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Comment by gonational | Hacker News Reader

Real talk, Mozilla; would you be interested in funding a privacy-oriented fork of Firefox with all the unnecessary extras (Pocket, etc.) stripped out?

I’m thinking something just like Firefox, except unencumbered by Google or other corporate affiliations, etc.

I think this would be the best first step towards any kind of “fixing the Internet”.

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It's tough.

People at Mozilla care so much about privacy, to the point that (when I worked there 2010-2012), they refused to do "services" the same way Google did (aka a login and a central server). So as a result, Chrome "just worked" and Firefox was completely unusable.

The people at Mozilla really care about privacy. But they also have to build something people can actually use. That means finding a balance between privacy and usability.

To you it's "fixing the Internet", but to most normal people it's "removing features." Like, can you imagine explaining to the average user why they can't just type a search into the address bar and get Google results?

(More specifically, though, what would you strip? Pocket is owned by Mozilla and is just a fancy bookmark manager, but sure. Google is just a default search; data isn't being sent to them. Outside of those, what would you remove?)

> they refused to do "services" the same way Google did

What services?

> More specifically, though, what would you strip?

Telemetry and the normandy/shield backdoor first of all. Then remove the google analytics from the about:addons page (or at least let adblockers work on it). Then let adblockers work on the mozilla pages. Then disable things like pings, beacons, etc by default and integrate more tor browser patches.

Firefox right now is the browser that calls back the most https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...

As for Pocket, Mozilla promised ages ago to make the server foss, still no luck with it.

This is an underrated comment.

> Google is just a default search; data isn't being sent to them.

You mean, apart from everything typed in the URL bar by default?

> ...they refused to do "services" the same way Google did (aka a login and a central server). So as a result, Chrome "just worked" and Firefox was completely unusable.

I think Mozilla found the perfect solution to services. They provide a service and open source the implementation [1]. This gives a "just works" option (which is still probably setting a pretty high privacy bar because it's Mozilla) and a fully self-hosted ultra-private option for those who want to go the extra mile.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/

As someone else said in here, I don't think they've open sourced the Pocket server software...

At least I haven't seen it yet.

I'm not really speaking for "Mozilla" because what does that even mean? But as one of the folks doing this summer program for Mozilla, I can say 100% we'd be excited to see a good application around this. There's a bunch of great browsers out there, most based on Chromium, but we're all pretty tied up with search as the only way to fund. Brave's made a step away from that, which is cool. I'd love to see more attempts at browsers with different funding models. If you have an idea and at least, say, the beginnings of a small team who could execute, we're available to provide feedback before you submit an application. thx!

This would benefit the couple of people who use that fork of Firefox, but would have no effect on every other Internet user. It's impossible for Mozilla to fund anything "unencumbered by Google or other corporate affiliations" when so much of their money comes from Google.

> unnecessary extras (Pocket, etc.)

Pocket is very necessary for some FF users (myself included).

That’s what add-ons are for.

If you're serious about this, you may want to contribute to the GNU IceCat project.

I'd be more interested in a fork with site isolation per process, no X11 exploits on Linux, etc.

We need a new Gecko - perhaps a fork of something else with all the resources Gecko gets put into it.

You are describing the Fission project [1]. You can enable it in nightly builds. It does break some things, crash a bit more often etc.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Project_Fission

Better many, many years late than never, I suppose.

Good resource!

It took Google several years to implement in Chromium as well. They just happened to have the convenience of having it ready when Spectre was revealed.

Why advocate for a fork when you could simply contribute to existing sandboxing and site isolation efforts?

Then how would they fund completely unrelated things like these?

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