Mozilla Rally
rally.mozilla.org
rally.mozilla.org
We want you to make a browser that is so good, that it can function independenty of Google and Chrome financially and technologically. This is not an end in itself. Google is just not a very trustworthy steward of the marketshare that they have on the browser market.
You are in a unique position to make this possible. Please double down on it instead of throwing away your hundreds of millions of monies that you have on unfocused, irrelevant bullshit that noone will remember in two years.
You made a whole browser engine that actually improved on current engines in Rust and then you basically threw it away. What on earth was that about ?
Mozilla we want you to make Firefox without any tracking, and without and advertizing shit in it , and we want it fast and secure, and we love your extensions. Some of us here are even willing to pay you subscription fees to support the browser! But keep in mind that you have millions of dollars already.
We loved you all the way from when your product was still called phoenix, Mozilla suite even, and everyone was so excited to have this excellent browser. We pooled money to take out full page ads in a paper newspaper for Firefox. Because we believed in your product so much. I still have the page here. Do you remember ?
Please. Stop with this stupid bullshit.
Focus, Mozilla, Focus!
From the depth of our hearts,
PS: and if you find some time, go fix that bug that makes the active tab so difficult to differentiate if lighting conditions or eyesight aren't perfect.
Is it possible that this is just a theme issue?
I think (I switched it a while ago) Firefox defaulted to System Theme on my machine (Ubuntu), not sure how that works in the Windows ecosystem though.
fwiw you can change the firefox chrome(what they call the browser widgets itself and predates googlechrome) css to highlight the active tab fairly easily if it's important to you.
At this point the average consumer is used to free stuff, and a subscription model would ensure that Firefox is only used by a niche audience.
It is doable. If there is an outrage, it would be manufactured.
There's a whole market around VPNs... So obviously enough money in that space.
There is no Mozilla infrastructure. All their servers run in AWS.
Yes I know - that would be a good place to start though don't you think?
In order to achieve Google independence, Mozilla can't just focus on Firefox. They need an ecosystem of web apps that are Firefox-first, or at least not Firefox-second the way Google's YouTube and Search are. They can build it themselves, or they can get other people to do it, just as long as it gets done.
Nobody seems interested in doing it for them. Most web pages either work better in Chrome, or they work about equally well in both browsers. The obvious allies that I can think of who might want to help elevate Firefox are Google's competitors, like NetFlix, Vimeo, various third-party ad companies, and, back when Google+ was still a thing, Facebook, but there are ideological reasons why being too overtly friendly with most of these companies can't happen.
Ideologically, Firefox would want to ally with hobbyist groups, but they're small and fragmented: if there was a widespread movement to push Firefox at the exclusion of Chrome, many hobbyists would be happy to participate, because fuck Google, but nobody wants to go on this stag hunt[1] alone, and nobody has enough influence to organize such a thing except maybe Mozilla themselves (if enough websites start blocking Chrome at Mozilla's request, YouTube will retaliate by blocking Firefox, and I'm pretty sure Google's war chest is big enough that they'd be the ones who live through this metaphorical nuclear war). So most hobbyist websites work about equally well in both browsers, which overall means that the set of websites that work well in Chrome is a superset of the ones that work well in Firefox.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt
Thus, Mozilla is stuck in a position where Google is vertically monopolizing them into irrelevance. Their repeated failure to launch their own products has proven that they don't have the power to go their own way, and working on their browser engine just means you have an excellent web browser engine, but that Chrome has them beat in the category of "stuff to actually do with it," which is much more important.
This is, of course, the reason why Google desperately needs to be broken up.
Every time Mozilla attempts to innovate on the web they're publicly berated for not refocusing the company on the cries of enthusiast developer crowd, as if continued criticism will eventually compel Mozilla to be a better company. Where's the support?
At this point it just seems like Google is keeping Mozilla alive for avoiding anti-trust issues, But all horizontal monopolies are switching to being vertical monopolies anyways as they've learnt there are no laws to stop them and so I don't think Google would have reasons to put up this facade for much longer either.
