A look at Firefox forks

Oops, thanks for the correction.

First of all, while many valuable perspectives are offered here, the legal nuances of the CCPA are complex and usually best assessed by those with formal legal expertise. It seems to me that individuals without legal training are the primary source of the allegation, so I believe that allegation itself needs to be taken with a grain of salt, as those making the accusation are quite possibly missing key legal context. This isn't intended as an insult, rather, just an objective observation from my perspective. Please ask a lawyer or law school friend to review all of this, including both the blog post and other HN post I linked above, as well as the links in that HN post, which include a law blog citing the drafting error. I encourage everyone with legal expertise to review these points and share additional insights. I am offering numerous, reputable, cross-checked sources for my position, something I haven't seen or heard from the people arguing for your position. If you have more information to share, please do share it. I want to have as holistic an understanding as possible here, after all.

Second, Mozilla as an entity has a lengthy track record of being the only big good guy in the "browser wars" for a long time. The entire ethos of Mozilla - both the foundation and the corporation (not the same business entity, another detail the many voices weighing in on this subject aren't even aware that they didn't know, but which is directly relevant to the legalese of the CCPA) - was to preserve a free, open-source, less untrustworthy major browser, in the face of IE and Chrome, both products of companies have taken a more opaque approach to their proprietary code and have been involved in decades worth of controversial experiments on (and changes to) user privacy, unlike Mozilla. Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) want to hide their code from you because their code contains a bunch of functionality that is optimal for the business' interests, but malicious from the perspective of end users who value privacy, freedom, and their right to determine what code runs on their own machine.

This brings me to my third point, that Mozilla's Firefox is COMPLETELY open source. If Mozilla was trying to slurp up user data to sell it, they wouldn't keep their product open-source, because the community would just strip out all the bits they don't like. Contrast to Alphabet (Google), who are literally deprecating Manifest V2 to prevent the community from developing ad blockers that actually block all ads, or Microsoft's documented historical practice of waging war on open standards through "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Lengthy, obvious, and well-documented patterns of abuse like that exist for both Microsoft / Alphabet (Google). Contrast to the lengthy pattern of standing up against that very same abuse from Mozilla. Keeping Firefox open source is antithetical to the interests of an entity which was trying to surreptitiously slurp up user data the way Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) do. While each organization has merits of their own, the availability of transparent, open source code (specifically, for the final product - not just an open core like Chromium) can help ensure that power users and developers like us have ways to verify and challenge any potentially problematic practices - something that Mozilla has remained committed to, but which Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) had never fully embraced to begin with.

Fourth, If you've read Firefox's blog posts, if you've read the discussion I linked to above, if you've read the articles about the CCPA drafting error, if you've read the Wikipedia article, confirming that it did contain the incorrect draft language, if you understand that lawyers interpret everything legalistically (not the way ordinary people do), I believe this all paints a picture of an honest misinterpretation on Mozilla's part of the obligations the CCPA might put on them, in the least generous interpretation of the draft language of the CCPA. This does make me sympathetic to the possibility that Mozilla made an honest mistake, but sympathy and trust are not the same, which brings me to my fifth point below.

I'm not "trusting" anything Mozilla says. I'm reading into, understanding, and verifying all of it. And again, even if Mozilla was trying to do such a thing, their current open-source architecture makes those efforts completely irrelevant to developers like myself and many others here who can read, understand, and make modifications to, and rebuild from source. Given the established track record of Mozilla and the documented shortcomings with proprietary browsers in this regard, one might consider whether some of the criticisms (that are encouraging people to trust a narrative that results in a snap judgement against Mozilla without reading into the details) could be influenced by broader competitive dynamics. Nonetheless, it’s important to evaluate each claim on its validated merits.

This brings me to addressing your concerns directly: you make a perfectly valid argument in favor of remaining vigilant, and I support this! Keeping an eye on Firefox source code modifications, monitoring the situation over time, and so on. These can be done while simultaneously assuming Mozilla made a genuine mistake here, and isn't secretly plotting against our interests. The narrative that Mozilla has suddenly turned evil is broadly inconsistent with Mozilla's lengthy track record of standing AGAINST such abuses from Microsoft and Alphabet (Google). That narrative alone is also NOT a reason to spread FUD about a browser that, as of this moment, remains WAY more trustworthy than the "main" alternatives that most uninformed users would migrate to, should they leave Firefox.

A good-faith, open, evidence-based discussion is key to ensuring our whole community understands these complex issues, and I'd accordingly invite you to share more evidence to support your interpretation, which I will read and consider in good faith.

> Also, fuck companies that do this. I just start permanently deleting accounts whenever services do this.

On the one hand yes, on the other - these times call for ditching US companies and switching to local (EU) ones. So it's better to tell these local ones to be more welcome / less hostile.

I have just yesterday asked Amazon to delete my account and all my personal data and stop processing it, quoting "Article 17 and Article 18 of the General Data Protection Regulation".

I'm also planning (as in: technically planning) to move all my data off AWS reasonably ASAP, too. It's personal stuff; mostly S3, domains registered and parked at Route53, some CloudFront distributions fronting static files, SQS/SNS - not much overall - and domains are the main PITA.

> Considering Mozilla overspends on everything else

That something is repeated endlessly does not make it true. In fact, it's a signal of disinformation (which doesn't make it false). And when words are used like "everything", it suggests 'nothing' specific is really known. And even to the degree it's true, the inference is weak; the question is, how much does web browser development cost?

$200M seems reasonable to me. Comparisons I've seen make it quite a bit less than estimates of Google's costs, for example.