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Comment by lancesells | Hacker News Reader

I'm always confused by the Mozilla hate here on HN. I mean Firefox works quite well as far as a browser goes, it's infinitely less evil than Google who is molding the web to their advantage and it's way more customizable than Safari.

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It's truly weird and I don't understand it. I mean not to defend Firefox but the HN reaction is almost comically extreme.

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Chrome: ...and so our company's puppy kicking campaign was a total success. In other news, we're updating our terms of service so that you agree to hand over your first born child.

HN: Meh, I'll still use Chrome though.

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Firefox: Today we fixed a bug that...

HN: OMG FIREFOX SUCKS. I'M USING CHROME NOW.

You can use de-Googled variants of Chrome that serve less telemetry, by default, and are more private, by default, than Firefox. They're also faster. And they're open source.

If variants are on the table, there's also IceCat and LibreWolf for the Firefox side.

Do these forks also undo the changes that google makes to chromium to push their agenda?

Behaviours that break expectations they've built up themselves hurt more than people just expecting Google to do Google things. I would posit that people that feel that way generally do not use Google's products, so it's viewed as not their problem, and also not surprising, when Google does something they don't like, but for Mozilla, it's felt as a betrayal of trust.

Google went through this a decade ago, when people stopped believing don't be evil was something Google cared about.

With Google it's fairly clear there is no expectation of privacy - Google doesn't particularly boast about it, and the fact that there's a ToS and "privacy" policy link below the download button on the Chrome website's page reinforces that.

If you ignore the privacy aspect, Chrome is actually a very good browser and has a healthy ecosystem of extensions. A lot of productivity-enhancing tools are distributed as Chrome extensions.

Firefox on the other hand constantly boasts about privacy which just gives a false sense of security - actually obtaining privacy with Firefox requires not only opting out of Mozilla's own bullshit such as Pocket, sponsored tabs/links and telemetry (the latter should be opt-in as per the GDPR) but also install a third-party ad blocker such as uBlock Origin.

Browser-wise, Firefox isn't stellar - it's slower than Chrome, lacks certain features and the extensions ecosystem is boring with a lot of the extensions that used to make it great have been killed off with the switch to Web Extensions.

At least with Google the business model is very clear, while Mozilla pretends to be on your side and fight for a better web experience while in reality being as nasty (if not more) than the competition.

this exactly plus also Mozilla used to be the "underdog" you rooted for when they were still small and weren't doing massive marketing campaigns and instead were innovating and doing cool stuff. somewhere I still have my Firefox logo shirt from when I was in high school. only a fool would maintain loyalty to a brand name despite massive personnel and mission statement changes over the years. I would like to like Firefox and Mozilla again but they haven't done anything to earn that from me in years.

> At least with Google the business model is very clear, while Mozilla pretends to be on your side and fight for a better web experience while in reality being as nasty (if not more) than the competition.

Really? They are as nasty (or nastier) than Google.

> Firefox on the other hand constantly boasts about privacy which just gives a false sense of security - actually obtaining privacy with Firefox requires not only opting out of Mozilla's own bullshit such as Pocket, sponsored tabs/links and telemetry (the latter should be opt-in as per the GDPR) but also install a third-party ad blocker such as uBlock Origin.

Presumably, they are nastier than Google because they have relatively anonymous telemetry data that doesn't include anything remotely private (seriously, take a look at `about:telemetry` and let us know what you find that breaches your trust), or because their sync product is end to end encrypted by default (unlike Google) or because they allow you to run your own sync server if you wish. Or maybe it is because the entire package is open source and extensively configurable and includes legitimately useful features like containers and tracking protection (wait, Google doesn't include that?).

Someone needs to stop taking hyperbole pills.

Every other browser caught up on features, and some bad things FireFox didn't have originally, it now has (ads, spyware). I don't really know why I'd recommend it to anyone these days. Early on, I was installing it everywhere anyone would let me, because it was so great compared to the alternatives.

I think it gets emotional because a lot of us used to really like Firefox, and we've watched it wither and rot due to bad decisions and what sure looks like a bunch of parasites feeding on its cooling corpse (and, to be fair, some really tough competition from Google and their massive advertising push for Chrome).

Meanwhile, the organization did manage to spin off a couple really great or promising side-projects (Rust, Servo, MDN) but then pulled the rug out from under them.

I wonder how many of these people complaining have even used it lately. Firefox with ublock is indispensable for me. I can't do DNS blocking everywhere all the time. You can disable any BS experiment stuff they put out through the about:config page. Chrome OTOH is spyware trash with a google account forced login dark pattern built right into the browser. I could do degoogled chrome but I don't see the point. What do I get? Floc style experiments?

I am using it lately (I have to use it, as on Windows and Linux there isn't anything better), which is why I'm so pissed off at it.

