not change anything for me:
1) I do not keep cookies around anyhow
2) I use umatrix to not run known evil scripts in the first place
I am not sure if it changes anything for the average user either. I would assume ad companies already use fingerprinting?
More deeply you risk to miss what could really be the best for you, for what is the best for somebody else.
Source: verified on own site in v69. Page views show up fine in GA but the browser displays the new warning shield.
I misunderstood the purpose of Thunderbird - it's marketed as a messaging app, which it is, but I didn't realize it did email as well.
I'm going back to Chrome. Firefox still lags on my machine after all these years. Even with a single tab and on their own initial launch page, scrolling performed a "caterpillar" effect where only the top half scrolled, and the bottom half jumped to catch up a split second later
Firefox has a market share small enough that publishers and the ad industry could try to just reduce ff usage with a coordinated campaign.
Is there a way to figure out the performance's origin in FF somehow?
Then it asked if I wanted to trust them. I answered yes, repeatedly, yet the error message reappeared over and over again. (really bad). I gave up.
A little more competence and I'm on board.
There might not be the level of control that you speak of in the iOS variant.
Then block the scripts, do a daily update of the latest hashes as they appear. Include an option for expert users to report new scripts.
For example I was averse to Firefox for a long time because I didn't like the way scrolling pages felt.
That being said, while I vaguely remember there being huge icons at some point for a few versions, there aren't any now in my Firefox. Just a normal looking menu with small icons on the left and text on the right. I can't promise this is true for every platform, but maybe you want to take another look.
While I think everyone should value their privacy, I did not mean that as an attack on you, but if a menu you never need to access once you learn some shortcuts is just as important a factor as being tracked on everything you do, you should reevaluate how important privacy really is to you.
I think it will be a pragmatic business decision.
I've set up a relay myself, so I guess I did my part... But I wish more people would see tor as a private browser, not a gateway to "drugs, CP, and extremism'"