I know this is not the point, but “begs this question” is the oddest construction of that phrase I’ve heard yet.

You’re completely right and I’m terribly disappointed that nuances like these get reflex downvoted.

Oh shoot, that’s actually the best example of all, and, in fact a great counterpoint to all of those examples above. If Ladybird does it and can sustain it, then Mozilla really has no excuses.

I entirely agree with you about Google perpetually shifting the goalposts, which increases complexity and works to their advantage. I would say I think of the standards and technology as being, in many ways, integrally related.

I think the idea though, is that it has indeed grown so vast that you need, effectively, teams of teams to keep up. There are browsers done with small teams of developers, but the fruits of those, imo, are not super promising.

Opera: moved to Chromium.

Vivaldi: also on Chromium.

Midori: moved to Chromium.

Falkon: Developed by the KDE team. Perhaps the closest example to what you are thinking of. It’s functional but lags well behind modern web standards.

Netsurf: Remarkable and inspiring small browser written from scratch, but well behind anything like a modern browsing experience.

Dillo: Amazing for what it is, breathing life into old laptops from the 90s, part of the incredible software ecosystem that makes Linux so remarkable, so capable of doing more with less. It’s a web browser under a megabyte. Amazing for what it is, but can barely do more than browse text and display images with decent formatting.

Otter: An attempt to keep the Old Opera going, but well behind modern standards. Also probably pretty close to what you are suggesting.

Pale Moon: Interesting old fork of pre-quantum Firefox but again well behind modern web standards.

All of the examples have either moved to Chromium to keep up, or are well behind the curve of being modern browsers. If Firefox had the compromised functionality of Otter it might shed what modest market share it still has, not to mention get pilloried in comment sections here at Lemmy by aspiring conspiracy theorists.

I do love all of these projects and everything they stand for (well, the non-chromium ones at least) but the evidence out there suggests it’s hard to do.

Every corporation invested in unhealthy ventures will say it is necessary, and they can do it ethically, regardless of how misleading or untrue it is. They will launder their bad behavior through an organization to make it appear more ethical and healthy.

My guy… you linked to a youtube documentary about the questionable economics of gold and a blog post about an unreliable certification group associated with Rainforest Alliance. Not because of anything specific to gold or certifications, but… to illustrate the general idea that corporations can be bad?

The level of generality you have to zoom out to, to associate those to Mozilla, is the same level of zooming out typically used for Qanon conspiracy theorizing.

This is exactly the kind of thing that people make fun of with Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. If you’re willing to zoom out to six degrees, you can connect Kevin Bacon to anyone in the history of cinema. It doesn’t prove that Kevin Bacon is personally connected to everyone in the history of cinema, but what it does prove is the frivolousness of reasoning from such stretched out connections. That goes for historical connections, but also funding connections, and, perhaps most importantly here, for conceptual connections. And I would venture that trains of thought hinging on such remote connections are a hallmark of fuzzy thinking, which is why it’s terrible to go from “Rainforest Alliance bad” to “… and therefore Mozilla ad privacy is bad.”

That’s not to say one shouldn’t be concerned about Mozilla’s venture into advertising, but that this is a terribly incoherent way of showing it, that’s as liable to produce overextended false positives connecting anything to anything as it is to produce any insight.

A fundamental flaw in this, is it still involves user data, even if “anonymized”. You can advertise without any user data.

Right. The reassurance is supposed to be: “don’t worry, no personalized data is retained.” So, ideally, no individual record of you, with your likes, your behaviors, your browser fingerprint, aggregated together with whatever third party provider data might be purchased, and machine learning inferences can be derived from that. Instead, there’s a layer of abstraction, or several layers. Like “people who watch Breaking Bad also like Parks and Rec and are 12% more likely to be first generation home buyers”. Several abstracted identity types can be developed and refined.

Okay, but who ordered that? Why is that something that we think satisfies us that privacy is retained? You’re still going to try and associate me with an abstract machine learned identity that, to your best efforts, closely approximates what you think I like and what is most persuasive to me. I don’t think people who are interested in privacy feel reassured at anonymized repurposing of data.

It’s the model itself, it’s the incentives inherent in advertising as an economic model, at the end of the day. I don’t know that there’s a piecemeal negotiation that is supposed to stand in for our interests to reassure us, or whose idea was that this third way was going to be fine.

Isn’t that exactly what brave did?

I’m actually quite intrigued with Braves attempts at innovating here, but I don’t know how effective they have been and, alas, Brave relies on Chromium.

