Louis Rossmann opines on the Firefox debacle [video]

When I installed LibreWolf via the Microsoft App Store (to easy auto updates) it would not let me into a profile file. It would state a directory in the dialog. I would try to then manually go to the directory and it would not exist. I don’t know if that was a result of a sandbox AppStore design or what. Anyway, I uninstalled and am trying Zen out. So far, so good and it has vertical tabs like I used Sidebery for in FF.

Is it possible to keep resist fingerprint enabled and only add an exception for dark mode?

I finally watched a Louis Rossmann video because he covered a topic I know a lot about.

I was surprised by how much he got wrong. He was mixing rumors, speculations, and facts as if they were all the same. He ignored some documentation the company released to counter the news stories, which he couldn’t have missed if he did any research at all.

By the end it felt like I had watched someone repeat the most uncharitable and speculative takes on the subject that had been collected from social media, all while ignoring any actual research.

It was weird to have it all presented in his faux fair and balanced demeanor, as if he was doing the company a favor by presenting both sides.

I don’t know if he’s always been this way or if this is a recent audience capture thing where he panders to people who want to be angry about things.

> As a long-time Louis fan it's sad to me he basically just complains even after leaving New York City. Also, when I met Louis IRL at one of his meetups he was actually super rude.

I've always gone out of my way to make people feel welcome at meetups. From asking a little about what they do, how their day is going, what their dreams are in life. I don't just do this as meetups. I do this when people recognize me on the street, when people recognize me if I'm on a date. I even took five minutes out to talk to a viewer while I was taking my girlfriend for treatment after she had a stroke.

The only person I've ever had a negative reaction from at a publi meetup in person was the stalker that followed my girlfriend across the country after I physically removed from the event.

You're not somebody I've ever met.

He’s just a kvetcher. I wish that kind of content didn’t do so well on YouTube/reddit - he’s rewarded handsomely for being like this, so he has no incentive to change.

Isn't this the "New York keeping it real" 'tude they are so proud of?

Not being flippant, I'm serious. That's what I've heard.

In peesonal experience, I found New Yorkers to be far friendlier than 99% of Bay Area baristas, so there's that.

There are more than enough things to complain about. If somebody wants to have a YouTube channel where they just complain, why is that a problem?

He said it's a nothingburger, then showed why. What a collosally unhinged asshole!

+1, a nicer looking ff experience, more customizable too.

As far as I know, Mozilla is funded primarily by Google. From their 2023 financial report[0]:

> Approximately 85% and 81% of Mozilla’s revenues from customers with contracts were derived from one customer for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively.

Google is not named, but to my understanding the "one customer" refers to them. Their aggressive monetization strategies are neither effective nor work to retain what little users they have left. This money is also being spent on crap like executive bonuses and acquiring adtech firms, so no wonder people feel alienated.

[0]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...

Someone needs to dismantle the system that clings onto a standard that requires $^6+/mo to implement. This is much more realistic than playing chase me game with someone who makes the rules.

They managed to convince everyone that a browser is naturally a hypercomplex app which requires so much maintenance, support and whatever. But in fact, a browser is an app mostly for rendering text, images and videos, and an embedded scripting language, which all wastes lots of memory and crawls on moderate loads. You can make an app like this in a month, solo, you just can’t fit it to the standard. Before web was a thing, people regularly made much more complex software that “web” heavily sucked compared to. This has to be done. No $200M/mo org can exist without naturally destructive interests in it. The lesson should be recognized, learned and never “feature update”d again. We learned everything we needed in these 30+ years, time to rip it out of corp hands, revisit, settle and put it into maintenance.

Add: to be clear, this is not a tech problem. It must be recognized and done at the antimonopoly level, crushed by the law.

I wonder if this could be a "money where your mouth is" thing for the EU.

If controlling a browser engine was considered strategic-- and for the love of the darkness, anything that gathers that much information and is owned by American techbros should be-- then they could provide a fair bit of a backstop to finance a dev team.

EU backing could also provide general street cred for the project-- it's both "financially resourced enough to not go poof" and "backed by an authority that both has a strong history of privacy protections, and is in a geopolitical scenario where they can't afford insecurity".

A very tiny percentage of people will switch.

