BTW, this Magic Lasso is an ad blocker for Safari.

Between this, and Magic Lasso quoting themselves, this blog post is really hard to take seriously

Hey, it’s been a few weeks. Guess whether Mozilla has updated their privacy policy yet!

It’s very clear what they say on their corporate website, right?

Set up a new email on Gmail or Proton Mail

Two words. They could have removed two words and made the instructions infinitely better.

And this is on the web page where, if you tap on it three times, it instantly exits out and goes to DuckDuckGo. Which is pretty neat.

And the blame for Mozilla’s lack of transparency rests entirely on Mozilla’s shoulders.

If you know anything about Mozilla’s finances at all, you know that they always are one to two years out of date. So your response, which I’ve seen before, is ignorant at best, and really disingenuous at worst. I hope for the former.

I don’t think you have to worry too much about Mozilla running out of money. Right now, they’re spending it like there’s no tomorrow.

CEO salary: Mitchell Baker’s salary jumped by millions of dollars while Firefox browser market share slumped.

Shopping spree: Mozilla purchased two brand new AdTech corporations in the last year or so:

• One of them serves up ads through Firefox on shopping websites and sells your browsing/location history.
• The other works with corporations like TikTok (and at least two more of the top 10 most popular social networks) to analyze their traffic.

Throwing cash around: If wasn’t enough, Mozilla has earmarked $30 million for AI research grants, and another $30 million for random venture capital.

So in general, even if you could to donate directly to the development of Firefox, I think Mozilla should get its financial house in order before you do. (But you cannot donate to the development of Firefox, which is another reason you might want to consider withholding any donations.)

$6.9 mil the last time they said. And that was in a year where CEO salary was (on average) cut across all for-profit companies, because even businesses react to market forces sometimes.

Either you die young or you live long enough to turn into the Blink engine.

My thought’s exactly. It doesn’t look perfect, but it’s the first time anybody is seeing this on a nightly release. I’ve had my issues with Firefox, but they’re really cooking right now.

This looks promising. Some of it is half-cooked, but the developers are soliciting feedback and actually responding to it there.

The dropdown should only be visible when the search bar is focused or the new tab / blank page is open

There is work being done to implement that behaviour

Back to the post, Mozilla also poses this question…

How Does This Benefit You?

…before providing some great answers. It’s good to see Mozilla still knows its target audience(s) and is still capable of communicating with them.

I would have loved if they had released an anniversary icon for FF.

You might have seen it already, but is this close enough?

More like a vasectomy.

Some Bitwarden and Firefox Nightly users recently pressed Ctrl+Shift+L and discovered that instead of logging them into their various websites, Firefox enabled Firefox’s AI chatbot.

You posted a privately sent email that contradicts a publicly accessible privacy policy. In the four weeks it took them to send that to you, nothing has been changed, same as the prior year. And they couldn’t even bother to spell their own product name right.

Do you acknowledge that the privacy policy makes it extremely clear that they do sell private data, as outlined in the table that they made for people who struggle to read and mentally parse full paragraphs of text?

What an email to read. I find it particularly valuable for the things it does not say, but not at all encouraging.

We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

They don’t say the TOS is incorrect or too broad. And they don’t say they will remove their promise to sell private data to advertisers.

At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws.

At this time? Pursuant to the law? If Mozilla is abiding by law and nothing more, that explains why they are legally forced to admit they sell private data to advertisers.

And the law is the lowest bar imaginable. Google operates under the law. Is Mozilla not better than them?

… service providers who make Faksepot run…

…and they can’t spell their own name right.

Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:

• It’s made by an ad company
• The same ad company runs multiple popular ad blockers (including AdBlock Plus)
• There are no standards on privacy invasion

uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.

The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla’s own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.

I’m still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.

It’s probably the nature of the change, too.

1. It’s easy to add a switch to disable the button.
2. It doesn’t cut into their bottom line.
3. It’s damn good PR.

Other stuff that people have been complaining about, like the massive backlash against baking in 3rd-party AI, won’t make the cut.

Relatively benign things like tab grouping are challenging, so despite being much more popular, the easier-to-implement AI features were given a fast pass to Release versions of Firefox.

Are there raw numbers on how many people use web browsers in general? Firefox releases a report, and it’s definitely been dipping, but that dip might be accounted for by a switch to other browsers (based on its percent of market share).

I’d be curious if you had any good sources for this, because my searches are mostly yielding crappy listicle blogs.

I’ve seen their reasoning, but I don’t agree with it. The biggest counterexample to their concerns are other browsers: Firefox is no trouble maintaining its IP, and Brave is fully open source yet has not been formed once AFAIK.

I’m very aware of its built-in bloat, but the ad blocking still seems to perform more like an MV2 ad blocker than an MV3 one (more is blocked even when using the same lists), and it allows you to natively select individual elements to block yourself.

In my personal experience, and with great regret, I must say that Brave does a better job with its built-in ad blocking than Vivaldi has. Even after I did my damnedest to tweak the ad blocker settings (adding more lists from more sources, removing the “allow some ads” list, etc).

Based on every browser statistic page I can find, about 2/3 of mobile traffic is through Google Chrome. There’s no ad blocker on that.

And mobile traffic is significant nowadays - it comprises around half of all traffic anywhere, despite requiring the viewer to be hunched over a phone or tablet.