Yet I still use Firefox as main browser, But have started to switch mission critical websites to Brave. Mainly because I don't want to use 3rd party extensions(Found a recommended Firefox add-on involved in malicious activity[1]) and that websites have started to treat Chrome as the only browser(We're back to IE 6 times again).
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210924045611/https://github.co...
Now they're just using that same war-cry as marketing to get you to sign up and fill out surveys for their market research. They're doing exactly what they're mad big tech is doing (collecting data), but with a dose of moral superiority.
It's sad that they've taken a message that resonates and just haphazardly use it for messaging anything they're building.
So instead of saying "you should run your a/b tests opt-in only", what you really mean is "in order to fight for privacy, you should never run a/b tests", which, again, totally wrong hill to die on. Why is it so important they not be allowed to try different features to figure out which ones work and which ones don't?
Mozilla has made so many missteps they circled a small planet with them. This isn't one of them.
I may agree with the goals, but that doesn't mean I should blindly trust them to execute them, right?
If I told you right now that HN is A/B testing the size of the vote arrows, and you see larger ones than I do, how exactly are your privacy rights violated?
On a website, that isn't too much of a problem, because you expect your activity to be tracked since you are interacting with a web server.
In a browser, the same tracking is more intrusive. My behavior on a site is now being sent to the browser author, an unrelated party.
But you're just assuming it is. It could also be "On uninstall and crash, report back which studies were enabled" to track how many people are uninstalling their browser when the flag stupid_feature="on" is set.
Be mad about the data collected [specifically, what type of data is collected], not about the concept of a/b testing. Set clear boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable. Otherwise you're fighting an ever-uphiller battle. Because if they want to know which sites you visit and the privacy boundary is "a/b testing isn't acceptable", they'll do it via history syncing instead.
What does this sentence mean? A/B testing fundamentally requires data collection, so I don't understand how to be mad about the data collected but not A/B testing.
Don’t be mad _that_ data is collected, be mad about _what specific_ data is collected.
I don’t know that I agree, but it does help me understand the meaning of the previous post. Thanks!
Of course we are. We didn't consent to being experimented upon or to have our behavior analyzed, so we have no basis for trust.
> Set clear boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable
Acceptable depends on trust. Ask for permission, not forgiveness, and I am more inclined to trust. Without that, I assume the worst.
Mozilla has arbitrary code execution rights on your computer the moment you allow them auto-updates. They're also entirely free to ignore your opt-out or opt-in requests.
What is the consequence of this? In the abstract I understand that it doesn’t feel great, but I’m asking in the specific, how does it make a difference to any individual user?
If you knew that the user in the A group made fewer misclicks after the back button was shrunk … how does that harm anyone?
That's not the point. The point is unless you are doing data collection on anything but an opt-in basis, you are not pro-privacy. What you do with the data or why you collect it or if that collection is harmful is irrelevant to this principle.
A _privacy marketed_ browser sending such analytics data back home is different from a regular browser doing so.
* a short list of all the data they could collect, and
* a promise that they won't collect anything else without asking for the user's consent again,
then I doubt anyone would complain.
https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/18/mozilla_mr_robot_fire...
https://researchbasics.education.uconn.edu/ethics-and-inform... https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/conduc...
If it's "see which color blue people like best in your UI" then this is nonsense. Nobody is going to be harmed regardless of which color blue you pick, so they don't need to be informed. Some privacy zealots may want to be informed, but they don't have a reasonable argument for why they need to know.
I don't care how you rationalize it, as long as there is any sort of intervention, you need informed consent.
This is redefining something ordinary to sound bad, but that doesn't make it bad.
And I do not think you're even sort of having this argument in good faith. You can't possibly be a rational person and believe that changing UI colors is "deeply problematic experimentation on people".
Forgive me if I'm a little pissed off but this privacy extremism shit is exactly what leads to people looking down at anyone who is a privacy advocate as a nutjob. So, thanks a lot for that, more work for those of us out there who want, to, I dunno, protect citizens from being genuinely fucking spied on and their data passed around like candy so better ads can be served.