I agree with you that Firefox with uBlock Origin is a killer combo, however getting it to that stage takes a bit of effort (why should I have to do that in a browser that boasts about privacy all the time?) and it feels like you have to constantly fight Mozilla - whether it's opting-out of various built-in spyware such as telemetry, crapware such as Pocket or "features" such as sponsored sites/tabs (again, all in a browser that boasts about privacy), redesigns such as the new tab bar, or the constant nags after every update.

It is - my comment is just pent up rage/venting in hindsight, I'll edit it.

Yes, I agree that it's still less evil, but it used to be so much better and clearly going downhill. Initiatives like this don't inspire confidence it's going to become any better.

i think you are misunderstanding a lot of the negative sentiment towards mozilla, IMHO much of it is frustration rather than hate. people expect all the BS from an evil surveillance ad giant like google, but as someone else said below, all the dumb decisions feel like betrayal to those who have been and are still loyal firefox users

I'm seeing active misinformation/free floating hostility in this post. There are ways to express discontent that don't sound like Mozilla murdered your puppy, but that is somehow the tone of some of these posts.

> it's infinitely less evil than Google

The thing is Mozilla get more than 80% of its revenue from Google.

It’s fine to question if they are not just an extension of Google at that point. They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers; while pushing things like https everywhere that makes ads and trackers life easier.

> They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers

Really? Take a look at https://blog.mozilla.org/security/category/privacy/

The vast majority of these have been doable for a decade with open-source, permissively-licensed add-ons such as uBlock Origin so they're quite late to the party (especially when they could literally bundle the aforementioned add-ons as built-ins), not to mention that a lot of these only work on the strictest level of tracking protection which isn't enabled by default - providing a false sense of security to less technically-savvy users.

That is a different argument than doing nothing.

You could argue that they're doing nothing in the sense that they're not doing anything extra that other browsers (who don't boast about privacy at every possible opportunity) don't already do. For a browser & company that makes privacy claims all the time I'd expect them to be ahead of the others, especially when permissively-licensed solutions exist that can be bundled with little effort.

> You could argue that they're doing nothing in the sense that they're not doing anything extra that other browsers (who don't boast about privacy at every possible opportunity) don't already do.

You could, but you would be wrong, right?

Well yes indeed, feel free to disagree; just trying to explain my understanding of the parent's argument.

err, sorry, but what? HTTPS everywhere does not help ads/trackers at all. It _does_ prevent your ISP to inject ads in your webpages, something that was done by quite a few US ISPs. And more importantly, it prevents anyone not between you and the TLS termination from snooping on the contents of your communication, which is a definite upside.

There are a bunch of valid reason to dislike Mozilla, this is a really weird hill to die on...

Imagine thinking HTTPS is a bad thing, jesus... They'd probably be even madder if they found out how much involvement Mozilla had in getting LetsEncrypt off the ground.

>The thing is Mozilla get more than 80% of its revenue from Google.

Why criticize them for this in a thread _about_ Mozilla diversifying their revenue?

Half of HN seems to hate them for being so dependent on Google and the other half seems to hate them for having profitable (if small) ventures that reduce their dependence on Google, like the VPN or Pocket, or this.

>They have done 0 actions towards blocking ads and trackers

This is total garbage and I suspect you know that. If not, please do some more research.

https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi...

https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest...

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#native-file-s...

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

Diversifying their revenue with equally-hostile sources is not really solving the problem, not to mention that if Mozilla needs money, maybe better management of their existing money would be a good start.

What other sources of money exist? Look around you, years of lax anti-trust enforcement has left a wasteland for any tech company that's not funded by Saudi Oil money (YC / Softbank / Venture Capital generally) or a top N tech company like Google / Facebook / Apple / Microsoft. And the situation outside of tech is way worse.

The gains in the average 401k are primarily due to the 40% of it that is Tesla / Facebook / Apple / Amazon / Alphabet.

Microsoft (Bing) has their own browser so why would they bother with Firefox, same for Apple. Yahoo is dead. Facebook is evil. Google probably only does it for antitrust reasons.

In the good old days there was the concept of making a product and getting your customers to pay for it.

I believe there's enough value in a user-agent in a world where browsers are increasingly user-hostile. Sell a browser with out-of-the-box security & privacy features such as ad blocking (with officially-maintained & reviewed filter lists), spyware protection and some enterprise-friendly features that are best implemented in the browser (TLS interception, DLP, etc) instead of shitty middleboxes.

> This is total garbage and I suspect you know that. If not, please do some more research.

I take the bait.

> https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1365400306767581185

Firefox doesn't block Google Analytics. This is not true.

The rest is PR fluff. Can you cite one feature that provide better privacy than Brave that blocks ads and trackers natively?

Yes it does. It isn't enabled by default because it breaks some websites. Enhanced tracking protection is not marketing fluff.

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