Many of the responders are in negation that the projects and the internet runs with money ๐ต. All these privacy conscious companies are trying to find solutions to balance having Ads with everything else. Remember most people online wants or expects everything to be free as in free beer. Innovation and coordination requires the Ads companies, which are mainly Google or Facebook. What should be scrutinize is How they do it more than What they do, to the extent that is reasonable.
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2022
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Privacy
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Curious, if every user paid a browser $5 a year for a subscription and every search engine $5 a year, would tht cover costs and allow for a small profit? I realize that depends on how many users there are, but seems like if we can put a pigs heart in a human and have the human live (poor, poor pig) and have a human walk on the moon that we's be able to find a private way for the individual to browse the internet.
We all deserve a salary for our work. But, what about profit? Are there shareholders, angel investors - how does the profit aspect of a browser or search engine work?
Could users buy early shares to later be paid back with future users' payments? The browser would have to accept anonymous users/payments - such as money orders or the equivalent, I think.
This is a good question I also have. I think we do need to explore some monetization options. As an example, ads on youtube allowed for independent media to thrive. It was good.
But youtube, or alphabet as a publicly traded company, wants more money than just to pay the creators. They gotta increase profit to please the shareholders so we are seeing more ads.
I think we should normalize paying a subscription fee for content so that we don't pay with it with our data. But it becomes a chicken and egg problem. Unless a creator or website is huge, not many ppl will subscribe for it initially. So what do creators or small websites do? Maybe there is room for ethical ads if we cant get enough users to pay or donate.
We need a serious effort to fork Firefox that can be maintained as a sustainable open source project. I know there are a few forks floating around, but they're small projects with only a handful of contributors. These kinds of efforts will never be a serious alternative.
A web browser is one of the most important pieces of software nowadays, and currently neither Chromium nor Firefox are true community efforts. We need something on the level of the Linux Kernel Foundation in my opinion.
Many people are upset about this, but it is in my opinion an excellent thing. Mozilla and Facebook are working together to improve one aspect of Facebook's privacy
It's not like Mozilla is shilling and getting paid off, as some people seem to think.
This is how privacy is really improved, by working with the companies and governments that have power in the space, not by sitting in your cave using only librewolf and tor, and refusing to use anything you don't build from source and self host.
That only helps you at best, and the privacy abusers (google, facebook) will just ignore you.
How is that supposed to work? Firefox's own products in itself are not that reassuring for user privacy. It was better when Moxie collaborated with them to improve whatsapp code. At least that guy's products were respected for privacy at that time.
Even if they don't live up to your standards, you can agree they are way ahead of the competition.
Are you talking about Chrome?
I see it as on the same level of a vegan advocacy organisation working with one of the biggest meat companies in the world. Sure, the vegan org might reduce the suffering of the animals under their control, but that shouldn't be their goal, complete abolishment of animal agriculture should be.
It's an apt comparison, but do you want complete abolishment of all forms of telemetry, tracking or advertising? Or perhaps more relevant, is that Mozilla's goal? I don't think so. See this post by them.
Yes, yes and yes. And Mozilla have been selling out their user's data since the day they took money from Google.
This is honestly what annoys me more than anything about Mozilla: they pretend to be champions for privacy, but they aren't. And people fall for it. They are controlled opposition. They are the social democrats of the privacy world: channeling privacy supporters into their compromise (and compromised) position and painting the radicals as unreasonable dreamers.
If they were to finally die, that would probably be good for online privacy. A real non-corrupt free software fork of chromium could take off with built-in ad blocking and actually good privacy defaults. Firefox is sucking the oxygen out of the room right now.
Ultimately all tracking and data collecting besides what's absolutely necessary needs to be declared 100% illegal. I have no hope Mozilla will help in this fight at all.