mcc (@mcc@mastodon.social)
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Attached: 1 image So this, from Firefox, is fucking toxic: https://mstdn.social/@Lokjo/112772496939724214 You might be aware Chrome— a browser made by an ad company— has been trying to claw back the limitations recently placed on ad networks by the death of third-party cookies, and added new features that gather and report data directly to ad networks. You'd know this because Chrome displayed a popup. If you're a Firefox user, what you probably don't know is Firefox added this feature and *has already turned it on without asking you*
  • Irdial@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    2 months ago

    Literally every browser has this option, and it gives users a choice. If you use an ad blocker, it has this option as well and has had it for several years now.

    • doodledup@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      This is the first browset to implement something like that. I don’t know what you’re talking about and you don’t either apparently.

      • Irdial@lemmy.sdf.org
        0·
        2 months ago

        Safari refers to it as “Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement”, and Chrome includes an option as part of its “Privacy Sandbox.” Please have the decency to do a basic google search before being an asshole :)

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Chrome’s privacy sandbox is a very different protocol from Mozilla’s PPA protocol. I haven’t read about Safari’s variant so I don’t know if that’s a copy/paste of Chrome’s or it’s own protocol

          The big difference between Privacy Sandbox (previously Topics API and before that FLoC) and PPA is that Google’s “solution” still tracks the user while Mozilla’s just tracks the ads and gives aggregate data to the advertiser

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Not this option, but generally I agree. Currently I don’t think this is bad, and in the longer term we will see if this leaks any identifyable data.

  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    2 months ago

    This almost sounds like a hoax. But assuming it’s true… Install LibreWolf. It’s Firefox without the infuriating Mozilla stupid.

  • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
    0·
    2 months ago

    And they wonder why their market share is decreasing.

    The only major browser that actually seems to care about their users is Vivaldi, sadly.

  • mtchristo@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 months ago

    Oh shit. Now that I have checked, it was turned on by default on mine too.

    What’s wrong with you mozilla ?? Firefox was supposed to be the alternative

    • fernlike3923@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      2 months ago

      Browser development might not be sustainable with user donations, but it sure as hell is sustainable when you get 400 million bucks by Google every year.

      • Auzy@beehaw.org
        0·
        2 months ago

        You’re actually wrong. They did when they started.

        I know because I donated

        The funny thing is that the people who complain most about stuff like this, tend to be the people who contribute the least.

        If you don’t like them making money to support development, you’re more than welcome to work full time on developing it for free

        • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
          0·
          2 months ago

          Ah interesting. I didn’t know. I started using Firefox as a kid around version 2.

          I totally want Firefox to make money, but I wonder if donations couldn’t be a significant part of that pie today. It seems a lot more people would prefer to donate to Firefox than Mozilla.

          • Auzy@beehaw.org
            0·
            2 months ago

            Yeah. Maybe I’m just old (I’m 40).

            I would be happy to donate. But, the reality is… donations don’t work in my experience. One of my projects went FrontPage on all the major tech sites (and even was mentioned in Linux format magazine).

            I got $300 in donations.

            $250 was from a person I knew…

            Backend projects often get screwed more, and I guess you probably need to hope you get supported by companies like Redhat ultimately. This may be why in my case. But backend projects always have people dissing them (frontend projects just need to look good and markety)

            I think what’s more important is that it’s open source to be honest. We’re actually lucky we still have Mozilla honestly.

            In Mozilla browser days (after Netscape), id imagine it would have been a struggle to get a good pay. The people still there I suspect took a massive risk, and could have moved to lots of other companies like Google instead quite easily

            I think they deserve to get rewarded…

            • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
              0·
              2 months ago

              I feel like Mozilla could have been what NextCloud is today. Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions. It could be all neatly integrated into Firefox, and you would pay a premium to use them without self hosting. The only thing they did was create Firefox VPN, and the only reason most people use VPNs is because of scammy marketing.

              • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
                0·
                2 months ago

                Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions.

                When Mozilla was founded the idea of hosted webapps didn’t exist. Quite the frankly web standards didn’t yet exist to allow such a thing to exist. Those were the days when you’d use Flash, Shockwave or Silverlight just to view media content on the web.

                But I do agree, they could be investing right now into feature rich hosted services, but they’ve only half-assed any paid services they’ve tried to integrate and then dropped them because they couldn’t get enough users to make it worth continuing the effort

                • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
                  0·
                  2 months ago

                  Exactly because Mozilla was around to see the Internet grow and mature they should have been fit to create such a suite.