Web standards have grown dramatically more complex since then. (To me, this raises a question in and of itself, I think it would be good to try and develop standards intentionally easy to maintain to avoid embrace-extend style dominance from individual companies).

You now have HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, WebGL, WebAssembly, WebRTC. You have newer and newer layers of security, and you have multiple platforms (Apple, Windows, desktop, phone) to develop for. It’s a mountain that has grown out of what was once just a unique type of slightly marked up text file.

It’s comments like this that concern me. It’s extrapolating on a worst case hypothetical, and setting it equal to a present day reality of Google’s hundred billion dollar advertising empire.

It doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be concerned about, but I think you need to understand the difference between possible bad thing, and fanning the flames of mob mentality.

Remember how Google wasn’t always evil?

You know who also also wasn’t always evil? VLC. And guess what, they’re still not evil! Even though they have turned town tens of millions of dollars that would have compromised their software. So, what does that prove? Maybe that measured concern should be combined with an ability to be nuanced on a case by case basis.

But it means we’re probably more susceptible to propaganda that accuses corporations of corporate bullshit, whether the accusation has merit or not.

Exactly. It’s a different variation. I think the Mozilla stuff is more a sleepwalking echo chamber than an intentional campaign, but at a certain point the difference doesn’t matter.

I still don’t want to see any unsolicited ads and this feels like the initial steps to try to make it more palatable to eventually try to force users to accept ads back into their lives.

Right, there’s still a slippery slope issue here. I actually think it was a good thing that Mozilla was coming up with add-on products to create a revenue stream. I would love to, for instance, pay for a 2TB Mozilla Drive over Google Drive. I would rather do that than the ads.

Thank you for breathing a bit of sanity into this thread. Same here. Some commenters were like “oh there’s already too many adds” and I was like wait, what? They’re not adding more adds to Firefox, are they? The article doesn’t suggest that.

The “Mozilla bad” crowd echo chamber has gotten completely out of control in my opinion, and it’s an avalanche of low effort comments, dozens of upvotes, and it’s kind of a self sustaining echo chamber that exists because it exists.

I would emphatically reject that any progress is being made. I’ll be moving on to other conversations.

I would say you’re basically right. I think Mozilla can try to grab a slice of the pie, the Q is if it’s enough, and fast enough, to replace revenue from the search partnership.

Yeah, I don’t love Manifest V3 adoption, just for what it implies about Google’s ability to push standards it wants. (Is google even pretending it’s not purposely targeting ad blockers with V3?) But if you have to, this is the way to go.

Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all.

That’s my argument? I don’t recall supporting the CEO pay. Pretty sure I said I don’t like it. And just to be clear, I am finding it hard to justify that much for a CEO. So that’s not turning my argument against me, because that was never my argument.

What it would really look like to, as you say, “turn my argument against me” would be something that speaks to Google’s search monopoly, ads monopoly, and hundredfold advantage in revenue, and why, in light of those facts, they would imply that Mozilla should have more market share. Like if I forgot to carry a two somewhere in my math, or why they are actually proof of a synergy that Mozilla is benefiting from that I’m not accounting for. Those would be examples of turning the arg against me, and I’m happy to hear it if there is one.

Non-profit doesn’t mean that there’s no employees. They’re still organizations that have a cash flow, seek to raise funds, and employ people to serve their mission. Most non-profits have paid employees.

I don’t see how eating their lunch would happen. Something like 85-90% of Mozilla’s income every year is from their Google search partnership. Google does some sort of revenue sharing thing where a portion of the value of search ads clicked through Firefox goes back to Mozilla, but the payment for search partnership itself, well, if that goes away, there’s no lunch to eat, metaphorically. There’s nothing to replace it with. Maybe Bing takes it’s place but I’m not sure that would happen.

I think the elephant in the room here is that Mozilla has 0.2% of the revenue that Google has, but is sustaining market share orders of magnitude higher than that. But unfortunately, at this point there’s a growing echo chamber of extremely low effort comments assuming that if you could just run back the clock, and not focus on “distractions” like their VPN or Mozilla.social, or the Mr. Robot Easter egg, that they would have overtaken Chrome in market share.

Like it was this easily achievable thing that just slipped through their fingers, rather than an inevitable consequence of Google’s disproportionate finances and monopoly power.

Right and that has existed long before today. And I can’t find anything in this article suggesting that the start page, or anywhere else, is going to be reallocated towards new ads which is what it sounds like the commenter above me was suggesting.

They also are rolling out a modified version of Manifest V3 that restores the ad blocker capability that Google was disabling.