Why I Broke Up with Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Why I Broke Up with Firefox

bookofjen.net

19 pointsfreediver41 comments

Mozilla, committed to carbon-neutrality in specific ways, mentioned accepting Bitcoin as a donation currency, and her conclusions were:

1. Mozilla doesn't care about the environment, and

2. I should drop Firefox and use Apple's browser.

I'm curious about Apple's App Store revenues from cryptocurrency apps, or about Apple's policy regarding their carbon footprint. I suspect that a company which has knowingly relied on child factory workers as part of its famously-vertically-integrated supply chain is maybe not as conscientious as Mozilla.

In that context, the author's snap judgement about how Mozilla must be totally reversing course seem a bit apoplectic and reactionary, given that she immediately went to Apple without taking even a cursory glance at Apples track record.

This article seems to be more of a manufactured platform for the author's distaste for cryptocurrency than an expression of genuine concern about the environmental impact of web browser publishers.

The author doesn't seem to appreciate that Mozilla's onboarding of a general cryptocurrency payment processor does not mean that Mozilla endorses the specific cryptocurrency Bitcoin with its notorious energy usage.

And going by the language used in the article (her apparent distaste that Mozilla is "encouraging people to mine cryptocurrency"), it's pretty clear that the author does not grasp that many cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin are not mined.

In short, aside from painting broad generalized strokes about Mozilla versus Apple, it also paints broad generalized strokes about cryptocurrencies. It's a piece based mostly on the author's opinion rather than objective research about the environmental footprints of companies or of payment processing.

They made a mis-step and then quickly corrected it. Apparently that's not enough for the author:

"At the time I am writing this blog post, it appears that Mozilla has removed the BitPay link from its donations page. That’s a start, but it doesn’t mean that Mozilla won’t decide to go ahead and put the BitPay link back again."

This is something that I really disagree with in our modern discourse, that people or groups of people are apparently incapable of change.

Mozilla did a thing, Mozilla got crap for it, Mozilla undid the thing and apologized. How does continuing to be publicly mad at them and ending one's use of their product inspire future people or groups to actually change?

It's the same as when people dig through old social media posts and then slag on someone in the here and now for it. "Oh, so you say you are a supporter of [thing] but what about that time in 2005 when you made an off-color joke about [thing] and left it laying around the Wayback Machine for anyone to find with barely an hour's worth of digging?!"

Literally the only reason the rando blogger is annoyed is because Mozilla could put the link back.

This perpetual outrage is particularly funny when you consider Apple Pay/Cash can also embrace crypto at any moment. That’s in character for Apple.

Then what? Does the author immediately throw away their expensive laptop and get a Surface, never to return to Apple?

I was expecting product reason. To hear they switched because the company accepted a form of payment the author didn't like is beyond lame. The reasons for switching and back left me wondering why I cared that they once used firefox.

Tell me it's slower or your bank doesn't let you login or a million other reasons. To drop a browser because they accept discover means your reasons for switching were fairly weak to begin with.

I don't agree with the author and wouldn't boycott Firefox because of this.

But I don't think the author was wrong to do it either. If a company said "Sure you can pay dollars, or you can pay us funny money if you also fully combust 628 lbs of coal for no reason," I think it would be right to boycott them.

To my knowledge, the biggest cryptocurrencies still use proof-of-work. A recent study said that Bitcoin emits the equivalent of 369.49 kg CO2 per transaction (regardless of size). Google tells me that coal emits CO2 at a rate of around 2.86x its mass when fully combusted. That means just paying someone with bitcoin is similar to burning 628 lbs of coal while we're in a climate crisis. No thanks.

And that doesn't even account for the fact that Mozilla is not going to hold on to the bitcoin, and the outgoing transaction will cost another 628 lbs of coal...

Thankfully most transaction happen off the chain.

It seems like this person wanted a browser for identity reasons instead the utility of browsing. Firefox isn't being sold and when you donate you donate to the foundation which doesn't fund firefox. Whatever impact on the environment she imagined doesn't exist in reality because she was never going to donate cryto and even if she did it would happen on a big exchange off the chain.

You are detailing the cost to defend the whole blockchain and every transaction that has occurred. Classifying it as just the cost of a single transaction is misguided.

Layer 2 bitcoin solutions like lightning with infinite theoretical TPS (transactions per second) make this kind of math seem even more idiotic.

When lightning was implemented, you could no longer definitely say each Layer 1 Bitcoin TX is 1 transaction. In reality, any single bitcoin tx could actually be a batch of 10,000+ transactions settling on Layer 1.

I've switched from driving a Toyota to driving a Volkswagen because Microsoft writes software that Toyota used and software is bad for the planet because it uses electricity.

Why I'm still non-monogamously dating Firefox, who is my main partner: It's the closest to free-as-in-speech browser software I can get.

Let me save folks a lot of time:

- Mozilla announces they're accepting crypto - Community is substantially annoyed, rightly pointing out crypto is horrifically bad for the environment - Mozilla says they're re-evaluating - Mozilla removes the crypto donation links in the meantime

...and that is not enough for Jen the Freelance Blogger.

Because "they could add it back."

I agree that crypto should be discouraged, unless/until it's made to be power efficient. It's sad to see tech bros and academics evangelize wasteful technology like this, and Mozilla buying in to the hype. We're better than this.

What other things in your life do you apply this rule (that they should be discouraged until they are made even more efficient) too?

