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In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

wired.co.uk

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Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#301

Post by jshowa3 »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #234
oarsinsync wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's a compatible position to be having, especially in the context of wanting a privacy-focused browser alternative to Chrome. It's inherently a social development in the form of software.

Development of code is a technical action. Can you explain why a secondary action outside of writing code is required simply based on the results of the code? Surely you aren't suggesting that for Google to develop anti-privacy code would require them to have anti-privacy social development?

Development of code is not, strictly, a technical action. Otherwise, how would you know what to develop unless you discussed the requirements of the customer? Discussing requirements with the customer, or even within your team, involves several facets of industry, including diversity.

For example, if you were trying to construct an app to measure diversity, you would need to know what category to measure, how to measure it, how to present it, etc.

And getting requirements right is paramount to the results of the code.

Of course, there are projects where these discussions are probably minimal (such as a kernel for instance), but in most cases, it compromises the majority of software development.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#302

Post by larrik »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #294
shadykiller wrote: post #3

Switched to Firefox a few months back. Havn’t missed Chrome at all

Things I miss after having switched a couple machines at home: Stored credit card / payment information. Chromecast because of the ecosystem devices in my house that use it. There are extensions to do this but they're not great. (Disclaimer: I work @ Google on Chromecast platform stuff.) Other than that, it's great.

Firefox supports stored payment information...

You may have to turn it on manually, though.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#303

Post by johnisgood »

nulbyte wrote: post #218
Ensorceled wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"private money" ... his salary, paid in small part by my donation to Mozilla, going to a cause that I definitely don't support. Seems we are full circle.

Is it your argument that he should only be paid his salary if he passes a litmus test? Or should he be paid his salary for the work he agreed to perform in exchange for it? In any case, I don't know that firing him was about his opinion (I hope not), but about the distraction the press coverage caused. I found it unfortunate nonetheless, even as a gay activist.

If you spend your salary on supporting a cause or movement with which we disagree, you are fired!

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#304

Post by adangert »

chippy wrote: post #173
a_imho wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's something a person would say with a salary depending on ads. Who likes tracking and popups? TV programming butchered? Endless garbage in the mail? Come on.

> something a person would say with a salary depending on ads I think the vast majority of employed users on HN are to a greater or lesser degree dependant on ads. Mostly indirectly I'd guess, and with varying independent levels of cognitive dissonance and awareness of their dependence. With a little bit of thought about how their organisation actually works they can see their place in it and the impact on the wider…

I make money through patreon, patreon mainly advertises itself through their users advertising their own patreon pages on their own content, which is far different than what you mentioned above. patreon itself doesn't advertise at all.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#305

Post by benologist »

newscracker wrote: post #293
benologist wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With 100s of millions in revenue every year for the last decade plus through their corporate entity aren't they already funded pretty much in perpetuity? On Wikipedia it says they get 2% of their corporation's revenue, which they own in its entirety, they can increase their funding more just by increasing the 2% they assign themselves from their own revenue. Not even a third of their funding is donations according to…

Most of that money is coming from the search partnership with Google, and that's what's paying the bills for Firefox and other direct development work (as I understand it). The donations from people go to Mozilla Foundation, which works on initiatives and campaigns. So whenever Google decides that the search partnership is not worth it, Mozilla Corporation (the entity that pays for Firefox, and is different from Mozi…

The way I understand it is the Foundation created and owns the Corporation so they would have a legal construct to receive their profits, and a ton of profits still comes in annually, and it's all their money regardless of which account it landed in or what % is assigned to Firefox.

They're sitting on half a billion in assets - https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#306

Post by newscracker »

jancsika wrote: post #287
skocznymroczny wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some way to ensure the donation money will actually go to Firefox and not to some sort of "diversity" campaign?

