Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users

Ultimately, the problem is that entire premise is deeply offensive. I do not want my browsing history being monitored, collected, sent to third parties, and sold to marketers in any form period. I do not want a browser using my data in any way to support surveillance capitalism.

The implementation is just FLoC/Topics API all over again and it's still not compelling. The first kick in the teeth comes right at the start where the entire thing is predicated on data gathered from having an ad shoved in your face.

> At impression time, information about an advertisement is saved by the browser in a write-only store. This includes an identifier for the ad and whether this was an ad view or an ad click.

I do not want ads. Ever. Like many (likely most) firefox users, I go to some lengths to prevent them from showing up in any form. Now that firefox is going to be profiting directly off of firefox users seeing and clicking on ads they will certainly degrade our ability to prevent them.

It then involves sending my data to third parties so that it can be aggregated. Then my browsing has to be monitored to identify conversion events. None of this is acceptable.

Here's what their Cookie Monster paper says:

> User perspective. Ann browses various publisher sites that provide content she is interested in, such as nytimes.com and facebook.com. Ann does not mind seeing relevant advertising, understanding that it funds the free content she enjoys.

I am not Ann. I very much mind seeing advertising, relevant or not. I do not understand that if funds "free content" I enjoy. If I need to be exploited to pay for something, that thing it isn't "free" and if it's infested with ads I do not enjoy it. The entire thing is based on a fantasy where users find this acceptable. We don't and it isn't. If we did, we'd probably all just be using chrome.

> FF is currently a key tool in the fight to avoid a Google-top-to-bottom future

Why should we care if Firefox isn't Google if both are just going to exploit us?

I already need to camouflage my user agent because some websites broke on a Linux host running chromium or Firefox. Switching UA to windows fixed this.

I believe it was an analytic bug in Disney+, where they didn't except Linux to be an acceptable OS.

> Fun fact: by subscribing to Pocket, you're directly contributing to Firefox's development.

That's not true. It isn't directly supporting anything except surveillance capitalism. Allowing yourself to be exploited in that way may indirectly support Firefox, but it's not the same thing as direct support.

Firefox users have literally begged Mozilla to let them actually directly support Firefox's development in the form of donations explicitly for that purpose alone, but Mozilla has always refused to allow it.

> Mozilla found itself in a situation of damned if they do, damned if they don't. People scream at them for depending on Google, and then they scream at them for trying to diversify their revenue.

People scream at them when they involve themselves in surveillance capitalism so yeah, spending a ton of money that could have gone into firefox development to instead buy an ad company so they can start spying on us while we use the internet isn't helping.

> Nobody wants to pay for a browser, browsers are essentially incredibly complex nowadays, and I have yet to hear how in the world are browsers supposed to get funding.

Are web browsers more "incredibly complex" than linux? I don't understand how people assume that web browsers are impossible to develop without selling users to the marketing industry while somehow linux and countless other open source projects have never once needed to do that.

Mozilla could at the very least try letting users pay for firefox development like users have been asking them to before they jump to selling firefox users out to the ad industry.

> And of course they want to cater to advertisers because it is advertising that maintains the open web

Advertising doesn't maintain the open web, it poisons it.

> And the open web is also dying, because people have been moving to mobile apps,

That's because many people don't own even computers anymore. Even where computers haven't been entirely replaced by devices that are designed for data collection and mindless content consumption, the cell phone is the computer that people have with them at all times. The dire situation around computing in general wouldn't be so bleak if we could get some decent and affordable mobile devices that weren't designed to spy on us, but I guess you might see it as that spying being what maintains the computer industry.

> when Mozilla engages in political activism, promoting Marxism?

The link you provide in support of this (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/chris-smalls-ri...) is an interview with Chris Smalls, a union organizer. It does not in any way promote Marxism.

(Smalls does at one point talk about "class struggle". He makes it explicit what he means: he thinks there is an opposition between "99.9% of us" and "the billionaires". This is not Marxism even though it uses one phrase that Marxists also use.)

> Or when they promote cancel culture?

The link you provide in support of this (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...) is to a blog post titled "We need more than deplatforming". It mentions deplatforming but doesn't advocate it (though it doesn't condemn it either), and the actual things it calls for are all Not Cancel Culture: "reveal who is paying for advertisements", "commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms", "turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation", "work ... to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms' impact on people and our societies".

You might reasonably disagree with those proposals; for instance, the next-to-last one could be anywhere from "excellent" to "dystopian" depending on what exactly "amplify X over Y" means and how "factual" versus "disinformation" is decided. But none of it is advocating cancel culture.

As for the "deplatforming" in the title: the specific case it's talking about is the idea that a social media platform should ban a particular user who had for some time plainly been breaking the platform's rules, and who (according to some) had used the platform to attempt to organize an antidemocratic coup. "Social media platforms should be encouraged to ban users who blatantly break their rules, even when those users bring them a lot of traffic" and "Social media platforms should not let themselves be tools for antidemocratic insurrection" are positions one can take without being a fan of "cancel culture".

(Not necessarily correct positions. E.g., if you hold that the insurrection in question was not antidemocratic, that it was a response to blatant election-rigging, then you will likely take a quite different view of how a social media platform should respond to it. I don't myself think that's a credible position, and I doubt the good faith of most of the high-profile people who endorse it, but I know it is something many people believe. Anyway, my point isn't that those positions are right, it's that they're positions many reasonable people take, and that getting from those to "Twitter was right to kick Donald Trump off" doesn't require any sort of endorsement of "cancel culture", and that therefore the fact that an article mentions the possibility of doing that in a not-obviously-disapproving way does not amount to "promoting cancel culture".)

DoH is necessary because ISPs snoop on DNS traffic and meddle with it. DNS is sendig everything in clear text and has no protection from modification.

As for DoH, you can choose not to use it, or use your own DoH server. I see no problems with it.