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This pretty much confirms that this is what everyone thought the change was about. So we get clarity, but no actual change in course from Mozilla. Good. We now know very clearly where Mozilla and Firefox stand on privacy.
I'm sad and disappointed that simply charging a fair price in return for offering something of value - with no other strings attached - has become so out of fashion in tech world. Almost everyone running tech businesses seems to assume that subscriptions or data capitalism are the only way to make any money these days. But I have paid for good software in the past and I know plenty of indie developers who still sell…
Selling browsers was tried, back in the 90s. They lost to free, when the audience was much more limited. Trying to sell a browser now is an even weaker proposition to most users. I also think you're overselling how many devs would pay for their resources. Individual contractors? Sure. But anybody salaried? My employer's response wouldn't be "sure, we'll pay for MDN & Firefox dev tools for all our devs"; it'll be "go…
To most users yes, but a group of power users like me can make them life-changing money. I'd happily pay a monthly subscription for my web browser.
It just does not need to be a U.S. entity. Otherwise, people without a Visa or Mastercard will be left out.
Crypto is fine for this use case.
While I agree with folks that this is a step backwards in privacy, I think it’s a good exercise to zoom out and understand Firefox’s position. The browser market is highly competitive, and Mozilla’s competitors have orders of magnitude more resources at their disposal. As we all know Firefox’s market share has been dropping over the past years and unfortunately the revenue supporting all of Mozilla comes predominantl…
Mozilla were pulling in ~$500M/year on those search deals. So on year one, spend $15M on a team of 20+ highly competent full time developers for Firefox, put $450M into a trust to fund future development, and find something to waste $35M on. Then for the next 15 years, find something to waste $500M on. The amount of money they've squandered is mind-boggling. If their goal had been to develop Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozil…
Implies that the browser is the mission, not some social cause is the mission
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.” JFC, it's funny they try to call this out as some kind of a "weird" definition when that's just... what selling is.
I actually laughed out loud at this. “We can’t say we don’t sell your data because some places have definitions of “sell” that are legally difficult to interpret, for example”:
50 states, plus Federal laws, and all the other countries of the world and internal jurisdictions is how many possible variations? And before you say "Yeah, but they all mean mostly the same thing", remember it's lawyers we're dealing with, who will happily charge large sums of money arguing over misplaced punctuation and legislators who will happily take bribes from those same lawyers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.” JFC, it's funny they try to call this out as some kind of a "weird" definition when that's just... what selling is.
I actually laughed out loud at this. “We can’t say we don’t sell your data because some places have definitions of “sell” that are legally difficult to interpret, for example”:
While I agree with folks that this is a step backwards in privacy, I think it’s a good exercise to zoom out and understand Firefox’s position. The browser market is highly competitive, and Mozilla’s competitors have orders of magnitude more resources at their disposal. As we all know Firefox’s market share has been dropping over the past years and unfortunately the revenue supporting all of Mozilla comes predominantl…
(And others would support exactly the opposite, I’m sure. But no one gets to sponsor what they personally care about.)
It may be relevant that Mozilla recently acquired a Meta-created ad tracking company and is now awash with Meta ad execs. [0] It may also be relevant that Meta is recently upsetting people in Europe for tracking and targeting people in spite of Europe's data protection rules [1]. My guess (and this is just speculation at this point) is that Meta and Mozilla think they're being clever and getting away with some "priva…
My guess is that they're aiming to pivot to become a Brave competitor, and either find a new (profitable) niche in the market, or just ride the business down to collapse.
Don't forget that private, hard-to-access data is now doubly valuable as AI training data.
In what countries is this FAQ (removed in their PR) not seen as a legally-binding contract with all current Firefox users? It seems like a very clear contractual obligation in the US. { "@type": "Question", "name": "Does Firefox sell your personal data?", 1 "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually laughed out loud at this. “We can’t say we don’t sell your data because some places have definitions of “sell” that are legally difficult to interpret, for example”:
That was in California. Presumably, it's worded somewhat differently, and with different intent, elsewhere. 50 states, plus Federal laws, and all the other countries of the world and internal jurisdictions is how many possible variations? And before you say "Yeah, but they all mean mostly the same thing", remember it's lawyers we're dealing with, who will happily charge large sums of money arguing over misplaced punc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really struggle to understand what legal team believes this language is necessary in downloaded software. Exactly. Even if nothing is changing at Mozilla, their legal team has invented a new interpretation of copyright law. That’s a huge deal from a legal perspective—Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc need to be rushing to add corresponding terms to their applications. Mozilla PR is dropping the ball completely by try…
Not for nothing, it is standard legal boilerplate. I just checked two randomly selected terms of service--one for ReadAI, the other for Google--and they both include a very similar clause with those exact parameters. That said, I'm not suggesting Mozilla isn't also being wildly hypocritical in their behavior, and hamfisted in their PR.