If something takes a significant amount of electricity to do well, should we not do it? No one should drive a Tesla?

Teslas are way more efficient than 90% of all cars - I guess you'd discourage them last. Honestly nothing comes to my mind which is not already discouraged, such as inefficient light bulbs, devices with high stand by consumption, ...

How about air travel or meat consumption? Those have big environmental footprints, but it doesn't seem like society generally discourages going on flights or eating meat.

it does through CO2 taxation or similar models, however I think the current levels aren't sufficient.

I think the tesla analogy is flawed. People want to get between places and the most current methods of transportation emit co2. So, a tesla driver, depending on how the local grid where they charged it is built, will likely emit less co2 getting around than someone driving a combustion powered car. The owner of an electric vehicle is going to want to go places regardless what kind of car they have.

What is the added value that cryptocurrencies have over traditional currencies/speculative investments?

Or what does it mean to 'do cryptocurrencies well'? What is it that we want to do? Their are other mechanisms to invest or to exchange value why are we using all these resources to create 'value' in this way?

> What is the added value that cryptocurrencies have over traditional currencies/speculative investments?

What is wrong with using cryptocurrencies for this? [0] Is there a problem using a stablecoin sitting on a blockchain technology designed for facilitating global cross-border payments? Maybe one of the use-cases is that they can send money to others even when users find out that their own banks have shutdown their own bank accounts [1] for no explanation.

[0] https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/uniswap-founder-s-bank-accoun...

If the local grid for the bitcoin miner is green then they're not emitting much CO2 either...

Is removing control from gatekeepers not valuable to some people? Is the argument that a transparent ledger is no more useful than an invisible one?

The biggest issue with proof of work crypto currencies is the "inefficiency" is the goal in and of itself. If someone makes a plane 10x more efficient tomorrow every airline is going to switch. If someone makes a bitcoin miner that is 10x more efficient they will need to 10x the difficulty to mine or it will become too cheap to attack the network.

Proof of work, unlikely almost anything else, is fundamentally opposed to efficiency gains.

What is wrong with cryptocurrencies like Stellar or Algorand?

Crypto tech has already been made power efficient. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only relevant ones that haven't adopted the new technology yet, and Ethereum is about three quarters of the way through rolling it out.

The subtext I'm reading in your comment is that most cryptocurrencies are power inefficient, which just isn't true.

I'm curious whether Bitcoin and Ethereum might actually constitute "most cryptocurrencies" by USD transaction value per day. They are certainly the only non-meme ones that most people hear about.

This post has nothing to do with "Firefox the browser".

I am seeing a lot of negative reactions in the comments which does match my initial reaction. But I am curious.

This article hit the front page so a reasonable number of people found it interesting.

Did anyone glean something positive from this article?

While I disagreed with the author's reaction to Mozilla's apology and what seems to be their good faith response to criticism, her argument against crypto on moral grounds changed my thinking about cryptocurrencies. It was the first time I'd heard such a strong argument against cryptocurrency on moral grounds that it is a waste of resources. I've heard some strong arguments for how in some places it may be subsidizing the developement of renewable energy production by buying up electricity at surge times, and that many crypto currencies are moving towards less energy intensive methods. Still, it seems that on the whole the constant use of resources to produce evidence that one has used resources as a proxy for storing value is absurd and wasteful.

> her argument against crypto on moral grounds changed my thinking about cryptocurrencies. It was the first time I'd heard such a strong argument against cryptocurrency on moral grounds that it is a waste of resources.

I have heard about the energy consumption of Bitcoin many times. The first time I heard the scale, I recall being shocked. If I wasn't familiar with the environmental impacts of Bitcoin, I imagine I would find this article fascinating.

For me, I found this article's critique of Bitcoin to be unsatisfying for two reasons. First, it didn't advance the author's own ideas as it was limited to two direct quotes. And second, it was information that I had heard before from several other sources.

If I had to guess, people upvoted without actually reading the article.

Dumping on Mozilla is pretty popular on HN.

This got me thinking: Maybe privacy and environment friendly are two things we cannot have both?

Privacy usually implies decentralized, but that’s less efficiency than centralized solution

There are plenty of zksnark based crypto solutions out there that are both private and environmentally friendly. Bitcoin uses a particularly nasty and wasteful consensus algorithm that just happened to have first-mover advantage enough to become a major contributor to world carbon emissions. It'll eventually go away and be replaced with one of the alternatives that doesn't require the same energy burn.

> Privacy usually implies decentralized

Not really. What is decentralized about your parents knowing everything about you, and still being privacy-respecting?

Perhaps you meant anonymity implies decentralized, which is debatable too.

I feel like I got clickbaited...

The seems like purity testing.

IIRC mozilla has been accepting bitcoin donations since 2014...

Apple allows apps which enable tracking and trading BTC have you considered contacting them and requesting them to stop?

Lol.

Sour grapes and misinformation. The reason to break up with Firefox (and especially Chrome and Safari) is that they are browsers which believe and are designed in a way where the end user does not have control. The end user is to be protected from themselves by removing control. It started in version 37 with Firefox, when they made it so you can no longer edit or add extensions without first getting approval from Mozilla. It's only become more like Safari and Chrome in the years since.

Don't break up with Firefox because they mentioned a way to donate you don't like. Break up with them because they're actively shipping browsers that are user hostile. Just like Apple and Google.

What browser do you use?

Forks of firefox from before it removed XUL. Seamonkey and Palemoon and the like.

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