No body wants to pay say 20$ a month for what they can have for free. I suspect you'd need a few hundred million in annual revenue to actually fund a full browser that doesn't rely on existing engines.

I think the question here is around how much money is actually needed to develop the browser features that people want without everything else that Mozilla does. At minimum, people would presumably want security fixes, new browser features that get standardized that websites will expect to be able to be used, and probably some amount of support/bugfixes for issues that people run into that aren't vulnerabilities but still might be annoying. It seems like a substantial amount of work, but I don't have a good sense of exactly how much would be needed for that. My understanding is that Mozilla makes its money primarily from deals to make certain search engines enabled by default, and secondarily from donations (with "selling user data" being somewhat of an unknown right now given that they seem to be claiming that they _don't_ make money from it because they're not "selling" it under what most people would consider to be selling, but it's not clear whether that's because they're claiming that "anonymized user data" isn't actually "user data" or whether they're not "selling" it).

The key factor to me is whether that poorly specified extra stuff is actually necessary as part of funding the development or not. As far as I can tell, getting a search engine deal is actually not out of the question for one of these forks; Waterfox's documentation[0] indicates that it has a deal like this (with Bing, from what I can tell from trying it out yesterday), and presumably a large migration of users to a fork could lead to an increase in the funding in the future, in addition to any individual donations. I don't know whether this would result in enough money in the long run to be able to continue developing a browser indefinitely, but Mozilla also is doing other things than just developing Firefox and has costs associated with that, and I don't think there's any other obvious revenue source, so the two most likely scenarios are that they're either making money off of selling user data (or something derived from it that they're claiming isn't user data but aren't willing to bet on the law agreeing with them) or they're actually incurring costs from those other things that could otherwise be spent on Firefox. If it's the former, I think that being vague and quibbling over semantics has lost them the presumption of good faith, and I'd reluctantly conclude that having browser focused on user privacy is no longer tenable and we might as well just all switch to Chrom{e,ium}. If it's the latter, then focusing solely on the browser would _reduce_ the incentive to sell user data for funding, and the fact that Mozilla doesn't seem able or willing to do this means that we're all better of moving to an alternative.

[0]: https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq/#6-how-does-waterfox-make-...

> If everyone does this, Mozilla won't be able to monetize your data and they will fight back for their survival.

So the whole thing is kinda weird, because the new terms of use _do not_ give Mozilla any ability to monetize your data. All they do is state that if you give the browser some data the browser can use that data to follow your instructions.

For example, I am using Firefox right now as I type this message in. Firefox will save what I type in my profile so that if my power goes out (or Firefox crashes, which is rare these days but wasn’t always) then it can recover this text when it restarts. It’s always done this but apparently Mozilla’s lawyers now think that this requires an explicit mention in the terms of use. I disagree, frankly, and I think the lawyers who forced this issue are milking it.

No, remove the quarantine flag on the command-line (find how on Google).

Waterfox, which some prefer over LibreWolf, seems to have an Android app. Haven't tried either of these alternatives on any platform though.

Are you trying to watch from a corporate managed account? That happens to me on occasion when I forget I’m in work mode.

You're surprised that hackers don't use mainstream tools?

ublock origin, tampermonkey, etc.

Fair warning it's beta quality but it's been my daily driver on ios and I've been happy with it.

> consider a chargeback

Chargebacks can’t be filed for every grievance. There is a specific list of circumstances that might qualify for chargebacks. I would seriously doubt that making a donation and then having the organization introduce new policies later would qualify under most agreements.

Frivolous chargebacks are not without consequence. One probably wouldn’t cause any obvious problems but if someone develops a pattern of weaponizing the chargeback system for other than the intended purpose (non-delivery of goods, product not as advertised and returns not accepted, etc) then the card issuer can drop the customer. Chargebacks are expensive for them and false chargebacks make you a risky, money-losing customer.

>(And if you donated to Mozilla in the past by credit card, consider a chargeback.)

???

A chargeback isn't supposed to be some sort of ultra bad review. It can only be invoked for specific reasons, like the merchant failing to deliver goods/services as expected, or an unauthorized payment. A donation is by definition a payment without expectation for anything in return, so you're going to have a hard time claiming the former. You might be more successful with the latter, but you'd also be committing wire fraud in the process.