Comment by autoexec
8 months ago
I love the idea of this project! I'm looking forward to giving it a try. I'm not your typical user (I'm more interested in what features a browser lets me disable than what it supports) and while right now Firefox comes out way ahead of everyone else in terms of empowering users to customize things to fit their needs it feels like with every update they introduce more features I need to disable and they're growing more aggressive about data collection.
I hope that as Ladybird grows you'll keep privacy, security, and customization in mind because our options in that space are very limited.
A reminder that the vast majority of Mozilla funding comes from Google who are an advertising company.
A reminder that years ago they were paid by an advertising firm to secretly install a plugin for a TV show. When someone raised a bugzilla bug about it, the project manager for the plugin (who herself had come to Mozilla after a career in online advertising tech...) marked it employee-only. Another employee reversed that, and then someone at the highest levels of Mozilla leadership changed it to a level that made it unviewable even by employees.
Pocket? That shit requires manually editing a bunch of config strings to disable. We were never asked "would you like to enable Pocket?" because they knew 99% of their audience would click "no." There still isn't a checkbox to disable it.
This whole "privacy is our priority" thing has been a farce and always will be.
But hey, they won't enable WebSerial because ZOMG DANGEROUS USERS CAN'T BE TRUSTED PRIVACY CHAOS DANGER DANGER MUST PROTECT THEM!
...meanwhile in Chromium browsers, WebSerial has been supported for years, it asks the user to give permission per-site just like cameras and microphones. The world has not caught fire, nobody's pacemaker has killed them, etc.
> A reminder that years ago they were paid by an advertising firm to secretly install a plugin for a TV show.
More recently they pushed an ad for Disney on users and the only way to prevent that was to turn off the redirect to the "what's new page" the show us after updates (browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone = "ignore") which means that now users have remember to manually check out https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/ for release notes.
Then later they pushed a full screen VPN ad on every firefox user. In response to the immediate outrage, they suspended the ad campaign and told people to add "browser.vpn_promo.enabled" to about:config and set it to "False", even though that only applied to the one ad everyone had already seen and been forced to click past. What they should have done was add "browser.promos.enabled" and made sure that any ads they added to the browser in the future respected that preference.
I agree 100% that pocket is a huge offense. It should never have been anything but an add-on.
> ...meanwhile in Chromium browsers, WebSerial has been supported for years
Most people using Chrome are already handing all their private info and internet browsing history to Google. No exploit needed. Last I checked (it's been a while admittedly) there was no way to totally disable WebRTC or service workers in chrome and they don't want you to be able to disable ads either. Chrome isn't really an option.
Firefox is a very imperfect browser, and I'm afraid that it's getting worse all the time, but it's still the best we have.
C'man, those gaffes are so much less than the telemetry Chrome has, and so much more less than Chrome would have if there was no competition
If your complaint is that Firefox doesn't support enough standards, ladybird is so far behind
Firefox isn't actually competing with Chrome in that sense, since Firefox's funding is essentially derived from the same advertising source as Chrome.
And Firefox's attempts to diversify by seeking new sources of advertising revenue don't actually make the problem better; what I would like is a browser that is not competing for advertising revenue.
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> A reminder that the vast majority of Mozilla funding comes from Google who are an advertising company.
The implication by users who frequently bring this up is that there's some unique influence on Mozilla. Yet if we're going by reminders Mozilla had a deal with Yahoo for three years in-between for it to instead be the default search engine and they were still paying hundreds of millions for the privilege (it's been estimated they were even paying $100m more than Google at the time, though by 2017 Mozilla reportedly felt they should have been making more and ended the deal prematurely after Yahoo was bought by Verizon).
Ie: I haven't seen evidence it's been unique partnership with Google in that regard. If there are more concrete examples of influence though I'd be interested (and it has to be understood I'm not a Google apologist either, I just seek more accurate critique as it's more robust).
Pocket isn't even enabled unless you choose to use it, so why would you need to disable it?
> they were paid by an advertising firm to secretly install a plugin for a TV show
I thought they weren't paid, and I know for sure that the plugin didn't load the code unless you set a special thing in about:config.
By the standards of easter eggs it was fine.
> When someone raised a bugzilla bug
I didn't hear about this part, I'd like to see your source. Though I don't know if that really worries me?
And I have no idea how it, or Pocket, is supposed to have any connection to privacy.