But hey, it's all good, you're keeping those pesky UI designers from knowing which of their redesign is better, so at least we got that going for us.
I also would not agree with any argument like "opt-in is necessary to reign in anti-privacy activities of bad companies like Facebook, but we're good UI designers at Mozilla so we don't need to use opt-in and can use opt-out with impunity."
A browser that collects and reports any information on its users without their explicit permission is simply not putting privacy first.
Any privacy-focused browser should make UI testing - or any other telemetry or analytics - opt-in and should generally clearly disclose any information being collected (and preferably make it available for inspection) and also describe all parties that will have access to the information as well as what it will be used for.
If you view them as instruments, you're a villain. It doesn't matter if your intentions are good. Everyone has good intentions. Every atrocity in human history has been made with good intentions.
It doesn't matter if you don't think it will do them any harm. That's not for you to decide.
You are free not to fill out the surveys but saying that any form of data collection is akin to "doing what big tech is doing" is an extremist position and undermines companies which are respecting users' privacy and requesting rather than forcibly extracting data about user behaviour.
I suppose when you know your audience is dwindling down closer and closer to just "people who are ideologically opposed to Chrome" this is the messaging you go with.
What I couldn't find was: does Mozilla get paid by the researchers for this data? There's language around users "donating" their data, and a sort of caveat-ed pledge not to "sell your data" but what the actualy structure of this program is was unclear to me. Their site isn't really clear about whether this falls under the auspices of the "corporation" or "foundation" side of Mozilla's operations.
I also wonder for research purposes, the extreme opt-in nature of this program, you need to be using Firefox, you need to opt-in to Rally, and opt-in to the specific study. You have so much selection bias there that the data feels like it won't be terribly useful for extrapolating valid patterns about, say, COVID-19 information/misinformation (as one of the studies is examining).
1. Trying to make money off selling it to end users.
2. Trying to make money by selling the end users' attention to advertisers.
3. Vanity, if it's a side/hobby project.
4. Influence the audience (pushing things aligned with their values into the audience's attention span).
5. Being a loss leader of a sort. E.g., trying to grab a market share in expectations to make money later, or sell growth figures to investors.
So, specifically to web browsers:
* Chrome, the de-facto standard, is clearly sustained by option #2.
* Because Chrome is free-to-use, option #1 is not viable for any competition.
* Because web browsers are complex and require a lot of upkeep, #3 is also mostly out of the picture.
So, if Mozilla wants to stay alive, they have no other choice than to treat their end users as the merchandise. And, to differentiate themselves from Google, they will keep making bullshit claims that will have nothing to do with reality. Even worse, as long as the current approach to antitrust doesn't change, there won't be any long-term alternatives to this model.
All of this could be swiftly solved by deeming indirectly subsidized "free" products anti-competitive (e.g. cash flow coming from outside the direct users), and not allowing mergers above something like a 20% market share, but I can't see this happen anytime soon.
Ironically, the page loads JS from https://cdn-3.convertexperiments.com (seems to belong to convert.com) and Twitter, without disclosing the fact that Mozilla is sharing your browser data with those two entities.
I'm a daily Firefox user myself, but I can't help to feel that each political effort they try to execute either backfires, or draws resources from what really has to be done: developing and maintaining a excellent user agent for the open web.
This is why (for the narrow demographic that bothers to care) uMatrix is such an awesome tool. This page is completely functional without loading either of those domains' shovelware -- and it saves laptop battery life too. This is true for most pages.
Ironic indeed that it's mozilla.org illustrating this point.
Block everything by default! Block all the things!
The requests were blocked in my browser, but the reason I checked in the first is the same reason I check every time some service claims to be pro-privacy or other similar things like this landing page: Are you actually living up to your words? In this case, they didn't, and honestly, there is not a cases where they do live up to their word 100%.