              • Auzy@beehaw.org
                0·
                2 months ago

                Yes… Similarly, there are lots of browsers that failed too… KHTML for instance is what Chrome and safari was based off…

                They have a huge number of projects they tried… Including their own mobile phone OS which they were actively shipping (it’s a pity it didn’t survive, would have been nice to have a 3rd OS)

                It’s really a risk / time payoff here. The reality is, when you see projects like this, there are 20 more which fail.

                When you have limited resources, things like Firefox VPN actually make sense, because its low risk (there’s a lot of competitors, but its fast to implement).

                An office suite takes a huge amount of resources, and is a lot of work.

                VPN’s do have their uses. But, I agree… 99% of it is scum marketing

          • SunDevil@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure all donations go to The Mozilla Foundation. I believe the foundation is the decision-making power for the corporation.

            Either way, yes, Mozilla sold their soul to Google (specifically, giving preference to Google Search) in exchange for sustainability (read: survival). Rather difficult to compete in a market where Google and Apple collectively hold upwards of 85% market share for something they provide “free.”

            https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            Non-profits of the scale that Mozilla is need good talent to continue to exist. Good talent needs to be paid close to market rates to work for non-profits, and retaining good talent requires even better pay and benefits than just what will get good talent in the door

            No matter how much or how little the talent at a nonprofit is paid people will go “why are they paying the CEO a $1 million dollar salary? They could hire 6-8 developers for that much!” “Why are they paying developers 100k/year? Can’t they accept 80k for the privilege of working for such an important bastion of the open internet?”

            15 million a year is a lot but it’s also 1/3 the median CEO pay rate. They have to pay the CEO at least semi-competitively to retain them

          • Auzy@beehaw.org
            0·
            2 months ago

            Rich guy?

            Presumably that is about Mitchell Baker… A woman… who was there since the beginning when the company was failing…

            The new CEO is also a woman and a temp CEO, who I’m guessing will again be replaced by an existing employee. Which guy are you referring to?

            What browser projects are you assisting with or donating to?

            Are you assisting with any open source projects at all?

            The biggest problem with the oss community is that as a developer, you need to accept always that you’ll get treated like absolute dirt by the community.

            One of my projects went FrontPage on many major Linux sites, and I ended up dropping it because I got tired of the abuse.

            You’ll get plenty of people contributing nothing to your project or competing ones, but they’ll tell you the 50 different ways you suck

            I donated back when Firefox was in beta. They were a dying company back then.

            Are you saying open source developers shouldn’t be rewarded at all?

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
            0·
            2 months ago

            Donations are a tiny fraction of Mozilla’s income. Firefox and related projects are their money earners for their actually charitable projects, pulling in at least half a billion or so a year.

            Not saying that the CEO pay is adequate or something, but your take is literally ignoring the article you yourself quoted.

        • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
          0·
          2 months ago

          The funny thing is that the people who complain most about stuff like this, tend to be the people who contribute the least.

          Why would I donate to them if they are going to advertise at me either way?

      • Iceblade@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        Yeah. I want to donate directly towards the development of FF, but I can’t. I know several other people who of a similar disposition.

    • kbal@fedia.io
      0·
      2 months ago

      Mozilla has been ad funded since 2005

      It was funded through a deal with an ad company. It did not become an ad company itself until much more recently. jwz had a succinct and memorable response to the the absurd idea that really it’s been ad-funded all along and that this makes things okay:

      You are just another of those so-predictable people saying, “The animal shelter has always had a kitten-meat deli, why are you surprised?”

      Yes, Mozilla started making absolutely horrific funding and management decisions many years ago. Today, they have taken this subtext and turned it into the actual text.

  • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
    0·
    2 months ago

    Is it tracking you or tracking ads? If it was the latter and it is made public, that is information I’m sure we would all be interested in

  • ooterness@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    You can disable this “feature”:

    1. Visit about:config

    2. Set “dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled” to false

  • devilish666@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    So… finally Mozilla has slowly but surely going into the dark side huh…
    I’m not surprised anymore, they even had telemetry code inside android apps from waaay back then (although seems for debugging purpose)

    In the end I’m not justify all company bc they need money for survive & exist, although i don’t like the way they do it

    • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
      0·
      2 months ago

      Mozilla has been bad actors since at least 2017, they implemented a piece of malware called Cliqz on a small number of German user’s installs that recommends various services based on browser history (aka tracking and advertising); so I’d hardly call this a new development, or Mozilla “just now” falling to the dark side (and that’s not even mentioning pocket and DoH to cloudflare, which are still enabled by default).