Sure: pay money directly to one of a thousand developers to implement missing functionality or fix pressing bugs in Firefox and make a pull request on it. For example: I see that Firefox still hasn't yet made all SVG elements attributes into presentation attributes per the SVG 2 spec. So right now in Firefox you can't do 'rect.style.width = "12px"' but in Chrome you can. Not sure you could easily get full coverage (e…

I'm sure that funding for "a tiny feature" or fixing "one tiny bug" would be beyond what most users can pay for at an individual level and still have the developer make a decent living. All the work that's desired to be done needs collective donations to be pooled and used since individual donations would be very small by nature.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#307

Post by adangert »

mamon wrote: post #165
TeMPOraL wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The media is financed by ads to the tune of around 50%. That's because it's the easiest and most profitable business model available. Kill it off, and media will shift to a different model. Advertising isn't necessary for media to exist, and it's not like people want media to exist because of ads. > That business is sort of necessary for democracy, as decision-making requires information to close the feedback loop.…

>> Kill it off, and media will shift to a different model The alternative model is to make users pay. Imagine all news sites hiding behind paywalls. Advertising is not only easiest and more profitable, it is also most convenient for the end users.

Another alternative is patreon. Remove all ads on your site other than ones to your crowdfunding page. Users are happy, the site makes money in proportion to it's quality.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#308

Post by jdc »

thomas wrote: post #161
jdc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are trying to avoid funding administration/marketing you can offer bug bounties for Firefox or Servo.

How would one go about this? I don’t see a way to donate to a bounty or create one.

You can use a generic OSS bug bounty market place, eg. Bounty Source.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_bounty

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#309

Post by sp332 »

lrem wrote: post #24
shadykiller wrote: post #3

Switched to Firefox a few months back. Havn’t missed Chrome at all

I work at Google, but use Firefox for all my private things... Except when I run into a page that's broken in Firefox. And except when I need developer tools. And except when I need the browser to translate sites for me. And except when I'm shopping, as Google does a good enough job with payment details. And except Google properties, because who knows what weird HTTP 3.7 will Chrome use to save some ocean boiling?

For translation, you can set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine and then type !translate at the beginning (or end) of the URL bar. If you don't want to change your search engine, make a bookmark with the URL "https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto... and the keyword "translate". Then you can just type "translate" before the URL and it will send you there.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#310

Post by martin_a »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #255
martin_a wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot understand this way of thinking. I want Mozilla to build a browser and a mail program. Nothing else. It's easy as that. And if I have to "fear" that they will use my money to build something else, I will not donate to them. Think of them as a company with several products. People would buy Firefox, they would buy Thunderbird, but probably nobody would buy the aforementioned "moz://" product or Pocket. In a…

Mozilla is not a democracy. You donate towards their mission and you are probably not informed enough about the back-stage politics of their foundation. I like Pocket because it provides features I don’t find in other browsers. I would happily pay for it especially knowing that this is the money that may also be used for the development of the browser engine. It’s like donating to Wikipedia, but only donating toward…

Quite from the top down your comment, but okay.

> Mozilla is not a democracy.

Obviously not, no. But as a user and a society we can still democratically decide how to handle companies and how they do business. And we can express our opinions just like I did and some people seem to have the same opinion, that's nice.

> You donate towards their mission and you are probably not informed enough about the back-stage politics of their foundation.

What is this? Some kind of "Our savior knows better than you, so keep your mouth shut, sheep!" didactics? From what little I can see from the front, I really don't want to get to know their back-stage politics.

And why back-stage politics after all? What's wrong about a clear "let's build the best, privacy-focused browser and best mail program" as a company mission? Actually that would be a great mission in this day and age. No need for back-stage politics and a more complicated mission.

> It’s like donating to Wikipedia [...] The issue is that you are donating towards infrastructure [...]

Especially this is not correct for Wikipedia/Wikimedia. They are doing _lots of_ stuff with that money that has absolutely nothing to do with keeping Wikipedia up and running. See [0] or [1] for lots of examples.

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia... [1] https://www.wikimedia.de/de/themen

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