Mozilla's positioning as a privacy advocate while consistently pushing projects that are antithetical to privacy is just nauseating.
I'm not sure we can meaningfully advocate for privacy atm without having a better understanding of what data big tech collects, what inferences they can glean from even limited data sets, what changes in behavior their customers can nudge users toward, and the worst-case hazards that extant algos can create.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind joining an "Evilcorp" social media network run by FSF, EFF, or some such, if it were done in a way where the insights gleaned about big tech dangers were to be made public in a responsible way. It's one thing to watch a documentary that provides a vignette with actors showing how social media might nudge a teen away socializing to instead check their status updates. It's quite another to find out that a single, seemingly trivial change to the "Evilcorp" feed caused an average of 2 hours less sleep for its userbase.
I'd also want to know-- what's the worst case sleep loss average? It's important to have detailed answers to these kinds of questions if we want to meaningfully protect our privacy online. And we don't even have something as crucial as `git blame` for these types of things.
And given the ubiquity of data mining today, the dangers of creating such a dataset must be a drop in the bucket by comparison.
this is a research tool. People voluntarily and with their own consent contribute data to understand how tech companies and algorithms use data.
If privacy now apparently entails that voluntarily collected data for scientific purposes is illegitimate we better close every university and business on earth down. These complaints are getting a little bit ridiculous.
This really is the kind of thing that could uncover some very shady practices by Facebook and others, but I expect it to produce the same kind of bullshit as the recent "Facebook whistleblower" who worried that facebook is not abusing its power sufficiently to censor and unperson people.
Brave as I understand it is just the Chromium browser at its core. (Similar to how all browsers on iOS are just safari wrapped in a different application layer)
- Native adblocker based on uBlock Origin algo
- Proxy all requests to Google based service in use in Chromium such as Safebrowsing
- Added anti fingerprinting stuff on some web techs such as webgl, canvas, plugins
- Still open source (to be noted: the ads code, server side, is not)
- Everything documented on their wiki
- Trusted binaries unlike ungoogled-chromium
If you can set aside the crypto part of Brave, I believe this is the best Chromium based browser currently.
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
Mozilla hasn't managed to sell me something yet and in fact relies on money from google which makes money with ads.
Understand search engine choice? That's an absurd thing to say; 90% of their revenue comes from default-search-engine contracts...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...
>"The majority of Mozilla's income (over 90 percent) is generated from relationships with search engines and Google has always been top of the list."
No doubt they'll report some true and nasty stuff about Facebook, but this is straight out of the "Big Tobacco/Oil" research funding playbook.
To me Mozilla is barely distinguishable from Google at this point
If they want to actually break with big tech, they can retract and apologize for this pro-censorship advocacy piece: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
No way would I touch something like this with your pole. This is langauge that paves a clear path for abuse. This isn't even modern day virtue signaling, it's been around for ages.
I can't manage to see Mozilla as standing on integrous ground, with their constant spewing of 'woke' bs and muddy objectives/chasing of butterflies.
Create something new to love, rather than fighting against what you hate.
I'd like to highlight a few reasons why this could be exciting and, indeed "pro-user".
* The core value proposition in my view, though not spelled out on the linked page (I think because it's targeting a broader-than-HN audience), is that data collection can produce answers to empirical questions about "Big Tech" that would otherwise likely never be answered by anyone except in-house Big Tech data analysts. E.g., empirical questions about the impacts of search engine design choices, how newsfeeds influence behavior, etc. Of course, these studies will face issues with selection bias, but that's not insurmountable, and probably better than nothing. For instance, publicly shared data about Pixel tracking, even from a biased sample, is better than having no data on that topic, IMO!
* The collaboration with academics and journalists is important because it means the results of each study will be shared. It's in the incentive systems of both groups to publish results. Best case, individual users, people who build browser extensions, etc. can use findings about search engines and newsfeeds to change their behavior or build new tools. Policy discussions would also benefit from some quantitative grounding.
