Comment by aucisson_masque
1 year ago
firefox is an open source software, i know it's great to bash it with the many questionable decisions they take but at the end it's still the least worst web browser and no one is entitled to having a free, ads free and privacy respecting web browser.
the author shows that mozilla royalty-free, worldwide license TOS change is now similar to what google always had with chrome.
To me as long as i understand the business model of mozilla, which is quite precarious but still, and it doesn't have some funny connections going in and out, i'm fine with their TOS change.
It's not the best but what you gonna do anyway ? chrome is chrome, 99% of the alternative are still running google chrome under the hood which give google insane leverage. Safari is at the mercy of apple dictatorship on the extension support. and that's all.
maybe once google is forbidden to give money to mozilla to choose the default search engine we will see real change in web browser choice, for instance it could fasten the agonizing mozilla death and prompt privacy or even just power user (as people who want to be able to block ads everywhere, not only where google mv3 allows it) to pay to develop, maintain and ultimately use a web browser.
I think this argument is tired.
Mozilla is making decisions in lockstep with Google around privacy in the browser.
Chromium is also open source software, and you'll note that several forks of that codebase don't have this "we're going to train AI models on literally everything you do online" clause.
Hell - Firefox itself has several forks which are also less invasive.
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> but at the end it's still the least worst web browser and no one is entitled to having a free, ads free and privacy respecting web browser.
No one is entitled to this - yet there are a good number of people who go out of their way to make this available. Use one of their tools instead of pretending that Mozilla is being "the good guy" here. They absolutely are not.
I'm genuinely curious about your leverage comment. Lots of people base their browsers on the open source Chromium project. They rely on Google for the source, but they aren't indebted in any way the company. They're essentially just forking the source every time they update.
On the other hand, Mozilla develops their own source code but is almost entirely funded by Google. They are looking for alternative funding, but does receiving all your paychecks from a company give them less leverage over you than freely copying their code? I'm not convinced.
I'm sad to see Firefox take this direction, but they've been going in a bad direction for a long time, and this is a bit too far for me. Deleted it everywhere. Personally, I like Falkon and Vivaldi. Jon von Tetzchner may not release all his source, but he has a great track record over decades of browser development, and that kind of earned trust is something Mozilla has not been fostering lately. He has never demonstrated that Google, Microsoft or anyone else has "insane leverage" over him or his companies and wasn't afraid to walk away from Opera when he didn't like the direction. We need more of that in the browser space.
> no one is entitled to having a free, ads free and privacy respecting web browser
I disagree. As governments and society at large are increasingly requiring you to be online for basic tasks we do owe it to make sure people have a user agent that doesn't come with strings attached.