That may be a consideration, but what’s important in the words of one mozilla employee in that thread is:

the future of the web. We work to push the industry forward and to push for decisions that enable people to shape their own online experience and that help consumers feel empowered and safe online.

deleted by creator

Someone make sure that page is archived. This could end up being the exact moment we hit peak bullshit.

Right, no doubt it’s something like that. So in short it’s sending information about your web browsing habits to Mozilla so that they can better inform their advertisers of who they’ll be reaching with their sponsored url bar suggestions.

Sometimes I forget that there are people who would have no problem with that. But after all, billions of people are happy to use Chrome.

They cannot aggregate or anonymise the data locally on your device, because that requires combining it with data from other devices. They can only water it down a little, just like google does with Floc or whatever they call it now.

The difference between this and the minor act of selling out that is their main source of income is enormous and seems too obvious to need commenting on. The difference between this and something more comparable such as sponsored links in Pocket is indeed that they are starting to collect audience data to enable it. It’s a small start, but it’s a major departure from the already somewhat distasteful situation people were accustomed to.

If you don’t think that’s about advertising, then I guess they’ve managed to sneak “Firefox Suggest” in there without you noticing that its main purpose is to show you ads unless you take the time to find out how to opt out.

“Firefox Suggest results may also include contextual suggestions from the Web and occasional sponsored suggestions from Mozilla’s partners, which are also on by default.”

They extract sensitive data from the users, but simply promise not to keep it except in anonymized aggregate form. They talk about and acquire a venture that specializes in collecting such data for advertisers but promises to keep to it only in a super-secret encrypted computing enclave. It’s the sort of thing Mitchell Baker often talked about wanting to do, in various interviews. They are aiming to turn Firefox into an ad platform.

I imagine they’ll probably fail and give up eventually, but who knows how much more damage will have been done by then.

I haven’t seen that happening

They’ve been talking about it for a while. They took one small step over that line into actually doing it last month.

How to free the rest of the web from advertising is not Mozilla’s problem. They are not even asking the right questions.

As for how they should deal with finances, in my opinion they should’ve taken some of the many hundreds millions of dollars they’re paid annually in excess of what it costs to maintain a web browser, and used that money to build up an endowment that would suffice to keep them funded for eternity. Mozilla Corp is said to be organized as a for-profit corporation in order to give it freedom from the legal restrictions that govern how non-profits can spend their money, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t be allowed to do that.

There are of course many other possible ideas. Trying to collect data about Firefox users in order to better target ads at them — while preserving everyone’s privacy of course — is fairly close to the worst one I can think of. It thoroughly undermines their brand identity, and will only accelerate the loss of market share. Not being an ad company has until recently been the number one advantage they had over the competition, and they’re slowly throwing it away piece by piece. Aside from the considerable technical challenges in actually doing privacy-preserving surveillance advertising, saying “we’ll collect data about you for advertising purposes but never invade your privacy” is also practically impossible to convince people of. Nobody without an MBA is buying it, and I don’t blame them.

This direction will not be sustainable.

As it says there, Laura Chambers was to take the job “for the remainder of this year” in a “transitional period” before a more permanent choice was made.

But I suppose this removes any doubt we might’ve had about whether she is keen to continue Mitchell Baker’s bright idea of turning Firefox into an ad platform. I had harboured some hope that opponents of that idea were the ones who forced the previous CEO out.

Wasn’t Mozilla supposed to be looking for a new CEO? Maybe they should get that done before throwing away millions of dollars on acquisitions? Surely the rush to destroy everything by adopting slogans like “data is the fuel that drives performance advertising” can wait for a few more months?

Well, they listen to the community when what the community is pointing out is a very obvious mistake which has a very high probability of causing a whole lot of bad press, at least.

our end goal is to make it available in general browsing for users with screen readers.

So obviously the people working on it know that the appropriate place for this stuff is in the screen reader, and/or in software that is designed for producing web pages. Who made the decision to cram it into the Firefox PDF editor instead, and why? Is anyone actually using that when they want to create a new PDF document? Is it just for PR reasons so they can claim there’s AI in Firefox now? To impress us, or to make way for more of the same? What is actually going on Mozilla?

But anyway it’s a difficult problem, as the example image suggests. It’ll be interesting to see how much progress they make.

we’ve been accelerating our ability to execute outstandingly, make faster decisions, and realize our multi-product ambitions.

Next time you wonder why CEOs get paid so much, just think about how rare it must be to find a person with the kind of fortitude it takes to say something like that with a straight face.

deleted by creator

Google and Apple have been very successful at convincing everyone, including banks, to see the idea of users having control over their own phone-like computers as dangerous.

A “printer”? Oh right, those things we used to spray ink on dead trees back in the 20th century.

“Power users” as understood by average UX designers. Real power users would prefer an improved extensions API so that we can have tabs placed and arranged however we’d like.

90% of the time, I’ve been pretty plug-and-play.

If it only works 90% of the time that’s not so good really.

To forestall the year 2038 problem maybe we could just start reckoning time based on years of the linux desktop.

Today is 06 March 33 YLD