* The alternative ways to answer these questions: academics and journalists run scrapers, data-collection browser extensions, etc. on their own. Harder to do, especially post-Cambridge Analytica and more recently, NYU's ad observatory getting shut down (https://cyber.nyu.edu/2021/08/21/facebook-disables-ad-observ...). Or, the state forces tech co.'s to publish answers. Or, we just never know!
* A weaker point: This project is trying to set new standards about data management, e.g. providing a true "one click to opt out" option. I see this as an experiment, that other projects can follow if it works. This is a bit more of a stretch than the previous two points.
My bias: I'm an academic who wants to see the results of the various studies being conducted, so I'm very hopeful!
It's not important to me.
Projects like this make me want to choose a browser other than Mozilla.
It's always possible in the future that Rally, or other initiatives, will find other ways to incentivize contributions (more projects that align with specific interests, more "visualization" of how your data contributions might impact the world, etc.).
As to whether the cost-benefit accounting (producing new knowledge, informing design vs. scaring users off Firefox, creating new privacy harms) will come out in favor of the project remains to be seen, of course!
It's a leadership issue and for an outsider looks almost like a hostile takeover. I stopped using Firefox years ago at this point and have stopped testing what I build for it since the relevance of Firefox unfortunately is miniscule anyway. They have too little market share now and they just continue turning their backs on everyone that used to support them.
There's a bit of a false dichotomy in some comments, where Mozilla Rally is preventing or hampering Mozilla from improving Firefox. They can and should do both at the same time, especially if both are positive things.
It doesn't mean all their initiatives are equally good, and that we shouldn't still criticize the bad ones. But this seems benign at worst, and could possibly do some good. it's completely opt in, transparent, and with very strong user control over the data.
Instead of chastising them for all their other shortcomings yet again, I prefer to be happy that this might benefit ethical research.
They've become some sort of an ethics firm that they front with their dying browser. A little like AOL being reduced to a web portal long after their Netscape days.
It's unfortunate because they really can't afford to compete with Google and continue with Servo or anything innovative.
They lost the race in browser performance and usershare. The only way I could imagine Firefox regaining the latter would be a political event of the popularity and significance of Net Neutrality "scaring straight" non-technical users into FOSS.
> “Mozilla Rally has the potential to be the Hubble Space Telescope of the Internet.”
> David Lazer, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences, Northeastern University
and
> “Mozilla Rally is a revelatory tool that seeks to fix the information imbalance created by tech platforms at the public’s expense.”
> Julia Angwin, Editor-in-Chief and Founder of The Markup
For example tracking facebooks tracking pixels (https://rally.mozilla.org/current-studies/facebook-pixel-hun...).
I can't determine if this is "fighting big tech with their own weapon" or "adding more tracking to the problem of too much tracking".
Oh wait, that’s exactly the opposite of what Mozilla is doing - they fired a hundred of engineering people some time ago. I guess the activist talking heads stayed though.
I wish firefox would focus on getting the browser up to snuff for daily usability things like basic profile switching and better defaults for privacy.
but c'est la vie.
Other than PR and growth hacks and maybe activism, which is what they seem to be trying now?
It seems like every other month there's a thread complaining about how Mozilla would never really do anything against Google's interests because of their income stream, and then every other month in between those rant threads Mozilla launches some new tracking protection [0] or privacy initiative directed specifically against Google.
[0] https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185
- Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
- Source: https://github.com/containers-everywhere/contain-google
Some people have estimated that Google gives Apple $15B in total for its default search position. That could mean that around 16-23% of Apple's profits come from Google paying for being the default search engine. Heck, analysts said it would probably reach $18-20B for 2022 (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/27/google-could-pay-apple-...). Apple's profits for the past 12 months was $94.7B (which is up around 66% against the previous 12 months). $20B would still be 21% of that. Even $15B is 16% of that.
The default search on iPhone is one of Apple's largest businesses. It's bigger than its Mac business or its iPad business or its wearables business.
