Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla’s earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.

  • anachronist@midwest.socialEnglish
    41·
    1 month ago

    Mozilla could have focused on being user-supported through fundraising like Wikipedia. Instead they chose the comfortable path of being funded by their biggest competitor, who is an evil monopoly spyware ad business, which has been compelling Mozilla to kill Firefox and become the badies on the way down.

    • tb_@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 month ago

      You can donate to Mozilla.

      Perhaps they should’ve put that more front and center. But if they add a prominent donate button the people on here would probably lose their shit too.

      • anachronist@midwest.socialEnglish
        11·
        1 month ago

        What on earth would that do? The poisonous leadership would not use it to improve the browser nor would they start working for donors instead of Google.

        My point is that there is a funding model that they could have pursued when they still had goodwill and trust. And my hope is if the government finally puts the boot in with Google, then this current version of mozilla will collapse, the rats will leave the ship and hopefully a good browser will emerge the way firefox emerged from netscape.

        • tb_@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 month ago

          But you just said

          Mozilla could have focused on being user-supported through fundraising like Wikipedia.

          It is an option.

          Clearly it isn’t working well enough for them.

          • anachronist@midwest.socialEnglish
            1·
            1 month ago

            They would have had to build that infrastructure. I’m not saying fundraising is easy. But it’s possible as proven by wikipedia. They could have cut Google loose 10 years ago and said "we’re going to use our runway to try to put together a wikimedia foundation style fundraising operation. I don’t think they can do it now because the trust, goodwill and quite frankly, userbase is gone.

    • utopiah@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 month ago

      If you were implying that I said being funded by Alphabet/Google was a good thing then let me be explicit, I did NOT say that nor believe it to be the case. Now, once again, cf my actual comment about pragmatic better alternative we can rely on and support today. If you meant to suggest better and are supporting that, please do share.