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Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

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131–140 of 469 posts

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#131
post #8

IMHO the EU should step in. Having a browser that is not controlled by big tech should be part of an effort to reduce the dependency on the US.

There's already an independent Europe based browser... Vivaldi.

But it depends on the Blink engine.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#132
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could but a national government is more likely to block sites at the ISP level. Also ... private companies can block things they don't like, such as competitors...or alter their search rankings.

Currently Firefox does not do any of those things out of the .deb / .tar.gz . I'd like to keep it that way, hence my resistance against involvement by parties which have shown to be either susceptible to or directly calling for censorship. This is also one of the many reasons why I wanted to see Mitchell Baker disappear from the organisation as she clearly was calling for active censorship. I frankly do not understan…

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Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#133

Firefox is done with. https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

Sounds like EU defined "sale of data" to mean a lot of other things besides selling data, like transferring information. And now Firefox cannot so definitively say they don't "sell your data", because they allow you to transfer webpages over the network.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already an independent Europe based browser... Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is just a chromium wrapper as far as I understand.

It's Chromium with the Google bits ripped out, Vivaldi has their own sign in/sync functionality, built in ad blocker, and custom UI. It's based on Chromium but has quite a bit different going on, as much as Brave or Edge.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already an independent Europe based browser... Vivaldi.

But it depends on the Blink engine.

So? Blink is a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KDE's web engine. It's all open source anyway. The point isn't that the code must be unique, only that it's not dependent on a large US tech firm. They might benefit from Chromium development but the option to hard fork is always there.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#136
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave does not need manifest v2 for it's ad blocker to work. It is not implemented as an extension. It is built into the browser itself.

Right but in my non-scientific test I found uBlock to work better so I don’t use the Brave blocker. My prediction is that Brave will eventually say that it’s too costly to maintain v2 in their fork and that people should just use the Brave blocker.

Interesting. What are you noticing? I might run ublock on top as well if it's worth it.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. A world where Mozilla ceases to exist due to lack of funding is arguably worse than the current state.

Time to wake up and smell the coffee. With less than 3% marketshare, Mozilla doesn't exist now for most people --- mainly just for Google.

Regardless of whether people know it exists, the world where it exists is much better than a world where it doesn't and there is only one option.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#138
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of reports can they generate from the data they collect: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone... ?

Searchfox? Not so fast! Don't forget they load "studies" code using so called "normandy" mechanism..

I don't understand what you're talking about. Do you have a reference? All I can find are UI experiments, AFAICT "what impact to telemetry does this UI change make?"

Where telemetry is what I linked above.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to provide one example, if Firefox suddenly no longer has bookmark/history/password syncing because Mozilla has refocused on its core products (Firefox/Thunderbird/MDN), suddenly you'll see Firefox's market share dwindle even more, because ordinary users are accustomed to every browser having a bunch of bells and whistles like profile syncing. The set of features people expect from a modern browser is really big…

I'm not sure how sync for firefox isn't part of focusing on firefox?

I've seen people argue that Mozilla shouldn't be offering cloud services and should just build a browser that never phones home to any servers at all, whether it's telemetry, automated updates, or profiles. I think all of those are part of shipping a modern browser, personally.

Maintaining all those cloud services raises your company's operational costs a lot, you now need people on-call 24/7 to maintain everything, you need webdevs who can wrangle postgres or redis or whatever, you need security experts to make sure the cloud stack is secure end to end, etc. So I think it's also fair for people to call this cloud stuff out as a cost center for Mozilla.

Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google

#140
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searchfox? Not so fast! Don't forget they load "studies" code using so called "normandy" mechanism..

I don't understand what you're talking about. Do you have a reference? All I can find are UI experiments, AFAICT "what impact to telemetry does this UI change make?" Where telemetry is what I linked above.

List of experiments I was talking about: https://experimenter.services.mozilla.com/api/v1/experiments...

I see some have addons.. but actually my point is precisely that I don't understand it - these addons can be auto installed? They can make requests? They're not on searchfox?

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