Yet Apple is still biting the hand that feeds them by working against ad tracking. One can argue that it might help Apple in other ways like customer goodwill, making marketers more reliant on Apple-provided data if third parties can't track as well, weakening Google in ways that might weaken the Android ecosystem, etc. Similarly, Mozilla is trying to get a certain amount of customer goodwill and potentially finding other ways for marketers to reach their customers.
While Apple's position in the market is quite secure, Mozilla might be seeing a future where Google doesn't think it needs to pay Mozilla for that default search position. Firefox users are likely people who know how to switch browser defaults and Firefox marketshare is getting small and continuing to decline. I think that's a big reason that we're seeing Mozilla search for new sources of revenue. It looks like Firefox usage is down more than 50% over the past 5 years alone. That means its default search position is a lot less valuable. Even if Google will continue to pay, those payments are likely shrinking. Firefox's position on mobile is even worse.
Even if Mozilla is mostly financed by Google, that financing is likely shrinking. At the same time, software engineers in the US are getting really expensive and Google is pouring money into Chrome (engineers and marketing). Chrome also benefits from a lot of third parties putting money into Chrome. Microsoft is now using Chromium for Edge and Node and the rest of the JS world uses V8. That puts so much weight behind Chromium for Mozilla to fight against - while likely seeing their funding from Google shrink.
It looks like Mozilla's royalty revenue is declining a bit (probably around 10% over the past 5 years), but not too substantially so far (and there's always some noise). But it's also not growing which puts them in a bit of a precarious position given that Google and others are investing more and more in Chromium, their marketshare is declining (which will likely lead to declines in search engine payments in the future), and the increasing cost of software engineers. So do you try to stick it out with the Google search agreement knowing that your users landing on Google's website will be told to upgrade to Chrome or do you try and find a source of revenue that isn't a competitor?
Give me privacy and, after that, speed. I don't want ANY data collection that is not opt-in. As it is I have to go out of my way to use a custom `user.js` to get this instead of it coming out of the box.
But it should have been opt-in.
If a company engages in monopolistic, anti-competitive, or abusive behavior, call it that.
But, large non-evil companies do not exist.
"But, large non-bad companies do not exist." I hope this helps you realize how unbased in reality this statement is. Maybe you could give me some basis as to how you justify this opinion?
> monopolistic, anti-competitive, or abusive behavior
Or, say, a bookseller delists some book for ideological reasons. If it's one private location, little harm, little foul. Amazon? Uh oh.
Size and market share do matter, and some effects depend on that.
Their poor decision making, including Pocket integration, started after they forced Brendan Eich out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27107820 ("Why does every advert look the same? Corporate Memphis (wired.co.uk)") [189 comments]
>"The illustration style is flat, geometric, figurative, and usually made up of solid colours... It’s an aesthetic that’s often referred to as ‘Corporate Memphis’, and it’s become the definitive style for big tech and small startups, relentlessly imitated and increasingly parodied. It involves the use of simple, well-bounded scenes of flat cartoon figures in action, often with a slight distortion in proportions (the most common of which being long, bendy arms) to signal that a company is fun and creative."
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...
but no... it's real
And those Pocket ads.
And why isn’t there an easy reader view at one click?
And why do they make it so hard to disable JavaScript? In Safari it’s just one easy key combo.
- Reader view (desktop): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
- Reader view (Android): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/view-articles-reader-vi...
- Reader view (iOS): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/view-web-pages-reader-v...
A Firefox support page recommends using the NoScript extension for quickly toggling JavaScript, which works on both desktop and Android:
- JavaScript support page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/javascript-settings-for...
- NoScript: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/
- Guide: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
It even works on HN discussion pages (though HN is such a simple site that there's no benefit). You can test it on this discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30061672) or any Wikipedia page.
And the fact that we are connected 99.9% of the time doesn't make it less annoying on the next flight (whenever that will be in this pandemic :)).
Uncover Facebook tracking. For what outcome?
Help local news find sustainability. What does this even mean?
What meaningful outcome comes from this Mozilla either for myself as a user or the wider community? Give me a tangible example of the benefits, please!